The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  The tram ran past the harbor studded with sailboats, then along the Niagara River toward the gleaming Union Bridge. Kids in LaSalle Park were flying kites. Racing shells practiced on the Black Rock Canal. A female coxed eight, in matching purple shirts, rowed with precision and vigor.

  None of those women had blown anybody up in the last twenty-four hours.

  The tram moved inland and I got off on the West Side. I carried my bag a couple of blocks, past reclaimed houses and a parking lot turned community garden, to the Fargo Architectural Collective. Home. We’d done the redesign ourselves, Teo and Salma and I, fusing two of the circa-1910 houses with their limestone footings and cool basements into a modern multipurpose. It had earned us some commissions. In the front garden stood a statue of old William Fargo himself, looking more like a leprechaun than the founder of separate transportation and banking empires.

  Teo greeted me at the door and enveloped me in a big bear hug.

  “Esme,” he said. “We’ve been worried. You’re okay?”

  “For certain values of the word okay.” I dropped my bag. Salma poked her head out of her workroom. She looked very serious. “What?” I said.

  “Come have some tea,” she said.

  The three of us sat down in the conference room and Teo brewed a pot of mood tea. “Am I going to need to be calmed down?” I asked.

  Salma leaned forward, her dark brow furrowed. “Our friends in Boston screwed up. Turns out not all of the video cameras were disabled. There may be some images of you approaching the building.”

  “Shit.”

  “The fact you’re not from Boston will help,” Teo said. “You have no history. We’re boring middle-class citizens; none of us are known activists.”

  “That should slow them down for about thirty seconds,” I said. I sipped some tea. We talked about the prospect of my taking a vacation. Vancouver, maybe, or Kuala Lumpur. After a while I said, “I didn’t sleep last night. I’m going to take a nap.”

  I went up to my room, sat on the bed, and unlaced my shoes. The right one was still damp from the puddle in Cambridge. I lay down. Outside my window a Carolina wren, another undocumented immigrant from the torrid South, sang its head off. Teo’s tea was good for something, and in a few minutes I drifted off to sleep.

  It was late afternoon when I woke. Salma came in and lay down beside me on her side, her face very close to mine. “Feel any better?”

  “Better.” I kissed her. “It was awful, Salma.”

  She touched my cheek. “I know. But somebody has—”

  I forced myself up. “You don’t know.”

  Salma sat up and put her hand on my shoulder. “If you’re going to be a soldier for change, then you have to accept some damages. Try not to think about it. Come on, take a shower, get dressed. We’re going out.”

  I swung my legs off the bed. I had volunteered, after all. “Where are we going?”

  “There’s a party at Ajit Ghosh’s. Lot of people will be there.”

  Ghosh was a coming intellectual voice. An aggregator, a cultural critic, the youngest man to hold a named chair in the history of UB. He lived in a big state-of-the-art ecohouse with a view of Delaware Park, Hoyt Lake, and the Albright-Knox. The neighborhood was money, new houses and old occupied by young, ambitious people on their way up. I didn’t like a lot of them, or who they were willing to step on in order to rise, but you had to give them points for energy and creativity.

  I did not care for the way they looked down on people whose roots in WNY went back to before it became trendy. The party would be full of people who came here only when living in New York City got too difficult, the Southwest dried up and blew away, and the hurricane-battered South turned into an alternating fever swamp and forest fire.

  I didn’t think I needed a party. But Ghosh’s house was a Prairie School reboot with a negative carbon imprint. It was better than lying around with the echo of an explosion in my head.

  “All right,” I said.

  Scoobie

  I’d spent the last three days at Roswell Park getting my tumors erased, and now I was out on the street ready to do some damage. I headed toward the restaurants on Main Street, walking past the blocks of medical labs, life extension clinics, hospitals, all with their well-designed signage and their well-trimmed gardens and their well-heeled patients taking the air. Most of them looked pretty good. Pretty much all of them were doomed.

  They treated their ailments and told themselves that nobody lives forever. But I would. An immortal living in the world of mortals—one of the few. The ones who committed to the task and made the best choices. Rationalism. Certain practices, investments, expectations. Habits of living.

  There’s an industry devoted to anti-aging, a jungle of competing claims and methods. Most of it is garbage, pretty pictures papering over the grave. Billions wasted every year.

  Not me. I didn’t invest in a single platform, but maneuvered between the options. Of course you could not always know the best choice with certainty. If you went T+p53 route, you entered the race between immortality and cancer. You had to boost your tumor suppression genes to counter the increased telomerase that prevented chromosome erosion. Hence my visit to Roswell. There was SkQ ingestion to reduce mitochondria damage. A half-dozen other interventions and their synergistic effects, positive and negative. To keep on top of this you needed as much information as possible. Even then you could make a mistake—but that was the human condition for us early posthumans.

  I had backups: a contract to be uploaded once they had worked out the tech. A separate contract to have my head cryogenically preserved once the brain had been uploaded. Some other irons in the fire, depending on the way things broke.

