The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I hack Jazza’s bills as well. Otherwise, he’d be out on the street.

  I sit there a while, just making sure he’s OK, if he wants anything. He snores. I give his knee a pat and leave. You get lonely sometimes.

  I get to my room and there’s a message. “Dad, you probably know this already but Bessie was mugged. I’ll be over tomorrow.”

  Bessie is my granddaughter. Never have a well crucial day.

  The next morning we’re doing Neurobics.

  They found out that even old people grow new neurons. If they give you PDA, it goes even faster, but you got to use it or lose it. So they make us learn. They make us do crazy stuff. Like brush our teeth with the wrong hand. Or read stuff from a screen that is upside down. Sometimes they make us do really off the wall stuff, like sniff vanilla beans while we listen to classical music. They’re trying to induce synaesthesia.

  Today we were in VR. We’re weightless in a burning space station. We got to get out through smoke and there is no up or down. What way does the lever on the door pull?

  I get a tug on my arm. It’s the Kid. He smiles at me real nice. “Mr. Brewster? I come find you. You son is here.”

  These days I walk like Frankenstein, on these fake little legs. They make your muscles work so they grow back. Nobody’s supposed to hold me up. The Kid does though. To him I guess I’m some old granddad and that is how you show respect!

  So I introduce him to my son. Joao, this is my boy Bill. Bill stands up and shakes the Kid’s hand and thanks him for taking care of me. My boy is fifty years old. He’s got a potbelly, but he still looks like a guy who never spent a day in an office.

  Bill is real neat. I can say that. He’s a neat kid, he just never made any money. He’d work in the summers as a diving instructor and in winter he’d go south. He went to teach primary school in the Hebrides. He did a stint putting chips in elephant’s brains in Sri Lanka.

  Today though his smile looks weirded out.

  “How’s Bessie?” I ask.

  Something happens to Bill’s face and he sits down. “Um. You didn’t see the news? It was on the news.”

  “Bessie was in the news?” Oh shit. You don’t get in the comics just for stubbing your toe.

  Bill’s voice rattles. “They did something to her face,” he says. He takes out his paper and fills it, and lays it out on the table.

  I tell him, “I didn’t see anything about it. I think we’re filtered. I think they filter our news.”

  “VAO. Only this time it really was a victim who got activated.”

  VAO protects banks, shopping malls, offices. Anything First World, or Nerd World, got VAO. It’s supposed to zap thieves. For just a second I thought maybe Bessie had been on a job like maybe being a gangsta skips a generation or something.

  Bill’s newspaper fills up with an animated headline.

  The headline says

  V

  A

  O ...

  And the headline animates into

  Very

  Ancient

  Offenders

  And then, for your delectation and amusement, up comes my granddaughter’s mugging, caught on security camera and sold by the ordnance company to defray costs.

  They run my granddaughter’s mugging for laughs. Because the muggers are old.

  Ain’t dey cute, them old guys?

  There’s my Bessie, going out to her car. Slick black hair, skinny red trousers, real small, real sweet. Able to take care of herself, but you don’t expect your own bolted, belted VAO parking lot to be the place where you get mugged.

  These four clowns come lurching out at her. They’re old guys like me. They’re staggering around on callipers, they got the Frankenstein walk but they stink of the street. One of them is wearing old trousers that are too small. The legs end up around his calves, and they’re held up by a belt, they don’t close at the front. There is a continent of dingy underwear on display.

  Bill says, “Microwave. Somehow they turned it on her instead of them. But they didn’t know what they were doing.” Bill can’t look at this, he’s hiding his face.

  And on the paper, Bessie is denied her own area.

  The keys in her hand go hot, she drops them. Her own shiny hair goes hot and she clasps her head, and she crouches down and tries to hide under her own elbows.

  Bill takes from behind his hand. “It’s supposed to stop before 250 seconds. After that it does damage.”

  These are old, old codgers. They shuffle. They forget to turn the fuckin thing off. They pick up the car keys and they’re too hot and they drop ’em. Well duh. Finally they shuffle round to some kind of switch.

  We’re at 300 seconds and Bessie’s trousers are smoking, and the skin of her face is curling up.

  “She’ll need a cornea transplant,” says Bill.

  They pick up her purse and just leave her there. They get into the car. I get a look at them.

  There’s two ways you get old. One, you shrivel up. The other, you puff out like a cloud. One guy has a face like melted marshmallow in these dead-white hanging lumps.

  “Old farts,” I hear myself say. I’m so sick of feeling angry. I feel angry all the time and there’s nothing I can do about anything. There’s nothing I can do about Bessie, nothing I can do about those old stupid jerks.

  “She’ll be OK,” says Bill and he’s looking at me and for just a sec I’m his Daddy again. I never was much of a Daddy when he was a kid, always off on a job or working for the company. He ended up being the kind of guy who never stops looking for a father. Christ, Billy. I wanted to have enough money so that you would never have to work, to make up for not being around. But all my money goes into being old.

  We latch hands. Bill’s spent all his life helping people. Bill’s just a better man than I am.

  “I’m sorry, Billy,” I say, and I mean for everything.

  That night Jazza and I finally go for a beer at the bar in the Happy Farm, but J’s in bad shape. He just sits staring. Neurobics make him dizzy. They got a new timed drug dispenser on his wrist. He does a little jump and groans when they dose him. We’re hanging out with Gus.

  Gus does this sweet little hippie routine. He says that he sold plankton to places like Paraguay so they could get carbon reduction credits. Now. Everybody who was awake knows that it didn’t work and nobody made any money at it. In fact they lost their shirts.

  So I ask myself: where does Gus’s money come from? I mean you got this greasy little dude who took too much whizz. His dialog is just too sussed for an eco-warrior.

  “You heard about this VAO stuff?” he asks me.

  “Only cause my granddaughter got mugged. I didn’t know they filter our news.

  “I got something that filters the filter,” he says. “This is news we need to know.”

  “About my granddaughter?”

  “No. Look me in the eye. The guys that do this are a crew. It’s several crews all over the country, but they’re all linked, and they’re all old guys. And they’re doing this kind of stuff a lot.”

  Suddenly, I am aware of the surveillance all around us. “So?”

  “Kind of blows our story, doesn’t it? Sweet little old guys playing computer games and taking physio.” Gus’s eyes are steady as a rock.

  I knew it. Gus is a player.

  I ask him, “How much are you uh ... tipping Curtis?”

  His face and smile are less expressive than an armadillo’s behind. “Too much,” he says. His eyebrows do a little jump.

  “Anybody else?” I ask him, meaning who are the other Players. It’s nice to know that even at our age we can make new friends and acquaintances.

  “Oh yeah,” he says looking around. “You could start with The Good Fairies.” The Good Fairies are a couple, been together 50 years. They look up from their table, and they look pretty mean to me.

  “I’ll get you that filter,” says Gus.

  Good as his word, I get mail. Takes me a while, because it downloads as dirty picture
s. I try a couple of times and finally get the code. Load it up and I got a different personalisation on the news.

  So I fill up my newspaper and I read the backstory. This crew has been at it for months. Old guys who hijack armed intelligent cameras, old guys who spray clubs with paralysis gas, or shoot electricity through whole trainloads of commuters. They edit out every single last purse and wristwatch while the ordnance that is supposed to protect the punters is turned around on them.

  There are zapped grannies, zapped babies, zapped beautiful teenage girls who should have been left to enjoy life. I never had any respect for direct-action crime. Money is magic, it’s a religion. All you gotta do is just walk into the temple and help yourself and nobody gets hurt.

  Not these geeks. For them, hurting people is part of the point. They’re not even really crooks. Crooks want to be invisible. These guys are so stupid and vicious that they want everybody to know about them.

  They got this crazy leader who calls himself Silhouette. Aw Jesus can you believe that? He probably grew up wanting to be Eminem or something. He still does that dumb thing with the splayed open hands pointing down. Silhouette is skinny like a model. His knees are fatter than his thighs and ho-hum, he’s all in black and he has his whole face blanked out, just black, no eyes no mouth. Oh, Daddy Cool.

