“Were your sons turned into swans?” Could this be his father, finally come to claim him? Ben can’t remember what the man looked like.
“They were turned into crows,” the man says. “It was my fault.”
Ben nods, not caring that the stranger isn’t his father or that his words make no sense. The man is powerful. Ben can see it. The man can help him, if he will.
He lets the stranger search the church, checking rafters and pews. Finally the man bends down and picks up a single black feather lying on the floor. He sighs. “They’re gone, then?”
Ben nods.
“Ah. Well.” He wrings out his shirt on the floor, squeezes water from his hair. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“You can wait out the storm here,” Ben says.
“I don’t mind rain.”
“Look.” Ben lifts his wing and holds it out, feeling helpless and desperate, like when he was a speechless child clinging to his sister’s legs. “I’ve met someone like you before. She changed me.”
The stranger glances at his wing but does not touch it. “I’m in a hurry.”
“Please. Before you go, make me whole. Make me myself again.”
The man sighs and glances at the windows, as if he is late and Ben is keeping him. “Okay,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”
The man turns away from Ben and raises his hands, feather tattoos crinkling and flexing, stretching like his arms are wings. He begins to sing, “Take me to fruit trees and green grass.”
The storm howls against the church house, peeling back shingles until water begins to spill in thick ropes from the ceiling. The man sings, and his words lose meaning, hitting the air like they are solid. His chant is an etching on a gravestone, lightning scarring the sky, a key threading a lock. He speaks, and the world opens around Ben, just as it did years ago.
The birds filling the church raise their wings and take flight. They swirl around Ben and land on his shoulders, his arms, his back, until their weight bears him to the ground. He is covered by their musty feathers. He falls down a well of sleep.
When Ben wakes, the church is silent. Light comes through the windows, and he doesn’t know how long he has slept. He pushes against the birds covering his body, but they are heavy and dead. They don’t stink of rot, the stranger’s magic having eaten all the life out of them. They fall like chips of wood.
For a moment their delicate bodies pain him. He meant to keep them safe, but they have been dying in his care for a long time. Now they are all dead. His grief doesn’t know where to begin.
Ben stands, afraid, and looks at his new body. He can see his two feet. He has a soft stomach, uncovered by feathers. Matching his right arm, he has a new left arm extending from his shoulder. He clasps his hands together, linking his fingers for the first time in years.
He clenches his teeth and sucks in a ragged breath. “No,” he says.
Ben reaches around, feeling his shoulders and back, searching for wings. He grasps his face, searching for a beak. He tries to honk, hoping to feel the sound slide up his long throat. But he is only a boy again, just as he started.
He runs out of the church, looking for the stranger, but the man is gone. The sky arches blue and vast over him, completely out of his reach. “No,” he says to the sky. “This isn’t what I meant. I wanted to be a swan again. I wanted to fly.”
He goes inside and collapses onto his pile of birds, gathering them against his chest. He covers himself in feathers, sings the man’s strange song. He prays there is some magic left, enough to carry him away, but the world with all its secrets remains shut.
Desperate, he stands on a pew and jumps as high as he can, flapping his arms. He remembers piercing the cold, high air. He remembers the warmth of his brother swans pressing against him at night. He remembers the beauty of his song. Ben tells himself that he is a swan still. The air slips past his fingers. He falls.
Peter Watts
ZeroS
from Infinity Wars
Asante goes out screaming. Hell is an echo chamber, full of shouts and seawater and clanking metal. Monstrous shadows move along the bulkheads; meshes of green light writhe on every surface. The Sāḥilites rise from the moon pool like creatures from some bright lagoon, firing as they emerge; Rashida’s middle explodes in dark mist and her top half topples onto the deck. Kito’s still dragging himself toward the speargun on the drying rack—as though some antique fish-sticker could ever fend off these monsters with their guns and their pneumatics and their little cartridges that bury themselves deep in your flesh before showing you what five hundred unleashed atmospheres do to your insides.
It’s more than Asante’s got. All he’s got is his fists.