  I grew up in Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the destroyed landscape of bitumen strip mines and oil sands, with its collapsing economy and desperate gun-toting mountain people. When the U.S. broke up and the northeastern and Pacific states joined Canada, freedom-loving Alberta took the opportunity to go the other way, ditching the arrogant bastards in Ottawa to join in a nice little union with Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Big skies, free men. Petroleum fractions. Though it had its charms, I had things I wanted to do, and not many of them could be done in Calgary.

  It was a beautiful day, a good day to be alive. I felt very young. Though this latest treatment would blow a hole in my savings, I decided to spend some money. At Galley’s on Main I ordered broiled salmon and a salad. I had not eaten anything like this in a year. I let the tastes settle on my tongue. I could feel the cells in my body exploding with sensory energy. The crispness of the lettuce. A cherry tomato. It was all astonishing, and I let it linger as long as I could.

  A man leaving the restaurant glanced at me and did a double take. It was Mossadegh.

  “By the fires of Ormazd!” he said. “Not expecting you in a place like this. How’s it growing, brother?”

  “Germinal,” I said. My connections with Mossadegh were mostly business. He knew a lot of women, though. I waved at the chair opposite. “Sit down.”

  “Haven’t seen you much,” Mossadegh said. “Where you been?”

  “Out of town for a few days. Clients.” I didn’t advertise that I was going to live forever.

  Mossadegh was a pirate. He said it was principle with him, not self-interest: freedom of information, no copyright or patents. That was how I got to know him, and on occasion he and I had made some money together. I would never let Mossadegh know anything about who I really was, though. The free flow of information is essential to posthumanism, but I didn’t want anybody in my business.

  I don’t belong to any of those cults. No Extropists. No oxymoronic libertarian socialists. Most of all, I don’t want any connection with anybody—anybody human, anyway. That might get you some information others didn’t have, but it’s too risky. The most vocal ones make the most idiotic choices.

  “Got anything working?” he asked.

  “Making some phony archives,” I said. “Mostly boring—famous
places, New York City, Beijing. Last week somebody wanted an event set in Kansas City in the 1930s, and I just about kissed his hand.”

  Mossadegh flagged down a waiter and ordered a drink. Alcohol—he wasn’t going to live forever, I can tell you that. “I know somebody who used to live in Kansas City.”

  “Really? Did he get out before, or when it happened?”

  “Get this: he left one week—to the day—before.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Truth is truth.”

  As the afternoon declined we went on about nothing particularly important. Mossadegh rubbed his long jaw with his long fingers. “Say, you want to come to a party?”

  “When?”

  “Right now, brother! Maryam’s been taking some grad classes and this rich prof’s throwing a blowout.”

  “I’m not from the university,” I said.

  “But I am, and you come with me. Stout fellow like you’s always welcome.”

  Mossadegh was no more from the university than I was, but I had nothing better to do. We caught a citicar up Elmwood. The setting sun reflecting off the windows of the houses turned them into gold mirrors. We passed a public building where somebody had plastered a video sign onto the side: “Go back to Arkansas . . . Or is it Kansas?”

  The party was in a new neighborhood where they had torn out the old expressway, overlooking the park. It was twilight when we got there, a little chill in the air, but warm lights glowed along the street. The house looked old-fashioned on the outside, but the inside was all new. A big garden in the back. Sitting on the table in the living room they had a bowl of capsules, mood teas, bottles of champagne and a pyramid of glasses. I passed on the intoxicants and drank water.

  The place was crowded with university students, artists, and various other knowledge workers. The prof who owned the place, dark and slender, wore all white; he held a champagne coupe in his hand, his palm around the bowl and the stem descending between his fingers in an affected way that made my teeth hurt. He had long, wavy dark hair. He was talking with two young women, nodding his head slightly as he listened. People sat in twos and threes, and there was a group in the sunroom talking politics. Lots of them seemed pretty lit.

  All of these people were going to die while I stayed alive.

  I stood at the edge of the political talk. A woman was speaking with emotion in her voice. “The people you can fool all of the time are dumber than pond scum, and it isn’t exactly a matter of fooling them—they want to be fooled. They’ll fight against anybody who tries to pull the scales from their eyes. The hopeless core of any politician’s support.”

  She looked to be about thirty. She wore a loose white shirt and tight black pants and she spoke with an intensity that burned, as if what she said wasn’t simply some liberal platitude. This college-undergrad cant mattered to her.

  “But fooling all of the people has become harder. Any conflict of interest, hypocrisy, double-dealing, inconvenient truth gets out as soon as somebody with skills addresses finding it, and too many people have the skills. A politician’s best bet is to throw sand into people’s eyes, put enough distracting information out there that the truth will be buried. You can make a career as long as people are blinded by ideology or just can’t think their way through your crap.”

  I didn’t want to get into these weeds. I wasn’t the kind of person they were. But she was right about ideological blindness, even if she didn’t realize that it applied to her, too.

