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

I could pretend anxiety about my objective for the search. Apprehending a target is a new skill for me. That could be worth further consideration, though it doesn’t strike me as brilliant. The last time I worked on a complicated idea for a secret plan, when the solution came to me I saw its brilliance immediately. I will wait for that feeling again.

The hallway floor before us is tiled smooth white, its grip and temperature synthetic, not ceramic. The walls and ceiling are also white. The hallway’s bright orderliness and its neat, closed doors visually resemble an abandoned hospital ward my team conducted exercise drills in last year. The smells could never be mistaken for each other, though—the vacant ward smelled of sickness and chemicals, and this place smells of dust and deep earth—and certainly not the sound. The seven flights we have climbed down muffle everything except the deep reverberating hum. I felt that hum in my bones and eyes even as Devin’s truck turned off the highway, and now it reaches a pitch and richness that makes my gums itch.

There are other, quieter sounds: the whirs, clacks, and whispers of the plant’s small machinery continuing its work. This facility is equipped with an interminable army of drone small-workers happily going about whatever tasks the Strong Arm has set them to. My dossier says they have been observed largely continuing about their regular routines, though with some abnormal clustering behaviors.

I jerk a foot out of the way of a miniature repair drone zipping along the edge of the hall, laden with a CPU fan across its beetle-back. Another even smaller drone tails it. I resist the urge to lunge after the mousy thing, and swallow, as well, the rumble of a growl I feel in my chest. Their movement is utterly unnerving. My gaze follows them like toenails following after the sweetest itch. Is Like.

I would prefer not to have these feelings at all. The unfortunate side effects of being a dog.

I whine quietly. The MFA’s hum almost drowns it out.

“Sera?” Carol says.

She does not ask a question, and so I do not answer her.

We follow the hallway to its end and take a different access stairway down. There are elevators, but we must avoid them, as their systems have been tampered with. We proceed down eleven additional flights. According to my DAT, we’re sixty-two meters beneath the surface. I feel pressure inside my ears. Carol breathes hard, though she is in excellent physical shape for a human her age.

The reactor’s noise grows more intense here. Carol opens the fire door on the stairwell and the sound increases again. Next to the door there is a station with small headphones, which I assume are noise-minimizing; Carol pauses to take a set and plugs its data pin into her DAT.

I shake my head several times to clear the congestion in my ears, but I am also hoping that the noise will diminish. It doesn’t; I simply grow used to it.

“Sera,” Carol says. She must speak over the growl of the earth around us. “Are you okay?”

It is disorienting, I tell her. Loud.

“Can you work?”

I can work. My answer is automatic, but I will make it true. I rely on my hearing to search. Although my skin crawls with this place, I can concentrate beyond the din for small sounds beneath it. My hearing is phenomenally acute. I am hampered but not crippled.

According to my building schematics, the access channel we need in order to reach the inner circuit of maintenance hallways and tunnels is on this level.

Carol taps at her radio screen but shakes her head, disgusted. “No signal,” she says. I knew there would not be one. She knew as well, I am sure, yet had to check. Humans seem far more anxious about being disconnected from the internet than I am from Modanet. I think this is due to Modanet’s limited nature versus the unlimited connectivity, sociality, and information provided on the internet: it gives humans the sense that they can solve any problem they come to with more information and the input of others. I, however, know that I must rely on myself. I have never seen the internet, aside from glances at human devices, and so I don’t miss its help.

Back when I was in training Dacy taught me not to look at screens and so I don’t look at them. At ESAC, if you look at screens, you get a verbal warning. If you look again after you’ve been warned, you get a time-out. They even take away privileges, like free-swimming time. When you are a young dog and full of energy, losing free-swimming time is a seriously unpleasant consequence.

Down at the bright hallway’s end a flying drone the size of a sparrow ducks out an open doorway. It follows the seam of the ceiling and wall, bobs through the next door and then out of sight. It makes an awful sound, a wasp’s whine.

My body yawns. I sneeze. I am feeling many different kinds of pressure.

“Hey,” Carol says, “you’re okay.” She is watching me closely, and the words seem as much a warning as reassurance. I try to release the tension in my body so that it is not as noticeable.

We continue forward. I try not to lag from heel position but each step feels like pushing through chest-high water. I follow Carol into a room where we weave between lab benches to a large storage room. There’s a door in here with an access pad but also a physical lock on the doorknob. The access pad light blinks orange, but Carol ignores it and produces a key. She turns the lock with a smooth scrape.

The door opens onto a grate-floored hallway, walled in cement, dim, and crawling. Three paw-sized drones skitter from the trajectory of the opening door. Others the size of pigeons whine past along the ceiling. One drops from its path and, as I watch, extends wheels beneath it, tucks its flight apparatus, and transitions to the floor without changing momentum.

“Shit,” Carol says. She is watching the drones as well. “I would guess it’s cover for the movements of their own drone. Shit, Sera, can you do it?”

I can work, I say again, but the response comes faster than thought. Then I do think about it, but I don’t change my answer.

I step forward but pause. I feel my voice in my chest and I try to stop it, but I can’t. It is its own thing squirreling after the movements of the drones that make the backs of my eyes tingle and my joints itch. I force myself forward again, pushing at the barrier of all that awful movement, and I can move into the hallway but my voice moves as well and comes out as a low moaning growl.

A cleaning drone trawls past me, swiveling out of my way, its brush-roller chewing the metal mesh of the walkway.

My mouth parts in a pant. I can smell the anxiety in my own breath. At least with my mouth open I can’t whine. The sound of the drones grinding and buzzing through the narrow hall mewls over the deep, endless groan of the MFA.

I startle as something warm touches my back. Carol’s hand on my withers. I look up. “Hold it together, girl,” she says.

As much as I dislike being touched, I move into the pressure of her hand. It feels steadying.

Carol doesn’t usually pet me. That’s something she saved for Mack.

I begin to understand why he loved her so slavishly.

Often environmental stimulus will fade into the background as I grow used to it. This is the case with the loud engines running the MFA. After a time, my senses adjust, and my hearing is again an asset to my search.

Not so with the intense visual stimulus of the drones. If anything, the continued exposure builds up. There are fewer now, but one still passes us at least every ten seconds. Walking through these teeming service tunnels with my mind open for hints of my target is like standing in a severe windstorm with my eyes open and no eyewear or body protection. I feel battered.