Whatever we’re shooting at. You blind murderous twaaaaase. You’re shooting eight-year-olds.
Again.
More gunfire. Still no voices but for a final animal roar that gives way to a wet gurgle and the heavy slap of meat on stone.
It’s a nuclear waste repository at the North Pole. What are children even doing here?
What am I?
What am I?
And suddenly he sees the words All tautologies are tautologies and ET’s back downstairs and the basement door locks and Kodjo Asante grabs frantically for the reins and takes back his life and opens his eyes:
In time to see the little freckled boy, dressed in ragged furs, sitting on Riley Garin’s shoulders and dragging a jagged piece of glass across his throat. In time to see him leap free of the body and snatch Garin’s gun, toss it effortlessly across this dimly lit cave to an Asian girl clad only in a filthy loincloth, who’s sailing through the air toward a bloodied Jim Moore. In time to see that girl reach behind her and catch the gun in midair without so much as a backward glance.
More than a dance, more than teamwork. Like digits on the same hand, moving together.
The pizzly’s piled up against a derelict forklift, a giant tawny thing raking the air with massive claws even as it bleeds out through the hole in its flank. A SAsian child with his left hand blown off at the wrist (maybe that was me) dips and weaves around the fallen behemoth. He’s—using it, exploiting the sweep of its claws and teeth as a kind of exclusion zone guaranteed to maul anyone within three meters. Somehow those teeth and claws never seem to connect with him.
They’ve connected with Acosta, though. Carlos Acosta, lover of sunlight and the great outdoors, lies there broken at the middle, staring at nothing.
Garin finally crashes to the ground, blood gushing from his throat.
They’re just children. In rags. Unarmed.
The girl rebounds between rough-hewn tunnel walls and calcified machinery, lines up the shot with Garin’s weapon. Her bare feet never seem to touch the ground.
They’re children they’re just—
Tiwana slams him out of the way as the beam sizzles past. The air shimmers and steams. Asante’s head cracks against gears and conduits and ribbed metal, bounces off steel onto rock. Tiwana lands on top of him, eyes twitching in frantic little arcs.
And stopping.
It’s a moment of pure panic, seeing those eyes freeze and focus—she doesn’t know me she’s locking on she’s locking on—but something shines through from behind and Asante can see that her eyes aren’t target-locked at all. They’re just looking.
“. . . Sofiyko?”
Whatever happens, I’ve got your back.
But Sofiyko’s gone, if she was ever even there.
Blackout
Moore hands him off to Metzinger. Metzinger regards him without a word, with a look that speaks volumes: flips a switch and drops him into Passenger mode. He doesn’t tell Asante to stay there. He doesn’t have to.
Asante feels the glassy pane of a tacpad under ET’s hand. That hand rests deathly still for seconds at a time; erupts into a flurry of inhumanly fast taps and swipes; pauses again. Out past the bright blur in Asante’s eyes, the occasional cough or murmur is all that punctuates the muted roar of the Lockheed’s engines.
ET is under interrogation. A part of Asante wonders what it’s saying about him, but he can’t really bring himself to care.
He can’t believe they’re gone.
No Control
“Sergeant Asante.” Major Rossiter shakes her head. “We had such hopes for you.”
Acosta. Garin. Tiwana.
“Nothing to say?”
So very much. But all that comes out is the same old lie: “They were just . . . children . . .”
“Perhaps we can carve that on the gravestones of your squadmates.”
“But who—”
“We don’t know. We’d suspect Realists, if the tech itself wasn’t completely antithetical to everything they stand for. If it wasn’t way past their abilities.”
“They were barely even clothed. It was like a nest . . .”
“More like a hive, Sergeant.”
Digits on the same hand . . .
“Not like you,” she says, as if reading his mind. “ZeroS networking is quite—inefficient, when you think about it. Multiple minds in multiple heads, independently acting on the same information and coming to the same conclusion. Needless duplication of effort.”
