Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Later, Yarrow set our camp close to a tiny wood cabin that showed clear signs of habitation. Perhaps I should have queried this – we were trespassing, after all, and surely wanted to keep our presence here a secret – but my mind was full. We ate, and the sun disappeared, and I lay down to sleep.

  I was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of a woman speaking. I continued to feign sleep, but I opened my eyes a very little to be able to see her.

  I saw her only in profile. She was beautiful – or had been once; about thirty, fine-featured, with long dark hair hanging down. When I looked more closely, as well as I could in the darkness and through half-closed eyes, I could see how tired she was, with her shoulders down, hunched over our small fire. She had the giveaway marks at her temple.

  She and Yarrow spoke softly to each other, with familiarity, but little discernible affection.

  “Where’s your man?” he said.

  “Went upriver weeks back. I guess I’ll see him again when the leaves start to fall.”

  “Good for us.”

  “I guess so.” She sighed. “Is she asleep?”

  “I should think so. Long day.”

  I closed my eyes, softened my breathing, and tried to picture the day’s flights. At length, the woman left. But my head now was full of her. Who was she? What was she doing here? This was plainly a jenjer on whom some considerable expense had been lavished once upon a time. She would stand out back in the main town; she would be at home in the core worlds, the capital. She was surely very high functioning. Who could afford to maintain her out here? Why would she be here at all?

  “Pretty piece, isn’t she?” Yarrow said, when he saw that I was awake, and looking back towards the house. His tongue ran moistly across his lips. “Expensive.”

  In the house, the single visible light was extinguished. “Who is she?”

  “Abbey? She’s the ranger’s wife. Gets lonely out here in the wild.”

  “Yes, but – you know what I meant, Yarrow.”

  He gave me a sly look. “Your friend Eckhart never mentioned her?”

  “The under-secretary is a busy man.”

  “Under-secretary, eh?” He laughed. “A fancy title. But he wasn’t beneath falling for a jenjer. When she was a little younger, mind, and still had her looks. She was his aide. Swore undying love for him. He believed her, like a fool.”

  Like a fool... “What happened?”

  “What do you think happened? They’re all the same, those creatures. She had a lover already, didn’t she, same kind as her. They had a plan to go off together into free space. She was going to fleece Eckhart for every penny. I think she’d even got her paws on official money. That’s what I heard, anyway. So what was the under-secretary to do?”

  What else could my friend do? Discovering her duplicity, he would have been obliged to act decisively, and punitively. There could be no mercy: what message would that send to her kind? So he had sold on her bond, sold her into exile, out here, to get by as best she could. I wondered now who owned this piece of land. The governor? Some other wealthy and influential friend, ready to prevent Eckhart’s reputation being destroyed by scandal? We’re all allowed one bad mistake, after all, and Eckhart was such an asset.

  Yarrow was whistling tunelessly between his teeth.

  “What happened to the lover?” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “The man, the one she intended to leave with?”

  He looked at me blankly for a moment. “Oh, him! His bond got sold on to the military. He’ll be a hero now, no doubt.” He grinned without fellow feeling. “Rather him than me.”

  I had done and seen enough. On my instruction, therefore, we set out on the return journey very early the next morning. I did not see the girl, Abbey, again.

  I left Yarrow at the river confluence, and made my own way back to town. When I arrived, Eckhart was somewhere else, on the governor’s business, but I did not wait for him to return. I had no desire to remain on this world any longer. I left grateful and profuse thanks for his hospitality and for the trip of a lifetime, and extended my own invitation for him to visit me in the core worlds whenever he had the chance. I said that I would pass on my address as soon as I had one, but I never have. I took flight, for somewhere else.

  People, Places and Things

  Den Patrick

  1: Danny

  Danny and I smoked weed. Like a lot of weed. And we watched films. Independence Day, Godzilla, Pacific Rim, Armageddon, Transformers, The War of the Worlds. We watched all of them, even Cloverfield, though it made Danny feel car sick. My favourite was always The Thing, while Danny preferred The Day the Earth Stood Still. He said he liked the way Keanu Reeves didn’t seem to have any feelings. I told him Keanu Reeves never seems to have any feelings, which gave us both a fit of the giggles that lasted half an hour. It may have been minutes, difficult to tell; we had been rolling pretty hard that day. It tells you how stoned we were back then that we didn’t realise The Day the Earth Stood Still was a remake.

  I would kill for a remake, for myself, for the whole planet, but there’s no one left to kill and it was always a ridiculous expression anyway. ‘I’d kill for a cup of tea’: hyperbole smashed into the atoms of the banal. Maybe that’s what they were doing at Bern this whole time, using the Hadron Collider to fire pointless things at each other, hoping the destruction might create something meaningful.

  Looking back, it’s obvious to me now that Danny and I were just two people wanting to watch the world be obliterated over and over. It’s easier to destroy something rather than engage with it, easier to watch it burn than interact with it, easier to see it explode than have to learn and be hurt by it. Better the world be scoured of all beauty than suffer the notion you might have to enjoy it or fall in love with it. I think there are lot people like Danny and me - or there were, before the unmaking.