He uses them. Launches himself at the nearest Sāḥilite as she lines up Kito in her sights, swings wildly as the deck groans and drops and cants sideways. Seawater breaches the lip of the moon pool, cascades across the plating. Asante flails at the intruder on his way down. Her shot goes wide. A spiderweb blooms across the viewport; a thin gout of water erupts from its center even as the glass tries to heal itself from the edges in.
The last thing Asante sees is the desert hammer icon on the Sāḥilite’s diveskin before she blows him away.
Five Years
Running water. Metal against metal. Clanks and gurgles, lowered voices, the close claustrophobic echo of machines in the middle distance.
Asante opens his eyes.
He’s still in the wet room; its ceiling blurs and clicks into focus, plates and struts and Kito’s stupid graffiti (ALL TAUTOLOGIES ARE TAUTOLOGIES) scratched into the paint. Green light still wriggles dimly across the biosteel, but the murderous energy’s been bled out of it.
He tries to turn his head, and can’t. He barely feels his own body—as though it were made of ectoplasm, some merest echo of solid flesh fading into nonexistence somewhere around the waist.
An insect’s head on a human body looms over him. It speaks with two voices: English, and an overlapping echo in Twi: “Easy, soldier. Relax.”
A woman’s voice, and a chip one.
Not Sāḥilite. But armed. Dangerous.
Not a soldier, he wants to say, wants to shout. It’s never a good thing to be mistaken for any sort of combatant along the west coast. But he can’t even whisper. He can’t feel his tongue.
Asante realizes that he isn’t breathing.
The Insect Woman (a diveskin, he sees now: her mandibles an electrolysis rig, her compound eyes a pair of defraction goggles) retrieves a tactical scroll from beyond his field of view and unrolls it a half meter from his face. She mutters an incantation and it flares softly to life, renders a stacked pair of keyboards: English on top, Twi beneath.
“Don’t try to talk,” she says in both tongues. “Just look at the letters.”
He focuses on the N: it brightens. O. T. The membrane offers up predictive spelling, speeds the transition from sacc’ to script:
NOT SOLDIER FISH FARMER
“Sorry.” She retires the translator; the Twi keys flicker and disappear. “Figure of speech. What’s your name?”
KODJO ASANTE
She pushes the defractors onto her forehead, unlatches the mandibles. They fall away and dangle to one side. She’s white underneath.
IS KITO
“I’m sorry, no. Everyone’s dead.”
Everyone else, he thinks, and imagines Kito mocking him one last time for insufferable pedantry.
“Got him.” Man’s voice, from across the compartment. “Kodjo Asante, Takoradi. Twenty-eight, bog-standard aqua—wait; combat experience. Two years with GAF.”
Asante’s eyes dart frantically across the keyboard:
ONLY FARMER NOT
“No worries, mate.” She lays down a reassuring hand; he can only assume it comes to rest somewhere on his body. “Everyone’s seen combat hereabouts, right? You’re sitting on the only reliable protein stock in three hundred klicks. Stands to reason you’re gonna have to defend it now and again.
”
“Still.” A shoulder patch comes into view as she turns toward the other voice: WestHem Alliance. “We could put him on the list.”
“If you’re gonna do it, do it fast. Surface contact about two thousand meters out, closing.”
She turns back to Asante. “Here’s the thing. We didn’t get here in time. We’re not supposed to be here at all, but our CO got wind of Sally’s plans and took a little humanitarian initiative, I guess you could say. We showed up in time to scare ’em off and light ’em up, but you were all dead by then.”
I WASN’T
“Yeah, Kodjo, you too. All dead.”
YOU BROUGHT ME BA
“No.”
BUT
“We gave your brain a jump start, that’s all. You know how you can make a leg twitch when you pass a current through it? You know what galvanic means, Kodjo?”
“He’s got a PhD in molecular marine ecology,” says her unseen colleague. “I’m guessing yes.”
“You can barely feel anything, am I right? Body like a ghost? We didn’t reboot the rest of you. You’re just getting residual sensations from nerves that don’t know they’re dead yet. You’re a brain in a box, Kodjo. You’re running on empty.
