The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  You were gone, looking inward. Lost in AIr.

  I saw two Chinese persons traveling together, immobile behind sunglasses. One of them stood up and went to the restroom, pausing just slightly as zie walked in both directions. Taking eyeshots? Sampling profile information? Zie looked straight at me. Ghosts of pockmarks on zir cheeks. I only saw them because I had turned off.

  I caught the eye of an Arab gentleman in a silk robe with his two niqabbed wives. He was sweating and afraid, and suddenly I was. He nodded once to me, slowly. He was a Voyager as well.

  I whispered your name, but you didn’t respond. I didn’t want to latch you; I didn’t know how much might be given away. I began to feel alone.

  At Abuja station, everything was sun panels. You bought some chocolate gold coins and said we were rich. You had not noticed the Chinese men but I told you, and you took my hand and said in Portuguese, “Soon we will have no need to fear them any longer.”

  The Arab family and others I recognized from the first trip crowded a bit too quickly into the Makurdi train. All with tiny Fabric bags. Voyagers all.

  We had all been summoned at the last minute.

  Then the Chinese couple got on, still in sunglasses, still unsmiling, and my heart stumbled. What were they doing? If they knew we were going and they didn’t like it, they could stop it again. Like they’d stopped the Belize launch. At a cost to the Cooperative of trillions. Would they do the same thing again? All of us looked away from each other and said nothing. I could hear the hiss of the train on its magnets, as if something were coiling. We slithered all the way into the heart of Makurdi.

  You woke up as we slowed to a stop. “Back in the real world?” I asked you, which was a bitchy thing to say.

  The Chinese man stood up and latched us all, in all languages. “You are all idiots!”

  Something to mull over: they, too, knew what we were doing.

  The Makurdi taxi had a man in front who seemed to steer the thing. He was a Tiv gentleman. He liked to talk, which I think annoyed you a bit. Sociable, outgoing you. What a waste, when the AI can drive.

  Why have humans on the Voyage either?

  “You’re the eighth passengers I’ve have to take to the Base in two days. One a week is good business for me. Three makes me very happy.”

  He kept asking questions and got out of us what country we were from. We stuck to our cover story—we were here to teach Lusobras to the Nigerian Air Force. He wanted to know why they couldn’t use the babblefish. You chuckled and said, “You know how silly babblefish can make people sound.” You told the story of Uncle Kaué proposing to the woman from Amalfi. He’d said in Italian, “I want to eat your hand in marriage.” She turned him down.

  Then the driver asked, “So why no Chinese people?”

  We froze. He had a friendly face, but his eyes were hooded. We listened to the whisper of his engine. “Well,” he said, relenting. “They can’t be everywhere all the time.”

  The Co-op in all its propaganda talks about how international we all are: Brasil, Turkiye, Tivland, Lagos, Benin, Hindi, Yemen. All previous efforts in space have been fuelled by national narcissism. So we exclude the Chinese? Let them fund their own trip. And isn’t it wonderful that it’s all private financing? I wonder if space travel isn’t inherently racist.

  You asked him if he owned the taxi and he laughed. “Ay-yah! Zie owns me.” His father had signed the family over for protection. The taxi keeps him, and buys zirself a new body every few years. The taxi is immortal. So is the contract.

  What’s in it for the taxi, you asked. Company?

  “Little little.” He held up his hands and waved his fingers. “If something goes wrong, I can fix.”

  AIs do not ultimately live in a physical world.

  I thought of all those animals I’d seen on the trip: their webbed feet, their fins, their wings, their eyes. The problems of sight, sound and movement solved over and over again. Without any kind of intelligence at all.

  We are wonderful at movement because we are animals, but you can talk to us and you don’t have to build us. We build ourselves. And we want things. There is always somewhere we want to go even if it is twenty-seven light years away.

  Outside Makurdi Air Force Base, aircraft stand on their tails like raised sabres. The taxi bleeped as it was scanned, and we went up and over some kind of hump. Ahead of us blunt as a grain silo was the rocket. Folded over its tip, something that looked like a Labrador-colored bat. Folds of Fabric, skin colored, with subcutaneous lumps like acne. A sleeve of padded silver foil was being pulled down over it.

