Writers of the Future Volume 27: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Other rooms, smaller and padded, held parties of synesthetes, giggling at each other as they heard colors and tasted music for the first time. They gibbered nonsensically as they struggled to share the experience through their rewired sensorium. The synesthesia only worked on the natural senses. Anything heard or seen through the æthernet bypassed enough of a person’s own biological systems to reduce the effect. So, in search of a better buzz, their rooms were decorated with old-fashioned video screens, audio pods and hanging shrouds of velvet, sandpaper and chain mail. They were scented with cut limes and what looked like small metal braziers of smoldering hair that smelled like cinnamon doughnuts and peppermint.

  I moved through those rooms quickly. That was a bad trip waiting to happen. Who knew how long it would take before one of them took a knife and decided to listen to the color of their friends’ blood?

  Majope waited for me at the hatch that led into the blimp. He was wearing the loudest dashiki I had ever seen over a white linen kanzu. He looked like a young Idi Amin, the slimmer, better-looking version from the revisionist histories. His cheekbones were dotted with tribal scars. Despite appearances, this balloon-dwelling drug dealer was something of a traditionalist.

  “One of your colleagues took a dive onto Hibari Street,” I said. “Come to think of it, he must have fallen from about this height. Know anything about it?”

  “Habari Street?” Majope’s voice was even deeper than I remembered but the thick accent and rolling Rs hadn’t changed. “You can do better than that, Conroy. Unless this idiot was a flying squirrel, there’s no way he fell from here and you know it.”

  I shrugged. “C’mon, man. You expect the dance and someone’s got to lead.”

  Majope laughed. “Well, if those are your moves these days, maybe it’s time to hang up your dancing shoes, old friend.”

  He had a point. I followed him inside to what used to be the dirigible’s observation deck—now Uncle Majope’s den—and slumped into a couch. The whole of Entebbe lay before me through the full-height windows. As night fell, the city became a grid of glittering lines of street lights cutting the buildings into neat squares like neon cheese wires and, above them all, the impossibly perfect column of the Jacob’s Ladder.

  To my work-focused, pattern-spotting brain, the city looked like a child’s puzzle where each block would move into the gap left by its departing neighbor until some deeper picture was revealed. In the distance I could just make out the lights of the Academy. That was the only part of the city that refused to follow the rectangular plan. There, the roads branched fractally like bronchioles, like a tree’s root system pressed between glass. Solving the puzzle there would be much more difficult.

  I watched one of the cars, as tall as a skyscraper, as it hooked onto the Ladder and began the climb to orbit. Without consciously realizing it at first, I slipped back into the æthernet and my splinter, seeing the blocky form of the slowly rising car at the center of my field of vision as it gave me the standard options. The æthernet bulged with information. It was all there, from the price of a peripheral suite (with porthole and private bathroom) to the engineering specifications of the Ladder itself.

  They say that theoretically there is no limit to how much information we can piggyback on the Higgs field. Every physical object in the universe, anything at all as long as it has a rest mass, can be registered with the Academy and its details taught to a node. As long as the mass stays consistent, the other information just sticks to it and is projected for anyone else to see.

  I casually called up the details of the climbing car over the æthernet and cross-referenced the passenger manifest against the database of Academy staff. No hits.

  Majope collapsed into a wicker chair opposite me.

  “I haven’t seen you for a while,” he said. “How’s Kissa?”

  “Stone cold and about half a light year away,” I replied. “She volunteered for a sleeper mission.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What do you need? I have some sweet skull candy, nootropics—best in Entebbe. A little acetylcholine, some GABA blockers. In fifteen minutes I can have you remembering things you forgot that you even forgot. I can take you back. Reboot. Show you your childhood again through a child’s eyes, through your eyes when you were a child. Just what you need.”

  I remembered the recipe: a complicated cocktail to recall a simpler time. I thought of Kissa and thought of the drugs that could make the smell of our lost child’s hair as real to me now as Majope’s battered old couch under my ass.

