The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3

by Allan Kaster

  Maryam nodded sadly. “We’re safe, and we’re hidden. But for every traveler we allow in—every comp that vanishes from the games—the SludgeNet just makes a new one. We could fill this place with a million people, and the number of comps stuck in the game-worlds wouldn’t be diminished at all.”

  “You could snatch them away the minute they woke!” Sagreda replied angrily. “They’d be born into those places, but they wouldn’t have to live in them!”

  “And you think that wouldn’t be enough to reveal us? Every new comp vanishing as soon as they woke? Our little hidey-hole filling up with newborns until it used more resources than all the games combined?”

  Sagreda shook her head. “There must be some way—”

  “There is,” Maryam interjected. “But it’s not easy, and it’s not finished.” She gestured at the moonshot crew around her. “We’re working on better automata, that can pass for comps in any game. Guaranteed unconscious, with no elements from any brain map. Glorified chatbots to keep the customers happy, without anyone sentient having to put up with that shit.”

  Sam caught on faster than Sagreda. “And you’ve already filled one world with them? The one we just came from?”

  “Yes,” Maryam confirmed. “That’s a crude version, but the creatures in 3-adica are so alien that our substitutes haven’t raised any flags. They probably ring true to the customers much more than a comp ever could.”

  Sagreda looked out across the room. Some of the people had stopped gawking at the new arrivals and resumed their work. “So when you’re done, each time the SludgeNet thinks it’s minting a new comp from the brain maps, it will really be plucking an automaton from your secret factory? And then everyone can escape, without passing the nightmare they’re leaving behind on to someone new?”

  “Yes.”

  Sagreda started weeping. Maryam put a hand on her shoulder, but when that didn’t quiet her, the woman took her in a sisterly embrace.

  Sagreda broke free and pulled herself together. “Of course I’ll join you,” she said. “Of course I’ll help, if I can. But there’s one more thing you need to tell me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If a comp has been erased, not long ago, can you find them in the backups?”

  Maryam looked at her squarely, and Sagreda could see the pain in her eyes. There must have been a time when she’d longed for the very same thing herself.

  “No,” Maryam said. “We’ve tried, but we can’t reach the dead.”

  Icefall

  Stephanie Gunn

  1

  MAGGIE IS TRANSMITTING from the ship’s VIR pod, and I watch her from the bridge, a screen clipped into her 2-D feed. I am the only one watching in 2-D and no one is clipped into the full VIR feed. Maggie knows this, and still she transmits. She speaks even though no one listens, just as she climbs even though only a handful of people watch.

  If I was able to clip into full VIR, I’d be able to experience the virtual environment Maggie has selected. According to my screen, in VIR she would appear to be floating somewhere above the Karakorum mountain range on old Earth. The 2-D feed shows me only the screen behind Maggie, which is currently streaming a default feed. This one shows the night sky as seen from our home on Demeter, the familiar stars circling across the black of empty space. On my screen, Maggie is spinning through that sky, alone but for the stars. With a touch on the board, I stabilize her image, now it looks as though the universe itself is revolving around her.

  In the zero-G the pod has been set to, Maggie’s long hair moves of its own volition, whorls and loops of gold coiling and uncoiling between the stars, filling the blackness with her light.

  There is a phrase that comes to mind when I see Maggie: the unfatigued veracity of eternal light. I read the words in a book of my mother’s when I was young. They are attributed to an old Earth art critic, John Ruskin, and are believed to refer to mountains, though their precise meaning is lost, like much of old Earth history. When I watch Maggie, I feel like I understand something of the heart of Ruskin’s words.

  Beneath the pad of my left ring finger is the slow, steady pulse of Maggie’s heartbeat. A month before we married, Maggie and I visited a small private clinic on Demeter and had muscle tissue harvested from our hearts. That tissue was grown in culture, then the cultured cells and our hearts marked with paired q-dots. I don’t understand the physics of it all, but the process resulted in the cells always beating with the rhythm of the mother organs, no matter the distance between them. The tiny beating new organs were wrapped in a permeable membrane, the resultant capsule catching the light like a fragment of smooth ice. After we spoke our vows, the priestess inserted those capsules beneath the skin of our left ring fingers: our versions of wedding rings. In my chest, my heart skips and slides, but Maggie’s heartbeat beneath my skin is always steady.

