by Rich Horton
“So why are we in a lekking lounge at 2 a.m.?”
“No drones,” Becker said.
“None in the local Milestones either. Even during business hours.”
“Yeah. I just—I wanted a crowd to get lost in.”
“At two in the morning.”
“People have other things on their mind in the middle of the night.” Becker glanced up as a triplet stumbled past en route to the fuck-cubbies. “Less likely to notice someone they may have seen on the feeds.”
“Okay.”
“People don’t—congregate the way they used to, you know?” Becker sipped her scotch, set it down, stared at it. “Everyone telecommutes, everyone cocoons. Downtown’s so—thin, these days.”
Sabrie panned the room. “Not here.”
“Web don’t fuck. Not yet, anyway. Still gotta go out if you want to do anything more than whack off.”
“What’s on your mind, Nandita?”
“The price of freedom.”
“Go on.”
“Not having to worry about some random psycho shooter when you go out for sushi. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
“You know I was being sarcastic.”
Becker cocked her head at the other woman. “I don’t think you were. Not entirely, anyway.”
“Maybe not entirely.”
“Because there were shootings, Amal. A lot of them. Twenty thousand deaths a year.”
“Mainly down in the states, thank God.” Sabrie said. “But yes.”
“Back before the panopticon, people could just walk into some school or office building and—light it up.” Becker frowned. “I remember there was this one guy shot up a daycare. Prechoolers. Babies. I forget how many he killed before they took him out. Turned out he’d lost a sister himself, six months before, in another shooting. Everybody said it tipped him over the edge and he went on a rampage.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“That shit never does. It’s what people said, though, to explain it. Only . . . ”
“Only?” Sabrie echoed after the pause had stretched a bit too far.
“Only what if he wasn’t crazy at all?” Becker finished.
“How could he not be?”
“He lost his sister. Classic act of senseless violence. The whole gun culture, you know, the NRA had everyone by the balls and anyone who so much as whispered about gun control got shot down. So to speak.” Becker grunted. “Words didn’t work. Advocacy didn’t work. The only thing that might possibly work would be something so unthinkable, so horrific and obscene and unspeakably evil, that not even the most strident gun nut could possibly object to—countermeasures.”
“Wait, you’re saying that someone in favor of gun control—someone who’d lost his sister to gun violence— would deliberately shoot up a daycare?”
Becker spread her hands.
“You’re saying he turned himself into a monster. Killed twenty, thirty kids maybe. For a piece of legislation.”
“Weighed against thousands of deaths a year. Even if legislation only cut that by a few percent you’d make back your investment in a week or two, tops.”
“Your investment?”
“Sacrifice, then.” Becker shrugged.
“Do you know how insane that sounds?”
“How do you know that’s not the way it went down?”
“Because you said nothing changed! No laws were passed! They just wrote him off as another psycho.”
“He couldn’t know that up front. All he knew was, there was a chance. His life, a few others, for thousands. There was a chance.”
“I can’t believe that you, of all people, would—after what happened, after what you did—”
“Wasn’t me, remember? It was Wingman. That’s what everyone’s saying.” Wingman was awake now, straining at the leash with phantom limbs.
“But you were still part of it. You know that, Deet, you feel it. Even if it wasn’t your fault it still tears you up inside. I saw that the first time we spoke. You’re a good person, you’re a moral person, and—”
“Do you know what morality is, really?” Becker looked coolly into the other woman’s eyes. “It’s letting two stranger’s kids die so you can save one of your own. It’s thinking it makes some kind of difference if you look into someone’s eyes when you kill them. It’s squeamishness and cowardice and won’t someone think of the children. It’s not rational, Amal. It’s not even ethical.”
Sabrie had gone very quiet.
“Corporal,” she said when Becker had fallen silent, “what have they done to you?”
Becker took a breath. “Whatever they’re doing—”
Not much initiative. Great on the follow-through.
“—it ends here.”
Sabrie’s eyes went wide. Becker could see pieces behind them, fitting together at last. No drones. Dense crowd. No real security, just a few bouncers built of pitiful meat and bone . . .
“I’m sorry, Amal,” Becker said gently.
Sabrie lunged for the jammer. Becker snatched it up before the journalist’s hand had made it halfway.
“I can’t have people in my head right now.”
“Nandita.” Sabrie was almost whispering. “Don’t do this.”
“I like you, Amal. You’re good people. I’d leave you right out of it if I could, but you’re—smart. And you know me, a little. Maybe well enough to put it together, afterward . . . ”
Sabrie leapt up. Becker didn’t even rise from her chair. She seized the other woman’s wrist quick as a striking snake, effortlessly forced it back onto the table. Sabrie cried out. Dim blue dancers moved on the other side of the damper field, other things on their minds.
“You won’t get away with it. You can’t blame the machines for—” Soft pleading words, urgent, rapid-fire. The false-color heatprint of the contusion spread out across Sabrie’s forearm like a dim rainbow, like a bright iridescent oil slick. “Please there’s no way they’ll be able to sell this as a malfunction no matter how—”
“That’s the whole point,” Becker said, and hoped there was at least a little sadness left in her smile. “You know that.”
Amal Sabrie. Number one of seventy-four.
It would have been so much faster to just spread her wings and raise arms. But her wings had been torn out by the roots, and lay twitching in the garage back at Trenton. The only arms she could raise were of flesh and blood and graphene.
It was enough, though. It was messy, but she got the job done. Because Corporal Nandita Becker was more than just a superhuman killing machine.
She was the most ethical person on the planet.
Aberration
Genevieve Valentine
You’ll see them someplace you’re going when you’re trying to make the most of your time. They’re standing at the top of the steps to the public library (the amazing branch where they do the photoshoots, not the squat concrete one you go to), or they’re on the balcony at a concert you overheard someone talking about. They’ll be at the greatest altitude you can reach while still seeming effortless; they like being able to look down.
You’ll notice them a long time before they notice you, though they seem to stutter in and out of sight. They’re dressed the way you’ve always wanted to dress. Sometimes you’ll glance back and not see them, but they’re nowhere else either, and a second later something catches your eye and it’s them anyway and you feel like an asshole. You never get a sense of what they look like.
If they smoke they’ll barely keep hold of their limp-dick cigarettes, wrist angled hard enough to crack. If they laugh it’s parted lips but teeth close together, two straight rows, a furrow between their eyebrows like they’re already finding reasons it’s not so funny after all. One of them touches the other one right at the small of the back, cigarette a cinder between their fingers, and you get the impression of pushing even though nobody’s moved.
They’re awful, they don’t even pretend otherwise, and when you look at th
em the hair on your neck stands up, and the word Rotten unfurls inside of you. (You couldn’t say it if anyone asked, your mouth is too dry, but it sits there sharp-edged, like you swallowed a name tag.)
One of them peels away, finally, passes you on the way to the bar or around the bottom edge of the steps towards the street; shoulders pinched, the shadow of the other one already falling across both of you.
“Don’t look,” she says, so low that music or traffic swallows it up. When they disappear, you’re still standing right where you were, staring at your own shoes, and it’s fucking stupid, but as soon as the words were out your gaze dropped.
It wasn’t like you did it because you were embarrassed to have been caught out; it was the urgency, some terror in the snap after the T and the K, and you know a warning when you hear one.
“Oh,” she says at the top of the bridge.
There’s little else worth saying—she’s gotten so tired of languages lately, which would feel like a defeat if she cared more about losing—but a sound of surprise still falls out of her sometimes, some gut punch of feeling that gets a death rattle.
The last time she vanished from this city it was a ruin and you couldn’t get within five miles of it, nothing left but a few plaster-roof islands and the last few wooden fingers of the pier. Appearing in it now is visiting a grave to find the departed eating an apple on their headstone.
She feels desperate already, so desperate as to be fully solid, and she grips the stone and waits for someone to run into her. No one does. No one can really see her for long; she’s been so many places she’s not really anywhere any more.
The stone’s at her hip. It’s quiet when she touches it, though she feels it all the time anyway, a phantom heat right through to her spine.
One of the vaporettos is sinking, nearer to the sea. But it’s early, only just dawn, and no one will realize in time for the alarm to do any good; half of them will drown. It won’t take long. She watches.
When it’s over she walks through the smaller streets, catches half-sentences and the windows of shops where the things in the very front have gone a little dusty and it doesn’t matter because they’re only tourists. Someone is napping in a piazza, and after she touches his shoulder he has no more use for his camera. She takes three photographs: the slime easing up the edge of a canal, the curtains in a house where someone is very ill, the shadow of a flight of birds that looks like a monster underneath the water.
It’s a city of corpses, like every other city, and she walks across the bridges and thinks about drowning.
He catches up with her under one of the abandoned billboards for Lunar Enterprises that looks out over a dark stretch of desert. She’s crossed her arms to keep from looking for a cigarette. Nobody makes them any more; there’s no point looking.
She’s carrying a camera, one of the instant ones that’s back in vogue. She’s holding the pictures like a hand of poker, five snapshots of the city at the edge of the valley as the lights went out and out and out.
“They came out nice,” his voice is a thousand years weary with telling her.
“They did.” They’re already fading, though; she only looked at them once. Soon they’ll start to disappear at the edges, and by the time they leave here there won’t be anything left to take.
He used to tell her to give it up, but she’s not the only one who has hobbies, and he stopped asking a long time ago.
He reaches for the pack in his pocket, taps out two, lights the second one off the cherry from the first. They give off just enough flare to remind them how pitch dark it is. She can see the hollow above his top lip, that’s all.
“I don’t smoke any more,” she says.
He raises his eyebrows, smokes both cigarettes at the same time.
The last of the smoke feathers from his mouth as he drops the butts; they vanish before they ever hit the ground, and he grinds his boot into the dirt like he’s trying to spite them. Their kind leave no traces.
Still, hers just vanish; his all gathers somewhere, waiting for him, everything he touches, everything he does. He’s always going home.
“Been hoping to run into you,” he says.
She’s been in eight places since she saw him last, or ten. In a couple of places there was only a day. She spent a week in the mountains, staying clear of a black bear that got more agitated the longer she stayed—it could tell something was wrong, right up until it died. She hopes it’s all right now, but it’s the same way she hopes everyone who drowns in Venice centuries from now fought until the very last; you get cruel eventually.
Maybe she started out cruel. She suspects that the very first time she opened her eyes and was elsewhen, her sympathy had vanished. Something she was born to.
(She’s thought about it, that maybe anyone becomes like this if you give them long enough and show them what they’ve seen. Doesn’t bear much reflection.)
From the city there’s a siren. The blast that comes in the dark will kill three hundred people, give or take.
He made friends all the time. Said they held on more fiercely, which she knows; said they loved more deeply, which she doesn’t doubt. But he loves them back, loves women and men and the sort of child who can actually see you, who stares you right in the eye and ignores you when you say, “Don’t look,” and then gets angry at all once as it realizes it’s been robbed and it’s looked too long at the thing that will kill it.
Lucky, she says when he tells her. He never asks her what she means.
“Good to see you,” she says.
The first of the rumblings begins. They look across the darkness, where the edge of the city is just beginning to separate from the dark with a layer of smoke and flame.
Her heart is a thousand stairs with nothing at the top, and she’s afraid all the way up.
If everything worked as it was meant to, you were always there just before the worst of it, the birdsong before the bomb. But aberration doesn’t always listen, and she appeared too late, sometimes, or a year early, or a hundred years. Sometimes she’d shown up in the middle of a war, and when the stone in her pocket warmed and creaked and pushed her to wherever she was going next, it was the only sound on a field without graves, the ground swallowing blood as fast as it could.
Once, by some mistake, she’d been spat out before there were people at all, and she’d sat on a tree trunk and watched the sun stain the leaves, and the ferns at her feet rustle with animals that seemed like her: mammal at first glance, but reptile if you knew what you were looking for. She lifted her hands before she remembered she had no camera. It got colder eventually, warmer again. The ground underfoot stretched an inch or two. She wondered if she’d be sitting there for a hundred million years, waiting. She didn’t mind.
There was a white vulture, and as it tilted its head to her, black eyes in sickly-blue sockets, it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She’s forgotten the thing that died.
She had no camera. When she appeared next (Morocco, maybe), her hands sat in her lap a long time, framed by nothing.
Lens aberrations in a camera, in order of disaster:
Distortion: A warp across something you thought was holding steady. Tilt shift: makes your subject fall away from you, every house teetering on the verge of collapse. Bokeh: a cheat in the shape of light, turning light into spheres of nostalgia that hover behind whatever you’re trying to capture, a hostage of a good time. Chromatic: The edges of your colors burn into something they aren’t, and you can’t trust your colors any more, but that one is subtle, and you won’t know until it’s too late.
Curvature: The thing you want most is sharp and bright, and everything else slips out of focus by degrees. That one you can live with. It’s close enough to life. Can’t blame it for that.
None of it works, of course. If it did there would be chaos. You can take all the pictures you want. Their face will be gone—some lens flare that wasn’t there before, or a dove taking off in the foreground with two feathers spread
over where they used to be, or obscured behind a cloud of someone’s cigarette, even if you’ve never smoked and they never have. If there’s no excuse that the frame can find, you’ll just see a vanished face where the picture’s been eaten away, someone lifting a disappearing glass to lips that don’t exist anymore.
The invading army of a country that doesn’t yet exist piles the corpses of the vanquished outside the camp. The straggling forces of the occupied wait until deep night before they set the bodies on fire. Their attack on the camp comes in the middle of the chaos, and takes hundreds of enemy lives; the contagion that was already sickening the dead wafts equally across friend and foe. Both armies will be decimated soon, and the germ will crawl victoriously over the countryside for longer than anyone remembers the war.
He’s leaning against the tree trunk, barely touching her left shoulder; his hair makes a sound against the bark when he turns to look at her. “If you take the tragedy out of it, it’s pretty funny.”
This is why she gave up on languages. “If you take the tragedy out of anything, it’s funny.”
He smiles and rolls his stone across his knuckles, a skipping stone shaped like a coin. She’s seen it a hundred times. She’s never laid a finger on it.
A deserter staggers past them, close enough to death that when he looks up he’s startled to see them.
“Don’t look,” she says, and the soldier opens his mouth, drops his gaze to the ground. It’s too late for him, though, and he doesn’t even make it past the tree before he crashes to the ground. He’s facing them, eyes open; she looks away.
He looks back and forth between the corpse and her, and for a moment his face gets fond; it does that whenever something happens that he can take for her having some kind feeling.
She lets him think what he likes.
(He was the one who explained her aberration, the first time he ever found her, when she was occupying the last of her mind and he looked like he knew how thin that thread had gotten. He must have been looking for her; she wonders, sometimes.)
His trajectories seem like real journeys—every time she sees him she knows he’s come from a place and is going to another, moving through the world and witnessing everything he can. Hers is a slow, suspended spiraling-down, and it’s possible to tell at which points he came back by clocking when things skidded violently to one side, a kite that’s been shot.