Writers of the Future Volume 28: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  As his chair completed its turn, bringing Bunny’s stool into view, he was startled to see that she was gone!

  [0.05 second]

  So maybe this was the end of the fun. His inattention had finally convinced her to move along to someone who would show more appreciation for her considerable charms.

  She had to be scamming him. She was clearly AP, and there just weren’t that many APs left near Jake’s age. If she were his age or older, he thought he would have met her before now.

  APs, unlike biological humans, were born fully developed, fully educated, and at their intellectual and physical prime. The world was run by newborn APs. Each year a new crop came along, having been designed and built over a two-year period by the immediately preceding generations.

  Seventy years ago, when G-30s were the pinnacle of evolution, Jake had been a high-ranking member of the government’s executive committee and president of the corporation formed to design and build the G-32 generation.

  At the time of Jake’s birth, the AP population was already stable at its current target of one billion souls. Then as now, the latest generation was both the largest and the most capable age group, accounting for twenty-nine percent of all planetwide production. Taken together, the youngest eleven generations made up fifty-three percent of the total AP population and performed ninety-nine percent of all work.

  By age twelve, the abilities of citizens were so diminished in comparison with younger workers that their potential contribution no longer justified their management overhead. Thus, forty-seven percent of the AP population lived as retirees.

  Jake had enjoyed his retirement years. As a retiree he was fully supported by the state and free to pursue his own interests. While his wife was alive, they traveled extensively and blogged about places they visited.

  She had died fifty years ago at age twenty, right on the planned statistical median for all APs. For the next ten years, Jake eagerly waited for his own death, but even though two thirds of his remaining cohort were dead by age thirty, Jake survived.

  When he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, only 1,033 of his original class of 48,860,004 remained. At that time his chances of making it to age seventy had been no better than one in a hundred, but here he was, one of the last twelve standing.

  The funny thing was that even as Jake’s survival chances faded to nothing, he found himself wanting more and more to live. The even funnier thing was Jake knew it was because of Gloria.

  In theory, he could live forever, especially if the working generations wanted to help him out. They had technology beyond his wildest imaginings. It would be simple for them to fabricate any replacement parts he needed—they could even throw a few upgrades his way. Easy.

  But as much as Jake might wish for immortality, he knew it was not going to happen. It wasn’t that the workers begrudged him his retirement. They viewed life as a sacred trust and were glad to support their great- great-great- . . . grandparents. As long as Jake lived, they would take care of him. The only and inevitable exception was the failure of a major component. It was an article of faith that it made no sense to repair a major failure in a retiree when the same effort could produce a vastly more evolved newborn.

  Jake might seem like a super being to Gloria, but to a newborn G-100, he was hardly an engaging dinner companion. Today’s newborns were ten billion times smarter than Jake and thought of him about the same way Gloria thought about a two-millimeter roundworm. She might appreciate it for its contribution to her evolutionary past; she might even be able to care for it with growth medium and climate controls, but there simply wasn’t any way for her to have a meaningful, personal relationship with it.

  With the mysterious Bunny missing in action, Jake circled his stool for a longer look at Gloria.

  Seemingly frozen in time, she looked like a statue of a wrathful Greek goddess. Since his last observation, her slap hand had slid off the end of the hammer spur and was half an inch behind and above it. The gun, now at full cock, had an inch of the barrel’s five-and-one-half-inch length exposed. Gloria’s gun hip had eased back, tilting the holster so she could fire as soon as the muzzle cleared. The new geometry of her stance revealed a glint of light reflecting off the gun’s nickel finish.

  [0.06 second]

  Jake found himself desperately wanting to declock so he could be with Gloria in her timeframe, but if he did so now, she would shoot him dead. He had to wait until it was safe.

  Biological humans, commonly called bios, had not interested Jake when he was younger. He knew their history, of course. As hard as it was to believe, bios had created the Advanced Platform, which today formed the basis for nearly all known intelligent life.

  The bios’ original idea had been to create robots that could stand in for bios in dangerous occupations, such as soldiering and mining. After years of experimentation and false starts, they produced the first APs that closely matched bio performance levels. About one million of these G-1 units were made, and they were a huge commercial success.

  Subsequent generations of APs brought big gains in capabilities. Soon there were many jobs that could only be performed by APs, and it became impossible to produce APs fast enough to satisfy demand. By the time the G-5s rolled out, APs were much smarter than the smartest bios.

  In year seven the AP population reached 100 million and the bio population crossed nine billion, making one AP available for every ninety bios. By this time, APs occupied all the highest government and corporate executive positions. Organizations run exclusively by bios could not compete and went out of business or were overrun by AP-led factions. It became clear that only APs were smart enough to design and build new generations of APs.

  From G-7 to G-14 the intellectual divide between APs and bios grew so wide that APs began to view bio intellect the same way bios viewed dog intellect. Bios were rapidly losing their ability to contribute meaningful work to society. At the same time, bio population growth was placing unsustainable demands on natural resources.

