The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

which meant she had penetrated highly porous rock that would store more water. With Hermit Crab’s rapid heating that extra water would vaporize and transform the giant rock into a pressure cooker. Such was the morbid sensitivity of my skill tree. No one except me could have perceived what the slight shift in the numbers meant.

‘Freckles, stop the heating and get out of there!’ I ordered.

‘Stop your nonsense! Can’t you see I’m busy…’

‘Now!’

‘You know how pissy you—’

Her voice cut out as though snapped by a pair of scissors. The signal from her cam was black and white static. I switched to the external cam, now blinded by a cloud of chalky dust. I couldn’t make out anything. Then, in three seconds of slow-motion replay, I watched the surface of the meteorite between the two claws explode. Debris hurtled toward Hermit Crab like a flock of birds fluttering from their nests. The titanium-aluminum alloy shell shredded like a paper lantern. The cabin decompressed. Opened to the vacuum of space, its steel frame revealed a human silhouette like a dangling internal organ. Dust overwhelmed everything.

‘Freckles! You hear me? Fuck…’ I flung down the headset. In a frenzy, I tried pulling myself into the spacesuit. Baldy was staring at me, motionless. The others had already turned away.

‘We gotta save her!’ I screamed. ‘The fuck you standing around for!’

‘Brother, her debt is paid.’ Baldy patted my shoulder. ‘Death is just the middleman.’

They say the Tonge-Ramesh model proved asteroids were harder to destroy by external forces than we ever imagined.

They say in space no one makes the same mistake twice because you won’t live to make it again.

There’s a saying for every flavor of truth.

The cabin spun before me. I was breathless. I felt as though an asteroid had collided with my chest. I felt someone exhale an icy breath into my ear, a familiar breath. The voice spoke softly, a single sentence. Then every hair on my body stood on end. My eyes flashed on perfect darkness. I collapsed face-first toward the grimy floor.

The single sentence was this: ‘You see my nose growing longer?’

3.

Everything was milky white.

I wasn’t in the control room. I wasn’t in any dark, dirty cabin of Mother Whale. Nor was I in the cold hopelessness of space, where death could knock at any time. Just where the hell was I?

It took me some time before realizing I had to be in a dream, the kind of dream that awakens one to a more sober reality.

They say sometimes one’s encrypted memory module overfills and reveals memories in the form of dreams, only we never can tell whose memories are revealed. All our memory modules are stored on one central cloud system for deployment.

Neither my sight nor my movement were under my control. It were as though I were puppeted by invisible silk threads, forced to wander like a ghost in corners I had no interest in.

The milky white in my field of vision began moving, metamorphosing into a cylindrical cabin that slid around me. In the absence of coordinates, this could mean I was being pushed down or out of the cabin. But then I focused in on points I could orient myself to, points on the high ceiling of a white room.

I began rotating about an axis a meter beneath my viewpoint. My line of sight remained horizontal, the movement slow, never exceeding five degrees per second. Perhaps this was to avoid my getting dizzy. Then I looked down and saw what my axis of rotation was: a man’s hip covered by a blue antibacterial surgical gown.

I was staring out on the world from the corner of this man’s vision.

‘How do you feel, Mr. Dongfang Jue?’ said a voice from the side.

My line of sight spun. In the doorframe stood a woman dressed head to toe in an almost glossy black that emitted a slight iridescent rainbow. On her chest, she wore a golden chain brooch. Her long hair was coiled high above her head like some strange signal tower. In space, everyone was forced to keep their hair cut short, if not already bald. You never knew if such uncontrolled hairs might be what triggered one’s death in the end.

‘Fine, just a bit strange, like something is scuttling around in my body, trying to control me, or restart me.’ The voice saying these words seemed foreign, deep and weary, as if at any time it might get disconnected.

‘This is a kind of associated hallucination. In theory, you shouldn’t feel any difference, those nanorobots… they’re very small, you know.’ The woman smiled. She walked up to the man’s body. I could see her more clearly now. She was in her twenties, makeup intricately applied, almost too refined. Her expression held a sense of superiority, as though she never needed to please anyone.

‘So… our contract has gone into effect?’

‘Legally, yes.’

‘Are you suggesting there may be something illegal? That’s a bit tedious at this point, Ms. Mei.’

‘What I mean is that, except in regard to the law, the technology is somewhat uncertain.’

‘But you said…’

‘Don’t worry about Anan’s part. Her operation is already taken care of.’

‘Oh, thank you.’

‘All costs will be added to your debt, encrypted in the blockchain embedded in your genes. No one can tamper with it.’

‘A life of debt.’

‘Look around you. Everyone’s eager to borrow. Borrowing represents confidence in one’s future and in one’s self. And why not? Debt defines a person’s value. Such a debt quota is available to few people on Earth. Which is the only reason I’m standing here now.’

‘Of course, Ms. Mei Li’ai, although your time is not as expensive as your father Mr. Mei Feng’s. But let’s talk it through. It’s a debt worth several lifetimes of an ordinary person’s toil.’

The woman gave an odd stern smile that seemed out of context in our conversation.

‘Please remember, Mr. Dongfang Jue. We owe our lives to the God who created us. From this day on, you must treat your body well, and we will use all