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

by Jonathan Strahan

  The doors remained open. He waited, as if he could wear the thing down by sheer persistence, or shame it into changing its mind, the way Janice could melt a night-club bouncer’s stony heart with one quiver of her bottom lip. But if his access was revoked, it was revoked; magical thinking wouldn’t bring it back.

  He raised his face to the button-sized security camera on the ceiling and silently mouthed a long string of expletives, making sure not to repeat himself; if it ended up in some YouTube compilation he didn’t want to look lame. Then he walked out of the elevator, across the lobby, and out of the building without looking back.

  The job hadn’t been the worst he’d done, but after four years he was due for a change. Screw Thriftocracy; he’d have something better by the end of the week.

  2

  DAN LOOKED AROUND at the group of parents gathered beside him at the school gate, mentally sorting them into three categories: those whose work hours happened to accommodate the pick-up, those who’d willingly chosen a life of domestic duties, and those who seemed worried that someone might ask them why they weren’t in a place of business at three o’clock on a weekday afternoon.

  “First time?” The speaker was a man with a boyish face and a fast-receding hairline. Dan had picked him for a category two, but on second glance he was less sure.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  The man smiled, a little puzzled. “I just meant I hadn’t seen you here before.” He offered his hand. “I’m Graham.”

  “Dan.”

  “Mine are in years two and five. Catherine and Elliot.”

  “Mine’s in year three,” Dan replied. “So I guess she won’t know them.” That was a relief; Graham put out a definite needy vibe, and being the parent of one of his children’s friends could well have made Dan the target for an extended conversation.

  “So you’re on holiday?”

  “Between jobs,” Dan admitted.

  “Me too,” Graham replied. “It’s been two years now.”

  Dan frowned sympathetically. “What line of work are you in?”

  “I was a forensic accountant.”

  “I’m in financial services, but more the sales end,” Dan explained. “I don’t even know why they turfed me out; I thought I was doing well.” As the words emerged, they sounded far more bitter than he’d intended.

  Graham took hold of Dan’s forearm, as if they were old friends and Dan’s mother had just died. “I know what that’s like, believe me. But the only way to survive is to stick together. You should join our group!”

  Dan hesitated, unsure what that might entail. He wasn’t so proud as to turn down the chance of car-pooling for the school pick-ups, and he’d happily weed a community garden if it put a dent in the grocery bill.

  “We meet on Wednesday afternoons,” Graham explained, “for book club, fight club, carpentry and scrapbooking, and once a month, we go out into the desert to interrogate our masculinity.”

  “Does that include water-boarding?” Dan wondered. Graham stared back at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Daddy, look at this!” Carlie shouted, running toward him so fast that Dan was afraid she was going to fall flat on her face. He broke free of Graham and held up his hands toward her like a crossing guard facing a runaway truck.

  “Slow down, gorgeous, I’m not going anywhere.”

  She ran into his arms and he lofted her up into the air. As he lowered her, she brought one hand around and showed him the sheet of paper she’d been clutching.

  “Oh, that’s beautiful!” he said, postponing more specific praise until he knew exactly who was meant to be portrayed here.

  “It’s my new teacher, Ms. Snowball!”

  Dan examined the drawing more carefully as they walked toward the car. It looked like a woman with a rabbit’s head.

  “This is nice, but you shouldn’t say it’s your teacher.”

  “But it is,” Carlie replied.

  “Don’t you think Ms. Jameson will be hurt if you draw her like this?”

  “Ms. Jameson’s gone,” Carlie explained impatiently. “Ms. Clay sits at her desk, but she’s not my teacher. Ms. Snowball’s my teacher. I chose her.”

  “OK.” Dan was starting to remember a conversation he’d had with Janice, months before. There was a trial being rolled out at the school, with iPads and educational avatars. The information sheet for the parents had made it sound laudably one-to-one, tailored to each individual student’s needs, but somehow he’d never quite imagined it involving his daughter being tutored by the creature from Donnie Darko.

