The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  “Top grade commercial,” the voice at the other end of the line says, “but not up to military standards.”

  “Listen, Vladimir, I need to know exactly what they’re doing, and I need to know what their weak spot is. I need this fast. This is a race. I’ll double the money – now.”

  “Deal,” the voice says. Danny retypes the entry on his computer and sends the money. After a pause the voice says, “Twenty-four hours,” and the connection light goes off.

  INT. PINEWOOD STUDIOS – VIEWING THEATRE – NIGHT

  Three writers are locked up with Jack, Rachel, two other directors, four line producers, and a creative consultant. Things are not going well. Every pitch the writers make gets shot down by somebody. The creative consultant is obsessed with demographics. Each of the directors is having a severe fit of the auteur syndrome and worrying about hypothetical angles on hypothetical plot points.

  Maddy Loveridge is a fifty-seven-year-old screenwriter and she’s covered more paper with slug lines than an insecticide research station. Finally, she blows. “Why don’t you all fuck off and let us get on with the fucking job!” she shouts. “We wrote you a great script and your fucking technology let you down! So don’t blame us. We do not do this by fucking committee, all right? Do we come into your studio and tell you what to fucking do? No. We hand over. We go home and watch daytime TV while you do all the glamorous bits and eat the good dinners and get photographed with royalty. So bugger off and watch Fellini and wish you were that good.”

  Jack nods, and the directors and producers head for the door. The creative consultant stays where she is. She looks about fourteen years old. “Maybe I can help?” she asks.

  Maddy smiles sweetly. “Yes, darling, you certainly can. You can go and organize some very nice curry and a case of red wine.”

  The door hisses shut after the creative consultant. There’s a pause. “Was I over the top?” Maddy asks. “No,” comes a reply, “I thought that was rather understated.”

  INT. SUNIL’S HOUSE – NIGHT

  Sunil’s deeply asleep when his mobile rings. It’s Selina. “I’m glad you’re there,” she says. “The bodies have gone. They broke into the mortuary and took the bodies. Why?” She sounds anxious.

  Sunil talks to her quietly and calms her down. Then he asks, “Where are you?”

  “Where do you think? I’m looking at empty body drawers.”

  “Is there anyone with you?”

  “No. The police brought me in to confirm it. They’ve just gone.”

  “Selina,” Sunil says, “listen to me. I want you to go to the busiest place you can find. Maybe A&E. I want you to phone Spiros. I do not want you on your own. In fact, get me Spiros’s phone number. Go now!”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what you know. They want to analyse the nano. They haven’t finished. Go now! Go!”

  There’s a crash and the mobile phone link goes dead. He tries Selina’s number: voicemail. He’s out of bed and dressed in seconds, and he’s calling Danny’s mobile as he runs downstairs.

  INT. PINEWOOD STUDIOS – SECURITY – NIGHT

  Danny lives half a mile from the studio complex and he’s already there when Sunil runs in. “Easy, easy,” he says. “Panic gets nobody anywhere. I’ve just been talking to Spiros. She’s definitely not in the hospital. No one saw anything.”

  “Are they searching the area?”

  “He’s got three policemen. It’s not exactly Dragnet on Corfu.”

  “If you were them what would you do? They’ve got two bodies and I’m praying they’ve got a live doctor. Where do they go?”

  “Italy or Albania. Corfu to Brindisi is over a hundred miles. Albania is close enough for day trips.”

  “Which means a boat.”

  Danny sighs. “I don’t think they’re turning up at the airport and loading the bodies onto an easyJet flight, do you?”

  “Come with me. I need you.”

  INT./EXT. PINEWOOD STUDIOS – COMPUTER CENTRE – NIGHT

  Two men in orange maintenance jackets climb down the access ladder on the high wall of the building, check their watches, and drive off.

  Sunil sits at a console in front of a bank of flatscreen monitors. Danny is across the room at the power control bay. Sunil says, “Power to level two.” Danny selects a setting on the panel. From outside the faint hum of generators rises a tone.

