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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Eventually, though, the intake is concluded, and Rachel is left staring up at a Styrofoam ceiling with a pattern of cracks that looks like a giant spider or an angry demon face descending toward her. She’s aware of being numb from extreme cold in addition to the other ways in which she is numb, and the air conditioner keeps blurting into life with an aggravated whine. A stereo system plays a CD by that white rock-rap artist who turned out to be an especially stupid racist. The staff keep walking past her and talking about her in the third person, while misrepresenting basic facts about her, such as her name and her personal pronoun. Occasionally they adjust something about her position or drug regimen without speaking to her or looking at her face. She does not quite have enough motor control to scream or make any sound other than a kind of low ululation. She realizes at some point that someone has made a tiny hole in the base of her skull, where she now feels a mild ache.

  Before you feel too sorry for Rachel, however, you should be aware that she’s a person who holds a great many controversial views. For example, she once claimed to disapprove of hot chocolate, because she believes that chocolate is better at room temperature, or better yet as a component of ice cream or some other frozen dessert. In addition, Rachel considers ZZ Top an underappreciated music group, supports karaoke only in an alcohol-free environment, dislikes puppies, enjoys Brussels sprouts, and rides a bicycle with no helmet. She claims to prefer the Star Wars prequels to the Disney Star Wars films. Is Rachel a contrarian, a freethinker, or just kind of an asshole? If you could ask her, she would reply that opinions are a utility in and of themselves. That is, the holding of opinions is a worthwhile exercise per se, and the greater diversity of opinions in the world, the more robust our collective ability to argue.

  Also! Rachel once got a gas station attendant nearly fired for behavior that, a year or two later, she finally conceded might have been an honest misunderstanding. She’s the kind of person who sends food back for not being quite what she ordered—and on at least two occasions, she did this and then returned to that same restaurant a week or two later, as if she had been happy after all. Rachel is the kind of person who calls herself an artist, despite never having received a grant from a granting institution, or any kind of formal gallery show, and many people wouldn’t even consider her collages and relief maps of imaginary places to be proper art. You would probably call Rachel a Goth.

  Besides dissociation—which is wearing off as the panic subsides—the one defense mechanism that remains for Rachel is carrying on an imaginary conversation with Dev, the person with whom she spoke every day for so long, and to whom she always imagined speaking, whenever they were apart. Dev’s voice in Rachel’s head would have been a refuge not long ago, but now all Rachel can imagine Dev saying is, Why did you leave me? Why, when I needed you most? Rachel does not have a good answer to that question, which is why she never tried to answer it when she had the chance.

  Thinking about Dev, about lost chances, is too much. And at that moment, Rachel realizes she has enough muscle control to lift her head and look directly in front of her. There, standing at an observation window, she sees her childhood best friend, Jeffrey.

  2.

  ASK JEFFREY WHY he’s been working at Love and Dignity for Everyone for the past few years and he’ll say, first and foremost, student loans. Plus, in recent years, child support, and his mother’s ever-increasing medical bills. Life is crammed full of things that you have to pay for after the fact, and the word ‘plan’ in ‘payment plan’ is a cruel mockery because nobody ever really sets out to plunge into chronic debt. But also Jeffrey wants to believe in the mission of Love and Dignity for Everyone: to repair the world’s most broken people. Jeffrey often re-reads the mission statement on the wall of the employee lounge as he sips his morning Keurig so he can carry Mr. Randall’s words with him for the rest of the day. Society depends on mutual respect, Mr. Randall says. You respect yourself and therefore I respect you, and vice versa. When people won’t respect themselves, we have no choice but to intervene, or society unravels. Role-rejecting and aberrant behavior, ipso facto, is a sign of a lack of self-respect. Indeed, a cry for help. The logic always snaps back into airtight shape inside Jeffrey’s mind.

