The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “Empathy isn’t always a good thing,” I say. “Irresponsible empathy makes the world unstable. In each conflict, there are multiple claims for empathy, leading to emotional involvement by outsiders that widens the conflict. To sort through the morass, you must reason your way to the least harmful answer, the right answer. This is why some of us are charged with the duty to study and understand the complexities of this world and to decide, for the rest, how to exercise empathy responsibly.”

  “I can’t just shut it off,” she says. “I can’t just forget the dead. Their pain and terror . . . they’re a part of the blockchain of my experience now, unerasable. If being responsible means learning how to not feel someone else’s pain, then it isn’t humanity you serve, but evil.”

  I watch her. I feel for her, I really do. It’s terribly sad, seeing your friend in pain but knowing that there is nothing you can do to help, knowing that, in fact, you have to hurt her more. Sometimes pain, and acknowledgment of pain, is selfish.

  I lift my blouse to show her the VR recorder taped to the small of my back. “This was recording until the moment guns started firing—from inside the camp—and I was pushed down to the ground.”

  She stares at the VR data recorder, and her face shifts through shock, recognition, rage, denial, an ironic smile, and then, nothing.

  Once the VR based on what I went through is uploaded—it doesn’t need much editing—there will be outrage at home. A defenseless American woman, the head of a charity dedicated to helping refugees, is brutalized by ethnic Han Chinese rebels armed with guns bought with money from Empathium—hard to imagine a better way to discredit the Muertien project. The best propaganda is often true.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it.

  She gazes at me, and I can’t tell if it’s hate or despair I see in her eyes.

  I look at her with pity.

  “Have you tried the original Muertien clip?” I ask. “The one I uploaded.”

  Sophia shakes her head. “I couldn’t. I didn’t want to compromise my judgment.”

  She has always been so rational. One time, in college, I asked her to watch a video of a young Russian man, barely more than a boy, being beheaded by Chechen fighters in front of the camera. She had refused.

  “Why won’t you look at what the people you support are doing?” I asked.

  “Because I haven’t seen all the acts of brutality committed by the Russians against the Chechen people,” she said. “To reward those who evoke empathy is the same as punishing those who have been prevented from doing so. Looking at this won’t be objective.”

  There’s always the need for more context with Sophia, for the big picture. But I’ve learned over the years that rationality with her, as with many, is just a matter of rationalization. She wants a picture just big enough to justify what her government does. She needs to understand just enough to be able to reason that what America wants is also what anyone rational in the world wants.

  I understand how she thinks, but she doesn’t understand how I think. I understand her language, but she doesn’t understand mine—or care to. That’s how power works in this world.

  When I first got to America, I thought it was the most wonderful place on Earth. There were students passionate about every humanitarian cause, and I tried to support every one. I raised money for the victims of the Bangladesh cyclones and the flooding in India; I packed blankets and tents and sleeping bags for the earthquake in Peru; I joined the vigils to remember the victims of 9/11, sobbing before Memorial Church in the late summer evening breeze, trying to keep the candles lit.

  Then came the big earthquake in China, and as the death toll climbed toward 100,000, the campus was strangely quiet. People who I thought were my friends turned away, and the donation table we set up in front of the Science Center was staffed only by other students from China like me. We couldn’t even raise a tenth of the money we had raised for disasters with far smaller death tolls.

  What discussion there was focused on how the Chinese drive for development resulted in unsafe buildings, as if enumerating the cons of their government was an appropriate reaction to dead children, as if reaffirming the pros of American democracy was a good justification for withholding help.

  Jokes about the Chinese and dogs were posted in anonymous newsgroups. “People just don’t like China very much,” an op-ed writer mused. “I’d rather have the elephants back,” said an actress on TV.

  What’s the matter with you? I wanted to scream. There was no empathy in their eyes as I stood by the donation table and my classmates hurried past me, averting their gaze.

  But Sophia did donate. She gave more than anyone else.

