The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Ichiro yanked open the door.

  “You came to laugh at me some more?” he asked, one hand on the door handle.

  “No. I’m sorry. I—”

  “You’re sorry. You’re a fucking little girl! Go play with Tomi and your other little friends. You can giggle all day and put some new flowers in each other’s hair instead of those rotted things. You look like an idiot!”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Ichiro.”

  “Get the hell out of here, Miho, and don’t ever come here again!” He slammed the door. She stood, staring at it. When a situation like this arose in the feeds, a minute or two would pass, then the angry person would open the door and ask forgiveness for his or her behavior, and they would kiss before the credits. While Miho waited, her hand fished around in her hair absently and found the flowers from the afternoon still there. The perfect orange carnation, tangled in the wilted blue flower of no type she knew. Its once-tender petals browned and curled at the edges. She tossed the blue flower into the bushes that lined the walk. Her sadness for it and for the old man who had given it to her lay thinly upon the mountain of sadness that Ichiro’s anger caused to rise within her.

  Miho stared at the door for a long time.

  Ichiro never went out with her again outside of school. Aimi showed up by his side soon after.

  At the doorway to her father’s hospital room, Miho understood everything before her eyes had a chance to focus. He lay motionless in his bed, a man in his mid-fifties looking ninety. His once striking head of hair was now bare scalp, and the loose skin of his face was gouged with misery. His eyes were shut tight and his mouth opened wider than seemed possible, open in some horrific, voiceless scream. Miho’s mother sat in silence by his bedside, cupping his tubing-pierced hand in hers. Her cheeks hung, soft and sagging, the skin of an overripe peach. Tears streamed down her face.

  Miho moved past the beds of the other patients that shared her father’s room. It took all of her willpower to keep from listing to her left and spilling into their visitors. At her father’s bedside, she lowered the guardrail with one hand. Amidst the crinkle of soft plastic, she poured herself into the old man’s thin, purple arms as if she had always belonged there. She buried her face in the stubble of his neck, scratchy even through the cocoon, and encircled him with her arms so gently, so as not to hurt him. She wished the smell would leave her nose. She wished his chest didn’t feel so hard against hers. Like her mother, she would not sob. The tears simply flowed.

  She wanted to tell her mother that she couldn’t bring herself to see her father before. She couldn’t bear to see him helpless and conquered by illness. But each time she tried to speak, her chest burned and the words caught in thick globs of phlegm and tears.

  She couldn’t say anything. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Perhaps her mother couldn’t hear anything, either.

  The doctors may not have been sure, but her father had known what he confronted; he’d arranged his own funeral from his hospital bed in the first few days of his stay. He had no son to do it for him, and chose to spare his wife and daughter the discomfort. He asked that his urn be placed in the company’s grave apartment complex, where his volumetric display could greet visitors and offer videos and feeds from his life. Even with this more cost-effective alternative, and humiliating but unavoidable negotiations, the funeral costs left them mere weeks from bankruptcy.

  Before releasing his body, the hospital irradiated it to destroy the nanos, so it came to the crematorium already burned black. Miho and her mother returned to the funeral home after the cremation. With chopsticks they separated his bones from the ash and placed them into his urn. Miho had never seen real bones before, but she knew these looked wrong. Some of the shards looked black beneath the gray ash, and bubbled in places, like soapy water. The bubbles were negatives of Shogetsu cherry blossoms, convex where the blossoms were concave, black where the blossoms were white. Man-made flowers, the ugliest things she’d ever seen. She glanced at her mother to confirm the strangeness of her father’s charred bones. Her mother said nothing, didn’t look her in the eye, just continued with the work.

  Miho realized that there would be no more dreams of her ceramic forever-father. Within that impenetrable shell could have only been emptiness.

  Late the following week Miho and her mother knelt on the floor of Miho’s bedroom, packing only the necessary items, when Miho told her mother that she should go back to finish off her shifts at Tanaka-san’s.

