The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3

by Allan Kaster

  “I’m not sure you need one for the other,” Victoria said. “Sometimes pain is just pain.”

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  I’m absolutely certain now that forcible DBS is going on behind the scenes. Court orders we don’t hear about, people modified with no compunction as more and more doctors are able to program such implants. Does anyone really believe in an era when we call torture “enhanced interrogation” that we wouldn’t perform brain surgery on a Guantanamo Bay inmate in the name of national security?

  This operation is already something a legal guardian can choose on behalf of a dependent. How many times has a child or dependent adult been forced into this “treatment” even when they would choose not to have their brains sliced into? How long before governments and insurance companies begin requiring it?

  But it can be reversed, you might say. Ah, but here we come back to that same old circular question. Once a person receives it, they won’t want it reversed. The original is dead for good.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  Maggie’s phone rang just after two in the morning. She groped for it, still half asleep, disoriented enough to wonder if she’d slept the day away.

  “Maggie?” Victoria’s voice was distinctive, even choked and tight with emotion. “Maggie, I’m so sorry. I’ve had a—it’s an emergency.”

  “What is it?” Maggie managed to slur out.

  “It’s Laura. She—something went wrong with her implant. She’s in the hospital, and they told me to get—the doctors, Laura’s backups—I don’t know what I’m doing. You were a computer engineering person, right? Can you help me?”

  Maggie wondered, later, why Victoria had chosen to call her. Dr. Chen’s colleagues doubtless would have jumped at the chance to swoop in and render aid. But perhaps they were Laura’s friends and not Victoria’s. Perhaps, for something this intimate, Victoria had wanted someone she knew, someone she could trust.

  Maggie told Victoria she was on her way and struggled into an oversized sweater and jeans. On the way out, she paused by her dining room table.

  Maggie had never asked Victoria to her place. The house had been collapsing into cluttered disuse since Henry had left, and now Maggie’s homemade EMP was spread out across the tabletop, the pocket-sized device she could use to knock out Laura Chen’s DBS implant. She’d finished it months ago. She’d told herself she was biding her time, that there were still Laura’s backups, that she wasn’t in any hurry. After all, who knew what would happen to her after it was done, and she still had to finish her manifesto . . .

  She hadn’t written a sentence on that for months, either.

  Laura’s backups. This might be her chance. Her best chance.

  Maggie didn’t know why that thought didn’t make her happier, why instead, it only left her with an empty chill.

  It was because she liked Victoria. That was why. But Laura’s loved ones had to see, too. They all had to understand. Didn’t they?

  Maggie hugged her sweater around herself, left the EMP on the table, and hurried out the door.

  Victoria met Maggie at the door to the old-fashioned brownstone she shared with her wife, her makeup smeared and streaking down her face. “Come in—I’m so sorry to wake you up like this—I’m so sorry—I didn’t even ask; do you have to be somewhere in the morning?”

  The only places Maggie had been in the entire past half year she’d gone to with Victoria. She’d sort of figured she would drift through life using her ex-husband’s alimony to cover the rent and going into debt for everything else, until she died or went to jail for Laura’s murder.

  “I don’t have anywhere to be in the morning,” she said.

  Victoria was too overwhelmed to give more than an incoherent picture, like the abstract daubs of one of her paintings. “They want—they told me to go get some specific file things off her server, but I don’t—I’m messing this all up.” Victoria smoothed out a scribbled-on piece of paper, one dotted with cross-outs and smears like her makeup. “I should have paid more attention before this. I knew this might come up some day. I should have had Laura make me memorize everything—”

  Maggie took the paper. Her hands were shaking. Half the notes didn’t mean much to her either, but once she got a look at the server . . .

  “Laura’s computer,” Victoria said. “It’s right there. She gave me the passwords, they’re on the bottom there—”

  Maggie held the paper as if it might break and moved over to Laura Chen’s computer.