  “So Ms. Snowball’s on your iPad?” he checked.

  “Of course.”

  “But where has Ms. Jameson gone?”

  Carlie shrugged.

  “I thought you liked her.” Dan unlocked the car and opened the front passenger door.

  “I did.” Carlie seemed to suffer a twinge of divided loyalties. “But Ms. Snowball’s fun, and she’s always got time to help me.”

  “All right. So what does Ms. Clay do?”

  “She sits at her desk.”

  “She still teaches most of the lessons, right?”

  Carlie didn’t reply, but she frowned, as if she feared that her answer might carry the same kind of risk as confessing to a magic power to transform the carrots in her lunchbox into chocolate bars.

  “I’m just asking,” Dan said gently. “I wasn’t in the classroom, was I? So I don’t know.”

  “Ms. Clay has her own iPad,” Carlie said. “She watches that. When we go to recess and lunch she stands up and smiles and talks to us, but the other times she just uses her iPad. I think she’s watching something sad.”

  “IT ISONLY a trial,” Janice said, examining the document on her phone. “At the end of two terms, they’ll assess the results and notify the, er, stakeholders.”

  “Are we stakeholders?” Dan asked. “Do you think being a parent of one of their students nudges us over the line?”

  Janice put the phone down on the dining table. “What do you want to do? It’s too late to object, and we don’t want to pull her out of that school.”

  “No, of course not!” He leaned over and kissed her, hoping to smooth away her worried expression. “I wish they’d made things clearer from the start, but a few months with Mrs. Flopsy’s not the end of the world.”

  Janice opened her mouth to correct him on the name, but then she realized he was being facetious. “I’d never picked you as a Beatrix Potter fan.”

  “You have no idea what my men’s group gets up to.”

  3

  DAN WOKE SUDDENLY, and squinted at the bedside clock. It was just after three a.m. He kept himself still; Janice would have to get up in less than an hour, with her shift at the hospital starting at five, so if he woke her now she’d never fall back to sleep.

  She only had the extra shifts while a colleague was on maternity leave; at the end of the month she’d be back to her old hours. If he didn’t find work by then, they had enough in their savings account to pay the mortgage for at most another month. And while his old employer could work their magic on smaller sums, they weren’t going to offer his family a chance to keep this house at half price.

  Where had he gone wrong? He could never have been a doctor or an engineer, but the last plumber he’d hired had charged more for half an hour’s work than Dan had ever earned in a day. He didn’t see how he could afford any kind of retraining now, though, even if they accepted thirty-five-year-old business school graduates who’d earned a C in high school metalwork.

  When Janice rose, Dan pretended he was still asleep, and waited for her to leave the house. Then he climbed out of bed, turned on his laptop and logged in to the JobSeekers site. He would have received an email if there’d been any offers, but he read through his résumé for the hundredth time, trying to decide if there was anything he could do to embellish it that would broaden his appeal. Inserting the right management jargon into his descriptions of his duties in past positions had done wonders
before, but the dialect of the bullshit merchants mutated so rapidly that it was hard to keep up.

  As he gazed despondently at the already ugly prose, an advertisement in the margin caught his eye. Have you been skill-cloned? it asked. Join our international class action, and you could be in line for a six-figure payout!

  His anti-virus software raised no red flags for the link, so he clicked through to a page on the site of an American law firm, Baker and Saunders. Dismissed from a job that you were doing well? he read. Your employer might have used legally dubious software to copy your skills, allowing their computers to take over and perform the same tasks without payment!

  How hard would it have been for the software that had peered over his shoulder for the last four years to capture the essence of his interactions with his clients? To learn how to gauge their mood and tailor a response that soothed their qualms? Handling those ten-minute conversations was probably far easier than keeping an eight-year-old focused on their lessons for hours at a time.