“And these . . .”
“Multiple heads. One mind.”
“We jammed the freqs. Even if they were networked—”
“We don’t think they work like that. Best guess is . . . bioradio, you could call it. Like a quantum-entangled corpus callosum.” She snorts. “Of course, at this point they could say it was elves and I’d have to take their word for it.”
Caçador, Asante remembers. They’ve learned a lot from one small stolen corpse.
“Why use children?” he whispers.
“Oh, Kodjo.” Asante blinks at the lapse; Rossiter doesn’t seem to notice. “Using children is the last thing they want to do. Why do you think they’ve been stashed in the middle of the ocean or down some Arctic mineshaft? We’re not talking about implants. This is genetic, they were born. They have to be protected, hidden away until they grow up and . . . ripen.”
“Protected? By abandoning them in a nuclear waste site?”
“Abandoning them, yes. Completely defenseless. As you saw.” When he says nothing, she continues. “It’s actually a perfect spot. No neighbors. Lots of waste heat to keep you warm, run your greenhouses, mask your heatprint. No supply lines for some nosy satellite to notice. No telltale EM. From what we can tell there weren’t even any adults on the premises, they just . . . lived off the land, so to speak. Not even any weapons of their own, or at least they didn’t use any. Used bears, of all things. Used your own guns against you. Maybe they’re minimalists, value improvisation.” She sacc’s something onto her pad. “Maybe they just want to keep us guessing.”
“Children.” He can’t seem to stop saying it.
“For now. Wait till they hit puberty.” Rossiter sighs. “We bombed the site, of course. Slagged the entrance. If any of ours were trapped down there, they wouldn’t be getting out. Then again, we’re not talking about us, are we? We’re talking about a single distributed organism with God knows how many times the computational mass of a normal human brain. I’d be very surprised if it couldn’t anticipate and counter anything we planned. Still. We do what we can.”
Neither speaks for a few moments.
“And I’m sorry, Sergeant,” she says finally. “I’m so sorry it’s come to this. We do what we’ve always done. Feed you stories so you won’t be compromised, so you won’t compromise us when someone catches you and starts poking your amygdala. But the switch was for your protection. We don’t know who we’re up against. We don’t know how many hives are out there, what stage of gestation any of them have reached, how many may have already . . . matured. All we know is that a handful of unarmed children can slaughter our most elite forces at will, and we are so very unready for the world to know that.
“But you know, Sergeant. You dropped out of the game—which may well have cost us the mission—and now you know things that are way above your clearance.
“Tell me. If our positions were reversed, what would you do?”
Asante closes his eyes. We should be dead. Every one of these moments is a gift. When he opens them again, Rossiter’s watching, impassive as ever.
“I should’ve died up there. I should have died off Takoradi two years ago.”
The major snorts. “Don’t be melodramatic, Sergeant. We’re not going to execute you.”
“I . . . what?”
“We’re not even going to court-martial you.”
“Why the hell not?” And at her raised eyebrow: “Sir. You said it yourself: unauthorized drop-out. Middle of a combat situation.”
“We’re not entirely certain that was your decision.”
“It felt like my decision.”
“It always does though, doesn’t it?” Rossiter pushes back in her chair. “We didn’t create your evil twin, Sergeant. We didn’t even put it in control. We just got you out of the way, so it could do what it always does without interference. Only now it apparently . . . wants you back.”
This takes a moment to sink in. “What?”
“Frontoparietal logs suggest your zombie took a certain . . . initiative. Decided to quit.”
“In combat? That would be suicide!”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
He looks away.
“No? Don’t like that hypothesis? Well, here’s another: it surrendered. Moore got you out, after all, which was statistically unlikely the way things were going. Maybe dropping out was a white flag, and the hive took pity and let you go so you could . . . I don’t know, spread the word: Don’t fuck with us.
