The Book of Phoenix
(Excerpted from The Great Book)

Nnedi Okorafor

There is no book about me. Well, not yet. No matter. I shall create it myself; it’s better that way. To tell my tale, I will use the old African tools of story: Spoken words. They’re more trustworthy and they’ll last longer. And during shadowy times, spoken words carry farther than words typed or written. My beginnings were in the dark. We all dwelled in the darkness, mad scientist and specimen, alike. This was when the goddess Ani’s still slept, when her back was still turned. Before she grew angry at what she saw and pulled in the blazing sun. My story is called The Book of Phoenix. And it is short because it was…accelerated.

I’d never known any other place. The 13th floor of Tower 7 was my home. Yesterday I realized it was a prison, too. Granted, maybe I should have suspected something. The two hundred year old marble skyscraper had many dark sides and I knew most of them. There were 39 floors, and on almost every one was an abomination. I was an abomination. I had read many books and this was clear to me. However, this place was still my home. Home: a. One’s place of residence. Yes, it was my home.

They gave me all the 3D movies I could watch, but it was books that did it for me. A year ago, they gave me an e-reader packed with 700,000 books of all kinds. When it came to information, I had access to everything I wanted. That was part of their research.

Research. This was what happened in Tower 7. There were similar towers around the world but Tower 7 was my home, so this one was the one I studied. I had several classified books on Tower 7. One discussed each floor and some of the types of abominations found on them. I’d listened to audios of the spiritual tellings of long dead African and Native American shamans, sorcerers and wizards. I’d read the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran. I studied The Buddha and meditated until I saw Krishna. And I read countless books on the sciences of the world. Carrying all this in my head, I understood abomination. I understood the purpose of Tower 7. Until yesterday.

In Tower 7, there was “transformative” genetic engineering, the in-vitro fertilization of organic robots, “rejuvenation” surgery on the ancient near-dead, the creation of weaponized weeds, the insertion and attaching of both mechanical and cybernetic parts to human bodies. There were people created in Tower 7, some were deformed, some were mentally ill, some were just plain dangerous, and none were flawless. Yes, some of us were dangerous. I was dangerous.

Then there was the tower’s lobby on the ground floor that projected a different picture. I’d never been down there but my books described it as an earthly wonderland, full of creeping vines covering the walls and small trees growing from artistically crafted holes in the floor. In the center was the main attraction. Here grew the thing that brought people from all over the world to see the Tower 7 Lobby (only the lobby; there were no tours of the rest of the building).

A hundred years ago, one of the landscapers planted a tree in the lobby’s center. On a lark, some scientists from the 9th floor emptied an experimental solution into the tree’s pot of soil. The substance was for enhancing and speeding up arboreal growth. The tree grew and grew. In a place where people thought like normal human beings, they would have uprooted the amazing tree and placed it outdoors. However, this was Tower 7 where boundaries were both contained and pushed. When the tree began touching the lobby’s high ceiling in a matter of weeks, they constructed a large hole so that it could grow through the second floor. They did the same for the third, fourth, fifth. The great tree has since earned the name of “The Backbone” because it grew through all 39 of Tower 7’s floors.

My name is Phoenix. I was mixed and grown in a lab on the 13th floor. One of my doctors thinks my name came from the birthplace of my egg’s donor. I’ve looked it up. Phoenix, Arizona is the full name of the place. However, from what I’ve read about my floor, even the scientists who forced my existence don’t know the names of donors. So, I doubt this. I think they named me Phoenix because of what I was, an “accelerated organism”. I was born two years ago but I looked, behaved and felt like a forty-year-old woman. My doctors said the acceleration would stop now that I was “matured”. To them, I was like a plant they grew for the sake of harvesting information.

Who do I mean by “them”, you must wonder? All of THEM, the “Big Eye” — the Tower 7 scientists, lab assistants, lab technicians, doctors, administrative workers, guards and police.We of the tower called them “Big Eye” because they watched us. All the time, they watched us, though not closely enough to prevent the inevitable.

I could read a 500-page book in two minutes. My brain absorbed the information and stories like a sponge. Up until two weeks ago, aside from mealtimes, looking out the window, running on my treadmill, and meetings with doctors, I spent my days with my e-reader. I’d sit in my room for hours consuming words upon words that became images upon images, ideas upon ideas. Now they gave me paper-made books, removing the books when I finished them. I liked the e-reader more. It took up less space and I could reread things when I wanted.

I stared out the window watching the cars and trucks below and the other skyscrapers across from me as I touched a leaf of my hoya plant. They’d given the plant to me five days ago and already it was growing so wildly that it was creeping across my windowsill and had wrapped around the chair I’d put there. It had grown two feet overnight. I didn’t think they’d noticed. No one ever said anything about it. I realize now that they had noticed. The plant was not a gesture of kindness; it was just part of the research. They didn’t really care about me. But Saeed cared about me.

Saeed is dead, Saeed is dead, Saeed is dead, I thought over and over, as I caressed one of my plant’s leaves. I yanked, breaking the leaf off. Saeed, my only friend. I crumpled the leaf in my restless hand; its green earthy smell might as well have been blood.

Yesterday Saeed had seen something terrible. Not long afterwards, he’d sat across from me during dinner-hour with eyes wide like boiled eggs, unable to eat. He couldn’t give me any details. He said no words could describe it.

“What does your heart tell you about this place?” he’d earnestly asked.

I’d only shrugged, frustrated with him for not telling me what he’d seen that was so awful.

He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “You read all those books…why don’t you feel rebellion? Don’t you ever dream of getting out of here? Away from all the Big Eye?”

“Rebellion against whom?” I whispered, confused.

He laughed bitterly, sat back and shook his head. He took my hand, squeezed it and let it go. “Eat your jallof rice, Phoenix.”

I tried to get him to eat his crushed glass. This was his favorite meal and it bothered me to see him push his plate away. But he wouldn’t touch it. Before we returned to our separate quarters, he asked for my apple. I assumed he wanted to paint it. He always liked to paint when he was depressed. I’d given it to him without a thought and he’d slipped it into his pocket. The Big Eye allowed it, though they frowned upon taking food from the dining room, even if you didn’t plan to eat it.

His words didn’t touch me until nighttime when I lay in my bed. Yes, somewhere deep deep in my psyche I did wish to get out of the tower and see the world, be away from the Big Eye. I wanted to see those things that I saw in all the books I read. “Rebellion,” I whispered to myself.

They told me the news in the morning during breakfast-hour. I’d been sitting alone looking around for Saeed. The others, the woman with the twisted spine who could turn her head around like an owl, the man who never spoke with his mouth but always had people speaking to him, the three women who all looked and sounded alike, the bushy bearded man who looked like a wizard from a novel, the baboon who spoke in sign language, the woman whose sweater did not hide her four large breasts, the two men joined at the hip who were always randomly laughing, the woman with the lion claws and teeth, these people spoke to each other and never to me. Only Saeed spoke to me.

One of my doctors sat facing me. The African-looking one who wore the shiny black wig made of synthetic hair, Bumi. They always had her deal with me when there was upsetting news. My entire body tightened. She touched my hand and I pulled it away. She smiled sympathetically and told me a terrible thing. Saeed hadn’t drawn the apple. He’d eaten it. And it killed him. My mind went to one of my books. The Bible. I was Eve and he was Adam.

I could not eat. I could not drink. I would not cry. Not in the dining hall.

Hours later, I was in my room lying on my bed, eyes wet, mind reeling. Saeed was dead. I had skipped lunch and dinner, but I still wasn’t hungry. I was hot. The scanner on my wall would start to beep soon. Then they would come get me soon. For tests. I shut my eyes, squeezing out tears. They evaporated as they rolled down my hot cheeks. “Oh God,” I moaned. The pain of losing him burned in my chest. “Saeed. What did you see?”

Saeed was human. More human than me. I met him the first day they allowed me into the dining hall with the others. I was one year old; I must have looked twenty. He was sitting alone about to do something insane. There were many others in the room who caught my eye. The two conjoined men were laughing hard at the sight of me. The baboon was jumping up and down while rapidly signing to the woman with lion claws and teeth. However, Saeed had a spoon in his hand and a bowl full of broken glass before him. I stood there staring at him as others stared at me. He dug the spoon into the chunks of glass and put it in his mouth. I could hear him crunching from where I stood. He smiled to himself, obviously enjoying it.

Driven by sheer curiosity, I walked over and sat across from him with my plate of spicy doro wat. He eyed me with suspicion but he didn’t seem angry or mean, at least not to the best of my limited social knowledge. I leaned forward and asked what was on my mind, “What’s it like to eat that?”

He blinked, surprised. Then he grinned. His teeth were perfect- white, shiny, and shaped like the teeth in drawings and doctored pictures in magazines. Had they removed his original teeth and replaced them with ones made of a more…durable stuff? “The taste is soft and delicate as the texture is crunchy. I’m not in pain, only pleasure,” he said in a voice accented in a way that I’d never heard. But then again, the only accents I’d ever heard were from the Big Eye doctors and guards.

“Tell me more,” I said.

After that, Saeed and I became friends. I loved words and he needed to spill them. He could not read, so I would tell him about what I read, at least in the hours of breakfast, lunch and dinner. He was from Egypt where he had been an orphan who never went hungry because he could always find something to eat. Rotten rice, date pits, even the wooden skewer sticks of kebabs, he had a stomach like a goat. They brought him to the tower when he was ten, nine years ago. He never told me exactly how or why they made him the way he was. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were who we were and we were there.

Saeed told me of places I had never seen with my own eyes. He used the words of a poet who used his tongue to see. Saeed was an artist with his hands, too. He had the skill of the great painters I read about in my books. He most loved to draw those foods he could no longer eat. Human food. Portraits of loaves of bread. Bowls of thick egusi soup and balls of fufu. Bouquets of lamb and beef kebabs. Fried eggs with white cheese. Plates of chickpeas. Pitchers of orange juice. Piles of roasted corn. They allowed him to bring the paintings to mealtime for everyone to view. I guess even we deserved the pleasures of art.

Saeed could survive on glass, metal shavings, crumbles of rust, sand, dirt, those things that would be left behind if human beings finally blew themselves up. However, eating a piece of bread would kill him as eating a big bowl of sharp pieces of glass would kill the average human being.

He took my apple and that night, he ate it. Then his stomach and intestines hemorrhaged and he was dead before morning. I never got to tell him what was happening to me. It might have given him hope; it would have reminded him that things would change. I wiped a tear. I loved Saeed.

