Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

But it was his taste for danger—even while he experienced none, even while his true self kept running independently in the background, in a secure location somewhere on Earth or in orbit—that awakened her own.

The first time she killed a man…

They had gone looking for opium and found an ambush. The leader said, “Kill the flesh-rider and keep the kathoey. We’ll sell her in—”

She had acted instinctively. She didn’t know what she was doing until it was done. Her knife—

The blade flashing in the neon light—

A scream, cut short—a gurgle—

Blood ruined her second-best blouse—

The sound of something breaking—the pain only came later. They had smashed in her nose—

Darwin’s Choice watching —

She killed the second one with her bare hands, thumbs pressing on his windpipe until he stopped struggling—

She laid him down on the ground almost tenderly—

Pain, making her scream, but her lungs wouldn’t work—

They hit her with a taser, but somehow she didn’t pass out—

She fell, but forward—hugging the man with the taser, sharing the current until there was only darkness.

“You were clinically dead,” he told her, later. He sounded impressed. “What was it like?”

“Like nothing,” she told him. “There was nothing there.”

“You were switched off?”

She had to laugh. “You could say that.”

They made love the night she was released from hospital. She licked his nipples, slowly, and felt him harden in her hand. She stroked him, burying her face in his full breasts. He reached down, touched her, and it was like electricity. She kept thinking of the dead men….

When she came, he said, “You would do it again—”

It wasn’t a question.

She was tuning in to people’s nodes, picking up network traffic to and from—the Malay business guys were high-encryption/high-bandwidth clouds, impossible to hack through, but here and there—

Kid with vintage paperback was on a suitably retro playlist with a random shuffle—she caught the Doors singing “The End,” which was replaced with Thaitanium’s “Tom Yum Samurai,” only to segue into Drunken Tiger’s “Great Rebirth.” Issan-girl was plugged in—a humming battery was sending a low current into her brain. She would be out for the journey…. The K-pop princess was playing Guilds of Ashkelon . So were her entourage. The French backpackers were stoned on one thing or another. Others were chatting, stretching, reading, farting, tidying away bags and ordering drinks—life on board the night train to Nong Khai was always the same.

The train was coming alive, the slug belching steam—the whole train shuddered as it began to crawl along the smooth tracks, slug-boys falling off it like fleas.

Tuning, scanning—someone two cars down watching the feed from a reality-porn channel, naked bodies woven together like a tapestry, a beach somewhere—Koh Samui or an off-Earth habitat, it was impossible to say.

Boss Gui: “I’m hungry!”

Mulan Rouge: “Food’s coming—” In the dining car they were getting ready, a wok already going, rice cooker steaming, crates of beer waiting—

“I want kimchi!”

“I’ll see if they have any—” though she knew they didn’t.

“No need.” A long, slow, drawn-out hum from one of the Toads. “I keep for boss.”

Limited vocabulary—you didn’t breed Toads for their brains.

She watched the toad reach into what the Australians called an esky . There was a jar of kimchi in there, and… other stuff.

Like a jar of living flies, for the Toads. Like what appeared to be a foetal sac, preserved in dry ice….

Other things.

She left them to it, returned to watching—waiting.

“You would do it again,” Darwin’s Choice had said. And he—she—it—was right. Mulan had liked it—a sense of overwhelming power came with violence, and if it could be controlled, it could be used. Power depended on how you used it.

She counted the succeeding years in augmentations and bodies. Three in Vientiane—she had followed Darwin’s Choice there to buy up a stash of primitive communist VR art—the deal went wrong and she had to execute two men and a woman before they got away. She’d had snake eyes installed after that. A man and a kathoey in Chiang Mai—DC was buying a genuine Guilds of Ashkelon virtual artefact that had turned out to be a fake. She’d had her skeleton strengthened following that….

With each kill, new parts of her. With each, more power—but never over him.

Gradually, Darwin’s Choice appeared less and less in the flesh. She had to cast around for work, hiring out as bodyguard, enforcer—hired killer, sometimes, only sometimes. Finally DC never reappeared. He had tried to explain it to her, once:

“We are I-loops but, unlike humans, we are self-aware I-loops. Not self-aware in the sense of consciousness, or what humans call consciousness. Self-aware in the sense that we are—we can — know every loop, every routine and subroutine. Digital, not neurological. And as we are aware so do we change, mutating code, merging code, sharing….”

“Is that how you make love?”

“Love is a physical thing,” he said. “It’s hormone-driven.”

“You can only feel love when you’re body-surfing?”

He only shrugged.

“How do you…” she searched for the word, settled on—“mate?”

Imagine two or more Others.Endless lines of code meeting in digital space— if s and and s and or s branching into probabilities, cycling through endless branches of logic at close to the speed of light—

“Is that what you’re like?”

“No. Shh…”

…and meeting , merging, mixing, mutating—“And dying; to be an Other is to die, again and again, to evolve with every cycle, to cull and select and grow, achieve new, unexpected forms—”

…not so much mating as joining , and splitting, and joining again—“A bit like that old story about humans replacing every single atom in their bodies every seven years—how the body wears out and regenerates and changes but the entity still retains the illusion of person, remains an I-loop—”

…but for Others, it meant becoming something new—“Giving birth to one’s self, in essence.”

The body he was surfing had been stoned, then, when he told her all this. When he was gone, she hired out. She enjoyed the work, but freelancing was hard. When the contract on Boss Gui came, she took it—and upgraded to corporate.

“We are never alone,” DC had told her, just before he left forever. “There are always… us. So many of us…”

“Can’t you all join?” she asked. “Join into one?”

“Too much code slows you down,” he said. “We have… limits. Though we share, too—share the way humans can’t.”

“We can share in ways you can’t,” she said. Her finger dug into his anus when she spoke. DC squirmed under her, then gave a small moan. His breasts were freckled, his penis circumcised. “True,” he said—whispered—and drew her to him with an urgency they were sharing only rarely, by then.

That had been the last time….

She wondered which species’ sharing was better—figured she would never know.

They said sex was overrated….

Yankee boy blue was no longer listening to the Doors—she couldn’t sense his node any more at all. She blinked, feeling panic rise. How had he slipped past her? Scanning for him—his vintage sci-fi paperback was still on his bunk.

Shit.

She glanced back into the cabin—Boss Gui glared up at her, then clutched his bloated stomach and gave a groan. The two Toads jumped—too hard, and hit the ceiling.