Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  He loomed, near invisible in the shadows. He didn’t even breathe and at least didn’t keen anymore, didn’t feel that level of pain at the upset. But his hand landed on my shoulder and clenched. Only his footfalls made sound as he followed me down the hall to the bedroom, which had become a refuge from all that scared him. A routine of safety.

  I levered myself to the bed to sit and he climbed on beside me, legs and arms folded. Not quite with his back to the door or window, he never allowed that, but he eased into facing me at an angle at least.

  And this was how we waited out the storm.

  Of course my mother had a key to my house; she’d insisted after I’d gotten out of the hospital, “just in case” living on my own in my “state” proved too difficult. Maybe I should’ve anticipated her worry. Every time she called she implied that Mark was a ticking bomb, so I just stopped answering her calls. Maybe she was in the neighborhood or maybe she did get in her car to drive a half hour to check if I was alive. Either way, through the storm she arrived and through the storm Mark heard her before I did.

  We sat in the near-dark and I was reading to him from the light of my comm. “‘He saw that to be firm soldiers they must go forward. It would be death to stay in the present place . . . ’” And at that exact moment Mark launched off the bed and out the door with the precision of a guided missile.

  I was fumbling for my chair, images in my mind of fang-toothed, angry neighbors storming my front door with pitchforks, when my mother’s shriek penetrated every surface between the foyer and my bedroom.

  “Mark!” Ass in the seat, hands on the wheels. “Mark!” I rolled out to see my mother face down on the floor, arms triangled behind her back, wrists caught in the vise of Mark’s one-handed grip. “Stand down, soldier.”

  “Get him off me, Tawn! Get this crazy fu—”

  “Shut up, Mom!” I stopped close enough to touch Mark’s arm. Beneath his sleeve felt like iron. I kept my voice quiet because I couldn’t see his eyes in the dark: “It’s okay. It’s my mother. It’s okay.” I repeated it until he let her go and stepped back near to the wall. Becoming motionless.

  “Mom.”

  “He’s crazy! What did I tell you!”

  “Mom, tone it down.” I didn’t offer to help her up. She wouldn’t have accepted it.

  She propelled herself to her feet in a pitch and yaw. “Look what he did to my wrists!” She stuck her hands toward me. In the cracks of lightning and illumination, I saw vague shadows. Maybe bruises.

  “You’re all right, you’re fine. Come sit down. You should’ve rung the doorbell, he thought you were breaking in.”

  “I have a key!”

  “I told you to call ahead.”

  “My own son!”

  I went to Mark and held his sleeve. “Come over here, man.” My mother wasn’t listening; she could stand by the door and bleat until it passed.

  Mark followed me to the living room where I hoped he would sit, but instead he went to the window, his post, and stared out. He didn’t have to breathe and he didn’t say a word, but I knew the entire ruckus unnerved him. There was no other word for it. It reverbed through my body.

  “Is that what he does all day?” my mother demanded behind me.

  “Can you at least lower your voice? You aren’t helping.”

  “I’m not helping!”

  “MOM.”

  We both stopped. Mark had turned around, now with his back to the window. His body blotted out what light came in from the street, creating a vacuum in my vision. So he could face us dead on. It was like the stare of a sarcophagus.

  My mother turned her back to him. “I’m worried for you, Tawn.”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “This isn’t normal. Look at him!”

  “He’s fine. We’re fine. We—”

  But she wasn’t listening. She began to walk around, feeling her way through the dark toward the office. Or my bedroom. It was so sudden when the lights flickered on and held that I had to blink spots from my vision. And in those moments Mark disappeared.

  After her.

  “Mark!”

  I couldn’t roll fast enough. I recognized his mode. Full protection, decisive defense. What he’d been built for. I wanted to hold him back but this was his nature. He wasn’t the one unnerved, he wasn’t the one concerned for himself. It was my voice he heard, that his programming responded to. My voice and its irritation and tension and impatience.