As grief overwhelmed me for the first time in my life, I pressed a hand against the thick glass of my window. I’d never been outside. I wanted to go outside. Saeed had escaped by dying. I wanted to escape, too. If he wasn’t happy here, then neither was I.

I wiped hot sweat from my brow. My room’s scanner began to beep as my body’s temperature soared. The doctors would be here soon.

When it first started to happen two weeks ago, only I noticed it. My hair started to fall out. I am an African by genetics, my hair was very coily and my skin was very very dark. They kept my hair shaven low because neither they nor I knew what to do with it when it grew out. I could never find anything in my books to help. They didn’t care for style in Tower 7, anyway…although the woman down the hall had very long silky white hair and Big Eye lab assistants came by every two days to help her brush and braid it…despite the fact that the woman had the teeth and claws of a lion.

I was sitting on my bed, looking out the window when I suddenly grew very hot. For the last few days, my skin had been dry and ashy no matter how much hydrated water they gave me to drink. Doctor Bumi brought me a large jar of shea butter and applying it soothed my skin to no end. However, this day, hot and feverish, my skin seemed to dry as if I were in a desert.

I felt beads of sweat on my head and when I rubbed my short short hair, it wiped right off, hair and sweat alike. I ran to my bathroom, quickly showered, washing my head thoroughly, toweled off and stood before the large mirror. I’d lost my eyebrows, too. But this wasn’t the worst of it. I rubbed the shea butter into my skin to give myself something to do. If I stopped moving, I’d start crying with panic.

I don’t know why they gave me such a large mirror in my bathroom. Large and round, it stretched from wall to wall. Therefore, I saw myself in full glory. As I slathered the thick yellow nutty smelling cream onto my drying skin, it was as if I was harboring a sun deep within my body and that sun wanted to come out. Under the dark brown of my skin, I was glowing. I was light.

I pulsed, feeling a wave of heat and slight vibration within my flesh. “What is this?” I whispered, scurrying back to my bed where my e-reader lay. I wanted to look up the phenomena. In all my reading, I had never read a thing about a human being, accelerated or normal, heating up and glowing like a firefly’s behind. The moment I picked the e-reader up, it made a soft pinging sound. Then the screen went black and began to smoke. I threw it on the floor and the screen cracked as it gently burned. My room’s smoke alarm went off.

Psss! Hissing sound was soft and accompanied by a pain in my left thumbnail. It felt as if someone stuck a pin into it. “Ah!” I cried, instinctively pressing on my thumb. As I held my hand up to my eyes, I felt myself pulse again.

There was a splotch of black in the center of my thumbnail like old blood but blacker. Burned flesh. All specimen, creature, creation in the building had a diagnostics chip implanted beneath his, her or its fingernail, claw, talon or horn. I’d just gone off the grid.

Not thirty seconds passed before they came bursting into my room with guns and syringes at ready, all aimed at me as if I were a wild rabid beast destroying all that they had built.

“Get down! DOWN!” they shouted. One man grabbed me, probably with the intent of throwing me on the bed so he could cuff me. He screamed, staring at his burned, still smoking hand. Someone shot me in the leg. It felt like someone had kicked my leg with a metal foot. I sunk to the floor, pain washing over me like a second layer of more intense heat. I would have been done for if someone else had not shouted for the others to hold their fire.

Thankfully, I healed fast and the bullet had gone straight through my leg. If it hadn’t, I don’t know what would have happened due to my extreme body temperature. One minute I was staring with shock at the blood oozing from my leg. Then next, I blacked out. I woke in a bed, my body cool, my leg bandaged. When they returned me to my room, the scanner was in place to monitor me since I could not hold an implant. They replaced my bed sheets with a heavy heat resistant sheet similar in material to my new clothes. The carpet was gone, too. For the first time, I saw that the floor beneath the carpet was solid whitish marble.

When I grew hot and luminous like this, electronics died or exploded in my hands. This was why they started giving me paper books. They were difficult to read, as I couldn’t turn the pages as quickly as I could with the e-reader. And the paper books they had were limited and old. And they could monitor what I was reading. Although now I realize with the e-reader they were probably monitoring my choices, too.

I didn’t tell Saeed about the heating and glowing because at the time I didn’t want to worry him. I enjoyed our talks so much. I wish I had told him.

The door slid open and my doctors came in, Debbie and Bumi. I took a deep breath to calm myself. When I was calm, though the heat did not go away, it decreased, as did the glow.

“How do you feel?” Bumi asked, as she took my wrist to check my pulse. She hissed, dropping it.

“Hot,” I said.

She glared at me and I shrugged thinking something I had not thought until Saeed was dead- You should have asked first.

“Open,” Debbie said, placing the heavy duty thermometer into my mouth.

I saw these two women every day. I knew their names, nothing more.

“She’s not glowing that brightly,” Bumi said, typing something onto her handheld. I resisted the urge to grab it and hold it in my hands until it exploded. Saeed was dead because of these people. I steadied myself, thinking of the cool places sometimes described in the novels I read. I once read a brief story about a man who froze to death in a forest. I thought about that.

“It might just be menopause approaching,” Bumi said. “I believe the two factors are correlated.”

I tuned out their talk and focused on my own thoughts. Escape. How? What would they do to me? What did Saeed see? He said it was something on this floor. My internal temperature was 130 degrees, but the temperature of my skin was 220. They couldn’t take my blood pressure because the equipment would melt.

“We need to take her to the lab,” Debbie said.

Bumi nodded. “As soon as the scanner says she’s reached 300 degrees. We don’t want her any higher or things around her will start to ignite.”

They left. I paced the room. Restless. Angry. Distraught. They would be back soon.

How am I going to get out of here, I wondered. As if to answer my question, Mmuo walked into my room. He came through the wall across from my bed. My heart nearly jumped from my chest.

“Did you hear?” he asked, sitting on my bed.

I blinked, feeling the rush of sadness all over again. He was Saeed’s friend, too. “Yes,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Phoenix.”

My face was wet and drying with sweat. “I’m getting out of here,” I declared.

Mmuo grinned but it quickly turned to a frown. “What is wrong with you? I can feel you from here,” he asked.

“I think it has something to do with how they made me. It’s been happening for two weeks and it’s getting worse.”

We looked at each other, silent. I knew we were thinking the same thing but neither he nor I wanted to speak it. If we spoke of my name, I didn’t think I’d be able to move, let alone run.

“Yes, that would make sense,” he said.

His full name was Uzochukwu D’nnmma but he called himself Mmuo, which meant spirit in a Nigerian language. He was a hero to all those who were created or altered in Tower 7. Like Saeed, Mmuo had been taken from Africa. He said he was from “the jungles of Nigeria”. I did not believe he was from any jungle. He spoke like a man who had known skyscrapers, office buildings and digital television. He knew how to disable the security doors on several of the floors and was known for causing trouble throughout the building. Not that he really needed to do so to get around the tower. Mmuo could walk through walls. The only walls he could not pass through were the walls that would get him out of Tower 7. Mmuo could not escape; obviously his abilities were created by Tower 7 scientists.

Mmuo was a tall thin man with skin the color and as shiny as crude oil. He never wore clothes, for clothes could not pass through the walls with him. He stole what food he needed from the kitchens. He was the only person/creature who’d successfully escaped the Big Eye’s clutches.

Why Tower 7’s Big Eye tolerated him, I do not know. My theory is that they simply could not catch him. And since he was contained, they accepted the trouble he occasionally stirred up. Most of those in the tower were too isolated and damaged to be much trouble if freed, anyway.

“It looks like your skin is nothing but a veil over something greater,” he said, after an appraising look. It was something Saeed would have said and the thought made my heart ache again.

“Can you open the door?” I finally said. “I…I want to see what is down the hall, near Saeed’s room.”

Mmuo met my gaze and held it.

I frowned. “What did Saeed see?” I asked.

He only looked away.

“Show me,” I said, suddenly wanting to sob. “Then help me escape.”

He moved close to me and I was sure he was going to hug me.

“Don’t touch me,” I said. “You’ll…”

He raised a hand up and made to slap me across the face. “Don’t move,” he said. His hand passed right through my head. I felt only the slightest moment of pressure and there was a sucking sound.

“Wha…”

“Can you hear me?” I heard him loudly say through what sounded like a microphone. I looked around.

“Shhh! They’ll hear you!” I hissed. I frowned. His lips hadn’t moved.

“No,” he said. He held his finger to his lips for me to quiet down and grinned, his yellow-white teeth shining, his black skin shining, too. “They won’t. You are hearing this in your head.

“Not even the Big Eye know I can do this,” he said aloud, but lowering his voice. “Whatever they did to make me able to pass through walls, I can pass it into people and they can hear me, until the tiny nanomites are sweated from their skin.”

“I did this to a little boy on the fifth floor. He had a contagious cancer, so they kept him in isolation for tests. Hearing me talk to him from wherever I was kept him sane. At least, until he died.”

His disease could have killed you, though, I thought.

He started to descend through the floor. “Fifteen minutes,” he said in my head, then he was gone.

I whipped off my pants and t-shirt and threw on a white dress they’d recently given me that was made of heat resistant thin plastic. The dress was long but light and allowed me to move very freely. I didn’t bother with shoes. Too heavy.

For a moment, I had a brief flash in my mind of actually stepping outside. Into the naked sunlight. I could do it. Mmuo would help me. He and I would both escape. I felt a rush of hope, then a rush of heat. The scanner on my wall beeped. I had reached over 300 degrees.

Just before the door slid open, I had the sense to spread some shea butter on my skin. I ran out of my room.

“If you want to see, turn right and then go straight. Do it quickly.”

I jogged, my feet slapping the cool marble floor. The hallway was quiet and empty, and soon I was in a part of my floor that I had never graced. The side where they kept Saeed. His prison, I thought.

I crossed a doorway and the floor here was carpeted, plush and red. I paused, looking down. I had never seen red carpet. Before they took it out, the carpet in my quarters had been black and flat. I wanted to kneel down and run my hands over it. I knew it would feel so soft and fluffy.

“See what you must but you have to make it to the elevator in two minutes,” Mmuo’s voice suddenly said into my head. “Go down the hall and turn left. You will see it. Hurry.”

