The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  He follows along with good humor and a kind of adorable narcissism that I’m so engaged with his cosmic bullshit and (under it all) an awakening sense that something’s off, askew. “Okay . . . ”

  The twin red suns multiply our shadows around us. I drift a little ways above myself on the wine, and it makes it easier to go on, to imagine or transmit this: “What if something out there knew a secret—”

  A secret! Such a secret, a secret you might hear in the wind that passes between the libraries of jade teeth that wait in an empty city burnt stark by a high blue star that never leaves the zenith, a secret that tumbles down on you like a fall of maggots from a white place behind everything, where a pale immensity circles on the silent wind.

  ”What if there were a way out? Like a phone number you could call, a person you could talk to, kind of a hotline, and you’d say, oh, I’m a smart, depressed, compassionate person, I’m tired of the great lie that it’s possible to do more good than harm, I’m tired of my Twitter feed telling me the world’s basically a car full of kindergartners crumpling up in a trash compactor. I don’t want to be complicit any more. I want out. Not suicide, no, that’d just hurt people. I want something better. And they’d say, sure, man, we have your mercy here, we can do that. We can make it so you never were.”

  He looks at me with an expression of the most terrible unguarded longing. He tries to cover it up, he tries to go flirty or sarcastic, but he can’t.

  I take my phone out, my embarrassing old flip phone, and put it on the table between us. I don’t have to use the contacts to remember. The number keys make soft chiming noises as I type the secret in.

  “So,” I say, “my question is: who goes first?”

  Something deep beneath me exalts, as if this is what it wants: and I cannot say if that thing is separate from me.

  He reaches for the phone. “Not you, I hope,” he says, with a really brave play-smile: he knows this is all a game, an exercise of imagination. He knows it’s real. “The world needs people like you, Dominga. So what am I going to get? Is it a sex line?”

  “If you go first,” I say, “do you think that’d change the world enough that I wouldn’t want to go second?”

  I have this stupid compassion in me, and it cries out for the hurts of others. Nico’s face, just then—God, have you ever known this kind of beauty? This desperate, awful hope that the answer was yes, that he might, by his absence, save me?

  His finger hovers a little way above the call button.

  “I think you’d have to go first,” he says. He puts his head back, all the way back, as if to blow smoke: but I think he’s looking up at the facsimile stars. “That’d be important.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he says, all husky nonchalance, “if you weren’t here, I would absolutely go; whereas if I weren’t here, I don’t know if you’d go. And if this method were real, this, uh, operation of mercy, then the universe is lost, the whole operation’s fucked, and it’s vital that you get out.”

  His finger keeps station a perilous few millimeters from the call. I watch this space breathlessly. “Tell me why,” I say, to keep him talking, and then I realize: oh, Nico, you’d think this out, wouldn’t you? You’d consider the new rules. You’d understand the design. And I’m afraid that what he’ll say will be right—

  He lays it out there: “Well, who’d use it?”

  “Good people,” I say. That’s how burnout operates. You burn out because you care. “Compassionate people.”

  “That’s right.” He gets a little melancholy here, a little singsong, in a way that feels like the rhythm of my stranger thoughts. I wonder if he’s had an uncanny couple days too, and whether I’ll ever get a chance to ask him. “The universe sucks, man, but it sucks a lot more if you care, if you feel the hurt around you. So if there were a way out—a certain kind of people would use it, right? And those people would go extinct.”

  Oh. Right.

  There might have been a billion good people, ten billion, a hundred, before us: and one by one they chose to go, to be unmade, a trickle at first, just the kindest, the ones most given to shoulder their neighbors’ burdens and ask nothing in exchange—but the world would get harder for the loss of each of them, and there’d be more reason then, more hurt to go around, so the rattle would become an avalanche.

  And we’d be left. The dregs. Little selfish people and their children.

  The stars above change, the false constellations reconfiguring. Nico sighs up at them. “You think that’s why the sky’s empty?”

