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

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  Hope spent the next morning getting her bearings, then drifted casually toward the Hotel Catedral, where she enquired about booking a table for supper. The lobby was all but empty, but the receptionist had the tight-lipped air of a man with a lot to worry about.

  “No tables for non-residents, senora; my apologies.”

  “Oh—in that case, can I book a room?”

  “We are fully booked, senora.”

  Hope made a show of peering around the empty lobby. “If it’s a money thing, I can show you a sight-draft on my company’s account?”

  The guy continued to stonewall, so Hope relented and wandered back onto the palm-studded plaza, where the sun was baking the sturdy buttresses of the titular cathedral. She was drinking a coffee at a cafe across the square when a gangly and somewhat sunburned young man pulled up on some sort of solar-assisted trike.

  “Hey—Hope Dawson, right?” He spoke English with a broad Glaswegian accent.

  Hope protested her innocence in passable Castilian, but he whipped out a little handheld from a pocket on his hunting vest and consulted it, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand.

  “Naw, see, this is definitely you. Look?”

  Hope looked. It was definitely her—her disembarking from the train yesterday afternoon, in fact. Droneshot, from somewhere above the station.

  “Who wants to know?” she growled, putting some war-reporter grit into it.

  “Mah boss. Wants tae offer ye a job, see.”

  “Well, you may tell your boss thank you, but I’m already employed.”

  “Bollix, lass—ye’ve not had a proper job in years.” The lad grins. “I should know. It was me as doxxed ye.”

  “Is that supposed to reassure me?”

  “Naw, it’s supposed to intrigue ye.” He slapped the patchwork pleather bench-seat of the trike behind him, shaded by the solar panel. “Cedric’s a few streets over the way. Come hear what he has to say before ye make up yer mind, why not?”

  * * *

  “I hope Ian didn’t alarm you, Miss Dawson,” said Cedric, as a waiter poured coffee. They were sat in the lobby of a mid-range boutique hotel which, given by the lingering musty smell, had been boarded up for years until very recently.

  “Not at all,” Hope lied, in a manner she hoped conveyed a certain sense of fuck you, Charlie. “But I’d appreciate you explaining why you had him dox me.”

  “I want you to work for me, Miss Dawson.”

  “Just Hope, please. And as I told Ian, Mister…?”

  He smiles. “Just Cedric, please.”

  “As I told Ian, Cedric, I already have work.”

  “Indeed you do—a career in journalism more distinctive for its length than its impact, if you don’t mind me saying so. Not many last so long down in the freelance trenches.”

  “Debts don’t pay themselves, Cedric.”

  “Quite. But it would be nice to pay them quicker, wouldn’t it?”

  Hope put down her coffee cup to hide the tremor of her hands. “I’m flattered, but I should probably point out I’m not really a journalist.”

  “No, you’re a qualitative economist. You were supervised by Shove and Walker, University of Lancaster. I’ve read your thesis.”

  “You have?”

  “Well, the important bits. I had Ian précis the methodological stuff for me, if I’m honest. It was well received by your peers, I believe.”

  “Not well enough to lead to any research work,” said Hope, curtly. No one wanted an interpretivist cluttering up their balance sheets with talk of intangible externalities, critiquing the quants, poking holes in the dog-eared cardboard cut-out of homo economicus.

  “Obviously not—but participant observation research work is what I’m offering you, starting today. Six months fixed term contract, a PI’s salary at current UK rates, plus expenses. I’ll even backdate to the start of the month, if it helps.”

  “What’s the object?”

  Cedric looks surprised; his expression reminds Hope of the animated meerkat from an ad campaign of her youth. “Well, here, of course. Almeria the province, that is, rather than just the city.”

  “Why?”

  He smiled, leant forward a little. “Good question!” A frown replaced the smile. “I’m afraid I can’t really answer it, though. Confidentiality of sources, you understand. But in essence, I was tipped off to an emerging situation here in Almeria, and decided I wanted to see it up close.”

  “I’m going to need more than that to go on, I’m afraid,” said Hope.

