Now We Are Ten: Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press

by Peter F. Hamilton

Eight

  I was awoken from a fitful doze by the sound of a rapid knocking at the door. As I lifted my head from the pillow, Richard hurried into the room. He sat in the side of the bed, reached out and cupped my cheek.

  “Anna1,” he said. “She’s dead. She shot herself.”

  I shook my head, feigning shock. “She must have known about us...”

  He looked confused. “But she was so driven, so single-minded in her need for revenge. This doesn’t make sense.”

  I slipped out of bed and moved to the door. “Come with me.”

  I hurried along the corridor to my room and held the door open for Richard. We moved inside and I stared down at the corpse. I took the laser from her loose fingers and looked at Richard.

  “What now?” he said.

  “Sit down,” I ordered.

  He crossed to the chair beside the window and sat down. I moved to the door, leaned against it and stared at him.

  “What?” he said. His expression became alarmed when I raised the laser and aimed at him.

  “I know all about it,” I said. “Your betrayal – your part in Anna’s plan.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Who are you?” He sounded frightened.

  “Anna1,” I said, and had the pleasure of seeing the fear in his eyes as I shot him through the chest.

  I woke the other Annas and I told them that Anna de Birkenstock was dead, then outlined Richard Elliot’s betrayal.

  A stunned silence greeted my words, then blind Anna5 said, “Anticlimactic, but a relief. What now?”

  “Now we move from here, immediately. There’s no telling if her people are aware of our location. I have another place across the city.”

  We lost no time and, one by one, we took taxi-fliers across town to the safe-house in New Camden.

  *

  Nine

  They came for us two days later.

  We were seated around the kitchen table, bathed in sunlight – six identical young women exchanging details of our lives to date, our hopes for the future. I promised I’d supply them all with new identities via contacts I’d made in the capital. They would be forced to undergo plastic surgery to alter their appearances, and life would not be easy.

  But at least now the future belonged to them; we were individuals, I told them; we were no longer property.

  The security team entered without a sound, almost with reverence. Within seconds a dozen black-garbed armed men moved around the table, covering us with their snub-nosed weapons.

  I hardly had time to register my shock.

  Across the table, I watched with disbelief as Anna5 stood up, smiling. “Take them away,” she ordered.

  A gentle hand fastened itself around my arm and eased me to my feet.

  *

  Ten

  I sat on the bed in a room at Allenby Hall, looking up as Dr Franklin entered and smiled down at me.

  Days had elapsed since my recapture, but I had not counted them. I lived in an eternal present, the past a source of regret, the future too terrible to contemplate.

  “Anna de Birkenstock will be arriving shortly,” he said, “for the operation.”

  “Anna...?” I began. “But you know she’s not Anna de Birkenstock! The original Anna is dead. I killed her, and Richard, back at the flat.”

  His gaze silenced me. “Of course we know all about that.”

  “So why...?”

  “Think about it,” he went on. “How could we go public with de Birkenstock’s death? Think how that might have affected the success of the de Birkenstock Organisation.”

  I stared at him, appalled by his cynicism.

  He laughed. “Oh, you little fool! Don’t you realise – it wasn’t Anna de Birkenstock you should have despised, but the tycoons and businessmen behind her: her backers, Anna, the people who put her where she was.”

  I shook my head, despairing.

  “And now,” he said, “we need to be seen to have a strong leader, a figurehead. You see, what matters is that the Organisation prospers, makes us all very, very rich.” He smiled. “Now take your pill, there’s a good girl.”

  He placed a pill and a glass of water on the bedside table.

  “What...?”

  “Your pre-op medicine,” he said, and slipped from the room.

  Later, alone, I stood by the window and stared down at the long gravelled drive as a limousine pulled up and a tall, elegant figure stepped out.

  Anna5, or Anna de Birkenstock – not that it mattered: we were all, of course, identical – paused, and, as if sensing my presence, raised her head to stare, blindly, at the window.

  Compelled, I lifted my hand and waved.

