Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  She swims against the current of the HigherWorks stream, finds Shimago, The Wayward, Mrs. John Dee. Their minds are open, familiar; part of her was already here inside them.

  Dyer traces her own nano in their brains, finds the cortical connections, wills herself into their sight and hearing, plucks words from their minds and plays them back: “So, ghost nano . . . turns out it’s not urban legend after all. It’s the golden land. The shiny future.”

  She wraps their fear and anger and confusion in her own joy, hears Shimago’s growing understanding like a swelling chord, feels The Wayward’s rising joy like sun on her face, is caught up swirling in Mrs. John Dee’s determination.

  The ghost nano, how is it everywhere, in everyone? Dyer wonders.

  “We’ve been spreading for years, searching for you.”

  “We have a presence, a ghost, if you will, across the world.”

  Dyer watches though Mrs. John Dee’s eyes as the DJ pushes her way through the crowd toward the wall, toward Dyer’s body.

  “But that presence is thin. Too thin, we feared, to save you. The only way to be sure the nano would be strong enough when you needed it was to send it with her.”

  The woman in the yellow hoodie is staring around wild-eyed. Her hoodie has fallen back, revealing bruised eyes in a too-thin face. She can’t be more than eighteen, twenty. She looks like every USER Dyer has ever seen, starting with herself, running from something, running to something, in the flow.

  “I am a licensed agent of Alphet Corporation,” the woman says, waving first her tablet, then the taser. “I’m a US citizen. I’ve got a damned take-down notice. There’s a frigging treaty. I order you to cease and desist this, this . . . ”

  The woman slides down the wall to squat next to Dyer’s body, still waving the taser.

  Dee shoves the taser out of the way. “If you’ve killed Dyer I will haunt you, which apparently is a thing we can bloody well do now, until your dying day,” she snarls. She kneels down, checks Dyer’s pulse, gasps a sigh of relief.

  “I’m a licensed agent of—” The woman looks at Dee. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve got no choice. I don’t know where else to go.”

  Dyer slips into her own body, opens her eyes.

  The lights of Shimago’s blimp spin above her, trace the image of the face on the wall. Nano glitters in the beams. Dyer inhales, the mixed scent of bougainvillea and apple blossoms, a bubbling on her tongue.

  Dyer expands with that breath, feels Dee’s love above her, feels Shimago’s calm and The Wayward’s delight as they kneel down by her. Dyer feels the hoodie woman’s churning confusion, her dread of returning empty-handed to a place not a home, staggering one small step ahead of decay despair disaster, chasing a ghost even more elusive, more impossible than Dyer’s impossible woman, something worn smooth by years of brick stone iron concrete carbon, something scattered scattered scattered but still alive.

  “Jocelyn,” Dyer says. The hoodie woman stares at her in astonishment. “I don’t know where we’re going, either. But I hope. You can come with us, if you want. It’s your choice.”

  Dyer raises a shaky hand toward the ghost nano’s neural cue. They all look up, together.

  2042-06-02T08:15:41+01:00

  • CONTACT: TARGET—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035. Z980023—LOST

  • ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE

  — WHEN U FOUND ME IN THAT HELL OF A “HOME” AND TOLD ME U HAD A JOB FOR A BRIGHT YOUNG THING LIKE ME—IF I WASN’T AFRAID TO GO, U SAID-IF I WAS BRAVE ENOUGH, U SAID-AND ANYWAY, U SAID, WHERE ELSE ARE U GONNA GO?

  — WELL IT’s ME ASKING THAT QUESTION NOW—GIVING U A CHOICE U NEVER GAVE ME-I’M ATTACHING IT-WHEN U R READY JUST OPEN IT UP AND-oPT-IN

  — KISSES—JO

  • ATTACHMENT: IMAGE (i)—

  T. R. Napper’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Grimdark Magazine, Galaxy’s Edge, and numerous others. His work has been translated into Hebrew, German, and French.

  By profession T. R. Napper is an aid worker, recently returned to Australia after three years in Vietnam. He is currently undertaking a creative writing PhD focusing on speculative fiction in Southeast Asia.

