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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Yes sir,” she says unhappily.

  “Countermeasures have to be in place before they link up, Lieutenant. If there’s any exploit—any at all—the hive will see it. There’s no way to outthink the damn thing once it’s engaged.”

  “Yes sir. Ready.”

  “That was fast.”

  “You said it had to be, sir.” She extends a finger toward a fresh crimson icon pulsing on the board. “Should I—”

  “Not yet.” The Colonel stares down from vicarious orbit, tries to make sense of the tableaux. What the hell are they doing? What can even a hive mind accomplish with reed mats and a few kilograms of mu—

  Wait a second …

  He picks an intruder at random, zooms in. The mud sheathing that body has an almost golden glint to it, now that he looks closely. Something not-quite-mineral, something—

  He calls up an archive, searches the microbial index for any weaponized synthetics that might eat heterocyclics. Scores.

  “They’re going after the umbilical.”

  The Lieutenant glances up. “Sir?”

  “The mud. It’s not just a disguise it’s a payload, it’s—”

  “A biopaste.” The Lieutenant whistles, returns her attention to the board with renewed focus.

  The Colonel tries to think. They’re not just aiming to cut the aerostat loose; you don’t need a hive for that, you don’t even need to breach the perimeter. Whatever this is, it’s microsurgical. Something that requires massive on-site computation—maybe something to do with microclimate, something that can be influenced by wind or humidity or any of a dozen other chaotic variables. If they’re not trying to cut the umbilical outright they might be trying to maneuver it somehow: a biocorroded hole exactly X millimeters in diameter here, a stretching patch of candle-wax monomers over there, and way up in the stratosphere the aerostat sways some precise number of meters on some precise bearing—

  To what end? Play bumper-cars with the maintenance drones? Block some orbital line-of-sight, nudge a distant act of ground-based terrorism into surveillance eclipse at a critical moment? Maybe they’re not going for the umbilical after all, maybe they’re—

  “Sir?” The first of the insurgents has made it to the donut hole. “Sir, if we have to light ’em up before they coalesce—”

  “Not yet, Lieutenant.”

  He’s a blind man in a bright room. He’s a rhesus monkey playing chess with a grand master. He has no idea of his opponent’s strategy. He has no concept even of the rules of the game. He only knows he’s bound to lose.

  The last of the insurgents lurches out of weapons range. The Lieutenant’s finger hovers over that icon as though desperate to scratch a maddening itch.

  Coalescence.

  That far-focus moment, that thousand-soul stare. You can see it in their eyes if you know what to look for, if you’re close enough and fast enough. The Colonel is neither. All he has is a top-down view through a telescope thirty-six thousand kilometers away, ricocheted through the atmosphere and spread across this table. But he can see what follows: the fusion of interlocking pieces, the simultaneous change in physical posture, the instant evolutionary leap from spastic quadruped to sapient superweapon.

  Out of many, one.

  “Now.”

  It knows. Of course it knows. It’s inconceivable that this vast emergent mind hasn’t—in the very instant of its awakening—detected some vital clue, made some inference to lay the whole trap bare. The station’s defenses whine belatedly into gear, startled awake in the sudden glare of a million thoughts; multimind networks may be invisible to human eyes but they’re bright blinding tapestries down in RF. The hive, safely behind the firing line, has no need to care about that.

  No, what’s got its attention now is the wave of hydrogen sulfide billowing from the southern storage tanks: silent, invisible, heavy as a blanket and certain death to any stand-alone soul. No baseline would suspect a thing until the faint smell of rotten eggs told him he was already dead.

  But this soul does not stand alone. Eleven of its bodies simultaneously turn and flee back toward the fence, each following a unique trajectory with a little Brownian randomness layered in to throw off the tracking algos. The other two stand fast in the donut hole, draw sidearms from belts—

  The Colonel frowns. Why didn’t the sensors pick those up?

  “Hey, are those guns—that looks like bone,” the Lieutenant says.

  The nodes open fire.

  It is bone. Something like it anyway; metal or plastic would have triggered the sensors before they’d even reached the fence. The slugs are probably ceramic, though; no osteo derivative would be able to punch through the least of those conduits …

  Except that’s not what the hive is going for. They’re shooting at any old pipe or panel, anything metal, anything that might—

  Strike a spark …

  Because hydrogen sulfide isn’t just poisonous, you idiot. It’s flammable.

  “Holy shit,” the Lieutenant whispers as the zone goes up.

  * * *

  It’s a counter-countermeasure, improvised on the fly. It’s a queen sacrifice; some of these bodies are doomed but maybe the fire will burn off enough gas to give the rest a chance, suck back and consume enough of that spreading poison for eleven bodies to make it to safety while two burn like living torches.

  For a few seconds the Colonel thinks it’s going to work. As Hail-Marys go it’s a good one; no baseline would have even come up with a plan in that split second, much less put it into action. But faint hope is only a little better than none, and not even demigods can change the laws of physics. The sacrificial nodes blaze and blacken and crumble like dead leaves. Three others make it halfway up the chainlink before the gas reaches them, still thick enough to kill if not to burn. The rest die convulsing in the dirt, flesh oiled and guttering with spotty candlelight, jerking with the impact of bullets that can finally kick at targets once they’re down.