  Of course Jeffrey recognizes Rachel the moment he sees her wheeled into the treatment room, even after all this time and so many changes, because he’s been Facebook-stalking her for years (usually after a couple of whiskey sours). He saw when she changed her name and her gender marker, and noticed when her hairstyle changed and when her face suddenly had a more feminine shape. There was the kitten she adopted that later ran away, and the thorny tattoo that says STAY ALIVE. Jeffrey read all her oversharing status updates about the pain of hair removal and the side effects of various pills. And then, of course, the crowning surgery. Jeffrey lived through this process vicariously, in real time, and saw no resemblance to a butterfly in a cocoon, or any other cute metaphor. The gender change looked more like landscaping: building embankments out of raw dirt, heaving big rocks to change the course of rivers, and uprooting plants stem by stem. Dirty bruising work. Why a person would feel the need to do this to themself, Jeffrey could never know.

  At first, Jeffrey pretends not to know the latest subject, or to have any feelings one way or the other, as the Accu-Probe goes into the back of her head. This is not the right moment to have a sudden conflict. Due to some recent personnel issues, Jeffrey is stuck wearing a project manager hat along with his engineer hat—which, sadly, is not a cool pinstriped train-engineer hat of the sort that he and Rachel used to fantasize about wearing for work when they were kids. As a project manager, he has to worry endlessly about weird details such as getting enough coolant into the cadaver storage area and making sure that Jamil has the green shakes that he says activate his brain. As a government–industry joint venture under Section 1774(b)(8) of the Mental Health Restoration Act (relating to the care and normalization of at-risk individuals), Love and Dignity for Everyone has to meet certain benchmarks of effectiveness, and must involve the community in a meaningful role. Jeffrey is trying to keep twenty fresh cadavers in transplant-ready condition, and clearing the decks for more live subjects, who are coming down the pike at an ever-snowballing rate. The situation resembles one of those poultry processing plants where they keep speeding up the conveyer belt until the person grappling with each chicken ends up losing a few fingers.

  Jeffrey runs from the cadaver freezer to the observation room to the main conference room for another community engagement session, around and around, until his Fitbit applauds. Five different Slack channels flare at once with people wanting to ask Jeffrey process questions, and he’s lost count of all his unanswered DMs. Everyone agrees on the goal—returning healthy, well-adjusted individuals to society without any trace of dysphoria, dysmorphia, dystonia, or any other dys- words—but nobody can agree on the fine details, or how exactly to measure ideal outcomes beyond those statutory benchmarks. Who even is the person who comes out the other end of the Love and Dignity for Everyone process? What does it even mean to be a unique individual, in an age when your fingerprints and retina scans have long since been stolen by Ecuadorian hackers? It’s all too easy to get sucked into metaphysical flusterclucks about identity and the soul and what makes you you.

  Jeffrey’s near-daily migraine is already in full flower by the time he sees Rachel wheeled in and he can’t bring himself to look. She’s looking at him. She’s looking right at him. Even with all the other changes, her eyes are the same, and he can’t just stand here. She’s putting him in an impossible position, at the worst moment.

  Someone has programmed Slack so that when anyone types “alrighty then,” a borderline-obscene gif of two girls wearing clown makeup appears. Jeffrey is the only person who ever types “alrighty then,” and he can’t train himself to stop doing it. And, of course, he hasn’t been able to figure out who programmed the gif to appear.

  Self-respect is the key to mutual respect. Jeffrey avoids making eye cont
act with that window or anyone beyond it. His head still feels too heavy with pain for a normal body to support, but also he’s increasingly aware of a core-deep anxiety shading into nausea.

  3.

  JEFFREY AND RACHEL had a group, from the tail end of elementary school through to the first year of high school, called the Sock Society. They all lived in the same cul-de-sac, bounded by a canola field on one side and the big interstate on the other. The origins of the Sock Society’s name are lost to history, but may arise from the fact that Jeffrey’s mom never liked kids to wear shoes inside the house and Jeffrey’s house had the best game consoles and a 4K TV with surround sound. These kids wore out countless pairs of tires on their dirt bikes, conquered the extra DLC levels in Halls of Valor, and built snow forts that gleamed. They stayed up all night watching forbidden horror movies on an old laptop under a blanket, on sleepovers, while guzzling off-brand soda. They whispered, late at night, of their fantasies and barely-hinted-at anxieties, although there were some things Rachel would not share because she was not ready to speak of them and Jeffrey would not have been able to hear if she had. They repeated jokes they didn’t 100 percent understand, and kind of enjoyed the queasy awareness of being out of their depth. Later, the members of the Sock Society (who changed their ranks over time with the exception of the core members, Rachel and Jeffrey) became adept at stuffing gym socks with blasting caps and small incendiaries and fashioning the socks themselves into rudimentary fuses before placing them in lawn ornaments, small receptacles for gardening tools, and—in one incident that nobody discussed afterwards—Mrs. Hooper’s scooter.