  ASTRANGE LOOP

  T. R. Napper

  In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.—Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop

  A huge clown, jaws as wide as Irving was tall, about to swallow him whole . . . A woman, black hair with the fringe cut too short, green eye-shadow, skin so smooth it looked real-life airbrushed . . . The woman—what was her name again?—yelling at him, perfect skin creased with contempt . . . a red fireworks blast, neon, frozen into the sky . . . fairy floss and sweat and machine grease in his nostrils and a girl, freckled, staring up at him with tears in her eyes . . . and those sounds, tinny music on a maddening, endless cycle, and the clown, swallowing him, while the woman yelled and the girl watched with sadness.

  Irving Kupfermann blinked into consciousness. White room with a white duo, man and woman, standing over him. The woman, young, lips glistening in the bright lights, pressed a paper cup into his hand. “Drink this,” she said. Irving drank, first sipping, then gulping as the extent of his thirst hit him. The man looked familiar. He wore a white lab coat and grasped a flexis-creen in both hands, looking down into its green-glowing ideograms. The doctor—Irving was pretty sure that’s what he was—had a full head of silver hair that probably wasn’t real, and a movie star chin that most definitely wasn’t real. The gold of the heavy chain around his wrist: that would be real. The doctor looked forty, but he stank of money. Probably closer to sixty.

  Doctor Eduard—the name floated up and popped into Irving’s forebrain— spoke to the nurse. “Potentials for synaptic growth and multiplication high, as are an increased release of kinase A proteins. Emotional response very high; memories appear authentic across all measures. Or the patient believes they are real, in any case.” He enunciated each word clearly, like he expected his audience to savour every single one.

  “Yes doctor,” the nurse replied, smiling, as she eased something from the top of Irving’s head—he caught a glimpse of a green neon circle. To his left, coming into view as the nurse moved to one side, was a painting of a tobacco pipe. Underneath it was written: this is not a pipe. Irving furrowed his brow at that.

  The doctor looked up at Irving and gave him the perfect imitation of a smile, his pristine white teeth matching the room. “You always bring us a first-class product, Irving.”

  Irving grunted and handed the nurse the empty cup.

  “Now: do you remember anything of the memory you just sold?”

  Irving shook his head. “No. Not really. It’s like a dream. It’s there at the edge of my mind . . . fragments. There was a woman, I think she was angry.”

  Doctor Eduard nodded. “Best that you sold it to us then. The key to happiness, Irving, is a bad memory.”

  Irving gave a non-committal shrug.

  “Those remaining fragments should fade away, and by the time you get home today, they will have decamped completely from your cerebral cortex. But, remember Irving,” said the doctor, finger in the air, “in the unlikely event any of this does come back to you, you must inform us post-haste. It is a violation of mnemonic copyright to remember things you no longer legally own. In such an eventuality we would need you to return here immediately to eliminate the rogue memories.”

  “Post-haste,” said Irving. “Indubitably.”

  The doctor missed the sarcasm, smiled insincerely, and returned to looking over his flexiscreen.

  Irving leaned back into the chair, relieved at the embrace of the soft, real leather against the back of his head. He’d been seated during the procedure, yet still felt exhausted. “How can I know if I’m remembering things I’ve sold?”

  “Ah yes, very good question,” said the doctor, returning Irving’s gaze with a supercilious expression that clear
ly indicated that, in fact, it was a very stupid question. “We have a trace program downloaded from the Kandel-Yu machine into your memory pin. If it picks up a specific neural pattern in your cerebral cortex—a unique grouping we call a memory-print—you will receive a warning on-retina advising you that you have begun to re-consolidate memories under license to us here at Thanks for the Memories. Often this will happen when you are dreaming.”

  Irving rubbed at his eye. “You tell me this often, doctor?”

  “Very.”

  The nurse suppressed a giggle.

  Irving nodded at her. “Is she an actual nurse, or are the staff here hired to laugh at you?”

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. The nurse retained her smile as she said: “A post-graduate qualification, three-year internship, and a field of five hundred candidates for this position.”

  Her response came easy. Irving pushed his unruly hair back from his forehead. “I guess I’ve said that before, as well.”

