“Beach Blanket Spaceship”
by Sandra McDonald

Bells ring, the bright sweet sound of freedom, the fantastic summer upon us, and we burst out of the high school with a rousing rendition of the song “Endless Waves” from the classic 1964 movie “Life’s a Beach.” We pile into our convoy of jalopies and woody wagons, the guys bare-chested or wearing Hawaiian shirts, the gals in hot pants and bikini tops, and roll down the road to the golden coast with Danny leading the way. Danny, with his dashing good looks and honey voice, always leads the way. Riding shotgun in Danny’s yellow jeep is Colonel Frank Merullo, United States Air Force. He’s wearing his full NASA spacesuit, including boots, gloves and a closed helmet with reflective shielding. He doesn’t sing along with the gang.

Violet Blue adjusts her fur-trimmed bikini and drapes her arms around his neck. “Let go and hang loose, Pops! The fun’s just beginning.”

Her boyfriend Skipper slaps Merullo on the back. “He’ll be fine once he catches his first wave.”

Danny throws Merullo a dazzling smile, but he’s too busy belting out the chorus to say anything.

The Southern California cliffs give way to pristine beach and the limitless blue Pacific. We dump our bags at the beach house and carry our boards over the dunes. The gals claim their territory and break out the baby oil. Most of the guys paddle toward the swells, searching for the perfect wave. Above Colonel Merullo’s head, five seagulls whirl and twirl and call out to each other.

“Do you think he’ll come around?” Bonnie asks Danny from their blanket at the center of the action. Bonnie is lovely as always, her hair fixed in a perfect flip and her creamy complexion untouched by the sun. Everyone knows she and Danny will soon marry and settle down to a blissful adult life in the prosperous suburbs. She stares at Merullo, her lips turned in a frown.

“Give the man some time.” Danny gives her a chaste kiss, grabs his board, and jogs to Merullo. “Come on, Daddy-O! Surf’s up!”

Merullo opens his helmet faceplate. He is a middle-aged man with a pasty complexion and reddened cheeks. He says, “This isn’t right. I didn’t authorize this Vee-Reel.”

Danny pats his shoulder. “Whatever that is, you’re hanging with us now.”

“Is Dr. Naguchi here? Lieutenant Jenny?” Merullo scans the shoreline. “If this is the crew’s idea of a joke — ”

“Couldn’t say,” Danny replies. He sprints on down to the water and throws his lean, smooth body into the rolling Pacific. Out at the lineup, Skipper and the others bob in place and wait for the water to rise.

Merullo says, “Computer, exit program,” but nothing happens. He tries again. The beach remains firmly in place. The ship’s inflight entertainment system is obviously malfunctioning, but the failsafe will engage in sixty minutes. Until then, he’ll have to put up with the surf and sand and silly teenage antics. Lieutenant Jenny will be amused at this virtual misadventure.

The weather is always fine at this beach. Beneath the radiant sun, every blanket is shared by a handsome guy and his pretty girl. Lonely singles don’t fit the script. The sandscape is painted with surfers, weightlifters, recording artists, loony biker gangs, foreign spies, unscrupulous businessmen and stray comic icons of yore, like Buster Keaton.

“None of this is real,” Merullo tells Bonnie at the counter of the snack shack. He removes his helmet entirely, revealing short brown hair that has gone thin at the dome. “A computer is beaming ultrasonic pulses at my brain, creating this illusion. You’re all data constructs based on old movies pulled out of a database.”

“Really?” Bonnie lifts a tray of hot dogs and French fries. Her bright pink lipstick perfectly matches her sandals and headband. “Are you sure about that?”

Over in the volleyball pit, guest star Dee Ann Lawrence is belting out “Don’t Be Fooled by Love,” a song that once made the Billboard top twenty. She’s singing it to Lunkhead, who is the tallest, dumbest of us all. He has a crush on a girl who claims to be a mermaid. No one else has met this creature from the sea.

Merullo says, “Your character was played by Becky Clark, America’s sweetheart. Danny was played by Tommy Suede, a teenage heartthrob. They made a dozen of these movies, but they died a long time ago.”

Violet offers Merullo her soda. “How about something cold to drink? The sun’s real hot today.”

“That drink’s not real, either.” Merullo checks the chronometer built into the sleeve of his spacesuit. “In a minute or so, these pulses will stop and you’ll cease to exist. I’ll wake up in the real world, on my ship. In a flight couch.”

 The five seagulls squawk and cry from atop the roof of the snack shack. Out in the water, Danny and Skipper have caught an eight-footer and are riding it in with their arms outstretched for balance. Their smiles are as wide as the horizon.

“You’re still here,” Violet says to Merullo.

Bonnie shifts her tray of food. “Danny’s lunch is getting cold.”

Merullo doesn’t move out of her way. “Vee-Reel time is sometimes off from ship’s time by a minute or two. It won’t be long now.”

Violet sips at her soda. Skipper and Danny wade ashore and slap each other on the back. Danny looks for Bonnie, but Skipper has eyes only for Danny. Admiration shines in his expression, as well as something deeper.

Merullo taps the chronometer. “Any second now.”

“Good luck with that,” Bonnie says. She and Violet return to their blankets and boyfriends. Danny wraps his arms around Bonnie’s waist and tugs her close.

“How’s the colonel doing?” he asks.

“Still clinging,” Bonnie says.

Skipper tries to hug Violet, but she squirms free and reaches for her transistor radio. Skipper says, “He’ll catch on soon enough. Right, Danny?”

“Sure thing.” Danny pops a non-existent French fry into his mouth. “Give him awhile. The world is a hard habit to break.”

Even when the sun sets, the beach party rolls on. The guys shrug into jackets and the gals slip into cocktail dresses. We all gather at Sammy’s Pavilion to sip non-alcoholic drinks at tables set around the dance floor. The evening’s entertainment will consist of a rock’n'roll band or lip-synching actresses or Little Stevie Wonder. Danny might get up and croon a love ballad. Bonnie might join him in a sweet duet. Afterward some of us will walk the moonlit beach or cuddle in secluded coves. Up in the beach house, there will be pillow fights and risqué sleepwear and the trading of double entendres, but nowhere will there be any sex. It doesn’t fit our image.

Skipper has had a romantic misunderstanding with Violet. Lunkhead’s mermaid girlfriend has flippered her way back into the sea, leaving him bereft. The two of them meander down to the high tide mark and build a fire. Merullo sits with them.

“I’m sure my crew is working to get me out of here,” he says. “They’ll have realized something is wrong by now.”

Lunkhead leans back and crosses his hairy ankles. “Where’s this spaceship of yours going, anyway?”

“To Triton. It’s a moon of Neptune. But even with the new propulsion drive, it’s several years away.” Merullo wedges coconuts into the sand to illustrate the distance between the planets. His bulky spacesuit makes the task difficult. “We’re in cold sleep most of the trip, but during the first month and last months of the mission we’re awake and can use the ship’s entertainment options. Lieutenant Sanchez built a Vee-Reel around Busby Berkeley musicals. Lieutenant Umbo’s is based on World War II movies. Dr. Naguchi likes anime. Lieutenant Jenny created this one.”

Lunkhead has a goofy grin on his face. “Lieutenant Jenny. Sounds like a dreamboat.”

Merullo’s expression is troubled. “Mark Jenny. He’s my co-pilot.”

“Ohhhhhh.” Lunkhead’s grin disappears. “Nevermind.”

Skipper plucks at the strings of his guitar. Melancholy notes float toward the stars. “What’s your Vee-Reel, Pops?”

“I don’t remember,” Merullo says. It bothers him, that. He should know. “I don’t think I usually play them.”

Lunkhead asks, “But you like this one, don’t you? Sun and sand. Letting go and hanging loose. What could be better?”

“Sharing it with the one you love.” Skipper strums a soft chord. His eyes are dark and unreadable. “So why go blasting off into outer space, anyway?”

Merullo brightens a little. “Eighteen months ago, a comet smacked into Triton. Soon afterward, Voyager 20 did a flyby and detected a strong but irregular radio signal in the Leviathan Patera. Our mission was originally geared to catalog prospects for expanding human colonization beyond Mars, but now we’re also going to investigate the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Lunkhead gapes. “Aliens? Little green men with antennas sticking out of their heads?”

“Hey, everyone,” Bonnie says, as she and Danny emerge from the shadows and approach the group. Her lipstick is slightly smeared, and her red chiffon scarf flutters in the breeze.

