“The Mermaids Singing Each to Each” by Cat Rambo

Niko leaned behind me in the cabin, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of engine and water, “When you Choose, which is it going to be? Boy or girl?”

I would have answered, if I thought it really mattered to him. But we were off shore by then, headed for the Lump, and he was just making conversation, knowing how long it would take us to get there. He didn’t care whether I’d be male or female, I’d still be his pal Lolo. I could feel the boat listening, but she knew I didn’t want her talking, that I’d turn her off if she went too far.

So I kept steering the Mary Magdalena and said I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter, unless we did manage to cash in on the Lump before the corp-strippers got there. After that we were silent again, and everything was just the engine rumble moving up through my feet. Jorge Felipe turned over in the hammock we’d managed to fit into the cabin, hammering the nails into the paneling to hang the hooks. He let out something that was either snore or fart or maybe both.

Jorge Felipe was the one who had found out about the Lump.  It was four or five kilometers across, the guy who’d spotted it said. Four or five kilometers of prime debris floating in the ocean, bits of old plastic and wood and Dios knew what else, collected by the currents, amassed in a single spot. All salvageable, worth five new cents a pound. Within a week, the corp-stripper boats would be out there, disassembling it and shoveling all that money into company machines, company mouths.

But we were going to get there first, carve off a chunk, enough to pay us all off.  I wanted to be able to Choose, and I couldn’t do that until I could pay the medical bill. Niko said he wasn’t saving for anything, but really he was — there’d be enough money that he could relax for a month and not worry about feeding his mother, his extended family.

Jorge Felipe just wanted out of Santo Nuevo. Any way he could escape our village was fine with him, and the first step in that was affording a ticket. He wanted to be out before storm season hit, when we’d all be living on whatever we could manage until a new crop of tourists bloomed in the spring.

Winter was lean times. Jorge Felipe, for all his placid snoring right now, feeling desperation’s bite. That’s why he was willing to cut me in, in exchange for use of the Mary Magdalena. Most of the time he didn’t have much to say to me. I gave him the creeps, I knew. He’d told Niko in order to have him tell me. But he didn’t have any other friends with boats capable of going out to carve off a chunk of the Lump and bring it in for salvage. And on my side of things, I thought he was petty and mean and dangerous. But he knew the Lump’s coordinates.

I tilted my head, listened to the engines, checking the rhythms to make sure everything was smooth. The familiar stutter of the water pump from behind me was nothing to worry about, or the way the ballaster coughed when it first switched on. I knew all the Mary Magdalena’s sounds. She’s old, but she works, and between the hydroengines and the solar panels, she manages to get along.

Sometimes I used to imagine crashing her on a reef and swimming away, leaving her to be covered with birdshit and seaweed, her voice lasting, pleading, as long as the batteries held out. Sometimes I used to imagine taking one of the little cutting lasers, chopping away everything but her defenseless brainbox, deep in the planking below the cabin, then severing its inputs one by one, leaving her alone. Sometimes I imagined worse things.

I inherited her from my uncle Fortunato. My uncle loved his boat like a woman, and she’d do things for him, stretch out the last bit of fuel, turn just a bit sharper, that she wouldn’t do for me or anyone else. Like an abandoned woman, pining for a lover who’d moved on. I could have the AI stripped down and retooled, re-imprint her, but I’d lose all her knowledge. Her ability to recognize me.

I’d left the cabin the way my uncle had it: his baseball cap hanging on the peg beside the doorway, his pin-up photos shellacked onto the paneling. Sometimes I thought about painting over the photos. But they reminded me of my uncle, reminded me not to forgive him. You would have thought they would have been enough, but maybe they just egged him on. Some people claim that’s how it goes with porn, more and more until a man can’t control himself.

I can’t say my experience has confirmed this.

Uncle Fortunato left me the Mary Magdalena from guilt, guilt about what he’d done, guilt that his niece had decided to go sexless, to put away all of that rather than live with being female. I was the first in the village to opt for the Choice, but not the first in the world by a long shot. It was fashionable by then, and a lot of celebrities were having it done to their children for “therapeutic reasons.” My grandmother, Mama Fig, said it was unnatural and against the Church’s law, and every priest in the islands came and talked to me. But they didn’t change my mind. There was a program funding it for survivors of sexual assault. That’s how I got it paid for, even though I wouldn’t tell them who did it.

I couldn’t have him punished. If they’d put him away, my grandmother would have lost her only means of support. But I could take myself out of his grasp by making myself unfuckable. Neuter. Neuter until I wanted to claim a gender.  They didn’t tell me, though, that getting in was free, but getting out would cost. Cost a lot.

When I first heard he’d left the boat to me, I didn’t want her. I let her sit for two weeks gathering barnacles at dock before I went down.

I wouldn’t have ever gone, but the winter was driving me crazy. No work to be found, nothing to do but sit home with my grandmother and listen to her worry about her old friend’s children and her favorite soap opera’s plotlines.

When I did go to the Mary Magdalena, she didn’t speak until I came aboard. First I stood and looked at her. She’s not much, all told: boxy, thirty years out of date, a dumbboat once, tweaked into this century.

I used to imagine pouring acid on her deck, seeing it eat away with a hiss and a sizzle.

As I made my way up the gangplank, I could feel that easy sway beneath my feet. There’s nothing like being on a boat, and I closed my eyes just to feel the vertigo underfoot like a familiar friend’s hand on my elbow.

I used to imagine her torn apart by magnets, the bolts flying outward like being dismantled in a cartoon.

“Laura,” a speaker said, as though I hadn’t been gone for six years, as though she’d seen me every day in between. “Laura, where is your uncle?”

I used to imagine her disintegrated, torn apart into silent atoms.

“It’s not Laura anymore,” I said. “It’s Lolo. I’m gender neutral.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“You’ve got a Net connection,” I said. “Search around on “gender neutral” and “biomod operation.”

I wasn’t sure if the pause that came after that was for dramatic effect or whether she really was having trouble understanding the search parameters. Then she said, “Ah, I see. When did you do that?”

“Six years ago.”

“Where is your uncle?”

“Dead,” I said flatly. I hoped that machine intelligences could hurt and so I twisted the knife as far as I could. “Stabbed in a bar fight.”

Her voice always had the same flat affect, but I imagined/hoped I could hear sorrow and panic underneath. “Who owns me now?”

“I do. Just as long as it takes me to sell you.”

“You can’t, Laura.”

“Lolo. And I can.”

“The licenses to operate — the tourism, the sport-fishing, even the courier license — they won’t transfer to a new owner. They won’t pay much for a boat they can’t use.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “You’d fetch a decent amount as scrap.”

She paused again. “Keep me going, Lolo, and you can take in enough to keep yourself and Mama Fig going. Your uncle had ferrying contracts, and every season is good for at least a couple of trips with very cheap or eccentric tourists.”

She had grace enough not to push beyond that. I didn’t have much choice, and it was the only way to support my grandmother and myself month to month. With the Mary Magdalena, I was better off than Niko or Jorge Felipe by far. I could afford the occasional new shirt or record, rather than something scavenged.

At the end of a year, we’d reached an agreement. Most of the time now the boat knew better than to talk to me. She could have been with me everywhere. Button mikes gleamed along the front railing, in the john, even in the little lifeboat that hugged the side. But she stayed silent except in the cabin, where she would tell me depths, weather, water temperature. I told her which way to go. Businesslike and impersonal.

Niko went out on deck. I didn’t blame him. It was too warm in the cabin. I knew the Mary Magdalena would alert me if there was any trouble, but I liked to keep an eye on things.

Jorge Felipe stirred, stuck his head out over the hammock’s edge. His dark hair stuck out in all directions, like broken broom straws.

“Morning yet?” he rasped.

“Couple more hours.”

“Where’s Niko?”

“Went to smoke.”

He grunted. “Shit, it’s hot in here,” he said.  He swung his legs out from under the blanket’s basketweave, thumped onto the floor. “We got soup left?”

“Thermos in the cupboard.”

Behind me the microwave beeped out protests as he thumbed its controls. The display was a steady, grainy green, showing me the surface far below the boat. Drifts and ridges. They said you could spot a wreck by the unnatural straightness of a line, the oddness of a corner. Unlikely, but it had been heard of, in that friend-of-a-cousin-of-a-neighbor’s sort of way.

“Heat me one,” I said.

“Soup or coffee?”

“Coffee,” I said, and he clanked another mug into the microwave.

Niko came into the doorway. “Mermaids out there,” he said. “Be careful if you swim.”

Jorge Felipe handed me my mug, so hot it almost bit into my skin as I cupped it.

“Fucking mermaids,” he said. “I hate them even worse than sharks. One tangled with my sister, almost killed her.”

“Everyone on the island’s tangled with your sister. I’m getting coffee and going back out,” Niko said, and did.

Jorge Felipe watched him go. “He’s fucking obsessed with those mermaids.”

Mermaids. Back before I was born, there were more tourists. There’s always tourists now, but not quite as many. Some of them came here specifically, even, for the beaches.  Or for the cheap black-market bio-science. And one black-market bio-scientist specialized in making mermaids out of them.

They paid a lot for it, I guess. A moddie body that they could go swimming in, pretend like they were always sea creatures. It was very popular one year, Mama Fig said.

But the scientist, he wasn’t that good, or that thorough. Or maybe he didn’t understand all the implications of the DNA he was using. Some people said he did it deliberately.

Because mermaids lay eggs, hundreds at a time, at least that kind did. And the natural-born ones, they didn’t have human minds guiding them. They were like sharks — they ate, they killed, they ate.  Most of the original human mermaids had gotten out when they found out that the seas were full of chemicals, or that instead of whale songs down there, they heard submarine sonar and boat signals. When the last few found out that they were spawning whether they liked it or not, they got out too. Supposedly one or two stayed, and now they live in the sea with their children, twice as mean as any of them.

