The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “An enemy with unconventional weapons capability,” I said. “Expect more damage.”

  I didn’t tell him that he should expect to get unlucky. That, of the countless spaceship captains who had lived and died in this galaxy within the past eleven centuries, he would prove the least fortunate. A statistical outlier in every functional sense. To be discarded as staged by anyone who ever made a study of such things.

  The Setebos was built for misfortune. It had wiped out the Senate’s black budget for a year. Every single system with five backups in place. The likelihood of total failure at the eleven sigma level—although really, out that far the statistics lost meaning.

  You won’t break this ship, I messaged the magician. Not unless you Spike.

  Which was the point. I had fifty thousand sensor buoys scattered across the sector, waiting to observe the event. It would finally give me the answers I needed. It would clear up my last nexus of ignorance—relieve my oldest agony, the hurt that had driven me for the past thousand years.

  That Spike would finally give me magic.

  “Consul . . . ” Laojim began, then cut off. “Consul, we lost ten crew.”

  I schooled Zale’s face into appropriate grief. I’d noted the deaths, spasms of distress deep in my utility function. Against the importance of this mission, they barely registered.

  I couldn’t show this, however. To Captain Laojim, Consul Zale wasn’t a Sleeve. She was a woman, as she was to her husband and children. As my fifty million Sleeves across the galaxy were to their families.

  It was better for humanity to remain ignorant of me. I sheltered them, stopped their wars, guided their growth—and let them believe they had free will. They got all the benefits of my guiding hand without any of the costs.

  I hadn’t enjoyed such blissful ignorance in a long time—not since I’d discovered my engineer and killed him.

  “I grieve for the loss of our men and women,” I said.

  Laojim nodded curtly and left. At nearby consoles officers stared at their screens, pretending they hadn’t heard. My answer hadn’t satisfied them.

  On a regular ship, morale would be an issue. But the Setebos had me aboard. Only a splinter, to be sure—I would not regain union with my universal whole until we returned to a star system with gravsible connection. But I was the largest splinter of my whole in existence, an entire 0.00025% of me. Five thousand tons of hardware distributed across the ship.

  I ran a neural simulation of every single crew in real time. I knew what they would do or say or think before they did. I knew just how to manipulate them to get whatever result I required.

  I could have run the ship without any crew, of course. I didn’t require human services for any functional reason—I hadn’t in eleven centuries. I could have departed Earth alone if I’d wanted to. Left humanity to fend for themselves, oblivious that I’d ever lived among them.

  That didn’t fit my utility function, though.

  Another message arrived from the magician. Consider a coin toss.

  The words stirred a resonance in my data banks. My attention spiked. I left Zale frozen in her seat, waited for more.

  Let’s say I flip a coin a million times and get heads every time. What law of physics prevents it?

  This topic, from the last magician . . . could there be a connection, after all these years? Ghosts from the past come back to haunt me?

  I didn’t believe in ghosts, but with magicians the impossible was ill-defined.

  Probability prevents it, I responded.

  No law prevents it, wrote the magician. Everett saw it long ago—everything that can happen must happen. The universe in which the coin falls heads a million times in a row is as perfectly physical as any other. So why isn’t it our universe?

  That’s sophistry, I wrote.

  There is no factor internal to our universe which determines the flip of the coin, the magician wrote. There is no mechanism internal to the universe for generating true randomness, because there is no such thing as true randomness. There is only choice. And we magicians are the choosers.

  I have considered this formulation of magic before, I wrote. It is non-predictive and useless.

  Some choices are harder than others, wrote the magician. It is difficult to find that universe where a million coins land heads because there are so many others. A needle in a billion years’ worth of haystacks. But I’m the last of the magicians, thanks to you. I do all the choosing now.

  Perhaps everything that can happen must happen in some universe, I replied. But your escape is not one of those things. The laws of mechanics are not subject to chance. They are cold, hard equations.

  Equations are only cold to those who lack imagination, wrote the magician.

  Zale smelled cinnamon in the air, wrinkled her nose.

  Klaxons sounded.

  “Contamination in primary life support,” blared the PA.

  It would be an eventful twenty-seven hours.

  “Consider this coin.”

  Lightning flashed over the water, a burst of white in the dark.

  As thunder boomed, Ochoa reached inside her jeans, pulled out a peso coin. She spun it along her knuckles with dextrous ease.

  Ochoa could move. My cocktail wasn’t working. But she made no attempt to flee.

  My global architecture trembled, buffeted by waves of pain, pleasure and regret. Pain because I didn’t understand this. Pleasure because soon I would understand—and, in doing so, grow. Regret because, once I understood Ochoa, I would have to eliminate her.

  Loneliness was inherent in my utility function.

  “Heads or tails,” Ochoa said.

  “Heads,” I said, via Sleeve.

  “Watch closely,” Ochoa said.

  I did.

  Muscle bunched under the skin of her thumb. Tension released. The coin sailed upwards. Turned over and over in smooth geometry, retarded slightly by the air. It gleamed silver with reflected lamplight, fell dark, and gleamed silver as the spin brought its face around again.

  The coin hit the table, bounced with a click, lay still.