“Or maybe it decided the hive deserved to win, and switched sides. Maybe it was . . . conscientiously objecting. Maybe it decided it never enlisted in the first place.”
Asante decides he doesn’t like the sound of the major’s laugh.
“You must have asked it,” he says.
“A dozen different ways. Zombies might be analytically brilliant, but they’re terrible at self-reflection. They can tell you exactly what they did but not necessarily why.”
“When did you ever care about motive?” His tone verges on insubordination; he’s too empty to care. “Just . . . tell it to stay in control. It has to obey you, right? That orbitofrontal thing. The compliance mod.”
“Absolutely. But it wasn’t your twin who dropped out. It was you, when it unleashed the mandala.”
“So order it not to show me the mandala.”
“We’d love to. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us what it looks like?”
It’s Asante’s turn to laugh. He sucks at it.
“I didn’t think so. Not that it matters. At this point we can’t trust you either—again, not entirely your fault. Given the degree to which conscious and unconscious processes are interconnected, it may have been premature to try and separate them so completely, right off the bat.” She winces, as if in sympathy. “I can’t imagine it’s much fun for you either, being cooped up in that skull with nothing to do.”
“Maddox said there was no way around it.”
“That was true. When he said it.” Eyes downcast now, sacc’ing the omnipresent ’pad. “We weren’t planning on field-testing the new mod just yet, but with Kalmus and now you—I don’t see much choice but to advance implementation by a couple of months.”
He’s never felt more dead inside. Even when he was.
“Haven’t you stuck enough pins in us?” By which he means me, of course. By process of elimination.
For a moment the major almost seems sympathetic.
“Yes, Kodjo. Just one last modification. I don’t think you’ll even mind this one, because next time you wake up, you’ll be a free man. Your tour will be over.”
“Really.”
“Really.”
Asante looks down. Frowns.
“What is it, Sergeant?”
“Nothing,” he says. And regards his steady, unwavering left hand with distant wonder.
Lazarus
Renata Baermann comes back screaming. She’s staring at the ceiling, pinned under something—the freezer, that’s it. Big industrial thing. She was in the kitchen when the bombs hit. It must have fallen.
She thinks it’s crushed her legs.
The fighting seems to be over. She hears no small-arms fire, no whistle of incoming ordnance. The air’s still filled with screams but they’re just gulls, come to feast in the aftermath. She’s lucky she was inside; those vicious little air rats would have pecked her eyes out by now if she’d been—
—Blackness—
¡Joder! Where am I? Oh, right. Bleeding out at the bottom of the Americas, after . . .
She doesn’t know. Maybe this was payback for the annexation of Tierra del Fuego. Or maybe it’s the Lifeguards, wreaking vengeance on all those who’d skip town after trampling the world to mud and shit. This is a staging area, after all: a place where human refuse congregates until the pressure builds once again, and another bolus gets shat across the Drake Passage to the land of milk and honey and melting glaciers. The sphincter of the Americas.
She wonders when she got so cynical. Not very seemly for a humanitarian.
She coughs. Tastes blood.
Footsteps crunch on the gravel outside, quick, confident, not the shell-shocked stumble you’d expect from anyone who’s just experienced apocalypse. She fumbles for her gun: a cheap microwave thing, barely boils water but it helps level the field when a fifty-kilogram woman has to lay down the law to a man with twice the mass and ten times the entitlement issues. Better than nothing.
Or it would be, if it was still in its holster. If it hadn’t somehow skidded up against a table leg a meter and a half to her left. She stretches for it, screams again; feels like she’s just torn herself in half as the kitchen door slams open and she—
—blacks out—
—and comes back with the gun miraculously in her hand, her finger pumping madly against the stud, mosquito buzz-snap filling her ears and—
—she’s wracked, coughing blood, too weak to keep firing even if the man in the WestHem uniform hadn’t just taken her gun away.
