Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 13

YOU HAVE MADE A SOLAR FLARE!.

"And you thought I didn't have a plan."

Claire started to laugh. Slamming into a couch cut it off. She would have broken a shoulder, but the couch was water-logged and soft.

Now the worm was an a.s.set. It repulsed matter, so the upjetting plume blew around it, around Silver Metal Lugger. Free of the flux tubes' grip, the wormhole itself accelerated away from the Sun. All very helpful, Claire reflected, but she couldn't enjoy'the spectacle-the rattling, surging deck was trying to bounce her off the furniture.

What saved them in the end was their magnetic grapple. It deflected most of the solar flare protons around the s.h.i.+p. Pushed out at a speed of five hundred kilometers per second, they still barely survived baking. But they had the worm.

Still, the scientific officer was not pleased. He came aboard to make this quite clear. His face alone would have been enough.

"You're surely not going to demand money for that?" He scowled and nodded toward where Silver Metal Lugger's fields still hung onto the wormhole. Claire had to run a sea-blue plasma discharge behind it so she could see it at all. They were orbiting Mercury, negotiating.

Earthside, panels of experts were arguing with each other; she had heard plenty of it on tightbeam. A negative-ma.s.s wormhole would not fall, so it couldn't knife through the Earth's mantle and devour the core.

But a thin s.h.i.+p could fly straight into it, overcoming its gravitational repulsion-and come out where?n.o.body knew. The worm wasn't spewing ma.s.s, so its other end wasn't buried in the middle of a star, or any place obviously dangerous. One of the half-dozen new theories squirting out on tightbeam held that maybe this was a multiply-connected wormhole, with many ends, of both positive and negative ma.s.s. In that case, plunging down it could take you to different destinations. A subway system for a galaxy; or a universe.

So: no threat, and plenty of possibilities. Interesting market prospects.

She shrugged. "Have your advocate talk to my advocate."

"It's a unique, natural resource-"

"And it's mine." She grinned. He was lean and muscular and the best man she had seen in weeks. Also the only man she had seen in weeks.

"I can have a team board you, y'know." He towered over her, using the usual ominous male thing.

"I don't think you're that fast."

"What's speed got to do with it?"

"I can always turn off my grapplers." She reached for a ;switch. "If it's not mine, then I can just Jet everybody have it."

"Why would you-no, don't!"

It wasn't the right switch, but he didn't know that. "If I release it, the worm takes off-antigravity, sort of"

He blinked. "We could catch it."

"You couldn't even find it. It's dead black." She tapped the switch, letting a malicious smile play on her lips.

"Please don't."

"I need to hear a number. An offer."

His lips compressed until they paled. "The wormhole price, minus your fine?"

Her turn to blink. "What fine? I was on an approved flyby-"

"That solar flare wouldn't have blown for a month. You did a real job on it-the whole magnetic arcade went up at once. People all the way out to the asteroids had to scramble for shelter."

He looked at her steadily and she could not decide whether he was telling the truth. "So their costs-"

"Could run pretty high. Plus advocate fees."

"Exactly." He smiled, ever so slightly.

Erma was trying to tell her something but Claire turned the tiny voice far down, until it buzzed like an irritated insect.

She had endured weeks of a female personality sim in a nasty mood. Quite enough. She needed an antidote. This fellow had the wrong kind of politics, but to let that dictate everything was as dumb as politics itself. Her s.h.i.+p's name was a joke, actually, about long, lonely voyages as an ore hauler. She'dhad enough of that, too. And he was tall and muscular.

She smiled. "Touche. OK, it's a done deal."

He beamed. "I'll get my team to work-"

"Still, I'd say you need to work on your negotiating skills. Too bra.s.sy."

He frowned, but then gave her a grudging grin.

Subtlety had never been her strong suit. "Shall we discuss them-over dinner?"

William Browning Spencer

William Browning Spencer is a recent emigrant into the SF community after years spent successfully scaling the walls of literary fiction. One of his two earlier novels, Resume With Monsters, alludes to Lovecraftian monsters. A collection in 1994, The Return of Count Electric, contained a fantasy story, "A Child's Christmas in Florida," that drew some genre attention. His first novel published as fantasy, Zod Wallop, was released in 1995 by St. Martin's Press. "Downloading Midnight" is, to the best of my knowledge, one of his first SF stories and bodes well for his future in the field. It is cyberpunk in the tradition of George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails as much as of William Gibson's Neuromancer.