  When Jeffrey’s mother was drunk, which was often, she would say she wished Rachel was her son, because Rachel was such a smart boy—quick on the uptake, so charming with the rapid-fire puns, handsome and respectful. Like Young Elvis. Instead of Jeffrey, who was honestly a little shit.

  Jeffrey couldn’t wait to get over the wall of adolescence, into the garden of manhood. Every dusting of fuzz on his chin, every pungent whiff from his armpits seemed to him the starting gun. He became obsessed with finding porn via that old laptop, and he was an artist at coming up with fresh new search terms every time he and Rachel hung out. Rachel got used to innocent terms such as ‘cream pie’ turning out to be mean something gross and animalistic, in much the same way that a horror movie turned human bodies into slippery meat.

  Then one time Jeffrey pulled up some transsexual porn, because what the hell. Rachel found herself watching a slender Latin girl with a shy smile slowly peel out of a silk robe to step into a scene with a muscular bald man. The girl was wearing nothing but bright silver shoes and her body was all smooth angles and tapering limbs, and the one piece of evidence of her transgender status looked tiny, both inconsequential and of a piece with the rest of her femininity. She tiptoed across the frame like a ballerina. Like a cartoon deer.

  Watching this, Rachel quivered, until Jeffrey thought she must be grossed out, but deep down Rachel was having a feeling of recognition. Like: that’s me. Like: I am possible.

  Years later, in her twenties, Rachel had a group of girlfriends (some trans, some cis) and she started calling this feminist gang the Sock Society, because they made a big thing of wearing colorful socks with weird and sometimes profane patterns. Rachel mostly didn’t think about the fact that she had repurposed the Sock Society sobriquet for another group, except to tell herself that she was reclaiming an ugly part of her past. Rachel is someone who obsesses about random issues, but also claims to avoid introspection at all costs—in fact, she once proposed an art show called The Unexamined Life Is the Only Way to Have Fun.

  4.

  RACHEL HAS SOILED herself again. A woman in avocado-colored scrubs snaps on blue gloves with theatrical weariness before sponging Rachel’s still-unfeeling body. The things I have to deal with, says the red-faced woman, whose name is Lucy. People like you always make people like me clean up after you, because you never think the rules apply to you, the same as literally everyone else. And then look where we end up, and I’m here cleaning your mess.

  Rachel tries to protest that none of this is her doing, but her tongue is a slug that’s been bathed in salt.

  There’s always some excuse, Lucy says as she scrubs. Life is not complicated, it’s actually very simple. Men are men, and women are women, and everyone has a role to play. It’s selfish to think that you can just force everyone else in the world to start carving out exceptions, just so you can play at being something you’re not. You will never understand what it really means to be female, the joy and the endless discomfort, because you were not born into it.

  Rachel feels frozen solid. Ice crystals permeate her body, the way they would frozen dirt. This woman is touching between her legs, without looking her in the face. She cannot bear to breathe. She keeps trying to get Jeffrey’s attention, but he always looks away. As if he’d rather not witness what’s going to happen to her.

  Lucy and a man in scrubs wheel in something gauzy and white, like a cloud on a gurney. They bustle around, unwrapping and cleaning and prepping, and they mutter numbers and codes to each other, like E-drop 2347, as if there are a lot of parameters to keep straight here. The sound of all that quiet professionalism soothes Rachel in spite of herself, like she’s at the dentist.

  At some point they step away from the thing they’ve unwrapped and prepped, and Rachel turns her head just enough to see a dead man on a metal shelf.

  Her first thought is that he’s weirdly good looking, despite his slight decomposition. He has a snub nose and thin lips, a clipped jaw, good muscle definition, a cyanotic penis that flops against one thigh, and sandy pubic hair. Whatever (whoever) killed this man left his body in good condition, and he was roughly Rachel’s age. This man could have been a model or maybe a pro wrestler, and Rachel feels sad that he somehow died so early, with his best years ahead.

