The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Last night I had a dream: I was hiking again with Dad. He used to take me up into the mountains—a two-day trek to Pico Duarte where it’s cold, and frost dances in the air and breaks the sunlight up into rainbows.

  Only this time we were walking in Colinas Bravas, and I was overjoyed they’d let him in, and then I realized that this was actually the Cibao, but a different Cibao, a Cibao that they ruled. As if somehow world history had been reversed and the Taíno still ruled Española and Europe had been settled by them. Dad and I sat on top of a cliff and let the wind blow over us.

  I didn’t get along with my mother. She hated how I turned out, but so often we become like our parents, don’t we? She was a good Catholic who believed in original sin. Have I made up that she once said those women of Colinas must be a different species because they don’t know original sin?

  If she did, then I think my mother was right.

  Original sin is having two sexes, one of whom doesn’t carry the child, who needs to know the child is HIS and in so doing needs to know the woman is HIS, and in time, since it’s a deal, he has to be HERS as well. If you absolutely must own the person you love most, then how important is owning everything else you love or like? Your book, your designer evening gown, your phone, your knife and fork (even just for the duration of the meal!), your piece of bacon, your slice of orange, your car, your home, your room, your bed, your individual sock with the green toes, let alone your own child. Owning becomes the culture, possession nine points of the law.

  Except in Colinas Bravas.

  They love the name Colinas Bravas, it chimes with how they see their country and perhaps themselves: the brave hills. But their own name for the place is the third person of their verb to be—“Ser” in Spanish. Transcription: Xix. The land just is. Not even the land is theirs. It’s not England or even Herland.

  The opposite of original sin is faith and here’s mine.

  I am, despite everything, a good person and soon they will see that. I’ve become a visibly better person living here. I don’t need to own Evie, I don’t need to own anything. I love this place and will do all I can to help it, out of love.

  I write to La Señora Luminosa with ideas—your people love telling stories, I say. Why don’t you let me record them, write them down, publish them in English, in Spanish. You tell them on your radio station. Let me put a satellite radio in the cover of the book so that people can listen and read at the same time? A tablet in the cover so that they can see more about you? Why don’t you run your own TV station so that you can finally watch things on it that are made for you? Let me do a Web site for you. Let me help sell your windmills all over the Americas in Spanish and in English.

  I work to become like them.

  I lie awake and listen to pebbles hiss on that beach and I try to cast off owning. I have only my rucksack and khaki and my hotel slacks and shirt. Over and over I visualize my womb, my ovum, imagine a jink in my belly and that a snake unfolds inside me, and I see myself marching to Luminosa chaste but pregnant and saying “behold.” I establish a sixth matrilineal line. I imagine this and as I drift off to sleep, I hear that sound, the waves of laughter.

  One day, they will let me back in.

  RedKing

  CRAIG DELANCEY

  Craig DeLancey has published short stories in magazines like Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Lightspeed, Cosmos, Shimmer, and Nature Physics. His novel Gods of Earth is available now with 47North Press. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he now lives in upstate New York and, in addition to writing, teaches philosophy at Oswego State, part of the State University of New York. He received a joint Ph.D. in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University, along with an MA in computer science. His research in philosophy is concerned primarily with philosophy of mind. His book Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal About Mind and Artificial Intelligence was published by Oxford University Press. He also writes plays, several of which have received staged readings and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, and elsewhere.

  Here he delivers a fast-paced and involving post-cyberpunk tale about a “code monkey” who is helping the police track down the source of a deadly computer virus that is infecting gamers—and, unless he can stop it, threatens to spread until it becomes a virtual pandemic.

  Tain held a pistol toward me. The black gel of the handle pulsed, waiting to be gripped.

  “Better take this,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I never use them.”

  We sat in an unmarked police cruiser, the steering wheel packed away in the dashboard. Tain’s face was a pale shimmer in the cool blue light of the car’s entertainment system. “Your file says you are weapons trained.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I got one of those cannons at home, locked in my kitchen drawer.”

  Tain turned slightly toward me. She still held the gun out, her fingers wrapped around the barrel. “You gonna get me killed, code monkey?”

  I considered telling her it was quaint to think that protection could be secured with a gun. But instead I told her, “I start waving that around, I’m more likely to shoot you than the perp. Just get me to the machines. That’s how I’m going to help you.”

  She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Well, at least you’re a man who knows his limitations.” She turned the pistol around, held it a second so that the gun locked to her hand print, and then she tucked it under her belt at the small of her back.

  She dimmed the dash lights. I was running a naked brain—standard procedure for a raid—and so the building, the sidewalk, and the road reduced down to the hard objects that our paltry senses could latch onto: a world without explanations, ominously obscure.

  We both leaned forward and looked up at the building before us, eighteen stories of concrete. The once-bright walls had faded to the color of mold. A half-hearted rain began, streaking the grime on its narrow windows.

  The clock on the dash read 2:30 A.M. No one in sight. Most of the lights in the building were out now.

  “You know the drill?” Tain asked me.

  “I know this kid we’re arresting probably wrote RedKing,” I told her. “That’s all I need to know.”