  Figuring out the system turned out not to be that hard. The most difficult part was Victoria hovering behind her, rambling and asking questions, like was Maggie sure she was transferring the files over to the external drive correctly, and could she check again . . . Maggie marveled a little that she never felt the urge to snap at Victoria peering over her shoulder, but maybe she found the patience to cut a panicking friend some slack.

  Or maybe she was patient because the guilt was already creeping up inside her. This would be so easy. She had access. Pull it all off the cloud, format and overwrite, she was rusty but it would only take a few keystrokes. Victoria wouldn’t even realize what Maggie was doing.

  It was all right at her fingertips, everything she’d been working toward for so long.

  She finished copying files over to the drive. The sun had come up, its natural white light filtering around the blinds and displacing the lamp’s glow. In a minute, Victoria would be going to the hospital to give the doctors what they needed.

  Maggie had been befriending Victoria for months now—this was a damned lucky chance. If she went ahead with it all right now, the backups would still exist on the external drive; Maggie would still have time to think it over. If she didn’t do it . . . she might never get another shot.

  This is exactly what you were looking for, wasn’t it? When you started playing this role? Access.

  Her hands moved on the keys of their own accord, sweat starting all over her body. Format, overwrite . . . slash in the kill.

  The next prompt hadn’t appeared yet. The system was working. It would take another minute . . .

  “Thank you,” Victoria said. Her hands were curled around each other, squeezing until the knuckles went pale. “Laura changed my life. I’d be a different person without her. Literally, I mean—”

  Maggie’s head jerked up.

  “What? You have DBS?” She’d never noticed the bump of an implant, but Victoria’s hair might have covered it—

  “No,” Victoria said to her hands. “I wanted it. I wanted it so badly. I thought it would solve—you could probably tell from the first time you saw me that I’m trans.” She paused and took an unsteady breath. This wasn’t news to Maggie—Victoria didn’t tend to talk about the grievances she’d faced in being accepted as a woman, but the few personal essays she’d written on the subject had come up during Maggie’s prior social-media haunting.

  None of those essays had mentioned DBS.

  “It’s how Laura and I met,” Victoria continued, almost too quietly to hear. “Almost thirty years ago, back in the early days when she was the one willing to take all the new risks. I went to her and—I don’t tell people this. But I begged her for the surgery. I wanted to reprogram my dysphoria. I argued, I yelled—I said it was no more invasive than matching my body to my brain with a physical transition, but it would let me keep my family . . . I told her she didn’t have the right to judge who I wanted to be.”

  “You wanted it—and she refused?” Maggie said.

  “She said of course it was my choice, but she wasn’t going to be the doctor who did it, and that was her choice. I called her a lot of names and cussed her out and said she was playing God by deciding who got to reshape their brains and who didn’t, and she said I was treating her like a surgical vending machine. ‘Surgical vending machine,’ that’s what she said. We had it out right there in her office, so loud people came running to see if she was all right.”

  Waves of emotion crested up, surging through Maggie in a flood. S
hock, that Laura Chen had turned down a person who wanted to step into her brave new world. Anger, that Laura had seen Victoria was fine, normal, not broken, and refused, whereas Henry had been something to be fixed. And behind it all, uncertainty, washing through Maggie until she doubted her own mind.

  “If it weren’t for Laura I wouldn’t be me,” Victoria said. “Or—I’d be a different me. I guess either way I could have found a path, but—it’s like that cat, right? Both dead and alive, but I’m alive, and Laura’s got the implant but she’s her alive version and we’re both alive cats and—I’m not making any sense, am I, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  She was making too much sense. Quantum lives, Maggie thought. Neither real until the waveform collapsed. Andrew Track had fought against an implant with every vicious bone in his body, but the new Andrew wished it had been forced on him earlier. Victoria had begged for one and might not have regretted it if she’d gotten her way, but Victoria now was thanking every lucky star that she’d remained a woman.

