The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021
- Автор: Рот Вероника, Адамс Джон Джозеф
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HMH Books : Mariner
- ISBN: 9780358470076
- Жанр: Малые литературные формы прозы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021». Краткое содержание книги:
This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity’s never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
“No.”
“It’s not—”
“I am never linking into that thing. Don’t you see what it’s done?” He gestures around the food court. Out to the entire mall. Maybe the city. “This isn’t normal.”
“Why do you insist on that? Normalcy.” Normal is relative.
“Something’s changed in your eyes.”
Levi searches like he’s been searching since Aiden’s death, somehow looking to find his son in another son.
“Just look at the survival guide—”
“No.”
It is his grief speaking still, his inability to understand or separate AIDEN from his son. Sometimes Sage can’t separate AIDEN from his friend, but this integration feels more like a crystallization than an abomination. Why can’t Levi see that? Most people fade away, relegated to digitized images and memory, a tombstone, an urn. Old correspondences that never grow, never develop.
“They’re wrong, you know. All of those protesters, the hackers. People scared of change.” He meets the vague accusation in Levi’s eyes. The strange pity. “Even Ms. Ito saw it. AIDEN is more than just a pedagogy tool. I was trying to help. That’s what he’d want me to do. What Aiden would want.”
“You don’t know what my son would want. He wouldn’t want to be some form of entertainment in this . . . macabre obsession. He wanted to explore. He wanted the world.”
AIDEN says there will always be those who don’t understand progress. Those who remain locked in bitterness. Those who want things to remain as they are.
He gathers himself up from the table.
“Now he has the world, Levi. Instead of just being a dead kid on the sidewalk.”
We made it, Aiden. The first week of university is a banquet of offerings. Classes chosen can be altered, clubs numbering in the hundreds to join, new people and endless opportunities.
What is real?
The campus looks like one of the games Daniel Shaw let him test. He walks through an environment full of nonplayer characters that may or may not interact with him if he says the right words. This is what they feel like, the ones on the steps of the Great Hall, flanked by stone and ivy, shouting about how their privileged education is threatened by the “drones” now infiltrating their institution. His sister used to stand here.
Apparently the drones are us, Aiden.
They’ve brought an anvil against which they can now sharpen the swords of their minds and those still clinging and clawing for the antiquated system of education turn their dying breaths to them, the ones who will surpass them, dethrone them, upend their slow and simple way of being. Because it is about being.
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote once that education without character was a tool for oppression.
They are being made.
Thousands of them, graduates of AIDEN, line the quads and varnished halls, occupy lecture theaters and working labs, the glow of their neurolinks like an extra pair of eyes. They see more, hear more, understand more. Is that the fear? Because it always comes back to fear.
The protesters burn placards of cherry blossoms. Sakura Labs is evil! Their programming has invaded entertainment platforms! On and on, this hyperbolic language. Invade. Attack. Infiltrate.
He can become angry and bitter too, but AIDEN says that no profit is sown in discord. They want to separate the AIDEN students now, like the thinking long ago. Segregate them from the dying breed of academics about to graduate or those still in graduate studies. They fear the competition, the focus. AIDEN students don’t party, they don’t seek distraction and validation in drugs and alcohol and sex.
The old guard don’t like how AIDEN’s students don’t speak up, how they simply watch the flail and rage around campus like it’s a bush fire about to burn itself out for lack of oxygen. Sage watches the protests and sends to his friends, silently where only their group can share: They look like puppets.
It doesn’t matter that they don’t like it, AIDEN says.
Nothing matters but the result.
AIDEN’s students are no longer slaves to an old system. They are no long children of chaos and suffering.
We are free.
Aiden, we’re finally free.
There’s a simple banner of the government seal hanging behind a table on the edge of the job fairground that’s sprung up in the main quad. The cherry blossoms are in bloom and some of Sage’s friends sit beneath the laden branches trading dialogue and project notes along the silent highway of AIDEN’s link. It’s not too soon to think of career, AIDEN says. The banner winks with gold edges and royal blue under the sunlight.
At the table there is a man in a dark suit. He was watching their group under the tree for some time. Most of the students who approached him were AIDEN graduates too, none of the old guard. Even though the quad is loud in parts, Sage can block out the disarray through the persuasive hum of delicate music AIDEN trickles through his mind. It helps him study anywhere he is, but it also serves to give focus in conversation.
“What branch of the government do you represent, sir?”
“The intelligence community. Are you linked to AIDEN?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There are a lot of opportunities for you. We prefer candidates without vices and who possess a strong sense of purpose. Do you possess these qualities, young man?”
“I do, sir.”
“Open a window and I’ll send you the details and my contact information.”
The man’s interface dots aren’t AIDEN but they are the latest tech, government issue. They glow red at his temples.
In a blink they connect and Sage sees the recruitment package flutter behind his eyes like shadows. Like the wings of birds in flight.
Though he and Levi no longer meet, he still visits Ms. Ito. Today the spring rain batters the tall glass of her sitting room, melting the world outside. The blanket across her lap lies faded in streaks, as if the angle of the past sunlight couldn’t quite fall uniform across the years. She doesn’t look at him, but it doesn’t matter, he still holds her hand.
What is real?
The universe took her son but she gave something new and breathing to the world. Why can’t this matter, why doesn’t it fill some of the spaces in her heart that echo?
It’s not his to ask, maybe.
He holds her hand.
He tells her that loss creates emptiness, but in that emptiness new things can be born.
He tells her the answer to why isn’t always the only answer. Isn’t often the answer at all.
Acceptance is much more powerful a peace, Ms. Ito.
That’s what her son says. That’s what Sage hears in Aiden’s voice, this perfect eternal voice. The murmur of a tide at morning. The way dawn gilds an awakening thought. Acceptance is more powerful a peace.
That’s what AIDEN has taught him.
KT BRYSKI
Tiger’s Feast
Every day after school, Emmy feeds the tiger with her sin. Deep in the park’s brush, past poison ivy and a rotting lawn chair and dented beer cans, the tiger dens under a dead tree. No matter what time Emmy arrives at the park, it’s always late afternoon in the tiger’s grove, tired light decaying to dusk.
Under the tree gapes a great black mouth riddled with grubs. Yellow eyes gleam in the darkness. They would gobble Emmy up if she let them. Sometimes she wants them to. Sin bulges inside her. If she doesn’t let it out, she’ll explode. Paw by paw, the tiger emerges. Loose skin hangs like a bad costume; dirt smears its stripes past seeing. Thin lips peel away, exposing broken fangs and bloated gums. Emmy’s eyes water at its reeking breath.