The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  Per l’evolution interventive, thank fuck, thank everything to do with fuck.

  Yet perhaps somehow it would offer a decisive advantage? This current stage of the battle was, after all, crucial, and the hivespire they were scheduled to takedown was the tallest yet: it was imperative that the Devaka not be allowed to reach out beyond the atmosphere, for whoever did so first would have the upper hand, would have a much higher likelihood of expected gain in terms of taking the sun. Not in any immediate sense, of course: both Bernoulliae and Devaka could leave the surface of their ruined world moments apart, could indeed reshape the world so that a million spires like the one toward which the troop carrier was hurtling—some Devaka hivespire, some Bernoulliae skywire—extended out into the cold vacuum above. So that a million whirling cables in the sky could spin and turn, crammed-full Bernoulliae kilotransports shrieking up and latching on, disgorging compressed Berns optimized for matter conversion.

  The floor disappeared beneath the tube, and ashes, ashes, they all fell down. !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic was soon tearing groundward through the humid, stinking air only a few meters to the north of a buckyglass-and-mmesh-steel ruin, covered in a thick cruft of autonomous infovorous barnacles and hairy with several tufts of viridian attack-ivy. Among the last biological life on the planet, the stuff festered only here and there in tangled clumps, and it almost certainly had gone inert longer before. It was wilderness, thick and brutal and everywhere, as far as the array of sixty-four compound eyes distributed throughout !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s armor-plated hosting unit could see, but their target was clear, nearby: a strange, taut little spire extending up from an armored anchor-clump on the ground up into the sky, nearly all of the way up into space.

  Falling; to explode on impact. This was the fate waiting !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic, who decided to pass the time until the end of everything by focusing on mental backscope panels—the space that the long-ago new migrant that had been !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s ancient ancestor would once have called “behind my eyes”—and discovered that this body actually had no option for sensory buffering of any kind. Not just olfac: visual, auditory, proprioceptive—every sense in fact was locked to the default-on mode. What were the üBernoulliae bloody thinking? It made vis mind coil back in disdain, in horror. This is what happens when you let committees build military-issue bodies for individuals without requesting their individual input. It skated so close to contrary to the Bernoulliae’s principles that !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic could not help but insert an annotation point into vis running coglog; maybe some branch of the Bernoulliae would note it. Probably not; probably it would pass without note in the Bernoulliae central ümittee. You could bitch, but it didn’t mean the erdegeists would listen.

  But it never hurt to try, and as a last act, !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic thought it fitting.

  A moment later, !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic outloaded vis last memex update into each of the individual combat units—for the sake of a sense of orientation when they woke, since the experience of the fall could be more economically computed in one mind and copied to others on bootup. An instant later, !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s core processor burned out automatically, all except for the trigger in the nose of the bulbous bomb-body that was set to explode a few mseconds later, a few dozen meters before contact with the ground.

  This was the end, for this battle, of !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic, who didn’t back up the memory. It was a necessary role, but uneventful. No point in backup. Who the fuck wants to remember—

  Blam.

  In the same place, except that it looked like another place entirely:

  Morning screamed through the windowglass, and through compound eyes he had never used before, Mesar Gargos woke to the sight of the sun’s halcyon rays. There was a strange, awful music everywhere. It was like the noise of dead machines screwing.

  If it weren’t for the panic, Mesar would have paused in shock, to look himself over and bemoan his rotten fate. The universe, he had learned in what felt like centuries—all of the details were beyond his recall now, of course—had a way of sticking a chainsaw up your metaphorical backside every once in a while, just to taunt you. Shall I start it now? Mother Nature would ask with a rotten-toothed grin. Whatcha gonna do without yer ass? And then, if you were lucky, the chainsaw would be gone, suddenly removed and the danger past, as if to remind you that it didn’t have to come all the way out, that it’s never too late for a little colonic apocalypse.

  Have to get up, Mesar realized, as the music started to dig its nails into the logic centers of his mind and squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze, and as he struggled, his limbs ground against something. Something hard, yet something that he knew was part of himself. He lifted what were supposed to be his arms aloft, and found that a half dozen legs—thin, jagged, the color of machine-oiled scrap tin—hoisted up above his form in near-unison.

  And of course, he saw them through those compound eyes, which made them look like a Haydn chorus of legs, hosts of limbs swerving in ugly unison.

  He twitched his antennae as if to shudder, only then realizing that this was why he felt as if he could taste the dust on the air, and then, in turn, that he had antennae. Ah, of course. It all came to him, memories flooding up from somewhere stale and calm within him. There was very little to it, finally: the world was divided into two sorts of beings: hardworking gaemi and rotten, useless, rabble-rousing baejjangi.

  This is the way things are. You are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like a gaemi. Because you work so hard, when winter comes you will not starve. You have never starved in winter, for you are a gaemi.