“Ok,” I said aloud. But he could not hear me. One-way communication. I ran down the red hallway. Through glass windows and doors, I could see lab assistants and scientists in labs. Each large room was partitioned by a thick wall. There was bulky equipment in most of the rooms. If I were careful, no one would notice me. After sneaking past three labs, I saw the one that Saeed saw. It had to be. I stopped, staring and moaning deep in my throat. This lab was much bigger than the others and ten black cameras hung from its high white ceiling.

There were two wall-sized sleek grey machines on both sides of the room. I could hear them humming. Powerful. Between them, the world fell away to …another world where it was daytime and all that was happening was perfectly bluntly brutally visible. There were old vehicles, trucks from long long ago, boxy, ineffective and weak. But strong enough to carry huge loads of cargo to dump into a deep pit. And that cargo consisted of human bodies. Hundreds of them. Dead. Not Africans. These dead people had pinkish pale skin and thin straight-ish hair like most of the Big Eye. When was this? Where was this? Why were the Big Eye scientists just standing there watching with their clipboards and ever observing eyes?

It was not like watching a 3D movie. Even the best ones could never look this …true. Bodies. And I could smell them. The whole hallway reeked with their rot and feces and bile and the smoke of the trucks. My brain went to my books and recalled where I had seen this before. “Holocaust,” I whispered, fighting the urge to turn to the side and vomit. I shut my watering eyes for a moment. I took a deep breath and nearly gagged on the stench. I opened my eyes.

This genocide happened during one of the early world wars. The Germans killed many of these people because they felt they were inferior or a threat or both. The book I read spoke as if wiping them out was the right thing to do. It certainly looked wrong to me. Were these Big Eye looking through time? Is this all they could do? Look? And why this time? For a moment, the portal disappeared and there was lots of scrambling, adjusting machines, pushing buttons, cursing. And then the portal reappeared showing the same activities, in the same time period in the same place. Happening.

I could feel the surge of heat in my body. Like a deep heart beat of crimson flames. I shuddered and felt it ripple over every surface of my skin. But I couldn’t move. Saeed had probably stood here just like this, too. Acrid smoke stung my eyes. My feet were burning the red carpet. A fire alarm sounded. I ran.

The elevator was open. It was empty. I ran in and it quickly closed behind me. I wished Mmuo would say something. If it went up, I was caught. If it went nowhere, I was caught. If it went down, I might be caught, but I might escape, too. I shut my eyes and whispered, “Go down, go down, please, go down. Have to get out!” Sweat beaded and evaporated all over my confused body and the elevator quickly began to feel humid.

If I hadn’t rubbed all that shea butter on my skin at the last minute, I’d have been in horrible pain, my skin drying and probably cracking. I was hot like the sun, there was a ringing in my ears, as if my own body had an alarm and it was going off, too. I looked at my hands. They were glowing a soft yellow. My entire body was glowing through my dress.

The elevator jerked upward. I grabbed the railing, pure terror shooting through me. At least, I would make it outside. I hoped I could take two breaths before they caught me. I sunk to the floor. Saeed was dead and I was still trapped. Tears dribbled from the corners of my eyes and hissed as they evaporated down my cheeks.

The elevator jerked again. “Sorry about that,” I heard Mmuo say in my head. He sounded distant. The elevator started moving down. I jumped up, grinning. I still had a chance. A louder alarm started to go off. They’d realized I was missing. “I can get you to nine,” he said. His voice was fading and I had to strain to hear it. “Two stairways in there. Run to the emergency one on the other side of the greenhouse, straight ahead when the doors open. You’ll be on the side of the greenhouse, just go straight ahead! Do NOT go near the center! There’s…” His voice faded away.

Had my heat burned away his nanomites? Probably. As the elevator flew down to the ninth floor, my feet burned the elevator floor. It came to a sudden stop and the doors opened. The blare of the Tower 7 alarm assaulted my ears but the most beautiful site I’d ever seen caressed my eyes. An expansive room full of trees, bushes, flowers, vines. In pots, on shelves, tangled within each other. I could see the city through the windows on my left. The sky was the deep rose of evening. I started quickly walking down the narrow path before me. Moss grew on the sides of trees. The air smelled green, fragrant, soily, I had never smelled anything like it.

I heard a rush of footsteps from amongst the plants to my right. Between the foliage, I could see them. Big Eye guards. In armor with shields, with guns.

“Hey!” one of them yelled, spotting me. All their guns went up. “Put your hands up. We will not hurt you.” The one speaking was a woman. I could see her clearly. She was short with long brown straight hair. She had pale skin and a hard voice.

Behind me I could hear the elevator rumbling. I still didn’t move. Saeed was dead. There was nothing for me here. I was two years old and I was forty years old. The marble beneath my feet absorbed my heat.

“Please, put your hands up,” the woman pleaded. “You know what you are. We can stabilize you.” She paused, obviously considering how much to tell me. I knew enough, though. Saeed was dead and it was all clear to me now.

“You’re a weapon,” the woman admitted. “If you wanted to know, now you know. I’m only here to help. You have to trust me. This wasn’t supposed to happen, you being like this. Please, let us help you.”

I heard the elevator doors opening just as I felt the light burst from me. There was warmth that started at my feet. It rolled up to my chest and pulsed out with a wave of heat. My shoulders jerked back and I stumbled to the side, getting a glimpse behind me. If I had blinked I still wouldn’t have missed it. My skin prickled as my glow became a light green shine. The light steadily radiated from me, bathing every plant in the room. The guards behind me in the elevator and on the far right side of the room all ducked down and for a moment it was quiet enough where you could hear it. All the plants began to grow. Snapping, pulling, unfurling, creeping. Thick vines and even tree roots quickly crept, stretched and blocked the elevator door. Leaves, branches and stems grew so thick around the guards to my right that they were blocked from view. They didn’t know I could do this.

The entire greenhouse swelled and flooded with foliage. Except a few steps ahead to my right. There was what I could only call a tunnel through the plants. It diagonally passed the cowering Big Eye. I ran into it just as the guards behind and to my right began to shoot toward where I’d initially been. Were they shooting through the plants or shooting at me, I do not know. And in many ways these two things were one of the same.

Mmuo had said to go forward to find the doorway. But I lost all sense of direction. So when I ended up standing before the giant glass dome I had no clue which way to run. My first thought was of the same book that spoke of the treacherous apple of knowledge. The Bible. Except that the man with enormous wings was not held up by any wooden cross. He was suspended in mid-air with his arms out and his legs tied together. His eyes were closed. His brown-feathered wings were stretched wide.

He was naked, his bronze-skinned body, muscled and very very tall, at least compared to my 6-feet. He had Arab facial features like Saeed and a crown of wooly hair like mine. He was magnificent. Behind the glass dome was a rough wooden wall. The Backbone.

Behind me, I could hear them coming. Hacking and shooting through the plants and calling my name. I wasn’t going to get out. I walked up to the glass and placed a hot hand on it. The glass was thick and very cool. Was there even air in there? Was that how they held him? Was it like being in outer space? What was space like for a creature made to fly?

His eyes opened. I gasped and jumped back. They were brown and soft kind eyes.

“Oh my God, Phoenix! Step BACK!” one of the guards screamed, shoving aside a bush. I noticed the guard did not point his gun. Nor did the others who emerged beside him. I looked back at the man with wings. He was looking right at me, no expression on his face. I was surrounded by guards, all begging me to step away, pleading that this creature was unique and dangerous. However, none of them came to capture me. I didn’t move.

Seeing the Big Eye cower, seeing their fear and sheer horror had a strange effect on me. I felt powerful. I felt lethal. I felt hopeful, though all was hopeless. I turned to the caged man and my hope evolved into rage. Even he was a prisoner here. I vowed that if I didn’t get out, at least he would.

For the first time I did it voluntarily. I was already so hot and I grew hotter when I reached into myself, into all that I was, all that I had been and all that I would be, I reached in and drew from my source. Then I turned to a nearby tree and let loose a pulse of light. I sighed as it left me, feeling relief. Immediately the tree’s roots began to buckle and creep toward the glass cage.

CRASH! They easily forced their way through and the rest of the dome began to crack in several places. The Big Eye turned and ran for their lives. I didn’t bother running. There was no better way to die. He burst through, knocking me aside with the intensity of his wake. Into the now dense foliage of the greenhouse. I saw none of it, but I heard and smelled it. Wet tearing sounds, screams, ripping, snapping, choking, not one gun fired. The air smelled like torn leaves and blood. It was still happening when I spotted the stairway between the plants and ran into it. I ran down and down flights and came to a heavy open door and entered the lobby.

For a moment, even after all that I had seen, I forgot what I was doing. The sight took my breath away. Tower 7’s lobby was more spectacular than I’d ever imagined. No words could make up for actually seeing this place. This space. I had never been in such a space. The ceiling was so high and the marble walls were draped with gorgeous flowering vines, the small trees and plants growing through the soil-filled holes in the floor. I fought not to fall to my knees. There was the base of The Backbone. Its trunk had to be over thirty feet in diameter.

I was dizzy. I was burning up. I was amazed. I was exhausted. There was a freed angel beast massacring its captors nine floors above. I could hear more Big Eye guards coming down the stairwell. The alarm was blaring and the lobby was empty…except for a lone figure standing near the exit doors. He was grinning. He’d been trying to get to this very spot for nine years and my escape gave him the chance.

“Hurry,” Mmuo cried. “Phoenix, MOVE!” I heard them burst through the stairway. I was running. I dodged small trees, scrambled around benches and leapt over plants. The door was yards away. I was going to make it. Outside, people walking by stopped to look.

Then I saw the guards come running onto the tower’s wide plaza. They seemed to come from all directions. They shoved gaping people aside. They pulled up people who were sitting on benches enjoying the lovely evening. Then they formed a line blocking the exit and stood there, guns to their chests. I ran to Mmuo and would have given him a hug, if it weren’t for my heat. We’d both almost made it.

“Go,” I told him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?” I was having trouble thinking straight and I could smell the floor burning beneath me. I didn’t know marble could burn. “Saeed would have been proud. I am proud. I set an angel free.”

His eyebrows went up. “You…”

“Go!” I said, looking at the approaching Big Eye coming from the stairwell. They were flooding from doorways and were coming down an escalator on the other side of the lobby. “Don’t ever let them catch you!”

He sunk through the floor and was gone.

