Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  Dyer is in line at the kebab stand for Mrs. John Dee’s shawarma, and someone is too close behind her: a caress of convection currents, a static tickle.

  Shimago back with the curry, Dyer thinks. Blue Tats and Glowstar Girl from this morning, ready for another pint. The staring pimple-faced pun-kling still hot to mash it. A yellow-hoodied bounty hunter with a take-down notice ready to tag and drag her back to California. Anyone, Dyer thinks as she turns, please, anyone but the shadowed thundercloud shape that is, nano or not, the ghost of Leanna Vance.

  It’s Kal’s friend, xe of the twig fingers and anime eyes.

  Dyer says, “Leelee, yeah? All right?”

  But those fingers are shaking, those eyes even wider than Dyer remembered. Leelee gulps a breath, another, manages to gasp, “Kal.”

  “Ah, damn it,” Dyer says. “UKIS?”

  Leelee’s confused alarm is baffling until Dyer realizes xe might not be a USER.

  “The Immigration Services?” Dyer says, miming a beret.

  Leelee shakes xyr head, mimes a hood instead. “A yank,” xe says, “Some hard sket with a taser,” in a lilting East End Jamaican accent. “Hard as can be in a yellow hoodie, which ain’t. Kal say ‘go tell Dyer’ so I go. Went down there,” xe points at the floor—the catacombs run under the market—then points up, “but they say you up here.”

  “Shit,” Dyer says. “Where are they? Kal and the hoodie woman? We’ll grab Shimago and go find them.”

  “Allow that,” Leelee says. “Kal take care of herself. She tell me to tell you this yank asking about HigherWorks, asking about Dyer. Sounds like the sket bringin’ a beef your way. I run here to warn you. Manz didn’t build this body for running, innit?” Xe shakes xyr head, tugs the lace around xyr sleeves straight.

  “Someone bringing a beef to HigherWorks?” Shimago asks, walking up with take-away bags in each hand. “Let them. They will discover that we are . . . ” He swings the bags like nunchacku, leans in for effect: “ . . . vegetarian.”

  Leelee blinks, a remarkable effect with those huge eyes, swings a long tapered thumb at the kebab stand. “Got some bad news den about the sha-warma, arms.”

  “The shawarma is for Mrs. John Dee, and she is, as she reminded me this afternoon, from London.”

  “Safe,” Leelee says, satisfied, and starts in on the frills around her collar.

  “You’re sure Kal doesn’t need help with this woman with the taser?” Dyer asks. “The street’s crazy today, with the anti-migrant rally, those USERs pulled out of the river, and that’s just the start of the weird.”

  “Kal bare fine, just getting the tourist lost round the wrong ends so I could find you. Won’t take long, with the sket limpin’ like that.”

  “This American has a limp?” Shimago asks.

  “Does now, innit?” Leelee says, pulls up xyr long frilly skirts to show the wicked points of xyr Mary Janes.

  “Admirable,” Shimago says. “Dyer, the problems of the day are now behind you and surely moving too slow to catch you up, thanks to . . . ”

  “Leelee, Shimago,” Dyer says, and pays for the shawarma. “That only works if I’m moving at all, and all day I’ve felt like I’m suspended.”

  “Girl, way Kal tells it, your mind running, all the time.”

  “This is true,” Shimago says.

  “Straight out of my head,” Dyer says. “Which is the point, actually. Shimago, that ghost nano thing . . . ”

  “Ghost nano is—”

  “Real,” Dyer says. “Meaning nanites that don’t decay, that self-repair, that can connect between brains without a network node.”

  Shimago frowns dubiously. “Dyer, even Alphet couldn’t—”

  “They did. I did. That’s what my lab was doing, that was the project I couldn’t talk about. Military contracts, whole squads linked empathically, using each other’s eyes, ears, brains. Then the Crash happened and, Jesus, I’ve never told anyone this, the truth is, even though we were running from everything we’d known, part of me was glad that project went down with everything else. But now I’m not sure, now I think maybe something leaked out, and it’s looking for me.”

  In the patient tone he reserves for The Wayward’s most unlikely theories, Shimago says, “Persistent or not, I find it unlikely that nano could create a complex enough network for consciousness to emerge.”

