The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Check the monitors for yourself, Sir Bryce. Beth is wide awake, and I’m afraid she’s in a lot of pain. It’s just her…”

  “Gallows humor, Sir B.,” the old woman says from the entrance to the quantum-measurement device. She groans then, a tremor from hell. “Can we just get this over? I’d rather be dead.”

  “Okay, honey,” Dr. Manchetti tells her, “we have everything ready for you. The nanocells are giving us a nice clean read. We’re ready when you are.”

  Deadpan, Croft asks, “What, you’re going to let me die unshriven?”

  The CEO frowns. “Dr. Manchetti, her forms said she’s a—”

  “A devout atheist, yes. She’s pulling your leg, Sir Bryce.”

  “Urp.” A string of saliva runs down her cheek. “Oh shit, I’m losing it, Thomas, I’m really losing it. I’m not going to be much good to you.”

  “It’s okay, honey, we’re ready to go.” Manchetti watches her a moment longer, rubbing his pale jaw. “It’s been wonderful knowing you.”

  “Yeah, real. Flip the switch, Thomas. Send me out with a smile on my face. Or not, as the case may be.”

  The woman tech at the central console murmurs, “All SQUIDs are on line, doctor. Systems nominal. Ready for superposition scan.”

  “Thank you, Jill. It’s your privilege, Sir Bryce. The green button.”

  “Call me Bry, Dr. Manchetti. That starts the quantum split?” It also triggers a lethal spill of neurotoxins from the spansule embedded in Elizabeth Croft’s cortex. Neither man is indelicate enough to mention this fact.

  Measurement Project’s chief scientist nods. “Together with a random binary switch on her pain gates.” The system is exquisitely precise. There is exactly one chance in two that the woman will stay in pain or go into analgesia before she terminates. “That’s it, just touch the pad, Bry. And call me Tom.”

  Still his superior hesitates. “Macabre. I feel like a public hangman.”

  “You’re not.” Manchetti grips Powell by the upper arm, a reassuring contact from one authority to another. Intestinal cancer has been killing the woman for months. She is in terminal cachexia, unable to keep down anything solid, starving in a potential agony only the pain-gate chips hold her from. All this is a matter of public record, duly attested. Three specialist cancer physicians, a psychologist, a grief expert and a team of ethicists have counseled Elizabeth Croft in her extremity, have certified her sane desire for euthanized release. Her scrawled signature stands on a dozen triplicated forms.

  The woman has closed her eyes again. She looks altogether parched, dried out, an Egyptian mummy. Bry Powell firmly presses the switch. There are hummings and clicks. Croft’s body slides into the machine.

  “Ah…” Her voice is soothed at once. “Ah, thank you, Thomas. Whew. I’ll die with a smirk on my face.” She falls silent, but her relaxed breathing is borne to them over the monitor system. After a moment she begins to hum.

  “Christ, that’s a relief,” Powell says. “I’d started to feel like a vivisectionist.”

  Manchetti is brisk. “Random outcome, Bry. Beth knows what she’s in for. It’s her chance at immortality. Scientific immortality, anyway. Of course, in half the universes the machine flipped the other way.”

  The administrator shakes his handsome, calculatedly silver head. “I still find it hard to take that literally. You’re telling me that, somewhere, Elizabeth Croft is still moaning with pain because—”

  “Not ‘somewhere,’ Bry. Here. Everywhere.”

  Everything that can possibly happen is happening. All the flipped coins are falling as heads and tails. All the cancer cases are turning out well and turning out badly, all at once. A monitor device sounds, and lights appear before them. “She’s transitioning into the chaotic regime. If the damned system works properly, we should hear the bifurcation—”

  Something truly terrifying occurs. Through the acoustic feed, Beth Croft’s humming continues. On a separate channel, her agonized voice tells them, “Oh God, this is awful. Look, I don’t like to bitch and moan, but isn’t there something I can have for the pain?” She pauses, as if someone is speaking to her. Nobody is, in this universe. “Oh. Oh. No, don’t bother explaining it, I know this is what I signed up for. I just wish I was that lucky cow.” Her moans become screams.

  Manchetti smiles and smiles. “Well. Bloody marvelous. Sir Bryce, I congratulate you. If it hadn’t been for Neurochip’s support…”

  Powell clenches his fists. “I. Am. Absolutely. Overwhelmed. Dr. Manchetti, it’s for me to congratulate you.”

