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

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “Thomas, you have to promise me. Help those men. Save them. Use the talent God has given you. Do it for me. Promise me, love.”

  Her words cut me. I fall to my knees. All the battles of five years, all the horrors I’ve seen come rushing back. I see the men I’ve saved, all of them, alive again. Their wounds healed and bodies whole. And I see their children, their wives and their families. I see their families.

  Something inside me breaks. “I promise.”

  The anger melts away like water running off a mountain. Jealousy runs down my spine and into the tortured ground. I can’t be angry, not anymore. My sweet Kayla was taken, but those men have a chance to be happy. I gave that to them.

  Kayla smiles and I fall in love with her all over again. “Goodbye, Thomas. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  She hugs me, and I try to hug back but there’s nothing there. I sit on my knees for a long time, eyes closed.

  Water is a rare thing in the universe. It gives life, and it takes it away. It brought the Cnidaria to Germonium, and they took everything I’ve ever loved away from me. Now I stand in the ruin they left behind, talking to ghosts and hiding behind denial.

  But I can’t lie to myself anymore. I’ll try to put away the anger, at least for now, and be the man she thinks I am. That’s what Kayla wanted.

  I stand up and turn toward my transport. In the back of my head, they call for me. In the far reaches, I hear them.

  Vector Victoria

  written by

  D. A. D’Amico

  illustrated by

  RYAN DOWNING

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David grew up as the son of a fisherman and commercial clam digger, and spent much of his youth on the ocean. The hard work and long backbreaking hours gave his mind plenty of time to wander, so he’s never been truly surprised at some of the places it’s been.

  As with many aspects of the author’s life, David’s writing skills are almost entirely self-taught. He has been writing speculative fiction as a hobby for many years, but has only recently begun to annoy others with it. He spends his days building computers, and at night he writes. One of his recent hobbies has been collecting and reading the Writers of the Future anthologies, and he can now proudly say he owns and has read every one of the twenty-six volumes, as well as the twenty-fifth anniversary coffee table edition.

  He is currently working on several projects, including a novel-length version of his award-winning story “Vector Victoria” and a lengthy piece of very dark fantasy.

  David currently resides in “The Witch City,” Salem, Massachusetts, with his lovely wife and four black cats.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Ryan’s interest in art started early, growing up watching TV programs like Wildcats, He-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They were his first taste of fantasy art and stories and his interest grew as he got older. When Ryan was old enough to read, he discovered comic books. The artwork impressed him so much he wanted to learn how to do it himself, but back then there was no such thing as an action comic artist in South Africa. Newspaper political comedy and Garfield were the best there was. There were no local X-Men, Spiderman comic-type artists, let alone schools which would teach it (which is what he wanted) so he had to train himself. Ryan spent years learning how to draw comic art from copying the artwork he liked. As Ryan got older and discovered more intricately detailed fantasy arts, he discovered digital art (computer art) which allowed him more creative freedom than any other traditional media could permit him. He continued to teach himself the ins and outs of technical expertise as well as extending his art styles with different types of digital painting including even those found in video games. He studied the philosophies and laws of art from L. Ron Hubbard’s book Art which he credits as invaluable to any artist.

  While the digital and comic art industry remains very small in South Africa, he still hopes to publish some of his own stories and move into the movie business to do conceptual arts and even direct a movie or two himself. Even developing video games is something he would love to do one day.

  Vector Victoria

  Victoria tossed herself into the chubby stranger’s arms and kissed him hard on the lips right in front of his red-faced wife. She danced playfully away, enjoying the open-mouthed look of surprise on both their faces. Shamus, watching from a distance, smiled as the infection began to spread.

  “Oh, you’re wicked.” Shamus, his voice an echo from the button phone on her right temple, laughed.

  “It’s more fun this way,” she sub-vocalized. “And a whole lot better than just sneezing on them.”

