The Apex Book of World SF Part 3

...a little Chinese boy hiding in a closet...

The image flashes again. I must go up into the house. I steal away, sneak up the steps, respectfully remove my sandals at the veranda, and I slip into the house.

A kerosene lamp burns. Light and shadows dance. There is a low wooden platform for a bed, a mosquito net, a woven rush mat for sleeping; off in a corner, there is a closet.

Birds everywhere. Dead birds pinned to the walls. Birds' heads piled up on plates. Blood spatters on the floor planks. Feathers wafting. On a charcoal stove in one corner there's a wok with some hot oil and garlic, and sizzling in that oil is a heart, too big to be the heart of a bird.

My eyes get used to the darkness. I see human bones in a pail. I see a young girl's head in a jar, the skull sawn open, half the brain gone. I see a bowl of pickled eyes.

I'm not afraid. These are familiar sights. This horror is a spectral echo of Nanking, nothing more.

"Si Ui," I whisper. "I lied to them. I know you didn't do anything to Sombun. You're one of the killers who does the same thing over and over. You don't eat boys. I know I've always been safe with you. I've always trusted you."

I hear someone crying. The whimper of a child.

"Hungry," says the voice. "Hungry."

A voice from behind the closet door....

The door opens. Si Ui is there, huddled, bone-thin, his phakhomah about his loins, weeping, rocking.

Noises now. Angry voices. They're clambering up the steps. They're breaking down the wall planks. Light streams in.

"I'm sorry," I whisper. I see fire flicker in his eyes, then drain away as the mob sweeps into the room.

My grandson was hungry, too. When he said he could eat the world, he wasn't kidding. After the second decaf frappuccino, there was Italian ice in the Oriental's coffee shop, and then, riding back on the Skytrain to join the chauffeur who had conveniently parked at the Sogo mall, there was a box of Smarties. Corey's mother always told me to watch the sugar, and she had plenty of Ritalin in stock--no prescription needed here--but it was always my pleasure to defy my daughter-in-law and leave her to deal with the consequences.

Corey ran wild in the Skytrain station, whooping up the staircases, yelling at old ladies. No-one minded. Kids are indulged in Babylon East; little blond boys are too cute to do wrong. For some, this noisy, polluted, chaotic city is still a kind of paradise.

My day of revelations ended at my son's townhouse in Sukhumvit, where maids and nannies fussed over little Corey and undressed him and got him into his Pokemon pyjamas as I drained a gla.s.s of Beaujolais. My son was rarely home; the taco chain consumed all his time. My daughter-in-law was a social b.u.t.terfly; she had already gone out for the evening, all pearls and Thai silk. So it fell to me to go into my grandson's room and to kiss him goodnight and goodbye.

Corey's bedroom was a little piece of America, with its Phantom Menace drapes and its Playstation. But on a high niche, an image of the Buddha looked down; a decaying garland still perfumed the air with a whiff of jasmine. The air-conditioning was chilly; the Bangkok of the rich is a cold city; the more conspicuous the consumption, the lower the thermostat setting. I shivered, even as I missed Manhattan in January.

"Tell me a story, Grandpa?" Corey said.

"I told you one already," I said.

"Yeah, you did," he said wistfully. "About you in the Garden of Eden, and the serpent who was really a kid-eating monster."

All true. But as the years pa.s.sed I had come to see that perhaps I was the serpent. I was the one who mixed lies with the truth and took away his innocence. He was a child, really, a hungry child. And so was I.

"Tell me what happened to him," Corey said. "Did the people lynch him?"

"No. The court ruled that he was a madman, and sentenced him to a mental home. But the military government of Field Marshall Sarit reversed the decision, and they took him away and shot him. And he didn't even kill half the kids they said he killed."

"Like the first girl, the one who was raped and strangled," Corey said, "but she didn't get eaten. Maybe that other killer's still around." So he had been paying attention after all. I know he loves me, though he rarely says so; he had suffered an old man's ramblings for one long air conditioning-free day without complaint. I'm proud of him, can barely believe I've held on to life long enough to get to know him.

I leaned down to kiss him. He clung to me, and, as he let go, he asked me sleepily, "Do you ever feel that hungry, Grandpa?"

I didn't want to answer him--without another word, I slipped quietly away.

That night, I wandered in my dreams through fields of the dead; the hunger raged; I killed. I swallowed children whole and spat them out; I burned down cities; I stood aflame in my self-made inferno, howling with elemental grief; and in the morning, without leaving a note, I took a taxi to the airport and flew back to New York.

To face the hunger.

"Transcendence Express"

Jetse de Vries.

Dutch writer and editor Jetse de Vries has published stories in several highly-regarded English magazines and was for a time co-editor of Interzone magazine. He is currently editing an anthology of optimistic science fiction for Solaris Books in the UK and, hopefully, writing more stories himself.

I: Daybreak in a little village in the Zambian highlands.

She's teaching. Maths and science at the village high school. The school itself puts the word derelict to shame. A building so run-down our own country's squatters would find it uninhabitable. Windows are an illusion, walls that are more crack that brick, benches that should be reported to Amnesty's human rights watch and a roof that doubles as a communal shower in the wet season.

She writes large letters on a shabby blackboard. Her cla.s.s, slowly getting used to the sight of a freckled redhead whose skin is shining from the liberally applied sunblock, starts to give more attention to the teachings than the teacher.

Hard to believe she's really doing this and enjoying it. Stranger still that she took a whole year off from one of the world's premier scientific projects. Most baffling, though, is the project she's taking up with her cla.s.s.

At first everybody--me included--thought it was a strange after-cla.s.s hobby thing involving manual skills. Carving wood: something she's not terribly apt at so she goaded the local sculptor into helping her and the children out with the practical parts. Making a flat, laptop-sized wooden box with a hinged cover. Each child making her or his own. So far, so good, so innocent.

Then she told her schoolkids they were going to fill their boxes up with something special, layer after layer. She made two large vats, filled them with certain 'secret ingredients', let them stand for a couple of days (so that they would 'grow full') and then added salt to one and zinc sulphide to the other until both solutions were saturated.

Right now they're applying the first layer.

"Miss," one of her cla.s.s asks, "why we do this?"

"You have to say 'why are we doing this,' Timmy." She can be a bit b.i.t.c.hy in cla.s.s, too.

"Why are we doing this, Miss?" Timmy rolls his eyes but complies.

"Because--if we follow the instructions carefully--these boxes will become your window to the world and beyond."

Which leaves me wondering, but those young kids can be very sharp.

"Like your laptop computer, Miss?" asks a large-eyed girl with k.n.o.bby knees.

"Very good, Melissa. Only better and on a purely biological basis."

"Really, Miss?" Neither the cla.s.s nor I believe our ears.

"I know this sounds too good to be true. We will need several months and we will have to be very careful. But if we follow the instructions and do our very best, we might succeed."

A mix of scepticism and expectancy from the cla.s.s. Liona saying you sometimes need to do crazy things to get even crazier results. I can't believe it.

That same night, in our barracks, I can't hide my disappointment.

"How can you do it?"

"Do what?" With that semi-innocent look saying she knows exactly what I mean.

"Saddle those poor kids up with illusions. Biological laptops, my a.r.s.e!"

Uh-oh: that smile. "You'll be surprised."

"Unpleasantly surprised. But your cla.s.s will be devastated."

"They won't be. David, you have to trust me on this."

"Trust you? Some of these kids may believe in magic, but I don't."

"The magic we're developing here is of the technological kind, the one so advanced as to be indistinguishable...."

"Something's going on, and I haven't got a clue, right?"

"David, I'm walking a fine line here. I'd like to tell you more but for the moment it's better if you don't know."

"Is this illegal? I don't want--"

"Depends on your definition of 'legal'. About as 'legal' as achieving patent rights on the genome of certain tropical plants that indigenous people have used for their curing properties from times immemorial. Trust me: I'm doing the right thing."

"The right thing?"

"Remember the Worldchanger? I'll tell you more as soon as we have some BIQCO's running."

"Biko? As in Steve Biko, the activist?"

"That's a good one, very appropriate, thank you."

Then she kisses me and does all those things that make further talk impossible. In the upcoming unrest I let it rest.

a): Nightfall, three months ago, in a small town in the Dutch lowlands.

Utter silence in a university lab. The lights were on; the QPP ran twenty-four hours a day. One solitary volunteer kept watch over the experimental set-up during the night. Liona Jansen, one of the project's scientists, typed furiously on the keyboard of the QPP-interface whilst in the pauses between her dazzling fingerwork she watched the monitor. Nothing she did showed up on any official record.

The Quantum Processor Project was one of the many experiments trying to achieve quantum computing. Whilst competing researchers used different approaches, the line of attack in Liona's lab comprised Bose-Einstein condensates of several thousands of Rubidium atoms, forming a single quantum ent.i.ty: quantum dots.

Ahead of the compet.i.tion, Liona's team had the first practical quantum processor up and running. Factorising incredible numbers, it not only proved that it worked, but brought in extra money for further research by selling its quantum encryption keys. It became so high in demand that it was kept running around the clock. But apart from abstract mathematical theorems and complex physical problems, the QPP was crunching some decidedly different numbers in the wee hours of night.

A smile appeared on Liona's face. Sound filled the room, music appropriate to the chill outside. Ambient noises like cold northern winds blowing over desolate, snowy planes. An audible crack slowly increasing to a breaking rumble like an arctic ice shelve toppling into the ocean. m.u.f.fled footsteps of mad Inuits performing breakdances in a polar landscape: Perceptions shatter, truths break Reality takes on a different take Consciousness of a new kind Enters the emperor's mind A bit of yearning Two trifles excess A ton of learning Transcendence express --Aura Aurora, the Eskimo experimentalists with their latest take on the world-- said Tess 2, a copy of her home expert system--You still dislike them?-- "Well, I kinda like this one." Liona admitted.

