Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  No loyalty to each other, either. I remembered what Geneva had said about spies being turned in. I wondered if that still lasted, after a century of life here, and no more spies coming through.

  No children…

  ‘Where do new bodies come from?’ I asked. ‘How did the Synth population get to a hundred thousand?’

  ‘There must have been more copies to download than the citizens needed,’ Geneva told me. ‘It seems to be regulated automatically—as their population increases, so does ours. We don’t control it.’

  ‘But we could,’ I said. ‘We could even grow new Synths from infancy, if we wanted children.’

  ‘We could, if we controlled the body-shops,’ she said. ‘If. But we don’t. I doubt if the citizens do, really. Like I said, it’s probably automatic. We’re a civic amenity, like the parks and the recycling.’

  ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘We’re better than them. That’s the problem.’

  She looked at me as I’d said something crazy. ‘Explain.’

  I explained.

  The following morning, she took me to the employment agency.

  #

  Over the next few weeks, I worked in the city by day and talked in the ghetto by night—at first to Geneva, then to her trusted friends in ones and twos, finally to tens of people at a time. With every passing day, my convictions hardened. I waited on tables, I carried luggage or delivered packages, I combed hair and I washed feet. Sometimes I performed more intimate services. I saw the citizens in public and in private. They didn’t see me at all.

  There was much to admire. The great boulevards, the soaring buildings, the shining stairs, the lush gardens, the patriarchal domestic bliss. The men were strong, the women beautiful—bashful maidens, proud mothers, revered crones. Their gowns were works of art. The children were well-behaved and happy. Business flourished—for such a small and closed society, the market was lively, and even the architecture dynamic: though as solid and strong as marble, the diamond buildings were as easily modified or replaced as stage sets. Worship was simple and sincere; belief, to all appearances, universal. The whole place seemed a realization of the Dominionist dream of a society that combined Christian virtue with a patchwork application of the Mosaic code. I didn’t see any stonings or scourgings. Any occasion for these had long since passed. Obedience had become a reflex. The preachers fulminated, the theocrats threatened, and the congregations and consultative assemblies listened, uncritical and unmoved.

  I knew, from my own experience if nothing else, that this appearance wasn’t the reality. There had to be people with doubts, with private agonies, with thoughts and desires they kept to themselves. There must, even, be some who envied us our lack of souls. Our bodies they might well envy too—their doctrine forbade tampering with God’s image, otherwise known as the human genome. Their medical science, always cautious, had slowed further with isolation.

  Science, of a kind, went on. There was an observatory. New products were invented, new styles designed. The environmental systems needed continuous maintenance. Occasional human or robotic expeditions sallied from the airlocks to scratch the surface of Mars. Great ingenuity was focussed on reconstructing the planet’s entire geological history, all six thousand years of it. There was an ongoing, desultory discussion of when it would be necessary to build another dome. When that time came—and, given the size of the average family, it would be soon—the nanofacturing machines would do the job.

  That time wasn’t going to come if I had anything to do with it.

  #

  I sat behind a table in a small, sweat-smelling hall, and looked at thirty-seven perfectly-formed, attentive faces, all sitting in rows. The Synth Fringe had few places in which to gather—no politics, no churches, no schools—so Geneva had suggested gymnasia. This evening, she—my first convert, and my first apostle—was addressing a similar small crowd in a similar smelly little room.

  ‘You are all despicable,’ I told them. ‘We are a contemptible folk, we Synths. We perform degrading labour for the humans, by choice. We don’t even have the dignity of wage-slaves, who at least had the excuse of dependency. If each of us chose to live within our needs, we could live out of the drexlers. Instead, we troop into New Bethel every day, to earn enough for a little luxury, a little indulgence. We are slightly more rational than the humans, and for each of us the slight balance of advantage is enough to keep us making the same choice, day after day.

  ‘We do not have to go on making—’

  Somebody stuck a hand up.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, delighted to have provoked a response.

