The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

“So, how exactly do you go about uninventing things?” I asked.

“It’s hard,” he admitted. “It’s all about unpicking probability threads from the fabric of creation. But they tend to be long and tangled, like spaghetti. So it’s rather like having to unpick a strand of spaghetti from a haystack.”

“Sounds like thirsty work,” said Michael, and I signalled him to pour me another pint of Old Bodger.

“Fiddly,” said the little man. “Yes. But I pride myself on doing good. Each day I wake, and, even if I’ve unhappened something that might have been wonderful, I think, Obediah Polkington, the world is a happier place because of something that you’ve uninvented.”

He looked into his remaining scotch, swirled the liquid around in his glass.

“The trouble is,” he said, “with the Wispamuzak gone, that’s it. I’m done. It’s all been uninvented. There are no more horizons left to undiscover, no more mountains left to unclimb.”

“Nuclear Power?” suggested ‘Tweet’ Peston.

“Before my time,” said Obediah. “Can’t uninvent things invented before I was born. Otherwise I might uninvent something that would have led to my birth, and then where would we be?” Nobody had any suggestions. “Knee-high in jet-packs and flying cars, that’s where,” he told us. “Not to mention Morrison’s Martian Emolument.” For a moment, he looked quite grim. “Ooh. That stuff was nasty. And a cure for cancer. But frankly, given what it did to the oceans, I’d rather have the cancer.

“No. I have uninvented everything that was on my list. I shall go home,” said Obediah Polkinghorn, bravely, “and weep, like Alexander, because there are no more worlds to unconquer. What is there left to uninvent?”

There was silence in the Fountain.

In the silence, Brian’s iPhone rang. His ring-tone was The Rutles singing ‘Cheese and Onions’. “Yeah?” he said. Then, “I’ll call you back.”

It is unfortunate that the pulling out of one phone can have such an effect on other people around. Sometimes I think it’s because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull out our phones together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we’re easily bored.

Whatever the reason, the phones came out.

Crown Baker took a photo of us all, and then Twitpicced it. Jocelyn started to read her text messages. Tweet Peston tweeted that he was in the Fountain and had met his first uninventor. Professor Mackintosh checked the Test Match scores, told us what they were and emailed his brother in Inverness to grumble about them. The phones were out and the conversation was over.

“What’s that?” asked Obediah Polkinghorn.

“It’s the iPhone 5,” said Ray Arnold, holding his up. “Crown’s using the Nexus X. That’s the Android system. Phones. Internet. Camera. Music. But it’s the apps. I mean, do you know, there are over a thousand fart sound- effect apps on the iPhone alone? You want to hear the unofficial Simpsons Fart App?”

“No,” said Obediah. “I most definitely do not want to. I do not.” He put down his drink, unfinished. Pulled his tie up. Did up his coat. “It’s not going to be easy,” he said, as if to himself. “But, for the good of all…” And then he stopped. And he grinned. “It’s been marvellous talking to you all,” he announced to nobody in particular as he left the Fountain.

WIDOWS IN THE WORLD Gavin J. Grant

The Granny wasn’t talking to any of them. The husband was collecting rocks, the other wives had stayed with the house, her mother was stretching at the other end of the beach, and the kids were running wild in the waves. The baby, still in utero, had only recently begun talking to her and already knew when to keep quiet.

The Granny was fed up with these endless tiny Aberdonian Islands. She wanted to go north where the husband would go outside without complaining endlessly about the heat. She could see him picking through his rocks. This beach was only fifty or sixty years old, from after the seas rose, and she wondered what he could find of interest. But she wasn’t talking to him, either. He sent the Granny a message, “I’m going to look for the original beach,” and walked into the surf.

She was worried, but the house would look after him. When had he last gone swimming? Could he even swim?

Her mother was walking along the water’s edge and something was swimming along parallel to her. Was it the husband? It didn’t move like him. It swam in closer and her mother stopped, pulled something out of her pocket, and fed it. It was a selkie. It lay in the surf, not changing. It was bigger than her mother but the Granny could tell it was at her mother’s beck and call. How unsurprising. Her mother drove the Granny out of her mind.

The Granny stamped away from her family, keeping her head down, watching her feet. The hill mosses were fighting the reeds. Something flashed in front of her feet and she slowed her perception to see a tiny grass snake trying to get away. She picked it up behind its neck. It wriggled in her hands and she was fascinated. She hadn’t seen one since she’d married into the house. Her mother was calling from the beach and then the house was breaking in with a call, too. The Granny dropped the snake in her pocket but she wasn’t thinking about it anymore. She was running toward the water and she couldn’t think of anything.

The Granny put the gun down. She picked up her embroidery, told the house, “Let’s move.” She kickstarted her rocking chair as she felt the baby kicking inside. The carpet was soaking up the mess her mother’s body was making. The rest of the family wives muttered as the house trembled, withdrew its roots from England’s northernmost tip, checked for clearance, and slowly took off. It was the Granny’s turn at embodiment, at being the children’s mother; so, horrified and disconcerted as they were, the wives didn’t complain.

“Don’t wake the husband,” she told the house.

The house said, “You left instructions to wake him when the latest bother was over….”

One of the wives murmured, “That’s probably now.”

“You know the husband hates change,” said the Granny. “Besides, he wasn’t talking about my be-damned mother, he was talking about the Hague.”

Which reminded her: part of her was still at work. Her embroidery hardly needed more than a look now and then, so she put in a call for lenience at the trial of the latest Georgian Dictator in the Republique Hague.

The Granny’s mother whispered, “Sarah, you misplaced that stitch.”

The Granny hefted her gun and shot her mother again. The Granny’s heads-up display pinpointed her mother’s body’s moment of physical death and red-flagged the fractal pattern of her mother’s consciousness- uploads jolting into action. The Granny activated a confinement shell around the still-leaking body. When her mother’s dead-woman switch engaged, the explosion spattered the remains all over the inside of a molybdenum box.

The Granny sniffed and the wives fell silent. She told the house to move her mother’s coffin into the basement. She should have gotten rid of her mother last month when the old hag insisted on going ashore to help a stranded selkie back into the sea. The Granny had been distracted: first by the husband, out rock collecting; then she’d caught a grass snake. She hadn’t seen a live one in twenty years. She’d taken it in and nursed it back to health. There was something else, the Granny thought, but she couldn’t think what it was.

Two minutes ago her mother had breezed in and thanked the Granny for at least keeping a tiny bit of fresh meat in the house even though “reptile was rarely anyone’s first choice. Or even their third, really.”

The wives were disturbed. Disembodied, they flowed through everything in the room: rattling the coffee table, spinning the old paper embroidery patterns, knocking the Granny’s walking stick against the back of her high-backed wooden rocker. She could hear them whispering to one another. “Where did she get a gun?” “Will we all go to prison?” “I’m glad she did it.” “What are we going to do?”

“You should sleep,” one said to the Granny. “This is taking it out of you.”

“Your mother released spores when… It’s in your lungs,” said another. “She gave you a flu.”

The Granny ignored them. She was annoyed she hadn’t cloned the snake but on the other hand she didn’t want to open the molybdenum coffin to pick through her mother’s remains to find some snake DNA. She could bet her mother’s nanos were working away at reassembling the body. If the Granny opened the shell, one of her