The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  Paparazzi! She has lived her life surrounded by paparazzi the way a dead dog lives its death surrounded by blowflies. Maybe now she’d given him a good angle on her tits he’d crawl off to whatever pathetic stone he lived under and leave her alone. No chance.

  Knowing it is futile, she pulls her mobile phone out of her bag and speed-dials Dave Marchant, the studio’s Media Relations boss.

  “All I wanted was ten days of peace!” she shouts into the phone. “I’ve been here forty-eight hours and I’m up to my boobs in telephoto lenses!”

  “Not me, Julie. Defo not me.”

  “Lying shit. Get these pap scum off me! And don’t call me Julie.”

  Marchant sighs and says, “Julie—I’ve told you before. Paparazzi come with the job. In fact, paparazzi are the job.”

  Amber Holiday, aka Julia Simpson, throws the phone into her bag and looks around. There is no sign of the photographer.

  EXT. GREECE—PALEOKASTRITSA ROAD—21:05 BRITISH SUMMER TIME

  The narrow road from Bella Vista down to the harbour is steep, narrow, and winding with sheer drops of several hundred feet and blind bends. The gap between the ochre road-edge markings and the low fences is very narrow. Dune buggies are fragile—just an open tubular frame and an engine on big wheels. Amber’s hired buggy is bright yellow. She looks like an exotic caged parrot, her cool sea-green silk top rippling in the breeze.

  She has no chance to see the black Mercedes coming up fast behind her until it’s too late. The impact throws her back against her seat. She yanks far too hard on the steering wheel, goes right towards the cliff edge, and overcompensates. The buggy slams over to the left, ricochets off the rock wall, veers across the road, and breaks through the cliff fence.

  Caged birds can’t fly far—not unless they’re angry and forget to fasten their seatbelts. Like a diver from an eight-hundred feet high-board, Amber Holiday flies a perfect arc out of her cage, her arms spread as though pleading for wings, her unblemished skin with its careful factor-twenty sunblock reflecting the deep red of the setting sun, her beautifully chiselled Oscar-winning face turning in the evening air, and the goddess of a million tabloid pages, a zillion web-hits, blogs beyond count and infinite adolescent wet dreams hits the terrace of an apartment block, explodes, and turns into something resembling a spatchcocked chicken in a red wine sauce.

  EXT. GREECE—CORFU TOWN STREET—NIGHT

  Police Lieutenant Spiros Koukoulades is strolling with his wife, Maria, down the dark and moody Venetian lanes of Corfu Town towards his favourite taverna, trying to divert her attention from the fur and silver shops, when Constable Alexandros Fotos runs towards them and stops, panting. Maria looks away. Spiros stands like a block of stone and says, “Alexi—what?”

  Alexandros takes a deep breath and says, “A woman went off the cliff above Paleokastritsa this evening. She’s dead.”

  “So?”

  Maria turns back, fixes the constable with an uncompromising black-eyed stare, and says, “My husband is not on duty tonight.”

  Alexandros would rather have faced a rioting mob in his underpants than face Maria Koukoulades, but he stands up straight and says to his boss, “Major Panagakos sent me to find you. Your mobile is switched off. The woman who died is a tourist. Major Panagakos told me to respectfully tell you to turn your mobile on and phone him immediately.”

  Spiros walks away into the shadows, flicking his mobile phone open. Maria sniffs and looks Alexandros up and down and says, “You’re Demetria’s son, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told her not to let any of her sons join the police. Are you ambitious? Do you want a promotion?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “Then you can look forward to an angry wife and hungry Sunday nights. What’s so important about a dead tourist? Tourists fall off cliffs every day of the week.”

  Maria’s stare and half-smile are strangely disturbing. She is a predator surveying prey and an erotic challenge. In the shadows of the five-hundred-year-old street Spiros is facing the wall and talking quietly into his mobile.

  “The thing is,” Alexandros says, “it turns out she might be famous.”

  INT./EXT. PINEWOOD STUDIOS—19:00 BST

  Earlier.

