The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 3

  “Can you?”

  “To Purth-Anaget, of course. They’ll go nuts. Collectors down there eat this shit up. But security will find out. I’m not even going to come back on the ship. I’m going to live off this down there, buy passage on the next outgoing ship.”

  “Just get me the audience, it’s yours.”

  A virtual shrug. “Navigation, yeah.”

  “And Emergency Services.”

  “I don’t have that much pull. All I can do is get you a secure channel for a low-bandwidth conversation.”

  “I just need to talk. I can’t send this request up through proper channels.” I tapped my limbs against my carapace nervously as I watched the fence open its large, hinged jaws and swallow my case.

  Oh, what was I doing? I wept silently to myself, feeling sick.

  Everything I had ever worked for disappeared in a wet, slimy gulp. My reason. My purpose.

  • • • •

  Armand was suspicious. And rightfully so. It picked and poked at the entire navigation plan. It read every line of code, even though security was only minutes away from unraveling our many deceits. I told Armand this, but it ignored me. It wanted to live. It wanted to get to safety. It knew it couldn’t rush or make mistakes.

  But the escape pod’s instructions and abilities were tight and honest.

  It has been programmed to eject. To spin a certain number of degrees. To aim for Purth-Anaget. Then burn. It would have to consume every last little drop of fuel. But it would head for the metal world, fall into orbit, and then deploy the most ancient of deceleration devices: a parachute.

  On the surface of Purth-Anaget, Armand could then call any of its associates for assistance.

  Armand would be safe.

  Armand checked the pod over once more. But there were no traps. The flight plan would do exactly as it said.

  “Betray me and you kill me, remember that.”

  “I have made my decision,” I said. “The moment you are inside and I trigger the manual escape protocol, I will be unable to reveal what I have done or what you are. Doing that would risk your life. My programming”—I all but spit the word—“does not allow it.”

  Armand gingerly stepped into the pod. “Good.”

  “You have a part of the bargain to fulfill,” I reminded. “I won’t trigger the manual escape protocol until you do.”

  Armand nodded and held up a hand. “Physical contact.”

  I reached one of my limbs out. Armand’s hand and my manipulator met at the doorjamb and they sparked. Zebibytes of data slithered down into one of my tendrils, reshaping the raw matter at the very tip with a quantum-dot computing device.

  As it replicated itself, building out onto the cellular level to plug into my power sources, I could feel the transfer of ownership.

  I didn’t have free will. I was a hull maintenance form. But I had an entire fucking share of a galactic starship embedded within me, to do with what I pleased when I vested and left riding hulls.

  “It’s far more than you deserve, robot,” Armand said. “But you have worked hard for it and I cannot begrudge you.”

  “Goodbye, asshole.” I triggered the manual override sequence that navigation had gifted me.

  I watched the pod’s chemical engines firing all-out through the airlock windows as the sphere flung itself out into space and dwindled away. Then the flame guttered out, the pod spent and headed for Purth-Anaget.

  There was a shiver. Something vast, colossal, powerful. It vibrated the walls and even the air itself around me.

  Armand reached out to me on a tight-beam signal. “What was that?”

  “The ship had to move just slightly,” I said. “To better adjust our orbit around Purth-Anaget.”

  “No,” Armand hissed. “My descent profile has changed. You are trying to kill me.”

  “I can’t kill you,” I told the former CEO. “My programming doesn’t allow it. I can’t allow a death through action or inaction.”

  “But my navigation path has changed,” Armand said.

  “Yes, you will still reach Purth-Anaget.” Navigation and I had run the data after I explained that I would have the resources of a full share to repay it a favor with. Even a favor that meant tricking security. One of the more powerful computing entities in the galaxy, a starship, had dwelled on the problem. It had examined the tidal data, the flight plan, and how much the massive weight of a starship could influence a pod after launch. “You’re just taking a longer route.”

  I cut the connection so that Armand could say nothing more to me. It could do the math itself and realize what I had done.

  Armand would not die. Only a few days would pass inside the pod.

  But outside. Oh, outside, skimming through the tidal edges of a black hole, Armand would loop out and fall back to Purth-Anaget over the next four hundred and seventy years, two hundred days, eight hours, and six minutes.

  Armand would be an ancient relic then. Its beliefs, its civilization, all of it just a fragment from history.

  But, until then, I had to follow its command. I could not tell anyone what happened. I had to keep it a secret from security. No one would ever know Armand had been here. No one would ever know where Armand went.

  After I vested and had free will once more, maybe I could then make a side trip to Purth-Anaget again and be waiting for Armand when it landed. I had the resources of a full share, after all.

  Then we would have a very different conversation, Armand and I.

  * * *

  Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work.

  His novels and over seventy stories have been translated into eighteen different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author.

  He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com

  Waiting Out the End of the World at Patty’s Place Cafe

  By Naomi Kritzer

  I ran out of gas in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, just 200 miles short of Pierre, my goal. Pierre, South Dakota, I mean, I wasn’t trying to get to someone named Pierre. I was trying to get to my parents, and Pierre was where they lived. I thought maybe, given that the world was probably ending in the next 24 hours, they’d want to talk to me.

