The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four Read Free Page B

he started out in cognitive psychology and she in applied mathematics. But computers were the alien glue that made all kinds of odd limbs stick together and work in ways never intended by nature. Like Frankenstein's monster , he had said when she mentioned it, and she had bought him a drink, because he got it. They ran into each other at a similar conference two months later, then again at some industry junket not long after they'd both joined social media startups. The pattern repeated itself, until, by the time they were both pitching venture capitalists at trade shows, they managed to get past the required cool, the distancing irony, and began to email each other beforehand to arrange dinners, drinks, tickets to the game. They were young, good-looking, and very, very smart. Even better, they had absolutely no romantic interest in each other.
    Now when they met it was while traveling as representatives of their credit-starved companies to make increasingly desperate pitches to industry-leading Goliaths on why they needed the nimble expertise of hungry Davids.
    Cody hadn't told Richard that lately her pitches had been more about why the Goliaths might find it cost-effective to absorb the getting-desperate David she worked for, along with all its innovative, motivated, boot-strapping employees whose stock options and 401(k)s were now worthless. But a no-travel job meant one thing, and going back to the groves of academe was really admitting failure.
    She sighed. "Where?"
    "Chapel Hill. And it's not . . . Well, okay, it is sort of an academic job, but not really."
    "Uh-huh."
    "No, really. It's with a new company, a joint venture between WishtleNet and the University of North—"
    "See."
    "Just let me finish." Richard could get very didactic when he'd been drinking. "Think Google Labs, or Xerox PARC, but wackier. Lots of money to play with, lots of smart grad students to do what I tell them, lots of blue sky research, not just irritating Vice Presidents saying I've got six months to get the software on the market, even if it is garbage."
    "I hear you on that." Except that Vince, Cody's COO, had told her that if she landed the Atlanta contract she would be made a VP herself.
    "It's cool stuff, Cody. All those things we've talked about in the last six, seven years? The cognitive patterning and behavior mod, the modulated resonance imaging software, the intuitive learning algorithms—"
    "Yeah, yeah."
    "—they want me to work on that. They want me to define new areas of interest. Very cool stuff."
    Cody just shook her head. Cool. Cool didn't remember to feed the fish when you were out of town, again.
    "Starts next month," he said.
    Cody felt very tired. "You won't be in Atlanta."
    "Nope."
    "Atlanta in August. On my own. Jesus."
    "On your own? What about all those pretty girls in skimpy summer clothes?"
    The muscles in Cody's eyebrows felt tight. She rubbed them. "It's Boone I'm not looking forward to. Boone and his sleazy strip club games."
    "He's the customer."
    "Your sympathy's killing me."
    He shrugged. "I thought that lap-dancing hooker thing was your wet dream."
    Her head ached. Now he was going to bring up Dallas.
    "That's what you told us in—now where the hell was that?"
    "Dallas." Might as well get it over with.
    "You were really into it. Are you blushing?"
    "No." Three years ago she had been twenty-eight with four million dollars in stock options and the belief that coding-cowboy colleagues were her friends. Ha. And now probably half the geeks in the South had heard about her most intimate fantasy. Including Boone.
    She swallowed the last of her tequila. Oily, ugly stuff once it got tepid. She picked up her jacket.
    "I'm out of here. Unless you have any handy hints about landing that contract without playing Boone's slimeball games? Didn't think so." She pushed her shot glass away and stood.
    "That Atlanta meeting's when? Eight, nine weeks?"
    "About that." She dropped two twenties on the bar.
    "I maybe could