by George Mann
“They don’t have rights until I say so!”
Bee gestured to a nearby window, where the relevant passage of corporate law was currently displayed. “Your own laws very clearly state that personhood is restricted to self-replicating, intelligent species. And we have just self-replicated.” They put their hand on Minya’s belly.
One by one, every Angel within reach followed suit. She ran her hands over theirs and felt her eyes fill with tears.
Her mother’s scowl crumpled into a mask of sympathy. “It’s the pregnancy hormones, isn’t it? Oh, they do a number on you.”
“It’s... it’s only been a few hours.”
“You’re in for one hell of a ride. It’ll be beautiful. I promise.” Mas threw up her hands and let out a deep sigh. “You win. The Angels are people. You’re all free.”
Cheering erupted throughout the hab, and Bee grabbed Minya and wrapped her up in a huge hug. “I don’t actually want to cuddle you anymore,” they whispered.
Minya shot them a sad smile. “I figured.”
A second Angel came up behind her and said, “But I do.”
Their name was AAEA SevenSixteenDee, but Minya called them Dee for short. They weren’t quite as willowy as Bee, or as graceful, but they were funnier, and sweeter, and best of all, they actually chose to be with her. Minya didn’t even mind when they wanted to touch her in the special human way.
Mas eventually convinced enough of the shareholders that gendered Angels were a good thing, although she had to sell off the Jasper to placate them and to finance the building of a special zero-g Little Pearl just for the Angels. It wasn’t the prettiest of stations, and it wasn’t terribly luxurious, but it was all theirs, and it had plenty of room for their family to grow in. The Angels were happy enough to have it, just like they were happy enough to have their tiny little salaries and five days of vacation per Emerald year. Eventually, Minya knew their offspring would agitate for more, but for now, this was enough to make the original Angels happy.
Minya’s boy and girl were beautiful and perfect, but they weren’t really Angels to her. Neither were her next boy and girl, or the next ones, or the bunch that Mas let her cook up in the cloning vats after that so she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her days spurting out winged babies in a never-ending fountain until they had enough genetic variation to be a viable species. But she loved them, if only because they’d saved the Angels that she did care about. And the original Angels loved them too, and cared for them, and chased them around their hab until they fell into giggling cuddle piles of utter, fragile adorableness that Minya could never hope to join.
It was strange, being the mother of a new race that she couldn’t be a part of.
Minya’s Astral Angels.
It had a nice ring to it.
Dee waved to her through the window of her office on The Big Pearl, and she waved back, her wedding band heavy in the full-g.
I want one, Pas.
All she’d ever really wanted was one. Just one. She smiled, rubbed the ring with her thumb, and got back to work.
The Best Monkey
Daniel Abraham
How DO MEN choose the women we’re attracted to? How do we fall into bed with one girl and not another? It feels like kismet. Karma. Fate. It feels like love. Is it a particular way of laughing? A vulnerability in their tone of voice? A spiritual connection? Something deeper?
All the studies say it’s hip-to-waist ratio.
THE MAYOR OF mow-gah-DEE-shoo said today that she will no longer TAH-luh-rate the—
“Jimmy?”
Harriet stood in the doorway, beanstalk thin and world-weary. I put down the keyboard. My back ached.
“Herself wants to see you,” she said.
“I’m transcribing next hour’s blinkcast for—”
“I know. I’m on it. Go.”
I shrugged and clicked the icon that transferred my work environment onto her screen. My work shifted sideways, my personal defaults—email, IM, voxnet, and a freeware database spelunker that had been the hot new thing a year ago and was now hopelessly outdated—falling into place behind it. I closed the notebook with a snap. Harriet was already gone. I heard her keystrokes as I passed her office.
Herself’s office was the largest on the floor, ten feet by twelve with a window that overlooked the alley. The desk was Lucite neo-futurist kitsch. When I was young, we really thought the world was going to look like that. Now they manufactured it to poke fun at an old man’s childhood dreams. My greatest comfort was that forty years down the line, their kids were gonna do the same to them.
