“Alone With Gandhari” by Gord Sellar

And the wailing chief of the cowherds fled, forlorn and spent,
Speeding on his rapid chariot to the royal city went,
Came inside the city portals, came within the palace gate,
Struck his forehead in his anguish and bewailed his luckless fate.
— from The Mahabharata, trans. Romesh C. Dutt (1898)

She was out there, serene in the mists, waiting for him, and Ron was coming to her. With the whole of his mind, he willed himself to see her: her immense walnut eyes, slightly alien; her long, regal nose with its flaring nostils; her long, elegant legs.

And then, suddenly, there she was in all her natural glory: no genetic engineering or hormonal tinkering had been performed upon her, and as such, she was a precious rarity. A creature of such loveliness, a sight for bruised and red-veined eyes. She eyed him calmly as he hurried toward her across the field of endless green and softly swaying daisies, under a sky so blue it would have made you weep if only it were real.

A memory of Kenny stirred — that poor, sad, dead glob of pudge he’d once been, that Ron had murdered in an empty field one night near Fort Worth with four Brother Ronalds. The ghost of a dead lardass grasping at his spirit’s throat, trying to haul itself back up through the greasy lips of oblivion.

Ron ignored it. The remnant artifacts of Kenny Jameson’s pathetic life — an army-green trash bag full of oversized clothes and whimpering regrets — had been left to rot in a shallow hole in the ground behind a shopping mall. With Guru Deepak’s help, he’d long ago learned how to deal with Kenny’s ego, the remnants of the man Ron had been before his rescue. He slowed his pace as he approached Gandhari, savoring the scratchy caresses of the high blue grass against his naked legs.

When he reached her side, he patted her twice upon the hip, with all the gentleness of a tender lover. “Namasté, Gandhari. Now, look at me,” he said with a smile. “Look at my body.” He glanced down at his own taut gut, the thin threads of wasted muscles beneath his somehow-clean skin. He had become somehow translucent, and could see the his own knobby, badly-carved kneecaps, the weary veins in his legs, the clutching bones of his ribcage, and even the curve of his pelvic bones through his patchily tanned, hairless hide.

Gandhari turned her head, lazily surveying his physique. She belched, and a heavenly draught bathed his face. He was suddenly moved by his passion for her, great Gandhari, gods-kissed blindfolded mother of a hundred sons from the Great Book, who had long ago attained her true and perfect form. He touched his lips to her forehead, between her eyes, and in response, she lovingly swished her tail over her back, an ancient gesture that meant nothing but pure bovinity in this world where flies buzzed no more.

Heart swooning, he made his way to her rear, and as he did so, she steadied herself, bracing. Gently, and with the greatest of reverence, he stuck a hand into her, and then another. He pried her open, drew a deep breath, and slid headfirst into the peace of the divine mother-cow’s womb.

Within her, there were others. The sounds of breathing and mumbled prayers and mantras. And Guru Deepak, preaching off in the distance, his voice muffled but undeniably musical.

Ron ignored the others. He relaxed, breathing mother Gandhari’s life-giving uterine fluids into his lungs, leaning back against the soft, warm walls of her womb. He was alone with Gandhari, within her. He was home, again. Nothing else mattered.

Then she spoke to him. Close by, tender yet clear, it was her womb-voice speaking to him alone, and he dreamed the most loveliest visions: of broken buildings, smoke and flames, and a endless, rising wave of liberation sweeping the earth entire.

“Listen, Kenny,” Mr. Paul said to him one day, in the staff room during his lunch break. “I’m gonna have to let you go.”

“Why?” Envelopes with little plastic windows filled Kenny’s mind. Bills inside them, and sternly worded final notifications. Without Prejudice.

“You really wanna know?”

“Uh… yeah?”

“Because you’re a fat fuckin’ pig, Kenny,” his boss said. “People don’t wanna see you servin’ their french fries and deep-fried, greasy chicken, Kenny. It reminds them of why they shouldn’t be eating it in the first place. It’s bad for our image.”

Kenny wanted to shout, to punch Mr. Paul in the stomach, to tell him to go screw himself, shove the job up his ass sideways. He knew his rights! He didn’t have to take this! He wanted to chuck his soda onto Mr. Paul’s shirtfront and tell him to ram his shitty job up his skinny little ass. But he just retreated inside himself, and began thinking again about how to check out of hotel butterball.

Pills, Kenny decided, but he lowered his head, and just mumbled his response.

“What?” Mr. Paul sounded defensive, as if he expected a lawsuit or an outburst or something. But Kenny wasn’t going to sue. He’d grown accustomed to maltreatment. That was just how fat people lived: obesity was the new leprosy. People even avoided your touch, like it was catching or something.

“Should I finish out my shift?” he asked again, louder. It was a bad time to be out of a job, with talk of another war in the air. Though at least he was too fat to be drafted. They’d never send him to Venezuela, let alone North Korea.

“Nah, just go on home,” he said, stealing one of Kenny’s fries and shoving it into his mouth. “We’ll mail your last paycheck to you.”

Kenny nodded, defeated, and turned to leave. Pills.

“And Kenny… don’t come back here again till you lose a couple of belt notches, you hear me?” Mr. Paul said, half-smirking.

Kenny never did go back there, though it’d be the first place Ron would attack, a few months later.

Meditations always ended, but today, they faded out too soon, and Ron found himself back in the claustrophobic hell of a media helmet that stank and was stuffy with desert heat. No matter how necessary the return to the world was, it always deadened him a little to leave behind the soft electromagnetic massage of the helmet and his brief audience with ultimate reality.

He removed the helmet carefully, wrapping it again in an old patchwork quilt, and rose to stow it for the day. All around him, other Ronalds were doing the same thing. There were so many of them: Mexican, black, gringo like himself, female and male alike. Some were wrapping their helmets, and others, that task completed, were sleepily ruffling their dyed-scarlet afros, slipping into their grungy yellow jumpsuits.

Guru Deepak, shirtless in his golden dhoti, stood beside the storage shelving units in the back of the decrepit U-Haul trailer behind one of the campers. He smiled toothily and mouthed encouragements to them as they stowed the VR gear safely away. To Ron, he said, “Mother Gandhari has blessed you specially,” and set his broad hand on Ron’s shoulder.

Ron didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t spoken to Guru Deepak in days. Not out of any animosity: it was just one of his silence kicks, the sort of habit Deepak indeed praised and tended not to interrupt.

“Why?” Ron asked, after a moment’s dazed thought.

“Later,” Deepak said with a small shrug of his powerful shoulders, and showed him his beautiful white teeth through a grin. They were perfectly straight, a show of dental perfection that could only be divine in nature.

Breakfast always followed meditations, so Ron made his way to the kitchen. A big vat of greenish dhal was bubbling in a cookpot on the ground, and a huge tray of breads — naan, loaves, buns — sat together in a big assortment. Bean soup again, he moaned inwardly. But immediately, he caught himself, seized his own disappointment, and pinned it to the wall of his mind as one might a live frog for dissection. He jabbed his resentment with harshness he’d once reserved for lily-livered politicians and hardened criminals.

Bless Gandhari, his craving for meat hadn’t returned. His self-control was always greater after a few hours in Her womb. A few minutes later, a bowl of dhal and a few hunks of bread in his possession, he sat down in his usual place, among usual faces.   “Namasté, Ronald,” they all greeted him in something too jumbled to be called unison.

“Namasté, Ronalds,” he said. “What’s up?”

Ron had meant nothing by it, but it seemed to him that, unlike most days, something was indeed up. They regarded him with careful, awkward eyes, blinking silent and waiting for someone to spill the proverbial beans.

Finally, the Mexican Ronald spoke up and said, with his familiar, heavy accent: “Guru say something t’you, don’t he?”

“How’d all y’all know about that?”

“In Gandhari’s womb,” the bony, flat-chested Ronald chick whispered, “I heard something. You know how it is.”

Ron did. Visions and whispers sometimes came. Prophecies, gleanings of Deepak’s wisdom. Burning visions of the future.

“Last time I had a vision like this one…” she said, leaning forward. “Well, there was a Mac Attack coming up soon, and that Ronald, Gandhari said the same words to…” She glanced down into her bowl of dhal, dipping a chunk of whole-wheat bread into the slop, and chewed noisily, as if she had no intention of finishing the sentence.

Ron kept his eyes on her as he expertly tore a piece of bread off and used it to spoon up some dhal without looking into the bowl. When she was about to dip her naan into her dhal again, he hissed, “What?”

“Listen,” she said. “If you’re lucky, you’ll be drinking mother Gandhari’s pure milk today. In heaven,” she added, as if the euphemism hadn’t been clear enough, and dropped the bread into her dhal. Her eyes softened a little, the tattooed-red tip of her nose wiggling as she sniffed, and with a lowered voice she added, “If you want, we can go out behind the storage sheds and I’ll give you a… you know.” She jerked a grubby fist up and down suggestively, one gaunt cheek propping outward by her tongue as she gave him a ghastly wink. “Just in case. Nothing more, though. I don’t wanna get pregnant before It happens. He feeds on childrens’ minds; they make Him stronger,” she droned, intoning the familiar mantra that Ronalds chanted to fend off carnal temptation. “But I’ll get you off, one last time before…”

“No thanks,” Ron said, and filled his mouth with hot, flavorless green bean mush. It wasn’t much of an act of will: she wasn’t his type, her breath stank, she was missing half her teeth, and anyway, he didn’t believe he was going to be a martyr. He’d done nothing to distinguish himself or earn such an honor. And even if Gandhari had chosen him to lead a mission, it didn’t mean he was going to die.

“Are you sure?” she said and licked her bright-red lips, her eyes slightly narrowed. He realized that she wasn’t being generous: she really wanted to do it. He wondered how many other martyrs she’d led off the path, the same day they were supposed to drink straight from Gandhari’s udder, and sent them spiraling back into the samsaric rut of reincarnation and flesh-addiction.

Who hungers for flesh of one kind, hungers for all, went Guru Deepak’s motto.

Was it jealousy, that Mother Gandhari always chose men to lead the Mac Attacks? Or some vestigal human instinct, half-dessicated lust? He imagined the Ronalds he’d admired: those he’d seen shot to death in the parking lots of ghastly eateries, and those whose bodies had been charred by fires or clapped in irons and shipped to reprogramming facilities, their animal bodies trapped and ensouled once again by the System. He imagined himself out behind the storage sheds, or huddled in the cab of a truck, or somewhere behind a clump of bushes, with her rancid breath wafting hot across his skin. Thick, acidic bile scoured its way up his throat.