  Dan read through the full pitch, then opened another browser window and did a search to see if there were any local law firms mounting a similar case; if he did this at all, it might be better to join an action in an Australian court. But there was nothing, and the American case seemed focused as much on the skill-cloning software’s Seattle-based vendor, Deepity Systems, as the various companies around the world that had deployed it.

  He had no proof that Thriftocracy had duped him into training an unpaid successor, but the lawyers had set up a comprehensive online questionnaire, the answers to which would allow them, eventually, to determine if he was eligible to be included in the class action. Dan wasn’t sure if they were hoping to get a court order forcing Deepity to disclose its list of clients, but their pitch made it sound as if the greater the enrollment of potential litigants at this early stage, the stronger their position would be as they sought information to advance the case. And it would cost him nothing to join; it was all being done on a no win, no fee basis.

  He glanced at the clock at the top of the screen. Carlie would be awake in half an hour. He clicked on the link to the questionnaire and started ticking boxes.

  AFTER HE’D DRIVEN Carlie to school, Dan sat in the living room, back at his laptop, hunting for crumbs. The last time he’d been unemployed he’d managed to make fifty or sixty dollars a week, mostly by assembling flat-pack furniture for the time-poor. But TaskRabbit was offering him nothing, even when he set his rate barely above what he’d need to cover transport costs. As far as he could tell, all the lawn-mowing and window-washing now went either to national franchises that advertised heavily to build their brand awareness, but would cost tens of thousands of dollars to join, or to desperate people who were willing to accept a few dollars an hour, and lived close enough to where the jobs were that their fuel costs didn’t quite bring their earnings down to zero.

  He was starting to feel foolish for signing up to the class action; even in the most optimistic scenario, it was hard to imagine anything would come of it in less than three or four years. And however angry he was at the thought that he might have been cheated out of the dividends of his meager skill set, he needed to put any fantasies of a payout aside, and focus his energy on finding a new way to stand on his own feet.

  Glaring at the laptop was getting him nowhere. He set about cleaning the house, sweeping and mopping all the tiled floors and vacuuming the carpeted ones, waiting for inspiration to strike. He’d already looked into office cleaning, but the bulk of it was automated; if he borrowed against the house to buy half a dozen Roombas on steroids and bid for a contract at the going rate, he might just be able to earn enough to pay the interest on the loan, while personally doing all the finicky tasks the robots couldn’t manage.

  Between loads of laundry he dusted cupboard-tops and book-shelves, and when he’d hung out the clothes to dry he spent half an hour on his knees, weeding. He could dig up the lawn and fill the entire back yard with vegetables, but unless the crop included Cannabis sativa and Papaver somniferum, it wouldn’t make enough of a difference to help with the mortgage.

  He still had an hour to kill before he picked up Carlie. He took down all the curtains and hand-washed them, recalling how angry Janice had been the time he’d carelessly thrown them into the machine. When he was done, he thought about washing the windows, but doing it properly would take at least a couple of hours. And he needed to leave something for tomorrow.

  On his way to the school, he spotted someone standing on the side of the road ahead, dressed in a full-body dog’s costume—white with black spots, like a Dalmatian. The street was purely residential, and the dog wasn’t holding up any kind of sign, touting for a local business; as Dan drew nearer, he saw a bucket and squeegee on the ground. The costume was matted and filthy, as if the occupant had been wearing it—or maybe sleeping in it—for a couple of weeks.

  Dan slowed to a halt. The dog nodded goofily and ran out in front of the car, wiping the windshield with crude, urgent strokes, even though there was no other traffic in sight. Dan wound down his side window and then reached into his wallet. He only had a five and a twenty; he handed over the twenty. The dog did an elaborate pantomime bow as it backed away.

  When he pulled into the carpark in the shopping strip beside the school, he sat cursing his stupidity. He’d just thrown away a fifth of the week’s food budget—but the more he resented it, the more ashamed he felt. He still had a partner with a job, a roof over his head, and clean clothes that he could wear to an interview. He ought to be fucking grateful.

  4

  “DO YOU NEED a hand there?”

  Dan straightened up as he turned toward the speaker, almost banging his head into the hood. Graham was standing beside the car, with his kids a few steps behind him, playing with their phones.

  “I think it’s a flat battery,” Dan said. He’d stopped paying for roadside assistance two weeks before; his trips were so short it hadn’t seemed worth it.

  “No problem,” Graham replied cheerfully. “Mine’s nothing but battery. I’ll bring it around.”

  The family walked away, then returned in a spotless powder-blue Tesla that looked like it had been driven straight from the showroom. Carlie just stood and stared in wonderment.

  Graham got out of the car, carrying a set of leads.

  “Are you sure that’s... compatible?” Dan could live with his own engine not starting, but if the Tesla blew up and fried Graham’s kids, he’d never forgive himself.

  “I installed an adapter.” Graham played with the ends of the cables as if they were drum-sticks. “I promise you, your spark plugs won’t even know they’re not talking to lead and acid.”

  “Thank you.”

  As soon as Dan turned the key in the ignition, the engine came to life. He left it running and got out of the car while Graham disconnected the leads.

  “I was about to ask Carlie to try to start it while I pushed,” Dan joked, closing the hood.

  Graham nodded thoughtfully. “That might actually be legal, so long as she kept it in neutral.”

  Dan glanced at the Tesla. “You must be doing all right.”

  “I guess so,” Graham conceded.

  “So you’re working now?” Just because he wasn’t keeping normal office hours didn’t mean he couldn’t have some lucrative consulting job.

  Graham said, “Freelancing.”

  “I did a unit of forensic accounting myself, fifteen years ago. Do you think I’d be in the running if I went back for a refresher course?” Dan felt a pang of shame, asking this man he barely knew, and didn’t much like, for advice on how he could compete with him. But surely the planet still needed more than one person with the same skills?

  “It’s not accounting,” Graham replied. He looked around to see who was in earshot, but all the children were engrossed in their devices. “I’m writing bespoke erotic fiction.”

  Dan rested a hand on the hood, willing the heat from the engine to aid him in keeping a stra
ight face.

  “You write porn. And it pays?”

  “I have a patron.”

  “You mean a Patreon? People subscribe...?”

  “No, just one customer,” Graham corrected him. “The deal is, I write a new book every month, meeting certain specifications. The fee is five grand. And since my wife’s still working, that’s plenty.”

  Dan was leaning on the car for support to stay vertical now. “You’re kidding me,” he said. “You email one person a Word file, and they hand over five thousand dollars?”

  “No, no, no!” Graham was amused at Dan’s obvious unworldliness. “The book has to be printed and bound, in a deluxe edition. One copy, with a wax seal. And there are other expenses too, like the ice-cream cake.”

  Dan opened his mouth but couldn’t quite form the question.

  “I 3D-print a scene from the book in ice cream, to go on top of the cake,” Graham explained.

  “And then what? You hand-deliver it? You’ve met the customer?”

  “No, it’s picked up by a courier. I don’t even have the delivery address.” Graham shrugged, as if that aspect were the strangest part of the arrangement. “But I can respect their desire for privacy.”

  Dan couldn’t help himself. “What was the last book about? Or is that confidential?”

  “Not at all. I get to release them as free e-books, a month after the print edition. The last one was called Citizen Cane. Two plucky Singaporean teenagers start a protest against corporal punishment that snowballs into a worldwide movement that overthrows repressive governments everywhere.”

  “How is that...?” Dan trailed off and raised his hands, withdrawing the question.

  Graham finished rolling up the leads. “And how are you and Janice doing?”

  “We’re fine,” Dan said. “Just when I thought we were going to lose the house, she got some extra hours at the hospital. So, yeah, we’re absolutely fine.”