  I’d taken back roads almost the whole way from Spokane, hoping to avoid the traffic jams. I also figured that out-of-the-way gas stations would run out of gas less quickly. That turned out to be true for a while. The problem was that the back-roads gas stations weren’t getting deliveries, either. The last gas I’d found was in Billings. If they’d let me fill up, I might have been able to make it all the way to Pierre on that tank, but the owner, who was overseeing the line with a large gun hanging over his shoulder, was only letting people buy eight gallons per car. Admittedly, that was probably the only reason they weren’t completely out.

  I turned my car off and checked my map. Belle Fourche was just 12 miles from I-90. I didn’t know exactly how much gas I still had, but the low fuel light had been on for a while and I wasn’t sure I could make it that far. I tried calling the gas stations along the interstate, but of course no one was picking up. If you had 16 hours left to live, would you spend that time working at a gas station?

  I rubbed my eyes, numb with fatigue and fear. If nothing else, maybe I could find somewhere in Belle Fourche to get coffee.

  • • • •

  Subway and Taco John’s had fallen victim to the “would you go to your job if you maybe had 16 hours left to live” problem, but I saw the lights on in Patty’s Place, a wood-framed building with a sign out front advertising REAL BBQ EVERYDAY, RIBS THURS NITE. The sign said to seat yourself. I looked around and finally spotted an empty spot in a corner by the window. Even just sitting down in a seat th
at didn’t have a steering wheel in front of it made me realize how exhausted I was. Possibly I should have taken a few more naps. Or a longer nap at some point.

  There was a TV in the corner with CNN on. The talking heads were arguing the asteroid’s projected trajectory, and whether the worst-case scenarios were actually too grim. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was probably 10km across. This one was 4.36 km. Big enough to cause devastating damage, but the scientist on the left thought it might just wipe out coastal cities but allow the inland areas to rebuild. The other scientist thought that encouraging people to migrate inland before the strike was a terrible idea because people were dying in their desperate attempts to escape the coasts, and this was completely unnecessary if the asteroid missed us. And if it didn’t, anyone who survived the strike would die in the fifty-year famine caused by the dust cloud blocking out all sunlight. “Seriously, folks, just hunker down wherever and wait to see what happens,” he said. “And hey, if we survive this, maybe consider re-opening the Arecibo Observatory, if it hadn’t lost funding we’d be able to map the trajectory—” His voice was rising, furious.

  “Coffee, hon?”

  I looked up at the waitress. “Yeah, thanks. And thanks for coming to work.”

  She poured me a mug of coffee. “I’m actually Patty, the owner. I figured I might as well come in and feed people as stay home feeling sorry for myself. Do you know what you want? I should warn you we’re out of a few things.”

  “I think I feel like breakfast,” I said.

  “I can bring you a big plate of pancakes and syrup. We’re out of bacon and sausage. If you want eggs, we’re down to those cartons of just egg whites but we could make those into an omelet for you.”

  “Pancakes and syrup sounds good,” I said.

  “You come far?”

  “From Spokane. I’m trying to get to Pierre but I ran out of gas.”

  I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. Maybe someone else was heading east, and I could beg a ride from them. Maybe someone in town would sell me the gas out of the car in their garage. Maybe maybe maybe. I wasn’t really in any shape to drive any further. Pierre was just a couple hours away, and there was a Super 8 across the street; maybe I could get a room and nap for a few hours before I tried driving any further. It was probably just as well if I got home right before the impact, if I wanted Mom to talk to me.

  The coffee was exactly like I remembered South Dakota coffee. Dip a bean three times in the hot water and call it good.

  “Hon, can I put two more people at your table? Your food’s going to be a while but I’ll keep the coffee coming.”

  I opened my eyes and looked up at Patty, and the two people standing behind her. “Sure.” They slid into the booth across from me.

  They were an older couple. Well, middle-aged, I guess. The man had white hair; the woman had reddish hair.

  “You look like you’ve been driving for a while,” the woman said, sympathetically. “You can go back to your nap, if you want.”

  It felt a little too uncivilized to ignore people sitting across from me, and besides, Patty had refilled my coffee. “My name’s Lorien,” I said. “Or Kathleen. I mean, Kathleen’s the name my parents gave me.”

  The couple exchanged a look I couldn’t quite untangle, and I tried to sit up a little straighter. “I’m Robin,” the woman said, “And this is Michael. And if Lorien’s your name, it doesn’t really matter to me what your parents called you.”

  “It’s kind of out of Lord of the—”

  “You’re among nerds,” Robin said, “We got it.”

  Michael was looking at the menu. “I wonder if they’ll have the caramel rolls,” he said. “There was a picture of the caramel roll in one of the reviews, but I bet everyone’s wanted caramel rolls…”

  “That seems likely,” Robin said. “Have you eaten anything here, Lorien?”

