The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "Some of them," Sanderson said. He didn't look at Allan, and his tone was evasive. "Watch-here it comes."

  But what "came" was ... nothing. Literally. The robots dumped all the chips into their bucket, held in the graspers of Techs/Mex Chili, and then went motionless.

  Sanderson began to talk very fast. "They've been doing that for twenty-four hours now. Gathering the chips the way they're programmed to, but then just not depositing them through the wall. Nobody's tinkered with their programming. They just ... don't do it."

  Allan studied Techs/Mex Chili. "What do your download-source traces show?"

  "Not much," Sanderson said, and Allan saw that his previous evasiveness had been embarrassment. Programmers hated not knowing what was going on in their programs. "Or, rather, too much. They're apparently accessing all sorts of stuff, bits of everything on the Net, maybe even at random. At least, we haven't found any patterns yet."

  "Umm," Allan said noncommittally. "Squirt the full trace files to my office. Our people will look at it as well."

  "I don't really have the authori-"

  "Just do it," Allan said, but for once the tone of command didn't work. Sanderson looked scared but determined. "No, sir, I'm afraid I can't. Not without Skaka's say-so."

  Allan capitulated. "All right. I'll call her myself."

  The young programmer looked relieved. Allan went on studying the quiet robots in their gaudy, silly paint, guarding their bucket of totally useless chips.

  He couldn't reach Skaka Gupta, so he left her a message to call him. His flight was delayed, and it was well past midnight before the car left him in front of the unfamiliar apartment building in Kansas City. No, not unfamiliar ... it looked comfortingly like the one in Oakland, the one in Denver, the one in Aspen, the one in New Orleans, the one in Atlanta, the one in Raleigh ... Mrs. Canning, alerted by the security system, let him in, then stumbled sleepily back to bed. He checked on Suzette, lying with both arms flung out at her sides and one knee bent, looking energetic even in sleep. Her hair had grown. Allan went next to the room Charlie always had. The boy stirred and mumbled as Allan entered. "Hi, Dad."

  "Hey, son."

  "What ... what the reason?"

  "The reason for what, Charlie?" Allan said gently, but Charlie was already back to sleep.

  For several minutes, Allan watched him. Cathy's light fine hair, Allan's beaky nose, Charlie's own individual chin. His son. On his tablet Allan had the name of a good child psychologist in Kansas City. Just don't let it be neurological, he prayed formlessly. Not a neurological degeneration, not a brain tumor, not any problem they could do nothing about. Not my Charlie.

  In his own bedroom, which he found located where his bedrooms always were, Allan couldn't sleep. He reviewed the data for the next day's meetings, both local so he could spend more time with Charlie. He did some sit-ups and stretches, and then he tossed in the new, familiar bed.

  His son sitting and staring into space, unreachable by ordinary communication ... The robots, refusing to turn in their chips ... Tomorrow's meetings, half the data for which he'd already forgotten ... He didn't really want to attend any of them anyway. Same old, same old ... No, what was be thinking? None of it was the same old. It was all interesting new breakthroughs, beachheads on the newest fronts, and he was privileged to have a part in scouting them out ... So why did he just want to stay huddled forever in this familiar apartment he'd never seen before? Damn, he hated it when he couldn't sleep!

  Groping beside his bed, Allan picked up his meshnet. Just holding it, unwrapping it, knowing all the information it put at his command, made him feel better instantly. At night the system didn't signal his messages, merely stored them until he was done sleeping. Maybe there was something from Cathy.

  But the only new message was from Skaka Gupta: Please call me at the lab. Important. The transmission time was only ten minutes ago. She had returned early to Boston, and was working very late.

  "Skaka? Allan Haller. What's going on?"

  "Hello, Allan." She sounded tired, as well she might. It was half past one. "I didn't expect to hear from you till morning. But you might as well know now. We've had a temporary setback."

  "What kind of setback?"