He looks down at her from a great height. His voice echoes from the bottom of a well. He doesn’t seem to be speaking to her. “Behind the mess hall—”
—English—
“—fatal injuries, maybe fifteen minutes left in her and she’s still fighting—”
When she wakes up again the pain’s gone and her vision’s blurry. The man has changed from white to black. Or maybe it’s a different man. Hard to tell through all these floaters.
“Renata Baermann.” His voice sounds strangely . . . unused, somehow. As if he were trying it out for the first time.
There’s something else about him. She squints, forces her eyes to focus. The lines of his uniform resolve in small painful increments. No insignia. She moves her gaze to his face.
“Coño,” she manages at last. Her voice is barely a whisper. She sounds like a ghost. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“Renata Baermann,” he says again. “Have I got a deal for you.”
Caroline M. Yoachim
Carnival Nine
from Beneath Ceaseless Skies
One night when I was winding down to sleep, I asked Papa, “How come I don’t get the same number of turns every day?”
“Sometimes the maker turns your key more and sometimes less, but you can never have more than your mainspring will hold. You’re lucky, Zee, you have a good mainspring.” He sounded a little wistful when he said it. He never got as many turns as I did, and he used most of them to do boring grown-up things.
“Take me to the zoo tomorrow?” The zoo on the far side of the closet had lions that did backflips and elephants that balanced on brightly colored balls.
“I have to take Granny and Gramps to the mechanic to clean the rust off their gears.”
Papa never had any turns to spare for outings and adventures, which was sad. I opened my mouth to say so, but the whir of my gears slowed to where I could hear each click, and I closed my mouth so it wouldn’t hang open while I slept.
What Papa said was true. I have a good mainspring. Sometimes I got thirty turns, and sometimes forty-six. Today, on this glorious summer day, I got fifty-two. I’d never met anyone else whose spring could hold so many turns as that, and I was bursting with energy.
Papa didn’t notice how wound up I was. “Granny has a tune-up this morning, and Gramps is getting a new mustache. If you untangle the thread for me, you can use the rest of your turns to play.”
“But—”
“Always work first, so you don’t r
un out of turns.” His legs were stiff, and he swayed as he walked along the wide wood plank that led out from our closet. He crossed the train tracks and disappeared into the shadow of the maker’s workbench. Tonight, when he came back from his errands, he’d bring a scrap of fabric or a bit of thread. Papa sewed our clothes from whatever scraps the maker dropped.
The whir of his gears faded into silence, and I tried to untangle the thread. It was a tedious chore. The delicate motion of picking up a single brightly colored strand was difficult on a tight spring. A train came clacking along the track, and with it the lively music of the carnival. Papa had settled down here in Closet City, but Mama was a carnie. Based on the stories Papa told, sneaking out to the carnival would be a good adventure. Clearly I was meant to go—the carnival had arrived on a day when I had more turns than I’d ever had before. I gathered up my prettiest buttons and skipped over to the brightly painted train cars.
It was early, and the carnival had just arrived, but a crowd had already formed. Everyone clicked and whirred as they hurried to see the show. The carnies were busy too, unfolding train cars into platforms and putting up rides and games and ropes for the acrobats.
I passed a booth selling scented gear oil and another filled with ornate keys. I wondered if the maker could wind as well with those as with the simple silver one that protruded from my back. A face-painter with an extra pair of arms was painting two different customers at once, touching up the faded paint of their facial features and adding festive swirls of green and blue and purple. “Two kinds of paint,” the painter called to me. “The swirls will wash right off with soap.”
It was meant to be a reassurance, but it backfired—the trip from the closet to the bathroom took seven turns each way, so soap was hard to come by. Papa would be angry if I came home painted.
“Catch two matching fish and win a prize!” a carnie called. He was an odd assemblage of parts, with one small brown arm and one bulky white one. His legs were slightly different lengths, and his ceramic face was crisscrossed with scratch marks. He held out a long pole with a tiny net on the end, a net barely big enough to hold a single fish.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 30
