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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Dorian put his forehead against the smartglass, watching as she slipped the disembodied cock into the nutrient gel of a chic black refrigerated carrycase. The night’s activities were a slick fog. He tried to remember what she’d told him between bouts of hallucination-laced sex, the endless murmuring in his ear while they lay tangled together. Things about her family in Buriram, things about her friends, things about her clients.

  Someone even richer than you, she’d said, fooled by his rented spidersilk suit and open bar tab. Wants me all the week. You’re lucky I think you are handsome.

  Dorian couldn’t contain his grin as he looked down at his tablet, flicking through the photos. She was right about one thing: he had always been lucky.

  BY THE TIME the hooker was dressed, Dorian had checked on Skinspin and verified her name was Nahm. She exited the bathroom with a slink of steam, wrapped in a strappy white dress, her black hair immaculate again. Dorian appraised her unending legs, soot-rimmed eyes and pillowy lips. She was definitely enough to catch even a celebrity’s biwandering eye.

  “What?” she asked. She crouched to retrieve one Louboutin knock-off kicked under the bed; Dorian produced its partner.

  “Nothing, Nahm,” he said, handing her the sandal. “I was just thinking how much I’d like to take you back to London with me.”

  “Don’t make a joke,” she said, but she looked pleased. She gripped his arm for balance while she slipped into her shoes and then gave him a lingering goodbye kiss. As soon as the door of the privacy suite snicked shut behind her, Dorian scrambled back into his clothes.

  Someone had dumped half a Singha across his shoes and his sport coat stank like laced hash, but he didn’t have time for a clothing delivery. He raked fingers through his gel-crisped hair, prodded the dark circles under his eyes, and left. The narrow hall was a bright, antiseptic white unsullied by ads, and the soundproof guarantee of each privacy suite made it eerily quiet, too. AIrun fauxtels did always tend toward a minimalist aesthetic.

  Walking Street, by contrast, bombarded every last one of Dorian’s senses the moment he stepped outside. The air stank like spice and petrol, and a thousand strains of synthesized music mingled with drunk shrieks, laughter, trilingual chatter. The street itself was a neon hubbub of revellers.

  Dorian used his tablet to track the sticky he’d slapped to the bottom of Nahm’s shoe. He couldn’t see her through the crush, but according to the screen she was heading upstreet toward the Beach Road entrance. He plunged off the step, ducking an adbot trailing a digital Soi 6 banner, and made for the closest tech vendor. A gaggle of tourists was arrayed around the full body Immersion tank, giggling at their electrode-tethered friend drifting inside with a tell-tale erection sticking off him.

  Dorian cut past them and swapped 2,000 Baht for a pair of lime green knock-off iGlasses, prying them out of the packaging with his fingernails. He blinked his way through set-up, bypassed user identification, and tuned them to the sticky’s signal. A digital marker dropped down through the night sky, drizzling a stream of white code over a particular head like a localized rainshower.

  Stowing his tablet, Dorian hurried after the drifting marker, past a row of food stands hawking chemical-orange chicken kebabs and fried scorpions. A few girls whose animated tattoos he vaguely recognized grabbed at him as he went by, trailing fake nails down his arm. He deked away, but tagged one of them to Skinspin later—it looked like she’d gotten her implants redone.

  Once he had Nahm in eyeball sight, he slowed up a bit. She was mouthing lyrics to whatever she had in her audiobuds as she bounced along, necksnapping a group of tank-and-togs Australian blokes with the sine curve sway of her hips. She detoured once outside Medusa, where bored girls were perusing their phones and dancing on autopilot, to exchange rapid-fire sawatdees and airkisses. She detoured again to avoid a love-struck Russian on shard.

  Ducking into a stall selling 3-D printed facemasks of dead celebrities, Dorian looked past Nahm to the approaching roundabout. A shiny black ute caught his eye through the customary swarm of scooters and tuk-tuks. As he watched, Nahm checked her thumbnail, then glanced up at the ute and quickened her pace. Dorian felt a jangle of excitement down his spine as he scanned the vehicle for identifying tags and found not a single one.

  Someone had knocked over a trash tip, spilling the innards across Nahm’s path, but she picked her way through the slimed food cartons and empty condom sprays with pinpoint precision that left Dorian dimly impressed. He squinted to trigger the iGlasses’ zoom, wondering if he should chance trying to get a snap of the inside of the ute.

