Asimov's SF, December 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “You dirty slut,” he said, quietly, calmly. “I'm going to teach you a lesson. Who was he?”

  Betty's voice came out in wordless sobs and denials. Keeping his hold on her hair, he began to punch her in the stomach and kidneys.

  He isn't hitting her in the face, David thought. That's rational. Otherwise neighbors might ask questions.

  Betty continued to apologize, to try to explain and make sense of this world, to herself and to Jack.

  David could not speak. He felt a dull, hot force rising inside himself, pushing on his throat and choking him. He reached out to grab Jack's hand, and Jack threw him to the ground without looking at him.

  The cries of the baby grew louder. A white hot pain throbbed inside David's head. He had never felt this angry and helpless. He could not do anything to stop the pain and terror; all he could do was manipulate symbols in his mind. He was useless. He has demonstrated difficulty in establishing empathy. He takes everything so literally.

  Betty's pleas and the baby's cries faded into the throbbing, pounding pain in his head. Time seemed to slow down. His mind began to drift, to leave the present.

  One, Myrtle Beach.

  He looked at the door leading to the kitchen. He got up.

  Two, Ms. Wu's hand on his shoulder.

  He looked down at his hand, and was surprised to see that he was holding the chef's knife. Like train passengers in rear-facing seats. The fluorescent light reflected from its cold blade.

  Three, “Nothing is wrong with him. He's shy. That's all."

  Betty was curled into a ball on the ground. The light was failing in the apartment. From the back, Jack's figure was implacable, a dark heaving mass that slowly lifted a fist into the air. The baby screamed again.

  Four, the diagonal line of digits stretching into infinity.

  He was on the floor again. He looked down to see that there was blood on his hand. The knife was on the ground. Jack sat quietly on the floor, his body leaning against the couch without moving as blood pooled around him. Betty crawled toward David.

  Five, this moment. Right now.

  * * * *

  Author's Note:

  Ms. Wu's presentation of Cantor's diagonal argument glosses over the point that any real number's decimal representation as an infinite series of digits is ambiguous. That is, a number such as 2 can be written as either 1.9999 . . . or 2.0000 . . . , which raises the possibility that the new number constructed via the diagonal argument might simply be the alternate form of another number that is already enumerated in the list. This can be addressed by requiring that the real numbers in the list adhere to the . . . 9999 . . . form, and that the constructed number not use the digit 0.

  The section on brain and the perception of time draws from the research summaries given by David Eagleman and Daniel Gilbert:

  David Eagleman, “Brain Time,” Edge: the Third Culture, June 24, 2009 (available at www.edge.org/3rdculture/eagleman09/eagleman09index.html)

  Daniel Gilbert, “The Brain: Time Travel in the Brain,” Time, January 19, 2007 (available at www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580364,00.html)

  Copyright © 2011 by Ken Liu

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: "RUN,” BAKRI SAYS

  by Ferrett Steinmetz

  As a die-hard gaming nerd, Ferrett Steinmetz's previous Asimov's stories have been heavily influenced by gaming. His first story “Camera Obscured” (September 2009) was inspired by Rock Band's leaderboards and “Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol” (October/November 2010) was the result of a D&D game gone wrong. His latest story may be sparked by videogame speedruns gone terribly wrong, but it takes that problem to a much deeper and darker level. Ferrett lives in Cleveland with his beautiful wife and blogs at The Watchtower of Destruction [theferrett.livejournal.com].

  “I just want to know where my brother is,” Irena yells at the guards. The English words are thick and slow on her tongue, like honey. She holds her hands high in the air; the gun she's tucked into the back of her pants jabs at her spine.

  She doesn't want to kill the soldiers on this iteration; she's never killed anyone before, and doesn't want to start. But unless she can get poor, weak Sammi out of that prison in the next fifty/infinity minutes, they'll start in on him with the rubber hoses and he'll tell them what he's done. And though she loves her brother with all her heart, it would be a blessing then if the Americans beat him to death.

