The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  Not long. Not long enough.

  Now she slept. Language was not a tool used often enough even in sleep to lament its own passing. Other things lamented more. The brilliance turned to and turned away.

  She remembers the garden behind the house. Her father grew corn—he was particular about the variety, complained how hard it was to find Silver Queen, even the terminated variety—with beans interplanted, which climbed the cornstalks, and different varieties of tomato with basil interplanted, and lettuces—he liked frisee. And in the flower beds alstroemeria, and wind lilies, and Eschscholzia. He taught her those names, and the names of Sierra flowers—taught her to learn names. We name things in order to to love them, to remember them when they are absent. She recites the names of the fourteen dead with her, and weeps.

  She’d been awake for over two weeks. The planet was far behind. The hibernation cocktail was completely flushed from her system. She wasn’t going back to sleep.

  ground

  rose

  sand

  elixir

  cave

  root

  dark

  golden

  sky-born

  lift

  earth

  fall

  The radio receiver chirps. She wakes, stares at it dumbly.

  The signal is strong! Beamed directly at them. From Earth! Words form on the screen. She feels the words rather than reads them.

  We turned it around. Everything is fixed. The bad years are behind us. We live. We know what you did, why you did it. We honor your bravery. We’re sorry you’re out there, sorry you had to do it, wish you . . . wish . . . wish. . . . Good luck. Good-bye.

  Where are her glasses? She needs to hear the words. She needs to hear a human voice, even synthetic. She taps the speaker.

  The white noise of space. A blank screen.

  She is in the Sierra, before the closure. Early July. Sun dapples the trail. Above the alpine meadow, in the shade, snow deepens, but it’s packed and easy walking. She kicks steps into the steeper parts. She comes into a little flat just beginning to melt out, surrounded by snowy peaks, among white pine and red fir and mountain hemlock. Her young muscles are warm and supple and happy in their movements. The snowbound flat is still, yet humming with the undertone of life. A tiny mosquito lands on her forearm, casts its shadow, too young even to know to bite. She brushes it off, walks on, beyond the flat, into higher country.

  thistle daisy cow-parsnip strawberry clover

  mariposa-lily corn-lily ceanothus elderberry marigold

  mimulus sunflower senecio goldenbush dandelion

  mules-ear iris miners-lettuce sorrel clarkia

  milkweed tiger-lily mallow veronica rue

  nettle violet buttercup ivesia asphodel

  ladyslipper larkspur pea bluebells onion

  yarrow cinquefoil arnica pennyroyal fireweed

  phlox monkshood foxglove vetch buckwheat

  goldenrod groundsel valerian lovage columbine

  stonecrop angelica rangers-buttons pussytoes everlasting

  watercress rockcress groundsmoke solomons-seal bitterroot

  liveforever lupine paintbrush blue-eyed-grass gentian

  pussypaws butterballs campion primrose forget-me-not

  saxifrage aster polemonium sedum rockfringe

  sky-pilot shooting-star heather alpine-gold penstemon

  Forget me not.

  Taiyo Fujii was born in Amami Oshima Island—that is, between Kyushu and Okinawa. In 2012, Fujii self-published Gene Mapper serially in a digital format of his own design, and it became Amazon.co.jp’s number one Kindle bestseller of that year. The novel was revised and republished in both print and ebook as Gene Mapper—full build—by Hayakawa Publishing in 2013 and was nominated for the Nihon SF Taisho Award and the Seiun Award. His second novel, Orbital Cloud, won the 2014 Nihon SF Taisho Award and took first prize in the “Best SF of 2014” in SF Magazine. His recent works include Underground Market and Bigdata Connect.

  VIOLATION OF THE TRUENET

  SECURITY ACT

  Taiyo Fujii

  translated by Jim Hubbert

  The bell for the last task of the night started chiming before I got to my station. I had the office to myself, and a mug of espresso. It was time to start tracking zombies.