“But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be.”
“Hurry it up, Cat. We got ten minutes, tops.”
She glances over her shoulder, back again. “We got a rig on the Levi Morgan, patch you up and keep you on ice until we get home. And we got a rig there that’ll work goddamn miracles, make you better’n new. But it ain’t cheap, Kodjo. Pretty much breaks the bank every time we do it.”
DON’T HAVE MONEY
“Don’t want money. We want you to work for us. Five-year tour, maybe less depending on how the tech works out. Then you go on your way, nice fat bank balance, whole second chance. Easy gig, believe me. You’re just a passenger in your own body for the hard stuff. Even boot camp’s mostly autonomic. Real accelerated program.”
NOT WESTHEM
“You’re not Hegemon either, not anymore. You’re not much of anything but rotting meat hooked up to a pair of jumper cables. I’m offering you salvation, mate. You can be Born Again.”
“Wrap it the fuck up, Cat. They’re almost on top of us.”
“’Course, if you’re not interested, I can just pull the plug. Leave you the way we found you.”
NO PLEASE YES
“Yes what, Kodjo? Yes pull the plug? Yes leave you behind? You need to be specific about this. We’re negotiating a contract here.”
YES BORN AGAIN YES 5 YEAR TOUR
He wonders at this shiver of hesitation, this voice whispering Maybe dead is better. Perhaps it’s because he is dead; maybe all those suffocating endocrine glands just aren’t up to the task of flooding his brain with the warranted elixir of fear and desperation and survival at any cost. Maybe being dead means never having to give a shit.
He does, though. He may be dead, but his glands aren’t, not yet. He didn’t say no.
He wonders if anyone ever has.
“Glory hallelujah!” Cat proclaims, reaching offstage for some unseen control. And just before everything goes black:
“Welcome to the Zombie Corps.”
Savior Machine
That’s not what they call it, though.
“Be clear about one thing. There’s no good reason why any operation should ever put boots in the battlefield.”
They call it ZeroS. Strangely, the Z does not stand for Zombie.
“There’s no good reason why any competent campaign should involve a battlefield in the first place. That’s what economic engineering and Cloud Control are for.”
The S doesn’t even stand for Squad.
“If they fail, that’s what drones and bots and TAI are for.”
Zero Sum. Or, as NCOIC Silano puts it, A pun, right? Cogito ergo. Better than the Spaz Brigade, which was Garin’s suggestion.
Asante’s in Tactical Orientation, listening to an artificial instructor that he’d almost accept as human but for the fact that it doesn’t sound bored to death.
“There’s only one reason you’ll ever find yourselves called on deck, and that’s if everyone has fucked up so completely at conflict resolution that there’s nothing left in the zone but a raging shitstorm.”
Asante’s also running up the side of a mountain. It’s a beautiful route, twenty klicks of rocks and pines and mossy deadfall. There might be more green growing things on this one slope than in the whole spreading desert of northern Africa. He wishes he could see it.
“Your very presence means the mission has already failed; your job is to salvage what you can from the wreckage.”
He can’t see it, though. He can’t see much of anything. Asante’s been blind since reveille.
“Fortunately for you, economics and Cloud Control and tactical AI fail quite a lot.”
The blindness isn’t total. He still sees light, vague shapes in constant motion. It’s like watching the world through wax paper. The eyes jiggle when you’re a Passenger. Of course the eyes always jiggle, endlessly hopping from one momentary focus to the next—saccades, they’re called—but your brain usually edits out those motions, splices the clear bits together in post to serve up an illusion of continuity.
Not up here, though. Up here the sacc’ rate goes through the roof and nothing gets lost. Total data acquisition. To Asante it’s all blizzard and blur, but that’s okay. There’s something in here with him that can see just fine: his arms and legs are moving, after all, and Kodjo Asante isn’t moving them.
