The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  It took almost two hours to add the cargo baskets to the flying machine’s frame. Mishon would ride in one basket, her weight balanced by the gear he piled in the other.

  It was almost noon when they were ready to go. Yaphet coiled the last rope, secured it in the basket. “It will be dangerous,” he reminded Mishon.

  “It is a flying machine,” she answered from her basket seat, waving her hand in a dismissive gesture. “We are sure to be killed and to destroy any enclave that we approach.”

  He answered her seriously. “That is the common belief, and it could be true.”

  She looked away. Her fingers clutched now at the basket’s rim. “We will stay far from any enclave.”

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  He settled himself in the cradle, relishing the familiar feel of it, the echo of memory. “We will test the common belief and learn if it is true.”

  He toggled the engine on. Felt a rush of artificial wind, a vibration in the frame. The flying machine lofted with smooth grace, white wings bright in the sun.

  Nick Wolven’s science fiction has appeared in Wired, Clarkesworld, Analog, and many other magazines and anthologies. New stories are forthcoming in Asimov’s and F&SF. He lives a quiet and secluded life.

  LAB B–15

  Nick Wolven

  1

  The young man was sitting outside the parking garage, and right away Jerry thought that was weird. This was the Arizona desert, middle of summer. People didn’t sit outside. They especially didn’t sit outside ugly parking garages, on strips of hot concrete, with no grass in sight.

  The boy was Arvin Taylor, one of the lab techs from the day shift. Not a person Jerry saw often, though technically one of his employees. He ought to be working, not lazing around outdoors.

  “Arvin.” Jerry pulled up, rolled down the window. “What are you—?”

  But Arvin was already hurrying toward the car.

  “Doctor Emery.” All the techs addressed Jerry as “Doctor.” It was something he insisted on. None of this Joe-John-Jane stuff, everyone on a first-name basis, like they were Mouseketeers or flight attendants. With the work they were doing, they couldn’t afford to be casual.

  Arvin bent down, peering in the window, squinting in the sun. He was dressed professionally but cheaply: Dockers, button shirt.

  The boy must have been sitting outside for hours. His shirt was soaked with sweat. He looked woozy, sunstruck.

  “I’m glad I caught you, Doctor Emery.”

  “How long have you been out here, Arvin?”

  “It’s really important.” The young man’s eyes slid sideways, feverish. Jerry worried he might pass out. “I have to tell you . . .”

  And that was it. Arvin’s mouth hung open, tongue moving vaguely.

  Jerry put a hand on the gearshift, a gentle reminder. He had work to do, places to be. “I’m due in the office. If I’m not mistaken, you’re supposed to be there, too. Doesn’t your shift go till six?”

  Arvin wasn’t listening. His eyes had assumed a peculiar cast, half daft, half frantic, like a circuit inside him had failed to connect. “It’s about . . . Lab B–15.”

  Jerry set his teeth. Lab B–15 was one of their experiment rooms. Lot of pricey equipment in Lab B–15.

  Not to mention the subjects themselves.

  Subjects. That’s what they called them: subjects. The word always made Jerry wince.

  “Arvin, if anyone has been mucking around with the stuff in the labs—”

  Arvin’s face was pained. Like a child about to cry.

  “Is it Anand?” Jerry’s tone was stern. “Has he been fiddling with the environmental controls again? Because I’ve told him and told him—”

  Arvin backed away. His hands were clawed, not quite forming fists. His eyes might have been tearing up—at this distance, Jerry found it hard to say.

  “Please, Doctor Emery. Please check.”

  “Arvin. I hope you understand how unprofessional this is. Arvin! Are you having some kind of breakdown?”

  But the young tech was already far from the car, shaking his head, stumbling backward across the crushed stone that filled the curbs around the garage entrance. Now he looked up, staring into the distance, upper lip drawn into a snarl against the glare of the southwestern sun.

  Like a paranoid schizophrenic, Jerry thought. Like someone terrified of everything, of nothing. Of the world.

  Jerry checked over his shoulder. Nothing there but the road curving into town, rocks and scrub, the suburbs of Phoenix at the desert’s edge.