Stop, he commanded himself, and he stepped back from all of these overwhelming emotions that had welled up within. From a slight mental distance, his envy and desire looked pathetic. His own disgust peered back at him impishly. They had fused, and sang in one voice. But when he looked deeper, he found sorrow and disdain, braided into one single wormlike creature and wriggling within his mind. He looked upon his flat-chested Ronald Sister and abjured that strange sadness-and-dislike emotion, struggling for compassion.

“No thank you,” he said with a smile, and admonished her with a mantra of his own. “After a Single Sip, Only a Big Gulp Can Follow.”

“Yes, true,” she said, nodding, and attacked her food. She tried to look relieved, but refused to meet his gaze again the whole meal. That didn’t surprise him; what surprised him was that none of the other Ronalds caught his eye again, either.

The first time he had seen a Mac Attack, he’d almost pissed in his size-52 pants. He’d been standing in the usual burger joint when suddenly they’d burst in, yelling through the speakers mounted on the fronts of their gas-masks.

“Killers! Murderers!” they’d screamed, those freaks. They had looked like Holocaust victims done up in soiled yellow clown costumes, red grins tattooed onto their faces, red curly wigs slapped onto their bald crowns. “You’re filthy! You’re insane!” Even in his panic, he’d thought, Look who’s talking. He remembered that, the way one remembers being a heartbroken teenager, or remembers the panic of holding a steering wheel for the first time: the memory of another person altogether, was what it now felt like to Ron.

But he hadn’t yet become a Ronald, then. He had been a different kind of human. No, not human, either. A man, maybe, but not human. He’d been a mere scraping beast. A herd man. Kenny the flabby herd man.

Seeing the Ronalds in action, he’d seen not their liberation from mediocrity, but only the dirt clinging to their faces, the blood and grime ground into the fabric of their costumes, the dung clinging to their floppy red shoes. They’d been liberated from the trap of ego and identity, and attained McMoksha, but through the thickening haze of the gas bombs they’d set off, he’d stared into their eyes behind their gas-masks and seen only one thing: crazy.

Little had he known, as he’d stumbled out the side door, through the parking lot, coughing and sputtering on the fumes, that he was the crazy one. He’d staggered past the rear bumper of his second-hand jalopy of a truck, its bumper crusted in consumers’ rights bumper stickers with blinking mottoes like: “Hands off my fried chicken!” and, “My lard, my life.”

He’d burned the last reserves of his energy hoisting himself up into the seat of his truck, squeezing in sideways, getting his foot onto the gas pedal. Still choking and coughing, he’d started the pickup truck’s engine, and, not bothering with the seat-belt — it didn’t fit him anyway — he’d slammed his foot down onto the accelerator.

He’d managed to cling to consciousness long enough to get down the road and slam his truck into a traffic-light pole in front of a gas station. Someone had already called 911 by then, and when the ambulance had shown up, they’d just given him an injection and a coffee and made him sit by the gas station and wait for the cops to come and take his statement. They’d even let him drive himself home an hour or two later.

His truck had been seriously dented, but his mind had been damaged far worse. The attack had hit him harder than the last international foreign terrorist attacks all rolled into one. It took him a week before he went to a burger joint again.

No other week in his life had ever felt as much like forever.

“My dear, brave Ronnies!” Guru Deepak declared to the eager assembly of the faithful.

They paused, setting their preparations aside, and turned to face their guru, settling on their backsides in the hot sand. White face-paint set off the black crusts beneath their fingernails, and excited gap-toothed smiles lit up their pimpled, scarred faces.

“Today, we launch a very important assault,” Guru Deepak declared, his head wobbling side to side insistently. “All our past struggles have led up to this. Yes, this is very-very important! Today, we end our endless attacks on the lowest levels of the death chains. The world has heard our message, and had many chances to heed it. The willing have already joined us.”

“And those who have chosen to ignore us… it is a tragedy, my Ronnies. It is heartbreaking. Every one of you knows what it was like to be a carnivore, to feast on the blood and bodies of poor animals. Every one of you, until you joined us, turned a deaf ear to the screams of murdered beasts suffering in your own flabby bellies. You thought you were punished for it, when being fat was almost a crime, but no punishment ever stopped you. Who aided you? Yes, I did… in Gandhari’s name.”

Ronald felt a tear in his eye. It all came back to him now, the people had stared at him. Their hissing whispers, as he’d gone by, echoed in his tortured soul. He remembered catching eyes with other fat people, obese women who’d looked at him with those wide, sorrowful eyes. I know, their looks had said, and he’d avoided their gaze. He hated those looks. Pious, hopeful pity. He had pitied those women back, who were surely as lonely as he was, but nonetheless he’d seen them as bulbous hags he would never stoop to touching. He’d never made one fat friend, ever. He’d hated fat people with a passion most people never experience in their happy, healthy lives.

And now, he looked down at himself, and he could see the bones within his arms; he could bend and touch his toes without any trouble; he hadn’t had a backache in months, though his muscles still twitched and shuddered every once in a while, and some of his teeth were coming loose. He never felt lonely anymore, though he didn’t feel the opposite of lonely, either. He wasn’t sure, even, what the opposite of lonely was.

“It was no sin. Being fat was a symptom. Not of your glands, my Ronnies, for none of you is fat now, and we have not changed your glands. Not of symptom of weakness: you are not weak people, and the world shudders when we attack. It was a symptom of your society. We know what it was a symptom of, don’t we?”

Then the Ronnies began to recite the mantra together, Ron’s voice one of dozens. They chanted this mantra together whenever a craving for fries or a burger hit one of their group:

Ravenous mouths, ravenous heads,
Devouring bodies and the earth,

The sickness of the living dead,

Eternal death, empty rebirth.

They repeated it over and over, faces turned skyward and eyes closed heavenward. After three, maybe four dozen repetitions, Ron felt a firm hand on his shoulder.

He opened his eyes, and standing above him was Guru Deepak. The Indian gestured with his eyes toward the center of the crowd, from where he’d been speaking, and whispered, “Come on.”

Ron rose on wobbly legs and followed him to the elevated platform at the crowd’s center, and just as he reached it, a few Ronalds — those in Deepak’s inner circle, clown-masked female eunuchs who went about with their beautiful bodies nude, clean and smooth and white as a millionaire’s finest dishplates — led a blotchy-coated, thin brown cow out onto the platform. Deepak tried to keep Ron distracted, but he glimpsed a muzzle on her nose, holding her mouth shut. The eunuchs slid it off quickly once they got her onto the platform, and after a few moments, she let out a loud, insistent moo.

The chanting stopped. Eyes bloomed slowly open, heads nodded downward from blind sky-gazing, and they caught sight of the cow.

“It is Gandhari!” Deepak hollered, and the Ronalds howled back with ecstatic joy. The cow flicked her tail listlessly, and farted. “She has chosen a Ronald to lead the mission!” he cried out, and Ron felt the guru’s hand clap him on the shoulder.

The joyous screams grew louder still as the Ronalds surged toward him and the cow. Their tattooed red mouths and noses, their teary eyes, blurred before Ron, and he turned to the cow. With all his might, he fought the ghostly poison of Kenny’s illusions, and willed himself to see not the sickly Jersey cow before him, but instead the true, beautiful, utter Gandhari.

And then it was effortless, seeing ultimate reality: she was standing right there before him, eyes burning with divine love as she chewed her timeless, life-giving cud. She exuded holiness, contentment. The cow radiated ineffable hope. 

Ron felt a boundless joy he’d never felt before.

The meeting had been held in a small room in the downtown Fort Worth YMCA. Corpulent men and women had sat in a circle, talking about their addictions. A.A. for the Obese, the counselor had said. It was the only way the hospital had let him go, after he’d failed to kill himself with painkillers one Sunday afternoon.

Ron had found the rules were insulting. A higher power? You had to believe in God to stop pigging out? Ten steps, twelve steps… whatever. That last night at the Y, he’d made up his mind not to come back.

But at the end of the meeting, the counselor, a gaunt Yankee with a shaved head and some kind of certificate from a nothing college in Vermont, had caught his arm and said his name softly. “Kenny,” he’d said.

“Yeah?” Kenny had said, trying not to let on that he’d given up on the support group.

“I can see what you’re thinking. That this group isn’t going to help you.”

“Naw, it ain’t that.” Kenny had been like that, then — so terrified of the truth: frightened to say it, frightened even to acknowledge it. “I’m just having an off day, and…”

“No, you’re right to think it. This group isn’t going to help you. But I know someone who can. I know someone who can free you. You know, I used to be…” He paused, a droplet of sweat on his brow sliding softly down in the harsh fluorescent light.

“What?”

The group facilitator had reached into his wallet, and pulled out a picture of an enormous man. A man so heavy it was difficult to imagine him walking, seated at a cheap diner table with a burger meal set in front of him, smiling.

“That’s what I look like five years ago,” he’d said.

“Well, lucky you,” Kenny had said, eager to flee his chance at liberation. “So for you it was just diet. Not glandular, or…”

Kenny had tried to push past him, but the man had stopped him, and said, “You know, people have glandular problems all over the world. But there is nobody this fat in Myanmar. There’s almost nobody this fat in Uzbekistan, either.” He lowered his voice when he said the names of those countries, looking around anxiously. What, was he paranoid too? As if any government department — even Homeland Security — would plant someone in a fatties’ support group! “It’s an excuse, and you know it.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

The guy lowered his voice a lot, then, practically to a whisper, as he suggested, “Why not come with me and find out?”

Kenny had noticed a few locks from the red wig in the backseat of the man’s car, just barely peeking out from under a magazine, but he hadn’t put two and two together until much later. He’d been too busy feeling mortified at how the car’s seatbelt hadn’t fit around his torso.

“Don’t worry,” his counselor had said, nodding in that encouraging way he always did. “I’ve been there myself. It’ll get better. I promise,” he’d whispered, turning his head to scan the parking lot one more time. Then they’d pulled out just a little too fast and sped off into the night.

“What are you doing here?” the man in the suit screamed.

Ron smiled silently, crossing the room slowly and carefully while the man scrambled with the drawers of his desk. Glass crunched beneath his feet, and somewhere in the building, an alarm wailed. He could hear the fluttering of bodies in motion, and terrified cries outside the man’s office. Fools, resisting the Ronalds who were trying to save them. He ignored all of that, and stared into the man’s eyes.

This was the right guy. His face had been burned into Ron’s mind during his last meditation session, within Gandhari’s womb. Ron raised his taser.

The man drew a pistol out from a drawer, and had it halfway up to Ron’s face when the needles slammed into his chest, through his fine tailored shirt.

“Don’t,” Ron said, a tiny smile curving within the thick red smile tattooed into the skin of his face.

The man pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He’d panicked, forgotten about the safety. That was enough time for Ron. He thumbed a button, and pain swept down the taser wires, through the needles and into the man.