  “Once or twice,” said the doctor, with a smirk. “When you’re in a particularly bad mood. Something, I suspect, related to the experience you just sold to us.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, forget it.”

  “I was hoping you would,” replied the doctor.

  The nurse’s smile widened.

  Irving rolled his eyes.

  The doctor pulled a vial from the pocket of his coat. “This is Neothebaine. Pour yourself a stiff drink when you get home, and add this before you imbibe. The memory eradication procedure should be sufficient to disrupt the neural print containing the target memory. But this—” the doctor held the vial up, its amber contents catching the light “—will be sure to wipe any remnants clean. You likely will not remember coming here to Thanks for the Memories, and you certainly will not remember either the procedure or this conversation.”

  “No problem,” said Irving, and touched the cochlear-glyph implant behind his left ear, fingertip against the small circle of cool steel. “Exo-memory: remind me to drink Doctor Eduard’s date-rape drug when I get home.”

  His exo-memory whispered back to him, its tone as flat as the steel of the implant: “Yes, Mister Kupfermann.”

  Unperturbed, the doctor typed something into his flexiscreen. “And finally, your compensation has gone through.”

  A message appeared on-retina, to Irving’s eyes only, in soft green glowing

  type:

  A deposit of 70,500 dollars has been recorded in your UberCoin account. You’ve done it! You’ve hit your savings target. Next steps:

  1) Ask your wife, Ondine Drinkwater, out to dinner to an expensive restaurant

  2) At dinner, explain that through your entrepreneurial acumen, you’ve become highly successful

  a) Making sure to avoid mention of your numerous trips to Thanks for the Memories

  3) As financial security has always been important to Ondine, it is important that you emphasize both your newfound reliability, and your considerable wealth

  4) This will convince her to end your trial separation and let you return home to her and your daughter, Eulalie

  Just a glance at the list made him smile. He’d done it. It’d been a long time, it’d been . . . Well, he wasn’t sure how long it had been. None of that mattered now. He was going to be reunited with his wife and daughter.

  Irving pushed himself out of the chair and walked out of the room. The doctor was trying to tell him something; he didn’t hear a word the man said. He walked through the expansive, marble reception and stepped out of the large double doors at the front of the building. Irving breathed deeply, smile still on his face, squinting under a hot white sun.

  It was time for him to come home.

  “Irving.”

  He looked up and there she was: Ondine. Purple eye shadow, black hair with the fringe cut too short, and that soft, glowing skin. She was under-dressed in denim pants and a tight leather jacket, but he didn’t notice that. She was twenty minutes late, but he didn’t think about that, either. All he could think about at that moment was the time, long ago, when he could have leaned over and kissed this beautiful woman, and she would have laughed and let him do so.

  She wasn’t laughing now.

  “Ondine,” he said, smiling despite the expression on her face. He stood up, dropping the gold-trimmed napkin he’d been playing with, and moved around the table to take her chair out.

  “I got it Irving, I got it,” she said, but he pulled it out anyway.

  She treated that with a raised eyebrow and half-smile. “I’m, ah, sorry I’m late.” Ondine’s voice was rich, throaty. She could be lead singer in a hard rock band. Or the voice-over for a sexy cartoon character.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, nothing. Wine?”

  “No,” she said, brusquely. And then, less so: “Not at lunch. I’ve got to get back to work after this.”

  “Well—” he grimaced “—you couldn’t make dinner.”

  “Be thankful you got lunch,” she said, deadpan.

  Something twisted in his chest. “Shall we order, then?”

  “Maybe. What’s this about, Irving?” she asked, indicating his clothes with her chin.

  He glanced down. The suit was dark-blue, tailor-made, with sharp creases freshly pressed. He wore a white shirt and smoke-blue tie, set with a silver tie-pin that matched the ring on his pinkie finger. He’d shaved his rough beard off, dabbed on some cologne, and tied his unruly curls back in a short pony-tail. The restaurant was none other than The Prince—the most sought-after dining spot in town. Gold-gilded cutlery, waiters in blood-red jackets, white light glinting through crystal chandeliers, and the soft murmurings of the good and great as they smiled fake smiles at each other and crunched hors d’oeuvres between perfectly symmetrical teeth.

