Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  People, places and things continued to disappear with steady regularity and we were all powerless to stop them. It was like reading about celebrities who had just passed away, but instead of David Bowie it was now the park two streets away, or the McDonalds on the corner. Sometimes a house or a block of flats would vanish and I would find myself breathless with a terrible dread. Had the families inside disappeared along with the buildings? What had happened to them? Were they aware it was happening as they vanished, or was it no different from a bomb?

  I looked at a picture of my dad on the shelf at my place. It had been a fishing trip when I was about eleven years old. I hate fishing but he thought it would be ‘good to do some father and son stuff’. In truth, it rained the whole three days and we played gin rummy in a tent, taking nips of whisky from his hip flask.

  The picture did not show my father in his waxed raincoat, it did not show the man holding a fish, the only one we caught. The picture revealed a bedraggled stretch of riverside and my eleven year-old self, staring into the camera with a shy smile. That’s was the second time my world ended I think. I knew he was gone in that moment. Mum had died years before, the first of my personal Judgement Days. Her passing fuelled my need to get constantly stoned and not feel anything. “Like Keanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood Still,” as Danny would say, except Danny wasn’t saying anything anymore. I tried to decide what was worse, overdosing on heroin or being unmade.

  I went to dad’s place slowly, no need to rush, nothing would change. He wasn’t there, though I spent the whole bus journey hoping it would be otherwise. The fact the buses were running at all made the day all the more surreal. I think Dad knew his time was up. The little table where he would eat dinner was immaculate, with only an old pad and pencil left behind. He had left a note but whatever had unmade him had unmade the pencil strokes too. Each loop and line, each letter and word, the paragraphs had all been unmade just as surely as my father had been. I cried for an hour, feeling like my eleven-year old self again.

  I don’t know what made me do it, but I checked the page underneath, tearing off the blank page where my father’s parting message had been so cruelly erased. My breath caught in my throat. The paper was uneven, faint indentations pressed into the paper by Dad’s heavy-handed scrawl. I lay the pencil flat and swished it back and forth across the paper, like a kid with a crayon. I’m not sure how it is that the words themselves were unmade while the indentations remained but it felt like a tiny victory over the unmaking.

  The words were faint and appeared as ghostly white streaks amid the grey of the pencil lead. They gave me some small measure of peace the day the Universe unmade my father. They were all I had left. All photographs of him were gone, his banking records and personal paperwork all gone. Even his old Tube station uniform cap unmade. That was when my world ended, and somehow, I stayed sober.

  5. Step Nine

  I should confess at this point that I wasn’t very good at the whole Alcoholics Anonymous thing. It’s not that I couldn’t stay sober, I just didn’t like their 12 Steps to Recovery. Yet here I was, at the end of the world, suddenly desperate to fulfil Step Nine:

  We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  I wasn’t expecting to embark on some quest of forgiveness, but events had a way of conspiring against me. I’d gathered up all the stuff I could carry from my place and moved in to Dad’s, keen to be close to him in any way I could.

  I was surprised to find that Mrs King who lived next door still existed. She was out on her balcony clutching the rail with a faraway look in her eye. I had assumed she had passed away, but here she was, in her nineties refusing to die or be unmade.

  “Hello, Love,” she said to me with a slow smile. “Come to see your Dad?”

  “I, well, he’s...’ the expression on my face told the rest of the story. She nodded and looked away.

  ‘I’m sorry,” I said, and wasn’t entirely sure why, just that this overpowering need to apologise had me rooted to the spot.

  Mrs King looked at me. “For what, Love?”

  “You know, all the times I turned up here drunk making a racket. And all the times my Dad had to go out looking for me. I know he told you about me. He didn’t exactly have a lot of people to talk to after mum passed.”

  “You don’t have to apologise to me,” said Mrs King. She pulled out a cigarette and lit the end, obscured behind a cloud of smoke for a second. “My Doctor told me to stop years ago, but I don’t suppose it matters so much anymore.” She gave me that slow smile again.