  The poisonous carpet spreads invisibly into the jungle, off to kill whatever weedy life it might still find there.

  The Lieutenant swallows, face pale with nausea and the unleashed memories of ancient war crimes. “We’re sure this isn’t against the…” she trails off, unwilling to challenge a superior officer, unconvinced by legalistic hairsplitting, unable to assess the threat posed by this vanquished enemy.

  But the threat is so very real. These things are fucking dangerous. If not for some happenstance bit of intel—unpredictable as a quantum flutter, never to be repeated—this hive would have accomplished its goal without discovery or opposition. Or maybe it did; maybe everything that’s just happened was part of the plan, maybe that lucky tip-off was deliberately crafted to make him dance on command. Maybe this was a defeat and he’ll never know.

  That’s the thing about hives. Always ten steps ahead. The fact that there are still jurisdictions where such abominations remain legal scares the Colonel more than he can say.

  “Why are we doing this, sir?”

  He scowls. “Doing what, exactly? Fighting for the survival of the individual?”

  But the Lieutenant shakes her head. “Why are we still just—fighting all the time? Among ourselves? I mean, weren’t the aliens supposed to make us all forget our petty differences? Unite humanity against the common threat?”

  The ranks are full of them, these days.

  “They didn’t threaten us, Lieutenant. They only took our picture.” That’s what everyone assumes, anyway. Sixty-four thousand objects of unknown origin, simultaneously igniting in a precise incandescent grid encircling the globe. Screaming back into space along half the EM spectrum as the atmosphere burned them to ash.

  “But they’re still out there. Whatever sent them is, anyway. Even after thirteen years—”

  Fourteen. The Colonel feels muscles tighten at the corners of his mouth. But who’s counting.

  “And with Theseus lost—”

  “There’s no evidence Theseus is lost,” he says shortly.
>
  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nobody said it was going to be a weekend mission.”

  “Yes, sir.” She returns her attention to the board, but he thinks there was something in her face as she turned away. He wonders if it might have been recognition.

  Unlikely. It was a long time ago. And he always kept behind the scenes.

  “Well—” he heads for the door. “Might as well send in the clowns.”

  “Sir?”

  He stops but doesn’t turn.

  “I was wondering—if it isn’t above my pay grade, sir—but you seemed really concerned about what that hive would do when it booted. No way we could keep up when it was engaged, you said.”

  “I’m waiting for a question, Lieutenant.”

  “Why did we wait? We could’ve gassed the lot of them before they ever linked up, and if they were that dangerous—well, it seems like bad strategy.”

  He can’t disagree. Which is not to say it was unwarranted.

  “Hives are dangerous, Lieutenant. Never doubt that for an instant. That said…”

  He considers, and settles for something like the truth.

  “If killing’s the only option, I’d rather kill one than thirteen.”

  * * *

  Some threats lurk closer to home. Some are somewhat less—overt.

  Take the woman on the feed, for example: a tiny thing, maybe 160cm. Nothing about Liana Lutterodt suggests anything other than contagious enthusiasm for a world of wonders. No hint of the agency that pays her expenses, sends her on these goodwill tours to dispense rainbows and a promise of Utopia.

  No hint of forces deep in the Oregon desert, using her as a sock puppet.

  “We climbed this hill,” she says now, to the attentive host of In Conversation. “Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now.”

  Her background’s unremarkable, for the most part: born in Ghana, raised in the UKapelago, top of her class in systems theory and theistic virology.

  “Now we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it’s a mirage, maybe it’s a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can’t see because the clouds are blocking the view.”

  Little in the way of overt criminal activity. Charged with possession of a private database at thirteen, interfering with domestic surveillance pickups at twelve. The usual fines and warnings racked up by the young before they learn to embrace the panopticon.

  “So we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill. No matter what direction we go, we can’t move off our peak without losing our vantage point. Naturally we climb back up again. We’re trapped on a local maximum.”

  Finally managed to drop off the grid legally by signing up with the Bicameral Order, which gets special exemption by virtue of being largely incomprehensible even when you do keep an eye on them.

  “But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here.”

  The Bicamerals. Named, apparently, for some prototype of reinvention that involved massive rewiring of their cerebral hemispheres. The name’s a coelacanth these days, though. It’s not even certain the Bicams have cerebral hemispheres any more.

  “But you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.”

  “You buy any of this?” The Lieutenant (a different Lieutenant—the Colonel has one in every port) glances away from the screen, lip pulled sideways in a skeptical grimace. “Faith-based science?”

  “It’s not science,” the Colonel says. “They don’t pretend that it is.”

  “Even worse. You don’t build a better brainchip by speaking in tongues.”

  “Hard to argue with the patents.”

  It’s the patents that have him worried. The Bicamerals don’t seem to have any martial ambitions, no designs of conquest—don’t seem especially interested in the outside world at all, for that matter. So far they’ve been content to hunker down in their scattered desert monasteries, contemplating whatever reality underlies reality.