  I take one look at this guy and I know just who he is. My generation, you know, we never fought a war. We grew up watching disasters on TV and worrying about our clothes. This guy is sitting there and he’s holding his face so that we can see he’s got killer cheekbones. The guy’s probably eighty and he’s worried about his looks.

  And of course he’s got a manifesto. He croaks it at me, in this real weird voice, until I figure out it’s been recognition masked. No voiceprint. It makes him sound like he’s talking underwater.

  “You sniff money on old people, and just because we can’t run and can’t hurt you back you strip us naked. You leave us in cold water flats and shut us up in expensive prisons you call Homes. You don’t pay us the pensions you promised When we get sick, you tell us our insurance that we paid for all our lives doesn’t cover the cost of care. You want us to die. So. We’ll die. And take we’ll everything from you when we go.”

  You want to know the spookiest thing of all? I know where he’s coming from I know exactly what Silhouette means.

  “Age Rage,” he says and clenches a fist.

  So the next day I’m back down in the bar with Gus. I got Jazzanova with me like he’s my good luck charm. Gus has his squeeze Mandy. Mandy used to be a lap dancer. She’s still got a body, I can tell you.

  She’s also got a mouth and the brains to use it. Her cover is that she used to be in property development. Well yeah maybe. A certain kind of old babe has the hardest eyes you’ll ever see.

  Mandy says, “The trouble with that scum is they’ll turn the heat up on all of us.”

  “Yup,” says Gus. “We’ll end up on the street.”

  “I’ll take Curtis with me,” I promise. “I got evidence on the guy.”

  Mandy’s not impressed. “Good! You can share the same cardboard box. Hope it makes you feel better.”

  We’re too old for fear. We just turn our backs on it. If we get the fear at all it takes us over, and our legs don’t work and we go little and frail and old. So we got to be like old dried leather. It used to be soft, but now it’s as hard as stone.

  The Good Fairies sit listening. They are as cerebral as fuck. I mean these guys are the only people I know who can tell their genitals what to do. They got married fifty years ago and they’ve only fucked each other since. I blame Aids.

  The Good Fairies sometimes talk in unison. It’s like twins who’ve been locked up in the same closet since they were born. “We have to take out Silhouette.”

  Best, as we cogitate. True. Beat. Us? Beat.

  Then we all start roaring with laughter. Mandy barks like a dog with its vocal chords cut out. Gus squeaks. I know I sound like gravel being milled. Jazzanova stares into outer space, and doesn’t want to be left out, so he laughs at the strip lighting and then he swallows a chip off the table edge thinking it’s a pill.

  Mandy is barking. “The Neurobics Crew!”

  The Good Fairies sit holding hands, sipping their cigarettes, and they don’t move a muscle.

  Fairy One says, real calm. “It’ll be real funny inside that cardboard box.”

  “Specially when it rains,” says the other. This guy is five foot two with a dorky beard. He looks like a failed Drag King, but he calls himself Thug, which has to be some kind of joke.

  “Yeah, but you guys,” says Mandy. “I can hear where you’re coming from, but what are going to DO?”

  Fairy One calls himself Jojo but I bet he’s really called George and he says, “We ask him to stop.”

  “Oh yeah? Sure!”

  “His position doesn’t make sense. He says he does it because he’s old. But it is the old he’s hurting.”

  Mandy shakes her head. “He’s in it for the money.”

  Thug disagrees. “He’s in it for the showbiz. Money won’t be enough.”

  Jojo says, “We show him how to get on TV and say something that makes sense for a change. I’m sure that most of us have something to say on the position of the old.”

  Mandy says, “How you gonna do that.”

  Jojo says, “I used to make TV shows.”

  Thug says. “All we gotta do is find who Silhouette is.”

  And I get this real weird, sick feeling and I don’t know why.

  Mandy jerks like she’s laughing to herself. She flicks cigarette ash like it’s going all over their pretty little dream. “You better get hacking,” she says.

  I don’t know if they did, but the next day my dear Dr. Curtis runs in to tell me we’re all about to get a visit from the cops.

  Curtis looks terrified. He looks sick. He leans against my door like they’re going to hammer it down. Plump smooth-skinned pretty little doctor, he’s got so much to lose.

  “How’s your system?” he asks smiling like he’s relearning how to use his facial muscles. He’s got something he doesn’t want to say in front of the ordnance.

  I don’t get it. “What’s it to you?”

  He makes a noise like someone’s jammed a pin in his butt. His eyes start doing a belly dance towards the window. I look out and see that the front drive of the Happy Farm is stuffed like a turkey with police cars.

  I just say, “A shape outlined against the light?”

  I mean a silhouette. Curtis sorta settles with relief and nods yes. “You’ve been following the news.”

  I get it. The cops are here to find out if any of us nice old folks are funding Silhouette’s reign of terror. That means that they’ll be going through our accounts. For once Curtis and I have exactly the same self-interest.

  I’m a thief and I’ve never been caught and that’s not because I’m smart, but because I know I’m not. So I worry. So I prepare.

  I got about ten minutes and that’s all I need. I start running my emergency program. It looks like a rerun of pro golf. Curtis hangs around. He wants to see how I do this. I need to put on my specs but I don’t want him to know about the transcoder.

  “Curtis, maybe you should go talk to our guests.” I mean slow them down. I mean get out of here.

  Then there’s a knock. In comes the Kid. Maybe he’s come to tell me about the cops too. He sees Curtis and I swear his eyes switch on with hate like a lightbulb.

  “Joao, maybe you could take Dr. Curtis out to greet our guests.” And that means: Joao help me get him out of here.

  That Kid is sussed. “You,” he says to Curtis, and punches the palm of his hand. Curtis understands that, too. Note. Not one of us has said anything that would sound bad in court.

  I hear the door shut. Finally I put on my specs and the transcoder shows me data download on one eye lens and data upload, on the other.

  It’s a fake I’ve had worked out for years. It’ll cover my wh
ole account and make it look like I’m some kind of gaga spendthrift, that I gamble a lot on a Korean site, lose my dosh, win some dosh. It matches, transaction for transaction, money in, money out.

  That’s what’s uploading. On the other lens, I’m encrypted my old data. I got maybe five minutes now.

  Just having some encrypted data on my system will be enough to make trouble. I’m ghosting the encrypted file and then I go to get it off my disk. It starts to squirt into my transcoder.

  I hear big heavy boots. I hear Dr. Curtis babbling happily. I hear a knock on the front door. Mine? No, next door.

  Six ... five ... four ... stuff is still downloading. Three two one zero. Right, off comes the transcoder. It looks like the arm from my glasses.

  On my hard drive, iron molecules are being permanently scrambled. Sorry Officer, I’m just this old guy and I’ve been having these terrible problems with my system.

  I go take a shower. They monitor your heartbeat and video your keystrokes but the law says they can’t perve you in the shower.

  And while I’m in the shower I take the transcoder and like I rehearsed a hundred times, I push it up the head of my penis.

  The transcoder’s long, it’s thin. In an x-ray, it’ll look like a sexual prosthetic.

  When the knock on my door comes, I’m out, I’m dry, and I’m in my nice baggy shiny blue suit. I am the picture of a callipered, monitored neurobic modern Noughties Boy. With money of his own.

  The Armament comes in. He looks like somebody who divides his time between weightlifting and V-games, hairy golden biceps, a smile like a rodent’s and heavy-duty multipurpose specs. His manner is unfriendly. “You’re Alistair Brewster. Hello. We’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  “I don’t see what’s stopping you.” I don’t do polite even with Armament.

  “Fine.” He sits down without being asked. His specs have a little blinking light. Smile, you’re on candid camera. “Mr. Brewster, you used to work for SecureIT Inc.”

  “Was that a question or a statement?”

  He blinks. “You worked on the design of security systems.”

  There is no lie as effective as the truth. “That’s how I made my money. I came up with some of the recognition software, the stuff that means the ordnance knows who it’s dealing with.” I try to make it sound rich.