Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  I am one-shot learning.

  I am the singularity.

  “I’m transhuman.”

  He laughs, short and sharp, as if I should be pleased. “You are transhuman.”

  “Did Don know?” It’s a stupid and entirely pointless question. I already know the answer. Tremors shake through me like aftershocks.

  “Of course he—”

  “Was he like me? Is he—”

  But he puts out my feeble little fire with a snort. “He was the bio-lead in designing and making you.”

  You’re such a fucking disappointment, Evie.

  “Did they all—” I realise that I’m crying only when I can no longer see or draw breath.

  He reaches across the space between us, grabs for my arm again. “I will give you another shot, Evie.”

  Of course they all knew. Of course they did. They are the controller and I am the child network. I remember what they have created for me. I feel what they have chosen for me. I have what they have given me. Through feeders and electrified floors and operandum levers. I do what they have decided I should do.

  Free will is an illusion after all.

  “I know this is a shock. But you can withstand a lot worse.”

  I try to swallow. I probably have a spec. A manual. A troubleshooting intranet page.

  “Now, you shouldn’t have killed him. You were programmed to resist the stimuli. But this time you didn’t. And that is a problem.” He shrugs again as if we’re discussing rising damp. “But, again, not an insurmountable one.”

  I stare across at him. At the long fingers he dangles between his legs, the purple of the veins at his wrists. The smile, smile, smile that never reaches the grey of his eyes.

  “A few more tweaks yet, Evie. Seems you’re not as incorruptible as we’d hoped.”

  I’m breathing loud through my nose like a bull. When I get up again, he gets up again. When I look at the Nostromo’s exit, he looks at it too. When I frown, he smiles.

  “You are free to go, Evie.”

  I run without being sure that I can. Past the living quarters, the bunk rooms, the labs, the stairs down to Engineering. My module and the Skinner box. I don’t look at any of them any more than I do all those faceless locked white doors.

  At the airlock, I stop. Key in my code over and over again until he comes up alongside me, smile intact.

  “Not quite yet,” he says. “Six minutes to landing.”

  And it only then occurs to me that I must have lain on that bloody plastic bench for twenty-nine days.

  I lean against the nanotube wall, count my breaths and listen to the fast streams and hot springs. Sink down onto the grass when my knees finally give out. Wait.

  When I hear the exterior hiss and exhale of depressurisation, I scramble back onto my feet. Watch for the entry pad to turn green.

  When it does, I key in my numbers again, step back as the mechanisms start vibrating, clunking, turning. “I want to see Mas.”

  Smile. Shrug. “You won’t be seeing him again.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I have never, ever managed to lose anything gracefully.

  A breath of air. Its whisper. Promise.

  He looks at me, squeezes my shoulders hard. “We’ll call you when we need you again. You behave, and we’ll set you up with the man—or woman—of your dreams next time.”

  And then I really do want to pour a cocktail of nanites down his throat.

  Instead, I push open the airlock.

  Climb up out of my Skinner box.

  I feel him watch me go. When I turn back around, he winks at me, reaches up for the hatch.

  “See you next simulation, Evie.”

  And then I’m just standing in the middle of a desert of petrified wood and badlands. Cliffs and canyons of sandstone and limestone, painted with grey- and red-coloured bands like Jupiter’s angry atmosphere. Alone.

  * * *

  It’s less of an oasis than a truck stop with no trucks. Except those that once a month restock the shitty little shack-shop with Coca-Cola and curly fries; the even shittier little lean-to bar with bad beer and peanuts.

  The white barman has dreads and a Che Guevara T-shirt. He always listens to terrible reggae. An Astro suit perches on a barstool, drinks tomato juice, and does a bad job of pretending not to look at me. There is another, I know, inside the shop, pretending to shoot the shit with the till guy, who has no till. No bloody customers. I have been here so many times, and yet it never feels familiar. Never feels like a respite from either before or after.