  In the seconds it took me to get from the living room to my bedroom where my mother had gone, I saw it ahead of me. In the span of his back and the straightness of his spine. In the precise way he seized my mother before she could set hands on my possessions. He spun her around.

  She struck him. Reflex or intent, I didn’t know. Of course it didn’t affect him at all, didn’t even bruise him. He didn’t flinch.

  Instead he dragged her to my window, opened it, and pitched her out.

  Luckily my house was a bungalow.

  She said she’d wanted to pack me a bag and take me away from any danger. That if she did that for me I couldn’t protest and would’ve been forced to go with her and ditch this mad idea of taking care of a military model. She had never understood that we wanted to take care of ourselves.

  She didn’t understand—when the VA engineers came to take him away— that he was my company and I was his.

  In the hospital they ran more tests on him. It was procedure because she’d filed a complaint. I gave my own statement: that he’d felt I was threatened, that he’d only been defending me, that my mother was crazy in her own right (I reworded that part a little). She’d disregarded my words and his existence. If I restricted her access to me or she learned to interact better, there would be no more problems.

  And, yes, I wanted him home again. He belonged there—where I could read to him, where we could play games, and where he might one day be able to speak to me. He’d made a place beside me and at my window. He’d learned my routines and created ones of his own. He wanted to know all the books on my shelves. He liked walking in the sun.

  He protected me. I wouldn’t strip that from him.

  They let me see him once while he was in the hospital. He lay on a stiff bed with transparent monitoring tape stuck to his temples. Little dots of glowing blue and red on the tape winked at me while his dark eyes stared blinkless, asking no questions.

  I touched his arm. His skin felt cold. Human warmth didn’t course through his veins. He didn’t even have veins. None of it mattered. “Mark. Hey man, don’t worry.”

  His head tilted, eyes met mine.

  I gripped his hand. After a moment his fingers curled around mine, just as strong. Even stronger. I said, “The storm’s gone and you’re coming home.”

  The children were walking on their way to school when we pulled up to the drive. It was a warm day, the kind where you wore light open jackets and began to roll up your sleeves in anticipation of summer. With the car windows down we heard their voices all the way to the school, to the yard. They sounded as colorful as their clothes and seemed to carouse right through the leaves to where we sat.

  He hadn’t said a word on the ride, only looked out the window. The parents passing behind on the sidewalk noticed us there; I spied the glances on the rearcam of the car. A couple of them paused as if debating whether to approach, to ask why we were just sitting on my own driveway doing nothing.

  But they didn’t approach and I looked at Mark’s profile. “You know . . . people are going to be like my mother. Like the neighbors. That’s just the way it is until they get used to us.” Not just him, but us.

  I’d learned not to expect conversation but he did make contact in his own way. No Scrabble board lay between us but he turned his hands palm up and open. He looked at me.

  What answer could I give him? That people were afraid, or lazy, or just plain ignorant? Who could we blame? The government, the military, the doctors and engineers?

  We were both on probati
on. Mark, so he wouldn’t injure somebody. And me, so I wouldn’t let him.

  “Where do you think this will lead?” my mother had asked. “You rehabilitate him or whatever they want to call it, and then what?”

  Somehow it was impossible for her to understand. “Then he’ll choose,” was all I’d said.

  Maybe one day he’d discover what had happened to his unit. Maybe I would help him. Or maybe we’d leave it alone because some memories were best left in the dark.

  Before we went inside the house I caught his attention again, touched his shoulder. “The doctors say you’re capable of speaking but you just choose not to. Sometimes that happens with people—”

  “I am people,” he said. His voice was lighter than I thought it would be, if hoarse from disuse. He was looking back out the window again. The sidewalk stretched clear now. “I am a person,” he said to the glass. To the outside world.

  They had created him to task but with the capacity for emotion. He was perfectly vulnerable, just enough, even for war.

