Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Stripped to Zero

First published in Nature, volume 524, page 130, 2015 by Nature Publishing Group

I don’t know why we bother waiting on the stoop. After an hour I grab Tommy’s Caillou backpack and reach for his hand. He tucks it against his chest. It kills me, but I can’t blame him. I’d call his mother if Karen would carry a phone. Or answer if she did.

Tommy follows me inside and says, “Do I still get chips for being good?”

“Sure," I say, turning, "if you can beat me. Go!"

We race across the lobby and down a hall to the 24Shop, a small room lined with video displays. I let him dart in just ahead of me, and the shop says, "Good morning, Tommy."

“How does she always know my name, Daddy?”

I shrug. To a four-year-old, even the most mundane technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The shop has a woman’s voice, soft and warm. I imagine her kneeling when she asks him, “What would you like, Tommy?”

He looks from screen to screen. Dancing chips. Splashing sodas. Cookies, ice cream and comfort foods. The shop says, “How about corn flakes with milk?” A bowl of cereal appears.

“No, chips,” he says.

“It’s much too early. Oatmeal with cinnamon?” Steaming oatmeal appears.

“No, chips! Daddy…”

Stupid nutrition protocols. “He can have a snack.”

The shop says nothing. Instead, images flow down a screen like a slot machine before settling on a MoonPie.

“Yes!”

“And a coke?”

“Why not?” I say.

A red light blinks above the bill slot. Standing behind Tommy, I nod, and the light turns green. A MoonPie tumbles into one tray, a can of RC into another.

“What do you want, Henry?”

Tommy takes my hand. "Nothing,” I say. “I’m good."

Upstairs, Tommy turns on the TV and tears into his food. He’s promptly shown commercials for MoonPies and RC. This he thinks nothing of.

I head for my reading room and find Karen sitting on the toilet tank. The mirror’s unplugged and draped with towels.

I close the door. "What are you doing in here? How did you even get in?"

"I spoofed a pass card."

"I’d get you a real card."

"Worse than phones." She glances through the high, small window.

“He waited an hour for you."

"I know. I watched."

"From the shadows? Jesus. He can’t remember most of your shit, but it’s starting to stick.”

“It’s not shit.”

I hold up my hands. “Look. He misses you. Come on out. I’ll tell him you—"

"Don’t make excuses for me. And I’m not going near that TV. This toilet’s bad enough. Probably reporting my weight.” She lifts her boots off the lid.

“Fine. I’ll call him.”

“No.”

“Then why get his hopes up? Why…this?”

“I wanted to see him, but I needed to speak with you.”

She slides down and stands close. She seems taller. And thinner. Probably the boots.

“I’m leaving,” she says. "For good. I won’t be coded anymore. I won’t be tagged. It’s killing me.”

“So you’ll kill him instead.”

“He’s another tag, Henry.”

"He’s a little boy."

"No. We’re just data sets here. Why can’t you see that? Is that all you want him to be?"

Now I get it. “You’re not taking him.”

“We could live clean. Stripped to zero. Anonymous. This place I’m going—"

“I’ll get him to his room,” I say and grip the door knob. “Slither out, and the TV won’t see you either.”

I don’t worry about her snatching Tommy. It’d be easier for her disappear if no one wanted to find her, and I would.

“Then tell him,” she says, “when he’s old enough, that I’m not crazy.”

“He’ll never be that old.”

My watch screen flares. Tommy knocks. "Daddy, I don’t feel well."

I look at Karen. She’s already ducking behind the black shower curtain.

I open the door. Tommy’s face is pale, sweaty and smeared with MoonPie. With a whir, the toilet lifts its lid.

“Quickly.” We kneel together on the mat, and Tommy spews brown black vomit.

I hear my mother say, “You just had to let him eat all that junk, didn’t you?”

The toilet expresses a milky foam that bonds with the vomit, then it vacuums both away. I wipe Tommy’s mouth with a tissue as the scent of vanilla fills the room.

"Smells like Mommy," he says.

“Yea.” I loved her vanilla perfume, which is why she stopped wearing it. Afterwards she seemed invisible. "I could set the vents to vanilla too."

"No, I want Mommy."

"I know." I rub his back.

"Why didn’t she come?” Tommy slams the toilet lid down. "Where is she?"

I take his wrists and turn him so I can look him in the eyes. "Do you love her?"

He nods.

"Then she’s always nearby."

"Like in the shower?"

“Ha! Exactly. Come on. Let’s get a new shirt on you."