  I shift in my seat, trace the cool beads of sweat at the neck of my bottle of bad beer. I look at my watch. The SUV will come in another two hours. Will take me to a crap hotel in Tucson, where I will spend hours, days, weeks pretending to have fun. Shopping, swimming, shagging. Telling myself that the minute I think of somewhere else—somewhere better—to go, I’ll go.

  When Mas yanks back the wicker chair opposite me and sits down, the Astro suit practically falls off his stool.

  “Are you okay?”

  “What?” I seize inside like a clock’s movement locking up: its wheels and pinion gears wound so tight it cannot move, cannot function. I try to stand up, my boots scrabbling for purchase on the hot rocky ground. “You’re not … What the fuck are you doing here? … I don’t—”

  When he reaches for me with his big hands, I rear back, knock over my beer bottle. Watch it spin and fizz, because it’s something to look at other than him.

  “They told you.” His voice is flat.

  And of course, I want to say, Why didn’t you tell me? too badly to say anything at all.

  “How could I tell you?” he says. And his eyes are so clear. “Baby, how could I tell you?”

  And maybe they are valid questions. I don’t know any more.

  “Evie,” he says, and moves just enough that he gives me momentary respite from the bright dry sun, places his cool hands over mine.

  I’m no one’s baby. I’m not even anyone’s Evie. I’m like those nanites chasing through Don on a corrupted, manipulated program. I probably don’t even have a name. I’m probably a number. Just like a prisoner. A killer.

  “I’m a fucking cyborg.”

  “Jesus Christ.” He gets up, comes around the table, lifts me out of my chair like I’m a bag of groceries, and I’m too busy grabbing hold of him, too busy pressing every part of me against him to care. To think.

  He holds me as I cry, as I choke, as I retch, as I forget and then remember how to breathe. He rubs my back, he kisses my hair, whispers apologies that aren’t cool and white like spring blossoms, but hot and fierce and furious like a funnelled vortex of fire and wind.

  “Here,” he whispers, when my grief finally runs out of fuel. I feel the sharp cool press of something metal against my palm. “Take this and go as far and as fast as you can.”

  I go still. I become calm. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. Press my face against his neck. Smooth my free hand against his scalp, his big shoulder.

  “It’s a tracker,” he says against my skin.

  I don’t doubt for a minute that I already have a tracker, embedded so deep in my code that I will never recognise it. But this. This is something I can throw away. This is something that at any time I can choose to throw away. Or keep.

  Maybe it’s just more conditioned stimuli. Because you threaten to take away what they have. What you’ve allowed them to have. What you’ve given them. And they have to know that he is what I want. They have to know that he is the man of my dreams.

  But I am unbalanced. I have no electrons left. Only empty space and fantasies. Where nothing that was once me lives. They probably don’t know that. I’m not hard and brittle like osmium. I am not impervious. Untouchable. Unreachable. I have never been satisfied with what they have allowed me to have. What they have given me. And I am not predictable. I didn’t do what they had hypothesised I would do.

  “There’s a Hummer half a mile northwest,�
�� Mas says. “The keys are in the ignition. Go. Now.”

  “I can’t. We can’t.”

  “We can.” His smile is brilliant. “We can do whatever we like.”

  And it’s not the Astro suit at the bar, now speaking frantically into a satellite phone, that finally convinces me, it’s remembering that any animal or bird inside a Skinner box eventually resigns itself to the fate that’s already theirs. Eventually understands that once you become a test subject, an experiment, you stay one forever. My mistake was believing that this was only a bad thing. Was only giving up. But the nanites knew better. They knew it was freedom. And they are my children. They are my child network.

  I kiss him. I let him kiss me.

  Heat, heartbeat, clean grass, and coffee.

  “I’ll find you, Evie,” Mas whispers. He draws back from me, cups my face in his hands. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Remember?”

  He is my reward. Because I have earned him. In so many ways, I have created him. He is my man.

  “They’ll probably never stop,” I say.

