The Apex Book of World SF Volume 3

by Lavie Tidhar

  “There’s not much to them,” said Surada, their cadre’s commander. “Some two hundred holed up in a cave network underground. You will coordinate with us?”

  “What do they have? Apart from—” Kanrisa motioned at the imaging of their tools, furniture, miscellanies. “These. They can’t possibly hope to fight with that.”

  “I have good reasons to think they’re culturing a strain that’d work against us. Of course, they haven’t any sample — unless somehow they do. Our casualty…” Surada’s expression flickered. “We collected her. There’s no chance. It’s best to proceed with caution regardless. We could bombard the whole area, which would be my preference, except the tunnels go deep.”

  “How about gas? Their ventilation can’t be much good. Two of my people developed an agent that bonds to their circulation. It’s been effective.”

  Surada gave a curt nod. “I’ve seen the footage. Brutally effective. Take a look at this, though.” A shape sharpened into focus on the viewport. “Thermal take from the symbiote. That’s a biomass right there.”

  “That,” I said, measuring it against a scale in my head, “is very huge.”

  “And very dense. Estimates say a hundred fifty tall, eighty wide, and five to eight hundred heavy. What do you say to that, savant?”

  “Her name is Jidri, Surada.”

  “They’re cloning muscle tissue — too dense to be anything else. There’s no organ, no anything except for a skeleton, also extremely dense and likely metal. They want to make…” I paused, remembering the makeup of the creature that had killed Tephem. “No radio, no anything. So it’s all grown in a vat, organically, without machinery or circuits or electricity. And maybe… here, where it thins. A cavity, I think. Waiting to be filled.”

  Surada nodded. “With what, Jidri?”

  “This is pure educated guess. This construct isn’t running on conventional energy — it’s going to be powered by one of their own. A crude transplant.” My rambling flung up a spume of disparate suppositions in my private sphere. I filtered them through my chip. “They are making another killing machine out of their own materials, controlled by a brain or a collective of brains. It will carry not a miniature sun but an anti–Bodhva weapon: physical, toxin, something. If we are to believe their threat.”

  “In line with my savants’ conclusions. Yes. What are the chances of your viral agent working on this biomass? So far as my probe’s been able to determine, what runs through its veins is crude fuel or possibly liquid alloy.”

  “Another approach then.” Kanrisa ran her fingers over the displays. They rippled, briefly projecting imprints of her hands that chased the real ones. “I have an idea. It’s not something I ever wanted to do. Circumstances have changed. Just to be sure we’ll flush them out first.”

  We flooded the tunnels. Redirecting the nearest reservoir proved more trouble than anticipated — so few natural bodies of water existed in Intharachit — but there was enough. Their shelter was old and, though chambers were armored and sealed, structural integrity had been eroded by time and neglect. That first rush killed fifty who hadn’t fled behind blast doors in time. Circuited synapses fired, machines coming awake under emergency routines.

  A sudden spike in neural electricity. Their callsign; our warning.

  Pulsating flesh so hot it flashed white on thermal take, stitched together by artificial sinews. Each ungainly piece must have been grown individually. Its head was distended, its torso a gaping red wound. From each pore, it oozed oil, pus, blood. Veins throbbed beneath its shell.

  “Ancestors,” one of the twins said. “What did they put into that thing?”

  “Brains locked in sync.” I ran a scan: whatever made up the skeleton blocked several of our sensors, but I could still measure neural voltage. “Twenty, no, sixty. Sixty brains transplanted, feeling in conjunction.”

  The other brother reared up from his cradle. “In a month they perfected that?”

  “No,” I said, “they perfected nothing.” We brute–forced our way into what passed for its mainframe. A composite hastily thrown together without regard for compatibility or efficiency, orienting as fast as it could to new senses, new realities expressed in synesthesia. And what it felt, through ink–stain drops infiltrating its liquid consciousness, was pain. Each sensory input overloaded it, converting to agony until it knew nothing else. It found its level in the biomass, erasing intellect and sanity, channeling it into one single pinpoint purpose: to lash out. At us.

  Kanrisa did not allow this. Once the biomass emerged she began.

  She was — is — a centrifuge; her age–mate echoes belonged to her, operating as her adjuncts. Over their voices’ output she wielded a fine control, able to reach in and weave, plait, and transfigure. That is the purpose of a Bodhva focus.

  What she did that day hadn’t been seen before and seldom since. Today we continue trying to replicate it, gnawing at the process with augmens, a cortex biosphere greater than the Abacus, and the best minds of our age. Progress is slow, with rare successes so miniscule they hardly count.

  Kanrisa seized the voices’ chorus and shattered it into sixty–five permutations of itself. It punctured situational probabilities where the laws of physics were rewritten for an instant.

  When it ended, the biomass was gone, each particle threshed into nonexistence. The tunnels became a crater. So did twenty nearest cities within range of the blast. Half the spatial storm that enclosed Intharachit coiled and released under Kanrisa’s guidance. Most coastal regions were drowned under tidal waves.

  We still had to spread Pattama’s virus to the surviving population, but it was a nominal gesture. Kanrisa had ended the war.

