A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  THE WARSHIP WAS finished, and there was still enough time for many deep breaths. The tool makers had reason for pride. Their dream had demanded all of their native genius, consuming capital and their empire while destroying every other strategy to deal with an increasing number of enemies. They had to win. No other route would save them from obliteration. And while winning still wasn’t assured, even with their flagship fueled and armed, the battle plans remained solid. That dense little sun was in position. The nudging solar flares were finished, the solar system exactly where it needed to be, and what promised to be a spectacular launch was about to commence. Those in charge weren’t demonstrative souls, but the occasion demanded festivities and self-congratulatory speeches as well as honors bestowed by important voices. Several honors were given to the storyteller, and ages later she remained proud enough to name each award. Or perhaps she was just being thorough. Which was in her nature, after all. Then with her voice turning soft, she mentioned that half of her sisters were chosen to ride the warship, in stasis but perpetually ready to come awake whenever the vast gray hull was battered by comets or enemy bombs. As an asset, she wouldn’t be scrapped. No, she would be frozen and carried along with the accompanying fleet. But after all of her steady selfless work, that critical duty felt like an insult. She implied that with her tone, then a brief silence. And finally, with one sharp confession. To a creature she barely knew, the tool admitted that a portion of her mind was doing nothing but wishing for a horrible, manageable disaster. Something foul would strike the warship, many sisters dying in the carnage, and then the tool makers would come to her with fresh work and many, many apologies.

  “I was watching,” she said. Then the words were repeated again and again, and Pamir gave up counting after twenty times. Then the watcher quit speaking, a considerable stillness taking hold of her body, and that stillness didn’t end when she spoke again.

  “That little sun struck its target. At the perfect moment, in the proper location, a small dense and relatively cool star dove into a much larger star, resulting in a fine explosion. A beautiful explosion.”

  “Explosions are always lovely,” Pamir agreed.

  “I was stationed aboard an auxiliary vessel safely removed from spectacle. But the heat of the blast, which was as rich as the outpouring light, could be felt. Could be relished. And those effects were minor next to the gravitational maelstrom. One star was swallowed by another, and a world-sized machine was set free. Without suffering any damage, by the way. But that event added nothing to its speed. No, the warship needed to plunge close to the quick-spinning, quick-moving black hole, and in turn, stealing away a portion of that enormous energy.

  “No other maneuver demands so much precision. You can imagine. Several of the ship’s giant engines were fired for the first time, and they didn’t fail. My ship struck its mark within centimeters of the ideal. Within the length of a hand. What I built pushed fabulously close to a collapsed star, and I watched, and in an instant the nearest point was reached, and that I watched, and then as the tides found their maximum, everything seemed well. I watched and nothing changed inside my gaze, and that’s when I discovered that, to my relief, I wasn’t a bitter entity wishing the worst for the others. This total success made me genuinely happy. My hyperfiber was at least adequate if not superior, and still watching, I decided to speak to my nearby sisters, telling them that perhaps in the future we could build a second warship of this caliber, or better, and employ it to explore one of our neighboring galaxies.”

  The words stopped.

  After a little while, Pamir said, “Tides,” and then, “No. They shouldn’t have mattered. A hull like that might have fractured a bit. But nothing that couldn’t be patched, in time.”

  One foot lifted, toes drawing a sphere.

  “You’re imagining common failures and simple consequences,” she said. “But that’s only because you’re a simple human, and why would you need to know anything else?”

  “Tell me what else,” he said.

  “Hyperfiber,” she said. “Those extraordinary bonds hold against every ordinary force. In most circumstances, the embedded power is out of reach. A contractor and his little tools have no need for these theoretical matters. But if each of those powerful bonds is shattered, and if the shattering happens in the proper, most awful sequence, energy is liberated. Not just the power available in our universe, but within countless adjacent realms too. Hyperfiber will burn, and it doesn’t burn gently. Not like hydrogen fuses or antimatter obliterates. No, if one billion warships with identical flaws have worked hard to place themselves in one position, inside one moment and one tiny volume, they are nearly the same bodies. And if identical fissures open in each of these realms... well, the strength of a trillion ships floods into your existence, and the meaning of your life evaporates inside one wild light, and an empire dies, and the universe surrounding you breaks into a celebration considerably more joyous than the grubby little party you were having just a few breaths ago...”

  IT WAS RARE for humans to enter the Avenue of Tools, and it was unprecedented for one of the Ship’s captains to walk among the residents. But this was a unique captain. Competence, seamless and steady competence, had carried Aasleen from being a very successful engineer into the highest ranks of the administration. This was a human who understood the nature and beauty of machines, and she made no secret about relishing the company of machines over her own species. It was even said that the lady’s husbands were robots and she had secret children who were cyborgs. That’s why some of the tools, seeing her so close, began to hope that maybe she was looking for a new mate, and maybe this would be their best day ever.

  But no, Aasleen was seeking one very particular tool, one using a string of names.

  A locally famous tool, as it happened.