  By the time he looked back, Arvin was gone, vanished into the garage, or into the blinding sunlight.

  It bothered Jerry, as he drove up the ramp, circled the garage levels, and parked on the top deck by the building entrance.

  Frankly, it bothered him a lot.

  He crossed under the pavilion of solar panels. At the coping, Jerry stood gnawing a knuckle. Below were the arabesques of housing parks, roads curling into cul-de-sacs lined with mini-mansions. The highway ran out into the desert, ending here at a low hill rising from seas of solar farms. Atop stood a glittering cluster of glass buildings.

  The Baxter-Clade Medical Center was funded with big donor money. It focused, consequently, on big-donor interests. Late-life therapies. Antiaging boondoggles. Artificial organs. A sample platter of rare cancers.

  The center was ostentatiously eco-friendly. Most of it lay below ground for better temperature regulation. That was where the riskier institutes were located. Research teams toiled on top-dollar projects, out of sight, literally underground, flush with tech-guru cash.

  The thing about rich donors was that they lived a long time. As a result, they tended to develop rare ailments. They also fell prey to freakish obsessions.

  Baxter-Clade catered to both.

  One of the labs on Jerry’s floor was working on treatments for Gorham-Stout disease—or, as it was evocatively called, “vanishing bone disease.” An affliction with only a few hundred reported cases, it was poorly understood. One of those cases, however, was the son of a hedge fund manager. Hence, research proceeded apace.

  Another group did blood rejuvenation, cloning cells from youthful donors. There were teams working on weird voodoo with DNA, stuff even Jerry didn’t understand. Then there was the cryo team. They got all the press.

  Rich folks who came to the clinic saw little of this work. They stopped in for their transfusions, their biopsies, their nouveau froufrou therapies. Receptionists guided them to the upper floors, with big windows and attractive rock gardens. They didn’t see what went on in the basement, the teams of researchers on their three sublevels, the doors labeled with names like In-Trans, Telomeric Initiatives, The Morgenstern Institute for Advanced Longevity. It was all a big warren of bare walls and offices. Rooms were labeled by number. Office A–7, Kitchenette K–1.

  Lab B–15.

  Jerry turned to the building. When the institute first headhunted him, they had offered a generous package. Attractive benefits. A salary double what he was making at the university. Perks such as only Baxter-Clade could provide.

  That wasn’t what had lured him out here to this desert bunker. Jerry came to escape. From academia, from his course load, from campus politics, from faculty squabbles. Drawn by a chance to work alone, away from humans, their drama, their demands, he had fled out here to the wilderness. He had done it, at bottom, to get away from small talk.

  Jerry kept an eye out for Arvin as he crossed the garage. It bothered Jerry when people acted strangely. When they showed excessive emotion, flirted, joked, gossiped, bantered.

  When they panicked.

  Hell, it bothered Jerry when people did anything. It was why he preferred to work at night, showing up around dinnertime. He saw his assistants in the evening, in the morning. He gave them their instructions. He expected them to comply.

  No backtalk, that way. Nice and simple.

  Why couldn’t people just do their jobs?

  Why couldn’t
they keep things neat and easy?

  The elevator carried Jerry down five floors.

  On sublevel three was the Fallows Institute, Jerry’s employer.

  He brought his coffee to the administrative office, where he pulled up the intranet and checked the logs. Nothing. Jerry ran through camera feeds, checking every room, paying special attention to the labs. Nothing. He took the controls for Lab B–15 and made the camera scan the whole room, whirr-whirr, rotating on its mount. He couldn’t see into every cupboard, but he saw enough.

  Nothing here.

  Jerry pulled up one of the surveillance AIs, a little program that scanned video footage for anomalies. He ran it on the camera feeds.

  Nothing.

  Jerry ran through the feeds himself, seventeen hours of stored footage, skimming for anything that looked weird. The thing was, they didn’t even use Lab B–15. At all times, they kept one lab idle. It was a planned redundancy, given the nature of their research.

  And Jerry found nothing, absolutely nothing. No one going in or out. No rattling machines, no smoking centrifuges. No one had even turned on the lights. The whole show played out in grainy night vision.

  Pointless. Ridiculous. Nothing to see.

