The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (35 page)

“Where the fuck do you get off, harassing a sick woman?” I blurt into the phone, loudly enough that Shary looks up for a moment and regards me with her impassive cat eyes.

“Your wife isn't sick,” George Henderson says. “She's . . . she's amazing. Could a sick person create one of the top one hundred kingdoms in the entire world? Could a sick woman get past the Great Temptation without breaking a sweat? Grace, your wife is just . . . just amazing.”

The Great Temptation is what they call it when the nobles come to you, the Royal Wizard, and offer to support you in overthrowing the monarch. Because you've done such a good job of advising the monarch on running Greater Felinia, you might as well sit on the throne yourself instead of that weak figurehead. This moment comes at different times for different players, and there's no right or wrong answer—you can continue to ace the game whether you sit on the throne or not, depending on other circumstances. But how you handle this moment is a huge test of your steadiness. Shary chose not to take the throne, but managed to make those scheming nobles feel good about her decision.

Neither George nor I have said anything for a minute or so. I'm staring at my wife, whom nobody has called “amazing” in a long time. She's sitting there wearing a tank top and absolutely nothing else, and her legs twitch in a way that makes the whole thing even more obscene. Her tank top has a panoply of stains on it. I realize it's been a week since Shary has gotten my name right.

“Your wife is an intuitive genius,” George says in my ear after the pause gets too agonizing on his end. “She makes connections that nobody else could make. She's utterly focused, and processing the game at a much deeper level than a normal brain ever could. It's not like Shary will be the only sufferer from Rat Catcher's Yellows at this convention, you know. There will be lots of others.”

I cannot take this. I blurt something, whatever, and hang up on George Henderson. I brace myself for him to call back, but he doesn't. So I go find my wife some pants.

4.

Shary hasn't spoken aloud in a couple of weeks now, not even anything about her game. She has less control over her bodily functions and is having “accidents” more often. I'm making her wear diapers. But her realm is massive, thriving; it's annexed the neighboring duchies.

When I look over her shoulder, the little cats in their Renaissance Europe outfits are no longer asking her simple questions about how to tax the copper mine—instead, they're saying things like “But if the fundamental basis of governance is derived from external symbols of legitimacy, what gives those symbols their power in the first place?”

She doesn't tap on the screen at all, but still her answer appears somehow, as if through the power of her eye blinks: “This is why we go on quests.”

According to one of the readouts I see whisk by, Shary has forty-seven knights and assorted nobles out on quests right now, searching for various magical and religious objects as well as for rare minerals—and also for a possible passage to the West that would allow her trading vessels to avoid sailing past the Isle of Dogs.

She just hunches in her chair, frowning with her mouth, while the big cat eyes and tiny nose look playful or fierce, depending on how the light hits them. I've started thinking of this as her face.

I drag her away from her chair and make her take a bath, because it's been a few days, and while she's in there (she can still bathe herself, thank goodness), I examine the cat mask. I realize that I have no idea what is coming out of these nose plugs, even though I've had to refill the little reservoirs on the sides a couple times from the bottles they sent. Neurotransmitters? Pheromones? Stimulants that keep her concentrating? I really have no clue. The chemicals don't smell of anything much.

I open my tablet and search for “divine right of cats,” plus words like “sentience,” “becoming self-aware,” or “artificial intelligence.” Soon I'm reading message boards in which people geek out about the idea that these cats are just too frickin' smart for their own good and that they seem to be drawing something from the people they're interfacing with. The digital cats are learning a lot, in particular, about politics and about how human societies function.

On top of which, I find a slew of economics papers—because the cats have been solving problems, inside the various iterations of Greater Felinia, that economists have struggled with in the real world. Issues of scarcity and resource allocation, questions of how to make markets more frictionless. Things I barely grasp the intricacies of, with my doctorate in art history.

And all of the really mind-blowing breakthroughs in economics have come from cat kingdoms that were being managed by people who were afflicted with Rat Catcher's Yellows.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Shary is a prodigy; she was always the brilliant one of the two of us. Her nervous energy, her ability to get angry at dead scholars at three in the morning, the random scattering of note cards and papers all over the floor of our tiny grad-student apartment—as if the floor were an extension of her overcharged brain.

It's been more than a week since she's spoken my name, and meanwhile my emergency sabbatical is running out. And I can't really afford to blow off teaching, since I'm not tenure-track or anything. I'll have to hire someone to look after Shary, or get her into day care or a group home. She won't know the difference between me or someone else looking after her at this point, anyway.

A couple days after my conversation with George Henderson, I look over Shary's shoulder, and things jump out at me. All the relationship touchstones that I embedded in the game when I customized it for her are still in there, but they've gotten weirdly emphasized by her gameplay, like her cats spend an inordinate amount of time at the Puzzler's Retreat. But also, she's added new stuff. Moments I had forgotten are coming up as geological features of her Greater Felinia, hillocks and cliffs.

Shary is reliving all of the time we spent together, through the prism of these cats and their stupid politics. The time we rode bikes across Europe. The time we took up Lindy-hopping and I broke my ankle. The time I cheated on Shary and thought I got away with it, until now. The necklace she never told me she wanted that I tracked down for her. It's all in there, woven throughout this game.

I call back George Henderson. “Okay, fine,” I say, without saying hello first. “We'll go to your convention, tournament, whatever. Just tell us where and when.”

5.

I sort of expected that a lot of people at the “convention” would have RCY after the way George Henderson talked about the disease. But in fact it seems as though
every
player here has it. Either because you can't become a power player of
Divine Right
without the unique mind state of people with Rat Catcher's, or because that's whom they were able to strong-arm into signing up.

