Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “What about Pevay? How did he think it went?”

  “I never knew. Never saw him again. We had a different Spirit Guide after that. Looked like Pevay, but it wasn’t the same guy. I think opening the portal cost him; maybe got him into trouble, and now he has to stay at home. Anyway, I’ve quit pro-gaming. I don’t have the time. I also broke up with Aileen, by the way.” He smiled, hopefully.

  “That’s sad,” said Chloe. “Would you like another coffee? And then I have to dash.”

  The romance was gone.

  Where do you find a leaf? In a forest.

  Where do you find a new species? In a rainforest would be a good bet. Or any dynamic environment, rich in niches for life; where conditions conspire to create a hotbed of diversity.

  Chloe had become interested in AI sentience when she was still an undergraduate. She’d taken a course in Artificial Intelligence; out of idle curiosity. She’d been at a lecture one day, watching a robot video (probably it was iCub) and a thought popped into her head, a random thought that would, eventually, change her career path.

  No. This is not the way it happens.

  Life is random, she wrote, in the secretive shorthand notebook she started using at this time. (Nothing digital that might be compromising!) I bet mind is the same. Mind isn’t about building cuter and cuter dolls. Or crippled slaves. Mind is a smoulder that ignites, in its own sweet time, in a hot compost heap of inflammable material. We’ll never build real AI sentience: it will be born. It will emerge from us; from what we are.

  Magic begins where technology ends . . . When they feel competent people don’t need magic. They only resort to extraordinary beliefs, rituals and words of power when they’re out of their depth. That’s what Malinowski had observed in Melanesia long ago, and it was still true; a truth about the human condition (like many of the traits once patronisingly called “Primitive”!) The gamers were extremely competent, but they’d known that Pevay was beyond them: so they called him an alien because the alternative was too scary. Chloe understood all that. She even understood why Pevay had vanished the way he did. By “opening a portal” he’d given the gamers closure, and covered his own tracks. But why had her Spirit Guide double-crossed her? Maybe she’d never know.

  A datastick had arrived in the post, soon after her banishment. It held the 56 Enamels: they were hers to keep. Chloe had been touched at the gesture; astounded when she looked up the monetized value of her digital treasure online. After she’d met with Reuel she uploaded the jewels, and looked at them again. She would never sell. She would keep the Enamels forever, if only to remind her that in Darkening World she had lived.

  Was Pevay scared of taking the final step? He and his kind were very far from helpless! But she had visions of the “human zoos” where Congo pygmies had been caged, with the connivance of her own people, in the bad old days. For this reason she’d kept quiet, and always would keep quiet. No decent anthropologist exploits her collaborators.

  But the Enamels gave her hope.

  Chloe published an interesting paper on the culture of online gaming teams. It was approved by the DW community, and well-received by her peers. And she waited.

  One day an email arrived. The source was anonymised. Untraceable. The message was short. It said “You are cleared for publication, Chloe.” It was signed DW.

  And so Chloe Hensen embarked on the great adventure of her life.

  The rest is history.

  Dream-Hunter

  Nick Wood

  Dream-Hunter.

  That is, indeed, what they call me.

  And what is it I search for?

  The heart of evil and truth – and, just sometimes, a little bit of madness and lies.

  Today, though, I might get the entire shitload.

  I choke back unexpected dread as I prepare for immersion in my pod, the Doc wiring my scalp to the monstrous man lying comatose beside me. Out of the corner of my right eye I can sense his slumbering bulk, rising and falling with a slow and menacing snore.

  Sledgehammer Jones.

  No, Sledgehammer fucking Jones.

  I wince as the Doc pulls on the scalp electrodes, stinging my right parietal area.

  She gives me a slap on my exposed arm, “Stop being a baby.”

  Like she’s the one going into the head of a brutal killer.

  Straining against the head strap, I lift my head a few inches and turn to the right. Jones is a mountain of a man swelling under those blue sheets, a pale white egg-domed head laced with cables feeding the machine between us. A big man indeed, and with a temper to match, I’d heard.