  I took the mug of espresso from the beverage table, and zigzagged through the darkened cube farm toward the one strip of floor still lit for third shift staff, only me.

  Zombies are orphan Internet services. They wander aimlessly, trying to execute some programmed task. They can’t actually infect anything, but otherwise the name is about right. TrueNet’s everywhere now and has been for twenty years, but Japan never quite sorted out what to do with all the legacy servers that were stranded after the Lockout. So you get all these zombies shuffling around, firing off mails to nonexistent addresses, pushing ads no one will see, maybe even sending money to nonexistent accounts. The living dead.

  Zombie trackers scan firewall logs for services the bouncer turned away at the door. If you see a trace of something that looks like a zombie, you flag it so the company mail program can send a form letter to the server administrator, telling him to deep-six it. It’s required by the TrueNet Security Act, and it’s how I made overtime by warming a chair in the middle of the night.

  “All right, show me what you got.”

  As soon as my butt hit the chair, the workspace suspended above the desk flashed the login confirmation.

  INITIATE INTERNET ORPHAN SERVICE SEARCH

  TRACKER: MINAMI TAKASAWA

  The crawl came up and just sat there, jittering. Damn. I wasn’t looking at it. As soon as I went to the top of the list and started eyeballing URLs in order, it started scrolling.

  The TrueNet Security Act demands human signoff on each zombie URL. Most companies have you entering checkmarks on a printed list, so I guess it was nice of my employer to automate things so trackers could just scan the log visually. It’s a pretty advanced system. Everything is networked, from the visual recognition sensors in your augmented reality contact lenses to the office security cameras and motion sensors, the pressure sensors in the furniture, and the infrared heat sensors. One way or another, they figure out what you’re looking at. You still have to stay on your toes. The system was only up and running for a few months when the younger trackers started bitching about it.

  Chen set all this up, two years ago. He’s from Anhui Province, out of Hefei I think. I’ll always remember what he said to me when we were beta-testing the system together.

  “Minami, all you have to do is treat the sensor values as a coherence and apply Floyd’s cyclic group function.”

  Well, if that’s all I had to do. . . . What did that mean, anyway? I’d picked up a bit, here and there, about quantum computing algorithms, but this wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard.

  Chen might’ve sounded like he was fresh off a UFO, but in a few days he’d programmed a multi-sensor automated system for flagging zombies. It wasn’t long before he left the rest of us in Security in the dust and jumped all the way up to Program Design on the strength of ingenuity and tech skills. Usually somebody starting out as a worker—a foreigner, no less—who made it up to Program Design would be pretty much shunned, but Chen was so far beyond the rest of us that it seemed pointless to try and drag him down.

  The crawl was moving slower. “Minami, just concentrate and it will all be over quickly.” I can still see Chen pushing his glasses, with their thick black frames, up his nose as he gave me this pointer.

  I took his advice and refocused on the crawl. The list started moving smoothly again, zombie URLs showing up green.

  Tracking ought to be boring, on the whole, but it’s fun looking for zombies you recognize from the Internet era. Maybe that’s why I never heard workers older than their late thirties or so complain about the duty.

  Still, I never quite got it. Why use humans to track zombies? TrueNet servers use QSL recognition, quantum digital signa
tures. No way is a zombie on some legacy server with twenty-year-old settings going to get past those. I mean, we could just leave them alone. They’re harmless.

  Message formatting complete. Please send.

  The synth voice—Chen’s, naturally—came through the AR phono chip next to my eardrum. The message to the server administrators rolled up the screen, requesting zombie termination. There were more than three hundred on the list. I tipped my mug back, grinding the leftover sugar against my palate with my tongue, and was idly scrolling through the list again when something caught my eye.

  302:com.socialpay socialpay.com/payment/?transaction=paypal.com&account

  “SocialPay? You’re alive?”

