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

by Rich Horton

  She expects the three bodies to act in unison, but only one turns to regard her. “You needn’t have dressed up.”

  “Ipnoa insisted. She believes in being presentable.” Words come too quickly; her cardiac rate elevates. The cyberneticist unnerves more than she thought. “Is it true that you were around when this was a live city, with a real name?”

  Esithu blinks at her. The other bodies are separately sketching a hologram of some chimeral beast and unpacking a data polyhedron. Neither has anything to do with each other in subject matter or medium. It’s hard to decide which would be more unsettling—three bodies that function in tandem, or a single mind that can make them appear independent. “Everyone asks that. You can look it up.”

  “Most of the information about you is falsified.”

  “I’m a private person.”

  “I’ve also heard that Esithu is more title than name, passed from the original to a series of meticulously selected successors.”

  “People will believe anything,” Esithu says, inflectionless. “You’re dying, yes? You must realize that my implant won’t help.”

  When she sits the sand coheres into clay, contouring to the jut and curve of her calves. “I didn’t expect it to.”

  “Nor can I cure the disease or prolong what remains of your life.”

  “I came here,” Sennyi says, smiling, “to die among strangers, so that I won’t break my crèche-parents’ hearts. I came here to become a ghost, and your implant lets me do that.”

  Eyes whiteless with augmens fix on her. “Five years are very brief,” they say, then thumb the arch, bringing up a display. “Let’s discuss the bees.”

  It was never an accident, of course. An experiment incompatible with extant subjects, for those already implanted cannot receive another. Sennyi’s genetic timebomb, a glitch in Thirteen’s birth-web, makes her a suitable candidate. Esithu’s screen ripples and stretches to show a visual of where the hive has bonded to her, symbiotic filaments as ubiquitous through her system as lymph nodes.

  “It self-propagates using your nutrients. You might’ve noticed needing more food.”

  Sennyi watches the other two bodies. They have moved on to assemble an exoskeleton out of detritus. Bar into joints, a welder wielded with deft speed. At least they are working together now. “They’re hacking tools.”

  “Not so basic. I’ve always wanted to make Samutthewi a shadow planet. Our population is low, our cities few. A perfect condition for us to secede from the collective consciousness.”

  Two years in Twenty-Five slip by almost without Sennyi’s notice. She receives messages from the ex-fiancé, which she deletes unread. The ones from her crèche-parents are urgent. Where is she? Why won’t she see them? She sends light-hearted, mostly truthful answers about gainful employment.

  “Why don’t you talk to them properly?” Ipnoa asks Sennyi once. “They sound sick with worry.”

  She finishes off another brief note. “Says someone who’s scrubbed off her cradle watermark. Even I didn’t do that.”

  Ipnoa’s cheeks color. It is a novel sight; Sennyi has never seen her lose temper, or even evidence that she might have a temper. “I have my reasons.”

  “So do I.” Sennyi doesn’t ask the question that burns in her mouth like venom at a stinger’s tip. It is not ready; she is not ready. “Do you like your work here? Believe in Esithu’s cause?”

  “The work’s what it is.” Ipnoa untangles then obliterates ties between a Samutthewi factory and a weapons conglomerate based in Yodsana. She is effortless. “Their cause is specific and I don’t think too many will agree with it, but it’s necessary. Your memory should be your own, not something for the net to revise at collective whim.”

  “In that case,” Sennyi says, “we are both hypocrites. And so is Esithu, unless they believe only the implanted deserve a private memory.”

  “There are limits to their influence. It’s not as if the implants could be distributed to everyone in want of them. But, maybe, in time. It is possible.”

  Her parents’ messages stop after Sennyi has expunged the final sliver of her existence. There will be no bereavement, she knows, only a nagging doubt and the outline of a solemn girl who grew to be the tallest in her class. In the last year her deterioration will be alarming, she’s been told. A simultaneous malfunction of digestive and respiratory organs. The hive will fail too. But until then it is asymptomatic; until then she is full of health and courage.

  Samutthewi is methodically rubbed out from awareness. Outside of Twenty-Five there’s no such thing as truly offline, and to alter data is to alter memory. Her bees are adapted for this purpose, and under that aegis of anonymity Twenty-Five’s deletion algorithms spread and contaminate with breathtaking speed.

  When the moth ship lands she is asking Ipnoa, “Did you have family?”

  The other woman begins to answer, then stops. Her expression pinches and Sennyi can hear the sloshing of water as the porpoise moves inside her, agitated. “Someone’s here to see Esithu.”

  A moment later she understands why Ipnoa is shaking: a broadcast that tells them to head for the roof. At the top everyone has turned out, some having rushed up the stairs and panting into AI-serrated air.

  Esithu is already there, serene and singular. The ship’s hostellum unreels and parts, disgorging a pair of foreigners.

  Sennyi shades her eyes. From their coloring—”Hegemony?”

  Ipnoa draws close to her. “Yes.” Her mouth is tight and her neck corded. Some of her tendons gleam more sculpture than skin.

  Giving no regard to their subjects Esithu greets the dignitaries and leads them into the tower. There’s a childlike quality to Ipnoa’s and the others’ distress, as though they are unsure their parent—and monarch, and perhaps deity—is so omnipotent after all.

  She goes to see Esithu unsolicited. Two of the bodies, which she’s irrationally come to think of as secondary, barely glance at her when she enters the hall of arches and owls. “This isn’t a good time,” one of them says.

  “We aren’t deleting Samutthewi quick enough.”

  “They are Hegemony. Different system. I would have dealt with them eventually, but they’re moving faster than I predicted. Look up the Masaal-Yijun dispute.”

  A conflict over energy wells, one of many such that have kept the Costeya Hegemony at perpetual war with the Sovereignty of Suoqua. “None of that has anything to do with us.” Samutthewi won free of the Hegemony three hundred years ago.

  “Don’t be a child. Every edge they can conceive of they will seize. Your hive would be useful to them, and they’re always fascinated by the thought of feral implants. They think that if I put a tiger in a soldier it’ll turn them into an unstoppable murderer, all aggression and no humanity.”

  “Are you,” Sennyi asks, “speaking to them right now?”

  “You know how to multitask. Talking and breathing simultaneously for one.” Esithu jerks their head. “What is it about warring states? Always so convinced a single unconventional scientist will break a stalemate and decide their victory.”

  “You can’t turn them down.”

  “Or what? They’ll hardly rain fire and bioweapons on this planet. Even for them that would be heavy-handed—it’s tricky to conjure up a pretext in which Samutthewi is a threat to anyone.” An owl falls, an impact of plastic and metal on disquiet sand. The other body rises, picks up the bird, and gazes at it in thought.

  “Where is your fourth body?”

  Both sets of eyes turn to her, a lapse she thinks, a break in the illusion of multiplicity. “Difficult to impress, I see. Three are too mundane for you?”

  “I’ve been scraping your access logs for two years. The bees do penetrate nearly anything.” Sennyi nods, offering a data pulse, as though this is merely academic to her when in truth it means everything. “My evidence for your perusal, if you like.”

  “I profess an abiding disinterest.”

  Her hands tighten around the impulse to shake the
cyberneticist by the shoulder or throttle them bare-handed, one neck at a time. “I insist on your interest. You need me for your project, and I may leave at will.”

  “This,” Esithu snaps, “is a very bad time.”

  “You can multi-task. I want two answers. Is Ipnoa my sister? I can’t tell from her DNA since crèche-siblings are genetically unrelated. Second, why did she know about the moth ship entire seconds before everyone else?”

  “She is your sister.” The cyberneticist shrugs. “Likely she expects you to respect her choice and not confront her with the fact, but who am I to arbitrate in family affairs. She’s been an assistant to me on and off, and has channel privileges.”

  “There’s no record of her working with you.”

  Esithu’s laughter issues from two tracheas, two mouths. “I hope you aren’t going to suggest that we are lovers or some such sordid thing. I’ve given you my answers, and frankly they’re more than you deserve. Excuse yourself, please. The Hegemonic representatives are leaving, and I have evacuation contingencies to activate.”