  The technician tells them, “Second-period doubling,” and Beth Croft’s aural feed becomes a babble of overlap, humming and shrieks of pain.

  “Packet analysis coming through now, Doctor,” Jill, the tech, informs them. “I’ll switch them to you in sequence.”

  The cacophony chops off, leaving a single feed. Beth hums in drugged delight. The channel is switched; she is saying lucidly, “I feel a lot better, Thomas. Could I have some water? Just a bit to wet my mouth. Thanks, nurse.” Switch. Her voice sharpens into outrage. “Hasn’t this gone on long enough? I must have been bloody mad. Oh. Oh. Cruel and unnatural punishment.” Another switch; she is babbling prayers from childhood: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Don’t let me die, oh please God, don’t let me…” The prayer trails away, and is replaced by the flatline tone from a life-signs monitor. “We seem to have a termination on channel 4,” the tech tells them unnecessarily. “Coming up on tertiary doubling.”

  The two men gaze down at the dying woman, listening to her travail in eight universes. The acoustic feed brings them a babble from six overlaps and two flatlines.

  Powell is awed. “You’ll have a Nobel for this, Thomas. You’ve just proved many-worlds quantum theory.”

  Dr. Manchetti grins like a skull. “We’ve done that before, Bry. No, by God, what we’ve got here is grander than that. This is a tool for exploring the universe.” Exultant, he cries, “All the universes there are.”

  “Period doubling has transitioned to chaos.” The babble swiftly turns into white noise cut through by flatline tone. As Beth’s many voices drop out one by one, the turbulent babble gives way to the single augmented flatline tone. “Full arrest across the entire available manifold.”

  “We’ve lost her. That’s all, Jill, thank you.”

  Ambient noise from the operation room cuts out as he closes a switch. Tom Manchetti stretches.

  “I imagine you have a backup candidate prepared for the next stage?”

  “Elizabeth Croft’s death was inevitable, Sir Bryce, expected and accounted for. Never fear, Bry, we’re ready to move on to full implementation. Here, I believe we deserve a small drink.”

  “Another cancer patient?”

  Manchetti checks the console, touching the key he has just closed. He lowers his voice slightly. “HIN-6, actually. We had severe chip rejection problems with Beth. T-cell compromise will help with that.”

  For a moment, Neurochip’s CEO regards his chief quantum scientist in silence. “How convenient, Thomas. How very provident.”

  * * *

  Jill Ng turns the shower off, towels her chunky body vigorously. Vietnamese pop squeals from the kitchen, a style she has grown fond of despite her better judgment. Plates clatter. She sticks her head around the door and sniffs. “Yum-cha, delicious.”

  “Morning, Jill.” Her husband frowns at her with mock censure. “Afternoon.”

  She grins. “We’ve both been working like … chinamen.”

  Daniel Ng spoons food on to a warmed plate. “Yeah. I hope N-chip appreciates just what great little company steadfasts we are.”

  The quantity of food is rather surprising. “Expecting company?”

  “I invited Binh and Tam for brunch. You don’t mind, do you? We knocked off so late I didn’t want to bother you by ringing.”

  “Cool, Dan.” The doorbell chimes, and she says, scampering for the bedroom, “Can you get it, sweetheart? I’
m not dressed.”

  Daniel smiles. “I noticed, you rude Australian girl.” He runs after her, waving a spatula, and they smooch noisily in the hall.

  * * *

  Glass’s Satyagraha drones as they eat, as they argue with unquenchable high spirits about their specialities. Through a crisp spring roll, spraying pastry, Daniel declares forcefully, “The re-entrant circuits to the hippocampus are the obvious place for consciousness.”

  His immediate boss, Tam Deng, snorts. “Oh, come off it, Daniel. Aren’t you tired of grubbing around after some single neural site of awareness?” And Tam’s tiny wife Binh adds, “Tam’s right, you know. I had a patient once, herpes encephalitis. Took out hippocampus and associated cortex. And nothing went wrong with his awareness … his consciousness … whatever you want to call it, except that—”

  Daniel sighs noisily; he has heard this tale before. “—he couldn’t remember anything for more than five minutes! Exactly!” He splays his hands. “Doesn’t that show some pretty impressive localization?”

