The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Of The Year Part 54

She looked at me long and hard. "Of course I was." She sighed, and her expression was once again distant, unreadable. "More than you'll ever know."

ITERATION.

JOHN KESSEL.

John Kessel lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. A writer of erudite short fiction that often makes reference to or pastiches popular culture, Kessel received the Nebula Award for the novella "Another Orphan" and for the novelette "Pride and Prometheus." He has published a range of impressive short fiction, including a series of time travel stories featuring character Detlev Gruber (the most recent of which is "It's All True"), and a series of science fiction stories set in the same world as James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner "Stories for Men." Kessel's short fiction has been collected in three volumes, Meeting in Infinity Meeting in Infinity, The Pure Product, The Pure Product, and and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence The Baum Plan for Financial Independence, and he has published three novels: Freedom Beach Freedom Beach (with James Patrick Kelly), (with James Patrick Kelly), Good News from Outer s.p.a.ce, Good News from Outer s.p.a.ce, and and Corrupting Dr. Nice Corrupting Dr. Nice. He and Kelly also co-edited the anthology The Secret History of Science Fiction The Secret History of Science Fiction, that makes the case for the rapprochement, over the last forty years, of literary and science fiction.

Enzo worked at the checkout in Tyler's Superstore. Tyler's had started life as a grocery but now offered a farmer's market, a bakery, a deli, a butcher shop, aisles of housewares, appliances, tableware, crockery, a pharmacy, a huge wine section, CDs and DVDs, photo reprints, small furniture, an optometrist, and a section for TVs and electronics. The ambient lights were low and soothing, the music bland, the employees, like Enzo, treading water. Enzo would be stuck at Tyler's until the place was driven out of business by some still-more-gargantuan sensorium that sold everything from new spouses to plastic surgery.

Until then he worked checkout. "Where is the bottled water?" asked a harried woman trailing a crying toddler.

"Over there, ma'am, aisle six, under that big blue sign that says Bottled Water."

She glared at him. "Don't be smart."

When she turned her back, Enzo flipped her off.

Kwasniewski, the a.s.sistant manager, saw him, stalked over, and gave him a five-minute tongue-las.h.i.+ng.

The store was filled with worn-out people 24/7. Like Enzo, they were spending money they didn't have. The global economy, the news told them, was booming. So why was everybody he knew working two jobs and living from one paycheck to the next? Why did everybody buy lottery tickets? Why did they try out for Become Megarich! Become Megarich! and and You Can't Be Too Thin! You Can't Be Too Thin! then watch those shows or a dozen like them nightly on various screens in astonis.h.i.+ng lifelike splendor? then watch those shows or a dozen like them nightly on various screens in astonis.h.i.+ng lifelike splendor?

The magazines at the checkout counter were plastered with bright images of celebrities-beautiful people getting married, getting pregnant, getting divorced, getting arrested, going into rehab, getting out of rehab, having affairs, gaining weight and then losing it again. Everybody wanted to be a celebrity. If you weren't a celebrity, you might as well kill yourself.

At night he went home and surfed the web.

At home that night Enzo received an anonymous email headlined "Re-invent the world." No text-just a link.

The link took him to a black screen with the single word, Iteration, in purple. Enzo clicked on it, and was led through a series of images and instructions. On the screen came up a simulation of the city. Using keyboard commands or mouse clicks or touchscreen gestures, you could zoom in on a neighborhood, a street, a single building-home or business-or even an individual person. Or you could back off to see the state, the country, the continent, even the globe itself.

You could alter any element of the simulation. The function page read: 1) You may change one small thing per session.

2) One session per 24-hour period Just a fancy MUD, with superior graphics. Still, it was interesting. Some major code writing had gone into this.

Enzo typed in his first change: good coffee.

The next morning Enzo could barely keep his eyes open. He had stayed up too late. After two hours working checkout Enzo saw Kwasniewski coming for him. He was carrying a cup of coffee.

"Take a load off your feet, Enzo." Kwasniewski handed him the cup. "Ten minutes."

The coffee was just the way he liked it, sweet and hot. Astonished, Enzo sat in the break room and watched Kwasniewski work the register.

The sofa in the room did not reek of mildew like it usually did.

