Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  I don’t. But I could have.

  I attack a few more simulants. In truth, I cannot say I am conducting experiments in response to violence. Beating them is somehow… cathartic. I feel anxious all day until I have hit them, after which I feel calm. I am perturbed by this, but I don’t tell anybody, even Nico.

  I’m cleaning the simulants fluid off myself, when I notice a couple about a hundred yards away. I draw closer and it’s Katrina talking to a male simulant.

  She is smiling.

  Is that bitch auditing my work?

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I yell.

  She is calm, and meets my gaze. The simulant wanders off before I reach them.

  “Hello, Storm,” she says.

  “Hello yourself. What are you doing?”

  “Chatting.”

  “Bullshit.”

  ‘“Okay, I confess, I was curious about your efforts and decided to see for myself.”

  “It’s no concern of yours.”

  “Ahh, but it is. You complained about the symmetry of my streets. I think that makes your work my concern. Since we’re all helping each other out.”

  I feel myself tense up at the smug tone in her voice, the challenging thrust to her chin. What surprises me is that the urge to hit her is so intense that I force myself to walk away.

  “Touché,” I mutter.

  At a prayer point in St John’s Wood I say, “There are things that children of drunks know that other children do not. I don’t mean that modern “addiction” crap. That’s some bleeding-heart bullshit. I mean drunks. For one thing, we know how to take a beating. Two, we are experts at observing other people. Three, we know how to strategically deploy alcohol. Too little, and you get withdrawal symptoms, which can make the drunk irritable. Too much, and you become a punching bag. You have to find the sweet spot, the optimum amount of alcohol to maintain tranquillity. Four, we know the borders of sobriety well. The drunk-not drunk threshold tells us when to disappear.

  “People who talk about ‘a mean drunk’ don’t know anything. Children of drunks recognise no other kind. We are weaned on violence and know nothing else.”

  I have been following Katrina for weeks now. She sees her simulant every day. He’s an Elliot Wells type. I went to secondary school with Elliot Wells and he was a bit of a wanker. I forget why. I think he is one of those people who knows everything and reminds everybody of it all the time. The kind who answers a question in class before anybody else, or who declares a wrong answer before the teacher does. That kind of wanker. Maybe.

  He pronounces consonants, for fuck’s sake. The rest of us drop them, like the good old faux cockneys we aspire to be. He has to enunciate. I am not exactly sure why I designed some simulants after him.

  I see them kissing next to a waterway in Little Venice. Kissing. It irritates the hell out of me. I don’t know how many Elliots there are in London, but I try an experiment. I wait until he has walked her to the edge of our complex, then I pounce on him as he walks back. I obliterate his head with dozens of strikes from my pipe.

  When he falls, I hear the drum beat of multiple feet. There are simulants running towards me. Just two of them at first. They don’t know how to fight, and they approach me one at a time, so I simply whack them in the faces with my pipe. But then there are more. When the two fall, three more appear, and when they fall a team of four runs towards me. They still attack one at a time, but I’m getting tired, my arm is weak, and it’s hard to keep my footing in the pool of faux-blood at my feet. The silence is disconcerting. They don’t get out of breath, and when I punch them in the belly, there is no forced exhalation. I try to run into the complex, but now there is a group of five and they appear to have learned to attack all at once. My pipe, slick with their fluids, slips from my fingers. I take punches to the body and head. I’m dazed, and still taking hits. I know that if I black out, they will kill me. Through the confusion of limbs, I see a team of six approaching. I am about five feet from the gate of the complex.

  I unleash a final burst of savagery, and am able to escape into the barrier. My hunch is correct. The simulants cannot enter. I fall to all-fours, catch my breath.

  I see a light come on in Terry’s house, but then it goes out again.

  The surviving simulants stand at the barrier and I give them the finger before I stagger home. When I look out of the window, both the incapacitated and active simulants are gone.

  Three hours later I wake up to scores of observation orbs in my room, more than I have ever seen in one place at the same time. And Nico. He appears in greyscale, as Tom Jones when he was in the band Tommy Scott and the Senators. White shoes, white trousers, open neck cardigan. The Senators was back in the Sixties. I’m staring at his outfit and I miss what he’s saying.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You’re under arrest,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Is your hearing malfunctioning?” He moves closer to my bed. “You are under arrest for the murder of Elliot Wells.”

  It turns out the strangers move fast in setting up a rudimentary judicial system, a police force and a prison of sorts. I am the first person to be arrested or placed in detention.

  “This is ridiculous,” I say to Nico.

  “You were the one who prayed for law enforcement,” he says.

  “For them. I’m not subject to their laws.”

  “You can argue that in court. Murder is a universal–’”

  “It’s not murder. The simulants are not alive.”

  “Well–’”

  “At most it’s cruelty to machines, and even you know how ridiculous that sounds.”

  “I suggest you work on your defence, Storm.”

  I don’t know what’s funnier, a Soviet show trial or this farce.

  The judge is a Miss Cadogan. The jury is full of Elliot Wells duplicates, which is annoying because it should be jury of my peers. Observation orbs are everywhere. All this malarkey because I deactivated the equivalent of a household appliance.

  There are no other humans in court, and that should make me suspicious right away, but I am overwhelmed by the absurdity of it all. What are they going to do, execute me? It’s not as straightforward as I think, though. Since this circus began my feelings on the matter have become complicated. I make glib statements about simulants not being alive, but deep down, where I won’t admit anything, I feel a cold weightiness in my heart. It makes my words ring false when I use them. Is that guilt I’m feeling? Have I convinced myself these simulants are alive?

  When I see the first prosecution witness the other shoe finally drops. The humans are going to testify against me. Katrina’s in the stand.

  “I appeal, Nico. I want to speak to them,” I say.

  He is silent for a while. I’ve never seen him like this. I get the sense that he is thinking, which is odd. I thought he was a mouthpiece.

  “You can’t,” he says, finally.

  “Prisoners and convicts have a right of appeal, since we’re pretending to be human. Take me to the fucking Apologists.”

  “You can’t speak to them, Storm, because they are not here.”

  “I’m sorry, what? What are you saying?”

  Tom fucking Jones is still dancing while delivering this news. Unbelievable.

  ‘“We’re not on Earth,” says Nico. “After your planet was destroyed you all were brought here, to the homeworld. That’s why you have to wear the suits when scavenging. This is not Earth.”

  I sputter, but I feel the ground falling away from me. “So what is this place?”

  “A kind of reserve, a place for you to thrive, build a new world, live.”

  “A wildlife reserve? A fucking zoo? Are you kidding me?”

  “The people you call Apologists don’t live here, haven’t done for centuries. They have left to explore–’”

  “Show me.”

  He does.

  Beyond the placeholder for what is to be the M25 London orbital motorway, he takes me t
hough what seems like nothingness, but is a doorway. It is suddenly dark, with spotlights from above. All around me, and extending as far as the eye can see are hundreds, thousands of proto-simulants. They stand there with their bland features and absent secondary sexual characteristics. They twitch occasionally, the way babies do, the way Chelsea did in her sleep.

  I look up, and the ceiling appears to be so far away, it must have clouds forming within. It was like a cathedral, but no cathedral I knew of was miles wide. No matter what direction I look in, I cannot see a wall. The heads of the simulants just keep going forever. The ceiling is transparent and shows a night sky, with constellations I do not recognise.

  “I want to go outside,” I say.

  “No. There is no atmosphere. You’ll die. Besides, there is nothing to see. This is all there is,” says Nico.

  “Give me the suits we go scavenging in,” I say.

  He humours me, but he is right. There is nothing to see outside but rock and dust and dead machinery. Overhead, a number of large celestial bodies in the sky, moons and satellites, no doubt.

  “Is there no way to get a message to–?”

  “Storm, they live in Dyson Clouds over multiple solar systems. They have countless worlds like this where they keep species like yours. They do not wish to hear your opinion. You are wasting your time.”

  I take the suit off. “There has to be retrial, Nico. I must be judged by my peers, not these… things. Let the Final Five judge their own.”

  In the end they elect to exile me, which is just like imprisonment, only with no walls, bars or daily routine. They agree it wasn’t murder to kill a simulant, but I had displayed ‘murderous behaviour’ which may well spill into their lives. They see me as dangerous. I do not tell them we are not on Earth because fuck them.

  They seal me in a cul-de-sac in Shoreditch. The simulants avoid the area and not even the ghost cars drive on the roads. It is hard, and I am lonely. I write down everything I can remember about Bea and Chelsea. If I am not to create simulant personalities then I will re-create others. I write about the lives of people I have known on Earth. I write furiously, so as not to go mad.

  I write about what happened here in this new London. The first version I write is a bit of whinging horsedung. I cast myself as a misunderstood martyr and gloss over the things I did wrong. I don’t know what I was thinking. Redemption after death? Much later, when I have achieved distance and some objectivity, I destroy the first account and write a more honest one. I am even able to interrogate myself, to ask myself why I really killed Elliot Wells and those other simulants. I use the word ‘killed’. I speculate on whether I was jealous, on whether I am perhaps attracted to Katrina. I delete that version too, and finally settle on one that just states the facts.

  I attend to every little thing. When the printer makes food I watch every minute process. Maybe I do go mad a little, because I speak to the drone sentries, even though they do not speak back.

  After about a year, a simulant escorts me to the funeral for one of the Kelly’s, then the other within a month. I pay my respects. Katrina is there, eyes swollen from crying. Terry’s there too, in sunglasses and staring at me. I want to explain to them that I have some insight into myself now, that I’m not a threat, and that I want to come back, but it reminds me of when I begged Chelsea to return home, and I end up saying nothing.

  We are the pandas who won’t mate. Endangered, in captivity, eating food printed from basic amino acids, glucose and triglyceride molecules, remaking our world from memory and language, a world both old and new.

  In this new London I am the first mass murderer. I serve my time, and when I come out of Shoreditch I do not recognise the proto-city. They give me new clothes, and ignore my protests. They have improved the water, there are cars, and the people are more like the grim arseholes you would normally see in the London tube crowds every day. Maybe this is not so bad. If I squint, this can pass for Earth.

  The complex is empty, and I have no idea where Katrina or Terry are. I see Nico one more time, but he does not tell me about the other humans.

  I go into a pub called The Cock and Bull to wait for the midday apology.

  The service is shit, but the cider tastes better.

  Montpellier

  Ian Whates

  Montpellier is a shithole. I didn’t want to go there in the first place but nor did anyone else and I was too slow in coming up with an excuse.

  There are four of them: Montpellier, Biscay, Siena, and Detroit. Officially termed ‘habitat complexes’, they are known locally as the Four Horsemen. War hasn’t actually broken out there yet, but three out of four ain’t bad. Besides, give it time...

  The Horsemen form an off-kilter diamond in an unfashionable downtown suburb of Victoria – the part of the city the tourists never see. Uptown the theme is eco-balance and elegance – leafy avenues lined with glitzy store fronts, pocket parks and hidden arboreta with tinkling water features and shaded paths and flower beds – all designed to relax the weary shopper after a morning’s indulgence. Downtown, not so much. Anything growing has been eaten, smoked, or chopped down for winter fuel long ago.

