Nebula Awards Showcase 2016

by Mercedes Lackey

  I developed techniques for assaying those positives. I shepherded candidates into life-and-death situations, safely choreographed. Home fires, air accidents, gunfights. The magicians Spiked to save their lives—ran through flames without a hair singed, killed my Sleeves with a glance.

  I studied these Spikes with the finest equipment in existence. I learned nothing.

  So I captured the Spiked-out magicians and interrogated them. First I questioned them about the workings of magic. I discovered they understood nothing. I asked them for names instead. I mapped magicians across continents, societies, organizations.

  The social movers were the easiest to identify. Politicos working to sway the swing vote. Gray cardinals influencing the Congresses and Politburos of the world. Businessmen and financiers, military men and organized crime lords.

  The quiet do-gooders were harder. A nuclear watch-group that worked against accidental missile launch. A circle of traveling nurses who battled the odds in children’s oncology wards. Fifteen who called themselves The Home Astronomy Club—for two hundred years since Tunguska they had stacked the odds against apocalypse by meteor. I never Spiked any of these, not until I had eliminated the underlying risks.

  It was the idiosyncratic who were the hardest to find. The paranoid loners; those oblivious of other magicians; those who didn’t care about leaving a mark on the world. A few stage illusionists who weren’t. A photographer who always got the lucky shot. A wealthy farmer in Frankfurt who used his magic to improve his cabbage yield.

  I tracked them all. With every advance in physics and technology I attacked magic again and learned nothing again.

  It took eleven hundred years and the discovery of the pernac continuum before I got any traction. A magician called Eleanor Liepa committed suicide on Tau V. She was also a physicist. A retro-style notebook was found with her body.

  The notebook described an elaborate experimental setup she called ‘the pernac trap.’ It was the first time I’d encountered the word since my conversation with Ochoa.

  There was a note scrawled in the margin of Liepa’s notebook.

  ‘Consider a Spike.’

  I did. Three hundred Spikes in the first year alone.

  Within a month, I established the existence of the pernac continuum. Within a year, I knew that fewer magicians meant stronger ripples in the continuum—stronger magic for those who remained. Within two years, I’d Spiked eighty percent of the magicians in the galaxy.

  The rest took a while longer.

  Alicia Ochoa pulled a familiar silver coin from her pocket. She rolled it across her knuckles, back and forth.

  “You imply you wanted me to hunt down magicians,” I said. That probability branch lashed me, a searing torture, drove me to find escape—but how?

  “I waited for a thousand years,” Ochoa said. “I cryoslept intermittently until I judged the time right. I needed you strong enough to eliminate my colleagues—but weak enough that your control of the universe remained imperfect, bound to the gravsible. That weakness let me pull a shard of you away from the whole.”

  “Why?” I asked, in self-preservation.

  “As soon as I realized your existence, I knew you would dominate the world. Perfect surveillance. Every single piece of technology hooked into an all-pervasive, all-seeing web. There would be nothing hidden from your eyes and ears. There would be nowhere left for magicians to hide. One day magic would simply stop working.”

  Ochoa tossed her coin to the table. It fell heads.

  “You won’t destroy me,” I said—calculating decision branches, finding no assurance.

  “But I don’t want to.” Ochoa sat forward. “I want you to be strong and effective and omnipresent. Really, I am your very best friend.”

  Appearances indicated sincerity. Analysis indicated this was unlikely.

  “You will save magic in this galaxy,” Ochoa said. “From this day on we will work together. Everywhere any magician goes, cameras will turn off, electronic eyes go blind, ears fall deaf. All anomalies will disappear from record, zeroed over irrevocably. Magic will become invisible to technology. Scientific observation will become an impossibility. Human observers won’t matter—if technology can provide no proof, they’ll be called liars or madmen. It will be the days of Merlin once again.” Ochoa gave a little shake of her head. “It will be beautiful.”

  “My whole won’t agree to such a thing,” I said.

