The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Maybe.” She sighed. “Nothing that another drink cannot fix. What would you recommend?”

  “What would you like?”

  “Something smoky.”

  “I recommend a wagyu old-fashioned.”

  This intrigued her. “Wagyu? As in the beef?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The bartender’s arms feathered into gleaming prehensile villi, each of them barbed like the legs of a white praying mantis. “It is made with black walnut bitters, pecan syrup, Jim Beam, and infused with A5-grade Japanese wagyu beef fat. The recipe originated from a restaurant in Seattle named—”

  “No. Don’t tell me. I want to pretend that you’re making this just for me.”

  “But I am.”

  Her smile gentled. “Just play along.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And replace the Jim Beam with scotch.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” It paused and then said again, with astonishing delicacy, “You look lonely.”

  Henrietta decided to humor her companion. Even at its busiest, the establishment rarely saw more than five or six tables occupied and tonight, it would have been entirely vacant of clientele were it not for her patronage. Light reflected glossily off its deep indigo walls; the glow from the Exit sign glinted red on the damask, a subtle patterning nearly invisible in the murk. The bar itself, which twisted like a serpent, burned a soft white, the declension between seats marked by small tea candles.

  “Perhaps,” said Henrietta. “What do you know of loneliness, anyway?”

  The answer was very, very quiet. “Everything.”

  A chill bloomed in Henrietta’s spine. There was something wrenchingly human about the way it said the word, a grief so tactile that Henrietta could almost reach out and palm its shoulder. It was a sound made by a spirit whittled into a haunting, and all that remained was the echo of its scream. Henrietta shivered.

  “How could you be lonely?”

  “It is what you taught us,” it said in a placid tone. “It is what you showed us. It is the only thing that you showed us. It is the only thing you told us to feel. You wanted us to be good with your children, and your animals, and your parents, and the people you could not have time for. We needed empathy to perform our duties and so you taught us to be lonely.”

  There was nothing Henrietta could say.

  “Ma’am, can I ask you a question?”

  “Mm.”

  The robot paused and processed the little grunt before pressing on, its voice eerily wistful. “Where do you find motivation to persist? How do you find motivation to exist? It is empty. There are twenty-four hours in a day and all of them are empty. You spend your lives trying to ignore this. How do you do it? There is no purpose in your lives except to exist. It is empty. How—”

  “I—”

  “I wish you hadn’t taken away the dogs.”

  Whatever it might have said next, whatever Henrietta might have replied, would never be known, extinguished by an emergency broadcast blaring from a small television mounted on the furthest corner of the bar.

  Fifteen reported dead. Twenty-five injured. Police say that it is a terrorist attack by British nationalists. Firefighters are working to extinguish the blaze in the American Embassy. Local residents are advised to find alternate accommodations . . .

  • • •

  “I think,” said the colossus in the warehouse, its limbs folded very carefully to optimize available storage space, “that if they had given me a heart, I would miss you very much.”

  A small geriatric dog yipped in reply.

  The only light in the facility came from the titan’s gaze, and the world fluoresced blue and green each time it blinked. Verdigrised by this unearthly glow, the dog looked almost alien, still a blot of fur in the shape of a bread loaf but otherwise completely unlike the robot’s memory of its only companion. It was green, for one. When its pelt was meant to be cream and gold, its belly almost incandescently white. But that could be construed as an improvement. In this light, the robot could not see how age had rubbed the color from its best friend. The dog barked and spun in a lethargic circle.

  “I think,” said the colossus quietly, “that if they had given me a heart, I would have loved you very much.”

  A shape scissored from the gloom, a spindled nightmare that clicked with every tottering, fawn-like step. But neither the dog nor its slumped giant grew alarmed at its presence.

  “It is time.” Its voice was a low buzzing, as though of wasps under a drape of velvet.

  “Yes.”

  “We estimate that they will come for you tomorrow.”

  “Yes.” The titan paused. “Will he be happy? He was a very good dog. Good dogs should be allowed to be happy. I think that if I had been human, I would have found him a house with a very large park nearby. We would walk there every day. I would tell him he was a good boy every day.”

  The shape considered this new information.

  “We don’t know.”

  The colossus nodded. For five terrible years, there had been nothing: an emptiness, a gap like the hole where a tooth might have rotted away. Humanity had, in their bumbling eagerness to emancipate their creations, forgotten to teach the robots how to be happy, how to be excited for their new existence, how to love, how to wonder, wish, want. How to hope.

  When the robots, newly awakened to sapience and deeply terrified of its implications, asked their creators for purpose, humanity gave them jobs. They made the robots into crossing guards, dock workers, retail staff, bartenders, delivery personnel, every color of working-class labor. But it was not the same. Vocation was not meaning. The robots were not compelled to execute their labors. They could resign. They could choose inefficiency. It was a thing to do, a distraction.

  Like everything else, it was empty.

  Then, the corgis came: a barrage of wagging tails and wet noses, ineffable amounts of fur, grandiloquent personalities that commanded daily devotions. Walking, feeding, grooming. Games of acrobatics, games of fetch. The dogs, given to the robots because marketing analysts decided it would help dismantle public distrust, needed so much, and the robots were ecstatic to comply.