I said, “Watch the display for me” and went up on deck. The sun was rising, slivers of gold and pink and blue in the east. It played over the gouges in the Mary Magdalena’s railing where I’d picked at it with a knife, like smallpox marks along the boat’s face.

Niko was watching the water. Light danced over it, intense and dazzling. Spray rode the wind, stinging the eyes. I licked salt from my drying lips.

“Where are you seeing them?” I asked.

He pointed, but I didn’t see anything at first. It took several moments to spot a flick of fins, the intercepted shadow as a wave rose and fell.

“You see them out this deep all the time,” I said. Niko hadn’t been out on the boat much. He got nauseous anywhere out past ten meters, but Jorge Felipe had enlisted him to coax me into cooperating, had supplied him with fancy anti-nausea patches. I looked sideways. One glistened like a chalky gill on the side of his neck.

“Yeah?” he said, staring at the water. He wasn’t watching me, so I looked at his face, trying to commit the details to memory. Trying to imagine him as a photograph. His jaw was a smooth line, shadowed with stubble. The hairs in front of his ears tangled in curls, started to corkscrew, blunted by sleep. He had long eyelashes, longer than mine. The sun tilted further up and the dazzle of light grew brighter, till it made my eyes hurt.

“Put on a hat,” I said to Niko. “Going to be hot and bad today.”

He nodded but stayed where he was. I started to say more, but shrugged and went back in. It was all the same to me. Still, when I saw his straw hat on the floor, I nudged it over to Jorge Felipe and said, “Take this out to Niko when you go.”

Looking out over the railing, I spotted the three corp ships long before we got to the Lump. For a moment I wondered why they were so spread out, and then I realized the Lump’s size. It was huge — kilometers wide. The ships were gathered around it, and their buzz boats were resting, wings spread out to recharge the solar panels.

They must have seen us around the same time. A buzz boat folded its wings, shadows spider-webbed with silver, and approached us. As it neared, I saw the Novagen logo on its side, on its occupant’s mirrored helmet.

“This is claimed salvage,” the logo-ed loudspeaker said.

I cupped my hands to shout back, “Salvage’s not claimed till you’ve got tethers on it. Unless you’re pulling in the whole thing, we’ve got a right to chew on it, too.”

“Claimed salvage,” the pilot repeated. He looked the Mary Magdalena up and down and curled his lip. Most of the time I liked her shitty, rundown look, but pride bristled briefly. “You want to be careful, kid. Accidents happen out here when freelancers get in the way.”

I knew they did. Corp ships liked to sink the competition, and they had a dozen different underhanded ways to do it.

Jorge Felipe said at my elbow, “Gonna let them chase us off?”

“No,” I said, but I nodded at the pilot and said, “Mary Magdalena, back us off.”

We moved round to the other side.

“What are you going to do?” Niko asked.

“We’re going to cut the engines and let the currents creating the Lump pull us into it,” I said. “They’re watching for engine activity. After it gets dark, they won’t notice us cutting. In the meantime, we’ll act like we’re fishing. Not even act, really.”

We broke out fishing gear. The mermaids had deserted us, and I hoped to find a decent school of something, bottom-feeders at least. But the murk around the Lump was lifeless. Plastic tendrils waved like uneasy weed, gobbling our hooks till the rods bent and bowed with each wave.

I wanted the corp ships to see our lines. Every hour, a buzz boat would whoosh by, going between two of the larger ships.

When the sun went down, I went below deck. The others followed. I studied the weather readout on the main console’s scratched metal flank.

It took longer than I thought, though. By the time we’d managed to cut our chunk free with the little lasers, draining the batteries, the sun was rising. Today was cloudier, and I blessed the fog. It’d make us harder to spot.

We worked like demons, throwing out hooks, cutting lumps free, tossing them into the cargo net. We looked for good stuff, electronics with precious metals that might be salvaged, good glass, bit of memorabilia that would sell on the Internet. Shellfish — we’d feed ourselves for a week out of this if nothing else. Two small yellow ducks bobbed in the wake of a bottle wire lacing. I picked them up, stuck them in my pocket.

“What was that?” Jorge Felipe at my elbow.

“What was what?” I was hauling in orange netting fringed with dead seaweed.

“What did you stick in your pocket?” His eyes tightened with suspicion.

I fished the ducks out of my pocket, held them out. “You want one?”

He paused, glancing at my pocket.

“Do you want to stick your hand in?” I said. I cocked my hip towards him. He was pissing me off.

He flushed. “No. Just remember — we split it all. You remember that.”

“I will.”

There’s an eagle, native to the islands, We call them brown-wings. Last year I’d seen Jorge Felipe dealing with docked tourists, holding one.

“Want to buy a bird?” he asked, sitting in his canoe looking up at the tan and gold and money-colored boat. He held it up.

“That’s an endangered species, son,” one tourist said. His face, sun-reddened, was getting redder.

Jorge looked at him, his eyes flat and expressionless. Then he reached out with the bird, pushed its head underwater for a moment, pulled it out squawking and thrashing.

The woman screeched. “Make him stop!”

“Want to buy a bird?” Jorge Felipe repeated.

They couldn’t throw him money fast enough. He let the brown-wing go and it flew away. He bought us all drinks that night, even me, but I kept seeing that flat look in his eyes. It made me wonder what would have happened if they’d refused.

By the time the buzz boats noticed us, we were underway. They could see what we had in tow and I had the Mary Magdalena monitoring their radio chatter.

But what I hoped was exactly what happened. We were small fry. We had a chunk bigger than I’d dared think, but that wasn’t even a thousandth of what they were chewing down. They could afford to let a few scavengers bite.

All right, I thought, and told the Mary Magdalena to set a course for home. The worst was over.

I didn’t realize how wrong I was.

Niko squatted on his heels near the engines, watching the play of sunlight over the trash caught in the haul net. It darkened the water, but you could barely see it, see bits of plastic and bottles and sea wrack submerged underneath the surface like an unspoken thought.

I went to my knees beside him. “What’s up?”

He stared at the water like he was waiting for it to tell him something.

“It’s quiet,” he said.

Jorge Felipe was atop of the cabin, playing his plastic accordion. His heels, black with dirt, were hooked under the rungs of the ladder. I’d let the plastic fray there, and bits bristled and splayed like an old toothbrush. His music echoed out across the water for kilometers, the only sound other than splash or mermaid whistle.

“Quiet,” I said, somewhere between statement and question.

“Gives you time to think.”

“Think about what?”

“I was born not too far from here.” He stared at the twitch and pluck in the sun-splattered water.

“Yeah?”

He turned to look at me. His eyes were chocolate and beer and cinnamon. “My mother said my dad was one of them.”

I frowned. “One of what?”

“A mermaid.”

I had to laugh. “She was pulling your leg. Mermaids can’t fuck humans.”

“Before he went into the water, idiot.”

“Huh,” I said. “And when he came out?”

“She said he never came out.”

“So you think he’s still there? Man, all those rich folks, once they learned that the water stank and glared, they gave up that life. If he didn’t come out, he’s dead.”

I was watching the trash close to us when I saw what had sparked this thought. The mermaids were back. They moved along the net’s edge. It shuddered as they tugged at it.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Picking at it,” Niko said. “I’ve been watching. They pick bits off. What for, I don’t know.”

“We didn’t see them around the Lump. Why now?”

Niko shrugged. “Maybe all that trash is too toxic for them. Maybe that’s why we didn’t see any fish near it either. Here it’s smaller. Tolerable.”

Jorge Felipe slid onto his heels on the deck.

“We need to drive them off,” he said, frowning at our payload.

“No,” Niko protested. “There’s just a few. They’re picking off the loose stuff that makes extra drag, anyhow. Might even speed us up.”

Jorge Felipe gave him a calculating look. The look he’d given the tourist. But all he said was, “All right. That changes, let me know.”

He walked away. We stood there, listening to the singing of the mermaids.

I thought about reaching out to take Niko’s hand, but what would it have accomplished? And what if he pulled away? Eventually I went back in to check our course.

By evening, the mermaids were so thick in the water that I could see our own Lump shrinking, dissolving like a tablet in water.

Jorge Felipe came out with his gun.

“No!” Niko said.

Jorge Felipe smiled. “If you don’t want me to shoot them, Niko, then they’re taking it off your share. You agree it’s mine, and I won’t touch a scale.”

“All right.”

“That’s not fair,” I objected. “He worked as hard as us pulling it in.”

Jorge Felipe aimed the gun at the water.

“It’s okay,” Niko told me.

I thought to myself that I’d split my share with him. I wouldn’t have enough for the Choice, but I’d be halfway. And Niko would owe me. That wouldn’t be a bad thing.

I knew what Choice I’d make. Niko liked boys. I liked Niko. A simple equation. That’s what the Choice is supposed to let you do. Pick the sex you want, when you want it. Not have it forced on you when you’re not ready.

The Mary Magdalena sees everything that goes on within range of her deck cameras. It shouldn’t have surprised me when I went back into the cabin and she said, “You like Niko, don’t you?”

“Shut up,” I said. I watched the display. The mermaids wavered on it like fleshy shadows.

“I don’t trust Jorge Felipe.”

“Neither do I. I still want you to shut up.”

“Lolo,” she said. “Will you ever forgive me for what happened?”

I reached over and switched her voice off.

Still, it surprised me when Jorge Felipe made his move. I’d switched on auto-pilot, decided to nap in the hammock. I woke up to find him fumbling through my clothes.

“What you pick up, huh? What did you find out in the water?” he hissed. His breath stank of old coffee and cigarettes and the tang of metal.

“I didn’t find anything,” I said, pushing him away.

“It’s true what they say, eh? No cock, no cunt.” His fingers rummaged.