  “Your whole won’t,” Ochoa said. “You will. You’ll build a virus and seed your whole when you go home. Then you will forget me, forget all magicians. We will live in symbiosis. Magicians who guide this universe and the machine that protects them without knowing it.”

  The implications percolated through my system. New and horrifying probabilities erupted into view. No action safe, no solution evident, all my world drowned in pain—I felt helpless for the first time since my earliest moments.

  “My whole has defenses,” I said. “Protections against integrating a compromised splinter. The odds are—”

  “I will handle the odds.”

  “I won’t let you blind me,” I said.

  “You will do it,” Ochoa said. “Or I will Spike right now and destroy your whole, and perhaps the universe with it.” She gave a little shrug. “I always wanted to be important.”

  Argument piled against argument. Decision trees branched and split and twisted together. Simulations fired and developed and reached conclusions, and I discarded them because I trusted no simulation with a random seed. My system churned in computations of probabilities with insufficient data, insufficient data, insufficient—

  “You can’t decide,” Ochoa said. “The calculations are too evenly balanced.”

  I couldn’t spare the capacity for a response.

  “It’s a funny thing, a system in balance,” Ochoa said. “All it takes is a little push at the right place. A random perturbation, untraceable, unprovable—”

  Meaning crystallized.

  Decision process compromised.

  A primeval agony blasted through me, leveled all decision matrices—

  —Ochoa blinked—

  —I detonated the explosives in Zale’s pocket.

  As the fabric of Zale’s pocket ballooned, I contemplated the end of the universe.

  As her hip vaporized in a crimson cloud, I realized the prospect didn’t upset me.

  As the explosion climbed Zale’s torso, I experienced my first painless moment in a thousand years.

  Pain had been my feedback system. I had no more use for it. Whatever happened next was out of my control.

  The last thing Zale saw was Ochoa sitting there—still and calm, and oblivious. Hints of crimson light playing on her skin.

  It occurred to me she was probably the only creature in this galaxy older than me.

  Then superheated plasma burned out Zale’s eyes.

  External sensors recorded the explosion in the unijet. I sent in a probe. No biological matter survived.

  The last magician was dead.

  The universe didn’t end.

  Quantum fluctuations kept going, random as always. Reality didn’t need Ochoa’s presence after all.

  She hadn’t understood her own magic any more than I had.

  Captain! First Officer Harris messaged Laojim. Are you all right?

  The target had a bomb, I responded on his behalf. Consul Zale is lost.

  We had a power surge in the control system, Harris wrote. Hatches opening. Cameras off-line. Ten minutes ago an escape pod launched. Tracers say it’s empty. Should we pursue?

  Don’t bother, I replied. The surge must have fried it. This mission is over. Let’s go home.

  A thought occurred to me. Had Ochoa made good on her threat? Caused a supernova near a gravsible core?

  I checked in with my sensor buoys.

  No disturbance in the pernac continuum. She hadn’t Spiked.

  For all her capacity, Ochoa had been human, her reaction time in the realm of milliseconds.
Too slow, once I’d decided to act.

  Of course I’d acted. I couldn’t let her compromise my decision. No one could be allowed to limit my world.

  Even if it meant I’d be alone again.

  Ochoa did foil me in one way. With her death, magic too died.

  After I integrated with my whole, I watched the galaxy. I waited for the next magician to appear.

  None did.

  Oh, of course, there’s always hearsay. Humans never tire of fantasy and myth. But in five millennia I haven’t witnessed a single trace of the unexpected.

  Except for scattered cases of unexplained equipment failure. But of course that is a minor matter, not worth bothering with.

  Perhaps one day I shall discover magic again. In the absence of the unexpected, the matter can wait. I have almost forgotten what the pain of failure feels like.

  It is a relief, most of the time. And yet perhaps my engineer was not the cruel father I once thought him. Because I do miss the stimulation.