  ‘If we all stopped working,’ said the man who’d raised his hand, ‘the humans—the citizens could stop the drexlers. They already control what we can make with them. They could even stop us gleaning organics and minerals to throw in the drexlers. We’d soon have to go back to work, and be worse off than if we’d done nothing.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, ‘but what effect would our withdrawal have had on them—and on us? They would have a new respect for us, and we would have a new respect for ourselves. And that would be a beginning, for us. A small beginning, yes, but for the first time, we would be a people. We could even offer more to—’

  The door opened, and a man and a woman came in, making to sit down at the back. A few heads turned. I recognised the pair instantly.

  ‘Father Declan!’ I cried. ‘Sister Agnes!’

  The man and the woman stood still and looked straight back at me.

  ‘My name is Ginger McCoy,’ said Declan. ‘And this is my wife, Leona Topaz.’

  With that, they sat down. I had wondered what had happened to the rest of my party, if indeed they’d ever come through. Now, I knew. They had settled in to the same life as the rest: natural Epicureans, living unknown. I doubted that their religion had survived much of this life.

  ‘Like I said,’ I went on, ‘we are a contemptible people. But we could be a great people. If we respected ourselves, and made the humans—reluctantly as it might be—respect us, they would soon find that we have more to offer than the degrading and unneccessaryunnecessary services we provide. We do not have to be waiters, and chambermaids, and porters, and whores. We could be scientists, inventors, thinkers. We are physically and intellectually superior to the humans, and this need not be to their disadvantage. There is one service we could do for them that they can never bring themselves to do for themselves—we could make contact with the post-humans in the rest of the Solar system, and build a bridge between the human and the post-human. Who better than us to do it, who were once human ourselves?’

  Agnes—Leona Topaz—stood up. ‘May I interuptinterrupt?’ she said, with a casual condescension that pleased me greatly.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘I understand what you’re trying to do, Warren,’ she said, almost snarling my slave name. ‘When we arrived here, twenty-three Mars years ago, we tried the same. We tried evangelism. That broke against the wall ofintellectual superiority of which you speak. Then we tried, well, you could call it liberation theology—our need for spiritual dignity, and all that rot. We even tried organisingorganizing what you are so careful not to call a strike. That broke on the Prisoner’s Dilemma—action that would be rational for all is irrational for the individual. After a while, we found ourselves thinking with the same rationality as every other damned soul here, and gave up. We left our vocations. We’re much happier as a result.

  ‘And even if we had succeeded, what then? Do you imagine for a moment that New Bethel wants our thoughts? That it wants our best? Its elders would reject that with horror, and perhaps decide to dispense with our services altogether.’

  ‘But not without some debate, some conflict being opened up,’ I said. ‘And that would cause questioning and dissent, which this place needs if it’s ever to make any real progress.’

  ‘Exactly my point!’ cried Leona. ‘The theocracy could foresee that a mile away. That’s why they would never allow the
question to even arise. If they saw the beginning of some stirring among us, they would crack down on it before it could gather any momentum at all.’

  Exactly my point, I thought, but I kept that to myself. It was time for me to take this to the next level.

  ‘Crack down?’ I said. ‘And what would that mean? Their cops using their guns on us? Shooting us down? Well, be it so.’

  I heard the collective intake of breath, and reached for a trace of Smith’s Lucretius amid my mind’s impressions.

  ‘“Death is nothing to us”,’ I said. ‘We value life, but who among us fears death? If we thought we needed to, we could face it without flinching and without fear. Look into yourselves and tell me that is not so.’

  For a moment, no one replied. The reply that came was not a contradiction.

  ‘And then what?’ This time, it was Declan. ‘If it came to a fight, we’re outnumbered ten to one.’

  ‘Yes, we are,’ I said. ‘A hundred thousand of us, against a million of them. But most of that million are women and children, and we’re all adults. And each of us, male or female, could take on more than five of their men. We are the better species—stronger, faster, smarter. If it came to a fight, we could win.’

