The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The control interface was crude, nothing like military systems, or even the ones the big trucking firms used. It was at least a decade old, and it had zero haptic feedback. But Casey had the feel for it. Give him another ten minutes, and he could make it tap dance.

  Two men got out of the security car, both in straight-leg trousers with a red stripe a couple fingers wide down each leg, like they were some kind of real cops or something. The short one with a ginger moustache on his lip had fewer chevrons on his shirt. His sleeves bulged, he had that thick-shouldered thick-necked look of a man fond of prescription muscle enhancement. He had a belt slung with an array of half a dozen weapons, curving back from his hip in descending order of lethality. The other, larger by far, just had a single. It was matte black, a revolver, in a size suitable for blowing a hole through a rhino. Casey’d never seen a cop, real or not, carry a gun like that.

  The second guy didn’t look right, either, the way he moved was off, elbows out, strutting almost. It took Casey a second to get it. The man looked to be in his thirties, but the skin on his arms and neck was smooth, perfectly hairless, tanned the shade of an expensive leather couch. Under it his muscles were even and had the kind of gym-tone you only saw on CG-enhanced movie stars. No one real had muscles like that. Just sprites and machines.

  “Morning, Sandra,” the cyborg said, giving her a big smile. His teeth were plastic too, as even and white as veterans’ tombstones. He never looked directly at Casey. The other cop never looked anywhere else, and kept one hand on the butt of his gun. “Just saw this guy trying to hitch a while back, and then he stopped here. Thought we’d come and see if he’s trying to bother you.”

  Sandra shook her head, and Casey let out a tension he hadn’t known he was holding in. “He’s fine, Terry. He’s helping me out with this piece of shit,” she said, jerking her chin at the post-hole digger. “He already got it moving again after I’d got it stuck.”

  “He’s not overcharging you for that, is he?”

  “Not charging her anything, sir,” Casey said. “She let me fill up with water, and I offered to help.”

  Cyborg quirked an eyebrow. “And then?”

  “And then I’m going to try and find some work in town,” Casey said.

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got somewhere to stay?”

  “Yes.”

  Terry moved in closer, then reached up and rapped a knuckle on Casey’s face, tapping the smooth white plastic above and between his eyes.

  “Casehead, huh?” he said. “No skin at all. What happened to you?”

  “Cray Liberation Faction,” he said.

  Terry smiled, like he’d met a celebrity or something. “No shit! You were in the Forces?”

  “I was in the reserves,” Casey said. “I was on the base when they set the thing off. Edge of the cloud just got me.”

  He was fine talking about the incident, which was all people seemed to want to talk about. The thump of the bomb, the faint mist hitting him as he stepped out of the cinderblock Remote Ops building. He’d been coming off a twelve-hour shift flickering from one task to the next, coaxing stuck self-driving trucks out of mud holes, around cattle, through rivers. The mist had felt refreshing for a minute, like a light rain, cool. Just for a minute.

  It was harder to talk about what came after, the hospital, the times before and after the induced coma.

  “Well, always an honor to meet a vet,” Terry said. He reached out with one of his big hands—the nails were new and soft and short, the knuckles scarcely wrinkled—and grabbed Casey’s to shake it. The red PAIN indicators flickered but didn’t quite come on in full at the corner of his vision, as Terry pumped his hand.

  “Well, if you’re okay Sandra, I think we’ll be on our way. Nice meeting you, soldier.” Terry slid himself back into the car, the side of it sagging under his weight. Even foamed metal bones and plastic muscle had a lot of weight. His sidekick clambered into the other side, adjusting his belt.

  The patrol vehicle spun in a tight circle, and headed off east down the Five in a cloud of dust.

  Sandra watched it go.

  “You don’t have to stay any longer,” she said. “They’re done with their little roadblock at Patience Lake, looks like. It should be clear for a while.”

  Casey shook his head. “I’ve almost got your post-hole digger figured out,” he said. He called up the interface again in his visual field, found some new control systems, and gave the augur an experimental spin. “See? Let me finish this job, at least.”

