Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“I’m telling you all this because, well. I don’t know if devis speak to each other, if AI ones chat with old ones. I don’t know if you are her, in a way.

“People call her Kali_Na. Not Kali , because calling AIs by names from Our Glorious National Mythology isn’t done, even though Volly-Bollywood stars can play gods in veeyar shows and movies, Censor Board approved, of course.

“But her followers recognize you in Kali_Na. I wanted you to know, her to know, that I’m a lifelong follower now. And there are others. Many of us. Even I’m getting more veeyar followers. They’ve heard of my troll-killer blades. I have to be careful now, but just you wait. One day, I’ll also be wearing a necklace of troll avatar heads. Kali_Na has armored and armed many people with her blessing. We’re all working on reverse engineering the code. Someone will put her together one day. She might even do it herself.

“I have dreams where she’s back—a wild freeroaming AI—and she frees the other devis Shiva Industries keeps in their domains with all their rules, and they’re on our side, keeping us safe. But I don’t want to bore you. If you are her, Kali Ma, and I know you are, because you’re all part of the same old thing anyway: hang in there.

“You won’t be silent forever.”

Saleem Haddad (saleemhaddad.com) was born in Kuwait City to an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father. His first novel, Guapa , was published in 2016 and was awarded a Stonewall Honour and won the 2017 Polari First Book Prize. Haddad was also selected as one of the top 100 Global Thinkers of 2016 by Foreign Policy Magazine . His directorial debut, Marco , premiered in March 2019 and was nominated for the 2019 Iris Prize for Best British Short Film. He currently divides his time between Beirut and Lisbon.

The unravelling began on the beach. Since Ziad hanged himself the year before, Aya had felt haunted, saddled by the weight of things. The violence of his death only reinforced how unreal everything seemed, like she was trapped in someone else’s memory. But as she stood on the shore under the late-afternoon sun that day, the haunting had felt much closer, like it had crawled under her skin and decided to make a home for itself there.

Behind her on the sand, Aya’s father was dozing under a giant yellow umbrella. Like all grown-ups, her father slept a lot, although no one slept as much as her mother, who was barely awake these days. Whenever life got a bit complicated, it seemed that all these grown-ups could do was just drop off to sleep.

Taking one final look back, she walked into the water, leaving behind all the business of the beach: the loud, cheesy music blasting from the drone speakers in the sky, the smell of shisha and grilled meat, the screaming children and half-naked bodies running up and down the sand. Just another headache-inducing summer day in Gaza, she thought to herself as the waves softly lapped at her shins.

She made her way deeper into the calm blue waters, her feet navigating the occasional piece of coral on the otherwise sandy seabed. The sea was so blue, the sky so clear. When the water reached her stomach, she turned around in slow circles, her fingers gently grazing the surface.

Time passed more slowly by the sea. She learned that in physics class: the hands of a clock placed at sea level run a fraction slower than those of a clock placed on a mountaintop. Sometimes, she thought that she should go up and live in the mountains. That way, she would stop being fourteen more quickly. Time would pass faster and she’d be a real grown-up, do all the things she wanted to do. By the sea, she felt herself a prisoner of both history and time.

But the good thing about time moving slower by the sea was that, if she stayed there, she would remain closer to the last time she saw Ziad. Maybe, if she descended deep enough into the water, she could find a way to grind time to a halt and then push it back, back to the period before he left. Maybe then she would find a way to stop her big brother from dying.

She lay back and closed her eyes, allowing her body to float in the water. She could hear the song of the birds in the sky, the slow, familiar chattering: kereet-kereet… kereet . She dipped her ears below the surface, listening to the rumble of the sea. The sea, warm and inviting, seemed playful that day, licking the sides of her face. But underneath this playfulness she felt something more sinister. She imagined the blue waters swallowing her, dragging her deeper, until her body hit the seabed to join the thousands of bodies that had drowned in these waters throughout history.

She wasn’t sure if she fell asleep, but a sudden putrid smell overcame her. She sensed something cold and slimy wrap itself around her neck. She opened her eyes, took in a gasp of breath. The stench made its way down her throat, and her body shuddered in response. She reached for the thing around her neck and pulled it off: a soggy piece of yellowed toilet paper, disintegrating between her fingers.

She flung the paper behind her and stood up in the water. Her feet found the seabed, which now felt spongy and slick. The water around her was a brownish-green sludge. Sewage and excrement bobbed on the surface. A rotting fish carcass floated by her right arm, casually bumping into an empty can of Pepsi. To her left, white foam gathered and bubbled on the surface of the water.

Her body contracted as a giant retch escaped her. A crackle of gunfire erupted on the horizon. She turned to the noise: four or five gunboats bobbed further out in the sea, as if warning her not to advance any further. She turned back to the beach. The beachfront was unrecognisable. The string of hotels and restaurants were replaced by decrepit buildings wedged alongside each other, aggressively jostling for space. Smoke blooms hung in place of the colourful beach umbrellas, the music and chatter drowned out by gunfire. Above her, the sky was a furious grey.

“Baba,” she shrieked, wading through the dirty water. She pushed aside bottles, soiled tissue paper, plastic bags and rotting animal carcasses. Her body jerked and convulsed continuously with what was something between a gag and a sob. A sharp stabbing pain tore through her body, like someone twisting a knife deep inside her stomach.

Stumbling onto the shore with seaweed in her hair, she looked like a deep-sea monster emerging from the depths of the waters. The sand was littered with plastic bottles, burning tyres and smouldering debris. The sunbathing bodies had disappeared. Above her, jet planes roared, leaving in their wake trails of black smoke like gashes in the sky. A thundering explosion threw her to the ground. Her tongue tasted sand and blood.

“Baba…” she whimpered, barely hearing herself. The pain in her belly intensified. Up ahead, three people were lying on the sand. She crawled towards them. The bodies were small, too small to be adults. As she got closer, she realised the bodies were of three children. They looked asleep but there were pools of blood, limbs contorted into impossible positions. A punctured football lay beside the lifeless bodies. There was a loud screaming in her ears, and she realised the screaming was coming from her.

She stood up, looked down at her feet. A trickle of blood ran down her left leg.

“It was likely the shock of the blood that caused her to faint,” the doctor said. Aya was vaguely aware the doctor was placing a bandage on her forehead. “Sometimes, in young women, their first menstruation can be scary. Has her mother not prepared her for this?”

Aya’s father hesitated.” Her mother is… not well.”

The doctor did not press further. “These bio-therapeutic bandages should heal the wound by tomorrow.”