Clarkesworld Anthology 2012

by Wyrm Publishing

  “Except whom does the enemy rely on to make their plans?”

  “Tell me,” I say.

  Talking quietly, making the words even more important, he says, “The Almighty.”

  “What are we talking about?” I ask.

  He says nothing, starting to change his shape again.

  “The Internet?” I ask. “What, you mean it’s conscious now? And it’s working its own side in this war?”

  “The possibility is there for the taking,” he says.

  But all I can think about are the dead people and those that are hurt and those that right now are sitting at their dinner table, thinking that some fucking Canadian bitch has made their lives miserable for no goddamn reason.

  “You want honesty,” Prophet says.

  “When don’t I?”

  He says, “This story about a third side…it could be a contingency buried inside my tainted software. Or it is the absolute truth, and the Almighty is working with both of us, aiming toward some grand, glorious plan.”

  I am sort of listening, and sort of not.

  Prophet is turning shiny, which happens when his body is in the middle of changing shapes. I can see little bits of myself reflected in the liquid metals and the diamonds floating on top. I see a thousand little-girl faces staring at me, and what occurs to me now—what matters more than anything else today—is the idea that there can be more than two sides in any war.

  I don’t know why, but that the biggest revelation of all.

  When there are more than two sides, that means that there can be too many sides to count, and one of those sides, standing alone, just happens to be a girl named Ophelia Hanna Hanks.

  About the Author

  Robert has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. He is currently working on a Great Ship trilogy for Prime Books, and of course, more short pieces.

  Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop

  Suzanne Church

  When my nose stopped aching, I smiled at Rain. She had snorted a song ten minutes before me, and I couldn’t quite figure why she waited here in the dark confines of the sample booth.

  “Rain?” I said. “You okay?”

  “Do you hear it, Alex?” she said, not really looking at me. More like staring off in two directions at once, as though her eyes had decided to break off their working relationship and wander aimlessly on their own missions. “It’s so amaaazing.”

  She held that “a” a long time. I should’ve remembered how gripping every sample was for her, as though her neurons were built like radio antennae, attuned to whatever channel carried the best track ever recorded. I needed to get her ass on the dance floor before I got so angry that I ended up with another Jessica-situation. I still had eight months left on my parole.

  “Do you hear it?” Rain nudged me, hard on the shoulder. “Alex!” Her eyes had made up and decided to work together, locking on me like I was the only male in a sea of estrogen.

  “Yeah, it’s awesome,” I lied. For the third time this week, I’d snorted a dud sample. My brain hadn’t connected with a single, damned note.

  Beyond the booth, the thump, thump of dance beats pulsed in my chest. Not much of a melody, but since they’d insisted I check my headset with my coat, I couldn’t exactly self-audio-tain.

  I grabbed her arm, feeling the soft flesh and liking it. Loving it. Maybe the sample was working on some visceral level beyond my ear-brain-mix. “Let’s hit the dance floor.”

  “In a minute. Pleeease.”

  Over-vowels were definitely part of her gig tonight.

  “Wait for the drop,” she said, stomping her foot.

  “Right.” I watched her sway back and forth, in perfect rhythm with the dance music coming from the main floor. The better clubs brought all the vibes together, so that every song you sampled was in perfect synch with the club mix on the speakers. When the drop hit, everyone jumped and screamed in coordinated rapture.

  I would miss the group-joy here in this tiny booth, with this date who was more into her own head than she would ever be into me. If I could get Rain out on the floor, I could at least feel the bliss, whiff all the pheromones, feel all those sweaty bodies pressed against mine, soft tissues rubbing together.

  “Yeaaaah!” She shouted and grabbed my hand, squeezing it. Harder. Her eyes pressed shut, her mouth wide open, she leaned her head way back.

  The drum beats surged, and then, for a fraction of a second they paused. Everyone in the club inhaled, as though this might be the last lungful of air left in the world and then…

  Drop.

  But drop doesn’t say it all. Not even close. Because when it happens, it’s like the most epic orgasm of all time and pinching the world’s biggest crap-log at the same moment.

  Rain opened her eyes and pressed her hand against the side of my cheek. Lunging with remarkable speed for a woman who over-voweled, she kissed me. Her tongue pressed against my lips.

  I tasted her. Wanted her. An image of Jessica popped into my head: the look of terror on her face when I accidentally yanked her under.

  The euphoria gone, I closed my mouth and turned away from Rain.

  “Whaaat?” she said.

  For a second, I thought about explaining what I had done to Jessica. Spewed on about how the drop isn’t always built of joy. Instead, I went with the short, obscure answer. “Probation.”

  Rain looked at me funny, like she couldn’t quite figure out how the judicial dudes could mess with our kiss-to-drop ratio. Finally, she smiled, and said, “Riiight.”

  Desperate to avoid another over-vowel, I shouted, “Let’s dance!” This time, when I grabbed her arm, she followed along like a puppy.