Who then howled.

“Drop it,” Ron ordered him.

The man didn’t obey. His clumsy hands fiddled with the gun, and then he tried to raise it toward Ron again.

Ron increased the voltage, and the man howled again,louder, dropping the gun involuntarily. Ron’s heart flooded with sorrow and sympathy. That such a powerful minion of the death-chains could fall to the ground and suffer, writhing pathetically — he needed to be liberated as much as anyone.

Ron slipped a paper bag over the man’s head and hauled him up, still shivering, to his unsteady feet.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve just been rescued.”

The back of the van was crammed with people, their ruddy-cheeked faces terrified. They weren’t fat, like the death-eaters Ron had seen walking the streets earlier in the day, on the way to the offices. These were kind of people whose daily schedules allowed for an exercise regimen, for occasional liposuction when necessary, for dietary restrictions. They could afford to eat well, and…

Ron sighed. He had to admit it to himself: they probably were not addicted as he had been, when his name had been Kenny. They would be almost impossible to liberate. They liked living in this evil, awful world they’d built.

“Where are we going?” shouted the CEO from under his paper bag.

“This is just routine inspection procedure, sir,” Ron said. “We want to see the state of your cattle.”

“You’re crazy! You asshole! We can’t go to every…”

“We don’t need to,” snapped Ron. “Y’all got an indoor ranch set up under San Marcos, don’t you?”

“What? How do you…?” One of the men reached for the paper bag on his head.

The wiry, half-Japanese Ronald chick from Oklahoma slapped his hand, and in her high-pitched voice, she said, “Don’t even try it, Mac!” All the other Ronnies burst out into laughter at her clever pun.

“You’d be surprised how much we know, Mr. Dalton,” Ron said once they had stopped guffawing. He let the man stew in that the rest of the way out to San Marcos.

If you want to imagine the future they want to build, Guru Deepak had preached once, imagine a boot stamping on a cow’s face, forever. Ron could see the boot before him, a big black industrial jackboot made from cow’s leather. It was stomping and stomping, brutal and incessant.

He comforted himself with another Guru Deepak’s teachings: I am a cow. You are a cow. We are all cows. We have been, and will again be, cows. We shall graze on green fields, and somewhere, sometime else, we are cows and bulls grazing on green fields. There is a calm and beautiful cow within every one of us. Namasté: the cow within me greets and salutes the cow within you.

That was the message of Guru Deepak, the whole of it, the heart and soul of it, and it comforted Ron as the van rolled out along the highway towards horrors unimaginable.

The people had met him with smiles and encouraging looks.

“My name is Kenny, and I’m a fast-food addict,” he’d said. They’d all sat there quietly, listening to his story. Which had been nothing special, just extra portions and aunts and uncles telling him to finish this or that so they wouldn’t have to take it home. School dances sat skipped out on, and the looming threat of diabetes. Bottles of cola every day, and the antidepressant effects of fries, burgers, desserts, and more burgers. How he’d finally tried to kill himself, and found he was too fat to die on a mere half-bottle of painkillers.

They’d smiled and nodded, listened generously. He’d felt weird telling them this, all these slim people, but they’d looked at him with what had felt, for the first time in years, like genuine respect.

“So,” he’d finished off, “I’m looking at all of you, and you’re all so slim. Skinny, even. I kinda can’t believe that y’all used to be big like me. But that gives me hope. I can change, you know?”

They’d clapped, and one of them, an Indian wearing a long golden shirt, had nodded as the clapping petered out and the others had looked at him. Dude looks like Gandhi, Kenny thought to himself for a moment. But with muscles and more hair.

“Oh, yes, Kenny,” he’d said with a wide, reassuring smile, his head nodding sideways. “I can help you change yourself. If you want it badly enough. But changing yourself isn’t enough. If we want to change ourselves, we must also change the world.”

Kenny had remembered, then the image he’d seen in the mirror a few days before, puke all down his undershirt, on that day he’d tried to die. Sagging man-tits under his thin yellow-stained undershirt, useless nipples as wide as silver dollars. All those eyes on him, the years and years of eyes focusing the way they do when people look at lizards and snakes. Then there had risen ache inside him, deep down at his core. He’d wanted to sleep with someone before he died. Someone real. Someone shaped like a woman — like a cello, not a pear or a watermelon. He’d wanted to run again, in this life.

“Sign me up,” Kenny had said, and then he noticed that one of them was fidgeting with a hypodermic needle in her hand.

Ron inhaled deeply. The bovoid stench was incredible, like a million tons of rank milk and blood and the faintest hint of corn-syrup in the air. Sweet, not disgusting the way he’d expected.

The hairless thing’s meters-long torso hung in a tickle-harness, for all the world like an immense caterpillar shuddering reflexively from the automated stimulation. Dozens of “legs” hung floppily from its side, squirming occasionally. They looked more like enormous fins of boneless meat, each bearing only a tiny black nail — the vestige of a hoof — at its tip. Stumps of other legs, still regenerating from the last meat-harvest, were visible.

Food and waste plumbing penetrated every natural orfice and a few artificial ones, as well. A series of udders, a dozen at least, hung from its underside, through the netting of the harness that suspended it. Pipe-feeds attached to each one. Ron could not tell whether the end he was looking at was the mouth or the ass, because the heads had been engineered out of these beasts. Superfluous, brains and faces. Not even eyes. Just tubes going in one end and out the other.

“This isn’t a cow,” Ron said. “It shits liquid fuel and it pisses sugar water and secretes two hundred liters of milk a day. It regrows its… legs… a hundred times before they give out. It has, what, sixteen or twenty wombs? And not one brain. This thing is not a cow.”

“Yes it is,” Mr. Dalton said, his dull eyes defiant. “According to the FDA…”

“Fuck the FDA! Screw ‘em in the throat with a chainsaw!” Ron howled. “Look at that thing… it doesn’t even look like a land animal!”

“What the hell do you think you look like?” Dalton snapped, and then winced in sudden fear.

Ron wiggled the tip of his tattooed-red nose and jammed one finger of his grimy white-gloved hand into Dalton’s chest. “Look who’s talking,” he said.

From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a movement. A ranch worker had lunged at him with a rifle. The gunshot blast sent all the hostages flat to the floor, Dalton included, but a thick, white-gloved hand clubbed the rancher flat onto the floor, unconscious.

Ron turned to New York Ronald — a tall guy with an Italian-looking face under his white paint and clownface tattoos. He was the one who’d taken out the would-be hero, and he kicked the gun from the rancher quickly, before turning to see if Ron was okay.

“Thanks, Ronald,” he barked. His savior acknowledged it with a nod.

The ranch-monsters hung row on row, oblivious in their harnesses, deaf as fingers and thumbs cut from a body and thrown to the ground. Looking upon them, rage boiled up within Ron. He could feel Gandhari within him, weeping for the fate of her brothers and sisters, these perverted things that should have been cows.

While some of the Ronalds chained up the farm-workers and office slugs together in manacles, Ron turned to his second in command — a big black Ronald who was blind in one eye — and muttered, “Little change of plans, Ronald. We’re bringing the boss man with us…”

“You sure, Ronald?” Worry was visible in the man’s sunken, bloodshot eye.

“Yeah, no problem. Let’s do this, everyone. Hurry up!”

The Ronalds howled, hoisting their jerry cans and chanting all the way.

An hour later, the silent writhing of bovoid horrors aflame still screaming through their minds, the Ronalds shoved their prisoners out of the back of their truck, still chained together, out into the desert heat. They begged to be dropped off in the city, but the Ronalds knew better than that: Homeland Security — or, well, someone hired temporarily by DHS, anyway — would be on top of them within ten minutes of the first phone call. Faraway in the distance, thick black smoke seethed up out of the ground and poisoned the desert air.

“We’ll drop your phones off a few miles up the road, beside the road. Someone will come and get you,” Ron said, and the door slammed, leaving them on the highway like ghosts in the sandy nothingness, the towering shadows of wind turbines slashing across the road behind them. There they left them.

All but Dalton, whom they drugged and shoved into a corner of the van.

“We can save him,” Ron said, his eyes fervid, lit by the remembered flames, now distant. Eyes dark with the smoke that filled the distant air. Eyes gleaming unnaturally with a bloody passion. The others said nothing, but their eyes avoided him as the truck tore down the dirt roads, back to camp, shaking them as they sat silent, waiting.

Guru Deepak streaked the thick red pooja paste up between Gandhari’s eyes, to the top of her head. The assembled Ronalds tossed flowers into the air, adorning her with necklaces of blossoms.

She mooed.

Dalton sat nearby, handcuffed. He oozed disdain. From a distance, Ron had watched Deepak argue with him until, suddenly, the shouting had cooled and Deepak had left the man sitting in the sand.

Ron’s hope refused to wither. A man like Dalton coming into the fold would be an absolute coup, a portent of worldwide victory. His gaze drifted back to Gandhari, who was being led close to him, so he cast his blossoms up into the air and cried out in joy and boundless, ecstatic praise.

An hour later, he huddled down to the floor in Guru Deepak’s private trailer.

“It’s alright,” he said.

“What?” Guru Deepak wore an incongruous frown upon his face.

“It’s alright. I didn’t do it for any reward. I just was inspired… by Her — Mother Gandhari. I knew in my heart that she wanted him brought to our camp.”

“Really,” Deepak muttered. It wasn’t a question. Ron carefully searched his guru’s face, surprised, until Deepak snapped, “How do you know what Gandhari wants? How do you know what I want?”

Ron gasped, panic shivering alive in his guts. Had he really made a mistake?

“I… I just felt… when I saw all those… things…”

“I know,” Deepak said, suddenly quiet, but very, very cold. “I know who you are, Kenny,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

“What? No… I’m not Kenny anymore…”

“You think I’m so naïve?” Deepak asked, a little harshly. Ron’s heart began to thump.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re the fifth plant they’ve sent,” Deepak said, his accent much less pronounced than usual, and his scowl luminous. “I thought you bunch might start finding some other way to spend all those bloody taxes. Don’t play dumb with me. You know very well how Dalton’s involved. What bringing him here is going to jeopardize. You know exactly what you’re doing.” Deepak’s accent had disappeared, and with it his beatific smile. The man looked like any old business captain, suddenly, even in his long golden kurta and brand-name sandals.

“Involved? What? What are you… I don’t understand, Guru,” Ron said, and he dropped to his knees. “Please… whatever I’ve done…” Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he touched his master’s feet.

Guru Deepak stared at him for a moment, cautiously, and then his expression brightened. “Could you really not be…?” he asked. “I want you to go meditate in Mother Gandhari’s womb.”

