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

by Gardner Dozois

  I imagine the flexible circuits embedded inside my brain falling into quiescence at the same time. Even smaller LEDs with even more advanced power cells go dark. The optogenetic adds shut themselves off when my brain is functioning healthily. Normally, microprocessors keep me sane and safe, monitor my brain activity, stimulate portions of the neocortex devoted to ethics, empathy, compassion. When I run, though, my brain—my dysfunctional, murderous, cured brain—does it for itself as neural pathways are stimulated by my own native neurochemicals.

  Only my upper body gets cold: though that wind chills the skin of my thighs and calves like an ice bath, the muscles beneath keep hot with exertion. And the jacket takes the edge off the wind that strikes my chest.

  My shoes blur pink and yellow along the narrow path up the hill. Gravestones like smoker’s teeth protrude through swept drifts. They’re moldy black all over as if spray-painted, and glittering powdery whiteness heaps against their backs. Some of the stones date to the eighteenth century, but I run there only in the summertime or when it hasn’t snowed. Maintenance doesn’t plow that part of the churchyard. Nobody comes to pay their respects to those dead anymore.

  Sort of like the man I used to be.

  The ones I killed, however—some of them still get their memorials every year. I know better than to attend, even though my old self would have loved to gloat, to relive the thrill of their deaths. The new me … feels a sense of … obligation. But their loved ones don’t know my new identity. And nobody owes me closure.

  I’ll have to take what I can find for myself. I’ve sunk into that beautiful quiet place where there’s just the movement, the sky that true, irreproducible blue, the brilliant flicker of a cardinal. Where I die as a noun and only the verb survives.

  I run. I am running.

  * * *

  When he met her eyes, he imagined her throat against his hands. Skin like calves’ leather; the heat and the crack of her hyoid bone as he dug his thumbs deep into her pulse. The way she’d writhe, thrash, struggle.

  His waist chain rattled as his hands twitched, jerking the cuffs taut on his wrists.

  She glanced up from her notes. Her eyes were a changeable hazel: blue in this light, gray-green in others. Reflections across her glasses concealed the corner where text scrolled. It would have been too small to read, anyway—backwards, with the table he was chained to creating distance between them.

  She waited politely, seeming unaware that he was imagining those hazel eyes dotted with petechiae, that fair skin slowly mottling purple. He let the silence sway between them until it developed gravity.

  “Did you wish to say something?” she asked, with mild but clinical encouragement.

  Point to me, he thought.

  He shook his head. “I’m listening.”

  She gazed upon him benevolently for a moment. His fingers itched. He scrubbed the tips against the rough orange jumpsuit but stopped. In her silence, the whisking sound was too audible.

  She continued, “The court is aware that your crimes are the result of neural damage including an improperly functioning amygdala. Technology exists that can repair this damage. It is not experimental; it has been used successfully in tens of thousands of cases to treat neurological disorders as divergent as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality, and the complex of disorders commonly referred to as schizophrenic syndrome.”

  The delicate structure of her collarbones fascinated him. It took fourteen pounds of pressure, properly applied, to snap a human clavicle—rendering the arm useless for a time. He thought about the proper application of that pressure. He said, “Tell me more.”

  “They take your own neurons—grown from your own stem cells under sterile conditions in a lab, modified with microbial opsin genes. This opsin is a light-reactive pigment similar to those found in the human retina. The neurons are then reintroduced to key areas of your brain. This is a keyhole procedure. Once the neurons are established, and have been encouraged to develop the appropriate synaptic connections, there’s a second surgery, to implant a medical device: a series of miniaturized flexible microprocessors, sensors, and light emitting diodes. This device monitors your neurochemistry and the electrical activity in your brain, and adjusts it to mimic healthy activity.” She paused again and steepled her fingers on the table.

  “‘Healthy,’” he mocked.

  She did not move.

  “That’s discrimination against the neuro-atypical.”

  “Probably,” she said. Her fingernails were appliquéd with circuit diagrams. “But you did kill thirteen people. And get caught. Your civil rights are bound to be forfeit after something like that.”

  He stayed silent. Impulse control had never been his problem.

  “It’s not psychopathy you’re remanded for,” she said. “It’s murder.”

  “Mind control,” he said.

  “Mind repair,” she said. “You can’t be sentenced to the medical procedure. But you can volunteer. It’s usually interpreted as evidence of remorse and desire to be rehabilitated. Your sentencing judge will probably take that into account.”

  “God,” he said. “I’d rather have a bullet in the head than a fucking computer.”

  “They haven’t used bullets in a long time,” she said. She shrugged, as if it were nothing to her either way. “It was lethal injection or the gas chamber. Now it’s rightminding. Or it’s the rest of your life in an eight by twelve cell. You decide.”

  “I can beat it.”

  “Beat rightminding?”

  Point to me.

  “What if I can beat it?”

  “The success rate is a hundred percent. Barring a few who never woke up from anesthesia.” She treated herself to a slow smile. “If there’s anybody whose illness is too intractable for this particular treatment, they must be smart enough to keep it to themselves. And smart enough not to get caught a second time.”

