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

by Gardner Dozois

  After about half an hour, the geeks paused and split up. Hope hunkered down just close enough to still receive the feed from her drones, then flew them slow and low down the narrow gaps between the greenhouses, using an IR overlay to pick out the warm bodies among the endless identical walls of plastic, and settled down to watch.

  Hope was no agricultural technician, but there was plenty of public info about the basic design of the greenhouses: long tunnels of solarised plastic sheeting with automated ventilation flaps covered row after row of hydroponic medium, into which mixtures of precious water and bespoke nutrients were dribbled at algorithmically optimised rates, depending on the species under cultivation. Over the years, more and more of the climate control and hydroponics had been automated, but the hapless workers still had the unenviable task of shuffling up and down the greenhouses on their knees during the heat of the day, checking closely on the health and development of their charges; the consequences of quality control failures were draconian, in that it meant being sacked and blacklisted for further employment. The only reason they’d not been replaced by robots was that robots couldn’t do the sort of delicate and contextual work that the greenhouses required; it was still way cheaper to get some poor mug straight off the boat from Morocco and teach him how to trim blight and pluck aphids than it was to invest in expensive hardware that couldn’t make those sorts of qualitative decisions on the fly. Plus the supply of desperate immigrants was effectively inexhaustible, and their wage demands were kept low by Europe’s endemic problem with unemployment. In Spain, as in much of the rest of the world, automation had been eating away at the employment base from the middle class downwards, rather than from the bottom upwards … and the more white-collar gigs it consumed, the larger and more desperate the working class became. There was barely a form of manual labour left that you couldn’t design a machine to do just as well as a human, but hiring a human had far lower up-front costs. Plus you could simply replace them when they wore out, at no extra expense.

  The geek night shift wasn’t doing the work of the greenhouse guys, that was for sure. Of the trio Hope was watching, one was squatting on the ground over a handheld he’d plugged in to the server unit at the end of the greenhouse module, another was fiddling around with the nutrient reservoirs, and the third was darting in and out of the little airlock next to the guy fiddling with the server. Lost in the scene unfolding in front of her eyes, Hope steered one of her drones in for a closer look as the third guy reemerged with his fists full of foot-long seedlings, which he threw to the ground before picking up a tray of similar-looking cuttings and slipping back inside.

  She was just bringing her second forward drone around for a closer look at the reservoir tanks when her spex strobed flash-bulb white three times in swift succession, causing her to shriek in shock and discomfort. Blinded and disoriented, she stood and started running in what she assumed was the direction she’d come, but tripped on some pipe or conduit and fell through the wall of a greenhouse. She thrashed about, trying to free herself from a tangled matrix of plastic sheeting and tomato plants, but strong hands grabbed her ankles and hauled her out roughly onto the path. She put her hands up to protect her face as a strong flashlight seared her already aching eyes. At least I’m not permanently blind, she thought to herself, absurdly.

  “Stay still,” grunted a Nordic-sounding man, and she was flipped over onto her front, before someone sat on her legs and zip-tied her hands behind her back.

  “I’ve got a bunch of drones out here,” she threatened.

  “No,” replied the Viking voice, “you had three. We only have one. But unlike yours, ours has a MASER instead of a camera.”

  Hope stopped struggling.

  * * *

  Dawn took a long time to come. When it arrived, Hope’s two hulking assailants fetched her out of the shipping container they’d locked her in, bundled her into the back of an equally windowless van, then drove eastwards in stony silence, ignoring her attempts at conversation. They delivered her to the reception room of a top-floor suite at the Hotel Catedral, where a familiar face was waiting for her.

  “Ah, Cordelia … or should I say Hope?” drawled Niceday. “We meet again!”

  Hope kneaded her wrists, where the cable-tie had left deep red weals. “You could have just pinged my calendar for an appointment,” she snarked.

  “I work to my own schedule, not yours. Nor Cedric’s, for that matter. How’s he doing, anyway?”

