by Ian Whates
“I can’t promise that,” said Milly. “I’m not much of a writer.”
Next dose said the screen.
“Are you coming?” asked Milly.
“Just finishing this sentence.”
THE MASHUP
SEAN WILLIAMS
Sean Williams writes for children, young adults and adults. The author of forty novels, ninety short stories and the odd odd poem, his work has won awards, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and been translated into numerous languages. His latest novel is Twinmaker, the first in a new series that takes his love affair with the matter transmitter to a whole new level.
THE VENUE THE next morning was still a little funky, in both senses of the word. There was mess everywhere – someone had put the CEO’s cardboard standee headfirst into the chocolate fountain, which was a waste of good wake-up juice as far as I was concerned, particularly on the publisher’s dime – while at the same time music still thudded away in the smaller party room, accompanied by the occasional slurred whoop.
I had a cab waiting outside. The plan wasn’t to stay long.
“Hey, James.” My friend the DJ was nursing a coffee in a corner with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Knowing him, though, she was for show, and somewhere under the skintight dress was a cock the size of an eggplant. “Just came by to get the name of that track you were playing earlier. Yazoo meets jungle – who knew?”
“Yeah, you love a good mashup.” He seemed more curious than peeved at the interruption. “I was going to send you the link, honest.”
“Network’s down, and this is on the way. Thought I could download it en route.” If the network got its shit together first.
“Sure. Right.” James looked for a piece of paper and a pen. It took a while. He jotted a name and held the slip of paper under the light to make sure I was reading it correctly.
“Moyët,” he said, pointing at the umlaut. “Devil, details.”
I patted him on the cheek and left him to his conquest.
“Hey,” he called after me. “You got one too, huh?”
“Got what?”
He indicated the ceiling above my head, where a small black sphere was clinging to a halogen lamp fixture like a surveillance camera that had popped free of its mounting. The thing wobbled and backed up when my eyes locked on it.
“What the hell?”
“They started showing up an hour ago,” James said. “Now they’re everywhere.”
There were two watching him and his conquest, and another studied the guy asleep in the corner. One trailed after an intern who passed through, an empty garbage bag dangling limp from her left hand. Her sphere rolled across the ceiling as if gravity didn’t work for it the normal way, hopping and jumping to get past obstacles.
“They don’t do anything,” said the girl as she left the room.
“All they do is watch,” James’ date added in a contralto that sent shivers up my spine.
“Safe flight,” James said with a wink.
Outside the taxi was gone, but I could afford to be philosophical: the only luggage I had was in my jacket, and if I missed the flight I could always get another one. Besides, the sphere had followed me out, which was more interesting than getting home in a hurry. It had zipped through the door before it shut behind me and now clung to the wall of the building. The space between my shoulder blades tingled. It was watching me, I knew it.
“I’m going to find a cab,” I told it. “You coming?”
The sphere made no sound or sign of understanding, just followed in a series of zippy leaps and bounds. Once, I caught it hovering in the air like a drone, as though deciding where to set down next. I ducked left. It kicked off empty air to follow me.
They were everywhere, now I knew to look, and I wasn’t the only one noticing them. We all had one – man, woman and kid. Some people tried to swat them away with brooms or bats. Some tried to outrun them. I passed a guy staring his down, to no avail, and a woman cursing hers in a steady stream. In the distance I heard shouts, gunshots, sirens. A motorbike roared by, driven by a teenager who was paying more attention to what was behind him than what lay ahead. His sphere slewed and skidded in his wake, but kept pace without faltering. They screeched in tandem around a corner. The crash I heard moments later might have been related.
“You enjoying this?” I asked mine. It didn’t respond.
I found a queue of people waiting for cabs and joined the end of the line, although I wasn’t hopeful. The streets were sludging up like the arteries of a fat man in a sauna.
“What do you think?” asked the woman next to me in the queue. She was huddled with three guys, all of them nursing hot drinks that stank of sugar and spice and everything that definitely wasn’t supposed to be in coffee. Four spheres watched from a nearby tree, fat attentive grapes that were soon joined by a fifth, mine. “Is it some kind of stunt?”
“Apple,” said one of the three guys before I could answer. “Or a start-up. Maybe something to do with life-logging.”
“I think it’s aliens,” said the guy next to him. “We’re at war, and we don’t even know it.”
“Seriously?” I said.
He shrugged. “Why not? Makes as much sense as anything else.”
“It’s the Singularity,” offered the third guy. “The Internet plus AI plus 3-D printers plus reality TV. Had to happen eventually.”
I didn’t know what to think, but I doubted it was a robot uprising, or aliens, or some stunt gone wrong. Truthfully, I was less worried about being watched than about where they all came from. I’m a numbers guy. There’s no such thing as a free drone. So who was paying for all this? How many Chinese workers were soldering their fingers to the bone to make them?
