The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  That was another little bit of irony. In the process of recoiling from me and what I’d done, society backlashed itself into doing what it should have done more than a generation earlier, and made producing more natches a crime. A last few insistent natural-children types were forcibly sterilized, and that was that; there haven’t been any natural children now in fifty years, or any legal ones in almost sixty. And in some weird kind of atonement, they’d developed prosnoetics (if I’d been allowed, I’d have held some basic patents for those) and some not-very-effective anti-aging juices that could stretch a natch’s lifespan out to one hundred twenty-five or so.

  My first unmistakable symptoms appeared in my late seventies. Bless their hearts, the editor-curators went public with who I was and the contributions I’d made, and the bighearted liberal Chief Administrator for the Atlantic Basin Region commuted my sentence. They hooked me up to prosnoetics, so that as my brain dropped away under me, I could keep going like an AI, and PrinceTech awarded me the Ph.D./MD I’d already earned a hundred times over.

  I had just graduated and was looking for something to do when the bringback technology came along. Alzheimer’s was a natch-only disease, and we were running out of natches. There were good arrestors that would stop its progress, but nothing to undo it, and some few old natches had had the bad luck to develop advanced Alzheimer’s before there were arrestors.

  With the bringback process, you could recover memories from the traces the dying cells left in the plaques, and recopy them into new, healthy brain structures, but it was exquisite long-term handwork; you needed someone with the right rapport for the patient and nearly infinite patience, having the same only slightly varied conversations over and over, constantly watching brain imagery to see what each new communication would make happen.

  And of all things, I turned out to be good at it. Fifteen years of my life went into bringbacks, about three years per patient, and those were by far my most rewarding years.

  My ninety-fifth birthday, and celebration of my sixth successful bringback, was kind of a gloomy occasion, despite the fact that I had real friends and colleagues and they were all there to help me feel loved and appreciated. The bringback business was running out of patients: only a few very old severely memory-damaged natches left, they were going to the moon or already there, and I couldn’t go with them. My trips to the moon had been decades ago, and I hadn’t felt like living the rest of my life in an underground office building, so I’d never thought seriously about relocating there.

  But now my being off prosnoetics and on cardiopulmonary support for acceleration risked the prosnoetics being off too long and not rebooting, especially since their delicate contacts might well break inside my head . . . natches with scrambled and plaqued-up bio brains could go, natches running on prosnoetics who were even more cyborg than I could go, heart patients could go, but my combination of a heart and a brain that both needed support was the one thing that couldn’t go.

  I’m afraid I got a little maudlin talking about the end of the only thing I’d done that felt really meaningful. People at my party were awfully nice, but it wasn’t much of a party, and they left early.

  But the next day, as I was eating a melancholy, solitary breakfast and trying to make myself go to the hospital to do more of the exit interviews and other nonsense involved in losing my job, the communication system said Dr. Selataimh was calling from the moon about Bridget Soon.

  I had thought, as we began work, that Bridget would be one of my favorites, and a wonderful seventh bringback, but then her health had started to fail in a way that indicated she needed to move to Serenity City as soon as possible. So after only a few appointments, she’d been bundled up and shipped to the moon, to restart her bringback process there.

  Selataimh was a vigorous, raw-boned woman who moved around too much for the camera to stay on her face well. “It’s an honor to get to consult with you about a patient,” she said. “And perhaps there’s nothing we can do. But when Bridget Soon woke up, she demanded you. We tried to explain, but she’s absolutely insistent. And she’s so clear and coherent we think she must have gone into breakthrough just before you mothballed her process on Earth, or maybe waking up here was the last poke she needed. In any case, she’s acting like she’s having a breakthrough and she won’t talk to anyone else but you, and as you know, if she clams up and won’t communicate . . . ” She let that trail off. We both knew that patients could sometimes uncooperate themselves into needing to start the whole bringback process over, losing months or years of life.

  “I wish I could get on the next ship going up,” I said.

