The New Voices of Science Fiction Read online

  She left Human Affairs and went to the beach, where she bought a mood booster and looked out at the waves rolling in. Up the beach a ways there were several women in burkinis, and children running along the beach. She thought they might be the same Muslim family, the girl Aminah among them, who had helped Jared do a handstand. Lake waved, feeling the freedom in her arm, light as the breeze. She could go to her beta testing job now, and work as long as she liked.

  She bought the memory excision tool, and carved away the worst about David and Jared, leaving just enough of the pain so she wouldn’t miss them. Then she went into her settings and deselected her feeding functions. She might as well speed things up.

  She received a message a few days later that her body had been vacated and cremated. There was no going back now. She was fully instantiated. What a relief, she told herself.

  David and Jared could reach her through the interface, but the outside world operated at a much slower pace. By the time they initiated messaging through the interface, they’d be old as history to her.

  In the meantime, she’d made it. She was in the better world for good.

  ROBO-LIOPLEURODON!

  DARCIE LITTLE BADGER

  Darcie Little Badger is an enrolled member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, and her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons , Mythic Delirium , and The Dark . Her work is also in numerous anthologies, including Lightspeed Magazine’s People Of Color Destroy Fantasy! special issue and Moonshoot: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volume Two. She is also co-writing Strangelands, a comics series in the H1 Humanoids shared universe. When she is not writing fiction or comics, she edits research papers, and she has a PhD in Oceanography. Her debut novel, Elatsoe , will be published in 2020.

  “Robo-Liopleurodon!” is an exciting slice-of-life piece about an underfunded marine researcher’s extraordinary day out on the high seas.

  MY INTERN SCREAMED. That’s rarely a good sign. Near the starboard rail, Abigail clutched a dripping, freshly towed plankton net. The collection vial dangling from the muslin funnel glinted in the sun, as if filled with silver particles.

  “Doctor!” she shouted. “Nanobotplankton!”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “They aren’t garbage?”

  “Look!”

  The collection vial was the size and transparency of a jam jar. Abigail thrust it at me, as if handing off a grenade. I activated the magnification on my protective goggles and peered at the murky seawater. Metal specks sloshed side to side, dizzying; they were shaped like pill boxes and propelled by nanocarbon flagella.

  “Alert the captain,” I said. “It’s bad news.”

  I’d heard horror stories about swarms of bots large enough to track and disable cruise ships; they reported either to governments or pirates or supervillains, and we were in the open ocean, well beyond any continental jurisdiction.

  Pirates or supervillains, then. What did they want from us? The vessel was equipped for research, and our most expensive cargo was a really good microscope. Would they demand hostages? I glanced at Abigail’s back; she was nineteen, brilliant, and had joined my lab with a fellowship for low-income students. She reminded me of myself, twenty years back when, driven by hope, I studied geosciences because the world was hurting, and somebody had to diagnose it so something could done.

  Since then, I’ve made plenty of diagnoses. But so little has been done.

  I wondered how long it would take Abigail to become jaded or—like many of my colleagues—leave the field. It’s hard to make a career in geosciences unless you love the earth. Even harder to study its death in the kind of detail that withstands peer review. How many reefs had I watched die? Islands drowned by the rising sea? Primordial species extinguished in the span of one human lifetime?

  Frustration drove my own advisor to early retirement. I was her last pupil; she left the moment I graduated. “They won’t listen to us, Maria,” she said. “They won’t fund us. And that means we can’t help them.”

  As I watched the water around our ship darken with swarming bots, I wondered: “Who will help us?”

  In the distance, a silver surface split the sea, but the vessel—an odd submarine?—dove before I could get a good look. One of the quick-thinking deckhands activated a distress drone. With an industrious whir, the tri-copter zipped over my head and attempted to escape the signal-blocking radius emitted by those damnable bots.

  The ship’s emergency siren wailed, indicating that I should leave the deck and take shelter in my cabin. But I couldn’t turn away from the sea, which churned like boiling soup beneath the drone. Seconds later, a metal beast breached the water. Its great, crocodile-shaped mouth yawned open and snapped, crushing the drone mid-leap. Its four paddle-shaped flippers flapped, their surfaces sleek and their edges sharp as knives. When the whale-sized machine landed, the impact rocked our ship and sprayed my face with water that tasted of salt and metal.