  “Why?” I asked her. “Why do you care about the victims when no one else seems to?”

  “I’m not going to have you heading back to China with an irrational impression that Americans dislike the Chinese,” she said. “Try to remember me when you get into these moments of despair.”

  That was how I knew we would never be as close as I had hoped. She had given as a means to persuade, not because she felt what I felt.

  “You accuse me of manipulation,” I say to Sophia. The humid air in the tent is oppressive, and it feels as if someone is pressing on my eyes from within my skull. “But aren’t you doing the exact same thing with that recording?”

  “There is a difference,” she says. She always has an answer. “My clip will be used to emotionally persuade people to do what is rationally the right thing as part of a considered plan. Emotion is a blunt tool that must be placed in service of reason.”

  “So your plan is to stop any more aid for the refugees and watch as the Myanmar government drives them off their land into China? Or worse?”

  “You managed to get money to the refugees on a tide of rage and pity,” she says. “But how does that really help them? Their fate will always ultimately be decided by the geopolitics between China and the US. Everything else is just noise. They can’t be helped. Arming the refugees will only give the government more of an excuse to resort to violence.”

  Sophia isn’t wrong. Not exactly. But there’s a greater principle here that she doesn’t see. The world doesn’t always proceed in the way predicted by theories of economics or international relations. If every decision is made with Sophia’s calculus, then order, stability, empire always win. There will never be any change, any independence, any justice. We are, and should be, creatures of the heart first.

  “The greater manipulation is to deceive yourself into believing you can always reason your way to what is right,” I say.

  “Without reason, you can’t get to what is right at all,” Sophia parries.

  “Emotion has always been at the core of what it means to do right, not merely a tool for persuasion. Are you opposed to slavery because you have engaged in a rational analysis of the costs and benefits of the institution? No, it’s because you’re revolted by it. You empathize with the victims. You feel its wrongness in your heart.”

  “Moral reasoning isn’t the same—”

  “Moral reasoning is often only a method by which you tame your empathy and yoke it to serve the interests of the institutions that have corrupted you. You’re clearly not averse to manipulation when it’s advantageous to a cause that finds favor in your framework.”

  “Calling me a hypocrite isn’t very helpful—”

  “But you are a hypocrite. You didn’t protest when pictures of babies launched Tomahawks or when images of drowned little boys on beaches led to revisions in refugee policy. You promoted the work of reporters who evoked empathy for those stranded in Kenya’s largest refugee camp by telling Westerners sappy Romeo-and-Juliet love stories about young refugees and emphasizing how the United Nations has educated them with Western ideals—”

  “Those are different—”

  “Of course they’re different. Empathy for you is but another weapon to be wielded, instead of a fundamental value of being human. You reward some with your empathy and punish ot
hers by withholding it. Reasons can always be found.”

  “How are you different? Why does the suffering of some affect you more than others? Why do you care about the people of Muertien more than any other people? Isn’t it because they look like you?”

  She still thinks this is a killer argument. I understand her, I really do. It’s so comforting to know that you’re right, that you’ve triumphed over emotion with reason, that you’re an agent of the just empire, immune to the betrayal of empathy.

  I just can’t live like that.

  I try one last time.

  “I had hoped that by stripping away context and background, by exposing the senses to the rawness of pain and suffering, virtual reality would be able to prevent all of us from rationalizing away our empathy. In agony, there is no race, no creed, none of the walls that divide us and subdivide us. When you’re immersed in the experience of the victims, all of us are in Muertien, in Yemen, in the heart of darkness that the Great Powers feed on.”

  She doesn’t respond. I see in her eyes she has given up on me. I am beyond reason.

  Through Empathium, I had hoped to create a consensus of empathy, an incorruptible ledger of the heart that has overcome traitorous rationalization.

  But perhaps I am still too naive. Perhaps I give empathy too much credit.

  Anony>: What do you all think is going to happen?

