The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  Harriet, usually the quietest of the group, uttered an involuntary, admiring expletive.

  The third drone had finished hitching itself to the tree on the opposite bank, and was flying across the water for its own rendezvous. Natalie strained her eyes as the second drone went into reverse, again separating the paired cables so its companion could slip through and form the link. Then the second drone released the loop completely and headed back to the riverbank, its job done. The third went off to mimic the first, tying its loose end to the tree where it had started.

  They repeated the whole exercise three more times, giving the bridge two hand-ropes and two deck supports, before breaking for lunch. As Natalie was unwrapping the sandwiches she’d brought, a dark blur the size of her thumb buzzed past her face and alighted on her forearm. Instinctively, she moved to flick it off, but then she realized that it was not a living insect: it was a small Toshiba dragonfly, its four wings iridescent with photovoltaic coatings. Whether it was mapping the forest, monitoring wildlife, or just serving as a communications node, the last thing she’d want to do was damage it. The machine should not have landed on anything but vegetation, but no one’s programming was perfect. She watched it as it sat motionless in the patch of sunlight falling on her skin, then it ascended suddenly and flew off out of sight.

  In the afternoon, the team gave their bridge a rudimentary woven deck. Each of the students took turns donning a life-jacket and hard-hat before walking across the swaying structure and back, whooping with a mixture of elation at their accomplishment and adrenaline as they confronted its fragility.

  “And now we have to take it apart,” Natalie announced, prepared for the predictable groans and pleas. “No arguments!” she said firmly. “Pretty as it is, it would only take a party of five or six hikers to break it, and if they ended up dashing their brains out in the shallows that would be enough to bankrupt the university and send us all to prison.”

  2

  AS NATALIE STARTED up the stairs to her apartment she heard a distinctive trilling siren, then saw a red shimmer spilling down onto the landing ahead. The delivery quad came into view and she moved to the left to let it pass, catching a welcome cool wash from its downdraft – a sensation weirdly intensified by the lime-green tint of the receding hazard lights.

  She tensed as she approached her floor, hoping that she wouldn’t find Sam waiting for her. His one talent was smooth talking, and he could always find someone willing to buzz him into the building. Against her better judgment she’d let her brother wheedle her into sinking ten thousand dollars into his latest business venture, but when it had proved to be as unprofitable as all the rest, rather than apologizing and going in search of paid work he’d started begging her to invest even more, in order to “tip the balance” – as if his struggling restaurant were a half-submerged Spanish galleon full of gold that only needed a few more flotation bladders to rise magnificently to the surface.

  Sam wasn’t lurking in the corridor, but there was a small package in front of her door. Natalie was puzzled and annoyed; she wasn’t expecting anything, and the drones were not supposed to leave their cargo uncollected on a doormat. She stooped down and picked up the parcel; it bore the logo of a local courier, but water had somehow got inside the plastic pocket that held the waybill, turning the portion with the sender’s address into gray mush. A gentle shake yielded the clinking slosh of melting ice.

  Inside, she put the parcel in the kitchen sink, went to the bathroom, then came back and cut open the mailing box to reveal an insulating foam container. The lid bore the words GUESS WHO? written in black marker. Natalie honestly couldn’t; she’d parted company with the last two men she’d dated on terms that made surprise gifts unlikely, let alone a peace offering of chilled crab meat, or whatever this was.

  She tugged the lid off and tipped the ice into the sink. A small pink object stood out from the slush, but it wasn’t any part of a crab. Natalie stared for several seconds, unwilling to prod the thing into position for a better view, then she fetched a pair of tongs to facilitate a more thorough inspection.

  It was the top part of a human finger. A little finger, severed at the joint. She walked away and paced the living room, trying to decode the meaning of the thing before she called the police. She could not believe that Alfonso – a moody musician who’d ditched her when she’d dared to leave one of his gigs at two in the morning, on a work night – would have the slightest interest in mutilating his own precious hands in the service of a psychotic prank. Digging back further she still came up blank. Rafael had smashed crockery once, in the heat of an argument, but by now she’d be surprised to elicit any stronger reaction from him than a rueful smile if they ran into each other on the street. The truth was, the prospect of the cops hauling any of these ex-lovers in for questioning mortified her almost as much as the macabre offering itself, because pointing the finger at any of them seemed preposterously self-aggrandizing. “Really?” she could hear the whole lineup of unlikely suspects demanding, holding out their pristine mitts. “You thought you were worth that?”

  Natalie walked back to the kitchen doorway. Why was she assuming that the amputation had been voluntary? No one she knew would commit such an act – upon themselves or anyone else – but that didn’t mean she didn’t know the unwilling donor.

  She turned around and rushed to the bedroom, where she kept the bioassay attachment for her notepad. The only software she’d downloaded for it was for personal health and pregnancy testing, but it took less than a minute to get the app she needed.

  There was no visible blood left inside the fingertip, but when she picked it up with the tongs it was full of meltwater that ought to be brimming with sloughed cells. She tipped a little of the water onto the assay chip and waited ten long minutes for the software to announce a result for the markers she’d chosen.