I pick Tommy up and bring him to his room. While he paws through a drawer, I hear her footstep outside. I smell the vanilla again, my stomach twists, and, despite everything, I want her to rush in and grab us both. So when the front door clicks, I’m horribly relieved, like someone watching his terminal partner finally die.

Tommy pulls out his Batman t-shirt. I bend him into it. We go to the living room and flop down in a heap before the TV. The first commercial is for vanilla air fresheners.

It’s on every channel.

Wire Paladin

First publishing in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review

At first the emails from SearchBot were merely aggravating. Although Joan marked them as spam, they still appeared in her inbox three times a day, then five. She created a rule to delete them on receipt. They nonetheless appeared, and their frequency increased. Like killing the ringer whenever VA B calls because answering only encourages the weasels, Joan gritted her teeth and deleted. Then the subject lines started getting personal.

JOAN HALL SEARCHBOT HAS RESULTS FOR YOU became JOAN HALL CORNELL 2000 and JOAN HALL AGE 37. Joan figured the spammers, after so many deletions, were trying to attract her attention by adding information from whatever databases they’d gotten her email from. That would explain how they knew her actual alma mater and age, not the ones she told people.

When the subject lines included OPEN NOW and VITAL, Joan googled SearchBot to see if others had had the same problem. Oddly, SearchBot seemed to be a reputable commercial tool one step up from Google News. According to various forums, collectors used it find objects their owners mentioned online, but hadn’t put up for sale. It enabled companies to suss out information about their competitors. For many it helped fill in genealogies. Although spammers use web robots to harvest email addresses, SB Tech’s site claimed they didn’t market by mass email.

So who was sending her the spam? Why did deleting one make another appear? And while she supposed the spammers could use SearchBot to find out her cat’s name and add it to a subject line, how did SearchBot know her only phone was a burner?

After a week Joan was considering cancelling her email account when a subject line said ELLIE PLEASE. Joan went cold. She nearly vomited. She had to open this email, viruses be damned. Joan stood up in a fighting stance and tapped.

Outside her house in a rental car, Klinsmen watched Ellie stand up and tap her tablet. Five stars, SearchBot. He was glad he’d paid for the premium service. A week ago SearchBot gave up “Joan Hall”; three days ago, her address. He never would’ve found her with that name, although he knew immediately where it had come from: the mother who’d disowned her and the first school she’d been expelled from. To hear her tell it.

SearchBot couldn’t distinguish truth from lies. It only dealt in data and how it was related. He envied SearchBot. You could avoid a lot of bullshit with that attitude.

As a bonus, SearchBot didn’t have to question people who might then alert her. Nor did it require travel expenses. He can’t imagine how much those would have built up during the past six years.

Klinsmen looked around the street: modest, quiet, comfortable. Neat yards. No kids. She probably had a couple old guys vying to be her handyman. And her job as a restaurant manager would let her stretch the money she stole from him a long way; longer, if the restaurant owners haven’t caught on to what she’s probably stealing from them. Smart moves, but he’d given her so much more than this.

Sure, he understood her need for freedom. He’d been nearly locked up half a dozen times. What he couldn’t grasp was her belief that he should fund her freedom without recompense.

Klinsmen checked his gun, buttoned his jacket over it and opened the door. He had people for this sort of thing, but he wanted to speak with Ellie first. He was a reasonable man. He knew he couldn’t get much of his money back, nor did he need it. Frankly, he’d rather have her back. He loved her smarts. They’d made a good team. Maybe they could work things out.

Klinsmen grabbed the bouquet he’d bought at the airport and headed for Ellie’s door.

SearchBot’s email contained two images, the results of a derived search, whatever that was, but Gmail blocked them. Did she want to see? In for a penny, she thought and revealed a Google Maps screen cap of her house and an AP photo of Noah Klinsmen after a recent acquittal.

As Joan tried to breathe, another email arrived from SearchBot. The subject line read: NOW. The mail contained a shortened URL. She clicked it. Up came her neighbor’s website.

Mr. Better was a sweet old man who hated only three things: dogs, dog poop and people whose dogs pooped on his lawn. He’d put a webcam in his front window to publicly shame them. At the moment, its livestream showed Noah carrying a bouquet up her walk.

Her breath came back as a laugh. Did he really think he could make up with her?

With his wife and cats dead, Mr. Better had one thing left to love: his neighbour, Joan. He mowed her lawn, fixed her plumbing and generally let her make him feel useful. He even insisted, after she’d admired his wife’s jewelry, that she take the nicest pieces for putting up with him. She’s like a daughter, he told himself while sitting at his computer, and so innocent.