I stood tall. There were over a hundred of them. Men and women armed with the guns I had seen them carrying all my life. No Big Eye guard went anywhere in the tower without them. I knew how they sounded, too. Nearly silent. I had been hearing shots fired all my life, too. For a multitude of reasons, but always with the same result. Something or someone was dead or severely injured. “Protect the scientist from the subject.” “Observe and learn.” “We will be better for it.” “For the Research.” I was taking all the pieces I had read and finally putting them together. The Big Eye crowded around me, twitchy with anticipation as if I were evil. After all I had done, to them, I guess I was evil. Or crazy.

I held up my hands, feeling myself utterly shining. The light bloomed from my body. The release felt glorious and I moaned with relief. Then more sighing than speaking, I said, “I give…”

They opened fire and it was as if I were punched with steel fists in every part of my body- chest, neck, legs, arms, abdomen, face. I was blown back and my vision went red yellow. I lay on my back. Everything was wet, the smell of smoke in the one nostril I had left. Smoke and….the perfume of The Backbone. I was looking at it, gazing at how it reached, up, up, up, through the high marble ceiling, through the 39 floors above. Into the sky. Reaching for the sky.

I felt the radiance burst from me, warm, yellow, light, plucked from the sun and placed inside me like a seed until it was ready to bloom. It bloomed now and the entire lobby was washed. The Big Eye covered their faces and dropped their guns. A few ran to the stairwell, others to the far side of the lobby. Most of them ran past my mangled body and out of the building. Those ones must have known what would happen next.

I knew. I was burning as the light pulsated and pulsated from me there on the floor. My body convulsed with it as my clothes burned and then my flesh. There was no pain. My nerves were burning.

My light shined on the plants and tiny trees of the lobby and they began to grow wildly, stirred and amazed with life. Vines stretched, lengthened, thickened. Flowers twisted open. Pollen puffed the air sweet. Leaves unfolded and widened. The stone floors were covered with green yellow white brown black, the strongest roots cracking its foundation.

My light shined on the great tree that was The Backbone. Its roots groaned as they shifted, coiled, expanded, and caused the entire portion of the floor around its roots to buckle and fall apart. The tree’s colossal trunk twisted this way and that, shrugging off the building that was its shackle. Chunks of the floors above began to crash down around me. I was ashes being scattered by vines and roots when Tower 7 fell.

Several of the buildings beside the tower fell, too. The Backbone stood tall, stretching its branches and opening its enormous leaves over buildings and streets. At its base, a small lush jungle sprung from the rubble of Tower 7. All this in the middle of the city. Helicopters hovered, news crews streamed footage live, people gaped from afar. When the debris settled, there was a moment, where my brilliant light shined into the darkness, for it was now nighttime. The news cameras recorded the winged man flying out of the rubble but not much else lived, except the man who could walk through walls. Mmuo walked out of The Backbone’s trunk and stood before it. “This is what you all deserve!” he shouted, shaking his fist at the eyes of the hovering cameras. Then he sunk into the ground and was never seen again.

No one in the city would approach the ruins of Tower 7. They sat for seven days, a pile of those things Saeed used to eat: rubble, glass, metal and…ash. And then I realized the meaning of my name.

About the Author

Nnedi Okorafor is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Who Fears Death (a Nebula Award Nominee for “Best Novel”). Her YA novels include Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize), The Shadow Speaker (winner of the CBS Parallax Award) and Long Juju Man (winner of the Macmillan Prize for Africa). Her YA novel Akata Witch will be released in April, 2011. Okorafor is a professor at Chicago State University.

Perfect Lies

Gwendolyn Clare

The only enjoyable part of my daily meeting with Losin was the view. One large panoramic viewport made up the far wall of his grandiose office — a perk of being the Director-General of the UN Interworld Relations Organization. Losin sat facing the door instead, so while he talked I stared over his right shoulder at the starscape beyond.

The Mask People’s starship floated in the distance, gargantuan yet fragile, a city-sized architectural latticework sprawling in three dimensions. The vessel had synchronized its trajectory with our station’s orbit, so it seemed to hang motionless against a backdrop of crawling stars. I loved the look of it — so still, so stoic. A massive, involuted shell to hide the Mask People and all their teeming emotions.

Not that it mattered how I felt. I would do my job.

Losin paused. “Are you listening, Nora?”

I don’t generally look at people’s faces unless I have a specific reason for reading them. Too late, I remembered how little Losin cared for my natural stoic demeanor.

I shifted my gaze to make eye contact and twisted my mouth into a reassuring smile. “Of course, sir.”

“It’s critical to reach an agreement with no alterations to the trade proposal. I don’t care what you have to do to convince them, I want signatures on that document as is.” He was in his third decade of politics and had both the gray hair and the attitude to match.

I played a quick microexpression of surprise across my face, followed by half-concealed disagreement. “With all due respect, sir, we’re at the start of what will likely be a long and complicated interspecies relationship. Pushing too hard at this juncture could have unforeseen consequences.” Not to mention the consequences of deliberately misrepresenting our intentions, outright lying to them, and attempting to steal from them. All of which I would soon facilitate.

“You’ll play the game the way I tell you to,” he said, flashing an unconscious sneer. He thought of me as his puppet, a glorified translator and nothing more.

A now-familiar flame of spite flared in my chest. To be fair, “puppet” was pretty much the job description I signed up for. I wore the title of ambassador purely to avoid insulting the Mask People with my negligible political status. Problem was, I couldn’t seem to shut off my brain quite the way Losin wanted.

I also couldn’t help needling him. “What shall I tell the Prime Judge if he asks to meet with you?”

Losin flinched slightly from fear of the Mask People’s hyperobservant abilities. “That might be unavoidable.”

“Maybe we could arrange a social event,” I offered, raising my eyebrows with the suggestion. “Some polite conversation but no politics beyond ‘we’re glad you’re here.’ A short introduction would be enough to set their minds at ease.”

Losin stood and poured a drink from a bottle on the credenza as an excuse to not look at me. At the same time that he resented me for every scrap of limelight he had to share, he understood I was necessary. Me with my unique deficiency, my talent for inexpression.

He swirled his scotch, trying to hide his reluctance. “Not a bad idea. I’ll have my secretary put it on the schedule.”

Out the viewport, a fleck of movement caught my eye. Sunlight reflected off an approaching short-range transport, the shuttle dwarfed in comparison to the Mask ship from which it came. They were coming, eager and well-intentioned. For a fleeting moment, I wished I’d quit politics and taken up life as a hermit.

“One more thing,” Losin said. “We’ve had a rise in threats against Mask People and the Interworld Relations Organization since the trade talks were announced. Central security has cordoned off an area of the station for the Mask People, but I want you to be extra careful, especially when you’re outside the secure zone.”

“Of course, sir,” I said, and smiled a professionally fake smile — lips a little too tight, eye muscles not quite scrunched enough. “Will that be all?”

The newest member of my personal security detail, Iman Amiri, waited outside Losin’s door. He fell into step beside me as I strode down the hallway. He had a restless bounce in his step, and after a moment he asked, “What’s our status?”

“The Prime Judge should be docking soon,” I said. “Time to meet your first Mask People.”

Protocol demanded that two more security officers meet us at the Bay Two entry hall to be present during interspecies contact. They weren’t two I was particularly fond of. They belonged to the camp who referred to me as “the robot” behind my back, as if I wouldn’t find out about something so inane. Amiri either hadn’t picked up on the nickname yet, or had decided it wasn’t worth pissing me off just to fit in with his coworkers. I hoped it was the latter; I could use someone smart to balance out these meatheads.

“New kid gets the screen,” I declared, and the meathead named Gorsky passed the large, round holographic projection screen to Amiri. I controlled the screen’s image wirelessly, which was very convenient for communicating with Mask People, but the chip behind my ear did little to alleviate the robotic reputation.

To Amiri, I said, “You can talk to them but they won’t be listening to the words — they’ll get the meaning from reading your face.”

He nodded, quick and nervous. Nervous was okay — not anything the Mask People hadn’t seen a hundred times before. Hostile would’ve been a problem, but I didn’t read any of that in the microexpressions he kept trying to cover up. The trying was okay too — they would hardly notice the false stoicism overlaid atop the true emotions.

At the opposite end of the hall, a light on the wall flashed green to indicate their arrival, and the doors slid silently open to admit the Mask People.

The first feature anyone notices about the Mask People is their enormous faces. To say that a Mask Person has an enlarged face is like saying that a giraffe has an elongated neck or a blue whale is a bit heavy. Mask People are mostly face by volume, the round surface covered in feathery, dexterous appendages that they use as their primary means of communication. The facial feathers come in bright, carnival colors — tourmaline green and iridescent violet, sanguine red and sunlit yellow — though that’s not why they’re called Mask People. Still, the feathers are hard to miss.

Most of their musculoskeletal effort goes into supporting their massive faces, with mobility only earning a distant second place, so the Prime Judge and his entourage shambled forward in a zigzag of awkward steps. I’ve overheard the spaceport brats making Mask-People-tipping jokes the way my great-grandparents may have joked about cow-tipping as children. They did look rather like it wouldn’t take much of a push.

Despite their innocuous appearance, the Mask People were far from harmless. Their starship came equipped with technologies that made humankind’s ventures into space look like monkeys throwing sticks in the air. Nothing like an imbalance of power to make trade negotiations a little too interesting.

Humanity’s only advantage was that they had me.

Following the Prime Judge, the Mask Ambassador, and their personal staff came the Mask Bearers, carrying the unwieldy cultural artifacts from which their species took their name. The masks, unlike the Mask People’s true faces, bear no resemblance to carnival dress — they are plain and blank, expressionless, and large enough to entirely cover a Mask Person’s face. Even the eye holes have one-way reflective glass, so the wearer can look out without anyone seeing their eyes. For a race of hyperexpressive beings, masks provide the only means of privacy.

The Prime Judge extended one long, skeletal arm to clasp hands in the standard human fashion, and I wrapped my fingers around his skinny digits with an appropriate level of solemnity. Their upper limbs always put me in mind of starvation victims. Good thing I never show what I’m thinking.

The Prime Judge greeted me in his native language, facial feathers dancing. Well met, Human Ambassador. Reading their language required a somewhat diffuse gaze; if I stared at any particular spot on their face, I would miss subtleties elsewhere. He was testing me, curious to see how well I understood him.

Welcome to Sol System, Prime Judge, I said, mentally puppeting the holographic Mask Person face projected by the screen in Amiri’s arms. I tailored my answer to be formal and respectful but with undertones of warmth and gladness. After years of training to be able to puppet my own body, it hadn’t been much of a stretch to adapt to the screen instead. The feathers on the Prime Judge’s cheeks smoothed flat, surprised and impressed with my grasp of his language’s emotive subtleties.