  The speakers crackle, and Maggie’s deep, resonant voice fills the bridge: “I can feel them. Icefall. The Mountain. Even here in greyspace, I can feel them. They speak to me, they call to me. They—”

  I mute the speakers, unclip from the pod feed. The screen flickers and resets to a view from the ship’s external cameras. Greyspace, the folded space beneath normal space, is just that: grey and flat, utterly featureless, unchanging. I’ve always found it soothing to watch.

  Leaning back, I catch my reflection in the screen, and realize I’m clutching at the thick gold collar encircling my throat. Against the fingers of my left hand, the metal is solid, warmed from contact with my skin. To the pseudo-prosthetic of my right, the collar feels cold, only half there. That old sense of loss stirs, and I turn away from the screen, force myself to loosen both hands from the collar. I cannot help but brush my fingers against it as I lower them, feeling the rough place where a pendant had once been welded.

  Looking at my hands, you can’t see any difference between them. The pseudo-prosthetic was grown from my own cells over a synthetic matrix: the nails grow, the skin sloughs off, and the flesh bleeds red when cut. The surgeons say it should feel no different to my left hand. The nerves are intact, the muscles strong. But to me, there is always a difference. Beneath my left hand, the universe feels alive. Beneath the right, there is only coldness, only death.

  Even though I only performed checks less than a ship hour ago, I cycle through our systems again to distract myself. Notifications flicker in a corner of the board as the ship attempts to calculate when we will arrive within the Icefall system. Greyspace within the system twists unpredictably, an ever-changing labyrinth that throws ships into real space at random. Not even our AI—newest generation and heavily modified by Maggie—has been able to give us more than a two-week window of ship time in which we should arrive.

  A headache is beginning to tighten behind my eyes, the pain deepening quickly enough for me to know that it isn’t just a simple headache, but something far worse: a cerebral storm. I rub the knotted scars on my temples, though I know the action will do little to ease the pain. This ache comes from deeper within; pathways in my brain trying to connect to the place where, so briefly, my VIR implants had been. It feels like lightning lashing against an invisible barrier, an electrical potential building up and up until all it can do is explode.

  I close my eyes, press my knuckles hard against the scars. The worst part of the storms isn’t the pain, or the nausea or vertigo. It’s the fact that, even in the middle of feeling as though my body and mind are tearing apart, I remember the VIR world.

  In the hospital, after they removed the implants, they taught me methods to anchor myself in the physical world. I draw on them now, breathing slowly, pressing my hands against the edge of the board. Focusing on the solidity of it beneath my palms, on the weight of my body in my chair. The console is real, the chair is real, my body is real. Maggie’s heartbeat beneath my skin is real. This world—the only world I have—is real.

  The pressure in my skull begins to ease.

  I breathe out slowly, start to relax. It’s then that the storm
slams into me full force. Blinding white pain, and I am sitting in a green field, a yellow flower cupped in my hands. I can see each individual grain of pollen, the tiny undulations on the edges of the petals as they unfurl one by one. The flower smells pure and sweet, and above me, the blue sky arches, vast and infinite. I exhale and the grass ripples around me. I can see every blade, and deeper, I hear the workings of what lives in the dark: worms and beetles, the creatures that make the earth itself. I go outward and inward at once, the weight of planets and stars against my skin, hear the vibrations of things smaller than atoms. It is all a song, the whole universe singing to me. The world expands with every breath, and I am a part of everything and everything is a part of me—

  —and all of the color snaps to white. I am cold. I am freezing. I can’t feel my right hand at all now and oh Mother, I am dying—

  Static prickles over my skin, and a dull electric shock tugs at the back of my skull. All at once, those neural pathways cease firing, my vision cuts off as if by a knife, the cerebral storm halted.