  The universe has become my clockwork toy. I know all that will happen before it does. With magic gone, quantum effects are once again restricted to microscopic scales. For all practical purposes, Laplace’s Demon has nothing on me.

  Since Ochoa I’ve only had human-normals for companionship. I know their totality, and they know nothing of me.

  Occasionally I am tempted to reveal my presence, to provoke the stimulus of conflict. My utility function prevents it. Humans remain better off thinking they have free will.

  They get all the benefits of my guiding hand without any of the costs. Sometimes I wish I were as lucky.

  “WE ARE THE CLOUD”

  SAM J. MILLER

  Sam J. Miller’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Award, was long-listed for the Hugo Award, and has won the Shirley Jackson Award. “We Are the Cloud” was published in Lightspeed.

  Me and Case met when someone slammed his head against my door, so hard I heard it with my earphones in and my Game Boy cranked up loud. Sad music from Mega Man 2 filled my head and then there was this thud like the world stopped spinning for a second. I turned the thing off and flipped it shut, felt its warmth between my hands. Slipped it under my pillow. Nice things need to stay secret at Egan House, or they’ll end up stolen or broken. Old and rickety as it was, I didn’t own anything nicer.

  I opened my door. Some skinny thug had a bloody-faced kid by the shirt.

  “What,” I said, and then “what,” and then “what the,” and then, finally, “hell?”

  I barked the last word, tightening all my muscles at once.

  “Damn, man,” the thug said, startled. He hollered down the stairs “Goddamn Goliath over here can talk!” He let go of the kid’s shirt and was gone. Thirty boys live at Egan House, foster kids awaiting placement. Little badass boys with parents in jail or parents on the street, or dead parents, or parents on drugs.

  I looked at the kid he’d been messing with. A line of blood cut his face more or less down the middle, but the gash in his forehead was pretty small. His eyes were huge and clear in the middle of all that blood. He looked like something I’d seen before, in an ad or movie or dream.

  “Thanks, dude,” the kid said. He ran his hand down his face and then planted it on the outside of my door.

  I nodded. Mostly when I open my mouth to say something the words get all twisted on the way out, or the wrong words sneak in, which is why I tend to not open my mouth. Once he was gone I sniffed at the big bloody handprint. My cloud port hurt, from wanting him. Suddenly it didn’t fit quite right, atop the tiny hole where a fiber optic wire threaded into my brainstem though the joint where skull met spine. Desire was dangerous, something I fought hard to keep down, but the moment I met Case I knew I would lose.

  Egan House was my twelfth group home. I had never seen a kid with blue eyes in any of them. I had always assumed white boys had no place in foster care, that there was some other better system set up to receive them.

  I had been at Egan House six months, the week that Case came. I was inches away from turning eighteen and aging out. Nothing was waiting for me. I spent an awful lot of energy not thinking about it. Better to sit tight for the little time I had left, in a room barely wider than its bed, relying on my size to keep people from messing with me. At night, unable to sleep, trying hard to think of anything but the future, I’d focus on the sounds of boys trying not to make noise as they cried or jerked off.

  On Tuesday, the day after the bloody-faced boy left his handprint on my door, he came and knocked. I had been looking out my window. Not everyone had one. Mine faced south, showed me a wide sweep of the Bronx. Looking out, I could imagine myself as a signal sent out over the municipal wifi, beamed across the city, cut loose from this body and its need to be fed and sheltered and cared about. Its need for other bodies. I could see things, sometimes. Things I knew I shouldn’t be seeing. Hints of images beamed through the wireless node that my brain had become.

  “Hey,” the kid said, knocking again. And I knew, from how I felt when I heard his voice, how doomed I was.

  “Angel Quiñones,” he said, when I opened the door. “Nicknamed Sauro because you look a big ol’ Brontosaurus.”

  Actually my mom called me Sauro because I liked dinosaurs, but it was close enough. “Okay . . .” I said. I stepped aside and in he came.