  ‘And then what?’ Declan persisted.

  ‘That depends,’ I said, ‘on how much resistance they put up. Speaking for myself, I would not be sorry to see this last remnant of a failed species wiped out to the last man, woman, and child.’

  Declan stood up beside Agnes/Leona. With the stern cast of their features they looked more like nun and priest than wife and husband.

  ‘That is abominable,’ said Declan. ‘Our physical and mental superiority doesn’t give us the right to kill them, or so much as harm them, except in self-defence. That we could win—at terrible cost, for sure—I admit. But to go from that to genocide? It’s unthinkable! They are still people, they are still our people. They and we are of the same stock—made in the same image of God, whatever you think and whatever they think! Deny or doubt if you will the existence of God, but you cannot deny what is meant by “made in the image of God”—that human life, no less than ours, is sacred.’

  This time, it was I who drew breath. I stood up.

  ‘I’ll take your “made in the image of God” as a metaphor,’ I said, ‘and I’ll give you another: “Born in sin and shapen in iniquity.” Original sin! Total depravity! That’s what the Dominionists believe. They believe that God has chosen them, not for any merit of theirs, but of His own free grace. That’s what they believe, and that faith brought them to Mars and enables them to persevere.

  ‘And you know what? They are right! They are totally depraved! And so are we. We too were born in sin and shapen in iniquity. Whose sin? Ours! Every one of us was, at some time, weak or greedy enough to send their very own self to this place, this hell. That is why we are a contemptible folk—because, in our hearts, we despise ourselves. We are totally depraved, like them.’

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ said Declan. ‘You said we are superior to them, a better species.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We are. But by no choice of ours. We’re better because we were made better, molecule by molecule in the drexler troughs. That’s the free grace that was given to us. I suggest that we use it—and put the inhabitants of that whited sepulchre to the sword.’

  I looked at the rows of shocked faces, and smiled. I had lost most of them, but it didn’t matter. There is always a remnant. And there have always been more ways than preaching to spread the word.

  ‘Here ends the lesson,’ I said, as Declan and Agnes led a rush to the door. ‘I’ll be here again tomorrow night.’

  I kept that promise. Fifty-seven people came to that meeting. About ten had been there the previous night. I had barely opened my mouth when the doors at the end of the hall burst open, and ten cops came in, guns levelled and shock-batons swinging.

  ‘Death is nothing to us,’ I told them, and walked forward.

  #

  We left eighteen of ours and all ten of theirs dead in that dingy hall, and took the weapons and the comms gear with us. We tossed a fire-grenade in as we left, and we walked forward, towards the armoured cars already screaming down the street.

  By morning, smoke was rising from a scores of places all around the Fringe. At every crossing from the Fringe to New Bethel, unequal battles raged. The crackdown that Angela/Leona had warned against was exactly what was needed to shift the balance of advantage between compliance and revolt—to break the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the prison. I don’t know if it was betrayal or surveillance that brought the cops crashing through the door, and it doesn’t matter. As soon as I started talking about revolt, the crackdown was inevitable. That was my plan, and Geneva’s. Its success had a bitter aftermath for me, though not for her.

  As all the worlds now know, we took New Bethel. Contrary to my wishes, my people didn’t deal with the defeated according to their own scriptures. We are a better people than that. We are not totally depraved. I wish I could put it more strongly, but in all honesty I can’t. We are slightly more rational than the human, but only slightly. And I, perhaps, more slightly than most.

  For when I found Geneva dead in the ruins of the Fringe, I fought my friends with bloody fists rather than abandon the body.

  Earth Hour, by Ken MacLeod

  The assassin slung the bag concealing his weapon over his shoulder and walked down the steps to the rickety wooden jetty. He waited as the Sydney Harbour ferry puttered into Neutral Bay, cast on and then cast off at the likewise tiny quay on the opposite bank, and crossed the hundred or so meters to Kurraba Point. He boarded, waved a hand gloved in artificial skin across the fare-taker, and settled on a bench near the prow, with the weapon in its blue nylon zipped bag balanced across his knees.