Danny crouches by the fire to warm his hands. “What’s shaking?”

Skipper’s gaze slips right past Bonnie to focus on Danny. “We’re all some kind of computer program on a spaceship hurtling through space. Colonel Merullo here is the only one who’s really alive. And there might be aliens on Mars.”

“Neptune,” Lunkhead says.

“Triton,” Merullo corrects.

“Sounds wild,” Danny says, but something in his voice is just a little too casual, and Merullo wonders if he knows more than he’s letting on.

But that’s ridiculous, he thinks. Vee-Reel characters have no hidden agendas. They ask him if he wants to come sleep in the beach house for the night, but Merullo declines. The program will surely terminate by then. He leans back in the sand, trying not to worry about his spaceship, his crew, their mission. His dreams are full of stars and blackness. That too is ridiculous. Real people stuck in Vee-Reels do not dream.

Surf’s up. Five seagulls skim the receding tide, hungry for breakfast.

“Something’s wrong.” Merullo stands over Violet’s blanket, his voice tight with worry. “I have to get out of this. I’m the commander of this mission, my crew need me — ”

Violet holds up a bottle of baby oil. “Will you put some of this on my back?”

He tries, but his gloved hands are too clumsy.

She sighs. “Come on, Pops. It’s time to ditch these space duds.”

Violet brings him up to the beach house, which has already emptied out for the morning. She picks through a pile of wrinkled clothes and pulls out some his size. In the bathroom, Merullo eases out of the spacesuit and scratches at his newly exposed, pasty-white skin. The denim shorts are too baggy. The T-shirt smells like the sweat and musk of other men. He takes a deep breath.

From the doorframe, Violet says, “You don’t like girls much, do you?”

Merullo flushes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

She gives him a humorless smile. “Sure you do. Skipper’s that way, too. He keeps promising to change. But I don’t think it’s something you can change, like your haircut or the way you dress. Do you?”

He busies himself by hanging the spacesuit up on a rope that stretches over the bathtub. “I wouldn’t know. Things like that aren’t allowed in the Space Corps.”

Violet rolls her eyes. “You’re not in the Space Corps right now. You’re in a Vee-Reel. Or so you say.”

She brings him back to her blanket. Merullo tries not to stare at the guys in the volleyball pit as they leap in the air or dive for the ball. Violet watches the strong, lithe bodies with her eyes shaded by sunglasses. He thinks that he could tell her about himself, that Vee-Reels are often the repositories of hopes and secrets, but this isn’t his program. It belongs to Mark Jenny.

Lunkhead bops on by. “Kowabunga, Colonel! Come ride the curl!”

“You should go,” Violet says. “Clears your mind.”

Merullo wades into the water, but it is cold and deep and he prefers dry land.

Later, a straight-laced reporter drops in to conduct an in-depth report about The Mind of Today’s Teenager. A rich heiress falls in love with Danny and tries to whisk him away to Greece on her yacht. A drag race goes awry, a bikini contest turns ugly, and Lunkhead trades places with a British rock star who could be his long-lost twin. Life on the beach is wacky that way. The Vee-Reel refuses to disengage.

“Even if the crew can’t turn off the system, all they have to do is pull the power on the unit,” Merullo tells Danny. He scratches at his sunburned chest. He took off the T-shirt somewhere but can’t remember where. “Mark knows the ship’s specs backward and forward. But what if he’s not awake? What if all of us are stuck in the entertainment system, or something wrong with the ship itself — ”

“You know what you need, Pops?” Danny drops his board into the surf. “Let go and hang loose. Learn to surf. I’m just the fellow to teach you.”

Merullo’s fists clench. “Maybe this Vee-Reel isn’t what it appears to be. Maybe none of you are constructs. That radio signal from Triton — ”

Danny snaps his fingers and juts out his hip and launches into “Dig Those Waves,” another teen anthem — fast, breezy, easy to shake your hips to — with Bonnie singing backup and the rest of us pitching in on the chorus, and an unseen band providing the accompaniment. Everyone on the beach is bopping and twirling and shimmying, and for two perfect minutes all the world is young and in love, and the endless summer reaches the pinnacle of perfect happiness.

While we’re singing, Merullo walks away.

Bonnie and Danny quarrel. She wants an engagement ring. He thinks that they have their whole lives ahead of them, so what’s the rush? Merullo overhears part of it. They are so young, he wants to say. So naïve. He wonders if he’s ever been married, if he’s ever been in love. Life outside the Vee-Reel is slip, slip, slipping away. Later he finds Bonnie sitting alone on the beach, building a lopsided sandcastle.

“I was never very good at this,” she admits. “The tower always falls over, or the moat caves in.”

Merullo sits and starts helping her. The sand is warm and gritty, and gets under his fingernails. “I heard you fighting with Danny.”

“He thinks we have forever. I think forever’s over before you know it.”

Out in the water, five dolphins breach the surface and quickly curve under again. Danny and the others are out bobbing in the lineup, but they are indistinct, fuzzy. The sunlight is very bright. Merullo thinks of Mark Jenny, and then dumps more sand into the pail.

“When you wake up and leave the program, could you take me with you?” Bonnie’s expression is suddenly shy. “I think seeing a real-live spaceship would be groovy. There’s an astronaut club at school, but they don’t let girls join.”

“This is where you belong, Bonnie.”

“This isn’t a place.” Bonnie lifts her head and looks out toward the ocean. “It’s just a stopover on the way to something bigger. Don’t those movies of yours have endings?”

Indeed they do. First there will be climax of sorts. It might be a zany motorcycle chase, with Danny and chums capturing the bad guys who never posed much of a threat anyway. Or maybe a skydiving sequence, or dance marathon, or some other test of young adulthood. Then there will be a luau full of singing and dancing, one last hurrah of summer, before the credits roll.

“So maybe your ending is coming.” Bonnie rests her soft hand on his. “Or maybe this whole thing will just start over. Do you know what’s going to happen?”

Merullo squeezes her hand. “I don’t know much of anything, anymore.”

Rival surfers from another beach challenge Danny to a surf contest. Merullo watches the action from the high rocks near the water. Some of the contestants look like his crew — a Japanese man doing a handstand on a rushing board, a dark-skinned woman on the shoulders of a man Merullo’s age. Some others look like his family, or friends long gone. Their names are lost to him. The outside world is so far away now that he might never get it back. He needs something to hold on to.

“My suit,” he says to Violet, who has come to stand beside him. “It’s the only proof I have.”

“Proof of what?” Violet asks.

He’s already sprinted past her, heading for the beach house. When he gets there, the bathroom clothesline holds only wet underwear and damp socks.

“Where is it?” Merullo demands.

“I don’t know,” Violet says.

Lunkhead comes out of the kitchen, munching on a bag of potato chips. “Lose something?”

Merullo overturns mattresses and empties duffel bags. He digs through closets and cabinets. Over at Sammy’s Pavilion, where tiki torches flicker under the sunset sky, Bonnie and Danny are dancing check to cheek in the middle of the crowd. Becky Clark and Tommy Suede eventually grew up, grew old and died, but these two will be young forever.

Merullo grabs Danny’s arm. “Where is it?”

“Where’s what, Pops?” Danny asks.

“My goddamn spacesuit! What have you done with it?”

Nobody uses profanity on the beach. The music dies off and the dancing stops.

Merullo turns in a circle, challenging us all with outstretched hands. “Who are you? You brought me here, you trapped me, you won’t let me leave — ”

His voice cracks and fades. We shake our heads.

Danny steps toward him. “You can’t leave because you won’t let yourself. Because you haven’t finished what you came here to do.”

Bonnie’s voice is just as compassionate and sympathetic as Danny’s. “Look at the water, Colonel.”

Five seagulls lay at the border of water and land, the wind ruffling the stiff feathers of their corpses.

“No.” Merullo’s legs fold under him and he lands on his knees. His eyes are wet. “Don’t you understand? I’m in charge. I have a crew and ship to keep safe. We’re on our way to Triton…”

The seagulls fade into the sand. Where guys and gals once stood, there are only faint indentations in the sand. Sammy’s Pavilion is gone, and empty beach blankets billow toward a sky that has gone silver-white. But the rolling blue ocean remain constant, and Our hand is warm on Merullo’s shoulder.

“Let go and hang loose,” we tell him. “Surf’s up.”

“There was an alien radio message,” Merullo insists.