  Not that I’ve always been on the side of the angels myself. But then, my father had always taught me to be assertive, modelling it forcefully to me whenever he suspected I had lied to them.

  Until mamma would step in, a protective pillow against his punches.

  I lean back again, to avoid my eyes spilling.

  Mother…!

  Focus on the job ahead.

  We go back a few years, Doc Lizzie Abasi and I – 27 missions in all – and I have a 96% hit rate – the best fucking Rider in the world.

  Bar none.

  But you probably know that, I’m all over the Wiki pages.

  Dream Hunter One, they call me.

  It’s almost countdown time now, I can smell the acidic, cabbage-like stink of the REM-inducing drip the doc is preparing and suck in my breath, readying to both fall and soar into Dream-Space.

  “Hey Doc,” I call, “Give me some decent music to work to this time, none of your funny Irish shit.”

  Doc smiles over me, the purple bag of Stim swishing in her gloved hands: “I’m not Irish, remember – and you put up with what I choose to play, Peter John Scott.” Always, she uses my full name – and yes I know, she’s Peckham born and bred, third generation ex-Nigeria, so where does the yen for Irish music come from?

  Fuck it, who knows where anything comes from, especially our nocturnal dreams seaming our lives with images that seldom cohere? And faces. Old women, vaguely recognizable, wrinkled, and dark – darker hued than me, dual heritage man that I am. Always staring at me, willing something from me.

  Tip of my brain stuff, never quite named.

  Focus, Scott, forget the phantom crones.

  I groan, “So what’s it to be this time, Lizzie?”

  She’s busy with the Loom™ – the machine that locks brains together, the drip already hanging between Sledgehammer Jones and me. This is always the point where my shivering increases and words start to freeze in my mouth.

  My fifteenth year at this game and it only gets harder.

  I hear the large man alongside me catch his breath, as if not fully asleep.

  Dread deepens.

  “Let’s Remember 1848’, by The Literal Leprechauns,” Lizzie says, moving onto my least favourite part, the needle in the arm. Her brightly beaded cornrows tickle my right cheek.

  “Wh-Why?” I ask, looking up at her face instead, forcing words out, unable to hide their quiver, “That’s a f-f-fucking long time ago.”

  Lizzie half-smiles – as if she doesn’t notice – and signals to me with a drop of her right palm; I’m going under soon. She tilts her head, squinting at me over her smart-specs with those brown eyes of hers. It’s as if there are still things she likes to look at directly, without hearing the verbal comments that attach like buzzing flies to her smart goggle visuals.

  Or perhaps she just doesn’t like to hear what the Face-Rec sites continually say about me.

  I’m not really that arrogant: I really do have me some damn fine parietal lobes. Perhaps I have my dead English dad to thank for my skills; I was raised on tales of his lucid breakfast dreams, but my Zulu mamma’s daily putu-pap and peanut butter toast always satisfied my stomach.

  So it was that I learned to straddle both God and Nkulunkulu: science and myth, dream and reality.

  I have not seen my mum since my divorce, more than ten years ago now.

  She’d gotten
on well with Shireen, my ex-wife.

  Perhaps too well?

  Mamma told me I’d turned into ‘him’ and then left me, going back to the other family I hardly knew in South Africa.

  ‘Him’ – my father with fists. Surely not, mother?

  Surely, surely not?

  “We need to know our past, in order to understand where we are going,” Lizzie says slowly.

  “But neither of us are fucking Irish,” I say, the quiver in my voice gone, as my hurt and fear fades into the groggy, initial rush of the Stim.

  Sledgehammer Jones is waiting, so I hold back from the pull of the dream, thinking thickly, focusing my gaze into the pulsating light overhead.

  I have my plan ready, but know that means little sometimes, given the inherent surrealism of the domain. They never give me an easy ride either – I’ve had some mega-whacked out dream partners over the years. Those who refuse to talk – or who deny their crimes – have seriously fucked up dreams.