  “I know. But it doesn’t matter.” He still goes on smiling. And I see that he is nervous, I see that he is scared. And that it doesn’t matter. “The world is our Skinner box, Evie.”

  I climb off his lap. The Astro suit climbs off his stool. Behind me, I can hear the creaking squeal of the shitty little shack-shop door.

  Mas stands up, grins so wide all I can see is his teeth. “You go now. I’ll take care of them.” And he winks with those eyes the colour of soil after rain.

  But I shake my head.

  I want to wonder what’s behind locked doors. I want to open them. Freedom is only free will. That’s all it’s ever been.

  “We’ll take care of them.”

  And when I rip through the stitches in my suit’s sleeve, and pull out the tiny vial of nanites, I grin with all of my teeth too.

  About the Author

  Carole Johnstone is a British Fantasy Award winning writer from Lanarkshire, Scotland. She has been publishing short fiction for more than ten years and has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best of the Best and Best Horror of the Year and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series in the US, and Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy. She is a regular contributor to Interzone, the UK’s premiere science fiction magazine, has been published by Titan Books, Prime Books, and PS Publishing, and has written Sherlock Holmes stories for Constable & Robinson and Running Press.

  “Signs of the Times”, a short story about the end of days in Leith; her debut short story collection, The Bright Day is Done; and a novella, Cold Turkey, were all short-listed for British Fantasy Awards.

  Copyright © 2019 by Carole Johnstone

  Art copyright © 2019 by Adam Baines

  The Song

  Erinn L. Kemper

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  Whale song echoed through the water in long, wistful moans. A pod calling to one another, repeating the same refrain.

  Dan paused in his inspection of the pier and floated at the ten-meter mark. A slight chill filtered through his wet suit and he tucked his gloved hands into his armpits to keep them warm.

  Beyond the steel lattice that supported the oil rig—repurposed and renamed SeaRanch 18—ranged the twilight murk of open sea. No hulking shadows drifted along the edges of visibility. If the whales came within eyesight, their song would give him one bitch of an earache.

  Pods rarely ventured near the rig. Some orcas had been acting up, but that was in a distant feeding ground. And sharks only circled in when the cowboys harvested a whale to process and package for transport. With no active orders, it was a good time for Dan to do a round of maintenance.

  Whale music had a weight to it, a ponderous, profound theme. The deeper notes resonated in his tissue and filled him with sweet nostalgia. A stuttering creak swept through—the slow rocking of a porch swing, a patio door caught in a summer draft. Then, the soft groan of settling into freshly laundered sheets for a long, long sleep.

  Bright chirps punctuated the song today. Humpback calves, perhaps, learning to sing like their fathers.

  Dan ran his hand along one of the steel legs that anchored the rig to the ocean floor. Bits of metal sloughed from the surface and drifted off in ashy motes. A few taps with his dive knife made a dull thud, rather than the cheerful ping of healthy steel.

  “Good thing I didn’t wait ’til the scheduled check. We’ve got evidence of corrosion. Might be time to replace the magnesium.” He spoke into his headset.

  Crackling static came back as Marge from maintenance replied. “Corrosion on Support One, got it.”

  He’d already inspected the lower docks that floated around the rig like tentacles. A bit of scraping and painting would get them up to snuff.

  Then the whales had started to sing, drawing him deeper into the water where the music compelled him to stay.

  “If the block of sacrificial metal has failed, it’s earlier than usual. Probably not pure enough magnesium. Or the connection to the legs is failing. I’ll check the other three, see if there’s any deterioration there.”

  He swam to the next leg. Solid. Same as the last two.

  “Looks like the problem is with the connection to the first. Easy fix. Lucky we caught it early.” He pictured Marge up there in her blue coveralls, pen clutched in her paint-stained fingers, adding to her list of things to keep her team busy.

  The whale song drifted away as he ascended.

  At five meters, he paused for a decompression stop—nothing but the click and puff of his own breathing to keep him company. He continued up, swallowing and wiggling his jaw back and forth until his eardrums popped, relieving pressure before the ache turned to pain.