Mask Ambassador, I said, looking at the Mask Person on its left, may I present New Security.

I translated the Mask Ambassador’s laconic greeting for Amiri and he replied with a simple “Hi.” He tucked his chin and glanced up at them and down again several times, awkward and anxious for their approval. I read amusement in the slow twirl of their feathers.

The introductions continued until everyone in the room had met everyone else down to the last Mask Bearer. In their culture, ignoring someone with an unmasked face was a terrible insult — even if that person, say a human security officer, would prefer to fade into the background. The custom also meant I had to shake the hand of each person I would shortly be backstabbing during the trade talks.

By the end, I was thankful that no actual discussion of policy was planned for the day, simply a mutual confirmation of the schedule for days to come. Once the introductions were completed, the Prime Judge seemed eager to move on to his private quarters; sometimes I think they visit purely to meet new people. Did I mention how very much they enjoy their introductions? It’s the people they’ve already met they grow tired of.

Not me, though, they don’t get tired of me because they can only read what I give them. By the end of the meeting, the Prime Judge left feeling reassured and a little intrigued. An excellent first impression. I earned their trust and felt sick all the while, knowing what was to come. If my face were chained to my innermost thoughts like a normal person, I would have grimaced.

Of course, if I were a normal person, the UN never would have slapped the ambassador label on me and shipped me up here. They hired me for the job because I was the only human they could find with the capacity for becoming fluent in the Mask People’s language. Also, because I was the only human who could successfully lie to them.

We had the rest of the day free, while the Mask People settled in to their temporary accommodations aboard the station. I dismissed the two meatheads and took Amiri with me when I left the entry hall. At the first major corridor junction, I turned toward the public sectors of the station.

Amiri raised an eyebrow at that, and I said, “We’ve got to make a stop.”

The Dark Moon Café offered garish décor and mediocre-to-awful food. More cafeteria than café, it was noisy, crowded, exposed, and I loathed it. We were served lunch, and I hoped my other purpose would be served as well.

“What exactly are we doing here? This is hardly a secure location,” Amiri said from across the table, displeasure showing in the crease of his brow.

“We’re fishing for extremists. If they’ve managed to get on board, I want to know about it.” The desire to do the exact opposite of what Losin instructed me to also may have contributed slightly, I admit.

“Draw them out using yourself as bait?” Amiri thought about it. “That’s nuts, but it’s my kind of nuts.”

“If they’re here, I’d rather we find them before they get a shot at the Mask People.”

I watched the crowd, scanning for tell-tale microexpressions of hate or disgust. We both picked at our food. Stake-outs weren’t a part of my usual repertoire, and this one gave me a strange combination of boredom and anxiety.

While he kept an eye on the exits, Amiri tried making conversation to relieve the tension. “Did you hear about the new Castillo Method results?” He’d been on the job for three weeks and hadn’t yet figured me out — though he kept fishing for clues.

“Nope,” I said, giving him none.

“They’re having some luck with sociopaths.”

I moved my gaze from the other patrons — none of whom displayed hostile intent — down to my half-eaten slice of quiche without making eye contact. “You’re suggesting I might be interested in the procedure, with regards to my condition.”

“They must be making progress if they can correct sociopathy now. And neural pathway realignment is noninvasive and very low risk. So why not?”

“I’d be out of a job, for one thing,” I said. And then, when he didn’t get it, “That was a joke.”

“Oh,” he said, and let himself grin.

I took another bite, chewed, swallowed. “I wonder how the sociopaths felt about the treatment.”

He grinned again. It wasn’t a joke this time.

I scanned the crowd once more. Either there weren’t any extremists on board, or they weren’t eating lunch at the Dark Moon like half the station was. It was frustrating not knowing, one way or the other. The last thing these trade talks needed was another element of uncertainty.

I forked one more mouthful, surgically removing the filling from the soggy crust, and slid the plate away. “Come on, new kid. There are other places to check.”

My parents thought I was a sociopath for a long time.

I hardly ever cried as a baby, and I never once smiled. It almost would have been a relief, I think, if I’d turned out to be severely mentally retarded. But as it was, I developed more or less normally, except that I utterly failed to express emotional responses or recognize them in others. My parents went through an endless stream of baffled child psychologists, all the while waiting for the tortured animal carcasses to start showing up.

But the problem wasn’t a lack of healthy emotions, simply an inability to communicate them. Finally they found a school — a special and very expensive school — that claimed to be up to the challenge, and they shipped me off. I never interacted with them outside of mandatory holidays after that. To this day I don’t know if they were ashamed of me, or ashamed of themselves for assuming their own daughter was a budding serial killer for so many years.

In school, I learned most of the regular drivel, but the classes that mattered were all about facial anatomy and body language and verbal inflection. I learned how to recognize emotions analytically, piece by painstaking little piece, and how to make my own muscles mimic them.

To everyone’s surprise, I got good at it — really good at it. Like an ESL student who knows better English grammar than a native speaker, I became more fluent in emotional expression than most of the people who use it naturally. The government recruited me when I turned eighteen.

Around one in four hundred people has a natural ability to read microexpressions and body language such that they can reliably tell when someone is lying. These people have been called “Truth Wizards.” I can do what they do, but I can do the opposite just as well. I suppose that makes me the “Falsehood Wizard.”

After a fruitless afternoon of scanning for extremists, I ate dinner in the security lounge with my staff so we could go over the work schedule for tomorrow. With each successive meeting between humans and Mask People, the anti-alien factions have spewed their xenophobic propaganda louder and louder. The station’s central security screens for anyone who poses a threat, but that just means the extremists need to act smarter to slip through.

Toward the end of the meal, I was finished with the business part and the men were chatting and joking among themselves.

“Hey Amiri, check this out.” Gorsky leaned over and poked me in the arm with his fork. It hurt. They all laughed when I didn’t flinch, all except Amiri who looked distinctly uncomfortable.

I stared at Gorsky, and my lack of expression set them to laughing for another round. That sound filled me with a black hatred for humanity.

I picked up my own fork and jabbed it down into the meat of his thigh, metal tines sinking into flesh. Gorsky’s eyes flew open with surprise and he howled his pain.

“You’re fired,” I said and stood to leave. “Amiri, come with me.”

Amiri seemed frozen in his chair for a moment before he scrambled to fall in step behind me. As we left, I heard Gorsky yell, “It was a joke, you crazy bitch!”

I thought about re-hiring him just so I could fire him twice. I should have put that whole situation to rest much sooner, before it got out of hand. Not very diplomatic of me. I’ve gotten so used to being isolated and ostracized that I suppose I stopped recognizing it for what it was: suffering in silence.

Story of my life.

“That was sort of amazing, what you did,” Amiri said later. It wasn’t technically his shift anymore, but I didn’t feel like facing the others.

We were in the sitting room of my suite — him fiddling with the settings on his standard-issue stunner and me reviewing the hundred-page-long trade proposal I’d be discussing the next day.

“It doesn’t concern you that your new boss stabbed one of her other employees?” I kept my eyes on the document, half-listening for his answer.

“No offense, but if the guy can’t defend himself against a pissed-off lady with a fork, he’s not much of a security officer.” He paused. “Why’d you do it, though?”

“I decided it was time to make a point,” I said, scrolling through to the next page.

“More like four points.” I could hear the grin in the timbre of his voice.

By page seventeen, I was treading water in an endless sea of legalese. The Mask People want to purchase asteroid mining rights, which is complicated enough on its own given that no one actually has a legal claim to the asteroid belt. And if they agree to trade their propulsion technology, then the very same mining resources suddenly become accessible and potentially desirable to humans, too.

Amiri interrupted again. “Wouldn’t things be easier if you pretended to be normal all the time? I’ve seen you working, you can mimic expressions perfectly. Why not just do that with everyone?”

“Because the act is a lie.” I set aside the document and looked up at him, curious to see how he’d react to my answer. “I never feel like smiling — I feel happy, and then I switch on a smile, like a robot executing an if-then command. It may look all warm and fuzzy and genuine to you, but it’s not.”

He cringed slightly at the robot reference, but he said, “If nobody can tell it’s a knock-off, what does it matter that it’s not the real thing?”

“I would know.” Sometimes it made me angry — the constant expectation that I pretend to be someone I’m not for the comfort and convenience of everyone else — but not right now. He was new and still trying to figure me out, which was more than meathead Gorsky ever did for me.

In the morning, I went early to the reception room to see Director-General Losin before the Mask People arrived. His back was to the door when I came in, but I caught him unconsciously wiping clammy palms on his trouser legs. Terrified. I held out a hand to tell my security detail — Amiri and Wellinger — to hang back, and I walked up beside Losin.

“They’re not psychic, you know.”

He jumped, then glared down at me for startling him. “What?”

“They can’t read your mind, just your face. All you have to do is stay focused on safe thoughts, safe emotions.”

“I know what I have to do, Nora.” Losin shifted his weight, restless, probably wondering how badly he could screw up his precious trade agreement with a single expression.

I admit, I was enjoying his discomfort. “Don’t worry. They’ll get bored with you pretty quick, so long as you don’t look like you’re hiding something,” I said and smiled sweetly.

Losin got back at me by assigning one of his own security detail to hold my screen, effectively tethering me to his side to serve as his personal translator for the morning. A small crew of central-security-approved caterers were already set up, and the other human guests began to arrive in ones and twos — whatever dignitaries Losin could manage to round up on short notice.

The Prime Judge, the Mask Ambassador, and their sizeable entourage arrived at the reception hall precisely on time. Within minutes, a few of the Mask People tired of Losin’s dignitaries and began to harass the caterers for introductions instead, offending the former and confusing the latter. I wished I could kick back and watch the hilarity ensue. But given that the average person could learn to recognize only a few of the most basic expressions in the Mask language, I was needed for any complicated interactions. My duties occupied my full attention.

Or almost all of it.

A movement in my peripheral vision distracted me. Across the room, one of the caterers walked with too much tension in his step and clutched his tray nervously. He was not here with the sole intention of serving appetizers.

I caught Amiri’s eye, then transferred my gaze quickly to the suspect and back again. He quirked a questioning eyebrow, not able to see the signs I saw. I widened my eyes and tilted my head down, insistent. A twitch of his shoulder, ceding the point, and he slid through the crowd in pursuit.