  Unsatisfied with this answer, she repeated the rap. “Twenty-seven-year-old male. Got his name legally changed to his code handle: Legion. Five prior convictions for 909.” Design, manufacture, and distribution of cognition-aversive and intentionally addictive software. “No record of violence. But he’s still a killer, so consider him dangerous. We go in fast, my people take him down, and you save what you can from his machines.”

  “I know my job.”

  “Right.” She pushed open her door. I followed her into the rain, heaving my backpack on. I tightened its straps and then snapped them across my chest.

  A Korean food truck, covered with twisting dim snakes of active graffiti, idled across the street. Its back door swung open, and cops in black, holding rifles, poured out.

  We ran as a group for the entrance to the tower.

  * * *

  A few kids stood in the lobby, smoking, and they turned pale and ran for the stairs when we parted the front doors. Their untied sneakers slapped at the concrete floor. We ignored them, but two cops took position in the lobby to ensure no one left. Tain had a set of elevator keys and she took command of both lifts. We squeezed into the elevator on the left, shoulder to shoulder with four other cops in full gear, their rifles aimed at the ceiling. The smell of leather and gun oil overwhelmed everything else while the LED counter flicked off sixteen flights.

  A chime announced our arrival. We made a short run down a dim hall and stopped before a door with an ancient patina of scratched and flaking green paint. The cops hit it with a ram and we filed in quick and smooth. I broke to the left, following half the cops through a dingy common room with a TV left on mute, the flickering images casting a meager glow over an open pizza box on an empty couch.

  A door by the TV led to a dark room. Two cops rousted the suspec
t out of bed and zip-tied him in seconds. Legion was a pale, thin kid with trembling, sticklike arms. He gazed around in shock. A woman leapt out of the bed and stood in the corner, shouting, clutching the sheets over her naked body. Somewhere a baby started screaming.

  Tain’s cops were good: They moved quietly, not all hyped on adrenaline, and they stayed out of my way as I ran through the apartment, checking each room for machines. But the only computers were in the bedroom: a stack of gleaming liquid-cooled Unix engines atop a cheap, particle board desk. Not heavy iron, but good machines: the kind rich kids bought if they played deep in the game economies.

  Legion began to yell, calling for the woman to bring him clothes while two cops dragged him out. The woman screamed also, demanded a lawyer, demanded her baby. I did my best to tune out all that noise, pulled a cable from the side of my backpack, and jacked my field computer straight into the top deck. Data streamed through my eyeplants—the only augmentation I was allowed to run here—and I tapped at a virtual keyboard. In a few seconds I dug under the main shell and started a series of static disk copies. While in there, I ran a top check to show the processes that threaded across the machines: nothing but low-level maintenance. Tain’s crew had got Legion before the kid could trigger a wipe.

  I turned, found Tain’s eye, and nodded.

  “Okay,” she shouted. “Wrap it up.”

  * * *

  It started with the gamers. It wasn’t enough to stare at screens any longer. They wanted to be there, in the scene. They wanted to smell and hear the alien planet where they battled evil robots, to feel the steely resolve of their avatar and enjoy her victories and mourn her losses. They wanted it all.

  That meant moving hardware into the skull, bypassing the slow crawl of the senses. Once we’d wired our occipital lobes, you could predict the natural progression of commerce: not just visuals, but smell, and sound, and feel, and taste had to come next. So the wires spread through our neocortexes, like the roots of some cognitive weed. Autonomic functions came after, the wires reaching down into the subcortical regions of pleasure and pain, fear and joy. We gave up all the secrets of our brains, and sank the wires ever deeper.

  Then people started to wonder, what other kinds of software could you run on this interface?

  Pornography, sure. The first and biggest business: orgies raging through the skulls of overweight teenage boys lying alone in their unmade beds.

  But after that, people began to demand more extreme experiences. A black market formed. For the buyer, the problem is one of imagination: What would you want to feel and believe, if you could feel and believe anything? For the coders, the problem is one of demand: How can you make the consumer come back again? The solution was as old as software: Write code that erases itself after a use or two, but leaves you desperate to spend money on another copy.

  That code was dangerous, but it wasn’t the worst. The worst was written by the coders who did not want money. They were users themselves, or zealots, and their code might just stick around. It might not want to go.

  RedKing was a program like that. RedKing was as permanent as polio. And RedKing made people kill.

  * * *

  When we got outside, a dozen press drones hovered over the street.

  “Damn,” Tain said. “How do they find us so fast?”

  “Hey, code monkey!” a voice called. We turned and saw a short, thin woman, with very short dark hair. Drones buzzed above her, filming her every move as she hurried toward us.

  “Ellison,” I said, “what brings you to this side of town?”

  She had a big mouth that probably could produce a beautiful smile, but she never smiled. Instead, her voice was sharp and quick. “You got a statement? A statement for Dark Fiber? This have anything to do with RedKing?”

  “No statement,” Tain said.

  “Come on, code monkey,” Ellison said, ignoring Tain. “You gotta give me something.”

  “I’ll catch you later,” I said.

  “He will not catch you later,” Tain said. She took my elbow. “No press,” she hissed at me. She slapped a small news drone that flew too close. It smacked into the pavement and shuddered, struggling to lift off again. We stepped over it.