  “I’m not talking AI, I’m talking about a pathway for consciousness to travel. Mental migrants.” Dyer’s accent was slipping. She looked around at the crowd in the market, London in its motley, two thousand years of migration, Camden in its shoddy sham glam even more of a refuge because no one pretended to be who they seemed.

  “Literally out of your head, in a strange body?” Shimago asks.

  “Don’t knock it ’til you try it, arms,” Leelee replies.

  2042-05-18T19:31:53+01:00 +51.539044-0.135225

  • CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—ONGOING

  • ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE

  — WE GOT ANY DIRT ON AN AMERICAN IN LONDON GOING BY “KAL”? THAT’S THE EXPAT I MENTIONED BEFORE—PIX ATTACHED BUT IT WAS DARK—SHE AND HER BITCH OF A WHATEVERFRIEND JUST GOT IN MY FACE BIG—TIME—F—ING TYPICAL—*SHE* COMES HERE FROM THE STATES BUT HERE I AM JUST TRYING To GET A F—ING HANDHOLD SO I CAN STAY AND SHE “DON’T LIKE MY ATTITUDE”—I’LL SHOW HER ATTITUDE I’M BRINGING THE TASER TONIGHT DON’T CARE IF THE TREATY ALLOWS IT OR NOT I’M DONE FOOLING AROUND

  — KISSES—JO

  • ATTACHMENT: IMAGEs (3)—

  Dyer, Shimago, The Wayward, and Mrs. John Dee, the Drop— Camden Catacombs—Friday Night

  Dyer knows the Drop is coming but that makes no difference. A skittering cicada orchestra over the drums cut by a crackle like a chord unplugged, jagged blue lines like the afterimage of lightning, and there they hang in darkness, silence: four hundred indrawn breaths, four hundred hearts hitting the beat together. Dyer watches Mrs. John Dee and The Wayward watch each other in the glow of their tablets, pushing the break as long as they can. With the heightened sensitivity of the nano sync Dyer can hear all four hundred heartbeats count it out, can feel the muscles burning to take a breath, can smell the sync start to fray and curl at the edges—circuits burning, Dyer remembers—and just as their suspended state teeters on the edge of impossibility, she sees the upbeat like a spark between Dee and Way and then the Drop like the thunder arriving: crashing drums, shimmering gamelan gongs, a thick golden glow like a flood of honey, four hundred breaths released, and through it all the bass a presence as physical as the brick and iron of the catacombs, as the bodies of the dancers.

  Shimago has his blimp on a slow loop, real spotlights roving through The Wayward’s illusory glow, which has drifted a neon red broken by slashes like kanji. Dyer sees the bandwidth bump on her monitors as he releases another batch of nano from the blimp’s dispensers.

  Dyer’s own work is mostly done by the time the dancing starts. She keeps an eye on the network, makes sure the biometrics feedback gets to Dee and Way, checks in with the security crew, makes sure no one hacks the donation points; they lost an entire evening’s take that way in Amsterdam.

  But now, right now, HigherWorks drops into the flow, and Dyer dives in after it, ecstatic.

  The Wayward has lowered his microdrones into the crowd, is layering their video streams into the flow—surveillance drones popping, Dyer remem-bers—the sensation of being everywhere in the crowd at once: her own face in the distance, Shimago and Dee side by side underlit by tablet light, a view over her own shoulder, but echoed—Way is delaying the stream by one two three beats, the crowd tripled by ghosts of itself—the blimp drifting life-sized in closeup, the dancers below like a cityscape of rooftop eyes and antennae arms, Leelee’s unmistakable eyes, Dyer herself again dancing head high eyes blinked black to match skin and leather, and there in the feed behind Dyer is a woman in a yellow hoodie pulled low a carbon gleam in each hand and behind her is a shape all in bl
ack like a hole in the dancers hair flown out like a storm coming.

  Dyer turns—and turns again in the flow and again and again—but the yellow hoodie and her impossible woman are gone, a trick of The Wayward’s echoing video stream. That feed is already shifting, a strobe staccato of images off the news, protestors packed like dancers, coiled razorwire, a line of walkers in an infinite tunnel. Mrs. John Dee layers in a beat sped to seizure pitch, a sticky sucking backward bass. Dyer can feel another Drop coming.

