The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Arrogant and silly as he was, your uncle was the savior of my family and a blessing on every day that I have lived since.”

  “Good,” felt like a worthy sentiment.

  Miriam stood and approached, smiling at both of us.

  That’s when instinct gave me my first warning: a visceral sense that this girl was not the foolish victim here.

  “I have met your terms,” Aamir said.

  Maybe so.

  “Bradley, I wish you and the girl a safe journey home,” he told me. Then the grateful man vanished inside a house that I barely knew at all.

  The young woman had her father’s build, muscles somewhat softened by her gender. She was pretty enough without being a natural beauty and the first smile was big if rather unconvincing—an expression worn for the occasion but not deeply felt.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Tired,” she claimed.

  I wanted to see desperation or relief in that face, or at least a sorry, slightly embarrassed quality that proved the girl felt something for me and my particular circumstances. But I didn’t deserve understanding. What I deserved was a smile that turned mocking and a quick chuckle, something about this adventure at least a little bit funny.

  Bristling, I looked everywhere but at her face—which might well have been part of the plan.

  “I want to get out of here,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m sure you do.”

  We walked toward the dock.

  Halfway there, she said, “Thank you, by the way.”

  I managed another couple steps before asking, “Why the hell did you come to this place? What were you thinking?”

  Again, that mocking laugh.

  My anger grew hotter. Looking back at the tanned feet and sandals following in my wake, I said, “You were warned not to come here. This place isn’t safe.”

  “I was with other people,” she said.

  “What other people?”

  She edited the word. “Friends,” she said emphatically. Then she walked up next to me, pressing the pace. “We were bored,” she said. “We were bored and had a boat, and I told them my mother’s stories about diving over these reefs. Some of the best coral in the world, Mom claimed. So everybody wanted to see, and we never intended to get in trouble.”

  “Aamir came floating out and grabbed you, did he?”

  She took a breath. She said, “Yes.”

  “Along with those scary friends of his,” I added, motioning at the boys with machine guns.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Straven was standing where I left him, surrounded by guns. He looked as if he was chatting amiably with the gunmen, which was in character, and then he stopped talking and everybody looked at us. My instincts were whispering, and I had no idea what they were saying. Then several guns were pushed against strong shoulders, and a keen sense of fear ate into me.

  “I wanted to be careful,” said Miriam.

  “Quiet,” I said.

  The dock felt endless. My little boat was bobbing on the perfect blue water, and Straven smiled at me before gazing at the girl. His face was full of information I couldn’t decipher.

  He looked back at me, saying, “Congratulations.”

  I didn’t talk.

  “You have done a good thing,” he said.

  “And you’ll get your cut, as soon as the three of us are out of here and safe,” I said.

  Straven said, “Yes.”

  My heart hurt, it was beating so hard.

  “Except I am staying behind,” he said.

  One of the gunmen laughed while the others practiced their menacing stances.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Straven shrugged. “I just made a new deal, and now my commission is unnecessary. So you are free of that expense, and please, use those funds however you think is best.” Then he took my hand and squeezed, saying, “You are a good enough man, Bradley. It has been a pleasure working with you.”

  I looked at his face and then back at the mansions. Somehow even more faces were pressed against the window glass.

  “Is everybody here Transcending?” I asked.

  “Everyone older than fourteen, yes.”

  “One hundred million dollars is more than enough,” I pointed out.

  He agreed. “But there are others who want to join us too. This project involves far more than one dilapidated resort for the spoiled and soft.”

  None of this should have been a surprise, yet I was startled, standing on the hot planks while looking back at the last busy days.

  Miriam broke the spell by jumping into the boat.

  “Come on, Brad,” she said.

  I still didn’t understand. If I had, I would have grabbed one of the guns and shot the girl a few times. Just for the satisfaction. But instead of violence, I amiably climbed down and watched the men untie the lines while Straven knelt, making certain that I saw the charm in his face when he unleashed it.

  “Honestly,” he said, “I was not certain what I would do today. Stay and Transcend with these people, or cash my paycheck and wait another week or two.”

  I told the boat to go home.

  We pulled away, and Straven rose again and waved. “This is a good day for everybody. You just don’t see it now, my friend.”

  Miriam was sitting in the bow. She looked relaxed, untroubled. I went up to her and sat, and when she glanced at me, I said, “The payment won’t go through.”

  Various thoughts passed across her face.

  I reached out and pulled the sunglasses away from her eyes. “I spent some of my own money to protect all of yours,” I said. “In a few minutes, they’ll find out that there’s nothing inside the encryption but nothing.”

  She smiled, and she nodded slowly. “We thought you might do that.”

  “Well, you were right.”

  Miriam shook her head. “Think again, Brad.”

  I felt dangerous and in control, sitting back on the padded seat, pulling what pleasure I could from my treachery.

  “Do you know why you should reconsider?” she asked.

  Again, I felt ill-at-ease.