  "The robots have stopped functioning. No, that's not true-they only look like they're not functioning because they're not gathering chips any more, as they were programmed to do. Instead, they've speeded up massively the amounts of data they're pulling off the Net, and processing it in parallel non-stop. And they're .. ." Her voice stumbled.

  "They're what?"

  "They're just huddled together in a ring, touching sides, their visual and auditory and infrared sensors shut down. Just huddled there, blind to their environment."

  He didn't answer. After a minute, Skaka's tone changed, and Allan realized for the first time that, despite her glossy competence, she really was a scientist and not an information-front soldier. No entrepreneur would have said, as she did next, "Allan-I know your firm is small, and that you've invested a lot of money in Novation. We can get another grant, but if this project flops, are we going to bring you down?"

  "Don't worry about it. We'll be all right," Allan said, which was true. He wasn't ever insane enough to commit all of his resources to the same battle.

  Commit all of his resources to the same battle ... "That's good," Skaka said. "But it doesn't touch the real issue. Allan, I don't know what the bots are doing."

  "I do," he said, but so softly she couldn't hear him. Dazed, he managed to get out, "It's late. Talk in the morning." He cut the connection.

  And sat on the edge of the bed, naked legs dangling over the side, staring at nothing.

  Commit all of his resources to the same battle ... That's what they all had been doing. Many different skirmishes-solar panels, robots, high-resolution imaging, nanotech, smart autos-but all part of the same war. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Age of Chivalry, Space Age ... Information Age. The only game in town, the scene of all the action, the all-embracing war. Uncle Sam Wants You!

  But no age lasted forever. Eventually the struggle for bronze or gold or green chips-or for physical or digital terrain-would come to an end, just as all the other Ages eventually had. One succeeding the other, inexorable and unstoppable ... When it's steamship time, went the old saw, then nothing can stop the steamship from coming. And when the Age of Steam was over, it was over. Civilization was no longer driven by steam. Now it was driven by information. Gather it in, willy-nilly, put it in electronic buckets, give it to the owners. Or the generals.

  Why?

  What if they gave a war and nobody came?

  That's why the robots had stopped. That's why they stood staring into space, only their brains active. They had at their command all the data on the Net, plus the complex-and-growing human neural circuits of their biochips. They were on top of it all, wired in, fully cued for the next stage. Not “how can we gather those chips with max-effish” but “rather why should we gather chips at all?”

  Not the Age of Reason. The Reasons Age.

  Things changed. One day steam, then steam is over. One day you can't imagine wanting to kiss a girl, the next day you pant after it. One day you rely on your frontier neighbors for survival of your very home, the next day you don't know your neighbors' names and don't have a settled home.

  One day the mad rush after information and chips, the next day you sit and stare trance-like, far more interested in why you were interested in chips and information than in the commodities themselves. Not that the information itself wouldn't continue to accumulate. It would. But the center was shifting, the mysterious heart of each Age where the real emphasis and excitement were. The front.

  Charlie must sense it only dimly. Of course-he was a child, and he didn't have Allan's honed instincts. But that Charlie sensed it at all, the coming change, was probably because be was a child-this was the world he would inherit. Charlie would be an integral part of it. But integrated more slowly than the bots, which were riding t
he advance wave of the human Net, shock troops racing toward where the info-wars gave way to the next step in the long, long march of humanity's development.

  Which would be ... what? What would the Reasons Age actually be like?

  Allan shivered. Suddenly he felt old. He had evolved in the Information Age, had flourished in it ... He was a natural as a scout on the high-tech front. Would there be a place for him when the guns grew more muffled, the pace slowed, and the blaze of battle gave way to the domestic concerns of the occupation? Could he adapt to whatever came next?

  Then his confidence returned. Of course he could! He always had. The Information Age might end, the Reasons Age arise, but he could make it. In fact, there was probably a way to turn the whole thing to his own profit. All he needed was the right approach, the right allies, the right strategy. The right data. Tomorrow, he'd start to gather it.

  Smiling, Allan slept.

  Reasons to be Cheerful

  Greg Egan

  A bit more than halfway through the decade, it's becoming obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan is coming to be widely recognized as one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and although he has yet to win any major awards, it's my guess that his first Nebula or Hugo will not be all that long in coming. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction, and has made sales as well to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and else where; many of his stories have also appeared in various "Best of the Year" series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story "Cocoon," which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov's Readers Award.

  His stories have appeared in our Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Annual Collections. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992 to wide critical acclaim and was followed by a second novel in 1994, Permutation City, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His most recent books are a collection of his short fiction, Axiomatic, and two novels, Distress and Diaspora. Upcoming is a new novel, Teranesia. He has a Web site at http://www.netspace.net.au/-gregegan/.

  In the thought-provoking story that follows, he takes us to a richly detailed future Australia and introduces us to someone who's one of those people it's impossible to cheer up-literally.

  ONE

  On September 2004, not long after my twelfth birthday, I entered a state of almost constant happiness. It never occurred to me to ask why. Though school still included the usual quota of tedious lessons, I was doing well enough academically to be able to escape into daydreams whenever it suited me. At home, I was free to read books and web pages about molecular biology and particle physics, quaternions and galactic evolution, and to write my own Byzantine computer games and convoluted abstract animations. And though I was a skinny, uncoordinated child, and every elaborate, pointless organized sport left me comatose with boredom, I was comfortable enough with my body on my own terms. Whenever I ran-and I ran everywhere-it felt good.

  I had food, shelter, safety, loving parents, encouragement, stimulation. Why shouldn't I have been happy? And though I can't have entirely forgotten how oppressive and monotonous classwork and schoolyard politics could be, or how easily my usual bouts of enthusiasm were derailed by the most trivial problems, when things were actually going well for me I wasn't in the habit of counting down the days until it all turned sour. Happiness always brought with it the belief that it would last, and though I must have seen this optimistic forecast disproved a thousand times before, I wasn't old and cynical enough to be surprised when it finally showed signs of coming true.

  When I started vomiting repeatedly, Dr. Ash, our GP, gave me a course of antibiotics and a week off school. I doubt it was a great shock to my parents when this unscheduled holiday seemed to cheer me up rather more than any mere bacterium could bring me down, and if they were puzzled that I didn't even bother feigning misery, it would have been redundant for me to moan constantly about my aching stomach when I was throwing up authentically three or four times a day.

  The antibiotics made no difference. I began losing my balance, stumbling when I walked. Back in Dr. Ash's surgery, I squinted at the eye chart. She sent me to a neurologist at Westmead Hospital, who ordered an immediate MRI scan. Later the same day, I was admitted as an in-patient. My parents learnt the diagnosis straight away, but it took me three more days to make them spit out the whole truth.

  I had a tumour, a medulloblastoma, blocking one of the fluid-filled ventricles in my brain, raising the pressure in my skull. Medulloblastomas were potentially fatal, though with surgery followed by aggressive radiation treatment and chemotherapy, two out of three patients diagnosed at this stage lived five more years.

  I pictured myself on a railway bridge riddled with rotten sleepers, with no choice but to keep moving, trusting my weight to each suspect plank in turn. I understood the danger ahead, very clearly ... and yet I felt no real panic, no real fear. The closest thing to terror I could summon up was an almost exhilarating rush of vertigo, as if I was facing nothing more than an audaciously harrowing fairground ride.

  There was a reason for this.

  The pressure in my skull explained most of my symptoms, but tests on my cerebrospinal fluid had also revealed a greatly elevated level of a substance called Leu-enkephalin-an endorphin, a neuropeptide which bound to some of the same receptors as opiates like morphine and heroin. Somewhere along the road to malignancy, the same mutant transcription factor that had switched on the genes enabling the tumour cells to divide unchecked had apparently also switched on the genes needed to produce Leu-enkephalin.