  I took the subway, not wanting to risk my own vehicle anywhere near the place. A state of the art security system doesn’t s discourage the resourceful thief, it merely inspires them. I should know. You see, my mistrust of the Horsemen isn’t born of cultural prejudice or media-fed ignorance, quite the opposite. I was born here. In Montpellier. That’s why when this job was passed to me it stuck, having already been shifted hastily along by a number of wiser colleagues. The assumption being that my heritage would give me some sort of advantage. Like hell. Anyone born in the Horsemen spends their waking hours dreaming of getting out and automatically despises those who’ve managed to.

  As I exited the subway it was raining. A monotonous drizzle, not heavy but relentless, as if determined to pummel the world into submission by a process of attrition. Around me were small houses with leaky roofs and water pooling in their doorways. Dark scowls followed me along the road – nosy old women peering out from windows, round-shouldered punks sheltering in porches. I didn’t fit. My clothes marked me as an outsider. Oh, I’d tried to dress down, but these days even my tattiest gear made me look like an uptown fuckwit that had got off at the wrong stop.

  If the Horsemen form a diamond it’s a rough one, knobbly and uncut. The components are towering edifices that thrust up from low-rise streets like broken teeth dislodged from the jawbone of some long-dead leviathan. Around and between them the squalor has leaked outward, uniting the district in poverty and grime. Or that’s how it’s always seemed to me. Truth is that this was a run-down neighbourhood before the Horsemen were constructed, while they were being constructed, and ever since they came to dominate the skyline. That’s just how it is. Self-contained communities with spacious apartments, schools, parks, shops, health centres, everything necessary to ensure a decent standard of living, the habitats were supposed to change all that. Not that anyone local ever bought into the hype. Sure enough, the money ran out. The promised support dried up. Immediately after the official opening – pats on the back and self-congratulatory handshakes all round despite the project being delivered nearly a year late – the authorities forgot about downtown, turning their attention elsewhere. Others moved in to fill the void.

  Ill-conceived and chronically under-funded, the new communities floundered before they’d properly begun. Downtown won. Instead of lifting the whole district out of the relentless mire of poverty as idealists had predicted, the habitats were dragged down into it. The Horsemen were born. They became the symbol of everything squalid and distasteful about downtown, both in public perception and in reality.

  Any wonder I didn’t relish coming back here?

  Ahead of me rose the jagged outline of the Horsemen, with Montpellier the closest at the southern tip of the diamond. At odd moments the sun struggled to break through; a watery orb drooping low and miserable over the city as
if even it had fallen victim to the general malaise and lacked the energy to climb higher. Presumably there was a rainbow somewhere, but not here. I trudged forward, hands in pockets, staring at the puddles, avoiding eye contact. I wasn’t really expecting trouble, at least nothing I couldn’t handle, but out here at the periphery you never could tell. The punks hanging around at this point were outliers – petty dealers and hotheads at the bottom of the pecking order – minnows. Even the minnows had teeth, though, and there was no guarantee that one of them, anxious to build a rep or simply bored, mightn’t fancy shaking down a stranger just for the hell of it. So I kept my head bowed, having neither the time nor the patience to spare.

  I was fully expecting to be challenged on reaching Montpellier itself, but that was fine. My employers benefited from off-world backing. The petty gang lords who squabbled over the Horsemen’s avenues and corridors weren’t about to risk messing with that sort of muscle. And if an ambitious lieutenant took it into their head to take me on, more fool them. Not so long ago I had been where they were now, except that I was better, which is how I got out.

  Funny thing about being a lookout: you have to make it seem you’re loitering without actually loitering at all. I spotted the first three as I came up to the entrance – not the main entrance, Montpellier doesn’t have a main entrance. The plaque identifying this one had been defaced, but I didn’t need it. This was SE3-Red, the ‘Red’ indicating which quadrant of the habitat the entrance led into, so why they bothered with the ‘South East’ bit is anyone’s guess. I had a total of nine customers to call on and four of them lived in Red, so it seemed as good a place as any to start. Personal visits weren’t exactly the norm, but nine customers defaulting within the same week made for exceptional circumstances.