Gardner Dozois - The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 18

Eva quizzed Roz every few days about the practicum. Because they spoke only about the practical issues of running the Society these conversations were a relief to Roz. She thought they were relief for Eva as well. Roz could ask any question, as long as it was about engineering. Eva would lean next to Roz over the tablet and click through diagrams of chemyical syntheses, twisting the ends of her hair in her fingers.

One evening as they were going through one of these sessions, Jack exploded. Afraid that he might say something that would make Eva suspicious, Roz went with him for a walk to talk over what was bothering him. When she told him she was thinking of moving out, he threatened to tell Eva what had happened to Carey. His paranoia was so sharp that she could smell it. She begged him to be quiet.

Roz realized that she was trapped. It would be safer for her and Jack both if she moved out of the apartment. Raisa was still looking for a roommate, and it would only be a matter of a few days for her to make the arrangements and move her things. But there was nothing she could do.

One day late in Roz’s practicum, Eva called her to the Fabrication research lab. Roz realized that it was not an accident that the last stop on her practicum tour was Fabrication, and the last stop at Fabrication was research, Eva’s own area. Roz had a sudden dread that Eva knew something, that ever since the festival she had been setting a trap, which was about to spring.

Like the biotech lab that her father worked in, in the interests of preventing contamination Eva’s nanotech lab was separated from the colony. At the end of the northwest lava tube, Roz suited up and passed through a lock onto the surface. It was months since Carey’s disappearance, and full night now. Mars and Jupiter were no longer visible; Venus shone brightly on the horizon. She followed a string of lights to the lab, entered, and pulled off her suit.

Eva met her at the check-in. “Thank you for coming, Roz. Come with me. I want to show you the Quantum Nondestructive Scanner Array.”

The QNSA lab was the largest in the facility. The scanner looked like nothing so much as a huge blue marble, the size of an elephant, divided at the equator. Eva had the technicians lift the upper hemisphere to expose the target area. “What we do here is pull a fast one on the universe. We bypass the uncertainty principle on the subatomic level by measuring test subjects at below the Planck-Wheeler length.”

“I don’t know that much physics,” Roz said.

Eva put her arm around Roz’s shoulder. Despite the affectionate gesture, she was not smiling. “We’ve made huge strides in the past six months.”

“What’s it for?”

“There are a hundred purposes-some of them quite revolutionary. On the most basic level, if we can scan to sufficient accuracy, and if the assembler team can succeed in producing a programmable assembler that can use the scan-then we will have created the most flexible manufacturing system in history. Any object we scan could be duplicated in the assembler.”

“Isn’t that expensive?”

“Smart girl. Yes, it is very expensive-of technology, energy, and time. It doesn’t make economic sense to use a system like this to manufacture simple things, like, say, an electric motor. That would be like running an MRI to check whether there’s gum in your pocket. But for more complicated things-organic compounds, for instance-it holds fascinating possibilities. Let me show you something.”

She took Roz into a side room separated from the lab by a large window. In the corner was a refrigerator. From it Eva took out two apples. She handed them to Roz. “What do you think of these?”

Roz looked them over. They were the same size, the same shape. Both felt cool in her palms. In fact, they felt exactly alike. She looked at them more closely. There was a spray of freckles near the stem of the apple in her right held the other next to it, turned it until they were in the same position. An identical spray of freckles marked the second apple. “They’re the same.”

“Yes. Now compare this.” Eva pulled a third apple from the refrigerator. This one was past its prime; its skin was darker and softer, and it smelled sweet. Yet it had exactly the same pattern of freckles as the other two.

“All three of these apples were assembled from the same quantum scan. We scanned the original apple six months ago. These two apples were assembled from the QNSA yesterday, the other a week ago. If we load the right raw materials into the assembler, we can create as many identical apples as we like.”

“That’s amazing!”

“Yes. It’s too expensive a way to make apples, though. In fact, there aren’t many things that would justify the expense of reproduction by QNSA.”

Eva took the apples back. She put the old one and one of the new ones back into the refrigerator. Then she polished the third on her sleeve and took a bite of it. Chewing, she handed it to Roz. “Try it.”

Roz took a bite. It tasted crisp and tart. Another lab worker came in and got a squeeze bottle out of the refrigerator. He nodded to Eva, smiled at Roz, and went out.

“I hoped at first that I might get over the loss of Carey,” Eva said. She looked through the window at the big blue marble. “I told myself that he was only one person, that we all die eventually, that it was his recklessness that had killed him and I never wanted him to be other than he was.” She brushed the back of her hand against her eye. “But a son is not supposed to die before his mother. Everything looks different afterward. It’s all just a collection of atoms.”

Eva turned to Roz. “How does the apple taste?”

“Good.”

“I’m glad. Now, Roz, I want to tell you what I’m going to do. It’s something that no one’s ever done before. Because of that it’s not a crime yet, but if it doesn’t become so common as to be ordinary in the future, I’m sure it will become a crime.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Some months ago, the project had reached a stage where we could scan a living organism. We scanned several guinea pigs, even a sheep. One night, while the lab was empty, I brought Carey here and scanned him.

“I’ve been waiting until we worked the bugs out of the assembler. Three days ago we recreated one of the guinea pigs from a four-month-old scan. Do you know what that means?”

Roz held her breath. “I think so.”

“If that guinea pig suffers no aftereffects, I am going to reconstitute Carey. I want you to help me.”

The sky opened up and a torrent of pure joy shot down to fill Roz up. She could not believe it. She hugged Eva, buried her head against the tall woman’s breast. It was a miracle. It was the way out.

Fire Nematodes made up most of the animal life on earth, by mass, Jack reminded himself. They were everywhere. The number of parasitic varieties was minuscule compared to the beneficial ones. Nothing to worry about.

But his hands itched. And his skin burned.

It had not taken Jack long to cut up Carey’s body, run it through the reduction chamber, mince the remains in the crusher and mix them into the project soil. He had hosed down the crusher and the floor of the lab. Fire, earth, water. Within a week there was nothing left of Carey but his elemental chemicals in the dirt.

Still, images of Carey were imprinted on the inside of Jack’s eyelids. I’m a freakshow, he thought a dozen times each day, climbing down the slope to the crater floor, pruning seedlings in the greenhouse, sitting on the edge of the pool in Sobieski Park. Lying in bed with Eva. I’m a lethal male in a society constructed to prevent males from going lethal. I didn’t even know it was happening. I’m a fucking maniac and no one can tell.