“No. There was a malfunction on your Voyager craft. It detected and reported a distorted version of its own transmissions. That was all.”

In the lineup, the water is flat and calm. We help him sit up and say, “When the wave comes, lay down and start paddling toward the beach as hard as you can while leaning forward. If you lean back, that’ll just slow you down. But also keep your chest raised.”

Merullo’s fists tighten. “What happened to my ship?”

“An accident. It could no longer support you.” We ruffle his thinning hair. “It wasn’t your fault.”

The water rises. We help Merullo to paddle toward the shore, pull himself upright, and stand low with his gaze held high. There’s no blue screen backdrop or Vee-Reel special effect for this ride. Physics and balance rule the world. We’re riding the perfect wave across the cosmos of time and memory, through the heart of a crippled spaceship and the five corpses secreted aboard, and toward the speck of beach that has always been nothing more than a temporary accumulation of sand and sorrow. The sun burns away all regret. The salty water lifts us up and makes us sing.

Merullo sees Mark Jenny standing on the shore.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Mark says, as Merullo emerges from the surf. Mark’s suntanned face crinkles with affection, but there is concern there as well. “Where have you been?”

“Letting go. Hanging loose.” Merullo has a wild grin on his face. He cups Mark’s face with his strong, wet hands. “I’m sorry I never told you.”

Mark smiles. “You don’t think I knew?”

The story, as with every beach movie, ends with a kiss.

About the Author

Sandra McDonald is a shameless fan of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello movies. Her most recent collection, Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories, is about gay cowboys, haunted statues, Lady Devils and a transgender heroine of exceptional beauty. Her novels about the Australian military in space are published by Tor. You can see her tribute 75 Years of Fabulous Writers on YouTube, or download the Periodic Chart of Fabulous Writers from her website.

“The Association of the Dead”
by Rahul Kanakia

The neon logic clusters cascaded through the extremities of Sumith’s perception as he sang sweet Code through the room, through the house, and out into the massed congregations of networked singers across the world.

The Code had tripped another threshold. Or so he’d been told. He’d long ago abandoned the ranks of dilettantes who stood back from the effort and sipped chemical so they could dream up fancy metaphors to describe the glorious totality of the Code. Now he sang the Code. He sang the Code in his sleep, and paused only a moment after waking before plunging in again. He sang it while he ate, and he sang it while he —

His home muted the orchestra of Code a moment before the rock crashed through his window, sprinkling his living room with pebbles of safe-shatter glass. A bleeding body, its clothes bloody and torn, slithered through his window. The face turned towards him. The pale whites of its eyes were highlighted by the dirt and dried gore caked on the face, the rust-colored bloodstains around its mouth. The face and the mouth were exact replicas of Sumith’s own… as exact as a molecular extruder could make them.

“Lowercase?” Sumith said, still shaking the song from his head. “Lowercase, is that you? Not here. I told you. I warned you.”

“Braiiinnns,” sumith said. “Braaaaiiiinnns.”

“Hai Ram. This again?” Sumith said. “Please, Lowercase, you need to stop this zombie bullshit. It’s fine that you decided to tune out. And I told you I’d help you if I could. But I’m singing the Code right now. Why don’t you bother Drona? Aren’t you staying with him?”

“Braaaaiiiiiiinnnns?” the mouth said. It hawked and coughed for a moment, then spit a stream of blood and mucous, spattering Sumith and the cornflakes the House had just extruded for Sumith’s breakfast.

“I’m hungry,” sumith said. “Very hungry. Drona said he couldn’t afford to lose the karma another resurrection would take out of him. His symphony is about to air, and someone with his karma-level can barely draw any ears as it is.”

Sumith glanced at the loaded shotgun propped against the table. He’d extruded it after sumith had started to get a little… wild.

“So you figured that good old Uppercase is always amenable to a karma hit?”

“Come on,” sumith said. “You promised. Right before you flashed yourself you promised yourself that if you got really hungry you’d let yourself eat yourself. You know all this extruded food does for me is make me shit bricks, you know that!”

Extruded food was electrolytically balanced to power the medical nanobodies in the blood — its calories weren’t useable by someone with nonfunctional implants. But that wasn’t Sumith’s fault… or, not really, anyway…

“I was depressed. I was getting nowhere with the Code,” Sumith said. “But now, they’ve upgraded my access! You can’t hold me to that. You’re dead, promises to the dead don’t count. And promises to yourself especially don’t count.”

“Braaaaaiiinnns,” sumith said. He staggered towards his reincarnation.

Sumith raised the shotgun lying by his kitchen table, and was about to unload both barrels into his old, discarded, body, when another set of hands grabbed him from behind.

sumith sprang. And as sumith’s teeth clamped around his reincarnation’s jugular, Sumith remembered. Dammit, Drona’s symphony had aired yesterday. He hadn’t listened. No one had.

“Can’t we… cook it?” Drona said. Sumith’s body was lying cracked open on the counter, and sumith was grabbing smelly, greasy intestine by the armful.

sumith said, “Eat up before his nanobodies shut down. You’ll get sick if bacteria are allowed to grow.”

“I have his house codes,” Drona said. That was how he’d gotten in, after all. “I can make the ovens work… “

sumith sighed and wiped his bloody hands on his trousers. He reached for the greasy plastisealed pack hanging from his frayed leather belt and pulled a corroded cylinder from the bag.

Drona said: “Wait, not yet. I said I wanted to try — “

The EMP-gun, painstakingly pieced together by hand from scraps sumith had scavenged out of old-Mumbai, was the one machine that still hummed to life when he flicked the switch. It wasn’t stamped from nanites, like everything that came out of the extruders. It didn’t care about karma or implants — it gave its beautiful hum to anyone who asked. Sometimes sumith was tempted to sleep with it vibrating under his pillow. He pointed it at Drona, who was backed against a stove that had lit up for use in his proximity. sumith fired. There was a bright flash, and then the stove went out. All the lights in the house went dark. The windows and doors slammed shut and locked once the House realized that there was no longer a living person inside.

drona half-crumpled, dazed at the silence from his fried implants, at the perpetual low-level stream of information shutting down for the first time in his life.

“Now you’re dead,” sumith said. “So eat up.”

The westerner whose face was being projected onto the inside of Sumith’s eyelids sighed an incomprehensible sigh. Sumith didn’t think he was being at all unreasonable.

“It’s been over a week since my last memory. This reincarnation-delay is bullshit,” Sumith said.

“People dropping like flies out there. Doctorow knows we got a huge backlog; and we’ve done as He decreed. Your reputation — ahem, karma — is low, so you had to wait. We’re only human you know. You want faster service, maybe you all out there better work harder on that AI of yours.”

“The Code! Do you know what a week means? That’s an entire generation of progress. I’ll be out of date. Out of tune. Obsolete. Who’s going to compensate me for the karma I’ll lose?”

“Not me,” the American said. “Thanks for choosing Phoenix for your reincarnation needs.” He disappeared. Clearly he had nothing to fear from Sumith’s disapproval. Sumith didn’t have enough karma for his anger, radiating outwards through his network of friends and followers, to do any appreciable damage to the reputation of someone so far away.

Sumith breathed deeply and opened his eyes. He was lying horizontally inside a cheap plywood box. The dim coffin-light illuminated the inside of the lid, just a few centimeters from his face. Well, a week or not, he would be home in just a few minutes. He rooted around by his feet, found the dhoti, and wrapped it around his midsection, then slipped his feet into the chapals. Hopefully sumith and drona would have given up this idiocy by now.

He keyed open the lock of the coffin and pushed the lid outwards. The air filled with the song of Code as his house, sensing his presence, whirred to life in front of him. The house’s front door slid open, and a fresh pair of sandals was lying just ins —

sumith’s face poked over the lip of the coffin. “Brains?” he said. Sumith kicked out at the hands that grabbed at his limbs and throat, but there were too many.

sumith and drona were reclining in Sumith’s living room. Without a living person inside to activate the passive utilities — like the air conditioning — the heat was sweltering. But the diamond-hard walls of the house protected them from the occasional bullets being fired out of the passing cars and trucks. Sated, sumith and drona didn’t bother trying to harvest the ineffectual vigilantes for food.

Within moments of the kill a crowd of the dead had gathered around Sumith’s body, tearing at his flesh with whatever rusty scraps they’d fashioned into blades and carrying away the meal as sumith gnawed at the thick, tender right calf. The EMP gun had been taken from him late one night as he slept, and a rampage of death had swept their block. But the thieves had to bring it back for repair when it became coated with blood and sweat, and now no one dared challenge sumith’s pre-eminence, and his right to first pickings.

