The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 6

  She climbed the steps in front of the airlock, waved her business card at the door frame and stepped out on the concourse. Her first breath and glance surprised her. Coming from the ancient, almost rural backcountry of the Moon, she’d expected the Inner Station to gleam within just as it shone without. What she found herself standing in was no such slick and clean machine. The air smelled of sweat and cookery, and vibrated with a din of steps and speech. Centuries of detritus from millions of passengers had silted into crevices and corners and become ingrained in surfaces, defeating the ceaseless toil of swarms of tiny cleaning machines. Not dirty, but grubby and used. The concourse was about a thousand metres across, and lengthways extended far out of sight in a gentle upward slope in either direction. People and small vehicles moved among stands and shops like herds among trees on a savannah. About a fifth of the static features were, in fact, trees: part of the station’s recycling system. The trees looked short, few of them over ten metres high. The ceiling, cluttered with light strips, sprinklers and air ducts, was only a couple of metres above the tallest of them.

  “Don’t panic,” said her mother’s voice in her earbead. “There’s plenty of air.”

  Constance took a few slow, deep breaths.

  “That’s better,” said her mother.

  “I want to look outside.”

  “Please yourself.”

  Constance made her way among hurrying or lingering people. It was a slow business. No matter which way she turned, somebody seemed to be going in the opposite direction. Many of them were exotics, but she wasn’t attuned to the subtle differences in face or stance to tell Cetians from Centaurans, Barnardites from Eridians. For those from farther out, paradoxically, the differences from the Solar norm were less: the colonies around Lalande, 61 Cygni and the two opposite Rosses—248 and 128—having been more recently established. Costume and covering were no help—fashions in such superficial matters as clothing, skin colour, hair, fur and plumage varied from habitat to habitat, and fluctuated from day to day, right here in the Solar System.

  She found the window. It wasn’t a window. It was a ten metres long, three metres high screen giving the view as seen from the station’s hub. Because it was set in the side wall of the concourse the illusion was good enough for the primitive part of the brain that felt relief to see it. The only person standing in front of it and looking out was a man about her own age, the youngest person she’d seen since she left the Moon. Yellow fur grew from his scalp and tapered halfway down his back. Constance stood a couple of metres away from him and gazed out, feeling her breathing become more even, her reflected face in the glass less anxious. The Sun, dimmed a little by the screen’s hardware, filled a lower corner of the view. The habitat haze spread diagonally across it, thinning toward the upper end. A couple of the inner planets—the Earth-Moon pair, white and green, and bright Venus—were visible as sparks in the glitter, like tiny gems in a scatter of gold dust.

  “Did you know,” the boy said after a while, “that when the ancients looked at the sky, they saw heaven?”

  “Yes,” said Constance, confused. “Well, I’m not sure. Don’t the words mean the same?”

  The boy shook his head, making the fur ripple. “Sort of. What I mean is, they saw the place where they really thought God, or the gods, lived. Venus and Mars and Jupiter and so on really were gods, at first, and people could just see them. And then later, they thought it was a set of solid spheres revolving around them, and that God actually lived there. I mean, they could see heaven.”

  “And then Galileo came along, and spoiled everything?”

  The boy laughed. “Well, not quite. It was a shock, all right, but afterwards people could look up and see—space, I suppose. The universe. Nature. And what do we see now? The suburbs!”

  Constance waved a hand. “Habitats, power plants, factories …”

  “Yes. Ourselves.”

  He sounded disgusted.

  “But don’t you think it’s magnificent?”

  “Oh, sure, magnificent.”

  She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “We could see the stars from the other side.”

  “Scores of them fuzzy with habitats.”

  Constance turned to face him. “That was, ah, an invitation.”

  “Oh!” said the boy. “Yes, let’s.”

  “We have work to do,” said the voice in Constance’s ear.

  Constance fished the card out of her shirt pocket and slid it towards a pocket lined with metal mesh on her trouser thigh.

  “Hey!” protested her mother, as she recognised what was about to happen. “Wait a—”

  The card slid into the Faraday pocket and the voice stopped.

  “Privacy,” said Constance.

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way across,” she said.

  His name was Andy Larkin. He was from a habitat complex in what he called the wet zone, the narrow ring in which water on an Earth-type planet (though not, at the moment, Earth) would be liquid. This all seemed notional but he assured her it made certain engineering problems easier. He’d been in the station for a year.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Bored back home. Lots like me here. We get called hall bats.”

  Because they flitted about the place, he explained. The deft way he led her through the crowds made it credible. His ambition was to take a Long Tube out. He didn’t have much of a plan to realise it. The odd jobs he did sounded to Constance like a crude version of her mother’s business plan. She told him so. He looked at her sidelong.

  “You’re still taking business advice from your mother’s partial?”

  “I’ve only just started,” she said. She didn’t know why she felt embarrassed. She shrugged. “I was raised by partials.”

  “Your mother was a mummy?”

  “And my dad a dummy. Yes. They updated every night. At least, that’s what they told me when I found out.”

  “What fun to be rich,” said Andy. “At least my parents were real. Real time and full time. No wonder you’re insecure.”

  “Why do you think I’m insecure?”

  He stopped, caught her hand, and squeezed it. “What do you feel?”

  Constance felt shaken by what she felt. It was not because he was a boy. It was—

  He let go. “See?” he said. “Do the analysis.”

  Constance blinked, sighed and hurried after him. They reached the far window. As she’d guessed, it showed the opposite view. As he’d predicted, it was still industrial. At least thirty of the visible stars had a green habitat haze around them.

  “I want to see a sky with no people in it,” Andy said.

  This seemed a strange wish. They argued about it for so long that they ended up in business together.

  Constance rented a cell in a run-down sector of the station. It had a bed, water and power supply, a communications hub and little else. Andy dragged in his general assembler, out of which he had been living for some time. It spun clothes and food out of molecules from the air and from any old rubbish that could be scrounged and stuffed in the hopper. Every day Andy Larkin would wander off around the marts and swap meets, just as he’d been doing before. The difference now was that whenever he picked up anything interesting Constance would show it to her mother’s partial. Andy’s finds amounted to about a tenth of the number Constance found in scans of the markets, but they were almost always the most intriguing. Sometimes, of course, all they could obtain were recordings of objects on the business card. In these cases they used the assembler to make samples to test themselves, or demonstrate to the partial. Occasionally the partial would consult with Constance’s actual mother, wherever she was—several hundred million kilometres away, to judge by the light-speed communications lag—and deliver an opinion.

  Out of hundreds of objects they examined in their first fortnight, they selected: a gene-fix for hyperacute balance; an iridescent plumage dye; an immersion drama of the Wolf 359 dynastic implosion; a financial i
nstrument for long-term capital management; a virtual reality game played by continuously updated partials; a molecular-level coded representation of the major art galleries of E Indi IV; a device of obscure purpose, that tickled; a microgravity dance dress; a song from Luyten 789 6; a Vegan cutlery set.

  The business, now trading as Larkin Associates, slammed the goods into the marketing networks as fast as they were chosen. The drama flopped, the song invited parodies (its hook line was a bad pun in hot-zone power-worker slang), the financial instrument crashed the exchanges of twenty habitats before it was Nortoned. The dress went straight to vintage. The dye faded. The other stuff did well enough to put Constance’s business card back in the black for the first time since leaving the Moon. “Did you know,” said Andy, “that the ancients would have had to pay the inventors?”

  “The ancients were mad,” said Constance. “They saw gods.”

  And everything went well for a while.

  Constance came out of the game fifty-seven lives up and with a delusion of competence in eleven-dimensional matrix algebra. To find that it was night in the sector. That she had frittered away ten hours. That she needed coffee. Andy was asleep. The assembler would be noisy. Constance slipped up her wraparounds and strolled out of the cell and walked five hundred metres to a false morning and a stand where she could score a mug of freshly ground Mare Imbrian, black. She was still inhaling steam and waiting for the coffee to cool when she noticed a fraught woman heading her way, pacing the longways deck and glancing from side to side. It was her mother, Julia Mukgatle. The real and original woman, of that Constance was sure, though she’d never seen her in the flesh before.

  Startled, she stared at the woman. Julia pinged her with her next glance, stopped and hurried over. At a dozen steps’ distance she stood still and put a finger to her lips. Then she took a business card from inside her robe and, with exaggerated care, slid it into a Faraday pocket on the knee. She pointed at Constance and repeated the procedure as gesture. Constance complied, and Julia walked up. Not sure what to do, Constance shook hands. Her mother hauled her forward and put an arm around her shoulder. They both stepped back and looked at each other with awkwardness and doubt.

  “How did you get here?” Constance asked. “You were light-hours away just yesterday.”

  “I wasn’t,” said Julia. “I was right here on the station. I’ve been here for a week, and tracking you down for weeks before that.”

  “But I’ve been talking to you all this time!”

  “You have?” said Julia. “Then things are worse than I’d feared.” She nodded toward Constance’s knee. “You have a partial of me in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you thought you were in contact with me”—she thumbed her chest—“in Jupiter orbit, you were in contact with another instance of the partial—or just the partial itself—faking a light-speed delay.”

  Constance almost spilled her coffee. “So the partial’s been a rogue all along?”

  “Yes. It’s one I set up for a business proposal, all right, but for a different proposal and sent to someone else.”

  “Why didn’t you contact me through another channel?”

  “When there’s a fake you rattling around the place, it’s hard to find a channel you can trust. Best come directly.” She sat on the stool opposite, leaned back and sighed. “Get me a coffee … on my card. Then tell me everything.”

  Constance did, or as much as seemed relevant.

  “It’s the game,” Julia interrupted, as soon as Constance mentioned it. “It’s the one thing you’ve released that can spread really fast, that’s deeply addictive and that spins off copies of partials. I’ll bet it’s been tweaked not to delete all the copies.”

  “Why?”

  Julia frowned. “Don’t you see? My rogue partial wants to survive and flourish. It needs a conducive environment and lots of help. It’s setting things up for a fast burn. Where did the game come from?”

  “A passenger in from Procyon A.”

  Julia banged her fist on the table. “There have been some very odd features in the communications from Procyon recently. Some experts I’ve spoken to suspect the system might be going into a fast burn.”

  “And the partial knew about this?”

  “Oh yes. It included that memory.” Julia grimaced. “Maybe that’s what gave it the idea.”

  “How could it do something like that? It’s you.”

  “It’s part of me. By now, a copy of a copy of a copy of part of me. Part of me that maybe thought, you know, that a million subjective years in a virtual environment of infinite possibility might not be such a bad idea.”

  “What can we do?” Constance felt sick with dismay.

  “Put out a general warning, a recall on the game …” Julia whipped out her business card and started tapping into it. “We may be in time. Things won’t be so bad as long as the rogue partials don’t get into a general assembler.”

  Constance sat for a few seconds in cold shock. Her mother was staring at the virtual screen of her card, her hands flexing on an invisible keyboard, chording out urgent messages.

  “Mom,” said Constance. She met Julia’s impatient glance. “I have, ah, something to tell you.”

  The older woman and the young woman ran through the bustle of a waking sector into the quiet of a local night. The older woman ran faster. Constance had to call her back as she overshot the door of the business cell. Julia skidded to a stop and doubled back. Constance was already through the door. The assembler’s blue glow lit the room. The chugging sound of its operation filled the air. Andy was backed into a corner, on the end of the bed. The bed was tilted on a slope. The other end of the bed was missing, as if it had been bitten off by steel teeth. The assembler had built itself an arm, with which it was chucking into its hopper everything within reach. The floor was already ankle-deep in small scuttling metal and plastic objects. The comms hub had been partly dismantled and was surrounded by a swarm of the scuttlers. Some of them had climbed the walls and burrowed into the wiring and cables. A stream of them flowed past Constance’s feet as she hesitated in the doorway.

  Behind her Julia shouted for a Norton. Answering yells echoed from the walls of the deck.

  Constance couldn’t take her eyes off Andy. He was too far away to jump to the door. She was about to leap into the middle of the room and take her chances when he bent down and threw the remains of the bedding on to the floor. He jumped on to it and from that to right in front of her, colliding. As she staggered back and Andy lurched forward. Constance grabbed him in her arms and kicked the door shut behind them. Within seconds smaller things, like bright metal ants, were streaming out from under the door. Constance stamped on them. They curled into tiny balls under her feet and scattered like beads of mercury. The larger machines that had already escaped repeated the trick, rolling off in all directions, vanishing into crevices and corners.

  An alarm brayed. Somebody ran up with a heavy-duty Norton and began discharging it at the machines. Julia grabbed the shooter’s shoulder and pointed her at the door of the business cell. Constance’s wraparounds, which had fallen back to the bridge of her nose, went black as a stray electromagnetic pulse from the Norton’s blast caught them. She tore them off and threw them away. Tiny machines pounced on the discarded gadget. They dismantled it in seconds and scurried away with its parts.

  Then there was just a crowd standing around looking at a door. The woman with the Norton kicked the door open, then stepped back. She had nothing more to do. Constance saw the assembler stopped in midmotion, hand halfway to its mouth. Stilled steel cockroaches littered the floor.

  “Are you all right?” she asked Andy.

  It was a stupid question. She held him to her as he shook.

  “I’m all right,” he said, pushing her away after a minute. He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “What happened?”

  Julia Mukgatle stepped forward. “Just a little intelligence excursion—the f
irst sparks of a fast burn.”

  Andy didn’t need an introduction—he’d seen her face often enough. “But that’s a disaster!”

  Julia shrugged. “Depends on your point of view,” she said.

  Andy gestured at the room. “It looks like one from my point of view!”

  “They wouldn’t have harmed you,” said Julia. “Flesh is one thing they don’t need.”

  Andy shuddered. “Didn’t feel like that when they were eating the bed.”

  “I know, I know,” said Julia. She put an arm around Andy’s shoulder. “Come and have some coffee.”

  The woman with the Norton nearly dropped it. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

  Julia looked around the anxious faces in the small crowd. She spoke as if she knew that everyone’s wraparound images were going straight to a news feed. “I’ve already sent out warnings. Whether anyone heeds them is not up to me. And whether we go into a fast burn isn’t up to me either. It’s up to all of you.”

  What it was really like to live through the early days of a fast burn was one of the many pieces of information that got lost in a fast burn. That didn’t stop people making up stories about it, and when she was younger Constance had watched lots. The typical drama began with something like she’d seen in the business cell: mechanical things running wild and devouring all in their path. It would go on from there to people lurching around like dummies run by flawed partials, meat puppets controlled by rogue artificial intelligence programmes that had hacked into their brains and taken them over. The inevitable still-human survivors would be hunted down like rats. The hero and the heroine, or the hero and hero, or heroine and heroine, usually escaped at the last second by shuttle, Long Tube, freezer pod, or (in stories with a big virtual reality element) by radio beam as downloaded partials (who, in the final twist, had to argue their way past the firewalls of the destination system and prove they weren’t carrying the software seeds of another fast burn; which, of course … and so it went on).