  A spaceship made of Fabric. Things can only get through it in one direction. If two-ply, then Fabric won’t let air out, or light and radiation in.

  “They say,” our taxi driver said, looking even more hooded than before, “that it will be launched today or tomorrow. The whole town knows. We’ll all be looking up to wave.” Our hearts stopped. He chuckled.

  We squeaked to a halt outside the reception bungalow. I suppose you thought his fare at him. I hope you gave him a handsome tip.

  He saluted and said, “I hope the weather keeps fine for you. Wherever you are going.” He gave a sly smile.

  A woman in a blue-gray uniform bustled out to us. “Good, good, good. You are Graça and Cristina Spinoza Vaz? You must come. We’re boarding. Come, come, come.”

  “Can we unpack, shower first?”

  “No, no. No time.”

  We were retinaed and scanned, and we took off our shoes. It was as if we were so rushed we’d attained near-light speeds already and time was dilating. Everything went slower, heavier—my shoes, the bag, my heartbeat. So heavy and slow that everything glued itself in place. I knew I wasn’t going to go, and that absolutely nothing was going to make me. For the first time in my life.

  Graça, this is only happening because zey want it. Zey need us to carry zem. We’re donkeys.

  “You go,” I said.

  “What? Cristina. Don’t be silly.”

  I stepped backwards, holding up my hands against you. “No, no, no. I can’t do this.”

  You came for me, eyes tender, smile forgiving. “Oh, darling, this is just nerves.”

  “It’s not nerves. You want to do this; I do not.”

  Your eyes narrowed; the smile changed. “This is not the time to discuss things. We have to go! This is illegal. We have to get in and go now.”

  We don’t fight, ever, do we, Graça? Doesn’t that strike you as bizarre? Two people trapped on the twenty-fourth floor all of their lives, and yet they never fight. Do you not know how that happens, Graçfushka? It happens because I always go along with you.

  I just couldn’t see spending four years in a cramped little pod with you. Then spending a lifetime on some barren waste watching you organizing volleyball tournaments or charity lunches in outer space. I’m sorry.

  I knew if I stayed you’d somehow wheedle me onto that ship, through those doors; and I’d spend the next two hours, even as I went up the gantry, even as I was sandwiched in cloth, promising myself that at the next opportunity I’d run.

  I pushed my bag at you. When you wouldn’t take it, I dropped it at your feet. I bet you took it with you, if only for the cupaçu.

  You clutched at my wrists, and you tried to pull me back. You’d kept your turquoise bracelet and it looked like all the things about you I’d never see again. You were getting angry now. “You spent a half trillion reals on all the surgeries and and and and Rhodopsin . . . and and and the germ cells, Cris! Think of what that means for your children here on Earth, they’ll be freaks!” You started to cry. “You’re just afraid. You’re always so afraid.”

  I pulled away and ran.

  “I won’t go either,” you wailed after me. “I’m not going if you don’t.”

  “‘Do what you have to,” I shouted over my shoulder. I found a door and pushed it and jumped down steps into the April heat of Nigeria. I sat on a low stucco border under the palm trees in the shade, my heart s
till pumping; and the most curious thing happened. I started to chuckle.

  I remember at seventeen, I finally left the apartment on my own without you, and walked along the street into a restaurant. I had no idea how to get food. Could I just take a seat? How would I know what they were cooking?

  Then like the tide, an AI flowed in and out of me and I felt zie/me pluck someone nearby, and a waitress came smiling, and ushered me to a seat. She would carry the tray. I turned the AI off because, dear Lord, I have to be able to order food by myself. So I asked the waitress what was on offer. She rolled her eyes back for just a moment, and she started to recite. The AI had to tell her. I couldn’t remember what she’d said, and so I asked her to repeat. I thought: this is no good.

  The base of the rocket sprouted what looked like giant cauliflowers and it inched its way skyward. For a moment I thought it would have to fall. But it kept on going.