  The guards are still at the far end of the street, just before the tangle of barbed wire that bars the prison entrance. Irena stands still, lets them approach her, guns out. One is a black man, the skin around his eyes creased with a habitual expression of distrust; a fringe of white hair and an unwavering aim marks him as a career man. The other is a younger man, squinting nervously, his babyfat face the picture of every new American soldier. Above them, a third soldier looks down from his wooden tower, reaching for the radio at his belt.

  She hopes she won't get to know them. This will be easier if all they do is point guns and yell. It'll be just like Sammi's stupid videogames.

  “My brother,” she repeats, her mouth dry; it hurts to raise her arms after the rough surgery Bakri's done with an X-acto knife and some fishing line. “His name is Sammi Daraghmeh. You rounded him up last night, with many other men. He is—

  Their gazes catch on the rough iron manacle dangling from her left wrist. She looks up, remembers that Bakri installed a button on the tether so she could rewind, realizes the front of her cornflower-blue abaya is splotched with blood from her oozing stitches.

  “Wait.” She backs away. “I'm not—”

  The younger soldier yells, “She's got something!” They open fire. Something tugs at her neck, parting flesh; another crack, and she swallows her own teeth. She tries to talk but her windpipe whistles; her body betrays her, refusing to move as she crumples to the ground, willing herself to keep going. Nothing listens.

  This is death, she thinks. This is what it's like to die.

  * * * *

  “Run,” Bakri says, and Irena is standing in an alleyway instead of dying on the street—gravity's all wrong and her muscles follow her orders again. Her arms and legs flail and she topples face-first into a pile of rotting lettuce. The gun Bakri has just pressed into her hands falls to the ground.

  Dying was worse than she'd thought. Her mind's still jangled with the shock, from feeling all her nerves shrieking in panic as she died . . . She shudders in the garbage, trying to regain strength.

  Bakri picks her up. "What is your goal?" he barks, keeping his voice low so the shoppers at the other end of the grocery store's alleyway don't hear.

  Why is he asking me that? she thinks, then remembers: all the others went insane. She wouldn't even be here if Farhouz hadn't slaughtered seventeen soldiers inside the Green Zone.

  It takes an effort to speak. “To—to rescue Sammi.”

  “Good.” The tension drains from his face. He looks so relieved that Irena thinks he might burst into tears. “What iteration? You did iterate, right?”

  “Two,” she says numbly, understanding what his relief means: he didn't know. He'd sent her off to be shot, unsure whether he'd linked her brother's technology to the heart monitor he'd stuck in the gash in her chest. It was supposed to trigger a rewind when her heart stopped. If he'd misconfigured it, Irena's consciousness would have died in an immutable present.

  Irena looks back at The Save Point, stashed underneath a pile of crates, a contraption that's totally Sammi; it's several old Xboxes wired together with rusted antenna and whirligig copper cups, the humming circuitry glowing green. It looks like trash, except for the bright red “[[” arrows Sammi spraypainted onto the side. That, and the fact that it just hauled her consciousness back through time.

  Bakri gives her an unapologetic nod: yes, I sent you off to die. “We can't let the Americans get it.”

  “No,” she agrees, then runs out to the street, headed four blocks down to wher
e the prison is. She closes her hands into fists so her fingers don't tremble.

  She's been shot. She will be shot again, and again, until she rescues Sammi.

  * * * *

  “Run,” Bakri says, and this time she pushes the tether up around her arm—it's wide enough to slide up over her bicep, underneath her abaya's billowing sleeves—but the guards are panicky. They shoot her when she crosses the chain they've strung across the road to the prison entrance.