  Sandra cocked her head to one side, her face a mask that concealed the kind of cost-benefit analysis Casey had seen before.

  “Sure,” she said. “And then do you want to come in for coffee?”

  * * *

  “I can’t eat anything,” Casey said. “I brought my own nutrients. It’s okay.” He patted his backpack.

  Sandra’s grandson, Sean, stared back across the kitchen table. He’d arrived home from school an hour after they’d finished with the digger, and Casey had moved on to diagnosing some malady with the control system of a fussy old converted John Deere tractor.

  “How do you even eat, though?” Sean asked. He was about fourteen or fifteen, his hands and shoulders already big, his skinny arms and torso struggling to catch up.

  “Sean,” his grandmother warned from the coffee maker.

  The kitchen was the most civilized place Casey had been in for weeks. Tile floor only a little chipped, big steel fridge humming to itself in the corner, a double sink. Ceramic containers were lined up against the back of the counter for sugar, flour, rice, pasta. Casey suspected it smelled clean, not hospital clean but the clean of a well-used home.

  “It’s okay,” Casey said. “A tube. It’s not pretty, but I have to sort of suck everything up. I don’t have a tongue anymore.” Nor much in the way of gums, no teeth, and not much pharynx. The StrepA-117 in the bomb had been wickedly efficient. It had flensed him from crown to toes. Flensed was a word he’d overheard from one of the doctors while he was in recovery. He’d had to look it up later.

  “How many of those nutrient packs do you have?” Sandra wanted to know.

  “Enough to get me from Thunder Bay to here,” he said.

  “You hitched?” Sean asked.

  “Some,” Casey said. “Mostly I walked.”

  “Sean, you want to go upstairs and do your homework?” Sandra said. The kid rolled his eyes and complied.

  “Can you drink anything else?” Sandra asked once her grandson’s door had closed.

  “Water,” Casey said. “Coffee. Broth.”

  “How’s your knee?”

  He paused too long, and she shook her head. “It’s not good, is it? How serious is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d need to take it apart to see.”

  “You can do that?”

  “If I have somewhere clean to work. I have some tools, but I’m not sure what I’ll need to make a start on fixing anything.…”

  “Casey, this is a farm. We’re not short on tools.”

  She gave him warm water and a spoon, and privacy while he mixed in one of his nutrient powders. He popped the little hatch at the top of his throat and drew out the tube, stuck it into the glass and sucked. His remaining throat muscles pulled up the liquid until only the dregs remained. He carefully detached the tube from its mounting afterwards, washed it at the kitchen sink, and swabbed the edge of the socket with alcohol, feeling the faint burning on his esophagus as a trace of the vapor wafted down into his throat.

  After he was finished, Sandra led him out to the Quonset hut. “Couldn’t they have done more for you?” she said. “The Forces?”

  He shrugged, plastic shoulders rising and falling in perfect unison. “Build me up like Terry? Sure, yeah, if they’d wanted to spend a couple million. Print me new teeth, new face, new muscles. Few square meters of skin. If you have enough money, you can get that done. Terry … looks like he went for the full p
ackage.” He paused. “Christ, what an idiot.”

  Sandra barked a laugh. “I’ve heard that said, though not about him getting upgraded. He’s been preening like a peacock for the past three months, since he got back from the clinic in Havana.”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s bought.”

  Sandra flicked a light switch and turned on bare overhead LEDs. The room was a garage and toolshed, with a broken-down car at the far end and workbenches along either side.

  “Will this place be clean enough? It’s not exactly a hospital.”

  “There’s nothing biological down in my knee,” he said. “As long as I don’t get any more grit in there, it’ll be fine.”

  Sandra found an old canvas tarp and rolled it out on the floor while Casey pulled his tools out of his backpack. He lowered himself to the floor and hauled his right leg straight with his hands, and rolled up his loose trousers to expose the knee. The whole thing was covered with a shroud of flexible grey plastic. He found the narrow seams and pressed his thumbs in, peeling back the soft surface.

  “That doesn’t hurt?” Sandra said.