  How could I forget? I created this domain and URL. From the time I cooked it up as a graduation project until the day humanity was locked out of the Internet, SocialPay helped people—just a few hundred, but any-way—make small payments using optimized bundles of discount coupons and cash. So it was still out there after all, a zombie on some old server. The code at the tail said it was trying to make a payment to another defunct service.

  Mr. Takasawa, you have ten minutes to exit the building. Please send your message and complete the security check before you leave.

  So Chen’s system was monitoring entry and exit now too. The whole system was wickedly clever. I deleted SocialPay from the hit list and pressed SEND.

  I had to see that page one more time. If someone was going to terminate the service, I wanted to do it myself. SocialPay wasn’t just a zombie for someone to obliterate.

  The city of fifty million was out there, waiting silently as I left the service entrance. The augmented reality projected by my contact lenses showed crowds of featureless gray avatars shuffling by. The cars on the streets were blank too; no telling what makes and models they were. Signs and billboards were blacked out except for the bare minimum needed to navigate. All this and more, courtesy of Anonymous Cape, freeware from the group of the same name, the guys who went on as if the Lockout had never happened. Anyone plugged into AR would see me as gray and faceless too.

  I turned the corner to head toward the station, the dry December wind slamming against me. Something, a grain of sand maybe, flew up and made my eye water, breaking up my AR feed. Color and life and individuality started leaking back into the blank faces of the people around me. I could always upgrade to a corneal implant to avoid these inconvenient effects, but it seemed like overkill just to get the best performance out of the Cape, especially since any cop with a warrant could defeat it. Anyway, corneal implants are frigging expensive. I wasn’t going to shell out money just to be alone on the street.

  I always felt somehow defeated after a zombie session. Walking around among the faceless avatars and seeing my own full-color self, right after a trip to the lost Internet, always made me feel like a loser. Of course, that’s just how the Cape works. To other people, I’m gray, faceless Mr. Nobody. It’s a tradeoff—they can’t see me, and I can’t see their pathetic attempts to look special. It’s fair enough, and if people don’t like it, tough. I don’t need to see ads for junk that some designer thinks is original, and I don’t have to watch people struggling to stand out and look different.

  The company’s headquarters faces Okubo Avenue. The uncanny flatness of that multilane thoroughfare is real, not an effect of the AR. Sustainable asphalt, secreted by designed terrestrial coral. I remembered the urban legends about this living pavement—it not only absorbed pollutants and particulate matter, but you could also toss a dead animal onto it and the coral would eat it. The thought made me run, not walk, across the street. I crossed here every day and I knew the legends were bull, but they still frightened me, which I have to say is pathetic. When I got to the other side, I was out of breath. Even more pathetic.

  Getting old sucks. Chen the Foreign-Born is young and brilliant. The company understood that, and they were right to send him up to Project Design. They were just as uncompromising in their assessment of our value down in Security. Legacy programming chops count for zip, and that’s not right.

  No one really knows, even now, why so many search engines went insane and wiped the data on every PC and mobile device they could reach through the web. Some people claim it was a government plot to force us to adopt a gated web. Or cyberterrorism. Maybe the data recovery program became self-aware and rebelled. There were too many theories to track. Whatever, the search engines hijacked all the bandwidth on the planet and locked humanity out of the Internet, which pretty much did it for my career as a programmer.

  It took a long time to claw back the stolen bandwidth and replace it with TrueNet, a true verification-based network. But I screwed up and missed my chance. During the Great Recovery, services that harnessed high-speed parallel processing and quantum digital signature modules revolutionized the web, but I never got around to studying quantum algorithms. That was twenty years ago, and since then the algorithms have only gotten more sophisticated. For me, that whole world of coding is way out of reach.

  But at least one good thing had happened. SocialPay had survived. If the settings were intact, I should be able to log in, move all that musty old PHP code and try updating it with some quantum algorithms. There had to be a plug-in for this kind of thing, something you didn’t have to be a genius like Chen to use. If the transplant worked, I could show it to my boss, who knows—maybe even get a leg up to Project Design. The company didn’t need geniuses like Chen on every job. They needed engineers to repurpose old code too.

