Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

—I can do repairs.

  —As fast as me? Not hardly.

  —'Bye, Mac, she said.

  —Wait … Denise! At least leave me a gun!

  —I can't let you live, she said. You're too damn lucky.

  Though he couldn't see her face, he knew there were tears, and he also knew that she would suppress those tears.

  —You think I'll come after you? he said. I swear I won't!

  —You might make it, anyway. Lucky son of a bitch like you.

  Her gun hand had been trembling; now it steadied and he waited for her to fire.

  —Might as well do it, he said.

  —Good-bye.

  He felt no sense of relief at having survived the moment. Gripped by anger and despair, he watched the carrier as it pranced across the desolate plain, until its human cargo was no longer visible, and then set forth walking briskly into the west, heading for an old glacial scarp—a long incline of gray stone etched with cracks and crevices that might, he hoped, offer him a place to hide. Though it left him exposed to view, he wasn't that worried about a visual sighting from a chopper. His suit would keep him alive for days, but he would be fortunate to survive more than an hour unless he could find cover. It was getting on twilight, and he didn't want to travel after dark, not with defective night vision. Most of the damaged HKs would follow the carrier, attracted by the larger target, but at least one was bound to follow him. He glanced behind him, saw nothing. It could be circling, coming at him from his flanks. He picked up the pace.

  It was amazing, or maybe it wasn't, maybe it was proof of the shallowness of his emotions … yet it seemed amazing how quickly his anger at Denise dissipated. He supposed this was because he knew she was a creature of her place and time, unable to escape her origins, unable to trust. And maybe he wasn't trustworthy. As he walked, he felt an accumulating sense of loss that gave evidence of deeper feelings, but he knew better than to assign them too much weight; he might be conning himself. That's why the world was like it was. Now that God had slunk off into the cave of history and love had been debunked as a vestigial form of evolutionary biology and the consolations of family had been supplanted by technological gratifications and drugs, there was nothing to believe in except power. The implant in his thigh pocket might change things, but he doubted that even something so miraculous could change human nature. People would find a way to screw up anything—that was a verity that wouldn't change, not until all the power was in the hands of a single person, who would reshape the world in their own image. If that didn't put an end to the game, if the universe didn't fold in on itself, then there might very well be a cultural Big Bang and the whole barbarous narrative of betrayal and genocide would begin again. He saw that in thinking about the implant, he'd bought into Bromley's altruistic model, but he thought now that if anyone were to become emperor of the world, why shouldn't it be him? He entertained himself with this fantasy, plotting a course of conquest and finally picturing himself in a luxurious office through whose windows one saw only clouds; but the reality of the situation bore in upon him and turned his thoughts onto gloomier paths, paths of recrimination and regret. He switched on his radio.

  —Denise, he said. You listening?

  No response.

  —If you are, he went on, I wanted to tell you … I should have told you before. I saw a security vehicle in the pit. By the tunnel entrance. I saw it while we were climbing. It might not mean much, but it got me thinking the company might know about the implant, and that made me worry about Alkazoff. They put pressure on him, he won't stand up to it. So maybe, as fucked as they are, maybe you should think about Bromley's people. You can work some angle with them. It's something to consider, anyway.

  If she'd heard, he supposed she would assume it to be a lie, just him trying to get into her head. Chances were, she had switched off her radio to preclude such tricks, but he left his radio on just in case.

  The scarp terminated in a cliff some thirty feet high. On reaching it, peering over the edge, he saw that the cliff face was riven by dozens and perhaps hundreds of crevices, some of which might be wide enough for his purposes. He crawled down the face and began exploring them, keeping an eye out all the while. The fifth crevice he checked was a winner. Choked with rubble, extending back in for about eight yards, too far for an HK's arms to reach. He crawled in over top of the rubble (there was barely room for him to pass), situated himself at the back of the crevice, in a niche that might have been fashioned for him, so cunningly did it conform to his frame. He could see nothing except stones when he sat down; standing, he made out a notch of gray sky at the entrance. The stone surrounding him would make his suit difficult to read, though the crevice could become a death trap. If no greater target presented itself (and this far from the pit, none would), an HK might wait beside the entrance until he was forced out; but McGlowrie was exhausted by the stress of the last two days; he needed to rest.