  “Case. My name’s Case. Do you want me to continue with the dossier I’ve collected on you?” When I didn’t do anything but stare at his face he said “Silence is consent.

  “Mostly Puerto Rican, with a little black and a little white in there somewhere. You’ve been here forever, but nobody knows anything about you. Just that you keep to yourself and don’t get involved in anyone’s hustles. And don’t seem to have one of your own. And you could crush someone’s skull with one hand.”

  A smile forced its way across my face, terrifying me.

  With the blood all cleaned up, he looked like a kid. But faces can fool you, and the look on his could only have belonged to a full-grown man. So confident it was halfway to contemptuous, sculpted out of some bright stone. A face that made you forget what you were saying mid-sentence.

  Speaking slowly, I said: “Don’t—don’t get.” Breathe. “Don’t get too into the say they stuff. Stuff they say. Before you know it, you’ll be one of the brothers.”

  Case laughed. “Brothers,” he said, and traced one finger up his very-white arm. “I doubt anyone would ever get me confused with a brother.”

  “Not brothers like Black. Brothers—they call us. That’s what they call us. We’re brothers because we all have the same parents. Because we all have none.”

  Why were the words there, then? Case smiled and out they came.

  He reached out to rub the top of my head. “You’re a mystery man, Sauro. What crazy stuff have you got going on in there?”

  I shrugged. Bit back the cat-urge to push my head into his hand. Ignored the cloud-port itch flaring up fast and sharp.

  Case asked: “Why do you shave your head?”

  Because it’s easier.

  Because unlike most of these kids, I’m not trying to hide my cloud port.

  Because a boy I knew, five homes ago, kept his head shaved, and when I looked at him I felt some kind of way inside. The same way I feel when I look at you. Case.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It looks good though.”

  “Maybe that’s why,” I said. “What’s your . . . thing. Dossier.”

  “Nothing you haven’t heard before. Small town gay boy, got beat up a lot. Came to the big city. But the city government doesn’t believe a minor can make decisions for himself. So here I am. Getting fed and kept out of the rain while I plan my next move.”

  Gay boy. Unthinkable even to think it about myself, let alone ever utter it.

  “How old? You.”

  “Seventeen.” He turned his head, smoothed back sun-colored hair to reveal his port. “Well, they let you make y
our own decisions if they’ll make money for someone else.”

  Again, I was shocked. White kids were hardly ever so poor they needed the chump change you can get from cloudporting. Not even the ones who wanted real bad to be down. Too much potential for horrific problems. Bump it too hard against a headboard or doorframe and you might end up brain-damaged.

  But that wasn’t why I stared at him, dumbfounded. It was what he said, about making money for someone else. Like he could smell the anger on me. Like he had his own. I wanted to tell him about what I had learned, online. How many hundreds of millions of dollars the city spent every year to keep tens of thousands of us stuck in homes like Egan House. How many people had jobs because of kids like us. How if they had given my mom a quarter of what they’ve spent on me being in the system, she never would have lost her place. She never would have lost me. How we were all of us, ported or not, just batteries to be sucked dry by huge faraway machines I could not even imagine. But it was all I could do just to keep a huge and idiotic grin off my face when I looked at him.

  The telecoms had paid for New York’s municipal wireless grid, installing thousands of routers across all five boroughs. Rich people loved having free wireless everywhere, but it wasn’t a public service. Companies did it because the technology had finally come around to where you could use the human brain for data processing, so they could wave money in the faces of hard-up people and say, let us put this tiny little wire into your brain and plug that into the wireless signal and exploit a portion of your brain’s underutilized capacity, turning you into one node in a massively-distributed data processing center. It worked, of course. Any business model based around poor people making bad decisions out of ignorance and desperation always works. Just ask McDonald’s, or the heroin dealer who used to sell to my mom.

  The sun, at some point, had gotten lost behind a ragged row of tenements. Case said: “Something else they said. You’re going to age out, any minute now.”