  “I’d feel that way myself,” Selataimh said. “And I confess I researched it first. It’s absolutely too dangerous for you to try traveling, and even if you got here and were lucky enough to still be alive and functional, you’d be stuck here. And I can certainly understand not wanting to spend the rest of your life in a basement on the moon. But . . . well, she was your patient, she’s mine, is there anything we can come up with that might help?”

  “Maybe something obvious.” I felt hope flaring up.

  “ ‘Try the obvious as soon as possible,’” Selataimh said, quoting me to me.

  “I’ve had to apologize to a whole generation of medical students for that textbook chapter,” I said. “Apparently profs love to quote it. Nevertheless, here’s what I’m wondering: I’ve done plenty of bringbacks on remote, via communication displays. The reason we can’t do one from the moon is supposed to be that one point three second radio lag each way. But has anyone ever tried it? I’m patient, and Alzheimer’s patients have lots of time.

  “Well, I need to see what’s happening in their brain while I talk and while they talk. And as long as the brain image remains synchronized with the conversation, there’s no real need for quick reactions. I can’t think of any time when I had to make an abrupt change of subject in mid-sentence, or react in real time to changing emotions. So why not just see if I can do it via telecommunication linkup? The worst that can happen is it will turn out that I can’t, which is exactly where we are right now.”

  And that was how we discovered that the radio lag enhanced the bringback process. The delay gave me time to look at the picture of the brain a little longer, think about it a little deeper, have about one more slightly better founded thought before speaking. It forced the bringbacks themselves to try harder and more often to retain an idea in working memory, and to send out more calls to the areas where the PPRNs were working, and to make more connections before I could interrupt them.

  The process we thought would be impossible was actually enhanced. Bridget Soon not only became my seventh bringback, she became my fastest and most complete up to that date. Knowing how to use the lag, I completed the two bringbacks after Bridget even more quickly.

  And then there were just a handful left of the severe cases, the ones who had all but forgotten who they were, the Alzheimer’s-damaged natches of my generation who had not quite all died yet, thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, and had developed dementia before there was arresting technology and prosnoetics. Almost all of them, of us, had been brought back.

  Daddy used to put on some old thing he called a “mixtape,” a bunch of unmodifiable songs in a fixed order, on the house speakers so we all had to listen to the same shit over and over, and there was a song with some line or thing about heartbreaker, dream waker, love faker on it that I guess was a big deal when Grandpa was young. He’d get all hurt if I added “mix-taper,” let alone “brain-raper,” to it. Like for some reason I was supposed to care what the song “really” sounded like, which meant whatever some old dead bitch had put down first, as if putting it down first (and being dead) meant she fucking owned it. The last generation before mine, when everyone was still a natch, trust me, totally fucking weird, all of them.

  But especially Mama and Daddy. They must have known that their thirty-year fundraising-and-sympathy ride was peaking and winding down to an end by the tim
e I was about twelve; the oldest nubrids were in their late twenties, still looked fresh-minted nineteen, and were still learning like bright twelve-year-olds and getting saner and more rational all the time. “Like a bunch of supermodel-athlete Spock-Buddhas,” Daddy would say, trying to sound sarcastic.

  If he thought that by saying those things, he could get me to say “I don’t wanna be a yucky old yucky-face yucky-brain nubrid,” the way he’d been able to do when I was eight and he and Mama would love bomb the hell out of me and then put me on camera for promotions, he was even more of a useless self-deluded old fuck than I had imagined. Now that I was in my early teens, I had started to realize just what my parents’ world-famous leadership of the battle for the right to have ‘natural children’ had meant for me and a million or so ‘natural children’ worldwide.