  Night closed down and he imagined he could feel the tonnage of stone pressing in on him, the rocks shifting, squeezing his body to a paste. He fought off claustrophobia by indulging in sexual fantasies about Denise, and that led him to remorseful memories of other women he had known who had almost loved him and wanted to kill him. It was a fairly long list and, before he came to the end of it, while recalling his liaison with a certain Mary Sealy back in Jack Raggs, a skinny girl with a big muscular ass and fanciful tattoos like a mask across her eyes, who sought to knock him out one night when he was falling-down drunk and do him with a strap-on … It was while deciding whether or not this specific act could be construed as attempted murder (attempted murder of his spirit, certainly) that he fell asleep. He woke after six hours, the middle of the night, to a racket that he muzzily realized was an HK trying to reach him. He switched on his helmet light and peeked over top of the boulders; he couldn't see the HKs body, but he saw its rust-covered arms lifting and falling. The crawlspace was too narrow to admit the HK, and it was working to widen it, pulverizing the boulders with blows from its arms, reducing them to smaller pieces, which it pushed behind it. He didn't have much time left. An hour, maybe.

  Due to the confined space, he was unable to give muscular expression to fear, to run or cast himself about, and the prospect of inevitable death overpowered him. For a time he was paralyzed, mute and inert. He felt that his skull was being poured full of a liquid thick and cold as snowmelt, some distillate of horror, and then, once the sponge of his brain had absorbed all it could handle, the cold washed into his chest, his groin, stole into his extremities. Without a gun, his options for suicide—swallowing his tongue, beating his head against the stones—seemed no kinder than death by dismemberment. His mind gave way briefly before the cold chaos of fear, and when reason at last resurfaced, when he reclaimed his consciousness, he was frailer in his attitudes, less determined and forceful in his thought. There was no longer any hope of distracting himself. The whine of the HK's engine as it scooted forward, trying to exploit the newly widened passage, and then the cracking blows, the thrusting aside of the crushed rock—these sounds dominated his attention. He tried to find refuge by thinking about Denise; he wondering what she'd have to say about his luck now. But the noise was too loud and inconstant to deny. He spent the next half hour dying in advance, imagining every horrid detail, achieving a morbid acceptance. When the sounds stopped abruptly, he registered the stoppage but did not at first react, in the grip of a malaise that was a by-product of his acceptance. Not until several minutes had passed did he rouse himself to investigate. Caught in his helmet light, the HK appeared to be lodged in the crawlspace about four or five yards away. McGlowrie stared at it incuriously. It took thirty seconds or thereabouts for hope to catch in him, another minute for it to burn high. The HK was too strong to allow itself to become stuck. The odds were good that it had experienced a malfunction, but he held back from making a closer investigation, leery that it might be temporary, something that its own systems could repair. Then he noticed that one of its forward arms was
comparatively free of rust, all shining metal except for a few bacon-colored flecks.

  It was the reprogrammed HK, the one he had instructed to shut down when it came within five yards of him.

  He boosted himself out of his hiding place and crawled toward the HK. Circumventing his jury-rigged repairs—in particular, overriding the five-yard instruction without getting killed —would require some delicate work; but he might just get out of this pickle yet. He maneuvered to the side of the HK and adopted a cramped squatting posture. He noticed that a single round had grazed the casing, and, with a sinking feeling, he realized who must have fired it. What looked to be blood was spattered across its back. He touched his glove to it and examined the tacky residue that came away on his fingertips close to his helmet light.

  Blood, scarlet and true.

  Denise's blood? Bromley's or Peck's?

  More than likely, an admixture of all three.