  It’s nine o’clock in the evening in Greece but only seven o’clock in England on a fine July day. Puffy white clouds and softly-vanishing feathery vapour trails catch the gentle light and smile down at crowded pub-garden benches and children laughing as they ride on their last higher and higher push on the park swings. Blackbirds forage for worms between the trees. Midges and fruit flies emerge in the branches and assemble like fighter squadrons planning their attack on the lakes of wine and beer on the tables below. Of all the possible delights of summer, there is none more perfect than a warm July evening in England.

  None of this is visible inside the vast, ugly, dark, heavily-guarded and hermetically-sealed hangar that is the centre of operations of FlashWorks Productions. Gone are the old soundstages. Gone are the lighting rigs, brutes, booms, and makeup trolleys. No champagne pops, no stars hang on dressing-room doors. As Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land”: “The nymphs are departed.”

  Inside this building there is never sunshine unless a script calls for it, and then it’s the fake light of artifice.

  We are the CAMERA as it tracks through lonely pools of cool halogen light past the steel-clad reinforced block containing four thousand and ninety-six clusters of massively-parallel computers, each of which contains one thousand and twenty-four superconducting quantum cores. Coils of foil-wrapped liquid helium pipes enter the roof of the block like the snake-hair of Medusa, calming the qubits into submission. Power lines from the substation outside hum. And no birds sing.

  CAMERA continues to track through the gloom—past the Administration Block, now silent and unlit on a Sunday evening—towards the studios. Thirty-two spheres stretch in rows to the distant darkness. Each sphere has a diameter of twenty-four metres and hangs from an umbilical cord of cables and coolants. Each sphere is wrapped in golden foil, for no particular reason apart from impressing the investors. Around the equator of each sphere there is a ring of luminous colour. Black equals empty. Blue equals maintenance. Green equals powering up. Orange equals rehearsal. Red equals TAKE and may not be interrupted by anybody.

  Seven of the studios are active. In Studio Two Sharon Lightly is directing Amber Holiday in scene forty-six. In Studio Five Don Fairchild is directing Amber Holiday and Tarquin Beloff in scene six. In Studio Six Rachel Palmer is directing Amber Holiday and Tarquin Beloff in scene ninety-seven. In Studio Eleven Greg Waleski is directing Angel Argent and Tarquin Beloff in scene fifteen. All these studios are at status orange.

  Only one equator glows red.

  CAMERA slows its track down the long dark aisle, turns towards Studio Nineteen, and …

  INT. PINEWOOD STUDIO 19—19:00 BST

  Jack Rogers seems to float on his director’s chair halfway up one wall of the enclosing sphere. He is at a high angle above what seems to be a city street in London. The curving walls of the studio are invisible. He sees tower-blocks and traffic. He sees light snow drifting from the upper right. Traffic lights flash and the buses make bright cones of the falling flakes in their headlight beams.

  He stretches his arm out and slowly brings his flattened hand downwards. The viewpoint drifts down. He is the camera. He sees for us. He is dream-flying above this street, but what he sees, we will see.

  We drift lower until we are close to Oxford Circus tube station. Snowflakes drift past the viewpoint. Crowds from every nation on Earth struggle to walk in the press of people. There’s traffic noise, shouting, and Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” playing as a holding music track.

  And there she is. Amber Holiday walks out of the tube station and pulls the fur-lined hood up on her coat. She shivers, turns, and begins to fight her way through the crowds eastwards, towards Soho.

  Jack says, “Follow. Keep her in the right-han
d segment,” and the camera moves to the left with her.

  Jack says, “Push in slowly,” and the camera closes in on her deep blue eyes. She smiles. It’s a big smile. And then her smile bends and curls into a snarl. Snot runs from her nose. Her eyes squeeze shut in pain. She falls to the floor, inert.

  Jack shouts, “Cut!” and everything freezes. The traffic, the crowds, the noise, the buses, the taxis, and the music simply stop.

  INT. PINEWOOD STUDIO 6—19:00 BST

  Rachel Palmer has long dark curly hair, intense blue eyes, a “don’t mess with me” attitude, and she’s having a hard time with the actors. Tarquin Beloff is impossibly handsome. The computers have enhanced his pectoral muscles, which through the gap in his open-neck shirt look as though he could destroy tower-blocks with a swipe of his hand.

  “I agree with Amber,” he says in his carefully melded accent of Russia, Boston, and BBC. “It’s a really bad line.”

