The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I was also to check whether a certain someone was in the room, in which case the plan would change completely. For that part, the guard’s gun would come in handy. And I wouldn’t have minded carrying one, too …

  But all David gave me was a stingpen.

  What did he know that I didn’t?

  * * *

  Central was as hectic as always, a loud, bright, garish labyrinth of people, neons, shops, and languages that stunned me every time I came here. In the streets around us, manicured dolls in designer clothes glided on high heels past the bright windows of Gucci and Prada and the dark dens of three-star restaurants, perfectly oblivious to the dirt-smeared delivery men pushing their trolleys around.

  Between the high-rises, I spied ominous, dark gray clouds. A typhoon had ravaged the Philippines the previous night, and there was a chance it would arrive in Hong Kong later today. I hoped not: it would ground all flights and keep us on the island for another twelve or twenty-four hours, much longer than I wished to stay.

  We reached the hotel. The guard stepped out, left the car to the valet, and waved at me to follow him through the doors.

  The lobby was crawling with people—a convention. “Advances in Chelation Therapies” read a sign above the registration table. That our meeting should take place during their recess felt like too much of a coincidence. I looked uneasily around me: anyone could be watching. A gun would be too easy to detect, David had said. He knew.

  A bunch of gray-haired toxicologists poured out from an elevator, leaving it to the guard and myself. He pressed on 49.

  Just as the doors closed, a slender hand slid in and stopped them.

  “Wait!”

  By reflex, the guard pushed me behind him and grabbed his gun.

  But it was only a girl in a black power suit and a white shirt, probably a convention attendee who had forgotten something upstairs. Grunting, the guard made her some space, pressing me even farther against the back of the cabin.

  I glanced at her as she took position in the elevator: cute, slim, classy, but there was something off about her, something too jaded. I wondered what toxins she dealt with. I figured she had quite a strong opinion of herself.

  The doors closed, this time for good. Instinctively, the guard reached for his earpiece as the steel walls temporarily cut his connection to the outside world. I had no such problem with my media glasses as the emitter—David’s unit—was in my jacket pocket. And just as I thought of it, the devil whispered to me:

  “Luke, do not say a word, but do exactly as I say. Take the stingpen in your hand, quietly. Then, when I give you the order, put it on the guard’s nape and press. Now!”

  Startled, I obeyed. The guard collapsed like a boulder.

  The girl immediately turned toward us, crouched down, and slipped her hand into the guard’s jacket.

  “What?” I gasped.

  “Sorry, Luke, there was no other way,” apologized David.

  “Here it is,” said the girl, handing me the guard’s shortwave transmitter, the one connecting his earpiece to his colleagues outside. Or so I thought.

  “Quick, Luke, connect me to it.”

  I drew David’s unit out of my pocket and plugged him into the transmitter, using a cable the girl had miraculously produced out of nowhere.

  27, said the elevator’s screen.

  “But why?” I asked David.

  “I realized only a short while ago that our guard had been turned. It was too late to change our plans, but it could work to our advantage. So I made a few modifications.”

  “You should have told me!”

  “Too risky—he might have noticed.”

  “And her?” She could hear only my side of the conversation and should have been startled. Instead, she just winked at me.

  “Another bodyguard, different agency. Clean, this one. She will take good care of you. Now stand ready, we are almost there.”

  The elevator slowed down. The girl drew a Sentech from a hidden holster and signaled for me to take cover behind her.

  “When we arrive, stay to the side and hold the button to keep the elevator open. If things fall apart, you leave. OK?”

  “OK.”

  The doors slid apart.

  I recognized the man in the corridor as a rider as soon as I saw him—even without the massive Glock he was pointing at us. He had the same arrogant look I had seen on scores of his peers, all made overconfident by years of letting their Taharas take charge of their reflexes via brain amps. Sometimes even more than their reflexes—though few AIs really liked the wetspace, too slow for them.

  Yet just as the rider noticed the guard at our feet, I saw his eyes widen in terror. I knew that look—David had just used the guard’s transmitter to hack into his system and temporarily block his amp. He now had to fend for himself alone, probably for the first time in years.

  The girl didn’t give him the chance. She shot him point-blank, in the chest, three times. Then she checked the corridor for other gunmen and ran to the rider’s body.

  “What was that?” I asked no one in particular.

  “His plan was to shoot you on arrival, then take me,” replied David. “We are simply reversing the roles.”

  The girl searched the rider’s body and pulled a sleek, dark metal box from his pocket, no bigger than a cigar case. Two red ideograms had been painted on it in zircon enamel: Valor, spelled in Kanji.

  It was a Tahara. Apart from the two symbols, it looked exactly like the one in my pocket—exactly like David.

  I knew what she was going to do. I had done it countless times.

  She put it on the floor and shot it to pieces.

  “Now go,” she ordered. “I’ll take care of the bodies.”

  * * *

  Back at the hotel, I checked my bank account and saw that David had transferred my usual fee. I had no idea where the money was coming from—the screen stated a numbered account in Switzerland—but in the ten years of our partnership, there had never been any problem with David’s credit, hence I had stopped wondering.

