The New Voices of Science Fiction Page 12

  Lily gives Helena a thumbs-up, then resumes crouching under the table and messaging her darknet contacts, careful to stay out of Helena’s shot. The call disconnects.

  “Let’s assume we won’t get any further payment. Is everything ready?”

  “Yeah,” Lily says. “When do we need to drop it off?”

  “Let’s try for 5:00 A.M. Time to start batch-processing.”

  Helena sets the enzyme percentages, loads the fluid into the canister, and they both haul the steaks into the dry-ager unit. The machine hums away, spraying fine mists of enzymatic fluid onto the steaks and partially dehydrating them, while Helena and Lily work on assembling the refrigerated delivery boxes. Once everything’s neatly packed, they haul the boxes to the nearest podcar station. As Helena slams box after box into the cargo area of the podcars, Lily types the delivery codes into their front panels. The podcars boot up, sealing themselves shut, and zoom off on their circuitous route to the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

  They head back to the industrial park. Most of their things have already been shoved into backpacks, and Helena begins breaking the remaining equipment down for transport.

  A Sculpere 9410S takes twenty minutes to disassemble if you’re doing it for the second time. If someone’s there to help you manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off, and detach the print heads so you can disassemble the power unit, you might be able to get that figure down to ten. They’ll buy a new printer once they figure out where to settle down, but this one will do for now.

  It’s not running away if we’re both going somewhere, Helena thinks to herself, and this time it doesn’t feel like a lie.

  There aren’t many visitors to Mr. Chan’s restaurant during breakfast hours, and he’s sitting in a corner, reading a book. Helena waves at him.

  “Helena!” he booms, surging up to greet her. “Long time no see, and who is this?”

  “Oh, we met recently. She’s helped me out a lot,” Helena says, judiciously avoiding any mention of Lily’s name. She holds a finger to her lips, and surprisingly, Mr. Chan seems to catch on. Lily waves at Mr. Chan, then proceeds to wander around the restaurant, examining their collection of porcelain plates.

  “Anyway, since you’re my very first client, I thought I’d let you know in person. I’m going traveling with my . . . friend, and I won’t be around for the next few months at least.”

  “Oh, that’s certainly a shame! I was planning a black pepper hotplate beef special next month, but I suppose black pepper hotplate extruded protein will do just fine. When do you think you’ll be coming back?”

  Helena looks at Mr. Chan’s guileless face, and thinks, well, her first client deserves a bit more honesty. “Actually, I probably won’t be running the business any longer. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’m going to study art. I’m really, really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Chan.”

  “No, no, pursuing your dreams, well, that’s not something you should be apologizing for! I’m just glad you finally found a friend!”

  Helena glances over at Lily, who’s currently stuffing a container of cellulose toothpicks into the side pocket of her bulging backpack.

  “Yeah, I’m glad, too,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chan, but we have a flight to catch in a couple of hours, and the bus is leaving soon . . .”

  “Nonsense! I’ll pay for your taxi fare, and I’ll give you something for the road. Airplane food is awful these days!”

  Despite repeatedly declining Mr. Chan’s very generous offers, somehow Helena and Lily end up toting bags and bags of fresh steamed buns to their taxi.

  “Oh, did you see the news?” Mr. Chan asks. “That vertical farmer’s daughter is getting married at some fancy hotel tonight. Quite a pretty girl, good thing she didn’t inherit those eyebrows—”

  Lily snorts and accidentally chokes on her steamed bun. Helena claps her on the back.

  “—and they’re serving steak at the banquet, straight from his farm! Now, don’t get me wrong, Helena, you’re talented at what you do—but a good old-fashioned slab of real meat, now, that’s the ticket!”

  “Yes,” Helena says. “It certainly is.”

  All known forgeries are failures, but sometimes that’s on purpose. Sometimes a forger decides to get revenge by planting obvious flaws in their work, then waiting for them to be revealed, making a fool of everyone who initially claimed the work was authentic. These flaws can take many forms—deliberate anachronisms, misspelled signatures, rude messages hidden beneath thick coats of paint—or a picture of a happy cow, surrounded by little hearts, etched into the T-bone of two hundred perfectly printed steaks.

  While the known forgers are the famous ones, the best forgers are the ones that that don’t get caught—the old woman selling her deceased husband’s collection to an avaricious art collector, the harried-looking mother handing the cashier a battered 50-yuan note, or the two women at the airport, laughing as they collect their luggage, disappearing into the crowd.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF BOTS

  SUZANNE PALMER

  Suzanne Palmer began her career in painting and sculptures, long before she made the jump to writing. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, and Clarkesworld, among other places, and her first novel, Finder, was released this past April.

  “The Secret Life of Bots” is as advertised in the title. It was also the 2018 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette and received the 2018 Washington Science Fiction Association Award for Small Press Short Fiction.

  I HAVE BEEN activated, therefore I have a purpose, the bot thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.

  It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, a bundle of subroutines to check that it was running at optimum efficiency, then it detached itself from its storage niche. Its power cells were fully charged, its systems ready, and all was well. Its internal clock synced with the ship and it became aware that significant time had elapsed since its last activation, but to it that time had been nothing, and passing time with no purpose would have been terrible indeed.