  “Tarquin,” says Rachel, “your opinion is valuable but I am actually talking to Amber here, so take a break.” Somewhere in the computer hub Tarquin’s user-interface state machine begins an infinite loop on its current node and he shuts up. That doesn’t stop several thousand other tasks in his entity cluster from reading and analysing books, paintings, music, and internet porn in search of a deeper simulacrum of humanity.

  Very patiently Rachel says, “Okay, Amber. So what exactly is your problem with the line?”

  “I can’t say ‘Don’t kiss me. You can fuck me, but you can’t kiss me. I’m not ready for kissing—yet.’” Amber deploys her brand-new secret smile. “It’s inconsistent with my character profile. Kissing is an early stage and fucking comes later.”

  Rachel sits back in her director’s chair and thinks for a moment. “The thing is, Amber,” she says, “what you’re saying is true for your inherited characteristics. Obviously Julie likes a bit of tongue-play before she feels like opening up, and so do I. But we’re doing acting, remember, and you have to adjust your parameters and weightings to accept that this is the way your character, Alice, feels about things. It makes her a little bit distinct from Julie and me. Maybe she values the tenderness of a kiss above body-touching and physical sexuality. Maybe she wants tenderness to be the goal and not the trigger. Just think about it.”

  Amber thinks about it for seven microseconds and says, “Okay—I’ve got that superimposition in place and I think I can do it but I’m not sure about the tone. Is it aggressive or seductive or hurt or confused or neutral or venomous…?”

  Rachel interrupts her. “I don’t want a list. Just update Alice and we’ll try it. Tarquin, come back.”

  Tarquin’s state machine receives the notification message and breaks out of its loop. His immobile features begin to move. He appears to breathe. He blinks. His lips are clean and moist.

  “Take it from the top,” Rachel says.

  Tarquin takes Amber in his arms and moves his mouth towards hers. She turns away enough to evade his kiss and says, “Don’t kiss me. You can fuck me, but you can’t kiss me. I’m not ready for kissing—yet.”

  Rachel smiles and says, “Not bad, darlings. Not at all bad. Quite effective and affecting. Just one thing, Amber…”

  “Yes?”

  “Lose the smile.”

  Amber’s smile bends and curls into a snarl. Snot runs from her nose. Her eyes squeeze shut in pain. She falls to the floor, inert.

  Seconds later, Tarquin goes catatonic, and his image fades to noise.

  MONTAGE—INT. PINEWOOD STUDIOS—EVENING

  A siren begins to wail. Red emergency lights flash outside the control room.

  Rachel, Jack, and other directors run down the long gloomy aisle from their capsules towards the control room. Jack leads the pack and punches the digits on the security keypad, and he’s first through the heavy door.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” Jack shouts. Senior Operations Manager Sunil Gupta is leaning over the shoulders of two console operators. Their touch-panels are Christmas trees of flashing red icons.

  EXT. UKRAINE—KIEV—EVENING

  It’s a very warm summer night in Kiev. Crowds sit outside cafes and bars. The moon reflects off the rippling surface of the Dnepr River. A dark shape bobs gently downstream, turning slowly in the current. Tarquin Beloff, aka Alexandr Bondarenko, is physically untouched. He has no wounds, no appearance of damage. His handsome features surface and turn down again into the moonlit flow. His only problem is that his lungs are full of water and he’s dead.

  INT. GREECE—CORFU—POLICE CAR—NIGHT

  The corporeal remains of Julia Simpson, aka Amber Holiday, have been bagged and sent to the mortuary in Corfu Town. Spiros and Alexandros are driving back to Corfu Town along dark, dangerous, twisty roads which weave between Cyprus trees and olive groves. Spiros’s mobile rings. He listens for a few seconds and gestures to Alexandros, who performs a risky three-point turn and accelerates.

  EXT. GREECE—CORFU—AGIOS STEFANOS NW—NIGHT

  Agios Stefanos is not the teenage shot-glass hell of Kavos to the south. It’s not the fish-and-chip zone of Sidari to the north. Once the tiny fishing port for the village of Avliotes which perches high on the surrounding hills, it’s a modern cluster of apartment blocks, tavernas, and bars. It has no disco. Self-respecting, numb-your-mind, under twenties would hate it. The beach is a long crescent of golden sand and gently-lapping Ionian Sea. Tourists know it as San Stefanos—allegedly renamed by package holiday company Thomson so that reps at the airport wouldn’t keep sending clients to either of the other two Agios Stefanos on the island.