  Danny’s fascination with destruction shifted from the silver screen to a more personal one. He started hanging out with some mates from work and tried to get me onto coke, but I wasn’t having any of it. I liked to get stoned and be quiet, but there’s not much quiet when you’re in a room full of cokeheads.

  I didn’t see Danny so much. A year later he told me he’d tried heroin for the first time, a year after that and he was dead. I didn’t go to the funeral but I did stop watching films about the end of the world. I threw my Zippo in the sea and stopped smoking spliff. I got myself a better job, a girlfriend, and started spending time in the local boozer.

  And that’s where my problems really started.

  2: People, Places and Things

  The first thing you discover when you join Alcoholics Anonymous is that they have a lot a catchphrases.

  One day at a time.

  This too shall pass.

  Keep coming back.

  The one that always stuck with me the most is that ‘we are powerless over people, places and things’. I think this particular phrase is just a fancy way of saying ‘shit happens, so you might as well deal with it’. For me, it always reflected the transient nature of life. I kept a girlfriend for a bit, Robyn, but then we split up. I was mates with Danny for a long time, and then he died. I had a flat for a while, and then I was in a bedsit. I had a job as a delivery driver, and then all I had was my drinking problem. All things diminish over time, but never more so than when you’re drinking, or so I thought.

  When I sobered up, things didn’t seem to improve. It’s quite a common story for people recovering from drink or drugs. They mourn the life they lost, even though it was no good for them. I know that doesn’t make much sense, addiction doesn’t make sense to anyone, but it’s a bit like pining for an ex, even though they were a total shit to you. For a long time they were all you knew and the idea of anything else is all too frightening.

  My new-found sobriety meant I could see the world properly, but I wasn’t sure it was the world I’d known before I started drinking. It looked like the world I was familiar with before I starte
d drinking, but something didn’t feel right. Something was missing; it was quieter somehow, subdued. Had people given up on their lives when I wasn’t looking?

  There I was, putting the most effort into my life I ever had, and everyone else had become anxious shadows of themselves. You could see it in the blank gazes on the bus, or the way people didn’t react if someone barged into them on the street. Toddlers didn’t wail or throw tantrums and teenagers stopped swearing and shouting on the street. The letters column in the Daily Mail stopped. I found out later that they weren’t receiving enough outraged complaints. Anger, and just about every other feeling, had faded to leave a nervous apathy.

  I thought I was imagining it at first, but I mentioned it to my therapist and he nodded. “There are less of us now, and those of us that are left feel the absence.” The session ran out of time so I couldn’t ask him what he meant.

  I arrived the following week, but he didn’t show up. I went back the week after that and the same thing happened. I never saw him again. The counselling agency apologised and told me he’d gone missing. The receptionist broke down on the phone, crying that it wasn’t just that he’d gone missing, but that all record of him had been deleted too. All the paperwork with his name on had been stolen, all his files deleted. She apologised over and over until a supervisor took the phone from her and ended the call.

  Something like 250,000 people vanish each year in the UK.

  Some of these people come back. Either they were broke, or needed to get sober like I did, or they fled the country. A few reappear months or years down the line.

  Now when people disappeared they stayed disappeared and no one knew why. The news reported an epidemic of missing persons, as if such a thing could be contagious. Mental health professionals would duly appear on television or radio or anywhere that wanted an expert opinion. Psychologists and therapists would wring their hands and blame the economy and poverty and the many ills of the 21st Century. No one really cared at first. When a poor person goes missing it means they’re not claiming benefits, but then rich people started going missing too and that’s when the Government started taking it seriously.

  It wasn’t limited to people either, there were other, more banal disappearances, everyday things: keys, the TV remote, passports, a dog-eared black and white photograph of your grandparents, phones, engagement rings. All of these things started evaporating with ever increasing frequency. Objects and artefacts we had taken for granted, keepsakes and curios, things we could rely on to be found under sofa cushions. All were gone, all were lost, and they remained lost.

  Art galleries reported a 36% increase in stolen art, but the crime scenes never yielded any clues. “It’s as if the picture vanished into thin air,” the police would say, “But we are determined to find the criminals.” It was a form of denial I think, anyone with an ounce of sense knew the paintings would never return, just as we knew the Liberty Bell was never coming back, or the statue of David in Florence would never be seen again. It was obvious the police weren’t telling the whole story, not about the stolen art and not about the missing people.

  I used to joke to my Dad that we’d become absent-minded as a species, misplacing important things amid the clutter of our lives.

  “There’s just too much stuff in the world,” I would say and Dad would give me a look.

  “Just as long as we don’t start losing our minds,” he would say.

  3: Lambeth North

  Lambeth North Tube station was built in 1906 and was originally called Kennington Road. It suffered bomb damage during the war, in 1941, I think. I know this because my Dad worked there and would churn out the odd fact when he was bored, which was often. I liked the Tube station because I’d always think of the old man as I passed through the gates, his kindly eyes and small, crooked smile. I wish I could have been more like my Dad. God knows he didn’t deserve an alcoholic son, and he didn’t deserve to see the world end like it did either.

