The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  She had never regretted her decision—until now.

  “It’s still too dangerous,” she said now. “You’re too close—”

  “Silence!” he regarded her through rheumy eyes. “I am Boss Gui, boss of the Kunming Toads!”

  “We are a long way from Kunming.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I am seventy-nine years old and still alive. How old are you?”

  “You know how old,” she said, and he laughed. “Sensitive about your age,” he said. “How like a woman.” He hawked up phlegm and spat on the ground. It hissed, burning a small, localised hole in the concrete.

  She shrugged. “Your cabin is ready,” she said; then: “Sir.”

  He nodded. “Very good,” he said. “Tell the driver we are ready to depart.”

  A taste for controlled violence…

  Darwin’s Choice used his human hosts hard. He strove to understand humanity. For that purpose he visited ping-pong shows, kickboxing exhibits, Louis Wu emporiums, freak shows, the Bangkok Opera House, shopping malls, temples, churches, mosques, synagogues, slums, high-rises, and train stations.

  “Life,” he once told her, “is a train station.”

  She didn’t know what to make of that. What she did know: to understand humanity he tried what they did. His discarded bodies were left with heroin addiction, genital sores, hangovers, and custom-made viruses that were supposed to self-destruct but sometimes didn’t. Sometimes, either to apologise or for his own incomprehensible reasons, he would go into the cosmetic surgeries on Soi Cowboy and come out with a full physical sex-transfer—seemingly unaware that his hosts might have preferred to remain non-op. Sometimes he would wire them up in strange ways—for a month, at one point, he became a tentacle-junkie and would return from the clinics with a quivering mass of additional, aquatic limbs.

  But it was his taste for danger—even while he experienced none, even while his true self kept running independently in the background, in a secure location somewhere on Earth or in orbit—that awakened her own.

  The first time she killed a man…

  They had gone looking for opium and found an ambush. The leader said, “Kill the flesh-rider and keep the kathoey. We’ll sell her in—”

  She had acted instinctively. She didn’t know what she was doing until it was done. Her knife—

  The blade flashing in the neon light—

  A scream, cut short—a gurgle—

  Blood ruined her second-best blouse—

  The sound of something breaking—the pain only came later. They had smashed in her nose—

  Darwin’s Choice watching—

  She killed the second one with her bare hands, thumbs pressing on his windpipe until he stopped struggling—

  She laid him down on the ground almost tenderly—

  Pain, making her scream, but her lungs wouldn’t work—

  They hit her with a taser, but somehow she didn’t pass out—

  She fell, but forward—hugging the man with the taser, sharing the current until there was only darkness.

  “You were clinically dead,” he told her, later. He sounded impressed. “What was it like?”

  “Like nothing,” she told him. “There was nothing there.”

  “You were switched off?”

  She had to laugh. “You could say that.”

  They made love the night she was released from hospital. She licked his nipples, slowly, and felt him harden in her hand. She stroked him, burying her face in his full breasts. He reached down, touched her, and it was like electricity. She kept thinking of the dead men….

  When she came, he said, “You would do it again—”

  It wasn’t a question.

  She was tuning in to people’s nodes, picking up network traffic to and from—the Malay business guys were high-encryption/high-bandwidth clouds, impossible to hack through, but here and there—

  Kid with vintage paperback was on a suitably retro playlist with a random shuffle—she caught the Doors singing “The End,” which was replaced with Thaitanium’s “Tom Yum Samurai,” only to segue into Drunken Tiger’s “Great Rebirth.” Issan-girl was plugged in—a humming battery was sending a low current into her brain. She would be out for the journey…. The K-pop princess was playing Guilds of Ashkelon. So were her entourage. The French backpackers were stoned on one thing or another. Others were chatting, stretching, reading, farting, tidying away bags and ordering drinks—life on board the night train to Nong Khai was always the same.

  The train was coming alive, the slug belching steam—the whole train shuddered as it began to crawl along the smooth tracks, slug-boys falling off it like fleas.

  Tuning, scanning—someone two cars down watching the feed from a reality-porn channel, naked bodies woven together like a tapestry, a beach somewhere—Koh Samui or an off-Earth habitat, it was impossible to say.

  Boss Gui: “I’m hungry!”

  Mulan Rouge: “Food’s coming—” In the dining car they were getting ready, a wok already going, rice cooker steaming, crates of beer waiting—

  “I want kimchi!”

  “I’ll see if they have any—” though she knew they didn’t.

  “No need.” A long, slow, drawn-out hum from one of the Toads. “I keep for boss.”

  Limited vocabulary—you didn’t breed Toads for their brains.

  She watched the toad reach into what the Australians called an esky. There was a jar of kimchi in there, and… other stuff.

  Like a jar of living flies, for the Toads. Like what appeared to be a foetal sac, preserved in dry ice….

  Other things.

  She left them to it, returned to watching—waiting.

  “You would do it again,” Darwin’s Choice had said. And he—she—it—was right. Mulan had liked it—a sense of overwhelming power came with violence, and if it could be controlled, it could be used. Power depended on how you used it.