“Thank you,” Ron whispered, touching Deepak’s feet again, and he hurried out of the trailer to the trunk containing the VR gear.

As he slid headfirst into the great cow’s womb, Ron’s heart was full of fear and confusion. He trembled in the darkness, and she said nothing to him for what felt like many days. The silent darkness was bisected by the pinprick sensation of an intravenous feed being inserted into the faraway arm of Ron’s faraway body, and still, he waited, as desert heat grew and subsided, like tides on the shore.

When she finally spoke to Ron, his faraway body — all but abandoned, that stinking flesh — was stretched out across the dusty ground, the helmet too heavy to support any longer. What she whispered to him was terrifying. Promises of plagues. Deadly cows wandering, dazed, through the smoldering ruins of shopping malls, speaking a language no human ears had ever heard, exhaling deadly contagion scented as sweet as wildflowers. Millions of their two-legged oppressors dead and left to rot, the meat in their bellies burning its way through them, unleashing wracking, fatal sicknesses. It was the end of the human world, the end of that long, hard, ceaseless fouling of the earth. It had come already, she told him, this end. It could never, ever be undone, she told him. She was elated, and his exhausted body bubbled with glee, knowing the plague would claim him, soon, too.

Shanti, shanti, he reminded himself. Peace, peace. Rebirth, he knew, would eventually come. He meditated, and he prayed, and it felt as if yet more months passed. Distant voices muttered somewhere over the virtual horizon, all of them too faint for the words to reach him. Rumors of a war. The gossip of an enemy, of government agents shouting, searching his body, rifling through the dreams in Gandhari’s womb.

Ron desired nothing more than to be born, in his next life, as a calf. Not as a man, at least: as something other — finer — than a human being. He yearned for his true, eternal form. To be a silent bull grazing the weeds of the remade earth. The image sang to him of the voices of choirs, the dung of the world, worms in the soil. An endless chorus of low, undulating moos.

And at the far end of that eternally warm and wet silence, a ripple surged through the womb shrouding his body — still the body of a man, though he was certain it would be transformed at any moment into his true four-legged form — and with a gentle quiver, he was pushed from dark, warm, sludgy comfort toward the dry dust and cold, once again out into the frightening nighttime of the world.

About the Author

Gord Sellar was born in Malawi but raised in Canada. He has lived in South Korea since 2002, where he has taught at universities, played saxophone in an indie-rock band, worked as an editor and co-translator, and started a study group focused on Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. He is currently studying of what appears to be an ongoing science-fiction renaissance in South Korea, as well as the historical reception of the genre there. He attended Clarion West in 2006, was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009, and his fiction has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Interzone, Tesseracts Twelve, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction Volume 26 (edited by Gardner Dozois), and with more work forthcoming in, among other places, Subterranean and Diet Soap.

“The History Within Us” by Matthew Kressel

On a wrist-mounted computer, Betsy Haadama watched a six thousand-year-old silent film. It was grayscale, overexposed, two-dimensional, and chronologically jumbled. On the film: a mustachioed man doting over his young son at a crowded zoo. A woman vigorously combing the boy’s white hair beside a large piano. A family eating a large meal, candles burning on a table, men wearing yarmulkes, bodies shivering in prayer. A river, people swimming, women in white bathing caps and full-body suits. Men on rocks by the shore, pipes in mouths, smoke drifting lazily upward. A park, the boy looking down at a dead pigeon. Staring.  Staring. Father picking him up, kissing him. In the sky, a bright sun.

A young sun.

“Pardon my intrusion in this time of ends,” a Twirlover said, startling her. The Twirlover’s six separate, hovering pink objects — like human knuckles — danced a looping, synchronized pattern in the air. “If it pleases you, will you share with me why you watch that flickering device so incessantly?”

In some parts of the galaxy one could be killed for being human. Betsy wasn’t sure if this Eluder Ship was such a place. But death was coming for all soon enough. So why fear it now?

“This is an ancient film of my paternal ancestor,” she said defiantly.

Puffs of air beat against her face as the Twirlover spun. “An ancient film? Indeed, such a rare treasure, an artifact of the past! If it pleases you, may we watch a portion together?”

She was about to tell it no, that she’d rather die alone, contemplating what might have been, when the alarm trilled down the cavernous halls of the Eluder Ship. A cold shiver ran down her spine as a cacophony of voices warned in ninety languages simultaneously, “Gravitational collapse imminent, my beloveds! Please take your positions inside your transitional shells!”

Angry rainbows flared across the floor and ozone and ammonia soured the air, warning those who communicated by color or smell. Betsy’s mind skipped and stuttered like the ancient film playing on her wrist as a warning to the telepaths skirted the fringes of her consciousness. Still more warnings she could not perceive with her natural senses no doubt flooded the chamber now.

Hundreds of creatures ran or flew or poured inside their transitional shells, strange cocoons fitted to their variform bodies. The Twirlover tumbled away as Betsy closed the cover of her shell. She hugged her knees and shivered as the glass cover sealed her inside with a hiss and a confirmation beep. A lifeboat or a coffin?  She’d find out soon enough.

Transitional shells filled the gargantuan chamber of the Eluder Ship like arrays of soldiers preparing for battle, their noses pointed toward the red-giant star looming outside. Maera — “The Daughter Star” — one of the few still-burning stars in the galaxy. It seethed before all, a conflagration as large as a solar system, turning everything the color of blood.

Forty seconds.

This was a pitiful end, but it was this or slow starvation, privation, death. The galaxy had been laid sere. No planets to grow food. No stars to keep warm. It wasn’t fair. None of them deserved this. But then she remembered Julio, and what she had done to him at Afsasat.  

I left you to die, Julio. And for that I deserve this.

Thirty seconds.

Soon now, Maera’s heart would cool by a fraction of a degree, and billions of tons of matter, no longer kept aloft by nuclear winds, would plunge towards its gravitational center at the speed of light. The star would collapse, go nova, and in its tortured heart the universe would tear. A singularity would form, a black hole, and Betsy Haadama and the thousands of others on this Eluder Ship would ride that collapsing wave into another universe. Their matter and energy, transmuted into pure information, would seed a new creation, the World to Come. Their consciousness, over long eons, would push matter into form, coerce dust to life. In some strange new way they would live on, gods reborn further down the corridor of infinity. And they had been doing this forever, would be doing this again and again until the end of time.   

Or so the litany went.

The story soothed troubled minds. But the science behind the technology was just a theory. It could be proven only by first-person observation. Any object which crossed a black hole’s event horizon could never communicate with the universe again. Just as easily, she might be annihilated forever. To those witnessing from the outside, there would be no difference.

Twenty seconds.

She tried not to peer up at The Daughter, though its ember light corrupted everything with its hellish glow. Instead she watched the film on her wrist: men in fedoras, women in ostentatious hats at an airport, people descending a stairwell from plane to tarmac. A baby hoisted in the air. Smiles. Laughing. Cut to a park. The boy looking down at the dead pigeon, staring. Staring. Father picking him up, patting him on the shoulder. The boy, crying.

Why do you stare at the bird?  Betsy thought. What are you thinking?

She looked up at the seething star.   So beautiful, terrible, immense. A wonder that such a thing existed. A horn bellowed and Betsy screamed.

“False Alarm! Beloveds, the imminent collapse was a false alarm! Spurious readings caused us to make an erroneous conclusion. We estimate at least six hours before stellar collapse, based on present readings.”

The voice announced the message in multiple languages, simulcast with aggressive rainbows, smells, alien sensations.

I’m alive! she thought. I’m still here! It felt exhilarating, for a moment. Then she remembered she’d have to do this again.

Slowly, shells opened and creatures emerged. Betsy scanned the motley lot of them as her cover retracted. A zoo of sentient species escaping from their cages, creatures made of every color, texture, and temperament.

So much life, she thought. Snuffed out by the Horde. Crimes beyond forgiveness. And made all the more vile because the Horde had been the progeny of the human race.

Betsy activated inositol in her bloodstream via thought command in order to suppress her panic/flight response. It soothed her, but only just enough to notice the hairs on the back of her neck rising from an electrostatic charge as the Twirlover returned.

“That was exciting!” it said.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Betsy said.

“To be so close to annihilation and then to come back again. It renews the sense of life!”

“Or the dread of living.”

“But the dread, if you explore it,” the Twirlover said, “reveals the miracle of existence out of nothingness. From out of horror comes life.”

The litany again. “Or out of life, horror,” she said.

It tumbled quietly for a moment. “Sometimes.” It moved closer to inspect her film. “That’s a child of your species, is it not?”

She glanced down at her screen. “No, that’s a rhinoceros.”

“Ree-Nos-Ur-Us. What a marvel of composition, all those rolling mountains of flesh. Does it still exist?”

“Extinct.”

The Twirlover whistled a mournful, descending arpeggio. “Like so much life in the galaxy. Like the once-glorious stars.”

The Horde had obliterated stars by the billions. They had wrapped the Milky Way inside a bleak cocoon of transmatter so that nothing, no ship, no signal — not even light — could pass. And then they vanished, leaving the galaxy to rot. Such was the legacy of humanity.

She wondered if the Twirlover would kill her outright if it knew what she was. Death by physical means might be preferable, she thought, to being flash-baked into quantum-entangled gamma rays. Six in one, really.

The film cut to a boy in a crib, bouncing. His mother lifting him, smiling for the camera. The boy laughing.

“That’s one of us,” she said. “My paternal ancestor.” Surprising herself, she felt pride.

“Ah, such wonderful protuberances!”

A wisp of dust coalesced above Betsy’s head. Winking diamonds swirled in yellow clouds. An aeroform creature. For a moment she glimpsed her own face of colored sparkles reflected back at her. But the aeroform being soon spiraled away, only to pause a few seconds later before a group of fronded Whidus who turned their mushroom-like eyes in her direction. Maybe they recognized her, knew what she was. Maybe they were plotting her demise.

A second, identical Twirlover approached Betsy and said to the first, “You know, my bonded-one, that we are about to die, do you not?”

“I was about to come back to you, my flesh-bond,” the first said. “And tell you about my sharing with this creature.”

“Indeed you were. I saw you tumbling towards me with great haste.”

“My flesh-bond, just take a good look at her smooth, auburn skin, the fine black threads that emerge from her head, the little valve at her peak where she modulates her words with a bacteria-laden pink muscle! And on her upper-left protuberance, that metal device which flicker-flashes with strange images. She watches it incessantly. She is curious, is she not?”

“There is something curious here, certainly.”

“My love, let us join so I can share my thoughts with you.”

“Indeed, I look forward to it!”

The two tumbled together into a single dancing, twelve-piece ring. Knuckles hopped, bounced, tumbled over each other. Music piped and whistled in byzantine harmonies. There arose a great shriek about them, and soon after they separated again into six-pieced individuals. Betsy thought they might have interchanged pieces in the process.