  God damn you, she thinks. I'm not like Sammi. I don't want to kill you. But they're terrified of what Fahrouz did. He cut the throats of seventeen men before anyone heard him; it's why the Americans rounded up anyone who had any connection to the resistance last night, including her brother. They think Fahrouz was a new breed of super-soldier; they believe any brown face is capable of killing them. But she's just a girl who's never fired a gun, not even in Sammi's stupid videogames.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  She tries climbing the high fence around the prison, but the barbed wire rips at her hands and the guard on the wooden sniper platform scans the prison every sixty seconds. He is inhuman, never tiring (at least in the fifty minutes she has before The Save Point's power fades and she's pulled back to the alleyway)—and his aim is infallible. He introduces her to the horror of her first headshot; when she reappears in the alleyway, her brain patterns are so scrambled she has a seizure.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  She tries different approaches; she smears her face with blood, yelling there's a shooter in the marketplace. She weeps, approaching as a mourner. She sneaks from the shadows. Anything to avoid killing them. They yell that they have orders to open fire on anyone crossing the line. Though they wince when they pull the trigger, open fire they do.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  She tries prostrating herself upon the ground. As she kneels to place her hands on the concrete, the tether slides down her arm. The sudden movement causes them to fire.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  She's getting good at dying, now. The trick is to go slack, so you don't flail upon waking when you rewind. Yet surrendering to her body's shutdown is like dying before she's dead. And every time she returns, Bakri's grabbing her with his sweaty palms, demanding to know her goal.

  "Stop it." She slaps his hands away. She shakes the iron bracelet at him; things inside it rattle. “You gave me a tether that looks like a damn bomb. No wonder they're shooting me! You have to restart it—Sammi made a tether you could bite down on, so no one could see—”

  “That one broke when they shot Fahrouz in the head,” Bakri snaps back. “You're lucky I could build any tether at all. You're lucky I'm here. Everyone else thinks this machine just drives men mad. They want Sammi to die.”

  The stitches from where Bakri implanted the heart monitor never stop hurting, her gashes always bleeding in the same way. She's always thirsty; her body can never relieve itself as she loops through the same time again and again. She gorges herself on stolen drinks from the marketplace between the alleyway and the prison—but then she's back with Bakri, dryness tickling the back of her throat. Why didn't she drink before Bakri started this? Why didn't anyone tell her to start the Save Point when she was lying down, so she wouldn't keep falling over?

  “Run,” Bakri says. She wishes she could tell Sammi about her improvements. All this hard-earned knowledge, lost.

  It becomes a game of inches. The babyfaced soldier is hair-trigger, ripping her body to shreds the moment anything unexpected happens—oh, Fahrouz, you put the fear of God into these Americans; you were only supposed to steal a laptop—but he's also a softie, arguing with his older compatriot if she's crying. The older black man is hard-edged, by the book; he yells that he will shoot if she comes two steps closer, and he always does.

  Sometimes the babyfaced one vomits as she's dying. The soldier on the wooden sniper platform always looks down like a distant God, crossing himself as she bleeds out. Then Bakri, asking her what her goal is.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  She doesn't always die. She can usually get to the button on her wrist. But dying never gets easier. Her mind understands what will happen; her body cannot. No matter how she steels herself for the bullet, her body overwhelms conscious thought with dumb animal terror.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  She learns to optimize. If she's crying this way to tug on the younger one's emotions, and creeps that way when the older soldier's busy bickering with the young one that they can't help, then how far can she get before they fire? There's a wet newspaper flattened against the street, then a tire track a little further, then a rusty coil of barbed wire next to the entrance. She can get past the newspaper consistently, nearly getting to the tire track before they blow her apart; what can she say that will get her to the barbed wire?

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  Their conversations become monotonous variants: Sir, she needs help. We have orders, soldier. Nothing she can do will make them discuss the weather, or tell her what cell her brother's in, or even smile. Just the same recycled topics, chopped into different words. It reminds her of home, listening to Sammi outwit AI guards and their recycled vocabulary, back when Sammi built bombs and played videogames.

  “Run,” Bakri says. Now she can always hit the tire track.