--The more minimal their music, the stranger their lyrics-- "Since when do expert systems have opinions?"

--According to the philosophers, I don't. I'm just reflecting your own thoughts in a warped way, acting as a sounding board-- "Really? Anyway, I dig these words."

II: Afternoon, somewhere in Zambia.

I can't believe it: some of those "biological computers" seem to work! How does she do it?

The screens come to life and give the kids instructions for testing the keyboard and mouse. Some kids are less lucky and have badly functioning or even completely dead BIKOs (as Liona calls them). At first Liona is too excited about the BIKOs that are working to notice the disappointment of the unfortunate kids. Until the increasing cries of frustration become so loud that even Liona--who can exist in a little bubble of her own when focused--cannot fail to hear them.

Give it to her: she handles it like she's been a high school teacher all her life. Gives her own--apparently functioning--unit to the most upset kid, and immediately soothes the other unhappy ones. Quickly makes them join those with working BIKOs, expertly making compatible teams. Then it's not long before little groups of two and three are fully absorbed in the wonders of working with these biological laptops.

Unable to keep my distance, I walk up to three cla.s.smates interacting with one such BIKO. The pictures are fuzzy, the colours ill-defined, and the reaction time tediously slow. However, the letters appearing are large and easily readable, and after all three kids have been asked to introduce themselves the program equally divides its attention to each of them, making them take turns whilst the other two can effortlessly follow what's going on. But man, is it slow. The display makes your eyes water and would have any western whiz kid tuning the screen properties like crazy.

Still, the real wonder is that those pell-mell constructions are doing anything at all. Furthermore, those African kids have nothing to compare them with, so are uncritically happy with what they've got. As dinner time closes in, Liona has to wrestle most kids away from their new toys and promises that first thing tomorrow they will--after school hours--start making new BIKOs, so that eventually every cla.s.smate will have one. The whole cla.s.s cheers and Liona's smile doesn't leave her face for the rest of the evening.

Of course, I'm full of questions, but she diverts my attention with a touch of innuendo that makes v.i.a.g.r.a look like a spark in a forest fire. How did she get all that lingerie and those...well...toys in such a small travel bag? As my rabbit breeding instinct overwhelms my monkey curiosity, the last vestiges of my rationality hope for some explanation later on. More--um--stringent matters require hard attention first.

In the following days my bafflement only increases. Those crazy BIKOs seem to improve over time. The screen colours become bright and sharp, the pictures crisp and clear, and the way they speed up is the most incredible thing of all. Their responses become so fast as to be instantaneous, and then they begin to mult.i.task. Haltingly at first but with a growing confidence that seems superhuman. Animations appear that would make any Mac freak drool, calculations finish so fast it would make any supercomputer programmer cringe, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Those BIKOs have a voice input as well, but that's the hardest part to get working. However, by the time it does function it effortlessly recognises individual voices. Then it reacts to all three kids talking at once, separately or in concert as the situation requires, with no discernable time lag and an increasing appropriateness that is eerie to watch. The BIKO divides its screen in precise parts aimed at each kid, tailoring its reaction speed and presentation to each individual. Furthermore, these kids adapt so easily in turn that they only use the keyboard or mouse in very unclear cases and talk to the BIKO as if it's the most normal thing in the world.

If that is hard to conceive, then get this: each BIKO interacts with its group of children like an ideal combination of loving parent, wise uncle and sharp aunt, patient teacher, and best friend. Well, not right away of course, but after some initial faults and hiccups it combines communicating, teaching, and mutual understanding to a level quite indistinguishable from telepathy.

I've changed my shift in the hospital camp just to see what the h.e.l.l is going on in Liona's cla.s.s. Every night my wonderment grows until Liona's devious delaying tactics can no longer contain it. Eventually, halfway through a bout of sloppy lovemaking (my heart isn't in it, my mind isn't in it; actually, only one part of me is), she indulges me.

"Liona, what the h.e.l.l is going on?"

"What you see: I'm giving these kids the education they deserve, with the appropriate tools."

"Okay, so you're trying to do the impossible: cram a whole high school education into these kids in a few months, and give them computers in the process--"

"Not normal computers. Biological quantum computers."

"What's the difference?"

"Hmm, maybe it's better if I print out that file for you. Wait a minute... "

She walks to her BIKO and comes back within a minute with a couple of printed pages. Can these crazy things print as well? Before I can ask, Liona thrusts the papers in my hands.

Recipe for a biological quantum computer.

(Read-only, quantum encrypted file) Quantum dots are not restricted to hi-tech lab constructs, they can be made biochemically. For instance, certain genetically engineered viruses have a string of amino acids at one end that have an affinity for zinc sulphide. Add these viruses to a zinc sulphide solution so that tiny cl.u.s.ters of the material stick to them, then let the water of the solution evaporate...