  Chance of fraternity: 95%

  Sam must have gone elsewhere for money, but it would have disappeared into the same bottomless pit as her own investment. And when his creditors had come for him with their bolt-cutters, who else was he going to rope in to help him repay his debt but his sister?

  Natalie wanted to scream with anger, but she found herself weeping. Her brother was an infuriating, immature, self-deluding brat, but he didn’t deserve this. If she had to re-mortgage the apartment to get him out of these people’s clutches, so be it. She wasn’t going to abandon him.

  As she began trying to think through the logistics of dealing with the bank as quickly as possible – without explaining the true purpose of the loan – her phone rang.

  3

  “WE DON’T WANT your money. But there is a way you can resolve this situation without paying a cent.”

  Natalie stared at the kidnapper, who’d asked her to call him Lewis. The food court to which he’d invited her was as busy as she’d seen it on a Wednesday night; she had even spotted a few cops. The undeniable fact of their meeting proved nothing incriminating, but how could he know she wasn’t recording his words?

  She said, “You’re not a loan shark.”

  “No.” Lewis had an accent from far out of state, maybe the Midwest. He was a dark-haired, clean-shaven white man, and he looked about forty. Natalie tried to commit these facts to memory, terrified that when the police finally questioned her she’d be unable to recall his face at all. “We’d like you to consult for us.”

  “Consult?” Natalie managed a derisive laugh. “Who do you think I work for, the NSA? Everything I know about drones is already in the public domain. You didn’t need to kidnap my brother. It’s all on the web.”

  “There are time pressures,” Lewis explained. “Our own people are quick studies, but they’ve hit a roadblock. They’ve read your work, of course. That’s why they chose you.”

  “And what am I supposed to help you do? Assassinate someone?” The whole conversation was surreal, but the hubbub of their boisterous fellow diners was so loud that unless she’d stood up on the table and shouted the qu
estion, no one would have looked at them twice.

  Lewis shook his head; at least he didn’t insult her intelligence by feigning offense. “No one will get hurt. We just need to steal some information.”

  “Then find yourself a hacker.”

  “The targets are smarter than that.”

  “Targets, plural?”

  Lewis said, “Only three that will concern you directly – though in all fairness I should warn you that your efforts will need to synchronize with our own on several other fronts.”

  Natalie felt light-headed; when exactly had she signed the contract in blood? “You’re taking a lot for granted.”

  “Am I?” There wasn’t a trace of menace in his voice, but then, the stakes had already been made clear.

  “I’m not refusing,” she replied. “I won’t help you to inflict bodily harm – but if you’re open with me and I’m sure that there’s no chance of that, I’ll do what you ask.”

  Lewis nodded, amiable in a businesslike way. He, or his associates, had been cold-blooded enough to mutilate Sam as proof of their seriousness, but if they planned to kill her once she’d served her purpose, why meet physically, in a public space, where a dozen surveillance drones would be capturing the event?

  “The targets are all bitionaires,” he said. “We don’t plan to touch a hair on their heads; we just want their key-strings... which are not stored on anything vulnerable to spyware.”

  “I see.” Natalie’s own stash of electronic pocket change didn’t merit any great precautions, but she was aware of the general idea: anyone prudent, and sufficiently wealthy, kept the cryptographic key to their anonymized digital fortune in a purpose-built wallet. The operating system and other software resided solely on read-only media, and even the working memory functioned under rigid, hardware-enforced protocols that made the whole setup effectively incorruptible. “So how can I get around that? Am I meant to infiltrate the wallet factory?”

  “No.” Lewis paused, but he wasn’t turning coy on her – merely hiding a faint belch behind a politely raised hand. “The basic scenario is the kind of thing any competent stage magician could pull off. The target takes their wallet from its safe, then gets distracted. We substitute an identical-looking device. The target commences to log in to their exchange with the fake wallet; we’ve already cloned their fingerprints so we can mimic those preliminaries on the real wallet. The target receives a one-time password from the exchange on their cell phone; they enter it into the fake wallet, and we use it to enact our own preferred transactions via the real one.”

  Natalie opened her mouth to protest: her understanding was that the message from the exchange would also include a hash of the transaction details – allowing the user to double-check exactly what it was they were authorizing. But she wasn’t thinking straight: to the human looking at that string of gibberish, the information would be invisible. Only the wallet itself had the keys required to reveal the hash’s true implications, and the fake wallet would blithely pretend that everything matched up perfectly.

  She said, “So all you need to do is invite these people to bring their wall safes to a Las Vegas show.”

  Lewis ignored her sarcasm. “The transactions can’t be rescinded, but it won’t take the targets long to discover that they’ve been duped – and to spread the word. So we need to ensure that these individual operations are as close to concurrent as possible.”

  Natalie struggled to maintain a tone of disapproval even as her curiosity got the better of her. “How do you make all these people get an itch to buy or sell at the same time?”

  “We’ve already set that in motion,” Lewis replied. “You don’t need to know the details, but in seven days and thirteen hours, unless the targets are comatose they won’t be able to ignore the top story on their news feeds.”

  Natalie leaned back from the table. Half her experience, and all of her best ideas, had involved maneuvers on a scale of tens of meters by devices that were far from small or stealthy. Dextrous as a well-equipped quadrocopter could be, sleight-of-hand was a bit much to ask of it.

  “So do you want me to program robot storks to carry the fake wallets down chimneys?”

  Lewis said, “The fake wallets have all been in place for a while, concealed inside innocuous-looking items.”

  “Like what?”

  “Cereal packets. Once people find the brand they like, they stick to it.”

  “I knew there was a reason I didn’t use my supermarket’s loyalty card. And the drones?”

  “They’re on site as well.”

  “The wallets are how big?”

  Lewis held his fingers a few centimeters apart. “Like credit cards. And not much thicker.”

  “So... how many dragonflies?”

  “Six at each site. But they’re not dragonflies: they’re custom-built, smaller and quieter. From a distance they’d pass for houseflies.”

  Natalie crushed the urge to start grilling him on detailed specifications. “So you have a plan. And you’ve got the tools in place. Why do you need me at all?”

  “Our plan relied on realtime operators,” Lewis confessed. “The whole thing seemed too complex to deal with any other way – too many variables, too much uncertainty. All the sites have countermeasures against radio frequency traffic, but we believed we could communicate optically; some people don’t consider that at all, or don’t make the effort to lock things down tightly.” “But... ?”

  “In three cases, it looks as if our optical routes have gone from mostly open to patchy at best. Not from any deliberate blocking strategies – just minor changes in the architecture, or people’s routines. But it means that a continuous link would be too much to hope for.”

  Lewis’s team had been given the right advice from the start: this was a job for humans. And now she was expected to program eighteen drones to perform three elaborate feats of prestidigitation, using nothing but their own tiny brains?

  Natalie said, “Before we go any further, I want you to prove to me that my brother’s still alive.”

  4

  “I RAN INTO your fifth grade teacher last week,” Natalie remarked, once the pleasantries were over. “The one you had a crush on.”

  Sam responded with a baffled scowl, too quickly to have needed to think through his reaction. “I don’t even remember her name. I certainly didn’t have a crush on her!”

  However much intelligence the kidnappers might have gathered on the two of them – all the family pets and vacations they’d shared, all the confidences they might have exchanged – there was no proving a negative. Natalie was sure she wasn’t watching a puppet.

  Someone else was holding the phone, giving the camera a wider view than usual. Apart from his splinted and bandaged finger Sam appeared to be physically unharmed. Natalie refrained from upbraiding him; she was the reason he’d been abducted, even if some idiotic plan to keep the restaurant afloat had made him easier to trap.

  “Just take it easy,” she said. “I’m going to give these people what they want, and you’ll be out of there in no time.” She glanced at Lewis, then added, “I’ll talk to you every morning, OK? That’s the deal. They’ll have to keep you safe, or I’ll pull the plug.”

  “Do you think you can check in on the restaurant for me?” Sam pleaded. “Just to be sure that the chef’s not slacking off?”

  “No, I really can’t.”

  “But Dmitri’s so lazy! If I’m not –”

  Natalie handed the phone back to Lewis and he broke the connection.

  They’d gone into a side-street to make the call; apparently Lewis hadn’t trusted Sam not to start yelling for help if he saw other people in the background.

  “I get to call him every day,” she said. “That’s not negotiable.” “By Skype,” Lewis replied.

  “All right.” A Skype connection would be much harder to trace than a cell phone. Natalie was beginning to feel nostalgic for her previous nightmare scenario of loan sharks and intransigent banks. “What if
I do my best, but I can’t pull this off?” she asked.

  “We’re sure you can,” Lewis replied.

  His faith in her was not at all reassuring. “There’s a reason your experts told you they’d need human pilots. I swear I’ll try to make this work – but you can’t murder my brother because I fall at the same hurdle as your own people.”

  Lewis didn’t reply. On one level, Natalie understood the psychology behind his strategy: if he’d promised that she’d be rewarded merely for trying, she might have been tempted to hold herself back. She suspected that she’d be unlikely to face criminal charges, regardless, but sheer stubbornness or resentment might have driven her to indulge in some passive sabotage if she thought she could get away with it.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “By the time you get home, we’ll have emailed you briefing files. We’ll need the software for the drones by midnight on Monday.”

  Natalie was so flustered that she had to count out the interval in her head. “Five days! I thought you said seven!”

  “We’ll need to verify the new software for ourselves, then install it via infrasound. The bandwidth for that is so low that it could take up to fortyeight hours.”

  Natalie was silent, but she couldn’t keep the dismay from showing on her face.

  “You might want to call in sick,” Lewis suggested.

  “That’s it? That’s the best advice you have for me?”

  “Read the briefing.” Lewis paused, then nodded slightly. He turned and walked away.