  Scents smacked at us as we pushed our way through the seething mass on the floor. This week’s freebie at the door was Octavia, some new perfume marketed at the twenty-something set. It was heavy on Nasonov pheromones, some bee-juice used to draw worker-buzzers to the hive. When the drug companies cloned it, the result was as addictive as crack and as satisfying as hitting a home run on a club hook-up.

  My nostrils still ached from snorting a wallop of nanites, but scent doesn’t only swim in the nose. The rest is all neurons, baby, and I had plenty to spare. Apparently so did Rain, because she was waving her nose in the air like a dog catching the whiff of a bitch in heat. The sight of her made me want to take her and do her right there on the floor.

  But Conduct was a high-end club. The bouncers would toss us both if they caught us in the act anywhere on the premises, so I kept it in my pants. I still had another two hundred in my pocket. Enough for three more samples. Maybe I’d pick up a track from an indie-band this time. Top forty drivel never seized my brainstem.

  Unlike Rain.

  The beats were building again. This time, with a third-beat thump, like reggae on heroin. I could feel the intensity from my fingertips to my teeth to my dick. Even if I couldn’t hear more than the background beats, I anticipated the drop. Rain o
pened her mouth again, raised both her hands in the air with everyone else, like a crowd of locusts all swarming together.

  Pause.

  Drop.

  My date kept her eyes closed, her hands on her own breasts as she milked the release for all it was worth. Any decent guy should’ve watched her, should’ve wanted to, but I caught sight of a luscious creature, near the high-end sample booth, in the far right corner of the club. The chick was about to slip between the curtains, but she caught me staring.

  Her eyes glowed the purple of iStim addiction, reminding me of Jessica.

  She had grown up in the suburbs, her allowance measured in thousands not single dollars. The pack of girls she hung with had all bought iSynchs when they first hit the market. The music sounded better when they could all hear the same song at the same time. For the first time in more than a hundred years, getting high was not only legal, but ten times more amazing than it had ever been before. We all lived in our collective heads, the perfect synch of sound and sex.

  I should’ve turned away from the sight of the purple-chick, should’ve reached out to Rain and kissed her again. Close tonight’s deal. Instead, I approached her swaying body, and next to her ear shouted, “Back in five.”

  She nodded.

  Fueled by fascination, and the two hundred burning a hole in my pocket, I headed for the high-end booth.

  One of the bald bouncers with tribal tattoos worked the curtains. Yellow earplugs stuck out of both ears, so conversation, or in my case, pleading, wasn’t an option. Feeling in my pocket for the two hundred, I scrunched the bills a bit, trying to make the wad appear larger than its meager value, then pulled out the stack in a flash. I had never dealt with this particular bouncer. Conduct was more Rain’s club than mine, so I hoped the bills would get me past. The guy didn’t even acknowledge me, as though he could smell my poverty, or maybe my parole. His eyes stared straight ahead.

  My head scarcely came up to his bare chest, so I was uncomfortably close to his nipple-rings, but I held my ground, and pointed at the curtains.

  He remained statue-like. More boulder-like. Then a woman’s cream-colored hand with purple nails ran from the guy’s waist to his pecs and he turned to the side, like a vault door.

  Purple-chick stood in the gap between the curtains. Her black dress was built of barely enough fabric to meet the dress code. Her hair stood on end like a teenager’s beard, barely there and oddly sexy. She must have dyed it every night, because the stubble matched her eyes and nails. A waking wet dream.

  “Come in.” She pointed beyond the curtains.

  “In what?” I mumbled to myself.

  “Very funny.”

  “You’re not laughing.”

  My body neared hers as I moved past into the sample booth. I carried my hands a little higher than would have passed as natural, hoping to cop a feel of all that exposed flesh on my way by. But she read me like a pheromone and dodged back.

  A leather bench-seat lined the far wall of the booth. Three tables were set with products in stacks like poker chips. The first was a sea of purple, tiny lower-case “i’s” stamped on every top-forty sample like a catalog from a so-called genius begging on a street corner for spare music. The second was a mish-mash of undergrounds like Skarface, Audexi, and Brachto.

  The third table drew me like fire. Only one sample. The dose was pressed into a waffle-pattern, which was weird enough to make my desire itch. But the strangest part was its flat black surface that sucked light away and spewed dread like mourners at a funeral.

  Purple-chick watched me stare at it, waiting for me to speak. My mouth kept opening and closing, but I couldn’t find words.

  Expensive. Dangerous. Parole. All perfectly legit words that I couldn’t voice.

  I had forgotten my two hundred. My palms must have been really sweating, because what had once been a quasi-impressive stack, now stunk of poor-dude-shame.

  With practiced smoothness, she liberated my cash and said, “The Audexi works on everyone.”

  Distracted from the waffle, I said, “How’d you know I couldn’t hear the last track?”

  “Your throat,” she said. “You’re not pulsing to the beat.”

  My fingers felt my pulse beating like a river of vamp-candy. Her observations were bang-on. I wanted to illustrate my coolness, or, at the very least, my lack of lameness, but all I could manage was, “Oh.”

  She laughed.