Amiri attempted to escort him out quietly, but the caterer stood his ground and started making a scene. The room fell silent as all the humans craned their necks to see what was going on. A couple other security officers descended on the caterer, and the ruckus ended with him stunned and dragged out of the room. At the door, Amiri turned to give me a slight nod, confirming that the suspect had something on him. Not a weapon, from Amiri’s expression. Poison, maybe. I’d have to ask him later.

I turned around again, intent on resuming my translator duties, but I froze when I saw Losin. His expression screamed, That moron is going to ruin all my plans.

I kept my own expression impassive and leaned in close to him. “Take a walk. Your face is a mess.”

He scowled, I met his gaze with an expressionless stare, and after a moment he relented. He wandered off and found a group of humans to socialize with until his thoughts were back under control. Relief washed through me. At least Losin had the sense to listen when it counted.

I caught the Prime Judge watching me, and the feeling of relief evaporated. My screen-holder in tow, I closed the distance to speak with the Prime Judge.

You saw all of that, didn’t you? I said, chagrined.

It rippled its facial feathers in the Mask Person equivalent of a wry smile. Of course.

Why didn’t you point out the threat before I noticed it?

I was curious to observe how your species would handle the situation.

And? I resisted the urge to look for Losin and check whether he had his expression under control yet.

The experience was informative, the Prime Judge said with a hint of cautiousness, almost suspicion.

I wondered whether the cautiousness was a response to the threat itself, or to Losin’s too-revealing reaction. Bluntness was often seen as a virtue in the Mask culture, so I said, It is not entirely safe for you here.

Yes, it said, at once resigned and forgiving — Losin had insisted on hosting the trade talks on the station. It would have been safer to meet on the starship, where we have adequate protection.

Doubt made me pause. This was supposed to be a social gathering, not a political tête-à-tête, but I needed to know more about how they viewed their own technology. Just “adequate”? Your species could sterilize the surface of our planet if you so desired.

The Prime Judge’s feathers smoothed with genuine surprise. Possessing the ability and possessing the intention are entirely different matters, Ambassador.

Indeed. If only that answer would satisfy Losin.

I knew that it wouldn’t. Losin was committed to a course of action, and I had no choice but to proceed as he’d planned.

The afternoon was reserved for the real work: trade negotiations. Amiri waited for me to finish lunch while Wellinger went ahead to secure the conference room. This arrangement was fine by me, since meathead Wellinger wasn’t likely to forgive me the Gorsky incident any time soon. I emptied my coffee cup, tucked all the necessary documents into a slim shoulder-bag, and made eye contact with Amiri to tell him I was ready.

Before Amiri joined my staff, I used to prefer multiple escorts. They talked among themselves and I could disengage, mentally withdraw from their company. Now it seemed almost comfortable, having Amiri all to myself.

We walked the spaceport corridors toward the designated meeting space, Amiri unconsciously matching my stride. Out in public, half his attention focused on scanning and evaluating — not too vigilant to hold up a conversation, but I wasn’t exactly feeling chatty with the trade negotiations only minutes away, so we walked in silence. The hallways seemed ominously long today.

I told myself I was just doing my job. The decisions had already been made by people more important and more knowledgeable than me. I was only a messenger, and none of it would be my fault. Not really.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Amiri tense in a way that shot adrenaline through my veins, and then all hell broke loose. The first two men closed with Amiri before he could unholster his stunner. The third and fourth stepped around them to come at me from both sides.

The one on my left said, “Eat this, bitch.” The one on my right fingered the handle of his shiv and said nothing. My own fingers tensed around the strap of my shoulder bag, readying to use it as a shield.

The sound of punches landing emanated from Amiri’s general direction, and his assailants fell to the ground, first one and then the other in rapid succession. He spun to face me, threw up his arm, and the other two dropped to the floor unconscious.

God he was fast. I never even saw him draw the stunner.

Back in my suite, I sipped from the glass Amiri gave me, hand shaking. Adrenaline — one of the few biochemicals I can honestly express, since it bypasses the brain and acts directly on muscle function.

I set the glass down so I wouldn’t drop it. “We need to reschedule the meeting.”

“Already done,” said Amiri.

“And have Gorsky forcibly removed from the station.”

“Gorsky?”

“They were waiting for me. There’s a short list of people who could’ve told them my schedule, and only one who recently took a fork in the leg.”

“Point,” he said, and dialed central security on his comm.

When he finished the call, he sat down across from me and leaned forward in the way people do when they’re trying to read someone. Force of habit, I suppose. He said, “You okay?”

“Yes.” The adrenaline high was fading and I felt too worn out to put on an act for him. “Honestly, I’m grateful for the delay.”

“Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good.”

I paused, considering how much to tell him. He’d saved my life; it seemed absurd to distrust him now. “In exchange for the asteroid mining rights they’ve requested, human technicians will be given full access to their onboard systems in the starship. And we promise not to copy any of their offensive technology, of course.” I looked up, to see if he got it.

“You’re kidding,” Amiri said. The kid was smart, I’d been right about that. “They’re going to trust us not to steal their weapon designs? That’ll end well. And you’re supposed to be selling this as a good plan?”

“We’re trying to establish a relationship of trust.” Trust we could exploit, of course. Never mind that, in the process of ensuring our martial adequacy against the Mask People, we might accidentally start the very war we sought to avoid. “Besides, our technicians are scrupulous and beyond reproach. That’s the party line.”

Amiri threw me a skeptical look. “The problem with telling perfect lies is that you might start believing them yourself.”

I would have winced then, were I normal. Amiri had no idea how close he came to hitting the mark — there’s nothing I fear more than the thought of the lies starting to control me, and not the other way around.

I didn’t share that with him. It was my right not to. I’m a professional at leaving things hidden and I don’t regret it — I tell myself I never regret it. I tell myself I like holding the world at arm’s length.

“You should call Wellinger. He’s probably still waiting in the conference room,” I said, ending the conversation.

The next morning, Amiri was on duty again for the rescheduled negotiations with the Mask People. We arrived at the conference room without incident. Wellinger reported the room secure and I told him to wait outside the door, which was against protocol but he did it anyway. I needed complete control over the negotiations, and I didn’t want his negative expressions cluttering up the room. Might give the Mask People the wrong impression about me — or the right one.

The Mask People entered through a door at the opposite end of the room, a small entourage preceding the more important political figures. The Prime Judge came in last, and he was wearing his mask.

I glanced at Amiri, who watched the masked Prime Judge with curiosity smeared all over his face. I said, “Think about something else.”

“What?”

“It’s extremely rude to inquire about mask wearing.”

“I wasn’t — ”

“Your face was,” I interrupted. “Think about anything else. You can think about screwing your girlfriend for all I care, just don’t wonder about the masks.”

He hunched his shoulders a little, embarrassed, and covered it up with a wry answer. “No pink elephants either, huh?”

I couldn’t blame him though. Secretly, I liked seeing them with their masks on, peaceful and flawlessly impassive. I am like a Mask Person who can’t take off the mask. I can never have an honest conversation with my own species; either it’s not honest, or it’s not a conversation, not the kind they want anyway. At least the Mask People understand the virtue of being hidden. Safety in isolation.

The Prime Judge’s mask came off and was passed to a Mask Bearer. Then the usual extensive greetings were exchanged all around, and we settled down to business.

The first hour or so of the meeting was an overview of the trade proposal, each party confirming that we understood all of the major points. Though I didn’t look at Amiri, his presence weighed on my awareness. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, I couldn’t stand not knowing what he was thinking. I threw him a sideways glance.

He smiled back at me with his eyes. It was only a momentary tensing of his lower lids, but I read warmth and confidence there. It was a smile that said, I’m not worried because I trust you’ll do the right thing.

The smile hit me like a punch, and I was yet again grateful my reaction stayed internal. The Prime Judge only saw Amiri’s half of the visual conversation. But beneath my silent face, Amiri’s words from last night echoed around my brain.

I was born to lie, that much was inescapable. But Amiri had been right: I should make the lies, not let the lies make me. Even a liar can sometimes show the truth about themselves, embedded in the rhyme and meter of their falsehoods.

As the meeting progressed, I meticulously emoted a fraction less enthusiasm than formal Mask-Person etiquette dictated. Not enough difference for my human overseers to detect, but then the Prime Judge was ever so much more sensitive than they were. All I needed was to light a spark of suspicion.

We reached the end of the document and the conversation floated away from the particulars to less concrete matters. The Prime Judge asked, How do your superiors feel about this agreement? A question that would have seemed odd between human ambassadors, but Mask People are accustomed to always knowing how everyone feels.

They are very eager to establish economic relations, I said. Entirely true, and beyond reproach from the viewpoint of a human negotiator. But on they, I gave a subtle emphasis of detachment, expressing a desire to disassociate myself from them.

The Prime Judge paused, considering my meaning. They come with honorable intent?

They will thoroughly fulfill their trade obligations — which was also true, but not the same as a “yes.”

We are concerned that trade remain peaceful and amicable.

Your offensive technology is far superior. How could humans pose a threat to you?

The Prime Judge rippled his feathers thoughtfully. Thank you, Ambassador. I believe we have reached an understanding.

The thing about perfect liars is they can fool anybody. You can never be sure whose side they’re on.

Director-General Losin was, needless to say, extremely displeased. Shall I describe his anger? The deep scowl, the tight jaw, the jutted chin? Anger is a simple emotion to read — it so rarely tries to hide itself.

“What happened in there? You seemed to be doing an acceptable job at the start.” He’d been watching on the security cam, of course. “Then suddenly they want to back out and redraft the agreement? Explain that to me!”

I shrugged, lacing the gesture with nervousness and confusion. “I don’t know what happened, sir.”

“You damn well must’ve screwed something up.”

“They changed their minds. I have no idea why.”

“And you’re going to tell me with a straight face that you did everything in your power to convince them to approve the proposal?”

“Yes,” I lied with ease. “Now that is something I can do.”

About the Author

Gwendolyn Clare has a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, and is currently working to add another acronym to her collection. Away from the laboratory, she enjoys practicing martial arts, adopting feral cats, and writing speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Ekaterina Sedia’s Bewere the Night anthology, Daily Science Fiction, and Abyss and Apex, among others.

Cinema 2.0: The Future of Movie Making?