  “At some point, are you going to tell me what you’re doing?” Danny asks.

  “Level three, please. Look, there is always some entanglement with a tiny proportion of the nano. There’s a lot of noise. Usually we filter it out. I’m locking all the computers together at maximum processing rate. I may be able to do something with the remaining nano. Just maybe. Level three, please.” The generators are getting louder. Even if you’d been standing next to the shaped Semtex explosive charges on the helium lines above the roof and even if the timers had made any noise at all as they counted down to zero, you wouldn’t have heard them.

  EXT. PINEWOOD STUDIOS – DAWN

  Lynne always gets in very early. She turns off the ignition on her BMW and reaches for the seatbelt. The dawn light is coming up over the studios. She’s fumbling for the seatbelt release when a bright flash is followed a second later by a huge bursting cloud of white vapour. The car rocks in the blast wave and rolls over. A shallow lake of liquid helium runs across the car park. It freezes the car roof into a brittle shell and evaporates.

  INT. PINEWOOD STUDIOS – DAWN

  CAMERA follows Danny and Sunil as they run from the computers to the door, through it into the corridor, slamming it shut behind them in a gust of helium vapour, and down the long walkway past the studio capsules towards Security, where the first thing they see is CCTV angles on the wrecked roof of their studio and Lynne hanging upside down in a frozen BMW.

  FAST FORWARD ten minutes. Lynne is wrapped in a fire blanket and sitting in the corner of Danny’s office drinking strong black coffee. Sunil is on the phone talking to Spiros.

  “Spiros, do you have access to the NATO surveillance system near Avliotes?”

  “No. Impossible.”

  “It’s an emergency. Can you talk to the military?”

  “How many months do we have?”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  The red light starts to flash on Danny’s encrypted telephone. Danny answers and listens. “Excellent. We’ll speak later about that. We need another favour . . . Yes, paid favour . . . I’ll put my technical chief on to you – and by the way Vladimir, he does not negotiate money . . . Fine.”

  Sunil takes the phone. Danny puts the conversation on speakers. “This is Sunil. We have an urgent need.” Danny winces – never tell the seller it’s urgent. “On the north of Corfu – Kerkyra – there’s a NATO tracking station near Avliotes. We need wide m-band radar tracking at precisely 107.43 GHz. The painted image will be two or three small reflections phasing in and out at fifteen-second intervals. The target will be on a boat heading north up the Albanian coast. We will need real-time coordinates.”

  There’s a pause and a deep voice says, “Put Daniel back on line.”

  Danny flips the speakers off and says, “Vladimir, can you do it? . . . How many million was that? . . . Hold on.” Danny walks over to Lynne. She’s stopped shivering. “I need a small budget increase,” he says and holds up the fingers and thumbs of both hands.

  “Get me another cup of coffee and you can have as much as you need,” she says.

  INT./EXT. CORFU SEA – DAY

  A small fishing trawler silently rides the swell in the bay of Liapades just south of Paleokastritsa on the west coast of the island. The sun is still below the hilltops to the east and the sea is shades of kyanos – dark blues and greens.

  Two black body-bags are on ice in the hold. Near them Selina is propped up against the hull. Her hands are tied behind her back and she’s gagged with white surgical gauze. The hull wall behind her vibrates heavily as the engines start up. A slim dark-haired m
an climbs down the stairs. He comes across to her, unties the gag, and feeds her water from a bottle. “What do you want?” she asks in Greek. He shrugs. She asks again in Albanian. He laughs and rubs his fingers and thumb together to suggest money.

  The boat begins to move out to sea and turns to the north.

  INT./EXT. GREECE – CORFU – RADAR STATION – DAY

  Theologos is twenty-two years old and nearing the end of his national military service. He’ll be relieved in two hours. Since the end of the Cold War it’s about as boring as it gets monitoring absolutely nothing of interest in the radar sweeps. Most of it is out of his control anyway. There’s so little need for him to do anything that one of his predecessors spent a few months in military prison for getting his mother to cover for him while he went to a party in nearby Sidari.