  The captain found what she wanted soon enough. And the ancient tool wasn’t entirely surprised by its visitor. Yet ignorance was a good starting point in any relationship, and that’s why the tool said, “I’ve done nothing illegal.”

  “Have I accused you of crimes?” Aasleen asked.

  “My business remains within the letter of the law,” the tool added.

  Aasleen laughed at the game. Then her human hands unfolded the crudest possible note: permanent ink on a piece of human skin. The skin was supple and pale and mostly depleted of its genetic markers. But not entirely, and what remained held hints of a known criminal who had been chased by nobody for many aeons now. What mattered were the words on the parchment. “‘Madam captain, you’re planning to fly us close to a black hole,’” she read aloud. “‘The rendezvous is a few years off, but maybe you should think a little harder about your methods. And that’s why you should chat with a genuine expert in hyperfiber.’”

  She stopped reading. “At this point, your various names are listed.”

  The tool stood in the center of the artery, flanked by hundreds of motionless, intensely interested neighbors.

  “Do you ever speak to humans?” Aasleen asked.

  “I have, yes.”

  “Recently?”

  “None recently,” the tool said.

  “Do you know any humans at all?”

  She said, “I did. One man. But he died several decades ago.”

  “A man?”

  “I worked with him, yes.”

  “He hired you for a job, did he?”

  “For many jobs. We formed a partnership and thrived as a team. For nearly eighty years, yes. His last will gave me the business and all of its contracts, which is why I am the richest citizen in the Avenue today.”

  “How did this man die?”

  “Tragically and without any corpse to honor,” the tool said.

  Aasleen let that topic drop. Instead, she shifted the parchment in her fingers, reading the rest of the odd note.

  “‘Ask the lady about the great ship that she built. Which may or may not have been real. But that isn’t the point. You’ll know that, Aasleen. The point is that
maybe we don’t want to be too precise in our aim. Or everything turns to shit on us. And you don’t want that, my friend.’”

  “You don’t want that,” the tool agreed.

  Aasleen said nothing.

  With a hopeful voice, the tool asked, “Is there more to the message?”

  “‘And this beauty,’ he writes. ‘This beauty before you has a thousand other wonderful stories to tell.’”

  The tool moved her limbs, drawing spheres in the air.

  “I don’t know the author to this note of yours,” she claimed. “But he is right in one regard, madam. Yes, I am a beauty.”

  THIS IS AS I WISH TO BE RESTORED

  Christie Yant

  Every night I come home and I drink. I trade away the hope, the guilt, the fear, even the love—I think it’s love, crazy as it seems. I trade them for oblivion, because otherwise I won’t sleep at all. I drink until there’s no life left in me, until I’m able to forget for just a little while the chrome vessel in the corner and what’s at stake. Sometimes I hope that I’ll dream of her. Sometimes I’m afraid that I will.

  I have two things that belonged to her. The first is a photograph, taken at a party in what looks like a hotel. Her hair is dyed red—it doesn’t quite suit her, so you know it isn’t hers, like an unexpected note in a melody where you thought you knew where it was going and then it went sharp. She’s holding a glass of something pink and bubbly. Maybe it’s her birthday. If so, it’s probably her twenty-eighth. She’s laughing.

  She was really young to be a client. Especially back then, most of the people who thought about life extension were retirees. Mortality was very much on their minds, and they’d had a lifetime to accumulate their savings—suspension was expensive. I wonder where she got the money. Her file doesn’t say.

  So in this picture she’s laughing. She’s seated, supporting herself with one hand braced against the carpeted floor. Her head is thrown back and her back is arched, and she’s just the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. There are other people around her, behind her, just smiling blurs holding drinks, but you get the feeling that she’s the reason they’re smiling. She’s the star they’re all in orbit around. Like me. I fell into her orbit years ago and can’t break free.

  The picture moves with me through my bleak basement apartment, from room to room—sometimes it turns up on top of the half-size refrigerator, sometimes absent-mindedly left on a shelf in the medicine cabinet where I discover it again later and take it with me to the bedroom. I’ve found it between the sofa cushions at least half a dozen times. She follows me, or I follow her—it’s been a lifetime since she smiled that smile, and I’m still completely, utterly taken.

  The one place it never goes is on the dewar in the corner. That would just be too macabre, considering.

  This is the only photograph she left. I often wonder what it was about this moment, this time in her life, that she could have looked ahead and known that this was as good as it gets. In this picture the cancer’s already killing her, she just doesn’t know it.

  She died less than a year later. Pancreatic cancer. It’s in her file.

  • • • •

  I was given her file four years after I started with the company, in a crumbling box of data that needed to be digitized.

  Those poor bastards, they had no idea what would happen to them fifty or a hundred years on. I wondered at the time whether they might have changed their minds about being cryopreserved at all. Probably not—they were in the immortality business, like we are. They would have paid any price.

  “All early conversion cases,” my boss said. “We don’t know what’s really there anymore. The risk of fracturing was high in those days.”

