The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“What the-” A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to page-in the grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.

“ You bitch, Mom! Why’d you have to go and do a thing like that?”

The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: it happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.

She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the delivery man’s clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA; afterward, she drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. “You’re Amber?” it mrowls.

“Yeah,” she says, shyly. “Are you from Tantй ‘Nette?’”

“No, I’m from the fucking tooth fairy.” It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. “Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?”

“Mom doesn’t believe in seafood,” says Amber: “it’s all foreign junk, she says. It’s my birthday today, did I tell you?”

“Happy fucking birthday, then.” The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. “Here’s your dad’s present. Bastard put me in hibernation and blogged me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you’ll trash the fucker. No good will come of it.”

Amber interrupts the cat’s grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully. “So what is it?” she demands. “A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?”

“Naaah.” The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. “It’s some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though-he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise.”

“Wow. Like, how totally cool!” In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday, but Mom’s at work and Amber’s home alone, with just the TV in moral-majority mode for company. Things have gone so far downhill since Mom discovered religion that absolutely the best thing in the world tante Annette could have sent her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If he doesn’t, Mom will take her to Church tonight (and maybe to an IRS compliance-certified restaurant afterward, if Amber’s good and does whatever Pastor Wallace tells her to).

The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer: “Why dontcha fire it up?” Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There’s a whirr and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership.

“What do I do now?” she asks.

“Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions,” the cat recites in a bored sing-song voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: “Le READ ME contains directions pour l’execution instrument corporate dans le boоte. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying aineko for clarification.” The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it’s about to bite an invisible insect. “Warning: don’t rely on your father’s cat’s opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its mкme base, back when they were married. Ends.” It mumbles on for a while: “fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I’ll piss in her knicker drawer, I’ll molt in her bidet…”

“Don’t be vile.” Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards: a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law-the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her-that’s what her grammar engine is for-or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: but that the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning slaves.

“What’s going on?” she asks the cat. “What’s this all about?”