The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (54 page)

“Can you hear me?” I ask. “Are you there?”

The robot:

I power up the robot and key the download sequence, reinstalling the rescued memory core.

The robot's screen flickers. The blue smiley face appears in the center, split with spiderweb cracks.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hello, Tesla,” the robot says.

“How do you feel?”

“I am well,” the robot says. “I believe you saved my life.”

The hole closes in my chest, just a little.

The robot's clean, symmetrical lines and tarnished purple surface glow. The robot is perfect. I stand up.

“How may I thank you for your help, Tesla?”

“Is there a way I can become a robot, too?”

The robot's pixelated face shifts; now the robot's expression frowns. “I do not know, Tesla. I am not programmed with such knowledge. I am sorry.”

I think about the speculative technical papers I read, articles Bernardo forwarded to me.

“I have a hypothesis,” I tell the robot. “If I could power myself with enough electricity, my electromagnetic thought patterns might be able to travel into a mechanical apparatus such as the computer hub.”

(Consciousness uploads aren't feasible yet.)

“I believe such a procedure would be damaging to your current organic shell,” the robot says.

Yes, I understand electrocution's effects on biological tissue. I have thought about it before. (Many times. All the time.)

The robot says, “May I suggest that you consider the matter before doing anything regrettable, Tesla?”

And I reply:

The robot says: “I should not like to see you deprogrammed and consigned to the scrapping plant for organic tissue.”

And I reply:

The robot says: “I will be sad if you die.”

I look up at the frowning blue pixel face. And I think of Jonathan and Bernardo returning and finding my body stiff and blackened, my fingers plugged into the power grid.

The robot extends one blocky hand. “Perhaps I would be allowed to devise a more reliable solution? I would like to understand you better, if that is acceptable.” The blue lines curve up into a hopeful smile.

The robot is still here. Jonathan and Bernardo are here. Melinda and Kimberly are here. I'm not a robot (yet), but I'm not alone.

“Is this an acceptable solution, Tesla?” the robot asks.

I take the robot's hand, and the robot's blocky fingers slowly curl around mine. “Yes. I would like that very much.” Then I ask the robot, “What would you like me to call you?”

How to become a robot:

1. You don't.
   

2. Not yet.
   

3. But you will.
   

Nathan Ballingrud
is the author of
North American Lake Monsters: Stories
and the novella
The Visible Filth.
He lives with his daughter in Asheville, North Carolina.

• The progenitive image of “Skullpocket”—a small group of young ghouls staring longingly through a cemetery gate at a glittering fair—sat in my brain for a couple of years before I finally figured out the story that went along with it. When I did, I was afraid to write it. Until that point I'd been writing what I think of as southern, blue-collar horror stories, and I worried that I wouldn't know how to write something that pulled from such a different aesthetic. Of course, that was precisely the best reason to try. I drew from my deep love of Mike Mignola's comics, Tim Burton's animated gothics, and the universal fear of a wasted life, and threw it all into the pot. Now I feel I'm just getting started. I want to write a book about Hob's Landing, covering the century of the Wormcake family's interactions with the town and how each transformed the other over time. Uncle Digby is already compiling his master's correspondence for me; the work begins soon.

T. C. Boyle
is the author of twenty-five books of fiction, including
The Harder They Come
(2015) and the second volume of his collected stories,
T. C
.
Boyle Stories II
(2013). His stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including
The New Yorker
,
Harper's Magazine
,
The Atlantic
,
Esquire, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Playboy
, and
The Kenyon Review.

• Though I work in many modes—pride myself on it, in fact—the ones that come most naturally to me are the whimsical, the absurd, and the surreal. I cut my writing chops on Coover, García Márquez, Calvino, Cortázar, Grass, Pynchon, Barthelme, Genet, Beckett, and a host of others who abjured straight-ahead realism and created playful, erudite works that showed me a whole new way of seeing. “The Relive Box” is a recent return to my roots. The story represents my reflections on virtual reality and how absorbing gaming can be (just like entering a story or novel, for that matter, either as author or reader). Of course, as many readers will know, the technology referenced here is very close to being reality, though the downloading of an individual's consciousness hasn't quite been perfected yet. Be pleased to know that I am working out the glitches in my basement lab and that the prototype of the X1520 Relive Box is virtually complete. I expect to begin marketing the first model within a year. So watch out!

Adam-Troy Castro
's twenty-six books include the Philip K. Dick Award–winning
Emissaries from the Dead
, first of a trilogy about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator, Andrea Cort. His most recent short story collection is
Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories
, published in 2014. This year has seen the penultimate installment of his series of middle-grade novels about a very strange and very courageous young boy who just might save us all,
Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows.
Castro lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, with his wife, Judi, and the usual writerly assortment of cats.

• Fiction writing can be a mysterious process in that there are no consistent rules governing which whimsical premise explored as a lark peters out in failure after a thousand not-very-satisfying words and which one develops its own gravity as those words begin to accrue. “The Thing About Shapes to Come” is a manifestation of that phenomenon. When I typed the first sentence about the child born in the shape of a cube, I had absolutely no idea that the story was headed anywhere but escalating absurdity. But the emotions deepened even as the details got sillier, and somehow by midstory I found I was writing a tale of a mother's defiance in the face of all possible barriers to a true relationship with her child. By composition's end, my heart demanded some firm indication that all this devotion was rewarded. None of this was planned before it happened. The story chewed the author like gum. More than one anxious reader, caught up in the strangeness of it all, has fervently begged for some clue to what happens after my protagonist walks through the doorway. I always reply that it was a very private and emotional moment between mother and daughter and that it would be churlish of us to intrude any more than we already have.