  “I’ve only got real sensory feedback from my hands, and a little from the soles of my feet. Everything else is just a kind of general proprioceptive feedback, some basic awareness of where my arms and legs are.”

  Under the rubber skin ran rivers of yellow artificial muscles and tendons. The metal kneecap rose up like an island in the middle of the stream of plastic. “I’m going to have to unpin all these muscles. It’ll take a while.”

  He’d meant that she could leave if she wanted. Very few people were eager to watch his self-maintenance. It was surgical, yet inhuman. He called up one of the instructables he’d downloaded after he got out of the hospital and kept it open in the corner of his visual field, occasionally zooming in on the diagrams, double checking. But he’d done this before, replacing worn-out muscles, tightening connections, replacing the metal pins that bound the muscles to his steel femur and fibula.

  It looked bad. He pulled the patella out from its nest of soft plastic, and found scratching on the back. He unpinned another couple of muscle groups, and with a pop, his lower leg dangled free. Casey leaned forward and looked down. Sandra flicked on a trouble light and held it up, but he’d already seen the problem.

  “Dammit,” he said softly. The curse echoed off the curved steel walls of the hut.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve cracked off the end of my femur.”

  A centimeter of steel had sheared away. The pieces had been jammed to one side, pushing up against the muscles running down his inner leg. A fraction of the edge of the femur head remained on the inside edge, but a crack undermined even that. It would go too, whether tomorrow, or in a week. And then he’d be trying to walk on a completely shattered knee, grinding away his fibula, too.

  Casey felt numb. He wondered why he didn’t feel worse. He had only a few bucks left on the cards in his wallet. He had no job, and no real hope of getting one. “Three bad breaks,” his grandmother had always said when she tossed a few coins into the hats of homeless men propped up at the edges of the Toronto sidewalks. “We’re all just three bad breaks away from being there ourselves.” This was his third break, Casey knew. He felt sick, a hollow feeling down between his guts and the hard mass of his battery stack.

  “Do you have any really good glue?” he finally asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Could I use some?”

  “You’re not going to get far gluing it back together,” she said.

  “A real clinic will charge you six thousand to install a new femur head,” he said. “I could install it myself, but a new part is at least a thousand. I could maybe buy a used one online for six, seven hundred.”

  “Veterans Affairs won’t help you out?”

  “There are kind of a lot of us,” he said. “Since the attacks. Waiting list for major parts was a year, last I checked. They might rent me crutches.”

  She brought him a tube of clear epoxy, and helped him hold the broken pieces together. When he was satisfied, he carefully, in proper sequence, snapped every muscle back in place again and pulled up the plastic cover, pressing down each tab. It looked like a real knee, at least.

  “You’d better stay here tonight,” Sandra said.

  He looked up. While he’d been busy, the sun had gone down, and the yard was now illuminated by an old sodium-vapor light, glowing sickly yellow from atop a tarry spruce pole.

  “I can stay in the barn,” he said.

  “You’ll stay in the house,” she said. “Couch is yours.”

  He woke up once in the night, pushed off the blanket and found his way to the back porch, pushed open the creaking screen door.

  The sky was alive.

  Clouds had rolled in, and they tossed lightning back and forth, javelins of white fire. The thunder rolled continuously, a guttural growling that shook Casey through his plastic skin, down into the hidden core where he still pumped blood. He shut off his heads-ups and watched through glassy eyes for an hour while the storm passed.

  Terry came back in the morning.

  The big black-and-white parked across the middle of the driveway, at a slanting angle that looked careless, but just happened the block access to the road.

  Casey was outside with Sandra in the puddle-dotted yard working on getting a tractor running. He was alternating between running it off his implants and the tablet, trying to find out why its crude AI kept spooking when it got too close to fences. The John Deere lurched back and forth near the entrance to the barn.

  Terry waved them over and waited near the car.

  “Gotta make us walk,” Sandra muttered. “Asshole. You stay quiet unless he asks you a direct question, okay?”

  Casey nodded.

