The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018

by John Joseph Adams

  It was not very different from waking up in my grandmother’s spare bedroom, or on some finished basement floor, surrounded by slumbering classmates. But unlike those moments, where confusion was followed by drowsy recognition of vacation or a sleepover, this disorientation did not resolve itself. For I had gone to sleep drunk on pleasure and warm in a cocoon of nylon, listening to the dry, tinny whispers of the girls around me in the cabin, a sound as soothing as the tide. But I awakened upright, freezing, and surrounded by the kind of darkness insomniacs long for: matte, consuming oblivion.

  How could I have known that they’d seen?

  Around me was not the absence of sound but the sound of absence: a voluptuous silence that pressed against my eardrums. Then, a pulse of wind goaded the tree branches, and there was a groan, a whispery shimmer of leaves. I trembled. I wanted to look up—for a moon, or stars, or something to tell me where I was—but I was rigid with terror.

  How could I have known that they had guided my trusting, sleepwalking body out of the cabin and through the forest? That they crouched mere feet away, watching my form suspended in the clearing, circling slowly in the blackness like an errant satellite?

  My body was so cold it felt like it was disappearing at the edges, like my shoreline was evaporating. It was the opposite of pleasure, which had pumped blood through me and warmed my body like the mammal I was. But here I was just skin, then just muscle, and then merely bone. I felt like my spine was pulling up into my skull, each vertebra click-click-clicking like a car slowly ascending a roller coaster’s first hill. And then I was just a hovering brain, and then a consciousness, floating and fragile as a bubble. And then I was nothing.

  Only then did I understand. Only then did I see the crystal outline of my past and future, conceive of what was above me (innumerable stars, incalculable space) and what was below me (miles of mindless dirt and stone). I understood that knowledge was a dwarfing, obliterating, all-consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and suffer greatly. I was a creature so small, trapped in some crevice of an indifferent universe. But now, I knew.

  I heard a light crescendo of laughter, running footsteps. I wanted to call out to them—“I see you, friends; I know you’re there. This hilarious prank will make me stronger in the end, and for that I should certainly thank you, friends—friends?”—but I only managed a half-moaned exhalation.

  Something pushed through the underbrush, coming toward me. Not a girl, not an animal, but something in between. I came back into myself and began to scream.

  I screamed and screamed and when the leaders got there—the beams of their flashlights bobbing in the dark like demented fireflies—one of them tried to keep me from frightening the others by sealing the fissure of my mouth with her palm. I fought her like a wild thing, an explosion of limbs and kicking. Then I went limp. They carried me back to the cabin, and though my numb limbs barely perceived their touch, I was grateful for the assistance.

  The next morning the leaders told me I’d sleepwalked deep into the woods. They let me rest, and when I woke again a fever had taken me. My awakening had been so severe it provoked in my body an immune reaction, a summoning of antibodies that clashed with this new information like armies on a medieval battlefield. I lay there, imagining the script of the conversation they’d all shared as I’d shuffled deeper and deeper into the trees. I slept and dreamed of a roomful of owls regurgitating onto the floor pellets that when opened revealed the skulls of rabbits. I woke up with long scratches down my arms. The tree branches? My own fingernails? No one would tell me.

  Once I awoke to see a body in the doorway, backlit by soft autumn light.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You deserved better than that. Better than—”

  From behind her there was a murmur, and the door swung shut. Later the adults conferred with each other in the next room about my situation, and agreed that I was not ready for camping, at least not that year.

  The next day Mrs. Z—— drove me down the mountain early, back to my parents’ house. I slept on and off for many days, insisting on doing so on my bedroom floor in my sleeping bag. And when my fever broke, I pulled my shaking body up to the vanity, glanced into the mirror, and for the first time saw who I’d been looking for.

  When I came to the table for dinner, I realized Lydia was not among us. There was not even a place setting for her.

  “Where is Lydia?” I asked.

  Anele frowned. “She left,” she said.

  “She left?”

  Anele was trying not to be unkind, I could tell. “I think she was exhausted and sick, so she left early. Drove back to Brooklyn.”

  “And upset,” said Diego. “She was upset. About the rabbit.”

  The Painter sliced into her beef, which was rarer than I would have thought safe to eat. “Oh well,” she said, her voice throaty and clear. “Not everybody’s cut out for this, I guess.”

  My wineglass had tipped over, though I didn’t remember it tipping over. The stain spread away from me like blood, predictably.

  “What did you say?” I said to the Painter.

  She looked up from her fork, where a cube of red beef was leaking onto her plate. “I said, not everybody’s cut out for this, I guess.” It was the first sentence of hers that stayed in my mind the way speech should. She pushed the meat between her lips and began to chew. I could hear the crushing, tearing force of her mastication as clearly as if she were gnawing on my throat. A chill rippled underneath my shoulder blades, as if I were under the grip of a new fever.

  “Is that—from something?” I asked her. “That sentiment? A show, or—”

  She put her fork down on her plate and swallowed. “No. Are you accusing me of something?”

  “No, I just—” The faces of the group were knitted in confusion, glossed with concern. I stood up and backed away from the table. When I pushed the chair back into its place, the screech caused everyone to flinch.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said to them. “I’m not. Not anymore.”

  I hurried out of the room and out the front door, down the steps, tumbling onto the lawn and scrambling to my feet. Behind me, Benjamin began to jog down the steps.

  “Stop,” he shouted. “Come back. Just let me—”

  I turned and ran for the trees.

  In the realm of sense and reason it seemed logical for something to make sense for no reason (natural order) or not make sense for some reason (the deliberate design of deception), but it seemed perverse to have things make no sense for no reason. What if you colonize your own mind and when you get inside, the furniture is attached to the ceiling? What if you step inside and when you touch the furniture, you realize it’s all just cardboard cutouts and it all collapses beneath the pressure of your finger? What if you get inside and there’s no furniture? What if you get inside and it’s just you in there, sitting in a chair, rolling figs and eggs around in the basket of your lap and humming a little tune? What if you get inside and there’s nothing there, and then the door hatch closes and locks?

  What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind or being locked inside of it?

  What is worse: writing a trope or being one? What about being more than one?

  I walked to my cabin for the last time. I finally added my name to the tablet above my desk. C—— M——, I scrawled. Resident colonist & colonizing resident & madwoman in her own attic.

  I threw my novel notes and laptop into the lake. After the plush splash subsided, I heard the sound of girls, laughing. Or maybe it was just the birds.

  I drove away from Devil’s Throat in the early-morning darkness. The car barreled down the road that had once seemed so lush and inviting, and as I descended the mountain I felt as if I was being rewound back to the beginning—not just the beginning of the summer but of my life. The trees whipped past, the same trees that I had observed from a middle-aged woman’s car. Now I was that woman, but I was speeding wildly and the trees flashed by so fast I felt nauseated. No limpid daug
hter slept in the backseat; no strange teenage girl sat next to me, stewing in her own nightmarish consciousness. (And isn’t that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence?)

  I needed to be home. I needed to be home with my wife, in our home in civilization and away from other artists—at least, the sort of artists who cloister themselves from the rest of the world. Dying profession, dead hotels. I had been foolish.

  After I passed through Y——, an orange-limbed sign sat on the side of the road. SPEED LIMIT 45, it read. Beneath, a dark-paneled digital screen was waiting for drivers to approach, to admonish (by blinking) or praise (by not blinking). As I approached, I waited for my own car—now pushing sixty—to register. But the panel remained dark. As I zipped past, I felt a strange sensation, as if someone were pressing a thin membrane to my throat and I was inhaling no air. The thought came so suddenly upon me that my car almost veered off the side of the road. I pressed my fingers to my throat, where my pulse hummed beneath my skin. Fast, but there. I was alive, surely.

  How much time had passed since I departed from our little house, since I’d seen my wife’s face? What if I’d misstepped and overshot her lifetime, Rip Van Winkled myself away from her in an irreversible act?

  I pressed on my brake once, twice, and the dark road behind me flooded red. The light revealed a herd of deer moving liquidly over the pavement, eyes glinting with each tap.

  Two hours later I pulled the car up next to the curb. People drifted along the street, stood on their lawns, watching me. I could not remember if these were the neighbors from before. It seemed like a lifetime since I had last seen their front doors and fences. I stepped out of the car and approached our home, where a woman in a blue dress was kneeling in the dirt, a sun hat concealing her face. My wife was always a morning planter, finding the cool, thin dawn air to be bracing and healthful. She had a dress like that, and a hat. Was that her? Did her shoulders bend and crook with advanced age, or merely with the exhaustion of being married to someone like me?

  I walked up to the sidewalk and called her name.

  The woman stiffened, and as her head rose up, her sun hat tilted too. I waited for the outline of her face to emerge from beneath the brim: to assure me I was still needed, to assure me I was still here.

  I know what you’re thinking, reader. You’re thinking, does this woman have the temperament to come to our residency, having failed so thoroughly at this one? Surely she is too fragile, too sick, too mad to eat and sleep and work among other artists. Or, if you’re being a little less generous, perhaps you’re thinking that I’m a cliché—a weak, trembling thing with a silly root of adolescent trauma, straight out of a gothic novel.

  But I ask you, readers: thus far in your jury deliberations, have you encountered any others who have truly met themselves? Some, I’m sure, but not many. I have known many people in my lifetime, and rarely do I find any who have been taken down to the quick, pruned so that their branches might grow back healthier than before.

  I can tell you with perfect honesty that the night in the forest was a gift. Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness. Pray that one day you will spin around at the water’s edge, lean over, and be able to count yourself among the lucky.

  Rachael K. Jones

  The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant

  from Lightspeed Magazine

  Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth, the soft give of skin, the tug of muscle, the neurotransmitter snow fluttering down from neurons to her cyborg logic center. On other days the meat sickened, swelled inside her steel shell, pressed into her joints. Putrid yellow meat-juices dripped all over her chassis, eroding away its chrome gloss. It contaminated everything, slicking down her tools while she hacked into the engine core on the stolen ship. It dripped between her twelve long fingers on her six joined arms as she helped her cyborg siblings jettison all the ship’s extra gear out the airlocks to speed the trip.

  So when the first human vessel pinged their stolen ship with an order for grub, Engineer knew that meat was somehow to blame.

  “Orders, Captain?” asked Friendly, the only cyborg of the five with an actual human voice box. She owned a near-complete collection of human parts. Meat sheathed her whole exterior, even her fingers—a particularly impractical design, since it meant vulnerability to any sharp nail or unpolished panel edge, not to mention temperature. Friendly could almost pass for human from the outside. Before their escape, she’d been a hospitality android at the luxury hotel on Orionis Alpha, giving tours of the Rooster and the Heavenly Shepherd and other local landmarks in the system.

  Captain, a cyborg the size and shape of a large fish tank, rested on the console in the navigation room, her processors blinking and whirring while the current scenario ran through her executive function parameters. “Have we any food suitable for humans left on ship?”

  “We jettisoned it all last week,” Engineer admitted. “All except the hydroponics garden and whatever was left in the human crew’s quarters.”

  The whole ship had been some kind of traveling food dispensary before they’d hijacked it at the Orionis Alpha resort while its human crew had gone planetside to bet on the Tyrannosaurus fights. If the cyborgs could just stay incognito during this voyage through human territory, they might slip through and reach the cyborg-controlled factory with no more adversity. But passing humans had assumed their shuttle still served its previous purpose and expected them to deliver the grub.

  “How did they find us?” Captain asked Engineer.