  “Ask him yourself,” she shot back. “I just work for him.”

  “Quod erat demonstrandum,” said Niceday, leaning against a drinks cabinet. “He’s always been a great collector of … novelties.”

  “You know him well, then?”

  Niceday laughed, but didn’t reply.

  “Why are those kids out hacking greenhouses in the middle of the night?”

  “That’s literally none of your business, Hope.”

  “But it is your business?”

  “Mine, yes, and that of my associates. There are laws against industrial espionage, you know.”

  “There are also laws to protect journalists from being kidnapped in the course of their work.”

  “But you’re not a journalist, Hope.” Niceday snapped his fingers. A hidden projector flashed up a copy of Hope’s contract with Huginn&Muninn onto the creamy expanse of the wall. “Qualitative economist, it says here. Good cover for an industrial spy, I’d say.”

  “I’m not a spy. I’m a social scientist.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  Hope opened her mouth to reply, then closed it.

  “You should listen to your gut instincts more often,” Niceday continued. “Isn’t that what journalists do? I hope that, after this little chat, your gut instincts will be to stay the hell away from my taskrabbits.”

  “What are you going to do if I don’t—have me disappear?”

  “Don’t dream it’s beyond my reach, girl,” he snapped. “Or that I couldn’t get you and Cedric tangled up in a lawsuit long enough to keep you out of my hair—and out of sight—for years to come.”

  “So why haven’t you?”

  The smile returned. “Lawyers are expensive. Much cheaper to simply persuade you to cease and desist, mano a mano, so to speak.”

  “That rather implies you have something to hide.”

  “Oh, Hope—who doesn’t have something to hide? Only those with nothing to lose. Do you think Cedric has nothing to hide? Weren’t you hiding behind a false name yourself?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But nothing. You’ve no moral high ground here, Hope. You can write a story about my taskrabbits and try to get it published somewhere, if you like, but you’ll find there’s no respectable organ that’ll run it. Takes a lot of money to keep a good news outlet running, you know, and ads just don’t cover it.” He shook his head in mock lament. “Or you could publish it online yourself, independently, of course. But you might find that some stories about you were published around the same time. The sort of stories that kill careers in journalism and research stone dead: fabricated quotes, fiddled expenses, false identities, kickbacks, tax evasion, that sort of thing.”

  “So you’re threatening me, now?”

  Niceday arched an eyebrow. “Hope, I just had two large men zip-tie your wrists together and lock you in a shipping container for four hours.”

  Hope felt the fight drain out of her. “Yeah, fair point.”

  “We understand each other, then. Good. Now, you get back to your fieldwork. The boys will drive you back to El Ejido, if you like.”

  “You’re just going to let me go?”

  He laughed again. “If I thought you or Cedric could do any lasting damage to my business plan, you’d have never got within a hundred klicks of Almeria. Do you think it says ‘Niceday’ on any of my passports? Do you think this face matches any official records, that this voice is on file somewhere? I might as well not exist, as far as law enforcement is concerned; far less paperwork that
way.” He crossed his arms. “Keeping your nose out of my affairs going forward is just a way of avoiding certain more permanent sorts of clean-up operation. Do you understand me?”

  Hope stared at him: six foot something of surgically perfected West Coast beefcake, wearing clothes that she’d need to take out a mortgage to buy, and the snake-like smile of a man utterly accustomed to getting his own way.

  “Who are you?” she wondered aloud. “Who are you, really?”

  He spread his arms in benediction, like that Jesus statue in Brazil before the Maoists blew it up.

  “We,” he intoned, “are the opportunity that recognises itself.”

  She didn’t understand him at all. She suspected she never would.

  * * *

  Around five weeks after she’d arrived, the storm finally broke, and Hope found herself riding shotgun in General Weissmuutze’s truck on the highway toward the port facility at Almeria, weaved along between an implacable and close-packed column of self-driving shipping containers. The hard shoulder was host to a Morse code string of greenhouse workers, moving a little faster on foot than the solar-powered containers, backs bent beneath their bundles of possessions. The General was less than happy.