  §

  We came home with more diagnostics than anyone knew what to do with.

  The aftermath was incandescent: as one we breathed, drinking in one another, as the city celebrated us not as heroes but as living stories. What we had done — decided by Kanrisa, mediated by me, brought into being by Pattama — was like nothing in living memory, and our living memory is immense in breadth and length. Pojama wanted for nothing but novelty, and we were that magnified many times over. Nothing seemed impossible. Kanrisa’s stigma vanished overnight. Through centrids we had grown in peace, and that was stagnancy. This was the first occasion after so long that conflict would jolt us forward.

  We were so much wanted back then, pulled this way and that, sometimes parted. Great bursts of advances were made. Optimizing the voices, evolving deep logics of our cortices at exponential rates, leapfrogs in cybernetics. Though Intharachit lay in ruins each savant had brought back libraries of DNA samples we would append to our biodiversity projects and assimilate into our virtualization programs.

  Kanrisa and I didn’t find time to marry properly, but we did put aside nights. Just as I had thought — had wanted — we secreted ourselves away in my cortex nest. I discovered the stretch marks on her breasts and thighs; I counted her epidermal implants, where they ridged her flesh, where they hardened the texture of her stomach. Her fingers digging into my hips, my nerves alight with her augmens output: a hundred compressed Bodhva songs.

  I…

  I can’t recount this, even to myself. Even to my cortices, who already know, who understand and record and dream with me. It is difficult. It is impossible.

  But when all else is gone there is the wreckage of our story, and within that, there is us. When I am done playing a small piece out for an audience and whispering it to myself, I will be able to begin again. I will go back to when we were young, and whole, and perpetual: a day of the scythe, in a garden festooned with lights.

  It is hard to pinpoint where the disintegration began.

  Minor lapses. She met my mothers, my siblings, and then she misplaced their names and their order: who was elder, who was younger. I told myself she had not been reared in a family but in an institution where no one claimed kinship to her. Why should I expect her to adjust overnight?

  One morning she woke up not qu
ite sure where she was.

  The next she woke up unable to remember Viraya, Tephem, any of her unit.

  After that, she could not remember me, and finally her implants went dormant: she could no longer echo.

  (I can’t speak this aloud. I can’t include it for my audiences. I do not discuss it with my friends, my family. It is taboo to speak Kanrisa’s name in my earshot.)

  Perhaps she was built to function only once. Perhaps she was so centrifugal that without the orbit of other echoes she could not exist, and losing Tephem mid–chorus damaged her. Or perhaps what she did to shatter her age–mates’ song, to manipulate Intharachit’s spatial storm, broke something within her that made her Kanrisa.

  Perhaps.

  §

  Today I think of my brother Zhuyi. The lost one, the tragic one.

  I lie in my cradle, in an obscure division of the complex that cares for the city’s network. It’s dim and quiet, so as to least disturb previous–gen cortices that haven’t yet made the leap and joined the great ocean of the Abacus. Most of my days are spent here, persuading them to become part of it, to join it in the tasks of monitoring the shields, maximizing compatibility, the processes that complete Pojama and keep it in constant growth.

  Some are reluctant, others afraid. A few refuse and those I shepherd into lesser systems, where they can serve and know simpler joys. Regardless of their destination, it’s necessary that their owners’ signature is erased first: their original information will only weigh them down unnecessarily.

  Nearly a cycle and a half have passed since I came to this division. My wait has been so long and precisely planned that when it finally shuffles into one of my arrays, there’s no surprise. Existence is a series of coincidences. One may stand still until chances collide and result. I choose otherwise. I calculate, predict, and attain. Opportunity must be plucked out of, and strained from, churning randomness.

  Tephem’s personal cortex drifts into my lap. It’s been in a protracted hibernation and will probably acquiesce to whatever I suggest. In spite of that, my breathing lurches and my heart palpitates uneven, now sharp and exquisite, then dull and empty.

  This will work.

  It has to.

  With delicacy — my physical fingers shake, even as the ones I’ve made in the administrative subreality move with surgical accuracy — I extract fragments of Tephem’s memorabilia, consumption habits, training permutation back–ups, all the things that can be found embedded in any private chip. It’s unambiguously, incredibly illegal. If found out I will be punished, my chips and cortices purged, some of my links disabled. It’ll blind me, shackle me, halve my self. There are data savants who, so deprived, can’t maintain sanity.

  I don’t care.

  Once my shift is finally ended I leave, bloated with thieved data. Through the scanners I step, nearly on tiptoes, as they skim over my heart–rate, neural activity, blood pressure. None of which is in its regular state and I get past only by fooling the sensors with prefabricated readings I installed a week ago in anticipation of today.

  For this my brain would be emptied, my genes scrambled until I’m no longer me; until the being known as Jidri is reduced to if–else strings.

  I am not afraid. The tightening of my larynx, the hammering of my heart: they are biological reflexes.

  Out in the streets, crowds buffet me, vendors trying to draw me in with flashes of sculpted light and funneled sound. A woman more cybernetics than flesh, her skin all facets, touches me with a jolt of seduction memes: inviting me to make love with her, glass to glass. I shrug her off and very briefly wonder if she’s an overseer agent. They can be anywhere and my crime—

  Kanrisa would have spat out her fear, as one would a morsel of spoiled food.

