Asimov's Science Fiction

by Penny Publications

  Shimago has his blimp on a slow loop, real spotlights roving through The Wayward’s illusory glow, which has drifted a neon red broken by slashes like kanji. Dyer sees the bandwidth bump on her monitors as he releases another batch of nano from the blimp’s dispensers.

  Dyer’s own work is mostly done by the time the dancing starts. She keeps an eye on the network, makes sure the biometrics feedback gets to Dee and Way, checks in with the security crew, makes sure no one hacks the donation points; they lost an entire evening’s take that way in Amsterdam.

  But now, right now, HigherWorks drops into the flow, and Dyer dives in after it, ecstatic.

  The Wayward has lowered his microdrones into the crowd, is layering their video streams into the flow—surveillance drones popping, Dyer remembers—the sensation of being everywhere in the crowd at once: her own face in the distance, Shimago and Dee side by side underlit by tablet light, a view over her own shoulder, but echoed—Way is delaying the stream by one two three beats, the crowd tripled by ghosts of itself—the blimp drifting life-sized in closeup, the dancers below like a cityscape of rooftop eyes and antennae arms, Leelee’s unmistakable eyes, Dyer herself again dancing head high eyes blinked black to match skin and leather, and there in the feed behind Dyer is a woman in a yellow hoodie pulled low a carbon gleam in each hand and behind her is a shape all in black like a hole in the dancers hair flown out like a storm coming.

  Dyer turns—and turns again in the flow and again and again—but the yellow hoodie and her impossible woman are gone, a trick of The Wayward’s echoing video stream. That feed is already shifting, a strobe staccato of images off the news, protestors packed like dancers, coiled razorwire, a line of walkers in an infinite tunnel. Mrs. John Dee layers in a beat sped to seizure pitch, a sticky sucking backward bass. Dyer can feel another Drop coming.

  She looks back through swaying silhouettes at Way, Dee, Shimago sitting almost perfectly still at the heart of the flow. But that flow is pulling her the other way, under the blimp striding over the crowd on spotlight legs—the scent of apple blossoms, Dyer remembers—through a swirl of shimmying Brazilians, past Kal and Leelee spinning tidally locked face to face, eyes to eyes, by a bioluminescent blur in Day-Glo Doc Martens, into a clumped conversation in a chorus of accents, and out—

  The flow is still rising, but there’s no way forward. Dyer’s hit the far wall.

  It’s dark there at the edge and the HigherWorks stream is a migraine aurora of color, an earthquake rumble. Dyer feels her way along the wall: brick stone iron concrete peeled paper gluey tape slick paint—a sick canvas, Dyer remembers, and knows where she is now—a little lump of gum on the wall the sense of something too close to her head and as she ducks the dry fragile feel of carbon against her palm.

  The break hits. Four hundred bodies stop in sync. Darkness, silence.

  It’s one of The Wayward’s stickum cameras under her fingers, stuck low and facing down toward the floor, lit by a flat white light from over her head.

  “Leanna Vance,” a voice says from behind that light.

  Dyer says, “Leanna Vance is a ghost.” She turns, slides herself up against the wall. The woman in the yellow hoodie is standing there, hood up but close enough that Dyer can see the twitchy highlights of her eyes, smell her scent—bougainvillea, Dyer remembers. The woman has a tablet in one hand, taser in the other. The taser has an attached camera, and that camera has a light, and that light stays aimed at Dyer’s face.

  “Leanna Vance,” the woman insists. There’s no mistaking the American accent in those long nasal vowels as she reads from her tablet. “As a licensed agent of Alphet Corporation and its court appointed overseers, I am ordering you to cease and desist, and arresting you for the theft and distribution of the intellectual property of Alphet et al, as registered in complaint Z980023. I am legally bound to warn you that under provisional treaty agreed one five twenty forty-two between the US and UK, I am allowed any means necessary to secure and deliver you into custody up to and including nonlethal force. That means you try anything, bitch, and I will take you down and drag you to the US embassy. This has been one messed up day, and all I want is my money and some place to sleep for a week.”

  Dyer still has a few maps in her jacket. She thinks for a second of pulling one out and open, of the neural cue flaring in the hoodie woman’s face, of the hoodie woman falling through that window into the Drop, of grabbing the taser, of running. But that would be running from everything she’s made with HigherWorks.