  Licorice

  Jack Skillingstead

  Becoming human hadn’t really worked out. Just look at this place. Ethan lay on the trundle bed’s thin mattress. The room enclosed him in dismal seediness. A bare light bulb stuttered and buzzed in the ceiling socket. Shadows twitched over the bed, the pressboard dresser, his clothes draped on the arms of the upholstered chair. The room smelled of sweat, toilet water, and deeply absorbed cigarette smoke. Ethan’s shoes pointed at the door, black socks drooping out of them as if they’d decided to abandon Ethan but hadn’t quite the animation to take the first step, let alone disengage the security bar and turn back the multiple bolts and latches.

  Ethan held a black pill, no larger than a peppercorn, between thumb and first finger. Four out of ten pills remained – three if he swallowed this one now. He based consumption of the pills on a standard denary system. The whole universe was denary-based. Ethan himself was one of the original Ten Creators, so he should know. As such, he was, technically, all powerful. At least he would be if he hadn’t chosen to become human. And becoming human really hadn’t worked out.

  Also, Ethan wasn’t his name.

  On the sidewalk under his window, a man and a woman began arguing. “Please,” the man said, “I’m giving it to you.”

  “You can shove it up your ass,” the woman said.

  Ethan sat up on the trundle bed, making the springs squeak tiredly

  “I don’t want to lose you,” the man on the sidewalk said, practically sobbing. “Take it. I won’t hide anything from you again. Not ever.”

  Easy to say, Ethan thought, after what you’ve already hidden and only revealed once she’d caught you. And here it was again: Ethan inside another person’s head. It happened all the time if he didn’t take his pills. Was this why he had no firm identity of his own? Let the so-called doctors parse that one out. Ethan’s ability to migrate through other minds had served him positively when he was writing stories for Galactic Tales of Wonder and The Uncanny Zoo. Other than that, it didn’t help. He feared straining through the minds of everyone around him while his own body remained immobile forever. Also, no one ever bought his stories. He resorted to the computer at the public library where he posted his favorites for free download on Amazon. When after a week they achieved fewer than ten downloads each, even when added together the numbers for three separate stories, he panicked and pulled them all. He and the other Ten Creators had designed a denary Universe. It was bad luck to fuck with that.

  Ethan got up, took ten shuffling steps to the kitchen nook, pressing his fingers to his temples. At the sink he held a dirty coffee mug under the faucet and turned on the cold water tap. Water trickled into the mug. Silently, he counted to ten then cranked the tap off. He pushed the pill between his lips and washed it down. The water slid oily over his tongue and tasted like tarnished copper.

  He waited, leaning on the edge of the sink, head down, counting backward from ten. When he reached zero, the pill released its chemical power (or so he imagined) and knitted closed the leak in his mind. Self-contained once more, Ethan approached the window (ten steps in a modified stride). Under his bare feet, the loose, paper-thin carpet felt like the skin of a malnourished animal. At the window, he pulled the curtain aside. Iron bars fenced him off from Brooklyn. Below the windowsill, a man in a rumpled sport coat pre
ssed something into a woman’s reluctant grasp. The man was about Ethan’s age, thirty or so, but heftier than Ethan, who at best presented as malnourished. The woman wore a black cocktail dress and too many rings. Her hair fell messily across her cheek. Was it deliberate, or had it come undone? “Take it,” the man said. “Go look. It’s all there. You’ll see it’s nothing. A lot of talk. Dumb talk.”

  The woman made a fist around whatever he had given her. Was she about to strike him? Having taken his pill, Ethan had no idea beyond his imagination. Perhaps it was always imagination; he didn’t like to consider that. Though he knew he was one of the original Ten Creators of the Universe, in this human form he had so often been mistaken for an ordinary madman that Ethan sometimes believed this was indeed the case.

  “Joe,” the woman in the black dress said, and Ethan, though she was clearly speaking to the man in the rumpled sport coat, felt himself addressed. Ethan backed away from the window (two steps plus a silent count of five to serve the multiple equaling ten), confused. Outside, the man sobbed openly. “Wait –”

  Footsteps retreated. The woman leaving him? After a sobbing interval, a second set moved off.