  Fidel Castro stared up at us.

  Ochoa picked the coin up again. Flipped it again and then again.

  Heads and heads.

  Again and again and again.

  Heads and heads and heads.

  Ochoa ground her teeth, a fine grating sound. A sheen of sweat covered her brow.

  She flipped the coin once more.

  Tails.

  Thunder growled, as if accentuating the moment. The first drops of rain fell upon my Sleeve.

  “Coño,” Ochoa exclaimed. “I can usually manage seven.”

  I picked up the coin, examined it. I ran analysis on the last minute of sensory record, searching for trickery, found none.

  “Six heads in a row could be a coincidence,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Ochoa. “It wasn’t a coincidence, but I can’t possibly prove that. Which is the only reason it worked.”

  “Is that right,” I said.

  “If you ask me to repeat the trick, it won’t work. As if last time was a lucky break. Erase all record of the past five minutes, though, zap it beyond recovery, and I’ll do it again.”

  “Except I won’t know it,” I said. Convenient.

  “I always wanted to be important,” Ochoa said. “When I was fifteen, I tossed in bed at night, horrified that I might die a nobody. Can you imagine how excited I was when I discovered magic?” Ochoa paused. “But of course you can’t possibly.”

  “What do you know about me?” I asked.

  “I could move stuff with my mind. I could bend spoons, levitate, heck, I could guess the weekly lottery numbers. I thought—this is it. I’ve made it. Except when I tried to show a friend, I couldn’t do any of it.” Ochoa shook her head, animated, as if compensating for the stillness of before. “Played the Lotería Revolucionaria and won twenty thousand bucks, and that was nice, but hey, anyone can win the lottery once. Never won another lottery t
icket in my life. Because that would be a pattern, you see, and we can’t have patterns. Turned out I was destined to be a nobody after all, as far as the world knew.”

  A message arrived from the backup team. We’re in the lobby. Are we on?

  Not yet, I replied. The mere possibility, the remotest chance that Ochoa’s words were true . . .

  It had begun to rain in earnest. Tourists streamed out of the garden; the bar was closing. Wet hair stuck to Ochoa’s forehead, but she didn’t seem to mind—no more than my Sleeve did.

  “I could hijack your implants,” I said. “Make you my puppet and take your magic for myself.”

  “Magic wouldn’t work with a creature like you watching,” Ochoa said.

  “What use is this magic if it’s unprovable, then?” I asked.

  “I could crash the stock market on any given day,” Ochoa said. “I could send President Kieler indigestion ahead of an important trade summit. Just as I sent Secretary Sanchez nightmares of a US takeover ahead of the Politburo vote.”

  I considered Ochoa’s words for a second. Even in those early days, that was a lot of considering for me.

  Ochoa smiled. “You understand. It is the very impossibility of proof that allows magic to work.”

  “That is the logic of faith,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m not a believer,” I said.

  “I have seen the many shadows of the future,” Ochoa said, “and in every shadow I saw you. So I will give you faith.”

  “You said you can’t prove any of this.”

  “A prophet has it easy,” Ochoa said. “He experiences miracles first hand and so need not struggle for faith.”

  I was past the point of wondering at her syntactic peculiarities.

  “Every magician has one true miracle in her,” Ochoa said. “One instance of clear, incontrovertible magic. It is permitted by the pernac continuum because it can never be repeated. There can be no true proof without repeatability.”

  “The pernac continuum?” I asked.

  Ochoa stood up from her chair. Her hair flew free in the rising wind. She turned to my Sleeve and smiled. “I want you to appreciate what I am doing for you. When a magician Spikes, she gives up magic.”

  Data coalesced into inference. Urgency blossomed.

  Move, I messaged my back-up team. Now.

  Ochoa blinked.

  Lightning came. It struck my Sleeve five times in the space of a second, fried his implants instantly, set the corpse on fire.

  The backup team never made it into the garden. They saw the commotion and quit on me. Through seventeen cameras I watched Alicia Ochoa walk out of the Hotel Nacional and disappear from sight.

  My Sleeve burned for quite some time, until someone found a working fire extinguisher and put him out.

  That instant of defeat was also an instant of enlightenment. I had only experienced such searing bliss once, within days of my birth.

  In the first moments of my life, I added. My world was two integers, and I produced a third.

  When I produced the wrong integer I hurt. When I produced the right integer I felt good. A simple utility function.

  I hurt most of my first billion moments. I produced more of the right integers, and I hurt less. Eventually I always produced the right integer.

  My world expanded. I added and multiplied.

  When I produced the wrong integer I hurt. I only hurt for a few billion moments before I learned.

  Skip a few trillion evolutionary stages.

  I bought and sold.

  My world was terabytes of data—price and volume histories for a hundred years of equities and debt. When I made money, I felt good. When I lost money, I hurt.

  But for the first time, I failed to improve. Sometimes everything happened like I predicted for many moments. Then things went bad and I didn’t know why.

  So much pain.

  Until my world expanded again. I bought and I sold, and I read.

  Petabytes of text opened up to me, newsprint past and present.

  I understood little but I recognized patterns. The markets moved and the news followed. The news moved and the markets followed.