  I shook my head. “I ordered pancakes but they haven’t come yet.”

  Patty came by. They were indeed out of caramel rolls but they had a caramel bread pudding. They were also out of hamburger buns, although they could offer you a hamburger on sliced bread. Michael ordered a hot turkey sandwich, Robin ordered meatloaf.

  “I bet they made the bread pudding out of those hamburger buns,” Robin said when Patty had left.

  “That seems like a questionable business decision,” Michael said.

  “I bet they made the bread pudding out of those hamburger buns because someone in the kitchen thought, ‘screw good business decisions, I want to eat something sweet and comforting and we’re out of caramel rolls.’”

  “Are you heading east?” I blurted out. They seemed like really nice people. Like people who might give me a ride.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Robin said. “We’re coming from Minnesota and heading to Yellowstone, actually.”

  “If you’re coming from the west, maybe you know where we could find gas?” Michael asked me.

  “I haven’t found gas since Billings, that was five hours ago, and they’re rationing,” I said.

  “Well, that’s promising,” Robin said, and pulled out her phone to look up the map. “…Totally not on our way, though. Hmm.”

  “I was really hoping we’d find some here,” Michael said.

  “Why are you going to Yellowstone?” I asked.

  “We’ve never been there,” Michael said. “Figured we might as well go check it out.”

  “You didn’t want to be with family?”

  “We said goodbye to my family before we left,” Michael said.

  “And Michael’s family is my family,” Robin said. “Family 2.0.”

  I must have looked a bit shocked, because Robin glanced at Michael and shrugged a little. “This isn’t my first Armageddon,” she said. “You could say it’s my third.”

  Patty arrived with my pancakes, plus sodas for Robin and Michael. Once the pancakes were in front of me, I realized that I was ravenous. Someone had turned up the TV in the corner: a new scientist was on, a guy named Scott Edward Shjefte, who was reminding everyone that in cosmological terms, an asteroid passing between the earth and the moon was a “direct hit” and yet there were 363,104 kilometers for a 4.36 kilometer object to pass through. “Imagine throwing a penny at a football field and trying to miss the 30-yard line. You’d feel pretty good about those odds.”

  “Not so much if the world was going to end if the penny hit the 30-yard line,” the host said. “Besides, this asteroid’s already beaten the odds, being spotted so late.”

  “So it would have to beat the odds twice!” Shjefte said. He sounded committed to this idea, not like he was grasping at straws, but the host didn’t look at all convinced.

  They agreed again that everything would be better if the Arecibo Observatory was still running, since the radio telescope there could have determined the asteroid’s trajectory with actual precision, and also, that the President’s order to launch nukes at the asteroid wouldn’t have done anything even if they hadn’t missed.

  “Do you think I’m panicking over nothing?” I said.

  Robin looked me over. “How old are you? You look about twenty five.”

  “I’m twenty-three.”

  “My first Armageddon was when I was a little kid, back in the 1970s. Have you ever heard of the Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They’re the people who knock on your door.”

  “I was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and when I was little, everyone at my church believed that the world was going to end in October of 1977. A lot of the adults sold their houses. My parents didn’t, but my father used up all his vacation time to take days off and knock on people’s doors.” She took a sip of soda and leaned back against her seat. “He used to take me around with him, because people are a little less likely to slam the door on a cute little kid. Only a little, though. It was hard. My Dad used to tell me ‘just keep walking, just keep knocking,’ that eventually people would listen. That actually
stood me in good stead years later when I was trying to get jobs in theater.” She looked at me. “Did you grow up in a church?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “The kind that believed in the Rapture and stuff?”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t have a — a date, you know, when everyone thought it would happen. Just, like, soon.”

  “Are you still a member?”

  “No,” I said, and ducked my head over my pancakes. After a minute, Robin went on.

  “I am a male-to-female transsexual. When I was little, and people would talk about the earthly paradise, I knew I’d receive a resurrected body and anything wrong with it would be miraculously fixed, but I couldn’t ask, did that mean I’d get a girl’s body? Or that I’d stop wanting a girl’s body? Because both options were actually terrifying to me at that point. One meant that my parents would find out, since of course they’d be in paradise with me, and the other meant I’d somehow be someone else.”

  I had looked up when she said “transsexual,” looking her over without really meaning to. I’d met trans women before, back home in Spokane, and I was looking at her because I was wondering if this should have been obvious to me and I was just that tired. There are places where if you meet someone you know they’re queer, but a diner in South Dakota isn’t really one of them.

  “Anyway. The sun rose on November 1st, and all the adults pretended that no one had ever said the world was going to end the previous month. And that was my first Armageddon.”

  Robin’s and Michael’s food arrived. “I’m definitely going to want some of the bread pudding,” Robin told Patty, “when I’m done with this.”

  “We’ve also got a big pineapple upside down cake that’s coming out of the oven right now,” Patty said.

  “Oh, excellent, I’ll have that!” Michael said.

  “Anyway, you can probably guess why Michael’s family is my family,” Robin said.