Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  And so it was done. The new palace was next door to the old one, with a gleaming pathway cut between the limerick grasses that grew wild on the mountainside. It was even more beautiful than the first. Its turrets were spun out of lost screenplays and its galleries were haunted by the mournful ghosts of singer-songwriters who never quite made it big. The King was sure that the Princess would be happy now.

  And she was, for a time. The Princess liked newness, and adventure, and she recorded a well-received album in the basement of the new palace. But after a few weeks, she became restless again.

  The King thought and thought. ‘If she doesn’t like this one, I’ll build her another,’ he said to the innkeeper’s wife, who put her head in her hands.

  ‘I know you’re trying to be romantic, but you’re approaching the question of female agency all wrong,’ she said.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ said the King.

  ‘Well, for instance,’ said the innkeeper’s wife. ‘I don’t even get a name in this story.’

  ‘How is that my fault?’

  The innkeeper’s wife looked at the King for a long time without saying anything.

  ‘Alright,’ sighed the King. ‘I’ll put it on my to-do list. Right now, I’ve got a palace to build.’

  The next palace was an enormous treehouse, built into the branches of the three tallest redwoods in the forest. The court had to be winched up in buckets or flown up on the backs of griffons, as there were no stairs to speak of, and an elevator would have spoiled the look of the thing. Walkways strung with fairy lanterns connected all the passageways, and the wind whispered dirty, earthy lyrics as it muttered through the leaves. Ravens and starlings and bright birds of paradise nested in the high eaves, and great dances were held on platforms in the canopy, where you could see the whole Kingdom sparkling in the endless starlight.

  ‘It’s great,’ said the Princess, ‘it’s really great. Let’s spend the week here.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d want to spend your life here,’ said the King.

  ‘Let’s come back to that question,’ said the Princess, taking him by the hand and leading him to bed.

  By the end of the year, the King had built the Princess ninety-nine houses.

  There were brutalist modern apartments and twee little cottages and cloud-castles built of the sharp, lovely dreams of underpaid academics who really wanted to be novelists. But still the Princess would leave, and go missing for days, and turn up in a dive bar a week later draped in reprobates and the obscene sweat of songwriting.

  By the time she walked out of the ninety-ninth house, the King didn’t bother looking for her, and went to numb his heart for a little while in his library.

  After a week, he was only a little bit worried.

  After two weeks, the words swam and snickered on the page in front of him, and he couldn’t concentrate for worry.

  By the end of a month, he was frantic. Where had she gone? What had he done wrong?

  ‘What is any of it worth,’ said the King, out loud, ‘if I can have everything I want, but I can’t have her?’

  The words hung in the air like obscure art on a gallery wall, and the King had a great idea for a new story. He saw it all in his head. It would be a story about a boy, and a girl, and a kingdom, and a quest, and there’d be enough angst for a trilogy, and probably some sizzling gypsies.

  The King picked up his pen.

  The Princess put her hand down on the blank page. She stood beside him, and the room fell away, and they were on the steps of the castle, and the air crackled with electricity, and her rage was beautiful and terrifying.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Stop that right now. I’m not a girl in one of your stories. Don’t you get it?’

  ‘I never thought you were,’ said the King.

  The Princess raised one ineffable eyebrow. ‘So why do you keep trying to write me into one?’

  ‘Because I love you, and I don’t want to lose you,’ said the King.

  She took his face in both her hands and kissed him.

  ‘I love you too much to let you write walls around me,’ she said.

  ‘But what sort of story can I write you into, if it isn’t one of mine?’

  ‘You can’t,’ said the Princess, folding her arms in a way that terrified the King more than he could possibly express. ‘I don’t want you to write me into any story. I want to make up my own story. You can be in it, if you like, but that’s all.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ said the King. ‘Everyone knows my stories are the best. You’ll mess it up. You won’t get the ending right.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ said the Princess, ‘but I want to try.’