It appeared in Tomorrow, the SF magazine published and edited by Algis Budrys.

Downloading Midnight

by William Browning Spencer

There was a big surge down at C-View, and a hologram from the American Midnight show went amok.

We got the contract for the cleanup, and Bloom was desperate to do it.

"Wow, American Midnight! I'm your man for this one, Marty." Bloom was moving around the room in a highly charged state. He stopped and leaned across the desk. "I mean, maybe I can do a repair. I mean, this is American Midnight. This is Captain Armageddon. This is-Marty! What's gonna happen to Zera? Are they gonna close the whole thing down? What about Zera Terminal? Look, you just gotta let me go. I'm an authority on American Midnight."

Bloom was a tall, skinny kid with a sheaf of straight blond hair and round, incredulous blue eyes. He was no respecter of personal s.p.a.ce, and his style of argument consisted of leaning into me, filling my field of vision with his manic gaze.

I leaned back, away from his rhetoric.

"Watching the flat reruns of American Midnight until you wear a loop in your brain doesn't necessarily make you an authority," I said.American Midnight was C-View's big success, a s.e.x holoshow that had been on the Highway for eight months. These days, a month is considered a good run, and most shows don't make it past a week. The show's hero, Captain Armageddon, had fragmented and was causing disturbances up and down the Highway. Someone had to go in and systematically delete the ghosts.

"I don't want a zealot on this one," I said. "We are way past repair here. Armageddon is out of control, and I need someone to do a no-nonsense wipe."

"I can do that," Bloom said, trying for some sort of solid expression (he looked like a guy trying to hold back a sneeze). "I've done plenty of wipes."

"Not like this," I said.

This one was different. It was a big surge. The sicker the bigger we say in the business, and there was plenty of psychic rot here.

American Midnight was fantasy s.e.x and, of course, generated entirely by artificial intelligence. The peeps at Morals are ever-vigilant. One incident of a human-acted holo and Jell Baker and everyone else at C-View would have been lodged in a federal behavior mod without recall or a mitigating hearing.

A guy named Seek Trumble was the human-map for Captain Armageddon, and his job, like that of any actor in a s.e.x holoshow, was to routinely plug into the artificial for personality updates, emotional fine-tuning, that sort of thing. But it was the holo that did the acting. Anything else would have been obscene, although you can still find anonymous bulletin rants arguing that explicit s.e.x between fantasy mock-ups is no different than explicit s.e.x narrated visually by real humans. Those rants are probably generated by kids who have no memory of the Decadence. You have to log some experience before you can think reasonably about obscenity.

So Seek Trumble had done a routine update, gone home and committed suicide, burning a hole through his forehead with a utility laser. His holo had gone amok and litigation was pouring into C-View.

"Marty, I can do the job," Bloom said. "Come on."

I had reservations. Human/artificial feedback loops are not an exact science. One holo of recent memory, a pretty fas.h.i.+on gridlet named Spanskie Lark, went online, stuck a finger in her mouth, and bit it off.

Before they could get her off-line, she had eaten all the fingers of one hand. Turned out her source was anorexic. That was recognizable cause-and-effect, but often the human kink was deeper, harder to search.

Bloom wore me down. I let him go. He went on-line for the cleanup, and three weeks later he still wasn't back.

C-View was one of the biggest studios out on the Broad Highway. Control there was a guy named Jell Baker.

"You think you are getting paid by the hour?" Baker screamed. "Look, I got about ten thousand trauma actions filed against me, and I want this rift closed."

I didn't like Baker, so it's just as well he signed off before I could express myself. The guy had come up through the glitter shows, and he didn't just have a file at Morals, he had a whole subdirectory.

My immediate concern wasn't Baker. It was Bloom. The job should have taken four days, a week max.

Where was he?I shouldn't have let him go. He was just a kid, still trapped in adolescence despite being a year out of the teens. He was a late-bloomer, one of those pale, V-wise, obsessive kids that don't really have a niche in the system. The sort of kid who grows up watching the Highway, an arcane data-freak with a head full of old holoshows and stars. I hired him because he was so crazy in love with the Highway. He'd been with me three years now.