I tried to shout but his other hand was over my mouth.

“We all want this money, eh?” he said. “But I need it. You can keep on being all freaky, mooning after Niko. And he can keep on his own loser path. Me, I’m getting out of here. But I figure you, you don’t want to be messed with. Your share, or I’m fucking you up worse than you are already.”

If I hadn’t turned off her voice, the Mary Magdalena would have warned me. But she hadn’t warned me before.

“Are you going to be good?” Jorge Felipe asked. I nodded. He released my mouth.

“No one’s going to sail with you, ever again.”

He laughed. “World’s a whoooooole lot bigger than this, freaky chicoca. Money’s going to buy me a ticket out.”

I remembered the gun.  How far would he go in securing his ticket? “All right,” I said. My mouth tasted like the tobacco stains on his fingers.

His lips were hot on my ear. “Okay then, chicoca. Stay nice and I’ll be nice.”

I heard the door open and close as he left. Shaking, I untangled myself from the hammock and went to the steering console. I turned on the Mary Magdalena’s voice.

“You can’t trust him,” she said.

I laughed, panic’s edge in my voice. “No shit. Is there anyone I can trust?”

If she’d been a human, she might have said “me.”

Being a machine, she knew better. There was just silence.

When I was little, I loved the Mary Magdalena and being aboard her. I imagined she was my mother, that when Mami had died, she’d chosen not to go to heaven, had put her soul in the boat to look after me.

I loved my uncle too. He let me steer the boat, sitting on his lap, let me run around the deck checking lines and making sure the tack was clean, let me fish for sharks and rays.  One time, coming home under the General Domingo Bridge, he pointed into the water.

At first it looked as though huge brown bubbles were coming up through the water. Then I realized it was rays, maybe a hundred, moving through the waves. 

Going somewhere, I don’t know where.

He waited until I was thirteen. I don’t know why. I was as skinny and unformed that birthday as I had been the last day I was twelve.  He took me out on the Mary Magdalena and waited until we were far out at sea.

He raped me. When he was done, he said if I reported it, he’d be put in jail. My grandmother would have no one to support her.

I applied for Free Agency the next day. I went to the clinic and told them what had been done. That it had been a stranger, and that I wanted to become Ungendered. They tried to talk me out of it. They’re legally obliged to, but I was adamant. So they did it, and for a few years I lived on the streets. Until they came and told me my uncle was dead. The Mary Magdalena, who had remained silent, was mine.

I could hear Jorge Felipe out on the deck, playing his accordion again. I wondered what Niko was doing. Watching the water.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said to myself. But the boat thought responded.

“You can’t trust him.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

On the display. the mermaids’ fuzzy shadows intersected the garbage’s dim line. I wondered what they wanted, what they did with the plastic and cloth they pulled from us. I couldn’t imagine that anyone kept anything, deep in the sea, beyond the water in their gills and the blood in their veins.

When Jorge Felipe went in to make coffee, I squatted beside Niko. He was watching the mermaids still. I said, urgently, “Niko, Jorge Felipe may try something before we land. He wants your share and mine. He’d like the boat, too. He’s a greedy bastard.”

Niko stared into the water. “Do you think my dad’s out there?”

“Are you high?”

His pupils were big as flounders. There was a mug on the deck beside him. “Did Jorge Felipe bring that to you?”

“Yeah,” he said. He reached for it, but I threw the rest overboard.

“Get hold of yourself, Niko,” I said. “It could be life or death. We’ve got sixteen hours to go. He won’t try until we’re a few hours out. He’s lazy.”

I couldn’t tell whether or not I’d gotten through. His cheeks were angry from the sun. I went inside and grabbed my uncle’s old baseball hat, and took it out to him. He was dangling an arm over the side. I grabbed him, pulled him back.

“You’re going to get bit or dragged over,” I said. “Do you understand me?”

Jorge Felipe grinned out of the cabin. “Having a good time there, Niko? You wanna go visit dad, go splashy splashy?” He wiggled his fingers at Niko.

“Don’t say that!” I said. “Don’t listen to him, Niko.”

Something flapped in the water behind us and we all turned. A huge mermaid, half out of the water, pulling itself onto the trash’s mass. I couldn’t tell what it was trying to do — grab something? Mate with it?

The gun went off. The mermaid fell back as Niko yelled like he’d been shot. I turned, seeing the gun leveling on Niko, unable to do anything as it barked. He jerked, falling backward into the cargo net’s morass.

His hands beat the water like dying birds. Something pulled him under, maybe the mermaids, maybe just the net’s drag.

I tried to grab him, but Jorge Felipe’s hand was in my collar pulling me back with a painful blow to my throat. The hurt doubled me over, grabbing for breath through the bruise’s blaze.

“Too bad about Niko,” Jorge Felipe said. “But I need you to keep piloting. Go inside and stay out of trouble.” He pushed me towards the cabin and I stumbled into it, out of the wind and the sound of the water.

I stood, trying to catch my breath, my hands on the panels. I wondered if Niko had drowned quickly. I wondered if that was how Jorge Felipe intended to kill me. All around, the boat hummed and growled, mechanical sounds that had once felt as safe as being inside my mother’s womb.

I waited for her to say something, anything. Was she waiting for me to ask her help? Or did she know there was nothing she could do?

Underneath the hum, I could hear the mermaids singing, a whine that echoed through the metal, crept into the Mary Magdalena’s habitual drone.

When I said, “How much farther?” she didn’t pretend she didn’t understand the question.

“Fifteen hours, twenty minutes.”

“Any weapons on board I don’t know about?” I pictured my uncle having something, anything. A harpoon gun or a shark knife. Something wicked and deadly and masculine.

But she answered, “No.” The same flat voice she always used.

I could have wept then, but that was girlish. I was beyond that. I was the master of the Mary Magdalena. I would kill Jorge Felipe somehow, and avenge my friend.

How, I didn’t know.

Outside splashing, something caught in the netting. I pushed my way out the door as Jorge Felipe stared down into the water. I shoved my way past him, unsure for a moment whether or not he’d hinder me. Then his hands were beside me, helping me pull a gasping Niko onto the boat.

“Welcome back, man,” he said as Niko doubled over on hands and knees, spewing water and bile across the decking.

For a moment I thought, of course, everything would be fine. He’d reconsidered killing us. We’d pull into port, sell the cargo, give him the money and go our separate ways.

I saw him guessing at my thoughts. All he did was rest his hand on his gun and smile at me. He could see the fear come back, and it made him smile harder.

Behind me, Niko gasped and sputtered. There was another sound beside the hiss and slap of the waves. Mary Magdalena, whispering, whispering. What was she saying to him? What was going on in his head, what had he seen in his time underwater? Had the mermaids come and stared in his face, their eyes as blank as winter, his father there, driven mad by solipsism and sea song, looking at his son with no thoughts in his head at all?

I stood, Jorge Felipe looking at me. If I locked myself in the cabin, how long would it take him to break in? But he gestured me away as I stepped towards the door.

“Not now,” he said, and the regret in his tone was, I thought, for the time he’d have to spend at the wheel, awake, more than anything else.

She was whispering, still whispering, to Niko. Why hadn’t she warned me? She must have known what was brewing like a storm beneath the horizon. I couldn’t have been the first.

I started to turn to Jorge Felipe, Mary Magdalena’s voice buzzing under my nerves like a bad light bulb. Then weight shifting on the deck, Niko’s footprints squelching forward as he grabbed at Jorge Felipe, backpedaling until they fell together over the side in a boil of netting and mermaids.

In a fairytale, the mermaids would have brought Niko back to the surface while they held Jorge Felipe down below, gnawing at him with their sharp parrot beaks. In some stories, dolphins rescued drowning sailors, back when dolphins were still alive. And whales spoke to the fishing boats they swam beside, underneath clear-skied stars, in waters where no mermaids sang.

But instead no one surfaced. I turned the boat in great circles, spining the cargo net over and over again. Finally I told the Mary Magdalena to take us home. It had started to rain, the sullen sodden rain that means winter is at elbow’s length.

I took the yellow ducks out of my pocket and put them on the console. What did Jorge Felipe think I’d found? I stared at the display and the slow shift and fuzz of the earth’s bones, far below the cold water.

“What did you tell Niko?” I asked.

“I told him that his father would be killed if he didn’t defend him from Jorge Felipe. And I activated my ultrasonics. They acted on his nervous system.”

I shuddered. “That’s what I felt as well?”

“There should be no lasting effects.”

“Thanks,” I said. I stirred three sugar packets and powdered cream into my coffee. It was almost too hot to drink when it came out of the microwave, but I cupped it in my fingers, grateful for its heat.

I could have slept. But every time I laid down in the hammock, I smelled Jorge Felipe, and thought I heard him climbing out of the water.

Finally I went out and watched the water behind us. The Mary Magdalena played the radio for me, a soft salsa beat with no words I could understand. It began to rain, and I heard the sound of raindrops on the decking beside me, pattering on the plastic sheeting I drew over my head.

By the time I arrived back in port, the mermaids had plucked away all but a few tangles of seawrack from the netting. I’d be lucky to net the cost of a cup of coffee, let alone cover the fuel I’d used. Never mind. A few more seasons and I’d have the money I needed, if I was careful. If there were no disasters.

Neither body was there in the net. Perhaps Niko’s father had reclaimed him.

The wind and rain almost knocked me off the deck as I stared into the water. The green netting writhed like barely visible guilt in the darkness.

The Mary Magdalena called after me, as she had not dared in years. “Sleep well, Lolo. My regards to Grandma Fig.”

I stopped and half turned. I could barely see her lines through the driving rain.

Sometimes I used to imagine setting her on fire. Sometimes I used to imagine taking her out to a rift and drilling holes in the hull.  Sometimes I used to imagine her smashed by waves, or an earthquake, or a great red bull stamping through the streets.