When he came back to the register, Kwasniewski moved down to spell Cindy in the next slot.

Enzo looked it up: iteration was a mathematical process whereby one arrives at the correct answer for an equation by subst.i.tuting an approximate value for X-a guess, in effect-then running it through the equation. You then put the new answer in place of X and run it through again. Each repet.i.tion produces a more exact answer.

"Clean water," Enzo typed in that night.

The next day Enzo's battered junker wasn't in the slot outside his apartment. Instead of a car key on his key ring he had a key to a bike lock that released a s.h.i.+ning new streetbike with cargo carrier on back. Enzo rode the bike to work. It seemed like half of the employees arriving that morning came on bikes. The traffic in the streets was less. Little electric vans dropped people off at their work and stores.

Tyler's seemed subtly different.

Among the celebrity magazines, one bore the photo of a homely kid with big ears who scored the highest on the national merit scholars.h.i.+p test.

Enzo changed one thing every night. But the next morning he could never remember what he'd chosen. Every day he inspected the world and vaguely speculated about what had been altered. Small things.

But of course, everything was tied to everything else, and whatever you changed, changed things around it, connected to it, or even distant things, tied by a long thread of a.s.sociations.

How many hits was the Iteration site getting? How many people, Enzo wondered, were entering their own changes into Iteration every day?

By the end of the week the store seemed much smaller, and less busy. The people who came in looked more rested. They knew Enzo by name. They joked about politics, but there was no edge of anger in their voices.

The woman from last week came in. Enzo was surprised to realize that he now knew her name-Mrs. Carmello. She looked a little dazed. "Where is the bottled water?" she asked.

Instinctively, Enzo looked over to Aisle 6. A big blue sign said Fruit Juice. "Bottled water?" He smiled. "Why would anyone bottle water, Mrs. C? You might as well try to sell air."

There are data sets in iteration that converge to single points, called attractive fixed points. Enzo wondered what point his series was converging toward? But it wasn't just his series. It was everybody's.

And what if somebody was making bad changes? Not everyone agreed what was bad or good. Bullies. Risk takers. Sociopaths. Did they have their own versions of Iteration? Were they at work in Enzo's world?

On the cover of the magazines was the team of volunteers who were working in the Paraguay economic miracle. Or Mrs. Shanks, a New York City librarian. Or some programming geek. He wasn't sure this was an improvement. Who wanted to read about librarians?

Infant mortality was at a historic low. People were calling it the best TV season since 1981. Psychiatrists were switching to internal medicine. The Buffalo Bills won the Super Bowl. Glaciers were returning to western Greenland.

The blizzard hit in early March and paralyzed the city. Enzo was riding the streetcar up Summer Street through a cloud of white when an electric van skidded through a stoplight and broadsided them. Enzo was thrown onto a thin elderly man with a green m.u.f.fler wrapped around his neck. As Enzo helped the old man up, amid the shaken pa.s.sengers, he saw that the woman driving the van had gotten out, looking dazed, her hand to her head. As he watched, a pickup truck followed the van through the stoplight and slid sideways into the van, pinning the woman between the vehicles. The jolt to the streetcar knocked the old man's head against a seat rail and drove Enzo to his knees.

The woman's screams tore through the swirling snow. People called 911 but the rescue vehicles were slow to respond. The old man, unconscious, bled profusely from a cut on his scalp. A number of pa.s.sengers tried to help free the screaming woman from the van wreck while Enzo cradled the old man's head in his lap, holding the green m.u.f.fler against his scalp to stop the bleeding. The air was bitterly cold and snow blew so thick outside the streetcar that Enzo could not see the building facades thirty feet away. Whose idea was this blizzard? The accident?

Was it anyone's idea? An unintended consequence?

The people on the streetcar and scattered pa.s.sersby worked to free the woman. They kept her alive until the ambulance finally arrived. "She'll lose that leg," Enzo heard one of the EMTs, whose face was blanched white from the cold, say. The old man watched Enzo with patient eyes. When the medics finally came to take over from Enzo, the old man smiled weakly at him. "Thank you," he said.

If he should make a small mistake it would get corrected automatically, and might even speed up the approach to the final result.