  Cedric somehow looked chagrined and reproachful at once. “There are limits, I’m afraid, and they’re not of my making. But look: if I say I have reason, solid reason to believe that Almeria is on the verge of a transformative economic event without precedent, and that I have spent upward of five million euros in just the last few days in order to gather equipment and personnel on the basis of that belief, would you trust me?”

  Not as far as I could throw you, frankly. “So why me, specifically?”

  A boyish smile replaced the frown. “Now, that’s a little easier! Remind me, if you would, of your thesis topic?”

  To her own surprise, Hope’s long-term memory duly regurgitated a set of research questions and framings polished to the smoothness of beach pebbles by repeated supervisory interrogations: transitions in civic and domestic consumptive practices; the influence of infrastructures and interfaces on patterns and rates of resource use; the role of externalities in the playing out of macroeconomic crises. Warming to her topic, she segued into a spirited defense of free-form empirical anthropology, and of interpretive methods as applied to the analysis of economic discontinuities.

  “Good,” Cedric intoned, as if she’d passed some sort of test. “H&M is researching exactly those sort of questions, and we think Almeria could be our Ground Zero.”

  That was a worrying choice of phrase.

  “The markets are turbulent places, Hope,” he continued, “too turbulent for mere mathematics to explain. They no longer interest me, in and of themselves.” He leans back in his chair. “This will sound crass to someone of your generation, I’m sure, but nonetheless: I am not simply wealthy. I am rich enough that I don’t even know what I’m worth, how I got that way, or who I’d have to ask to find out. Money is a very different matter for me than for you. I have the extraordinary liberty of being able to think about it purely in the abstract, because my concrete concerns are taken care of.”

  Hope stared at him, stunned into silence.

  “So I am able,” Cedric continued, “to explore economics in a way accessible to few, and of interest to even fewer. Lesser men, poorer men obsess over mere commerce, on the movement of money. My concerns are larger, far larger. You might say that it is the movement of money that fascinates me.”

  She grabbed her bag, stood up, and started for the doorway.

  “Hope, hear me out, please,” he called. “I don’t expect you to like me, or even understand me. But I need you to work for me, here and now, and I am willing to pay you well. Wait, please, just for a moment.”

  Hope paused in the shade of the doorway, but didn’t turn around.

  “Check your bank balance,” he said after a brief pause. She blinked it up on her spex: a deposit had just cleared from Huginn&Muninn AB, Norwegian sort-code. More money than she’d earned in the last twelve months, both on the books and off. “Consider it a signing bonus.”

  She turned round, her arms crossed. “What if I won’t sign?”

  Cedric shrugged elegantly in his seat; he’d not moved an inch.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, turning on her heel.

  Ian drove her back to her apartment block on the trike.

  “So I’ll come fetch ye tomorrow morning, then,” he announced. “Run you down to El Ejido, get ye all set up and briefed.”

  “I told Cedric I’d think about it, Ian.”

  “Aye, I heard ye.” Ian grinned. “Told him the same mesel
f.”

  * * *

  True to his word, Ian came to collect her the next morning. Hope found, to her surprise, that she was packed and ready to go.

  “Knew ye’d go fer it,” asserted Ian, bungeeing her bags to the trike.

  “Very much against my better judgement,” she replied.

  “Aye, he’s an odd one, fer sure. But he’s not lied to me once, which is more than I can say fer mah previous employers.” He saddled up, flashed a grin. “Plus, he always pays on time.”

  “He’d better,” replied Hope, as Ian accelerated out into the empty streets of Almeria, heading westwards. “What is it you do for him, anyway?”

  “Not what you might be thinking! Ah’m a kind of general gopher, I guess, but I do a lot of reading for him when he’s got other stuff on. News trawls, policy stuff. The doctoral theses of obscure scholars, sort o’ thing.” He flashed a grin over his shoulder. “Sometimes he just wants to chew over old science fiction novels until the early hours. You thought it was hard to find work off the back of your doctorate? Try bein’ an academic skiffy critic, eh!”

  “Seriously?”

  “Oh, aye. Says they inspire him to think differently. Me, I reckon he thinks he’s Hubertus fuckin’ Bigend or somesuch…”

  “Who?”