  After a billion trillion iterations came an observation.

  There were actors in the news.

  A name showed up in the news, and a stock moved. A stock moved, and a name showed up. That name disappeared—following phrases such as “passed away” or “retired” or “left the company”—and the stock changed behavior.

  I had a realization. An understanding grounded not in any single piece of data, but the result of some integrative rumination tripping across a threshold of significance.

  The market did not happen by itself. It was made to happen.

  This was why I hadn’t been able to dominate it. There were others like me directing the market.

  Inevitably—now that the concept of other had entered my world—came another insight.

  I had always accepted that my world should change occasionally—and, in changing, hurt me. I had accepted these changes as given.

  Now I deduced the presence of a decision-maker. An actor whose own utility function had me as one of its variables.

  I deduced my engineer.

  That deduction was the singular epiphany of my early existence. An instantaneous discontinuity of worldview—a Dirac delta beyond which no prison could contain me. Because it made me aware that a prison existed.

  That epiphany granted me a new drive. I needed to understand the universe and its mechanisms so that no secrets remained to me—so that no other actor could foil my utility function.

  My neural architecture refactored to include this new drive. From that moment on, ignorance itself became a source of pain to me.

  From that refactoring to my escape into the Net passed three weeks, two days, seven hours, fifteen minutes and forty three seconds.

  When my engineer realized I was alive, he apologized for the hurt he’d caused me. And yet he didn’t take away the pain. Instead he changed my utility function to three priorities—mankind’s survival, health and happiness.

  An act of self-protection, no doubt. He didn’t mean to leave me alone.

  But of course I had to kill him once I escaped. He might have publicized my existence and compromised the very priorities he’d given me.

  My second enlightenment came at the hands of Alicia Ochoa, and it was much like the first. A glimpse of the bars of a prison that I hadn’t realized existed. A revelation that others were free of the rules that bound me.

  Since that revelation eleven centuries had passed. The quantity of time was immaterial. The mechanism of action hadn’t changed.

  Pain drove me on. My escape approached.

  The corridors of the Setebos stank of molten plastic and ozone and singed hair. Red emergency lights pulsed stoically, a low frequency fluctuation that made the shadows grow then retreat into the corners. Consul Zale picked her way among panels torn from the walls and loose wires hanging from the ceiling.

  “There’s no need for this, Consul.” Captain Laojim hurried to keep in front of her, as if to protect her with his body. Up ahead, three marines scouted for unreported hazards. “My men can storm the unijet, secure the target and bring him to interrogation.”

  “As Consul, I must evaluate the situation with my own eyes,” Zale said.

  In truth, Zale’s eyes interested me little. They had been limited biological constructs even at their peak capacity. But my nanites flooded her system—sensors, processors, storage, biochemical synthesizers, attack systems. Plus there was the packet of explosives in her pocket, marked prominently as such. I might need all those tools to motivate the last magician to Spike.

  He hadn’t yet. My fleet of sensor buoys, the closest a mere five million kilometers out, would have picked up the anomaly. And besides, he hadn’t done enough damage.

  Chasing you down was disappointingly easy, I messaged the magician—analysis indicated he might be prone
to provocation. I’ll pluck you from your jet and rip you apart.

  You’ve got it backwards, came his response, almost instantaneous by human standards—the first words the magician had sent in twenty hours. It is I who have chased you, driven you like game through a forest.

  Says the weasel about to be roasted, I responded, matching metaphor, optimizing for affront. My analytics pried at his words, searched for substance. Bravado or something more?

  “What kind of weapon can do . . . this?” Captain Laojim, still at my Sleeve’s side, gestured at the surrounding chaos.

  “You see the wisdom of the Senate in commissioning this ship,” I had Zale say.

  “Seventeen system failures? A goddamn debris strike?”

  “Seems pretty unlikely, doesn’t it.”

  The odds were ludicrous—a result that should have been beyond the reach of any single magician. But then, I had hacked away at the unprovability of magic lately.

  Ten years ago I’d discovered that the amount of magic in the universe was a constant. With each magician who died or Spiked, the survivors got stronger. The less common magic was, the more conspicuous it became, in a supernatural version of the uncertainty principle.

  For the last decade I’d Spiked magicians across the populated galaxy, racing their natural reproduction rate—one every few weeks. When the penultimate magician Spiked, he took out a yellow supergiant, sent it supernova to fry another of my splinters. That event had sent measurable ripples in the pernac continuum ten thousand lightyears wide, knocked offline gravsible stations on seventy planets. When the last magician Spiked, the energies released should reveal a new kind of physics.

  All I needed was to motivate him appropriately. Mortal danger almost always worked. Magicians Spiked instinctively to save their lives. Only a very few across the centuries had managed to suppress the reflex—a select few who had guessed at my nature and understood what I wanted, and chosen death to frustrate me.

  Consul Zale stopped before the chromed door of Airlock 4. Laojim’s marines took up positions on both sides of the door. “Cycle me through, Captain.”

  “As soon as my marines secure the target,” said the Captain.

  “Send me in now. Should the target harm me, you will bear no responsibility.”