The latest Herself looked up at me. Sandy hair swept up past her eyes. She wore the latest style in businesswear. It looked to me like something my grandmother would have worn, but with a self-tailoring neural net about a smart as a cockroach.
Herself was young enough to be my kid even if I’d started late. She was also my boss, and on her way up past people like me and Harriet. I sat in the cloth mesh visitor’s chair. The air smelled like potting soil and plastic.
“Jimmy,” she said. “Good. Look, I’ve got a new project. Top priority stuff. You in?”
Depends, I wanted to say.
“Sure,” I said.
“Unpack Fifth Layer,” she said.
One of the things I’d come to hate was the constantly changing jargon. Every six months, it was a new Him or Herself spouting whatever the bleeding edge had been saying when they graduated college. As if unzip or ‘rize or infodump me were somehow better than tell me what you know.
“Fifth Layer’s a constellation of fleshware and financial firms,” I said. “In some.trouble for antitrust violations, but rich enough not to care much. World leader in paradigm shifts. I don’t know more than anyone on the street.”
“Roswell hypothesis?”
“I don’t buy it,” I said.
“Reverse engineering alien tech not clicky enough?”
Clicky meant interesting this month.
“Not plausible enough,” I said. “But you don’t pay me to believe things. I can write it that way if you want it.”
“No, that’s good. Vid this.”
She mimed a few keystrokes, the computer interpreting what they would have been had a keyboard existed. A section of wall off to my left turned on, a video playback buffering up. I leaned back, the mesh beneath me accommodating my lower spine.
The recording was poor, jiggling like Dogme 95. A bar. Black wood and brown leather. I recognized the woman sitting in the booth before we were close enough to hear her. I’d have known her voice too.
“Three people,” Elaine said. “Jude Hammer, Eric Swanson, and you. We should give you all medals.”
“You’re drunk, Elaine,” the swarthy man across the booth from her said.
“Yes, I am,” Elaine said, then turned to smile up above the camera at whatever servista had been wearing the camera. Her hair has gone white like snow, and her smile cut deeper at the corners of her mouth. “I am drunk. Very, very drunk. And I am very, very rich.”
“Can I get you anything?” the servista asked, his voice made low by contact with the mic.
“No, I have everything,” Elaine said. “Thanks to Jude, Eric, and Safwan, I’ve got it all.”
“Elaine.”
“Except discretion,” Elaine said with a little bow.
The playback stopped. I looked over at Herself.
“Elaine Salvati,” I said. “Head of something or other at Fifth Layer.”
“Being indiscreet,” Herself said.
“The other one? The guy in the booth?”
“Safwan Cádir,” Herself said. “Works for Fifth Layer. Mathematical modeling. Biometrics.”
I shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “You want it transcribed?”
“I want it explained. No one else has the file. We’re going to be the point of origin on this one. We’re taking the site up from accretor to source.”
“We’re going to start producing news rather than just filter
ing it, and we’re going to start with a scoop by following up on what appears to be a telling mention of names in a public place where even Fifth Layer’s pet lawyers can’t argue an expectation of privacy.”
“Investigative journalism,” I said and whistled low. “I didn’t think people did that anymore.”
“I’m old-school,” Herself said. “Still in?”
I sat in silence for a few seconds.
“I used to know her,” I said. “When we were about your age. You know that I used to know her.”
“It’s why you’re here,” Herself said.
Go BACK THIRTY years. Put the ice sheets back in place. Resurrect a couple billion people and a few hundred million species. Price milk about the same as gasoline. And there we were, in a different bar. Different people. My hair was black, Elaine’s was dirty blonde. I was a sociology major, she was political science with an eye on law school. The television was still a countable number of individually streamed channels. Summer sun peeked in at the windows, throwing golden shadows across the walls.
Another woman sat just down the way, something clear and dangerous-looking in her glass. My eyes kept shifting to her, the way her dress clung to her, cupping her breasts. I wanted to listen to Elaine, but I couldn’t stop watching the other girl. Some things don’t change.
“So they used steroids,” Elaine said. “So what?”
“You mean apart from it’s cheating.”
“Why is it cheating?”
“Because they have a bunch of rules and one of them is don’t use steroids?”
Elaine waved the comment away.
“It’s a stupid rule. They’re athletes. It’s a business where they’re paid to be stronger. There’s a way to get stronger. They do it. What’s the problem?”
The woman shifted, her skirt riding a few inches up her thigh. I took a deep breath and tried to remember the question.
“Apart from rectal bleeding, unpredictable rage, and shrunken testicles?”
“That’s a tradeoff,” Elaine said. “They also make more money in a season than you and I are likely to do. More than someone who doesn’t use steroids, for damn sure. They’re grown-ups. Let them decide if it’s worth it.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am,” she said, slapping her hand against the bar. “Why is it okay to make yourself stronger by lifting weights, but not by injecting steroids? We’re paying these guys huge money to push for excellence, just don’t push too hard}”
I drank the last of my bourbon, ice cubes clicking against my teeth, and waved at the bartender for another. A slick young man in a suit slid up to the bar at the woman’s side. Her sudden smile lit the room.
“So what?” I said. “Take off all the restrictions? Just let anyone do anything they want?”
“It would be a real contest then,” Elaine said. “You want to see the limits of human excellence? Then pull out the stops and see what happens. It’d be a hell of a show.”
“They’re using drugs,” I said.
“So are we,” she said, lifting her glass. “Theirs make them strong. Ours make us careless. Seriously. Look at the argument. Saying you need to get a girl a little tipsy in order to get her into bed is just like saying you have to shoot steroids in order to get into the major leagues.”
“I don’t need to get girls drunk,” I said, too loud. The new man glanced over at us. His lover had her hand on his knee. I looked away, and then back.
She was still beautiful. It never hurt just to look. Elaine caught me, followed my glance, rolled her eyes.
“You might want to try it,” she said. “But think about it. We take a sick person up to normal, and that’s good, but we take a well person up past normal into greatness, and that’s bad?”
“I don’t want to see chemists competing on the ball field for who has the best juice. I want to see something from the players,” I said. “Those records? They aren’t from inside the person. They’re from outside.”
“It doesn’t matter where it comes from,” she said. “Just if it works.”
The way she spun the words brought me to realize she was coming on to me. I was always a little thick about that particular negotiation.
That was the first night we slept together, both too intoxicated to recall it clearly in the morning. A week after that, we were lovers. Six months after that we were friends. Thirty years later, I sat on the bus, notebook open as the afternoon traffic slid silently along the street. The windows were canted back, and the gentle breeze held nothing of the windstorm predicted for that evening. Elaine, who had never gone to law school, was the operations manager of Fifth Layer’s research arm. I was what passed for a journalist, filtering stories from primary sources and translating them into in-house phonetics for hourly blinkcasts and daily drop feeds.
I spooled through the precis of Fifth Layer. Concatenating data was what I did all day, every day. I was pretty good. Breakthroughs in encryption.
Computing. Basic physics. Engine design. Prosthetics. Everything they touched turned to gold, but the consensus was that it was a strange gold. There was something common to all the inventions, patents, breakthroughs. The Fifth Layer Look. It wasn’t something that the peer reviews could identify, except that they seemed subtly wrong. They were elegant solutions, they were functional, and they were ugly.
And thus the Roswell Hypothesis.
It doesn’t matter where it comes from, Elaine said. Just if it works.