  “No thanks. Not this time.”

  “What then? What did you come here for?”

  I tossed the bag on the coffee table between us.

  Majope sucked disapprovingly through his teeth. “Why do you bring this to me?” He snorted. “You know I don’t do this undergraduate crap.”

  “I know. I already know where this came from. I found it in the apartment of an Academy Magister. I came here to talk to the man who sold it, but he was already dead. Punched out just before I got here. Coincidence?”

  “You’re the njagu,” Majope said. “You tell me, Mister Policeman.”

  “You know about anyone moving skull candy into the Academy? I figure maybe there’s a trade that someone doesn’t want exposed.”

  “Trade?” Majope laughed. “Do you know how secure that place is? You said you were inside a Magister’s apartment. You’re probably only the third or fourth person allowed on campus this year that wasn’t Academy staff. And the staff never leaves the campus, at least not the Magisters.”

  “And yet here it is,” I said gesturing toward the bag.

  “One empty bag does not make a drug trade.”

  “One bag and two dead guys start to look like something.”

  “Two?”

  “The Magister.”

  Uncle Majope leaned back in his chair. “And who did you say his dealer was?”

  “I didn’t. And I don’t know for sure that the contact was direct, but the Bounce originally came from Tommy Nagura. He’s fairly small time. Been off the ’net for over a year. No arrests, no inquiries, even paid his taxes as far as I can tell.”

  “Tommy Nagura was the dealer?”

  “You know him?”

  “Everybody knows Otaku Tommy. If he was dealing in the Academy, you guys would have him lit up like the president’s palace.”

  Another Jacob started the slow acceleration up the Ladder. Either I had missed the returning car, or perhaps there was a blank slot in the schedule; either way, the one-way traffic made it look as if the city were escaping to space one building at a time.

  There are many ways to trick the æthernet. Like with any field of competitive endeavor, be it evolution or drug running, there has always been a symbiotic relationship between predator and prey.

  The first, best way is not to tell anyone what you are doing. That may sound simple, but, believe me, it’s not that easy. You want to grow glitterweed? Who’s bringing your seeds down the Ladder? You want to whip up a sheet of Bounce—who’s going to tailor your enzymes or sell you your heat lamps to cure the gel? In an age where everything, absolutely everything that rolls off an assembly line, is blown into a mold or cast, carved, fabbed, wrought or extruded anywhere in the world is registered with the Academy, the business of doing business can get very involved. And with sub-sentient quantum networks building predictive models based on Academy data, you can bet that growing some dope in your momma’s backyard is going to get noticed by someone.

  Natural products are the best. If you can avoid the scrutiny of the modelers’ predictions for a few days or weeks, the transformative power of Mother Nature works to steadily scramble the original signal. Your bag of fertilizer will be tagged as soon as the bag is stitched, but once the nitrogen is drawn up into the plant stems, once the phosphates have been leeched by a few days�
� watering, the signal gets scattered. Exactly which minute particle of mass is assigned to which q-bit of the signature in the Higgs field? Every molecule of carbon that gets bonded and released to perfume the air is data lost—static adding to the background hiss in the field.

  But what Tommy was doing was something else again. He wasn’t just working the foibles of the Higgs. He hadn’t just come up with a new and lucrative wrinkle, another way to palm the ace and cheat the pit boss for a few more hands. He had dropped off the æthernet entirely. That was unheard of. The incorruptible æthernet, somehow fallible, and Otaku Tommy dead, taking a pavement dive the moment this secret looked like it might become uncovered.

  There was more at stake here than Otaku Tommy and a Magister who liked to Bounce on his time off. Someone was covering their tracks.

  But they both killed themselves! What could make a man walk calmly off a building? Or enter a command that would smear him over the walls of a room like a bug across a windshield?