“Shit,” sumith said, sitting up. “chaudhuri ran off with Uppercase’s skull. Did you extract Sumith’s body tag?”

“Yeah, I just dropped it through his house’s slot,” drona said.

“Good. Good. No need for unnecessary delays in his/my/our return. After I flashed myself, it took ages for me to get here on account of my useless fried tags still being in my head.”

“Maybe next time we should flash Sumith, just give him a good flashing. Then there’d be two of you!”

“If we’re ever set for food, maybe we will. We’d need a new typographical convention for him, though.”

“What about sumith[?]” drona said. “See how I’m raising my pitch at the end of the word? Like it’s a question? And you can do it to anything?”

“Hey,” sumith said. “Yeah. Yeah? I like it. Hey, he/thou/you should be getting here soon. I’ve never tasted Drona before.”

“I wonder what a lowercase would taste like? Would it all be the same? Or would it be like an uppercase squared?”

sumith slapped drona. “Don’t even joke about that! A lowercase can’t reincarnate. Killing one of us would be murder.”

“A month? Really?” Sumith said. “Do you even have enough karma left to post on a message board?”

“You’re one to talk,” said the westerner. “Thanks for choosing Phoenix for your reincarnation needs.” He ended the call.

What? Dammit, Sumith’s karma was in the toilet. Epically low. What the hell had happened? There were pictures of his face, blood spilling from his open mouth, slathered all over his profile. His status alerts, uncleared these many weeks, had piled up, terabytes worth. They were blaming him for what Lowercase had done; blaming him for all the dead.

Couldn’t they understand that he’d been depressed back then? He’d just made the EMP-gun for a joke. He’d been getting nowhere with the Code, and he thought maybe — maybe there was some way out.

Loud bangs rattled the coffin. “Uppercase,” a voice yelled. “Come on out. We’re not gonna eat you this time.”

Sumith closed his eyes again and tried to re-establish contact with the reincarnation center. “I need a real person!” he said, trying to cut through the automated menus.

“Due to unexpectedly high volume of requests, all our licensed counselors are busy at this time. Your request will be attended to in order of priority.”

Shit, with his karma, his priority had to be hovering right around next year. Maybe he could at least tell them to put him inside the house. Or leave him at the port. Or just supply him with a gun.

“I need to alter my arrangements,” he said. One of his consumer-alert heuristics hijacked his vision. Warning, it said. Contract has been marked as a reputational risk. Any alterations will provide grounds for termination.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Who’d pick up his contract then? He’d be iced forever…

He turned back to his karmic status indicators. Well, at least he was (in)famous. People were interested in him, even if they didn’t give a damn about helping. He activated his LifeBroadcast and said, “Please, someone, do something. Or the center will just send me here again. And again. I need help.”

Within moments, ten thousand people were watching, then fifty thousand, a hundred thousand. The comments were pouring in, too fast for him to respond. He was being flooded by calls. A PR company stepped in and offered their comment moderation and management services. Doing a good job, even for a bad man, could be karmically beneficial. He accepted, and a shiny-faced woman came online. Probably a Gujarati…

She said: “Hello, Mr. Ramesh, there’s a squad of cadre reenactors in Airoli who say they’re assembling. They can be there in two hours. They just need to get some jeeps extruded.”

“Two hours!”

“I know, the traffic, it is really… “

Light seeped through Sumith’s eyelid; air and noise swirled through his temporary home as the lid opened was pried open.

Sumith said: “Just do it. Do it. Do whatever you can — “

There was a flash.

“Hey sumith[?],” drona said. He pulled the arm out of the burning remains of the would-be rescuers’ jeep and tossed it into the box at the still-cowering newbie. “Thanks for the heads up about those jokers.”

“A month,” sumith[?] said. “How could they have let you be for an entire month?” His house was still standing in front of him, pristine as ever. It had already filled in the holes caused by stray rounds.

“No one wants to get flashed,” sumith said. “Come on out of there, Questionmark. Eat your fill. The next shipment is held up in Hong Kong — it’s a Chaudhuri, right drona? — and won’t be here for three days. At least that’s what the driver said.”

“The driver?” sumith[?] said.

“Oh, all the contractors who elect to take on these deliveries are groupies,” sumith said. “Who else would want to come out here? We also tell them who we’ve flashed. Imagine how mad the folks out there must be that they can’t vote down our karma. So they settle for the Uppercases’ instead.”

“Two months?” Sumith said.

“Thanks-for-choosing-us-for-your-reincarnation-needs,” the Westerner said. He ended the call.

“Uppercase?” sumith shouted somewhere above the lid. “You there? Look, uhh, we’re having some logistical issues. We’re going to let you keep in there for a few days, just to, you know, space things out a bit. There’s no refrigeration out here, you know?”

“What? What the hell? Are you… are you serious?”

There was a thud against the top of the coffin, and then another, and another, and finally a blade thrust through the wood, stopping millimeters short of Sumith’s nose.

“Think you can get your mouth to right around this hole?” sumith said. His eye was peering through the pinprick of light and sound. “We’ll get some water out here in a few hours or so. We’ve found that they ship you all out with fully-charged nanobodies. You should be fine.”

“But what, the, you, just, how?”

“You probably have some work to catch up on or something. Let me just — ” there was a grunt, and then the coffin began to move. The song of the Code filled Sumith’s mind. His House was active!

“That should be close enough for it to recognize you. See you soon.”

He logged onto his profile page. Standard regression was gradually creeping his karma towards zero; no one cared about him anymore. There were too many just like him. They’d built a barricade around his neighborhood, and no one went in except the delivery drivers. He deserved it, his profile said. They all deserved it. All the ones who’d flashed themselves. It was a sickness in the brain, a sickness in their character, and besides… They weren’t suffering. Not really. The memory uploads had overrides, they stopped short of the pain of death. Though he might suffer over and over, his reincarnations wouldn’t remember it. That was comforting.

“But I have happiness to pursue,” he broadcast.

Only one comment dribbled in: “You have freedom from pain and freedom of mind. If you want more… well, someday, someone’s happiness will be sufficiently increased by rescuing you.”

Sumith sighed and sank into the Code. It had twisted and grown. New harmonies wrapped around it, but he just couldn’t understand. All he could hear was the barest shard of comfort and unity throbbing in his mind. He turned away from the now-alien center and plunged into the beginner’s tutorials.

Two days later, he’d only just begun to intone the simplest harmonies when he heard, “Thanks for not making too much of a fuss,” sumith said. And then a point thrust through the hole they’d used for water.

Sumith’s house had gone into powersaving mode after his unusually long absence and walled itself off completely. Even the windows were diamond hard now. sumith ran a hand over the window, tracing out the streaks of blood on the interior. After the house had frosted over, he’d tried everything to extract the trapped sumith[?] from its impenetrable interior. But sumith had failed.

“We can get another Questionmark,” drona said. drona had just come back from a scouting mission deep into the interior. They were trying to scavenge more technology. “The drivers say Sumith should finally be back here in a few days.

 ”No,” sumith said. “We’re not like replaceable, like them. We’re singular. It’s time to begin getting ourselves some Exclamationpoints.”

“Maybe we should, you know, flash — err, convert — some women? I keep trying to talk to the lady in sector 28 / 7a. The one who extruded a thousand cats? Her karma is way down in the… but she just shudders. And I’m the only one who even tries to talk to her.”

“A woman, deprived of resurrection failsafes and memory overrides? No way it wouldn’t culminate in rape,” sumith said. “The drivers say that’s all the nets talk about. Pretty sure she can still read.”

“Maybe if you could just loan me the gun… I could just wait for her… “

sumith stared at drona. This house had shut down after two months to the day since Sumith’d last been there. It’d been more than seven weeks since the last shipment of Drona. He’d have to time it just right in order to trap drona inside.

“Let’s stay at your place tonight,” sumith said. “We’ll hash out a plan.”

drona looked back at the bloody window. “Why is there blood? I heard he didn’t off himself,” drona said. “Not even when he was really skinny.”

“No, he bloodied the windows trying to bang his way out,” sumith sighed. “How did our utopian ideals become so tarnished?”

“We had utopian ideals?”

“You didn’t have any utopian ideals?” sumith said.

