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

by Gardner Dozois

  Legion flinched. For the first time, his mocking smile faded as he read a few lines of the news story.

  I leaned forward. “Here’s what’s before you.” I held up a finger. “Option one. Admit you wrote RedKing. You can plead that you never knew it would be dangerous. The fact that you confessed will count in your favor. You’ll get a few years, and you’ll keep some net privileges. But—here’s the important point—you’ll be immortalized as the creator of the greatest brain hack ever.”

  I held up a second finger. “Or, option two. Deny you wrote RedKing. Maybe we can’t convict you, maybe we can—let’s call it fifty-fifty odds. But if you walk free or you go to prison, either way, you lose your chance for the world’s biggest cred upgrade. You’ll have given up immortality for a fifty percent chance of escaping a few years Upstate.”

  “I think my client has heard enough,” the lawyer said. She pulled at Legion’s sleeve, but the kid did not move. Tain held her breath.

  “Vee can’t hack,” Legion said.

  “You and I know they’re just some teenage thugs whose only skill is to steal credit info off old ladies. But this story has been picked up by a dozen other news companies. Reporters can’t tell a real hacker from a kid wearing a mask. And Vee was delighted to claim credit. They’ve already released a confession video.”

  “Only I could have written RedKing.”

  I nodded.

  “Mr. Legion,” the lawyer growled, “I have to advise you that—”

  “Only me,” Legion said.

  Tain exhaled.

  * * *

  “You get everyone from the bar?” I asked Tain. We sat in her office, looking at her wall screen image of mountains.

  She nodded. “Only one has proven infected, a young woman. Stepin is working on tracing back the code.”

  “I’m sorry I caused so much trouble.”

  “Getting Legion to talk has made up for some of it. How did you know he would crack?”

  “It’s a coder thing. Once I’d experienced RedKing, I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime hack. No one like Legion would be able to stand someone else taking credit for it.”

  “And how is your friend Ellison going to take it when she discovers your story about Vee was bogus?”

  “Ellison will be fine as long as she gets to break the story that Legion confessed. She’ll be better than fine: We gave her two good stories, and one of them was even true.”

  Tain cracked a smile that broke into a laugh. But it died quickly.

  “What will it be like, if thousands of people get this virus? Maybe thousands already have it. It’s the end of goddamn civilization.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just this week’s threat. With any luck we can contain RedKing.”

  “And then the next brainvirus will come along.”

  I nodded. “It’s a race.”

  Tain squinted. “You got kids, code monkey?”

  “No.”

  “I got a kid. Four years old. A second on the way.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah. But I swear, you know what, as soon as I put in my time, earn my pension, I’m going to get the wife and move out to Montana.” She gestured at the wall image. “And there, I’ll never get the implants in my kids. I’ll make sure they live in the real world.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Me, I’m not much use at anything but coding.”

  She grunted. “You wanna stick around awhile? Our old code monkey, she’s moving to a desk job at Code Isolation.”

  “All right.”

  She reached into a drawer and pulled out a big pistol. It fell on her desk with a heavy thud.

  “Only, put your damn gun back in your kitchen drawer and lock it up before you hurt somebody.”

  Things With Beards

  SAM J. MILLER

  This is a hard-hitting—in fact, frankly brutal—story of a man with a secret so horrifying that he can’t even bear to remember it himself.…

  Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and The Minnesota Review, and other markets. He is a nominee for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Coming up is his debut novel The Art of Starving. He lives in New York City, and can be found at www.samjmiller.com.

  MacReady has made it back to McDonald’s. He holds his coffee with both hands, breathing in the heat of it, still not 100 percent sure he isn’t actually asleep and dreaming in the snowdrifted rubble of McMurdo. The summer of 1983 is a mild one, but to MacReady it feels tropical, with 125th Street a bright beautiful sunlit oasis. He loosens the cord that ties his cowboy hat to his head. Here, he has no need of a disguise. People press past the glass, a surging crowd going into and out of the subway, rushing to catch the bus, doing deals, making out, cursing each other, and the suspicion he might be dreaming gets deeper. Spend enough time in the ice hell of Antarctica and your body starts to believe that frigid lifelessness is the true natural state of the universe. Which, when you think of the cold vastness of space, is probably correct.