  Alexandros drives into the centre of the village and parks outside The Little Prince apartments and taverna. The terrace restaurant area is busy. Cameras flash as Michalis (Mike) delivers Sizzling Steak to tables near the road. The platter steams and spits, and he wears a plastic bib. Michalis hates serving Sizzling Steak, but it’s tonight’s special.

  As Spiros and Alexandros leave the car and walk towards the restaurant the lights dim a little, and another Spiros, who is a waiter, and yet another Spiros, who is also a waiter, begin to dance a sirtaki in the aisle between the tables. Corfu is awash with men called Spiros after the island’s patron saint, Agios Spyridon. Their legs swing back and forward and around. They touch their heels and then their toes. They jump down to a crouch and then spin and rise, their arms spread wide.

  Dimitris, the owner, sprays barbecue lighter fuel from a bottle onto the floor and ignites it. Blue and orange flames flicker as Spiros and Spiros dance through fire and camera flashes.

  The policemen wait on the side of the road, watching, until the dance finishes, and then skirt the tables and walk into the interior of the taverna. Dimitris gestures for them to follow, and leads the way through to the apartment block and up the stairs to the swimming-pool level and the rooms.

  Room 101 is at the end of the corridor. A slippery-floor sign bars the way. Joe, the barman, keeps guard on the end of the corridor. He’s looking pale.

  Dimitris hands the master key to Spiros, and they go in.

  INT. GREECE—AGIOS STEFANOS NW—ROOM 101—NIGHT

  Angel Argent, aka Audrey Turner, lies on the floor facedown. She’s wearing a black bikini. An empty bottle of sleeping pills and a half-empty bottle of Metaxa are side by side on the work surface. Her dark brown hair is spread out around her head like a deep shadow.

  Spiros says, “Skata!”—which roughly translates to “Oh shit!”—and turns to Dimitris. “How did you find her?”

  “It’s a change-over day. People on night flights can get an extension to the late afternoon. One of the maids came in to prepare this room by mistake. By the way, her friend hasn’t turned up yet tonight. They had a bit of a row this morning.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Not him—her. Julia Simpson.”

  Alexandros and Spiros exchange one of those looks between policemen which contain the unspoken words “night” and “long.”

  “Alexi,” Spiros says, “rad
io in and get a science team here as fast as possible. And bring some security tape from the car. Dimitri—be so kind as to keep this area sterile and put two Sizzling Steaks on to cook!”

  INT. CONFERENCE AREA—PINEWOOD STUDIOS—NIGHT

  Sunil Gupta is ending his presentation to an assembly of directors, producers, executive producers, and most importantly, Lynne Songbird, who owns the studio, the actors, the staff, FlashWorks, an executive jet or two, and houses in LA, Glasgow, London, Paris, and Bangalore. Sunil is scared. Lynne is volatile. Lynne kicks punch-bags with bare toes for exercise. She wants some good news, but there isn’t any.

  “So basically,” Sunil says nervously, “we’ve lost quantum entanglement to five key actor brains—all within minutes of each other.”

  “Keep the heid!” Lynne says, reverting to the Scottish idiom for stay calm. “How can that happen?”

  Sunil points to a diagram on his electronic whiteboard. “We can only come to two conclusions: either the laws of physics have changed today, or these people are dead.”

  Jack’s been in the corner talking on his smartphone. He comes over into the light of the whiteboard projector. “I phoned Angel’s mobile again,” he says. “A policeman on Corfu answered it. Amber drove off a cliff. Angel took an overdose.”

  “And?” Lynne asks.

  “This many brains gone within minutes of each other? Looks to me like we’re under attack.”

  There’s a long pause as Lynne’s blue eyes track across the room. “Jack, Sunil, Rachel, Jason—stay here. Everybody else goes home, but keep your phones on and be ready to go anywhere at very short notice. Thank you.”

  When the room empties Lynne points to some seats and pours herself coffee from the flask near the whiteboard. Nobody says a word. Eventually Lynne sits down and says, “Okay. We need to be clear about this. Jack—you’re senior director on this movie. How much have we got?”