  “What is that?” a deckhand asked, dismayed.

  “I . . . can’t believe this,” I said, “but it looks like a robo-Liopleurodon.”

  The Liopleurodon head reared from the water, its jaws snapping, flourishing five-inch-long serrated teeth that could easily tear our hull to shreds. I took a step back, at once startled and fascinated. Its engineer had put exquisite care into the design, emulating the strength and form that once made the Liopleurodon the greatest carnivore in the Jurassic sea.

  Far beyond the Liopleurodon, silver bobbed on the undulating sea. I zoomed in with my goggles and glimpsed a hatch protruding from a metal dome.

  “Doctor!” Abigail said, tugging on my sleeve. “The captain wants us off the deck. Come with me! We can’t—”

  “ATTENTION RV,” the Liopleurodon boomed. “SURRENDER ALL MICROSCOPES, CTDs, AND REAGENT-GRADE CHEMICALS, OR WE WILL DISABLE YOUR SHIP.”

  There was something familiar about that voice.

  “Dr. Barbara?” I asked. “Dr. Barbara, is that you?” I threw myself against the railing and waved at the Liopleurodon’s glassy black eye. “Hey! Hey, it’s me! Maria! Can you hear me? Holy schist, this can’t be happening!”

  The Liopleurodon’s mouth opened wider, as if gasping. “MARIA!?”

  “Are you piloting that robot dinosaur?” I asked.

  “ER. WELL. A ROBOT MARINE REPTILE.”

  “And robbing us?”

  “FOR THE GREATER GOOD.”

  “Greater good?”

  “EARTH AND SCIENCE.”

  I’d been wrong. My advisor never gave up. Although I wasn’t sure that joining a team of rogue scientist pirates was much better. And it had to be a team. Dr. Barbara might be a brilliant chemical oceanographer, but she wasn’t a paleontologist or an engineer.

  “YOU MUST THINK I’M TERRIBLE. JUST—ER—NEVER MIND. WE CAN FIND SUPPLIES ELSEWHERE. I HOPE YOUR RESEARCH IS FRUITFUL.”

  The Liopleurodon began to sink. “Wait!” I said.

  It hesitated, half its head submerged. “YES?”

  “Have you really accomplished anything with this . . . this criminal behavior?”

  “OF COURSE. JUST THIS YEAR, WE HAVE ELIMINATED ONE MILLION TONS OF MICROPLASTICS FROM THE NORTH PACIFIC GYRE AND SAVED A WHALE SPECIES FROM EXTINCTION.”

  “You’ll be caught someday, Dr. Barbara,” I said.

  “PERHAPS.” The Liopleurodon winked. “TAKE CARE, MARIA.”

  As our attackers vanished and the ocean cleared, Abigail asked, “Who was that?”

  “Apparently, my graduate advisor.”

  “Is she a supervillain, or something?”

  “Or something,” I said. And I wondered if someday that something would be me.

  Silver glinted against the horizon as the robo-Liopleurodon leapt one last time.

  THE DOING AND UNDOING OF JACOB E. MWANGI

  E. LILY YU

  E. Lily Yu’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld , The Boston Review , Fantasy & Science Fiction , McSweeney’s Quarterly , Apex , Uncanny , Terraform , Tor.com, and many others. She has been
a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, and WSFA Small Press awards, and she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012. She is one of three writers to appear in both volumes.

  “The Doing and Undoing of Jacob E. Mwangi” follows the titular character as he undergoes a fundamental change from his comfortable gamer identity.

  ON SUNDAY AFTER SERVICES, Jacob Esau Mwangi beat a hasty retreat from the crowd that descended upon his beaming parents and Mercy, who on this rare visit home between Lent and Easter terms was displayed between them like a tulip arrangement.

  “What a daughter! Be a famous professor soon.”

  “You have not forgotten about us common people? Cambridge makes all the children forget. They act so embarrassed when they come home—”

  “Funny to think they both come from the same family.”

  “It’s very strange, isn’t it?”

  “Where did he go anyway, that Jacob boy?”