  “Look, guys,” Jill tells them, “I mightn’t know much about the brain’s wetware…”

  Dan says parodically, “‘I’m just a humble quantum mechanic.’”

  “… but if my Connection Machine lost a bunch of parallel processors, it’d flip its lid too.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Tam insists. “I’m sorry, Jill, it’d ‘degrade gracefully,’ the way a human brain does. It’d be hurt, but not like ripping out the chip from a notepad.”

  Jill Ng shrugs. Really she doesn’t care. “I guess.”

  Dan will not budge. “The thing about the hippocampus is, you find transient changes on the presynaptic side. You get these big spikes—”

  “Is anyone going to eat the last pork bun?”

  “You have it, Binh,’ Jill says. “I’m for more Chablis. See, my poor tired hippocampus,” and she pauses, smiling, “has these big spikes—” Everyone laughs, the mood eases.

  “It’s been a rough few days,” Tam says, leaning back in his chair. “I’ve never seen N-Chip so zoned. Not just neurosci. You ‘Schrödinger’s Dog’ buggers too, isn’t that true, Jill?”

  Daniel stands up abruptly. “I’ll get coffee. Tam, you shouldn’t ask. Jill’s team’s Sec Four, stricter security than us for heaven’s sake.”

  “Hey, smooth.” With careless sarcasm, Binh adds, “Like they’re not going to drag you away to reeducation camp, Daniel.” There is a moment of aghast silence; the woman is instantly abashed. “Sorry, Danny. Foot in mouth.”

  Dan says distantly, “That’s okay, Binh. It’s just that … well, my interface runs’re dragging up a lot of crappy stuff I thought I’d buried twenty years ago.” Daniel Ng has a machine growing in his head. An array of nanocells lives in his corpus callosum, ready to download to his project’s neural net. Three million molecular gadgets let Tam and the rest of the cog-sci team monitor Daniel’s cognitive throughput.

  His wife reaches up, touches his arm. “Listen, darling, I don’t think you need to—” And Tam says, blandly, “If I’d known the procedure was upsetting you, Daniel, I wouldn’t have allowed…”

  He shakes his head. “No, it’s all right. Return of the repressed,” he says with a ghastly grin. “Helps hose out the psychic toxins.”

  Softly, Binh asks: “The boat trip to Australia?”

  “Yeah. Ffff.” He shivers. “Nightmares, I can tell you.”

  “Really, Dan,” Jill tells him, looking from one face to another, understanding only her husband’s palpable pain and nothing of its immediate cause, “you shouldn’t—”

  “Why shouldn’t I, Jill?” he says bitterly. “Because it upsets you to hear how your husband’s mother and sisters were raped in an overcrowded boat and left to die with no food or water?”

  Tam is shocked. “Daniel! These are ghastly, terrible things, but there’s no need to take it out on Jill!”

  Jill Ng has tears in her eyes. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I didn’t know your work was—”

  “Oh shit! Darling, I’m sorry. It’s these damned dreams!”

  The guests rise, collect their possessions. “Binh and I should go,” Tam tells him. “Dan, if you need some time off, give me a call on Monday. Don’t even bother coming in. You really don’t look well, you know.”

  Binh kisses Jill lightly. “Thank you for yum-cha, Jill. Here, give me a hug, Daniel. Gosh, you’re getting thin.” As they walk to the door she murmurs to him, “I know what it’s like.” Her boat had tried to land three times in Malaysia before they were accepted at Pulau Besar. Her father was drowned. She was eight years old. “But we are alive. We’re alive.”

  “Yes, by some filthy throw of the dice.” And Daniel would never stop feeling guilty that he had made it and not his mother and his poor sisters.

  * * *

  Amid a pattering of polite applause, Neurochip’s chair opens the final session. “We’re fortunate to have our chief executive officer with us for this concluding session. Good afternoon, Sir Bryce, and welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe in keeping briefings … brief.”

  Through mild, satisfied laughter, she says, “I’m pleased to see representatives here from Accounting and Industrial Applications. We’ll try to keep our discussion informal and user-friendly. If our speakers get too technical, please drag them back to earth in the customary manner.” There is a ripple of friendly laughter. “Dr. Thomas Manchetti, head of Measurement Project.”

