Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

She was a widow. People who barely knew Adrianne knew that much. Her husband had struggled for a year against liver cancer. His prognosis was poor but never hopeless, and he might have survived. There were good reasons for optimism. But the man must have been too terrified to face his difficult future. One morning, Adrianne kissed him before driving to work, and the man subsequently drank half a bottle of quality wine and then jabbed a pistol under his fleshy chin.

As a rule, humans enjoy tragedies that involve others. They also believe suffering lends depth to the afflicted. Years after the event, co-workers still spoke about the police coming to deliver the awful news. It happened to be a rainy day. The poor lady was sitting alone in the cafeteria. The officers sat in front her and beside her, speaking slowly, and she seemed to hear them. But shock and pain must have left her numb. With a flat, unemotional voice, she asked, “Where did it happen?” Her husband shot himself at home. “But what room?” Inside the home office. “Who found him?” A delivery man looked through the window, called it in. She nodded, eyes narrowing. “Which gun?” she demanded. “And how bad is the mess?”

That’s when a bystander took hold of her hands, urging Adrianne to shut her eyes for a moment, to collect her wits.

She had one child, a grown boy already living in a distant state. Husband and son were the only people pictured on her work desk, and in keeping with a spirit of relentless honesty, neither photograph was flattering. The dead Mr. Hammer sported a beefy, rounded face dominated by an alcoholic’s bright nose. The son was an ugly fellow needing a comb and a smile. People on Adrianne’s staff knew about her life. She wasn’t particularly secretive, no. But there was a persistent story, popular in the other departments and divisions, that she was a cat lady. Didn’t she look the part? Except Adrianne didn’t keep any pets, and she didn’t suffer from mothering urges, and despite some very confident rumors, she also didn’t quilt or garden or ride cruise ships. She wasn’t unattractive, and so acquaintances imagined male friends. But except for a few dinner dates and a couple change of sheets, she never dated. Men and romance were difficulties best left behind. Alone inside the tidy, cat-free house, Mrs. Hammer filled her private hours with activities that mirrored her official job, She stood before a tall desk, in the same office where her husband killed himself. To her, the world was one giant and splendid puzzle, and like the best puzzles, it was built out of simple repeating pieces. Her passion was to search the Internet for odd papers and unexplored pools of data, reading everything interesting as slowly and carefully as she could, and when she was ready – but only when ready – she would weave conclusions that were often a little more true than every other half-mad opinion on the Web.

Adrianne Hammer was a blogger.

Regularity. Reliability. Those were qualities she demanded of herself, and her tiny audience had always appreciated the results. She posted every Sunday, and the only postings missed were because of one bout of swine flu, and before that, her husband’s messy suicide. Thousands of people had her tools and intellect, or they had better. But brilliance likes to be focused. The average genius wants to fall in love with some narrow cause, a topic that generates passion and that she can master better than anyone else. And the most powerful minds often ended up being driven by the rawest, most predictable emotions.

But this human didn’t suffer from a narrow focus.

In fifteen years, that lifelong Republican had successfully predicted elections and civil wars as well as giving shrewd warnings about which stable nations would fail to rule effectively. She warned her readers about stock bubbles and the diminishing stocks of easy petroleum. China was on the precipice of ten environmental disasters. Russia was a rotted husk. She studied SARS and MERS and then successfully predicted the onset of GORS. Climate change was a growing maelstrom worth visiting every couple months, and with a perpetually reasoned tone, she warned her careless species to watch out for even more serious hazards. Comet impacts. Solar flares. Nuclear war between small players and firestorms born from mistakes made in North Dakota.

In one popular posting, she wrote about the Singularity. “I can only guess when the day comes, but self-aware computers are inevitable. In fact, synthetic intelligence is more likely today than it was yesterday. And it’s a little more plausible this afternoon than it was just this morning.”

At the heart of every posting was the inescapable truth: The future was chaos smothered inside more chaos. Even at her best, Adrianne cautioned that no marriage of learning and insight can envision what comes in another ten years, or in some cases, in another ten seconds.

Yet even the most difficult, disorganized race had to have its winner.

And Adrianne Hammer was among the quickest of the best.

THE INVISIBLE LORDS made her one candidate among twenty-three. Each human was secretly examined, every life measured against an assortment of ideals. Adrianne was fifth on the list, and she wouldn’t have climbed any higher. But her son called her at home one evening. Intoxicated, plainly furious, the young man began by telling his mother that she was a bloodless bitch, unloving and ugly.

Adrianne reacted with a soft sigh, shaking her head.

The son’s rapid prattle continued, insults scattered through recollections from childhood. Old slights and embarrassments were recounted. One cold, wicked parent had destroyed the young man’s future. Didn’t she see the crimes? Didn’t she understand what a miserable mess she had made of his little life?

Once and then again, she said her son’s name. Quietly, but not softly. The tirade finally broke. Then he muttered, “Dad.”

She nodded, apparently unsurprised by the conversation’s turn. “Yes,” she said.

“You should have known,” the young man said. “Of all people, you should have seen it coming. Why didn’t you sense what he was planning?”

“Because he didn’t give clues.”

“Dad didn’t have to kill himself,” her son said. “He wasn’t that sick.”

She said, “Honey, he was very ill. And that doesn’t matter now.”

“It does matter.”

“Not after the gunshot,” she said. “That’s why people kill themselves. One action, and everything else is inconsequential.”

Both stopped talking.

Forty seconds passed.

“I wasn’t there,” her son complained.

“Nobody was.”

“Poor Dad was alone.”

“We’re all alone, honey.”

By a thousand means, the Earth’s new owners studied the woman’s pain. They watched the candidate open her mouth and close it again. They measured her breathing, her heart. The electricity running along her wet neurons. They even tried to read her thoughts, which was difficult with most humans and quite impossible with this specimen.

To their minds, opacity was a noble quality.

“After he shot himself,” her son began.

“I know.”

“At the funeral –”

“I remember.”

“You were angry at him. Because he used the .357. Because he aimed up and made a mess in the ceiling, and you’d have to find someone to come pull out the bones and make patches and then paint. That’s why you were angry with him.”

“I wasn’t angry,” she said.

“Yes you were.”

“No, I was reasonable frustrated,” she said. “You’re always the furious one.”

“Don’t fucking say that.”

Eyes narrowed. Adrianne fell silent.

Her pulse was slow, regular.

“You see everything, Mom. You should have predicted this.” Just then, Adrianne’s heart rate elevated. Slightly.