  Could Otaku Tommy have killed the Magister and then himself? There were certainly people in Entebbe’s underworld who would kill to prevent this new, omniscient node if they had known about it. But Tommy didn’t have those kinds of connections.

  I wasn’t going to find out sitting on Uncle Majope’s couch, that was for sure. He showed me to his personal elevator that ran down the spine of the advertising spire.

  “Kila la kheri,” he said. “Good luck, my friend.”

  The elevator rattled down the spire, creaking and shuddering and jamming up at one point, refusing to move until I punched the button again. Eventually the doors opened into an alley that led back to the main street.

  The nausea I had felt before bubbled in my stomach once again and as I stepped out into the alley I reached out to steady myself against the wall. It evaporated before my fingers and suddenly, impossibly, I was falling.

  I felt my heels slip from their footing and something hit me hard under the ribs. I barked like a seal as the impact knocked the breath from my lungs. I could feel whatever it was that hit me scraping at my side and I clung to it like a drowning man to a shard of driftwood.

  I looked down between my boots at the street below.

  How could that be? I had seen the doors open onto the alley, but now I was hanging out of the car, the street a good couple of meters below me!

  A crowd had stopped to stare at me as I dangled half in and half out of Majope’s elevator. The pavement immediately beneath me was clear and level. Someone was shouting at me in Japanese. It’s okay, they said. Let go and we’ll catch you.

  It was an easy drop.

  An easy drop? Had that been the last thing to go through Tommy Nagura’s mind before the microbots sleeted through him? Before he was torn to bone shards and jelly?

  I hung on.

  The car started to accelerate upward again. In seconds, we were higher than Majope’s dirigible and still climbing. I was no longer in Majope’s elevator; I was clinging onto the side of an orbital car as it accelerated up the Jacob’s Ladder. I bowed my head between straining shoulders and vomited a pure parabola over Entebbe as the city spread out below me at dizzying velocity.

  I could see the running lights glinting off the skyscrapers that surrounded the Ladder and, as we climbed higher, off the waters of Lake Victoria. Above me, the mass of the speeding car bulked impossibly huge. My fingers and forearms burned with fatigue as the pitiless acceleration built. Maybe if I jumped now I could reach the waters of the lake. There were stories of people surviving such falls. A cloud of microbots swarmed around me, protective gnats designed to keep birds and other wildlife from colonizing the huge, unpatrolled expanse of the Ladder. They swarmed by the thousand, clumping on my feet and around my legs as if I had waded knee-deep through a cybernetic mud. They encrusted my jacket and crawled thick through my hair like lice.

  A door opened in the side of the Jacob just above the thin ridge I clung to. A wave of offal washed over me through the new opening: liquefied bloody garbage, waste from the Academy’s clean-room filters. I was slicked in the remains of Magister Musoke. I could feel his blood, still warm, running down my sleeves and under my fingers.

  A hand reached down to me, the knuckles poking through the flesh like thorns. Otaku Tommy smiled down at me with shattered teeth. I ignored the hand and concentrated on keeping my grip on the blood-slick ledge.

  My fingers trembled with the strain of hanging on, the weight of the microbots like concrete boots threatening to tear me from my handhold.

  I checked the bit rate on my æthernet feed—it was maxed out. I was swimming in a sea of false data, everything I saw and heard projected through the æthernet. I tried to override the feed but the hack was complete—I was locked out of control over my own sensorium.

  The visions shifted again: the stars above me exploded like novae, impossibly brilliant light stabbing through my closed eyelids like blades of burning magnesium. And through it all the constant burning fatigue of my knotted fingers as I clung desperately on.

  With no other constant I set my focus on the pain. The æthernet could not reproduce that. No light show could fake the shaking cramp. I was definitely holding onto something.

  I heaved, strained ligaments screaming at me as I pulled myself upward. The thing beneath my fingers was flat and hard. I felt an edge bite into the flesh of my palms, more pain—all good news now. Pain was reality, pain was survival. I focused on the edge, feeling every ridge and groove in its surface.

  I traced the extent of the edge beneath my hands and found it stretching backwards as a flat plane—the floor of the elevator! I hauled myself inward—fingers scraping through cheap carpet—the feel of harsh nylon and embedded grit like sandpaper against my cut hands.

  The feeling against my fingers became an insistent pressure against the hard points of my elbows, then the weight of my body pressing the breath from my lungs as I lurched forward, flapping like a landed fish.

  My hand found a corner, stubbed fingers against unyielding vertical planes. More pain, enough for a broken finger or two. I was back inside the lift now. I rolled onto my back and clutched my quivering, cramping forearms to my chest. My hands fluttered, spastic with fatigue.

  There was an instant of brilliant light fit to ignite worlds, a thunder like the rage of disappointed gods and then all was silent.

  When I opened my eyes, I was lying on my back in Majope’s elevator. The opened door showed we had stopped halfway down the spire, about a hundred meters from the street below. A light blinked next to the emergency stop button on the control panel.

  I checked my bit rate: normal.

  I locked everything down.

  Everything.

  I couldn’t afford to leave any layers active. A full sensorium hack would be easy enough to spot, but editing one speeding truck out of my vision would be just as effective and that was the kind of data rate that could be overlooked.

  The world around me washed out to a gray pasteboard replica of its former self. The streets were drab and pale under monochromatic street lights. No one bothered installing neon signs or animated advertising when it could be provided through the æthernet at a fraction of the cost.

  I walked in crowds, keeping unobtrusive physical contact, brushing against coats, jogging elbows to make sure that those around me were really around me and not just æthernet ghosts.

  Any communication over the æthernet was suspect. I considered going back to the Department on foot, but approaching any armed officers made me nervous. Whoever hacked my æthernet feed could just as easily do the same to them. If you couldn’t believe the evidence of your own eyes, there was no telling what they could make you do.

  There was only one place to go: the Academy. Whoever was hacking the æthernet had proved they could override a splinter, but I was betting that fooling an LI or a node would be a different
story. With so many nodes at the Academy to register my presence, there was no way my assailant could trick them all.

  Plus, I reasoned, the level of sophistication required to manipulate the æthernet so completely pointed firmly toward a perpetrator inside the Academy itself. Maybe I could force their hand.

  The crowds thinned out as I approached the Academy. I approached cautiously, checking every detail against the dim picture in my memory, wishing that I had paid more attention on my first visit.

  I kept my hand near my weapon, not that I could do anything if the LI decided to launch a few hyper-kinetics my way, or decided to shear my legs out from under me with a weaponized gravity wave.

  I kept an eye on my bit rate, but there was no sign of any attempt to pervert the field. The inside of the visitors’ center was just as I remembered it. A few nodes rolled past. One of them stopped in front of me.

  Good to see you again, Detective, it sent.

  I was reluctant to unlock my æthernet feed, but it was an easy guess. “Stromboli?” I asked, drawing disapproving looks again in the library quiet.

  I am pleased that you remember me.

  “Your English has improved,” I said. More looks.

  I looked around the hall. There were muted conversations going on around us but none drew the same disapproving glances that I did. And the subtle looks were all aimed at me directly, not Stromboli, not even a flicker. Although nodes were commonplace in the Academy, surely one acting autonomously to strike up a conversation with a visitor would attract some interest?

  An autonomous node. An autonomous node that no one paid any attention to, almost as if they couldn’t see it.

  Suddenly it all became clear. Stromboli at my side outside the air lock when all the other nodes were sent away. Stromboli following me through the Magister’s apartment without attracting even a comment from my guide.

  “Why did you kill Tommy Nagura?” I asked.

  There was a pause. Stromboli was a quantum computer. If my hunch was correct, it was probably the smartest entity on the planet by a couple of orders of magnitude and it paused.