  ‘You’ll skip vital exposition,’ said the King. ‘You’ll put the plot twists in all the wrong places.’

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ said the Princess.

  ‘You see?’ said the King. ‘That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.’

  Then he sat down on the castle steps and threw up into the geraniums.

  ‘Colin,’ said the Princess. ‘Stop being such a drama queen. That’s my job.’

  ‘The hundredth house is my heart,’ said the King. ‘Will you live there, at least?’

  The Princess started to cry.

  ‘I hate it when you do that,’ she said.

  Then she kissed him again.

  ‘This isn’t ever going to get easier, is it?’ he asked, a very long time later, when they’d come up for air.

  ‘I hope not,’ said the Princess. ‘That would be boring.’

  ‘You know,’ said Colin, drawing her onto his lap, ‘in all my life, I never met a girl who could match me.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Melanie. ‘In all my life, I never met a boy who could catch me.’

  She laughed, and it sounded like the first chord of the song you loved most when you were young and longing.

  Then she ran.

  The King followed.

  It wasn’t the end.

  About the Author

  Laurie Penny is an award-winning author, journalist, screenwriter, essayist, public speaker and activist*. She has written several books, including Bitch Doctrine, Unspeakable Things, and Everything Belongs To The Future. She writes essays, columns, features and gonzo journalism about politics, social justice, pop culture, feminism, technology and mental health and she gets time, she also writes creepy political science fiction. She makes words for money, trouble and social change for lots and lots of places including The Guardian, Longreads, Time Magazine, Buzzfeed, The New York Times, Vice, Salon, The Nation, The New Statesman, The New Inquiry, Tor.com and Medium. When she’s not on the road, Laurie is based between London and Los Angeles.

  Copyright © 2019 by Laurie Penny

  Art copyright © 2019 by Kuri Huang

  The Touches

  Brenda Peynado

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  I’ve been touched exactly four times in real life. The first was when my mother gave birth to me, picking up her bacteria as I slid out of her womb, the good stuff as well as the bad. My father caught me, and his hands, covered in everything that lives on our skins, made contact then, the bacteria, yeast, shed viruses, and anything else from under his fingernails spreading to my newborn epidermis. That was the second touch.

  I must have been gooey and crying, and they both held me for a moment before the robot assigned to me snipped my cord, took me up in its basket, and delivered me to the cubicle where I would live the rest of my life. There it hooked me into the virtual reality mindset, the body-adapting and stimulating cradle station. Then Nan, what I eventually named my robot, turned on its caretaker mode and sent my mind into clean. Back in dirty, everything that came with me—the blanket my mother wrapped me in, the towel that wiped placenta from my face, the suction ball that pulled out the goop from my nose and mouth, the basket—was incinerated. That was right after the first Plague Legislation, back when they were still allowing natural births and
cohabitating marriage units.

  I wish I remembered it. My parents told me about those moments of seeing me in real life, smelling me. It wasn’t the same, holding me in clean, they said. They’d tuck the blanket around me and sing me a song, and sometimes my mother would tell me what it felt like to actually hold me. Then, my avatar still passed out back in my virtual reality bedroom, I’d pull out of clean and Nan would be above me, smiling with her LCD face screen, unhooking me from the wires and hugging me with her white plastic arms.

  My parents are dead now. Their cubicle in dirty was incinerated. The only thing I have of the moment they held me is a video Nan recorded when she pulled me away from them and brought me here.

  I’ve only been thinking of it lately when Telo and I go to bed. I inherited the code for my parents’ clean house, so the ephemera of their stuff is still there in the rooms, although I turned my childhood bedroom into the master bedroom and recoded the algorithm for how much space I could take up with the house. I’ve been thinking about which room would belong to the baby.