“Here” is a tiny convention hotel in Orlando, Florida, with fuzzy bulletin boards that mention recent meetings of insurance adjusters and auto parts distributors. We're a few miles from Disney World, but near us is nothing but strip malls and strip clubs, and one sad-looking Arby's. We get served continental breakfast, clammy individually wrapped sandwiches, and steamer trays full of stroganoff every day.

The first day, we all mill around for an hour, with me trying to stick close to Shary on her first trip out of New Hampshire in ages. But then George Henderson (a chunky white guy with graying curly hair and an 8 Bit T-shirt) stands up at the front of the ballroom and announces that all the players are going into the adjoining ballroom, and the “friends and loved ones” will stay in here. We can see our partners and friends through an opening in the temporary wall bisecting the hotel ballroom, but they're in their own world, sitting at long rows of tables with their cat faces on.

Those of us left in the “friends and family” room are all sorts of people, but the one thing uniting us is a pall of weariness. At least half the spouses or friends immediately announce they're going out shopping or to Disney World. The other half mostly just sit there, watching their loved ones play, as if they're worried someone's going to get kidnapped.

This half of the ballroom has a sickly sweet milk smell clinging to the ornate cheap carpet and the vinyl walls. I get used to it, and then it hits me again whenever I've just stepped outside or gone to the bathroom.

After an hour, I risk wandering over to the “players” room and look over Shary's shoulder. Queen Arabella is furiously negotiating trade agreements and sending threats of force to the other cat kingdoms that have become her neighbors.

Because all of the realms in this game are called “Greater Felinia” by default, Shary needed to come up with a new name for Arabella's country. She's renamed it “Graceland.” I stare at the name, then at Shary, who shows no sign of being aware of my presence.

“I will defend the territorial integrity of Graceland to the last cat,” Shary writes.

Judy is a young graphic designer from Toronto, with a long black braid and an eager narrow face. She's sitting alone in the “friends and loved ones” room, until I ask if I can sit at her little table. Turns out Judy is here with her boyfriend of two years, Stefan, who got infected with Rat Catcher's Yellows when they'd only been together a year. Stefan is a superstar in the Divine Right community.

“I have this theory that it's all one compound organism,” says Judy. “The leptospirosis X, the people, the digital cats. Or at least, it's one system. Sort of like real-life cats that infect their owners with
Toxoplasma gondii,
which turns the owners into bigger cat-lovers.”

“Huh.” I stare out through the gap in the ballroom wall, at the rows of people in cat masks all tapping away on their separate devices, like a soft rain. All genders, all ages, all sizes, wearing tracksuits or business-casual white-collar outfits. The masks bob up and down, almost in unison. Unblinking and wide-eyed, governing machines.

At first Judy and I just bond over our stories of taking care of someone who barely recognizes us but keeps obsessively nation building at all hours. But we turn out to have a lot else in common, including an interest in Pre-Raphaelite art, and a lot of the same books.

The third day rolls around, and our flight back up to New Hampshire is that afternoon. I watch Shary hunched over her cat head, with Judy's boyfriend sitting a few seats away, and my heart begins to sink. I imagine bundling Shary out of here, getting her to the airport and onto the plane, and then unpacking her stuff back at the house while she goes right back to her game. Days and days of cat-faced blankness ahead, forever. This trip has been some kind of turning point for Shary and the others, but for me nothing will have changed.

I'm starting to feel sorry for myself with a whole new intensity when Judy pokes me. “Hey.” I look up. “We need to stay in touch, you know,” Judy says.

I make a big show of adding her number to my phone, and then without even thinking, say: “Do you want to come stay with us? We have a whole spare bedroom with its own bathroom and stuff.”

Judy doesn't say anything for a few minutes. She stares at her boyfriend, who's sitting a few seats away from Shary. She's taking slow, controlled breaths through closed teeth. Then she slumps a little, in an abortive shrug. “Yes. Yes, please. That would be great. Thank you.”

I sit with Judy and watch dozens of people in cat masks, sitting shoulder to shoulder without looking at each other. I have a pang of wishing I could just go live in Graceland, a place of which I am already a vassal in every way that matters. But also I feel weirdly proud, and terrified out of my mind. I have no choice but to believe this game matters, the cat politics is important, keeping Lord Hairballington in his place is a vital concern to everyone—or else I will just go straight-up insane.

For a moment, I think Shary looks up from the cat head in her hands and gives me a wicked smile of recognition behind her opaque plastic gaze. I feel so much love in that moment, it's almost unbearable.

SAM J. MILLER

FROM
Uncanny Magazine

Craig Perry, university administration employee

J
UDY GARLAND, DEAD
. That's where it started. Dead five days before, in London, “an incautious overdosage” of barbiturates, according to the coroner, and her body had just come back to New York for burial. Twenty thousand people lined up to pay their respects. Every gay man in Manhattan must have gone, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't go see her in that coffin and disturb the delicate Dorothy Gale I had in my head. I don't know, I needed to move, to walk, to run. To do
something.
So I headed for the Hudson River Piers.

My sadness buoyed me up, made me feel like I was looking down on the entire city. I watched the sky go blue and orange and red and purple and indigo as the sun set, then watched the lights come on across the river in Jersey City. June 1969: The wet Manhattan air was like sick breath coming out of our collective throat.

I felt it in me, then. A spark. I didn't see it for what it really was, but I felt it.

That's why I went to the Stonewall.

Sadness is a better spark than rage. I remember thinking,
Revolutions are born on nights like this.
So many people would be mourning Judy. We'd all be miserable together. What couldn't we do, if we were all on the same page like that? Now it sounds like I'm trying to be portentous, given what ultimately went down that night, but I really did have that feeling.

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop