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

by Gardner Dozois

  Ruth does as he asked. Then she tells him, “I’ll pay you three hundred dollars a day, with a five thousand dollar bonus if you succeed this week.”

  “Deal.” He grins and picks up the router, getting ready to leave.

  Because it never hurts to tell people what they’re doing is meaningful, she adds, “You’re helping to catch the killer of a young woman who’s not much older than you.”

  Then she goes home because she’s run out of things to try.

  * * *

  The first hour after waking up is always the worst part of the day for Ruth.

  As usual, she wakes from a nightmare. She lies still, disoriented, the images from her dream superimposed over the sight of the water stains on the ceiling. Her body is drenched in sweat.

  The man holds Jessica in front of him with his left hand while the gun in his right hand is pointed at her head. She’s terrified, but not of him. He ducks so that her body shields his, and he whispers something into her ear.

  “Mom! Mom!” she screams. “Don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot!”

  Ruth rolls over, nauseated. She sits up at the edge of the bed, hating the smell of the hot room, the dust that she never has time to clean filling the air pierced by bright rays coming in from the east-facing window. She shoves the sheets off of her and stands up quickly, her breath coming too fast. She’s fighting the rising panic without any help, alone, her Regulator off.

  The clock on the nightstand says 6:00.

  She’s crouching behind the opened driver’s side door of her car. Her hands shake as she struggles to keep the man’s head, bobbing besides her daughter’s, in the sight of her gun. If she turns on her Regulator, she thinks her hands may grow steady and give her a clear shot at him.

  What are her chances of hitting him instead of her? Ninety-five percent? Ninety-nine?

  “Mom! Mom! No!”

  She gets up and stumbles into the kitchen to turn on the coffeemaker. She curses when she finds the can empty and throws it clattering into the sink. The noise shocks her and she cringes.

  Then she struggles into the shower, sluggishly, painfully, as though the muscles that she conditions daily through hard exercise were not there. She turns on the hot water but it brings no warmth to her shivering body.

  Grief descends on her like a heavy weight. She sits down in the shower, curling her body into itself. Water streams down her face so she does not know if there are tears as her body heaves.

  She fights the impulse to turn on the Regulator. It’s not time yet. She has to give her body the necessary rest.

  The Regulator, a collection of chips and circuitry embedded at the top of her spine, is tied into the limbic system and the major blood vessels into the brain. Like its namesake from mechanical and electrical engineering, it maintains the levels of dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin and other chemicals in the brain and in her blood stream. It filters out the chemicals when there’s an excess, and releases them when there’s a deficit.

  And it obeys her will.

  The implant allows a person control over her basic emotions: fear, disgust, joy, excitement, love. It’s mandatory for law enforcement officers, a way to minimize the effects of emotions on life-or-death decisions, a way to eliminate prejudice and irrationality.

  “You have clearance to shoot,” the voice in her headset tells her. It’s the voice of her husband, Scott, the head of her department. His voice is completely calm. His Regulator is on.

  She sees the head of the man bobbing up and down as he retreats with Jessica. He’s heading for the van parked by the side of the road.

  “He’s got other hostages in there,” her husband continues to speak in her ear. “If you don’t shoot, you put the lives of those three other girls and who knows how many other people in danger. This is our best chance.”

  The sound of sirens, her backup, is still faint. Too far away.

  After what seems an eternity, she manages to stand up in the shower and turn off the water. She towels herself dry and dresses slowly. She tries to think of something, anything, to take her mind off its current track. But nothing works.

  She despises the raw state of her mind. Without the Regulator, she feels weak, confused, angry. Waves of despair wash over her and everything appears in hopeless shades of grey. She wonders why she’s still alive.

  It will pass, she thinks. Just a few more minutes.

  Back when she had been on the force, she had adhered to the regulation requirement not to leave the Regulator on for more than two hours at a time. There are physiological and psychological risks associated with prolonged use. Some of her fellow officers had also complained about the way the Regulator made them feel robotic, deadened. No excitement from seeing a pretty woman; no thrill at the potential for a car chase; no righteous anger when faced with an act of abuse. Everything had to be deliberate: you decided when to let the adrenaline flow, and just enough to get the job done and not too much to interfere with judgment. But sometimes, they argued, you needed emotions, instinct, intuition.

  Her Regulator had been off when she came home that day and recognized the man hiding from the city-wide manhunt.

  Have I been working too much? she thinks. I don’t know any of her friends. When did Jess meet him? Why didn’t I ask her more questions when she was coming home late every night? Why did I stop for lunch instead of coming home half an hour earlier? There are a thousand things I could have done and should have done and would have done.

  Fear and anger and regret are mixed up in her until she cannot tell which is which.

  “Engage your Regulator,” her husband’s voice tells her. “You can make the shot.”

  Why do I care about the lives of the other girls? she thinks. All I care about is Jess. Even the smallest chance of hurting her is too much.

  Can she trust a machine to save her daughter? Should she rely on a machine to steady her shaking hands, to clear her blurry vision, to make a shot without missing?

  “Mom, he’s going to let me go later. He won’t hurt me. He just wants to get away from here. Put the gun down!”

  Maybe Scott can make a calculus about lives saved and lives put at risk. She won’t. She will not trust a machine.

  “It’s okay, baby,” she croaks out. “It’s all going to be okay.”

  She does not turn on the Regulator. She does not shoot.

  Later, after she had identified the body of Jess—the bodies of all four of the girls had been badly burnt when the bomb went off—after she had been disciplined and discharged, after Scott and she had split up, after she had found no solace in alcohol and pills, she did finally find the help she needed: she could leave the Regulator on all the time.

  The Regulator deadened the pain, stifled grief and numbed the ache of loss. It held down the regret, made it possible to pretend to forget. She craved the calmness it brought, the blameless, serene clarity.

  She had been wrong to distrust it. That distrust had cost her Jess. She would not make the same mistake again.

  Sometimes she thinks of the Regulator as a dependable lover, a comforting presence to lean on. Sometimes she thinks she’s addicted. She does not probe deeply behind these thoughts.

  She would have preferred to never have to turn off the Regulator, to never be in a position to repeat her mistake. But even Doctor B balked at that (“Your brain will turn into mush.”). The illegal modifications he did agree to make allow the Regulator to remain on for a maximum of twenty-three hours at a stretch.Then she must take an hour-long break during which she must remain conscious.

  And so there’s always this hour in the morning, right as she wakes, when she’s naked and alone with her memories, unshielded from the rush of red-hot hatred (for the man? for herself?) and white-cold rage, and the black, bottomless abyss that she endures as her punishment.

  The alarm beeps. She concentrates like a monk in meditation and feels the hum of the Regulator starting up. Relief spreads out from the center of her mind to the very tips of her fing
ers, the soothing, numbing serenity of a regulated, disciplined mind. To be regulated is to be a regular person.

  She stands up, limber, graceful, powerful, ready to hunt.

  * * *

  The Watcher has identified more of the men in the pictures. He’s now in a new motel room, this one more expensive than usual because he feels like he deserves a treat after all he’s been through. Hunching over all day to edit video is hard work.

  He pans the cropping rectangle over the video to give it a sense of dynamism and movement. There’s an artistry to this.

  He’s amazed how so few people seem to know about the eye implants. There’s something about eyes, so vulnerable, so essential to the way people see the world and themselves, that makes people feel protective and reluctant to invade them. The laws regarding eye modifications are the most stringent, and after a while, people begin to mistake “not permitted” with “not possible.”

  They don’t know what they don’t want to know.

  All his life, he’s felt that he’s missed some key piece of information, some secret that everyone else seemed to know. He’s intelligent, diligent, but somehow things have not worked out.

  He never knew his father, and when he was eleven, his mother had left him one day at home with twenty dollars and never came back. A string of foster homes had followed, and nobody, nobody could tell him what he was missing, why he was always at the mercy of judges and bureaucrats, why he had so little control over his life, not where he would sleep, not when he would eat, not who would have power over him next.

  He made it his subject to study men, to watch and try to understand what made them tick. Much of what he learned had disappointed him. Men were vain, proud, ignorant. They let their desires carry them away, ignored risks that were obvious. They did not think, did not plan. They did not know what they really wanted. They let the TV tell them what they should have and hoped that working at their pathetic jobs would make those wishes come true.

  He craved control. He wanted to see them dance to his tune the way he had been made to dance to the tune of everyone else.

  So he had honed himself to be pure and purposeful, like a sharp knife in a drawer full of ridiculous, ornate, fussy kitchen gadgets. He knew what he wanted and he worked at getting it with singular purpose.

  He adjusts the colors and the dynamic range to compensate for the dim light in the video. He wants there to be no mistake in identifying the man.

  He stretches his tired arms and sore neck. For a moment he wonders if he’ll be better off if he pays to have parts of his body enhanced so he can work for longer, without pain and fatigue. But the momentary fancy passes.

  Most people don’t like medically unnecessary enhancements and would only accept them if they’re required for a job. No such sentimental considerations for bodily integrity or “naturalness” constrain the Watcher. He does not like enhancements because he views reliance on them as a sign of weakness. He would defeat his enemies by his mind, and with the aid of planning and foresight. He does not need to depend on machines.

  He had learned to steal, and then rob, and eventually how to kill for money. But the money was really secondary, just a means to an end. It was control that he desired. The only man he had killed was a lawyer, someone who lied for a living. Lying had brought him money, and that gave him power, made people bow down to him and smile at him and speak in respectful voices. The Watcher had loved that moment when the man begged him for mercy, when he would have done anything the Watcher wanted. The Watcher had taken what he wanted from the man rightfully, by superiority of intellect and strength. Yet, the Watcher had been caught and gone to jail for it. A system that rewarded liars and punished the Watcher could not in any sense be called just.

  He presses “Save.” He’s done with this video.

  Knowledge of the truth gave him power, and he would make others acknowledge it.

  * * *

  Before Ruth is about to make her next move, Daniel calls, and they meet in her office again.

  “I have what you wanted.”

  He takes out his laptop and shows her an animation, like a movie.

  “They stored videos on the adaptor?”

  Daniel laughs. “No. The device can’t really ‘see’ and that would be far too much data. No, the adaptor just stored readings, numbers. I made the animation so it’s easier to understand.”

  She’s impressed. The young man knows how to give a good presentation.

  “The wifi echoes aren’t captured with enough resolution to give you much detail. But you can get a rough sense of people’s sizes and heights and their movements. This is what I got from the day and hour you specified.”

  They watch as a bigger, vaguely humanoid shape appears at Mona’s apartment door, precisely at 6:00, meeting a smaller, vaguely humanoid shape.

  “Seems they had an appointment,” Daniel says.

  They watch as the smaller shape leads the bigger shape into the bedroom, and then the two embrace. They watch the smaller shape climb into space—presumably onto the bed. They watch the bigger shape climb up after it. They watch the shooting, and then the smaller shape collapses and disappears. They watch the bigger shape lean over, and the smaller shape flickers into existence as it’s moved from time to time.

  So there was only one killer, Ruth thinks. And he was a client.

  “How tall is he?”

  “There’s a scale to the side.”

  Ruth watches the animation over and over. The man is six foot two or six foot three, maybe 180 to 200 pounds. She notices that he has a bit of a limp as he walks.

  She’s now convinced that Luo was telling the truth. Not many Chinese men are six foot two, and such a man would stick out too much to be a killer for a gang. Every witness would remember him. Mona’s killer had been a client, maybe even a regular. It wasn’t a random robbery but carefully planned.

  The man is still out there, and killers that meticulous rarely kill only once.

  “Thank you,” she says. “You might be saving another young woman’s life.”

  * * *

  Ruth dials the number for the police department.

  “Captain Brennan, please.”

  She gives her name and her call is transferred, and then she hears the gruff, weary voice of her ex-husband. “What can I do for you?”

  Once again, she’s glad she has the Regulator. His voice dredges up memories of his raspy morning mumbles, his stentorian laughter, his tender whispers when they were alone, the soundtrack of twenty years of a life spent together, a life that they had both thought would last until one of them died.

  “I need a favor.”

  He doesn’t answer right away. She wonders if she’s too abrupt—a side effect of leaving the Regulator on all the time. Maybe she should have started with “How’ve you been?”

  Finally, he speaks. “What is it?” The voice is restrained, but laced with exhausted, desiccated pain.

  “I’d like to use your NCIC access.”

  Another pause. “Why?”

  “I’m working on the Mona Ding case. I think this is a man who’s killed before and will kill again. He’s got a method. I want to see if there are related cases in other cities.”

  “That’s out of the question, Ruth. You know that. Besides, there’s no point. We’ve run all the searches we can, and there’s nothing similar. This was a Chinese gang protecting their business, simple as that. Until we have the resources in the Gang Unit to deal with it, I’m sorry, this will have to go cold for a while.”

  Ruth hears the unspoken. The Chinese gangs have always preyed on their own. Until they bother the tourists, let’s just leave them alone. She’d heard similar sentiments often enough back when she was on the force. The Regulator could do nothing about certain kinds of prejudice. It’s perfectly rational. And also perfectly wrong.

  “I don’t think so. I have an informant who says that the Chinese gangs have nothing to do with it.”

  Scott snorts. “Yes, of cours
e you can trust the word of a Chinese snakehead. But there’s also the note and the phone.”

  “The note is most likely a forgery. And do you really think this Chinese gang member would be smart enough to realize that the phone records would give him away and then decide that the best place to hide it was around his place of business?”

  “Who knows? Criminals are stupid.”

  “The man is far too methodical for that. It’s a red herring.”

  “You have no evidence.”

  “I have a good reconstruction of the crime and a description of the suspect. He’s too tall to be the kind a Chinese gang would use.”

  This gets his attention. “From where?”

  “A neighbor had a home motion-sensing system that captured wireless echoes into Mona’s apartment. I paid someone to reconstruct it.”

  “Will that stand up in court?”

  “I doubt it. It will take expert testimony and you’ll have to get the company to admit that they capture that information. They’ll fight it tooth and nail.”

  “Then it’s not much use to me.”

  “If you give me a chance to look in the database, maybe I can turn it into something you can use.” She waits a second and presses on, hoping that he’ll be sentimental. “I’ve never asked you for much.”

  “This is the first time you’ve ever asked me for something like this.”

  “I don’t usually take on cases like this.”

  “What is it about this girl?”

  Ruth considers the question. There are two ways to answer it. She can try to explain the fee she’s being paid and why she feels she’s adding value. Or she can give what she suspects is the real reason. Sometimes the Regulator makes it hard to tell what’s true. “Sometimes people think the police don’t look as hard when the victim is a sex worker. I know your resources are constrained, but maybe I can help.”

  “It’s the mother, isn’t it? You feel bad for her.”

  Ruth does not answer. She can feel the Regulator kicking in again. Without it, perhaps she would be enraged.

  “She’s not Jess, Ruth. Finding her killer won’t make you feel better.”