Clarkesworld Year Nine by Neil Clarke & Sean Wallace

Author:Neil Clarke & Sean Wallace [Clarke, Neil & Wallace, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, chinese, clarkesworld, fantasy, science fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, short fiction
ISBN: 9781642360011
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2018-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

False Endings

I have precious little time left. So I will not say much. One never has the skin that befits her.

I know I’ll never finish this article—I still haven’t even decided on the title, or what this story is really about. What do you think? I might have called it:

Massacre Market

or

The Mechanical Reproduction of Violence: Truth, Massacre, History

or even

Android Whores Can’t Cry: Under the Surface of Death Meditation

Either way, I know that, if I did finish it, I would dedicate it

“To my B., my pearl, who taught me this:

The skin always disappoints.”

>>>END OF FILE

>>>END OF RECORD. 14 OF 14 FILES RECOVERED.

This is all the material I managed to retrieve from Aliki’s hard drives. I wait for the reporter sitting across from me in Dick’s living room to go through them.

“You realize your memory files provide conflicting information about what happened to both my colleague Aliki Karyotakis and her informant Richard Phillips,” he says.

I am silent. Is that true?

I recall the last time I saw Aliki.

She is lurching at Dick, pushing him away from me during one of his violent playacts. He falls back and hits his head. He is very still. We are all very still.

She is also standing by the city pillar with me, in a crowd of people I haven’t quite registered. I look at the sky. The sun is shining through the smog. When I look down again, she’s gone.

She is also looking at me as a tall man leads her onto a platform and places a hood over her head. Then a noose. Then the platform gives.

She was also never here. I never met her.

And Dick? Dick is always either dead or missing.

“Have you tinkered with your memory?” the reporter asks.

“It is possible,” I say. “But I have no memory of that, as I am sure you are aware.”

“Of course.” He shuffles in his chair. “OK, let’s take the first version. Can you tell me what happened?”

He already knows this. Why does he ask?

“She pushed him. He died. Humans break easily like that.”

“And then?”

“She turned herself in.”

“Wasn’t she terminated?” That’s when I notice the nacre on his underarm. Ah.

“I think the human term is ‘sentenced to death and executed,’ ” I correct him. He should know this. I’m sure he does.

“Did you watch? The execution, I mean.”

I watch him. He is serious, eyes cold. A reporter reports.

“A hammer is what a hammer does,” I whisper.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” I say. “A reflex. Yes. Yes, I think I watched.” I sense the nacre spread on my face, my surface irreparably hardened. It reflects the light so brightly it almost hurts my eyes.

“Are you going to cry?” he asks, hoping, I bet, for a good twist in his story.

The programming takes over, like gears shifting inside me, and I can’t stop it, I can’t stop it, I can’t.

“Android whores can’t cry,” I say. “Who wants to fuck a whiny bitch?”

This puzzles him. He focuses on my lips, and he’s about to say something, but he stops. I know he stops because of what he sees.

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