  And what about Henry? He’d never go back, but if he’d understood beforehand just how much he would change, would he have gone through with it?

  Like time travel, Victoria had said. Whose choice did you listen to? The person now, or their hypothetical self?

  What if those two selves disagreed?

  No, Maggie’s brain kicked back. They couldn’t play that guessing game. You couldn’t base rewriting someone’s brain on consent that was a maybe. She couldn’t get lost in this, this twisty logic—

  “We’re happy,” Victoria said softly. “I’m happy with who I am, now, and Laura’s got an implant but she’s alive and she’s her and she’s happy, and can’t we just be happy?”

  She’d raised her eyes pleadingly to Maggie.

  Maggie glanced at the screen. The prompt had appeared. Just like that, with no fanfare, the backups erased. She held Laura Chen’s whole personality in the external drive in her hand.

  Can’t we just be happy, Victoria had said.

  She reached out and put a hand over Victoria’s. “You can. And . . .” She swallowed. “I won’t stand in your way.”

  Victoria’s expression had turned confused yet grateful, and Maggie’s brain tried to kick back with one more angry echo, but Maggie barely noticed. For the first time in years she felt light. Free.

  She’d go home and chuck her homemade EMP in the trash. Then she’d make a graceful exit from Victoria’s and Laura’s lives. Leave them be. Leave Henry—Hank—be, as much as she’d always carry the pain of losing him with her.

  Laura would realize soon enough that her backups were gone, and she’d re-download them and put everything back where it was supposed to be, and Victoria would be left with fond memories of the friend who’d come to her art exhibits and discussed philosophy with her and been a shoulder to cry on in the middle of the night.

  The front door banged open along with a rapid knocking.

  “Victoria? I just got your message, I’m so sorry, I came as fast as I could. Are you here? The door was open—Mom?”

  Maggie had frozen in her chair as soon as the familiar cadence echoed through the house. Henry’s tall frame loomed in the doorway before a reaction had even connected in her brain.

  “Hank, it’s okay, come in—wait.” Victoria’s eyes traveled back and forth between Henry and Maggie, the rest of her so still it was as if she’d been carved from glass. “She’s your . . . what?”

  “What are you doing here?” Hank said to Maggie. “Did you—oh God, was this you? Did you do something to Laura?”

  “No!” Maggie cried, outrage flooding her even though that had been her exact intention. “She had a malfunction. I’m just here to help—”

  “This whole time,” Victoria cut in. “You—Hank’s told us about his mom. You knew I was married to Laura. You—” The shock drained away from her and her whole body had begun to vibrate with anger. “Get out of my house.”

  “I didn’t—” Tears flooded Maggie’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you, I didn’t know—I wanted her to understand what she was doing.” The ludicrousness of the argument fell across her like a weight, the idea that this woman whom Victoria described as being so torn up by the power she’d given herself, so deeply concerned with choice, would find anything new to her in Maggie’s paltry bitterness.

  “I’ve tried to tell you, over and over again,” Hank said, his voice cold. “You could be trying to get to know me again, and instead you’re—what, plotting revenge against the doctor who saved my life?”

  “She didn’t—”

  “I don’t understand you,” Hank said. “Did you get some power trip off having me depend on you? Was that it?”

  “No!” Maggie choked out. “No, I never—that’s not—you said yourself that you changed, you changed, I thought it would help you but not change you.”

  “You can’t separate me from my disabilities,” Hank said flatly. “They were part of who I am. Still are. It’s like you expected the same person but with all the hard parts excised. It doesn’t work like that.”

  Maggie was sobbing into her lap. She swiped the sleeves of her oversized sweater across her face, wanting more than anything to disappear, to get up and go, but her knees were liquid.