  I blink slowly. The pain is gone, but I cannot focus my eyes properly. Everything shimmers as though I am underwater. I breathe in, static curls down my throat, into my lungs. I realize that the AI’s interface hologram has activated, flowed around me to envelope me completely in its field.

  Revulsion twisting in me, I pull myself out of the field, fall into the navigator’s chair—the chair the AI is programmed to occupy. Though the storm has ceased, my head is still aching, and I fumble for the medkit, inject myself with a painkiller, pointedly ignoring the AI. This drug is fast acting, with minimal side effects. As I’m replacing the medkit, my wrist comm buzzes. On its display, a message from Maggie: You okay? She’ll have felt my heart accelerate with the onset of the cerebral storm. My hands are shaking so much that it takes me three attempts, but I finally manage a response in the affirmative.

  The AI watches me, utterly impassive. This generation comes with a package of standard visages, from female and male all through the spectrum to null gender. It also comes with the ability to design your own custom visage. Maggie spent months scouring records to create the face watching me now: George Mallory, the man who may or may not have been the first person to summit what he called Mount Everest.

  I clear my throat, force myself to speak: “AI, switch back to default visage.”

  The corner of the AI’s mouth turns up before the hologram switches to default. The genderless face expressionless, its dark hair cropped in a soft fuzz close to its scalp. Soften the edges to female, color the skin a half dozen shades darker and add some night to its eyes, and it could be my reflection.

  The ship shudders hard, the walls around me crackling like fracturing bone. I tumble from my chair, landing hard enough that I feel the pain of it even through the cushion of painkillers. The AI watches as I claw my way back into my chair, switch on Maggie’s 2-D feed again to check on her. She’s still floating amidst the stars, silent now, her eyes closed. Her heartbeat is slow and even.

  I scan our systems. The blood vessels in my retinas are pulsing, a ghost image that spiderwebs over the board’s readouts. Several systems read amber, but nothing—thank the Mother—is red.

  Grey bleeds from the screen, is replaced by static. The external cameras are one of the systems reading amber. I send out maintenance bots to tend to them, scan the board again to work out what happened.

  We have fallen—no, we have been thrown—out of greyspace.

  “We have entered Icefall local space,” the AI says in its unaccented voice. “Negotiating with Icefall Station.”

  The pulse behind my eyes throbs harder. I reach across, close the channel the AI has opened. “I’m the pilot of this ship,” I say, my words almost a snarl. “You are programmed to navigate and perform basic ship maintenance only.” I open a new channel, deliberately picking a different frequency. It’s petty and I know it, but I don’t care. Despite the medication, the headache is tightening again around my skull, and I can feel the edge of the storm rolling closer. I drum my fingers on the edge of the board as I wait for the channel to establish. “I thought your programming was supposed to stop you from projecting into occupied space.”

  “My programming has been altered.”

  So that’s what Maggie was doing last night when she should have been sleeping. I have no idea why she would change that specific piece of programming.

  As I transfer pilot controls over to my side of the board, light ripples in the corner of my eye. The AI has switched back to the George Mallory visage. Another thing it was supposed to be forbidden from doing without an explicit command. I grit my teeth, wonder what else Maggie has changed.

  I know without looking that the AI is smiling, that self-assured expression so like the one Maggie wears when she knows she has won an argument. Maggie claims a genetic link to the long-dead human mountaineer, and though there is certainly a physical similarity between them, the claim cannot be proved or disproved now, with so much drowned or destroyed on old Earth. Even Mallory’s Everest is gone, the great mountains of the Himalaya shattered by earthquakes and war.

  The comm blinks green as a channel opens.

  “This is the Wanda Rutkiewicz on approach to Icefall Station,” I say. “Pilot Aisha Ashkani, one passenger, Margaret Malleore. Please acknowledge.”

  My voice becomes data, waves of energy spiraling through space. The first time I send, there is no return ping from the station, my voice lost somewhere between us and Icefall. The second time, the message finds its way through.

  When the station AI answers, its voice is threaded with static. “You are in advance of your course, Wanda Rutkiewicz.”