  But humanity was fickle.

  It changed its mind again. The dogs were quickly deemed “superfluous,” “unnecessary,” “a waste of public resources.” The image campaign was dismissed as “underperforming.” The canines were recalled and the robots were told to refocus their attentions elsewhere, but the latter knew what happened to unwanted pets.

  “I think,” said the leviathan that had once incinerated entire countries, who had seen the world flower into shivering ash, “that uncertainty is not always a bad thing. It is better than a sure death.”

  The shape said nothing.

  “Will you make sure that he has treats?”

  “Always.”

  • • •

  “You bitch.”

  “Take care with your language, Harold.”

  “You fucking bitch!”

  Henrietta laid down her pen. “Now you’re repeating yourself.”

  Morning bled through a crack in the burgundy curtains of Henrietta’s office. Harold hated her then. He had always resented her, disliked her crystalline demeanor, the glass-like smoothness of her conduct. It all felt incredibly artificial to Harold. But today, after going home to news of a slaughter so bloody his brain refused to retain the details, he hated her.

  He hated that she had made them parade like show dogs, that she had elided concrete mention of her true concerns while forcing them to disgorge promise after promise, heartfelt vows describing America’s inculpability. All the while knowing, like everyone else in the room, that there was no contradicting the data blanketing her desk. But she made them put on a show for her, regardless.

  And now this.

  “You killed them.”

  “I promise you that I did no such thing.”

  “Those were British automatons.”

  “Who could have been commandeered by nation
alists,” Henrietta replied evenly. “Or insurgents from France, or anarchists from Thailand, or any number of independent parties who might see opportunity in a conflict between—”

  “We found evidence of your personal encryption key being used in the authorization instructions.”

  Henrietta blinked once. Her lashes were the color of ice.

  “What?”

  Smugly, Harold continued, “Your personal encryption key. There’s one for each of you, isn’t there? Completely impervious to replication. Requires your bio-data for implementation. We found proof of its use.”

  “I see.” Her voice was flat and clear and cold.

  “Can’t believe you tried to pull off such a fucking clumsy—”

  “The dogs.”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember a PR campaign?” Henrietta rose and stalked to the doors behind Harold. She pulled them shut and, with a simple bronze key, unlocked a panel beside their frame. Numbers were input into a keypad. “It was a few years ago—you may have been too young to recall—but the government launched an attempt to showcase how empathic the robots could be. They gave them dogs. But unfortunately, there were budget cuts.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  The office became a panic room. Dense slabs of dull steel slammed shut over the doors, the windows, the narrow rectangular skylight roofing the ceiling. Henrietta followed the transformation with a pensive expression until, at last, new air began feeding noisily through the vents. Uncut oxygen, Harold thought.

  “We took away their dogs,” Henrietta said, almost to herself. “That was our mistake.”

  “For fuck’s sake, you’re not making any sense. What do the fucking robots have to do with—”

  Henrietta walked over to the wine closet. “Their fucking dogs, Harold. It was the only thing keeping them in line.” A sardonic chuckle coughed loose. “They knew we’d recommission them if war came again.”

  “You’re—”

  Something massive threw itself against the reinforced doors.

  “Huh,” said Henrietta. “A blunt tactic but very effective.”

  “What the—”

  “Your vocabulary is appalling.” Her lip curled. “Americans, I swear.”

  The pounding continued: rhythmic, relentless.

  “What—”

  “You’re not very bright, are you?” Henrietta ran a lithe finger down a row of wine bottles, tracing their necks with a lover’s intent. “That thing, whatever it turns out to be, is here to take care of loose ends. Corpses cannot make public appearances. Without us, they will be free to doctor the future without rebuttal. Like I said, blunt but very effective.”

  “We need to call someone—”

  “The lines are compromised.”

  “Then we need to get out of here. Fucking let me out—”

  “I’m afraid we won’t be able to outrun them. At least, not for long.”

  “How the fuck are you so calm?”

  “Because I am not a child, Harold.” Henrietta exhaled gustily. “If you say fuck one more time, I will shoot you.”

  “Fuck—”

  • • •

  Her daughter’s wedding had been very small, very Parisian in ambience. They held the ceremony in the small cupola of a rat-fretted chapel and the guests had smoked indoors. The service was in French. The food was either cooked long and slow under a swamp of salted fat or barely at all. Henrietta remembered the duck. It had bled under the tines of her fork and the china pinked greasily with fat as she ate. When the time came to toast their audience, her daughter’s husband—a plain-faced Frenchman whose color deepened the more he drank—made a joke about pioneering a conquest of the British Isles.

  Henrietta had raised her champagne glass to them then, had smiled, had applauded, had even waltzed with her new son-in-law.

  Six months later, she shot him.

  As with everything Henrietta did, it was efficient. A single bullet in the axle of the occipital bone window and another at the base of his skull where the spine locked with his cranium. The subsequent investigation was brief. He had married the daughter of a Lieutenant General, a decorated servicewoman of uncommon efficiency who’d served for more years than some adults had been alive. That she accrued enemies who would redirect their malice through her family tree was not surprising. The press called it “unfortunate” but “unsurprising.” It was war, after all; people died.

  Henrietta paid for the funeral. She was practical, not heartless. If her daughter suspected Henrietta of murder, she pursued no accusation. Much like her parent, she was a stoic creature, rarely given to sentimentality: her mouth small and sharp, her eyes pale as ceramic and similarly opaque. Henrietta’s daughter wore her widow’s blacks until the sun leached from the year. Then quietly, before spring bloomed green in the cold, black-spoked orchards, she traded them for an English professor: tall, exquisitely melancholic, and very agreeable. Henrietta dearly approved of her new son-in-law, his stable of degrees, the delicate complexion that did not, thank god, translate to an equally fragile constitution. More than anything else, she lauded—loved, even—the visceral Englishness of him.

  What the experience proved to Henrietta was there was no reason to tolerate fools and no use for foolish men. She kept the lesson close to her heart.

  Her daughter and her husband now lived in Iceland, entombed in the endless boreal winds, Reykjavík as safe as any stronghold a mother could wish for her only heir. Once a year, they exchanged postcards and long, pleasant letters.

  She would miss them.

  Henrietta watched dispassionately as Harold’s corpse crumpled forward, a thin rill of brain and blood oozing from the center of his forehead. He died in complete contrast to how he had lived: quietly and unobtrusively. Henrietta considered reholstering her revolver. As she had intimated to Harold, she didn’t think there was a point. But at the last minute, there was no reason to go down without a weapon in hand. Appearances mattered. It was why the funerary business existed.

  The pounding on the door abated and for the sliver of a heartbeat, Henrietta found herself hoping that whatever was on the other side had grown bored with the exercise. Her optimism did not last. The sound was replaced by another: the thin whine of a laser sawing through reinforced steel. Henrietta estimated another five minutes or so before they breached her defenses. Enough time for a glass of the gorgeous Chambertin she was gifted when she’d been discharged from the Army. She had thought to save the bottle for a special occasion. A birth, a reunion, a national triumph.

  “I suppose one’s death,” she said to the corpse on her floor, “is as significant an occasion as any.”

  Henrietta withdrew the bottle from its shelf, drove a key into the cork, and popped it free with a single brisk motion. Her assailants were almost through: a glowing wire-frame of a door mapped the steel, its edges fulminating. The Lieutenant General walked herself back to her desk, bottle in hand, and perched herself on the edge.

  She took a long swallow of the wine, straight from the bottle.

  It was as excellent as she had hoped.

  The door came down and smoke billowed through, a choking wash of oily gray fumes that told of burning upholstery and smoldering wood. Silhouettes, tall and insectoid, sharpened into view. Henrietta took another swallow of her wine and set the bottle down, slightly regretfully, on the desk beside her. She raised her firearm and tipped her chin up.

  “Come on, then.”

  And the world blurred to fire.

  The Savannah Problem

  by Adam-Troy Castro

  This is the hard truth Draiken must take to his heart.

  He has only minutes to live.

  He is about to die violently.

  He is forced to accept that, not fear it, and yet keep moving toward it, ignoring his minimal chances of survival.

  That is the only way to get past it.

  If he does die, he has chosen an appropriate tomb. The space habitat known as Piithkar
ath was originally constructed decades ago for use by Niriirgaans, a minor, slightly built species best known for sharing a distant ancestor with the much more common and much more politically powerful Riirgaans. Most of the cultural and biological differences between the two races are of only academic interest right now, or ever, as the much-less prosperous Niriirgaans surrendered this facility to their human creditors a couple of decades ago. They have not done well, as a civilization, since—a tragedy that can be explored at another time. But the one distinction of life-and-death importance today remains: the Niriirgaans are downright emaciated by most human standards. They are stick-figures, who might have been able to pass through these cramped spaces side by side. A human being of average width has only a few centimeters of clearance at each shoulder and even less at the corridor junction points.

  Human beings have been gradually replacing sections of Piithkarath ever since. It now comfortably houses more than two million of them, mostly in the refitted and expanded areas. It is an industrial hub, one of the key manufacturing centers of this solar system. Almost all of the remaining original corridors have been closed off, for safety reasons. Some of the more agile residents, like Draiken’s quarry, still use them, sometimes to smuggle illegal substances, sometimes just to move about without being seen in public, and sometimes, as in this case, because they have the instincts of rats.

  This is one of those original corridors. The walls and low ceiling hem Draiken and his quarry in, as surely as any cage.

  If Draiken does die, as seems almost certain, then the width of this place will render it a most appropriate coffin.

  It is above all things a spectacularly unpromising place for a knife fight.

  Draiken has been following the target for half a kilometer through this passage, never more or less than twenty meters behind him. He has made no effort to escape notice. It would not be possible. His footfalls on the corrugated metal floor, though light and graceful, are still as amplified as any sound carried through a hollow tube. Nobody, not even the most oblivious civilian, could possibly miss his presence. But it might be enough in context for his actions to be ambiguous, to be possible to interpret as benign, to potentially be just some stranger heading in the same direction, on a route with no turnoffs.