The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (31 page)

The silver-haired woman returns to what she has no trouble recognizing as a doorway and runs her fingers up and down the jamb, filled with wonder at its sudden appearance. She turns away from it and peers up and down the path between the other children of her daughter's generation, to make certain that nobody is watching. As it happens, nobody is. Di has chosen the perfect moment. This gesture is only meant for one.

The silver-haired woman cannot see anything past the opening but darkness, not even when she removes her sunglasses and shades her eyes from the glare. The precise nature of the answers to be found inside are not available to her, not out here. But she senses no threat: just the welcome the young are supposed to extend to the old, when the most inexorable of life's many passages transfers the responsibility from one to the other.

With another glance up and down the row, just to be sure that she remains unobserved, the silver-haired woman murmurs the first words she has ever been able to speak in response to an act Di has committed out of personal volition. “All right,” she says. “Good girl.”

Then she takes the first step, and her daughter lets her in.

SAM J. MILLER

FROM
Lightspeed Magazine

M
E AND CASE
met when someone slammed his head against my door, so hard I heard it with my earphones in and my Game Boy cranked up loud. Sad music from
Mega Man 2
filled my head and then there was this thud like the world stopped spinning for a second. I turned the thing off and flipped it shut, felt its warmth between my hands. Slipped it under my pillow. Nice things need to stay secret at Egan House, or they'll end up stolen or broken. Old and rickety as it was, I didn't own anything nicer.

I opened my door. Some skinny thug had a bloody-faced kid by the shirt.

“What,” I said, and then “what,” and then “what the,” and then, finally, “hell?”

I barked the last word, tightening all my muscles at once.

“Damn, man,” the thug said, startled. He hollered down the stairs, “Goddamn Goliath over here can talk!” He let go of the kid's shirt and was gone. Thirty boys live at Egan House, foster kids awaiting placement. Little badass boys with parents in jail or parents on the street, or dead parents, or parents on drugs.

I looked at the kid he'd been messing with. A line of blood cut his face more or less down the middle, but the gash in his forehead was pretty small. His eyes were huge and clear in the middle of all that blood. He looked like something I'd seen before, in an ad or movie or dream.

“Thanks, dude,” the kid said. He ran his hand down his face and then planted it on the outside of my door.

I nodded. Mostly when I open my mouth to say something the words get all twisted on the way out, or the wrong words sneak in, which is why I tend to not open my mouth. Once he was gone I sniffed at the big bloody handprint. My cloud port hurt, from wanting him. Suddenly it didn't fit quite right, atop the tiny hole where a fiberoptic wire threaded into my brainstem through the joint where skull met spine. Desire was dangerous, something I fought hard to keep down, but the moment I met Case I knew I would lose.

Egan House was my twelfth group home. I had never seen a kid with blue eyes in any of them. I had always assumed white boys had no place in foster care, that there was some other better system set up to receive them.

I had been at Egan House six months, the week that Case came. I was inches away from turning eighteen and aging out. Nothing was waiting for me. I spent an awful lot of energy not thinking about it. Better to sit tight for the little time I had left, in a room barely wider than its bed, relying on my size to keep people from messing with me. At night, unable to sleep, trying hard to think of anything but the future, I'd focus on the sounds of boys trying not to make noise as they cried or jerked off.

On Tuesday, the day after the bloody-faced boy left his handprint on my door, he came and knocked. I had been looking out my window. Not everyone had one. Mine faced south, showed me a wide sweep of the Bronx. Looking out, I could imagine myself as a signal sent out over the municipal Wi-Fi, beamed across the city, cut loose from this body and its need to be fed and sheltered and cared about. Its need for other bodies. I could see things, sometimes. Things I knew I shouldn't be seeing. Hints of images beamed through the wireless node that my brain had become.

“Hey,” the kid said, knocking again. And I knew, from how I felt when I heard his voice, how doomed I was.

“Angel Quiñones,” he said, when I opened the door. “Nicknamed Sauro because you look a big ol' Brontosaurus.”

Actually my mom called me Sauro because I liked dinosaurs, but it was close enough. “Okay . . .” I said. I stepped aside and in he came.

“Case. My name's Case. Do you want me to continue with the dossier I've collected on you?” When I didn't do anything but stare at his face he said, “Silence is consent.

“Mostly Puerto Rican, with a little black and a little white in there somewhere. You've been here forever, but nobody knows anything about you. Just that you keep to yourself and don't get involved in anyone's hustles. And don't seem to have one of your own. And you could crush someone's skull with one hand.”

A smile forced its way across my face, terrifying me.

With the blood all cleaned up, he looked like a kid. But faces can fool you, and the look on his could only have belonged to a full-grown man. So confident it was halfway to contemptuous, sculpted out of some bright stone. A face that made you forget what you were saying midsentence.

Speaking slowly, I said, “Don't—don't get.” Breathe. “Don't get too into the say they stuff. Stuff they say. Before you know it, you'll be one of the brothers.”

Case laughed. “Brothers,” he said, and traced one finger up his very white arm. “I doubt anyone would ever get me confused with a brother.”

“Not brothers like black. Brothers—they call us. That's what they call us. We're brothers because we all have the same parents. Because we all have none.”

Why were the words there, then? Case smiled and out they came.

He reached out to rub the top of my head. “You're a mystery man, Sauro. What crazy stuff have you got going on in there?”

I shrugged. Bit back the cat-urge to push my head into his hand. Ignored the cloud-port itch flaring up fast and sharp.

Case asked, “Why do you shave your head?”

Because it's easier.

Because unlike most of these kids, I'm not trying to hide my cloud port.

Because a boy I knew, five homes ago, kept his head shaved, and when I looked at him I felt some kind of way inside. The same way I feel when I look at you. Case.

“I don't know,” I said.

“It looks good though.”

“Maybe that's why,” I said. “What's your . . . thing. Dossier.”

“Nothing you haven't heard before. Small-town gay boy, got beat up a lot. Came to the big city. But the city government doesn't believe a minor can make decisions for himself. So here I am. Getting fed and kept out of the rain while I plan my next move.”

Gay boy.
Unthinkable even to think it about myself, let alone ever utter it.

“How old? You.”

“Seventeen.” He turned his head, smoothed back sun-colored hair to reveal his port. “Well, they let you make your own decisions if they'll make money for someone else.”

Again I was shocked. White kids were hardly ever so poor they needed the chump change you can get from cloudporting. Not even the ones who wanted real bad to be
down.
Too much potential for horrific problems. Bump it too hard against a headboard or doorframe and you might end up brain-damaged.

But that wasn't why I stared at him, dumbfounded. It was what he said, about making money for someone else. Like he could smell the anger on me. Like he had his own. I wanted to tell him about what I had learned, online. How many hundreds of millions of dollars the city spent every year to keep tens of thousands of us stuck in homes like Egan House. How many people had jobs because of kids like us. How if they had given my mom a quarter of what they've spent on me being in the system, she never would have lost her place. She never would have lost me. How we were all of us, ported or not, just batteries to be sucked dry by huge faraway machines I could not even imagine. But it was all I could do just to keep a huge and idiotic grin off my face when I looked at him.

The telecoms had paid for New York's municipal wireless grid, installing thousands of routers across all five boroughs. Rich people loved having free wireless everywhere, but it wasn't a public service. Companies did it because the technology had finally come around to where you could use the human brain for data processing, so they could wave money in the faces of hard-up people and say,
Let us put this tiny little wire into your brain and plug that into the wireless signal and exploit a portion of your brain's underutilized capacity, turning you into one node in a massively distributed data processing center.
It worked, of course. Any business model based around poor people making bad decisions out of ignorance and desperation always works. Just ask McDonald's, or the heroin dealer who used to sell to my mom.

The sun, at some point, had gotten lost behind a ragged row of tenements. Case said, “Something else they said. You're going to age out, any minute now.”

“Yeah.”

“That must be scary.”

I grunted.

“They say most guys leaving foster care end up on the street.”

“Most.”

The street
, the words like knives driven under all my toenails at once. The stories I had heard. Men frozen to death under expressways, men set on fire by frat boys, men raped to death by cops.

“You got a plan?”

“No plan.”

“Well, stick with me, kid,” Case said, in fluent fake movie gangster. “I got a plan big enough for both of us. Do you smoke?” he asked, flicking out two. I didn't, but I took the cigarette. His fingers touched mine. I wanted to say,
It isn't allowed in here
, but Case's smile was a higher law.

“Where's a decent port shop around here? I heard the Bronx ones were all unhygienic as hell.”

“Riverdale,” I said. “That's the one I go to. Nice office. No one waiting outside to jump you.”

“I need to establish a new primary,” he said. “We'll go tomorrow.” He smiled so I could see it wasn't a command so much as a decision he was making for both of us.

My mother sat on the downtown platform at Burnside, looking across the elevated tracks to a line of windows, trying to see something she wasn't supposed to see. She was so into her voyeurism that she didn't notice me standing right beside her, uncomfortably close even though the platform was bare. She didn't look up until I said
mother
in Spanish, maybe a little too loud.

“Oh my god,” she said, fanning herself with a damp
New York Post.
“Here I am getting here late, fifteen minutes, thinking oh my god he's gonna kill me, and come to find out that you're even later than me!”

“Hi,” I said, squatting to kiss her forehead.

“Let it never be said that you got that from me. I'm late all the time, but I tried to raise you better.”

“How so?”

“You know. To not make all the mistakes I did.”

“Yeah, but how so? What did you do, to raise me better?”

“It's stupid hot out,” she said. “They got air conditioning in that home?”

“In the office. Where we're not allowed.”

We meet up once a month, even though she's not approved for unsupervised visits. I won't visit her at home because her man is always there, always drunk, always able, in the course of an hour, to remind me how miserable and stupid I am. How horrible my life will become, just as soon as I age out. How my options are the streets or jail or overclocking; what they'll do to me in each of those places. So now we meet up on the subway, and ride to Brooklyn Bridge and then back to Burnside.

Arm flab jiggled as she fanned herself. Mom is happy in her fat. Heroin kept her skinny; crack gave her lots of exercise. For her, obesity is a brightly colored sign that says
NOT ADDICTED ANYMORE
.
Her man keeps her fed; this is what makes someone a Good Man. Brakes screamed as a downtown train pulled into the station.

“Oooh, stop, wait,” she said, grabbing at my pant leg with one puffy hand. “Let's catch the next one. I wanna finish my cigarette.”

I got on the train. She came, too, finally, hustling, flustered, barely making it.

“What's gotten into you today?” she said, when she wrestled her pocketbook free from the doors. “You upset about something? You're never this,” and she snapped her fingers in the air while she looked for the word
assertive.
I had it in my head. I would not give it to her. Finally she just waved her hand and sat down. “Oh, that air conditioning feels good.”

“José? How's he?”

“Fine, fine,” she said, still fanning from force of habit. Fifty-degree air pumped directly down on us from the ceiling ducts.

“And you?”

“Fine.”

“Mom—I wanted to ask you something.”

“Anything, my love,” she said, fanning faster.

“You said one time that all the bad decisions you made—none of it would have happened if you could just keep yourself from falling in love.”

When I'm with my mom my words never come out wrong. I think it's because I kind of hate her.

“I said that?”

“You did.”

“Weird.”

“What did you mean?”

“Christ, honey, I don't know.” The
Post
slowed, stopped, settled into her lap. “It's stupid, but there's nothing I won't do for a man I love. A woman who's looking for a man to plug a hole she's got inside? She's in trouble.”