  I get the choice picks, the hardest of the hard. As befits the best of the best, I guess.

  My head sinks back and I watch the screen above the far wall struggling to make visual sense of Jones’s Imago-EEG, a cloudy and murky grey, he’s still some way short of REM state.

  Time to let go. I slip into the barely charted space between waking and dreams and hover in hypnagogic flux, pulsing a Door to be walked through – but…

  What – the – fuck?

  The screen flickers, fuzzes and sharpens. A man stands: slim and sharply-suited in grey, a svelte version of the nude man lying on the medical trolley next to me. This thinner, virtual Sledgehammer Jones is ignoring the glowing green door behind him – avoiding my usually unfailing initial lure.

  Instead, he seems to be peering out at me – and, and he, he’s fucking waving?

  “What’s, uh, – what’s his status?” I ask, my voice fading distant, crashing. My vocal cords constrict as I start to slowly sink.

  I can still sense Sledgehammer’s body alongside me – seemingly sedated by a drip infusion.

  “Dream status reached,” Lizzie says, a vague shape now, floating between us. “He’s deep in REM sleep.”

  How – the – fuck – is this – possible? I’m one of only a small batch of people in the world who have learned how to tread and weave the borders of dream and waking. We’re starting to knit together at the brainwave level, and it’s me who’s supposed to be holding the fucking threads – yet, somehow, this bastard is waving at me while dreaming, grinning like a skinny snake.

  The pull into sleep is an intolerable tug at my being, but I focus on pushing my frontal lobes for just that little bit longer.

  Is this just a hypnagogic hallucination?

  “Up his sedation,” I grind out slowly; REM sleep locks the body muscles, to stop you doing daft things while you dream, like killing someone.

  I see Lizzie’s shape swing towards the screen – and freeze.

  Forever.

  And for no time at all.

  She spins around again and hovers over him; I’m guessing she’s opening his Stim drip even wider.

  On the screen, Jones has turned and opened my green door, blowing it red with a breath.

  Red.

  The Sledgehammer’s favourite colour.

  He steps through.

  As for me, I lose my grip to the torrent of sleep.

  I am disembodied, a vague flash of fish in a raging unconscious river. Then I am there; gasping, wet and shivering, in a muted and pale cream bathroom. I have all the props ready, waiting – a bathroom, a bath, and several…implements.

  The man himself is not yet here. I have time to strengthen this dream, to sculpt the images from many visits and forensic holograms – I sense Jones looping along my corridor just outside.

  I twitch and tweak his synapses with fused will. There’s a part of the hippocampus where the memories beneath the dreams can be unlocked – with the right training and expertise.

  He will enter soon, filling the bath with someone he knows and re-enact a scene from his unconscious that he has – until now – always consciously denied.

  (Flowers and broken glass make a green rabbit jump.)

  I breathe slowly to clear the crazy images and re-orient myself, even though I have no need to breathe. Then, with familiar dexterity, I climb the wall like Spiderman, sticking myself to the ceiling and making myself invisible.

  The scene below starts to shiver and splinter into a myriad of dream fragments, a confused chaotic collage, disorienting me for eternal moments.

  I forget… no, I …remember, I am Peter, Peter Scott, Rider. This is my dream. Reassert command; take control… With practiced ease, I re-clarify the bathroom walls, with matte beige paint and maroon horizontal stripes at chest height, as per forensic record.

  Jones must be coming – and he is powerful. But he seems scattered and shattered in his dreaming thoughts. I only hope he is now fully immersed in my dream.

  Distantly, I hear bathwater tinkling and I buzz myself back into being, hanging from a burning hot bulb on the ceiling, invisible spider-like legs scalding. Sledgehammer Jones must be disturbing the strands of this scene.

  Steam and coconut scented bath salts saturate my nose from the water below; my eyes water with the sharp tang surging through my sinuses. Spiders don’t have sinuses, do they?

  Focus, Scott. Stay alert – and watch out for the bursting of any irrational anomalies from Jones’s unconscious.