  “You have no job,” her mother said as she folded a plain yellow blouse. “You have no need for a job. We’re leaving in three days. You must stay and help me pack. That was another life.”

  Miho rested her hands on her suitcase as she gathered her strength. Everything she was taking from that other life fit into this one large bag, now that the nonessentials had been sloughed off from their lives. She took a deep breath and smelled the rice cooking in the kitchen. It was nearly done.

  “Okāsan,” she said, overcoming her discomfort at addressing her mother directly, “I love him. I love Ichiro.”

  The older woman looked into her daughter’s eyes. Miho peeled off the video strips so her mother could see into her without obstruction. After a long moment her mother nodded and Miho bolted for the door.

  On the way to Tanaka-san’s, the feeds placed an advertisement for Aimi right in front of Miho, so that Aimi suddenly rose from the harbor to tower over the city like Gojira. Miho hadn’t even thought of Aimi in the last nine days, the first time she’d left her mind in almost a year. Everyone in Nagasaki who used feeds peered skyward to see up the tiny black skirt of Aimi’s French maid uniform. Her presence demanded absolute attention, and even at this scale she personified perfection. Not a pixel out of place. Miho watched Aimi’s enormous fingers, the same ones that had touched her leg, now larger than tree trunks. She felt the sweat once more, cold with astonishment. For the first time, Miho felt the ridiculousness of her world.

  Perhaps.

  Perhaps Aimi was ridiculous.

  Miho blocked the feed and removed all other Aimi feeds from her favorites for the first time in twelve months. The giant robot disappeared, leaving not a ripple to sway the tiny cargo ships coming to the city.

  Restaurant traffic was slow, and she hadn’t been given any orders other than pork and fish for champon. For the last two dishes she’d used the formula that Tanaka-san and his wife had tried. With no more orders in sight, she hit save on the machine, and decided to explore its capabilities. Miho had never used an industrial model before. She experimented by instinct. She was trying something she’d never made before, but she had enough experience in the kitchen that it felt right. The machine employed a deft touch beneath the fingers of a capable user. The operator to her right gave her a funny look when he glanced at her recipe. She smiled and ignored him.

  Something moved in her peripheral vision. A woman, not Aimi but another. Miho’s reflection examined her from the polished steel of a hanging pan. Maybe the world still held room for her. Miho was, after all, the operator of the food injector. The machine couldn’t have come up with a flavor quite like hers.

  Ichiro came back into the kitchen. She watched him directly. He wouldn’t look at her, hadn’t looked at her since the funeral, though he came her way.

  On an impulse, she stuck her arm in the food injector, hit the button, and let the machine pierce her with a thousand needles. She drew her breath in hard, heard the needles scrape the bone as her arm burned. The operator beside her shouted and grabbed at her bleeding arm, but she pushed him away.

  Ichiro arrived in an instant.

  “What happened?”

  “Taste me,” she said, offering her arm to him.

  “What?”

  “Taste me.”

  “You’re crazy, Miho! You need a bandage!”

  “Be quiet and smell me.” She brought her forearm up to his face while she spoke. Ichiro stopped short, overcome with confusion. He moved his sealed lips, swallowed hard.
She knew he was salivating. His mouth opened slightly. He looked into her eyes. Miho nodded.

  Flesh and blood, in many ways overshadowed by today’s technology, still had its advantages. To a girl who knew so much about boys, it remained a far superior tool. Lust and animal comfort may be won by the machines, but beauty belonged to the flowers, the living ones. Love belonged to her father and to herself. Both belonged to the fleeting.

  “I love you, Ichiro,” she said

  Ichiro bit into her upper forearm, taking a little meat back with him. She had already decided she wouldn’t scream; she wanted this pain. He chewed while she bled, moaning when she wouldn’t. Throughout the kitchen, employees dropped their work and ran to them. Miho didn’t register Tanaka-san’s commanding voice, worthy of a military officer, keeping his people at bay. She focused on Ichiro like a Zen master, oblivious to the tension all around her, peering into his wide, wet eyes.

  “Would Aimi feed you this way?” she whispered.

  She braced herself for another bite, but he sucked at her searing wound instead. Ichiro’s father nudged him aside and dressed her arm in silence, with a clean white towel. Members of the prep crew arched their necks to see.

  “I’m so sorry, Miho,” Ichiro said.

  “It’s all right,” she said, nodding toward her arm. “I wanted you to.”

  “Not about that. About everything.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  Ichiro pushed in again and pressed his bloody mouth against Miho’s ravenously. Tanaka-san shouted, and his people returned to their stations, averting their eyes. Miho tasted the salt from a year of choked-back tears, tasted her own hot blood, and tasted—finally—the lips which made that blood run faster.

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  All bureaucracies obey certain iron laws, and one of the oldest is this: get your seasonal leave booked early, lest you be trampled in the rush.

  I broke the rule this year, and now I’m paying the price. It’s not my fault I failed to book my Christmas leave in time—I was in hospital and heavily sedated. But the ruthless cut and thrust of office politics makes no allowance for those who fall in the line of battle: “You should have foreseen your hospitalization and planned around it” said the memo from HR when I complained. They’re quite right, and I’ve made a note to book in advance next time I’m about to be abducted by murderous cultists or enemy spies.

  I briefly considered pulling an extended sickie, but Brenda from Admin has a heart of gold; she pointed out that if I volunteered as Night Duty Officer over the seasonal period I could not only claim triple pay and time off in lieu, I’d also be working three grades above my assigned role. For purposes of gaining experience points in the fast-track promotion game they’re steering me onto, that’s hard to beat. So here I am, in the office on Christmas Eve, playing bureaucratic Pokémon as the chilly rain drums on the roof.

  (Oh, you wondered what Mo thinks of this? She’s off visiting her ditz of a mum down in Glastonbury. After last time we agreed it would be a good idea if I kept a low profile. Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli. But I digress.)

  * * *

  Christmas: the season of goodwill towards all men—except for bank managers, credit scoring agencies, everyone who works in the greeting card business, and dodgy men in red suits who hang out in toy shops and scare small children by shouting “ho ho HO!” By the time I got out of hospital in September the Christmas seasonal displays were already going up in the shops: mistletoe and holly and metallized tinsel pushing out the last of summer’s tanning lotion and Hawaiian shirts.

  I can’t say I’ve ever been big on the English Suburban Christmas. First you play join-the-dots with bank holidays and what’s left of your annual leave, to get as many consecutive days off work as possible. Then instead of doing something useful and constructive with it you gorge yourself into a turkey-addled stomach-bloating haze, drink too much cheap plonk, pick fights with the in-laws, and fall asleep on the sofa in front of the traditional family-friendly crap the BBC pumps out every December 25th in case the wee ones are watching. These days the little ’uns are all up in their rooms, playing Chicks v. Zombies 8.0 with the gore dialled to splashy-giblets-halfway-up-the-walls (only adults bother watching TV as a social activity these days) but has Auntie Beeb noticed? Oh no they haven’t! So it’s crap pantomimes and Mary Poppins and re-runs of The Two Ronnies for you, sonny, whether you like it or not. It’s like being trapped in 1974 forever—and you can forget about escaping onto the internet: everybody else has had the same idea, and the tubes are clogged.

  Alternatively you can spend Christmas alone in the office, where at least it’s quiet once everyone else has gone home. You can get some work done, or read a book, or surreptitiously play Chicks v. Zombies 8.0 with the gore dialled down to suitable-for-adults. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work . . . except when it doesn’t, like now.

  Let’s rewind a week:

  I’m pecking away at a quality assessment form on my office PC when there’s a knock at the door. I glance up. It’s Bill from Security. “Are you busy right now?” he asks.

  “Um.” My heart just about skips a beat. “Not really . . . ?”