  Somewhere three months out, it would start the engines, which drive the ship by making new universes, something so complicated human beings cannot do it.

  The AI will make holograms so you won’t feel enclosed. You’ll sit in Pamukkale, Turkiye. Light won’t get through the Fabric so you’ll never look out on Jupiter. The main AI will have some cute, international name. You can finish your dissertation on Libro del cortegiano. You’ll be able to read every translation—zey carry all the world’s knowledge. You’ll walk through Urbino. The AI will viva your PhD. Zey’ll be there in your head watching when you stand on the alien rock. It will be zir flag you’ll be planting. Instead of Brasil’s.

  I watched you dwindle into a spark of light that flared and turned into a star of ice-dust in the sky. I latched Emilda and asked her if I could stay with her, and after a stumble of shock, she said of course. I got the same taxi back. The rooftops were crowded with people looking up at the sky.

  But here’s the real joke. I latched our bank for more money. Remember, we left a trillion behind in case the launch was once again canceled?

  All our money had been taken. Every last screaming centavo. Remember what I said about fraud?

  So.

  Are you sure that spaceship you’re on is real?

  John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, and Tor.com. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

  Hold-Time Violations

  John Chu

  “Attention passengers: the next Red Line train to Alewife is now approaching” echoes off the walls. Not only has the next Red Line train to Alewife arrived but its passengers have already flooded the station, a torrent rushing up the escalators, through the turnstiles, then down the concourse to spill out the doors to Cambridge. The flood coming as the PA system squawks catches Ellie off-guard. It’s rush hour. When a train arrives on one side of the platform, the one on the other side leaves seconds later. She sprints, a veritable salmon racing against the current of bodies. Her pack sloshes between her shoulder blades, a sloppy fin batting the waves of people that surround her.

  No one has tried to kill her yet today. Occasionally, skunkworks isolationists try. Also, her sister, Chris, arranges something pretty much every day to keep her sharp. Maybe the mistimed announcement is part of the attempt. She’ll be caught in the rip current of bodies, a wave will overwhelm her, and the knives of a shark hiding in the swell will tear her to pieces. Compared to the attempt with the Mylar balloons, jar of Marmite, and the US men’s Greco-Roman wrestling team, an ill-timed flood at Alewife Station is downright practical and likely.

  None of that happens, though. The crowd flows around her as she plunges down the stairs toward the platform.

  The car doors shut just as she reaches them. While the PA system blasts, “Attention passengers: the next Red Line train to Alewife is now arriving,” the train clatters away. The train supposedly now arriving sits already emptied on the opposite side of the platform. It beeps as its doors slide shut.

  Some guy wearing shorts that stretch across his thighs, no shirt, and more self-possession than Ellie thought possible hovers in front of one of the doors. Someone else sits on a bench, staring at her e-reader. A thin woman reaches for Ellie like someone drowning reaching for a buoy. Her luggage crashes to the floor. She asks in rapid Mandarin whether Ellie knows how to get to the Best Western. Her oboe-like voice skips through her words.

  Ellie blinks. She doesn’t really speak Mandarin, at least not to anyone she doesn’t know. The Best Western is just a short walk away. With luggage, though, the woman will want a taxi but there’s almost always one dropping someone off right outside the station. All the woman needs to do is go up the escalator and cross the concourse. The response Ellie stitches together doesn’t draw laughs. In fact, the woman thanks her. Ellie decides she is not today’s assassin.

  The woman doesn’t turn to the escalator. Instead, she freezes for a moment then glares at Ellie.

  “If you’d quit your job after Mom’s diagnosis like I’d asked, you could move to DC,” the woman says in fluent English, her voice now husky. “You wouldn’t have to worry about missing the Amtrak.”

  The woman looks nothing like Chris, but she now sounds exactly like her. A childhood in Taipei clashed with an adolescence in Buffalo to give Chris an accent that is incongruously Brooklyn.

  People randomly start sounding like her sister all the time. Some people text. Her sister waylays convenient strangers. The frequency never makes it less disconcerting.