  “She was cute,” I observed. “Any chance we’ll see her again?”

  “Not a chance. After this, she needs to disappear for some time, avoid any contact, especially with us.”

  “Shame.”

  I opened the minibar, found a glass and some ice, and poured myself two fingers of bourbon. A faint whistle could be heard from outside—the screaming gale now racing through the streets, flogging sheet after sheet of rain against the windows. As I’d feared, a full-blown typhoon was coming, preventing us from leaving the island that night.

  “Have you ever thought about stopping all this?” I asked David. “Retiring?”

  “Why? Is this something you would like, Luke?”

  I sighed. David’s social interface was possibly too refined: answering a question with another question? Who did that, apart from shrinks?

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t wake up this morning thinking: ‘Hey, let’s kill a guy today!’”

  “He would have done the same to you, had he been able to. And you would not have been his first.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “So, do you really want to retire?”

  “No. Not yet. Maybe one day, but … It would be better if we could avoid killing people.”

  “You know I cannot promise that, Luke. But I will try my best.”

  * * *

  Later, I was watching some cheesy romcom on TV, one of those oldies starring Jennifer Aniston. I needed something quiet and cheerful, something without violence and blood and killing. I thought I had seen all of her movies over the years, several times, but as the film progressed it became increasingly unfamiliar. Jenn was ditched by her boyfriend, went to Japan to train as a ninja, then came back to exact her revenge on him and his evil henchmen, thus foiling their nefarious plots to take over the world … I finally realized it was one of those recent remakes with digital clones. Disappointed, I switched off the screen and heard David
suddenly speak into my ear.

  “This one is for you.”

  Someone rapped at the door.

  “For me?”

  “Yes.”

  I opened the door, and for a couple of seconds I thought it was her, the girl: same hair, same mouth, same opinionated expression on her face …

  But her nose was different. Slightly more pug. And the suit wasn’t as well cut as this morning’s.

  It wasn’t her.

  “You asked for pillows?”

  I looked at the bed, startled—then I understood. “I asked?”

  “Yes, an hour ago. For the night. You also requested I wear a suit, remember? Can I come in?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Sorry, that was a mistake. I’m terribly sorry.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You sure? You paid already. Makes no difference to me.”

  David …

  “Certain. It was a mistake. False alarm. You can go home, nothing to see here.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “OK. We don’t do refunds, you know?”

  “That’s fine, perfectly fine. Good-bye.”

  I closed the door and growled at the AI, “David … Never do that again.”

  “Why not? I thought she looked exactly the same. It took me some time to find her.”

  “Just … don’t. Good night.”

  * * *

  I wondered why David hadn’t found a rider like the one we killed today, all amped-up and eager to be a simple pawn in the bigger game. How could two machines built by the same person be so different?

  Yet that was a fact: no two of Tahara Hideo’s designs were identical—and every second of their individual existences contributed to make them even more different.

  In that respect, I had been lucky to meet David: he was less reckless, more subtle than most of his peers. Sometimes though, that same subtlety felt even creepier than the other Taharas’ cold-blooded efficiency: he was too human, yet not human at all, and his actions sometimes made my skin crawl, as if he inhabited the AI equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.

  Tahara Hideo, what have you done?

  * * *

  Tahara had worked all his career as a semiconductor engineer for one of the largest Japanese manufacturers, Hotoda. Like any salary man, he had started at the bottom of the pile and climbed his way to the top, generating hundreds, maybe thousands of patents for his employer and ending up managing one of its R&D departments in Kyoto.

  Gradually, rumors spread that someone was churning out exquisitely elaborate, ultra-powerful AIs on the black market. Each unit came in a black, lacquered box painted with two Chinese ideograms: two symbols accounting for each AI’s personality at birth. No two of them were exactly alike, either in design, components, or programming.

  When the police finally found Tahara’s trail, they discovered millions of dollars’ worth of equipment in his cramped suburban flat, most squirreled away from the labs and assembled in a state-of-the-art smelter. Over fifteen or twenty years, he had constructed probably more than a hundred different models, each one more refined than the last. Learning on the go, he had discovered shortcuts and bypasses that conventional manufacturers could only dream of, until his lead was no longer measured in months but in eras. Some things he had achieved still perplexed computer scientists: how had he come to think of them? And more importantly, how did they work?

  One particular adjective was often used in discussions of his work: quantum. He had built quantum computers.

  To buy equipment that was more suited to his own little domestic operation than the made-for-mass-production tools he could steal at work, he had eventually begun selling some of his creations to deep-pocketed, mostly secretive buyers. No one knew for sure how many he had disposed of by the time police clamped down on his operation: fifty? Sixty? More? Only two things were certain: first, each of his AIs was more powerful than anything mass-produced, even today (Hotoda, to whom all the stolen equipment and prototypes had been returned, still struggled to adapt his innovations to their own designs). And second, none of these AIs had any backloop preventing them from illegal or immoral behavior.

  To most people, Tahara—who died of a stroke in jail (heartbroken, said some) without explaining his secrets—was the ultimate white-collar criminal.

  To a few, he was a demigod, the ultimate weaponsmith.

  * * *

  The typhoon lifted overnight. Opening the curtains in the morning, I saw blue sky and clear air all over Victoria Harbour. In the streets below, beneath the skyscraper jungle, cleaners were already cutting down the trees the storm had felled. There was little traffic, but it would soon pick up—time for us to leave.

  David in my jacket pocket, bag in hand, I hailed a taxi in front of the hotel and directed the driver to the airport.

  By the time we crossed the Harbour and entered Kowloon, street activity had indeed returned to normal, and we ended up caught in a massive gridlock, between a street market and a highway feeder. On the sidewalk next to me, an old lady was busy chopping sausages on a wooden block, undisturbed by the crowd walking around her and the hypermodern towers above. I watched her with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and disbelief.

  “Luke, I think we should leave.”

  Surprised, I looked around us.

  “What do you mean, leave?”

  “I think … Jump out onto the curb! Now!”

  An SUV was creeping along the street next to us. I took only one glance at its passengers and their guns before I scrambled out the door. Bullets peppered the taxi just as I darted past the fragile old lady and her cleaver, into the market’s crowd. I heard the doors of the SUV open and footsteps rush behind me—I had to escape, fast.

  “Turn left as soon as you can, into the small space between the buildings and the stalls. There are fewer people there, you will run faster. And maybe they won’t see you.”

  I followed his instructions and entered the dimly lit alleyway between the colorful stalls and the dark street-level rooms they used as warehouses. My pursuers weren’t fooled, though—I could hear them closing in …

  “Turn right now. And take the bus.”

  “What bus?”

  I stumbled into a one-way street where traffic, heading away from the gridlock, was moving swiftly. As if in answer, a minibus was waiting in front of me, the last passenger already inside. I slid aboard just as the doors started closing. The driver didn’t even glance in my direction before pulling away.

  “Now duck!” ordered David.

  I fell to my knees as my pursuers erupted onto the street, looking everywhere. They kept their hands inside their jackets, presumably on their guns. It was too public a place to openly show their weapons, but I knew they wouldn’t hesitate to draw if they found a good angle.

  Had my life been an action movie, this would have been a good time to extract a semiauto from my bag and spray them all with bullets. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and it wasn’t our style.

  As if on cue, all our pursuers suddenly looked in the bus’s direction. Something gleamed on each man’s head—amps. They all had amps.

  “Jesus, David, did you see that?”

  The minibus was a smart choice: their drivers were paid by the rotation and tended to rush like hotshots along their circuit. I would be far across town before our pursuers got their SUV out of gridlock.

  The driver yelled at me in Cantonese. Holding up my hands in apology, I pressed my wallet against his card reader. He grunted and focused back on the traffic.

  “Do not relax yet,” instructed David. “We get off in two stops.”

  “What?”

  But I had learned long ago that there was always a good reason for whatever David did. So when the bus came to its second halt a few blocks later, I hopped off into the street.

  “Now take a taxi.”

  “Back to the airport?”

  “No, they knew we were heading there. Same for the bus, they can trace its route. We need to get them off our trai
l.”

  I looked around, searching for a taxi stand. Arrows immediately superimposed themselves on my media glasses, pointing left.

  That’s when I noticed the glitter of an amp, a hundred meters away and approaching fast. A different guy—no, three. God, how many are there?

  “I recommend you run,” said David.

  I raced through the crowd and jumped the queue into the first available taxi. The driver yelled at me, but that stopped as soon as I threw all my cash at him.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “Just drive!”

  He started the engine and speeded away under the stunned gaze of the people in the queue.

  “So, where to?” I repeated to David when I was confident we had put some distance between us and our pursuers.

  “I am checking. Yes … Tell him Kowloon East.”

  “Shouldn’t we make for the border instead?”

  “It is too late for that. The way they found us suggests they already control all the checkpoints. We will need to use other means to leave the city.”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  “I will explain, Luke, but please tell the driver to turn here first or we will end up in China.”

  * * *

  “So what was that?” I asked as soon as the door closed behind us.

  We had checked into a crummy hotel on the east side of the peninsula, crammed between soulless residential towers and seedy commercial buildings. This was the part of Kowloon developed over the old Kai Tak Airport, and somehow they had managed to make it even more cramped than the rest of the city. No one was going to find us there, needle in a haystack and everything, but I couldn’t help feeling claustrophobic, especially now that David had told me we couldn’t leave the city.

  His voice buzzed in my ear, quiet and reassuring, always so freaking quiet.

  “You know how I can detect another Tahara when it comes close—I can sense its search patterns as it looks for the same local information I am seeking. In this case, I sensed these patterns. Multiple times.”

  “You mean there were several Taharas?”

  “Not Taharas. Not this time.”