  Then she twirled away, rubbing a moist palm against the cheek of a gray-haired man, stopping briefly to lick her finger and tuck it into the ear of a small dark-skinned woman who had just stepped off the pellet platform. They yelled. The man complained loudly, and the woman actually flipped her off. Victoria just laughed and danced. She knelt in front of a passing stroller, leaning in to pick up and hug a pale-skinned little girl in a pink bonnet. Victoria loved children and made it a special point to give them all a big dose.

  She somersaulted away from the crowd, leaping onto a raised dais filled with decorative palm trees. Her handiwork wouldn’t take long to spread. The man she had kissed, the chubby one in the garish orange hula shirt, struggled to explain to his wife what had just occurred.

  “Who was that?” the wife demanded sharply.

  “Nobody—I don’t know,” the husband stammered. “I never saw her before in my life.”

  The wife slapped him across the face, and Victoria winced. “So, naked girls always throw themselves at you?”

  Victoria frowned, glancing down at her lean brown body. She wasn’t exactly naked, just tastefully undressed in a pale yellow belt-skirt and a few fiber- optic tattoos called shimmies. Spreading a virus took skin contact and lots of it.

  Well?” Shamus dropped down beside her, folding his long ebony legs beneath him like one of those tables that hucksters used to flash their card tricks on. He tipped that ridiculous gray fedora he had been wearing lately into a more rakish angle and smiled a broad, thin-lipped smile. His body shone, glistening with an olive-toned iridescence that only Victoria could see. It radiated a cold fire, tiny sparks sliding liquidly along his black skin as he moved. Her skin held a similar radiance, tinted in shades of the sun seen through the canopy of a rain forest and visible only to the inoculated as a layer of oiled microdiamonds.

  “You like my technique?” She winked and pursed her lips, making fish faces in his direction. He leaned over as if to kiss her, but stopped a chaste distance away. His breath smelled of licorice.

  She wished she could taste him, meet his body with her own, but that would only provide a “Romeo and Juliet” type ending to a promising day. Instead, she watched the color shift in liquid splashes, in leaps and arcs across his skin, as the battle was waged and lost across the landscape of his body.

  Their work out on the streets came with a price. They couldn’t touch, not until long after a session like this, not until days of gene therapy, enzyme replenishment and other uncomfortable things she tried not to remember. In fact, even a caress would mean death to either of them. The same was true for her and any of the post-infected strangers who wandered unknowingly through the gardens and walkways of the ring-shaped pellet train platforms. With each transition along the vector, the virus altered slightly. It mutated along a spectrum that would not vary its purpose, but would allow it to creep back into her skin and infect her as readily as she infected the many fresh faces that traveled throughout the Las Vegas area.

  To a Vector, with their compromised immune systems, an unplanned infection meant a quick and painful death. So Vectors touched, or breathed or sneezed very carefully—or else.

  “You enjoy this, don’t you?” he laughed.

 
She smiled. “Why can’t saving the world be fun?”

  “That’s why I wear this hat. Styling . . .”

  She giggled and stuck her tongue out. “Funny and funny looking are different.”

  Shamus had been her partner—as well as her lover, her mentor and her boss for nearly a year. They had originally met in Kyoto at a G12 protest to stop the emission of some deadly toxic gas that giant nations were producing. The exact cause hadn’t been important to her then. She was fighting the good fight, and that’s all that mattered.

  Shamus hadn’t registered on her radar. He had been just another pretty face among the hundreds struggling to change the world.

  She’d hopped around a bit after that: Save the North Atlantic Cod up in Reykjavík, stop the encroachment of deserts down in Cameroon, free Tibet, Chechnya, Hawaii at a Tiananmen Square rally in Beijing. The last had gotten her thrown in a holding cell that smelled like lemon-flavored urine. It had been two days that had seemed like two years. It had been the scariest experience of her life with constant interrogation, threats of torture and worse. She had cried the whole time, begging to go home. On the second night, the local authorities thought they had scared her enough, so they put her on the first plane out of the country.

  Later, she had returned to the States and eased up for a while, passing out leaflets for Greenpeace for a month before hooking up with a couple of other girls who were doing the shimmy thing. They had already gotten some serious grafts, large patches of skin oversewn with the thin twisted fiber optics which made them walking advertisements, and they were dancing in front of the big-name casinos. Victoria had chickened out after only a few shimmy clusters, finishing her obligation with semi-permanent inks. She danced for a while, but it had been too much like selling out. Her sponsors had her promoting flashy First World excess items like deodorant and cars which burned honest-to-god gasoline.

  She had refused to do it. They had fired her. She went back to PETA. At a rally against the murder of white lab mice, she had met Shamus again. They dated, kind of. Shamus never touched her that first night. She thought it wonderful, strange and unusual. It made him seem different from other men, exotic in a chaste sort of way. She didn’t find out the truth until months later.

  She gestured to the line of people exiting newly arrived pellets. They moved in small packs through the circular platform and up past the thin strips of shrubbery the city called a park. From her vantage on the top ring of the bull’s-eye-shaped concourse, she could see it all. The chubby man, still arguing with his wife, had begun to turn a pale shade of green. The infection had blossomed out from the point where Victoria’s lips had met his, spreading like hot tar from his head and down across his shoulders. His wife still wagged a finger at him, but it dripped a verdant honey that crawled along her forearm and over her body like a troop of glowing malachite ants.

  The gray-haired man she had caressed and the tiny black woman she had given the “Wet Willie” to had gone their separate ways, faint patches of glistening emerald that formed a lopsided triangle in conjunction with the first couple. The old man, his face scrunched into a tiny oval as he squinted in the sunshine, absentmindedly took one of the flyers being circulated by the minions of some religious cult on the prowl. Olive-colored diamonds passed through his infected fingers, oozing like mucus onto the toga-clad boy holding the flyers—who in turn spread the virus to fellow members of his sect as they maneuvered and traded packets of leaflets to accost the maximum number of tourists.

  The woman, short but quite hefty, leaned heavily on guide rails, plant pedestals, trash cans and sometimes other commuters as she ambled her way to the mobile walkways. Every place she paused, she deposited a small puddle of jade liquid, visible only to Victoria and Shamus. Each one of those hot spots became a brief reservoir, a starting point for the induction of the virus as new hosts came into contact.

  Within a few minutes, the entire lower platform had been engulfed. As new pellets arrived from the Strip, Fremont Street, the Boadd, a themed adults-only play land, and points around the greater Las Vegas area, they dislodged uninfected passengers and accepted a cargo of freshly created Vectors that sped off in all directions to propagate the virus.

  What was this one?” Victoria asked as she watched the last island of unaltered people merge into the pearly green sea of humanity. It was good to actually speak. She found it difficult to carry on a conversation through throat movements alone. The button phones were necessary if they were to keep a low profile, but she had never liked them.

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “No,” she giggled. “I figured you’d tell me later. You always do.”

  And he would. Since he had first indoctrinated her into the movement, Shamus had made it part of his duty to try and educate her about the variations of the virus they spread: their origins, their effects on the general population and the occasional unintended mutations which it was their job to squash. They both knew his tutelage was a waste of time, but she loved him for treating her as an equal and not just a stupid girl. Even after nearly a year together, she still sometimes thought of herself as an imposter, as nothing but a troubled outsider pretending she was part of the big picture.

  Shamus knew it all, and that was enough for her. He had been a doctor once, or so she thought. He never admitted it, but he talked like one all the time. He still kept much of his early life a secret from her, and she had never pushed him, not yet. Someday he’d open up, share those early years which must have held as much pain for him as her own held for her. She liked to joke that someday she’d know him better than he knew himself.

