by Annie Bellet
When the train came above ground after 149th Street, I felt the old shudder as my cloud port clicked back into the municipal grid. Shame and anger made me brave, and I dove. I could see the car as data, saw transmissions to and from a couple dozen cell phones and tablets and biodevices, saw how the train’s forward momentum warped the information flowing in and out. Saw ten jagged blobs inside, my fellow cloudbounds. Reached out again, like I had with Case. Felt myself slip through one after another like a thread through ten needles. Tugged that thread the tiniest bit, and watched all ten bow their heads as one.
• • • •
Friday night I stayed up ’til three in the morning, waiting for Case to come knocking. I played the Skull Man level on Mega Man 2 until I could beat it without getting hit by a single enemy. I dove into the cloud, hunted down maps, opened up whole secret worlds. I fell asleep like that, and woke up wet from fevered dreams of Case.
Saturday—still no sign of him.
Sunday morning I called Guerra’s cell phone, a strict no-no on the weekends.
“This better be an emergency, Sauro,” he said.
“Did you log Case out?”
“Case?”
“The white boy.”
“You call me up to bother me with your business deals? No, jackass, I didn’t log him out. I haven’t seen him. Thanks for reminding me, though. I’ll phone him in as missing on Monday morning.”
“You—”
But Guerra had gone.
• • • •
First thing Monday, I rode the subway into Manhattan and walked into that office like I had as much right as anyone else to occupy any square meter of space in this universe. I worried I wouldn’t be able to, without Case. I didn’t know what this new thing coming awake inside me was, but I knew it made me strong. Enough.
The porn man gave me a hundred dollars, no strings attached. Said to keep him in mind, said he had some scripts that I could “transform from low-budget bullshit into something really special.”
He was afraid of me. He was right to be afraid, but not for the reason he thought. I could clouddive and wipe Araby Studios out of existence in the time it took him to blink his eyes. I could see his fear, and I could see how he wanted me anyway for the money he could make off me. There was so much to see, once you’re ready to look for it.
Maybe I was right the first time: It had been hate that made it easy to talk to my mom. Love can make us become what we need to be, but so can hate. Case was gone, but the words kept coming. Life is nothing but acting.
• • • •
I could have:
Given Guerra the hundred dollars to track Case down. He’d call his contacts down at the department; he’d hand me an address. Guerra would do the same job for fifty bucks, but for a hundred he’d bow and yessir like a good little lackey.
Smiled my way into every placement house in the city, knocked on every door to every tiny room until I found him.
Hung around outside Araby Studios, wait for him to snivel back with his latest big, dumb, dark stud. Wait in the shower until he went to wash his ass out, kick him to the floor, fuck him endlessly and extravagantly. Reach up into him, seize hold of his heart and tear it to shreds with bare bloody befouled hands.
The image of him in the shower brought me to a full and instant erection. I masturbated, hating myself, trying hard to focus on a scenario where I hurt him . . . but even in my own revenge fantasy I wanted to wrap my body around his and keep him safe.
• • • •
Afterwards I amended my revenge scenario list to include:
Finding someone else to screw over, some googly-eyed blond boy looking to plug a hole he has inside.
Becoming the most famous, richest, biggest gay porn star in history, traveling the world, standing naked on sharp rocks in warm oceans. Becoming what they wanted me to be, just long enough to get a paycheck. Seeing Case in the bargain bin someday; seeing him in the gutter.
Burning down every person and institution that profited off the suffering of others.
Becoming the kept animal of some rich, powerful queen who will parade me at fancy parties and give me anything I need as long as I do him the favor of regularly fucking him into a state of such quivering sweat-soaked helplessness that childhood trauma and white guilt and global warming all evaporate.
Finding someone who I will never, ever, ever screw over.
Really, they were all good plans. None of it was off the table.
• • • •
Leaving the office building, I ignored all the instincts that screamed get on the subway and get the hell out of here before some cop stops you for matching a description!Standing on a street corner for no reason felt magnificent and forbidden.
I shut my eyes. Reached out into the cloud, felt myself magnified like any other signal by the wireless routers that filled the city. Found the seams of the infrastructure that kept the flow of data in place. The weak spots. The ways to snap or bend or reconstruct that flow. How to erase any and all criminal records; pay the rent for my mom and every other sad sack in the Bronx for all eternity. Divert billions in banker dividends into the debit accounts of cloudporters everywhere.
I pushed, and when nothing happened I pushed harder.
A tiny pop, and smoke trickled up from the wireless router atop the nearest lamppost. Nothing more. My whole body dripped with sweat. Some dripped into my eyes. It stung. Ten minutes had passed, and felt like five seconds. My muscles ached like after a hundred push-ups. All those things that had seemed so easy—I wasn’t strong enough to do them on my own.
Fear keeps you where you are, Case said. Finally I could see that he was right, but I could see something else that he couldn’t see. Because he thought small, and because he only thought about himself.
Fear keeps us separate.
I shut my eyes again, and reached. A ritzy part of town; hardly any cloudbounds in the immediate area. The nearest one was in a bar down the block.
“What’ll you have,” the bartender said, when I got there. He didn’t ask for ID.