  Baejjangi are green and useless and they sing with their legs in vast choirs and their souls are red like some dead ancient political philosophy that was smashed into zerosum before modern memory begins; wasteful and selfish and horridly ridiculous and they want to rob you, to screw you to cognitive death, and they will shag your little computronium brain to pieces if they can steal computational cycles that way so never talk to a baejjangi, for gaemi are good and useful but baejjangi are wicked and resource-wasteful and wrong and must be destroyed at all reasonable benefit-balanced-costs, and Mesar dizzied as all of this flooded into his mind and he was, he discovered, unable to halt the tirade that seemed to have been wired into him and which he felt deep down must be absolutely true.

  Mesar wondered for a moment, just for a moment, what a baejjangi actually looked like, and that was enough for the tirade to pause, and then begin once again.

  From the top.

  All the way through. With an integrity diagnostic launching in his cognitive backstage, just in case.

  When the tirade finally concluded and the diagnostic had crashed, Mesar flicked his antennae forward, following some instinct he hadn’t known himself ever to possess before right then, and shuddered slightly when he caught sight of them, as much because they were his as because of the acrid stink that they reported to his shocked and bewildered little gaemi mind.

  The data mines, he thought, but the thought died on the lips of cognition the same way cavatinas died on the lips of girls in that French poem by that drunken, drug-maddened teenaged libertine who was, obviously, a proto-baejjangi, all sur vos lèvres and never mind the little black bête tickling the lips. The lips où meurent les cavatines.

  What strange sort of mind-chocolate is this stuff, this bizarre coding system for useless data? Wasteful! A little gaemi head isn’t supposed to be polluted by such things. Something was wrong with Mesar’s brain; or rather, the mind that bubbled up from the virtualized machinery of his brain was broader than it was supposed to be. The mind had realized this consciously even before the diagnostic routines began trying to figure out how that shit about French poetry could possibly have gotten in there.

  It was not something that had originated within his own mind, Mesar hoped. He hoped instead the crazy thought had been triggered somehow by the horrid music in the distance. The music was ruining him, twining itself between
the coiling wires of his mind. He could hear it through the window, through the wall, a great humming noise that boomed in surges, like the howling of the world inside his belly. Glittering, looping back onto itself, chunking along like some enormous half-dead sex machine shrieking in the faraway dawn.

  Mesar clattered out of his bed, leaving behind the ragged sheet. It had been torn on the thick, black wire-hairs that jutted from the great femur and tibia of his legs. There was a mirror on the other side of the room, and Mesar crossed over to look into it.

  A mechanical ant, black as coal unharvested and nestling still in the belly of the earth, gazed back out of the mirror at him with its great robotic compound eyes. Mesar did not scream, did not smash the mirror, did not lie down and begin to weep, because something had reached into his head and tapped him on the shoulder of his mind.

  It was a scent. At least, that was how he perceived it. Mesar was rather certain that it wasn’t actually a scent at all, but rather it was a digital signal that had, somehow, been translated by some kind of Olfactory User Interface. (OUI, yes, oui, it was OUI, and this was funny somehow to Mesar, though properly formatted gaemi don’t laugh and are never amused. The diagnostic noted this and recommenced scanning anew.) It virtually dragged him out of the room, across the floor of his small living room, and out into the apartment hallway, where the shadows were long and thick.

  The other doors in the hallway were open too, voices echoing. He looked again with his compound eyes, and did not see Aviru and Dashkar and the others, whom he knew were supposed to be there. What he saw were movements that were more and more blurry the further away they happened. Movements, he realized, that were familiar to him.

  Mechanical gaemi movements.

  Mesar went out into the hallway, all the way out, and scurried toward his neighbors. When he reached Aviru’s door, he stopped. Somehow, he knew how to “talk” even though he’d never used a body like this before. It was a combination of what felt like vague scents, and the clacking together of mandibles.

  “Buddy? Are you all right?” he asked the gaemi he assumed to be Aviru.

  “Of course,” the ant-machine clack-scented in reply. “Why would I not be?”

  Mesar was careful not to answer immediately. Perhaps there was some explicable cause underlying this shift. Something turned up in the data mines, or a whim of The Administrator?

  Such archaism. Administrator? Mesar had been a free gaemi of the Distribudded Republicha Ondologicka Devaka for as long as anyone could remember, or at least for as long as he himself could recall. Of course, his memory access generally reached to only about five minutes before, but this fact was rooted in a deeper tagset, self-referential to all gaemi cognitive processes, and bound itself to an utter absoluteness of certainty. Devaka had a policy about deities, which was that they were not permitted within the logico-memetic framework of a Devaka gaemi-mind. Whatever had meddled with his instantiation rightset, had also meddled with his cognitive contents. He was thinking Oh my God again, though that meme ha been hacked from the fundamental filter of the gaemi brain ages before.

  “You haven’t noticed anything . . . strange?” That music, that awful dissonant noise, slammed through his consciouness deeper, harder still. It was almost too much for a gaemi to bear.

  But Aviru had already lost interest, and taken off down the hallway, toward the stairwell leading down. Mesar clacked after him, broadcasting stern protest, but it was hopeless, and a moment later Mesar began to follow his compatriot.

  Consciousness began with a flash of light, like it always does in battle.