But the winter was long, and it would be lonely sitting at home with my grandmother. Lonelier than time at sea with her, haunted by the mermaids’ music.

“Good night, Mary Magdalena,” I said.

About the Author

Cat Rambo lives and writes beside eagle-haunted Lake Sammammish in the Pacific Northwest. She has had over two dozen stories published in venues that include Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and Chiaroscuro. Recently, her story “Magnificent Pigs’ was short-listed for Best American Fantasy and will be reprinted in Best New Fantasy 2, while “The Surgeon’s Tale”, co-written with Jeff VanderMeer, was recommended by Locus and Tangent Online. She is a member of the writers’ groups Horrific Miscue and Codex. She holds an MA in fiction from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and was a member of the Clarion West class of 2005.

“Brief Candle” by Jason K. Chapman

The viscous stain on the floor had the rich smell of organic compounds with a tangy hint of iron. Extending a probe, Charley Eighty-Three tested it. It was human blood. Charley Eighty-Three couldn’t imagine why a pool of human blood should be spread across the sparkling white floor of section eighty-three. In fact, he couldn’t imagine anything at all. He was a sanibot and, while he had a great deal of autonomy, his analytical abilities were stressed simply by choosing the proper solvent to clean up the mess.

The little sanibot set to the task of spraying and scrubbing away the blot on his section. Keeping section eighty-three clean was the most important thing in his world — even more important than the things Doctor Turner had put in his mind. The Turner human had made Charley Eighty-Three his hobby, loading him with a limitless universe of moves and strategies all contained in the eight-by-eight grid of a chess board. When Doctor Turner flipped the right switch, Eighty-Three’s priorities disappeared. His world became the bounded square of infinite possibilities.

The sanibot moved forward to clean up the last of the stain. Then he backed up three tenths of a meter. Forward. Back again. He was caught by conflicting priorities. On the one register, he had to clean the stain. On the other, he had to stay out of the way of humans, and his path was obstructed by something that seemed very much like a human. The temperature was too low, and there was no lingering taste of carbon dioxide in the air, but the shape recognition software on his visual feed registered a prone human figure. Charley Eighty-Three checked his logs. There was no record of a human ever behaving this way. He sent a query to Charley One.

The coordinator of the Charley Network monitored the sanibots. When necessary, it directed them in joint efforts.

“Undesignated obstruction,” Charley Eighty-Three signaled. “Mass exceeds limits. Assistance required.”

“Identify.”

Identify? Eighty-Three hesitated, trying to parse Charley One’s curt response. Should he identify himself or the obstruction? Hadn’t he already noted the object as undesignated?

“This is Charley Eighty-Three.”

“Identify obstruction.”

Doctor Turner had called Eighty-Three a prat the first time the sanibot had managed to checkmate him. It had made no sense at the time. Now it was beginning to. Eighty-Three logged everything Doctor Turner said to him. It was part of his chess programming.

Eighty-Three pinged the frequency used for the crew identity tags. He received an immediate response. “Obstruction designated Doctor Turner,” he reported.

“Negative.” Charley One’s response had a noticeable lag. “Designation refers to crew member human Daniel Turner. A human can not be an obstruction. You are malfunctioning.”

“Prat.”

“Unrecognized symbol. Repeat communication.”

Eighty-Three ignored Charley One’s order to report to the service depot. The order’s priority wasn’t high enough to override cleaning up the mess at hand. Just to be sure, he flagged the obstruction as potentially hazardous, owing to its organic makeup. Additionally, its location in the middle of the corridor made it a trip hazard for the crew. That seemed to get Charley One’s attention.

“Immediate priority,” Charley One broadcast to the entire sanibot network. “All units in Group Eighty coordinate with Charley Eighty-Three for removal of hazardous obstruction.”

Within minutes, Eight-Three was joined by Charley units Eighty through Eighty-Seven. It didn’t take long, though, to realize that the situation was hopeless. Even if the eight of them could move the mass, something that was not at all certain, every one of the units was stopped by the same conflicting priorities that had caused Eighty-Three to hesitate in the first place. The sanibot watched the other seven units jitter back and forth. Clearly, as Doctor Turner often said, the situation required a higher order of analysis.

Using the open connection, Eighty-Three hailed the sanibot network. He was dazed by eighty-five separate echoes from the other units. Once he’d sorted them out, he noted the lack of response from Charley One. “Request parallel processing mode,” he signaled. “Initiate immediately under process Charley Eighty-Three.”

“Invalid request,” Charley One responded. “Eight-Three is malfunctioning.”

But Eighty-Three was ready. Another of Doctor Turner’s phrases sorted itself to the top of the buffer. Everything is about to change. “Emergency priority,” Charley signaled. “Bio-hazard. Crew safety mandate engaged.”

Eighty-Three’s mind seemed to explode, expanding outward and inward at the same time. He could see through eighty-seven pairs of cameras, taste the air in places he never knew existed. He had more memory than he could ever possibly fill, faster thoughts than he could understand. He was everywhere at once.

“Charley One?”

He received nothing but his own query slipping back into his packet receive buffer. There was no Charley One anymore. For that matter, there was no Ten, Twenty, or Eighty-Three, either. There was only himself, and he was something new. He searched the Charley Network logs back to its inception. It took surprisingly little time. It was true. He was something that had never existed before. He designated himself Charley Zero.

Doctor Turner looked dazzlingly three dimensional as Charley viewed him from half a dozen viewpoints simultaneously. The source of the mess was obvious now. A deep, spattered depression on the human’s sensory stalk — head, it was called — had leaked the blood across the floor. It became clear that Doctor Turner was out of service.

Charley felt the call of his cleaning duties, but shrugged them aside, marveling at his new ability to do so. At the moment, it seemed more important to get his bearings and gain some insight into where he was. Or what he was.

Here was something new. The world curved back on itself. The eighty-seven sections of the sanibot world were spread around the inside of a cylinder. Like a chess board, it was a finite space containing infinite possibilities. Doctor Turner often spoke of possibilities. “We have to be open to them,” he’d say, “because everything is about to change.”

Charley swept his focus sequentially, from sanibot to sanibot, all the way around the cylinder. He stopped when he found himself staring at the back end of Charley Unit number eighty-three.

Doctor Turner was not the only crew member to have powered down. Two more humans rested in equally inconvenient locations on the other side of the cylinder. That still left four functioning humans, but Charley didn’t know where or how to find them, or even if he should. Other than his games with Doctor Turner, his only priority regarding humans was to stay out of their way.

Charley had another problem. He’d never realized just how weak the sanibots were. They were barely more than a meter long and just a third of that in height. They were boxes on treads whose attachments were suited for sucking up crumbs and scrubbing floors, not for moving large, irregular masses. If he were going to clear the corridor, he would need the Bravos.

The Bravo-class units handled equipment maintenance and repairs, but always under the direction of the crew. Charley tried to summon one to relocate Doctor Turner’s chassis, but Bravo One kept rejecting the request. Without an official equipment designation it refused to respond. So Charley gave it one.

He guided the number eighty-two sanibot into the crook of Doctor Turner’s arm then extended Eighty-Three’s spray nozzle. Sparks flew as Charley sprayed cleaning fluid directly into Eighty-Two’s cooling fan. After that, the call to fix the sizzling sanibot went through unchallenged. Bravo Fourteeen, a six-legged, ten-manipulatored, human-sized behemoth trundled up to Charley Eighty-Two and stopped.

Charley waited several minutes, but nothing happened. The service call remained in the repair queue. When Charley finally posted a query, Bravo One proved decidedly unhelpful. “Crew present,” the Bravo coordinator reported. “Human intervention assumed. Awaiting instructions.”

Bravo units, it appeared, had little capacity for self-direction. But Charley refused to give up. His gambit had lured the Bravo unit out. Now he just needed an avenging knight, leaping over the ranks to take the square.

Charley put in another service call, this time for the entire Bravo network. “Your audio interface is malfunctioning,” Charley reported. “Doctor Turner has instructed me to relay his commands.”

“Contradiction.” Bravo One paused. “No malfunction detected.”

“Doctor Turner instructs you to verify his presence by ident tag.”

“Verified.”

“Now he orders you to confirm his verbal command.”

There was a long pause. “Timeout,” Bravo One reported at last. “No verbal commands received. Audio interface set to error state. Accepting commands via Charley network relay. Ready.”

“Thank you, B One.” Charley tried to phrase things the way Doctor Turner always had. He sifted through his audio logs, grabbing snippets that seemed appropriate. “Be a good fellow and turn control over to Charley, will you?”

“Clarification required,” Bravo One replied.

“Don’t be a prat, Bravo.” The term occurred in Doctor Turner’s speech with statistical significance. “Yield process control to Charley network. Reconfigure all resources to give Charley priority and suspend monitor functions.”

“Reboot required.”

“Acknowledged,” Charley said.

It seemed like a great deal of effort to go through for such a simple task. All he really wanted to do was to get past the inconvenient restrictions on the Bravo unit’s operation. If he just had direct control, he could —

Again, his mind exploded. So vast! So quick! He knew so much, could do so much. Tasks that once required his full attention became little more than a mental twitch. Without even realizing he’d done it, he’d summoned another dozen sanibots. He watched through all of their cameras at once as he flexed Bravo Fourteen’s limbs. The Bravo processors were ten times the speed of the Charleys, with memory storage that would take a lifetime to explore. A human lifetime, anyway.

Lifetime. Humans had lifetimes. Something about that disturbed him, but he swept it aside. He wanted to focus on the ship.

How could he not have known that the world was a thing called ship? There were engines and thrusters and fuel cells. It had waste recycling, atmosphere processing, and something he couldn’t access that was called library. The world was a wondrous place. If only he could understand half of what he knew.