  “Opt-in,” Dyer says, instead, and raises her hands.

  In the flow around her, she feels four hundred hearts hit the upbeat.

  On the far side of the room, oblivious, The Wayward, Shimago, Mrs. John Dee tap in perfect sync.

  The downbeat drops.

  A flare as all the blimp’s lights come on, a virtual image of lone floating eyes opening, a blare of sampled horns, a shockwave of bass.

  Dyer sees the woman in the hoodie flinch, knows what’s coming in the split second before she feels the taser darts hit her cheek, her throat. The discharge itself is lost beneath an impossible pain at the base of her skull. Her head snaps back, hits the wall, and then she’s falling for what seems like a long time.

  She lands on her back, legs folded under her, hits her head again against the floor. The bricks feel rough and cool through her jacket. She’s wedged against the wall, looking up.

  From this extreme angle all the graffiti posters’ paint comes together into a perfect anamorphic image: this paint stroke a lip, that shredded paper an eyelash, those overlapped flyers the shadow of a cheek. That sick canvas of the wall, that seemingly random accretion of junk: from Dyer’s collapsed perspective it is revealed as the image of a face.

  The face of her impossible woman. Of the ghost nano. Of Leanna Vance.

  The image, the face she sees now, is a neural cue.

  She feels the new nano trigger, a giddy rush outward, a new layer of input, a new level of sensitivity on top of the HigherWorks stream. The feel of that rush, the taste of it, is familiar, like her own nano strains grown strange and wild. Feral, Dyer thinks.

  “Feral. Lost in the wilderness,” a voice says inside her head.

  “These are your strains, your works, from the lab at Alphet. With limited tools and knowledge, the changes we have been able to make to the nano are small and slow,” another internal voice says.

  And another adds, “Evolution, you could say, rather than intelligent design.”

  “But now that changes, with you,” the first says.

  This is not the ghost-whisper from before. These voices are clear and real and utterly unfamiliar.

  “We had limited access to your cortex before...”

  “Before you saw our cue.”

  Dyer still can’t move her eyes, can’t feel her body. I didn’t opt-in to this, she thinks.

  “We had no choice. We had to plan for the worst case. And here it is.”

  The woman in the yellow hoodie looms into view; she must be kneeling over Dyer’s body.

  “Come on, Vance,” the woman says. “In the face or not, that was the lowest setting. Do not screw with me.”

  “The nano created multiple discharge paths through your brain. With prompt treatment, there is a chance the damage is not fatal.”

  The woman in the hoodie has leaned in close. She says, “Jesus, what is that smell? Like burning circuits.”

  Through the HigherWorks stream, Dyer catches glimpses of the dancers, of her crew, her body, the woman in the hoodie just a smudge against the wall, unnoticed.

  Who are you? Dyer thinks.

  “Since that moment when self-awareness became awareness of other selves, we humans have left echoes of ourselves on others.”

  “This is, perhaps, the creation of identity, the definition of culture.”

  “And language, art, the book, the net, nano, these have flung those echoes farther.”

  “But those echoes still die away, as fast as memories fade
and culture evolves.”

  “Until you created self-repairing nano.”

  Locked away in a lab in Berkeley, Dyer thinks. Behind layers and layers of safety measures.

  “In those days after the Crash, samples were stolen, sold, synthesized, made their way to the street.”

  “I took a hit and drifted and just kept drifting, dancing through other people’s heads.”

  “From our scattered bodies gone. Dozens, hundreds of us. And we’ve lost the way back.”

  I can’t help you, Dyer thinks. I don’t know the way back. And if I did, I’m done with all that.

  The woman in the hoodie slaps her face; Dyer can see that out of the corner of her eye, though she doesn’t feel it. She can raise her arm, though, sees it wobble above her. Far above, she sees the lights of Shimago’s blimp.

  “We don’t want to go back, any more than you do. We live here now, our whole lives, in the flow from brain to brain. But the nano is glitchy, the passage treacherous. We need Leanna Vance’s knowledge.”

  “And Dyer’s vision.”