  Manchetti stands. “Thank you, Madam Chair. You’ll all get a technical download about the project to your notepads but, to be brief, I’m happy to report that my team has achieved a successful application of the Schrödinger’s Cat effect. Actually we now prefer to call it the Schrödinger’s Dog effect.”

  “Sorry,” interjects a well-bred voice, “you’ve lost me. Are these animal experiments? I thought N-Chip’s concentrating on human subjects these days?”

  Madam Chair murmurs, “Background, Thomas. Keep it short.”

  “Oh, yes. One forgets—” Manchetti is irritated, but falls smoothly into his customary patter. “Ah, the issue my group’s been exploring is known as the Measurement Problem. In quantum physics, we encounter the so-called Indeterminacies. Measure one parameter, you know, and another becomes blurred.”

  “That’s what Kevin told the auditors.” Everyone laughs.

  Manchetti permits a smile. “In this case, the accountant is the universe itself. You might recall the late Stephen Hawking’s jest: ‘Not only does God throw dice, He throws them where they can’t be seen.’ Well, we’ve managed to track the dice down.”

  “I thought that was impossible? Like going faster than light?”

  “That’s a relativity restriction, David … but we’re working on that one too. Okay, the cat.” Seventy years earlier, in 1935, he explains, Erwin Schrödinger had dreamed up an imaginary experiment. Put a cat into a sealed box with a lethal device triggered by a single quantum event, a radioactive particle emission, with one chance in two of decaying within a given interval. Quantum theory said the event was undetermined until the box was opened and the state of affairs recorded—observed. So until the box was opened, the cat was neither dead nor alive but in an incomprehensible overlap of the two states.

  The wit from Accounting says, “I can’t see a lively market for zombie cats!” The room ripples with laughter. “Cost less to feed, I suppose.”

  “It always sounded ridiculous,” Manchetti agrees, annoyed, “but that’s what the equations tell us.”

  “Well, equations. It’s like statistics, isn’t it? All smoke and mirrors.”

  “No!” Manchetti is adamant. “Quantum physics is right! It works! It’s the basis of electronics. Obviously we were looking at it wrong. The trouble is, the human mind seems almost powerless to look at it correctly.”

  “Put ’em out of their misery, Thomas,” the CEO says easily. “The eat’s both dead and alive, isn’t it—in parallel universes?”

  Pained, Manchetti says, “A rather mis
leading way to put it, Sir Bryce. I’d prefer to say that our universe—by definition, the only universe that actually exists—is fashioned out of an infinite set of superposed alternative histories, most of them extremely unlikely.”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “Not really. Look at it this way. Every moment, the universe contains a finite though very large number of particles. But each of those particles has an infinite number of different fine-grained histories and futures. It’s like the geodesic dome over the racetrack—every strut hangs off every other strut.”

  “So this dog’s a greyhound, eh?”

  Through the laughter, Manchetti says crabbily, “We tend to assume that the cat dies in half the histories, and in the other half it stays alive. But that’s a very narrow opinion. In some of the possible histories, you see, Schrödinger changed his mind and didn’t do the experiment at all. In others, animal-rights activists broke in and pulled the poor thing out of the box.”

  Delighted, the accountant cries: “Ah! And in some, Schrödinger used a dog instead!”

  The room fills with happy uproar.

  “Exactly! And in an infinite number of others, the Earth never formed, and in still others, intelligent life evolved from vegetables instead of primates … Most of those extreme possibilities cancel out, luckily. But you see, there’s always a small chance that when Erwin opens the box the histories decohere in such a way that a dog history is selected, instead of one with a live or a dead cat.”

  “You’re saying you’ve proved this? You’ve put in a cat and got out a dog!”

  Manchetti is unruffled. “Far more remarkable than that, Joan. We’ve tracked the alternative histories of, of, what should we call her, Bry … Schrödinger’s Human?”

  * * *

  His intercom tells him, “Dr. Ng, you have a visitor.”

  “Thanks, Tricia. Send ’em through.”

  “It’s your wife, Dr. Ng.”

  Daniel leaves his workstation. “Jill! Hello, sweetheart.” He hugs her in a distracted manner. “What are you doing down here in the dungeon?”