Shine (45 page)

"I can't hear you--"

"--in two places," Singer says. "--our own map, you know?"

Onscreen, the nearest predator, now fully under Brandon's control, shows him a display of Singer's coordinates. He sees the shapes darting in and out for extra strikes. Sees Singer's coat spreading around his body like blood.

Luckily, his new predator is armed.

Onscreen, he watches the building next to Singer's rooftop transform itself into a pillar of smoke and dust. He hears shouting. He watches them flee. Some of them are hobbling.

The bombing stuff,
he had told Singer,
it's mostly over now.

Really, he had just been getting too good at his job. Too practised. A little too cavalier, perhaps, about human life. A little bit unburdened, possibly, from the crushing constraints of self-awareness.

"--eally don't mess around, do you?"

"Are you okay?"

"...Bleeding."

"There are people coming. And the predator." He circles it, dives low, so Singer will see.

"Should find Tink."

"Fuck the drone. Stay awake."

"Tall order."

Across his stomach, Brandon feels a slight pressure. A hand. Singer's. Slowly, Brandon places his in the same spot.

"--brig you for this, you know."

"It's okay." His hand clenches the clothes.

"This is actually a lot better than I was expecting." Singer's voice is remarkably clear. "You know, this was my lifetime achievement award. For services rendered. I could pick any project. Any person."

The pressure on Brandon's belly increases just a little.

"I'm looking at the moon," Singer says. "It's come out very early, tonight."

Unable to stop himself, Brandon peers out his window. The moon is there, etched on the sky, a shiny coin. "I'm looking at it, too," he says. "I'm right there with you."

"I know you are."

"Singer." He blinks. "Shit, this is hard--"

"No, it's easy." Through the clothes, Singer rubs Brandon's shoulder. "You've made it very easy. If you only knew... how scared I used to be..."

"Of what?"

No answer.

"Of what?" he asks again, staring hard into the sky and keeping his voice, somehow, just above a whisper. "What were you so scared of?"

But the pressure fades, slides away, and his clothes are lighter now with only one man wearing them. Soon, the shadows of his room fill with the chirps of error messages. A missing heartbeat. Lost input. He hears the team arrive on the scene. He hears sirens for the building he has just destroyed.

He realizes, belatedly, that the predator remains under his control.

Then he's going over feeds, inputting street names, finding faces. Tink has logged all the falconers in the area and after that it's just a process of elimination. He checks the faces. This one. That one. He swears he recognizes one of them. Even if it was just a half-second glimpse of bad video. He knows that face. He'll know it forever.

He knows where it lives. And how to destroy it.

"Heiser, what are you doing?"

A stranger's voice. He rips out the earbud. How dare they? Always watching except for when it matters most. His phone rings. He throws it to the other side of the room.

They had warned him about becoming too much of a machine. About identifying too strongly, adopting a mechanistic attitude. As though machines were somehow to blame, and not this thing inside him, this force that roared and spun like a sandstorm. This utterly human thing.

He is already pressing buttons. Already drafting excuses.
They had important footage,
he would say.
They stole it. And then they killed my--

At his window, something buzzes. He turns and sees a single glowing eye, like a firefly, blinking unsteadily in the darkness. Damaged. Broken.

"Tink," he says. He crawls over and scoops her into his palm. She's ripped open and raw--delicate wires now twisted in odd shapes, wings battered. "How did you get here? Did you fight the falcon?"

In his hand, Tink wiggles worm-like, then begins blinking. A moment later her second pair of wings arrives. They fly unevenly, one wing all crushed so the segment moves in circles. Slowly, carefully, they attempt to re-join each other. The pieces don't quite fit, but they keep trying. They blink ceaselessly at each other, bleeding light, struggling to understand what's missing.

He's at Narita, at the duty-free bar, where they serve sample-sized sakes from bottles he still can't quite justify buying. Has his own firm, now. Prefers working for himself. Lives out of his mobile. Currently he's using it to interview a new recruit. She's in Korea. That's where things happen, these days. He's flying there later today.