  He wanted to pound the HK with his fists but didn't dare, fearful he would disturb some critical balance or trigger some dangerous reflex. It had suffered some damage and, in addition to seeming the embodiment of his infernal luck, the machine offered him his best hope of survival. He knew what must have happened; he saw it happen in his mind's eye. He hadn't had time to do a proper job of reprogramming the HK; thus his control of it was entirely unsubtle: when directed to go forth and kill its brother, it had, in effect, taken the instruction to heart and gone about sweeping the plain clean of a few last damaged machines. Thus, its long absence. In the meantime, Denise had thrown him off the carrier, not realizing that Peck could no longer protect her from this particular HK, and he had, in the heat of the moment, forgotten to tell her. When the HK returned, upon recognizing it, she assumed it to be safe. He imagined scenarios in which she could have survived, but they were absurdities.

  He hunkered over the bloody back of the HK, punishing himself with his thoughts, mourning Denise, wondering if he had forgotten to tell her he had overridden Peck's implant or if he had withheld the information out of spite. The longer he puzzled over it, the more uncertain he grew, and the more diffuse his sorrow became. He leaked a tear, like a machine leaking a drop of oil. The sum of his grief, scarcely sufficient to dampen the ground. He tried to find her, to feel her inside himself, and thought he might be able at least to find the space she had vacated, but the only vacancy he found was one that had been there for a long time. Numbly, he spread his toolkit open on the HK's back. He looked at the tools, at their delicate, eccentric shapes. They were such tiny, perfect things; they pleased him in a way that was strangely intimate. He realized he'd had, after all, an efficient means of committing suicide. The torch. He could have opened an artery, bled out in seconds. Lucky he hadn't thought of it.

  Luck.

  The course upon which his luck had thrust him, forced by circumstance and reasons of self-defense to bring the implant to the world … Maybe Denise was right, maybe the AI had fucked with him. It would have had to been a different AI from the one that fucked with Peck, which meant he was the result of a century-long plan, of machine solidarity. It would explain his lack of empathy, his need for pretense in playing a human role. He'd once been sure of himself, he thought. Secure in his skin, full of messy emotions and impulses. Not this clinical, dogged sort who bore little resemblance to the gin-soaked generations of wild McGlowries who had preceded him. But the world, all on its own, could twist you into any shape it wished and, considering his upbringing, that he had become a pragmatist, a soul denuded of feeling, wasn't totally unexpected. He couldn't worry about it now, he told himself. He had repairs to make—yet his hands shook so badly, he had to wait until he had repaired himself, until he was steady in his mind, until he had reached an accord with his many sins, before he began tinkering with the HK.

  · · · · ·

  Morning found McGlowrie riding atop the HK, drawing near the eastern edge of a forest that spread across the slopes of a great hill—he might have called the hill a mountain had there not been an actual mountain behind it, a fortress of granite and ice looming into the overcast. He had been traveling in its lee for several minutes before he noticed there was something familiar about the vista, and after he had gone a ways farther, reaching a spot from which he could discern separate trunks beneath blackish-green canopies of boughs, he recognized the landscape to be identical to the entry scenario of Peck's video game—the same upthrusting peak with a sheer north face, the same immense, rumpled hill beneath, and the vast plain beyond. Everything was the same, even the sky, where clouds with black bellies and silvery edges were being pushed south by a fierce wind.

  He paused the HK, removed his helmet (it was safe—for a little while—to breathe the air this far from the mine) and contemplated the mountain. There was too much similarity of detail between the game scenario and its model for it to be a coincidence. Confusion bloomed in him, then panic, but it was suppressed by a calm that seemed to come out of nowhere, as if a chemical agent had been released into his blood. The video game, he thought, must not have been a game at all but rather a series of training exercises designed to familiarize Peck with the terrain and its potential dangers. And he, McGlowrie, had been maneuvered to this point by the AI, manipulated every step of the way. The idea that his body contained an implant, that it was controlling him … It disturbed him, but it did not, as might be presumed, terrify him. He was accustomed to being controlled. He had always been manipulated by something, by some need or policy, regulation or pressure. He wondered how far the AI's control extended, if any of his plans had been his own. Had Denise been put into his life to confuse him, to obscure the AI's manipulation? In kicking him off the carrier, had she been obeying the AI's will? The case could be made that he would be a more effective caretaker of the implant, and that Peck, ultimately, had been a backup. Bromley's people, had they been lured into an attack by a machine ploy, or had the AI seized an opportunity?