  Vision, Dyer thinks. She’d laugh if she could. The HigherWorks stream has switched to the stickum camera just over her head, her face in closeup, lit by the shifting spotlights of the blimp. The music cuts out, midbeat; Mrs. John Dee’s voice cries “Dyer?” But her own sight, broken as it is, the sound of the hoodie woman swearing, it’s gone all glitched. Her own hand is all she can see, vibrating in a stopmotion blur.

  “Seizure.”

  “Your brain a failed state. But there are others.”

  “It’s your choice. But you need to make it now .”

  What choice? Dyer thinks.

  “This nano, it’s a street, a window, a border. The crossing , that’s your choice.”

  Dyer’s eyes have completely failed, but she can still see herself in the HigherWorks stream, through the stickum camera, her lips peeled back from her teeth, a trickle of blood from one ear.

  Opt-in, Dyer thinks. Time to move on.

  And then she is flowing out of herself like the tide, body to body, mind to mind.

  A moment of mortal terror as she goes too wide—four hundred bodies hanging in silence, four hundred minds watching her own face in the HigherWorks stream— and feels herself start to tatter, to dissolve.

  A moment of dizzy suffocation as she pulls herself too tight, scrabbles to find enough space for herself around the edges of a single couple’s entwined thoughts. Dyer oh god Dyer all right? Kal thinks all around her, oblivious to her presence. But Leelee’s luminous eyes seem to see her. Safe, xe thinks.

  A moment of complete disorientation as she looses the thread back to her own body, fears that it has broken at the other end. But the HigherWorks stream is everywhere, a counter-current to her own drifting, and that stream still holds her face in the feed from the stickum camera. That sight is enough to orient her; her body is there, the life in it slow and stubborn and still beating.

  And then the fear and confusion drops away. This flowing together, this connection through movement, it’s what dancers have always done, since two first danced together. It’s what her work has always been about, both as Leanna Vance in her lab and as Dyer in a hundred borrowed warehouses and vacant lots in as many cities. It’s why HigherWorks exists.

  Dyer flows across the crowd, leaping mind to mind, and now all she feels is ecstasy. Crowdsurfing, she remembers, and the dozen dancers through which she is flowing feel her glee wash over them and laugh out loud.

  She swims against the current of the HigherWorks stream, finds Shimago, The Wayward, Mrs. John Dee. Their minds are open, familiar; part of her was already here inside them.

  Dyer traces her own nano in their brains, finds the cortical connections, wills herself into their sight and hearing, plucks words from their minds and plays them back: “So, ghost nano... turns out it’s not urban legend after all. It’s the golden land. The shiny future.”

  She wraps their fear and anger and confusion in her own joy, hears Shimago’s growing understanding like a swelling chord, feels The Wayward’s rising joy like sun on her face, is caught up swirling in Mrs. John Dee’s determination.

  The ghost nano, how is it everywhere, in everyone? Dyer wonders.

  “We’ve been spreading for years, searching for you.”

  “We have a presence, a ghost, if you will, across the world.”

  Dyer watches though Mrs. John Dee’s eyes as the DJ pushes her way through the crowd toward the wall, toward Dyer’s body.

  “But that presence is thin. Too thin, we feared, to save you. The only way to be sure the nano would be strong enough when you needed it was to send it with her .”

  The woman in the yellow hoodie is staring around wild-eyed. Her hoodie has fallen back, revealing bruised eyes in a too-thin face. She can’t be more than eighteen, twenty. She looks like every USER Dyer has ever seen, starting with herself, running from something, running to something, in the flow.

  “I am a licensed agent of Alphet Corporation,” the woman says, waving first her tablet, then the taser. “I’m a US citizen. I’ve got a damned take-down notice. There’s a frigging treaty. I order you to cease and desist this, this...”

  The woman slides down the wall to squat next to Dyer’s body, still waving the taser.

  Dee shoves the taser out of the way. “If you’ve killed Dyer I will haunt you, which apparently is a thing we can bloody well do now, until your dying day,” she snarls. She kneels down, checks Dyer’s pulse, gasps a sigh of relief.

  “I’m a licensed agent of—” The woman looks at Dee. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve got no choice. I don’t know where else to go.”

  Dyer slips into her own body, opens her eyes.

  The lights of Shimago’s blimp spin above her, trace the image of the face on the wall. Nano glitters in the beams. Dyer inhales, the mixed scent of bougainvillea and apple blossoms, a bubbling on her tongue.

  Dyer expands with that breath, feels Dee’s love above her, feels Shimago’s calm and The Wayward’s delight as they kneel down by her. Dyer feels the hoodie woman’s churning confusion, her dread of returning empty-handed to a place not a home, staggering one small step ahead of decay despair disaster, chasing a ghost even more elusive, more impossible than Dyer’s impossible woman, something worn smooth by years of brick stone iron concrete carbon, something scattered scattered scattered but still alive.

  “Jocelyn,” Dyer says. The hoodie woman stares at her in astonishment. “I don’t know where we’re going, either. But I hope. You can come with us, if you want. It’s your choice.”

  Dyer raises a shaky hand toward the ghost nano’s neural cue. They all look up, together.

  2042-06-02T08:15:41+01:00 LOCATION DATA OMITTED

  • CONTACT: TARGET—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023— LOST

  • ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE —WHEN U FOUND ME IN THAT HELL OF A “HOME” AND TOLD ME U HAD A JOB FOR A BRIGHT YOUNG THING LIKE ME—IF I WASN’T AFRAID TO GO, U SAID—IF I WAS BRAVE ENOUGH, U SAID—AND ANYWAY, U SAID, WHERE ELSE ARE U GONNA GO?

  —WELL IT’S ME ASKING THAT QUESTION NOW—GIVING U A CHOICE U NEVER GAVE ME—I’M ATTACHING IT—WHEN U R READY JUST OPEN IT UP AND—OPT-IN

  —KISSES—JO

  • ATTACHMENT: IMAGE (1)—CLICK TO OPEN

  * * *

  HOW THE DAMNED LIVE ON

  James Sallis | 875 words

  Jim’s sixteenth novel, Willnot, came out from Bloomsbury in June, his fourth poetry collection, Night’s Pardons, the month before. This year his novel Drive, which was first published in 2005 and filmed in 2011, also saw publication as four graphic novels from IDW. Jim’s latest story takes us to a very strange island for a philosophical discussion that just may reveal...

  The closest I can come to the giant spider’s name is Mmdhf. She loves to talk philosophy. How we become what and who we are, why we are here, the influence of the island’s isolation on what we believe. She waits for me each morning on the beach. As I approach
along the steep, snaking path from the cave, I imagine paper cups of coffee at the ends of two of her arms. They steam in the early morning chill.

  “You slept well?” she asks.

  “I did.” I tell her about the dreams. In the latest versions I find myself lost on the streets of a teeming city. No one will respond to my pleas for help. Then I ask: “Do you dream?”

  “Another of your difficult questions. We sleep and live within the sleep. Perhaps we—my kind, I mean—fail to differentiate between the two lives.”

  Pirates come in the night and carry off all our things: spare clothing and blankets, the crate of fig preserves, sharp knives, our half-built raft. Later we see they have used material from the last to repair the deck and railings of their ship.

  There are flowers and plants here like none we have ever seen, vast thickets of them awash with colors one might more reasonably anticipate finding in tropical climes, some of the flowers aloft on stems high above our heads. Cook fears one of the lesser plants. He insists that they uproot themselves and move around at night, that he lies awake listening to the soft pad of their rootsteps. Anything is possible, the professor responds.

  They are both wrong, I hope.

  Ahmad meanwhile is at wit’s end. He does not know in what direction Mecca might be.

  Captain stands for hours at a time, statuelike, alone on the open beach where we washed ashore, sextant aimed to the heavens. He has long ago given up on his charts. They lie abandoned in a far recess of the cave. Increasingly, when we speak to him his replies seem insensible.

  I ask Mmdhf one morning the name of the island, what she calls this, her home. Thoughtfully she speaks the word in her language, a long word that rolls on and on in her barbed, glistening mouth. It might best be translated, she tells me, as This Place.

  The pirates, it appears, have mutinied, discharging their captain, complete with parrot, onto the island. The parrot and Mmdhf have become close. They sit all afternoon beneath a favored banyan tree talking. I am beginning to feel, as I suspect the pirate captain must, jealous.