  Jacob, outside the chapel’s blue acrylic domes, caught the first flying matatu without regard for where it went.

  He glowered out the window at the holograms of giraffes and rhinos that stalked the streets, flashing advertisements both local and multinational. A lion yawned and stretched among the potted plants at the center of a traffic circle, the words DRINK MORE JINGA COLA scrolling along its tawny flanks.

  Twenty-five years before, the gleam and gloss of digital advertisements had divided the globetrotting Kenyan Haves from the shilling-counting Have Nots who shopped at tin-sided street stalls with painted signs. Now that that partition was obsolete, humanity had split itself into Doers and Don’ts. Jacob’s mathe and old man were devoted Doers, an architect and an engineer. Every month they asked Jacob if he had created anything lately, and every month, when he gave them a cheerful shrug, they flung up their palms in ritualized despair.

  The matatu halted and hovered while more people crammed on.

  Jacob had no stomach for returning to his apartment, a windowless box in Kawangware that he had picked specifically for its distance from the family manse. He unrolled his penphone and selected Rob’s name.

  hey, game time?

  sorry can’t

  what’s going?

  dame. tell u later

  sawa

  Outside the window the tidy six-story buildings of Kibera Collective flashed wholesome mottos in LEDs. Pick up after yourself. Harambee. Together we can remake the world. Jacob frowned absently, mapping his route in his head. If he swapped matatus here, the next would take him as far as Black Nile Lounge. The Black Nile was his usual base, though he’d venture as far east as the Monsoon Club if Rob was joining. You did that for a brother.

  And Rob was his brother in all the ways that mattered, just as his gaming group was his true family: Robert and nocturnal Ann from Wisconsin and Chao from Tennessee, as well as sixty guildmembers from places as exotic as Anchorage and Korea who formed a far-flung network of cousins and in-laws, as full of gossip and grudges and backbiting and broken promises as the real thing. They were all Don’ts, of course. Doers played too, intermittently, but the Don’ts slaughtered them all, every match, always.

  The no-man’s-land between the Doers and Don’ts was as close as anything came to a war these days. Though the lines were deeply entrenched and wreathed in verbal barbed wire, and battles pitched as often in PvP as over dinner tables, no real bullets were ever fired. There had been little of that since the days of the Howl.

  No one liked to speak of the Howl, of the blood that darkened and dried in the streets, of the mind virus that had reawakened after a century of dormancy to sow chaos and fear.

  For out of the Howl had come the great Compassion, when, like a strange flowering in a sunless cave, the fervent prayers of adherents of every faith and the ferocious meditations of the variously spiritual, bet-hedging, and confused had reached critical mass, triggering a deep immune response in the human psyche. As if struck by lightning, the five billion survivors of the Howl had let the rifles and knives fall out of their hands, then embraced, or dropped to their knees and wept.

  It was like God Himself sat down and talked with me, Jacob’s mathe liked to say, and his old man would nod solemnly, yes, that was how it was.

  By the fiftieth time he heard this exchange, Jacob was ready to pitch a can of Jinga Cola at each of their heads. He had not known the Compassion, having been born shortly afterward, and was thoroughly sick of hearing about it.

  During the three years that the Compassion lasted, dazed legislators in every country redistributed wealth and built up healthcare and social services, while the wealthy deeded entire islands and bank accounts to the UN. Petty crime and begging vanished from Nairobi’s streets. House gates were propped open. Askaris found no work and opened flower stands and safari companies. Kibera shantytown self-organized, pooled surplus funds, and built communal housing with plumbing and internet.

  Gradually, as memories of the Compassion faded, life returned to a semblance of normalcy. Rush-hour drivers again cursed each other’s mothers, and politicians returned to trading favors and taking tea money. But there remained a certain shining quality about life, if looked at the right way—or so Jacob’s elders said.

  The most important outcome of all that ancient history, as far as Jacob was concerned, was the monthly deposit in his account that the Kenyan government styled Dream Seeds, distributed to every resident not already receiving a stipend from another government. This paid for Jacob’s bachelor pad and now, as he touched his pen to a scanner, for the Black Nile entry fee, a handful of miraa, and a bottle of beer.

