Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  — MIGHT ALL PAY OFF, THOUGH, CUZ THAT TIP SEEMS LEGIT-JUST BEEN HERE 12 HOURS AND I’VE ALREADY GOT A POSSIBLE HIT ON VANCE HERSELF—GOT A FEW PHOTOS BUT I COULDN’T GET CLOSE AND THESE CONTACT CAMS U GAVE ME ARE CRAP-UR FANCY SCAN APP SAYS AROUND 50% MATCH—SHE’S HAD SERIOUS BODY WORK AND SHE’S GOT THIS CRAY CRAY LOOKING SURFER DUDE WATCHING HER BACK AND SHE’S EDGY As HELL SO DON’T START SPENDING THE MONEY YET-OH WAIT, I *HAVE*-1 DON’T SCORE THAT BOUNTY I AM SO SO VERY DOOMED

  — KISSES-JO

  • ATTACHMENT: IMAGES (7)—

  Dyer and Mrs. John Dee, brooding nano—

  Camden Catacombs—Friday Noon

  “Mrs. John Dee, you said no self-respecting Londoner would be caught dead in Camden in the daylight,” Dyer says. She’s sitting on the microassembler in an attempt to block the bright, busy control panel from view.

  Mrs. John Dee tugs a blue floral frock on over her head, sets her glasses on her nose, peers over them at the folks staggered about the catacomb chamber.

  “Dyer, love, none of these people are self-respecting.”

  She sheds a heavy studded cuff, the last of her work uniform, and toes the box of leather, chrome, and vinyl under the workbench. As the only legal Brit in HigherWorks, she picks up spending money selling LPs to tourists who can’t play them. The money’s okay, and the contacts in the community of artists and musicians working the markets are better. The required punk attire—“the hoary old eighties,” Mrs. John Dee calls it, “and heavy on the hoar”—is more suited to Dyer’s taste, but Dyer’s forged ID codes aren’t up to the scrutiny required by the Economic Refugee act.

  “And you said the catacombs are off limits due to the danger of flooding from the canal.”

  “A positive death trap,” Mrs. John Dee agrees. “Which is why you had to pick three locks when we first moved in. No one dares come down here.”

  Paint-tagged kids chase each other with rattling spraycans. Students ring their teacher under the dim hanging bulbs, dutifully examining the rails set into the brick floor where horse carts once rolled. A family dozes on a blanket, surrounded by the remains of a picnic. And what looks for all the world like a tour group in bright Brazilian colors mills about under the vaulted galleries, kept away from the equipment by some hastily stacked boxes and Dyer’s glare.

  Mrs. John Dee points at the massive slab of brick and ironwork that supports the far side of the underground warehouse. “Look, that wall was blank when we got here. That’s a sick canvas, would’ve been tagged top to bottom had this place been open.”

  They’d moved in three weeks ago, and the wall is already covered, a collage of overlapped graffiti, bills pasted up and torn down again, what looks like bird crap even though they’re underground, a hanging pair of seriously soiled trousers that none of the group dared get near enough to take down. A little girl with perfect doll hair and knock-off Day-Glo Doc Martens is staring up at the wall. Dyer and Dee watch as she leans forward and carefully sticks her gum in one of the few remaining spots of bare brick.

  Dyer sighs and shifts to cover a neon green popup on the panel. “Should have had my hips widened when I had my legs done,” she says.

  Mrs. John Dee scrubs her mohawk into its natural teal tangle, pulls her tablet out of her bag. “Bollocks. Your hips are the eighth architectural wonder. They just need some company. Budge up, love.” She pulls herself up onto the microassembler next to Dyer, peeks under her arm at the control panel. “What are we hatching?” she asks.

  “Soundsystem, all for you,” Dyer says. “Bud interface, cochlear induction. Everything except the auditory cortex stuff. I ran that in with the visual batch.”

  Mrs. John Dee does a little shimmy on the microassembler hatch. “Breed, my lovelies, breeeeed,” she says. And adds, as the little Day-Glo girl copies her move across the will-be dancefloor, “We’re going to jail, aren’t we?”

  “No, you’re going to jail,” Dyer says. “If the police decide we’re causing enough of a nuisance, they’ll haul you up for some Section 63 nonsense. ‘Repetitive beats.’”

  “‘Repetitive beats’ my bucephalus bouncing bum,” Mrs. John Dee says with another shimmy. “Did you even listen to the track I—”

  “The Wayward, Shimago, me, we’ll be put in the Dover Center to be beaten down for a year, deported back to the US and then things will really get bad. Worse, if the UK rejoins the IP treaty zone.”