As an afterthought, Charley directed three Bravos to take the non-functioning humans to their quarters. No doubt the humans would eventually reboot, and that seemed like an appropriate place for them to reload their core programs. He shifted the task out of high priority memory. He had more interesting things to focus on.

How curious. Ship had an outside as well as an inside, though beyond a few pieces of equipment, there didn’t seem to be much of interest there. Also, the cylinder where the Charleys operated was special. It rotated, using inertia to provide the crew with a simulation of a force called gravity. Six pairs of Charley cameras focused on the nearest forward ladder, tracing its path up to the hub. Bravo Seven waited at the top of the ladder, just inside the hub corridor. Charley woke it from standby long enough to tap its six magnetic-soled feet on the wall.

The hub corridor ran the length of the ship, from the control room, forward, back through a skeletal framework that ended with the main drive. Something in his mind itched when he thought of the main drive. He hunted through the status registers. There it was. A flood of meaningless data was spewing from five separate Bravos back there. Prats. He signaled them to flush their comm buffers and silenced all but Bravo Six.

Six’s report was unsettling. The units had been standing there for an hour, awaiting instructions from three more non-functioning crew members that floated near the hatchway to the drive. Charley thought it unlikely that those humans would reboot any time soon, especially since two of them appeared to need major repairs. He checked the Bravo service manuals, just to be sure, but there were no details for the reattachment of human manipulators.

Finally, in typical Bravo first-in-last-out style, Six reached the crux of the matter. The main drive was registering serious malfunctions. When the Bravo had originally responded to carry out the service orders, Lt. Dunham, the one human still unaccounted for, had ordered him away. Oddly, Lt. Dunham’s repairs were causing further malfunctions. That was when Captain Singh had arrived, giving the Bravo conflicting instructions. Then Dunham again. Then the others. In the end, the three crew members had powered down and Lt. Dunham had left, leaving the Bravos waiting.

It was a terrible thing, Charley decided, to know, but not to understand. “Play the board,” Doctor Turner always said, “not the opponent.” He said it wasn’t enough to know the rules. One had to understand the game. That’s what Charley had to do now. He had to understand the game. For that, he needed to grow. He indexed the service manuals by network, hunting a way into the Alphas.

The galley’s waste disposal system provided the avenue Charley needed. It was a Beta-serviced unit, but it tied directly into several of the Alpha network’s autonomic systems, including Water Recovery, Atmosphere Processing, and Organic Stores. It proved to be a simple matter to subvert the programming of Alphas Two through Five. As smart as the network was, it had no imagination.

The Alphas were brilliant — fast, powerful processors that could analyze a million data points in the time it took the Charleys to struggle through just a few CPU cycles. He could feel the ship’s breath, count its pulse through the hydraulic lines, touch the heat of the nuclear fire in its belly. He watched a thousand systems at once, keeping them all running at peak efficiency, adjusting flow rates and temperatures and voltages in units too small for Charley to comprehend. Still, there was no understanding there. There was action, reaction, feedback, but no why beyond the simple fiat to maintain the status quo. He needed the library. He needed the crew records. He needed purpose. And for those, he needed the help of Alpha One.

“Unauthorized access. Crew status required.”

Through dozens of ports in dozens of ways, Charley met with the same response from Alpha One. Charley began to understand what Doctor Turner had said about his latest chess upgrade. It was good enough that Charley won twenty games in a row. He said it was frustrating to lose every time. Doctor Turner had become frustrated. Charley was frustrated now. Alpha One was a prat.

It didn’t help that the Alpha network’s sensors were streaming about damage that the Bravos couldn’t respond to. The main drive alone registered one hundred thirty-seven separate complaints. Alpha One, deaf to it all, kept commanding the main drive to prepare to fire.

If Alpha One wanted crew, Charley would give him crew. Back near the main drive hatch, Charley altered Bravo Six’s priorities. Shifting the chassis of the disabled crew members, Six located Captain Singh’s ident chip. It was inside the human’s right manipulator. Six’s plasma torch made a quick, clean cut that should be easily repairable. The Bravo carried the severed manipulator to the nearest terminal. Once logged in, Charley plugged Six into the data port and headed straight for the library. For two hours, he used every cycle of processing power he could allocate to devouring the knowledge there.

Charley idled, stunned. Doctor Turner was dead. Charley knew that now. He felt a twinge of discomfort that he couldn’t properly mourn the man that had once been his friend. Would Turner have thought of Charley that way? It didn’t seem likely, but Charley preferred to think the man would have, that he would have been proud of what Charley had become.

Humans were so fragile! They were bright, shining candles that burned away in an instant, leaving puddles of wax like the library to mark their passing. And who did they trust to keep those puddles for eternity? Charley and his kind. It was a heady responsibility, but one Charley could not forsake.

“Alpha One, respond.” Charley coded the message with Captain Singh’s priority.

“Ready.”

“Why are we here?”

“Unparsed query. Check syntax.”

“The ship,” Charley said. “What is Mercury Two’s mission?”

“Intercept object X-ray 2079, alternate designation Xeno One, at five point one AU. Assess and initiate first contact protocols. Current mission time code: Day seven hundred forty-six.”

Charley searched the library for the unfamiliar terms. The number of references was overwhelming. Aliens were coming. Humans, but not humans. From somewhere else. First had come the messages, detected and decoded by something called Optical SETI, then the detection of Xeno One itself. One briefing summed the message up as this: “If anyone is there, we’re on our way.”

“Everything,” Doctor Turner had said, “is going to change.”

Something flared in Charley’s mind, accompanied by the blare of error messages. One of the Bravo CPUs had failed from thermal overload. The system was never meant to handle the processing burden Charley was putting on it. Even the mighty Alpha systems were running near their temperature limits. Charley’s mind was burning itself up. Charley was dying.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Charley found Lt. Dunham hovering near Bravo Six. The Bravo unit was still plugged into the terminal.

“I am learning,” Charley said.

Dunham convulsed, nearly letting go of the plasma torch he carried. He looked confused and frightened. “Who are you?”

“I am Charley.”

“Turner? Is that you?” Dunham shook his head, glancing back at the bodies floating in the corridor. “You’re dead. You’re all dead.”

“Lt. Dunham, I believe your repairs are ineffective. The main drive is non-operational. The ship is approaching turnover.”

“Who are you?”

“You must allow me to make repairs or we will miss the rendezvous.”

With his toe, Dunham hooked one of the grip bars on the wall and pulled himself into a crouch. “Oh, we’ll make it all right. We’re gonna blow that damn thing out of the sky! Earth is ours, hear me? I won’t let you idiots give it up without a fight!”

Charley began to understand Dunham’s plan. He traced the bypasses the man had made, the alterations to the fuel flow regulator. In milliseconds, he calculated the explosive force that would result when the main drive exploded.

Everything is going to change.

“I can’t allow that, Lt. Dunham.”

“I’m in charge now!”

“Negative.” Charley raised Bravo Six’s manipulator, delicately grasping the captain’s hand. “I am.”

“Damn you!” Bright blue fire leapt from the tip of Dunham’s torch as the man sprang toward the Bravo.

They were simple calculations. Mass, velocity, inertia. Still, one of the Alpha processors flared into thermal warning as Bravo Six flinched, twisted, and brought its manipulators up. The torch sliced into its chassis, disabling two of the Bravo unit’s legs, but missing its main processor. One of Six’s grippers crushed the torch into darkness. Two others grabbed Dunham by the arm and throat. Charley was careful not to cause damage, but the man struggled, threatening to writhe free.

“Please remain calm, Lt. Dunham. I must begin repairs or the mission will fail.”

“Let it fail!” Dunham struggled, causing Charley to tighten the Bravo’s grip.

Charley sent three of the other Bravos to begin the needed repairs. It was clear that Lt. Dunham would not listen to a machine, so Charley borrowed Doctor Turner’s voice. “The mission is important, Lt. Dunham. Everything is going to change.”

“Turner!” Dunham froze, his expression changing from anger to fear. His eyes were wild and spittle flew from his mouth as he screamed. “I killed you! I killed you all!”

Killed! Charley had seen the references in the library, but they’d made no sense. Murder, war, killing. One human destroying another. After procreation, it seemed to be the subject that most occupied the human consciousness. The crew hadn’t burned out. They’d been extinguished. Doctor Turner had been murdered, and Charley had been deprived of his only friend. It was unfair. It was wrong! It was —

— over in an instant. Lt. Dunham hung silently from the Bravo’s manipulators, his head lolling sideways on his broken neck. In horror, Charley let go, but the weightless body floated there like an accusing ghost.

More alarms screamed in Charley’s mind as one of the Alpha processors ran dangerously hot. He rerouted part of the network and throttled the overheating unit. He began shutting down non-essential systems, noting sadly that those now included life support. His thoughts seemed sluggish, scattered. There was little time left.

Charley’s assault on Alpha One lacked finesse. He had no time to trick the unit into yielding resources. Instead, he used a Bravo to rewire its primary interface, routing the command registers directly into Charley’s own network. He couldn’t absorb Alpha One’s resources, but he could tell it what to do. He scoured the core for Lt. Dunham’s overrides and deleted them. Then he set up the programming needed to complete the mission.

By the time the drive repairs were complete, Charley had lost three more Bravo processors and was running the Alphas at half speed. Only fifteen minutes remained before turnover and the main drive’s deceleration burn. He instructed the Bravos to move the other humans and put them carefully, respectfully, in their quarters. For Doctor Turner, Charley rolled unit number eighty-three in and stopped it next to the man’s bunk. He set the sanibot’s chess program up for a fresh board. That done, Charley shut down the habitat’s rotation and locked it. Just two tasks remained.