  You’re being played, he told himself. You are smarter than her. Way too smart for this to work on you.

  She’s appealing to your vanity. Don’t let her yank your chain. She thinks she’s so fucking smart. She’s prey. You’re the hunter. More evolved. Don’t be manipulated—

  His lips said, “Lady, sign me up.”

  * * *

  The snow creaks under my steps. Trees might crack tonight. I compose a poem in my head.

  The fashion in poetry is confessional. It wasn’t always so—but now we judge value by our own voyeurism. By the perceived rawness of what we think we are being invited to spy upon. But it’s all art: veils and lies.

  If I wrote a confessional poem, it would begin: Her dress was the color of mermaids, and I killed her anyway.

  A confessional poem need not be true. Not true in the way the bite of the air in my lungs in spite of the mask is true. Not true in the way the graveyard and the cardinal and the ragged stones are true.

  It wasn’t just her. It was her, and a dozen others like her. Exactly like her in that they were none of them the right one, and so another one always had to die.

  That I can still see them as fungible is a victory for my old self—his only victory, maybe, though he was arrogant enough to expect many more. He thought he could beat the rightminding.

  That’s the only reason he agreed to it.

  If I wrote it, people would want to read that poem. It would sell a million—it would garner far more attention than what I do write.

  I won’t write it. I don’t even want to remember it. Memory excision was declared by the Supreme Court to be a form of the death penalty, and therefore unconstitutional since 2043.

  They couldn’t take my memories in retribution. Instead they took away my pleasure in them.

  Not that they’d admit it was retribution. They call it repair. “Rightminding.” Fixing the problem. Psychopathy is a curable disease.

  They gave me a new face, a new brain, a new name. The chromosome reassignment, I chose for myself, to put as much distance between my old self and my ne
w as possible.

  The old me also thought it might prove goodwill; reduced testosterone, reduced aggression, reduced physical strength. Few women become serial killers.

  To my old self, it seemed a convincing lie.

  He—no, I: alienating the uncomfortable actions of the self is something that psychopaths do—I thought I was stronger than biology and stronger than rightminding. I thought I could take anabolic steroids to get my muscle and anger back where they should be. I honestly thought I’d get away with it.

  I honestly thought I would still want to.

  I could write that poem. But that’s not the poem I’m writing. The poem I’m writing begins: Gravestones like smoker’s teeth … Except I don’t know what happens in the second clause, so I’m worrying at it as I run.

  I do my lap, and throw in a second lap because the wind’s died down and my heater is working and I feel light, sharp, full of energy and desire. When I come down the hill I’m running on springs. I take the long arc, back over the bridge toward the edge of town, sparing a quick glance down at the frozen water. The air is warming up a little as the sun rises. My fingers aren’t numb in my gloves anymore.

  When the unmarked white delivery van pulls past me and rolls to a stop, it takes me a moment to realize the driver wants my attention. He taps the horn, and I jog to a stop, hit pause on my run tracker, tug a headphone from my ear. I stand a few steps back from the window. He looks at me, then winces in embarrassment, and points at his navigation system. “Can you help me find Green Street? The autodrive is no use.”

  “Sure,” I say. I point. “Third left, up that way. It’s an unimproved road; that might be why it’s not on your map.”

  “Thanks,” he says. He opens his mouth as if to say something else, some form of apology, but I say, “Good luck, man!” and wave him cheerily on.

  The vehicle isn’t the anomaly here in the country that it would be on a city street even if half the cities have been retrofitted for urban farming to the point where they barely have streets anymore. But I’m flummoxed by the irony of the encounter, so it’s not until he pulls away that I realize I should have been more wary. And that his reaction was not the embarrassment of having to ask for directions, but the embarrassment of a decent, normal person who realizes he’s put another human being in a position where she may feel unsafe. He’s vanishing around the curve before I sort that out—something I suppose most people would understand instinctually.

  I wish I could run after the van and tell him that I was never worried. That it never occurred to me to be worried. Demographically speaking, the driver is very unlikely to be hunting me. He was black. And I am white.

  And my early fear socialization ran in different directions, anyway.

  My attention is still fixed on the disappearing van when something dark and clinging sweetly rank drops over my head.

  I gasp in surprise and my filter mask briefly saves me. I get the sick chartreuse scent of ether and the world spins, but the mask buys me a moment to realize what’s happening—a blitz attack. Someone is kidnapping me. He’s grabbed my arms, pulling my elbows back to keep me from pushing the mask off.

  I twist and kick, but he’s so strong.

  Was I this strong? It seems like he’s not even working to hold on to me, and though my heel connects solidly with his shin as he picks me up, he doesn’t grunt. The mask won’t help forever—

  —it doesn’t even help for long enough.

  Ether dreams are just as vivid as they say.

  * * *

  His first was the girl in the mermaid-colored dress. I think her name was Amelie. Or Jessica. Or something. She picked him up in a bar. Private cars were rare enough to have become a novelty, even then, but he had my father’s Mission for the evening. She came for a ride, even though—or perhaps because—it was a little naughty, as if they had been smoking cigarettes a generation before. They watched the sun rise from a curve over a cornfield. He strangled her in the back seat a few minutes later.