  “Ellison has helped me out a few times,” I told Tain as we walked away. “And sometimes I help her out.”

  “While you’re working for me, you only help me out. And the only person that helps you out is me.”

  We got in the car.

  * * *

  At the station, they gave me a desk pressed into a windowless corner by the fire exit, under a noisy vent blowing cold air. The aluminum desk’s surface was scarred as if the prior owner stabbed it whenever police business slowed. I was filling in for their usual code monkey, and I got the impression they didn’t aspire to see me again after this job. I didn’t care. The desk had room for my machine and Legion’s stack of machines, the cold air was good for the processors, and I wouldn’t have time to look out a window anyway.

  Within an hour I had scanned Legion’s machines twice over, mapped out every bit and byte, dug through all the personal hopes and dreams of the scrawny guy now shivering in the interrogation room.

  I sighed and went looking for Tain. I wandered the halls until I found the observation room with a two-way mirror looking in on the suspect. Tain stood over him.

  “She’s been in there a while,” one of the cops standing before the window told me between sips of coffee.

  “I want my lawyer,” the kid said. His voice sounded hollow and distant through the speaker. He sat in a metal chair, and I wondered if he knew it measured his autonomic functions while he talked. Some people refused to sit when they got in an interrogation room.

  “You made your call. Your lawyer’s on her way.” Tain bent forward. Her strong arms strained at the narrow sleeves of her coat as she laid a tablet on the table. Even from a distance, we could see the tablet displayed the picture the news had been running all week: a teenage kid with brown disheveled hair, smiling with perfect teeth. He looked innocent, and maybe rich.

  Legion glanced down. “I’m not saying anything till I get my lawyer.”

  Tain pointed at the picture. “Phil Jackson.”

  “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “With what?” Tain asked, with exaggerated innocence.

  “I watch the news.”

  “I didn’t take you for someone who watches the news, Legion.” Tain tapped the tablet decisively. “Seventeen. Doing fine in school. Lonely, but what high school kid doesn’t think he’s lonely, right? So little Phil Jackson loads a copy of RedKing into his head. Spends a week delirious, happy maybe, thinking he’s king of the world—who knows what it makes him think? Then he cuts his mother’s throat, hits his father with the claw of a hammer, and jumps off the roof.”

  Legion looked up at Tain and smirked. Tain became as taut as a spring. She wanted to hit him. And Legion wanted her to hit him. It would provide great fodder for his lawyer.

  But she held her fists. Legion waited, then said softly, as if he could barely manage to stay awake, “I told you, I watch the news.”

  “What they didn’t tell you on the news, Legion, is that we got the code out of that kid’s implants, and our code monkeys decompiled it, and you know what they found? Big chunks of stuff written by you. Unmistakable provenience. Big heaps of Legion code.” Tain let her voice grow soft and reasonable. “We’ve got fifty-four confirmed casualties for this virus. It’s only going to get worse. And the worse it gets—the more people that commit crimes or hurt themselves—the worse it’s going to be for you, Legion.”

  He clamped his jaw and mumbled, “My lawyer.”

  “I’ll go get her for you. You sit here and look at the kid that your code killed.”

  Tain kicked the door. The cop outside opened it. In a second she was around the corner and when she saw me she walked up close.

  “Tell me what you got, code monkey.”

  “Nothing,” I told her.r />
  Her heavy black brows drew together over her pale, inset eyes. I held up my hands defensively.

  “Hey, no one wants to find the raw code for RedKing more than I do. But I’ve scanned every bit of his machines, and I got next to nothing.”

  * * *

  Tain dragged me to her office, her grip tight on my elbow, and closed the door.

  “You saying your division made a mistake when they linked this guy to the code?”

  I sat down on a hard metal chair by the door. Tain followed my example and flopped back into the chair behind her desk. It squeaked and rolled back.

  “No. There’s code on Legion’s machines that is unique and that matches identically big chunks of the RedKing program. But there isn’t a lot there. And it’s … general.”

  “What do you mean? What kind of code?”

  I hesitated. “A toolkit. For running genetic algorithms.”

  “What’s that doing in there?”

  I frowned. “I’m not sure yet. I have a hunch, and it’s not good news. I’d rather follow up a little, study the code, before I say more.”

  “Don’t take too long. So why isn’t this toolkit enough to convict?”

  “Hackers tend to give toolkits away, on some user board or other. You can bet he’ll claim he did, first time we ask about the details.”

  Tain frowned in disgust. “You see the autonomics on that kid while I was interrogating him? He flatlined everything. Skin response. Heart rate. Temperature and breathing. All unchanging. He fears nothing, he cares about nothing.”

  “Oh,” I said, “he cares about one thing. His credibility. That’s what’s driving him.”

  “Okay, fair enough. You code types have your whole thing with cred. But what I’m trying to say is, the guy is a classic psychopath.”

  I nodded. “He’s a bad guy. But can we prove he’s our bad guy?”

  She stared at the image on her active wall: mountains at the edge of a long green prairie. It was surprisingly serene for this nervously energetic woman.