Mark Cole

Film producer Matt Hanson calls it Cinema 2.0. Using a radical new model derived from the social networking web phenomenon and the Creative Commons/Open Source movement, this unprecedented evolutionary step in the development of cinema throws aside traditional studio production methods in favor of a decentralized, web-based approach.

Several high-profile projects on the web have embraced this new paradigm — and many of the most visible efforts using some form of this “crowdsourcing” are science fiction films. That this new cinema should have attracted the interest of the SF fanatics out there can hardly be said to be much of a surprise: after all, this is the movie production method of the future.

Isn’t it?

And that’s the real question: are we witnessing the end of yet another antiquated steam-age industry — or merely the runaway expansion of a new tech bubble on the verge of bursting? Is this really the wave of the future — or is it just science fiction?

One of the first to dabble in this approach — director Timo Vuorensola — made the most successful movie ever released on the Internet. Over eight million people have downloaded the free Finnish SF comedy Star Wreck since its release in 2005. Mostly shot on greenscreen in someone’s apartment, the film looks like a professional Hollywood product — although the commercial film industry would never greenlight an absurd Finnish-language parody that ends with an all-out battle between Star Trek and Babylon 5. Star Wreck was the product of a team of around 3000 volunteers, although Vuorensola found it difficult to organize such a large number of people. Somehow out of the chaos, the quick fixes and ad hoc solutions, he eventually learned how to gather volunteers, how to break the many important jobs down into smaller tasks, and how to distribute these among the helpers.

Vuorensola and his team took all this knowledge and found a way to automate the process — which led to the creation of a new website, www.WreckAMovie.com. Not only did they use the site to launch their new movie effort, Iron Sky, but they opened it up to other filmmakers who wanted to create their own crowdsourced movies. The site now hosts over a hundred projects by other creators.

Looking through the various projects on WreckAMovie gives an impression of what the Cinema 2.0 process might look like in action. The films include both shorts and feature length projects; everything from horror, SF and superhero films to industrial film projects and a few frankly experimental efforts. Some seem quite personal, while others (like Storm Warning’s Zombie SS troopers) could be routine Hollywood exploitation flicks. One film — the first outside project launched on the site, a Finnish horror film called Sauna — is actually finished (it had a budget of over a million dollars). Another project, Marsipan, has already produced a series of short animated comedies, with more to follow. One author launched an attempt to create a collaborative novel, while the makers of the German apocalyptic SF film Taiketsu: Future Babylon Chronicles have decided to use WreckAMovie to create a sequel. A group of fans plan to create a Star Wreck short (Star Wreck 2pi: Twistdrive). Perhaps the most intriguing entry comes from the producers of a television show who hope to find visual effects experts online — and they insist this is a paying gig.

Some of the projects look quite professional — even commercial. Others seem inept, amateurish or (like a planned short film, currently on hold while they try to get Bruce Timm’s permission to adapt one of his Batman stories) hopelessly naive. Perhaps many of these projects will never go anywhere as they only have one or two members at present.

At least one of them looks like it might be worth watching: Snow Blind, an SF spaghetti western set in a snowbound post-apocalyptic world. But perhaps that’s just because their poster is so cool — almost as cool as Iron Sky’s trailer.

In 1944, the Nazis discovered the secret of anti-gravity and set up a secret base on the far side of the Moon. In the year 2018, they return to conquer the earth. Iron Sky’s creators launched their project with a stunning two-and-a-half minute teaser trailer featuring incredible images of Nazi flying saucers, of the moon landings and the secret Nazi moonbase. They describe it as a dry comedy inspired by Doctor Strangelove and the look of alien invasion movies like Independence Day. Slated for a 2011 release, Iron Sky, like Star Wreck, will be released on the web for free download. It already boasts its own website (www.ironsky.net), a variety of posters and publicity images, and this time the film will be in English. It boasts a planned five million dollar budget and a script by Johanna Sinisalo, Finland’s best known science fiction writer (and no, this is not another example of the dry Finnish wit: her first novel Not Before Sundown (Troll in the US) has received a number of awards, including the Tiptree, and was translated into 20 languages).

Timo Vuorensola plans to gather ten thousand active volunteers into his filmmaking community this time. To get an idea how this will work, consider some of the current tasks posted on the site: one called for weapon designs, another for concept drawings of space ships. These vehicles would be part of a fleet of Earth vessels sent up to fight the Nazis — those produced by nations other than the United States. However, as the film is set only nine years into the future they had to represent a reasonable extrapolation from current technology. Another task asked for help with the US space fleet, although this was a writing task, not a graphic one, dealing with the question of the make-up of the fleet, the names of the ships and other details. As with most of the other collaborative film projects on the web, the writing tasks are set up as open forums for each particular part of the script: participants comment on and help to refine the text. Think of it as a variation on the traditional script conferences used by traditional studio movies — only with (potentially) thousands of participants offering their comments.

While Timo did not release Star Wreck in an Open Source format and has not offered to do so with Iron Sky, he has flirted with the notion in one of the movie’s side projects. He released all the film elements of the Iron Sky trailer and invited people to edit their own versions of it (although any version without the trailer’s annoying theme song would be an improvement!).

More radical is the approach adopted by another creator, Solomon Rothman. Rothman first toyed with the idea of Open Source film when he released his first short, “Boy Who Never Slept.” He posted all the original footage and source materials online for anyone who wanted to put together his own version.

But he went beyond this with his second project, an SF short film, “Jathia’s Wager.” He started by releasing a script outline online, along with a call to action, asking for volunteers who wanted to work on a no-budget film.

While his volunteers helped develop the script, he also hoped that other people would make their own versions of his film. He gave them the opportunity to create their own script from his scenarios and at every step Rothman posted the newly completed segments — including his film rushes — under a Creative Commons license that made them available for use by other filmmakers. Some of his materials actually came out under a form of the license that allows their commercial use.

Perhaps no other element of the various Cinema 2.0 proposals is quite as exotic as this fascination with remixing. It is curiously common in the world of the Internet — thousands of “mashups” lurk out there on YouTube — but remixing is the one element of these all these plans that the mainstream industry will never accept. Even a director as open to new technologies as George Lucas tried to stamp out the various “Phantom Edit”s of Episode One (although the fact that they were better than his original might have something to do with this. One suspects, though, if it had been Steven Spielberg, he might have bundled them with a multi-disk release of his film!)

How might collaboration work on a film project? In one sequence, Rothman filmed an actor portraying a “universal life form” in front of a greenscreen in Ventura, California, which he would later combine with an exterior location shot. Rothman had a British voice actor record the lifeform’s lines in England, with the help of a group of sound engineers he’d located on the web. Finally, he redid the special effects used to create the final image three times, after a flurry of e-mail exchanges with various members of his team.

Solomon Rothman released the finished film on the web on March fourth of 2009. However, his collaborative plans go even further than Jathia’s Wager. He plans to explore the universe he created in other films, and hopes that other directors will do so as well. He set up his own moviemaking website, moviepals.org (which resembles WreckAMovie.com in many ways), and he hopes that it will generate other new collaborative films.

The most ambitious plan for creating a “Cinema 2.0″ SF thriller came from an experienced digital producer, Matt Hanson.

It used to take Matt Hanson ten minutes to explain when anyone asked him what he did, but then his girlfriend coined the term “film futurist.” Back in 1996, he created the “onedotzero” digital film festival, which has become the largest festival dedicated to cutting-edge digital imagery. When he learned that there weren’t enough digital films around for the festival, he started commissioning and producing digital shorts. In recent years, he wrote several books on his vision of the future of film. With the rise of MySpace and other social networking sites as his inspiration, he put together A Swarm Of Angels, a project intended not merely to make a single film, but to create a networked online film production community.

And his vision is decidedly ambitious. He wants to make a movie with a budget of over one million pounds Sterling, which he plans to raise by subscriptions from the members of the Swarm. He intends to recruit fifty-thousand members, each of whom would contribute twenty-five Pounds (about forty dollars at current exchange rates) to the project. At least in the early stages of the process, he offered different levels of memberships at various prices, but the number of slots in each order were strictly limited. Despite these different levels, the swarm is a meritocracy: members advance in its hierarchy based on their performance. Ultimately, Hanson hopes, when the final project is filmed, that he can recruit many of the artistic and technical people he needs from within the Swarm’s membership.

What do Swarm members get for their money? There will be some nice goodies along the way, special promotional items and videos, but the main draw is that you get to contribute to a real movie — one that millions of people will one day see.

Currently, he has the Swarm working on two separate scripts: The Unfold, and The Ravages (formerly Glitch), both of which might loosely be called thrillers with soft SF elements. The Unfold begins when a musician receives a call from his mother — who supposedly died five years before. She is trapped in the mysterious Fold — but rescuing her may mean the end of the world. The Ravages involves a love quadrangle set against a world in which neo-luddites persecute a virtual reality underground movement. Ultimately the Swarm will vote to film one of these two scripts.

This is one of the more remarkable aspects of the Swarm: all major creative decisions are put up to a vote of the entire community. What is even more remarkable is that Matt Hanson feels that this process will give him even more freedom to put his own vision on the screen than the traditional studio model: he gets final say on which ideas from the forums will end up in the film — and he knows that Hollywood expects the director to dance at the whim of the money people.

But the Swarm’s mission goes beyond filming Matt Hanson’s first full-length movie. One of the early decisions made by the Swarm was that they would put any money that their movie made towards filming their next project. While they intend to release the film for free, they know that there will be profits along the way — and Hanson hopes that they will set up the Swarm as an independent film production company, able to make its own unique products without having to answer to outside backers.

Not only does Hanson have his own considerable experience to draw from, but he recruited a group of advisors who include SF author, free culture advocate and copyright activist Cory Doctorow, cult comic book artist Warren Ellis (creator of such works as Planetary, Transmetropolitan and Orbiter), pioneer digital film producer Tommy Pallotta (who produced Richard Linklater’s eccentric animated adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly), and musical mashup artist Eric Kleptone of The Kleptones. The Swarm’s membership is now over a thousand members and, after a brief hiatus while they prepared for the next step of the production, they are once again ready to recruit the next flight of new members.

There is something truly awe-inspiring about Matt Hanson’s plan, something about its radical approach, its heavy-hitting team of advisors, its aggressive take-no-prisoners challenge to the cinematic powers that be. If they do manage to gather a substantial amount of capital the Swarm could become a major player in the industry — and its members might end up reaping cash profits from their original investment.