  “Of—aliens, you mean?” What a curious brain.

  “Yeah. They were too good. They ran into bad people, bad situations, and they didn’t want to compromise themselves. So they opted out.”

  “Maybe someone’s hunting good people.” If this thing were real, well, wouldn’t it be a perfect weapon, a perfect instrument in something’s special plan? Bait and trap all at once.

  “Maybe. One way or another—well, we should go, right?” He comes back from the cosmic distance. His finger hasn’t moved. He grins his stupid cocky camouflage grin because the alternative is ghoulish and he says, “I think I make a pretty compelling case.”

  Everything cold and always getting colder because the warmth puts itself out.

  “Maybe.” Maybe. He’s very clever. “But I’m not going first.”

  Nico puts his finger down (and I feel the cold, up out of my bones, sharp in my heart) but he’s just pinning the corner of the phone so he can spin it around. “Jacob definitely wouldn’t make the call,” he says, teasing, a really harsh kind of tease, but it’s about me, about how I hurt, which feels good.

  “Neither would Mary,” I say, which is, all in all, my counterargument, my stanchion, my sole refuge. If something’s out to conquer us, well, the conquest isn’t done. Something good remains. Mary’s still here. She hasn’t gone yet—whether you take all this as a thought experiment or not.

  “Who’s Mary?” He raises a skeptical eyebrow: you have friends?

  “Stick around,” I say, “and I’ll tell you.”

  Right then I get one more glimpse past the armor: he’s frustrated, he’s glad, he’s all knotted up, because I won’t go first, and whatever going first means, he doesn’t want to leave me to go second. He wouldn’t have to care anymore, of course. But he still cares. That’s how compassion works.

  If I had a purpose here, well, I suppose it’s done.

  “You’re taking a break from work?” He closes the phone and pushes it back to me. “What’s up with that? Can I help?”

  When I go to take the phone he makes a little gesture, like he wants to take my hand, and I make a little gesture like I want him to—and between the two of us, well, we manage.

  I still have the number, of course. Maybe you worry that it works. Maybe you’re afraid I’ll use it, or that Nico will, when things go bad. Things do so often go bad.

  You won’t know if I use it, of course, because then I’ll never have told you this story, and you’ll never have read it. But that’s a comfort, isn’t it? That’s enough.

  The story’s still here. We go on.

  Time Bomb Time

  C.C. Finlay

  -pop-

  The sharp scent of ozone—sudden like heartbreak, raw as a panic attack—filled Hannah’s dorm room, from the paper-swamped desk across her rumpled bed to the window overlooking the quad. The lights flickered. Her heart skipped a beat.

  “God damn it.” She prodded Nolon’s foot with the toe of her shoe. She wanted to kick him. “Tell me what you just did.”

  “Nothing.” He was leaning over the weird device from his lab, tapping a code on the keypad.

  “What are you doing now?” Anger pushed at the edges of her voice, but she held it in check. She wanted him to leave, but she didn’t want to upset him.

  “Don’t worry so much—nobody’s going to get hurt.” He pressed his shoulder against her, didn’t even have to push—she flinched and bumped into the wa
ll. He laughed at her, like it was a joke. “It’s not a time bomb.”

  She sighed. “I don’t care if it’s a confetti bomb,” she said, pointing at the keg-sized device. “Whatever it is, get it out of here.”

  He glanced at her through blond bangs, beaming his best grin. He only used it when he wanted to make out or get away with something. “C’mon,” he pleaded. “I really want you with me when this goes off, Hanan.”

  “It’s Hannah,” she corrected. He used the name her parents gave her, even when that wasn’t what she wanted. She hated how people looked at her and thought Muslim or terrorist, not Arab Christian or second generation American and never just plain American. “My name is Hannah.”

  “It’s close enough—” He must have seen fury flash in her eyes, because he put up his hands in surrender. “Sure, Hanan, whatever you want.”