  The next day a woman who wears her cobra outside, around her waist, is sent to Yodsana. Twins, who each have a stoat peering out between their vertebrae, are selected for Laithirat. The paper ships bearing them leave with two boxes of bees. Their passage will be obscured by a set of monk beads, strategically planted a generation previous.

  Sennyi spends the day unwell, her chest hollowed out, her lungs alone for the first time in half a decade. The hive’s absence makes her alien to herself. It takes a week to bud and birth, replenishing in twos and threes. When she is half-full, Sennyi forges the workers into a unit, and connects.

  In the virtuality of Twenty-Five the monk’s path is without end, winding high around the old towers, penetrating windows with assassin precision. It is alive, signposted with shrines and icons of old spirits. Monks in sedate progress move along the vertical riverbanks, clear-eyed and clean-shaven, black lacquer bowls in hand.

  She’s never seen them embodied before, only heard their voices.

  A feather grazes the corner of her eye. She catches it—finds it soft, tactile. Dimensional. The scent of coconuts flavors the air. That too is new; before the virtuality has always been flattened, odorless.

  The bees orbit her, humming apidae music. In her palms frangipanis have blossomed, yellow-fringed white, pale peach, orange. Funeral flowers, their roots moving slowly under her skin. She twists one off and tucks it behind her ear, inhaling its dessert smell.

  Other tower residents pass through her, ghosts that do not mark their collision or her presence.

  She climbs as a matter of course, in recognition of metaphor. By the time she has covered the height of two floors her calves begin to throb. After four sweat pours from her, honeyed salt in the crooks of her elbows, honeyed salt on petals and leaves.

  When she mounts the last step, her feet are raw and red.

  The chanting is loud here, skin-close, and Esithu could have been one of the monks in dress if in little else. “They were massacred, the seven-hundred seventy-seven, when Costeya conquered us,” Esithu says, stepping away from the edge. “The atrocities an expansionist empire will commit to break a nation’s spirit. No one remembers that now.”

  “Neither do you. It’s data you inherited.”

  “Nothing wrong with inheriting data, as long as it is truthful. The trouble is when someone falsifies history and that history becomes truth in the collective conscious.” Esithu flexes mud-stained fingers. “For the original Esithu to be standing here they would have to be five, six hundred. Not even a cyborg lasts that long.”

  “The successor would be someone who no longer exists. Someone who’s removed every thread and trace of their identity.”

  “Like you,” Esithu says amiably. “Do you aspire to the post?”

  “I did what I did to spare people some tears. You, I wouldn’t know.”

  “Back in the day when everyone was entirely offline it was the norm to die among loved ones.” The cyberneticist kneels and opens their cupped hands. Water splashes on grass; a sapling springs, and in a moment they have shade over them, banyan leaves of mica and beaten gold.

  Sennyi fingers the frangipani in her hair and discovers that it has become chiseled bone, sharp-edged, without smell. Those in her arms remain floral, continue to waft sweetness. “It strikes me as selfish.”

  “It is human.”

  The banyan grows roots with the strength of continents, trunks with the age of centuries. Sennyi cranes her neck after the tree until she can’t anymore, until it has become the sky. Boughs in place of sunlight, heart-shapes in place of stars. “The bees unlock a total sensory load.”

  “You might have tried with a full hive—but here you are, and perceiving most of what you’re supposed to. Fine, don’t you think, a virtuality that engages all the senses and encompasses all the self?”

  “Is uploading minds your ultimate goal?” The fantasy, once, of a certain kind of laypeople. “I didn’t realize you would indulge in that.”

  “I wasn’t always a scientist.” Esithu chuckles as though the concept of ever having had a past amuses them. “People should have a choice to exist on their own terms, to forget if they want, to remember if they don’t. To have a history which may not be rewritten. That was Esithu’s wish.”

  Sennyi presses her nails deep into the grass. Soft-wet, the smell of mulch. “What happens if everyone connects to Twenty-Five through the hive? Through me.”