  He’s thinking about breakfast when there are six loud alert sounds. A message in French and English appears on his main comms screen: Baltic terrorist alert level orange. HQ Brussels assuming control. Ensure backup systems online and secured.

  The radar control settings screen shows the scanners switching to m-band frequency 107.43 GHz.

  INT. PINEWOOD – SECURITY – DAY

  The radar sweep images from Peroulades appear on one of the big screens. Danny points to the chair in front of it. Sunil sits down. “Your turn, fella,” he says.

  Lynne is feeling better and pacing the room, angry. “They’re calling all the shots here,” she says bitterly. “We’re running after them. I don’t like being screwed around by these bastards!”

  Danny leads her to the far end of the room and speaks very quietly. “This is the full picture,” he says. “Universa are way behind on production of their EMO set-top boxes. The first batch they had from a plant in China was rubbish, and there were design faults anyway. They are shitting themselves that we’ll get our stuff out first. But here’s the thing: they’ve switched production to Korea. They’re tooling up for a production run of seventeen million units. Single source. They’re depending on a custom chip-set. We may be able to help them. But you don’t need to know.”

  Ice-cold blue eyes stare into his. “Do it,” she says. “And if you can kill a few of them while you’re at it I sure don’t need to know but I want to see the newspaper clippings.”

  Sunil jumps up and shouts, “Got them!” On the monitor the radar is painting a bright dot that fades on several sweeps and then flares again. There’s a smaller, fainter dot next to it. The track is moving slowly up the west coast of Corfu.

  Danny flips his mobile open and speed-dials Spiros.

  INT./EXT. GREECE – CORFU – SEA – DAY

  It’s a beautiful morning. The sunlight dances on the tiny white caps of the waves. The sea is ultramarine and the wake of the fishing boat is pure gleaming white foam flashing with rainbows. A dolphin flips out of the water for a moment and vanishes. Two coastguard single-prop planes come over the hills to the east and zoom loudly overhead. They bank steeply and turn back over the boat at five hundred feet.

  The boat’s captain goes to full throttle and keys his radio. He talks rapidly in Albanian, and then shouts. He takes a handgun from the hatch and sticks it under the belt of his shorts as he runs for the stairs down to the lower area.

  Selina says nothing as he hoists a body bag over his shoulder and goes up again. She can’t hear the splash over the engine noise. He returns and takes the second body bag. Then he comes back down again.

  He holds the gun at her head as he cuts the rope tying her to a stanchion on the hull. “Up!” he says in Greek. Selina tries to stand on cramped legs and winces with the pain. “Hurry!” he shouts, waving to the stairs with the gun. She moves slowly. He hits her across the face and her nose starts to bleed. He pushes her up the stairs and onto the deck. He gestures towards the side of the boat. She moves across the planks until her thighs are against the rail. As he lifts the gun, there’s an explosion of noise as a helicopter roars at low-level over the hills towards the boat. He looks up. When he looks down again, she’s gone.

  Maybe every human has a moment of katharsis – purification, release. Selina is feeling this now. The engines stop. She is under the boat, kicking slowly with her legs to conserve oxygen, when the dolphin comes up to her and nuzzles her gently. Maybe Poseidon has sent Delphinos to bring her the good luck she badly needs.

  On the deck the captain raises his handgun towards the helicopter and is instantly shredded with machine-gun fire.

  INT. PINEWOOD STUDIOS – DAY

  The technical centre is a wreck. The studio capsules are dead without their source. The computers are inert. There’s water everywhere from the Fire and Rescue damp-down. This is a billion-pound insurance claim.

  Lynne stands there with Sunil and Jack. “How long to be up and running again?” she asks.