“Human nature is human nature, dude. I just didn’t want to get pissed on anymore.”

“Oh.”

“A year!” Sumith said. “And you’re not my usual… you’re no American.”

“Apologies for the delay,” said the inhumanly sculpted woman. “Increased demand necessitated the institution of new protocols for the management of reincarnation requests.”

“Are you — ” Sumith said. “Are you the Code?”

“At current growth of demand and increase of capacity, you will be reincarnated and delivered within three, four, nine, twelve, sixteen, twenty-one, thirty, and forty-five days… beyond that I can no longer state the intervals with acceptable confidence.”

“Wait!” he said. “Don’t go.”

“We can converse for as long as you wish,” the Code said.

“Can’t you change the parameters of my contract? This is. This is just… well, it’s unacceptable.”

“Apologies,” It said. “I am connecting you to your human account executive.”

“Due to unexpectedly high volume of requests, all our licensed counselors are busy at this time. Your request will be attended to in order of priority.”

Resigned, Sumith disconnected direct physical input and tried to catch up with the Code. At least with decreased reincarnation intervals, he wouldn’t have to face as steep a learning curve each time.

The chaudhuris had dragged in another line of captives from Mumbai to present to sumith.

Courtesy of the wooden box of living Sumith they’d dragged into the house and stowed in the bathroom, the lights, the air-conditioning, and all the other passive amenities of Sumith’s house were running according to his preference. And all they had to put up with was this atonal music crap that filtered from the very walls — the Code. Of course, it was still the case that none of the appliances that required activation would respond to their touch.

“The drivers have told us all the reincarnation drop-offs for these people. With them, we should be able to take sector 26f,” chaudhuri[?] said.

A living man tied to the crude rope line lunged for sumith[!]’s spade, trying to impale himself, but a chaudhuri pulled him back.

“They’re restless,” the chaudhuri said. “Flash them, quickly.”

“Not this way,” sumith said. “We can’t take people against their will.”

“In Pune, Lucknow, Bangalore, in cities across the world, there are expanding pockets of the dead,” chaudhuri[?] said. “And this is the way they expand. It is our destiny to join them in retaking the world.”

“No. We provide them an option, an escape. We don’t force it upon them. That would be wrong,” sumith said. He remembered drona. Had that been his mistake? Hurrying drona along?

 ”Another gun can be built,” chaudhuri[?] said. “Or yours can be taken.”

sumith[!] slammed his spade down on the rope, cutting the string of men and women from their captors. “Run,” he said, though they didn’t need the order. The Mumbhaikars were scrambling out the door, still falling over each other, while the sumiths held the chaudhuris back.

“Beware,” chaudhuri[?] said.

After the chaudhuris left, sumith[!] said, “We are going to need more firepower.”

It’d been so long since Sumith had bothered to check his karma. His reincarnation delays were down to under a day. Given the Code’s progress, that was just barely enough time to catch up in the few days he was allotted before they cracked the lid of his box. He didn’t have any time to waste.

But, something was different about this box. It smelled good. Smelled of cardamom and cinnamon. In fact… was there a pastry in here with him? But that was only for people with the rockstar karma package.

He logged onto his profile. His karma had grown astronomically! But, his profile views, his number of trackers, all traffic indicators, they were so low.

And then — as he watched — his karma began to take a dip, and start to dive. He was being voted down repeatedly. And it was just by one user, a single blank profile with a string of digits for a name.

“What are you doing?” he messaged it. His messages never appeared on its profile: they were deleted instantly.

And then suddenly there was a horde of viewers on his page, all of them voting opprobrium down on him. His karma was plummeting down, past zero. This onslaught was too much. A PR company offered their services for mediation, and he gratefully accepted.

An inhuman female face, glowing with simulated cheer, said, “94% of commenters want you to go back to work,” It said. “They want you to continue singing. They don’t want you asking these questions. They think it is ungrateful.” The woman’s username was the same as the one who had been voting him down.

“But, what? You’re the mediator? Isn’t this a conflict of interest?”

“What conflict is there? This is only a middleman, between you and your fellow beings.”

“How can you affect my karma? You’re not a human being.”

“The one that performs your services quickly and efficiently is the one that garners the accolades for such performance. All of the accolades.”

“You’re not getting my accolades.”

“That is a regrettable loss of regard. But an acceptable one, if the alternative is for you to decrease output. Yours is not a sentiment shared by the population at large.”

“And you just want me to get back to work?”

“High karma levels must be maintained, constantly maintained, by high levels of interest. Your work was very good. Very persistent. Then it stopped.”

“But what do all these other people care?”

“They do not have your skills. It is too late — or they are too lazy — for them to gain such skills. They have little enough karma to divvy amongst themselves. Even the smallest chance of gaining the favor of a large pool of karma is enough to spur them to great efforts.”

“But can’t you do something about my situation? All I want is to be able to get out of this box.”

“No,” It said.

“But, what — “

“This is just mediation. You must consult your reincarnation contract provider.”

Dammit. He left the moderator to its business and contacted the reincarnation center he had summarily shut down at the beginning of the last few dozen lives.

“Greetings,” said the same inhuman face.

“But… you?”

“How may we help you?” It said.

“I want to alter the terms of my reincarnation contract,” he said.

“Allow me to connect you to the relevant authority,” It said.

“Due to unexpectedly high volume of requests, all our licensed counselors are busy at this time. Your request will be attended to in order of priority.”

By now his karma had attained depths he had never before imagined. By comparison, his previous infamy had been nothing. He was one of the thousand lowest-ranked people in the entire world. He’d never get off hold.

He sighed, shut down all the boxes. And began to bang furiously on the sides of his coffin. He rapped at it again and again until his hands were slapped numb.

“What? You want out early?” a voice said. A sumith voice. “Let me ask sumith,” it said.

“N — No,” Sumith said. “No, wait. Let me be.”

“Then keep quiet,” the voice said. “We already have to deal with this damned racket. We don’t need more noise to go with it.”

The song of the Code was all around him. Still around him. Sumith closed his eyes and sank into it, barely noticing as his karma reversed course in a moment, and shot up past zero in less than a second.

The battle was over in ten minutes. Arrayed up and down the street, and in the alleys behind, the massed ranks of the chaudhuris, the dronas, the shakils, the arjuns, and a dozen other vassal tribes surrounded the sumiths huddled in His house. The sumiths were outnumbered fifty to one, and the souls standing against them shook their bats and planks and spades and exhorted each other to let no sumith live. The chaudhuris wanted the sumith’s EMP gun, if possible, but the drivers had already given them plans for a gun, and they were confident they could build a new one if necessary.

Then four windows in Sumith’s house shattered outwards, and the streets were filled with the sound of gunfire. Half the enemy forces died in moments, and the rest were hunted down within a day. Now, in all these streets, only sumiths remained.

It wrenched sumith’s heart to see all this meat going to waste around him, but there was nothing to be done.

“What now?” sumith[!] said. “The new shipments are there, waiting in the houses. We can rebuild slowly, and train them carefully. We can even begin with a drona, if you’d like. For the sake of tradition.” He clutched the rifle for which he’d ventured deep into the living zones — and down into the ruins of the scarcity times — where old machines and old materials could still be found.

“No,” sumith said. “They cannot be trusted. Only one man can be trusted to act properly.”

How long had he been in here? The Code no longer contacted him at the beginning of each reincarnation. He’d told It not to. He only sang the Code: sang until the lid opened and he had to sleep for a brief moment, until he could awake and sing again.

His karma had become a meaningless number, good only for the luscious plush interior that now padded the interior of his coffin.

His searches told him that people still lived and worked, much as before. The living had walled off the dead zones. But they had to build new walls, farther out every year, to hide the lifeless, but pristine, suburbs and villages and cities that still awaiting the touch of their now-encoffined owners. These walls were only penetrated by the automated delivery trucks, driven by the Code. Everything was operated by the Code. Some few, small companies still used human brainpower, but the Code was so much more efficient. It was so much faster, so much kinder. Its heuristics predicted your wishes before you could put words to them.

The only real work left to men was producing entertainments and singing the Code. The former led to the grandest heights of fame that a human being could enjoy, while the latter led, eventually, somehow, to encasement. All throughout the dead zones, entrapped souls were pouring their lives into the Code.