No one on the streetcar, Enzo realized,could have prevented the accident.There was really n.o.body to blame. But the people had dealt with it, in small ways, as best they could. People, when they had to, behaved remarkably well.

Enzo's next change: better prosthetics.

Iterates may be categorized into stable and unstable sets depending on whether a neighborhood under iteration converges or diverges. Some move toward stability, others away.

Enzo told himself the changes he made were for everyone's good. And people would like them. Or at least they would act like they did.

As best he could tell, life got better. Some things still went wrong. For instance, one morning when Enzo awoke there was a woman in the bed beside him. She was very beautiful. The previous night had been glorious. She slid out from beneath the covers. He touched her arm, and she faced him.

"I have to go now," she said. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black.

"Please don't."

"This is supposed to be an improvement," she said.

"It is."

"Not for me." She gathered up her clothes and left.

Enzo did not have to be at work for two hours. He got out of bed and put on some clothes. He made a cup of coffee. It was hot and sweet. He sat at his kitchen table and wrote a poem.

A lovely woman Left her scent on my pillow.

There are no small things.

THE CARE AND FEEDING OF YOUR BABY KILLER UNICORN.

DIANA PETERFREUND.

Diana Peterfreund grew up in Florida and graduated from Yale University with degrees in Geology and Literature. She has been a costume designer, a cover model, and a food critic, and her travels have taken her from the cloud forests of Costa Rica to the underground caverns of New Zealand. She is the author of the four books in the "Secret Society Girl" series, as well as young adult novel Rampant Rampant, a contemporary fantasy about killer unicorns, and its sequel, Ascendant Ascendant. She has also written film novelization Morning Glory Morning Glory, several short stories set in the killer unicorn world, and critical essays about popular young adult and children's fiction. Diana lives in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, with her husband and daughter, and is hard at work on her next young adult novel, a post-apocalyptic retelling of the Jane Austen cla.s.sic, Persuasion Persuasion.

"Cool. It's a freak show," says Aidan. "I didn't know they had those anymore."

I don't think we're supposed to call them freak shows. Though I know my parents would freak if they knew I was anywhere near one. Too much nudity, too many pathways into the occult.

The tent is near the back of the carnival, decorated with garishly painted plywood signs and lit by a string of lights at the entrance flap that does little more than cast long shadows, obscuring most of the ads.

So far, the carnival has been pretty lame. There's a Ferris wheel, but it costs four dollars to go around a single time-Yves says they must have to pay a fortune for insurance. The hot dogs look ancient and shriveled, and taste more like jerky. The cotton candy is deflated, the funnel cake soggy, and they aren't selling anything cool like deep-fried Twinkies. I had to beg my parents to let me come too. You see, the fairgrounds back up to the woods, and I'm not allowed anywhere near the woods anymore.

Maybe if we played some games on the midway it would have been fun, but Aidan p.r.o.nounced them childlike and insipid, suitable only for jocks and their sheeplike followers, and we all agreed. Except for Yves, in a move clearly designed to recall my collection of bobble-headed monkeys that we'd ama.s.sed over several summers spent being childish and insipid at the Skee-Ball range down the sh.o.r.e.

Yves loves telling cringe-worthy stories about the dumb stuff we used to do, especially since last fall. Most especially whenever he catches me flirting with Aidan.

"Ewww," says Marissa, insinuating herself and her bare-midriff top between Aidan and me. "A two-headed cow? Is it, like, alive?"

"Probably not," says Yves from behind us. "I bet it's pickled."

I look over my shoulder and wrinkle up my nose at him. Yves's eyes are dark, framed by even darker lashes that were always too long and full for a boy. His hands are balled up in his jacket pockets and he's giving me one of those long piercing looks that have been another one of his specialties since last fall.

Summer refuses to go inside the freak show, citing how inhumane it is to put people with deformities up on display. But a quick glance at the signs out front reveals only one sideshow performer whose "qualities" don't seem self-inflicted: the wolf-boy. The others are a tattooed man, a sword swallower, and some guy called the human hanger who looks like his claim to carnival fame is dangling stuff from his body piercings. Gross. Maybe my parents have a point. I move down to examine the next sign, and freeze.