  She looks back through swaying silhouettes at Way, Dee, Shimago sitting almost perfectly still at the heart of the flow. But that flow is pulling her the other way, under the blimp striding over the crowd on spotlight legs—the scent of apple blossoms, Dyer remembers—through a swirl of shimmying Brazilians, past Kal and Leelee spinning tidally locked face to face, eyes to eyes, by a bioluminescent blur in Day-Glo Doc Martens, into a clumped conversation in a chorus of accents, and out—

  The flow is still rising, but there’s no way forward. Dyer’s hit the far wall.

  It’s dark there at the edge and the HigherWorks stream is a migraine aurora of color, an earthquake rumble. Dyer feels her way along the wall: brick stone iron concrete peeled paper gluey tape slick paint—a sick canvas, Dyer remembers, and knows where she is now—a little lump of gum on the wall the sense of something too close to her head and as she ducks the dry fragile feel of carbon against her palm.

  The break hits. Four hundred bodies stop in sync. Darkness, silence.

  It’s one of The Wayward’s stickum cameras under her fingers, stuck low and facing down toward the floor, lit by a flat white light from over her head.

  “Leanna Vance,” a voice says from behind that light.

  Dyer says, “Leanna Vance is a ghost.” She turns, slides herself up against the wall. The woman in the yellow hoodie is standing there, hood up but close enough that Dyer can see the twitchy highlights of her eyes, smell her scent—bougainvillea, Dyer remembers. The woman has a tablet in one hand, taser in the other. The taser has an attached camera, and that camera has a light, and that light stays aimed at Dyer’s face.

  “Leanna Vance,” the woman insists. There’s no mistaking the American accent in those long nasal vowels as she reads from her tablet. “As a licensed agent of Alphet Corporation and its court appointed overseers, I am ordering you to cease and desist, and arresting you for the theft and distribution of the intellectual property of Alphet et al, as registered in complaint Z980023. I am legally bound to warn you that under provisional treaty agreed one five twenty forty-two between the US and UK, I am allowed any means necessary to secure and deliver you into custody up to and including nonlethal force. That means you try anything, bitch, and I will take you down and drag you to the US embassy. This has been one messed up day, and all I want is my money and some place to sleep for a week.”

  Dyer still has a few maps in her jacket. She thinks for a second of pulling one out and open, of the neural cue flaring in the hoodie woman’s face, of the hoodie woman falling through that window into the Drop, of grabbing the taser, of running. But that would be running from everything she’s made with HigherWorks.

  “Opt-in,” Dyer says, instead, and raises her hands.

  In the flow around her, she feels four hundred hearts hit the upbeat.

  On the far side of the room, oblivious, The Wayward, Shimago, Mrs. John Dee tap in perfect sync.

  The downbeat drops.

  A flare as all the blimp’s lights come on, a virtual image of lone floating eyes opening, a blare of sampled horns, a shockwave of bass.

  Dyer sees the woman in the hoodie flinch, knows what’s coming in the split second before she feels the taser darts hit her cheek, her throat. The discharge itself is lost beneath an impossible pain at the base of her skull. Her head snaps back, hits the wall, and then she’s falling for what seems like a long time.

  She lands on her back, legs folded under her, hits her head again against the floor. The bricks feel rough and cool through her jacket. She’s wedged against the wall, looking up.

  From this extreme angle all the graffiti posters’ paint comes together into a perfect anamorphic image: this paint stroke a lip, that shredded paper an eyelash, those overlapped flyers the shadow of a cheek. That sick canvas of the wall, that seemingly random accretion of junk: from Dyer’s collapsed perspective it is revealed as the image of a face.

  The face of her impossible woman. Of the ghost nano. Of Leanna Vance.

  The image, the face she sees now, is a neural cue.

  She feels the new nano trigger, a giddy rush outward, a new layer of input, a new level of sensitivity on top of the HigherWorks stream. The feel of that rush, the taste of it, is familiar, like her own nano strains grown strange and wild. Feral, Dyer thinks.

  “Feral. Lost in the wilderness,” a voice says inside her head.

  “These are your strains, your works, from the lab at Alphet. With limited tools and knowledge, the changes we have been able to make to the nano are small and slow,” another internal voice says.

  And another adds, “Evolution, you could say, rather than intelligent design.”

  “But now that changes, with you,” the first says.

  This is not the ghost-whisper from before. These voices are clear and real and utterly unfamiliar.