“Not fair!” said the second. Or was it the first?  Betsy couldn’t tell them apart anymore. “You playful trickster! You gave me your segment, so now I know your thoughts. But then, you sense my emotions too.”

“What joy it is to share mind with you, beloved! Yes, I feel your misplaced jealousy. And so much of it! What a waste of energy. Don’t you see? This creature is alone and needs to share with someone!”

“Perhaps, but does it have to be you?”

“Not me alone, but us together!”

“In this last hour, you would defile us?”

“Please!” Betsy interjected. “I’d prefer to be alone anyway — ”

“One must never be alone!” the first said. “Share with us! Let us merge gloriously with your words.”

“Indeed, tell us,” the second said, “Did you have a bonded-one who abandoned you, who wandered off to have intercourse with strangers when you need him?”

‘Intercourse?’ she thought. Perhaps there was more to the Twirlover concept of sharing than she realized.  ”Actually, I left him.”

“Of course you did,” the second said. “Like attracts like.”

“Where did you abandon him?” the first said.

Interesting, the way it had interpreted her words. “I left him at the first nova,” she said. “The Mother Star. Afsasat.”

“You were at Afsasat and you didn’t go through the event-horizon?” the second said. “I don’t believe your story! Beloved, look how she defiles this union!”

“Surely,” the first said, “you are joking, trying to please us with paradox? Why would you do something so idiotic? Why not escape through Afsasat when you had the chance?”

She sighed and turned her attention to the film on her wrist. Mustachioed father and blond-haired son walking down a path. Father, smiling. Boy running, falling. Crying. Father picking him up, kissing him. All better. All better.

“Did you hear our questions?” the first asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s just that it’s a very long story.”

“Our lives are stories. We are empty without them. Fill us so we may fill you.”

Strangely, she had stopped shivering. She even felt a little warm. If this was intercourse, then she was determined to be a good lover. “This film is part of ‘The Biography,’” she said. “A record of my ancestors’ lives that was encoded within my genes.”

“Such joy! I have heard of this technology, the sharing of such immensity,” the first said. “How far back do your records go?”

“About six thousand years.”

The second squealed.

“I told you, beloved,” the first said. “She is share-worthy.”

Her mother had told her the story in the quiet hours while drifting under the ash streams of the decimated Magellanic Clouds, or over stale, thrice-brewed tea, while the ice-blue rings of Cegmar rose above the horizon, or while her mother gently brushed her hair and chills trickled down her spine. When he turned seventy, the boy in the film digitized his aging childhood reels and then gave them to his son. His son added films, photos, and memorabilia and passed the collection to his offspring. His children added more history and passed this collection on again. This continued for generations. Eventually his descendants decided to encode this amalgamated history within their DNA, so it would never be lost or forgotten. Every child was thereafter born with the memories of their parents, and theirs before them, and theirs before them. And also in their bodily archives were the early records — the films, photos and keepsakes that started the tradition. The Biography was an ancient and unbroken chain that began with this black and white film playing on her wrist. The first.

And now the last.

“It’s so large!” the second said.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Your story,” the first said, “To carry all that history within you!”

“It’s not in me anymore. Julio and I stripped all of it, every last base-pair, from our genes. I recall only my personal experiences now. This computer… it holds the last copy. This is the Biography, now.”

This fragile, solitary thing on her wrist.

“But why?” Moans and tweets. “That must have been an immense loss!”

The answer was complex, full of shame and guilt. Instead she offered the highly edited version. “Because we wanted to enter the World to Come without a past.”

The Twirlovers tumbled noisily, screeching.

“I put the Biography on this ancient computer,” she said, pointing to her wrist. “It belonged to my grandmother, five hundred and eighty years ago. Julio and I parked our starsloop in orbit around Afsasat and we stowed this wrist-player in our shrine-room. We said goodbye to our past and then we flew over to the Eluder Ship. Our starsloop and the Biography within would be destroyed when Afsasat went nova.”

Chirps. Squeals.

“But Afsasat took its time. So I explored every corner of the Eluder Ship. I discovered that none of my species were there. That meant Julio and I might be the last of my kind in existence. And that meant the Biography was the last of its kind too.”

A duet of whistles in a major key.

“I used to recall the smell of my great-grandmother’s hair of twenty-three generations ago as her lover leaned in to kiss her pink lips. I knew every defect in the bathroom tiles of the beach house where my ancestor Rhindi lived four thousand years ago. I could hear the gulls cry as they flew in the colored dawn as the four suns rose, one green, one orange, one yellow, and one blue before Eleanor left her family for war, to die in deep space, but not before she had a son to pass on the memory. I once remembered the joy Yalta felt toward his seventeen lanky daughters, all born in zero-g, all tall, graceful, beautiful, with eyes like blue giants. These weren’t others’ lives. They were mine. I had lived these lives too.”

Seven long, high notes.

“So many people had once lived inside of me. Even these memories that I’m telling you about now — they come from this device! Not from me!  I’m silent inside. And I realized that if I let the Biography die I would be murdering billions. Just like the Horde.”

A very human gasp, then a precipitous pause.

“So I changed my mind. I decided I’d bring the Biography with me into the World to Come. My ancestors deserved that much. I was about to retrieve it from our starsloop, but Julio held me. Afsasat could go nova at any moment, he said. And…he wanted to sever us from the past. I disagreed.”

Betsy started shaking again as the moment became clear in her mind. She remembered his exhausted, pleading eyes, his unruly black beard.

“Did you forget what they did?” Julio had said. “Did you erase that memory too? The Horde, the progeny of the human race, stole our children! And you want to bring their history with us? We decided we wouldn’t allow that. The Biography has to be destroyed.”

“I know what we decided, Julio!” she said. “But I can’t let all those people die!”

“They’re already dead, Betsy!”

“I can’t believe you just said that.” Her face grew hot. “They’re not dead! They once lived within us! They gave us our lives, and we owe them our memories!”

“I don’t feel that way at all.”

“Julio, how can you abandon them so easily?”

“They led us to this place of death and horror.  I sever myself from the past for that reason alone.”

And in the end, it was she who had abandoned him.

She swallowed down her tears as the Twirlovers squealed and beckoned her to continue.

“I told Julio I wanted to wander the ship alone, and instead I snuck off to fetch the Biography. Maybe he knew where I was going. I’ll never know. I reached my starsloop and was ready to return when I heard the alarm. Afsasat was collapsing. One minute to nova. Not enough time to return safely. I panicked. I had to save the Biography, all those lives, from destruction. Nothing else mattered. I powered up my ship and fled.”

For weeks she had wondered, did Julio search the Eluder Ship for her? What did he feel when he realized she had left him? Like the thoughts of the boy in the film, she’d never know. He had entered a black hole, and nothing could cross that dark horizon.

The Twirlovers cried out, a piercing shriek. Perhaps they orgasmed together. Eventually, the second said, “What a dirty tale! So much abandonment. I feel defiled. A sinner! This is the kind of sharing you wanted, my beloved?”

“But in fetching her Biography she returned to her people!” the first said. “Don’t you see? Isn’t sharing so much more rewarding after a long absence?”

“You twist words easily, my bonded-one! Her story was…acceptable.”

A large Perslop sloshed towards them. The creature was amber, a gelatinous three-limbed starfish with translucent skin and dozens of eyes like upturned brown bowls.

“Do you wish a comforting invocation?” the Perslop said.  A slit tucked into one of its armpits burped open to reveal hundreds of tiny white teeth, and its warm breath reeked of dead seas. “I know rituals from a thousand faiths. Or, if you wish, you may teach me one.” Its voice was like wind blowing over ruins.

“Blessings, smooth-skinned pleasure to behold!” the first Twirlover said. “We welcome a fourth to share!”

“No we do not!” the second Twirlover said.

“My flesh-love, please!” the first said. “Do not be rude.” Then to the Perslop: “Instead of an invocation, my finely contoured friend. Will you share a story with us?”

“Incorrigible!” the second said, tumbling furiously.

With the moist end of one if its arms, the Perslop inched towards Betsy’s wrist. The tip opened into a tripod of three small fingers, with diminutive brown eyes capping the end of each. The eyes wiggled nervously above the ancient film. “What is this?” it asked.

“It’s her people’s history!” the first said. “From six-thousand years ago!”

“Interesting,” the Perslop said. “Your race hasn’t changed much.”

“That’s a duck,” Betsy said. “Extinct.”

“So, that’s you there?”

“No, that’s a walrus. Also extinct.”

“Then whose history did you say we are watching?”

“My race. They’re at a zoo.”

“A ‘zoo?’” the Perslop said.

“A place that housed animals in cages.”

“What for?”

“So they could observe them without danger to themselves,” she said.

“Another act of separation!” the second Twirlover said. “Such a barbaric, dirty race!”

“Her filth notwithstanding, keeping something caged is not barbarism,” the Perslop said, its moist arm dangling an hairsbreadth from Betsy’s face. “Before the Horde destroyed my brothers, I used to travel with my colony to a fecal press, where we severed one of our limbs and tortured it in a cage until it released a small amount of feces. We then burned that feces as an offering to the Absent One. They were profoundly holy events. And I miss them very, very much.”

The second Twirlover squeaked loudly three times.

“You see, my beloved?” the first said. “This is the joy you have missed by withdrawing from union all these years!”

On Betsy’s wrist the film played on, men in white shorts and shirts playing handball. Women sitting on the sidelines bringing smoky cigarettes to their lips. The young boy, a few years older, standing on a porch, talking to a beautiful girl.

“You simplify my thoughts!” the second Twirlover said. “I take no joy in the suffering of others. If I did, I would find pleasure in the atrocities of the Horde. But those are stories I never wish to hear again. If I could, I would erase them from history like this creature erased this Biography from her genes!”

If only that were possible, Betsy thought. To rewrite history. If so, she’d go even further back, to the creation of the Horde, more than three hundred years ago.  Humanity had been evolving rapidly for generations. They had augmented their consciousness to the point that the body became irrelevant. Flesh was now a temporary abode, while the mind was free to explore and play in infinite space. Epic works of art, science, and philosophy were commonplace. Physical suffering had been eradicated. It was a true Golden Age of humankind.

But the Hagzhi, a prideful, stoic and gargantuan species that had once peacefully abided humans, became fearful of humanity’s growing power over matter and began to spread lies and sow seeds of mistrust. Later, the Hagzhi began to systematically exterminate humans as a way to prop up their own faltering galactic hegemonies. Humanity was nearly destroyed in the wars that followed, but after that tumult, humans vowed that they would never let such a catastrophe happen again. Through heroic feats of research they discovered the secret folds of negative time and learned the simple mystery behind the origins of consciousness. They learned how to, with a thought, create a sun. And with another, destroy it.

