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

by Gardner Dozois

  She reaches for the gun. Josef howls in frustration, and lunges for her throat. His teeth rip into her oesophagus, and she feels his jaw snap shut on her windpipe. His hair fills her face, and he’s heavy on her chest. She can’t breathe, and wonders how many others have died like this. How many others, because of her, and what she taught him?

  Josef pulls back, his face dripping with her blood and, as Paige gasps for breath, the wound bubbles.

  Josef snatches the photograph from her unresisting fingers. She tries to move her arms, but can’t. Josef’s speaking, but the fangs make it difficult and she can’t hear him over the roaring in her ears. Her eyes swivel around in panic, looking for help. The guests in the other rooms must be awake now, and cowering behind their peepholes. Some at least will have called the police.

  Then, as she twists her head, she catches movement in the room behind her. Federico stumbles into the light. The boy looks dazed and frightened; there are scratch marks on his face, but he has the shotgun in his hands.

  There’s a flash, and Josef jerks. Part of his face disappears, bitten off by the blast. Another flash, and he topples from Paige like a puppet with its strings cut, knocking his head against the doorframe as he falls.

  Paige slaps a palm over the sucking wound in her neck, pinching the skin together, hoping she can heal before she suffocates.

  Federico bends over her. Wordless, she points to the coil gun, and he kicks it over.

  “Help me up,” she croaks. As long as she keeps her hand covering the injury, her vocal chords still work.

  With Federico’s hands under her shoulders, she struggles to her feet and coughs up a wad of blood. She feels unsteady, but each breath is easier than the last.

  Josef lies in a spreading patch of red-soaked carpet. One of his eyes is completely gone; that side of his face is a gory ruin; but the other seems miraculously untouched, and still beautiful. His hands twitch on the carpet like angry spiders.

  Paige plucks the slippery, homemade throwing stars from her forearm, and tosses them aside. She points the coil gun at Josef’s heart. Dimly, she can hear sirens pulling up on the street outside.

  Josef’s remaining eyelid flutters. She knows he’s down, but he’s obviously not out.

  She says, “How many people have you killed, Josef?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she pulls the trigger. The gun whines and his chest blows apart. His heels scrape at the floor, as if trying to escape, and she raises the gun to his face.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  She looks away as she fires, and she keeps the trigger depressed until the magazine clicks empty.

  When she looks back, Josef’s head’s gone, and there’s a hole in the floor.

  The photograph of his daughter falls from his fingers.

  He’s dead.

  She sticks the spent gun back in her belt. For some reason, her smashed cheek hurts more than her torn throat. She looks around to find Federico leaning on the doorframe.

  Paige hawks red phlegm onto the carpet. Then she leans down and takes hold of Josef’s boot. Gritting her teeth, she drags his body back into her ruined hotel room. Moving slowly and painfully, she retrieves the vodka bottle from the dressing table, spins the lid off, and raises the bottle in a toast to her fallen student. She stands over him for a long moment. Then she takes a deep swallow, which makes her cough.

  “Goodbye, Josef,” she says. There’s nothing else to say. There’s no triumph here, no closure, nothing but bone-deep weariness. Solemnly, she pours the remaining contents of the bottle—most of a litre of spirit—over his chest and legs; then she pulls a complimentary matchbook from the desk, and strikes one.

  The wet clothes go up in a woof of blue flame. The fire spills onto the carpet, and the room fills with smoke.

  Paige opens the desk drawer and takes out another clip of ammo for the coil gun. Then she limps back to Federico.

  “I have to go,” she says. She has to move on to the next target, the next time zone.

  A fire alarm rings, and the sprinklers go off. The shotgun’s on the floor at Federico’s feet. He’s holding the photograph of Josef’s daughter. Water’s running down his face, streaking his cheeks. His dreads are soaked.

  “You’re a fucking monster,” he says.

  Paige puts a hand to the torn flesh of her throat. She can feel the sides stitching themselves back together.