His other senses work fine; he feels the roughness of the rope against his palms as he climbs the wall, smells the earth and pine needles bedding the trail. Still tastes a faint hint of copper from that bite on the inside of his cheek a couple klicks back. He hears with utmost clarity the voice on his audio link. His inner zombie sucks all that back too, but eardrums don’t saccade. Tactile nerves don’t hop around under the flesh. Just the eyes: that’s how you tell. That and the fact that your whole body’s been possessed by Alien Hand Syndrome.
He calls it his Evil Twin. It’s a name first bestowed by his dad, after catching eight-year-old Kodjo sleepwalking for the third time in a week. Asante made the mistake of mentioning that once to the squad over breakfast. He’s still trying to live it down.
Now he tries for the hell of it, wills himself to stop for just an instant. ET runs and leaps and crawls as it has for the past two hours, unnervingly autonomous. That’s the retrosplenial bypass they burned into his neocortex a month ago, a little dropgate to decouple mind from self. Just one of the mods they’ve etched into him with neural lace and nanotube mesh and good old-fashioned zap’n’tap. Midbrain tweaks to customize ancient prey-stalking routines. An orbitofrontal damper to ensure behavioral compliance (Can’t have your better half deciding to keep the keys when you want them back, as Maddox puts it).
His scalp itches with fresh scars. His head moves with a disquieting inertia, as if weighed down by a kilogram of lead and not a few bits of arsenide and carbon. He doesn’t understand a tenth of it. Hasn’t quite come to grips with life after death. But dear God, how wonderful it is to be so strong. He feels like this body could take on a whole platoon single-handed.
Sometimes he can feel this way for five or ten whole minutes before remembering the names of other corpses who never got in on the deal.
Without warning ET dances to one side, brings its arms up, and suddenly Asante can see.
Just for a millisecond, a small clear break in a sea of fog: a Lockheed Pit Bull cresting the granite outcropping to his left, legs spread, muzzle spinning to bear. In the next instant Asante’s blind again, recoil vibrating along his arm like a small earthquake. His body hasn’t even broken stride.
“Ah. Target acquisition,” the instructor remarks. “Enjoy the view.” It takes this opportunity to summarize the basics—target lock’s the only time when the eyes focus on a single point long enough for Passengers to look out—before segu
eing into a spiel on line-of-sight networking.
Asante isn’t sure what the others are hearing. Tiwana, the only other raw recruit, is probably enduring the same 101 monologue. Kalmus might have moved up to field trauma by now. Garin’s on an engineering track. Maddox has told Asante that he’ll probably end up in bioweapons, given his background.
It takes nineteen months to train a field-ready specialist. ZeroS do it in seven.
Asante’s legs have stopped moving. On all sides he hears the sound of heavy breathing. Lieutenant Metzinger’s voice tickles the space between his ears: “Passengers, you may enter the cockpit.”
The switch is buried in the visual cortex and tied to the power of imagination. They call it a mandala. Each recruit chooses their own and keeps it secret; no chance of a master key for some wily foe to drop onto a billboard in the heat of battle. Not even the techs know the patterns; the implants were conditioned on double-blind trial and error. Something personal, they said. Something unique, easy to visualize.
Asante’s mandala is a sequence of four words in sans serif font. He summons it now—
ALL TAUTOLOGIES
ARE TAUTOLOGIES
—and the world clicks back into sudden, jarring focus. He stumbles, though he wasn’t moving.
Right on cue, his left hand starts twitching.
They’re halfway up the mountain, in a sloping sunny meadow. There are flowers here. Insects. Everything smells alive. Silano raises trembling arms to the sky. Kalmus flumps on the grass, recovering from exertions barely felt when better halves were in control, exertions that have left them weak and wasted despite twice-normal mito counts and AMPK agonists and a dozen other tweaks to put them in the upper tail of the upper tail. Acosta drops beside her, grinning at the sunshine. Garin kicks at a punky log and an actual goddamn snake slithers into the grass, a ribbon of yellow and black with a flickering tongue.
Tiwana’s at Asante’s shoulder, as scarred and bald as he is. “Beautiful, eh?” Her right eye’s a little off-kilter; Asante resists the impulse to stare by focusing on the bridge of her nose.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 26