  Then the lasershow started up again, throwing its neon green web into the dark clouds over Pattaya’s harbor, and as Nahm craned her beautiful head to watch for what was probably the millionth time, her heel punctured a sealed bag of butcher giblets.

  “Shit,” Dorian said, at the same time Nahm appeared to be saying something similar. Casting a glance at the approaching ute, she lowered herself gingerly to the curb to hunt through her bag. She produced a wipe and cleaned the red gunge off her ankle and the strap of her sandal. Dorian bit at the inside of his cheek.

  She continued to the underside of the shoe, wiping the needle-like heel clean, then paused. Dorian winced, thinking of all the many places he could have put the sticky. Slipped into her bag, or onto the small of her back, or even somewhere in her hair.

  Nahm pincered the tiny plastic bead between two nails and peered at it. Dorian crossed his tattooed fingers, hoping she wasn’t one of the many girls addicted to Bollywood spy flicks. She frowned, then balled the sticky up in the used wipe and tossed it away. The stream of code floated a half-meter over, now useless, as the ute pulled in.

  Dorian slid closer, watching Nahm get to her feet, smooth out her dress. For the first time, she looked slightly nervous. The ute’s shiny black door opened with a hiss. Dorian didn’t have an angle to see the interior as Nahm slithered inside, but the voice within was unmistakable, Cockney accent undisguised.

  “Christ, what is that stink? Please do not track that shit in with you, love.”

  Dorian didn’t get to hear Nahm’s retort. The door swooshed shut and the ute bullied its way back into the traffic. Dorian trotted over and picked up the bloody wipe, retrieving the sticky from inside. The smell barely bothered him, because Alexis Carrow was slumming it in Pattaya and he was going to blackmail the ever-loving shit out of her.

  WHEN DORIAN TRIED to search Nahm’s profile again, he wasn’t particularly surprised to see she’d pulled it off Mixt and Skinspin and the rest. Either finding the sticky had spooked her, or her current customer was upping the pay enough to make exclusivity worthwhile. Dorian had to do things the oldfashioned way, with a sheaf of rumpled 200 Baht notes doled out to helpful individuals.

  He didn’t find her on the beach until late afternoon, and almost didn’t recognize her when he did. She sat cross-legged on the palm-shaded sand, chatting to the old woman selling coconut milk and bags of crushed ice from a sputtering minifridge. Her face was more or less scrubbed of makeup, eyes smaller without the caked-on kohl, and her black hair hung gathered in a ponytail. Loose harem pants, flip-flops, a canary yellow Jack Daniels tank he assumed was being worn ironically.

  “ Sawatdee krap,” Dorian said, butchering the pronunciation on purpose. He flashed her an incredulous grin. “This is a surprise.”

  Nahm looked up, surprised. “Hello,” she beamed, running her fingers through her ponytail. Then her smile dimmed by a few watts. A crease of suspicion appeared on her forehead. “What is it you want? I am no working.”

  “I guessed from the flip-flops,” Dorian said. “Long night for you?”

  Nahm narrowed her eyes. “You,” she said. “You put a... thing. To my shoe. First I think it was Ivan, but it was you.” She said something to the old woman in machine-gun Thai, too fast for Dorian to even try at, and slunk to her feet. “I am going. I don’t care you are handsome, you are crazy like Ivan.” She brushed sand off her legs and made for
the street.

  “Have you figured out who you’re fucking yet?” Dorian asked, dropping pretenses. “That business lady? The angry one?”

  Nahm stopped, turned back.

  Dorian clawed the air in front of his face as an extra reminder. “Whatever she’s paying you is shit,” he said.

  “More than you pay me.”

  “She’s a lot richer than me,” Dorian said. “She’s Alexis Carrow.”

  Nahm’s eyes winched wide and she put a furious finger to her lips, scanning the beach as if paparazzi might burst up out of the gray sand.

  Dorian grinned. “So you do know.”

  “What is it you want?” Nahm repeated, raking fingers through her ponytail.

  “I want to talk business,” Dorian said. “Walk with me a minute?”

  He chased a few coins out of his pocket to buy a coconut milk and a bag of ice chips, then gestured down the beach. Nahm swayed, indecisive, but when Dorian started to walk she fired off another salvo of indecipherable Thai to the old woman and fell into step with him.