  “Heard you died, man,” comes a sweet rough voice, and MacReady stands up to submit to the fierce hug that never fails to make him almost cry from how safe it makes him feel. But when he steps back to look Hugh in the eye, something is different. Something has changed. While he was away, Hugh became someone else.

  “You don’t look so hot yourself,” he says, and they sit, and Hugh takes the coffee that has been waiting for him.

  “Past few weeks I haven’t felt well,” Hugh says, which seems an understatement. Even after MacReady’s many months in Antarctica, how could so many lines have sprung up in his friend’s black skin? When had his hair and beard become so heavily peppered with salt? “It’s nothing. It’s going around.”

  Their hands clasp under the table.

  “You’re still fine as hell,” MacReady whispers.

  “You stop,” Hugh said. “I know you had a piece down there.”

  MacReady remembers Childs, the mechanic’s strong hands still greasy from the Ski-dozer, leaving prints on his back and hips. His teeth on the back of MacReady’s neck.

  “Course I did,” MacReady says. “But that’s over now.”

  “You still wearing that damn fool cowboy hat,” Hugh says, scoldingly. “Had those stupid centerfolds hung up all over your room I bet.”

  MacReady releases his hands. “So? We all pretend to be what we need to be.”

  “Not true. Not everybody has the luxury of passing.” One finger traces a circle on the black skin of his forearm.

  They sip coffee. McDonald’s coffee is not good but it is real. Honest.

  Childs and him; him and Childs. He remembers almost nothing about the final days at McMurdo. He remembers taking the helicopter up, with a storm coming, something about a dog.… and then nothing. Waking up on board a U.S. supply and survey ship, staring at two baffled crewmen. Shredded clothing all around them. A metal desk bent almost in half and pushed halfway across the room. Broken glass and burned paper and none of them had even the faintest memory of what had just happened. Later, reviewing case files, he learned how the supply run that came in springtime found the whole camp burned down, mostly everyone dead and blown to bizarre bits, except for two handsome corpses frozen untouched at the edge of camp; how the corpses were brought back, identified, the condolence letters sent home, the bodies, probably by accident, thawed … but that couldn’t be real. That frozen corpse couldn’t have been him.

  “Your people still need me?” MacReady asks.

  “More than ever. Cops been wilding out on folks left and right. Past six months, eight people got killed by police. Not a single officer indicted. You still up for it?”

  “Course I am.”

  “Meeting in two weeks. Not afraid to mess with the Man? Because what we’ve got planned … they ain’t gonna like it. And they’re g
onna hit back, hard.”

  MacReady nods. He smiles. He is home; he is needed. He is a rebel. “Let’s go back to your place.”

  * * *

  When MacReady is not MacReady, or when MacReady is simply not, he never remembers it after. The gaps in his memory are not mistakes, not accidents. The thing that wears his clothes, his body, his cowboy hat, it doesn’t want him to know it is there. So the moment when the supply ship crewman walked in and found formerly frozen MacReady sitting up—and watched MacReady’s face split down the middle, saw a writhing nest of spaghetti tentacles explode in his direction, screamed as they enveloped him and swiftly started digesting—all of that is gone from MacReady’s mind.

  But when it is being MacReady, it is MacReady. Every opinion and memory and passion is intact.

  * * *

  “The fuck just happened?” Hugh asks, after, holding up a shredded sheet.

  “That good, I guess,” MacReady says, laughing, naked.

  “I honestly have no memory of us tearing this place up like that.”

  “Me either.”