  “I know,” she says.

  And with that, she fades away.

  Coma Kings

  JESSICA BARBER

  Those of you who complain that your kids are addicted to computer games might want to take a look at the compelling family drama that follows, which warns us that you ain’t seen nothing yet.

  New writer Jessica Barber grew up in Tennessee, but moved to New England to attend MIT, where she studied physics and electrical engineering. After a brief stint building rocket ships in southern California, she returned to Cambridge, where she now spends her days developing open-source electronics, with a focus on tools for neuroscience. Her work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons and Lightspeed.

  So I guess the story begins, fittingly, with someone handing me a Coma rig and saying, play me.

  Two a.m. and I’m at this party in somebody’s trailer out in the trashy part of town. I’m stoned out of my mind and there’s something on the television, either one of those cheesy infomercials or some sort of comedy thing making fun of those cheesy infomercials, and I’m trying to figure out which. I keep turning to the kid sprawled out beside me and saying, “Is this for real? Or is this like, a joke?” and he keeps blinking at me and going, “What? I don’t…” and then trailing off. And so I’m deep into this important cultural assessment when somebody shoves a Coma rig into my hands.

  “Fuck off,” I say, even though my fingers automatically curl into the wires. “I’m stoned, I don’t wanna play.”

  “Come on,” says the guy who handed me the rig. “You’re Jenny, right? I hear you’re really good,” he says. True. “I hear you’re like, the best in the state, easy.” Not true, because of Annie, but I guess he’s not counting her. “I’ve wanted to play you like, forever.”

  Either I’m really susceptible to flattery when stoned, or I actually just want to be playing Coma all the time, twenty-four/seven, no matter what, but either way I say fine and start to pull on the rig.

  In each of my temples there are three distinct depressions, dents where the electrodes of my own rig have sat for hours on end. When I play Coma using my own gear, pulling on the headpiece feels like slotting a puzzle piece into place, but this kid’s rig is too big for me, not broken in. I try my best to align the electrodes properly, but in the end I just can’t get it to sit right, so I say fuck it and let it go all crooked. If you’ve played Coma you know this is a dumb idea, because it means the calibration will be all off and it will make you play like a spaz, but this is a throwaway game and I figure, who cares. I slide the opaque goggles over my eyes, fumble for the headphones and settle their huge soft cups over my ears, and the world disappears.

  This is the point where usually I’d access my own personal Coma account, but like I said, I’m stoned, the rig doesn’t fit, and I don’t want some stupid throwaway game to drop me in the rankings. So I log in as a guest on the kid’s account instead.

  Which is what fucks me over so badly, in the end.

  * * *

  When Coma first came out, it was this gimmicky thing, a rich kid’s game, nothing I cared about or could have afforded if I did. I played for the first time at a mall. One of those demo booths set up spanning the food court, and the only thing I noticed about it then was that it was blocking my way to Sbarro’s. I hadn’t been interested, but Annie thought it looked like the coolest thing ever, and she begged me to let her play.

  Forget it, I’d said, it looks stupid, I’m hungry, but she whined until I told her fine, get in line. Tough luck for her, though, you had to be thirteen and at the time she was only eleven. I played just to s
pite her, since I was fourteen and made the age cutoff.

  I love how you can do these things that fuck you over forever, that change your goddamn life, and not even care at the time, not even know.

  I won that first game at the mall easily, even though I had no clue what I was doing. Then I won the next game, and the game after that too, and by the end of the day I had more wins than anybody else and guess what that meant? Two free Coma rigs for the trouble.

  I planned on selling them. They were going for five hundred bucks apiece, I mean, shit. But when we got home Annie goaded me into playing against her. Well, she won, of course, you know that much, and then I could hardly sell them off, could I? Not until I beat her.

  I suppose you can guess how long it took for that to happen.

  * * *

  I should probably tell you how that game at the party went, but I never know how to explain Coma when I’m out of the rig. It’s not like chess or something, it never makes sense when your brain is in the real world. If you really care, the game is on record, like every other game of Coma ever played.

  It’s not worth watching; the kid is fucking terrible. We turn on our rigs and there’s nothing. I start building a box. Then there’s nothing but the inside of my box. One corner starts to crumble a little, and that’s the kid trying real hard, but then I just make it not crumble and that’s the end of that. I place a single white stone in the center of the box, and the game is over.

  All of this is hardly worth telling you, except for what happens next. I feel the kid log out in a huff, and I’m about to do the same. But then there’s a ping up in the left corner of my consciousness, letting me know that Annie is requesting a game, and it’s a good thing I’m sitting down back in the real world because otherwise I would have fallen right over.

  Here’s the thing. I have been trying to get Annie to play me again literally for years. I have sent game requests, again and again, and have gotten rejected each time. She absolutely will not play me. And now she’s been tricked, she doesn’t know it’s me, I finally get to play her, and here I am: wasted out of my mind with a Coma rig that doesn’t even fit.

  If I were slightly less stoned, I might have started crying. As it is, I can’t even try to play, can’t even make the vaguest real effort because I know I’ll just get slaughtered, immediately, without mercy. Instead I start building useless structures, crumbling shapes that spell out Annie, it’s me, come back, I miss you.

  The shock buys me about two solid minutes before Annie annihilates me and I am kicked out of the game. I can’t even bring myself to try and send her messages, try to request another chance. I just pull myself back into the real world, gut hurt and gasping for air.

  I get home several hours before dawn, but my mother is up, sitting at the kitchen table and turning an unlit cigarette in her fingers, staring at the vinyl tabletop. The long walk home has cleared my head a bit, but I still feel shell-shocked, like there’s something sharp worming its way through the spaces between my organs. Like I’m going to burst apart at any moment.

  My mother doesn’t look at me. “Where you been?”

  “Went to a party,” I say. “Told you I was gonna go.” She makes a rough noise, deep in her throat, and I keep talking before she can say whatever it is she’s sitting on. “How’s Annie? You checked in on her?”

  “She’s the same as ever, what do you think?” Ma says, which I take to mean no.

  I try not to grit my teeth. “You still gotta check on her,” I mutter, move to squeeze past her but her hand darts out, catching me around the forearm.

  “Don’t you tell me how I gotta care for my own child,” she snaps. Her cheap fake nails have half broken off, and their edges bite deep crescents into the underside of my wrist. We glare at each other until she releases me.

  I bite down hard on the sides of my tongue and shove my way into the room I share with Annie.

  Annie lies on her bed, just like she always does, a vanishing outline of a human body under a nubbly blanket, her head obscured by goggles, oversized headphones. She is surrounded by a small forest of medical equipment: stands for IV drips and catheter bags and heart rate monitors with their slow steady pulse of life.

  The port at the base of her skull is hidden among pillows, under wide bandages. No electrodes. She doesn’t need those anymore.

  Once I would have been overwhelmed by the urge to rip away every bit of equipment that surrounds her. Fuck, I’ll admit it: More than once I have given into this urge, but by now I know it doesn’t make any difference. She still lies there, just as unresponsive but now stripped bare, the heart rate monitor sending up a wailing protest in her absence.

  So I don’t touch her. I just slide to the floor, scrape my thighs and palms across the synthetic roughness of the carpet and glare. “Goddammit, Annie,” I tell her.

  There is a sound from the doorway and I fling myself around to face my mother, cheeks burning. She isn’t looking at me, though. Her eyes are trained on Annie.

  “I can’t keep this up forever, you know,” she says. “It ain’t cheap. They don’t give me enough to look after her right. Sooner or later, we’re gonna have to let her go.”

  She has been threatening this for years.

  I don’t respond, just turn around and fit my molars together, like a small child, like if I pretend she isn’t there maybe she’ll disappear.

  It doesn’t work. It never does.

  * * *

  “Jennifer, I really need to see you applying yourself,” says Miss Denton. “You’ve already missed two tests this quarter, and I haven’t gotten any homework at all from you yet.”

  I used to like school. I mean, maybe “like” is a strong word. But it was all right. These days, when I manage to go, it feels like trying to pull my limbs through molasses, impossibly difficult and never-ending. This is a compounding problem. It’s hard enough getting my ass to school by seven-thirty in the morning on a good day. Getting my ass to school when I’m just going to get yelled at for the last time I failed to get my ass to school is just adding indignity to injustice.

  “I know,” I say. “I’m going to make them up, honest. I’ve just been…” I don’t know what to say, here. Tired, is what almost comes out of my mouth. But that’s not the sort of excuse you can use.

  I can tell by the way Miss Denton’s expression folds in on itself that she is supplying her own narrative. Poor Jennifer, with her crazy sister. Miss Denton wears tiny frameless glasses perched on the end of her nose, and she takes them off to polish them, stalling for time. “I know it’s been a hard year for you,” she begins.

  Christ, I’m tired of this speech. I know it’s rude, but I let my body hunch forward, rest my forehead against the laminate desktop. It’s cool, and slightly sticky. I don’t even have the energy to be disgusted.

  Miss Denton perseveres. “I know it’s been a hard year for you. But your junior year is just starting, and your grades right now are so important for college. You do still want to go to college, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I say, because I am supposed to. I wonder if it’s true. Standard small town dream: Make it out, make it somewhere far away.

  I wonder if they’d let me keep Annie in my dorm room.

  * * *

  I don’t make it to second period. I get to the door, then think of sitting at a desk for a solid hour and a half, the real world feeling cramped and finite, and just can’t. I find myself pushing through a side door out into the parking lot, twisting my way through rows of cars baking in the early sun. I can feel my rig tucked safe in my trunk, like a fucking siren song, and before I can think, I’m angling my steering wheel toward the city.

  People go to Coma parlors for one of two reasons.

  The first reason—why I go—is just to have a safe, quiet space to play Coma uninterrupted. The full-immersion aspect means it’s different than how gaming used to be. You can’t yell at your mom to get out of your room, or shove the cat away if it walks across the keyboard. Or worse
, if something catches fire, or you’ve got a crazed family member screaming obscenities and threatening to kill you. If you’re planning to really settle in for a long game, better to be someplace supervised, someplace safe.

  The second reason people go to Coma parlors is to hack their rigs. For some people, tweaking the electronics is just as much of a draw as actually playing the game. They think adding extra electrodes, overclocking the microprocessor, whatever-the-fuck else will give them an edge, help them achieve some sort of in-game nirvana. I think this is mostly bullshit; I use two-year-old stock parts and the occasional firmware upgrade, and I play better than most of the gearheads. Plus, we all know what it actually takes to get to that place of inseparability from the game.

  There just aren’t very many people willing to go that far.

  Lady K’s place looks like somebody’s garage workshop. Bare cinderblock walls, concrete floor. There’s a smattering of institutional couches around the outer edge, about half taken up by prone bodies, but the majority of its real estate is occupied by long, cobbled-together workbenches, ringed by kids bent industriously over the exploded innards of their Coma rigs. Soldering irons send fine wisps of smoke upward; someone’s running a Dremel carefully along the rim of their goggles.

  The eponymous Lady K, a short, apple-cheeked chick who can’t be much older than me, is peering into a microscope when I come in, but she looks up at the door chime and gives me a little grin. I’m not in here often enough to be considered a regular, but Lady K knows me regardless. I’m higher ranked than anybody else who plays here, which probably helps my notoriety.

  That, and Annie.

  Always fucking Annie.

  “Hey Jenny,” says Lady K. “You working on something today? Or just playing?”

  “Just playing, for now,” I say. “Can I crash out on that couch?”

  “Go for it,” says Lady K, and minutes later I am deep in Coma.