  When he slid from the car to head into the house, eventually I followed him, calling the chair from the back of the car to lever myself into it. I rolled up the ramp to the front door, where Mark stood, holding it open for me even though he didn’t have to.

  It was just the human thing to do.

  Gord Sellar is a Canadian writer currently living in the South Korean countryside with his wife and son. (So far, no sentient dog.) His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies since 2007, and he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009. He also wrote the script for South Korea’s first cinematic adaptation of an H. P. Lovecraft story, the award-winning The Music of Jo Hyeja (2012).

  PRODIGAL

  Gord Sellar

  “He doesn’t look any different,” Jennifer commented, when we got home from the research facility, after Benji’s final sentientization treatment.

  “He’s not supposed to yet, are you, boy?” I said, ruffling the hair on his head. He looked up at us from the tatty carpet with his big, curious terrier eyes, and I’d swear he smiled a little.

  Technically, she was right. He didn’t really act very differently, not in any tangible way. Having recuperated from his various surgeries and treatments, he still liked the same things: fetch-the-ball, chasing me around the backyard, going for a run—familiar pleasures. He’d still come and sit beside me as I watched TV in the evenings, content with a pat on the head or a scratch behind the ear when he caught me working. He was our good-natured consolation prize. Our gentle not-quite-a-child, a terrier puppy whose brain was developing massive neural connectivity day by day, the sparse woodland of his mind turning into a dense jungle, and whose mouth and throat had been cleverly sculpted into a system capable of expressing in speech those thoughts he’d already started having. I thought of it as this incredible gift, at the time, albeit a gift he hadn’t quite received yet. A miracle. He’d be a wonder-dog. That was why we’d called him Benji, after all.

  But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see a change in him right from day one. It was something about his eyes. Something . . . well, just more than before. To me, it was unmistakable.

  A few months later, we had some people over. It was the first party we’d had in half a year, mostly neighbors and coworkers, people like that. Some had heard about Ben, that he’d begun to talk finally. They expected some kind of demonstration. I’d warned him, hoping it would make him less nervous, but it had the opposite effect. He began to tap his front paws on the carpet, to shake his head a little like a wet puppy, his tail half-wagging nervously. The first few people were folks who’d never come to a party at our place before, and Ben nervously avoided them.

  Then Lorna arrived. A wannabe-painter-friend of Jennifer’s, Lorna was familiar with Ben. She had played with him before the treatment, so he remembered her a little. As soon as her bulky shoulders passed through the doorframe, Benji barked excitedly. It had become a strange sound, no longer his own, no longer quite doglike, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. He ran up to her and began sniffing at her feet. Ears perking up in recognition, he mumbled a distracted, “Hello,” before sticking his nose into her crotch for a sniff. Then he simply proclaimed, “Nice!”

  “Oh my!” Lorna said, reaching down at him. “Now, Ben, you really mustn’t do that!” She forced his head down, pushing his face away from her, and said to me, “I thought they were supposed to be intelligent post-op?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jennifer said. “Tim, maybe you should take him upstairs?”

  I nodded. “Come on, Benj,” I said, and tucked my hand under his collar. I led him to the bottom of the stairs, and he went up them obligingly. I followed him up and then said, “Left, Benji, left.” He followed the direction, and walked into our bedroom. “Good boy,” I said when we were both in, scratching behind his ear.

  “Why?” he asked me, looking up curiously.

  “Well, you’re not supposed to sniff people like that.”

  “Sniff?”

  “You know,” I said and did my best impression of a dog sniffing.

  “Oh. Nice sniff! Hello friend!”

  “No, for dogs it’s a nice hello. For people, it’s rude,” I explained while fishing a hide dog bone out of my sock drawer. I tossed it to him, and he caught it out of the air, but he didn’t chew it right away. Instead, he just set it down and stared at me as if he had some question he didn’t know how to phrase. After a while, he seemed to abandon the attempt, and as he chomped down on the bone, I quickly left the room, closing the door behind me. Before I went down to the party, I heard him pad toward the door, sigh loudly, and settle down onto the floor beside the door.