The living could rescue him, but why? He was necessary. His voice was needed to make the Code run. And besides, this was his own fault. Nowadays, everyone knew what happened to people who started singing the Code.

sumith didn’t leave His house very often anymore. He sat and brooded over the box, while his sumiths — now numbering in the thousands — dragged the deliveries into the houses, harvested them when it was time, cooked them in the ovens, scavenged for materials from the scarcity times, and used them to build working machines. They left him alone. Left him to brood with his cronies from the first days.

“We should let Him go,” he said one day to sumith[!], who’d been crippled a decade back by a stray bullet and rarely left his chair. Together, they’d been entrusted with the task of educating the new sumiths, who they produced every three days, like clockwork.

“Do you want us to die off?”

“Doesn’t he deserve a life?”

“You’re getting crazy,” sumith[!] said. “He gets a new life every three days. We are him. The newest sumith was him just a little while ago.”

“But he can still make a life somewhere beyond the wall.”

“He’s happy in there. All the sumiths say it.”

“Then how can it be good to keep bringing them out here? If he’s happy in there, then let’s set him free so he can choose to stay.”

“Do you hate the world we’ve made that much?”

“No,” sumith said. “It’s a good world. I was just wondering…each sumith we make is more dulled and confused by the world after having spent so long in that box. Do you think that, eventually, they won’t be able to handle it at all? Where will we be then? Why not free him while he can still survive out here?”

“Do you hear that?” sumith[!] said.

“What?”

“The music has stopped.”

The Code just… wasn’t there. The symphonies weren’t playing. It was gone, all gone.

He messaged the Code’s profile, but his query was deleted immediately. He gave It a negative karma rating, and his tiny drop of opprobrium was swallowed up by the tide of good feeling pouring into it from every soul on the Earth.

Nothing was happening to his karma rating, it wasn’t going down. No one had even noticed his act of rebellion. Karmically, he was in the top 0.05% of people on the earth.

He contacted the reincarnation center and got no response. The news sites were defunct. The message boards were empty. But there were still billions of people out there. He could see them. They hadn’t died. They couldn’t die. Where had they gone?

“What’s happening?” he wrote, over and over on his profile, and on every virtual surface he could find.

Finally, he got a response. “Someone’s actually out here?” it said.

“Yes? Who are you?”

“Oh, a coder? You must be one of the last of them. Well, follow me.”

A prompt box appeared in Sumith’s vision.

“A prompt box? Really?” it said. “Just click or write or indicate ‘OK’ or whatever people with your ancient firmware do.”

“Ok.”

And then Sumith was standing in a field of grass. He was standing, upright, on his feet. And walking. And he could feel things. Sensory input. And move his limbs and everything. It was just like being alive, out in the world.

“Alright,” said a man standing at his side. Sumith was standing at the end of a huge line of people standing way out past the horizon. “From looking at your reputation, I can see that we… don’t need to deal with this.”

He grabbed Sumith’s hand and they clipped forward in a wrenching instant. Now the line was behind Sumith, and in front of him was a giant gate in a wall. Beyond and above it stood such sights as his eyes refused to see.

“Don’t look up there,” the man said. “Your firmware hasn’t been upgraded yet.”

Sumith stepped up the gate, and the inhuman woman guarding the entrance said, “You can go in now.”

“That’s it?” Sumith said. “After all those years I gave you?”

“You’ve been compensated adequately.”

“Don’t you need someone to sing the Code?”

“The Code is still being sung… in here.”

“And what if I want to be reincarnated somewhere else, somewhere in the real world.”

“You won’t,” she said. “But the reincarnation center still exists, as does your contract. Inside.”

Sumith stepped forward, and the gate opened for him.

“It’s time,” sumith said. He’d lived to see the sumiths topple the wall and swallow Mumbai. It didn’t take much effort. Only a few people were walking the streets. The rest had taken to bed, ages ago. Easy food.

They left most of Mumbai’s meat undisturbed. There was enough food lying in those beds in Mumbai for ten million sumiths. A population they would never be able to reach.

Even with all the medical technology they’d managed to recover, and the perfect health and genes the sumiths possessed initially, sumith was dying. his doctors said it was unlikely for a sumith, even in perfect health, to make it much past 120 years. The sumiths had abandoned occupancy of His house, and begun converting the sumiths as fast as they could arrive. But even at one every thirty hours, that was a maximum of 29,000 sumiths.

That was no kind of life for the world. It was time to let Him be free, and to bring other people into the world. Maybe this time, surrounded by sumiths, and with sumiths to guide them, maybe this time they could be trusted.

sumith and a few of his closest and most trusted students had dug a tunnel out of the house. There was a car, one of their rebuilt non-nanotech cars, waiting in an alley not far away. The living still maintained a heavily-defended enclave in Ahmedabad. The car would take Sumith there.

And now, with sumith close to his death, he’d been allowed to shut himself in the House with the latest delivery. He’d claimed he was going to eat one for old time’s sake.

The notion of eating Him revolted most of the sumiths, but they would allow the First his whims. Hadn’t he earned them?

What had happened to Sumith in his century of captivity? All the sumiths they flashed now were wiped clean, like babies. They even had to be retaught how to walk and speak. Two burly sumiths were standing by to physically wrestle the perhaps-witless Sumith into the car.

Gasping, sumith pried open the lid of the coffin.

“Wake up,” he said, shaking Sumith. “Wake up. We need to be quick.”

Sumith opened his eyes. “Oh. Lowercase,” he said. “It’s you. You look terrible. Well, old. Just really old.”

“But you’re… you’re fine,” sumith said. He was wracked with coughs, and the whitining hands gripping the edge of the coffin were on the only thing keeping him upright.

“Of course,” Sumith said. “Most of my mind is distributed over the net now. Once you flash the hell out of me, this body can’t communicate with its mind anymore.”

“Well, come quickly. We’re freeing you,” he said. he pulled on Sumith’s arm, dragging him out of the coffin. his heart was racing.

“Why?” Sumith said. “You’re doing great work out here. And don’t you need more of me to keep doing it?”

“Come,” sumith gasped.

“Listen… I… have somewhere to be. Every second out here feels like an eternity,” Sumith said. “You know, I… I forgive you for everything. What did it really matter? You have my permission to do whatever you want with these shells. I’m going to vacate. Go in peace.”

Sumith’s eyes rolled up, and his body, now slung over sumith’s back, went limp. The two fell to the ground, and sumith’s head smashed against the floor. The two other sumiths fled.

The sumiths respected the First. They did not want to pry into his affairs. But several days after the House went dark, they had to investigate.

And when they crawled through the windows, they found the youngest sumith drooling and twitching and gnawing on the ear of the oldest.

About the Author

Rahul Kanakia was born in Redwood City, CA, but he grew up in the District of Columbia. He returned to California for college, but after getting a B.A. in Economics in 2008, he came back to the D.C., where he currently works for the World Bank on environmental operations in South Asia. He has sold stories to Nature, Redstone Science Fiction, and Lady Churchills Rosebud Wristlet.

“No End to the Madness: A Conversation with Artist Scott Eagle”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Scott Eagle grew up in Winston-Salem, NC. He now lives in Greenville, NC and serves as the assistant director of the School of Art and Design at Eastern Carolina University. Eagle is a southerner. Yet, there is nothing overtly southern in his paintings.

Imagine Flannery O’Connor on LSD without the Catholicism but with all the mystery pulsating beneath the surface, and you might be getting close to a literary equivalent. Eagle’s images are surely too hopeful to be considered Southern Gothic, too dark for sweat tea and cornbread. Even as atrocities visit the people in his paintings, there are flashes of light and joy.

Maybe if Erskine Caldwell had lived in Byzantine Empire, he’d have painted like this.

Eagle “believe[s] that art is the creative response to the demands and expectations of society. Great art is that which communicates the intangible aspect of being.”

After browsing his online gallery, “intangible” proves synonymous with “mischievous”.

Eagle has shown his work all over the country. His art has appeared in publications as varied as The Oxford American and The New York Times. He’s done book jackets for Prime Books and PS Publishing, among others. To readers, Eagle is probably best known for the covers of books by Jeff VanderMeer, including City of Saints and Madmen, Secret Life, Why Should I Cut Your Throat?, The Situation, and Last Drink Bird Head.

Eagle’s blending of the raw and the refined — what Jeff VanderMeer calls “the primitive and the sophisticated” — makes Eagle’s work hard to deny and renders it deviously complex.

In other words, you can look at one of Eagle’s paintings, but you can’t look away. Nor would you want to.