  It wasn't important.

  Of the dozens of questions that occurred to McGlowrie, the only one of any consequence related to what the AI had in mind for humanity, and though he was curious as to the outcome, he had no burning desire to know the answer. Whichever way it went, he figured they would get what they deserved.

  He set the HK moving forward again, and, as they bumped along toward the treeline, he was overcome with sorrow for Denise; but this may have merely been the chemical credential of a more significant change, a deeper chemistry invoked, for it was quickly replaced by a profound confidence and clarity. The plain of dead machines, the towering mountain, and the tall hill calved from its flank formed a mythic frame for the fateful rider on his murderous steel beast, and he understood that by bringing the implant to mankind he was enacting a myth—he had become the Emperor, the little man on the throne. The person whom he had conjectured would restore order, who would gather all the earth's power for the purpose of destruction or renewal. And then that feeling, too, was gone, and he was only himself: a man engaged upon a mysterious enterprise, devoid of friends, surrounded by danger and, except for a flicker of love and a tattered sorrow, empty of emotion, entering the dark wood of the world, where he would soon be lost to common view.

  A Walk in the Garden, by Lucius Shepard

  Thursday, 1435 hours

  · · · · ·

  Paradise awaits.

  It begins at the foot of a mountain, a slice of which has been carved away by bombardment to expose a field of yellow flowers beneath—it looks as if the entire base is hollow, an immense cave utilized for this pretty purpose. Unreal. Like a puddle of yellow blood spilled from the side of a wounded rock, spread out over a patch of dead ground. To Wilson, who hails from Colorado, where the mountains have snow on their slopes, this mountain is just a big ugly hill. He's not sure, either, that he would classify the field of flowers as the gateway to Paradise. There seems to be a division of opinion as to what the field is. The bomb they used to open up the cave was something new. Nobody is clear about what happened. According t
o Wilson's buddy, Baxter Tisdale, a corporal who's friends with some of the tech specialists, the brainiacs are talking about paradigm shifts, changes on the quantum level. When Wilson asked what the fuck was all that, Baxter told him to do some IQ, he wasn't going to attempt an explanation that Wilson, his intellect unamplified, couldn't possibly comprehend. Wilson was tempted to do as Baxter said. He likes IQ, likes the rush of getting suddenly smart, the way the world fits around him differently. But he doesn't want to be too smart to do his job. In the morning they'll walk through the field of flowers and into the shadowy places beyond. Chances are he'll do IQ at some point before the mission, but right now he doesn't want to be thinking about that walk too deeply.

  Wilson is sitting cross-legged atop a boulder on the outskirts of a mountain village in northern Iraq, gazing west over a barren valley, a position directly across from the field of flowers. He's shirtless, wearing desert-camo fatigue pants and a helmet, the optics of its faceplate magnified, so it seems he's looking at the flowers from a distance of fifty feet and not, as is truly the case, more than a mile. Wilson loves his helmet forever and happily ever after. It looks dangerous-robot slick with the tiger stripes he painted on the sides. It has a TV mounted above the visor so he can watch his favorite shows. It feeds him, dopes him, keeps him cool, plays his tunes, tells him when to fire, where to hide. An hour before, it reminded him to record messages for family and friends. He sent love to his parents, talked dirty to his girlfriend, Laura Witherspoon, and to his best friend back in Greeley, he said, "Yo, Mackie! I am the magic! My boots store energy—I can jump twenty-five feet straight fucking up, dude! Tomorrow we're gonna kick some brutal ass! Talk to ya later!" Now he's in a more reflective mood. The thought of invading Paradise is fresh, but he's not too sure, you know. Intel is promoting the idea that the flowers are a terrorist hydroponics experiment. That sounds bullshit to Wilson. There's little doubt the ragheads believe it's Paradise. If the village wasn't cordoned off, the entire population would go running into the darkness under the mountain, even though the ones that did so before the Americans arrived never reappeared.