  “Your knee got fixed?” Terry asked as they hiked up to his cruiser. His subordinate was gone, or maybe hiding behind the polarized glass windows of the car, Casey couldn’t tell. Anyone could have been back there. He adjusted his eyes, and thought he made out someone in the back. An arrested prisoner, maybe? Looked like someone small, a woman or a kid.

  “At least for a little while.” Casey said. “Sandra helped.”

  Terry nodded, and smiled a little, the expression too tight somehow on his broad face. As if he didn’t quite have enough skin to spare, after being sliced open and put back together.

  “Sandra, you remember that thing we were talking about before?” Terry said.

  “Next Tuesday,” she said. “I said the fifth, and next Tuesday is the fifth.”

  “I’m just making sure you remember.”

  “I remember, Terry.”

  He frowned—something in her tone was too familiar, had too much quiet contempt. Casey saw it then. The kid who’d grown up in town, every adult knowing him, his parents. Now he’d put on a badge, but he was still just Terry to them. Casey imagined that could be a powerful irritant to a certain kind of personality.

  “Good,” Terry snapped. He glanced over at Casey one more time, eyed his knee, and climbed back into his cruiser. The car made a messy, aggressive turn, still on manual, and sped off down the Five.

  “What was he talking about?” Casey said, and realized as soon as the words were out of his throat what was going on. “Sorry,” he said.

  Sandra sighed. “Christ, don’t know where I’m going to find the money. Have to borrow something from my cousin Pete, if he can spare it.”

  “How’s the shakedown work?”

  “Civic Protection Association dues,” Sandra said. “Terry’s CEO as well as chief constable. The fees were pushed through by his friends on the regional council. Monthly. Plus fines for late payment. Fines for various infractions of local bylaws—Terry is our bylaw officer too, of course—and fines for having an unsecured property, fines for failure to report suspicious activity, fines for pissing off Terry or one of his buddies in uniform.”

  “No one’s gone to the RCMP?”

  “That was the first
thing we did. But the Force isn’t what it used to be, since devolution and privatization. We’ve had trouble finding an officer willing to take on a petty local thug. There are worse ones than Terry, you know. And after he shot Bill Frazier, no one was exactly willing to take direct action.”

  “He killed someone?”

  “No. Bill owed Terry too much money and he’d already sold his old harvester, and he couldn’t afford to sell his new one. When Terry showed up with a seizure order, Bill took a shot at him with his dad’s old hunting rifle. Terry didn’t quite kill him, but Bill’s in prison now and missing a kidney and about four feet of small intestine.

  “That’s the thing about Terry, he’s not stupid, or not stupid enough. He uses paperwork, he has something that looks official backing him up. He’s careful enough to cover himself if something goes wrong. And he gets what he wants. He took Bill’s harvester and it sold at auction last spring. Victim surcharge. ’Cause Bill shot first.”

  Casey nodded.

  “I’d better go,” he said. “He’ll think up some fine eventually. Harboring a fugitive or something.”

  “You’re not wanted, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Then stay another day. Terry’s dangerous, but he’s cautious. Make sure your knee will hold. Head into town then.”

  Casey paused, silent. He thought he should just walk straight out across the swirling dust of the farmyard and head west, stopping only when he was a hundred klicks away from Sandra’s farm and Terry’s black-and-white cruiser. Things were bad enough here, he thought. Hadn’t he avoided becoming part of these bad situations by skirting around them, past them?

  “It’s not like I won’t put you to work while you’re here,” Sandra said. “I’ve still got equipment that you can take a look at. Drones and so forth.”

  “Okay,” Casey said. The word slipped out. Much as he wanted to keep moving, a couch and some useful work had a powerful pull. It felt normal.

  The next morning, he worked on the system of the big combine harvester, then started running through the machine’s maintenance cycle, checking all its fluids and attacking it with the grease gun he found in the big barn. The machine was in pretty good shape, but he got the sense that the entire farm was understaffed. He remembered the photos inside the house on the mantlepiece, of Sandra’s husband and of their grown children, Sean a gangly elementary-school kid. Now it was just two of them.