  For the first time, she considered that she might hate him. “I don’t want to be a rat trapped in the maze of your brain anymore,” she snapped. He was so close, she could smell the grunge—he must have been up, working on his project for days. What she wanted was a clear route to the door so she could leave the room if he didn’t. “Just put your experiment over by the window.”

  He stared at the window, toward the quad where TV crews were covering the big student protest. “You do understand what I’m trying to do, right?” he said. “If I set this off, it proves my theories. But it also functions as the best political statement ever. It’ll show the world that all we do is go through the same meaningless motions over and over.”

  “You can’t involve other people in your science experiments without their permission. And I know you haven’t gone through the Institutional Review Board. What you’re planning to do is wrong.”

  He ignored her. “The thing is, the larger the radius of the temporal effect, the shorter the duration. Too big, and it will happen so fast no one will notice. A small bubble, the size of this room, will last for several minutes, but then it won’t be recorded by the TV cameras. And I’ve only got one device, one chance.” The light in his eyes flickered like numbers changing on a calculator screen.

  She felt a pang of empathy for him. He was desperate to make this work, the same way he had been desperate to make their relationship work. “Let’s talk about this, okay? Whatever you’re trying to prove, this isn’t the way to do it—”

  “Dr. Renner doesn’t believe in my temporal bubble theory. I have to change my dissertation or leave the program. He wants me to ‘stop wasting time.’ ” He said the last phrase in Renner’s nasally voice, and his shoulders slouched in defeat. “So this is it for me—if I don’t prove my theory in a really spectacular, public way, my research is finished.”

  “Look, the physics goes way over my head, but I know that you believe in the theory and that’s enough for me.” She could believe in anything if it would get him out of her room.

  “You’re the only one who still believes in me.”

  “So why are you doing things this way?” She gestured at the strange device, then reined in her hands, afraid that any sudden movement could make it go off. “It’s like you want the whole world to see you self-destruct.”

  “I want to change the world.” His stare was too intense, his eyes rimmed by dark circles, his breath tainted with the formaldehyde smell of stale Red Bull. “I want to change the way the world sees me. The way that you see—”

  She stopped him right there. “Even if your theory is right, this isn’t the way to do it. You can’t publish this. You won’t get credit for it. What are you thinking?”

  “Panama!” he blurted. “You remember the palindrome. Only, technically, this works more like a palingram. A palingram is made of words or phrases, not letters. So the individual units are cognitively whole. Like ‘I do, do I?’ or ‘one for all and all for one.’ ”

  “That still doesn’t make any sense.” Never mind the fact that she was a lit major and had taught him about palindromes and palingrams and all that stuff. “Time doesn’t work like ‘a man, a plan, a canal.’ ”

  “If you’re reading a palindrome, you can’t tell whether it’s going forwards or backwards. Inside a temporal bubble, it’s the same thing. You can’t tell which way time is flowing.”

  She crossed her arms over the anxious tightness in her chest. “Look, you’ve explained this to me before. But time only flows in one direction. You can’t make time run backwards, even for a few seconds.”

  “How would we know? We’re always stuck inside our own perception. Our brain takes these little packets of perceived time and arranges them in order to create a sense of causality. The continuum of time, the connections and flow between events, that’s cognitively constructed.”

  “Sure, but whatever’s going on in your head, however you perceive things, there’s still an objective reality outside.” Like the objective reality that they weren’t dating any more, regardless of what he wanted.

  “That’s it exactly, that’s what I’m trying to demonstrate. People only live in the psychological present, in the now. Look at Ernst Pöppel’s research. It proves that our neurocognitive software”—he paused to wave his hand around his head—“processes temporal experience into these one-to-ten second packets of perceived time. That’s what gives us a sense of constant nowness.”

  “I don’t care!” She was done with him, so done. It wasn’t her job to validate his feelings or make him feel good about his bad decisions. “Get that thing out of my room. Now.”