  NT>: China is going to have to invade. Those VRs have left Beijing no choice. If they don’t send in the troops to protect the rebels in Muertien, there will be riots in the streets.

  goldfarmer89>: Makes you wonder if that was what China wanted all along.

  Anony: You think that first VR was a Chinese production?

  goldfarmer89>: Had to be state-sponsored. It was so slick.

  NT>: I’m not so sure it was the Chinese who made it. The White House has been itching for an excuse for war with China to divert attention from all those scandals.

  Anony>: So you think the VR was a CIA plant?

  NT>: Wouldn’t be the first time Americans have manipulated anti-American sentiment into giving them exactly what they wanted. That Ellis VR is also ramping up US public support for taking a hard line against China. I just feel terrible about those people in Muertien. What a mess.

  little_blocks>: Still stuck on those snuff VRs on Empathium? I’ve stopped long ago. Too exhausting. I’ll PM you a new game you’ll definitely like.

  NT>: I can always use a new game. ^_^

  Author’s Note

  I’m indebted to the following paper for the term “algics” and some of the ideas about the potential of VR as a social technology: Mark A. Lemley and Eugene Volokh, “Law, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality,” Stanford Public Law Working Paper No. 2933867; UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 17-13 (March 15, 2017), available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2933867 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2933867.

  Rich Larson (patreon.com/richlarson) was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain, and now lives in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Annex and Cypher, as well as over a hundred short stories—some of the best of which can be found in his collection Tomorrow Factory. His award-winning work has been translated into Polish, Czech, French, Italian, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Besides writing, he enjoys traveling, learning languages, playing soccer, watching basketball, shooting pool, and dancing kizomba.

  MEAT AND SALT AND SPARKS

  Rich Larson

  Doesn’t look like a killer, does she,” Huxley remarks.

  Cu shrugs a hairy shoulder. To her, all humans look like killers. What her partner means is that the woman in the interrogation room does not look physically imposing. She is small and skinny and wearing a pale pink dress with a mood-display floral pattern; currently the buds are all sealed up tight, reflecting her arms wrapped around her knees and her chin tucked to her chest.

  The interrogation room has made a similar read of her mood, responding by projecting a soothing beach front with flour-white sand and blue-green waves. The woman doesn’t seem to be aware of her holographic surroundings. Her eyes, small and dark in puddles of running makeup, stare off into space. Every few seconds her left hand reaches up to her ear, where a wireless graft winks inactive red. Apart from that, she’s motionless.

  Cu holds her tablet steady and jabs the playback icon enlarged for her chimpanzee fingers. She crinkles her eyes to watch as the woman from the interrogation room, Elody Polle, bounces through the subway station with her dress in full bloom. With a bland smile on her face, she walks up behind a balding man, pulls the gun from her bag, pulls the trigger, remembers the safety is on, takes it off and pulls the trigger again.

  “So calm,” Huxley says, tearing open a bag from the vending unit. “She was like that the whole time, apparently, up until they stuck her in interrogation. Then she lost her shit a bit.” He grins and shovels baked seaweed into his mouth. Huxley is almost always grinning.

  Cu flicks to the footage from interrogation: Elody Polle sobbing, pounding her fists against the locked door. She looks over at her partner and taps her ear, signs Faraday shield?

  “Yeah,” Huxley says, letting the bag fall to his lap to sign back. “No receiving or transmitting from interrogation. As soon as she lost contact with that little graft, she panicked. The police ECM should have shut it down as soon as she was in custody. Guess it slipped past somehow.”

  Acting under instructions, Cu suggests.

  Huxley see-saws his open hands. “Could be. She’s got no obvious connection to the victim. We’ll need to have a look at the thing.”

  Cu scrolls through the perpetrator’s file. Twenty years’ worth of information strained from social media feeds and the odd government application has been condensed to a brief. Elody Polle, born in Toronto, raised in Seattle, rode a scholarship to Princeton to study ethnomusicology before dropping out in ’42, estranged from most friends and family for over a year despite having moved back to a one-room flat in North Seattle. No priors. No history of violence. No record of antisocial behavior.