  Sammi always played videogames. He hated going outside. He got political at thirteen after Mother was blown apart by a smart missile programmed with the wrong coordinates. Even then, Sammi never placed the bombs. He just handed people boxes of death, with instructions where to place them. Irena remembers how he'd tinker with his explosives and then play first-person shooters to relax, as though they were aspects of the same thing.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  Sammi was a genius with wires. When the Americans jammed the cell phones he used to activate his bombs, Sammi set the bombs to go off fifteen minutes after the cell phone signal cut out. And when the Americans got a jamming device that fuzzed the signal but didn't kill it, he switched to proximity sensors. Then he started working on other sensors—sensors that predicted when people would walk by, sensors that sent signals back to twenty seconds before they were disconnected.

  By the time he was seventeen, bombs bored him. He started other experiments.

  “Run,” Bakri says. Now she's consistently past the tire track, her fingers halfway to the barbed wire.

  She'd gotten janitorial jobs for Sammi's volunteers, after they'd finished their trial runs with The Save Point. They made lousy employees. They knocked over cups of coffee and stared at the spill for minutes, then sobbed in relief.

  Irena understands why, now. They were grateful the spill stayed. Something remained changed—unlike her thirst, unlike the gash in her side, unlike the endlessly soft-hearted boy soldier and his hard-assed sergeant.

  “Run,” Bakri says. Now her fingers always touch the barbed wire. Now she knows how to die.

  Now she fires the gun when they're perfectly distracted. She aims for the young one first because he shot her first, it's only fair; the gun's kick almost knocks it from her hands. She fires three more times, gets lucky, the third shot catches him in that baby face, a wet red fountain, and as he tumbles to the ground she laughs because she's no longer scared.

  She knows why Fahrouz killed seventeen soldiers. He was just supposed to get a laptop and get out, but how many times was he beaten before he slipped past the spotlights? How long did he endure the fear of being shot before he realized The Save Point erased all consequences? The guards’ dumbstruck surprise as she kills them is the repayment for a thousand torments they can never remember.

  “Run,” Bakri says. She does, now, eagerly. She's going to kill them as many times as they killed her.

  * * * *

  Irena realizes she's drifting off-mission when she starts shooting Bakri in the face.

  She didn't mean to shoot him; it's just that Irena had gone down in a particularly bad firefight with the soldiers, one where they'd shot
her left arm before tackling her to the ground, and she'd barely jammed the tether-button against the pavement before they hauled her off to prison. And she'd fallen over again once she'd rewound, and Bakri'd grabbed her and yelled, “What is your goal?” and she yelled that her goal was to shut him up and she shot him.

  It was a good idea, as it turns out. She needs to shoot well, and firefights aren't a good time for lessons. So when Bakri says “Run,” now she walks down the alley, takes aim, and shoots Bakri in the head. The marketplace shrieks when they hear the gun, but she just empties the clip at a garbage can and presses the tether-button.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  Bakri should be the one running, but he doesn't know. He's always surprised. If her first shot doesn't kill him, he weeps apologies.

  “Run,” Bakri says. Then, once she jams the gun into his belly, he blubbers: “I know I should have told you the heartbeat monitor might not work. But you might not have done it then—we can't let Sammi's ideas fall into their hands!”

  She doesn't care about that. That was weeks ago.

  “You drove him insane, didn't you?” she asks. “He wanted to stop, didn't he?”

  “Him who?” Bakri is dumbfounded. Fahrouz was just yesterday for him, and already he's forgotten. She shoots him.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  She feels a pang of guilt once she realizes that Bakri might not even know what he did. Yet she knows what happened all the same: they told Fahrouz he had to get the laptop, and condemned him to God knows how many cycles of breaking into the Green Zone until he returned with one. Bakri and Sammi would never have turned it off until Fahrouz brought them results.

  The machine doesn't drive people mad. Its controllers do.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  She tortures Bakri for a while, trying to get him to turn off The Save Point. He won't, and she can't break him in fifty minutes. Bakri knows Sammi will reveal The Save Point's mechanisms once they start in with the serious interrogations. He tells her he'd die a thousand times before he let the Americans have this technology.