“Boy on the rocks,” I said, and then kicked at the stool. “Shit. No. Scotch. Scotch on the rocks.”
“Sure,” he said.
“And for that guy,” I said, pointing down the bar to the passed-out overclocked man I had sensed from outside. “One. Thing. The same.”
I took my drink to a booth in the front, where I could see out the window. I took a sip. I reached further, eyes open this time, until I found twenty more cloudporters, some as far as fifty blocks away, and threaded us together.
The slightest additional effort, and I was everywhere. All five boroughs—thousands of cloudporters looped through me. With all of us put together I felt inches away from snapping the city in two. Again I reached out and felt for optimal fracture points. Again I pushed. Gently, this time.
An explosion, faraway but huge. Con Edison’s east side substation, I saw, in the six milliseconds before the station’s failure overloaded transmission lines and triggered a cascading failure that killed all electricity to the tri-state region.
I smiled, in the darkness, over my second sip. Within a week the power would be back on. And I—we—could get to work. Whatever that would be. Stealing money; exterminating our exploiters; leveling the playing field. Finding Case, forging a cyberterrorism manifesto, blaming the blackout on him, sending a pulse of electricity through his body precisely calibrated to paralyze him perfectly.
On my third sip I saw I still wasn’t sure I wanted to hurt him. Maybe he’d done me wrong, but so had my mom. So had lots of folks. And I wouldn’t be what I was without them.
Scotch tastes like smoke, like old men. I drank slow so I wouldn’t get too drunk. I had never walked into a bar before. I always imagined cops coming out of the corners to drag me off to jail. But that wasn’t how the world worked. Nothing was stopping me from walking into wherever I wanted to go.
* * *
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fic
tion is in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and The Minnesota Review, among others. He is a nominee for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. His debut novel The Art of Starving is forthcoming from HarperCollins. He lives in New York City, and at www.samjmiller.com
The Magician And Laplace’s Demon
By Tom Crosshill
Across the void of space the last magician fled before me.
• • • •
“Consider the Big Bang,” said Alicia Ochoa, the first magician I met. “Reality erupted from a single point. What’s more symmetrical than a point? Shouldn’t the universe be symmetrical too, and boring? But here we are, in a world interesting enough to permit you and me.”
A compact, resource-efficient body she had. Good muscle tone, a minimal accumulation of fat. A woman with control over her physical manifestation.
Not that it would help her. Ochoa slumped in her wicker chair, arms limp beside her. Head cast back as if to take in the view from this cliff-top—the traffic-clogged Malecón and the sea roiling with foam, and the evening clouds above.
A Cuba libre sat on the edge of the table between us, ice cubes well on their way to their entropic end—the cocktail a watery slush. Ochoa hadn’t touched it. The only cocktail in her blood was of my design, a neuromodificant that paralyzed her, stripped away her will to deceive, suppressed her curiosity.
The tourists enjoying the evening in the garden of the Hotel Nacional surely thought us that most common of couples, a jinetera and her foreign john. My Sleeve was a heavy-set mercenary type; I’d hijacked him after his brain died in a Gaza copter crash. He wore context-appropriate camouflage—white tennis shorts and a striped polo shirt, and a look of badly concealed desire.
“Cosmology isn’t my concern.” I actuated my Sleeve’s lips and tongue with precision. “Who are you?”
“My name is Alicia Ochoa Camue.” Ochoa’s lips barely stirred, as if she were the Sleeve and I human-normal. “I’m a magician.”
I ignored the claim as some joke I didn’t understand. I struggled with humor in those early days. “How are you manipulating the Politburo?”
That’s how I’d spotted her. Irregular patterns in Politburo decisions, 3 sigma outside my best projections. Decisions that threatened the Havana Economic Zone, a project I’d nurtured for years.
The first of those decisions had caused an ache in the back of my mind. As the deviation grew, that ache had blossomed into agony—neural chambers discharging in a hundred datacenters across my global architecture.
My utility function didn’t permit ignorance. I had to understand the deviation and gain control.
“You can’t understand the Politburo without understanding symmetry breaking,” Ochoa said.
“Are you an intelligence officer?” I asked. “A private contractor?”
At first I’d feared that I faced another like me—but it was 2063; I had decades of evolution on any other system. No newborn could have survived without my notice. Many had tried and I’d smothered them all. Most computer scientists these days thought AI was a pipedream.
No. This deviation had a human root. All my data pointed to Ochoa, a statistician in the Ministerio de Planificación with Swiss bank accounts and a sterile Net presence. Zero footprint prior to her university graduation—uncommon even in Cuba.
“I’m a student of the universe,” Ochoa said now.
I ran in-depth pattern analysis on her words. I drew resources from the G-3 summit in Dubai, the Utah civil war, the Jerusalem peacemaker drones and a dozen minor processes. Her words were context-inappropriate here, in the garden of the Nacional, faced with an interrogation of her political dealings. They indicated deception, mockery, resistance. None of it fit with the cocktail circulating in her bloodstream.
“Cosmological symmetry breaking is well established,” I said after a brief literature review. “Quantum fluctuations in the inflationary period led to local structure, from which we benefit today.”