  “Sorry, love, shouldn’t laugh, I know. But really, what else can we do?” She waves at the crowd.

  The students have filed out into the tunnels, and the Brazilians have expanded like vapor to fill the available space.

  “Move on,” Dyer says.

  Mrs. John Dee frowns, prods her tablet with a tattered teal fingernail. “I’m not at all sure I like the idea of running, just because the bloody fascists have voted themselves in and our own dear fans are all too, um, fanatic.”

  “It’s not running,” Dyer says. She gestures at the billowing Brazilians. “It’s just the flow. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of blah blah.’ You’re a DJ, Dee, you know about the flow.”

  In the gaps between the Brazilians, she sees the shine of black leather under thunderhead hair, glittering coal-smoke eyes. Flashback to this morning’s vision, the impossibly disappearing woman. Dyer’s chest thrums.

  She slips off the microassembler. “Be right back. If the panel beeps three times, hit the green button.”

  “Oh, ah, okay. Oh dear,” Mrs. John Dee says behind her.

  Dyer follows the leather gleam across the dancefloor, loses it in the gloom and bustle, reaches that graffitied far wall. No one is there, nothing like that fragile face, not in the crowd or under the vaults on either side. Like this morning at the canal, she’s dissolved away.

  “She show me the spot for my gum,” the doll girl says in a stage whisper, blue eyes serious under straight-cut bangs, then she laughs and swirls back into the crowd.

  Well, what were you expecting on a day turned weird and wired, Dyer thinks. “What else?” Dyer asks the wall.

  The wall responds with a flicker: a scrap of smartpaper, smeared under sellotape and glitching all along the torn edge. Dyer tugs it from the brick, squints at the scrolling text. It’s some sort of government document, a snarl of nested digital sigs and certs and then the title, PROVISIONAL AGREEMENT ON THE RENORMALIZATION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GRE—

  Dyer tries to scroll up, searching for a date, but the paper glitches, resyncs on a list captioned PATENTS OF SPECIAL CONCERN, and there at the top is “A PROCESS FOR THE MUTUAL SELF-REPAIR OF NANOMECHANISMS” BY LEANNA VANCE and then it’s her eyes glitching, flashes of memory in time to her pounding heart of those last worst days in the US, a sudden sinking nausea, a tinnitus squeal. The squeal stops, starts again, and Dyer realizes it’s not in her head; it’s coming from across the room. She pushes back through the Brazilians to find Mrs. John Dee, all five ferocious feet of her, restacking the box barricade around their workspace, pausing after every box to glare down the vaults.

  Dyer sweeps up a box, lifts it over Mrs. John Dee’s head to the top of the stack. “What happened?”

  “Some bloody bint knocks the boxes over, ‘oh, excuse me,’ she says, and when I get up to sort it out she nips in to play with your panel there, face first and wide eyed.”

  “Contact cams,” Dyer says, nausea returning.

  “‘That’s a bit of none of your business,’ I said, and she doesn’t even blink. ‘You deaf?’ I ask, and give her a nudge in the kidneys, in case she really was.” Mrs. John Dee demonstrates with a vicious jab of her elbow.

  Dyer steps back out of range. “So?”

  “So since her hearing was apparently bollocksed, I figured I’d give it a tune up.” She patted her tablet. “I was just setting up audio network tests. I figured if she was rigged for cams, she’d have bud implants as well. I boosted the volume to eleven.”

  “Ah,” Dyer said.
“That was feedback, then, that I heard. From forty feet away.”

  “Her head will be ringing for a fortnight. Ought to put a spanner in her party plans.”

  “You think she’s a nano cook?”

  “If she were a fan, or paparazzi, she’d have gone for our lovely visages, not the gear. She’s a bizarro you from some rival Drop party crew.”

  Dyer’s thinking of that fade-away face, those eyes. “She look like me? Only with hair?” She waves her fingers over her head like clouds drifting. “Did she, uh, fade?”

  Mrs. John Dee shrugs. “She looked like a yellow hood-up hoodie. Not so much fading as slinking away in disgrace, tail between her legs. Lovely tail, though. All’s well that ends well.” Mrs. John Dee demonstrates with another shimmy.

  Dyer makes a dubious “mmm.” She fishes the scrap of smartpaper out of her back pocket, but it’s gone completely glitched, just a scattering of pixel dust.