  It was low tide and the beach was a minefield of broken glass bottles and plastic trash floating in tepid puddles. Other than a prone tourist couple baking away their hangovers, Dorian and Nahm had the place to themselves.

  “You familiar with the term blackmail?” Dorian asked, handing her the coconut milk.

  Nahm spun the straw between her fingers. “I watch bad movies. Yes.”

  “Your client is wearing a blur for a reason.” Dorian ripped open the ice bag. “She’s not keen on the tablos finding out she took a sex trip to Thailand.”

  Nahm gave an irritated shake of her head. “If she find that thing on my shoe, big fucking trouble for me, you know that?”

  “Does she actually sweep you for bugs? Christ.” Dorian popped a chunk of ice into his mouth. “Pawanoia.”

  “She careful.”

  Dorian crunched down on the cube, eliciting a squeal and crack. “Yes. Very careful. Meaning any fuck-footage from her trip is going to be extremely valuable. Do you want to get rich, Nahm?”

  “Everybody wants to get rich,” Nahm said, plumbing with her straw, not looking at him.

  “Well, this is your shot. Also, my shot.” Dorian spat a piece of ice into the filmy surf. “Alexis Carrow has enough money that paying two enterprising individuals such as you and me to suppress a sex scandal is easily worth 50,000 Euros. And if she refuses to negotiate, any of the bigger tablos would pay us the same for the footage.”

  Nahm’s eyes went wide and Dorian realized he probably could have halved his actual demand a second time.

  “Enough money to take care of your family out in Buriram,” Dorian continued. “Get them out of the village, if you want. Definitely enough to assuage any lingering embarrassment about how their first-born financed her vaginoplasty.”

  “I make good money do what I do now,” Nahm said sourly. “Enough money. I send them.”

  “Not 50,000 Euros money,” Dorian said. “D’you really want to hook in Pattaya your whole life?” He packed another ice cube into his cheek. “This city is the diseased bleached asshole of Thailand. It’s disgusting.”

  Nahm gave him a dirty look. “You’re here.”

  “I’m disgusting,” Dorian explained.

  “And this is why Pattaya is Pattaya,” Nahm said, lobbing her half-empty coconut milk into the water. “You make Pattaya be Pattaya.”

  “Don’t have to litter about it.” Dorian crunched his ice. “If you help me pull this off, you can live wherever you want.”

  “In London with you?” Nahm asked dryly.

  “50,000 Euros,” Dorian repeated. “Split even. Fifty percent yours, fifty percent mine. I’ve got a way to short-circuit the blur projector. I’ll rig a sticky, it’s the same thing I stuck to your shoe. Tiny. You just have to put it on the collar without her noticing.”

  “I told you she scan me in the car.” Nahm folded her arms. “Very careful, remember?”

  “That’s why we plant it in the room beforehand, along with a little slip-in eyecam,” Dorian said, groping inside the ice bag with reddened fingertips. “Where’s she taking you tonight? Does she do fauxtels or the real thing?”

  Nahm bit her lip. Dorian could practically see the tug-of-war on her creased forehead, a chance at instant wealth battling the cardinal rule of confidentiality.

  “I want sixty percent,” Nahm said. “I lose my best ever client. I maybe get big fucking trouble. You are safe with your phone somewhere, no risk.”

  Dorian grinned. “You’re sharper than you let on. Why the dizzy bitch act? Do clients really like it that much?”

  “Sixty percent,” Nahm repeated, but with a hint of her own grin.

  “Fine.” Dorian spat out his ice and stuck out his hand. “Sixty.”

  ALEXIS CARROW HAD rented a suite at the Emerald Palace, a name Dorian thought a bit generous for an eight-story quickcrete façade topped by a broken-down eternity pool collecting algae. But if she was after privacy, it wasn’t a bad choice. It was far enough from the main drag to be relatively quiet, and small enough to be inconspicuous.

  Of course, gaining access was as easy as waltzing past reception wearing a drunken grin and clutching an expired keycard fished from the wastebasket outside. Dorian affected a slight stagger on his way to the lift. Once the shiny doors slid shut, he took out his tablet and called Nahm.

  “How’s the timing?” he asked, as she appeared on the screen putting up her hair with a static clip.