  But there are other ways to throw the world on its side. Things are—fragile, these days. Whole societies have been known to fall in the wake of a single paradigm shift, and the Bicamerals own half the patent office. They could make the global economy eat itself overnight if they wanted to. It wouldn’t even be illegal.

  Lutterodt isn’t actually part of that hive, as far as anyone can tell. She just fronts for it; a friendly face, a charismatic spokesperson to grease wheels and calm fears. She’s out in the world for the next couple of weeks, doing the rounds: a fellow standalone human being, with access to the deepest Bicameral secrets. Completely at home in a world where a thought doesn’t know enough to stop at the edge of the skull, doesn’t even know when it’s left one head and entered another.

  “You want to bring her in?” the Lieutenant asks as Lutterodt disarms the world with a smile and a pocketful of metaphors.

  He has to admit it’s tempting: cut her off from the herd, draw the curtain of Global Security across the interrogation. Who knows what insights she might share, given the right incentive?

  He shakes his head. “I’ll go to her.”

  “Really?” Evidently not what this new Lieutenant signed up for, setting forth on bended knee.

  “She’s on a goodwill tour. Let’s give her a chance to spread some good will.”

  It’s not as generous as it seems, of course. You never want to strong-arm an adversary until you know how hard they can push back.

  * * *

  This global survey, this threat-assessment of hived minds: it’s not his only assignment. It’s only his most recent. A dozen others idle in the background, only occasionally warranting examination or update. Realist incursions into the UKapelago; a newly separatist Baptist Convention, building their armed gyland on the high seas. The occasional court-martial of some antique flesh-and-blood infantry whose cybernetic augments violate the Rules of Engagement. They all sit in his queue, pilot-lit, half-forgotten. They’ll flag him if they need his attention.

  But there’s one candle the Colonel has never forgotten, though it hasn’t flickered for the better part of a decade. It, too, is programmed to call out in the event of any change in status. He checks it anyway, daily. Now—back for a couple of days in the large empty apartment he kept even after his wife went to Heaven—he checks it again.

  No change.

  He puts his inlays to sleep, takes grateful refuge in the silence that fills his head once the overlays and the status reports stop murmuring through his temporal lobe. He grows belatedly aware of a real sensation, the soft tick of claws on the tiles behind him. He turns and glimpses a small furry black-and-white face before it ducks out of sight around the corner.

  The Colonel adjourns to the kitchen.

  Zephyr’s willing to let the apartment feed him—he pretty much has to be, given the intermittent availability of his human servant—but he doesn’t like it much. He refused outright at first, rendered psychotic by some cross-species dabbler who must have thought it would be enlightening or transcendent or just plain cute to “share consciousness” with a small soul weighing in at one-tenth the synapse count. The Colonel tries to imagine what that kind of forced fusion must have been like: thrust into a maelstrom of incomprehensible thought and sensation, blinding as a naked sun; thrown back into stunned bleeding darkness once some narcissistic god got bored and cut the connection.

  Zephyr hid in the closet for weeks after the Colonel brought him home, hissed and spat at the sight of sockets and fiberop and the low-slung housecl
eaner trundling quietly on its rounds. After two years his furry little brain has at least rejigged the cost/benefit stats for the kibble dispenser in the kitchen but he’s still more phantom than fur, still mostly visible only from the corner of the eye. He can be coaxed into the open if he’s hungry and if the Colonel is very still; he still recoils at physical contact. The Colonel indulges him, and pretends not to notice the ragged fraying of the armrest on the living room couch. He doesn’t even have the heart to get the socket removed from the patch of twisted scar tissue on Zephyr’s head. No telling what post-traumatic nightmares might be reawakened by a trip to the vet.

  Now he fills the kibble bowl and stands back the requisite two meters. (This is progress; just six months ago he could never stray closer than three.) Zephyr creeps into the kitchen, nose twitching, eyes darting to every corner.

  The Colonel hopes that whoever inflicted that torment went on to try more exotic interfaces once they got bored with mammals. A cephalopod, perhaps. By all accounts, things get a lot less cuddly when you go B2B with a Pacific octopus.

  At least Human hives can lay claim to mutual consent. At least its members choose the violence they inflict on themselves, the emergence of some voluntary monster from the pool of all those annihilated identities. If only it stopped there. If only the damage ended where the hive did.

  His son’s candle slumbers in its own little corner of his network, a pilot light in purgatory. Zephyr glances around with every second bite, still fearful of some Second Coming.

  The Colonel knows how he feels.

  * * *

  They meet on a patio off Riverside: one of those heritage bistros where everything from food prep to table service is performed by flesh-and-blood, and where everything from food prep to table service suffers as a result. People seem willing to pay extra for the personal touch anyway.

  “You disapprove,” Dr. Lutterodt says, getting straight to the point.

  “Of many things,” The Colonel admits. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  “Of us. What we do.” She glances at the menu (literally—it’s printed on dumb stock). “Of hives in general, I’m guessing.”