Altered States: A Cyberpunk Sci-Fi Anthology Read online

A mech just walked away, afterward, visor down, communing with his inner voices. Everything went to the interfaces. There was a record. Of course there was a record. Everyone knew that.

  It was at the human interface things could drop out.

  He used the fire key, walked out an emergency exit, waited in the rain.

  The cruiser nosed up to the curb, black and black-windowed, and swallowed him up.

  “Saved the soft drink,” Sheila said. “Thought you’d be dry.”

  It was half ice-melt. But it was liquid. It eased a raw throat. He sucked on the straw, leaned his head back. “They calling us in?”

  “No,” Sheila said. That was all. They didn’t want a de-brief. They didn’t want a truth. They wanted—wanted nothing to do with it. Nolan’s body to the next-ofs, the live-in...to whoever, wherever would hide him.

  Another mouthful of ice-melt. He shut his eyes, saw wire-schemas, endlessly folding, a pit you could fall into. He blinked on rain and refracted neon. “Ross killed Nolan.”

  “You and I don’t know.”

  “Was it Ross?”

  “Damned convenient a Company mech was in hail. Wasn’t it?”

  “No Presence at all. Nolan—Nolan was shot between the eyes.”

  “MarsCorp exec—her live-in boyfriend with no record, no visa, no person. Guy who knew The Arlington’s underground, who had a pass key—”

  “He was keying through the doors?”

  “Same as you were. Real at-home in the bottom tiers. You see a weapon on him, you see where he ditched one?”

  “No.” Raindrops fractured, flickering off the glass. He saw the gray ghost again, the no-Presence that could walk through total black. Or key through any apartment door, or aim a single head-shot with a computer’s inhuman, instant accuracy.

  He said, “Adds, doesn’t it?”

  “Adds. Downtown was seeing what I was. I told them. Told them you had bad feelings—”

  “What the hell are they going to do? We got a dead mech down here—”

  “The live-in shot Nolan. Shot the company mech. That’s your story. They can’t say otherwise. What are they going to say? That the guy didn’t have a gun? They won’t come at us.”

  “What about our record?”

  “Transmission breakup. Lightening or something.” Sheila’s face showed rain-spots, running shadows, neon glare. “Bad night. D-D, bad shit.”

  “They erase it?”

  “Erase what?” Sheila asked.

  Silence then. Rain came down hard.

  “They want to bring their damn politics down here,” Sheila said, “they can take it back again. Settle it up there.”

  “Settle what?” he echoed Sheila.

  But he kept seeing corridors, still the corridors, folding in on themselves. And sipped the tasteless soft drink. “The guy’s shirt was clean.”

  “Huh?”

  “His shirt was clean.” Flash on the restroom, red water swirling down and down. “He wasn’t in that room. Nolan knew Ross was coming. The guy was living there. His smell’s all over. That’s why the ammonia trick. Nolan sent him for the stairs, I’ll bet it’s in the access times. He couldn’t have hid from a mech. And all that screaming? The mech wanted something. Something Nolan wasn’t giving. Something Ross wanted more than she wanted the guy right then.”

  “Secession stuff. Documents. Martian Secession. Not illegal, not in Dallas…”

  “The mech missed the live-in, had to shut Nolan up. Didn’t get the records, either. A botch. Thorough-going botch. The live-in—who knew the building like that? He wasn’t any Company man. Martian with no visa, no regulation entry to the planet? I’ll bet Nolan knew what he was, I’ll bet Nolan was passing stuff to the Movement.”

  “An exec in MarsCorp? Over Martian Transport? Ask how the guy got here with no visa.”

  “Shit,” he said. Then he thought about the mech, the kind of tech the rebels didn’t have.

  They wouldn’t want a witness,” he said. “The rebels wouldn’t. The Company damned sure wouldn’t. Ross would’ve gone for me, except I was linked in. I was recording. So she couldn’t snatch the guy—had to shut the guy up somehow. They damn sure couldn’t have a Company cop arrested down here. Had to get him shut up for good and get Ross off the planet…”

  “Dead in,” Sheila said. “Dead for sure, if he had talked. Washington was after the Company for the make and the Company was stonewalling like hell, lay you odds to that—and I’ll bet there’s a plane seat for Ross tonight on Guiana flight. What’s it take? An hour down there? Half an hour more, if a shuttle’s ready to roll, and Ross would have been no-return for this jurisdiction. That’s all they needed.” She flipped the com back to On again, to the city’s ordinary litany of petty crime and larcenies, beneath an uneasy sky. “This is 34, coming on-line, marker 15 on the pike, good evening, HQ. This is a transmission check, think we’ve got it fixed now, 10-4?”

  END TRANS

  C.J. CHERRYH has won four Hugo Awards and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field, the author of more than forty novels. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work; she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and Bronze Age Greek ethnography. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. She works constantly, researches mostly on the Internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter, and her website Closed Circle www.closed-circle.net.

  LAST HUMAN

  Jorge Salgado-Reyes

  Originally appeared in the Eat Sleep Write Flash Fiction Contest in May 2014 where it came third.

  I looked back at the tracks my suit left on the desert sand. Already the wind started to erase them. Only the radioactive rain for company. Up ahead, the highest point of Ojos del Salado beckoned. I trudged upward, pulling the sledge as nightfall descended, encasing me in darkness. A darkness pierced only by my suit light. I kept going. Twenty minutes until moon-rise.

  Finally, the summit. I looked back across the moon-lit landscape. Nothing moved. Nothing lived here. My eyes lifted to the moon as it peeped above the horizon. Luna seen through an orange haze.

  It’s been twenty-five years since we did it. We completely fucked it all up. We let those mother-fuckers blow it up. No one knows who started it but the fingers all point at the big three so-called superpowers. The three-day war annihilated what people used to call the West. Now Europe lies under a sheet of ice. You can walk across the Mediterranean. The Sahara is under the sea. England is gone, completely wiped from the face of the Earth. Someone air burst a nuke over the Amazonian basin. The trees are all gone and the ice conquers all. The winds scour the land clean. The radioactive rain brings death to all it touches.

  We here in the Observatory watched it all. My colleagues all left, trying to reach their families. They didn’t make it. I took in the few pitiful survivors from the south; Mapuche, who fled the ice.

  I am the only one left. The two hundred and fifty Mapuche died within a few months of radiation poisoning. Only myself now, living under the Atacama desert. And then the weather worsened. Radio transmissions, once multitudinous, grew silent one by one.

  On a ni
ght like today, I stare at that orange moon and wonder. I wonder if anyone up there survived? We were conquering space. They called it the Final Frontier once. We established Luna City but without resupplies from Earth, there’s no way they could have survived. We had even sent a small team to Mars.

  The author Robert Heinlein once wrote,

  It may take endless wars and unbearable population pressure to force-feed a technology to the point where it can cope with space. In the universe, space travel may be the normal birth pangs of an otherwise dying race. A test. Some races pass, some fail.

  I guess we failed. The tears stung my face as I dug into the earth and made the posts ready for the plaque. I attached it to the posts.

  I leave this plaque here for whatever alien race might one day find it. This plaque commemorates the Human race, once masters of Earth, wiped out by our own folly. Remember us and know that we reached out to the vast expanse of the universe and we dreamed of one day joining you. We dreamed and failed! I, Professor Eduardo Rocha, last of the People.

  END

  JORGE SALGADO-REYES is a Chilean and British sci-fi/cyberpunk author, private investigator, and photographer. Born in Temuco, Chile, Salgado-Reyes left his country of birth at age seven in 1975 with his family driven into exile by the Pinochet dictatorship. Subsequently brought up in the United Kingdom, he changed residence frequently with his family as a child. Salgado-Reyes became somewhat of a loner who read science fiction from an early age. After spending his adolescence in Mozambique, he returned to the UK where he completed his education.

  In 2011, Salgado-Reyes began writing his first novel, The Smoke in Death’s Eye, a work still in progress.

  In 2012, Indie Authors Press published Salgado-Reyes’ first reference book, British Process Servers Guide, written in collaboration with Stuart Withers and Helen Withers.

  Salgado-Reyes can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter, or through his Amazon Author Page. Further information can be found on www.salgado-reyes.com/wiki/jorge-salgado-reyes-2/.

  ANNABELLE’S CHILDREN

  Gregory J. Wolos

  From up here on the ceiling, I see three scalps beneath me. Their owners are having a meeting. The fluorescent lights illuminate one head that’s shaved and gleaming with an indentation in the center that looks like a sunken grave, one with a hairline receding to dark curls, and a third with a comb-over that fails to cover skin the color and texture of butterscotch pudding. This head and the head with curls belong to men I knew when I was alive.

  I’ve been dead for days and days, and this is the first time I’ve recognized anyone, so I don’t know if my presence in this room is by coincidence or design. “Dead” for me has been a completely passive experience. Every morning I wake up attached to something that’s living—something different each day, no repeats, at least not so far. Yesterday I was with a goldendoodle, the day before a Starbucks barista. Today, it’s this spider on the ceiling. I’ve got no will of my own, no physical essence. Where my host goes, I go. And though I share my partner’s space, I’m neither seen nor felt. So far I’ve had no appetites at all. I recognize emotions, but I don’t seem to feel them. I have extraordinary patience—have you ever spent a day connected to a clam?

  This morning the men down at the conference table are talking about me and the eggs harvested from my ovaries before I lost my battle with acute myelogenous leukemia. Carl, the one with the curls, was to have been my husband. The comb-over guy is P.P. Frederico, the filmmaker who gave me my big break after my last stint in rehab, years before my death. The shaved scalp belongs to a stranger. The three are discussing an idea for a reality TV show—Annabelle’s Children, one of them called it.

  “You say you’ve got full legal rights to Annabelle’s eggs?” shaved head asks.

  Carl clears his throat. “Zygotes,” he says, “not eggs. Annabelle and I were told that fertilized eggs would survive the freezing better. I supplied the sperm. The zygotes are legally mine.”

  Carl’s right. My eggs were harvested because aggressive chemotherapy and radiation were going to sterilize me. His sperm fertilized the salvaged eggs in vitro, and the zygotes were frozen so we could have our own biological children when I recovered. Which I didn’t.

  Light reflects off the stranger’s polished head. He must be a network executive. His fingers drum the table. “I don’t know. Isn’t the point of this show that each couple—each husband of the couple—will fertilize one of Annabelle’s eggs himself? The way I understood it is you have the competitive stuff first—the sports and the trivia contests and whatever—singing, if you want—with the usual up-close-and-personals, followed by the audience vote. Then the winning dads fertilize the eggs, which get implanted in their wives.”

  “We plan at least one show on the science of it all,” P.P. says. “Doctors, test tubes, Petri dishes. Footage of sperm penetrating eggs. We stagger the implantations so we get about eight weeks’ worth of births at the end of the season. Twelve couples is the target.”

  “Hunh,” the network guy grunts. “But Annabelle is the attraction. People want to be connected to her! No offense, but what’s the appeal of kids that are half Carl’s?”

  “Didn’t you read the market research we sent?” P.P. asks. “Focus groups couldn’t differentiate between 'egg' and 'zygote.' We just de-emphasize Carl. We lose him in the scientific mumbo-jumbo, as far as the TV audience is concerned. For potential competitor-parents—ninety-five percent of those questioned deemed the father’s biological involvement ‘unimportant.’ This is about Annabelle and nothing else, Larry.”

  “If we include episodes on the impact of environment on child development, it’ll be better scientifically if all the kids had the same biological mother and father,” Carl offers quietly.

  “But,” P.P. says, “what we’re selling is Annabelle and her children.”

  Carl’s head has flushed pink, but he’s silent. Is he angry? It seems this bargaining with my eggs would have disturbed me once. Was it Carl or P.P. who cooked up this reality show idea? They’d collaborated on the cartoon-horror remake of The Island of Doctor Moreau that resurrected the career I’d done my best to trash. The animated Moreau flopped, but the voice I gave to the wretched dog-man M’ling found empathetic ears among the lonely and miserable, and my performance drew raves. With P.P. to vouch for my rejuvenated work ethic, offers poured in. Broadway called, and I won a Tony playing a young mother. Then serious films—more mothers. Even illness couldn’t keep me down—when work became impossible, I became a role model, a leading advocate for cancer research. Those Thrive awareness anklets, the magenta ones you see everywhere? Inspired by my tribulations.

  “Annabelle Hadley is a classic American story of redemption, Larry.” P.P. slaps the table. “Annabelle’s Children will immortalize her!” He pauses. “From porn star to angel,” he sighs.

  “I don’t know about ‘porn star,'” Carl murmurs. I don’t deny it could have happened. Prior to my final visit to rehab, while promoting my Scaredy Cat line of clothing in a Walmart, I’d made lewd gestures with my microphone before propositioning the store manager. Then I’d thrown up and passed out.

  “We wouldn’t go there,” Larry says. But he admits, “She had a hell of a life,” and I know he’s sold on my show.

  “Right,” P.P. says. “We start with a documentary. Two hours, Carl?”

  “Two parts, one hour each.”

  “M-hmm. Two hours on Annabelle’s roller coaster life. We’ll show the couples competing for the zygotes weeping over the highs and lows, the final tragedy. But the winners will have the chance to bear Annabelle’s children!”

  “The couples’ demographics?” Larry asks.

  “Like any other reality show: rich, poor, minorities—hey, Carl, gay men would need their own surrogate wouldn’t they?”

  My former lover shakes his head. “Too complicated. It would be easier to go with a lesbian couple.”

  There’s silence, and P.P. looks up toward the fluorescent lights. His dark
glasses are impenetrable. The other men follow his gaze. Carl’s brown eyes look sad. I think Larry might see my spider, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” P.P. asks. Carl and Larry mumble assent.

  Larry’s indentation reminds me of an infant’s soft spot—something’s pulsing in it. Maybe Carl should have been the one to bring up my beauty. Being dead, I don’t dwell on it, but somewhere between party-girl bloat and dying-woman desiccation there was beauty. And in the beginning, too, when I was an innocent child with Hollywood dreams.

  “Reunion shows,” Larry says dreamily.

  “And guaranteed spin-offs,” P.P. adds. “Maybe decades of programming. Annabelle’s Children will be the biggest entertainment phenomenon we’ve ever seen. Think of the merchandising opportunities. It’s like we’re breeding our own celebrities.”

  “We will be breeding our own celebrities,” Carl says. I look down at the curls I used to run my fingers through. My almost-husband had a diminished sense of smell: He claimed he’d burned out his nostril cilia when he was a boy, huffing hot ammonia gas brewed from a Christmas-gift chemistry set. He had virtually no sense of taste either and had to fake compliments when we ate at celebrity gourmet restaurants.

  A cell-phone chimes and all three men reach for a pocket, while my host spider dashes into a gap in the dropped ceiling. It’s dark. Today is about to end. If death holds form, tomorrow I’ll wake up with a new partner. I’ve got forever to find out what happens to my children.

  I’m attached to a pet ferret. Its nose and eyes are tiny black beads, and it wears a blue collar as thin as a rubber band. We curl around a pink bunny slipper and peek out from beneath a sofa. Running shoes flank our sides like the walls of a fortress. Two adults and two children sit above us. From time to time a popcorn kernel drops, and the ferret darts forward and nips it up, then retreats. Sounds of nibbling accompany the TV voices like static. The television’s flickering light paints every surface.