  No spooks or poltergeists, that was sure.

  Jerry ran the day’s reports. Along with punch-card entries and ID checks, he reviewed computer logins, door access checks, front gate checks, parking-space scans, equipment usage. No one had entered Lab B–15. No one had used the equipment. No one had taken anything from the shelves. Every item in there had a radio tag, and they were all logged and inventoried, in their proper places.

  The place was a crypt. Deathly still.

  Deathly.

  That got Jerry thinking.

  He made himself do it. He pulled up the camera feeds again.

  And he checked the freezer room.

  If there was one part of the institute that might conceivably drive someone crazy—a sensitive soul like Arvin, for instance—it was the freezer room. Jerry himself got chills in the freezer room. And no, not from the cold.

  Once upon a time, back when Jerry started, they hadn’t called it the freezer room at all. They had called that room the Morgue.

  The name hadn’t stuck. It was too descriptive, too vivid. Too, well, accurate. They settled on a different name, one that got the point across with minimal morbidity. “Freezers.” That did the trick.

  So Jerry checked the logs for the freezer room.

  The freezers were fine.

  What the hell was Arvin talking about?

  Jerry sat back, chewing a knuckle. He’d done due diligence, checked every contingency.

  One thing he did not do was get up, walk down the hall, and enter Lab B–15.

  Hell with it. Jerry shook his head. He’d already wasted enough time on this nonissue. Arvin was having some kind of breakdown, that was all. What the younger staff called “a moment.” People did this all the time, they had “moments,” giving into unreasonable emotions. It drove Jerry nuts.

  On a whim, he ran a check on Arvin’s movements. Nothing unusual. It was a typical day: in at eight, on the dot. Out for lunch at one o’clock sharp. Back at two, again on the dot. Except for the stint in the parking garage, the young man had spent all day at his station. Jerry looked again at those numbers. Eight o’clock sharp. One o’clock sharp. Two o’clock sharp. Everything was exact to the second. Were those numbers . . . maybe . . . a little too typical?

  Stop. No point getting fanciful. Jerry actually laughed at himself, snapping off the screen (and Jerry Emery rarely laughed). This was crazy. Arvin’s hysteria had infected him, too. Eight sharp. Two sharp. It wasn’t so unusual. It was how things should be. Punctual. Orderly. A nice average day.

  Jerry had run the numbers. He’d checked the logs. He had work to do.

  He closed the program.

  In the institute, the day shift was winding down. Machinery hummed in Lab B–11; the S&D machine was running a scan. Jerry found it a soothing sound. It would go on for months, night and day, with only intermittent breaks to cool the equipment. Like a refrigerator running, a comforting drone.

  Kim Naylor, the head biologist, was bent over the optical dissector, lasering away at a cart of tissue samples. Kim was the opposite of Arvin, a nononsense type, crisp and obsessive when it came to sample collection. A bit of a slob with respect to appearance, but her work was unimpeachable. Jerry thought of saying hi, but why bother? They’d make awkward small talk; they’d both be put out. Better to get to work.

  His office beckoned, a nest of ragged paper. Printouts were sticky-tacked to the wall, hanging at angles, covering more printouts, all scrawled with equations running sheet to sheet. Figures had been crossed out dozens of times, blurred under blizzards of recalculation. Lately Jerry had abandoned math in favor of cryptic conjectures, scrawled in marker.

  Reduce optimization of synaptic updates?

  Try zero batching of nodal spike selections . . .

  Apply forced stimulation! All inactive circuits!

  Recent additions were little more than desperate outbursts.

  Enough models!

  Startup matters?

  More FLOPS!

  It was the literalization of a brainstorm.

  Jerry shuffled through the litter. Everything important was done in the computer. But when Jerry was frustrated, he printed, he scribbled. If nothing else, it gave him the satisfaction of crumpling up his failed ideas.

  He certainly had been doing a lot of that.

  Plunking himself down, Jerry ran the week’s reports.

  Subject Arnisev’s run in the VALIT environment had undergone critical degradation across all clusters.

  Subject Yamahoto’s run had catastrophically failed after twenty-seven seconds.