  The dream steadies, seaming itself thicker, lacing itself with the richest of sensorial detail – and I sense Jones’s excitement as his dream throbs ahead of him, moving into the bathroom like a palpable, gloating force, ready to shake and shape events.

  Here we fucking go, then. I ready myself too.

  It is then that I see her. She is in the bath. Thickened and greying slightly with the approach of late middle years, she is bending forward, water dripping off her back as she scrubs her toenails with deft concentration.

  Jones himself enters, and I am relieved to see he is in a red bathrobe that reveals his real, blossoming bulk – no longer able, then, to conjure a lucid and ideal dream-self; he is finally absorbed into the fabric of our mutual dreaming. She – his wife, Alice – hesitates and half turns to Jones.

  “I’ve almost finished,” she says, covering her breasts with her arms.

  “So am I,” Jones says, smiling.

  Slowly, she looks up, and her sadness wafts up to me. A drop of water spools off her left cheek. I wonder, for the briefest of moments, if it is salty.

  “Why, Alice?” Jones asks, standing squarely, stolid in his growing anger.

  She seems unaware, shrugging with resignation and a hint of despair. “Barry does care for me, you know. And you haven’t really been here for a few years now,” she says, “Always – working?”

  “Yes!” Jones shouts. “Working, fucking working – while you – you fucked!”

  Shit, flashes of a bedroom scene intrude, another man with Alice, their limbs sprawled together, elsewhere. Take us back, back to my scene. There… I re-plaster the bathroom vignette, focusing intently on bringing back all pieces, including the implements.

  Especially the implements.

  Jones’s wife has her hands lifted, covering her eyes and, I’m now sure the leaking water dripping through her fingers is salty. Her shoulders are heaving and her voice is muffled, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t- didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  But Jones has already picked it up.

  One of the three implements in the bathroom at the time – toilet brush, hand vac and… a small sledgehammer. Propped behind the toilet bowl, it had been mistakenly left some few days past by builders completing the wall renovation. It was neither easily nor automatically available. And yet the man has stepped around the toilet to heft it, moving back to the bath and his wife, readying himself, hammer over his head.

  Alice drops her hands to the side of the bath and only gulps with a frightened raspin
g wheeze. Her pinkish eyes are dilated, huge, staring us down.

  Eventually, her voice comes, raspy with fear: “John, what – what are you– what?”

  He swings the hammer down onto his wife’s head.

  Despite myself, I close my eyes.

  She screams – and screams – and screams?

  I look.

  She is thrashing in the water, desperately, frenzied in panic. The bath water is… clear, foaming with her surging activity, but clear.

  The large man stands, head down, hammer in both hands. He has stopped the swing just inches from his wife’s head.

  But… in reality, he had not.

  Dream-jacking always gets to the truth. Defences down, dreamers re-enact events – given the right steer, the right props from an expert Rider – and there are none better than I.

  My prompts always spark a replay of actual events, dream or no dream.

  Uh-uh, focus, Scott…

  Sledgehammer Jones straightens and looks up then.

  Straight at me.

  “So. How much are the Crown Prosecution paying you for this?”

  Shit.

  Fucking shit.

  Jones’s wife is standing now. Water streams down her body, over her breasts, down her belly and thighs.

  Jones looks back at her, but keeps speaking to me. “My name’s John. Just John Jones. I loved this woman dearly. I want to set her free.”

  “What?” I whisper from the ceiling.

  He looks up at me again. “I’m going to put the hammer down and let her go, so she can join Barry, like she always hoped.”

  “But… that’s not what happened.”

  “No,” he says, “But it’s what should have happened.”

  I’ve never faced this dilemma before. What to do? If I just let him take hold of the dream, I have no doubt they will fire me. They get paid by the conviction – as do I.

  John Jones puts the sledgehammer down. His wife has stepped out of the bath and is drying herself on a large white towel – she wraps it around her body and ties it over her left shoulder like a toga.

  “I loved you, John,” she says.