The Hagzhi race vanished from existence in a day. One hundred and seventy planets, moons, outposts and stations erased from the universe. Later, for no reason anyone could discern, other races vanished. Races which had never threatened humanity. The Onyx Horde, as this force came to be known, acted without cause or reason.

Not all humans accepted the rise to supra-consciousness. Not all humans wanted to change. The Horde slaughtered those who resisted. Those who hid were found, tortured, and killed. And there were those, like Betsy’s ancestors, who had made a deal and were spared.

“Keep the Biography in your genes,” the Horde had commanded her ancestors. “Keep your physical human form. Do this and you will not die.”

And her ancestors agreed, and survived, even prospered, while the rest of the galaxy was ruined. When the other races discovered that there were humans who were spared the Horde’s madness, that the Horde were the progeny of the human race, the long dormant seeds of doubt that the Hagzhi had planted re-sprouted, this time across the entire galaxy. Humans were slaughtered without remorse, and the Horde did not come to save them.      

If I were given that choice now, Betsy thought.   To live or die by their rules, I would have chosen death. I’d rather die than live under their darkness another instant.

On the film, a crowded beach. People swimming. Large umbrellas casting shadows. Wisps of cloud in the sky, all under a bright sun.

A young sun.

The Twirlovers stopped twirling. The Perslop leaned in closer to see.

“Such a young sun,” the Perslop said. “Bright and warm. The sight fills me with sadness. No longer do such stars burn in the Milky Way. Here we orbit this dying star in a dead galaxy where only a few cinders burn in a quiescent sea. And all about the universe a hundred billion galaxies dangle forever beyond our reach. The Onyx Horde has sealed us forever from their glorious light. May their souls be stripped from eternity!”

On the film, a party. People laughing, dancing, hands on hips, forming a human train. Cone-shaped hats.

“What are they doing?” the Perslop asked.

“A party,” Betsy said. “A new year’s celebration.”

“And why do they bounce up and down?”

“They’re dancing.”

“Do you remember, my soul-union,” the first Twirlover said, “how we danced for three ascensions of the Hagic Moon with the birth of our tumble-litter?”

“I shall never forget!” the second said, squealing. “Our many tumblers, searching for their bond-sisters. How they merged and separated a thousand times before they joined the sisters to complete their soul!”

“May they find the path to the Glory Star that resides at the center of creation.”

On the film, the blond boy in the corner staring into the camera eye. I’d always assumed that one day someone would look into the Biography and see me. But I’m the last, aren’t I?

“Your children, are they dead?” the Perslop said to the Twirlovers.

“They were living on Ental,” the second said. “It was obliterated by the Horde.” A hiss like a distant wave crashing on an empty beach.

“I had nine offspring,” the Perslop said. “Three died in the disastrous attempt to pass through the galaxy’s transmatter shell. Three died of malnutrition. Two died in an experiment to create a new star.”

“That’s only eight,” the first Twirlover said. “And the ninth?”

“Suicide.”

On the film, an elderly couple in formal clothing sitting beside a bright window. Their bodies in silhouette. The woman, Bessie. The man, Oser. Betsy’s oldest ancestors in the Biography. She and Julio had named their children after them. A boy and girl. Twins. She remembered their puffy, newborn faces, their eyes hungry for life.

She and Julio and her children had been living on the temperate moon of Aeoschloch with one hundred other Biography-carrying humans, far from the wars and the suspicions of the other races. And one morning, as the swirling black eye of the gas giant Ur rose above the distant hills, as she was breast-feeding her twin children, she was swept away.

She could not see or hear or sense anything, even her own screams, but she felt a presence probing her, scanning her, reading and rereading the Biography within her as if it were the most important thing in the universe. And she knew this presence, remembered it from the Biography and the memories within.

The Onyx Horde.

Then the Horde spit her and a hundred other humans out over the sandy coastline. Some people did not rise from the cold beach. Their eyes stared lifeless into the starless sky. Some had organs missing or were merged with others into horrible grotesqueries. Some went mad. Some had reappeared in the ocean and drowned. And the children, all the pre-pubescent ones, had vanished. The Horde had taken them. Every one.

Oser and Bessie, two months old, barely enough time to open their eyes and learn their parents’ faces. Gone.

The seventy surviving colonists were wrecked, devastated. Should they have more children? No, they decided, the Horde could just as easily take them again. Should they try to forget and live out their lives on this backwater moon? No, how could they ever find joy again, knowing that the Horde could come again at any time? Then the colonists heard about Afsasat, the Eluder Ship being built there and a possible way to escape the Horde forever.  

And so it was decided. The colonists would end their history on their own terms. They would attempt to enter the World to Come, but without the Biography inside of them. They would excise it from their genes, shedding themselves from the thing which the Horde seemed so desperately to desire. Shedding themselves of humanity’s sordid history. It would be, in their own small way, revenge.

But they’d have to get to Afsasat first. The Eluder Ship was being constructed in a quadrant of space that was rumored to be tolerant of humans. But the colonists would have to navigate through large quadrants of dangerous space. So they traveled in many ships, by multiple circuitous and zigzagging routes. Betsy and Julio arrived safely. When Betsy walked around the ship, looking for other humans, she found none. They were the last two.

And now, on this second Eluder Ship, there was only her.

Outside the windows, lightning the size of a hundred dead planets forked across Maera’s surface. The star looked ancient, tired, ready to sleep forever. The aliens throughout the chamber paused to stare up at the star.   

Her wrist flickered like the star outside. On the film, the mustachioed man. The woman with the beautiful black hair. Another party. A different day. A cake with five flames. Eyes reflecting candlelight. The boy, blowing the flames out. Smoke and applause. Silent cheer.  

“You said you wanted a story,” the Perslop said, “Well I have one. A few weeks ago I confronted a group of wandering Ergs. One told me that he’d captured a human — ”

Betsy started in her seat.

“The Erg said the human was an ugly, repulsive thing,” the Perslop continued. “With dark hair covering most of its carbuncle head, and liquid leaking from its odious eyes. It pleaded for its life. And the Erg, a compassionate being, decided ultimately to let it go. But afterward he became terribly distraught. He said he’d missed his opportunity to destroy a creature which had caused so much of the galaxy’s pain. For a long time I considered this Erg’s position.

“I once had a vast starship. I found a bore-worm nibbling in my refuse berth. I believed in the sanctity of all life, and decided to let it live. Six weeks later, my ship was infested with bore-worms, and no one would dock with me for fear of having their hulls eaten. I had to incinerate my ship. You see, I let one worm live, and thousands returned to ruin me.  Is it not the same with humans? If we let one live, do we not give them the chance to destroy us again? I told the Erg that he did the righteous thing, but I truly did not — do not — believe it myself.”

The Twirlovers chirped quietly.

“Where did he find this human?” she blurted. “How many weeks ago was this?” Dark hair covering its head? she thought. Julio, is he speaking of you?  

The first Twirlover said, “Please, tell us more, beloved! This is wonderful!”

“What more is there to tell?” the Perslop said. “We may be reborn in a new universe, but if we carry that worm along with us, do we not risk infestation again?”

Betsy stared into the Perslop’s tripod eye-cups. It knows, she thought. It knows what I am. Then she remembered the aeroform creature studying her and the Whidus staring at her and the Twirlovers’ odd behavior around her.

They all know, she thought. Every one of them knows!

“Do not fear, human,” the Perslop said. “I’ll not kill you. I define myself by being what you are not. I let you live even though every pulse of my hearts says you should be squashed between my arms like vermin.”

Betsy stared at the Perslop, shivering. Weakly, she said, “Was your story about the human true?”

Outside, a brilliant solar flare leaped from Maera and grew angrily out into space. The Daughter, shedding her last vestiges of life. Soon now.

The Perslop gestured to her screen. “Is your story true? Is not history filled with lies and obfuscations?”

On the screen, a beach, waves crashing silently. Umbrellas casting large shadows. A beautiful young woman smiling shyly at the camera. The future wife of the boy. A burning ball of light in the sky. Everyone watched the screen.

“So beautiful,” the Perslop said. “And gone forever…”

Silence. Even the Twirlovers went still.

“Please!” she said. “Tell me! Was it true?”

“Why?” the Perslop said. “Why should I tell you? Why do you deserve an answer?”

She took a deep breath. “Because someone I love might still be alive,” she said. “To me, that’s everything.”

The alarm trilled, startling her.  ”Gravitational collapse imminent, beloveds! Please take your positions inside your transitional shells!”

“No!” she cried. “Not yet!”

The Perslop began to move away.

“Wait!” she screamed. “Please tell me!”

The Perslop paused but did not turn back. “I am the last of my kind,” the Perslop said. “I came over here to tell you that you are not.”

The Twirlovers shrieked and suddenly merged. They tumbled madly, yelping, barking, while the Perslop left for its transitional shell.

Ninety seconds to collapse.

Maera flickered and angry waves rippled across its surface, but Betsy could not summon the will to close her shell. On her viewscreen, the park, the blond-haired boy skipping, scaring away pigeons. Dappled sunlight. A breeze through trees.. A dead pigeon on the dirt. The boy, stopping, staring. Staring.

Suddenly, she understood why the boy stared at the bird for so long.

This is the first time you knew death! she thought. You knew the bird would never rise again. And you knew that one day you’d fall too, that everything falls! That’s why you gave these films to your son. You wanted him to remember you, forever!

Seventy-five seconds.

The Perslop had been right, she thought. I could be polluting the new universe with this history.

Sixty-five seconds.

But all those lives, erased? I can’t kill you, great-great grandfather. You are the first. Without you, we would be nothing. My ancestors, without all of you, I am nothing.

Sixty seconds.

The fourteen billion-year history of this universe had already unfolded. But for the World to Come, the story had yet to be written. Maybe the World to Come was a lie, but then again, maybe there was new life on the other side of the event horizon. Maybe they truly had been doing this forever and ever. A flower gone to seed.

She jumped out of her transitional shell, took off her grandmother’s computer from her wrist, and placed it inside the shell. Then she pressed the button to seal it inside.

She’d send the Biography, its mammoth history, with its eons of joys and sorrows, through Maera. She hoped that in the next universe, humanity would be different. Better. What every parent wishes for her children.

“Goodbye,” she said.

The Twirlovers still tumbled together in the air beside her, as wild as a radioactive atom. The alarm continued to wail. “Get in your shells!” she screamed. But they ignored her.

Twenty seconds.