  She heaved and struggled and vomited. He realized only later how stupid he’d been. He had to hide the body, because too many people had seen us leave the bar together.

  He never did get the smell out of the car. My father beat the shit out of him and never let him use it again.

  We all make mistakes when we’re young.

  * * *

  I awaken in the dying warmth of my sweat-soaked jacket, to the smell of my vomit drying between my cheek and the cement floor. At least it’s only oatmeal. You don’t eat a lot before a long run. I ache in every particular, but especially where my shoulder and hip rest on concrete. I should be grateful; he left me in the recovery position so I didn’t choke.

  It’s so dark I can’t tell if my eyelids are open or closed, but the hood is gone and only traces of the stink of the ether remain. I lie still, listening and hoping my brain will stop trying to split my skull.

  I’m still dressed as I was, including the shoes. He’s tied my hands behind my back, but he didn’t tape my thumbs together. He’s an amateur. I conclude that he’s not in the room with me. And probably not anywhere nearby. I think I’m in a cellar. I can’t hear anybody walking around on the floor overhead.

  I’m not gagged, which tells me he’s confident that I can’t be heard even if I scream. So maybe I wouldn’t hear him up there, either?

  My aloneness suggests that I was probably a target of opportunity. That he has somewhere else he absolutely has to be. Parole review? Dinner with the mother who supports him financially? Stockbroker meeting? He seems organized; it could be anything. But whatever it is, it’s incredibly important that he show up for it, or he wouldn’t have left.

  When you have a new toy, can you resist playing with it?

  I start working my hands around. It’s not hard if you’re fit and flexible, which I am, though I haven’t kept in practice. I’m not scared, though I should be. I know better than most what happens next. But I’m calmer than I have been since I was somebody else. The adrenaline still settles me, just like it used to. Only this time—well, I already mentioned the irony.

  It’s probably not even the lights in my brain taking the edge off my arousal.

  The history of technology is all about unexpected consequences. Who would have guessed that peak oil would be linked so clearly to peak psychopathy? Most folks don’t think about it much, but people just aren’t as mobile as they—as we—used to be. We live in populations of greater density, too, and travel less. And all of that leads to knowing each other more.

  People like the nameless him who drugged me—people like me—require a certain anonymity, either in ourselves or in our victims.

  The floor is cold against my rear end. My gloves are gone. My wrists scrape against the soles of my shoes as I work the rope past them. They’re only a little damp, and the water isn’t frozen or any colder than the floor. I’ve been down here a while, then—still assuming I am down. Cellars usually have windows, but guys like me—guys like I used to be—spend a lot of time planning in advance. Rehearsing. Spinning their webs and digging their holes like trap-door spiders.

  I’m shivering, and my body wants to cramp around the chill. I keep pulling. One more wiggle and tug, and I have my arms in front of me. I sit up and stretch, hoping my kidnapper has made just one more mistake. It’s so dark I can’t see my fluorescent yellow and green running jacket, but proprioception lets me find my wrist with my nose. And there, clipped into its little pocket, is the micro-flash sleeve light that comes with the jacket.

  He got the mask—or maybe the mask just came off with the bag. And he got my phone, which has my tracker in it, and a GPS. He didn’t make the mistake I would have chosen for him to make.

  I push the button on the sleeve light with my nose.

  It comes on shockingly bright and I stretch my fingers around to shield it as best I can. Flesh glows red between the bones.

  Yep. It’s a basement.

  * * *

  Eight years after my first ti
me, the new improved me showed the IBI the site of the grave he’d dug for the girl in the mermaid-colored dress. I’d never forgotten it—not the gracious tree that bent over the little boulder he’d skidded on top of her to keep the animals out, not the tangle of vines he’d dragged over that, giving himself a hell of a case of poison ivy in the process.

  This time, I was the one that vomited.

  How does one even begin to own having done something like that? How do I?

  * * *

  Ah, there’s the fear. Or not fear, exactly, because the optogenetic and chemical controls on my endocrine system keep my arousal pretty low. It’s anxiety. But anxiety’s an old friend.

  It’s something to think about while I work on the ropes and tape with my teeth. The sleeve light shines up my nose while I gnaw, revealing veins through the cartilage and flesh. I’m cautious, nipping and tearing rather than pulling. I can’t afford to break my teeth: they’re the best weapon and the best tool I have. So I’m meticulous and careful, despite the nauseous thumping of my heart and the voice in my head that says hurry, hurry, he’s coming.

  He’s not coming—at least, I haven’t heard him coming. Ripping the bonds apart seems to take forever. I wish I had wolf teeth, teeth for slicing and cutting. Teeth that could scissor through this stuff as if it were a cheese sandwich. I imagine my other self’s delight in my discomfort, my worry. I wonder if he’ll enjoy it when my captor returns, even though he’s trapped in this body with me.

  Does he really exist, my other self? Neurologically speaking, we all have a lot of people in our heads all the time, and we can’t hear most of them. Maybe they really did change him, unmake him. Transform him into me. Or maybe he’s back there somewhere, gagged and chained up, but watching.