The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2017 Edition by Rich Horton

Author:Rich Horton [Horton, Rich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2017-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

6.

Rob wasn’t the sort to put on an act. If he said he was happy ditching research and filling his father’s role as a marine farmer on some remote island, that was because he was. I never quite did find the time to physically visit him in Harris—it was, after all, on the other side of the globe—and he, with the daily commitments of the family business, didn’t get to Seoul. But I came to appreciate my glimpses of the island’s strange beauty. That, and the regular arrival of chilled, vacuum-packed boxes of fresh scallops. But was this really enough for Rob Holm? Somehow, despite his evident pride in what he was doing, and the funny stories he told of the island’s other inhabitants, and even the occasional mention of some woman he’d met at a ceilidh, I didn’t think it was. After all, Creagach was his mother and father’s vision, not his.

Although he remained coy about the details, I knew he still longed to bring his many worlds experiment to life. That, and that it would be complicated, controversial, and costly. I’d have been more than happy to offer financial help, but I knew he’d refuse. So what else could I do? My media company had grown. I had mentors, advisors, and consultants, both human and AI, and Rob would have been a genuinely useful addition to the team, but he had too many issues with the lack of rigor and logic in this world to put up with all the glitches, fudges, and contradictions of virtual ones. Then I had a better idea.

“You know why nothing ever changes here, don’t you?” he asked me as our avatars sat together in the Eldon late one afternoon. “Not the smell from the toilets or the unfestive Christmas decorations or that dusty Pernod optic behind the bar. This isn’t a feed from the real pub any longer. The old Eldon was demolished years ago. All we’ve been sitting in ever since is just a clever formation of what the place would be like if it still existed. Bar staff, students, us, and all.”

“That’s . . . ” Although nothing changed, the whole place seemed to shimmer. “How things are these days. The real and the unreal get so blurry you can’t tell which is which. But you know,” I added, as if the thought had just occurred to me, “there’s a project that’s been going the rounds of the studios here in Seoul. It’s a series about the wonders of science, one of those proper, realtime factual things, but we keep stumbling over finding the right presenter. Someone fresh, but with the background and the personality to carry the whole thing along.”

“You don’t mean me?”

“Why not? It’d only be part time. Might even help you promote what you’re doing at Creagach.”

“A scientific popularizer?”

“Yes. Like Carl Sagan, for example, or maybe Stephen Jay Gould.”

I had him, and the series—which, of course, had been years in development purgatory—came about. I’d thought of it

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