  Daddy, the old fool, was always telling me “be careful what you wish for, you may get it.” If only wishing could have gotten it for me! If only it could have undone what he and Mama did to me, and encouraged so many other people to do to the other natches. Him and his “preserving natural humanity”! He believed in that horseshit with such passion that he thought, if I got my way, despite the impossibility of injecting the nubrid modification virus sequence after the twelfth week of pregnancy, I would end up mourning, longing, yea fucking well fainting for the short painful life of increasing mental rigidity I had thrown away, and then I’d really be sorry.

  Like fucking Christ.

  Thanks to Daddy and all his pontificating about what was truly human (as if a professor of comparative literature would know shit about it), thanks to Mama and her blogging all the time about the Natural Way, thanks to them realizing that as the flow of new followers began to dry up, they would need to have a kid to demonstrate their point: here I was. Demonstrating away. Demonstrating just how wonderful and natural and human it was that I would barely live past a hundred if I were lucky, and that people thirty years older than I would still be young and vigorous in the year my withered old husk, long since having entered “second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” would fall into its grave, at least four full centuries before the nubrids even began to wear out.

  I feel my hand on the cleaver, and I look in Mama’s eyes, and I tell her, “I will hate you forever. I will hate you forever. I will hate you forever,” and just as she starts one of her whiny little pleads, I slash her across both of those watery soggy sentimental eyes with the cleaver, so that me saying that is the last thing she ever sees. It makes me laugh.

  I release my painfully hard grip on my chair arms. The prosnoetics kick in. I am breathing like a racehorse on top of a mountain and the cardiopulmonary support gear is working itself into a lather trying to get me into the safe range. I sit gasping, trying to feel calmer, feeling all that rage in those memories, for the first time in at least twenty-five years.

  To be overpowered by internal rages again; Oh, wise and gentle-spirited Dr. Gbego, you have no idea how good this feels. You probably can’t have any idea. I envy you that, but thank you for bringing my rage back.

  The prosnoetics take hold, and finally I look into the screen and say, “Wow, Layla.”

  “Wow indeed,” she says, I say, we giggle. “Do you think they’ll make us stop?”

  I shake my head. “Not right away. By the time they figure out what we’re doing, we’ll be done.”

  “You sound very sure.”

  “Check my memories for a minute while I catch my breath from yours, my darling self. One thing that didn’t change as humans gave way to nubrids—career trumps caution. Remember how we got into this.”

  My ninth bringback was a nice but rather timid 108-year-old named Annie Souriante who was rapidly reacquiring violin and Caribbean cooking and made me laugh a lot. Usually, before, I’d known by the end of the first year who was scheduled to be my next bringback, but Annie and I were closing in on full restoration, and not only did I not have another patient lined up, there weren’t any on the waiting list for the whole hospital.

  “We’ve drained the pool of the severe cases,” Dr. Gbego said. “Now the problem is more ATB.”

  “ATB?” I asked. We were sitting across the table from each other at a reception in the Mnemology Department. I didn’t know him well then, and I suppose because of his very controlled, deliberately pleasant personality, I may never know him very well. Nobody might.

  “ATB is Ability to Benefit. We have a lot of people who are still mostly functional but lost big chunks of memory into plaques before we had the technology to arrest that. They’ve lost context or connections or some big chunk of themselves. I would bet the funding could be there to bring them back to full function.”

  “Is there a reason you’re talking to me about it?”

  He made a little press-lipped smile. “I try not to be so transparent.”

  That made me like him a little, so I opened the door of possibility by a tiny crack. “Are you by any chance referring to the fact that I have substantial unrepaired Alzheimer’s damage, leading to my very flat and rude affect, and some severe difficulties with recall, and I’m an expert on bringbacks?”

  “Well, yes, of course.” Gbego shrugged. “It was really foolish of me to think I could keep you from seeing where this was going long enough to sound you out.”

  God, he’s a gorgeous man, smooth deep brown skin and beautiful symmetric features and eyes you could fall into forever. The nubrid process has improved the aesthetics of the visual world almost as much as it has altered the hope in people’s lives. And back then I hadn’t yet understood that his smoothness was neither a likeable act nor a cultivated strategy; he really was that smooth, with nothing for a person to stick to. But I didn’t know that then the way I do now.