  “We had limited access to your cortex before . . . ” “Before you saw our cue.”

  Dyer still can’t move her eyes, can’t feel her body. I didn’t opt-in to this, she thinks.

  “We had no choice. We had to plan for the worst case. And here it is.”

  The woman in the yellow hoodie looms into view; she must be kneeling over Dyer’s body.

  “Come on, Vance,” the woman says. “In the face or not, that was the lowest setting. Do not screw with me.”

  “The nano created multiple discharge paths through your brain. With prompt treatment, there is a chance the damage is not fatal.”

  The woman in the hoodie has leaned in close. She says, “Jesus, what is that smell? Like burning circuits.”

  Through the HigherWorks stream, Dyer catches glimpses of the dancers, of her crew, her body, the woman in the hoodie just a smudge against the wall, unnoticed.

  Who are you? Dyer thinks.

  “Since that moment when self-awareness became awareness of other selves, we humans have left echoes of ourselves on others.”

  “This is, perhaps, the creation of identity, the definition of culture.”

  “And language, art, the book, the net, nano, these have flung those echoes farther.”

  “But those echoes still die away, as fast as memories fade and culture evolves.”

  “Until you created self-repairing nano.”

  Locked away in a lab in Berkeley, Dyer thinks. Behind layers and layers of safety measures.

  “In those days after the Crash, samples were stolen, sold, synthesized, made their way to the street.”

  “I took a hit and drifted and just kept drifting, dancing through other people’s heads.”

  “From our scattered bodies gone. Dozens, hundreds of us. And we’ve lost the way back.”

  I can’t help you, Dyer thinks. I don’t know the way back. And if I did, I’m done with all that.

  The woman in the hoodie slaps her face; Dyer can see that out of the corner of her eye, though she doesn’t feel it. She can raise her arm, though, sees it wobble above her. Far above, she sees the lights of Shimago’s blimp.

  “We don’t want to go back, any more than you do. We live here now, our whole lives, in the flow from brain to brain. But the nano is glitchy, the passage treacherous. We need Leanna Vance’s knowledge.”

  “And Dyer’s vision.”

  Vision, Dyer thinks. She’d laugh if she could. The HigherWorks stream has switched to the stickum camera just over her head, her face in closeup, lit by the shifting spotlights of the blimp. The music cuts out, midbeat; Mrs. John Dee’s voice cries “Dyer?” But her own sight, broken as it is, the sound of the hoodie
woman swearing, it’s gone all glitched. Her own hand is all she can see, vibrating in a stop-motion blur.

  “Seizure.”

  “Your brain a failed state. But there are others.”

  “It’s your choice. But you need to make it now.”

  What choice? Dyer thinks.

  “This nano, it’s a street, a window, a border. The crossing, that’s your choice.”

  Dyer’s eyes have completely failed, but she can still see herself in the HigherWorks stream, through the stickum camera, her lips peeled back from her teeth, a trickle of blood from one ear.

  Opt-in, Dyer thinks. Time to move on.

  And then she is flowing out of herself like the tide, body to body, mind to mind.

  A moment of mortal terror as she goes too wide—four hundred bodies hanging in silence, four hundred minds watching her own face in the HigherWorks stream—and feels herself start to tatter, to dissolve.

  A moment of dizzy suffocation as she pulls herself too tight, scrabbles to find enough space for herself around the edges of a single couple’s entwined thoughts. Dyer oh god Dyer all right? Kal thinks all around her, oblivious to her presence. But Leelee’s luminous eyes seem to see her. Safe, xe thinks.

  A moment of complete disorientation as she looses the thread back to her own body, fears that it has broken at the other end. But the HigherWorks stream is everywhere, a counter-current to her own drifting, and that stream still holds her face in the feed from the stickum camera. That sight is enough to orient her; her body is there, the life in it slow and stubborn and still beating.

  And then the fear and confusion drops away. This flowing together, this connection through movement, it’s what dancers have always done, since two first danced together. It’s what her work has always been about, both as Leanna Vance in her lab and as Dyer in a hundred borrowed warehouses and vacant lots in as many cities. It’s why HigherWorks exists.

  Dyer flows across the crowd, leaping mind to mind, and now all she feels is ecstasy. Crowdsurfing, she remembers, and the dozen dancers through which she is flowing feel her glee wash over them and laugh out loud.