  On the edge of the visitors’ area is a small octagonal storeroom in a small octagonal building.

  I pass into that room, where a cortex sleeps. It’s had no contact with any other for two full segments. Gently I bring it awake but not online, wiring myself into it without tapping into a network. It comes out of standby with reluctance, only faintly recalling who I am.

  To reconstruct a person is hard, to reconstruct a stranger long dead almost impossible. Even with a fully–powered, cognizant cortex with the latest ware. But I can’t take the risk of using my own — I need to be anonymous, as far offline as I can go.

  Over these last two cycles, I collected snippets of surveillance, records from sanitariums and trails left across the net, piecing together a picture of Tephem. With the personal data I’ve downloaded, the result is, theoretically, at least half–complete. Nevertheless, a whole life is not easy to transliterate into code. There’s much to reconcile, a host of contradictions and phases I can’t easily put in order.

  The reconstruction is agonizing. I install updates to the cortex a little at a time, but it remains sluggish and unwilling. I persevere and coax. I can’t return too often; sometimes I would manage three visits in as many days, sometimes almost none, and each can be measured in minutes. My nerves fray and I would keep away for fifteen, twenty days. I don’t know if my theory is anywhere near correct or functional. This is all I have left, to reconstruct Tephem and that moment in Intharachit. To recomplete her inner system and make her the center of that unit again.

  Unnatural winter persists over Pojama. I’ve been told they have found a way to localize the weather patterns. How quickly the world hurtles by.

  When it is done, finally, I purge all remnant information. There would be no trace. A copy of the reconstruction lives in a partition of my chip, but that is the only one. I send it off, behind multidimensional proxies and the best encryption I can do.

  “What is in it?” the splicer asks, when the packets have passed through dead drops in pieces and reassembled on his end.

  “You don’t need to know.” I hold many secrets of his, and now have another: he would be my accomplice. “Put it in her treatment programs.”

  “But—”

  “Please do it.”

  I cut contact and wait for word from Umadu.

  §

  It is the first day of summer and the city is festooned with lights.

  I wander my family’s home, where the trees are fruiting heavy and red, where the roofs are gestating blue pearls in each tile. It feels strange to be leaving; I’ve been in one place for so long. My work at the op–net is done with, and I am at last entering newer, stranger fields. Umadu continues to send reports, each emptier than the last.

  Two cycles. It’s time to be elsewhere, be someone else.

  “It is good,” one of my sisters said as I miniaturized my cortices to fit a single chip, drinking down protocols and matrices that would hibernate in my implants. “You will be holding stars in your hands, and how many dream of that?”

  “Sister, I don’t dream of stars.”

  She wound a mercury chain around my wrist. “Second best is not so bad. It is a life. I will think of you and hope you find peace.”

  There are gold–and–black fish in our pond, a hybrid Zhuyi has cultivated in his spare time. It has eyes like one of his former wives’, he said, and in its swimming patterns he claims to see the imprint of her body. Above me, something sings with a human mouth, the favorite song of one of Zhuyi’s once–husbands. He’s turned our home into a memorial. We all indulge him, glad that he no longer spends all his time running those simulations. I’m on speaking terms with Varee, one of his erstwhile wives, and when Zhuyi isn’t home she sometimes pays us a visit.

  “It is good,” one of my mothers said as I folded sheets of shiftcloth to fit into a single case, smoothing the permutative fabrics that would regulate my temperature up in the cold of satellite stations. “You will be conquering dimensions, and how many dream of that?”

  “Mother, I don’t dream of conquest.”

  She clinched an electro–carbon cube around my throat. “Second best is not unacceptable. It is a life. I will think of you and hope you find joy.”

  My contract
is valid for half a segment; beyond that I will be free to renew it, or enlist as part of the force. It will be some time before I’m physically here again. I’ve already begun arrangements to transfer guardianship of Kanrisa to me officially — she has no one who can claim genetic relation to her — and cryogenics will be needed to slow down her aging. Where I’m going, time will move at sporadic paces.

  My transport is here, a spindly thing running on sub–routines so unintelligent they spare me no acknowledgment. The research ventures I’ll be a part of are secretive and I’ll have scant opportunities to speak to my family, most of them monitored. But if there’s a way for her, a way to her, it is in the probability crossroads — the noiseless impact between invisible dimensions — that I will find it.

  Someone’s trying to open a comm channel. I mute it. The vehicle irises open and I think of the worlds beyond, of what our world looks like from far above. Of being unfettered by the sun.

  Footsteps behind me, bare feet pattering on pavement. A shadow falls, overlapping mine.

  It is the first day of summer and the city is festooned with lights.

  I turn.

  “Your name is Jidri,” she says, bringing my hand to her lips. “And you are to be my wife.”

  A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight

  Xia Jia

  Translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu

  Chinese author Xia Jia began publishing in 2004 in a variety of Chinese SF magazines. She is a several–times winner of China’s prestigious Galaxy Award for her short fiction, including one for the following story.

  Awakening of Insects, the Third Solar Term: