The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (74 page)

"Not a trouble," he says and waves a hand dismissively. "And look, as I said, don't you fret over the cargo. Terra's no different than aluminum and pharmaceuticals."

"It's
not
my first goddamn terra run. How many times I have to –"

But she's thinking,
Then why the extra seven-percent hazard commission, if terras are the same as all the rest?
Nix would never ask such a question aloud, anymore than she can avoid asking it of herself.

"Your Oma, she'll –"

"Fella, I'll see you later," she says, and walks quickly towards the cafeteria door before he can get another word or ten out. Sometimes, she'd lay good money that the solitudes are beginning to gnaw at the man's sanity. That sort of shit happens all too often. The glare in the corridor leading back to the housing module isn't quite as bright as the lights in the cafeteria, so at least she has that much to be grateful for.

6.

M
uddy, sweatsoaked, insect-bitten and insect-stung, eyes and lungs and nostrils smarting from the hundreds of millions of gametophytes she breathed during her arduous passage through each infested isotainer, arms and legs weak, stomach rolling, breathless, Nix Severn has finally arrived at the bottom of the deep shaft leading down to Oma's dormant CPU. The bzou has kept up with her the entire, torturous way. Though she didn't realize that it
was
a bzou until halfway through the second 'tainer. Sentient viruses are so rare that the odds of Oma's crash having triggered the creation of (or been triggered
by
) a bzou has a probability risk approaching zero, at most a negligent threat to any transport. But here it is, and the hallucination isn't an hallucination.

An hour ago, she finally had the presence of mind to scan the thing, and it bears the distinctive signatures, the unmistakable byte sequence of a cavity-stealth strategy.

"A good quarter of an hour's walk further in the forest, under yon three large oaks. There stands her house. Further beneath are the nut trees, which you will see there," it said when the scan was done. "Red Hood! Just look! There are such pretty flowers here! Why don't you look round at them all? Methinks you don't even hear how delightfully the birds are singing! You are as dull as if you were going to school, and yet it is so cheerful in the forest!"

Oma knows Nix's psych profile, which means the bzou knows Nix's psyche.

Nix pushes back the jumpsuit's quilted hood and visor again – she'd had to lower it to help protect against a minor helium leak near the shaft's rim – and tries to concentrate and figure out precisely what's gone wrong. Oma is quiet, dark, dead. The holo is off, so she'll have to rely on her knowledge of the manual interface, the toggles and pressure pads, horizontal and vertical sliders, spinners, dials, knife switches… all without access to Oma's guidance. She's been trained for this, yes, but AI diagnostics and repair has never been her strong suit.

The bzou is crouched near her, Shiloh's stolen eyes tracking her every move.

"Who's there?" it asks.

"I'm done with you," Nix mutters, and begins tripping the instruments that ought to initiate a hard reboot. "Fifteen more minutes, you'll be wiped. For all I know, this was sabotage."

"Who's there, skycap?" the bzou says again.

Nix pulls down on one of the knife switches, and nothing happens.

"Push on the door," advises the bzou. "It's blocked by a pail of water."

Nix pulls the next switch, a multi-boot resort – she's being stupid, so tired and rattled that she's skipping stages – which should rouse the unresponsive Oma when almost all else fails. The core doesn't reply. Here are her worst fears beginning to play themselves out. Maybe it was a full-on panic, a crash that will require triple-caste post-mortem debugging to reverse, which means dry dock, which would mean she is utterly fucking fucked. No way in hell she can hand pilot the
Blackbird
back onto the rails, and this far off course an eject would only mean slow suffocation or hypothermia or starvation.

Nix takes a tiny turnscrew from the kit strapped to her rebreather (which she hasn't needed to use, and it's been nothing but dead weight she hasn't dared abandon, just in case). She takes a deep breath, winds the driver to a 2.4 mm. mortorq bit, and keeps her eyes on the panel.

"Alright," she says. "Let's assume you have a retract sequence, that you're a benign propagation."

"Only press the latch," it says. "I am so weak, I can't get out of bed."

"Fine. Grandmother, I've come such a very long way to visit you." Nix imagines herself reading aloud to Maia, imagines Maia's rapt attention and Shiloh in the doorway.

"Shut the door well, my little lamb. Put your basket on the table, and then take off your frock and come and lie down by me. You shall rest a little."

Shut the door. Shut the door and rest a little…

Partial head crash, foreign-reaction safe mode. Voluntary coma.

Nix nods and opens one of the memory trays, then pulls a yellow bus card, replacing it with a spare from the consoles supply rack. Somewhere deep inside Oma's brain, there's the very faintest of hums.

"It's a code," Nix says to herself.

And if I can get the order of questions right, if I can keep the bzou from getting suspicious and rogueing up.

A drop of sweat drips from her brow, stinging her right eye, but she ignores it. "Now, Grandmother, now please listen."

"I'm all ears, child."

"And what big ears you have."

"All the better to hear you with."

"Right… of course," and Nix opens a second tray, slicing into Oma's comms, yanking two fried transmit-receive bus cards.
She hasn't been able to talk to Phobos. She's been deaf all this fucking time.
The CPU hums more loudly, and a hexagonal arrangement of startup OLEDs flash to life.

One down.

"Grandmother, what big eyes you have."

"All the better to see you with,
Rotkäppchen."

Right. Fuck you, wolf. Fuck you and your goddamn road of stones and needles.

Nix runs reset on all of Oma's optic servos and outboards. She's rewarded with the dull thud and subsequent discordant chime of a reboot.

"What big teeth I have," Nix says, and now she
does
turn towards the bzou, and as Oma wakes up, the virus begins to sketch out, fading in incremental bursts of distorts and static. "All the better to
eat
you with."

"Have I found you now, old rascal?" the virus manages between bursts of white noise. "Long have I been looking for you."

The bzou had been meant as a distress call from Oma, sent out in the last nanoseconds before the crash. "I'm sorry, Oma," Nix says, turning back to the computer. "The forest, the terra… I should have figured it out sooner." She leans forward and kisses the console. And when she looks back at the spot where the bzou had been crouched, there's no sign of it whatsoever, but there's Maia, holding her antique storybook…

MYSTIC FALLS

Robert Reed

Robert Reed (
www.robertreedwriter.com
) has a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Nebraska Wesleyan University, and has worked as a lab technician. He became a full-time writer in 1987, the same year he won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, and has published twelve novels, including
The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle
, and far future SF
Marrow
and
The Well of Stars
. A prolific writer, Reed has published over 200 short stories, mostly in
F&SF
and
Asimov's
, which have been nominated for the Hugo, James Tiptree, Jr., Locus, Nebula, Seiun, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and World Fantasy awards, and have been collected in
The Dragons of Springplace
,
The Cuckoo's Boys, Eater-of-Bone
, and
The Greatship
. His novella "A Billion Eves" won the Hugo Award. His latest book is major SF novel
The Memory of Sky
. Nebraska's only SF writer, Reed lives in Lincoln with his wife and daughter, and is an ardent long-distance runner.

T
here might be better known faces. And maybe you can find a voice that rides closer to everyone's collective soul.

Or maybe there aren't, and maybe you can't.

The world knows that one face, and it knows one of a thousand delightful names, and recognizing the woman always means that you can hear the voice. That rich musical purr brings to mind black hair flowing across strong shoulders, unless the hair is in a ponytail, or pigtails, or it's woven into one of those elaborate tangles popular among fashionable people everywhere. Beauty resides in the face, though nothing about the features is typical or expected. The Chinese is plain, but there's a strong measure of something else. Her father is from Denver, or Buenos Aires. Or is it Perth? Unless it's her mother who brought the European element into the package. People can disagree about quite a lot, including the woman's pedigree. Yet what makes her memorable – and appealing to both genders and every age – isn't her appearance half as much as the fetching, infectious love of life.

Most of us wish we knew the woman better, but we have to make do with recollections given to us by others, and in those very little moments when our paths happen to cross.

These incidents are always memorable, but not when they happen. In every case, you don't notice brushing elbows with the woman. Uploading your day is when you find her. Everybody knows that familiar hope: Perhaps today, just once, she was close to you. The dense, nearly perfect memory of the augmented mind runs its fine-grain netting through the seconds. That's when you discover that you glanced out the window this morning, and she was across the street, smiling as she spoke to one companion or twenty admirers. Or she was riding inside that taxi that hummed past as you argued with your phone or your spouse or the dog. Even without her face, she finds ways to be close. Her voice often rides the public wi-fi, promoting food markets and thrift markets and the smart use of the smart power grid. The common understanding is that she is a struggling actress, temporarily local but soon to strike real fame. Her talents are obvious. That voice could hawk any product. She has the perfect manner, a charming smooth unflappable demeanor. Seriously, you wouldn't take offense if she told you to buy death insurance or join an apocalyptic cult.

Yet she never sells products or causes that would offend sane minds.

It is doubtful that anyone has infused so much joy in others. And even more remarkable, most of humanity has spoken to the creature, face to face.

Was it three weeks ago, or four? Checking your uploads would be easy work, but that chore never occurs to the average person.

That is another sign of her remarkable nature.

But if you make the proper searches, she will be waiting. Six weeks and four days ago from now, the two of you were sharing the same line at the Tulsa Green-Market, or an elevator ride in Singapore, or you found yourself walking beside the woman, two pedestrians navigating a sunbaked street in Alexandria.

Every detail varies, save for this one:

She was first to say, "Hello."

Just that one word made you glad.

She happened to know your face, your name, and the explanation was utterly reasonable. Mutual friends tie you together. Or there's a cousin or workmate or a shared veterinarian. Forty or fifty seconds of very polite conversation passed before the encounter was finished, but leaving a taproot within the trusted portions of your life. Skillful use of living people achieves quite a lot. And because you were distracted when you met, and because the encounter was so brief, you didn't dwell on the incident until later.

The incongruities never matter. She wears layers and layers of plausibility. You aren't troubled to find her only inside uploaded memories. Finding her on a social page or spotting long black hair in the distance, you instantly retrieve that fifty seconds, and you relive them, and it's only slightly embarrassing that her smile is everywhere but inside your old-fashioned, water-and-neuron memories.

The creature carries respectable names.

And nobody knows her.

Her slippery biography puts her somewhere between a youngish thirty and a world-worn twenty-three. But the reality is that the apparition isn't much more than seven weeks old.

Most people would never imagine that she is fictional. But there are experts who live for this kind of puzzle, and a lot more is at stake here than simple curiosity.

The mystery woman was four weeks old before she was finally noticed. Since then, talented humans and ingenious software packages have done a heroic job of studying her tricks and ramifications, and when they aren't studying her, the same experts sit inside secure rooms and cyberholes, happily telling one another that they saw this nightmare coming.

This cypher.

This monster.

The most elaborate computer virus ever.

The Web is fully infected. A parasitic body has woven itself inside the days and foibles of forty billion unprotected lives.

Plainly, something needs to be done.

Everyone who understands the situation agrees with the urgency. In fact, everyone offers the same blunt solution:

"Kill the girl."

Though more emotional words are often used in place of "girl".

But even as preparations are made, careful souls begin to nourish doubts. Murder is an obvious, instinctive response. The wholesale slaughter of data has been done before, many times. Yet nobody is certain who invented this mystery, and what's more, nobody has a good guess what its use might be. That's why the doubters whisper, "But what if this is the wrong move?"