  “This Vector has a whole new topology. The infection process is the same—the capsid uses some of the same proteins, and the antigens are real close. It’s a retro, though, RNA based. It’ll fool the body into making a wide spectrum of antibodies to counter what they’re putting out there. It’s one of the most ambitious deliveries we’ve Vectored yet. A majority of the population will never know they’ve been infected, and those who can be helped by it will experience only mild flu-like symptoms for a couple of days.”

  She smiled. The doctor was leaking out of him again.

  “And this will counter it? We’ll break the FIT program?” she asked.

  “We’re getting closer,” he said. “The government will either have to stop their ‘Forced Inoculation Terrorism’ or come clean and admit it to the public.”

  She smiled. The passion in his voice was so out of character with his usual casual demeanor. This was his love, his true calling. The “Federal Initiative To Cure” program (the real name of FIT) didn’t have a chance.

  He trailed off, his dark eyes wandering over the crowd. Something was wrong. Victoria followed his gaze. Among the infected passengers leaving the pellets headed toward the airport stood an inconspicuous man of indeterminate age. He could have been a father, a brother or a husband. She wouldn’t have said he was fat or thin, short or tall. He appeared to be a little of everything, a human average, completely unremarkable.

  Except that his body appeared bathed in an angry shade of blood-colored diamonds.

  Victoria watched in shock as the man sneezed into the crowd. A red fog spread from his lips, visible she was sure, only to the inoculated. He looked like a firebreather, one of those Polynesian-style performers who stood outside the Grand Hawaiian Casino and fascinated passing tourists with bright jets of flame. But what this man spat was far stranger than any fire.

  “Who is that?” she asked. He wasn’t part of their movement. She didn’t recognize him, and he looked too clean.

  Shamus hopped from the dais. He began to wander in the direction of the newcomer, acting casual, blending in. Vectors were like shadows, always there in the light, but seldom noticed.

  “Stay here a minute,” he sub-vocalized.

  At first it was merely odd. Then it became frightening as she watched the
man spraying germs like a flamethrower. A crimson-colored tsunami washed over the crowd, spreading faster than the eye could see. It began as an intense blaze of bloody light, studded with garnet and ruby, which broke like a wave onto whatever the Vector touched, breathed on or came in contact with, covering them like a blanket—and then, nothing. No green radiance, or even red, just people the way they were before either Vector got to them. The two diseases simply canceled each other out.

  There shouldn’t be any other Vectors. She and Shamus were exclusive. They operated west of the Rockies, moving from city to city, sowing infection like farmers sowed wheat. Always, the infections manifested as greenish to the inoculated. The strange red glow made her uneasy, as if it were intended to stand out.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said as she somersaulted from the dais, dancing her way quietly through the crowd, careful not to touch or be touched. This was the part she hated. The “germy cold shoulder” she liked to call it. Until she went through her cleansing, she’d be susceptible to the mutated touch of her own Vector.

  Shamus glanced quickly back. His long dark face was carefully neutral, but his eyes glittered like obsidian shards. “Stay back, Victoria. I’m serious.” His lips never moved, but his voice came through her button phone loud and angry. It was the stern older Shamus, the “Doctor” Shamus, and not the quiet, amused, lover-Shamus who spoke.

  But Victoria, ever petulant when accosted by authority, ignored him. Instead, she picked her way through the thickening crowd with superb agility and great care, conscious of their closeness, but outwardly casual and energetic. She was, after all, supposed to be merely a shimmy girl, a walking, dancing piece of eye candy, an advertising gimmick meant only to display merchandise on the glowing patches of fiber optics tattooed to her naked skin.

  The chubby man arguing with his wife still occupied a place on the platform. Victoria watched as the ruby-colored wave engulfed them, flaring through her hard-wrought work in an instant, sublimating the greenish shine with a burst of bright cherry—and then, nothing. What was this process doing to them? She hadn’t any medical training, but she knew that Vectoring triggered the immune response. What happened when you turned that response on and off like a light switch?