Neil Gaiman
is the best-selling author of books, graphic novels, and short stories for adults and children. Some of his most notable titles include the novels
American Gods
,
The Graveyard Book
(the first book ever to win both Newbery and Carnegie medals), and
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
(the U.K.'s National Book Award 2013 Book of the Year)
.
More recently published were his
New York Times
best-selling short story collection,
Trigger Warning
, and the enchantingly reimagined fairy tale
The Sleeper and the Spindle
(with illustrations by Chris Riddell). Born in England, Gaiman now lives in the United States with his wife, the musician and author Amanda Palmer.

• I wrote
Neverwhere
, a novel about London Above and London Below, in 1997. About five years later I began to write “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back,” but after two pages I put it away and wrote something else instead. It wasn't until the BBC did an adaptation of
Neverwhere
and I spent an afternoon listening to it that I realized how much I missed the characters and the world.
This is great
, I thought.
I wish there was more.
But the only way there would be more was if I wrote it.

So I began this story as a way of finding my way back to London Below. The Marquis de Carabas (I pronounce it
Marquee
) is a rogue and a dealer in favors and obligations. Three quarters of the way through the book he is killed and restored to life. This happens after that. My thanks to Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin for offering it a home in their
Rogues
collection, and to the editors of this volume for picking it.

Theodora Goss
is the author of the short story collection
In the Forest of Forgetting
, the accordion-style novella
The Thorn and the Blossom
, and the poetry collection
Songs for Ophelia.
With Delia Sherman, she coedited the first
Interfictions
anthology. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” won the World Fantasy Award. She lives in Boston and teaches at Boston University as well as in the Stonecoast MFA Program.

• “Cimmeria” was inspired by one of my favorite stories, Jorge Luis Borges's “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” I first read it as a college student, around the time I was trying to figure out how to write. I was an immigrant, a Hungarian who had lost her country and language, who had grown up in this strange new society. I took a class on the Latin American magical realists and started reading literature that brought the magical and real together in that way, which made sense to me. My actual lived experience made sense when I read Isabel Allende and Milan Kundera. Toward the end of “Tlön,” archaeologists begin finding “hrönir,” objects created by expectation, essentially recreating the past. My practical mind, trained as an academic, thought,
They must have journals to write up their findings.
So I came up with a
Journal of Imaginary Archaeology
, and from there it was a logical step to the
Journal of Imaginary Anthropology
, to the creation of entire civilizations. And then I thought about the academics involved: Who would they be, how would they react? Because academics are human, after all: their personal lives intertwine with their research. But the story is also meant to be flipped inside out, because who are these Americans believing that they created the ancient civilization of Cimmeria, which has existed for more than two thousand years? The flip side is a story about hubris and imperialism, about the American and European tendency to believe that Western civilization has somehow created the rest of the world. The story is meant to be both stories at once, its own shadow. And then, right around the time it was published, war broke out in the Crimea.

Alaya Dawn Johnson
is the author of six novels for adults and young adults. Her novel
The Summer Prince
was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Her most recent,
Love Is the Drug
, won the Norton Award. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including
Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Subterranean, Zombies vs. Unicorns
, and
Welcome to Bordertown.
In addition to the Norton, she has won the Cybils Award and the Nebula Award (for the story included in this anthology) and been nominated for the Indies Choice Award and the Locus Award. She currently lives in Mexico City.

• I have a vampire problem. If you asked me five years ago, I would have said I didn't much like vampires. But then I wrote two historical vampire novels. A momentary lapse, I thought. And then came a vampire short story. And another. At this point it occurred to me that I might need some help. I started this particular vampire story four years ago, while attending a conference in Bologna, Italy. I wrote nearly half of the first draft longhand, in my Moleskine, with my Lamy fountain pen (the hipster writing accessories are no surprise to those who know me, but I usually reserve them for note-taking, not drafting). Why northern Italy would inspire a story about a vampire apocalypse in Hawai'i I could not tell you—but there they were. Hungry, insatiable, waiting. At the moment my vampire problem seems to be in remission, but I've learned not to underestimate their temptation, or their bite.

Kelly Link
is the author of the collections
Get in Trouble
,
Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners
, and
Pretty Monsters.
She and Gavin J. Grant have coedited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror
and, for young adults,
Monstrous Affections.
She is the cofounder of Small Beer Press. Her short stories have been published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Best American Short Stories
, and
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.
She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts.

• Of the various stories that I've managed to write in the last ten years, “I Can See Right Through You” is the one that, when I think about it, I feel a certain sense of satisfaction that stems from the fact that I wrote it at all. I knew how I wanted to start it and I knew how I wanted to end it, and then for over a year I tried to work my way from point A to point B. I wrote so many versions of the first thirteen pages that eventually I began saving them in numbered drafts, just to see if there was something I could figure out from the progression of wrong to different to still-wrong to okay-I-guess to here's-something-salvageable-if-only-I-can-figure-out-how-to-incorporate-it that would make writing other stories easier. The problems, it seemed to me, had to do with speed and motion of the various parts, not to mention the problem of who Meggie and Will ought to be. I had a sense of their relationship, but the characters themselves changed gender, age, sexual orientation, and degree of fame from draft to draft to draft until I had a pair of characters who seemed exactly themselves, as if the true versions had been there all along. I had in mind from the start certain stories—all demon lover stories—by Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Bowen, and especially Joyce Carol Oates's “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” The other thing I had in mind was something that the writer Holly Black had told me about an interview with either Leo DiCaprio or Kate Winslet and something one of them said about their relationship—first, the intimacy and isolation and strangeness of making a movie like
Titanic
and the kind of closeness that evolves under those circumstances and, afterward, during the promotion of such a monumentally popular movie. Once I got past the first thirteen pages, I still bogged down at certain crucial points in the story. The writers Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, and Sarah Rees Brennan threw me a rope every time.