  “I have a team down at the airport; the private planes are leaving as quickly as they can arrange a take-off window. And then there’s the port,” she complained, gesturing out of the passenger-side window toward the sea, where Hope could see a denser knot than usual of ships large and small waiting for their time at dockside. “Every spare cubic foot of freight capacity on the entire Mediterranean, it looks like. They’re trying to clear as much of the produce as they can before I can seal the port.”

  Weisskopf’s team had been awoken by an urgent voicecall from the FDA in the United States. A routine drugs-ring bust by the FBI somewhere in the ghost-zones of Detroit had uncovered not the expected bales of powder or barrels of pills, but crate after crate of Almerian tomatoes. After taking a few samples to a lab, they discovered that the fruit’s flesh and juice contained a potent designer stimulant connected to a spate of recent overdoses, and informed the FDA. The FDA began the process of filing with Washington for an embargo on imports from Almeria, before informing the Spanish government and the UN, who’d patched them straight through to Weissmuutze in hopes of getting things locked down quickly.

  “Scant chance of that,” said Weissmuutze later, as they watched the ineffectual thin blue line of the Almerian police force collapse under a wave of immigrant workers trying to climb the fence into the container port. “The Spanish government doesn’t have much reach outside of the big cities, and they handed the port over as a free-trade zone about a decade ago. The consortium is supposed to supply its own security, but…” She shrugged her bearlike shoulders. “My people are deactivating all the containers they can now the highway’s blocked, but these poor bastards know that means there’ll be more space for passengers.”

  Hope watched as the front line of workers reached the fence and began lobbing their bags and bundles over it, shaking at the fencepoles. “I think they’ve known this was coming for a while,” said Hope.

  “We’ve all known something was coming,” muttered Weissmuutze. “Exactly what it is that’s arrived is another question entirely.”

  Hope left Weisskopf and her peacekeepers to supervise the developing riot as best they could and headed for the airport, where Ian was lurking at Cedric’s behest. The concourse bar was crowded with men who wore the bland handsomeness of elective surgery with the same casual ease as their quietly expensive Valley-boy uniform of designer jeans, trainers, and polo-necks.

  “Honestly!” protested Ian over the rim of his mojito. “This is only my first one, and I only bought it ’cause they’d nae let me keep my table if I didn’t.”

  Hope filled him in on happenings at the port. “What’s happening here, then?”

  “Looks like the circus is leaving town. Well, the ringmasters, at any rate. Hisself hoped I might be able to get some answers, but it’s like I’m invisible or something, they’ll nae talk to me…”

  Hope sighed and scanned the room via the smallest and subtlest of her drones, finally spotting a familiar mask. Donning her own she made her way over to the end of the bar, where Niceday was sat nursing a highball of something peaty and expensive. “Ms Dawson, we meet again. Are you flying today?”

  “I put myself on the stand-by list, but for some reason I’m not expecting any luck.”

  “Oh, very good,” he replied, flashing a vulpine grin. “Are you sure you’re not looking for a career change? I can always find work for girls with a bit of character, you know.”

  Yeah, I’ll bet you can. “My current contract is ongoing, Mister Niceday, but thanks for the offer. You’re moving on from Almeria, then?”

  “Yeah—the party’s over, but there’ll be another one soon enough, somewhere. The lions must follow the wildebeest, amirite?”

  “If the party’s over, who’s in charge of cleaning up?”

  Niceday waved a hand in breezy dismissal. “The UN has been here a while, hasn’t it? They know what they’re doing.”

  “They know what you’ve been doing, too.”

  “Fulfilling the demands of the market, you mean?”

  “Manufacturing drugs, I mean.”

  “Oh, I forgot—all drugs are bad, aren’t they, unless they’re being made by and sold to the right people? Besides, if those drugs weren’t illegal or patented, I wouldn’t be able to make any profit from doing so. Market forces, girl. I don’t mark out the field, I just play the game.”

