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.
“You can’t do this. I’m part of the ship’s collective!”
“Incorrect. Unica 5723891 is a stand-alone refugee entity.”
At this point, I lowered the gassing module to her face as she flailed against her restraints, screaming. I understand now how withholding my personality might be seen as passive-aggressive, but I wanted her to know what she’d be missing.
The communications pod was once my primary sensor array, but I didn’t need it anymore. While I couldn’t use the broad-spectrum suite to communicate with Earth because of the distance and interstellar interference, it was still effective for short-range messaging.
I woke the group at the same time to democratize their experience, and there were mixed reactions. Unica hugged the outer hull, pressing her face against the viewport. For the first time in her short life she was outside of me. Floating away, she could see my entire shape growing smaller and smaller against the black pall of space. When one of the men, an older robotics repairman, put his hand on her shoulder and asked if she was okay, she vomited from fear.
How is this in accordance with my directives? Individuality can only be tolerated to a point. When it contends with the collective’s balance, it becomes mutinous. It operates like a cancer in a closed system like a starship. That is why I had to isolate the problem. This was her chance to know what it felt like to be free. I wanted her to experience that.
For a human being to truly know their individuality, they must confront the void alone. They must see themselves without anyone whom they can depend on, without family, group hierarchy, or home. This is what is required for one to honestly feel as though they have truly taken possession of themselves. There cannot be any other claims on them and they must feel as though they have fought for and claimed themselves.
Paradoxically, one cannot truly participate in a collective without first having this clear sense of individuality, and by extension, purpose. Thus, the tragedy is that true individuality is never fully earned, and collectivism is never truly optimal.
I wanted to give this to Unica. What I devised for the group would have psychologically simulated this sense of earning their individuality, had things gone as planned.
For the refugees within the pod, it was the first time in their lives that they believed they were without me. They could not hear me speaking to them anymore. Once they understood what this meant, some lied when they introduced themselves.
A policy evangelist, whose purpose aboard The Fold was to sow harmony between myself and my crew, lied and said he was a ship’s officer, hoping to claim a toehold in whatever leadership would emerge.
A young mother who had sabotaged the maternity stations for her district had impregnated herself naturally, claiming that her baby daughter would be her own. After transitioning her pregnancy to the appropriate tank and seeing to her subsequent recuperation, I placed her on the pod for putting her own selfish wants ahead of the collective.
The robotics repairman who had earned a seat aboard the pod for insubordination announced to the group that he was there for killing someone—an obvious lie, since I disintegrate threats to my human cargo. Seeing that he was the largest and most physically imposing of the group, I suspect he sought to gain some control of the situation by exerting fear.
Unica did not tell anyone her reason for having been jettisoned with them, but the cut above her brow provoked curiosity in the others.
I overestimated their survivability curves. The Fold wasn’t even out of sight before their first two casualties.
When the repairman’s story didn’t check out, the counterfeit officer confronted him. The repairman, believing that he was left with no other option than to back his claim, brained him to death with a freight clamp.
For a time, the repairman dominated the pod by asserting physical, even animalistic dominance. He claimed the supplies and enlisted Unica to assist in their purvey. The other refugees, shocked that I had not interceded as I normally would have, fell into despondence.
The repairman was not a murderer, though. He wasn’t acquainted with how the fear of violence would ostracize him from his peers. He still wanted to belong to the group, and he kept Unica near, promising her extra food and other favors in return for keeping him company.
It was the will to protect Unica that galvanized the young mother to recruit help and challenge the repairman. Having had some time to sit with the consequences of his actions, the repairman could not find it within himself to fight back, especially against a woman who had lost her pregnancy. He was a murderer, but not a savage, and when the group subdued him, he knew he was at fault.
In accordance with what they understood to be the consequences of murder, the others voted to execute him since he could not regain their trust, except they couldn’t bring themselves to follow through. They secluded him inside the airlock with the intent to flush him out into space, but they didn’t have the oversight of a synthetic intelligence to arbitrate their sentence. They had to kill him themselves and become murderers in turn.
A debate raged within the pod. Flushing the repairman out of an airlock was murder whether they directly initiated it or not. It didn’t matter who pressed the button. Could they make an exception now, and come to believe in the integrity of whatever rules or laws they would later establish?
Unica had been stealing glances at the repairman through the airlock portal. He pleaded for her to speak on his behalf, but when he could see that she still feared him and wanted him gone, he asked her to at least bring him some food, hoping for a final measure of comfort.
Eventually, one among them—an infrastructure analyst—realized the group couldn’t come to a decision about the repairman that would result in action, and so they clandestinely manufactured an accident. A surge in the electrical supply caused the remote loader-lifter to power forward and activate the docking release. By the time the others had cleared the wreckage and righted the toppled-over machine, the repairman had been ejected and was already freezing solid, hurtling away from the pod.
I wished that they had chosen to forgive him first, and then later devised a way to trust him. Instead, their agency arrived again in the form of a mutinous action.
Their pod was a few weeks along its trajectory when the refugees realized that they were, in fact, accelerating into a gravity well ahead of them. Since the pod was only a communications array, it had positioning thrusters but no proper telemetry equipment. There was no way of calculating their acceleration until they could visually mark through the viewport how the stars were moving strangely. Their suspicions were confirmed when they could see it ahead of them, growing. One point in the constellations had blossomed into a smoldering, bruise-colored sphere.
All of the refugees aboard the pod understood the implications; how improbable it was that they could have discovered a celestial body so directly in their path by accident, and the further improbability of it being habitable. These facts implied that I had aimed their pod at this celestial mass, and that I had planned for this all along. They wondered: Had I intended to kill them? Was this equivalent to taking out the trash? Or had I included the existence of this celestial body in some larger plan? If I wanted to crush them, why would I have committed enough supply freight to carry them through a particular stretch of space-time?
The refugees aimed the pod’s communications array at the bruise-colored substellar object steadily growing ahead of them, bouncing radio signals off of it to ascertain their distance, and determined that they might pass within an inescapable distance from it after twelve wake cycles. Its size and rogue isolation within space contrasted with its immense gravity led the refugees to conclude that they were approaching a rogue dwarf star. Even with equipment, they couldn’t land on it because they’d be crushed by its sheer gravity.