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.
Audra hit her keyboard hard with angry fingers. Where is Dagmar?
The cursor vanished. Dagmar’s icon hovered for a while, and then it, too, vanished.
Audra kept typing, knowing the cowards would get the message when next they dared log in. You’re going to die. You’re all going to die of the plague because you wouldn’t let us do our jobs. May the pox take you and the plague finish you.
No other curse felt more potent; there was nothing as transgressive and shocking than to wish this awful death on another human being. Audra slammed her fist against her desk.
“What happened?” Colin’s voice seemed from another world, but for once it was a welcome distraction. Audra relaxed her clenched jaw and tried to answer him calmly.
“I don’t know. I thought . . . I thought I was talking to Dagmar.” She sounded helpless to her own ears.
Colin rested a hand on her shoulder in a rare gesture of comfort, but then his fingers spasmed hard against her collarbone. “What’s that?” he asked harshly, leaning over her to peer at her screen.
A rush of new, unread messages clustered thickly down the page, chiming faintly on arrival until they all merged into one long, high-pitched pulsation. Audra muted the sound. “Someone’s flooding the Network with data files. But who . . . how? We always save our work to our network daily . . . hourly.”
She tapped a message open, not caring for once that Colin was reading over her shoulder. “Who’s AES?” he asked.
Dagmar’s Alexander, the guardian and investor angel of the Network. She went cold again. She had fallen out of the habit of hope. If it was something this big, it had to be bad.
Then the lab phone rang. Audra answered it absently without checking the caller identity, her eyes still reading the titles of the incoming messages on her overwhelmed screen. “Dr. Lee here. How can I help you?”
“Hello, Dr. Lee. Sorry to be a nuisance. We found a lot of information, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to organize it for us. We’ll be very busy for a little while.” Slightly accented English, oddly antique phrasing, and a little quaver of age or weakness over it all.
“What?” Audra dropped her professional tone. “Who is this?”
“She trusts you to pull it all together. Remember, no one is indispensable. Continue the work!”
With a click, the caller vanished into the ether, whether of his own will or no, Audra could not tell. “Oh God, no,” she whispered. Was Dagmar dead, or dying? Imprisoned? Injured? How had they silenced her? Was the Network at risk? She began to pull drawers open, scrambling for old physical backup disks and storage cards to plug into her main and save the new messages.
“What can I do?” Colin demanded. “How can I help?”
“You can’t,” Audra wailed. “I don’t have time to explain this to you. Just give me some space. I have to get all this before it disappears, too!”
An answering wail came from the inner room of the sealed section—Maisie waking in distress, either because of Audra’s shouting or some other, personal nightmare. She walked into the half-light of the lab, crying inconsolably, and curled up with her blanket near the air lock entryway.
“Help her,” Audra begged Colin, and turned her back to them both.
She worked long hours into the early morning, saving files and sending frantic notes to others on the Network. Replies and fresh news came in for her to read, and slowly the cascade of chaos began to resolve itself into a quantifiable situation with a potential solution.
“Oh, Gilles,” Audra said softly. “I wish it had been aliens.”
Dagmar, or someone under her direction, had discovered and unlocked a secret cache of research. Not only recent, ongoing research by many of the leading scientists in the field (including some recent unpublished papers by Zhang, Trevor, and Ali that Dr. Pereira would love to see), but also transcripts of commentary from an internal forum featuring names from several of the most famous research institutes. Audra laughed to herself a little bitterly. They had been investigating similar areas: phage therapy, of course, as well as immunotherapy and stem cell therapies and potential antimicrobial drugs. And they had shared none of it with the wider world.
Why? Audra wanted to believe in incompetence, not malice, but she knew how hard the Network had tried to get information from these same institutes. She couldn’t help but imagine the worst. Beyond all conspiracy theory, what if the silence from the mainland, and the missing journalists, and the darkening corners of the web were only partly due to the plague? What if there was a cull—not a purposeful, engineered attack, but a carefully curated neglect? Keeping the best chances of prevention and cure for those who could afford to pay for it . . . a kind of plutocratic manifest destiny.
Their central medical systems and institutions hadn’t collapsed, not really. They’d been hit hard, but they hadn’t given up. They’d consolidated. And they’d quietly narrowed focus, deciding who was worthy of being saved, and waiting for time to take care of the rest.
Hot fury surged through Audra’s veins. She knew triage, and she would not dignify this with that name. This was pure, arbitrary selfishness that would see millions of innocents die so that rich old men could live a few months longer in an emptier world. She would take up the challenge they had abandoned and stay true to her declaration of ethics, if not for Dagmar, then for Maisie.
Maisie.
Audra hadn’t heard so much as a sniffle from her direction for ages. She looked through the barrier and saw Colin lying in the recliner with Maisie in his arms, all wrapped up snug and comfortable in her blanket. They were both sleeping soundly. She smiled.
And then, quietly, she came up to the barrier and slowly pressed her hands against it, pushing against the contaminated air of the interior. “Colin. Colin . . . why?”
Unmasked, pajama-clad, cheek to Maisie’s flushed and tear-damp cheek, her brother held his child with a peacefulness that was its own kind of saintly defiance.
Dr. Pereira assigned Antonio to monitor and care for Colin and Maisie, another favor that Audra did not dare request but for which she was deeply grateful. She literally did not know how to feel anymore; there was never a moment of unalloyed joy or pain. She missed Dagmar and worried about her to the point of full grieving, and yet she was ablaze with the excitement of Dagmar’s discovery and focused on the work of redirecting their research efforts to take advantage of the new data. The week that Antonio reported the emergence of Colin’s pox symptoms was the same week that Jennifer relayed a massive breakthrough from a group of community clinics in Kerala.
By the time Colin’s sores had scabbed over and healed up, the first phage trials in Kerala were underway. Audra thought about having a small party to celebrate both . . . and then received the news that though the cure had been successful, the attempt to make the cure infectious by droplet transmission had triggered a cytokine storm in test subjects. The fatality rate had reached as high as 80 percent in some groups.
Jennifer’s lip twisted bitterly. “We wanted a cure that would be more infectious than the disease. We didn’t anticipate that the immune system would overreact to it. But don’t worry. We’re going to make some changes and try again. We’re close, Audra. I promise.”
Months later, Kerala confirmed that the problem had been solved. But the day Audra began to synthesize doses of the cure in her lab according to version two of the Kerala formula was the day she first heard Maisie cough and knew that this was it, this was what they had feared all along. A ticking timer went off in the back of her brain, and she pushed it further back into the shadows to be in company with her feelings about Dagmar and her brother and her niece. No use dwelling on what she could not change.