  I thought about my last three days in the clinic. Four tumors they’d zapped out of me this time. Prospects were that cancer treatments would get better, and if they didn’t I could go off telomerase life extension and try something else. But I had to admit that staring at the ceiling while the machines took care of something that in the old days would have killed me in three months was not pleasant. And there was nobody I could tell about it. Not anybody who would care, anyway.

  The next time I passed through the living room, I poured myself a glass of the champagne. What the hell.

  It tasted good, and unaccustomed as I was to alcohol, I got a little buzz on right away. For an hour I wandered through the house listening to snatches of conversation. I got another glass of wine. After a while I went out into the garden. It had cooled off considerably, and most of the people who had been out there were back inside now that it was full night. Balls of golden light shone in the tree branches. It was pretty.

  Then I noticed somebody sitting on a bench in the corner of the garden. It was the woman who had been ranting in the sunroom. She ignored me. Leaning on one arm, wine glass beside her, she looked as if she were listening for some sound from a distant room in the house. I drifted over to her.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She looked up. Just stared for a moment. “Hello.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “Do you live here?”

  “No.”

  “Friends with somebody who does?”

  “Salma is my sister. She’s one of Ghosh’s girlfriends.”

  “Who’s Ghosh?”

  She looked at me again and smiled. “This is Ghosh’s house.”

  “Right. Do you mind if I sit?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  I sat down and set my glass next to hers on the bench. “Political, are you?”

  “Politics is a waste,” she said. “Like this thing in Cambridge yesterday—what are they trying to prove?” The anger I had heard in her voice earlier came back. “It’s just killing for killing’s sake. The things that need changing aren’t going to be changed by blowing people up. It’s in the heart and the head, and you can’t change that with a hand grenade.”

  Maybe the wine was working in me, but I couldn’t let that go.

  “Lots of things are decided by hand grenades,” I said. “Most things, in the end, are decided by force. Hell, politics is just another form of force. You figure out where the pressure points are, you manipulate the system, you make it necessary for the ones who oppose you to do what you want them to do. You marshal your forces, and then you get what you want.”

  She looked unconvinced. I liked the way her black hair, not too long, curled around her ear. “You’re not from around here,” she said. “The accent. You a real Canadian?”

  “Alberta.”

  Her eyebrow raised. “An immigrant?”

  “Technically, I guess. It’s not like I wasn’t born and raised in Canada.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Scoobie.” I could smell the scent of the soap she used.

  “Esme,” she said, holding out her hand. I shook it.

  “So what do you think that bombing accomplished, Scoobie?”

  “Not much. People don’t even know who it was aimed at, and for what reason. No way was it some pro-immigration group. That’s a false-flag move. The two guys they blew up aren’t particularly influential. They have no power, not even symbolic power. They might as well have been hit by lightning.”

  “Sounds like you agree with me.”

  “If you think it was done stupidly, then I agree with you.”

  She looked down at her feet. She wore black canvas slippers. “I agree with you,” she said. “It was done stupidly.”

  We sat in silence awhile. I picked up my glass and drained the last of my wine. Esme took up her own.

  “So why did you emigrate?” she asked me.

  “I came to Toronto for the work, at first. I have an interest in the medical professions. The big clinics, the university. Then it was McGill for a few years. Then I came here.”

  “Do you get any flak as an immigrant? Lots of people don’t like them. Alberta is pretty hard right.”

  “I don’t care about that. I guess you could say I’m apolitical. The differences between the Canadian government, Texas, and the Sunbelt states mean nothing to me. I suppose you could call me a libertarian—small ‘l.’ Certainly I’m for free information, but it all seems petty to me.”

  “Petty?�
� The edge came back into her voice.

  “This is just a moment in history. Like all political debates, it will pass. What’s important is keeping alive. You don’t want to get caught between two crazy antagonists. Or get connected up with one side or the other.”

  “Do you seriously believe that?”

  I don’t know why I should have cared what she thought. Something about the way she held her shoulders, or the slight, husky rasp in her voice. It was the voice of somebody who had cried for a long time and was all cried out. She was arrogant, she was wrong, but she was very sexy.

  I tried to make a joke. “Singularity’s coming. All bets are off then.”

  “The Singularity is a fantasy.”

  I laughed. “What are you, a religious mystic?”

  “I’m an architect.”

  “Then you ought to know the difference between the material world and fairyland. Is there something supernatural about the human brain? Is it animated by pixie dust?” I was feeling it now. Humanists, with their woo-woo belief in the uniqueness of the “mind.”

  “They’ve been talking about strong AI for eighty years. Where is it?’

  “Processing power is still increasing. It’s only a matter of time. It’s just the architecture—”

  Esme laughed. “Now you’ll tell me about the architecture. Listen, no Jesus supercomputer is going to save you from the crises around us. You can’t sit it out.”

  “I can and I will. This fighting between Canada and the Sunbelt is completely bound to this time and place. It doesn’t matter. It’s just history, like some war between the Catholics and Protestants in the 14th century.”

  “How can you say that! People are dying! The future of our society depends on what we do today. Immense things hang in the balance. The climate! Whole species! Ecosystems! Women’s rights! Animal rights!”