  “Do we have to have this discussion right now?” Ellie furrows her brow. “If I don’t get to South Station in time, the next Amtrak is tonight. I’ll be there before the afternoon.”

  The woman only comes up to Ellie’s neck. She glares down at Ellie anyway.

  “Too late.” The woman folds her arms across her chest. “If I have to stay at home to watch over Mom, you have to go to the skunkworks and repair the physics of this universe.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “Everyone’s wrong about why International Prototype Kilogram is losing mass relative to its official copies. We’d see divergences between copies even if the kilogram were defined by something more fundamental than a cylinder of platinum alloy. The notion of the kilogram, itself—”

  “Has become unstable.” Ellie frowned. “Fundamental physical constants are changing—”

  “Yes. Now the good news—”

  “There’s good news?”

  “—is we’ve found some hold-time violations in the skunkworks. Probably caused by some leaking valves. They must be why the kilogram’s unstable. Fix them and I promise I won’t judge you when you don’t get here until tomorrow afternoon. First time for everything, sis.”

  By “first time,” Ellie isn’t sure if Chris is talking about being sent to repair the skunkworks or not judging her for being late. Probably the former. Nothing in the matryoshka doll that is the set of universes can prevent Chris from judging her. Ellie would ask, but Chris has already gone.

  The woman turns around as though she hasn’t said a thing. She goes to the escalator, trundling her luggage behind her.

  At least someone gets to go where she wants to. Ellie doesn’t because Mom lies comatose on a bed in Chris’s den. Mom needs constant attention from Chris the way dolphins need tax advice. However, taking care of your parents is a filial obligation and no one is more Chinese than someone who no longer lives in the motherland. Even though Chris wants Ellie in the same house as Mom, she doesn’t actually let Ellie do anything for Mom. Chris would rather do it herself.

  Ellie visits every weekend anyway. She only needs one reason: once in a while, Mom shifts in bed. She yawns. Her eyes open a crack and, for a moment, she stares right at Ellie. She’s about to wake from her long nap, or so it seems for that moment. Then her eyes close again and she slumps back into bed. She probably never moved in the first place.
Still, this seems like much more than random firing of neurons in a brain about to die. Ellie, even though she knows better, can’t help thinking that the next time might be the time.

  The train beeps. Its doors slide open. Passengers stream onto the train. Ellie shakes her head clear then joins them.

  The skunkworks that generates a universe lives within the surrounding universe. There are an infinite number of skunkworks and universes. Everyone else is headed toward Davis Square. Ellie, on the other hand, is headed to the universe that surrounds this one.

  The air in the skunkworks feels spackled onto her skin. It burns into her lungs like hot fudge, slow and slick, its aftertaste at once sickly sweet, bitter, and sour. It takes effort to force back out.

  The skunkworks looks like the masterpiece of some mad plumber who failed perspectives class in art school. The labyrinth of pipes that surrounds her make her dizzy at first. Broad swathes of transparent mesh stretch between pipes and she bobbles until she gets her bearings.

  Fat pipes pass overhead. They form a de facto canopy hiding the skunk-works, which stretches for miles above her. In actuality, it stretches for miles in all directions. Fixes have piled on top of so-called improvements have piled on top of emergency repairs forever. Rust covers the gates and reservoirs at the intersection of pipes. Most pipes block each other’s way and have to zigzag around each other. No pipes unscarred from dead welds of stubs where pipes used to join together.

  Data pulses through the pipes in all directions. The pipes ripple, but stabilize in time for clacking of valves and the burbling of reservoirs. Probably because she already knows which ones they are, the pipes that violate the hold-time requirement look out-of-sync even to the naked eye. Pipes are supposed to be stable a little before reservoir valves clack until a little after. The pipes that violate the hold-time requirement start to ripple again too soon, corrupting the reservoirs they feed.

  Someone stands on a mesh below her. Daniel. He’s a verifier, not an isolationist. None of the latter have found her yet. Ellie lets go of the breath she didn’t realize she was holding.