  “I’m not sure I ever told him how sorry I was, before he was taken.”

  “He always knew you regretted it,” replied Mrs King. “And he always knew you were sorry. Don’t worry yourself over it, there’s not much time left.” She headed back indoors and I wondered if I’d ever see her again.

  I kind of lost of it after that. Not by getting drunk. Dad hadn’t kept booze in the house for years. I found his address book. So many of the pages were missing entries, either people unmade or the addresses themselves. Many lacked telephone numbers from where their phones had vanished.

  One by one I phoned all the numbers that remained. I found myself speaking to strangers, old friends of the family, people who really didn’t want to speak to me at all. My message was the same regardless of the circumstances.

  I was sorry if I’d ever caused them any trouble.

  I was sorry to my Dad and wanted them to know we’d reconciled before he was unmade.

  I loved my Dad and wanted them to remember him, all the good in him, his kindly eyes and small crooked smile.

  Those phone calls lasted forever and I made them fearful the phone would be unmade from my hands, fearful the person I spoke to suddenly fell silent, unmade mid-conversation. It took me a whole day but I worked through every number in the book, those that were left anyway. I lost track of the number of people I reached out to, yet each of them gave some fragment of my Dad back to me: his favourite pub, a football match, the day he was promoted, how proud he was when I finally sobered up, who his best man had been and “You know John, he was Betty’s son from number 57...” and so on and so on. People stitching together reality from faded memories and nostalgia.

  I’m standing on the balcony at Dad’s flat and the tears won’t stop tracking down my cheeks. Just about every other building in the street has gone now. My old school, the church I was baptized in, the newsagents I used to deliver the papers for. All unmade, all remembered by me and me alone. There are just roads now, roads that lead nowhere, roads without corner shops and roads without cars.

  I haven’t seen anyone in a week, at least I think it’s a week, the calendar was unmade and I can’t keep track anymore. There’s no news, no TV at all, no electricity. I never thought I’d miss the howl of planes coming into land over London. The silence is a weight that drags me down.

  There’s a knock on the door and Mrs King stands there, unbending and resolute and reassuringly ancient. She says she found a book my Dad lent her. The author is T.S. Eliot she says. Would I like it? I open the cover and find The Hollow Men – my eyes drift over the words.

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  Mrs King asks me why I’m laughing and I tell her my Dad is some sort of genius. I tell her all the anecdotes and stories I collected over the phone, I share all my memories of him, all the good in him, his kindly eyes and small crooked smile.

  “What if they’re not unmade,” says Mrs King. “What if all this,” she gestures at the absences from her balcony, “Is just moving on, taken some place else.”

  “Like heaven,” I say, and I want to sound sneering and sarcastic but I don’t have in me. Mrs King shrugs.

  “Like heaven.” She smiles.

  I’m not sure I really believe in heaven,” I sa
y, but I breathe easier thinking my dad is somewhere else than not all.

  “What would heaven look like?” says Mrs King.

  “Like Lambeth North Tube station,” I say. “With my Dad on duty, standing by the barrier, with his old cap and small crooked smile.”

  Mrs King smiles and we wait, not for a bang, but a whimper.

  Staunch

  Paul Graham Raven

  The Hackney Kid’s kidneys go into shut-down on our way out of Gunchester.

  The faraday house in east Stockport is a shit-hole. Three houses knocked into one, rotten floorboards under scraps of carpet; where the doorframes were, you can see layers of chicken-wire jutting from the crude plasterwork. All the usual hawkers and hustlers, freelance tech-bros, pedlars of chemicals and procurers of more personal services are here... we’re the only guests today, but we’ve been through here enough times that the usual suspects know better than to shake down my people.

  Along with my crew, I lay out my hardware on a square of tarp, rebooting each unit into safe mode, patching what I can, hoping I won’t need to patch what I can’t. This is easier for me than for the other Surgicals, because none of my kit is networked... except my wrist-pad, natch, but that’s encrypted with a 1024-bit key held only in Wee Jenny’s Cupboard of Wonders, somewhere in the Highlands of the Scots Republic, and nothing passes through that firewall without me asking it to.

  No such luck for most of my crew, who are all ‘plantheads of one sort or another: the Kid and ‘Arry Satchels with their data-diver rigs; Nirmayi’s industrial stentrodes and interfaces; Nick-by-Name and her real-time physics engines and strategy modules. The one thing their ‘plants all have in common is that they’re illegal, obsolete, obscure, or a mix of all three.

  They weren’t when first fitted, natch. When ‘plants first arrived on the scene, employers were competing for subjects to install them in; ten years later, once the crude, error-prone and invasive ‘plants were superseded by scanwebs you could just slip on and off like a hat, they were competing for liability lawyers to avoid having to clean up their mess. The result was a whole lot of folk with a head-full of proprietary tech they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get rid of, nor use for legitimate work.

  Over the years, I’ve found a fraction of those folk, gathered them together. I find work for them. For us.

  They’re pleased to be transiting out of Gunchester, though. We lost a fifth of our salvage to customs: the Red Rose Federation is signatory to countless legacy trade agreements, meaning a lot of public-domain intellectual property, hardware or software, gets flagged as stolen or pirated as soon as it identifies itself to the municipal network. And while salvage isn’t considered theft in every jurisdiction, and while we may have been on UN business that came with salvage permits, Gunchester don’t care. It’s toll-gate robbery, in a way – but it’s a cost of doing business, so we suck it up like everyone else.

  Even if your hardware doesn’t decide to grass you up to a city full of greedheads, borders present other problems: expired licenses; forced OS upgrades; even local viral variants your firewalls don’t know. Hence the rituals of the faraday house, the hand-annotated hardcopy lists of recent exceptions and hardware seizures taped to the walls, the ‘change-and-mart grifters stinking of hydroponic tobacco and stale sweat...

  I finish my ablutions first, as usual, and barter for half a reefer from a toothy old Rasta crouched in a corner; old Swampy joins me at the window to share it. I take a quick head-count: everyone looks good to go but for the Kid, stalled halfway through his strip-down, knelt among his weapons and modules, staring up into interface space like he can see god in there. An angry god, at that.

  “You alright, Kid?” asks ‘Arry, wrapping up his own strip-down. “Not let yer insurance lapse again, ‘ave yer?”

  “Not... as such,” says an unusually subdued Kid, sliding out of i-space.

  The Kid’s original kidneys crapped out when he was twelve or so; I don’t recall exactly why, but given his namesake, it’s not hard to guess. While he’s all tubed up to a dialysis machine, two suits arrive and tell his parents they can give him some new experimental artificial kidneys, and no, no, don’t worry about the cost, we understand, all you need to do is sign on your son’s behalf and we’ll let him pay it off over the course of his whole lifetime... hell, we’ll even help arrange jobs for him to make it easier! I never had kids myself, but it doesn’t take high empathy stats to understand why the poor bastards signed him up. The Kid himself admits it gave him his childhood back: he was lucky, in that he got an experimental model that actually worked as designed.

  He got lucky later, too. Once he hit his economic majority at sixteen, his benefactors sent him to Hinkley: remediation work in the exclusion zone around Osborne’s Folly. But the UN grants for the Hinkley clean-up ran out after a few years, by which time said benefactors had ceased to exist as a legal entity; the Kid couldn’t trace them, at any rate, and they never got in touch again. So he thanked his luckies, signed up for a new career (and more ‘plants) as a data-diver, and forgot all about it.

  Only now his renal system has been flagged as lacking a site-license for the software it’s running, and the OS is demanding that the Kid return immediately to a certified repair services provider before the gratis 48-hour introductory offer expires, and the Kid with it.

  The company that made those kidneys hasn’t existed for a decade. Hell knows who acquired the IP on them – some robolawyer operating out of the Upper Eastern Seaboard States, probably. Doesn’t make much difference.

  I know immediately what I have to do, how I can save the Kid.

  Know who can save him, rather.

  “We need to get the Kid to Sheffield,” I tell them. “I have some... there’s people there who can maybe fix him.”

  Nirmayi shakes her head. “Wrong season for crossing the mountains.”

  “There’s not really a right season.”

  Gunchester’s a fine place to start from if you’re heading south; I’ve been wanting to hit the Bristol fayres and trade our salvage. We’ve been up in the Lake District these last few months, working another UN contract, protecting autonomous agrisystems from the endless army of amphibious cropper-drones that clamber out of the Irish Sea: North African kids based in Southern Europe, piloting Chinese hardware, probably convinced they’re grinding out gold and kudos in some game-world; their real objective is to grab viable samples of the European biome to take back to what’s left of the States. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: surveillance drones on fire off the shoulder of Scafell Pike... oh, it’s a proper warzone up there, even if the human cost happens hundreds of miles away. Tough work, but good pay by UN standards, plus salvage rights on each drone we decommission. A few bits and bobs managed to fall off some damaged agritech, too – the sort of stuff that’s easiest sold to specialists, so to speak. Hence my yen for the fayres of Somerland.

  But now we have a new destination... and heading east out of the Red Rose Federation is a different matter entirely. Passing people over the Pennines isn’t easy these days: the lesser roads are overgrown, the Hope Valley line was bombed out years back, and the canals are crawling with water militias who survive by squeezing communities downstream. And while the old Snake Pass road is still solid enough for smallish vehicles, anything less than an APC is an open invitation for the brigantii to canter down the sides of the cut armed with stolen welding lasers, slice you out of the car and eat you like corned beef from the tin.

  We need to go underground – very literally so.

  Everyone’s finishing up their lock-and-load. The Kid’s sat hunched on his tarp, all knees and elbows like a drowned spider, his skin oddly yellow and glistening with sweat. I don’t have long. No one dies on the job. No one ever has, not in the Surgicals.

  I round ’em up and move ’em out, my mouth running all the old war-movie clichés, trying to play the game, live the story... to get the narrative moving. That’s always been my problem, I guess: I like givin
g the orders, but I hate making the decisions. That’s why the Surgicals pick our contracts democratically these days, and why not every member does every mission. Well, every member but me and Wee Jen: can’t stage a circus without a ringmaster and someone to wrangle the permits out of the council, after all.

  Having decisions forced on you isn’t much fun either – I should have remembered that, really. Part of me does remember it, in fact. But it’s not the part that gets shit done, and the Kid needs that part in charge right now. So I put on the mask, and I play it.

  The veterans are old enough to see through the frame. Like me, they grew up in a time when there was still assumed to be some sort of canonical reality, no matter how little anyone could agree on its nature—that there was a difference between marketing and entertainment, between truth and the stories we drape over its nudity. Nirmayi knows everything, of course, as by necessity does Wee Jen. And it was Swampy himself who put me in touch with the design collective who hammered out the original brand narrative for me, back when I was just starting.

  But to the younger ones like the Kid and Nick-by-Name, even ‘Arry to some extent, the story of the Surgicals is just as true as the story of how their parents met, or how Silicon Valley faked the Mars landings: they take the first explanation they’re offered, either because they want it to be true, or because they’re worried it already is. To them, being in the Surgicals is simply a better story than the one they were in before, not least because it’s a story that slightly more people have heard of – and it’s a chance to play a bigger role than Washed-up Casualty of Sociotechnical Innovation, 3rd Class.

  And to them, I’m Elaine Stainless: the med-student roller-derby rogue who somehow turned her losing team into a legendary crew of grey-ops systems analysts specialising in theatres of advanced context collapse.