  There had been a lot of people and items affected by the disappearance phenomena by that point, but it was really Lambeth North Tube station that put it on the map, so to speak. Or rather it took Lambeth North Tube station off the map, because the whole place just wasn’t there anymore. It was this event more than any other that really brought it home to me. The building simply wasn’t there, just a yawning absence on the street. The news channels drove themselves into a frenzy. Not only had the station building vanished but the staircase and the lifts were gone too. Serious men in fluorescent jackets led by other serious men in white coats arrived. They scanned the soil using radar but there was no sign of the platform below. Engineers walked down the line to discover the tunnel ended abruptly for about two-hundred meters, only to start up again on the way to Elephant and Castle.

  It wasn’t just that Tube station was gone, it was as if it never existed. The tunnel hadn’t been filled in, it had never been excavated in the first place. People could remember Lambeth North Tube station, but no mention of it remained anywhere. Books on the history of the Tube had blank pages. Websites were riddled with ‘404 Error – Not found’ messages. Theories zipped back and forth across the internet, in conversations, on texts. Had it been a hoax? Was it an elaborate stunt? Were avant-garde terrorists to blame for this new attack on the London Transport network? Various far right parties blamed the immigrants, the chairman of Transport for London had a nervous breakdown, and no one came any closer to discovering what had happened or why.

  And there was the subtle erosion of information. All mentions of Lambeth North Tube station faded after 24 hours. Text messages deleted themselves. It wasn’t enough that Lambeth North Tube station had gone, it was as if the very concept of the station wanted to be forgotten, scrubbed from existence, edited from all records, just like my therapist. I ran internet searches for the statue of David and it was the same story. 404 Error -- not found. The newspapers that had covered the story were missing text and pictures.

  The Tube station, my dad’s Tube station, was the first of many architectural casualties. Churches, old pubs, and Stonehenge were all taken, or faded from reality, depending on what version of conspiracy you adhered to. It was impossible to keep track of everything that had been unmade. That’s what they called it after one MIT professor released a frantic YouTube clip. The professor claimed we had ‘unmade’ the universe and I couldn’t help wondering if he was right.

  Keeping a record of what had gone was a pointless endeavour. Any list of unmade people unwrote itself. Records of unmade places began to delete themselves the moment they had been compiled; hard drives died and back-ups failed. Networks of obsessives emailed information to each other in strict 24 hour cycles, but even these were undone. Sometimes the very computers and servers the information was held on would be unmade, vanished to whatever unplace such items were transported to.

  Reports filtered in from all over the world and the response was always the same, no matter the nation, culture or religion: incredulity. We had expected some vast final battle, a Ragnarok, an Armageddon. We had expected dirty bombs on metro trains in major cities. We had dreamed aliens in vast ships would use laser cannons. We had not expected to be edited out of the Universe piece-by-piece, place-by-place, person-by-person. We were being quietly unmade without explosions or fuss, without bloodshed or fury. Dad said it had ‘all gone a bit T.S. Eliot’ but I didn’t know what he meant. He told me to read The Hollow Men and I didn’t know what that meant either.

  People that understood came together and set aside their differences. Now that threat of mutually assured destruction had passed, everyone wanted to be remembered by someone. People reached out to one another, defying the unspoken boundaries of class, religion, caste, sexuality, ability, even colour. Perhaps our prejudices had been unmade too.

  Not all people understood the unmaking, and not all prejudices were unmade. America dispatched the National Guard to stop the anticipated wave of looting, which is to say white people with guns looked for reasons to shoot black p
eople looking for food. And the National Guard were restrained compared to the white vigilante gangs that sprang up, declaring themselves the Zip Code Militia, but failing to understand the irony. No one was ever going to get mail again, not after most American cities became war zones.

  The UK was more sedate. Panic-buying became the norm and a few supermarket trucks were held up en route. People started stealing replacements for the things that had been unmade, games consoles, televisions, clothes.

  “It’s as if they think they’re entitled,” I said to Dad, “Compensation for a Universe that randomly steals from them.”

  We were having a cup of tea on his balcony. He lived in an old council flat he’d had the sense to buy before everyone was priced out of the city. We used to stand up there pointing out where buildings used to be. The skyline of London was less dramatic without the Shard thrusting into the skies.

  “Entitled? That’s your generation, not mine,” replied Dad. “We worked for the things we owned.” He shook his head and wandered back into the flat. The shops that still existed in the streets below were boarded up. A few companies tried to keep going as fewer and fewer employees arrived for work each day. The police were noticeable by their absence, I wondered how many of them had been unmade, never to be seen again. Living in a world where the landscape forgot itself was bad enough, but it was the absence of people that really unnerved. I followed Dad into the flat, relieved to find him sat in an armchair watching the news.

  4. Impressions

  The BBC showed a clip of a woman who had paid for something in her local corner store. A young mother with ash blonde hair, she turned away for perhaps thirty seconds and the pushchair was gone, along with her eighteen-month old daughter. The mother was hysterical, the shopkeeper too. You could feel the panic bleeding out of the screen as the woman searched the store, her every movement caught in grainy CCTV footage. The clip went viral, people made sure to repost it every twenty-four hours to make sure it outran the erosion of unmaking. The unmade girl’s name was Rebekah.