She ran to the rear of the chamber and leaped into an escape pod. She pressed the emergency activator and in an instant she was hurtling away from the Eluder Ship at a large fraction of the speed of light. In the window behind her, Maera blinked twice, like two eyes closing, then began to fade. The star shrunk to half its size, and a moment later the sky filled with white light. The ship bleated a thousand warnings as Betsy closed her eyes.

“I’m coming, Julio. I’m coming for you.”

She had watched the ancient film so often that it still played in her mind, projecting on the back of her eyes like a movie screen. The boy in the park, running, laughing. Falling. Scuffing his knee. Father picking him up, kissing him, comforting him. Above them, a sun.

A young sun.

About the Author

Matthew Kressel’s work has or will soon appear in Interzone, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, Farrago’s Wainscot, and the anthologies Naked City, edited by Ellen Datlow, and Hatter Bones, edited by Paul Jessup, as well as other markets. He runs Senses Five Press, which publishes Sybil’s Garage, now reading for its seventh issue, and the World Fantasy Award-Winning anthology Paper Cities. Alongside Ellen Datlow, he co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan. He is a member of the Altered Fluid writers group.

“A Terrifying Mix of Honesty and Rigor: A Conversation with Kij Johnson” by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Kij Johnson didn’t really want to be thought of as “a tentacle-porn girl,” but she knew her story, “Spar,” worked as a story so she sent it off. 

Last month, “Spar” was nominated as a finalist for the 2009 Nebula Awards in the short story category.

“This is a story I love,” Johnson says below, “without liking it at all.”

“Spar” is disturbing. There’s weird sex. And tentacles. And there’s relentless beauty — of craftsmanship, of the imagination — and… something other than beauty, too.

Johnson is an award-winning writer of novels and short fiction — she taken the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Crawford Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Her novels include Fudoki and The Fox Woman, both from Tor Books. She’s also an essayist, an accomplished poet, and a highly respected teacher.

Since the late 1980s, Johnson has worked throughout the industry, at places like Dark Horse Comics, Wizards of the Coast, and Tor Books. 

But at heart she’s a storyteller.

Johnson can pull you into a story so fast you want to scream — for the joy of it, the mastery, the thrill, the excitement of being in the hands of a great writer: “Aimee’s big trick is that she makes 26 monkeys vanish onstage.” Or, you might scream for other, more visceral reasons: “In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.”

Kij Johnson, says Jeff VanderMeer, is “a wonderful writer who takes big chances and has a gigantic imagination.” “Spar,” according to VanderMeer is “crazy-ass brilliant work.”

Johnson’s risk-taking pays off. Readers reap the rewards. Below, Johnson and I talk about “Spar,” writing, and sex with aliens.

“Spar” has garnered a good bit of attention. Readers have been both repelled and compelled at the first paragraph, the language, the subject matter. How’d you happen to write it?

It’s really different from most of my other stuff, isn’t it? Or not, actually.

Stories for me are always a slough of apparently unrelated ideas, often gathered over years. “Spar” is like that.

Years and years ago I wrote a draft of a first-contact story, but stalled out when I started to think through the challenges of communication with any sort of alien intelligence. Dogs are an alien intelligence with which we share (some) biology and similar group dynamics. They do something we ask, “sit,” for instance, but their motives for sitting are not necessarily the motives we like to ascribe to them. If it’s hard to understand what forms a dog’s understanding, how much harder to understand a truly alien intelligence?

So I put that on the back burner.

Next piece: Over the past few years, I’ve been writing a bunch of meditative stories — “At the Mouth of the River of Bees,” “The Evolution of Trickster Stories among the Dogs of North Park after the Change,” “The Cat who Walked a Thousand Miles” — even “26 Monkeys, also the Abyss” is at heart a contemplative story. I wondered if I was falling into the rut of careful craft. I was afraid that my writing was getting a little too glossy.

When I use glossy referring to writing, I usually mean smooth prose — craft — sometimes at the expense of the underlying truth that makes something art.

I wanted to write something aggressively non-glossy. I joked that it could be about a human and an alien in a lifeboat who fucked all the time because they were bored. But that wasn’t much of a plot, when you got right down to it, so it remained a joke. Onto the back burner.

Last piece: summer of 2009 I was thinking about the ways relationships come apart. It’s always about lack of communication, isn’t it? And then everything fell together: a story about what can happen as the people we love turn into non-communicative aliens with whom we share a bed. And a story about sex with an alien because it’s that or die of boredom. All the other things — the weird Stockholm Syndrome dynamic; the fear of leaving a familiar situation, however horrific; the cruelty that comes from familiarity — evolved in the rewrite. It’s interesting to me how what I saw as the primary and very obvious theme of the story is the one people notice least.

The first sentence came first, and then the rest in a five-day rush, including rewriting as I went. I spent a lot of time crafting the story to make it appear un-crafted and non-glossy. The irony does not escape me.

Despite the completely disparate content, “Spar” has a lot of stylistic similarities with other stories of mine. In “26 Monkeys,” I was exploring how far I can break up scene structure and still have a story. I have also been stripping out some of the lush prose that I tried in stories like “River of Bees,” — “26 Monkeys” was also part of this — to see what my writing looks like in a simpler mode. “Spar” is a direct result of this thinking.

In “26 Monkeys”, what did breaking up the scene structure reveal to you about the nature of scenes? Did doing this inform “Spar” or other subsequent stores?

Most of the scenes in “26 Monkeys” are not scenes at all, if one considers a scene a small story arc where a question is posited or an action attempted with a result that changes the larger story in some fashion. Most of the pieces don’t even pretend they are conventional storytelling, as vignettes often do. But they each contain part of what is in a conventional scene, however unorthodox the presentation. Descriptions, characterization setting, thematic statement, statement of conflict, clear problems and their resolution — they’re all there, and if you put them together, you get a unified story arc.

“Spar” breaks it down farther still; there’s almost no storyline, and things that are events are stripped to the bone, leaving in at least one case a single sentence. To tell this story more conventionally would make it either erotic or porn, depending on my intention. I mean it to be neither.

I love seeing what happens to a story when you take out the standard elements, but for this to work, the underlying emotions have to become commensurately stronger. Spar’s style would just be artifice if the story were just about the narrator’s inability to communicate with her husband.

What were the most difficult decisions you had to make in writing “Spar”?

The hardest was sending it out at all. It’s deeply unpleasant as a story, offensive on many levels. I knew it worked as a story, but I wasn’t sure how it would be read and I wasn’t thrilled to be thought of as a tentacle-porn girl. There are a couple of sections that I hated, but they were effective and in they stayed. This is a story I love without liking it at all.

In some ways I’m the lucky one, because having written it I can walk away. Readers are stuck with it in their minds.

Makes me wonder, what is a short story’s job?

I can’t say. I know that for my writing, I hope I change the reader in some way — make her see something or experience something she would not otherwise, and may not want to. What I write may or may not be entertaining, but my goal going in is usually not entertainment — it’s exploring themes and people and styles I am curious about. I’m always happy when people like reading it and get what I’m doing. Most of my fiction does what I want it to because (except in a couple of cases) I don’t send it out before it does so.

Is it challenging working with editors when you are pushing so many limits?

Not really. They either buy it or they don’t. I think it’s more challenging for the editors sometimes. I know that Neil Clarke asked for input from at least one person outside the magazine before he made the decision. 

You’ve been on both sides of the desk, what is the ideal writer/editor relationship? When does it work best? Work the worst?

Well, that’s hard for me to say, since my editors have made minimal revisions. What I need most (which is a very, very careful copy edit for things like repetitive words) may not be what others need. I do think that steady contact is important. It’s really easy for writers (and by “writers,” I mean “me”) to disconnect from things like deadlines.

I will clarify that most of my editorial work was actually production work — managing editor as the person who puts all the materials together, not as a creative input — so from that side of things, what mattered to me most was that the authors get their stuff in on time.

What does writing poetry allow you to do that writing prose does not? How is your process different when writing poetry? Do you feel more or less comfortable in either genre?

I am really just starting to think again about poetry after some years away, so I don’t have a good answer for you. Poetry is a terrifying mix of artistic rigor and honesty, but then, that’s what I have been striving toward in my fiction, so maybe it won’t be so bad.

You’ve worked at such a wide variety of places in publishing — WotC, Tor, Black Horse. How is the speculative fiction world different now than it was when you made you first sale in the late 1980s? Which changes are for the better?

The world is a lot more open to it now, though they don’t like the name yet, do they? There are many talented or brilliant writers working in the interstices of the literary and speculative genres, and this has improved both genres. There’s room now for Michael Chabon to write alternate history and detective stories, and for me to write stories that are primarily about relationships.

There’s a huge range of fantasy and SF that evolved within the gaming and the fanfic worlds, and that has opened up new writers, readers and viewers. I love this, though I suppose other people are seeing it as the death of quality speculative fiction — but there’s no reason a dark space adventure involving a lot of killing should be held to a lower standard than Kelly Link.

Any thoughts on “Spar” being a Nebula finalist?

I am thrilled. It’s a difficult story to read, and it’s hard to see past the graphic aspects to what the story is really about, which is how communication fails in relationships.

What’s next?

Oh, who knows? I owe a short story and a novel. And I am starting grad school this fall, I hope, to complete a degree. We’ll see.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.

“Future Brains: Neuroscience Fiction versus Neuroscience Fantasy” by Luc Reid

Science fiction has had brains on the brain at least since Dr. Frankenstein installed one in his monster. Over the years science fiction has depicted technologies like mind control (in Star Trek, for example), instant learning (The Matrix), telepathy (Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars), and transferring memories and skills (The Dollhouse). While some of these technologies may eventually prove to be possible, others are extremely unlikely to ever work based on what we now know about the brain — because our own minds are much stranger territory than we ever used to imagine they were.

Downloading Memories, Viewing Memories and Total Recall

The common assumption about how memory works is that it’s like a video camera. This shows up in science fiction accounts of retrieved memories as well as in our legal system (”tell the court exactly what happened. Was the man you saw wearing a green tie?”). According to the video camera analogy, we store every detail of everything we perceive, and when we want to use the memories, we replay them on a mental screen. If this idea is accurate, it seems reasonable that someday we might be able to transfer memories from people’s heads onto digital media. We could also access any detail of anything that has ever happened to someone just by looking at the right spot in the person’s memory.

However, as research has revealed in recent years, our memories don’t work like video cameras at all. Instead, our brains identify the most novel or important elements of what we perceive and store those elements in locations scattered throughout the brain, while everything else is discarded. Even a momentary image we retain isn’t stored as one piece. In his book Brain Rules, developmental molecular biologist John Medina says: “If you look at a complex picture, for example, your brain immediately extracts the diagonal lines from the vertical lines and stores them in separate areas. Same with color. If the picture is moving, the fact of its motion will be extracted and stored in a place separate than if the picture were static.”