My phone was still dead, and no wonder given the bandwidth those things were gobbling up. I couldn’t call home or check the news, but it seemed safe to assume they were everywhere. After an hour of hopeless waiting and speculating I abandoned the cab plan and decided to walk back to the hotel. I didn’t really want to, but there was nowhere else to go. By then, weirdly, the watchers appeared to have watchers of their own, smaller red spheres that trailed the ones trailing us, and soon there were green ones too, and yellow, in descending order of size. The air was full of simplistic atomic models, the kind you saw in class as a kid. Spheres spun, swooped, and whizzed around the city’s human inhabitants, who looked increasingly perplexed and desperate as the morning wore on.
Add to that the holes that were appearing in buildings, lampposts and cars, like Swiss cheese. This explained where the spheres were coming from, I guessed: material was being sucked out of the environment to make more of the things, somehow. So maybe the Singularity guy was right, after all. The Internet plus whatever plus nanotechnology as well. It was as if we’d put all the ingredients out on the table and they’d assembled themselves while our backs were turned.
AT THE HOTEL, the concierge had gone but the clerk who’d checked me out was still behind the desk. She gave my key back to me and didn’t re-swipe my credit card. Two multicoloured constellations watched the transaction from several dozen angles at once, orbiting around our heads. I asked about breakfast and she said there might only be soup available now, since the kitchen had pretty much shut down. She said she’d find someone to send it right up.
I took the stairs in case the power went out and let myself back into the room, feeling like I was looping back on a life I had left behind. The air smelt stale. Feeling faintly hungover for the first time that day, I fell onto the unmade bed and pulled the sheet across me. A pair of mesh stockings slithered out.
I rolled away from the memory with a groan. She had seemed great, and we had got on fine, and it was an open question as to who picked up who, which always worked for me. Things had only gone wrong when we had come back to the hotel and started making out.
“Bite me,” she’d said. “Go on. You know you want to.”
“Why would I want to do that? I like you.”
&nbs
p; “Yeah, and you like steak too, right?”
“Actually, I’m a vegetarian.”
“Really? Well, shit. Pretend I’m tofu. It might still work out.”
“You want to be tofu?”
“Uh, yeah... maybe not.”
I rolled over and closed my eyes. I didn’t need to see the spheres to know they were there, occupying all the niches and cracks of the room, watching, always watching. Their eyes didn’t close. Thank god, I thought, they were a recent phenomenon.
I slept and had a nightmare about M&Ms.
When I jerked awake an unknown time later there were spheres everywhere. All sizes and colours, they stretched in filaments across the ceiling, down the walls, and pooled in the corner behind the lamp. They were all the colours of the rainbow and every imaginable shade. The smallest looked like fine grains of talcum powder, only visible when they moved.
I sat up and they rustled, forming new shapes and structures, revealing new holes where they had eaten into the walls and fixtures. I looked around the room in numb amazement, feeling an emptiness in my stomach that hadn’t been there before. If the soup had come, the watchers had eaten it, along with the bowl, cutlery and tray. The porter too, for all I knew.
“Am I next?” I asked the assembly of spheres, thinking of the OMG aliens guy in the street earlier. Was this some cosmic demolition crew, devouring all we built and all we were while the cameras kept running, like This Old House in space?
A thought slid into my head that wasn’t really a thought. It was a certainty, and it didn’t originate with me.
Moyët.
It took me a second to place the name of the track James had played the previous night. Yazoo and jungle; champagne and Alison Moyet. The note was still in my pocket.
I sat up to address the spheres properly.
“Was that you? Did you just talk to me?”
What is ‘you’? What is ‘me’?
I rubbed my eyes and felt something that hadn’t been there before. That got me out of moving. In the bathroom mirror I saw one black sphere and a multicoloured cluster growing out of my forehead like alien acne.
“Get it out,” I said, breaking into a sweat. “I don’t want this in me.”
What is ‘out’? What is ‘in’?
“Stop saying shit like that! Why are you doing this? What do you want?”
There was a whisper as all the other watchers swarmed into the bathroom with me.
This isn’t an either/or situation.
The thought was urgent in my mind, and although it had the strangest flavour it felt like one of my own. Humans had believed themselves removed from nature ever since we became civilised, but we never had been, really. Global warming showed us that. Yet somehow we still thought we were removed from technology, whether it was made by us or someone else. Weren’t we machines as well as animals? And weren’t we also works of art, swimming in a soup of cultural context? My thing wasn’t James’ thing wasn’t tofu girl’s thing, but all those things coexisted and sometimes they rubbed off on each other. Sometimes they blended.
I was feeling dizzy. Whatever this was, it wasn’t an invasion or a robot uprising or anything simple like that – or maybe it was, but it was all of them at once, instead of just one. The possibility throbbed like a tumour in my thoughts, turning me, twisting me. It was then I realised.
I was part of the biggest mashup in history. How could I possibly miss that?
I opened my arms and held them out Christlike, minus the cross. My hands shook just a little. The spheres rushed in, bringing new senses, new feelings. The watchers became the watched. It was all so very meta. I opened my mind and let it happen.
THE FROST ON JADE BUDS
ALIETTE DE BODARD
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a computer engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction: her stories have appeared in markets such as Clarkesworld, Asimov’s and numerous Year’s Best. Her Aztec noir trilogy Obsidian and Blood is published by Angry Robot, worldwide. Visit www.aliettedebodard.com for book reviews, writing process and Vietnamese recipes.