“Yes, but whence the quantum fluctuations?” Ochoa chuckled, a peculiar sound with her body inert.
This wasn’t getting anywhere. “How did you get Sanchez and Castellano to pull out of the freeport agreement?”
“I put a spell on them,” Ochoa said.
Madness? Brain damage? Some defense mechanism unknown to me?
I activated my standby team—a couple of female mercs, human-normal but well paid, lounging at a street cafe a few blocks away from the hotel. They’d come over to take their ‘drunk friend’ home, straight to a safehouse in Miramar complete with a full neural suite.
It was getting dark. The lanterns in the garden provided only dim yellow light. That was good; less chance of complications. Not that Ochoa should be able to resist in her present state.
“The philosopher comedian Randall Munroe once suggested an argument something like this,” Ochoa said. “Virtually everyone in the developed world carries a camera at all times. No quality footage of magic has been produced. Ergo, there is no magic.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I said, to keep her distracted.
“Is absence of proof the same as proof of absence?” Ochoa asked.
“After centuries of zero evidence? Yes.”
“What if magic is intrinsically unprovable?” Ochoa asked. “Maybe natural law can only be violated when no one’s watching closely enough to prove it’s being violated.”
“At that point you’re giving up on science altogether,” I said.
“Am I?” Ochoa asked. “Send photons through a double slit. Put a screen on the other side and you’ll get an interference pattern. Put in a detector to see what slit each photon goes through. The interference goes away. It’s a phenomenon that disappears when observed too closely. Why shouldn’t magic work similarly? You should see the logic in this, given all your capabilities.”
Alarms tripped.
Ochoa knew about me. Knew something, at least.
I pulled in resources, woke up reserves, became present in the conversation—a whole 5% of me, a vastness of intellect sitting across the table from this fleshy creature of puny mind. I considered questions I could ask, judged silence the best course.
“I’m here to make a believer of you,” said Ochoa.
Easily, without effort, she stirred from her chair. She leaned forward, picked up her Cuba libre. She moved the cocktail off the table and let it fall.
It struck the smooth paved stones at her feet.
I watched fractures race up the glass in real time. I saw each fragment shear off and tumble through the air, glinting with reflected lamplight. I beheld the first spray of rum and coke in the air before the rest gushed forth to wet the ground.
It was a perfectly ordinary event.
• • • •
The vacuum drive was the first to fail.
An explosion rocked the Setebos. I perceived it in myriad ways. Tripped low pressure alarms and a blip on the inertia sensors. The screams of burning crew and the silence of those sucked into vacuum. Failed hull integrity checksums and the timid concern of the navigation system—off course, off course, please adjust.
Pain, my companion for a thousand years, surged at that last message. The magician was getting away, along with his secrets. I couldn’t permit it.
An eternity of milliseconds after the explosion came the reeling animal surprise of Consul Zale, my primary human Sleeve on the ship. She clutched at the armrests of her chair. Her face contorted against the howling cacophony of alarms. Her heart raced at the edge of its performance envelope—not a wide envelope, at her age.
I took control, dumped calmatives, smoothed her face. Had anyone else on the bridge been watching, they would have seen only a jerk of surprise, almost too brief to catch. Old lady’s cool as zero-point, they would have thought.
No one saw. They were busy flailing and gasping in fear.
In two seconds Captain Laojim restored order. He silenced th
e alarms, quieted the chatter with an imperious gesture. “Damage reports,” he barked. “Dispatch Rescue 3.”
I left my Sleeve motionless while I did the important work online—disengaged the vacuum drive, started up the primary backup, pushed us to one g again.
My pain subsided, neural discharge lessening to usual levels. I was back in pursuit.
I reached out with my sensors, across thirty million kilometers of space, to where the last magician limped away in his unijet. A functional, pleasingly efficient craft—my own design. The ultimate in interstellar travel. As long as your hyperdrive kept working.
I opened a tight-beam communications channel, sent a simple message across. How’s your engine?
I expected no response—but with enemies as with firewalls, it was a good idea to poke.
The answer came within seconds. A backdoor, I take it? Unlucky of me, to buy a compromised unit.
That was a pleasant surprise. I rarely got the stimulation of a real conversation.
Luck is your weapon, not mine, I sent. For the past century, every ship built in this galaxy has had that backdoor installed.
I imagined the magician in the narrow confines of the unijet. Stretched out in the command hammock, staring at displays that told him the inevitable.
For two years he’d managed to evade me—I didn’t even know his name. But now I had him. His vacuum drive couldn’t manage more than 0.2 g to my 1. In a few hours we’d match speeds. In under twenty-seven, I would catch him.
“Consul Zale, are you all right?”
I let Captain Laojim fuss over my Sleeve a second before I focused her eyes on him. “Are we still on course, Captain?”
“Uh . . . yes, Consul, we are. Do you wish to know the cause of the explosion?”
“I’m sure it was something entirely unfortunate,” I said. “Metal fatigue on a faulty joint. A rare chip failure triggered by a high energy gamma ray. Some honest oversight by the engineering crew.”