  “I’m trying to make an impression,” he said.

  “You look like an insurance salesman.”

  “That wasn’t the impression I was going for.”

  “So you’re not trying to sell me something?”

  “Just a dream.”

  “Oh Irving,” she said. “Spare the schmaltz, buster. It doesn’t suit either of us.” But she smiled as she said it, and the twisting in Irving’s chest loosened a little.

  He pointed at her clothes. “Where do you get to work dressed like that? You a roadie now?”

  “I work from home, you know that.”

  “Doing what?”

  Her brows furrowed. “Speech therapist, Irving. Same as always; same as I’ve been doing for the past ten years.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he lied. “I meant the same sort of speech therapy you used to do.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Right. Sure. The same sort of speech therapy as I always did.”

  Irving carefully hid his embarrassment. “And Eulalie—how is she? Still the smartest kid in class?”

  Ondine paused, permitting her irritation to ebb. “Yes. Her teacher thinks she’ll be able to skip fourth grade. She . . . ” Ondine trailed off, looked down at her purple-painted nails.

  “She?”

  She sighed and looked back at him. “She misses you.”

  “I miss her too,” he said, and it was the truest thing he’d said in a long time.

  Things went well after that. For a little while, anyway.

  Ondine agreed that she may as well stay for lunch, as she was there, after all. So they ate. And it was good. He ordered real meat and Ondine said oh no, eyes like circles, but he insisted and they shared a minute steak. They agreed neither of them had eaten meat since they honeymooned in Fiji, and then laughed about getting kicked out of the resort. They’d taken magic mushrooms and—in the throes of a sublime mind-and-body-buzz—broken into the kids’ play centre and pasted glitter all over their naked bodies. Ondine had then convinced Irving that they were Moroccan glow worms looking for a burrow. A groundskeeper caught them an hour later, digging a hole in a golf course green with their hands.

  Irving excused himself to the bathroom after they’d finished the main. He checked t
he stalls to make sure he was alone, then put a finger to his implant. “Exo-memory: I want on-retina recall dialled to maximum while I have lunch with Ondine Drinkwater. I don’t want to forget a single detail about our lives together—not a detail. Understood?”

  “Understood, Mister Kupfermann,” whispered the implant. “I am required to remind you that you have previously ordered me to keep all memory prompts down to Level One: only in case of emergency or direct request. You said, and I quote, ‘I don’t need that shit haunting me anymore’.”

  Irving looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t recognize the guy in there. The shiny blue suit and the pale, sweaty skin and the ponytail and that ridiculous tie-pin he bought for ten grand at a glittering store full of smug service staff. He looked like a douche. Felt like one, too. The only thing that remained familiar was the nose. Big hook nose that Ondine charitably called ‘Roman.’ Combined with the bags under his eyes he didn’t feel very Roman, right then. He looked like a vulture, picking over the carcass of his marriage.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, to himself. “Way to ruin the mood, arsehole.”

  “Sorry, Mister Kupfermann?” murmured the implant.

  “Nothing, it’s nothing.”

  “Mister Kupfermann?”

  “ What?” he hissed.

  “Are you sure you want your exo-memory turned up to maximum?”

  He looked away from the mirror. “You heard me. I want to remember everything.”

  Dessert came. She had ice-cream; he had coffee, strong and black. Ondine was quiet, biting her bottom lip as she ran her finger slow around the edge of the porcelain bowl. Irving waited for her to say what she wanted to say.

  Eventually she did. “So where did all this—” she waved a hand at the room “—come from?”

  “Hope, Ondine, it came from hope,” he said, and reached across the table, putting his hand on hers. She didn’t take hers away. “Hope can be the irrational desire for a miracle, despite all evidence to the contrary. But that’s not the sort of hope I have. Mine is based on the reality of what we had together, Ondine, and the concrete steps I’ve taken to reclaim my life. I’m successful now, like you always said I could be. I can be someone you depend on. I’m someone you can build realistic hopes around. All this is a manifestation of that—not an idle promise, but a promise kept, to myself, that I was worthy enough to get you back.”