The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

I hadn’t seen her in the flesh for almost two years. After facing too many dead ends together, we’d split up to cover more ground: Francine had searched from New York to Seattle; I’d taken the south. As the months had slipped away, her determination to put every emotional reaction aside for the sake of the task had gradually eroded. One night, I was sure, grief had overtaken her, alone in some soulless motel room-and it made no difference that the same thing had happened to me, a month later or a week before. Because we had not experienced it together, it was not a shared pain, a burden made lighter. After 47 years, though we now had a single purpose as never before, we were starting to come adrift.

I’d learnt about Jake Holder in Baton Rouge, triangulating on rumours and fifth-hand reports of barroom boasts. The boasts were usually empty; a prosthetic body equipped with software dumber than a microwave could make an infinitely pliable slave, but if the only way to salvage any trace of dignity when your buddies discovered that you owned the high-tech equivalent of a blow-up doll was to imply that there was somebody home inside, apparently a lot of men leapt at the chance.

Holder looked like something worse. I’d bought his lifetime purchasing records, and there’d been a steady stream of cyber-fetish porn over a period of two decades. Hardcore and pretentious; half the titles contained the word “manifesto”. But the flow had stopped, about three months ago. The rumours were, he’d found something better.

I finished the cigarette, and slapped my arms to get the circulation going. She would not be on the barge. For all I knew, she’d heard the news from Brussels and was already halfway to Europe. That would be a difficult journey to make on her own, but there was no reason to believe that she didn’t have loyal, trustworthy friends to assist her. I had too many out-of-date memories burnt into my skull: all the blazing, pointless rows, all the petty crimes, all the self-mutilation. Whatever had happened, whatever she’d been through, she was no longer the angry 15-year-old who’d left for school one Friday and never come back.

By the time she’d hit 13, we were arguing about everything. Her body had no need for the hormonal flood of puberty, but the software had ground on relentlessly, simulating all the neuroendocrine effects. Sometimes it had seemed like an act of torture to put her through that-instead of hunting for some magic shortcut to maturity-but the cardinal rule had been never to tinker, never to intervene, just to aim for the most faithful simulation possible of ordinary human development.

Whatever we’d fought about, she’d always known how to shut me up. “I’m just a thing to you! An instrument! Daddy’s little silver bullet!” I didn’t care who she was, or what she wanted; I’d fashioned her solely to slay my own fears. (I’d lie awake afterwards, rehearsing lame counter-arguments. Other children were born for infinitely baser motives: to work the fields, to sit in boardrooms, to banish ennui, to save failing marriages.) In her eyes, the Qusp itself wasn’t good or bad-and she turned down all my offers to disable the shielding; that would have let me off the hook too easily. But I’d made her a freak for my own selfish reasons; I’d set her apart even from the other adai, purely to grant myself a certain kind of comfort. “You wanted to give birth to a singleton? Why didn’t you just shoot yourself in the head every time you made a bad decision?”

When she went missing, we were afraid she’d been snatched from the street. But in her room, we’d found an envelope with the locator beacon she’d dug out of her body, and a note that read: Don’t look for me. I’m never coming back.

I heard the tyres of a heavy vehicle squelching along the muddy track to my left. I hunkered lower, making sure I was hidden in the undergrowth. As the truck came to a halt with a faint metallic shudder, the barge disgorged an unmanned motorboat. My aide had captured the data streams exchanged, one specific challenge and response, but it had no clue how to crack the general case and mimic the barge’s owner.

Two men climbed out of the truck. One was Jake Holder; I couldn’t make out his face in the starlight, but I’d sat within a few metres of him in diners and bars in Baton Rouge, and my aide knew his somatic signature: the electromagnetic radiation from his nervous system and implants; his body’s capacitative and inductive responses to small shifts in the ambient fields; the faint gamma-ray spectrum of his unavoidable, idiosyncratic load of radioisotopes, natural and Chernobylesque.

I did not know who his companion was, but I soon got the general idea.

“One thousand now,” Holder said. “One thousand when you get back.” His silhouette gestured at the waiting motorboat.

The other man was suspicious. “How do I know it will be what you say it is?”