A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Sure, but that launch didn’t put the objects into orbit. Orbit was accomplished up here.

  What are they?

  Oh, so far, nothing. They’re platforms.

  Platforms for what?

  Pace took a silence, looked troubled, but he was enjoying it.

  Let’s say that I worry about mankind. We had a close call with an asteroid a few years ago, you may remember. It’ll be back soon. We need assets out here to help us with that problem.

  And so, you want to put on these platforms . . .

  Nuclear weapons. What else has enough push for an asteroid?

  Bad idea. Could end up with hundreds of small asteroids instead of one big one.

  You know what would be a much worse idea? Doing nothing.

  Why you?

  Nobody else is doing it, that’s why.

  Where you going to get nukes?

  Oh, look, it doesn’t have to be nukes. Use giant lasers if you want, whatever. I’m offering these platforms to any nation that wants to contribute to the long-term survival of mankind. I’ve got interest at NASA and DoD.

  No pushback?

  NASA? They’ve already ceded Earth space. DoD? SecDef is ours, a former Uber VP. The Joint Chiefs are mostly on board, and for the whiners there’s always early retirement. I don’t need to own their weapons. They’d simply be under our management.

  Hard to believe they give you control.

  Pace tapped his glass into a slight spin. A small blob of whiskey escaped. He sucked it into his mouth, and swallowed. Smiled.

  They let us manage their satellites. We’re a trusted actor. DoD would love a way to bypass the Outer Space Treaty. I offer us as a beard, that’s perfect for them. Get a few allies on board, even better.

  At this point, Sergei knew it would be wise to shut up, finish his drink, say goodnight. He didn’t feel wise.

  What is your long game?

  Pace squinted at him. What makes you think I have a long game?

  You are smart guy.

  Sergei let the silence stretch. Pace was compelled to dominate a conversation, to fill up the social space. That went against the solitary, obsessive nature that Sergei recognized, but he saw how Pace had learned to deploy that nature tactically. Now he saw Pace shift out of the social space, back into his own mind. He squinted as he manipulated his headsup. It was like watching a lizard.

  You’ve read Max Weber? Pace said at last.

  Some.

  Pace’s eyes flickered as he quoted: “A state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.”

  So?

  Here’s my long game: I want to redefine “human community” for the better. My method is to redefine who’s “legitimate.”

  Yes?

  The nation-state as a form of political organization is recent. Treaty of Westphalia, 1648. There’s no reason it needs to persist. There are better alternatives.

  Sergei gave him more silence. Pace shifted back into his public mode.

  See, I’m big on dual use. Once these platforms are armed, they can also protect against dangers from below. I mean, look at the data. Nation-states have very bad metrics. You know that. So many wars, so many killed. So much property damage. We can do better. We will. We can build and manage the defense cloud.

  Platforms are vulnerable.

  I’m an optimist. These platforms are stealthy and maneuverable. Anyway, ASAT’s a non-starter, Kessler Effect and all, that’s unwritten but fundamental. It’s why we’re up here, am I right? Soon I’ll have memoranda of understanding with certain public and private actors, which will make any action against the platforms a lot more complicated. Let’s say that I foresee a regime in which it’s in everyone’s interest to leave them the hell alone.

  Meanwhile they are traffic hazard.

  Oh, they’ll be no trouble. The orbital elements are in your database. You have what you need to protect all our assets.

  All our assets?

  Pace held out his hands in a kind of embrace.

  Everything that’s up here under our management. To quote one of my heroes: They’re our assets now, and we’re not giving them back.

  Why tell me?

  You’re smarter than you like to let on. There could be a place for you in our ground operations.

  Sergei shrugged. Pace shook his head.

  Hate to see expertise go to waste. Here’s my private email. Let me know if you’re interested.

  That night, strapped in his sleeping bag after Pace and his pilot had departed the hab, Sergei thought it over.

  In 2029, the asteroid Apophis had crossed Earth’s orbit. A scary close approach, closer than many geosynchronous satellites. The thing was three hundred fifty meters across. Not extinction-level, but many times Tunguska. A one-gigaton impact was nothing to sneeze at.

  Sergei had been in space then, had watched it fly by. It brightened to third magnitude, moved through about forty degrees of sky in an hour, faded, was gone. It was due back in 2036. Odds of impact were only a few in a million, but Sergei saw how useful that recent near miss and impending return could be to a system selling itself as asteroid defense. The nuclear option against asteroids made no sense, but politics made no sense. The meme of “protection” was more powerful than reason.

  As to Pace’s longer game, he didn’t buy it for a couple of reasons. First, the U.S. would never hand over control of nukes. They’d invented them; they’d become the global hegemon with them, and more or less remained so because of them. But: that “more or less.” Pace was lying, but his lie had exposed a deeper truth that eroded Sergei’s faith that the U.S. was the U.S. of his imagination.

  Second, it made no strategic sense to station weapons in space. Launch costs were high, platforms vulnerable, delivery difficult. Earth-based systems were the better choice.

  Unless the weapons were assembled in orbit. But why do that?

  He remembered a job he’d done months ago, EVA, in person, servicing an orbital nanofactory which produced microscopic pellets—flecks of material embedded in zero-gee-perfected beads of glass. Manifests identified the material as LiDT: lithium deuteride and tritium. Mildly radioactive. He’d been curious, but had forgotten about it once he was safely back.

  Now he logged onto SIPRNet and searched classified scientific papers. Soon he found “Typical number of antiprotons necessary for fast ignition in LiDT.” Primary author: R. Fry, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The paper detailed the results of the first breakeven fusion reaction a few years back.

  That was it, then. The Livermore Lab had worked on fusion since its founding, eighty years ago. Its founding purpose was nuclear weapons, and its grail was a pure fusion weapon. This bomb could be small and light and still hugely destructive. Sergei was no nuclear scientist, but those pellets were clearly nuclear fuel. They were being produced in orbit; and so could bombs that used them.

  What about delivery? Uber already had a thriving Earthside business in package delivery using small drones. Suppose you mounted a few dozen fusion bomblets on drones, packed those drones in a cheap capsule, dropped it from orbit, popped it open in the troposphere, where you could then MIRV the drones to individual targets. The only defense would be to destroy the capsule before it opened. If the capsule were small and stealthed, could it get through? He didn’t know.

  He could be wrong. Maybe they weren’t working on bombs. Maybe they wouldn’t succeed. Maybe it would take a long time. Maybe he should forget the whole thing.

  Kiyoshi and Sheila’s alcove was near his. Sergei could hear the thumps and moans of their tangled bodies through the thin walls. He allowed himself to think of Izumi, of tracing his finger slowly along the arch of her foot, hearing the intake of her breath, taking her big toe in his mouth and hearing her gasp.

  His heart and soul didn’t buy his maybes.

  Two days later he was on the way back to Earth. They would touch down in Kazakhstan. Kiyoshi and Sheila were also ending their
shifts, while Boyle stayed on. Sergei looked away from the couple, strapped in across from him, their hands intertwined.

  It would make sense to take Pace’s offer. It had come wrapped in a veiled threat. Pace even had a point. Sergei had no sentiment for the nation-state. During World War II, Petersburg had been under siege for nine hundred days. Shostakovich had been there. The population went from three point five million to six hundred thousand. In his lifetime, the endless Chechen wars. Was any of that right?

  Out the small window, the sun slanted across a long wall of cumulonimbus over the coast of Venezuela. Somewhere below the clouds, American troops were liberating oilfields.

  “The right thing.” Who could know what that was? Imagine all the damned souls who believed they had done the right thing. Who may in fact have done the right thing, and found themselves damned anyway.

  And Sergei was ready, maybe, to finally stay below the clouds. To keep his feet on the ground, to have a normal life.

  But that was mere survival. There was a Russian saying, vsyo normal’no, “everything is normal.” No matter how screwed up: “everything is normal.” Also that American saying: “the new normal.” Universal surveillance was the new normal. Resource wars were the new normal. Climate refugees by the millions were the new normal. And if Pace got his way, his executive monopoly of “legitimate” violence would be the new normal.

  Sergei shut his eyes as the faint whistle of reentry grew to a thunder and the capsule juddered. Soon they’d be at four gs. Pure falling, again, but now into the burning force of the still-living planet’s atmosphere. Still living for how much longer?

  Izumi had said to him once: You think a lot, but you follow your heart. He wasn’t sure he did, but he was glad she thought so, or at least that she said she did. He let the memory of that gladness echo in him. Maybe it was time to be sure.

  Who will take care of your heart and soul?

  The self is not the soul. The soul is what you were as a child, until you learned to protect it, enclosing that fluttering, vulnerable moth in the fist of the self.

  Outside, the heatshield roared and burned. A firedrake of plasma, the capsule passed over Helsinki, Petersburg, Moscow, specks in a crowded emptiness. He opened his eyes.

  He saw that both his fists were clenched tight. Very slowly he allowed his hands to open.

  2018

  THE EQUALIZERS

  Ian Casey

  I’ve got to stop doing this, Pamela thought when her phone beeped her awake at six A.M. Or at least stop doing it on weeknights. I’m thirty-seven—I don’t have the energy to live on four hours’ sleep any more.

  She reached under the unfamiliar pillow to grab her phone and stifle the alarm, before it disturbed whoever slept beside her. Then she slid out of bed and slunk into the bathroom to pee. She checked her phone to see whereabouts in London she’d ended up, and summoned a cab with the taxi app.

  Back in the bedroom, Pamela dressed hurriedly, not bothering to smooth her rumpled clothes. When she got home she would have a shower, change into a fresh outfit, and apply new makeup. Casual dating was harder for women. If a man stayed overnight somewhere, he could return to the office wearing the same clothes he wore yesterday, augmented with a day of stubble, and no one would bat an eye.

  If everyone wore the Equalizers, it wouldn’t matter what I looked like, Pamela thought. I could waltz back into the office in yesterday’s outfit, without any makeup, and no one would know.

  Tempted, she imagined the memo she would write: “To further enhance the Firm’s commitment to equality of opportunity and prevention of discrimination, wearing Equalizers is now mandatory for all staff . . . .”

  Meanwhile, the bed’s remaining occupant began to stir. An arm emerged out of the sheets, groping blindly as though trying to snatch more sleep from the air. Then, abruptly, the man sat up. His ravishing auburn hair resembled the flowing locks of some Byronic poet who might spend the morning either writing a sonnet or swimming the Hellespont.

  “Morning, darling,” he said, flashing a smile to entice her back to bed.

  Pamela frowned. “What happened to your accent?”

  “My accent?” He laughed. “Oh, it comes and goes. It’s probably run off to America to seek its fortune. You know, the Irish people are very temperamental, and so are their accents—”

  “Never mind,” Pamela said. “I have to go.”

  She checked her handbag: money, keys, phone. As she clattered downstairs, she heard the guy calling out from his bedroom. “It’s only six o’clock. Top o’ the morning! Stay for breakfast, I’ve got a leprechaun in the fridge—”

  The taxi had arrived. Pamela got inside, confirmed her address, then buried her

  face in her hands. He was fake! He just played up the Irishness because he knew it attracted women. What a pathetic fraud—to practice, and to fall for. It exposed how shallow she’d become lately, attracted to merely physical attributes. A nice head of hair and a charming voice . . .

  At least the sex had been good.

  I’ve got to stop doing this.

  Pamela’s workplace was a glass-fronted office block, one of many towers clustered like skyscraper icons in a PowerPoint chart showing the battle for market share. She donned her Equalizers on arrival, as she had done every day during the trial period. The glasses altered her vision; the frames generated nerve-induction input for her ears and nose. The Equalizers transformed what she saw, heard, and smelled.

  When she walked into the lobby, the receptionist and the roving security guard appeared as purple humanoid shapes, with no personal characteristics such as hairstyle or skin color. Each avatar’s chest displayed a job title and employee number. The default identifiers didn’t include names, because names might hint at gender or ethnicity. The Equalizers eliminated such distinctions.

  “Good morning,” said the receptionist, sounding as robotic as a speech synthesizer reading from a dictionary. All traces of pitch and accent had been removed.

  “Morning,” Pamela replied. The receptionist wasn’t yet wearing Equalizers, and heard her true voice. If Pamela pushed for universal adoption, soon everyone in the building would wear them.

  She entered the Human Resources department, her fiefdom since she’d become HR director two months ago.

  “How did it go last night?” Vonda asked. She appeared in Pamela’s vision as an orange avatar with a familiar employee number. You could customize the avatars and assign them any color—apart from shades of black, brown, red, yellow, or white. The default view allocated colors by department: HR was orange, Consulting was green, Building Services was purple, and so forth.

  “Badly,” Pamela replied. “I can’t talk now—I’ve got interviews—but shall we meet for lunch?”

  “Sure!”

  Pamela printed out the job description and the candidates’ applications, which had been anonymized to remove any bias-inducing details. She skimmed the documents one last time, then took them to the conference room.

  Employee 35781, the section head who needed a new data analyst, appeared as a green avatar with the horizontal stripes of a principal consultant. The Equalizers eradicated most differences, but preserved the company hierarchy.

  Pamela handed over a set of Equalizers, and the green avatar’s head acquired a goggles icon as Employee 35781 donned them. “You should see me as an orange shape,” she said. “Are you getting that?”

  “Yes, yes. Is this really necessary?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, her voice full of conviction. “It’ll help you hire the best candidate. A fair environment will improve employee morale. And most importantly, we’ll save money if we don’t keep paying compensation for discrimination claims.”

  The company had recently settled a tribunal claim and a lawsuit from ex-employees alleging discrimination and harassment. After this debacle, the former HR director had been fired. Pamela was promoted to the position, with a mandate to reform the company’s culture. Hence she’d brought in the Equalizers
, as both policy measure and public penance.

  She was introducing them gradually, wary of alienating the workforce. Wearing them at interviews was simply one step—a statement of intent, a bullet point on the new “Living Our Values” webpage. Discrimination didn’t just occur at the hiring stage. It also arose in promotions and pay raises. That would be harder to prevent, even if she made everyone use Equalizers every day.

  The interviews took all morning, as Pamela and Employee 35781 strove to differentiate between the candidates without identifying them. Wearing the Equalizers felt like playing a primitive videogame with cartoonish icons and metronomic voices. It was alienating and left Pamela desperate for genuine human contact. After three hours of interrogating anonymous grey shapes, she was eager to get lunch and catch up with Vonda.

  She left the building and removed her Equalizers, greedily absorbing the sight of London’s crowds as she strolled to the usual riverside cafe. She snagged an outdoor table, checked her phone, and saw a message from Vonda saying she’d be late.

  Pamela sighed. A few minutes to kill. I might as well take a quick look online. She touched an icon, and her phone’s screen filled with pictures of men. Tapping any picture would bring up the owner’s profile. But for long moments, Pamela simply flicked through the pictures, screen after screen of them. Tall men, short men, bald men with hideous shirts . . . She was fascinated by the range of physicality on display: beards and moustaches, earrings and tattoos; expressions friendly or brooding or chirpy or fierce.

  I’ve got to stop doing this. What’s happening to me?

  She shoved the phone back into her handbag, relieved to see Vonda hurrying toward her table. They’d been friends ever since meeting during Freshers’ Week at Bath University. In twenty years they’d celebrated together, commiserated together, and shared everything about their lives. Vonda was unshockable, conducting her own love life as if on a dare.

  So when Vonda quizzed her about last night’s date, Pamela described the disaster in detail.

  “If I’m going to choose guys because they’ve got gorgeous hair and a sexy accent, I can’t be surprised if they start faking it. Maybe even that hair was a wig! It serves me right.”