  She counted the succeeding years in augmentations and bodies. Three in Vientiane—she had followed Darwin’s Choice there to buy up a stash of primitive communist VR art—the deal went wrong and she had to execute two men and a woman before they got away. She’d had snake eyes installed after that. A man and a kathoey in Chiang Mai—DC was buying a genuine Guilds of Ashkelon virtual artefact that had turned out to be a fake. She’d had her skeleton strengthened following that….

  With each kill, new parts of her. With each, more power—but never over him.

  Gradually, Darwin’s Choice appeared less and less in the flesh. She had to cast around for work, hiring out as bodyguard, enforcer—hired killer, sometimes, only sometimes. Finally DC never reappeared. He had tried to explain it to her, once:

  “We are I-loops but, unlike humans, we are self-aware I-loops. Not self-aware in the sense of consciousness, or what humans call consciousness. Self-aware in the sense that we are—we can—know every loop, every routine and subroutine. Digital, not neurological. And as we are aware so do we change, mutating code, merging code, sharing….”

  “Is that how you make love?”

  “Love is a physical thing,” he said. “It’s hormone-driven.”

  “You can only feel love when you’re body-surfing?”

  He only shrugged.

  “How do you…” she searched for the word, settled on—“mate?”

  Imagine two or more Others.Endless lines of code meeting in digital space—ifs and ands and ors branching into probabilities, cycling through endless branches of logic at close to the speed of light—

  “Is that what you’re like?”

  “No. Shh…”

  …and meeting, merging, mixing, mutating—“And dying; to be an Other is to die, again and again, to evolve with every cycle, to cull and select and grow, achieve new, unexpected forms—”

  …not so much mating as joining, and splitting, and joining again—“A bit like that old story about humans replacing every single atom in their bodies every seven years—how the body wears out and regenerates and changes but the ent
ity still retains the illusion of person, remains an I-loop—”

  …but for Others, it meant becoming something new—“Giving birth to one’s self, in essence.”

  The body he was surfing had been stoned, then, when he told her all this. When he was gone, she hired out. She enjoyed the work, but freelancing was hard. When the contract on Boss Gui came, she took it—and upgraded to corporate.

  “We are never alone,” DC had told her, just before he left forever. “There are always… us. So many of us…”

  “Can’t you all join?” she asked. “Join into one?”

  “Too much code slows you down,” he said. “We have… limits. Though we share, too—share the way humans can’t.”

  “We can share in ways you can’t,” she said. Her finger dug into his anus when she spoke. DC squirmed under her, then gave a small moan. His breasts were freckled, his penis circumcised. “True,” he said—whispered—and drew her to him with an urgency they were sharing only rarely, by then.

  That had been the last time….

  She wondered which species’ sharing was better—figured she would never know.

  They said sex was overrated….

  Yankee boy blue was no longer listening to the Doors—she couldn’t sense his node any more at all. She blinked, feeling panic rise. How had he slipped past her? Scanning for him—his vintage sci-fi paperback was still on his bunk.

  Shit.

  She glanced back into the cabin—Boss Gui glared up at her, then clutched his bloated stomach and gave a groan. The two Toads jumped—too hard, and hit the ceiling.

  Double shit—she said, “What’s wrong?” but knew.

  He said, “It’s starting.”

  She shook her head. “It can’t. It’s too soon.”

  “It’s time.”

  “Shit!”—a third time, and it was counterproductive and she knew it.

  Boss Gui’s face was twisted in pain. “It’s coming!”

  And suddenly she picked up the North American’s node.

  “Sh—”

  They were going to Nong Khai, from there to cross into Laos. Boss Gui wanted to expand the business, and business was booming in a place called Vang Vieng, a tawdry little mini-Macau at the foothills of the mountains, four hours from Vientiane—a place of carefully regulated lawlessness, of cheap opium and cheaper synths, of games-worlds cowboys and body hackers, of tentacle-junkies and doll emporiums and government taxes that Boss Gui wanted a part of.

  A large part of.

  There were families runningVangVieng but he was the Old Man, olfala bigfala bos blong ol man tod blong Kunming, and the Chinese had anyway bought up most of Laos back in the early privatisation days. He would cut deals with some, terminate the others, and slice himself a piece of the Vang Vieng dumpling—that was the plan.

  She had advised him against it. She told him it was too soon to travel. She asked him to wait.

  He wouldn’t.

  She sort of had an inkling as to the why….

  She was picking up the kid’s node right next to the driver’s.

  Which was not good at all.

  The driver’s, first: an incomprehensible jumble of emotion, in turns horny, soothing, driven, paused—the driver and the slug as one, their minds pulsating in union—hunger and lust made it go faster. Snatches of Beethoven—for some reason it calmed down the slugs. The driver not aware of the extra passenger—yet.

  The kid wasn’t really a kid….

  His node blocked to her—black impenetrable walls, an emptiness not even returning pings. He was alone in his own head—which must have been terrifying.

  She had to get to the front of the train. She had to get on the slug. And Boss Gui was convulsing.

  “Why are you just standing there, girl?”