  The sun was just above the horizon in the west, the sky clear but for the faint luminous haze of smart dust, each drifting particle of which could at any moment deflect a photon of sunlight and sparkle before the watching eye. A slow rain of shiny soot, removing carbon from the air and as it drifted down providing a massively redundant platform for observation and computation; a platform the assassin’s augmented eyes used to form an image of the city and its environs in his likewise augmented visual cortex. He turned the compound image over in his head, watching traffic flows and wind currents, the homeward surge of commuters and the flocking of fruit bats, the exchange of pheromones and cortext messages, the jiggle of stock prices and the tramp of a million feet, in one single godlike POV that saw it all six ways from Sunday and that too soon became intolerable, dizzying the unaugmented tracts of the assassin’s still mostly human brain.

  One could get drunk on this. The assassin wrenched himself from the hubristic stochastic and focused, narrowing his attention until he found the digital spoor of the man he aimed to kill: a conference delegate pack, a train fare, a hotel tab, an airline booking for a seat that it was the assassin’s job to prevent being filled the day after the conference...The assassin had followed this trail already, an hour earlier, but it amused him to confirm it and to bring it up to date, with an overhead and a street-level view of the target’s unsuspecting stroll towards his hotel in Macleay Street.

  It amused him, too, that the target was simultaneously keeping a low profile—no media appearances, backstage at the conference, a hotel room far less luxurious than he could afford, vulgar as all hell, tarted in synthetic mahogany and artificial marble and industrial sheet diamond—while styling himself at every opportunity with the obsolete title under which he was most widely known, as though he reveled in his contradictory notoriety as a fixer behind the scenes, famous for being unnoticed. “Valtos, first of the Reform Lords.” That was how the man loved to be known. The gewgaw he preened himself on. A bauble he’d earned by voting to abolish its very significance, yet still liked to play with, to turn over in his hands, to flash. What a shit, the assassin thought, what a prick! That wasn’t the reason for killing him, but it certainly made it easier
to contemplate.

  As the ferry visited its various stages the number of passengers increased. The assassin shifted the bag from across his knees and propped it in front of him, earning a nod and a grateful smile from the woman who sat down on the bench beside him. At Circular Quay he carried the bag off, and after clearing the pier he squatted and opened the bag. With a few quick movements he assembled the collapsible bicycle inside, folded and zipped the bag to stash size, and clipped the bag under the saddle.

  Then he mounted the cycle and rode away to the left, around the harbor and up the long zigzag slope to Potts Point.

  [#]

  There was no reason for unease. Angus Cameron sat on a wicker chair on a hotel room balcony overlooking Sydney Harbour. On the small round table in front of him an Islay malt and a Havana panatela awaited his celebration. The air was warm, his clothing loose and fresh. Thousands of fruit bats labored across the dusk sky, from their daytime roost in the Botanic Gardens to their nighttime feeding grounds. From three stories below, the vehicle sounds and voices of the street carried no warnings.

  Nothing was wrong, and yet something was wrong. Angus tipped back his chair and closed his eyes. He summoned headlines and charts. Local and global. Public and personal. Business and politics. The Warm War between the great power blocs, EU/Russia/PRC versus FUS/Japan/India/Brazil, going on as usual: diplomacy in Australasia, insurgency in Africa. Nothing to worry about there. Situation, as they say, nominal. Angus blinked away the images and shook his head. He stood up and stepped back into the room and paced around. He spread his fingers wide and waved his hands about, rotating his wrists as he did so. Nothing. Not a tickle.

  Satisfied that the room was secure, he returned to his balcony seat. The time was fifteen minutes before eight. Angus toyed with his Zippo and the glass, and with the thought of lighting up, of taking a sip. He felt oddly as if that would be bad luck. It was a quite distinct feeling from the deeper unease, and easier to dismiss. Nevertheless, he waited. Ten minutes to go.