  The man in the booth assigning cubes handed Jacob a keycard marked 16 and said hopefully, “Maybe a Kenyan game today, sir? My brother’s studio, I can recommend—”

  “Maybe another day, boss.”

  “You cannot blame a man for trying. Japanese fantasy war sims again?”

  “Good guess.”

  “I like to know my customers.” He sighed. “I don’t know how we will compete, you see. Our industry has just been born—theirs is fifty, sixty years old.”

  “You will find a way,” Jacob said, to escape.

  The door to the VR cube hissed open. Jacob lasered the title he wanted on the wall—Ogrefall: Visions of Conquest—then donned the headset and gauntlets, which stank of sweat. In a higher-end establishment the gear would be wiped down with lavender towelettes between uses, and tiny pores in the wall would jet out molecules of the scent libraries shipped with the games, odors of forest and moss, leather and steel, but Black Nile was a business scratched out of hope and savings from jua kali, the owner a Doer to his core, and the game loads were all secondhand.

  Jacob launched the game and became a silver lion with braided mane, ten feet tall and scarred from battle. Ann and Chao were already online, knee-deep in the corpses of ogres and the occasional unfortunate Doer, their whoops of joy ringing in his ears.

  “Hey! No Rob?” Ann asked.

  “Some dame,” Jacob said, placing his paw over his heart. “He’s a goner.”

  “You say that every time,” Chao said. “And you’re always wrong. Rob gets bored faster than anyone else I know. I give her fifteen minutes, max.”

  Ann said, “We’re storming Bluefell right now. Figured you two’d be along. I don’t know what we’ll do without Rob.”

  “Let’s run it,” Chao said. “Rob will catch up to us.”

  They battled their way up a snowy mountain, pines creaking and shaking lumps of snow down on them. Ice demons lunged and jeered and raked their faces. Ann died. Chao died. Jacob died. Their vision went black, and then they found themselves at the foot of the mountain.

  “Again?” Chao said.

  Again they wiped.

  “This is bullshit,” Ann said. “I give up.”

  “Hi, guys,” Rob said. “What are we playing today?”

  “Told you,” Chao said.

  “Where are you?” Jacob said. “And where’s your girl?”

  “Took
you long enough,” Chao said. “Twenty-four minutes. A new record.”

  “She’s here with me. We’re at Monsoon. Trying to skip the tutorial. Hang on.”

  A moment later, there she was. Purple-haired and elf-eared, in novice’s robes.

  “Good,” Ann said. “Five’s more than enough, even with an egg. Here, I’ve got a spare bow.”

  The new girl looked around. “Wow, they pushed their graphics to the limit. But they’re still using the Conifer engine—ooh—and it has that vulnerability they didn’t do a full distro patch for. I wonder what happens if—”

  Jacob blinked. She was suddenly wearing a gallimaufry of gear, harlequin in color and decorated with the taste of a drunken weaverbird. But her character now displayed a respectable power level.

  Ann and Chao stared in horror.

  “What? Is it the colors? I can change those—give me a cycle—”

  “Robert,” Ann said, very slowly. “What does she do?”

  “Oh, I’m a programmer, mostly. I make indie games with two friends from university. Ever heard of Duka Stories? That was us.”

  “Guys—” Rob began.

  “She’s a Doer,” Chao said. “You picked up a Doer.”

  “This is Consolata. We’ve been dating for three months.”

  “It’s nice to meet you! What do you all do?” She turned toward Jacob, sparkling with hope.

  Jacob growled.

  “Fuck this,” Ann said, and logged off.

  Chao said, “Not cool, man. Not cool at all. Hit me up when she’s history—or don’t, I don’t care.”

  And he was gone.

  “Did I do something wrong?” Consolata said.

  “I—” Rob sighed. “I didn’t know they’d be like that.”

  “Really,” Jacob said. “You did not know.”

  “Nah, Jacob—”

  “There is a reason why we do not cross the line. Doers are evangelical. Listen to her. Next thing, you’ll be an entrepreneur, or a community leader, shaking the hand of every aunty in church. You will shake their hands, and you will say, I feel so sorry for that Jacob boy, he never applied himself to anything. Chao, oh, what a waste of intellect. Poor Ann, I’m sure she could have been amazing at anything, if only she tried—”