  Since we elected to be assigned a baby, my avatar’s belly has been growing. Most of the time I don’t notice it, despite the code putting pressure feedback on my movement algorithms and my walk turning into a waddle. I’m getting stronger; that’s what I mainly feel. But when I get into bed, it’s hard to get comfortable. Technically, Telo could have been the one to go through the pregnancy algorithm, since we don’t believe in gender-norming or any of those religious restrictions. He’s the more nurturing of the two of us, and when I see him with his charges at the childcare center, surrounded by big-eyed, jumping kids that call him Mr. Telo, or more often with the younger ones, Mistelo, it melts me. But that’s why I had to be the one to get pregnant. Supposedly going through all the algorithm motions of natural birth, even when you’re getting the baby from a test tube, activates all those love centers and makes you feel more connected. I’m the one who needs the extra help.

  Tonight, Telo pauses at the bedroom doorway, which tells me sex is on the horizon, and reaches for my hand. He scoops me up and I giggle at the rush upwards. My face in his chest, he starts to rock me. It’s the only thing that will turn me on. My therapist thinks I’m trying to get at whatever primal feeling that would have unleashed in me if it were real touch. But since the pregnancy algorithm started showing, it’s awkward and I don’t fit right. He squeezes too hard on my belly and I can’t lose myself like I used to. Telo can tell that I’m flinching. He sighs deeply, and then drops me on the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Once the algorithm’s run its course, things will get back to normal.”

  “It’s not your fault,” he says, and rolls over. “Goodnight, love.”

  And then we put our avatars to sleep, and I emerge into dirty.

  There’s Nan again, her face screen peering into my VR immersion ball. “Hi, sunshine,” she says. She unhooks my headset, pulls me out of the ball so I don’t start spinning it through my range of motion, and starts brightening lights slowly to get my eyes used to the idea that I’m in the real, dirty world again.

  Not that I want to see much in dirty, anyways. Outside it’s gray and ruined earth, trying to heal itself. All the superbugs—microbes and viruses that evolved immunity to antibiotics, that melted out of the polar ice caps and were released into the oceans, bugs we hadn’t seen for a million years—they’re all still out there, proliferating. Inside, the cubicle is a standard-issue sanitized room: only enough to feed yourself, hug your robot like you’re supposed to, bathe when you need, and then plug right back in and sleep along with your avatar. Every crack is sealed, every intake and retake valve opened only once a vacuum is established in the rest of the system. Back before the toilets were vacuum-sealed, they would spew all their bugs into the air, infecting everyone who used the same ventilation system, killing entire apartment complexes. It’s revolting, knowing how even the bacteria we need is mutating on our very skins, inside us, just a roll of the dice before they turn into something deadly; knowing that if the seals around our doors were to give way, we’d probably be puking our guts out within the week, killed by a bird flu or Ancient Mariner Infection or Limb-Taking Staph or Airborne HIV. I’m itching to log back into clean where none of that matters.

  “Time to eat,” Nan announces brightly, a vacuum-sealed precooked meal arriving down the chute. “Beef chili.”

  It’s chicken and potatoes—I can see that even blinking against the light. Nan’s glitches have been getting worse, but I haven’t gotten around to ordering spare parts. I know it’s important. Without our personal robotics assistants that function as our doctors, our caretakers, our alarm systems, we wouldn’t have survived past the first sweep of plagues. Without the drones and army of specialty robots meant to take our place in the outer, dirty world, farming and manufacturing and constructing, we would have to expose ourselves.

  Best I can tell, Nan’s power supply is part of the problem. It’s shorting and restarting her modules at different times, and the desynchronization makes her go buggy.

  “Remind me tomorrow to order a new power supply,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says, “babycakes.”

  “Telo?” Telo, a pro at logging into the caretaker units while at work, has logged into Nan. I hate when he does that. I feel naked in dirty, my real self less attractive than my avatar, my hair matted and greasy because no one can smell me alone in my cubicle.

  “Surprise,” he says with Nan’s voice.

  He hugs me with her white plastic arms, the way Nan is programmed to do every night. The hugs are supposed to be soothing, meant to combat the developmental disorders of a lifetime of not being touched, but it’s awkward. Nan runs cold, and there’s no part of her that gives. I’ve thought of wrapping her in memory foam, but that would block her panels. At least in dirty, I’m not pregnant. My stomach is flat and my range of motion intact, and I can hug him back good and hard.

  He holds up the soap and makes Nan’s face a goofy grin, and I laugh and jump in the shower.

  But then Nan glitches again, and she just stands there frozen with the soap in midair, hung. Ten minutes later when she starts up again, she’s only Nan and Telo has logged out.

  * * *

  When I wake up in clean, morning light is slicing in through the blinds and the birdsong I’ve programmed is playing on a loop from the window. Telo is next to me in the bed, dead to the world. My hand passes through his shoulder; his avatar is empty and he hasn’t logged back into it. His avatar has been sleeping later and later these mornings. I wonder what he’s doing over there in dirty. Eating, voiding, getting ready for the morning? He’s told me he looks almost the same as his avatar, except his dark hair is a lot curlier, and he lets it grow long. He has a scar on his shoulder where he fell on a sharp corner of his immersion ball when his robot wasn’t looking. His avatar’s skin is as smooth as glass.

  “Remember to order a new power supply.” I hear Nan’s voice barely in range of my perception, her whispering into my headset back in dirty. I disabled her direct clean login after the last time hearing her voice loud above me made me jump out of my skin. This way, she’s soft and distant, the way I like the dirty world.

  I groan, stretch, try to remember where I left my virtual tablet before I logged out last time. If clean was unregulated, I could simply wish the tablet into my hands. I get annoyed that part of the legislation to create clean required that everything be tied to a physical representation as close to real life as possible. So we don’t become alien to ourselves, none of this living exclusively in our heads. They wanted to pretend the world was back the way they dreamed it. I get it—nostalgia. Even though none of us can eat in clean, my parents left the kitchen in the digital representation of the house they used to have in real life, and I didn’t code it out when I inherited because it was always there in my childhood. I use it as my meditation room where I try to imagine the smell of coffee.

  I find the tablet in the kitchen, blinking on a stool.<
br />
  Things have been tight since paying for our test-tube baby, so before I order the part, I check our bank account. But there’s more money in there than there should be, by at least five hundred bitcoins.

  Telo yawns loudly behind me, walking stiffly into the kitchen.

  “What’s this?” I say, and I show him the tablet screen.

  “Oh, I took on a few extra kids.”

  “More than a few.”

  “We talked about this, right? Wasn’t it what you wanted?”

  “Just be careful. If anything went wrong with a few of them at the same time…”

  “Nah. I’ve got all the luck. You shouldn’t worry about it. Off to work yet?” He leans against the doorframe, and god, his avatar is so beautiful. His dirty self, of course, looks less perfect, less symmetrical, and his eyebrows droop downwards. Still, the avatar is a cousin to him. Or at least that’s what he says. I’ve never logged into his robot, and I don’t want to. Even when he does it, it feels like looking into someone’s secret closet, invading the one time they can be alone.

  “Just as soon as I get this belly under control,” I say, pulling on the dress I’ve recoded for maternity.

  I ride the bus into the industry district. Avenue of the Giants features skyscrapers for the greatest minds in clean: the philosophers in the Commission for Digital Humanization, the engineers in the Commission for Stabilization, and the scientists in the Commission for Re-entry, my building. There doesn’t come a day when I’m not thankful that these are government task forces, instead of corporate-run research which would have guaranteed that only the rich would be able to be human or re-enter dirty once we figured out how to fight the diseases. I flash my badge at the Re-entry doors.

  In the lab, Alicia is dancing behind the blood samples while they run. This lab is set up with a corresponding lab over in dirty, manned by robots. Here, when Alicia puts in blood samples to run, robots put the real-life samples from humans or birds and set them spinning in the machine. It’s seamless. It makes me wonder what would happen if clean were ever perfect, if we could eat and smell and taste here. Would we ever want to leave? Would we even care about that other world we ruined?