If that’s the case, you might well wonder why you can vividly remember every detail of playing Monopoly with your cousin when you were twelve, or a toast at a wedding you went to last week. The answer, disturbingly, is that our brains make up details to complete the picture. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert puts it this way in his book Stumbling on Happiness :”… information acquired after an event alters memory of the event … First, the act of remembering involves ‘filling in’ details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.”

Understanding these things about memory — that we extract details instead of making recordings, that memories are stored in fragments all across our brains, and that a lot of what seems to be memory is really our brains filling in the blanks — it becomes clear that we’ll never be able to download or view memories per se: that would be like trying to show a film when all you have is a capsule review. However, it might be possible eventually to view someone’s imperfect recollection of a memory, along with other thoughts they have. We’ll talk about the neuroscience of that a little further on.

Erasing and Altering Memories

While viewing memories may be a long shot, erasing and altering memories is already a reality, at least in lab animals. By blocking the brain’s ability to create proteins, scientists have prevented memories from forming and erased existing memories in a number of experiments over the last few decades. The reason a memory can be so easily erased even long after it’s made is that — bizarrely — every time we remember something, the memory gets rewritten. Anything that interferes with the rewriting turns recollection into erasure.

Memories can also be altered this way. McGill University behavioral neuroscientist Karim Nader explains: “imagine you were at a scene of a crime. Someone asks you if you remember a person with a red jacket there (in reality there was no one with a red jacket there). When you call up the memory of the crime scene, it becomes labile, creating an opportunity for suggested or created images of a person with a red jacket to become stored with the original memory undergoing reconsolidation. Therefore, the next time you think of a crime scene there may be someone wearing a red jacket at the scene of the crime and, to the subject, it’s completely accurate.”

Mind Control

What about mind control? Well, if someone found a way to stimulate parts of the brain remotely and with very fine control, there would be a possibility that real mind control could be developed. But those are big “ifs” — you probably don’t need a protective tin foil hat just yet.

Some kinds of body control, though, are already happening. A process called Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is used to trigger muscle contraction in paralysis victims: it can make a limb move through a sequence resembling natural motion by applying electrical current that bypasses the brain altogether.

Similarly, it’s also been known for years that stimulating specific parts of the brain with electricity can cause thoughts, feelings, memory recall, physical sensations, and even hallucinations. How or if any of this could be accomplished indirectly, without putting some kind of electrical equipment right on or into a person, is an open question; but, at least in theory, a great many physical and mental functions are ready to go off with just a little jolt of electricity.

Then there is subliminal suggestion, which may sound like an urban legend but has a solid basis in fact. Gilbert points out how susceptible our brains are even to information we don’t realize we’ve received. “… when volunteers watch a computer screen on which words appear for just a few milliseconds,” he writes, “they are unaware of seeing the words and are unable to guess which words they saw. But they are influenced by them. When the word hostile is flashed, volunteers judge others negatively, When the word elderly is flashed, volunteers walk slowly. When the word stupid is flashed, volunteers perform poorly on tests.”

Copying Minds

In the August 2009 issue of Clarkesworld, Brian Trent’s article “Eternal Lives on Hard Drives?” looks into some present-day technologies that could in theory lead to the ability to upload minds — like Project Blue Brain, a supercomputer system that has successfully modeled a system of about 10,000 neurons. As Trent points out, our brains are far more complex than this. Each of us commands a vast neuroelectrical network of about a hundred billion neurons, each one making synaptic connections to, on average, 7,000 other neurons.

Until very recently — 1998, in fact — the accepted wisdom was that the adult brain doesn’t change connections, only strengthens or weakens them. But studies since that time have demonstrated that our brains are not just capable of changing: they’re changing all the time. Medina writes, “The brain is constantly learning things, so the brain is constantly rewiring itself.”

So while it’s widely recognized that our brains are much more complex than today’s computers, it’s not immediately obvious how much more complex they are, or that they work in a completely different way. In the brain, for instance, neural connections are both the structure and the means of storing information, so that our hardware and software are one and the same. Still, even though Project Blue Brain is many millions of times less complex than the neural network of a real human brain, it’s arguably a start to modeling that kind of network.

Physiologically speaking, the neural network is only one of two major systems that make us think and feel the way we do. Science fiction stories about uploading minds generally focus only on these neural connections, and as important as they are, they aren’t the whole story. Any true representation of a brain also needs to model a set of chemical systems our brains and bodies use to convey information and incite action: neurotransmitters and hormones. This cast of characters is large, varied, and extremely colorful, including dopamine (associated with pleasure and addiction), cortisol (associated with stress), testosterone (associated with aggression and arousal in both men and women), oxytocin (associated with love, affection, and attachment), and many more. These chemicals are both manufactured and consumed by our bodies, not all of them in the brain — so in a very real sense, our mind is much larger than our brain, encompassing a wide variety of sensations and emotions that, while they trigger neural activity, are at least as chemical as they are electrical.

This problem could be sidestepped if a brain could somehow be copied or transferred to a new body. Unless we were able to physically transplant the brain (as in Shelley’s Frankenstein or Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil), this would require physically growing the structure of the new brain. To do that, we would have to learn the trick not just of reading an entire brain’s worth of neural connections, but also of causing billions of neurons to grow and of creating the 100 to 500 trillion synaptic connections that make up a human mind, because in the brain, information and structure are the same thing. If we could do that, though (and so far we can’t do anything like it), and if the destination were a new human body with a normal endocrine system, the resulting person might more or less think and feel like the original, because the same kinds of chemical systems would be present.

However, if we’re talking about copying a mind to somewhere other than a human body, we have both the problem of needing to duplicate (or translate) the whole neural map to a new brain and the problem of simulating the neurotransmitter system in the brain, as well as a goodly portion of the endocrine system. Whether it’s even conceptually possible to reproduce the wide array of chemical influences that can affect the human brain using a strictly electronic device is debatable at the least.

Instant Learning

In The Matrix, Neo (the main character) learns kung fu and many other martial arts with uploads to the brain that take a few minutes at most. For comparison, around the time you read this I’m testing for my black belt in Taekwondo after applying myself energetically for three and a half years … and earning a first dan black belt is far from “mastering” Taekwondo.

Let’s tackle one of the obvious problems with instant learning first: in real life, physical skills often require body development. Taekwondo involves conditioning that over months and years builds up fast-twitch muscles, and no amount of brain-changing will give a person skill in Taekwondo without the conditioning to support it. (Fortunately, of course, we’ll have nanotechnology to build the muscle for us … won’t we?)

However, if we consider just the mental side, which would be more than sufficient for chess or political strategy or speaking fluent Swedish, is instant learning possible? Again we’re faced with the question of changing the synaptic connections of many, many neurons, but the problem here is even more complex than the problem of transferring a mind, because every human brain has different neural connections, and you can’t just impose a generalized neural map on an existing brain: that would be like trying to drive across New York using a map of Florida. Instant learning would have to make connections with existing parts of the neural map, leveraging existing knowledge, connections, and skills. So just planning the neural changes to make would require three steps: mapping out the skill in neural terms, mapping out the entire existing brain, and figuring out a way to merge the skill map with the existing brain map without causing serious harm. This may mean the feat is impossible — or just that it’s epically complex.

Accelerating learning methods through neuroscience, however, may already have started. For instance, Medina’s book Brain Rules offers some very specific, neurology-based advice for improving learning through use of more visual material, charging information with emotion, and repeating at specific intervals to lock knowledge into memory.

Mental Telepathy, Reading Thoughts and Watching Dreams

Is it conceivable that we might someday communicate telepathically or be able to view someone else’s thoughts? We know that actual memories aren’t like video recordings, but interestingly, thoughts are a little closer. When we imagine an image or a scene, it turns out that this activates many of the same parts of the brain that really witnessing such an image or scene would.

For example, in a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and described in the LA Times and the Times’ accompanying blog, doctors were able to communicate in a very rudimentary way with patients who were thought to be vegetative, by monitoring their brains and asking them to imagine — of all things — playing tennis.

If we developed a much, much more sophisticated means of monitoring neural activity, in theory it might be possible to decode signals from the visual cortex and view what someone was visualizing in their mind’s eye. The same might apply, in theory, to imagined sounds. So if we had a currently nonexistent, super-efficient scanning tool, and if we completely understood how imagined sights, sounds, and speech were depicted in the human brain, and if we could apply this general knowledge to the variable individual brain, then in theory maybe we could view or transmit thoughts, dreams, visualizations — or even “mental speech.”

This isn’t quite the same thing as being able to read minds, though. For one thing, while we’re used to thinking of thoughts as being framed in language, in fact a lot of our thinking occurs at a level below language, and a lot of our mental experience occurs at a level below thinking.

So while we can at least envision how we might listen to mental speech (and if we could precisely stimulate the auditory cortex, even make it heard inside another brain), communicating emotion and other subtle sensations may pose much trickier problems. Detecting chemicals that are affecting the human brain is hard enough, but reproducing those effects in another human brain means having to control all of the neurons and organs producing those chemicals. What’s more, the chemical parts of the brain act much more slowly than the electrical parts, so that the chemical releases would have to be sent out in advance of when they’re meant to impact.

All of which tells us something that Mr. Spock has been trying to say for a long time: that conscious thought and logic are simply very complex, but emotional systems are messy as hell.

Bibliography

Alberini, Cristina M. “The role of protein synthesis during the labile phases of memory: revisiting the skepticism” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory volume 89, issue 3, March 2008

Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006

Healy, Melissa. “Breaking Through the Silence of the Seemingly Unconscious: Researchers Read Minds of the Vegetative” Los Angeles Times Web site, 4 Feb 2010

Johnson, Steven. Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. New York: Scribner, 2004.

Le Bihan, D., et al. “Activation of human primary visual cortex during visual recall: A magnetic resonance imaging study” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 90, pp. 11802-11805, December 1993

Medina, John. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle: Pear Press, 2008. (Supporting materials available online at http://www.brainrules.net)

“Memories Become Labile Whenever They Are Retrieved.” Human Frontier Science Program Web site

Trent, Brian. “Eternal Lives on Hard Drives?” Clarkesworld Magazine, August 2009

About the Author

Luc Reid writes extensively on the psychology and neuroscience of self-motivation at www.willpowerengine.com. He is a Writers of the Future winner and author of Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures (Writer’s Digest Books, 2006). His fiction appears regularly on The Daily Cabal and has also seen print in Abyss & Apex, Brain Harvest, and elsewhere. He runs the online, spec-fic neopro writers’ group Codex and is a former radio commentator for Jacksonville, Florida NPR affiliate WJCT. Luc lives on a hillside in Vermont with his son and a menagerie of musical instruments.