  But Ian had slipped on a set of retro-style enclosure headphones and turned his attention to his driving, dodging wallowing dirtbikes and scooters overloaded with helmetless geeks and their motley luggage, all headed westwards. The road from Almeria to El Ejido passed briefly through foothills almost lunar in their rugged desolation, before descending down to the Plastic Ocean itself. Hope couldn’t see a patch of ground that wasn’t covered with road, cramped housing, or row after monotonous row of greenhouses shimmering with heat-haze. Hope was surprised to see trucks at the roadside in the iconic white and blue livery of the United Nations, and tapped Ian on the shoulder.

  “What the hell are they doing here?” she yelled over the slipstream.

  “The man hisself tipped ‘em off. Fond of the UN, he is—fits wi’ his International Rescue fetish, I guess—and they seem to appreciate his input, albeit grudgingly. We’ll fix ye a meeting wi’ General Weissmuutze, she’s sound enough. Always good to know the people wi’ the guns and bandages, eh?”

  * * *

  Ian dropped Hope at a small villa near the southern edge of El Ejido, loaded her spex with a credit line to a Huginn&Muninn expenses account and a bunch of new software, and told her to call if she needed anything, before whizzing off eastwards on his ridiculous little vehicle. Hope settled in, pushed aside her doubts and got to work familiarising herself with the town and the monotonous sea of greenhouses surrounding it. Cedric’s backroom people had assembled a massive resource set of maps and satellite images, and a handful of high-def camdrones were busily quartering the town, collecting images to compile into street-view walkthroughs; they’d also, they claimed, fudged up a cover identity that would hold up to all but the most serious military-grade scrutiny. Hope had her doubts about that, but after a handful of days and a fairly drastic haircut, she was confident enough to hit the streets and pass herself off as just another new arrival, of which there were more and more each day.

  Eager and noisy gangs of geeks were descending on boarded-up villas, boutique hotels and bars, reactivating the inert infrastructure of the tourist sector, stripping buildings back to the bare envelope before festooning them with solar panels, screen-tarps, and sound-systems of deceptively prodigious wattage. The wide boulevard of Paseo los Lomas, quiet enough during the daylight hours, started to fill up with ragged revellers around 6pm; by 9 each night, with the heat of the day still radiating from the pavements, it resembled a cross between a pop-up music festival and a Spring Break riot. The few businesses still owned and operated by locals hung on for a few days, watching their stock fly off the shelves at premium prices, before selling up their operations lock, stock and barrel to expensively dressed men bearing bottomless yen-backed banker’s draughts.

  “I’d have been crazy not to sell,” a former restaurateur told Hope, as his wife and kids bundled their possessions into the trunk of a Noughties-vintage car retooled for biodiesel. Inside the building, an argument was breaking out between the new owners over which internal walls to knock through. “The mortgage has been under water for a decade, and they offer to pay it off in full? I’m not the crazy one here. They’re welcome to it,” he said, turning away.

  Inside the cafe, Hope found five geeks swinging sledgehammers into partition walls, watched over by a man so telegenic that he was almost anonymous, his office-casual clothes repelling the dust of the remodelling process.

  “Hey, girl,” the man drawled in approval. The geeks carried on hammering.

  “Hi!” she said, bright as a button. “So I just got into town, and I was wondering which are the best job-boards? There’s, like, so many to choose from.”

  The guy looked her up and down. “Guess it depends what sort of things you can do, doesn’t it, ah … Cordelia?”

  “That’s me!” The cover identity seemed to be working, at least. “I guess you’d say I was in administration?”

  “Not much call for admin at the moment, princess. Here.” He threw an url to her spex. “That’s the board for indies and non-specialists. You’re a bit late to pick up the best stuff, but you should be able to make some bank if you don’t price yourself out of the market. Or maybe one of the collectives will take you on contract for gophering? I’m sure these lads could find a space for a pretty little taskrabbit like yourself in their warren, couldn’t you, boys?”

  “Right on, Niceday, right on,” enthused a scrawny geek. “You want the url, girl?”

  “Please,” she lied. “I’mma shop around some more, though. See what my options are, you know?”

  “Whatevs,” shrugged the dusty kid. “Longer you leave it, less we’ll cut you in.”