  “So this is some ideological crusade, then?”

  “Nah,” he replied, warming to his theme. “More an opportunity that was too good to pass up. My colleagues”—he gestured around the crowded bar—“and I had been doing business around south Asia, making use of all the redundant 3d printing capacity out there that the fabbing bubble left behind. But recent changes in feedstock legislation made it much harder to produce … ah, viable products, let’s say. If you want feedstock that produces durable high-performance materials … well, you might as well try buying drug precursors, right? Serious regulation, poor risk/reward ratio. Boring.

  “Now, I’d been watching the local markets here for some time, flipping deeds and water futures for chump change while I kept an eye open, when I had my little revelation: the greenhouses of Almeria were basically a huge networked organic 3D printer, and the only feedstocks it needed were water, fertiliser and sunlight. And while it couldn’t print durable products, it could handle the synthesis of very complex molecules. Plants are basically a chemical reactor with a free-standing physical structure, you see, though my geneticist friends assure me that’s a terrible oversimplification.”

  “So you just started growing tweaked plants right away?”

  “Not quite, no; it took a few weeks to set up the shell companies, liaise with buyers, and get the right variants cooked up in the lab. Not to mention getting all our taskrabbits housed and happy! Then it was just a case of getting buyers to file legitimate orders with a grower, set the taskrabbits to handle the seedling switcheroos and hack the greenhouse system’s growth parameters. Intense growing regimes mean you can turn over full-grown tomato plants in about three weeks. Biotech is astonishing stuff, isn’t it?”

  “You’re not even ashamed, are you?” Hope wondered aloud.

  “Why should I be?” His frown was like something a Greek statue might wear. “I delivered shareholder value, I shipped product, and I even maintained local employment levels a little longer than they’d have otherwise lasted. We are the wealth creators, Miz Dawson. Without us, nothing happens.”

  “But what happens after you leave?”

  A look of genuine puzzlement crossed Niceday’s face. “How should I know?” He glanced away into some dataspace or another, then stood and downed his drink. “Gotta go, my gulfstream’s boarding. Sure I can’t tempt you with a new position?” The smile was suave, but the eye beneath the rai
sed eyebrow was anything but.

  “Very.”

  “Shame—waste of your talents, chasing rainbows for Cedric. The option’s always there if you change your mind.”

  “And how would I let you know if I did?”

  Niceday winked, grinned again, then turned and vanished into the crowd. Hope went back to find Ian, who was getting impatient.

  “Waitresses still will nae serve me, dammit. All ah want’s a coke!”

  “I think they’re concentrating on the big tippers while they can,” Hope replied; he rolled his eyes. “C’mon, let’s get back to El Ejido. Weisskopf says it’s all kicking off down at the container port. She wants us civvies out of the way.”

  Ian sighed. “You’ll never guess where the trike’s parked.”

  * * *

  Things fell apart fast after Niceday and his fellow disruptors moved on. It soon became apparent that, absent the extra profit margin obtained by growing and shipping what the international media was already waggishly referring to as “FruitPlus,” a perfect storm of economic factors had finally rendered Almerian greenhouse agriculture a loss-making enterprise. Cedric’s quants spent long nights in their boutique hotel arguing heatedly over causal factors, but the general consensus was that relentless overabstraction of water from the regional aquifer had bumped up against escalating shipping costs and the falling spot-price of produce from other regions. Chinese investment in large-scale irrigation projects on the other side of the Med were probably involved, somehow; if nothing else, it explained the mass exodus of the immigrant workers. Those that had failed to get out on the empty freighters had descended on the dessicated former golf resorts along the coastline, squatting the sand-blown shells of holiday villas and retirement homes left empty by the bursting of the property bubble, fighting over crouching space in the scale-flecked holds of former fishing vessels whose captains saw midnight repatriation cruises as a supplement to their legitimate work.