  She had spoken his real name. It was Joe, not Ethan. Joe contained only three letters and so wasn’t even a multiplier that could equal ten. No wonder he hadn’t remembered earlier! His name was bad luck.

  If she knew him did that mean she was one of the Ten Creators of The Universe? Perhaps he was not the only one who had decided to try exile in human form. Was he not alone after all? Alternatively, it might be nothing. Are there coincidences? He couldn’t remember what he and the others had decided about that. Joe pulled on jeans, a t-shirt, and a shiny blue warm-up jacket. He plucked his traitor socks from his shoes and filled both socks and shoes with his feet. Outside, the air smelled of a recent rainfall. The wet sidewalk gleamed like seal skin under the street lamps. Joe felt disoriented. The air buzzed with nervous energy, like the failing light bulb in his room. People shouldered past him, their faces moving, emitting noise. Words. Joe was like them and not like them. He held his breath and counted down from ten, the denary calming him, centering him.

  Joe.

  At the end of the block, the woman in the black dress halted by a lamp post, staring at the object in her opened fist. After a moment, Joe understood she was weeping.

  At his halting approach (his head was full of tens; moving down the sidewalk in ten-step sections while counting cracks in the pavement), she opened her hand and dropped the insubstantial thing, a tiny wad of paper. She glanced at Joe then turned and passed under a pink squiggle of neon. Joe stooped to pick up the wadded paper. He pried it open with his fingernail and read the word hand-printed across the wrinkles. BOOSTAR555. He counted letters and numbers. Ten again. Proof that coincidences were not part of the design.

  The pink squiggle was a martini glass tilted festively (drunkenly?) over the doorway of the Moonlight Lounge. Joe stood under the neon sign listening for the code to unlock the secret mystery of BOOSTAR555. He imagined the code whispered intermittently from charged gas trapped inside the pink glass tubing. It was the key to releasing him from human bondage.

  Go after her. She’s one of you.

  Joe entered the lounge, where answers waited. Recorded cabaret music failed to enliven the environment. Heavy wooden booths absorbed the already-dim light. A stuffed raccoon stared down from the back bar with black marble eyes. Two men together and the woman in the black dress sat at opposite ends the leather and oak bar, feet propped on the brass rail. The men stared blatantly at the woman, and the woman stared at her drink – something blue in a stem glass. Her fingers picked apart a cocktail napkin, like scavengers hunting for a morsel.

  Joe looked at BOOSTAR555, then closed his fingers around it and approached the bar. He sat, leaving one stool open between himself and the woman, as if they were expecting a mutual friend, or the answer to an important question. Succumbing to the ambience, Joe ordered a scotch.

  The woman ignored him, her cocktail napkin reduced to confetti that failed miserably to suggest celebration. Joe watched from the corner of his eye, anticipating a pattern, a true coded message, something. When coherency didn’t emerge (a theme in his blighted life), Joe opened his hand and placed it on the bar between them, BOOSTAR555 in his palm. “You dropped this,” he said, “didn’t you?” Adding the question reduced his advantage, and he wished he could take it back.

  The woman looked sidelong at his hand. “Not mine,” she said.

  “It’s a code, isn’t it? From Joe.”

  She turned her head and looked directly at him. Her unevenly applied lipstick gave her mouth the appearance of a double meaning. She narrowed her eyes, or refocused them, and he realized she was already drunk, and must have been even during the argument under his window. “And you are?” she said.

  “I’m –”

  “Who do you think you are?”

  His reply dissolved. Her question was so relevant. He closed his mouth to form a new answer. She was angry, indignant, perhaps righteously so. He found it difficult to interpret the signs. Joe rummaged through a store of expected responses – a box in a dingy corner of his mind which contained the sorts of things people might say in given circumstances. He found something and quickly adapted it, first trying the words in the privacy behind his eyes. You seemed upset. “I’m nobody,” he said aloud. “You seemed upset.” The addition of I’m nobody, though technically accurate, may have been a mistake. She drew back. Don’t improvise, he told himself.