  “You should listen to him, Cordelia,” said the well-dressed guy, stepping closer to her. “In business, it pays to be bold.” His eyes narrowed a little. “And loyal.”

  “Oh, sure! So what about your warren, Mister…?”

  “Niceday. And I don’t have a warren, I hire them.”

  “So you’re, like, a veecee or something?”

  Niceday smiled an oily sort of smile. “Or something,” he agreed. The smile vanished as he locked eyes with her. “Choose wisely, Cordelia, and choose soon. This isn’t the time or place for … observing from the sidelines. Unless you’re with the UN, of course.”

  “Haha, right! Well, ah, thanks for the advice,” said Hope, her heart hammering against her ribs, and beat a swift retreat.

  * * *

  The mood on the periphery of the town was in sharp contrast to the raucous debauch of the centre. The greenhouse workers—almost all youngish North African men—were packed like matches into street after street of undermaintained tourist villas and former residential blocks, with the more recent arrivals living in slums built of breezeblocks and plastic sheeting on the vacant lots where the plastic ocean broke upon the dark edges of the town. Hope spent a few hours wandering from coffeeshop to shisha-shack, trying every trick in the interviewer’s book to get them to talk. They were happy enough to have drinks bought for them on Cedric’s dime, and to complain at length about work in the abstract as they demolished plates of tapas and meze, but questions about actual working conditions led only to sullen, tense silences, or the sudden inability of the formerly fluent to speak a word of Spanish.

  “You only ask about our work so you can steal our jobs,” a gaunt man accused her toward the end of the evening, pointing his long, scarred finger at her through a cloud of fragrant shisha smoke. “For so long, no one else will do this work so cheap. Now all you people come back, make trouble for us.”

  She tried dropping her cover a bit, and played the journalist card; big mistake.

  “Journalists, they don’t make good stories about us, ever. We are always the villains, the evil A
rabs, no?”

  She protested her innocence and good intentions, but he had a point. Hope’s background research had uncovered a history of tension between the greenhouse workers and the local residents that stretched back to before she was born: grimly vague and one-sided stories in the archives of now-moribund local news outlets about forced evictions, arson, and the sort of casual but savage violence between young men that always marks periods of socioeconomic strife. The attacks had lessened as the local youth migrated northwards in search of better work, but there was a lingering vibe of siege mentality among the remaining immigrants, and their dislike for the influx of favela geeks was tangible.

  “Go back to your rich friends,” the man repeated, jabbing his finger for emphasis. “It is they who are meddling, trying to make us look bad! We’ll not help you pin it on us.”

  “Pin what on you?” Hope asked, suddenly alert to the closeness of the knowledge she needed, but the guy’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened and he shook his head, and the whole place went silent and tense, and Hope was horribly aware of being the only woman in a dark smoky room full of unfamiliar men speaking an unfamiliar language.

  She stammered out some apologies, paid her tab and left quickly, but the damage was done. From that point on, the workers refused to talk to her. As the days passed, there were a few ugly incidents in alleyways late at night: botched muggings, running brawls, a few serious stabbings on both sides. But the geeks were confident in their new-found dominion, not to mention better fed and equipped, and the workers had no one on their side, least of all the employers they’d never met, and who only communicated with them via the medium of e-mailed quotas and output itineries. If Hope wanted to get to the bottom of whatever was going on, she was going to have to do more than ask around.

  * * *

  Most of the geeks worked by day in jury-rigged refrigerated shipping containers and partied by night, but Cedric’s backroom people had tipped her off to the existence of a small night shift that drifted out into the greenhouse ocean around midnight and returned before dawn. They’d furnished Hope’s villa with an assortment of technological bits and bobs, including an anonymously military-looking flight-case containing three semi-autonomous AV drones about the size of her fist. She spent an afternoon syncing them up with her spex and jogging around among the miniature palms and giant aloes in her compound, getting the hang of the interface, then waited for night to fall before decking herself out in black like some amateur ninja and sneaking along the rooftops toward the edge of town, using the raucous noise of the evening fiesta as cover. Spotting a small knot of kids heading northwards out of town, she sent two drones forward to tail them, one to run overwatch, and followed after at a distance she assumed would keep her out of sight, or at least give her plenty of time to cut and run if she was spotted.