  She tried to keep her voice even. “I found the assassin. He is planning to kill the slug—destroy the entire train, and you with it.”

  Boss Gui took that calmly. “Clever,” he said, then grimaced. His naked belly glistened, a dark shape moving beneath the membrane of skin. The Toads looked helpless, standing there. She flashed them a grin. “I’ll be right back,” she said. Then she left, hearing Boss Gui’s howl of rage behind her.

  Running down the length of the train—through the dining car, past toilets already beginning to smell, past farang backpackers and Lao families and Thais returning to Udon from the capital—past babies and backpacks and bemused conductors in too-tight trousers that showed their butts off to advantage—warm wind came in through the open windows and she blocked out the public nodes broadcasting news in Thai and Belt Pidgin. The end of the train was a dead end, a smooth wall with no windows. She kicked it—again and again, augmented muscles expending too much energy, but it began to break, rusting old metal giving way, and fading sunlight seeped through.

  How had the kid gotten through? He must have had gecko-hands—climbed out the window and crawled his way along the side of the train, below the window line, all the way to the slug….

  She reached out—sensed the driver’s confusion as another entity somehow wormed its way into the two-way mahout/slug interface. Stop!

  Confusion from the slug. The signals rushing through, too fast—horny/hungry/faster—faster!

  He was going to crash the train. The driver: Who is this? You can’t—

  She kept kicking. The wall gave way—behind it was the slug’s wide back, the driver sitting cross-legged on the beast, the intruder behind it, a hand on the driver’s shoulder—the hand grew roots that penetrated the woman and the beast both.

  Hostile mahout interface initiated.

  The driver was fighting it, and losing badly. No one hijacked slug trains.

  On her private channel—Boss Gui, screaming. “Get back here!”

  “Get your own fucking midwife!”

  But she could sense his pain, confusion. How many times had he gone through it in the past? she wondered.

  The hijacker had kept the driver alive. Had to—the whole thing had to look like an accident, the driver’s body found in the wreckage, unmolested—no doubt he planned to jump before impact.

  Could he?

  She crept behind him. Neither hijacker nor driver paid her any attention. And what could she do? Killing the hijacker would kill the interface—he was already in too deep.

  Unless…

  From Boss Gui, far away—“Hurry!”

  Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if Darwin’s Choice had stayed behind. It was possible for kathoey to give birth, these days… could an Other foster a child? Would he want to?

  Or he could have flesh-ridden a host… she would have kept the male parts just for that. If he’d asked her.

  But he never did.

  The hijacker must have had an emergency eject. She had to find the trigger for it—

  Wind was rushing at her, too fast. It was hard to maintain balance on the soft spongy flesh of the slug. It was accelerating—too fast.

  She was behind the hijacker now—she reached out, put her hand on the back of his head. A black box…

  She punched through with a data-spike while her other hand—

  Darkness. The smell of rotting leaves. The smell of bodies in motion, sweat—hunger, a terrible hunger—

  “Who the fuck are you? How did you get in here?”

  Panic was good. She sent through images—her standing behind him, the data-spike in his head—and what else she was doing.

  “You can’t do that….”

  She had pushed a second data-spike through his clothes and through the sphincter muscle, into the bowels themselves—detached a highly illegal replica-tor probe inside.

  She felt the slug slow down, just a fraction. The hijacker trying to understand—

  She said, “I am being nice.”

  She was.

  He had a choice.

  The probe inside him was already working. It was the equivalent of graffiti artists at work. It replicated a message, over every cell, every blood v
essel, every muscle and tendon. It would be impossible to scrub—you’d need to reach a good clinic and by then it’d be too late.

  The message said, I killed the slug train to Nong Khai.

  It was marking him. He wasn’t harmed. She couldn’t risk killing him, killing the interface. But this way, whether he got off the train or not, he was a dead man.

  “I’ll count to five.”

  He let go at three.

  Light, blinding her. The wind rushed past—the driver sat as motionless as ever, but the train had slowed down. The hijacker was gone—she followed him back through the hole in the wall.

  He was lying on his bunk, still reading his book. He wasn’t listening to music any more. Their eyes met. She grinned. He turned his gaze. She had given him a choice and she’d abide by it—but if the Toads happened to find out, she didn’t rate his chances….

  Well, the next stop was in an hour. She’d give him an extra half-hour after that—a running start.

  She went back to the boss.

  “It’s coming!” Boss Gui said. She knelt beside him. His belly-sac was moving, writhing, the thing inside trying to get out. She helped—a fingernail slicing through the membrane, gently. A sour smell—she reached in where it was sticky, gooey, warm—found two small arms, a belly—pulled.

  “You sorted out the problem?”

  “Keep breathing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, of course I did! Now push!”

  Boss Gui pushed, breathing heavily. “I’m getting too old for this…” he said.

  Then he heaved, one final time, and the small body detached itself from him and came into her hands. She held it, staring at the tiny body, the bald head, the small penis, the five-fingered hands—a tiny Boss Gui, not yet fat but just as wrinkled.

  It was hooked up with a cord to its progenitor. With the same flick of a nail, she cut it cleanly.