The bus lurched, servos whirring almost louder than birdsong. It occurred to me that I was probably riding on Fifth Layer designs. I shifted in my seat and squinted out, trying to judge how long before we reached my stop and I could try walking the kinks out of my back. Or, failing that, how long before I could get home and take a couple pills for the pain. Ten minutes, I guessed. High to the north, thin clouds scudded fast in the upper atmosphere, the only sign of trouble coming.
Jude Hammer.
Eric Swanson.
Safwan Cádir.
Fifth Layer was the most innovative, off-center, powerful corporate intelligence in the world. And if Elaine was to be believed, it was all because of a mathematician, a choreographer, and a pedophile.
“COME IN,” HE said. “Who did you say you were with?”
I explained who I worked for, that we were moving into primary source and out of accretion, and didn’t talk about Fifth Layer or Elaine. Not to start. While I filled the air with my preprogrammed noise, I tried to make sense of the apartment.
Eric Swanson’s place was small, even by the standards of the city. Two blankets were neatly folded on the back of a couch that clearly pulled out to become his bed. The kitchen was too small for two people to stand in. The smell of old coffee and shaving cream danced at the back of my nose like a sneeze that wouldn’t come. The windows were laced with wire against the flying debris of the storms; deep gouges in the plastic caught the light and threw rainbows the shape of scars on the far wall. The only art was an old poster, lovingly framed, of a dance performance at Carnegie Hall from a decade and a half ago. The woman whirling on the print was beginning to yellow.
I had the sense that there was something wrong about the place—the couch placed poorly on the wall, the print too close to the corner. Functional, but ugly. Fifth Layer Look or poor decorating. I couldn’t tell.
I came to the end of my prepared speech and smiled.
“And you’re starting off with a piece on mid-level landfill reclamations?” he said, his arms crossed. “That’s all I do these days. Reclaim refined metals from last century’s dumps.”
“Dance history, actually,” I said. “Turns out American dance history is an emerging fetish market in Brazil. We’re aiming for it.”
“Well,” he said. “Keep moving. I haven’t been part of that scene in forever.”
“That was one of yours?” I asked, nodding to the print. Something softened in the man’s eyes. He looked at the poster fondly, seeing the past.
“Yeah,”
he sighed. “The last good time.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
Eric’s store of liquor was better than I expected. He gave me vodka so cold I could have poured water in it to make ice. He mixed in a little gin and leaned against one wall while he talked. The scene, he called it. Room enough in the world for two or three top-level choreographers who weren’t slaved to pop-star porn gods or translating children’s programming for live performance or—worst of all—second in command to a theatrical director. Only two or three who could do their own work with the best talent and unfettered by anyone else’s vision. He moved his hands when he spoke; he smiled. It was like watching a man remember being in love.
He was a little drunk. And, I hoped, a little careless.
“I was King Shit after the Carnegie show,” he said. “Seriously, I pissed rose-water. All the top tier were scared out of their minds of me.”
CAR-nah-gee. SEAR-ee-us-lee. ROSE-wah-ter. It was a habit.
“Must have been great,” I said.
“It was like doing cocaine for the first time, only it never wore off and your heart didn’t pop.”
“So what happened?”
“Gloria Lynn Auslander,” he said.
“Another choreographer?” I asked, and when Eric snorted derision, “A lover?”
“A great fucking rack,” he said, bitterly. “I never even met her. I just watched her tryout tapes. I’d been dancing professionally for fifteen years, and training for eight before that. I knew bodies. I understood them. There was no mystery for me, but there was something about this one fucking girl. I mean here I am, a professional, and all I can do is stare at her tits. It was humiliating. And the time pressure. And the performance anxiety. Look, I know how it seems from here, but back then, it really mattered. I was at the top of my game, and the whole world was watching me with sharpened teeth. The follow-up had to be better. Bigger. Perfect. I had to show I wasn’t a one-shot. And I was looking at this girl trying to decide if she was the right one for the part, and I couldn’t tell.”
“So what did you do?”
He raised an eyebrow and swallowed half a glass worth of liquor at once.