"I've been told I have kind of an attitude problem," she says.

"How's that?"

"I'm not really good at holding back."

"In what way?"

"I once suggested we would be safer billeted in a fort made out of PET bottles, like those garbage-picker kids make."

He pauses, examines his glass. "Seriously, or were you just mouthing off?"

"...I'm sorry?"

"Were you suggesting it seriously, or were you being passive-aggressive?"

A long pause. "Now that you ask, I'm not so sure."

"Fair enough."

"That's not really why I was let go, though."

"What do you think the reason was?" This answer is never quite the truth, but he likes hearing the recruits' version when they give it.

"They found out I was gay, and then they kicked me out," she says, with a barely-suppressed yawn. "Good riddance."

"You're gay?"

"That a problem?"

"Well... no. Was it a problem for your old team?"

"Only this one girl. Because I was our team's field medic. I tried telling her that it meant I'd know the terrain better than some bullshit ROTC rat fresh out of high school, but that didn't go over too well."

"Shocking."

"I know, huh?" She's laughing. "Anyway. I figured you should know. If you think it's going to be a problem for anybody, I'd rather hear about it now than later."

Over the phone, he hears something rumble. She curses in Korean. Her details say trilingual, medic, once delivered a baby behind enemy lines after rescuing the mother and others from a labour camp. Has no problem with bloodbots or minilabs. Knows how to read their findings. Feels comfortable with placing them in the right people at the right time. Willing to do undercover work to make it happen. Useful, when his latest project involves mapping the wartime spread of sexually-transmitted disease from within the body in order to locate secret rape camps.

"Sorry, but I have to go," she says. "I know it probably sounds bad, me cutting my own interview short, but I think something just exploded a couple blocks away. I'd better get there before the collectors do. Seriously, you would not believe how old some of the shit being fired is. Real relics. It's crazy. People are
selling
it."

"Have fun," Brandon says, and lets her go. She is clearly more at home in her work than in selling herself, anyway, and he likes that. She's younger than he was when he entered the business, and already twice the hero he can imagine ever being. It's a little scary. He hopes she doesn't burn out. It would be a loss. It has been his good fortune to meet exceptional people in his line of work, and his regret to lose some of them. He doesn't do much with these people, just winds them up and lets them go, sometimes nesting them together like hard, bright jewels. Perhaps that's a mistake on his part, his detachment, the way he deals with people remotely.

But he can tell her this later, after he's arrived. She might like to know. All his people might like to know, actually. He should tell them. He should remind them that he knows they work hard and that he appreciates it. He fishes in his pocket for his flashpass and his fingers brush old robot pieces, impossibly chunky and sharp, he reflects that the world has really only made it this far by being composed of people who insist on re-building things stronger than they were before, more lasting and useful, with room for everyone. When he gets there, to where all the hard work is, he'll tell his people he knows how difficult it is. He'll tell them he knows the sacrifice they're making, the strength required to go slow and make steady progress instead of grand gestures. And they'll stare at him and wonder what's wrong and why he gets like this, sometimes, and he'll tell them to be safe and do their best.

I emancipated my robot when she told an elaborate lie. I realized then, that she'd developed a mind's eye.

--Ken Edgett--

About the Authors

Jason Andrew
lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Lisa. By day, he works as a mild-mannered technical writer. By night, he writes stories of the fantastic and occasionally fights crime. As a child, Jason spent his Saturdays watching the Creature Feature classics and furiously scribbling down stories; his first short story, written at age six, titled 'The Wolfman Eats Perry Mason,' was rejected and caused his Grandmother to watch him very closely for a few years.

Madeline Ashby
can be found at her blog, escapingthetrunk.net, and @madelineashby on Twitter. She immigrated to Canada in 2006, where she joined Toronto's Cecil Street Irregulars genre writing workshop. Since then, she has been published in
Flurb
,
Nature
, and
Escape Pod
. When not working on her novel, she's a student of the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program at the Ontario College of Art and Design, a blogger for
WorldChanging Canada
and
Frames Per Second Magazine
, and a fan of anime and manga.

