The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

She turns and looks back at me. Unimpressed. Tired. “I found something out,” she says. “I was so proud of myself. I actually thought, Brewster’ll be pleased.” She sniffed and pulled in some air. “I got the faces of the guys in the suits, and the guys who mugged your granddaughter. I kept running ’em though, all night long. The cops must know this. But.”

She looks so tired. She looks like she’s going to fall asleep standing up.

“All those guys have Alzheimer’s.”

I let that sink in. Mandy didn’t move. It was as if her whole body was swelling up to cry. She just kept staring out the window.

“Alzheimer’s?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of like Attack of the Zombies? We lose our minds and they send us in to steal. We’re just bodies, meat. They won’t need us for even that soon.”

The grey light through the grey window, on her nose, on her cheeks. It made her beautiful.

I thought of the glasses on the bed, with built-in transcoders. The glasses will tell you who your friends are. They’ll tell you it’s time to take your pill. They’ll tell you that you have a plane to catch, and how to get out of the Happy Farm and where the pickup point is.

I think cheekbones. I think a shrivelled cricket’s face.

“Oh shit,” I say, like my stomach’s dropping out. “Oh, SHIT!” Already I’m walking.

“Brewst?” Mandy kind of asks. Godamn callipers. I’m hobbling up and down like a fishing cork, I’m trying to run and I can’t.

“Brewst. What is it?”

Hey, you know, tears, are streaming down my face? I suddenly feel them. My elbow kind of knocks them off my face. Those bastards, those bastards are making me cry.

“Brewster? Wait.”

Mandy’s tripping after me.

And all I can think is: Jazza. Jazza, you’re worth so much more than that. You used to design things, mix music, girls would look at you with stars in their eyes. Ahhhhccceeeeed! Dancing with your shirt off on the brow of a bridge, young and strong and smart and beautiful. Jazza.

You’re not just a meat puppet, Jazza. I hope.

I’m still crying, and I’m bumping into things because I can’t see.

Back in his room Jazza is sitting up on the edge of his bed staring, looking at the corners of the ceiling like he can’t figure them out. I sit and stare and look at the flesh that’s as shrivelled as his life tight all around his wrists, his ankles his skull, his cheeks.

I’m aware that Mandy’s standing next to me.

I put on Jazza’s glasses. I try a couple of passwords: Age Rage, Silhouette. Nothing. Then I take a stab at something else:

Iron Man.

And then his glasses say to me. “Where did you read comics as a boy?”

I say back. “Trees.”

And there’s a flash of light, brighter than the sun, up into my eyes, into my head. And I know for certain then. It’s checking my retinas.

Then it all goes dark. I’m not Jazza. So the program won’t open, but hey, it doesn’t need to open.

I look at the face again, just to be sure.

“Mandy,” I croak, and I’m real glad she’s there. “Meet Silhouette.”

And the only thing I’m feeling is gratitude. I’m just glad that Jazza was more than a zombie. I’m just glad that he was more than that. I still can’t quite see, my eyes inside are dappled by the retina check. I’m thinking of all the times he did freelance for me: on the software, on all that VAO. He worked on it, he would know how all the ordnance cooked.

And I get it.

You see, you’re this smart guy. You’ve buzzed all your life, but there’s no money, and you’re losing your mind. Maybe you get told by some young stuck-up intern doing time on the social programs that he’s real sorry that your insurance won’t pay for the drugs. You’re poor so you get to lose your marbles. So you get mad. You get mad at everybody, at the world, at God. You turn all your brain onto one final thing. You plan ahead, for when you’re gaga and beyond being charged or convicted. You invent Silhouette and store him up, and set the bugs loose to search for a new kind of crew.

You get your revenge.

Mandy takes my arm and shakes it. “Brewst. Brewster,” she says. All she can see is some sad old fuck dissolving into tears. She can’t understand that I’m crying because I’m happy. I can’t understand it either.

I just know in my butt: Jazza thought of this.

“He was Silhouette,” I say, and breathe in deep.

“How?” demands Mandy. Hand on hip, Mandy won’t buy just any fairy story.

I feel reasonably cool again as well.

“Silhouette’s not a person, its a program, a series of programs that all work on the same algorithms. The programs take you over, tell you what to do, how to do it. Maybe what to say. Maybe you get to be Silhouette for a while and if you’re gaga enough you won’t even know it. So trace Silhouette then. One week he’s in Atlanta, the next he’s in LA, the next week he’s in New York. They’ll be hacked into the glasses. The glasses and the terminals and the crude little chips in your head.”