  She said, “Several thousand poor people can certainly afford to pool their funds and pay for several Transcendences. But they only needed to pay for one person’s Transcendence. They had to find a charitable girl who would give them a situation that they could exploit, letting their entire community take the ultimate journey together.”

  I grabbed a knee, a hand.

  “Don’t touch me, Brad.”

  My hands jumped off the machine.

  “How long ago?” I asked.

  “By my count, I left your world fifty-two years ago,” she said, laughing again at something she could see and that was reliably funny.

  I was furious and sick inside, and on the outside, trembling.

  “Let them have the ransom,” she said. “Although technically speaking, I don’t believe that’s what it is.”

  I didn’t talk.

  “And you can take the rest of my inheritance for yourself, if you want.” Her facsimile leaned forward, making certain our eyes met. “I know quite a lot that I didn’t know before, Brad.”

  “I bet,” I whispered.

  “But one grand truth found me, long before I was laid down inside the cold bath,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She waited, probably for days by her reckoning.

  “What did you learn?” I finally asked.

  “How the world is going to end,” she said. Then the facsimile sat back and turned itself off, never speaking another word.

  Drought

  Mogadishu looked prosperous, looked happy. There were as many smiles in the streets as there were faces, and I couldn’t count either, the city was so jammed with people. Children and their parents crowded me, plus a very few elderly, and there were armies of machines busily chasing jobs and hobbies and whatever else it was that our mechanical servants did with their neurons. I walked throug
h the crowds for an hour before finding a proper rental shop. I said that I wanted a car, except what I got was more a spaceship with tires. The grinning young office worker had been in town only three months, but he acted like the expert that I needed. And I needed nothing less than the best, he claimed. Driving through the interior could turn frustrating without warning. No, there weren’t any explicit dangers outside the city. Unless I looked delicious to a saber-lion or cybernetic hyena, I was going to be safe enough. The smiling young fellow said that I was a man accustomed to the best, obviously, and the best was a fat-tired wonder that generated its power from a palladium-tritium reactor that would keep me fed and comfortable for the next fifty years, if necessary.

  “Let’s hope for better than that,” I said, planting my signature at the bottom of the legal terrain.

  As promised, the car was a wonder, and my drive proved interesting, what with the beautiful scenery woven around an endless boredom. Rains had been reliable for several years and rivers and grasslands were prospering in what used to be wastelands, and of course the wild game had returned, often wearing embellishments given by cold clever dreamers. The young highways were still in good repair, but the last economic boom that had swept across the continent, destroying drought and civil unrest, had also erased the farms that would have thrived in the new Eden. When every patch of ground is a national park, parks cease to matter very much. Each slice of this countryside was as splendid as most of its neighbors, and every time one more person Transcended, another ex-peasant from the wilderness could move into a magical city, buy an empty apartment for cheap, and settle into a robot-aided existence free of dust and dreariness.

  Modern life was just the proving grounds for the greater Heaven to come, which was Transcendence.

  On that particular day, barely two billion people were still walking the emerald face of the Earth, and that number fell weekly, reliably and steadily steering us toward a population that would, that should, probably level out around five hundred million. At least that’s what plenty of AIs and Transcendent sociologists were claiming, figuring on reproductive urges, social norms, and other well-researched factors.

  Half a billion sounded like plenty of humans, and of course our species was too stubborn and too adaptable to put ourselves into extinction willingly.

  So why did troublemakers like me insist on worrying about our survival?

  Driving the reborn savanna, it was easy to push every great fear out of the way. That left the little terrors free to claim me, which was what every son does when he drives off to visit his mother.

  The highway ended abruptly, construction machines abandoned in mid-scoop and pour. The dirt roads after the pavement meant slower driving, and soon those roads failed as well. After that, each new stream and little lake wasn’t just new, it was free of the weight that comes with names and histories, and a man traveling alone could think he was an explorer in the mold of Burton and Kurtz.

  On the far shore of the largest local lake was a tidy village straight out of the Neolithic. Sitting under an umbrella that looked weirdly familiar to me was an old woman I had never seen before.

  “You could have flown here,” said my mother’s voice. “We wouldn’t have minded at all.”

  “Driving felt more honest,” I said.

  “If that’s what matters, you should have walked from the coast.”

  “Maybe that’s how I’ll return.”

  The skin that was once terrified of any sunlight had turned brown and leathery. A tooth was missing in front, and Mom didn’t appear to care what sagged and what spread. But even depleted, dressed in nothing but wild fabrics and other creatures’ leather, the woman looked fit. I told her so.

  Happy for the praise, she said, “We should race along the beach. I would win.”

  “Not in a fair contest,” I said.

  “Oh Brad,” she said. “Mothers never play fair.”

  Her community was full of like-minded souls who had come from every continent, every background. A thousand villages and tribes like theirs were scattered along the Rift Valley, each with its quirky rules and nonbinding covenants, all united in the mad hope that what they were doing would last longer than their own generation.