  To her surprise, he started to carry the device past her. She backed away into the corner between the bed and her desk. “It’s not a bomb.” He sounded defensive, even hurt. “It creates a bubble, not an explosion.”

  “That looks like a bomb,” she said. How could he bring anything that even looked like a bomb around her? “I don’t want it in here.”

  “I just need five minutes. The TV cameras are outside for the protest. I’m going to do a demonstration of my research and I want to make sure they broadcast it live. I came here to tell you, because I want you to see it too.”

  He was sad and hopeful and eager, like a puppy at the pet store. Which is why she had brought him home in the first place. But just like a puppy, he left messes everywhere and required constant, exhausting attention. From the very beginning, dating him had been a bad idea, a ticking bomb just waiting to explode. “I’m sorry, but I’m really busy right now.”

  “Please give me a chance,” he begged. He held the device from his lab, cradling it in his arms like a monstrous baby.

  “Nolon,” she said. “We broke up.”

  She remembered the last time she had seen him, that night in his lab, lights dimmed, everything silent. A smaller version of his device was hooked up to a cage where a white rat ran through a maze. He had tapped a code on the keypad and then she smelled ozone. The lights flickered. There was a loud -pop-. A shimmery bubble formed around the cage, and the rat ran backwards, repeating the same steps in reverse. A rewind. When it reached the beginning, it started forward again, feet following the exact path. She felt bad for the rat, like it was a puppet. The experience was very weird and upsetting.

  Nolon stood there, staring at her, waiting for her to say something. On the outside she froze; inside, she freaked.

  A familiar knock startled Hannah and she jumped reflexively to yank open the door.

  -tattarrattat-

  A familiar knock startled Hannah and she jumped reflexively to yank open the door.

  Nolon stood there, staring at her, waiting for her to say something. On the outside she froze; inside, she freaked.

  She remembered the last time she had seen him, that night in his lab, lights dimmed, everything silent. A smaller version of his device was hooked up to a cage where a white rat ran through a maze. He had tapped a code on the keypad and then she smelled ozone. The lights flickered. There was a loud -pop-. A shimmery bubble formed around the cage, and the rat ran backwards, repeating the same steps in reverse. A rewind. When it reached
the beginning, it started forward again, feet following the exact path. She felt bad for the rat, like it was a puppet. The experience was very weird and upsetting.

  “Nolon,” she said. “We broke up.”

  “Please give me a chance,” he begged. He held the device from his lab, cradling it in his arms like a monstrous baby.

  He was sad and hopeful and eager, like a puppy at the pet store. Which is why she had brought him home in the first place. But just like a puppy, he left messes everywhere and required constant, exhausting attention. From the very beginning, dating him had been a bad idea, a ticking bomb just waiting to explode. “I’m sorry, but I’m really busy right now.”

  “I just need five minutes. The TV cameras are outside for the protest. I’m going to do a demonstration of my research and I want to make sure they broadcast it live. I came here to tell you, because I want you to see it too.”

  “That looks like a bomb,” she said. How could he bring anything that even looked like a bomb around her? “I don’t want it in here.”

  To her surprise, he started to carry the device past her. She backed away into the corner between the bed and her desk. “It’s not a bomb.” He sounded defensive, even hurt. “It creates a bubble, not an explosion.”

  “I don’t care!” She was done with him, so done. It wasn’t her job to validate his feelings or make him feel good about his bad decisions. “Get that thing out of my room. Now.”

  “That’s it exactly, that’s what I’m trying to demonstrate. People only live in the psychological present, in the now. Look at Ernst Pöppel’s research. It proves that our neurocognitive software”—he paused to wave his hand around his head—“processes temporal experience into these one-to-ten second packets of perceived time. That’s what gives us a sense of constant nowness.”

  “Sure, but whatever’s going on in your head, however you perceive things, there’s still an objective reality outside.” Like the objective reality that they weren’t dating any more, regardless of what he wanted.