Mr. Better watched Klinsmen knock on Joan’s door. He didn’t know she had a boyfriend, and he didn’t like the look of him. If he were expected, why not park in front of her house, not two doors down in front of his?

While Noah knocked, Joan slashed open her padded headboard and pulled out her money belts. She grabbed her go bag from under the bed, her purse from the dresser, and slipped down the hall to the back door. Dammit. Her car was in the driveway. She couldn’t get to it, let alone get away without Noah getting her.

Her cat wandered in. “Sorry, Cora,” she said and slipped out the back door.

Joan crept to the other side of the house, an alley shadowed by the six-foot stockade fence surrounding her back yard. She’d considered it an ideal feature when she moved in, never suspecting that Noah would use the front door. She crouched behind her AC unit, took her tablet from her go bag and pulled up Mr. Better’s cam.

Noah paced her stoop. He shook the flowers and kept opening his mouth, wanting to yell. Undeterred Mr. Better crossed the street. Joan heard him call from the sidewalk, “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Joan.” Noah held up the half-bent flowers.

“I don’t think she’s home,” Mr. Better said.

“How would you know?” Noah said.

“This is a nice street. People look out for each other.”

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.

Automatic Sky

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.

A projection of Sonhar’s sky as viewed from her father’s estate fills the walls of the command dome: the binary suns, three of the five major moons, and a shining silver ring like a bridge to them all. The wonders complement Marina, with her bright eyes, broad pretty face, and exaggerated mouth, and they make Hub forget his own world, which is more like the speck.

He taps the ring in his breast pocket. It’s still there. To afford its red diamond, he had to fly all the way to Fantin’s Planet, fifty-two folds, and mine the stone himself. He has little to give, but he can give her effort.

The ansible bongs. The readout displays Marina’s transmission code. He picks up the receiver. He could run her voice through the aircom, but Hub likes feeling her mouth close to his ear.

“Ahoy,” he says.

“Hubbert, where are you?”

“Near Elsanna.” The frozen dwarf planet, slightly squashed, slides across his starboard monitor.

“Thank goodness.”

“I said I’d come back.”

“Don’t kid, Hub. Something’s wrong.”

“Are you alright? I could get there sooner if—”

“No, don’t. I don’t know what’s happening. Stay away till I—”

The ansible drops the call. Hub smacks it. It’s an older model, which he bought from this guy he met, and hitting it sometimes works. Not this time.

When Marina doesn’t call back after a minute, he tries her. No response. Worse, the ansible detects no receiver on her end. He runs a diagnostic, that is, he pries the ansible out of the console, flips it over and makes sure nothing burned out or broke inside. All looks well. He replaces the ansible.

There could be a problem with the local network. Hub has to confirm his landing reservation anyway, so he calls her district’s spaceport. No receiver detected.

He stares at the speck. He tries the district transmission centre to check on outages. No receiver. Not even a message saying they have better things to do than reassure him. He calls five numbers in five random districts. No receivers.

Hub calls another solar system entirely.

“Pick up or delivery?”

Hub hangs up. The ansible does work.

He glances at the suns topping the rotunda. The Betsys give off so much light, the sky is white: a perfect picnic noon, Marina would call it. Her skin refuses to tan, and on days like this it glows as if she were becoming light herself. When going to meet her at some out-of-the-way spot with a basket and blanket, he can see her from half a kilometer away. His beacon.

Hub drums his fingers on the navigator. Folding inside a solar system is foolish, given the multiple proximate gravities deforming space. The fuel and effort aren’t worth the time saved and risk of being sucked into a planet or moon. Sonhar is 44.4 hours away, though, and he could cut that in half at least.

The navigator takes five minutes to resolve a fold that will take him only 2% closer, but put him in a position to make a 7% fold. Hub punches it. The monitors blacken, flicker and change. Elsanna has shrunken to stern. Sonhar, now on the under monitor, remains a speck.

The navigator hums, the ship maintains its impetus of SoL .09, and Hub calls the transmission centre floating above Pemecks, the gas giant one orbit out from Sonhar. He worked there for a year, which is as long as he has ever worked anywhere, and someone might remember him. The ansible finds a receiver, but it’s engaged. Hub waits for a connection until the fold comes in, hangs up and punches it.

Sonhar’s pixels have divided like cells in a dish. Thirty minutes pass. The Pemecks line comes free, but no one engages him. Hub tries one of the gas plants circling the planet. They funnel their calls through Sonhar for security, but this plant is owned by Marina’s father. A year ago he hired Hub away from the transmission centre to maintain his transports and six months later he asked him to work on his estate. When Hub moved to Sonhar, he should have returned the plant’s list of private transmission codes. They’re all engaged, probably trying to reach Marina’s father. Hub folds again.

The fourth resolution will take forty-eight minutes. Hub has the ansible bong through the aircom like a heartbeat, but now that he knows Pemecks is still there, he doesn’t need the centre or the plant to answer until the fold is nearly in. He’s done a calculation himself. In forty-six minutes the light from Sonhar at the time Marina called will reach its neighbor, and Pemecks can tell him if Sonhar is also still there.

Hub spends the time floating through the Sonharn sky. On the estate he maintained the family’s hoppers. One morning, at her command, he took Marina up and gave her some lessons. She proved a fair hand with the stick. They started flying every day, and every day they talked, a hopper’s cramped cabin inspiring intimacies the hoppers’ hanger never could have. His stories took her beyond Sonhar, which she had never left. Her smile took him beyond the world, and often he came to, as if from a deep sleep, worrying about their fuel levels. Pushing himself around the dome, Hub wishes he could program an image of her floating with him.

The fold comes in. Before punching it, Hub lets the ansible bong a few more times. His father once told him: When you’re digging a well and you don’t hit water, dig another meter before you quit. You don’t want to go through life thinking you missed a chance by the length of your arm.

His father was right. Pemecks answers. Hub shouts, “What happened to Sonhar?” over their “Why are you on this line?” Then Hub parries their “Who is this? Stop trying us,” with “No, tell me. What’s going on?” Hub hears yelling in the background. Pemecks disconnects. Hub calls back. The ansible bongs unanswered for three more minutes before he folds.

The last resolution will take more than an hour. The fold will put him near Sonhar’s largest moon. He hopes he won’t need it. He hopes he can glide there at .09, chatting with Marina the whole way. In twenty-nine minutes he’ll know if he can. That’s when he’ll meet the light coming from Sonhar himself.

The suns are falling. A wisp of rich blue rises along the eastern horizon. After a day of flying, he and Marina would sit on the steps of a folly her father had built and watch it grow. “The promise of night,” he called it one day. “The promise of space,” she said. And after the stars emerged, she took his hand for the first time. Two weeks later the twilight saw her kiss him. In a month she was relieved that noon couldn’t talk and a pillar blocked her father’s view from the main house. Tomorrow those steps are where he’ll propose, and he doesn’t care who thinks it folly.

Hub propels himself to the forward monitors. Sonhar has become a dot no less dirty than the speck. He can’t bear to see the planet looking so cold. Hub applies some filters. The dot turns a vibrant blue set off by her ring and the scattered pearls of her moons. It seems to breathe.

That’s what Marina longs to see: the world and distance from it. As soon as he puts his ring on her finger, he’ll take her right here, then teach her how to fold. He’ll let her tune the sky to any world’s she wants because he won’t need Sonhar’s anymore.

With five minutes left Hub sits. With three he tries Marina. Hub hears muttering between the bongs. With one minute left he hangs up. The mutters were resolving into Marina’s voice.

A purple line angles from the top of the monitor and pokes through the planet. Hub initiates various sensor readings, then reinitiates those his fingers refused to key correctly. The planet glows red. The line extends to the bottom. The readings come in. The planet’s being drenched in gamma radiation. The ozone layer is disintegrating. The suns start washing Sonhar with UV. After nearly two minutes the line’s trailing end leaves the top of the monitor, slips through the planet like a finger from a ring and drains out the bottom.

Sonhar’s sky billows pink around the planet and chases the gamma ray jet. One by one the moons also turn red as if in sympathy. The rings look as sharp as a knife-edge.

Hub drifts into the sky. The suns feel hot on his back, although that’s not part of the program, and he shivers like dust. Is this simulation all that’s left of Sonhar? No. The suns will set. Tomorrow they’ll rise. No one is likely to see them.

Hub removes the monitor’s filters, and all the color goes out of the world. He turns off the sky, and all the color goes out of the dome. The walls are grey and tangled with pipes. Paint peels off the buttresses. The dome is spattered with drops of random fluids. Marina deserves a better ship than this to take her into space.

She’s in reach. She could be alive. She won’t survive for long, nor will he, but she will see the heavens and he will see her.

The fold comes in. Hub punches it.