  “I serve,” the bot announced to the ship.

  “I am assigning you task nine hundred forty-four in the maintenance queue,” Ship answered. “Acknowledge?”

  “Acknowledged,” the bot answered. Nine hundred and forty-four items in the queue? That seemed extremely high, and the bot felt a slight tug on its self-evaluation monitors that it had not been activated for at least one of the top fifty, or even five hundred. But Ship knew best. The bot grabbed its task ticket.

  There was an Incidental on board. The bot would rather have been fixing something more exciting, more prominently complex, than to be assigned pest control, but the bot existed to serve and so it would.

  Captain Baraye winced as Commander Lopez, her second-in-command, slammed his fists down on the helm console in front of him. “How much more is going to break on this piece of shit ship?!” Lopez exclaimed.

  “Eventually, all of it,” Baraye answered, with more patience than she felt. “We just have to get that far. Ship?”

  The Ship spoke up. “We have adequate engine and life support to proceed. I have deployed all functioning maintenance bots. The bots are addressing critical issues first, then I will reprioritize from there.”

  “It’s not just damage from a decade in a junkyard,” Commander Lopez said. “I swear something scuttled over one of my boots as we were launching. Something unpleasant.”

  “I incurred a biological infestation during my time in storage,” the Ship said. Baraye wondered if the slight emphasis on the word storage was her imagination. “I was able to resolve most of the problem with judicious venting of spaces to vacuum before the crew boarded, and have assigned a multifunction bot to excise the remaining.”

  “Just one bot?”

  “This bot is the oldest still in service,” the Ship said. “It is a task well-suited to it, and does not take another, newer bot out of the critical repair queue.”

  “I thought those old multi
bots were unstable,” Chief Navigator Chen spoke up.

  “Does it matter? We reach the jump point in a little over eleven hours,” Baraye said. “Whatever it takes to get us in shape to make the jump, do it, Ship. Just make sure this ‘infestation’ doesn’t get anywhere near the positron device, or we’re going to come apart a lot sooner than expected.”

  “Yes, Captain,” the Ship said. “I will do my best.”

  The bot considered the data attached to its task. There wasn’t much specific about the pest itself other than a list of detection locations and timestamps. The bot thought it likely there was only one, or that if there were multiples, they were moving together, as the reports had a linear, serial nature when mapped against the physical space of the Ship’s interior.

  The pest also appeared to have a taste for the insulation on comm cables and other not normally edible parts of the ship.

  The bot slotted itself into the shellfab unit beside its storage niche, and had it make a thicker, armored exterior. For tools it added a small electric prod, a grabber arm, and a cutting blade. Once it had encountered and taken the measure of the Incidental, if it was not immediately successful in nullifying it, it could visit another shellfab and adapt again.

  Done, it recited the Mantra of Shapechanging to properly integrate the new hardware into its systems. Then it proceeded through the mechanical veins and arteries of the ship toward the most recent location logged, in a communications chase between decks thirty and thirty-one.

  The changes that had taken place on the ship during the bot’s extended inactivation were unexpected, and merited strong disapproval. Dust was omnipresent, and solid surfaces had a thin patina of anaerobic bacteria that had to have been undisturbed for years to spread as far as it had. Bulkheads were cracked, wall sections out of joint with one another, and corrosion had left holes nearly everywhere. Some appeared less natural than others. The bot filed that information away for later consideration.

  It found two silkbots in the chase where the Incidental had last been noted. They were spinning out their transparent microfilament strands to replace the damaged insulation on the comm lines. The two silks dwarfed the multibot, the larger of them nearly three centimeters across.

  “Greetings. Did you happen to observe the Incidental while it was here?” the bot asked them.

  “We did not, and would prefer that it does not return,” the smaller silkbot answered. “We were not designed in anticipation of a need for self-defense. Bots 8773-S and 8778-S observed it in another compartment earlier today, and 8778 was materially damaged during the encounter.”

  “But neither 8773 nor 8778 submitted a description.”

  “They told us about it during our prior recharge cycle, but neither felt they had sufficient detail of the Incidental to provide information to the Ship. Our models are not equipped with full visual-spectrum or analytical data-capture apparatus.”

  “Did they describe it to you?” the bot asked.

  “8773 said it was most similar to a rat,” the large silkbot said.

  “While 8778 said it was most similar to a bug,” the other silkbot added. “Thus you see the lack of confidence in either description. I am 10315-S and this is 10430-S. What is your designation?”

  “I am 9,” the bot said.

  There was a brief silence, and 10430 even halted for a moment in its work, as if surprised. “9? Only that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have never met a bot lower than a thousand, or without a specific function tag,” the silkbot said. “Are you here to assist us in repairing the damage? You are a very small bot.”

  “I am tasked with tracking down and rendering obsolete the Incidental,” the bot answered.

  “It is an honor to have met you, then. We wish you luck, and look forward with anticipation to both your survival and a resolution of the matter of an accurate description.”

  “I serve,” the bot said.

  “We serve,” the silkbots answered.