  But that was what I’d always done with him at parties. It was nothing new. Except . . . it felt different now, doing that to him.

  Watching Benji learn to speak was sometimes downright eerie.

  It all happened so fast. From a wordless beast, he’d turned into a chatterbox in the space of a few months. They had implanted a neurochemical dispenser inside his skull, something that seeped the chemicals straight into his brain, wiring up a crazy new secondary network that not only made him smarter by the day, but also made him pick up language much faster than any human child.

  Not that he spoke well. Even with his re-sculpted upper palate, some words were hard to pronounce. Which made him hard to understand, and with no human body language to compensate for it. He was usually wide-eyed, his expression as inscrutable as any canine’s. If you’ve never known a sentient dog, it might sound crazy, but I swear Benji really did have expressions, though it took me years to learn to read them.

  “What’s prrbrr?” he asked me one day, just when I got home from work. He was still stuck at excitedly muttering two-word sentences.

  I squatted down close to the plastic doormat, scratched him behind the ear. “What’s that?”

  “What’s pregmand ?” he asked quietly, conspiratorially.

  “Pregmand? You mean pregnant? It means, uh, that someone has a baby inside,” I said. “Like a mama dog, before the baby dog is born, she’s pregnant.”

  “Oh,” Benji said and began panting excitedly. “Really?” He blinked at me oddly and padded off toward the creaky basement stairs, his tail wagging behind them. I suddenly started wondering whether Benji had gotten out and gotten a sentientized neighbor dog pregnant. We hadn’t gotten him neutered, I remembered with a groan. That was not going to be a fun conversation.

  Of course, that wasn’t it at all. Benji just had incredible ears. He could hear phone conversations behind closed doors, arguments two houses away. No secret was safe with Benji around. But the penny only dropped a week later when Jennifer called me during one of my rare days down at the lab. It was just like her to pick that day to tell me.

  “Tim?”

  “Yes, honey,” I said into my cellphone, “Just a minute.” Glancing one last time at the ongoing statistical analysis for artificially accelerated lateral gene trans
fer, I flicked my monitor sourcing to the phone’s feed, and then full screened the videostream. She was sitting on the couch, wearing a pink T-shirt and dark blue sweatpants. “What’s up, sweetie?”

  “I have some news,” she said, looking slightly green around the gills, but smiling.

  I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t, until I asked, “What is it?”

  “Uh, well, honey. Remember how Dr. Flynn told us we’d never be able to have a baby?”

  “Yeah . . . ” I said, eyes widening.

  “Turns out she was wrong.”

  “You’re . . . pregnant?” I had to make sure.

  She nodded at me, a brilliant smile widening on her face.

  Benji padded into view, beside her, and looked at her carefully. “Pregnend make baby?”

  “Yes, Benji. Mommy’s making a baby. You know what that means right, Benji?” she asked him. He stared at her silently, not answering. He hadn’t yet figured out how to answer tag questions like that. “You’re going to have a little brother or sister.” She turned and winked at me and said, “What do you think of that, Big Daddy?”

  “Woo!” I yelled, and then I said, “I love you,” and she smiled at me.

  “Baby!” Benj shouted, and his tail wagged, thump, thump, thump against the couch so hard it made Jen laugh aloud.

  Over the months that followed, Benji got more and more excited, just like us. One evening, after Jennifer had begun to show a little, he started in with questions during dinner.

  He pulled his head out of his dog dish and turned to Jen: “Baby dish? Have dish?”

  Jen smiled and shook her head.

  “Baby dish share,” he said and wagged his tail.

  Jennifer giggled and said, “How cute,” and I laughed, and I patted him on the flank of his hind leg, as he turned back to the dish and devoured his dinner excitedly.