  “It is possible. It’s inadvisable. Originally I intended for your hive to become Twenty-Five, but we haven’t the time. For now we’ll try again elsewhere.”

  “What happens,” she repeats, “if everyone connects to Twenty-Five through me?”

  Esithu motions at the sky. A slash of horizon opens. “You’ll be providing the protocols for everyone else’s implants. In essence you will be Twenty-Five. A mind separated from the frailty of your skin.”

  She laughs, surprising herself with its loudness. “I thought so. It’s lovely being right.”

  “You’ve an abrupt imagination.”

  “Three years,” she says, “are so very brief.”

  She has prepared a long time for death. It is jarring to think that there is an alternative now, one that has gestated in her two years and which tastes like delirium.

  Once the idea has taken hold Esithu does not allow her time to second-guess. Her hive is monitored more closely. How many bees generated over a given period of time. Do the particulars of what she eats affect their temperament and lifespan. The candidates on Yodsana and Laithirat proved incompatible. Two are dead, four comatose, and Esithu does not try any more after that. The lethal genetic combination that Sennyi bears is both rare and exacting.

  Esithu creates back-ups of Twenty-Five and sends them to Thotsakan. “A Hegemony armada came looking for us,” they say. “They went to the wrong system. Tricky to find a planet that doesn’t exist on charts anymore and which doesn’t present coordinates on standard axes. Bless their AI pilots. Such stupid, straightforward things. I prefer to be careful, even so.”

  On the day of transition Ipnoa holds her tight, and clutches her hand as long as she may while Esithu runs Sennyi through diagnostics one final time. During the initial stage, Esithu has warned her, she will be a closed loop. All interactive channels will be shut to her. She won’t be able to reach Ipnoa or anyone else.

  The casket that would house her body is featureless, hostile. As she slips into it claustrophobia clots her gullet and for a precipice moment her reflexes howl no. Nutrient feeds latch onto her, and she lies there with the bees’ thunder in her ears.

  Then she goes in, and becomes Twenty-Five.

  Detached from the net at large and walled into herself, she does not perceive time. She hears from no one and sees little that is not raw data. Even Esithu is spectral and mute to her, their face a paper mask, their torso a convex lens through which the substance of Twenty-Five may be examined. Sennyi exercises her will like a
muscle newly discovered. The city gains flocks of ospreys and hawks nesting under each eave, in the crooks of amber bridges. A dilapidated theater finds its lost plays brought back onstage, to an applause of phantoms.

  There are caches of history Esithu left behind, and from those she reconstructs the city as it once was. She fills the streets with vehicles like sleek sharks, and ignites the walls with commercial overlays pulsing directions to secret nooks where shoppers will find curios they’ve seen in dreams. She gives the mausoleum bone jars rattling in ancestral voices and a frangipani forest that buds in every color of that species, thick with butterflies the size of her head.

  Her hunger for solitude ebbs; the need for company aches. A month might have passed, or more. Her physical body might have met its expiry date, or not. Network activity tells her no Costeya moth has yet descended to destroy them.

  The next phase comes in an earthquake.

  The edges of her city, her world, fall away. When she looks across tectonic cracks she sees low walls and low buildings.

  She crosses to stand before the crèche in which she was raised.

  “What do you think?”

  “What’s been happening?” she says to Esithu’s reflection.

  “Success. I’ve converted Thirteen’s system to ours. You’ll be able to contact your parents. If you wish to.”

  “I don’t.” There’s no physicality here unless she permits it. But there is a simulation of pain for all that, of a heart clenched between terror and want. “Am I dead?”

  “Functioning brain, functioning hive. The important parts. For what it’s worth I offer my condolences.”

  “I’ve made my peace.”

  “You make peace too easily.”

  “Wrong,” Sennyi says. “Is Ipnoa your fourth body?”

  Esithu’s image flickers. “How long have you suspected?”

  “A while. Circumstantially. How evasive you were when I pressed about Ipnoa; how well she understands your cause, when everyone else is going along out of sheer sycophantry. How she is the only person in this city who’s erased herself so completely. A price, I’m guessing, she—you—paid to become Esithu.”