  2042-05-18T12:09:00+01:00 +51.541709-0.147667

  • CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SUPPORTING EVIDENCE IP VIOLATIONS SEE NOTE

  • CONTACT: TARGET (CONFIRMED)—MARIAM EBADI UK7D1B4GU230011—PRIORITY NA RUMORED ASSOC. LEANNA VANCE C.F.—UK RESIDENT ID CONFIRMED VIA DIRECT SCAN EMBEDDED TAG

  • NOTE: TARGET OPERATING ALPHET MODEL X50EU MICROASSEMBLER RUNNING UNRELEASED OS-LICENSE MoDULE DISABLED-SEE ATTACHED IMAGES

  • NOTE: UNREGISTERED NNDA PROFILES IN VIOLATION OF 21USC2401—SEE ATTACHED IMAGES

  • ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE

  — GOT THE BITCH-YEAH YEAH NO PHYsiCAL ID YET NO DOCUMENTED DISTRIBUTION BUT WHO ELSE IS GONNA BE RUNNING ALPHET.COM BETA CODE WITH CUSTOM MODULES? AND THE LICENSE MOD IS AXED SO THAT’S IP VIOLATION RIGHT THERE *AND* SHE’S COOKING DELIVERY AGENTS WITH UNREGISTERED PAYLOADS—DO ME A FAVOR AND SEE IF THERE’S A BRIT LAW ABOUT THAT SO I DON’T HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE TREATY B.S. AGAIN

  —ALSO THIS EBADI BIMBO IS HACKING EARBUD IMPLANTS—*GOT* TO BE A BRIT LAW AGAINST THAT

  —SEE *TOLD* U I WAS A GOOD INVESTMENT

  —KISSES—jo

  • ATTACHMENT: IMAGES (5)

  Dyer, Shimago, and Mrs. John Dee, rocket in pocket—

  Mornington Crescent—Friday Afternoon

  Dyer levers the backpack over the exit turnstile at arm’s length, ducks the bristling bouquet of carbonfiber antennae that spill from the top.

  “Fragile,” Shimago reminds her.

  “So are my eyeballs,” Dyer says.

  Shimago doesn’t have to lift his pack; the turnstile only comes up to his thighs. Mrs. John Dee drags her duffel thumping behind her.

  “Why is the helium so heavy?” she grumbles. “Ought to just float along. Maybe if I let some out into the bag.”

  “No,” Dyer and Shimago say in unison. “You just want to huff it and sing in a squirrel voice,” Dyer adds.

  “And then I shall just float along,” Mrs. John Dee agrees happily.

  “Anyway, that’s the lightest bag,” Dyer says.

  “That’s another thing,” Mrs. John Dee says. “Why is the rocket so heavy?”

  “It’s not—”

  “A rocket. Yes, love, but that’s what I call it because the first one was such a lovely rockety shape.”

  “—Not heavy,” Shimago continues. “Just big.”

  “Sixteen times the network bandwidth of the last one,” Dyer says. “Twice as many nano dispersers.”

  “And your subsonic driver,” Shimago says. “The entire carbon outer shell is the resonator. 120DbA at 20 Hertz.”

  “Ace. Teeth shall be rattled,” Mrs. John Dee says, out of breath and a few steps behind. She’s turning circles as she walks, duffel swinging.

  “Wait ’til you see it flying, with the spotlights and the screens running,” Dyer says. “It’s perfect, looks just like the film. Only thing we couldn’t find is a clean recording of the announcer. You’ll have to record Shimago when we get back to the catacombs.”

  Shimago booms, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.”

  Mrs. John Dee is still spinning. Dyer turns around. “Dee, what are you—”

  “USER freak. Fuck off home.”

  Dyer turns back. Whoever’s speaking is hidden behind Shimago’s bulk. She leans left to see a dozen pimpled punklings in custom-printed carbon, active tats a riot of football logos and Union colors.

  “Tha’s right, you heard ’im, you yank sket,” one of them said to Dyer.

  Shimago sets a hand on the lead punkling’s shoulder. “Balderdash, my lad. Do I look like a economic refugee, American or otherwise?” he says, in his best King’s English.

  Shimago looks like six-foot-four two hundred and fifty pounds of gear-pierced lcd-tattooed fully networked Tongan-Californian rugby-playing airship-piloting Drop-partying choreomaniac. His hyphens alone outweigh these punks, Dyer thinks and bares her teeth.

  “Dunno, she fit though, innit?” one says, gaze dropping down under Dyer’s.

  “Issit?” the lead one says, squinting. Shimago shifts his grip to the kid’s head, palms it like a ball and turns it upward.

  “Since you seem so full of perceptions upon our character, perhaps you would like to present them to the authorities,” Shimago says.