I liked having the energy around. I'm forty. I'm not in love with any of it. Big R/Little R, I cast a cold eye on it all.

I went down to the waystation at ComWick where Bloom floated in Deprive, threads flowing out of him, undulating like a giant jellyfish in a sea of brown ink. His long white face seemed to pulse under the monitor light.

"He's fine," the tech a.s.sured me. "We'd pull him out if there were any neuro anomalies."

Techs always tell you everything is under control. That's what this one said.

"Save it for a gawker's tour," I told her. "I've been doing maintenance for fourteen years now. I know how it goes. You're fine, and then you're dead."

"This is poor personal interaction," the tech said. "You are questioning my professional skills and consequently devaluing my self-image."

I shrugged. Facts are facts: in over eighty percent of the cases where neural trauma shows on a monitor, the floater is already too blasted to make it back alive.

I thanked the tech and apologized if I had offended her or caused an esteem devaluation. She accepted my apology, but with a coolness that told me I'd have another civility demerit in my file.

I went back to my place. I called Personal Interface to see if my request for dinner with Gloria still held. I had to navigate the usual labyrinth of protocols, but the dinner was confirmed. I'd been seeing Gloria for three years, and we had graduated to low-grade, monitored encounters, step-two intimacy. Next year we would have unrestrained access to public meetings. Gloria was excited about it, but I had reservations. Sometimes it seemed the courts.h.i.+p was going too fast. I'm old-fas.h.i.+oned, and I remember the time when the first year of a relate was strictly a matter of logging contracts and waivers-you never even saw your sig after the dizzy moment of mutual selection on the grid.

I notified Gloria that dinner was on, and then I lay down and turned on the rain. I did some of my best thinking in the rain.

Some people don't like rain forest decor, don't like the way the rain seems to go right through you, like silver needles. I like the feeling of peace, of nothingness. As a kid, I always thought it would be cool to be a ghost.

I listened to the sound the rain made as it hissed through the trees. Every now and then some far-off bird would cry out.

Maybe it was a little too restful. I fell asleep and was almost late for dinner.

Gloria was in a bad mood. She felt neglected. I hadn't left a single message all week. I told her I'd been off-line a lot with the business, but that wasn't good enough. She said I was afraid of intimacy. She brought up my last relate profile, which rated me down in communication and emotional input.

I tried to change the subject.She identified that behavior, reminded me that evasiveness had shown a seventeen-point increase in my last profile.

It was a bad evening, and we terminated it without invoking the optional after-meal conversation.

In the morning, Bloom still hadn't shown. The auto-trace didn't have an absolute for me, but it intuited a coordinate. I went in after setting the auto-recorder. The Highway can be confusing. It doesn't hurt to have a playback, something to log what you think you've seen.

The maintenance mock-up for the Highway is an underground system of dank tunnels, bleak Sympathy bars, hustlers, fugitives, outlaws.

"This stink is only virtual," I told myself as I strode quickly down a wet street, virus-mice scuttling out of my way, a data trash of newspapers and old computer jokes blowing out of the alley.

I looked for Bloom in the bars and slacker dives and loop hovels.

An old counter said he'd seen Bloom. "He your friend?" the counter asked.

"We're partners," I said.

"Better forget him," the geez said. "Better get on up to the Big R and leave him behind."

"Why's that?"

"He's othersided. I recognize the look."

The under-Highway was less stable than usual. I kept hitting blue pockets in the road. I watched an old apartment building fight for integration, fail, and fly away in a great ripple of black crows.

I'd never seen a surge like this.

I didn't find Bloom that day. I decided to go flat in a cheap wire pocket. I've logged a lot of time under the Highway, and my mental health doesn't require luxury.

In the morning, I went down to a storefront on Gates Street and talked to an old leak named Sammy Hood. Sammy logged a lot of time under the Highway. I had never met him off-line, but down here he was a small, dirty guy in a carelessly integrated suit that was always wavering.

Sammy leaked to all the major news beats, from tabloid to top credit, and fenced info to whoever was hungry. He had a reputation for delivering flesh goods.

He watched while I transferred credits. He smiled.

"Martin," he said, "I figured you would be along. Heard young Bloomy boy was running down the Armageddon crazies, so I figured you'd show. This one is no job for a wire-whelp."