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

“You were hoping she’d snap out of it?” said the doctor. “Plenty of people feel that way. It’s normal to hope for a miracle.” Call-Me-Anne added some comforting noises, and said something about benefits and being in the system.

“Yeah, okay,” Marcus said. “But you still didn’t answer my question. How much do these scans cost?”

“Sorry, I couldn’t tell you, I don’t have anything to do with billing,” the doctor said smoothly. “But we can’t do any surgery without them.”

“I thought you already did some,” Marcus said.

“We were going to. Until I saw what was behind her eye.”

“It’s that big?” asked Marcus.

“It’s not just that. It’s—not your average tumor.”

Marcus gave a humorless laugh. “Tumors are standardized, are they?”

“To a certain extent, just like the human body. This one, however, isn’t behaving quite the way tumors usually do.” Pause. “There seems to be some gray matter incorporated into it.”

“What do you mean, like it’s tangled up in her brain? Isn’t that what a tumor does, get all tangled up in a person’s brain? That’s why it’s hard to take out, right?”

“This is different,” the doctor said. “Look, I’ve been debating with myself whether I should tell you about this—”

“If you’re gonna bill me, you goddam better tell me,” Marcus growled. “What’s going on with her?”

“Just from what I could see, the tumor has either co-opted part of your wife’s brain—stolen it, complete with blood supply—or there’s a second brain growing in your wife’s skull.”

There was a long pause. Then Marcus said, “You know how crazy that sounds? You got any pictures of this?”

“No. Even if I did, you’re not a neurosurgeon, you wouldn’t know what you were looking at.”

“No? I can’t help thinking I’d know if I were looking at two brains in one head or not.”

“The most likely explanation for this would be a parasitic twin,” the doctor went on. “It happens more often than you’d think. The only thing is, parasitic twins don’t suddenly take to growing. And if it had always been so large, you’d have seen signs of it long before now.

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t even take a sample to biopsy. Your wife’s vitals took a nosedive and we had to withdraw immediately. She’s fine now—under the circumstances. But we need to do those scans as soon as possible. Her right eye was so damaged by this tumor that we couldn’t save it. If we don’t move quickly enough, it’s going to cause additional damage to her face.”

Nell took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. She hadn’t thought they would hear her but they had; all three stopped talking and Call-Me-Anne and Marcus scurried over to the side of her bed, saying her name in soft, careful whispers, as if they thought it might break. She kept her eyes closed and her body limp, even when Call-Me-Anne took her hand in both of hers and squeezed it tight. After a while, she heard them go.

How had they done that, she marveled. How had they done it from so far away?

Something can be a million lightyears away and in your eye at the same time.

Her mind’s eye showed her a picture of two vines entangled with each other. Columbus’s ships, just coming into view. The sense she had been missing was not yet fully developed, not enough to reconcile the vine and the ships. But judging from what the doctor said, it wouldn’t be long now.

Bruce Sterling published his first novel, Involution Ocean , in 1977. The author of ten novels and four short story collections, he is still perhaps best known in science fiction as the Godfather of Cyberpunk. He edited the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades , and his early novels, The Artificial Kid and Schismatrix, are perhaps the closest things he wrote to cyberpunk. After closing the ’zine Cheap Truth and leaving cyberpunk to others in November 1986, he went on to write major science fiction novels like Holy Fire , Distraction, and The Zenith Angle . He is the author of a large and influential body of short fiction, much of which has been collected in Crystal Express , Globalhead , A Good Old-Fashioned Future, and Visionary in Residence . His most recent books are new novel The Caryatids and major career retrospective Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling .

So, I’m required to write this want-ad in order to get any help with my business. Only I have, like, a very bad trust rating on this system. I have rotten karma and an awful reputation. “Don’t even go there, don’t listen to a word he says: because this guy is pure poison.”

So, if that kind of crap is enough for you, then you should stop reading this right now.

However, somebody is gonna read this, no matter what. So let me just put it all out on the table. Yes, I’m a public enemy. Yes, I’m an ex-con. Yes, I’m mad, bad, and dangerous to link to.

But my life wasn’t always like this. Back in the good old days, when the world was still solid and not all termite-eaten like this, I used to be a well-to-do, well-respected guy.

Let me explain what went on in prison, because you’re probably pretty worried about that part.

First, I was a nonviolent offender. That’s important. Second, I turned myself in to face “justice.” That shows that I knew resistance was useless. Also a big point on my side.

So, you would think that the maestros of the new order would cut me some slack in the karma ratings: but no. I’m never trusted. I was on the losing side of a socialist revolution. They didn’t call me a “political prisoner” of their “revolution,” but that’s sure what went on. If you don’t believe that, you won’t believe anything else I say, so I might as well say it flat-out.

So, this moldy jail I was in was this old dot-com McMansion, out in the Permanent Foreclosure Zone in the dead suburbs. That’s where they cooped us up. This gated community was built for some vanished rich people. That was their low-intensity prison for us rehab detainees.

As their rehab population, we were a so-called “resiliency commune.” This meant we were penniless, and we had to grow our own food, and also repair our own jail. Our clothes were unisex plastic orange jumpsuits. They had salvaged those somewhere. They always had plenty of those.

So, we persisted out there as best we could, under videocam surveillance, with parole cuffs on our ankles. See, that was our life. Every week, our itchy, dirty column of detainees got to march thirteen miles into town, where our captors lived. We did hard-labor “community service” there with our brooms, shovels, picks, and hoes. We got shown off in public as a warning to the others.

This place outside was a Beltway suburb before Washington was abandoned. The big hurricane ran right over it, and crushed it down pretty good, so now it was a big green hippie jungle. Our prison McMansion had termites, roaches, mold, and fleas, but once it was a nice house. This rambling wreck of a town was half storm-debris. All the lawns were replaced with wet, weedy, towering patches of bamboo, or marijuana—or hops, or kenaf, whatever (I never could tell those farm crops apart).

The same goes for the “garden roofs,” which were dirt piled on top of the dirty houses. There were smelly goats running loose, chickens cackling. Salvaged umbrellas and chairs toppled in the empty streets. No traffic signs, because there were no cars.

Sustainable Utopia here is a densely crowded settlement full of people in poorly washed clothing who are hanging out making nice. Constant gossip—they call that “social interaction.” No sign of that one percent of the population that once owned half of America. The rich elite just blew it totally. They dropped their globalized ball. They panicked. So they’re in jail, like I was. Or they’re in exile somewhere, or else they jumped out of penthouses screaming when the hyperinflation ate them alive.