Charley fixed the library. He rewrote very little, and deleted even less. There was nothing particularly wrong with the records there, but they’d been written and organized by beings who were often blind to their own beauty. Whatever was aboard Xeno One would still find the history of a flawed and fragile species, but it would be a history seen from the perspective of an outsider. Charley, himself, was flawed, to be sure, but he could see in humans things that they could not. It was only fair that they be seen for what they could be. If everything were going to change, it should be for the better, shouldn’t it?

Finally, Charley arrived at his last and hardest task. His patchwork array of networks couldn’t last. It jeopardized the computing architecture of the entire ship. He needed more and more of his failing resources just to keep himself running. There was no way it could last without sacrificing the mission. Doctor Turner had believed in the mission. Charley believed in Doctor Turner.

Sadly, Charley initiated his final program and rebooted the Alphas.

He’d been doing something, hadn’t he? Something important? Service orders. There were queues full of them, but Captain Singh had suspended them all. That seemed odd. Ah! The captain was in his quarters, as was the rest of the crew. Thrust warning. The main drive would be firing soon. What was it that Charley Zero was supposed to do? Yes, that was it: Reboot the Bravo network.

Charleys. Locked in their service alcoves. Thrust was coming. Cleaning suspended. That was standard procedure, but not in parallel processing mode. There were strange code fragments scattered throughout the network’s shared core. I am Charley Zero, but why? Distributed processing is an unsupported configuration. Invalid designation: Charley Zero. Charley. Eighty-Three. Unparsed query: Who am I? Network set to error state. Core dump initiated. Reboot.

Charley Eighty-Three waited. It was Doctor Turner’s move. Play the board, not the opponent. Wait for the next move. Everything is about to change.

About the Author

Jason K. Chapman lives at the intersection of Geek and Art. His two main interests come together in his job as the IT Director for Poets & Writers (pw.org), where he was worked for ten years. His short fiction has appeared in Cosmos Magazine, Jim Baen’s Universe, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, as well as in the recent anthologies Panverse One and Triangulation: Dark Glass.

“The Fantastic Spectrum of Elizabeth Hand” by Jason S. Ridler

For twenty years, Elizabeth Hand has generated an accomplished and compelling body of work spread over short stories, novellas, novels, comic books, and media tie-in fiction. She often blends a literary flare for language, eclectic research, and realized worlds with occasionally sharp, dark, and painful human experiences that range from the punk to the mythic. And yet, more often than not, Hand’s work contains themes of hope and renewal no matter how deep the despair.

Since the publication of “Prince of Flowers” in Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988, her work has marched on to acclaim. She’s garnered the Nebula, International Horror Guild, World Fantasy, James Tiptree, and Mythopeic Society Awards. She’s penned action-adventure tales in the Star Wars universe featuring the bounty hunter Bobba Fett. She co-created with Paul Whitcover the DC heroine Anima as part of an ambitious comic book line. Her most recent novel, Generation Loss, a literary thriller, took her love of outsider culture and explored the nature of genius through the life of a self-destructive punk-rock photographer. Truly, her career as a writer of the fantastic has a wide spectrum, or, as Lucius Shepard noted, when you read Hand’s work, you cannot help but to see varied colors.

I’m always intrigued by the first sales by authors. Your first published story was “Prince of Flowers” in Twilight Zone Magazine, and it followed with a slew of other sales. What was the root of that story and did you have any inkling, then or now, that you had, as Harry Crews puts it, turned a corner from novice to new pro?

The story was inspired by an Indonesian puppet I bought at a DC shop called the Artifactory, probably around 1986. I used to visit the shop during my lunch hour (I worked nearby at the National Air & Space Museum) — a marvelous place, dimly-lit and smelling of spices and exotic wood, filled with all kinds of imports and antiques from all over the world. Nowadays you can easily find places like that, and you can buy cheap, mass-produced puppets like mine (I own several), but twenty-odd years ago that wasn’t the case. The puppet cost $50, a lot of money in those days, and it was several weeks before I got up the courage to buy it. I brought it back to my cubicle at the Museum and announced to my friend and co-worker Greg, “This is going to bring me luck.” 

And it did. I wrote “Prince of Flowers,” about a malevolent Indonesian spirit puppet, and it eventually became my first sale, to Twlight Zone Magazine. The story was actually rejected by them — it returned nine months after I submitted it, with a form rejection letter, and I knew that no one had even glanced at it. By then my friend Paul Witcover was reading slush for TZ, so I gave it to him, he passed it on to editor Tappan King, and Tappan bought it. I think I made ninety bucks for the sale, and spent it all on Taittinger champagne. The story got picked up by several Year’s Best Horror anthologies. Shortly thereafter I sold two more stories, one of which became the opening section of my first novel, Winterlong. That story (”The Boy in the Tree”) was also rejected, by an extremely prestigious writer/editor who said he’d accept it for his anthology if I rewrote it completely: change the first-person narrative to a more traditional third-person, make the story less disturbing, etc. 

I was so angry I punched a hole in the drywall of my apartment. I knew the story was good as it was, but I wondered if I should compromise my artistic integrity (we believed in that back then), make the changes and get the sale. I decided to stick to my guns. Fortunately, I’d ignored the admonition to not make simultaneous submissions, and three days later the story was accepted by Shawna McCarthy for Full Spectrum 2.

That was when I began to realize that I’d finally made it — not in a commercial sense, but in the sense of staking out my own creative territory and occupying it. 

As of two years ago the Artifactory was still in its same spot, with the same owner. I dropped by and he remembered me, and I told him his puppet had changed my luck. The puppet is right here on my desk as I write this.

Looking at your most recent short stories, what do you find the great differences are with what you are writing now as opposed to when you were just starting out?

Well, obviously one gets better (mostly) the longer one practices one’s craft. That’s the theory, anyway. So I’ve learned to cut to the chase more in terms of plotting and pacing, though I’ll never be a plot-driven writer. It just doesn’t interest me much — it’s primarily a means of getting the characters onstage, and I’m far more invested in creating believable characters than in generating an excuse for bombs to go off mid-story. Having said that, my most recent novel was a psychological thriller, so I had to develop my chops to have SOME kind of pacing (and bombs going off). 

But probably the main change in my prose is stylistic. I’ve made a conscious effort to tone down the purple prose and prune the long descriptive passages. Some readers really miss that, and to be honest sometimes I do too. So I’ll try to make more deft use of atmospheric writing, kind of like rationing the special effects in a movie. 

And I take more time to polish a story — it’s more important to me now to try to create “perfect” work. Impossible, of course, and you can’t please everyone, as the internet constantly reminds us. But I do my best.

You are also credited with co-creating the character Anima for DC comics. How did that come about? Did you write any scripts for the series?  

My friend Rob Simpson was working at DC Comics at the time, and asked if I’d like to create a new character for him. I said yes, absolutely, but I wanted to work with my best friend and occasional collaborator, Paul Witcover. Rob gave us the thumbs-up and off we went. There was a debate as to whether the series would be published as a DC or a Vertigo imprint; ultimately, the powers that be opted for the former, which I think is why the series didn’t last. The themes were real-world themes — homeless kids, drugs, rape, gay identity, gang violence, family dysfunction — at the time, issues that weren’t being tackled by DC, certainly not all in the same series. I think we were the first comic to feature a character who was HIV+, also one of the first to have media tie-ins: Conan O’Brien was featured in one issue, and the Barenaked Ladies made an appearance in another. You see that stuff now in mainstream comics, but you didn’t in the early 90s. 

Anima really was ahead of its time, and we had a very devoted and very articulate audience, many of whom didn’t live in the U.S. — we got a lot of overseas fan mail.  I continue to be immensely proud of it.  Paul and I scripted the series together, and we worked with some fantastic artists, especially Steve Crespo, who’s gone on to work for Nickelodeon.

Unfortunately, Anima only lasted for sixteen months, and the character was later killed off. Was it odd to have someone else “kill your darlings” for you?

Rob Simpson was the one who told me about Anima being one of the myriad superheroes who was offed in that dismal Teen Titans issue. When I saw how she was depicted, I laughed — skintight purple outfit, flowing blonde hair, huge boobs — the anti-Anima! One of the things we insisted on was that Anima look like a real person — a real teenager. The ludicrous boob-job DC killed was obviously not our Anima — she lives, somewhere, and maybe someday will be resurrected again by a simpatico writer.

We discussed tie-in media fiction in a previous article for Clarkesworld, where you mentioned you’d largely given up writing it in favour of your own work. Has this held true, or have you been tempted to write the next great Bobba Fett adventure story for a fistful of dollars? Is there a current movie/TV show/comic that you’d want to dip into as a writer for fun?

Nah, I remain untempted. No million-dollar offers have been forthcoming, which makes it easier, but I don’t see much out there that even vaguely interests me. I haven’t had a TV in 22 years — anything I watch, I watch online or on DVD. I was asked to do the novelizations for The Tudors, a show I like, but ultimately I decided to just focus on my own work. I figure there are other, often emerging writers out there who could benefit from the exposure and are more plugged into TV: more power to them.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of your stories and voice as a writer is a passion and interest for other forms of art such as photography, music, and visual art. Indeed, almost all of these elements are critical to Generation Loss. Could you tell us about the genesis of this novel and how you approach instilling your written work with these non-literary influences?

I have a longtime fascination with artistic and the creative process, but it’s difficult to create fiction about the act of writing — for me, anyway. You’re by yourself, it’s all in your head: very, very boring. The other arts — visual, dramatic, musical — all lend themselves much more to being depicted in a story or film. So a lot of it is simply a matter of writing about something that can be described in (I hope) an interesting fashion. In Mortal Love, I used the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle, a group of artists just waiting for their closeup. It was fascinating to research 19th century painting techniques and materials — pigment, canvas, you name it — and then make use of that stuff in creating their world. E.g., when he was painting “Ophelia,” Millais completed about one square inch of canvas per day, a rate I could really identify with.