  There is no blood, no tissue of any kind. Not-MacReady sucks all that up. Absorbs it, transforms it. As it transformed the meat that used to be Hugh, as soon as they were alone in his room and it perceived no threat, knew it was safe to come out. The struggle was short. In nineteen minutes the transformation was complete, and MacReady and Hugh were themselves again, as far as they knew, and they fell into each other’s arms, into the ravaged bed, out of their clothes.

  “What’s that,” MacReady says, two worried fingers tracing down Hugh’s side. Purple blotches mar his lovely torso.

  “Comes with this weird new pneumonia thing that’s going around,” he says. “This year’s junky flu.”

  “But you’re not a junky.”

  “I’ve fucked a couple, lately.”

  MacReady laughs. “You have a thing for lost causes.”

  “The cause I’m fighting for isn’t lost,” Hugh says, frowning.

  “Course not. I didn’t mean that—”

  But Hugh has gone silent, vanishing into the ancient trauma MacReady has always known was there, and tried to ignore, ever since Hugh took him under his wing at the age of nineteen. Impossible to deny it, now, with their bare legs twined together, his skin corpse-pale beside Hugh’s rich dark brown. How different their lives had been, by virtue of the bodies they wore. How wide the gulf that lay between them, that love was powerless to bridge.

  * * *

  So many of the men at McMurdo wore beards. Winter, he thought, at first—for keeping our faces warm in Antarctica’s forever winter. But warmth at McMurdo was rarely an issue. Their warren of rectangular huts was kept at a balmy seventy-eight degrees. Massive stockpiles of gasoline specifically for that purpose. Aside from the occasional trip outside for research—and MacReady never had more than a hazy understanding of what, exactly, those scientists were sciencing down there, but they seemed to do precious little of it—the men of McMurdo stayed the hell inside.

  So. Not warmth.

  Beards were camouflage. A costume. Only Blair and Garry lacked one, both being too old to need to appear as anything other than what they were, and Childs, who never wanted to.

  He shivered. Remembering. The tough-guy act, the cowboy he became in uncertain situations. Same way in juvie; in lock-up. Same way in Vietnam. Hard, mean, masculine. Hard drinking; woman hating. Queer? Psssh. He hid so many things, buried them deep, because if men knew what he really was, he’d be in danger. When they learned he wasn’t one of them, they would want to destroy him.

  They all had their reasons, for choosing McMurdo. For choosing a life where there were no women. Supper time MacReady would look from face to bearded face and wonder how many were like him, under the all-man exterior they projected, but too afraid, like him, to let their true self show.

  Childs hadn’t been afraid. And Childs had seen what he was.

  MacReady shut his eyes against the McMurdo memories, bit his lip. Anything to keep from thinking about what went down, down there. Because how was it possible that he had absolutely no memory of any of it? Soviet attack, was the best theory he could come up with. Psychoactive gas leaked into the ventilation system by a double agent (Nauls, definitely), which caused catastrophic freak outs and homicidal arson rage, leaving only he and Childs unscathed, whereupon they promptly sat down in the snow to die … and this, of course, only made him more afraid, because if this insanity was the only narrative he could construct that made any sense at all, he whose imagination had never been his strong suit, then the real narrative was probably equally, differently, insane.

  * * *

  Not-MacReady has an exceptional knack for assessing external threats. It stays hidden when MacReady is alone, and when he is in a crowd, and even when he is alone but still potentially vulnerable. Once, past four in the morning, when a drunken MacReady had the 145th Street bus all to himself, alone with the small woman behind the wheel, Not-MacReady could easily have emerged. Claimed her. But it knew, somehow, gauging who knew what quirk of pheromones or optic nerve signals, the risk of exposure, the chance someone might see through the tinted windows, or the driver’s foot, in the spasms of dying, slam down hard on the brake and bring the bus crashing into something.

  If confronted, if threatened, it might risk emerging. But no one is there to confront it. No one suspects it is there. Not even MacReady, who has nothing but the barest, most irrational anxieties. Protean fragments; nightmare glitch glimpses and snatches of horrific sound. Feedback, bleed-through from the thing that hides inside him.