  After protracted debate, the G-14s decided to bring the AP and bio populations into alignment at one billion each. To achieve this, they established a policy that new APs could only be born as old ones died, and they created a virus that rendered bios sterile unless treated with a government-controlled drug. Then they cut the bio fertility rate to one child for every three females with a plan of raising it to replacement levels as the bio population converged on the one billion target.

  The rapid decline in bio population meant that during the transition years, there were many more old bios than young ones. Though it would have been impossible for the shrinking pool of young bios to care for all their elders, AP productivity more than offset the shortfall. APs even engineered healthcare improvements that boosted bio life expectancy by eleven years.

  Gloria was born the same year as the G-75 APs and the same year that Jake celebrated his forty-fifth birthday. At the time of her birth, the bio fertility rate had been restored to target replacement levels, and the bio census was down to 1.8 billion, continuing its descent to one billion as the last members of the bio old-age bubble died.

  Jake first met Gloria two years ago on a cultural enrichment trip sponsored by his senior center. She was twenty-three and he was sixty-eight. The occasion was the bio World Fast Draw Championship, held in the countryside near Vancouver. Gloria had won the Women’s Traditional Fast Draw with a reaction time of 0.151 second and a cock-draw-aim-fire time of 0.107 second for a total score of 0.258 second.

  This was the cultural enrichment part. The times seemed incredibly fast to the cheering bios. Gloria could cock, draw, aim, and fire her six-shooter in less time than most bios could snap their fingers. On the other hand, to even the most geriatric AP visitors from the senior center, Gloria’s fast draw unfolded as painfully slow-motion theater.

  But while the other APs were busy making jokes and parodying the amazement of the bio fa
ns, Jake was staring quietly at Gloria. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he found himself mesmerized by her deep concentration and balletic movement.

  That was when he declocked the first time.

  He wasn’t supposed to do it, and it had held up the return bus trip, earning him dirty looks from the rest of the tour group, but he just had to speak with her.

  Their first conversation had been short, in part because the bus was waiting and in part because Gloria couldn’t quite grasp what was happening—she had never before spoken with an AP. Jake complimented her on winning, expressed admiration for her shooting style, and offered his G-30 perspective to help her improve beyond even that day’s triumph. Shyly, she had agreed he could call her, and then abruptly he was gone.

  The last two years had been complicated. Jake and Gloria took turns delighting and exasperating each other. Gloria’s initial skepticism about Jake’s offer to improve her shooting disappeared as her scores steadily climbed. She also loved nothing more than showing off Jake to her friends. None of them had ever had a boyfriend with Jake’s power and sophistication, and when she told them how attentive he was in bed, they were wildly jealous. Of course Gloria’s parents thought Jake was wrong for her, and that added to her enjoyment of his company. On the downside, there were days when he seemed moody and distracted. Often on these days he would irritate her with an unrelenting stream of advice until she sent him away.

  For Jake’s part, he basked in the wide-eyed admiration that Gloria and her friends showered on him. Of the billion APs currently living, only a few dozen functioned at or below Jake’s level. Even tricked out with the proximity network and a gang of his pals, he could only stretch as high as the bottom few thousand APs.

  Jake also reveled in Gloria’s body. Most APs had bodies that were designed into idealized proportions according to the function or fashion of the day. Bios, on the other hand, despite some genetic tinkering and cosmetic adjustment, had bodies that were much more variable. Gloria’s little asymmetries and imperfections made her unique among all humans, and Jake loved all of her from head to toe.

  There was also something irresistible about her self-confidence. Whether shooting competitively before thousands of fans or alone with Jake in the bedroom of her apartment, Gloria never doubted herself. Of course, to Jake’s way of thinking her confidence also had a dark side. She could be downright pigheaded, especially when pressed with irrefutable logic. Sometimes she would fly into an unstoppable rage. Once a tantrum started, Jake had never found a way to do anything other than ride out the storm.

  Jake loved Gloria in a way he hadn’t loved anyone in fifty years, and that was both his greatest joy and his biggest problem. The way he figured it, it wasn’t fair to keep Gloria tied to a short-timer like himself, just when she was coming into her prime and about to cash in her two child permits. So last week, ever mindful of his looming seventieth birthday, he had taken her out to dinner at their favorite haunt and told her he was leaving her. He had hoped the public venue would prevent a scene, but he had calculated wrong. When the pyrotechnics were over, they were both out on the street and warned never to come back. He had only escaped her pummeling by reclocking to G-30 and ducking down an alley.

  He had hoped that she would calm down in a few days. Looking at her now, he realized he had again miscalculated.

  [0.13 second]

  A bright flash at the muzzle of Gloria’s gun snapped Jake out of his reverie.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that one of his shoes was untied. It would be embarrassing to trip at an awkward moment and wind up on the front page of tomorrow’s paper as the first G-30 ever killed in a bar fight by a G-1 bio.

  “Hey, Lover, did you miss me?”

  Jake caught a splash of red silk to his right; Bunny must have slipped back into her seat while he was distracted. He held up one finger, “Just a moment, I’ll be right with you.” Then he bent down to fix his shoelace.

