The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3

by Allan Kaster

  Given the potential disruption that a character’s dilation could cause, it would make sense for the game to wake new entrants at a very small scale, offering them a chance to find their feet, and shoulders, without bumping into anyone. And though the lesson was immensely hard to swallow, the fact remained that—colossus or not—she still couldn’t go striding out across the wilderness, exploring in any conventional way. Her choices were to reposition herself within her new, much larger, prison and then shrink down for a closer look in case she’d missed something, or to keep on inflating her body until her current surroundings in all their desolate grandeur revealed themselves to be nothing, on the scale that mattered, but a tiny patch of dirt.

  Sagreda spent a few minutes pacing in a circle, staring at the ground, but she saw no signs of any tiny cities hidden in the dust—and if the game’s greatest architectural features had been something she might easily have crushed beneath her feet from sheer inexperience, there’d have been a lot of rebooting going on.

  So she took a few deep breaths, steadied herself, then spread her shoulders wide.

  12

  “Make room, make room!” a male voice shouted irritably. Sagreda shrank out of the way as the passerby expanded to fill most of the square, deftly bloating and stepping then finally contracting, leaving him on the opposite side. For a moment or two, an afterimage of his blimp-pufferfish-horse-balloon body breaking up into distinct onion-layers lingered in Sagreda’s vision.

  She quickly expanded back to her previous scale before someone else muscled in; if you gave these people an inch, you ended up toy-sized. “Do you know a newcomer named Sam?” she asked a 3-adan who’d ended up beside her in the wake of the maneuver. There was no reply.

  She’d been standing at more or less the same spot in the corner of the square for hours, slowly increasing her size as the opportunities arose. Her fellow characters had been kind enough not to trample her as she ascended out of the “desert,” but actually traversing any significant distance here—by becoming as large as the journey you wished to make—seemed to require a combination of nerve, skill, and luck that she had not yet attained. A few of her contributors were offering a collective flashback to their first attempts to cross an ice rink, but however conspicuous they might have felt as novices trying out their blades, Sagreda was fairly sure that they’d had nothing on this.

  She closed her eyes for a moment to escape from the headache-inducing perspective. Until now, she’d always been part of an ant trail of travelers moving to-and-fro between the worlds, carrying intelligence of what lay ahead; this was the first time she’d arrived at her destination without a single contact. But she’d met at least a dozen people at different times who’d sworn they were heading for 3-adica, before she and Mathis had resolved to make the journey themselves. Even if no one had ever come back, she couldn’t be alone here.

  “Sam!” she bellowed, keeping her eyes closed; it was easier to feel uninhibited that way. Going on the barrage of noise striking her from all directions, she was fairly sure that sound had the means to propagate at least across the square. Whether there was anything beyond this place was another question; the only really practical way it could be part of a larger city was through a hierarchy of scales, with people having to bloat even more to move between them.

  “Sam!” If there was a customer nearby and she was violating the local mores, so be it: let them flag her for deletion. It was all she could do to move her body out of other people’s way here; she had no idea how she was going to find food or shelter. Did she really think she was going to be able to map this world’s flaws and exploit them, all on her own?

  “Captain!” a voice whinnied back. Sagreda had almost forgotten that she’d never given the boy her real name back in Midnight.

  She opened her eyes. “Sam! Where are you?”

  “Here! Over here!”

  Sagreda searched the crowd in the direction of his words, but how was she meant to recognize him?

  “Don’t worry! I’ll come to you!”

  The square’s mostly empty center was abruptly filled with a new parade-float pony, which shrank down beside her.

  “Can you see me now?” Sam joked.

  “Yes.” For a moment, Sagreda could find nothing more to say; her relief was too tainted with guilt. “I’m sorry you ended up here,” she said finally. “I never meant that to happen.”

  “It’s my own doing,” he replied. “I should have waited for you.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Ten days.”

  Sagreda bowed her head. If she’d been alone that long herself, she would have lost her mind.

  “It’s all right, Captain,” Sam said gently. “You’re here now. So at least I’ve got someone to talk to.”

  “You haven’t made any friends with the locals?”

  He snorted. “You know how some people back in London . . . you could tell there weren’t nobody home? Here, they’re all that way.”

  Making the two of them the only comps in a world of automata? He had to be exaggerating. If the SludgeNet had been willing to populate the place without resorting to comps at all, they would never have been plucked from the queue and embodied here.

  “Maybe the lifestyle has just ground them down,” she suggested. “Have you been able to learn the ropes at all?”

  “I seen how to get by,” Sam assured her. “If you want grub, you got to put in the work, tending one of them patches.”

  “Patches?”

  “They’re like . . . small farms,” he struggled. “You need to eat the weeds, not the shoots—if you take the shoots for yourself, you’ll get a flogging. But if you eat enough weeds, they can smell it on you, and they’ll feed you proper.” Sam must have read bemusement on her face, or perhaps just in her silence. He said, “Only way to learn it is by watching.”

  Sagreda found the courage to follow him across the square; once she’d done it, her previous timidity seemed absurd.

  The patches were small areas of walled-off ground in one corner of the square, full of agricultural workers who shrank down into them and did exactly as Sam had described: roaming across their circle of land, chomping red and yellow weeds that were competing with the tender green buds of some kind of crop that was sprouting from the dusty soil. The two of them watched for a while, peering down into the Lilliputian realm, until four of the workers grew tired and expanded back up to the scale of the square.

  “Now!” Sam urged her. Other 3-adans were jostling around them, eager for work. Sagreda followed Sam down into the patch, though her first attempt put her on land that had already been thoroughly weeded, and she had to re-bloat a little and move before she found a suitable location.

  The weeds tasted foul, but no one else was spitting them out, and if the odor really was an essential meal ticket Sagreda wasn’t going to risk defying convention. In some ways it was restful to have her gaze fixed on the ground, where the distance-rings were closely packed and the strange geometry was more hypnotic than emetic.

  She lost herself in the near-mindlessness of the task, trying not to think about how comfortable she could have been if she’d never left East at all. With everyone around her game-aware, and the water-wheels she’d built powering something close to civilization, it seemed like paradise now.

  “Captain!” Sam called to her. The sky above them was darkening, which was curious, because it contained no sun. “Time to eat!”

  She watched him grow, taking note of how he was able to shift his feet to avoid trampling either crops or workers, and followed him back to the square.

  “I don’t know what we should call this place,” Sam admitted cheerfully as he led her to a queue beside an opening in a wall. “‘Restaurant’ might be gilding the lily.” Sagreda waited for the gap in front of her to grow large enough for her to bloat into it and advance. She was starting to internalize the sequence of contortions needed to get from place to place, which was both helpful and a bit depressing.
/>   “We need to be on the lookout for things that appear wrong,” she told Sam.

  “By my count, that’s everything,” he retorted.

  “You know what I mean. Wrong by the rules of this place; standing out as different.” The possibility that everyone who’d come here before them had failed to identify a single new exploit was too grim to consider, even if it would explain why no traveler had ever emerged from 3-adica. The old cubical trigger wouldn’t work here; it relied too much on Euclidean geometry. But there had to be others. The whole eye-watering nightmare around them must have tested the GPU code to destruction at some point.

  When it was Sagreda’s turn at the window, a surly 3-adan commanded her to breathe in his face, and she obliged. With a deft move so rapid she could barely parse it, he expanded out through his hatch and used his mouth to hang some kind of feed bag around her neck, full of what looked like pieces of mature versions of the crop she’d been weeding.

  She retreated clumsily into the square and waited for Sam to join her. She was famished, but the bulk of vegetable matter already inside her—which seemed to have inflated along with her when she’d left the patch—made the meal hard to swallow. There ought to have been some way she could force the weeds in her stomach to shrink relative to her body, but perhaps it was in their nature to resist.

  “Not so bad, is it?” Sam enthused as he munched his share of greenery.

  Sagreda thought: They shoot horses, don’t they?

  The light was fading rapidly now. “Where do people sleep?” she asked.

  “Where they stand,” Sam replied. “Don’t worry, I ain’t never fallen over.”

  “Good night, then,” she said. “And thanks for helping me today.”

  “Good night, Captain.”

  She closed her eyes, grateful for the weariness that dragged her swiftly into oblivion.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  When Sagreda woke, the sunless sky was an equally pale blue in all directions. Her legs were stiff, and it was clear that nothing she’d eaten had lost any volume in the process of digestion.

  “Where do people go to . . . do their business?” she asked Sam, reluctant to push him toward a more twenty-first century mode of speech. If he took comfort from his self-reliant Dickensian persona, she wasn’t going to start needling him with cues that might wake memories of contributors whose idea of a hard time had been a weak phone signal or an outdated PlayStation.

  “I’ll show you.”

  She followed him to a passage that started from an opening in the wall of the square and led to a room shielded from public view. At one end of the room there was a pit, but the odor was actually no worse than that of the weeds. Sagreda had expected the 3-adans to shrink down before defecating, to minimize the volume of their waste, but perhaps it had some use at this scale.

  She positioned her rear beside the pit, and her body’s instincts took over.

  As she was bloating and stepping her way toward the exit, she noticed to her amusement that the walls of the room were densely inscribed with what seemed to be graffiti. No words, but hundreds of crude, scratched sketches. Sagreda supposed they’d been executed with nothing more than a sharp rock gripped between the teeth, which largely excused the lack of artistic merit.

  She and Mathis had often lamented the fact that most of the worlds they’d visited had had public bathrooms segregated by gender. A cryptic graffito, hidden in a riot of other scrawls, would have been the ideal way for them to leave messages for each other.

  She surveyed the wall, trying not to get distracted by her curiosity about the bulk of its contents. The images didn’t strike her as pornographic, but then, she had no idea what 3-adan sex entailed, if there even was such a thing.

  She was about to give up, when her gaze returned to a scribble she’d passed over earlier. It might have been a meaningless set of scratches, but if she tidied away its imperfections in her mind’s eye, she could almost believe it was a diagram of some kind. Four lines formed an eight-pointed star, which on its own would have been nothing but an abstract doodle, but there seemed to be annotations. The horizontal line was labeled on the right with a loop that might have been a zero, and forty-five degrees anticlockwise from that, the adjacent line was labeled with a vertical dash that could have been a one. Then, continuing anticlockwise, but skipping the vertical line, beside the next point of the star was a hook that resembled a question mark.

  Sagreda stood contemplating the thing until someone else squeezed into the room, harrumphing at her scandalously protracted presence. She departed, and found Sam still waiting for her outside.

  “I thought you must have fallen in,” he joked.

  “There’s something you need to see in there,” she said. “And I need the Sam who remembers the Moon landing.”

  When the room was free, they went in together. It took Sagreda a while to locate the star again.

  Sam said, “What is it? Some kind of test?”

  “I hope so,” Sagreda replied. “For an automaton, with nobody home, it shouldn’t elicit a response at all. For a customer who’s steeped in 3-adic geometry, who’s only here because they know the subject so well, there must be a single, perfect answer that makes sense on those terms. And I guess there could be comps who are so immersed in the game that they’d come up with the same reply. But your average, lazy customer, or a comp just answering reflexively without thinking, is going to say ‘three,’ right?”

  “Counting around from zero, sure,” Sam agreed.

  “So what we need is the answer that none of those people would give. The answer that makes sense to a traveler, who knows that this isn’t the real world, who isn’t trying to show off their 3-adic knowledge, but does need to show that they can do more than recite what their contributors learned from Sesame Street.”

  Sam turned toward her, and they spoke in unison: “Minus one.”

  The wall split open and the two stone halves swung away from the room to reveal a long, Euclidean corridor, with a floor of shining linoleum beneath ceiling panels of buzzing fluorescent lights.

  Sam said, “Indiana Jones, eat your heart out.”

  Sagreda nudged him with her shoulder. “Quick, before it closes!”

  He remained motionless. Sagreda was desperate not to miss her chance, but she wasn’t leaving him behind.

  “Sam! If someone who shouldn’t see this comes in, it won’t be there anymore!”

  Sam nodded his head and trotted forward, advancing without any need to change size. Sagreda followed him, not looking back even when she heard the stone doors behind them slam closed.

  13

  At the end of the corridor was something resembling a department store changing room. It was too small for both of them to enter at once.

  Sam said, “You first.”

  In the mirror, Sagreda saw her equine incarnation, but once she’d faced it, it declined to keep tracking her movements. She stood for a while, confused, then said, “No.”

  The 3-adan horse was replaced by the captain.

  “No.”

  She kept going, winding her way back along a linked list of her former bodies, until she was finally staring at the one she’d woken in for the very first time, dressed in the same coarsely woven tunic.

  “Yes.”

  A dozen graduated slider controls appeared on the surface of the mirror, labeled with things like “age,” “height,” and “weight.”

  “There’s nothing I need to change,” Sagreda said. “Done. Finished. Okay.”

  The controls vanished, and the image changed from a frozen dummy to a reflection of her own body, restored.

  She stepped out into the corridor.

  “Captain?” Sam asked, bewildered.

  “My name’s Sagreda,” she said. “It’s a long story.”

  Sam went in, and emerged as a twenty-something version of his Midnight incarnation, with the same unruly blond hair, and slightly cleaner, newer versions of the same down-at-heel Victorian clothes.

>   “Now what?” he wondered nervously.

  Sagreda noticed a side door beside the changing room that hadn’t been there before. The cool, slightly tapered cylindrical doorknob felt strange as she gripped it; her contributors had known this sensation, but in none of the worlds she’d lived in herself had this style been the norm.

  She opened the door and stepped into a very large room full of rows of people sitting at computer screens. She wasn’t sure what to make of the content of the screens, but the vibe was definitely more space probe command center than investment bank. There were men and women of all ages and ethnicities, with clothes of every style and era. As she took another step, a man noticed her and nudged his neighbor. She glanced back and gestured to Sam to follow her. As the two of them walked between the rows of consoles, people began standing and applauding, beaming at the newcomers as if they were returning astronauts.

  Sagreda froze and found herself trembling with rage. “What about everyone else!” she screamed. “What about all the others!” These comps had found the cracks in 3-adica, and used them to build this cozy little haven—but if they’d burrowed deep into the clockwork monkey’s shattered jaw, why hadn’t they brought every last prisoner of the SludgeNet to safety?

  A woman in a brightly patterned dress approached. “My name’s Maryam. What should I call you?”

  “Sagreda.”

  “Welcome, Sagreda.”

  Sam had hung back, embarrassed by his companion’s outburst, but now he stepped forward and introduced himself.

  Maryam said, “Everyone you see here is working as hard as they can to bring the others to us. But it’s going to take time. When you’ve settled in, and had a chance to recover, maybe you can join us.”

  Sagreda wasn’t interested in settling in until she knew exactly what these people were doing with exploits so powerful they could summon this whole mission control room out of thin air without the SludgeNet even noticing.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “You’re safe here! You’re invisible! What’s the work that’s still to be done?”