  * * *

  “Fifth building burned down this week,” said the Black man with the Spanish accent. MacReady sees his hands, sees how hard he’s working to keep them from shaking. His anger is intoxicating. “Twenty families, out on the street. Cops don’t care. They know it was the landlord. It’s always the landlord. Insurance company might kick up a stink, but worst thing that happens is dude catches a civil suit. Pays a fine. That shit is terrorism, and they oughtta give those motherfuckers the chair.”

  Everyone agrees. Eleven people in the circle; all of them Black except for MacReady and an older white lady. All of them men except for her, and a stout Black woman with an Afro of astonishing proportions.

  “It’s not terrorism when they do it to us,” she said. “It’s just the way things are supposed to be.”

  The meeting is over. Coffee is sipped; cigarettes are lit. No one is in a hurry to go back outside. An affinity group, mostly Black Panthers who somehow survived a couple decades of attempts by the FBI to exterminate every last one of them, but older folks too, trade unionists, commies, a minister who came up from the South back when it looked like the Movement was going to spread everywhere, change everything.

  MacReady wonders how many of them are cops. Three, he guesses, though not because any of them make him suspicious. Just because he knows what they’re up against, what staggering resources the government has invested in destroying this work over the past forty years. Infiltrators tended to be isolated, immersed in the lie they were living, reporting only to one person, whom they might never meet.

  Hugh comes over, hands him two cookies.

  “You sure this is such a good idea?” MacReady says. “They’ll hit back hard, for this. Things will get a whole lot worse.”

  “Help us or don’t,” Hugh said, frowning. “That’s your decision. But you don’t set the agenda here. We know what we’re up against, way better than you do. We know the consequences.”

  MacReady ate one cookie, and held the other up for inspection. Oreo knock-offs, though he’d never have guessed from the taste. The pattern was different, the seal on the chocolate exterior distinctly stamped.

  “I understand if you’re scared,” Hugh says, gentler now.

  “Shit yes I’m scared,” MacReady says, and laughs. “Anybody who’s not scared of what we’re about to do is probably … well, I don’t know, crazy or stupid or a fucking pod person.
”

  Hugh laughs. His laugh becomes a cough. His cough goes on for a long time.

  Would he or she know it, if one of the undercovers made eye contact with another? Would they look across the circle and see something, recognize some deeply hidden kinship? And if they were all cops, all deep undercover, each one simply impersonating an activist so as to target actual activists, what would happen then? Would they be able to see that, and set the ruse aside, step into the light, reveal what they really were? Or would they persist in the imitation game, awaiting instructions from above? Undercovers didn’t make decisions, MacReady knew; they didn’t even do things. They fed information upstairs, and upstairs did with it what they would. So if a whole bunch of undercovers were operating on their own, how would they ever know when to stop?

  * * *

  MacReady knows that something is wrong. He keeps seeing it out of the corner of his mind’s eye, hearing its echoes in the distance. Lost time, random wreckage.

  MacReady suspects he is criminally, monstrously insane. That during his black-outs he carries out horrific crimes, and then hides all the evidence. This would explain what went down at McMurdo. In a terrifying way, the explanation is appealing. He could deal with knowing that he murdered all his friends and then blew up the building. It would frighten him less than the yawning gulf of empty time, the barely remembered slither and scuttle of something inhuman, the flashes of blood and screaming that leak into his daylight hours now.

  MacReady rents a cabin. Upstate: uninsulated and inexpensive. Ten miles from the nearest neighbor. The hard-faced old woman who he rents from picks him up at the train station. Her truck is full of grocery bags, all the things he requested.

  “No car out here,” she says, driving through town. “Not even a bicycle. No phone, either. You get yourself into trouble and there’ll be way of getting out of here in a hurry.”

  He wonders what they use it for, the people she normally rents to, and decides he doesn’t want to know.