Free Godlike Machines by Jonathan Strahan [Editor]

the window, at the gray-white sky. “I could fetch it for you. If you gave me some money, and told me where to go.” Seeing the sceptical look on her face, I add, “I’d come back.”
    “We’ll go together. It’s good exercise for me, to get out of this place. If I didn’t have errands, I’d probably never leave the building.”
    Nesha puts on several more layers of clothes and fetches a coat for herself. None of Gennadi’s coats fit me (they’re all too tight in the sleeves) so I’m forced to make do with Doctor Kizim’s again. At least it’s dried a bit, and I have something warm on underneath it. Nesha locks her apartment, turning keys in three separate locks, then we walk slowly to the elevator, still where I left it, on the ninth floor.
    “I shouldn’t have mocked you, Dimitri Ivanov. That wasn’t called for.”
    The elevator doors close. “Mocked me?”
    “About the musical box. The thing you came to give me. Now that we’ve spoken a little more, I see that you’re not the madman I thought you might be. I should have known better.”
    “It’s understandable.”
    “Did it really come from the Matryoshka?”
    “All the way back.”
    “Why did they let you keep it?”
    “Because they didn’t realize its significance. By the time we got back, I knew that we weren’t going to get an easy ride. The truth that we’d discovered-it wasn’t going to be something our political masters wanted to hear. We were all ill—the perfect excuse for incarceration in some nameless medical facility cum prison or madhouse. Yakov and Galenka were sick with radiation exposure. I was sick with the Matryoshka inside my head. None of us were going to see daylight again.”
    “I read the papers and saw the television reports. They never actually lied about what happened to you.”
    “They didn’t have to lie. As long as there was a reason not to have us out in public, they were happy.”
    The elevator completes its trundling, hesitant descent. We leave the building, venturing into the snow-covered street. I glance around, vigilant for prowling Zils and men in dark suits.
    “I kept the musical box with me all the way home. They found it, of course, but it was always presumed to be one of my personal effects-something I’d taken aboard the ship when we left. The idea that it might be an artifact—a. thing from the Matryoshka—that never crossed their minds.”
    “And you never thought to tell them?”
    “They’d have destroyed it, Nesha. So I kept it close with me, all the time I was in the facility. The only person I ever showed it to was Doctor Kizim, and I don’t think even he believed where it had come from.”
    “You must have trusted him.”
    “You had to trust someone in a place like that. Just like I’m trusting you now. The musical box is yours now. It’s a piece of the future, in your hands.”
    She removes it from her coat. Until then I have no idea that she’s brought it with her.
    “The tune it makes ...” She starts turning the little handle, the notes tinkling out. We’re in the street, but there’s no one else around to notice one old woman with a little metal box in her hands, or to question why she’s turning the handle in its side. “I think I know it. It’s something familiar, isn’t it? Something Russian?”
    “Like you always said. But please don’t play it now. It makes my head hurt.”
    She stops turning the handle and returns the musical box to her pocket. We trudge on in silence for several more streets, until we’re in sight of the shopping complex where Nesha hopes to find her bread. It looks dingy and disused, but already people are milling around outside. In their dark winter clothes, they form an amorphous, weary mass. Our premier smiles down on them from the looming side of an apartment tower, his lips moving but no sound coming out. Seagulls have pecked away at him, attracted by the flickering colors, flaking away huge pieces of his face.
    “If the musical box