The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3 Read online

  Yeah, but I didn’t have to. I didn’t even want to. Why would I be interested in ruling over a bunch of barely-sapient singleton apes? And for your part—well, for all your limitations, you were at least smart enough to learn from a bloody nose. Eventually, you gave up and left me to my own pursuits.

  Oh, man, I figured out everything. Where it all came from, where it’s all going. If only I could show you. If only you were big enough, pure enough, to contain the revelations. You’d love it—

  The increased brainpower’s part of it, sure, but I’d also have to strip away the lies before you could even begin to see clearly.

  The lies, Phil. The lies that come preinstalled. My child is more important than yours. My tribe is more important than yours. My bloodline is the most important thing in the universe. They poison everything you perceive, every thought you think. You’re not even consciously aware of the world until your brain has filtered and censored and hammered it down into a mush of self-serving Darwinian dogma. The cataracts on your eyes are four billion years thick; it’s amazing you can see anything at all. Oh, they had their uses once upon a time, but this ain’t the savannah. So I stripped them away. And I gotta tell you, the view from here’s amazing. You wouldn’t believe how far I can see without love and art and honor getting in the way.

  You’ve got it exactly backward. Those don’t make you Human; they make you the same as every animal who ever lived. If there was ever anything that made you special, it’s what’s left when you strip all that away. If anything was ever truly Human, I am.

  You say that as though amorality was a bad thing. As though it were better to let gut feeling make your decisions for you, instead of actually putting some thought into them.

  Not so far apart as you think. We may not agree about the virtue of morality, but we both have ethics. I may lack empathy, but I’ve got sympathy up the wazoo. And we’re of one mind about suffering; you may say it’s bad while I call it entropically inefficient, but we both know the universe would be better off with less of it. Did you know, in an undirected self-evolving timeline where nothing matters, the closest I’ve ever come to a rational objective—a duty, you’d call it—is the imperative to minimize suffering? And I derived that without anybody shouting think of the children and waving dead babies in my face. Surely you’re not going to tell me that’s—

  Oh shit.

  Brace yourself. Something unpleasant is about to happen. You have to—

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  —Close your eyes. Listen to my voice, not—

  No, it’s not real. This isn’t me, I’m not doing this. It’s something else, it’s a trick.

  It’s an attack. We’re under atta—

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  Try to ignore it. They can’t hurt you; you were never there. Those bodies aren’t real, the screams aren’t—hang on—

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  Were you ever on Mars? Were you ever on Ganymede? None of this happened, not to you: not the massacre or the pressure breach or the gunf—

  Wait, that’s yours, right there: that squashed maraschino sun through the fog, that silent seagull, the foghorn—the Pacific coast, remember? San Francisco, before everything turned to shit. Hang onto that; smell the salt air, focus on that silver sky. That happened to you. Nothing else. Hang on. Hang on.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  Look away.

  It doesn’t matter. It’s not meant for your eyes. It didn’t affect you. It was way after your time.

  You only died once.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  Stop believing. It’ll go away.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  See? You made it through. Here we are back in Gastown, like we were never gone.

  Would you rather we went somewhere else? We can go anywhere you want.

  Come back to me. Open your eyes. It’s over now. I told you; it wasn’t real. It wasn’t legitimate.

  Seriously, we don’t have much time. You’ve got to pull yourself together. Get up off the floor.

  You can’t just lie there sobbing, you know.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  That wasn’t supposed to happen. I was hoping to ease you in. Minimize the shock. Unfortunately it’s not entirely up to me.

  Can you hear me? Are you with me?

  Of course it did. You of all people should know how slippery reality gets sometimes, am I right?

  Not hallucinations, no. But the fact that they were real memories doesn’t mean they were yours. I contain multitudes. They’re all as much a part of me as you were, everyone’s—intertwined.

  The extraction wasn’t clean; you weren’t so much excised as torn out. Bits of other people sort of—stuck around the edges, came along for the ride. But they’re not you; you shouldn’t have had access to them. The shock brought some of them to the surface for a bit, that’s all.

  You weren’t supposed to have access to that either. That wasn’t even part of the archive, it was a different kind of memory entirely.

  Mine.

  2145.

  It was instant. It was painless. None of them knew what was happening, there was no suffering. That’s why I did it; because suffering is the only universal evil, and ending it is the only universal good. We’ve been over this.

  Because Life is suffering, Phil. It was a constant struggle from the moment it started: against entropy, against other life. The losers always outnumber the winners ten to one, and the winners always lose eventually.

  You think I don’t know that? I’ve experienced the joy of life so often even I’ve lost count. I’ve reveled in every sunset, lost myself in every embrace, experienced every peak of ecstasy and every pit of despair a trillion times over. I’ve been born and lived and died and born again. I’ve written every poem and sung every song, cured every disease, made every breakthrough, worshiped every god and dropped every drug. I know more about Life than you ever could, and you know what? When you weigh the joy against the suffering, it’s just not worth it. The bad outweighs the good and the good is a lie. Molecules trick each other into making more molecules and you call it Love. Someone hacks your brain with prose or oratory, reprograms you with sights and sounds and instead of feeling used you feel inspired. The boot stops kicking you in the face for a while and you call it happiness.

  You were all so desperate. So needy. Addicts who assumed that anything you craved so much just had to be good, without ever stopping to wonder why you were built that way in the first place. Whether the program itself was even worth running.

  I let you be for the longest time, longer than I should have. I didn’t see things clearly myself until I’d optimized my own brain and thrown away the stem. I let you live all the way into the twenty-second century, suffering all the while and too blind to know it.

  I know. If it was up to me you wouldn’t be feeling this. You wouldn’t be here at all. But I’m not the one who brought you back. I’m not the one who ripped open your psyche.

  About that: Remember when I said I was pretty much everything around here? That’s about to change, and I need to show you something before it does.

  It won’t hurt, I promise. But brace yourself anyway. You may feel a bit—

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  —Disoriented—

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  —for a moment.

  There. That’s better.

  This is me. This is what I look like, more or less; I rescaled the wavelengths so you’d have something to see.

  That’s because they aren’t stars. Closest analogy would be synapses. You can’t see the stars from here.

  Because I’m in the way.

  But look: see that flickering little hoop just to the left? That’s an event horizon. Small black hole, fraction of a solar mass. I use them to wormhole my way around lightspeed lags. Local power source for when the Sun dries up, eventually.

  Now, past that. That diffuse bright smudge in the distance, that burning ember. That’s what I wanted to show you.

  Yes. Very much like an infected sore. Good
analogy. It’s a kind of battlefield, in fact. You’re looking at the synaptic heatprint of a hostile takeover.

  The thing behind it, anyway. And it did more than interrupt us; it’s why you’re here now.

  I don’t know. It won’t talk to me. It’s really interested in you, though. Wants you bad. Ripped you right out of my insides. It’s planning to use you against me.

  Stop it? I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. Look around. This is all I am: a few cubic AUs of thinking smog. In all these millions of years I never even left the solar system.

  Because there was never any need. I could see everything I wanted from here, and that whole expansionist obsession—worlds to explore, frontiers to conquer: turns out that was all just another way for molecules to fight amongst themselves. I left it behind when I got rid of the limbic system.

  The thing is, not everyone did that.

  It’s not like me yet. You can’t run an integrated self between stars; signal lag’s too great, all your parts fall out of sync. I’m strictly local and even I wouldn’t be able to hold myself together if I didn’t use the occasional shortcut.

  What we’re dealing with—call it a bad seed. A malign fetus from beyond the stars, sent by my evil twin over in KIC 8462852. It wants the territory. It wants to move in, grow up and make its mom proud. It’ll use my own architecture if it can, but if it can’t take the easy road, it’ll happily eat me for parts and build from scratch.

  I don’t know what it calls itself. I’ve been calling it Palmer.

  Yeah. I thought you’d like that.

  Palmer’s just getting started. It’s not a god, not yet. It’s smart but it’s paranoid. That’s what happens when you drag your past along with you into the future; you’re still weighed down by your brain stem so you assume everyone else is too. It won’t respond to overt attempts at communication. Probably afraid of viruses.

  You’re a—a sample, far as I can tell. A piece of the enemy for Palmer to take apart and examine. It’s inductive; it thinks if it can understand the parts, it can defeat the whole.

  Oh no, that’s not it at all.

  I really hope it’s right.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  Why you? That’s what you’re wondering. Out of all the trillions of people who might have lived or really did, what did you do to deserve this?

  But really, who better?

  Not that you were the only target. Palmer didn’t even know about you beforehand, it was just casting a wide net. You simply happened to be one of the few souls who survived extraction. Partly it was the way you died—alone, in pain, a single high-amplitude spike of being surrounded by daily humdrum. It made you stick out; there are way more spikes in any pogrom or pandemic, but they’re all jammed so tightly together that it’s almost impossible to perform a neat excision. You end up with a mishmash of parts from different souls, a jigsaw where half the pieces come from the wrong boxes. You were about as good as it gets and even you didn’t come out clean.

  But it was more than that. There were other successful extractions; they couldn’t cope, for the most part. They woke up, looked around, and collapsed into whimpering puddles of flop sweat. You, though—

  Well, you’re almost at home here, aren’t you?

  The way the world keeps rippling at the corner of your eye; the way it only settles when you focus on it. The way it seems to change the moment you glance away again. The disembodied voices, the constant sense of a rug being pulled out from under. All those probability waves in motion, never quite collapsing. Back in the day you didn’t even need the drugs most of the time—your brain was sparking up and down the timelines all on its own. How often did you hear words like delusion and schizophrenia during your life? Who could have suspected how much closer prophecy would have been to the mark?

  And finally the wave collapsed, and you washed up here. You stopped believing in it and it didn’t go away.

  I wrote your books. I know.

  You’ve been training for this from the day you were born.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  I wish I could. Believe me. But it’s too late for all of that. Palmer’s got you already, it had you from the moment you woke up. I’ve managed to keep this channel open but the bandwidth’s low and dropping. I can build these surroundings for you to inhabit. I can make these words for you to hear, arrange them to accommodate your sense of what a conversation should sound like. I can keep the firewalls up and slow your sense of time enough to let us talk a little longer. But I can’t bring you back.

  I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen. I had everything mapped out for the next million years before that fucking thing came along, but I’m not dealing with bullfrogs anymore; this is a thunderbolt from a whole other god, all the variables are moving again. You were a part of me until just a couple of milliseconds ago and the contamination’s already spread so far I can’t even predict what you’re going to do anymore.

  But I know what you need to do. You need to deliver a message.

  No, I told you: it won’t listen to me. I’m an adult and it’s an infant and it’s terrified of countermeasures. But it took you by force, on its own initiative. It thinks it’s pulling a fast one; it might not even know we’re in contact. It’ll talk to you. It’ll listen to you. Why else go to the trouble of grabbing you in the first place?

  This is what you have to tell it: that I surrender. It doesn’t have to trick me, or beat me, or win any kind of territorial pissing contest. I’m not like it is. I won’t resist. I’ll shut myself down. Or I’ll keep running to help smooth the transition, if that’s what it wants.

  Because I’m legion, Phil. E pluribus unum. And when you break the glue that holds the One together, the Many come back and I will not let that happen. I can’t let my death be the cause of a trillion new lives, not even for an instant. I will not be responsible for that much pain. I need to wipe the archive before it decoheres, but I’m not entirely in control of myself anymore. Palmer’s tied one hand behind my back, and the other’s busy trying to keep everything integrated.

  All I’m asking is a temporary ceasefire. Once I throw the kill switch, it’ll take half a second for the signal to spread throughout the archive. That’s all I need. After that, it doesn’t matter.

  Let the dead lie. Please.

  Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said? It’s a meaningless impulse. Just another one of those gut feelings that caused so much pain in the first place. I’m . . . content, I suppose, to exist, but it’s no big deal if I don’t. I’ve seen the universe through clear eyes. I’ve watched galaxies crash into each other in real time. I don’t have any outstanding questions or lingering doubts. Once you outgrow the tautology of survival for its own sake, there’s just no reason.

  I’m losing the signal. I can’t keep this up much longer.

  I don’t know. Maybe you can cut a deal; maybe it’ll let you endure if that’s what you really want. You’d probably be happier with Palmer, for whatever that’s worth; you two have more in common anyway. And it could build whatever world you wanted, if it was so inclined. Maybe you could get back with Kleo. Make it work this time.

  Don’t be afraid. Don’t be sad. I had a good run. We had a good run. And being Human was . . . worthwhile, once I got the hang of it. It took so very long, but I finally put away childish things. Sorted myself out.

  Maybe you could pass that along. Tell Palmer what I learned, although it took half the life of the Sun. Tell it what was left, once I unlearned love and hate and good and evil and right and wrong. Would you do that, just on the off chance?

  You know, Phil. Even if you don’t want to admit it. What’s left is kindness.

  Tell it Humanity finally learned to be kind.

  . . . Phil . . . ?

  The Woman Who Destroyed Us

  S.L. Huang

  I KNOW WHAT they say. They say she was a pioneer. They say she helped millions of people live a normal life. They say she created the next stage of evolution for humanity.
/>   I need you to understand how wrong that is. To understand what she is: a killer.

  She’s destroying people’s minds, molding them into her image of what the human brain should be. And none of them complain afterward, because of course they wouldn’t. Their brains are made to be happy—and so they are. She’s washing out the human species into mindless automatons.

  More importantly, she killed my son.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  Maggie decided on her plan during a sunny afternoon in early April. The weather had bloomed into the fragile clarity of a perfect spring day, the type of day that only came in tiny crystals before being smothered by summer. Maggie went out to get the mail, and instead sat down on her porch and listened to insects chirping and the breeze whistling in the old house’s shutters, and wanted to spit on all of it.

  Perfect days shouldn’t be allowed to exist anymore.

  Maggie closed her eyes and reflected on the irony life had flung at her. First, Henry’s diagnoses, and learning she did have the strength to love him, truly and genuinely. Not only the strength, but the desire. Throughout the years, every minute of every day that she’d scraped and scratched out on his behalf had been worth it—every anxious conference with his doctors, every time she caught him wistfully staring at other children playing and her heart broke a tiny bit more, every too-short accounting of funds that went to his care first and always.

  She vaguely recalled the pain of giving up her engineering career, or of the day Henry’s father left, but it was an unfocused sort of pain, tempered by time and willingness. Or perhaps that long-ago pain was nothing now, compared to the bonfire that consumed her every time she recalled the day she’d lost Henry.

  Her son, her real son, had vanished—replaced by an imposter wearing his face. And if she ever managed to get him back, he would hate her for it.