  “She’s on her way,” Nahm said, unsticking a floating tendril of dark hair from her eyelash. “Get me from Bali Hai in five minute, then take ten, twelve minute back to hotel. Over.”

  “Alright.” Dorian punched the backlit eight with his knuckle. “So I’m going to put it in the back of the toilet.”

  “So, how they did in The Godfather. Over.” Nahm was now applying a gloss to her lips that shimmered like broken glass and was not paying as close attention as Dorian would have liked.

  “Sure,” he said. “As soon as you get in, go to the bathroom. Get some water going so she can’t hear you take the lid off. Then open the ziplock, take the eyecam out first. You ever wear contacts?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s like that,” Dorian said. “Once you have the eyecam in, take the sticky out of the ziplock and hide it in your hand.”

  “And put it to the blur without her knowing it,” Nahm continued, then, in a surprisingly credible imitation of Dorian’s accent: “Base of the projector if possible, over.”

  “Yeah, then business as usual,” Dorian said, as the lift jittered to a halt. “She won’t notice when the projection goes down, so long as you’re being your usual distracting self and you don’t start complimenting her eyes or anything batshit like that.” The lift made to open and he jammed it shut again. “Do what you normally do,” he went on. “Let the eyecam do the work. After she pays you, come find me across the street and we’ll get the POV uploaded to a private cloud. At which point, champagne and a blowjob.”

  “Who give the champagne, who give the blowjob?” Nahm asked, checking her thumbnail offscreen. “Over.”

  “Both on me if you do this right,” Dorian said, knuckling the Open Door button. “Message me when you get the hotel.” He paused, and then, because she was growing on him a bit: “Over.”

  Nahm’s face lit up for the split second before he ended the call, then Dorian set off down the stucco-walled hallway. He made a quick check around the corner, then doubled back to door 811 and made short work of the electronic lock. The suite had obviously been prepped for her arrival. Freshly-laundered sheets on the bed, a sea of fluffy white towels at the foot of it. Condom sprays and lubricants arrayed brazenly on the nightstand. Minibar stocked with Tanqueray gin and Lunar vodka.

  Dorian plucked a cube out of the full ice bucket and popped it in his mouth, making his way to the bathroom. He lifted the featherweight top off the back of the Western-style toilet, then reached inside his pocket whe
re the tiny eyecam and the even smaller sticky had been lovingly double-bagged in ziplock. Neither had been cheap, and he had a feeling he wasn’t going to get the sticky back.

  Setting the bag adrift in chemical-smelling water, Dorian replaced the top of the toilet and re-entered the room. He walked in a slow circle around the bed, picturing angles, trying not to get distracted imagining Nahm and a celebrity CEO fucking on it. In the end, he decided to plant his insurance cam in the far corner. It would be an uncreative wide angle shot, but with a nearzero chance of Alexis Carrow’s deblurred face failing to make an appearance.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Nahm to manage the eyecam, but back-ups were his cardinal rule where information storage was concerned. A healthy fear of technical difficulties went hand-in-hand with hacking for a living.

  Once satisfied with the cam’s placement in a shadowy whorl of stucco, Dorian put his ear to the door to listen for footsteps. Hearing nothing, he exited the room, heart pumping with the old break-and-enter exhilaration from his teenage years.

  His hand was still on the doorknob when a black-shirted employee rounded the corner in his peripheral. Dorian didn’t look up. He pretended to struggle with the door, then looked down at his keycard and made a slurred sound of realization.

  “This no your room, sir. Can I help you?”

  Dorian tried not to jump. The man had slunk up and stopped directly behind him, quiet as a cat, a feat made more impressive by the sheer size of him. Tall for a Thai, broad-chested and broad-shouldered, with a shaved scalp glistening in the fluorescent lighting and a tattoo of a cheerful cartoon snake wriggling up and down one sinewy forearm. Dorian could have sworn he’d been kicked out of a couple bars by the very same. Bouncers and hotel security tended to overlap.

  “Wrong floor,” Dorian said, waving his keycard. “Hit the wrong button in the lift. One too many Changs.” He shook an imaginary beer bottle.

  “Okay, sir,” the guard said, not smiling.

  “Nice tattoo,” Dorian added. “Friendly-looking little bugger.”