  The blast sent !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus soaring up toward the reinforced outer wall surrounding the anchor point of the hivespire. Well, then, came the realization, I’m a shock troop for my unit. That was more than anything simply chance, though the bootload into this role had been automatic for !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic, based on anticipated location within the blast.

  But when the transport had left the nerve center, thiscould not have been known. Had !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic been struck by a strong enough breeze, !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s trajectory would have been ultimately different, and a differently outfitted consciousness would have loaded. Like the pseudorandomly selected strings of text marking !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s metafork and metathread, vis trajectory was the result of pure chance. It had taken the Bernoulliae aeons—maybe five hundred seconds—to propose and discard a series of non-hierarchic markersets, before resurrecting chunks of random antispam Pre-Fracture archaeosoftware harvested from software subtrates a century buried, and ages more—perhaps a thousand seconds—for the full clade to agree communally to agree to regard as non-signifying and simply expedient the inherent serial connotations that remained inherent in the text generated pseudorandomly by said ancient code. Hierarchy was a disease born of the mind’s gregarious mammalian roots, one it had not quite learned to shed when it peeled away body, but the system represented a considerable step forward.

  !oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7—a near cousin in terms of metaforks, but distant in terms of metathread—soared past, shattering the reinforced walls with its shoulders of corrugated buckymeat, belching torrents of flame from a dozen evenly spaced apertures visible in the armor plating of its killskin as it crashed past the brink of entry. When !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus slammed through the same wall less than a decasecond later, the interior was already a landscape of screaming flame.

  [Hey!] !oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7 messaged, pinging a coordinate nearby, but peripheral to the focus of their attention.

  !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus spun, widening visual spectrum across extended bands, UV, infra, microwave, and a charging form became visible, a few meters away. A host of buckyflesh arms rose up in unison from the sides of !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s killskin, reaching out to the attacker and transmitting high-freq radio as a burst of shrapsile flared out toward it.

  No use: Devaka Corp had reevaluated the logs of recent battles, it seemed, and put new killskins into production. Properly armored footsoldiers, these servatars were, even if they were mere augmented meatbots. !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s arms caught the thing, which was shaped like a mechatoon of a small armor-plated panther, and bombarded it with data probes in a few short instants, until it became apparent that this thing wasn’t on remotecon.

  Autonomous. A mind in there. Not intelligent, merely conscious, and trained to attack.

  How primitivist. How . . . cruel. The poor thing was probably unhackable in the time available.

  A prox alert came from another Bern (metafork !eXTremopHiLe, metathread t453h*aFFadaVit), who was scaling up the side of the building toward them. Weirdly late—the alert was on its 347th iteration, but this was the first anyone inside the structure had heard of it. !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus pinged out a strategy alert and spun to hurl the Devaka servatar out through one of the wall breaches. Tenctacular appendages—those of the approaching Bern, waiting outside the window—flared up and out, seizing the servatar and smashing its struggling shape back against the building’s outer wall.

  It had been almost beautiful enough for mindcast, until the servatar had suddenly, desperately, exploded. Some kind of mnuke blast.

  The well-spent !eXTremopHiLet453h*aFFadaVit tumbled out down the side of the building, not destroyed but seriously damaged; !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus received a last, desperate backup ping loaded with memory data, just in case. Sketchy, schematic, but then who the fuck really wants to remember in vivid and perfect detail being taken out thirty seconds into a major battle?

  Meanwhile, the firestormer—!oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7—had slammed through a wall aflame into the next compartment of the floor, pinging !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus to follow quickly. What sort of Ant Colony sets up shop in a hole like this? they wondered as they plowed through the flaming wreckage, and then !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus realized, only a couple of enormous steps later, that they’d fallen for tactical spam. Devaka wasn’t up here at all. It was a trap.

  Devaka’s
ant drones weren’t surprising. Clever, sometimes, and most often persistent, but not surprising. They were constant, predictable scammers. But the Bernoulliae knew this, and had sent them here anyway. The nested algorithms of possible scams urfurled in !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s mind, but there was no time to discard all the momentum they’d built up, so: Slag it. !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus slammed through the cheap wall, which was, weirdly enough, laced with a lattice of cheap, overt wiring. Easily visible without microscopic zoom; overt, lattice-woven copper wire.

  What?

  A puzzle piece slid into place. The now-lagging contact, the senseless, unshielded outgoing signals traffic.

  !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus: [We’re in a Faraday trap, and they just switched the shitting thing on!]

  A few mseconds lag, and then !oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7 replied: [Testing . . . ] The reply came just before the onslaught began: a signal, across all bands, amplified and somehow . . . intelligent. It was probing the Berns’ minds, like living wires scrabbling into a chink in metal armorplating, searching for a way in; for a site at which to infect.

  !oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7 realized it first, and warned the others: [Intrusion signal strike ongoing, switch to qcoding.]

  Simultaneous to that warning, !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus transmitted a wordless pointer for all recipients to scan toward: [31.235449259063188, 121.50624364614487]

  Out a nearby breach in the outer wall, soaring above a landscape of the chill, ancient ruins of one of the great cities left behind after the extinction of the complete global food chain, !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus caught sight of another troop carrier. Another Bernoulliae kilotransport.