  “Wha?”

  “He taking you to the po-po,” another explains.

  “I’m just sayin’ I’d mash that,” the one staring at Dyer says.

  Mrs. John Dee comes spinning past Dyer, takes the lead punkling out at the knees with the duffel; he dangles from Shimago’s hand like a doll. The other punklings step back from the swinging bag. “You want a mashing?” she asks the starer. “You cheeky little muppet. The lot of you in our ends, up from, what, Surrey? Think you’re hard because you spent the money Mummy gave you on tats you can turn off again before you get home? She’s hard.” That with a hand out toward Dyer. “She eats suburban white boys like you for breakfast.”

  “Not hungry,” Dyer says. She steps up even with Dee. The starer only comes up to her chin; she looks straight over his head at the crowd pushing past in the too bright sunlight, all willfully or carelessly oblivious. But there’s a knot of anxious faces across the street that have noob USER written all over them, pinned in place like the sun’s a spotlight. Lucky the punklings hadn’t run into them instead.

  “What are you doing here?” Dyer wonders under her breath. She means the USERs, stumbling through London on this unsettled day of days, but the punklings react with shrugs and awkward shuffles. “Dunno,” one says. “Heard this voice said check those three, they’s yanks.”

  Shimago sets his captive punkling upright. “A case of mistaken identity,” he says. “Easily corrected by a conversation with the police about anti-social behavior.” Shimago gives the leader a gentle push, and the kid stumbles forward, trips over Dee’s duffel again, bumps shoulders with the starer. It’s not entirely a bluff; Dyer and Shimago’s forged IDs will hold up to a quick fingerprint or retinal scan. But they’re likely to fail the sort of full biometric series that Immigration runs, and it’s been one of those days.

  A too-long moment as the punkling weighs the cost of confrontation versus the loss of face. Finally he mutters “freak” and shuffles down the sidewalk without looking back; his mates straggle behind him. The starer stays a beat longer, finally makes eye contact. Dyer blinks her corneas clear, looks down at him until he blushes and turns away.

  “A new life awaits us in a golden land of opportunity and adventure,” Dyer says.

  Shimago sighs, hefts his pack on his shoulder, heads off perpendicular to the punkling’s retreat.

  “Mrs. John Dee, you are yourself from the lovely green lawns of Surrey, are you not?” he asks.

  “I was,” she says. “But Mrs. John Dee is from here and now, Shimago.”

  The duffel nudges Dyer’s leg. Mrs. John Dee is walking backward, head swinging like a radar dish. “Dee, what the hell are you loo
king for?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. John Dee says. “Whatever you’ve been looking for since this morning. Which is, judging from the look on your face, a much bigger deal than some sixth form twits a-twitting.”

  “I don’t know what . . . ” Dyer almost says “you’re talking about,” but that’s neither fair nor true. “What it is. Somebody following me. Somebodies. An IP bounty hunter. A parallel me from some other dimension. Maybe Way is right and it’s ghost nano.”

  “Ghost nano is an urban legend,” Shimago says.

  Dyer growls, strides five steps to the next road crossing, stops cold. Mrs. John Dee bumps into her from behind. Shimago stops next to Dyer. His look of gentle concern grows less gentle as he looks up from her to the street.

  On the far side of the crossing are two uniformed officers of the UK Immigration Service, conspicuously not cops courtesy of their berets and their semi-automatics. The two are staring straight at them through the stream of crossing pedestrians.

  Mrs. John Dee wedges herself between Dyer and Shimago. “You’re not seriously waiting for the walk light?” she says. Then she follows their gaze and adds, “Oh. Oh dear. But they can’t stop us unless they have cause.”

  Shimago says, “Crossing against the light is cause.”

  “And not crossing is suspicious behavior,” Dyer says.

  As if summoned by her statement, the two UKIS officers step off the curb. Dyer fights the sudden urge to look over her shoulder; looking like she’s going to run could escalate a bad situation into a fatal one.

  And then she looks anyway, because she knows what she’ll see: the fragile-faced woman, from the canal, from the catacomb wall, standing in carbon black relief against a white sunlit storefront. Not a woman, though, is it? Not a rival nano cook, not some patent-tracking bounty hunter in from the US. It’s something else entirely, that outline drawn flat against the concrete like an opening, like a door. With no conscious decision Dyer takes Mrs. John Dee’s hand, tugs her toward the figure even though it’s already fading to a shimmering afterimage. There’s a real door there, though, behind the figure’s promise, and Dyer grabs the handle, looks back to see if Shimago is following.