  Cu checks the live feed from the interrogation room. Heart-rate down, she signs, tucking the tablet under her armpit. Time to talk.

  Huxley looks down into the chip bag. “These are terrible.” He shoves one last handful into his mouth, crumbs snagging in his wiry red beard, then seals the bag and puts it neatly in his jacket pocket. He licks the salt off his palms on the way to the interrogation room.

  The precinct is near empty, but there are still curious faces peering from the cubicles as they pass. Cu doesn’t come to the precinct often. Huxley had to beg her to put in an appearance. She prefers working from her apartment, where everything is the right size and shape and there are no curious faces.

  The outside of the interrogation room looks far less pleasant than the interior: it’s a concrete cube with a thick steel door that seals shut once they pass through it.

  Cu squats down a respectable distance away from the perpetrator, haunches sinking through the holographic sand onto padded floor. Huxley pulls up a seat right beside her.

  “Good evening, Ms. Polle,” he says. “My name’s Al. You doing okay in here?”

  Elody Polle sucks in a trembling breath, and says nothing.

  “This is my partner, Cu,” Huxley continues. Elody’s eyes travel over to her, but don’t register even a hint of surprise. “We need to get a better idea of what happened earlier, and why. Can you help us with that?”

  Elody says nothing.

  Cu takes a closer look at the earpiece. The graft is puffy and slightly inflamed. A DIY job, maybe. Ask her about the piece, she signs. We would hate to remove it.

  “Cu’s curious about that wireless,” Huxley says. “So am I. In the subway footage, the way you’re bobbing your head, it almost looks like someone was talking you through the whole thing. Want to tell us about that?”

  A flicker crosses Elody’s face. Progress.

  “Because if you don’t, we’ll have to r
emove the earpiece and have a look for ourselves,” Huxley says. “As much as we’d hate to ruin that lovely graft job.”

  Elody claps her hand protectively over her ear. “Don’t you fucking dare!” She tries to shout the words, but her voice is hoarse, flaked away to almost a whisper. As if she hasn’t spoken aloud in months.

  Cu pulls up the speech synth on her tablet and taps out eight laborious letters, one question mark.

  “Echogirl?” the electronic voice blurts.

  Elody’s eyes winch wide. As she looks over at Cu, her cheek gives a nervous twitch.

  Huxley’s furry red brows knit together. He signs, what the fuck is that.

  Echogirl, echoboy, Cu signs. Use an earpiece, eyecam. Rent themselves out to someone who says where to go, what to do, what to say.

  Thought that was. Huxley’s hands falter. “A kink, sort of thing,” he says aloud, and Elody’s face flushes angry red.

  “It’s a lifestyle,” she says. “She told me you wouldn’t understand. Nobody does.”

  “Is she going to come get you out of this mess?” Huxley demands.

  “Of course she is.” Elody purses her lips, turns away.

  Huxley turns to Cu. Take the earpiece? he signs. Or what?

  Cu scratches under her ribs, watching a tremor move through Elody’s hunched shoulders. Offer turn off the Faraday, she signs.

  Huxley nods, then turns back to address Elody. “I bet she won’t,” he says. “I bet you a twenty, and half a bag of chips. Well.” He pats his coat pocket and the bag rustles. “A third. Yeah, in fact, I bet the last thing she’s ever going to say to you was pull the trigger. Should we turn off the shielding and see?”

  Elody turns back, eyes shiny with tears. “Yes,” she whispers. “Please, I need to hear her voice, I need . . .” Her tone is eager, but Cu can see uncertainty in the tightening of her eyelids, the bulge of her lower lip.

  Huxley makes a show of rapping on the door, telling them to turn off the Faraday. There’s a sudden subtraction from the white noise as the generator cuts out, then Huxley’s phone starts vibrating his pocket with updates.