  Subject Polodny’s run in the new “Veritude” sim had performed successfully for almost seven minutes, with a slowdown factor close to zero, rich dynamic performance across functional minicolumns, and interactions with the chemical perfusion model that matched observations on organic subjects.

  Great!

  But at four hundred seconds, even this last model had undergone calamitous disintegration, fragmenting into disconnected circuits that pulsed and strobed like schizoid Christmas lights, convulsing into seizures of disconnected stars.

  On and on it went. Crashed programs. Busted experiments.

  Jerry cursed and chewed a knuckle.

  The numbers changed from trial to trial. But the basic problem was always the same.

  They had names for it in the office. The spasming issue. Mechanical mouse. The jitters.

  Subject one’s gone mechanical mouse!

  Subject seven’s caught the jitters!

  Jerry called it what it was.

  Braindeath.

  “Jerry?” It was Kim, her glasses askew, leaning into his office. Weird. Jerry could have sworn he’d closed the door. But there Kim was, standing in his riot of papers. “I’m off for the night. We’re almost finished with the supplemental scans on Bogstrand. Once we’ve built out the diffusion effects I’ll feed them into the signaling simulator. We can have full volumetric analysis by Friday, I think.”

  Jerry spoke around the knuckle lodged in his teeth. “Thanks, Kim.”

  Five seconds later, he realized she was still there, fingers curled over the jam, eyes distracted under her steel-colored hair. “You’ll be okay here by yourself?” Kim sounded worried. “Chris is off for the night. Marjorie just left. I sent Arvin home.”

  Jerry looked over the top of his monitor. “What happened with Arvin, anyway? I saw him outside, by the garage. He seemed . . . distressed.”

  Kim’s face contracted, lips parting, brows contracting. Not worried, Jerry thought. Puzzled. A rare emotion for Kim Naylor, but that was how she looked right now: utterly baffled, as if a peculiar and upsetting thought had come to her unbidden.

  “You know,” Kim said, faltering, “you really should . . . you should look into Lab B–15.�
�

  Her eyes were like Arvin’s, half-dreaming and feverish.

  Jerry narrowed his eyes. “And why is that, Kim?”

  Kim bit her lip. “I just think you should do it, that’s all. I really think you should check it out.”

  Jerry stood slowly, coming around the desk. He studied Kim before speaking. “Arvin said the same thing. That I should check Lab B–15.” Kim said nothing, only stared, goggleeyed. Jerry continued, “I reviewed the security files. I checked the footage myself. I didn’t see anything.”

  “Lab B–15,” Kim said, and it was clear now something was wrong. Her voice had gone hollow, haunted, strange. She spoke like a woman possessed. “There’s something in there you need to see, Jerry. Something . . .” Her words ended in a fading whine, leaving the thought unfinished.

  Jerry stuck his knuckle between his teeth. “You know, I don’t appreciate being teased. I have five hundred failed trial runs to explain, seven donors breathing down my neck. We’re in crisis mode. If this is some kind of game, or prank, or—” It came to him. “If this is a set up for a surprise party, Kim, I swear, I don’t even—”

  But Jerry must have blinked, or lost focus, or blanked out. Kim Naylor was gone.

  All night in the office, Jerry worked alone with the machines.

  Once, Jerry had appreciated this slumberous ambience. The quiet of the underground office drew on the profounder silence of the southwestern desert. The dreamlike glow of the fluorescent lights cast a hallucinatory clarity over the halls. Machinery humming in unoccupied rooms. There were no people, no distractions.

  It comforted Jerry to pace in these clean dark corridors, with nothing to keep him company but computers. It gave him time to think.

  But all he could think about now was failure.

  Fifteen years. Twenty-seven subjects. So many hopeful trial runs.

  They’d been cocky, at first. The key techniques were well-established. Early tests had seemed promising. And the core concepts were sound. Hell, weren’t the concepts sound?

  The donors certainly thought so. Cash had flooded in.

  Now what? Angry billionaires called Jerry every week, wanting to know where their money had gone. And the reporters, the damn reporters. Popular science magazines had overhyped the initial press releases, as they always did. Now, a new generation of hacks came sniffing around every week, eager to sensationalize Jerry’s failure.