  His rueful little admission made me feel like he’d actually sought me out emotionally. So I asked, “Well, if we did a bringback on me . . . who would do it?”

  Gbego said, “Conventional answers: Smithson, Abimbola, Cheng.” He shrugged, clearly indicating they’d all be fine with him, but that he wanted to be asked about another possibility.

  “Unconventional answer?”

  He leaned forward, the clear dark eyes zeroing into mine, the smile held closely in check. “You.”

  “How could—what?”

  He held up his hands. “Here’s the thought that occurred to me. The radio lag delay has shortened bringbacks from around three years to less than two. We’ve all been saying that if we knew how that was going to go, we’d have started out doing bringbacks on delays, even if people were in the same building. Because the delay doesn’t have to be radio lag; it was just that when we had to try to do Ms. Soon’s bringback on remote, we had to tolerate the delay, which otherwise we’d never have tried.

  “But, here’s what intrigues me, Dr. Palemba, the delay could be artificial, we could just build it right there into the communication system, with the bringback and the coach right there in the same hospital. So we set you up with an interrupter; you talk as you, your prosnoetics switch out, your brain goes to its natural state, then your message is delivered. Your natural state brain replies, it comes back through a delay—”

  “Do not,” I said, choking with more feeling than I had had in many years, “do not use the word ‘natural’ around me, all right?”

  He did that little bow and forehead touch. “How thoughtless and rude of me. I am so sorry. But please think about it. It could enhance your life. Don’t let my rudeness and inconsideration cut you off from it.”

  “Or cut us off from possibly being co-authors of the most brilliant research paper of the next decade?”

  He grinned broadly; I didn’t know if I’d forgiven him but he thought I had. “Well, yeah. Well, hell yeah.”

  “I’ll think about it. I don’t sleep much and I get ideas late at night. What’s the latest time I can call you?” I realized I probably had forgiven him, and right then, I knew I was going to do it.

  We plunge in
, Layla and I, and the memory swarms back with all its feelings, all its details, how it felt to say what I said and hear what I heard. All those things that the prosecutors deduced from blood spatters and coagulation time, from fluid ballistics, from running approximating simulations, are now all mine in memory again.

  I raged at my parents, cursed them, made sure they knew what this was about. I had planned the blows and cuts, knowing neither of them would have it in them to fight, so that they heard everything I had to say. Knowing how devoted Daddy was to Mama, when he came rushing in at her scream, I shattered him with a dozen planned blows, so that he was bleeding and helpless while I worked on her and explained that all that shit she called love was nothing of the sort, that I knew it was all for her, not for me, that she would not have made me a natch (the word they prohibited in the house) if she had loved me, that it was malice and not mistake. And I cut, and cut, till she died sobbing.

  Daddy took longer, and I reminded him that what had happened to Mama was his fault, the whole time.

  They knew the cuts and blows of it all from the crime scene analysis, but I never told anyone what I had said.

  Or what I had felt: sheer, glowing hot joy.

  I hadn’t sought a bringback of my own, though there were skilled practitioners who would gladly have done it, not because I didn’t want to interrupt my scientific work, as I’d told that slick mannequin Gbego, but because I’d feared that I might find remorse or sorrow or weeping over their bodies.

  I don’t find a bit of that. The memory is pure white rage, and that delights me. Especially it makes me happy in this way: Daddy and Mama were so convinced that natural humans needed to be preserved. They talked about remembering the human heritage, and you could hear, inside that, that they wanted to live forever in the memories of natural humans.

  Well, here they are. Fewer than a hundred natural humans left, and the memory of their destruction is a burning hot glowing pleasure that will warm me the rest of my days. A nubrid, now, a nubrid has such total plasticity, I might have worn the memory down into smooth forgiveness and acceptance. But a human? We’re not that plastic. We can hold a grudge forever.