  Norwegian-based High North Alliance claims the carbon footprint resulting from eating whale meat is substantially lower than that of beef. One serving of whale meat contains 181% of your daily intake of iron, and 55% of your daily intake of B12. It is low in fat and cholesterol. As of 2010, fluke meat cost up to two hundred dollars per kilogram, more than triple the price of belly meat.

  —Dr. Suzanne Anderson, How Do You Like Your Whale?

  Dan stopped to grab some lunch in the mess before heading to his quarters for a shower.

  Swimming always made him hungry. When he was a kid in tadpole class, he wouldn’t get out of the water until the very last minute. Floating on his back, he’d relish the weightlessness, the other children’s splash and chatter bubbling around him. His mother’s frowning face would appear over him, her mouth moving, words muted. She’d always bring a big bag of snacks for his post-swim refueling. In his teens, a round of fevers and ear infections kept him out of the water until he thought he’d dry up. Alien voices strained toward him, as though rising from aquatic depths. He spent solitary days in his room writing lines for poems he never completed, words that filtered through his muddied thoughts but never merged.

  Alone, alone, alone, alone.

  Adrift, adrift, alone, alone.

  When he first started diving he’d worried the scarring on his eardrums would keep him from deep-sea work, limit his earning potential. Luck was on his side there. Only once, after his wife died, had his ears started buzzing, sounds fading in and out. Stress-related deafness, the doctors said when they suspended his dive license and sent him to the company shrink. He was relieved when his hearing came back after her funeral.

  Mess tray in hand, he walked the line. Baked beans, mac and cheese, chicken strips, pickled beets, mushy peas. Comfort food from the freezer or a can. Three weeks since they’d seen any fresh produce. Two weeks since they’d brought in relief staff.

  Save-the-whale extremists had bombed the last transport before it even left dock, no survivors. The FREE WILLY and HEAR THEIR CRY, DON’T LET THEM DIE! signs hadn’t done much to dissuade SeaRanch staff. Equipment sabotage and bombings were another story. SeaRanch was having trouble finding workers willing to risk the trip. No
body knew when the next transport of relief staff would come.

  Not that Dan was complaining. The money was good, his account climbing into seven figures now. He was no longer saving for a house with room to grow, away from the city, where a kid could actually play outside—his wife’s dream, not his. But he continued saving, mostly out of habit. Maybe he’d think of something to do with the money. A dream of his own. And, really, he had nothing calling him back to land—just an empty apartment with a half-eaten box of cereal in the cupboard and the TV remote perched on the arm of his foldout sofa. Better than the mess he’d had to clean up when his wife took permanent leave. He’d already forgotten the exact color of her eyes and the way her skin smelled after they’d made love. Almost.

  A bump from behind and Dan’s lunch plate skidded close to the tray’s curved edge.

  “Shit, sorry. I thought…” One of the new scientists, easily identified by her green coveralls, caught the dinner roll that tumbled from Dan’s tray. “I assumed you’d moved along. I’m a total klutz.”

  “No worries, doc. Just daydreaming. You can have that one.” Dan grabbed another dinner roll and moved off in search of an empty table. He picked one in the far corner of the room and set his glass and utensils in their proper spots around his plate. Knife blade-in, bottom of the fork in line with the rest.

  “Mind if I join you?” The scientist had followed him to the table. She bit her lip as she waited for him to swallow his first bite of pickled beet.

  Dan nodded and cleared his throat. “Be my guest. Mi mesa es su mesa.”

  “Cheers. Seems like most of you guys prefer to eat alone. Really, everyone here is pretty antisocial. I expected a lot more, you know, camaraderie.” She dragged her fork through her beans, leaving a winding river behind. “My name’s Suzanne.”

  Suzanne.

  Suzanne with the youthful face

  And winter-grey hair.

  Suzanne who smiles shyly,

  Gazes at me with hazel eyes