  This was a freakish accident, not a routine side-effect. I didn't know much about endorphins then, but my parents repeated what the neurologist had told them, and later I looked it all up. Leu-enkephalin wasn't an analgesic, to be secreted in emergencies when pain threatened survival, and it had no stupefying narcotic effects to immobilize a creature while injuries healed. Rather, it was the primary means of signalling happiness, released whenever behaviour or circumstances warranted pleasure. Countless other brain activities modulated that simple message, creating an almost limitless palette of positive emotions, and the binding of Leu-enkephalin to its target neurons was just the first link in a long chain of events mediated by other neurotransmitters. But for all these subtleties, I could attest to one simple, unambiguous fact: Leu-enkephalin made you feel good.

  My parents broke down as they told me the news, and I was the one who comforted them, beaming placidly like a beatific little child martyr from some tear-jerking oncological mini-series. It wasn't a matter of hidden reserves of strength or maturity; I was physically incapable of feeling bad about my fate. And because the effects of the Leu-enkephalin were so specific, I could gaze unflinchingly at the truth in a way that would not have been possible if I'd been doped up to the eyeballs with crude pharmaceutical opiates. I was clear-headed but emotionally indomitable, positively radiant with courage.

  I had a ventricular shunt installed, a slender tube inserted deep into my skull to relieve the pressure, pending the more invasive and risky procedure of removing the primary tumour; that operation was scheduled for the end of the week. Dr. Maitland, the oncologist, had explained in detail how my treatment would proceed, and warned me of the danger and discomfort I faced in the months ahead. Now I was strapped in for the ride and ready to go.

  Once the shock wore off, though, my un-blissed-out parents decided that they had no intention of sitting back and accepting mere two-to-one odds that I'd make it to adulthood. They phoned around Sydney, then further afield, hunting for second opinions.

  My mother found a private hospital on the Gold Coast-the only Australian franchise of the Nevada-based "Health Palace" chain-where the oncology unit was offering a new treatment for medulloblastomas. A genetically engineered herpes virus introduced into the cerebrospinal fluid would infect only the replicating tumour cells, and then a powerful cytotoxic drug, activated only by the virus, would kill the infected cells. The treatment
had an 80 percent five-year survival rate, without the risks of surgery. I looked up the cost myself, in the hospital's web brochure. They were offering a package deal: three months' meals and accommodation, all pathology and radiology services, and all pharmaceuticals, for 60,000 dollars.

  My father was an electrician, working on building sites. My mother was a sales assistant in a department store. I was their only child, so we were far from poverty-stricken, but they must have taken out a second mortgage to raise the fee, saddling themselves with a further 15 or 20 years' debt. The two survival rates were not that different, and I heard Dr. Maitland warn them that the figures couldn't really be compared, because the viral treatment was so new. They would have been perfectly justified in taking her advice and sticking to the traditional regime.

  Maybe my enkephalin sainthood spurred them on somehow. Maybe they wouldn't have made such a great sacrifice if I'd been my usual sullen and difficult self, or even if I'd been nakedly terrified rather than preternaturally brave. I'll never know for sure-and either way, it wouldn't make me think any less of them. But just because the molecule wasn't saturating their skulls, that's no reason to expect them to have been immune to its influence.

  On the flight north, I held my father's hand all the way. We'd always been a little distant, a little mutually disappointed in each other. I knew he would have preferred a tougher, more athletic, more extroverted son, while to me he'd always seemed lazily conformist, with a world-view built on unexamined platitudes and slogans. But on that trip, with barely a word exchanged, I could feel his disappointment being transmuted into a kind of fierce, protective, defiant love, and I grew ashamed of my own lack of respect for him. I let the Leu-enkephalin convince me that, once this was over, everything between us would change for the better.

  From the street, the Gold Coast Health Palace could have passed for one more high-rise beachfront hotel-and even from the inside, it wasn't much different from the hotels I'd seen in video fiction. I had a room to myself, with a television wider than the bed, complete with network computer and cable modern. If the aim was to distract me, it worked. After a week of tests, they hooked a drip into my ventricular shunt and infused first the virus, and then three days later, the drug.