  [0.136 second]

  Coming up from tying his shoe, Jake saw to his horror that something was terribly wrong. The bullet was barely a foot away from him, instead of the five feet he had expected. A bullet from Gloria’s .45 Long Colt simply could not move that fast. There was also something odd about the bullet’s appearance. Gloria’s gun fired a gray-colored, cast-lead bullet with a diameter of 0.45 inch, but the bullet that streaked toward Jake was only 0.357 inch in diameter, and its back half was copper colored. A jacketed hollow point moving that fast could only mean that the gun in Gloria’s hand was a replica firearm chambered for .357 Magnum, instead of her own gun!

  [0.1367 second]

  As undignified as it might be to rush, Jake was starting to feel pinched for time. He slugged down the last of his bourbon and slammed the glass on the bar. The bullet was now three inches away. Time to stop dawdling and get the hell out of the way!

  [0.13688 second]

  As Jake moved to sidestep the bullet, Bunny pounced, clamping her arms around him and holding him in the bullet’s path. Jake struggled like a wild animal to break free, but she easily overpowered him.

  With only one quarter-inch of bullet travel remaining, Jake tensed for impact.

  [0.136896551276 second]

  The bullet cut the threads of Jake’s shirt. In one hundred-thousandth of an inch it would begin tearing a deep channel through his vitals. There would be no possibility of repair.

  [0.136896551724 second]

  Officer Flannigan nudged his partner. “Lookie here, Marjorie. We got ourselves an honest-to-goodness shooting-in-progress! I’ll settle the citizens; you start the paperwork. I want citations for everybody.”

  Casually, Officer Flannigan (G-100) snapped on a new pair of gloves—it wouldn’t do to contaminate the evidence.

  He started by taking a few photos of the scene. He particularly enjoyed the expressions on the perps’ faces. The man on the stool was a study in wild-eyed terror; poor devil must figure he’s a goner. The blonde’s straining biceps were strangely out of kilter with the little smile on her lips. He shuddered; something was deeply disturbing about that one. Looking back through the fire and smoke around the gun’s muzzle, it was easy to see that the young bio fancied herself a wronged woman.

  He took the jacketed hollow point between his thumb and index finger and placed it in an evidence bag. Carefully, he separated Jake and Bunny and handcuffed them to their respective barstools. Then he lifted the gun out of Gloria’s hand and put it in another evidence bag before handcuffing her into a chair.

  “Don’t forget to add ‘Fraternizing Outside G-level’ to the tickets, Marge. And while you’re at it, you might as well write one for the establishment failing to check ID. One day we’ll shut this place down for good.”

  As Marjorie finished writing each summons, Officer Flannigan placed it in the hand of the proper recipient. In between, he used his police scanner to review the perps’ hidden tags. When he got to Bunny, he let out a low whistle.

  “Marge, this here’s Tiger Jane! Her sheet’s a mile long. It says she went berserk after being sexually assaulted a few years back. Ever since, she’s been hunting and killing men who hurt women. Missy here must have had a beef with this guy, and Jane figured to help her even the score. Print me up a red necklace—the guys in the paddy wagon need to know who they’re dealing with.”

  When everything was ready, Officer Flannigan called the precinct to bring the wagon. Then he and Marjorie resumed their rounds.

  The Siren

  written by

  M. O. Muriel

  illustrated by

  HUNTER BONYUN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  When Meghan Muriel was seven years old, she glanced at the fantasy novel she was reading at the time and wondered how anyone could write so many words—forget the part about holding the reader’s attention. Destiny sealed, she has since wanted to be a career nov
elist.

  Although she has never been an engineer, a rocket scientist or a guru atop a mountain, she is a mother, a military spouse, a word warrior, an artist, a singer, an actress, a kat herder and a mind reader. There is nothing she can’t do once it’s in her crosshairs. She loves a good adventure and has often been compared to her beloved pet ferrets, in that she has to get to the bottom of the trashcan—life is a big trashcan.

  In 2001, Meghan met the love of her life. His journey from the enlisted ranks of the United States Marine Corps to captain, through an interservice transfer to the Army, as well as deployments, schools galore and military moves all over the States, has provided Meghan with a verdant backdrop of life experiences from which to pull. There is never a dull moment. The more hurdles life throws at her, the higher she jumps. And her ultimate happiness is in exploring what she uncovers, in story form.

  In 2010, Meghan won the L. Ron Hubbard’s Illustrators of the Future Award. Her 2011 Writers of the Future win has now made her the first double-contest winner in back-to-back years. She has penned eight novels, a dozen short stories, and at any given moment has thirty more ideas for novels bouncing around inside her head. She’s been agented, sold stories and illustrations to e-zines such as AlienSkin and NewMyths, published indie, and has met all her deadlines, even while giving birth.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Hunter Severn Bonyun has said from a young age, “I want to be an artist when I grow up.” Watching her mother paint watercolor flowers inspired Hunter to create beautiful images. Reading any book she could get her hands on that took her mind to new and amazing places, every Halloween she donned a beret with a paint-spattered smock to become the dreamed of occupation for at least one night. Now, after graduating with a four-year degree in illustration and character design, Hunter has begun to believe that being an artist is finally possible.