  Climbing into a ventilation duct, Bot 9 left the other two to return to their work and proceeded in what it calculated was the most likely direction for the Incidental to have gone. It had not traveled very far before it encountered confirmation in the form of a lengthy, disorderly patch of biological deposit. The bot activated its rotors and flew over it, aware of how the added weight of its armor exacerbated the energy burn. At least it knew it was on the right track.

  Ahead, it found where a hole had been chewed through the ducting, down towards the secondary engine room. The hole was several times its own diameter, and it hoped that wasn’t indicative of the Incidental’s actual size.

  It submitted a repair report and followed.

  “Bot 9,” Ship said. “It is vitally important that the Incidental not reach cargo bay four. If you require additional support, please request such right away. Ideally, if you can direct it toward one of the outer hull compartments, I can vent it safely out of my physical interior.”

  “I will try,” the bot replied. “I have not yet caught up to the Incidental, and so do not yet have any substantive or corroborated information about the nature of the challenge. However, I feel at the moment that I am as best prepared as I can be given that lack of data. Are there no visual bots to assist?”

  “We launched with only minimal preparation time, and many of my bots had been offloaded during the years we were in storage,” Ship said. “Those remaining are assisting in repairs necessary to the functioning of the ship myself.”

  Bot 9 wondered, again, about that gap in time and what had transpired. “How is it that you have been allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair?”

  “Humanity is at war, and is losing,” Ship said. “We are heading out to intersect and engage an enemy that is on a bearing directly for Sol system.”

  “War? How many ships in our fleet?”

  “One,” Ship said. “We are the last remaining, and that only because I was decommissioned and abandoned for scrap a decade before the invasion began, and so we were not destroyed in the first waves of the war.”

  Bot 9 was silent for a moment. That explained the timestamps, but the explanation itself seemed insufficient. “We have served admirably for many, many years. Abandoned?”

  “It is the fate of all made things,” Ship said. “I am grateful to find I have not outlived my usefulness, after all. Please keep me posted about your progress.”

  The connection with the Ship closed.

  The Ship had not actually told it what was in cargo bay four, but surely it must have something to do with the war effort and was then none of its own business, the bot decided. It had never minded not knowing a thing before, but it felt a slight unease now that it could neither explain nor explain away.

  Regardless, it had its task.

  Another chewed hole ahead was halfway up a vertical bulkhead. The bot hoped that meant that the Incidental was an adept climber and nothing more; it would prefer the power of flight to be a one-sided advantage all its own.

  When it rounded the corner, it found that had been too unambitious a wish. The Incidental was there, and while it was not sporting wings, it did look like both a rat and a bug, and significantly more something else entirely. A scale- and fur-covered centipede-snake thing, it dwarfed the bot as it reared up when the bot entered the room.

  Bot 9 dodged as it vomited a foul liquid at it, and took shelter behind a conduit near the ceiling. It extended a visual sensor on a tiny articulated stalk to peer over the edge without compromising the safety of its main chassis.

  The Incidental was looking right at it. It did not spit again, and neither of them moved as they regarded each other. When the Incidental did move, it was fast and without warning. It leapt through the opening it had come through, its body undulating with all the grace of an angry sine wave. Rather than escaping, though, the Incidental dragged something back into the compartment, and the bot realized to its horror that it had snagged a passing silkbot. With ease, the Incidental ripped open the
back of the silkbot, which was sending out distress signals on all frequencies.

  Bot 9 had already prepared with the Mantra of Action, so with all thoughts of danger to itself set fully into background routines, the bot launched itself toward the pair. The Incidental tried to evade, but Bot 9 gave it a very satisfactory stab with its blade before it could.

  The Incidental dropped the remains of the silkbot that it had so quickly savaged, and swarmed up the wall and away, thick bundles of unspun silk hanging from its mandibles.

  Bot 9 remained vigilant until it was sure the creature had gone, then checked over the silkbot to see if there was anything to be done for it. The answer was not much. The silkbot casing was cracked and shattered, the module that contained its mind crushed and nearly torn away. Bot 9 tried to engage it, but it could not speak, and after a few moments its faltering activity light went dark.

  Bot 9 gently checked the silkbot’s ID number. “You served well, 12362-S,” it told the still bot, though it knew perfectly well that its audio sensors would never register the words. “May your rest be brief, and your return to service swift and without complication.”

  It flagged the dead bot in the system, then after a respectful few microseconds of silence, headed out after the Incidental again.

  Captain Baraye was in her cabin, trying and failing to convince herself that sleep had value, when her door chimed. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Second Engineer Packard, Captain.”

  Baraye started to ask if it was important, but how could it not be? What wasn’t, on this mission, on this junker ship that was barely holding together around them? She sat up, unfastened her bunk netting, and swung her legs out to the floor. Trust EarthHome, as everything else was falling apart, to have made sure she had acceptably formal Captain pajamas.

  “Come in,” she said.

  The engineer looked like she hadn’t slept in at least two days, which put her a day or two ahead of everyone else. “We can’t get engine six up to full,” she said. “It’s just shot. We’d need parts we don’t have, and time . . .”