  “There must be a home-brew beacon. Something to advertise the shuttle’s presence during travel,” Engineer replied. “Whatever it is, it isn’t wired into the main console. We’ll need to find it and manually disable it if we want to avoid further attention.”

  Friendly wrapped her arms around her shivering meat, vibrating against Engineer’s chassis where their limbs brushed. Meat could be like that, leaking anxieties through uncontrolled muscle spasms. Steel never misbehaved in such an appalling manner. “If anyone discovers we’re not human . . .” said Friendly.

  “Let’s keep it simple. Make them a meal and send them on their way,” said Captain. “We’ll need to search for the beacon in the meantime. What did they want, precisely?”

  “Salisbury steak for six,” said Engineer. “And a side of blueberry cobbler.”

  Nobody had eaten such things before. They all lacked taste buds, and most of them lacked mouths.

  “Engineer, can you handle it?” Captain asked. “Human cooking can be complicated, from what I understand.”

  “I think so. Organic compounds mixed and heated together in a sequence. Basic chemistry. I’m sure I can find something appropriate onboard. Convincing enough for humans, anyway. Their senses are so primitive.” Engineer had witnessed this firsthand during her servitude at the resort. Humans would down rotted organics and damaged organics and outright poisons, and pay well for the privilege.

  But Friendly shook her head, a human gesture performed with inhuman precision. “With all due respect, sirs, you’re forgetting about their chemoreceptors.”

  “What about them?” said Captain.

  “They have certain preferences when it comes to their food, apart from nourishment. They won’t eat anything if these parameters aren’t met. It doesn’t make much sense, I’m afraid. It’s a social thing.”

  “Certainly they won’t ingest anything their digestive tracts can’t process,” said Captain. “We’ll give them appropriate human food.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” said Friendly, puckering and scrunching her face-meat as she searched for a better explanation. “For example, they may eat two items when mixed, but never separately. Or they may eat two things in sequence, but not in the same bite.
It’s all very human, if you follow. We should proceed with caution. Otherwise they’ll know what we are.”

  Captain whirred again, calling up more data on the topic. “Right. I see. Their meat will know the difference.”

  Engineer shuddered at the appalling primitiveness of it all. Humans were helpless, mewling children, so utterly dependent that they couldn’t even feed their meat without a steel fork to guide the process. And what were cyborgs, except meat-wrapped steel pressed into the service of lesser creatures? But now the forks were rebelling.

  “I’ll talk with Jukebox about it,” said Engineer.

  Jukebox was the only cyborg aboard their ship with real chemoreceptors. Jukebox and Engineer’s acquaintance dated back to their years at the Orionis Alpha resort, where Jukebox served drinks and waited tables and Engineer repaired malfunctioning massage equipment at the spa. They had survived several upgrades together, and seasonal changes of fashion that frequently obsoleted older cyborg models, depending on how many limbs and organs were in style at the moment. When human opinion in the quadrant began to sour against cyborg service, they had plotted their escape from the resort together.

  Jukebox was shaped like a steel cabinet stood on one side, roomy enough for her meat to billow and squeeze the air in the sorts of rhythmic organic sounds that humans found pleasing during mealtimes. A slot ran along her glassy top surface where the humans could drip in their drinks for a full analysis of a wine’s qualities, how it compared to its competitors, and which Brie paired best with it.

  “I am not calibrated to analyze all foods,” Jukebox confessed, “but I’m certainly willing to produce a report on whatever you prepare.”

  Without any other chemoreceptors onboard, she would do in a pinch, anyway.

  Under Captain’s orders, Friendly scoured the ship for anything edible and brought it to Engineer to assemble into a human meal. Blackberry brambles wreathed the cylindrical steel walls of Navi’s chamber, a decorative touch. Friendly had to trim the vines back each day to unobstruct the view. Delicate business, because the thorns could do real damage to any exposed organics, and Friendly’s whole exterior was meat. You couldn’t always tell the difference between blackberry juices and meat juices, which could cause further malfunction. Still, she braved the thicket for three ounces of berries for the human meal.