  “I’m upset,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I be?” She picked up her drink and finished it. “Blue Jasmine.”

  He frowned, not understanding.

  “You want to buy me a drink, don’t you?” she said, clarifying things. “That’s the point, correct?”

  “Yes?”

  The bartender removed the woman’s empty glass and shredded napkin. He mixed a new drink, strained it into a clean glass, and set it before her on a fresh napkin. “Cheers,” she said, tilting her glass toward Joe. He stared at her. She rolled her eyes. and drank. Joe sipped his house scotch. It was awful. He put the glass down and pushed it away.

  “About the code,” he said.

  “What code?”

  “Here.” Joe tapped the wrinkled paper with BOOSTAR555 written on it. She swept her hand at it and the scrap of paper fluttered to the floor. Joe grabbed for it and almost fell off his stool. Holding onto the edge of the bar, he reached down and came up with the paper.

  “It’s just his password.” the woman said. “Are you going to drink that?” She pointed at his drink.

  “What? No.”

  She pulled his glass over.

  “Whose password?” he asked.

  “Joe’s.”

  “I’m Joe.”

  She held his glass of scotch to her lips, eyeing him owlishly over the rim. “Huh?”

  “My name. It’s Joe. Are you saying this is my password. And by password do you mean code? I need something to unlock my powers.”

  “You’re fucked up.” She threw her head back and finished his scotch. It pulled her face into a knot which loosened after a moment, her eyes blinking rapidly to catch up. “I’m out of here. Call me a cab or, what is it, Uber. Now you’re supposed to say you’re a cab. You’re an Uber doesn’t sound right.”

  “You’re one of the Ten, aren’t you?”

  The bartender loomed in. “You okay, Allison?”

  Allison.

  The bartender knew her. She came from the neighborhood. Had she been monitoring him? Was Joe the only one in the dark? The raccoon observed them beadily from its dusty perch on the back bar.

  “I’m A-okay,” Allison said and started to stand, then abruptly dropped back on her barstool, as if a faulty mechanism had given way, as if pins had slipped out of her knee joints. “Give me another drink, please.” The bartender filled a glass with water, garnished it with a lemon rind, and set it before her. Allison regarded the water without comment. She
turned to Joe. “Is Joe really your name?”

  “I think so.”

  She laughed. “Don’t you know?”

  He smiled because her laugh suggested it was the appropriate response, even though he didn’t grasp the humor. He supposed it was a thing missing in him; one of the things.

  “You’re pretty strange,” Allison said.

  “Am I? I think you’re one of the Ten.”

  She squinted. “Listen. Don’t get any bright ideas.”

  “I don’t understand.” Joe drew back a little, as if distance enhanced clarity.

  “People know me in this place, all right?” She turned to the bartender. “How about another Blue Jasmine?”

  “Drink your water, Allie,” he said. “Then maybe.”

  Allison made a face and picked up the glass, held it a moment, then set it back down. She leaned towards Joe. “Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass to know people.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Aw, what do you know about it.”

  “I –”

  “Anybody ever cheated on you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lucky.” She grabbed the scrap of paper away from him. “This password, it’s supposed to make me think Joe – my Joe – is sorry. But all it means is that he wants me to love him even if he goes online and talks to men. I’m supposed to log-in, okay? Go on his account and see it’s all harmless. You know what I think?”

  “Not yet.”

  She squinted. “I think my Joe has identity issues.”

  Joe’s attention quickened. Perhaps too eagerly, he said, “I do, too.”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  “I meant me, I have identity issues.”

  “Oh, God. Really?”

  “That’s why I said I think so when you asked if my name was really Joe. Because I don’t know. Can I tell you something? Something in all seriousness?”

  “In all seriousness?” She looked intently at him, swaying on her bar stool. “Only if you get me another drink.”

  Joe motioned for the bartender. “I want to try one of those blue things.” When the new drink arrived Joe held onto it until the bartender turned his back, then he passed it to Allison, who drank half of it and quickly handed it back. She regarded him unsteadily. “Go ahead, Joe. If that’s your name.”