  My eyes wandered back to the waffle. I licked my lips.

  Grabbing my chin, she forced me to look at tables one and two. “Your price range.”

  “What’s the waffle?”

  “New.”

  “Funny.”

  She didn’t laugh. “Far from it.”

  “Addictive?” I asked, staring at the purple on the first table. How this woman could work the booth without Jonesing for her own product made me rethink her motives.

  “The absolute best never are,” she said.

  “No black eyes allowed in the boardroom, huh?”

  She nodded. “Precisely.”

  I remembered Rain. By now, she’d have noticed my absence.

  Purple-chick still held my two hundred. Her eyes locked on mine. “Try the Audexi. You won’t be disappointed.”

  Like a Vegas dealer, she shoved all of my money through a hole in the wall, selected an Audexi sample from table two, and held it in front of my nose.

  I probably should’ve reported her. All of the clubs had to be careful not to push products hard, end up drawing the cops in to investigate. But my money was long gone and Rain wouldn’t wait much longer.

  I exhaled. The moisture turned the poker-chip-shaped disk into a teeming pile of powder-mimicking nanites, and I snorted. For several blinding seconds, my nose felt as though a nuclear bomb had blown inside. I could feel Purple-chick’s hand on my arm, making sure I didn’t wipe out and sue the club. Then the song erupted in my mind.

  Sevenths and thirds. Emo-goth-despair. Snares and the ever-present bass, bass, bass. Music flowed like a tsunami through a village, grabbing ecstasy like cars and plowing through every other thought except for the sweet tweaks of synths and the pulse-grab of the click-track. The song was building, and all I could think about was finding Rain before the drop.

  Rain and I danced in nanite-induced harmony until the early dawn. Exhausted and covered in sweat and pheromones, we grabbed our coats and carried rather than wore them outside.

  The insides of my sore nose stuck together in the frigid air, a wake-up call for the two of us to don our coats or end up with frostbite. I didn’t want to, I was so damned hot and pumped, but I figured I should set a good example for Rain. And the way our night was progressing, I wouldn’t have much time to scan my barcode at the parole terminal before curfew.

  Jessica’s fucking choice of words would be killing my buzz for eight more months.

  That fourth of October had been hot as hell. After clubbing, we both stripped and headed into the lake for a skinny dip. Except she wasn’t skinny and I wasn’t much of a dipper. She’d called me over to the drop and I thought she meant for the lingering song, not the drop-off hidden in the water. When the drop blissed me, I lost my footing and plunged over my head.

  “Shit, it’s cooold,” said Rain.

  I snapped back to reality. “Still with the vowels?”

  “Screw you.” She pushed me away and called a cab with the same arm-wave.

  “Don’t be that way, baby.”

  “Now I’m your fucking baby? After ditching me for a dozen drops while you plucked that purple fuzz-head.”

  “You saw?”

  “Who didn’t?”

  “Sorry. But you gotta admit, you and me, we really synched after.” I nudged her, maybe a little too hard. “The last sample I snorted was worth it. Right?”

  A cab squealed a U-turn and stopped in front of Rain. She started to climb in and then looked up at me.

  I shook my head. Shrugged. “Tapped out.”

  “Fine.” She
slammed the door in my face and the cab took off up the street.

  I stood there, watching my breath condense in the air, its big cloud distorting her and the cab. The cold clawed its way into me, sucking away my grip on reality. The shivering reminded me to at least wear my coat.

  As I stuffed my arms into the sleeves, I sniffled, feeling wetness and figuring the cold was making my nose run. But then I noticed the red drops on the ground and the front of my coat. I wiped with one finger and it came back a dark and bloody mass. Dead nanites, blood, snot, all mixed together. Two shakes didn’t get it off my finger, so I rubbed the mess in a snow bank and only managed to make it worse.

  The nearest subway was blocks away. I should’ve kept my mouth shut, shared the cab with Rain and then stiffed her for half the fare. But I’d hurt her enough for one night. Hurt enough women for one lifetime.

  Jessica had been the closest thing to a life preserver, so I grabbed on. Tripping on the samples, her brain couldn’t remember how to hold her breath, or at least that’s how my lawyer argued it at the trial.

  As I trudged for the subway, I concentrated on not slipping and falling on my ass. I found the entrance, and headed down the stairs, gripping the cold metal handrail, even though my warm skin kept sticking to it. The Audexi sample still pulsed through my system and I couldn’t walk down in anything but perfect synch. The song was building to another drop, and I had to make the bottom of the platform before that moment, or I would be another victim of audio-tainment.

  The platform was nearly empty, save for a few other clubbers too tapped out to cab their way home. Octavia hung in the air, the Nasonov-pheromone-scents calling us all home like buzzers to the hive. Much as I loathed their company, I couldn’t resist the urge to huddle with the others in the same section while we waited for the train.

  Off to our right I caught sight of Purple-chick. She wore a long, black faux-fur coat. The image of her here, slumming it with the poor, was as wrong as a palm tree in a snow bank. She belonged in some limo, holding a glass of champagne.