SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Noah unbuttoned his jacket. “So who’s looking out for you?”

“911. I called before I came.”

“Bullshit.”

“Funny thing, 911. You call. You hang up. They still send a cop. Old men like me have to apologize for our shaky fingers.”

Joan could have kissed those fingers. Too bad he’d never see her again.

“So I’ll wait.” Noah sat on the stoop. “The stories I could tell the cops about Joan.”

Mr. Better shifted in place and Joan realized, as Noah did, that he hadn’t called 911.

Mr. Better didn’t give up. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Noah ignored him and took out his phone. After a few moments Mr. Better went back to his house. It killed her, the humiliation on his face. He stopped on the porch and looked straight at the cam; she realized he was looking at himself in the front window. His shoulders trembled, his eyes clenched and his lips muttered. When he turned aside to go in, she realized he’d been eclipsing Noah, who’d disappeared from her stoop.

Joan reached for the gun in her go bag.

Klinsmen scrolled through his eBay auctions while the old man stared at him. So this is how you flip a guy off nowadays. After three bids the old guy gave up. As he crossed the street, Klinsmen got a new report from SearchBot. He hit the shortened URL.

His browser opened to a livestream. The old guy was walking towards him on the screen, which disturbed Klinsmen until he looked behind the old guy on the screen and saw himself. He waved to make sure. That dirty old creep, he thought.

Klinsmen got up, buttoned his jacket and went to his car. He hated witnesses, especially those he couldn’t do anything about. He’d send a few guys to deal with Ellie. It was stupid of him to come. Klinsmen slid into the driver’s seat, tossed the flowers in the street, and watched Mr. Better open his front door.

He hated loose ends too. The old guy had seen him. He’d tell Ellie, and Ellie would run. Klinsmen checked the old guy’s site. There were no other streams, just the one in front, none for the back. He unbuttoned his jacket again.

Thus preoccupied, Klinsmen took a moment to think, “That was a strangely convenient email.”

Joan cocked her gun, breathed deeply twice and looked past the corner of the house. Noah hadn’t come around to try the back door. She didn’t hear him either. She checked the tablet. The street was empty. No, there was a car. Someone was in it.

The car wheeled around. Joan ran to the driveway in time to see it turn left out of the street. It didn’t go far. The car turned at the next corner and parked. Through a gap in the trees she saw Noah get out and cut through the property behind Mr. Better’s house.

Joan kilroyed over her hood. She should go. Get the bag and belts. Get in the car. The car whose oil Mr. Better had changed. The car he’d vacuumed. The car he’d helped her buy because a restaurant manager’s salary only went so far.

Noah slinked across Mr. Better’s back yard and vanished behind his house. Joan started down the driveway, gun hard against her hip. At the sidewalk she stopped and pulled her burner from her back pocket.

Mr. Better watched his stream. The man was just sitting in his car, looking at his house, looking at him. He’d be damned if that man got anywhere near Joan. He should call 911, but he’d had a better idea. Mr. Better took down his double-barreled shotgun, loaded two shells and went to the front door. This was one argument the man couldn’t ignore.

Klinsmen wedged himself between two shrubs and looked through an open back window. The kitchen was empty, but down a hallway he could see the old guy bent at the front door. Pathetic, he thought. Klinsmen drew his automatic and aimed through the window screen. Too easy.

Mr. Better looked through the peephole, leaning on his shotgun for balance. The car was gone. He exhaled. What had he been thinking? Then he saw Joan on the sidewalk. So pretty. She must have been out for a walk. She was looking at his house. She must need him. He had to tell her about the man. He reached for the knob.

No. Mr. Better pushed his forehead against the peephole until it hurt. He was an old fool. Old men shouldn’t love. They’d had their chance. They certainly shouldn’t try to be heroes. Mr. Better turned away from the door, hefted the shotgun, and shuffled toward the kitchen.

The phone rang. Startled, Mr. Better fired.

Joan heard what sounded like an explosion in Mr. Better’s house. Not thirty seconds later she heard the siren. No sense in her getting involved now.

She got her bag and belts, threw them in the car and slowly backed out of the driveway. Joan was rolling up to the corner when the police car appeared. She thought they would stop her, but they turned into the next street and stopped in front of Noah’s car.

They got out, looked inside and looked at each other.

A voice called across the yards. It was Mr. Better. She couldn’t believe it. He was distraught, but alive. She started to cry. He must have gotten her call. Then she remembered his grandfather’s shotgun, which hung above his mantle. She didn’t think it even worked.

Joan put on her blinker, turned right and drove slowly out of town, amazed at how quickly the police had responded.

That night over beers the 911 operator started the story for the twentieth time: “I’ve had vampires call. Werewolves. Vampires who wanted to be werewolves. But I never had a robot call. Guy used a voice synthesizer. Sounded like Stephen Hawking. And all he had to say was the latitude and longitude of that guy’s phone.”

A week later SB Tech automatically renewed Klinsmen’s SearchBot access, charging a credit card registered to a restaurant he owned. Reports were sent out several times a day, but with diminishing results. Joan Hall had ceased being mentioned anywhere.

A month later the automatic renewal was rejected. The credit card had been cancelled. Several emails were sent. They were bounced back. His email address had also been cancelled.

Not willing to lose a long-standing customer, a senior rep called the number SB Tech had on file for one Frazier Svenson. It too had been cancelled. The desperate rep googled his name. She got no results and closed the account.

The SearchBot was reassigned to a San Diego art dealer who had it trawl photos online for pieces of art in the background whose owners might not realize were valuable. SearchBot also found contact information so the dealer could give the owners a story about how he’d seen the piece online and fallen in love with it. Then he would make a lowball offer.

The SearchBot’s algorithms judged this behavior to be statistically unfair, so it emailed the art owners with more accurate valuations of their property to even the playing field. It continued to struggle with devising subject lines that didn’t seem spammy or scary.

First published by AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review

Marina’s world is a pale speck on Hub’s forward monitor. Having just unfolded at the edge of her system, he won’t arrive at Sonhar for two days, and the wait is killing him. When you travel halfway across the void to propose, you want to fold the void so thin you can hold your girl’s hand through it. Hub’s engine isn’t good enough for that, though. At best it can sort of wad up the void. So Hub turns on his automatic sky, which acclimates travelers to their destination worlds and makes Hub feel like he’s already with her.