ON THE COMMS-IMAGE, Chi looked much as Thuy remembered her: tall and thin and dour, almost skeletal, as if what had happened to her in her youth still stifled her metabolism – and, in truth, perhaps it did. Neither Thuy nor any of the family – nor, indeed, any inhabitant of the Scattered Pearls Belt – really knew the full extent of what happened to her, or how to reverse it.
“You look well, elder sister,” Chi said. The words would have suited the Imperial Court; would have been appropriate for an elder of Chi’s generation. There were other, more familiar ones, more suitable for the sister of one’s blood; and Chi could have used them. She could have pretended to care. But of course she no longer bothered.
Thuy couldn’t bring herself to lie. “You don’t.”
Chi laughed, but it didn’t reach her eyes – and even the makeup and the plucked eyebrows couldn’t distract from the red, burst blood vessels in her corneas. “You never could lie.”
“Not to family,” Thuy said, simply. She wondered where Sixth Aunt had got to; she’d left the ship a bi-hour ago, saying she needed to find something in the Apricot Blossom Ho orbital, and hadn’t come back. Staring into her sister’s eyes, Thuy wished she could have counted on Sixth Aunt’s biting wisdom and overbearing presence; on her reassurance that she was handling this the proper way; for anything that would have taken away that feeling of baiting a tiger with nothing but her wit to save her – and ancestors knew wit had never been her strength.
On Thuy’s implants-feed, the signal from The Dragons in the Peach Garden flowed like a meditation prayer – the ship’s trackers were attempting to trace the call, hopping from node to node in the network, discarding the more remote planets of the Black Tiger solar system, moving in closer to the centre...
Let them find something; anything that would help them. Let them track Chi down before it was too late.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Chi said.
“Did you expect me to stay away after I got your message?”
“What, that I was coming back to the orbital of my childhood?” Chi’s voice was slightly ironic; as if already detached from the conversation. Of course it would be.
“You know what I mean,” Thuy said.
The trackers were narrowing it further; to the middle band between the large space stations and the stunted, burnt planets; to the Scattered Pearls Belt itself...
Please please please...
“I know exactly what you mean. You have this pathetic notion that you can stop me, that you can make me change my mind.” Chi’s face was closed again – as serene, as enigmatic as the statue of Quan Am in the temples. “You’re free to try, elder sister. But you’ll never succeed.”
And with that, the comms cut off. Thuy remained standing for a while, staring at the emptiness in front of her eyes – the ship’s network superimposed the images directly on her field of vision – and tried to banish her sister’s image from her thoughts.
The Dragons in the Peach Garden spoke up. “I tracked the signal to the vicinity of this orbital, and then I lost it. I’m sorry, child.”
Thuy sighed. “Not your fault, great-aunt.” The mindship was old; old enough to have seen her mother and grandmother as children – old enough to remember everything about Chi before... the incident. “How close a vicinity?”
The calligraphy scrolling on the walls flickered, turning from red to pale pink for a barely perceptible moment – the mindship was a proud one, and not easily embarrassed. “A neighbourhood of at least three orbitals, including this one.”
Anywhere, in other words.
Thuy stared at the walls, hoping to find some distraction, some wisdom in them. But her eyes were drawn inexorably to the intricate, etched pattern of chemical burn-marks – back from a time before the war, when The Dragons in the Peach Garden had been a transport ship for Galactic factories; when her overseer had cared l
ittle about acid damage from burst boxes – cheaper to hire a new ship than to bother spending money on repairs. No solace to be found there; only painful scars.
Thuy sighed. With a flick of her fingers she called up Chi’s previous message, and stared at the vision that coalesced in front of her, as translucent and insubstantial as the Courts of Hell.
It was a mindship – one that bore as much resemblance to The Dragons in the Peach Garden as the calligraphy of a child did to a New Year’s welcome scroll painted by a master. Lines that should have been effortlessly flowing were crooked and jagged; the hull was a jumble of metals haphazardly joined, much as though everything had melted together in the furnace of the workshops.
Thuy moved her fingers, turning the image of the mindship back and forth – every new point of view revealing fresh details – exhausts bursting at sharp, impossible angles from the hull; rivets and connectors spread like fungi on the pitted surface; protruding fins and wings, cancerous growths in a tumultuous, nausea-inducing pattern that was impossible to take in all at once. It was hard to tell how much was the original Galactic ship and how much was Chi’s painstaking reconstruction work, but Thuy suspected that even brand-new the mindship would have been an eyesore; and an abomination in more ways than one.
There had been only one line in the message; a handful of words that had chilled Thuy to the core of her being.
Is she not beautiful, elder sister?
She didn’t know what the ship was called, but she knew who had made it; and for what purpose; and some of Chi’s purpose in putting it back together.
For years she’d hoped that Chi’s absence at New Year’s Eves and family death anniversaries meant that she was somewhere else, whether in Galactic or in Dai Viet space; that she’d found a place where she could fit, where she could be happy. The message had proved otherwise.
She brought her fingers together; and let the ship vanish from her field of vision. “We’re too late,” she said, aloud.