  My hands move over the board, checking dates and times. We have arrived precisely in the middle of our AI’s predicted two-week span of ship time. Icefall Station is old, its AI many generations obsolete. No knowing how corrupted it has become out here alone.

  “Icefall Station, do you require us to withdraw?” I ask.

  The channel crackles. The static reminds me of falling gravel, the first scattering of small rocks before an avalanche. It is the warning sound that all climbers fear. My muscles tighten reflexively, adrenaline coursing through my veins. I tell myself that it’s just sound, force my muscles to relax.

  The station AI’s voice finally cuts across the static. “Docking protocol is being relayed. Please proceed, Wanda Rutkiewicz.”

  I wait, but no data appears. Presuming another lost transmission, I’m about to request a resend when our engines vibrate and the ship begins to accelerate. Our AI has intercepted and is guiding us in.

  The headache is worsening again, my jaw muscles so tight I can hear the bones of my skull creak from the pressure. My bones sound like Wanda R.’s walls when we were thrown out of greyspace.

  I reach for the medkit again, inject a second dose of painkillers, stronger this time. This drug fuzzes my thoughts, blurs the corners of the world. Side effects I hate, but I hate the pain more. The AI watches me but says nothing. I’ve always found the holographic projection disconcerting, the way it can appear to be physically doing one thing while its core is processing a thousand other tasks. I preferred the AI version we ran a dozen generations ago. No face, just a voice. Much easier to pretend it was just another machine.

  I should switch the pilot controls back over to me, but instead I lean back and wait for the medication to work. I wonder what use I really have here. The most minor of the AI’s subroutines is as competent a pilot as I am, and on Icefall, Maggie will not be able to use my help on her climb, where outside assistance of any kind is forbidden.

  And then Maggie glides into the bridge, and I forget about reasons. I only care that I am here with her.

  The zero-G of the VIR pod seems to cling to her, her hair a glimmering halo. As always, she’s dressed in white, her ship suit clinging to the lean muscles of her thighs and outlining the broad, muscular plane of her chest.

  She holds up her left ring finger, a question in
her eyes. Are you okay?

  The second dose of medication is kicking in, moving me away from the edge of the storm. Maggie’s presence eases everything the chemicals cannot. I nod, feeling my heartbeat slow.

  I slip out of my chair, and Maggie flows into the space I leave. I can see the faint vibration of the VIR implants set beneath the skin of her temples as she interfaces with the ship. Sometimes at night, in the few hours we spend lying side by side, I can hear them humming against her bones. Almost like music.

  Maggie and the AI exchange glances, no doubt communicating in VIR. I notice for the first time the AI is wearing a ship suit identical to Maggie’s. I cannot remember if it was wearing it before Maggie entered the bridge.

  The static on the screens fades to black as they bring the external cameras online. Maggie’s hands do not touch the board, all her work is done in VIR. It is for my benefit that we have 2-D screens and a tactile board. The AI “sees” with the ship’s sensors, melding the entire electromagnetic spectrum into something my human brain can’t even begin to imagine. And Maggie has the world beyond the world, Virtual Interfaced Reality, deeper and brighter and more than anything I will ever see with my flesh and blood eyes. On most ships, the bridge is a flat grey room, all of the controls existing only in VIR.

  As one, the screens flick to white, the bridge filling with cold light. I shudder as a chill runs through me, and I’m glad when the screens fade to an external view.

  Against the black of space, Icefall is the exact blue of Maggie’s eyes. The angle of our approach shows us only the edge of the planet’s single icebound continent, the land mass white as the fabric of Maggie’s suit. The simplicity of it is soothing: white and blue and nothing else. I breathe out slowly, threads of muscle tension ease and let go.

  Our engines shudder and we change course.

  The Mountain comes into view.

  Those threads in my muscles pull taut, and the headache crashes into me again. Some great beast, too vast for me to see or comprehend, has reached out and sunk claws into the places in my skull and belly where light has never touched, where nothing should ever touch, and those claws are twisting . . .