Jacques Barcia
is a speculative fiction writer and information technology reporter from Recife, Brazil. His short fiction has appeared in Brazilian, American and Romanian online markets. He's one of the authors actively supporting Greenpunk.net and the Outer Alliance initiative. When he's not writing, Jacques acts as the lead singer of Brazilian grindcore band Rabujos. He's married and has the smartest, loveliest, bookishiest daughter in the world. Jacques is currently working on his first novel. He can be reached at www.jacquesbarcia.wordpress.com.

Aliette de Bodard
is a French computer engineer who moonlights as a writer, with short fiction forthcoming or published in markets such as
Asimov's
,
Interzone
and
Realms of Fantasy
. She's a Campbell Award finalist and a Writers of the Future winner. Watch out for her debut novel, the Aztec fantasy
Servant of the Underworld
, published by Angry Robot.

Eva Maria Chapman
has successfully pursued a variety of careers; teacher, academic, psychotherapist and director of an energy efficiency company. In her career as author, she is a genre hopper. Her first book
Sasha & Olga
, a memoir, charts the adversities of her Russian refugee family, before and after emigrating to Australia; her second,
Butterflies & Demons
, unveils the extraordinary past of the Kaurna Adelaide Aborigines, combining historic fiction with fantasy. 'Russian Roulette 2020' is her first foray into Science Fiction and has inspired her to embark further into this genre. She is now writing an optimistic novel set in the future. She lives in happy seclusion in a wildlife sanctuary on the edge of Exmoor, England, with her husband Jake. When not writing, or growing vegetables, she likes to make (and wear) hats, party with friends, and frolic with her grandchildren.

Ken Edgett
is a geologist whose research has largely focused on the planet Mars. Working at Malin Space Science Systems of San Diego, California, USA, he targeted tens of thousands of images acquired by the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. In 1997-2002, Edgett was a regular on-air contributor of 1-2 minute science education pieces for a children's television program,
Brainstorm
, produced by KTVK-TV in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. He is the co-author of a children's book,
Touchdown Mars!
, published in 2000, and his first published short fiction was in the 2008 anthology,
Return to Luna
, from Hadley Rille Books. In addition to writing, Edgett's present effort includes that of being the Principal Investigator for a camera aboard the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, launching in 2011.

Eric Gregory'
s stories have appeared in
Strange Horizons
,
Interzone
,
Black Static
,
Sybil's Garage
, and more. He has also written non-fiction for
Fantasy Magazine
and
The Internet Review of Science Fiction
. Visit him online at ericmg.com.

Kay Kenyon'
s latest work, published by Pyr, is a sci-fantasy quartet beginning with
Bright of the Sky,
a story that introduced readers to the Entire,
a tunnel universe next door. Publishers Weekly listed this novel among the top 150 books of 2007. The series has twice been shortlisted for the American Library Association Reading List awards. The final volume,
Prince of Storms
will appear in January 2010. Her work has been nominated for major awards in the field and translated into French, Russian, Spanish, Czech and audio versions. Recent short stories appeared in
Fast Forward 2
and
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two
. She lives in eastern Washington state with her husband. She is the chair of a writing conference, Write on the River, and is currently working on a fantasy novel. All of her work has happy endings, except for those with characters who, alas, must die.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia
was born in the north of Mexico and moved to Canada several years ago. She lives in beautiful, rainy British Columbia with her husband, children and two cats. She writes fantasy, magic realism and Science Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in
Fantasy Magazine
,
Futurismic
,
Shimmer
and
Tesseracts Thirteen
. With the help of editor Paula R. Stiles and a band of eldritch writers she publishes the online zine
Innsmouth Free Press
. Silvia is also working on her first novel and be found online at www.silviamoreno-garcia.com.