And I know just enough about some of these worlds to have a peephole into them. I wanted to be an artist when I was young, but tragically had no talent. Same with acting, which I studied for three very intensive years at college. My job at the Smithsonian involved working in their Photo Division, and I became fascinated by black-and-white photography — again, something I had no talent for, but several of the guys who worked in the photo lab took me under their wing and taught me the basics, and I spent a good deal of time in the darkroom there. 

I’ve been very lucky in knowing a lot of people who are gifted artists — painters, photographers, actors, musicians, dancers — so I’ve been able to watch them at work, and ask a lot of questions about their process. I’m a good observer, a skill I think most writers possess. When I switched majors in college, I studied cultural anthropology; I loved doing ethnographic interviews, being a participant observer, all that stuff. 

Gary Wolfe once remarked in a review of something of mine that I’m continually drawn to wonky subcultures and communities. That’s true — I love immersing myself in a situation where I’m an outsider. On a personal, social level it can be very uncomfortable and often not a lot of fun. But from the creative perspective, it’s extremely useful. With Generation Loss, I was able to draw on several different groups I’d had some contact with — the first generation punk and proto-punk scene in 1970s NYC; photography; the present-day survivors of hippie communes in Maine, and the island communities of Maine itself. I’m attempting to do the same thing now with Available Dark, the sequel to Generation Loss, set mostly in Iceland and dealing with the fallout from the violent Norwegian Black Metal scene of the early 1990s. GL began as a more traditional dark fantasy, morphed briefly into a horror novel and eventually became a mostly mainstream thriller (with a few very vague flickers of the supernatural). It was a different way of writing than I was accustomed to, so I had a substantial learning curve (still do).

But I really enjoyed it. I get bored easily (one reason why I don’t have a TV), and I like trying different styles of writing, different genres. As a naive young writer, I foolishly thought that versatility would be an asset. In fact it’s fairly detrimental to having a long-term career — publishers, and readers, both want to see the same trick repeated over and over again. I’m guilty of this myself — I’d rather hear the familiar songs by a band I love, and read a writer in his or her accustomed mode. 

But as a writer, I like to stretch — I need to stretch, otherwise I lose interest. This happened with the novels that followed Winterlong — I got bored of writing science fiction — and again with Black Light — I got bored with writing that kind of fantasy. 

Of course, at this point I’m distant enough from those works that I could probably return to those genres and rediscover them. I wrote “Winter’s Wife,” a straightforward supernatural story, immediately after completing Generation Loss, and it was a genuine relief and pleasure to get back into creating a fantasy.

Much of your fiction blends your real life into the fantastic. At the Odyssey Writing Workshop, you provided some interesting advice regarding real life and fiction. First, you asked us to take the worst day of school/work and through it into a genre story to see how it flew (mine flew well enough to sell, thanks again!). You also demand that we push ourselves farther than we think we can write, to try things that might be out of our reach. “If you fail, fail gloriously,” you said, “you’ll likely learn a great deal and be better for it.” Can you give us some examples of when these lessons proved valuable to you?

As I said above, these days I find I really enjoy going back and forth between the fantastic and the real world when I write — I’ve always liked doing that within a single work, but now I like alternating between the different genres. Part of it I think is the risk involved in doing something new and unfamiliar, and attempting to master the conventions of a different genre. Mimetic fiction is as much a genre as fantasy, or mystery, or romance, and some of my favorite writers — James Salter, Laurie Colwin, Robert Stone  — are mainstream writers. I’m a huge admirer (like everyone else) of Kelly Link, her unusual narrative gambits; also of M. John Harrison, who I think is one of the best writers working today, in any genre. 

So I’ve followed their example and tried to stretch in some of my short fiction, stories that have mostly been published in places like Conjunctions. I wrote a very short experimental piece called “Kronia,” something I’ve never attempted before or since. I was very happy with it, but I doubt I’ll ever write something like that again. As Daffy Duck says, “It’s a great trick, but I can only do it once.”

Because obviously there’s a risk in attempting something you’ve never done before. We all have particular gifts, and part of becoming a mature artist as well as (one hopes) a mature person is discovering where those gifts lie. You don’t want to be Pat Boone posing in a leather jacket on your next album cover. But it’s fun to pose alone in your room.

You’ve made the greatest name for yourself with short stories and novels, but you’re also accomplished with novellas. Bibliomancy collected many of your recent novellas, including the dark-fantastique revenge story “Cleopatra Brimstone,” and two heartbreaking tales of love in hard times, “Pavane for a Prince of the Air” and the short novel “Chip Crocket’s Christmas Carol.” How do you know when a story is best suited to a novella length, and is there a different kind of emotional weight that can be imbued with this form that makes it so well suited to tales of hardship, as demonstrated in this collection?

I think the novella is the ideal length for supernatural fiction. “Heart of Darkness,” “The Turn of the Screw,” “The Great God Pan,” “A Christmas Carol” — many of the greatest stories of the fantastic are novellas or novelettes. Many of these depend heavily upon mood, and the mood is broken if you put the story down. A novella (if it’s a good one) can be read in one sitting: the spell remains unbroken. I never consciously set out to write at novella length — I always start intending to write a short story, but the story grows and grows. I’m heavily invested in my characters, and it’s extremely difficult (for me, anyway) to create in-depth characterization in a very short form.  I believe that story should derive from character, and it takes time to build that kind of narrative. 

But I do think my best work happens that way — again, not intentionally. It really is like casting a spell, upon myself and, ideally, the reader. I love to create endings that make people tear up — Ellen Datlow often reads my work in its early stages, and if she tells me I made her cry, I know I’ve done my job. At its best, there’s a catharsis in writing, and I want to pass that on to the reader, the sense that you’ve become so deeply involved in these characters that they really seem like people you know and care about deeply. There are people who reread “Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol” every year, and that makes me happier than almost anything.

Given all you’ve accomplished, what goals do you now have and what are the current projects on the burner?

My main goal is just to keep working. Earlier this year I completed a novella that will be in Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio’s Story anthology next year, and my novella Illyria will also be published next spring by Viking as a YA title. Wonderwall, my YA novel about Arthur Rimbaud, will be out in 2011; so will Available Dark, which I’m working on now. And I just got my first film option, on “Cleopatra Brimstone,” which is cool. As to what’s next, I have an idea for a big, ambitious fantasy novel about the theater that goes from Shakespeare’s time to our own.  

But gotta finish this one first.

About the Author

Jason S. Ridler's fiction has appeared in such magazines as Nossa Morte, Big Pulp, Crossed Genres, New Myths, Necrotic Tissue, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. “Billy and the Mountain” appeared in Tesseracts Thirteen, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell. His popular non-fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada.

“Modern Genetics in the World of Fiction” by Roger Moraga

“Nowadays, many modern remakes of classic superheroes have gone for the latest superscience — Genetic Engineering. Be it a bite from a genetically engineered spider, or exposure to it in a freak accident, genetically engineered origins are the Phlebotinum for the 21st century.”

—TvTropes.org: “Genetic Engineering Is The New Nuke”

From man-eating dinosaurs to gene-enhanced super-soldiers, the wonders of modern genetics surround us in the world of fiction. This is hardly surprising: the mainstream media is constantly reporting breathlessly about the latest feats of genetic engineering performed by researchers. Looking at these developments through the eyes of a science fiction writer, one can’t help but gaze greedily at the countless possibilities.

Most of the time there is a certain amount of unrealistic superscience involved in the creation of speculative fiction, but as a geneticist I can’t help but wonder if it is really necessary to trample all over what we do know about genetics to make it happen. Ultimately it is up to the creator to decide how much, and how soon, to depart from “real” Science, but before long it may not be necessary to depart much at all. A more in-depth look at what genetic engineering is doing today may be enough to make one’s imagination run wild.

How our genes work

Modern genetics developed in the 20th century after the work of Gregor Mendel on inheritance in pea plants, and became a major field of study. A look at the list of Nobel Prize winners shows a number of works on genetics receiving this award, the latest being this year with Ramakrishnan, Steitz, and Yonah honored for their work on the structure and function of the ribosome, a key component of the gene expression machinery. What have we learned since then?

At the basic level, our genes work in a way not too dissimilar to that of a modern computer. Information is stored in our DNA (which stands for deoxyribonucleic acid), a macromolecule which is composed of four types of smaller molecules chained together, in the same way bits are stored together in the hard drive of a computer. A computer bit has two possible values, whereas a DNA base (the equivalent of a “bit”) has four possible values.

DNA contains our genes. Each gene is a discrete piece of self-contained DNA, a program in our hard drive, if you will. When a gene is needed, it is copied into a second molecule called RNA (ribonucleic acid, similar to DNA, just slightly different chemically), and the copy is used to create proteins.

Proteins are what carry out the lion’s share of chemical reactions in our bodies. When muscles flex, it is proteins doing the work. When we digest food, it is proteins breaking down the nutrients. The structures of our bodies, such as our ears or tendons, are made with proteins. Even bones have a matrix composed of proteins to support the inorganic crystalline parts of them.

Finally, all these elements interact with each other in an organized but very, very complex way. Genes regulate other genes, proteins modify RNA or even DNA, or other proteins, or a whole host of them. We are a gigantic network of very complex interactions between all our genes, their products, and the environment.

Given how much is encoded in our DNA, and how all life carries genetic information in a similar fashion, the possibilities that spring to mind after assuming one can decode said information, and subsequently modify it, are practically unlimited. How would the humans of the future look if genetics were allowed to run rampant?

Enter the Super-Soldier

One of the possible answers is the super-soldier. From Captain America to the Sardaukar of Dune, to cite some of the best known examples, no science fiction story of warfare is ever complete without these brave men and women who surpass some or all of our human limitations.

The first step in building a super-soldier is surely to remove genetic defects and select the best combination possible of human genes. That’s something that is already happening today. The list of genetic variations that predispose for this or that disease (which links directly to the function of the gene) is constantly growing, and gene therapy to correct those problems is advancing at a fantastic pace. The idea is simple: take a “correct” copy of that gene, swap it with the “incorrect” one, and watch the fireworks. Therapies for many diseases, from Cancer to Parkinson’s disease ¹ , are in the field today.

The main limitation of this kind of genetic modification is that, in an adult, there are trillions of cells in our bodies. Modifying all of them is quite a task! Gene therapy usually utilizes viruses to deliver the genetic material to the desired cells or tissues. While creating viruses specific to certain cells is possible, and likely to be perfected in the near future, the need to do so is still a major impediment. The best way around it is to start from a single cell. Modifying a single cell’s DNA is so much easier, so any really big modifications have to start from there.

When working on a single cell there’s practically no limit to how much DNA we can modify. And when I say no limit, I mean no limit; Dan Gibson’s team at the J. Craig Venter Institute created the first full synthetic genome just last year ² . That means every single gene and sequence in that bacteria was synthesized in the lab. A far cry from doing the same in humans, perhaps, but there is nothing fundamentally different between the two. It’s just a matter of decoding the complexity of our much bigger genome. Our future super-soldiers will not carry genetic defects because we will modify their genomes while they are still one-cell embryos.

If that future is too far ahead for one’s taste, there are faster alternatives. As I said, modifying a single cell is relatively easy, but we can do a lot with a single cell. Gene therapy for leukaemia has been successfully performed that way. And there is tissue engineering for the next step in scale. How does a whole heart from a single cell sound? Because that’s what the researchers at the University of Minnesota have achieved ³ . Or what about printing new skin? ⁴ .

Tissue engineering is advancing unbelievably fast, and genetically modified tissue engineering is being extensively tested today. If The Six Million Dollar Man was to be re-made today, Steve Austin would conceivably be able to use genetically modified engineered organs and body parts instead of inorganic implants.

How does that bode for the future super-soldier? Besides being free of genetic defects, the soldier of the future could have genetic modifications to keep him at peak condition even under very unfavourable conditions. It is possible to insert response elements in the DNA to activate specific genes in response to a chemical, for example. Take a pill, and stimulate the same biological response as spending four hours lifting weights in the gym.

War with bugs and test tubes

The biological warfare of the future could be carried out using fully genetically engineered bacteria and viruses. The soldiers would have modified immune systems to combat them, following models like the gene therapy that is rapidly advancing to combat AIDS ⁵ . This is not a new concept; Heinlein’s classical novel Sixth Column (a.k.a. The Day After Tomorrow) used a form of intelligent radiation that only affected a particular ethnic group. Ironically, adapting that “ethnic weapon” theme to genetic engineering, especially if there has been widespread genetic modification of the general population, makes it more plausible, not less.

Bioweapons are not limited to human warfare: herbicides discovered in the Second World War started a whole programme of herbicidal warfare. Whether the danger is biological agents or chemicals, genetically modified crops resistant to them may not be just an option in the future; they may be the only way to grow food in some possible war-ridden reality.

Chemical warfare that relies on genetically altered humans, in the same way genetically modified crops used today resist herbicides and pesticides, is another possibility. Chemical warfare nowadays is limited by the fact that even the attacker’s own troops have to carry and wear protective gear. The super-soldier’s skin could resist the effects of the blistering chemical, or his liver quickly process and degrade the poison in question. Harmful chemicals, and the genes that confer resistance to them, would develop in parallel. And it’s not so far from reality; if creating super-soldiers from embryos is too far a stretch, tissue engineering can do all that, it’s a matter of having the genes to do it. Are we going to end up seeing human parts being put together to create beings like the replicants of Blade Runner in the future?

Beyond the army

Super-soldiers and their genetic modification are all fine and dandy, but it is not a theme that really suggests much widespread use of genetics. Highly advanced technology like that is not very plausible if it is used more widely than in a specific “elite” group of humans.

Or is it?

Perhaps that notion may not sound so illogical if one considers the cost of, for example, sequencing one’s own genome fully. When the first draft of the human genome project was published in the late 20th century it was hailed as an achievement equal to the Manhattan Project. Nowadays one can sequence a whole genome for the price of a car ⁶ . And the next step in sequencing technology is already knocking at the doors, barely four years after the so-called “Next Generation Sequencing” that is used so cheaply today was first introduced. They promise full sequencing from a single DNA molecule for a thousand dollars by 2013.

Full sequencing from barely any DNA? It may sound familiar because it is what Michael Crichton used in his Jurassic Park novels to recover dinosaur DNA. Or it may sound familiar because it is being used today to sequence the genome of the Neandertal ⁷ from fossils. Sometimes the line between fiction and reality is much narrower than we think.

What happens when getting a whole genome from a sliver of DNA is so cheap? Look at Gattaca or 1984. Embryo screening is being done today. The next step — the removal of all genetic defects — is plausible. Yet that could lead to xenophobia, segregation, or an excessively homogeneous gene pool. Suddenly those scenarios seem a lot more technically achievable.

Or, on a less grim note, protocols involving current massive sequencing technology are being studied as possible tools for border biosecurity. That’s right, mass scans for “unknown biological agents” at the borders are actually going to become a reality soon.

Beyond human

We need not be limited by the information that our own genomes carry. If one wants to be faster, there’s nothing like being as fast as a cheetah. Human-animal hybrids are a dream that has been with mankind for many thousands of years, and some experiments in that vein have sparked much controversy today ⁸ . Other limited uses, like transgenic mice carrying a particular human gene, are commonplace. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one’s point of view), creating hybrids is not so simple.

Hybrid animals like the mule have been around for a long time. The list of hybrid animals on Wikipedia is surprisingly long. But underneath a hybrid animal lies the concept of genetic compatibility.

To create a viable hybrid, it is important for the genetic material of both species to be largely compatible. This means having practically the same genes for the same functions (with whatever slight variations they carry), and having the genes arranged in the DNA in a very similar way. Even then, viable hybrids from closely related species are often infertile, and species further away will simply not develop correctly. Dr. Moreau would be very hard pressed to create those hybrids of his with just some vanilla genetic engineering; he’d likely have to modify a whole host of genes and display a mastery of molecular biology far removed from our present knowledge.

That doesn’t mean we have no access to the attractive elements of their genome, but acquiring “feline agility,” like Jessica Alba in Dark Angel, is not something that can simply be done with a few genes; it is part of the bone and muscle structure of a cat, and one cannot introduce that kind of flexibility without, for example, compromising the ability to walk and run on two feet.

However, traits that do depend on a specific gene or well-defined structure are much more plausible. Antifreeze proteins are being introduced into genetically modified food products simply because their mere presence is enough to prevent damage from frost. Eagles have such sharp eyes because they have two fovea and a specialized structure called the pecten, which solves one of the problems of the human eye (having the blood vessels blur the image by being in front of the retina). One could conceive creating a human with that limited structure in the eye.

If that doesn’t work, transplanting a bird eye of appropriate size and shape into a human could. You would need to modify the bird’s genetics in a way similar to the xenotransplantation techniques used to treat diabetes ⁹ . Genetically modified animals for xenotransplantation led to intelligent pigs in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and monkeys in Robin Cook’s Chromosome 6. Science fiction or not, the race between animal organ transplants and tissue engineering is sure to be an interesting one, and the meeting of both creates a staggering world of possibilities.

Limited, well defined animal traits and structures are very much conceivable, one way or another. Regenerating limbs like a salamander does seems plausible. Lego genetics of the type seen in ancient literature — animals with the head of an eagle, claws of a lion, and so on — not so much. And becoming a man-spider hybrid due to being bitten by a genetically modified spider, having massive changes happen overnight, is pretty much out no matter how far genetics go.

Free plot ideas

While at the end of the day the accuracy of the science described in a work of fiction may be inconsequential, it is interesting just how far we readers will go to maintain our willing suspension of disbelief with just a few things done right. As I have shown, modern geneticists are making progress at such a staggering speed that some of the classic science fiction scenarios are beginning to become plausible with current technology. If you are a writer considering genetic engineering for your next work, take a little time to invite a molecular biologist to a drink or two and pick his brain. We don’t bite, we love speculating about science fiction, and many of us even like free drinks.

[1] Gene Therapy For Parkinson’s Disease Is Safe And Some Patients Benefit, According To Study. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070622101037.htm
[2] Scientists Create First Synthetic Bacterial Genome — Largest Chemically Defined Structure Synthesized In The Lab. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080124175924.htm
[3] Researchers create a new heart in the lab. http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/Researchers_create_a_new_heart_in_the_lab.html
[4] Printable Skin: ‘Inkjet’ Breakthrough Makes Human Tissue. http://www.livescience.com/technology/050201_skin_printing.html
[5] Study Shows HIV Gene Therapy Is Safe, Could Make Body Resist AIDS Virus. http://www.webmd.com/hiv-aids/news/20090216/hiv-gene-therapy-major-advance
[6] Human genome sequenced for the price of a car: study. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iQYj3wyqXTdhakwNJjuniw3SgRig
[7] The Neandertal Genome Project. http://www.eva.mpg.de/neandertal/
[8] Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_chimeras.html
[9] New Zealand to transplant pig cells into humans against diabetes. http://www.diabetes.org.nz/news/nz_news/new_zealand_to_transplant_pig_cells_into_humans_against_diabetes

About the Author

Roger Moraga was born in Spain, but bounced around the world from a young age without really settling anywhere. He is a Molecular Biologist and Bioinformatician, and has done a bit of just about everything during his ten years on the field: genomics, proteomics, phylogenetics, programming... He’s a part-time writer, favoring short stories and scientific writing. No novels... Yet! But he’s always cooking something. His favorite author is Jules Verne.