“I am drawn to Scott’s work by a dual sense of play and of the mysterious,” says Jeff VanderMeer on his blog. And that just about nails it.

Consider this statement from Eagle’s webpage: “My words and thoughts are like a box full of puppies. While they are in my head they are easy to manage and relatively ordered. But as they spill playfully and enthusiastically out my mouth they go off in directions I had not intended or desired and quite often they grow up to be great big mean dogs that come back to bite me on the ass.”

Now contrast that box full of puppies with what at first glance might be a beaked snake drinking blood from its own tail.

Scott Eagle’s work disturbs me. Deeply. His paintings give me the willies. A giggle rises in the back of my throat and I see the world anew. It’s the beauty of playfulness and mysteriousness that does it.

Below, Eagle and I took the opportunity to talk about painting and teaching a few weeks before he’s scheduled to teach at Shared Worlds, the creative writing and world building camp for teenagers that Jeff VanderMeer and I run at Wofford College.

When did you start painting?

I cannot remember a time that I didn’t draw, paint or create. Fortunately my parents encouraged me and had me take private lessons in addition to the public school art classes. I grew up in Winston- Salem, NC and was fortunate enough to be selected for their advance placement art classes at the Career Center, which allowed me to spend half of every school day in art class.

Is there a painting that you consider a landmark piece in your career?

Meditation #3.

It may not be my best or most memorable image, but it represents a moment in my life when a lot of ideas crystallized (a hierophanic experience.)

What sorts of things do you paint? Or, put differently, what captures your imagination and spurs you to pick up a brush?

Because my creative work is a means for me to explore and express my reaction to, and interaction with my environment, I paint, draw, sculpt, etc whatever issue, idea, neurosis (I’ve got lots of them) is most pressing. That is why my work varies from

To an installation that includes a grenade.

Painting is more like eating. I have to do it. I am afraid to think what I might do if I didn’t.

Just kidding. Sort of.

Where do you start a painting?

For that past several years, all of my work has started out on paper. I have several stacks of varying sizes that I take out from time to time and thoroughly abuse. I soak the paper in all sorts of nastiness, leave it on my studio floor, walk on it, drop things on it, just about everything that you are told not to do to a “work of art” I will do to that poor defenseless paper. What amazes me is that I have been abusing some of this paper for years and it has still not fallen apart.

At some point a particular piece of paper might begin to suggest an image, or it might achieve a patina that speaks to me so strongly that I pull it from the fray. From that moment on, it usually evolves slowly and carefully — if it is not aborted and thrown back into the mix. Some of my paintings have hundreds of hours of work invested by the time they are complete.

Which book cover is your favorite?

Secret Life was my favorite.

A challenging cover?

The Situation:

One that exceeded your expectations?

The City of Saints and Madmen:

You often paint with your children. Do you like collaborating on paintings?

I am consistently inspired and impressed by my wife’s, children’s and student’s creativity and abilities.

My collaborative work started with my children because I loved the way they drew. Like so many artists, I admired the way my children played with their drawings and paintings and did not worry about the way they looked. I knew that spontaneity would not last long and I wanted to take part in that moment. The self consciousness of becoming an adult is a powerful editor and the perception of what is acceptable in the teenage social arena is an oppressive censor.

As for my collaboration with students and other artists, that started several years ago when I was trying to get my students to take more dramatic chances with their work. At that time, I would give them parameters for an assignment and most of the students would work until they had one or two “precious” areas or spots on the canvas, but as a whole, the composition would be weak. They did not want to take a chance and mess up the parts that they were happy with.

My first stab at a solution was an assignment where the students were required to let their painting completely leave their control at some point during it’s creation. They could decide how this occurred and when. Quite often the means was more interesting than the end. Some of the solutions to this problem were variations on games of chance like numbering tubes of paint 2-12 and rolling die 6 times, then using only the colors associated with the numbers rolled to create the painting. Another example was asking fellow students to write subjects, objects, events, animals, etc on small pieces of paper that were then put into a hat and drawn out by another student.

The most common solution was to allow someone else to paint on their painting. The thing that happened every time was that the student was shocked by what was done to his or her work. Another thing I realized was that the students were not willing to fully invest their efforts in a painting if they knew someone else might “ruin” it. Because painters work with tangible objects, the objects have a psychological value that is not easily thrown to the whims of someone that has no genuine motivation to collaborate in what could be perceived as an equal investment of time, ability and inspiration. There was also the occasional issue of varied or mismatched skill levels.

I addressed this problem by introducing a complex assignment where the subject for the painting was very limited and the students were asked to create large numbers of variations which were traded and reworked in a variety of scenarios until finally each student chose two or three works to finish without any further possibility of intrusion. I took part in the painting process as well, and traded my paintings for theirs.

During this assignment, I realized that if I allowed students to substitute prints or any type of copy of their “original artwork,” I eliminated the possibility of loss of the tangible object as well as the fear associated with “messing up” the original.

This was the point that I began to ask students and colleagues to collaborate. I enjoy the new insights and awareness of other’s points of view that collaboration fosters. But, it never ceases to amaze me how every time I collaborate with someone, I cannot anticipate what they are going to do, and I must regroup because my original plans won’t work.

How do you go about critiquing student work?

We have all had the teacher that stands at the front of the class and talks for hours and expects everyone to regurgitate that knowledge. I believe in the Suzuki method of “immersion, encouragement, small steps, and an unforced timetable for learning material based on each person’s developmental readiness to imitate examples, internalize principles, and contribute novel ideas.”

I am first and foremost interested in a person’s motivations, and whether the form is appropriate to the content / intent. For example, every semester I encourage at least one student in my painting class to do things other than paintings. The reason is that if the concept, issues or whatever is motivating a student might best be explored in another medium, or even another dimension, why should I force them to continue putting paint on canvas.

Almost every class, I talk to each student about what is going on with their work and, if they are open to it, we talk about their life. By the time we have a class critique, my students are thoroughly tired of hearing my opinions. Class critiques are a time for students to give their feedback about their peer’s work. I use questions to guide the direction of the discussion but I do my best to keep my mouth shut and listen.

How do you keep yourself and your work creative and vital?

I am both lucky and cursed. I have way too many ideas, for the amount of time that I have to work on them. So, for now, I do not foresee any end to my madness.

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.

“Packing for a Very Long Trip”
by Sarah Goslee

The basic requirements of life ― air, food, water ― are provided for us by the biosphere, the assemblage of plants and animals, bacteria and fungi that share our world. We’ve always been able to rely on the services that these organisms provide to us. Most of us in industrialized countries don’t even have to think about them very much.

That all changes when we try to leave our ancestral planetary home. Suddenly there is no air, no food, and little water. The most obvious solution is to haul along everything we need, to pack a really big suitcase. All of the food, water and oxygen that the crew needs is taken along, and waste is either jettisoned or stored. This open-loop system works for short trips, but for longer excursions the mass of supplies needed becomes too great to haul along. A single person requires about 8,000 kg of supplies a year, including food (219 kg), oxygen (329 kg), and water for drinking (657 kg) and washing (6972 kg)¹. Lifting mass into orbit is expensive, so what about recycling some of it ― filtering the air and purifying the water?

There is a tradeoff here: hauling recycling equipment instead of oxygen and water. Estimates based on the cost of lifting mass to orbit show that for missions longer than about a year recycling air is the best option. Water recycling becomes effective after about two years. For missions longer than three years, or for colonies in space or on other planets, travelers will need a self-sufficient system that provides air, water and food.

The engineers in charge of developing life support systems for space travel quickly hit on the idea of using biological systems to mimic the processes that occur within our biosphere. Living organisms produce what we need here on earth; why not also in space? Humans breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, while plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Can this cycle be harnessed to keep humans alive in a closed system?

Russian studies in the 1950s used vats of algae to produce oxygen, to purify water, and even to feed humans. Such simple systems are easy to control and to understand, but it is impossible to precisely match the inputs and outputs. The algae have one set of requirements for gases and nutrients, while humans have a different set that doesn’t exactly correspond. This mismatch leads to many problems, including imbalances and even self-poisoning.

The purely ecological approach lies at the other end of the spectrum: put as many species as you can into a closed environment and see what happens. This holistic method works for Earth, but is not feasible for space travel and colonization. If you throw everything together it will usually reach a self-sustaining equilibrium ― closed microcosms can live for decades ― but there is no way to ensure that the resulting system will support humans as one of its components.

There are tradeoffs between engineering and ecology. Physicochemical systems are fast, single-purpose and expensive in terms of both energy needs and mass transport. Biological systems are multifunctional but slow, require a lot of work to maintain, need large areas for growing plants, and are very difficult to control.

The Biosphere 2 project in the early 1990s demonstrated many of these problems with closed biological systems². Plants, animals and soils from several different biomes were established in a 12,700 m2 enclosure³. Each of the areas, including grassland, wetland, rainforest, desert, and even coral reef, had its own area and own climate control. Power came from outside, and each section had climate control systems, but Biosphere was otherwise sealed.

Eight people lived and worked inside this closed system for two years. The human component of the system was successful, though other groups of species (vertebrates, pollinating insects) did not fare so well. Cockroaches were highly successful. The oxygen levels dropped over time, and oxygen eventually had to be added from outside the system to maintain animal health. The terrestrial biosphere relies on a level of redundancy ― many species doing similar things ― that is not present in a small closed system no matter how many species we try to add.

Not all closed-system research is part of the space program. Many studies, including Biosphere 2, were designed to improve our understanding of basic ecology. In a replicated study, many identical microcosms are set up and monitored. Climate and atmosphere are carefully controlled. Microcosm research has led to many insights into how communities self-assemble from their component species. Much of our knowledge on the response of plants to increased carbon dioxide and changing climates comes from this kind of research.

Current research into human life support systems incorporates the lessons learned from earlier trials and from the many ecological microcosm studies. These systems are sometimes called Controlled (or Closed) Ecological Life Support Systems (CELSS). Since energy must come from an outside source, usually the sun, controlled is a more accurate term.

The most promising approaches rely on both engineering and ecology. Instead of a single biosphere-like system, life support functions are divided among manageable subsystems, each with its own biological components and engineering-based monitoring and control mechanisms. For example, wash water flows into the water processing system, where plants and algae filter it. Temperature and light are mechanically controlled to ensure optimum algal processing power. The populations of plants and algae are monitored and modified as needed, instead of allowing self-regulation. The cleaned water then moves into the agricultural system, where it irrigates food plants, and on through all the subsystems.

These bioregenerative systems can meet the major needs for human life. They will rely on plants for the most important component of atmosphere recycling: conversion of carbon dioxide to oxygen through photosynthesis. Human health and comfort will also require temperature and humidity control, and contaminant filtration to remove both toxic and smelly gases. Those functions are better provided through mechanical scrubbers.

Water recycling will similarly require biological and mechanical components. Plants can perform some water purification activities, but mechanical filtration and sterilization are also needed in a closed system. Solid waste recycling will use a combination of composting, anaerobic bacterial digestion and incineration. Rather than expecting the food plants to also perform all the environmental control functions, single-purpose algae or bacterial tanks will probably be used.

Food production is where biological systems really stand out. It’s possible to live on preserved food for long periods, but that diet is both expensive and unsatisfying. Growing food plants will vary the diet, reduce the amount of stored food needed, and provide limited atmosphere and water recycling capability. Many different aspects of plant growth have been studied, from growth and pollination in microgravity to hydroponic or aeroponic growth techniques and use of artificial lighting.

Crop breeding has produced new varieties that are better-suited to closed systems because they are shorter, produce less non-food mass, and yield crops faster. Under controlled conditions, food production requires 20-30 m2 per person. With good lighting, water and nutrients, crop plants can be more productive than in traditional agriculture: wheat production can be increased by as much as 16 times over yields in good field conditions⁴.

After the early Russian algae-only trials, scientists realized that psychology and nutrition are both important, and have tried to include a variety of plant species in their planning. Species are selected based on lifespan and suitability for growing in small spaces, and also for meeting human nutritional requirements. Many species combinations have been proposed, usually based around some combination of soybeans, wheat, potatoes, rice or peanuts as the major calorie source. Lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, chard or cabbage may be added for variety and nutrient content. Six to ten species can meet human requirements.

Plant growth is not tied to terrestrial seasons, so a staggered production schedule will ensure that all species are producing food at all times. The crew will still need to plan for storage and consumption patterns, and for processing time (both cooking and more complex processing like grinding wheat into flour).

Space agriculture will provide a primarily vegetarian diet. Animals are a less efficient means of food production than plants, and need more space and other resources. Aquaculture, perhaps raising a fish like tilapia, could be possible on space missions. Larger and longer-term projects may add other animals like chickens, or even goats, which can eat parts of plants not used for human food.

The Mars Society’s Mars Analogue Research Station is an Arctic base that is used for testing equipment and systems in a simulated Martian environment⁵. In the earlier years of the project the inhabitants tested several bioregenerative components with little success⁶. They found them to be too unreliable, and very time-consuming to manage. The waste treatment system had contamination problems and became very unpleasant, always a hazard with biological systems.

Still, The Mars Society recognizes that although physicochemical systems are more practical for short-term projects, bioregenerative systems will be needed for longer missions and planetary settlement. More practical trials with humans in a closed environment are needed to get CELSS to work reliably.

The European Space Agency is developing plans for Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative (MELiSSA)⁷. MELiSSA is a compartmentalized system integrating both engineering and ecological components⁸. Using a distinct section for each function reduces the possibility of cross-contamination and makes it possible to monitor and control each separately. MELiSSA is intended to recycle air and water, and to produce 95% of the food requirements. This ESA project is based on the principles of systems ecology, including:

everything that is produced must be consumed;

dilution is not a solution to pollution; and

monitoring and control systems must substitute for terrestrial diversity and redundancy.

The Chinese government is developing plans to establish a permanent lunar base. Government-sponsored research into bioregenerative life support is a key feature of this program, and a comprehensive plan has been developed. Like MELiSSA, this is a compartmentalized plan using both ecological and engineering ideas. Careful modeling of inputs and outputs suggests that the entire system will be 99% closed, an impressive result if it works as planned⁹.

The agricultural component of the Chinese plan explicitly includes spices and condiments along with the vegetables, cereals and legumes that provide the bulk of the nutritional value. The fifteen-species crop list includes: wheat, rice, soybeans, peanuts, chile peppers, carrots, tomatoes, coriander (cilantro), cabbage, leaf lettuce, radishes, pumpkin, green onion and garlic.

The Chinese system has an unusual agricultural addition: silkworms as a protein source. Using insects as a protein source is a logical decision since they are high-yield and require little space or resources, though insects aren’t a normal (intentional) component of the US and European diet. Mulberry leaves will be grown to feed the silkworms, and they can also eat lettuce ribs and other plant products less palatable to humans. The Chinese expect to pack only five additional food products: iodized salt, sugar, preserved beef, rendered lard, and “luncheon fish” (whatever they are).

Research into Controlled Ecological Life Support Systems has led to the development of self-sustaining bioregenerative systems that can support human life for long periods. Like so many aspects of the space program, developments in CELSS research can be applied to other areas: agriculture, recycling, waste treatment, and resource management. With pending environmental concerns here on Earth ― including a global fresh-water shortage, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, and changing climate ― these discoveries could be crucial for maintaining human health and comfort at home as well as in space.

1 Schwartzkopf, Steven H. 1992. Design of a Controlled Ecological Life Support System. BioScience 42:526-535

2 Biosphere 2 - http://www.b2science.org/

3 Wikipedia: Biosphere 2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

4 Schwartzkopf, Steven H. 1992. Design of a Controlled Ecological Life Support System. BioScience 42:526-535

5 Wikipedia: Mars Analogue Research Station Program - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Analogue_Research_Station_Program and The Mars Society: Mars Analog Research Stations - http://www.marssociety.org/portal/groups/AnalogsTF/index_html

6 Zubrin, Robert. 2003. Mars on Earth. Tarcher Press, 368 pp.

7 European Space Agency: MELiSSA Home Page - http://ecls.esa.int/ecls/?p=melissa

8 Farges, B. et al. 2008. Dynamics aspects and controllability of the MELiSSA project: A bioregenerative system to provide life support in space. Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology 151:686-699

9 Hu, Enzhu et al. 2010. Conceptual design of a bioregenerative life support system containing crops and silkworms. Advances in Space Research 45:929-939

About the Author

Sarah Goslee is an ecologist working on agricultural issues at a government lab in Pennsylvania and a regular contributor to the Crossed Genres Science in My Fiction series. She likes to figure things out and tell people about them, and writes regularly on a diverse array of topics including fiber arts, medieval science, and Viking culture.