  This good land fed them and clothed them, and they smiled at least as much as the citizens of Mogadishu. I met Mother’s friends and neighbors, names piled on names. Nobody appeared especially ignorant about the world. These unaugmented minds spent a portion of their days studying world events, and every household had at least two readers filled to bursting with classics, some thousands of years old, others written last week.

  I thought that was ironic and said so.

  “Why is that, Brad?”

  The classics made sense to me. But after Grandpa’s day, there were suddenly too many titles in the world for the world to read. Pointing out the obvious, I said that even if the smartest person went into the cold bath, and even if he or she survived for a thousand years measured in plodding earth-time, there was no way to swim this ocean of word and thought.

  “Why even bother reading?” I asked.

  She nodded, and she smiled. “But do you see any readers being used?”

  No, actually, I hadn’t.

  “Because you won’t,” she said. She threw a little laugh at me, adding, “We keep these devices as tests, and believe me, nobody’s will ever fails them.”

  I was sure I’d met everyone in the village, but then I strolled into my mother’s tidy hut. A somewhat younger man was sitting on the floor, and suddenly he was standing. He was Chinese and shy-faced until he spoke, and then he called me, “Bradley.” He shook my hand with both of his, saying, “Please, let me put you at ease. I love your mother because of her great wealth.”

  Mom laughed loudly, but my expression lacked any good humor.

  Then both of them were laughing, their ambush successful.

  “He means my goats,” she reported. “Just my goats. I told you, I left everything else for the World Orphan Society, so kids left behind by Transcending parents have enough resources to thrive.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” I said.

  Then I started to smile, and not just a little bit.

  It was the first time in a very long while that I felt truly happy, and isn’t that the best moment to make life’s important decisions? When joy and a good journey are buoying you up?

  Transcendence

  I sat beside the long conference table, talking.

  “I always thought that maybe, just maybe, before I died in every way, I could figure out a fix that would make ordinary life so attractive, compelling, and pure that Transcendence turned out to be a passing fad. I don’t know how I was going to do it. Design the first cheap starships, or show people how we could terraform the solar system, or maybe I’d invent fancy transporters that could send us to the center of the galaxy where we’d meet whoever thinks they’re in charge.

  “Or even better, I’d reconfigure the cosmos, giving us new rules to live by.

  “Or maybe . . . ”

  I hesitated. Then with a shake of the head, I said, “You don’t have to be stuck inside a cold-gel bath to be full of idiot dreams.”

  Nobody said a word.

  “There was a moment, out on the veldt with my odd old mother, when I realized that I wasn’t going to do anything amazing. And even worse, the world had turned empty on me, and I hadn’t even noticed.

  “Do you know what it takes to empty the world?

  “Do you?

  “It’s not when the people are all gone. That hasn’t happened and it probably can’t happen. No, the Earth turns vacant when the dead are more compelling than the living, and nobody left can take their place.

  “This is when I finally made up my mind,” I said. “When I understood that I was on the brink of being alone, and really, much as I wished, there wasn’t going to be any miracle fix that I could accomplish inside my own Transcendence.”

  Then I paused, looking out a window that I had
built just a half-moment ago.

  Snow was falling on the mountain slope.

  Everybody was waiting for me. Drawn from every memory and from every last file, the dead looked at me impatiently. A couple voices whispered my name with pissy tones, but I didn’t care what my uncles said. Lucee was young and pregnant with Miriam, and two bruised boys were sitting like prisoners on their chairs, and Grandma Joyce was the calm center, and my mother looked like someone who could never eat goat or live on dirt. Meanwhile, the old patriarch himself was standing behind me, waiting to claim his chair. But that was my chair, and I told Grandpa so.

  “What are we doing here?” he asked.

  “Don’t play dumb, Dad,” said Mother. “This is a game he’s built, and we are the pieces.”

  “Bradley? Is that true?”

  “No,” said the eight-year-old in their midst. “This is a lot bigger than any game. It’s taken me three years and all of our family’s remaining wealth and power, and I’ve also gathered up thousands of willing souls to share the cold-gel with me. We’re working together here. Our minds and the biggest, quickest banks of quantum computers are married into a single Transcendence.”

  “Brad wants us to run the family meeting,” said Lucee.

  “Little Brad wants to be in charge,” Miriam said, from the womb.

  “Except I don’t have any explicit goal here,” I warned. “This simulation is the best ever managed, and it has its own future. And the modeling doesn’t involve just you, but billions of other people, dead and otherwise. All but a tiny sliver of my chilled brain is being used to help maintain an Earth the same as ours was decades ago. There is just one difference: In this realm, there is no Transcendence. That technology is forbidden, impossible, and unthinkable. And as soon as this eight-year-old boy walks out that door, your minds will be set back to Aspen on the brink of Christmas. Miriam will be a fetus again, and Grandpa will be a rich cancer patient, and I don’t have any clue what will happen next to any of you.”

  Every face was fixed on me.