  Rachel tries to scream. She feels Lucy and the other one connecting her to the dead man’s body and hears a rattling garbage-disposal sound. The dead man twitches, and meanwhile Rachel can’t struggle or make a sound. She feels weaker than before, and some part of her insists this must be because she lost an argument at some point. Back in the Safe Space, they had talked about all the friends of friends who had gone to ground, and the Internet rumors. How would you know if you were in danger? Rachel had said that was a dumb question, because danger never left.

  The dead man smiles: not a large rictus, like in a horror movie, but a tiny shift in his features, like a contented sleeper. His eyes haven’t moved or appeared to look at anything. Lucy clucks and adjusts a thing, and the kitchen-garbage noise grinds louder for a moment.

  We’re going to get you sorted out, Lucy says to the dead man. You are going to be so happy. She turns and leans over Rachel to check something, and her breath smells like sour corn chips.

  You are violating my civil rights by keeping me here, Rachel says. A sudden victory, except that then she hears herself and it’s wrong. Her voice comes out of the wrong mouth, is not even her own voice. The dead man has spoken, not her, and he didn’t say that thing about civil rights. Instead he said, Hey, excuse me, how long am I going to be kept here? As if this was a mild inconvenience that was keeping him from his business. The voice sounded rough, flinty, like a bad sore throat, but also commanding. The voice of a surgeon, or an airline pilot. You would stop whatever you were doing and listen, if you heard that voice.

  Rachel lets out an involuntary cry of panic, which comes out of the dead man’s mouth as a low groan. She tries again to say, This is not medicine. This is a human rights violation. And it comes out of the dead man’s mouth as, I don’t mean to be a jerk. I just have things to do, you know. Sorry if I’m causing any trouble.

  That’s quite all right, Mr. Billings, Lucy says. You’re making tremendous progress, and we’re so pleased. You’ll be released into the community soon, and the community will be so happy to see you.

  The thought of ever trying to speak again fills Rach
el with a whole ocean voyage’s worth of nausea, but she can’t even make herself retch.

  5.

  JEFFREY HAS WONDERED for years, what if he could talk to his oldest friend, man to man, about the things that had happened when they were on the cusp of adolescence—not just the girl, but the whole deal. Mrs. Hooper’s scooter, even. And maybe, at last, he will. A lot depends on how well the process goes. Sometimes the cadaver gets almost all of the subject’s memories and personality, just with a better outlook on his or her proper gender. There is, however, a huge variability in bandwidth because we’re dealing with human beings and especially with weird neurological stuff that we barely understand. We’re trying to thread wet spaghetti through a grease trap, a dozen pieces at a time. Even with the proprietary cocktail, it’s hardly an exact science.

  The engineer part of Jeffrey just wants to keep the machines from making whatever noise that was earlier, the awful grinding sound. But the project manager part of Jeffrey is obsessing about all of the extraneous factors outside his control. What if they get a surprise inspection from the Secretary, or even worse that Deputy Assistant Secretary, with the eye? Jeffrey is not supposed to be a front-facing part of this operation, but Mr. Randall says we all do things that are outside our comfort zones, and really, that’s the only way your comfort zone can ever expand. In addition, Jeffrey is late for another stakeholder meeting, with the woman from Mothers Raising Well-Adjusted Children and the three bald men from Grassroots Rising, who will tear Jeffrey a new orifice. There are still too many maladjusted individuals out there, in the world, trying to use public washrooms and putting our children at risk. Some children, too, keep insisting that they aren’t boys or girls, because they saw some ex-athlete prancing on television. Twenty cadavers in the freezer might as well be nothing in the face of all this. The three bald men will take turns spit-shouting, using words such as psychosexual, and Jeffrey has fantasized about sneaking bourbon into his coffee so he can drink whenever that word comes up. He’s pretty sure they don’t know what psychosexual even means, except that it’s psycho and it’s sexual. After a stakeholder meeting, Jeffrey always retreats to the single-stall men’s room to shout at his own schmutzy reflection. Fuck you, you fucking fuck fucker. Don’t tell me I’m not doing my job.