  In that case, maybe I wouldn’t have to track zombies anymore.

  I pinched the corners of the workspace over my little desk at home and threw my arms out in the resize gesture. Now the borders of the workspace were embedded in the walls of my apartment. Room to move. At the office, they made us keep our spaces at standard monitor size, even though the whole point is to have a big area to move around in.

  I scrolled down the app list and launched VM Pad, a hardware emulator. From within the program, I chose my Mac disk image. I’d used it for recovering emails and photos after the Lockout, but this would be the first time I ever used it to develop something. The OS booted a lot faster than I remembered. When the little login screen popped up, I almost froze with embarrassment.

  id:Tigerseye

  password

  Where the hell did I get that stupid ID? I logged in—I’d ever only used the one password, even now—and got the browser screen I had forgotten to close before my last logout.

  Server not found

  Okay, expected. This virtual machine was from a 2017 archive, so no way was it going to connect to TrueNet. Still, the bounceback was kind of depressing.

  Plan B: Meshnet. Anonymous ran a portable network of nonsecure wireless gateways all over the city. Meshnet would get me into my legacy server. There had to be someone from Anonymous near my apartment, which meant there’d be a Meshnet node. M-nodes were only accessible up to a few hundred yards away, yet you could find one just about anywhere in Tokyo. It was crazy—I didn’t know how they did it.

  I extended VM Pad’s dashboard from the screen edge, clicked NEW CONNECTION, then MESHNET.

  Searching for node. . .

  WELCOME TO TOKYO NODE 5.

  CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET IS LEGAL.

  VIOLATING THE TRUENET SECURITY ACT IS ILLEGAL.

  THE WORLD NEEDS THE FREEDOM OF THE INTERNET, SO PLAY

  NICE AND DON’T BREAK ANY LAWS.

  Impressive warning, but all I wanted to do was take a peek at the service and extract my code. It would be illegal to take an Internet service and sneak it onto TrueNet with a quantum access code, but stuff that sophisticated was way beyond my current skill set.

  I clicked the TERMINAL icon at the bottom of the screen to access the console. Up came the old command input screen, which I barely remembered how to use. What was the first command? I curled my fingers like I was about to type something on a physical keyboard.

  Wait—that’s it. Fingers.
<
br />   I had to have a hardware keyboard. My old MacBook was still in the closet. It wouldn’t even power up anymore, but that wasn’t the point. I needed the feel of the keyboard.

  I pulled the laptop out of the closet. The aluminum case was starting to get powdery. I opened it up and put it on the desk. The inside was pristine. I pinched VM Pad’s virtual keyboard, dragged it on top of the Mac keyboard, and positioned it carefully. When I was satisfied with the size and position, I pinned it.

  It had been ages since I used a computer this small. I hunched my shoulders a bit and suspended my palms over the board. The metal case was cold against my wrists. I curled my fingers over the keys and put the tips of my index fingers on the home bumps. Instantly, the command flowed from my fingers.

  ssh -l tigerseye socialpay.com

  I remembered! The command was stored in my muscle memory. I hit RETURN and got a warning, ignored it and hit RETURN, entered the password, hit RETURN again.

  socialpay$

  “Yes!”

  I was in. Was this all it took to get my memory going—my fingers? In that case, I may as well have the screen too. I dragged VMPad’s display onto the Mac’s LCD screen. It was almost like having my old friend back. I hit ⌘ + TAB to bring the browser to the front, ⌘ + T for New Tab. I input soci and the address filled in. RETURN!

  The screen that came up a few seconds later was not the SocialPay I remembered. There was the logo at the top, the login form, the payment service icons, and the combined payment amount from all the services down at the bottom. The general layout was the same, but things were crumbling here and there and the colors were all screwed up.

  “Looks pretty frigging odd. . . .”

  Without thinking, I input the commands to display the server output on console.

  curl socialpay.com/ | less