  Bill is one of our regular security officers: a former blue-suiter, salt-and-pepper moustache, silver comb-over, but keeps trim and marches everywhere like he’s still in the military. “It’s about your Christmas shift,” he says, smiling vaguely and hefting a bunch of keys the size of a hand grenade. “I’m supposed to show you the ropes, y’know? Seeing as how you’re on overnight duty next week.” He jangles the key ring. “If you can spare half an hour?”

  My heartbeat returns to normal. I glance at the email on my computer screen: “Yeah, sure.” It’s taken me about five seconds to cycle from mild terror to abject relief; he’s not here to chew me out over the state of my trainers.

  “Very good, sir. If you’d care to step this way?”

  From Bill, even a polite request sounds a little like an order.

  “You haven’t done the graveyard shift before, have you sir? There’s not a lot to it—usually. You’re required to remain in the building and on call at all times. Ahem, that’s within reason, of course: toilet breaks permitted—there’s an extension—and there’s a bunk bed. You probably won’t have to do anything, but in the unlikely event, well, you’re the night duty officer.”

  We climb a staircase, pass through a pair of singularly battered fire doors, and proceed at a quick march along a puce-painted corridor with high wired-glass windows, their hinges painted shut. Bill produces his keyring with a jangling flourish. “Behold! The duty officer’s watch room.”

  We are in the New Annexe, a depressing New Brutalist slab of concrete that sits atop a dilapidated department store somewhere south of the Thames: electrically heated, poorly insulated, and none of the window frames fit properly. My department was moved here nearly a year ago, while they rebuild Dansey House (which will probably take a decade, because they handed it over to a public-private partnership). Nevertheless, the fittings and fixtures of the NDO’s office make the rest of the New Annexe look like a futuristic marvel. The khaki-painted steel frame of the bunk, topped with green wool blankets, looks like something out of a wartime movie—there’s even a fading poster on the wall that says CARELESS LIPS SINK SHIPS.

  “This is a joke. Right?” I’m pointing at the green-screen terminal on the desk, and the h
uge dial-infested rotary phone beside it.

  “No sir.” Bill clears his throat. “Unfortunately the NDO’s office budget was misfiled years ago and nobody knows the correct code to requisition new supplies. At least it’s warm in winter: you’re right on top of the classified document incinerator room, and it’s got the only chimney in the building.”

  He points out aspects of the room’s dubious architectural heritage while I’m scoping out the accessories. I poke at the rusty electric kettle: “Will anyone say anything if I bring my own espresso maker?”

  “I think they’ll say ‘that’s a good idea,’ sir. Now, if you’d care to pay attention, let me talk you through the call management procedures and what to do in event of an emergency.”

  * * *

  The Laundry, like any other government bureaucracy, operates on a 9-to-5 basis—except for those inconvenient bits that don’t. The latter tend to be field operations of the kind where, if something goes wrong, they really don’t want to find themselves listening to the voicemail system saying, “Invasions of supernatural brain-eating monsters can only be dealt with during core business hours. Please leave a message after the beep.” (Supernatural? Why, yes: we’re that part of Her Majesty’s government that deals with occult technologies and threats. Certain abstruse branches of pure mathematics can have drastic consequences in the real world—we call them “magic”—by calling up the gibbering horrors with which we unfortunately share a multiverse [and the platonic realm of mathematical truth]. Given that computers are tools that can be used for performing certain classes of calculation really fast, it should come as no surprise that Applied Computational Demonology has been a growth area in recent years.)

  My job, as Night Duty Officer, is to sit tight and answer the phone. In the unlikely event that it rings, I have a list of numbers I can call. Most of them ring through to duty officers in other departments, but one of them calls through to a special Army barracks in Hereford, another goes straight to SHAPE in Brussels—that’s NATO’s European theatre command HQ—and a third dials direct to the COBRA briefing room in Downing Street. Nobody in the Laundry has ever had to get the Prime Minister out of bed in the small hours, but there’s always a first time: more importantly, it’s the NDO’s job to make that call if a sufficiency of shit hits the fan on his watch.