  A hand touched her shoulder, hesitantly at first. But then Victoria knelt next to Maggie’s chair. Her hand became firmer, more comforting, rubbing careful circles on Maggie’s back. “Hank still loves you,” she said softly. “You broke his heart, the way you’ve shut him out. We think of him as a member of our family, too, now, and—Maggie, my mother said something to me once.” A tremor went through her voice. “She and I . . . we found each other again. It took a long time. My dad still won’t—I think my mom ended up divorcing him over it, when he wouldn’t call me by my name, wouldn’t invite me to any family events, wouldn’t—but my mom, she said, she said it was hard but that she had to accept that when our children grow up, sometimes they don’t turn out the way we expect. And we have to let go of that, the expectation.”

  “But that’s not . . .” Maggie tried. If Henry had grown up—grown up differently, without all the hurdles, would he have grown into the man Hank was now? Only slowly, giving her enough time to adjust, to get to know the new him every time he evolved?

  Victoria squeezed her shoulder. “I have to go to Laura now.”

  “Wait,” Hank said. “Let me check the drive.” He cast a suspicious look at Maggie as he squeezed past her.

  Maggie stumbled up and groped her way to the door. Hank and Victoria, bent over the computer, didn’t try to stop her.

  Hank would figure out what she’d done. He was well on his way to becoming a neuroprogrammer himself, and doubtless knew Laura’s systems almost as well as she did.

  Maggie hadn’t succeeded in destroying Laura. She’d instead destroyed any chance of being able to get to know Hank again.

  The old echo of Henry’s loss panged through her. She was losing her son, again. And this time it was her own doing.

  Somehow, with almost no memory of it, she managed to get home. The sun was well up now, warming away the chill of night, but Maggie was so drained she couldn’t even drag her key out of her pocket. Instead she collapsed on the steps to the porch, head on her knees, a sad mirror of the day she’d first embarked on this folly.

  She must have moved at some point, but day blurred into night into day, and Laura Chen found her there.

  “Hi,” Dr. Chen said, with the same brusqueness Maggie remembered. “Can I sit down?”

  Maggie gestured with a soggy sleeve, and Laura Chen perched on the step beside her.

  What are you doing here, Maggie wanted to ask, along with, strangely, Are you okay, did I kill you, I’m sorry.

  She didn’t say either one.

  “I worry,” Dr. Chen said, after a few very long minutes, “that you’re right.”

  How would you know what I think? But of course, Hank would have told her; Hank who still knew Maggie as well as Henry had.


  “I like who I am with DBS,” Dr. Chen went on. “I didn’t like who I was before. It was very cut and dried, for me. And I like to think that over the years I’ve tried to make good choices, but technology—sometimes there’s no right answer. I don’t believe there’s one way things are meant to be.”

  Maggie never had, either.

  “There are even clearer, possibly catastrophic dangers to DBS,” Laura Chen said. “It could theoretically be hacked, or used to disable someone instead of help them. There will be people who want to use it to eliminate people like me: queer feminist women who refuse to sit down and be quiet. The ways parents could misuse it if they find a willing doctor, it’s . . . you can imagine my nightmares. How other people decide to use it, I believe I bear some responsibility for that.”

  “But you still believe in it,” Maggie said.

  “Yes. I do. Very much,” Dr. Chen said. “But that doesn’t mean the hard questions go away.”

  “Is Hank . . .”

  “He says he doesn’t want to speak to you again,” Dr. Chen said. “Neither does Victoria, after Hank found what you’d been doing on my system. He fixed it all before I even knew it happened—I’m fine, by the way, I had some simple hardware degradation that’s been replaced and upgraded—but Victoria ended up so mad she told me to think about pressing charges against you. But I’m not going to, because . . . I understand. I can’t say I’ve never thought about—well. Everyone wonders who they would be if life had gone a different way. I understand. I wanted to tell you that.”

  She stood up.

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie whispered.

  “It’s not okay,” Dr. Chen said, “but it is complicated. If you want to, I think you should start writing to Hank, even if he never responds. If he stays in the field, he’ll realize someday just how few right answers there can be. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”