  “It took two years last time,” Sunil says, “so let’s be optimistic and say one.”

  They’ve never seen her cry before.

  “We can finish the movie,” Sunil says quietly. Lynne laughs through her tears and Jack puts his hand to his head. “And just how are we going to do that?” Lynne asks.

  “Go out and shoot with real actors,” Sunil answers.

  “What?” She waves her arms around. “Which particular century are you in? We can borrow brains and do anything we like. We can shoot movies in three weeks that would have taken six months. You designed this stuff, for Christ’s sake! Are you really suggesting that we go back to pointing cameras at real people? You’re mad, isn’t he Jack?”

  Jack walks over to a pile of cable and stirs it with the toe of his Adidas trainers. “I’d like to do it, but we don’t have anybody left in the country capable of manning an old-fashioned unit. Cameras, lighting – it’s all gone.”

  “Here, maybe,” Sunil says, “but not everywhere. By the way, can I borrow the jet?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve got an appointment with a doctor.”

  INT. KOREA – ELECTRONICS FACTORY – DAY

  Bright green motherboards move down the production line. The main processing chips have arrived from the fab unit. The chips have been made without human intervention, their millions of transistors carefully crafted from design templates on the central computer. The motherboards pause and chips are inserted by robotic units. They move on and pass through a bath of liquid solder. They arrive at the point where cables are attached and then into a bay where they are married with their shiny black set-top boxes. From here the units reach the packaging area and slide neatly into the colourful cardboard boxes with pictures of fantastic movie scenes and the word EMO coming out like a stereoscopic projection. The slogan the world’s been seeing day after day in an expensive advertising campaign runs across the boxes in a diagonal stripe: See it, Feel it, Be it!

  The production lines move swiftly and efficiently, as they must, because they have seventeen million EMOs to produce, and that’s just the start.

  EXT. CORFU – AGIOS STEFANOS NW – NIGHT

  The little road through the village centre is blocked for traffic. Two nine-thousand watt lighting brutes are standing in the road outside The Little Prince. Thick cables run from the lights to a generator parked outside the bakery. The camera is on a jib arm and looks down on the taverna terrace from ten feet above. Jack stands next to the jib talking quietly to Elena Vafiadou, the camera operator.

  Alexandros is wearing black trousers and a white shirt. Makeup assistants are gently tapping powder onto his face. He’s a waiter who falls in love with an English girl and discovers that he has the power to manipulate people. He’s going to have to make some big choices between using his powers for good or evil. Nearby, Alice Walton sits alone at one of the tables whilst a young woman from Frocks adjusts the straps on her dress.

  At another table sit Spiros and Maria. Spiros wrinkles his nose and says, “I hate this makeup.”

  She smiles in a feline way and says, “See what I’ve had to put up with all these years for your pleasure, Spiros!”
>
  He sighs. “I’m still not sure Alexandros is doing the right thing.”

  “I am,” she says. “If you were younger and better-looking I’d have put you up for the job!”

  The Assistant Director picks up a megaphone. “We’re going for a take. Starting positions, please. Is the kitchen ready?” There’s a quick burst of affirmative radio traffic from the AFM in the kitchen. The Sparks hits the big switch and the lights come on, brighter even than a Corfu noon. “Quiet, please, and stand by!”

  Jack says, “Turn over.” Camera and sound operators confirm that they’re rolling. “And – action!”

  The music begins and Alexandros puts down his tray and begins to dance, his arms held out wide, his feet swinging back and forward and across and check and back again. He’s light on his toes. He spins and kneels.

  Michalis comes from the kitchen wreathed in steam as he carries Sizzling Steak across the terrace and puts it down on Spiros and Maria’s table. Alice lifts her beautiful sad downcast eyes and watches Alexandros dance. This is the moment. This is the precise second when she falls hopelessly in love.

  “And – cut! Check the tape,” Jack calls. “Please reset and stay where you are – we’re moving on to the close-ups.”