  I’ve seen the results of fracturing. It’s not pretty. The early full-body cases were bad, which was one of the reasons they went to neuro in the first place. The splits in the elbows, the back of the knees, the buttocks, the groin—anywhere there’s a fatty fold, the frozen flesh split wide open. When they realized it was happening, and that there was almost no chance of a full-body patient getting out of it without severe damage, they were all converted to neuros. The procedure is executed with a power saw.

  I flipped through the files, brittle and yellowed with age. The metal prongs that held the files together had rusted, and some of them snapped off when I tried to free the pages for scanning.

  Her file was near the end. I scanned it and put it back in the box with the others to be destroyed. I didn’t even really think about why I went back for it. I just wanted to see her smile again.

  • • • •

  The other thing I have of hers is a note—hand-written, on a 3×3-inch faded yellow square. The writing runs across it at a diagonal. She wrote it with a fountain pen; I can tell by the way the width varies in the strokes. They are bold strokes, no-nonsense strokes. The ink is a whimsical green. Was that important to her? This was her last message to anyone who mattered.

  There is a small stain at the bottom of the paper now, a droplet of liquid that the ink bled into and spread like lichen. Brandy, if it was from five years ago; whiskey, if it was more recent. I’ve had this file for a long time. I can’t read it now, not really, not in the state I’m in. It swims in front of me through a bourbon haze. But I know what it says.

  This is as I wish to be restored.

  Her wishes were clear, written there in green ink, spattered and smeared from my ministrations, and that’s what keeps me up at night, keeps me drinking. What would she want me to do? The note is all I have of her, aside from the picture, and the file, and the file says nothing.

  That’s not strictly true. It’s just all I know of her. I have all of her. All that’s left, anyway.

  • • • •

  From what I’ve read, her actual last words were nothing to write home about. She wanted her cat looked after. She wanted water, and was cold. That’s pretty normal. “Cover my feet,” she said to the nurse. “I’d like a drink of water,” she said. “My mouth is so dry.” Usually there is no wisdom imparted, no grand finale—we’re cold, and we want to sleep. It was no different for her.

  Her final moments were uneventful, if you discount the cadre of specialists outside her door. It was after she died that things got serious.

  That was all a very long time ago.

  When the money ran out and it became clear that we couldn’t sustain them all, we had to decide which patients we couldn’t save. I’d been with the company for the better part of a decade by then. I remember Melanie breaking down in tears during the board meeting, and Bill having to excuse himself to be sick in the restroom. This was a failure that we took personally, so personally that for a while I was spending nights taking calls from colleagues and talking them out of suicide. You can see why they would consider it—it would have been a poetic kind of atonement. Generations of patients had placed their lives in our hands, and we’d failed them.

  The earliest patients had the lowest probability of success, due to the imperfect vitrification processes they used in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Eighty-three early patients were selected, their polished chrome dewars stacked against a cinder block wall and their data files updated. Distant descendants were tracked down and contacted, most of whom neither knew nor cared that they had an ancestor in suspension and weren’t much interested in the disposition of their remains.

  She never had children, never got married. There was no one to call, and no one to care that the count had changed by one when I turned them over for disposal.

  • • • •

  The unit is fairly easy to maintain. The temperature isn’t as well regulated as I’d like, and I can’t get it as cold as we had at the facility, but I do what I can.

  Three years ago last August, I nearly lost her to a storm that kept me away from home longer than expected. In my mind I could see the sweating canister as the temperature climbed, I could see that crimson hair hanging in lank wet strands, while decomposition set in—autol
ysis, cell rupture, her skin blistering, slippage, irreversible damage—everything we as mortal beings fear and everything that we had protected her from for the better part of a century.

  And her face, while achingly beautiful, was not the worst of it. If her brain began to thaw, what part of her would be lost first? Language skills? Motor function? Impulse control? Memory? I could imagine her life as a map, traced in sepia on immaculate folds of gray matter: the roads, waterways, borders, and landmarks of her heart erased one ruptured cell at a time. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I had to get to her and stop it.

  I nearly knocked the basement door off its hinges, my heart pounding like a hammer, but there she was—enclosed, sealed, regulated, cold. Liquid nitrogen levels low but not dry. Cold enough. If I had been another six hours it might have been too late.

  That was the moment, knowing that I’d almost lost her. I could no longer pretend that I could store her here forever. I had to start planning for her revival.

  The next morning I came to on the floor, empty bottle just out of reach, my head pounding and my gut in revolt. When I opened my eyes in the half-light, there was a face in front of me, like I’d woken in a bed beside someone meant to be there, and in my half-conscious state I thought it was her. I reached out to touch her, and my fingers struck the hard, cold steel of the dewar.

  I haven’t traveled since.

  • • • •

  I bought a green pen. I wrote the words over and over again in a notebook that I used for nothing else, and I carried the picture of the laughing girl from room to room as I thought about what it meant to revive her.

  I practiced until I couldn’t tell the difference between her handwriting and my own. I try to put myself in her place—young, unafraid, confident that the future will be better, brighter, and that she will be welcomed there. I write the words, and for the six seconds that it takes, I think I can feel what she felt in those moments. The stroke across the T is emphatic, the flourish on the d is full of anticipation of a day when all of her dreams will come true.