And yet one feels a little like Sancho Panza, watching uneasily as his master levels his lance at the windmill’s vanes. It seems too ambitious, too programmed, too much like one of those get rich quick books sold on late night TV. It might work. It might. Really.

It merely seems unlikely

Science fiction has not fared well in the hands of the traditional film production process. Blame the difficulty of bringing any idea through the convoluted production maze intact; the all too common bias that sees SF as something essentially juvenile; the demands of hesitant investors; the belief that a genre that commands a largely male audience should have lots of bullets, babes and bombs; or whatever other reasons come to mind. What is certain is that some of the most creative SF films (Primer, Cube, Dark Star and so forth) have come from outside that process.

The freedom that Cinema 2.0 promises might result in an unprecedented explosion of serious science fiction films. It could unleash the creativity of countless creators and allow them to work together no matter how far apart they are.

Or it might be a chimera, a pretty delusion which never takes us anywhere.

Is it future or fiction?

Unfortunately, only the future can truly answer that question.

But until then you might as well keep your eyes out for Snow Blind, The Unfold, Iron Sky or whatever else these wild-eyed film radicals might make.

They’re guaranteed not to be commercial…

Iron Sky completed filming in early February and is now being edited.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His stories have appeared at Flash Fiction Online (“Reverse Engineering”) and Abyss And Apex (“I Expect There Will Be A Reason Soon”), and his musings on Science Fiction at IROSF.com.

Drama Hobbits, Mosquitoes, and Other Negotiations: A Conversation with Cory Doctorow

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Cory Doctorow has a pretty straight-forward job. All he has to do is, as he says, “keep up with new technological developments” and write prose that makes his readers want to live life as though it were, to borrow from Dennis Lee and Alasdair Gray, the first days of a new and better world. To that end, Doctorow writes with a clear-eye, a biting wit, and a relentless intolerance for social injustice.

A Canadian-born son of teacher-activists, Doctorow is journalist, blogger, speculative fiction writer, and activist. He’s also very much an idealist.

“When I was five they told me I was going to march at my aunt’s wedding,” Doctorow said. “They said, ‘Cory, do you know how to march?’ And I said, ‘Of course I do!’ I mimicked carrying a placard and walking back and forth shouting, ‘Not the church and not the state, women must control their fate!’ Idealism has been in my make up for a very long time.”

In addition to co-editing the website Boing Boing, Doctorow has written for such publications as The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Wired, and the Guardian. His novels have all been released by Tor, HarperCollins UK, and electronically under the Creative Commons License. They include, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and Makers. He’s also written two novels for young adults, Little Brother and For the Win.

His other books include the short fiction collections, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present and With a Little Help, and non-fiction, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction and Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. He has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Prometheus Award, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and British Science Fiction Awards.

Last year, Doctorow’s quest for a better world took on a new urgency when he became a new parent. He and I spoke while he was touring for his recent novel, For the Win, and our conversation covers topics such as video games, parenting, collective negotiation, and, of course, writing.

How’s the tour going?

Tours are great. They’re very hard work in that you don’t get enough sleep and you’re very busy, but fundamentally what you’re busy doing is going to places where large groups of people tell you how much they like your books. There are much worse things you could do. I miss my family and I wish I could get more sleep, but in the grand scheme of things [touring] is just not a hardship.

Have there been any strange moments?

There’ve been a couple pretty weird ones. I’ve had two funny misunderstandings. A friend of mine was interviewing me for the Guardian over Skype at six in the morning in San Francisco. It was later in the day for her, obviously, and luckily she’s a good friend. I forgot the camera was on and answered the phone naked. I’d been up since five but I hadn’t gotten dressed yet.

The other funny bit was when a guy came to my signing in Austin and I said, “What would you like in your book,” and he said, “Drama Hobbit.” I said, “Drama Hobbit?” And he said, “Yeah,” so I drew him the most dramatic Hobbit I could. I’m not much of a drawer and I said, “There you go!” And he said, “No, no, draw Muhammad.” Well, nobody knows what he looks like…

Do you ever lose track of where you are and what you’re doing?

A couple of times. For all my blithe and macho bluster about how easy a tour is, not sleeping is actually really hard as any new parent will tell you. [Lack of sleep] makes it hard for your brain to work. You don’t make long term memories when you don’t sleep. This is why parents have second kids, because they literally can’t remember how hard the first kid was.

[Without sleep], you get disoriented. Several times on this tour I’ve woken up in a dark hotel room and not remembered which city I was in. I tried to feel my way in the dark to a bathroom that was in a totally different place. Luckily, I found the bathroom or that would have been another, even more embarrassing story about the tour.

Has being a parent changed your writing life much — what you write about, when or how you write?

It’s changed a little bit about how I write. Working for EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and having a really, really busy and demanding job, meant that I had to cleanse myself of any urge to be ceremonial when I wrote — to be sure that the universe was all in alignment before I could put my fingers on the keyboard or to have the right music or a cigarette (back when I was a smoker) or whatever. It meant that the only way I could conceivably be a writer was if I wrote whenever there was a minute. The secret to being a writer when you have a baby is: whenever the baby is asleep you write. When the kid’s asleep, you do stuff, whether that stuff is relaxing or cleaning the house or whatever that’s your moment to do it because you really can’t do it when the kid is awake. That’s also the secret to being a successful parent. At least for the first kid. I don’t know how people with two kids do it. So [parenthood] made me even more disciplined about just writing when the moment presents itself.

In terms of subjects, I find myself coming back more to Dennis Lee’s aphorism, “Work as though you lived in the early days of a better nation,” which Alasdair Gray quoted and which is engraved over the doors of the Scottish Parliament. [My] fiction has an element of didacticism and idealism in it and I find myself thinking about how this might inspire my readers to “work as though it were the first days of a better nation” or a better world that my daughter can inherit.

Has being a parent given you license — though that’s probably not the right word — to be more outwardly idealistic?

[Laughing] You know what? I’ve been pretty idealistic all my life. My mom was a pro-choice feminist activist and in the first photo of me that ever appeared in the newspaper I was being held aloft by Doctor Henry Morgentaler who’d just received the Order of Canada. [He is] the doctor famous for bringing legal abortions to Canada and he was forever being arrested before abortions were legal. [The picture was taken] at a fundraiser for him at a restaurant in Toronto. I was about four, wearing a spiffy tartan suit. [Idealism] has been in my blood forever.

Both of your parents were teachers and activists. Did you ever go through a period of rebellion against their worldview?

It’s funny. We have this notion, probably from watching sitcoms like Family Ties, that the opposite of an activist is a conservative. But that’s not the opposite of an activist. The opposite of an activist is a civilian. It’s someone who actually just doesn’t care about politics. To go back to Family Ties, the person who is most in opposition to the parents wasn’t the Michael J. Fox character — I can’t believe I’m doing this with Family Ties — it was the sister, the one who was a beauty queen. She had no firmly held beliefs of any kind on any social issue. That really is the exact opposite of being a political person.

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. Love and hate are at least on the same axis. They are both firmly held beliefs. They just happen to be polar opposite firmly held beliefs. But on that one criteria — is this belief strongly held? — they’re identical.

I’ve had and have quibbles with my parents’ political beliefs. I’m skeptical, for example, of the centralist urge of Marxism and I think that Marxism and Keynesianism and other market ideologies are built on worlds in which they really couldn’t conceive that goods that were scarce might become less scarce by demand. Like the Napster economy where the more people there are who want a song the more copies there are that appear all over the internet and the less scarce it becomes. This is the reverse of all our traditional economic thinking in which things that people want a lot of, the supply of it dwindles.

As you’ve been traveling across the States, have you run into much resistance to your advocacy of unions in For the Win?

The only thing that really exercises parents, teachers, and school boards is sex and particularly gay sex, which I’ve yet to write, but which I must do someday just for the sheer pleasure of attracting that malicious approbation.

I wrote a book, Little Brother, for young people, which is essentially a manual for over-throwing the state. And the only thing that I’ve ever had a complaint about from an authority figure was that the kids sassed their elders, drank beer, and that a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, both of whom are deeply in love and in a committed relationship, put on a condom, wriggle their eyebrows at each other, and the chapter ends. The next chapter strongly implies that they’ve just lost their virginity to each other. The message from authority figures seems to be, by all means tell them how to overthrown the state if you must, but you must never imply that 17 and 18-year-olds have sex — let alone safe sex.

There are plenty of excesses in the trade union movement. I would be the first to admit that the trade union movement has done some bad and dumb things in its history. People whose job it is to solve a problem often end up being people whose job it is to preserve the problem, so they can go on solving it. But collective negotiation is an unalloyed good. Groups of people who can get together and negotiate collectively in their interests are what make the world go ’round.

If you shop at Costco, you’re doing collective negotiation. You and your neighbors have joined, essentially, a co-op that buys goods in bulk in order to command better prices. That’s what collective negotiation is. If you’ve ever gotten a group rate for a bunch of friends or for your wedding party at the local hotel, that’s collective negotiation. It’s a bunch of people who realize that together they have more power than they would’ve had individually. I’ve yet to have any critic of the labor movement explain to me how it is that workers are supposed to balance their power and their employer’s power, apart from gathering together and negotiating as a group. It seems pretty obvious to me that a single worker who goes to her employer and says, “I feel like the way that you work me is unfair and I’ve got these suppurating wounds from work without adequate protective gear. I think that you should take some of your profits and divert it to safety equipment” — why wouldn’t that worker just be shown the door if it wasn’t for either regulations that rose in the wake of the trade union movement or from the trade unions themselves. So, I think, there are lots of things the trade union movement has gotten wrong over the years and continues to get wrong, but I do think the trade union movement is pretty necessary.

What is it about workers organizing that threatens people?

One of the great tricks of the ruling elite in America is to convince every poor person that he is a rich person in waiting. There are a lot of workers who, when they think about their interests, think, “Well, eventually I’m going to own a factory and when that happens I want to get a better deal out of my work force and I won’t be able to do that if there are trade unions around.”

There has been a very successful movement convincing people that unions do more harm than good. Or that the need for unions is past. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed a weekend off, an eight hour day, a forty hour week, safety equipment at the office, or the pleasure of having children who aren’t mangled by industrial machinery has the unions to thank for it. [Unions] can be cumbersome sometimes. Certainly I’ve chaffed at a science fiction convention when, for example, we wanted to plug in another microphone and we couldn’t do it because there was a union rule. We probably need some regress of that. And there are unions that have been captured by organized crime over the years. But the excesses of capital and corporations are numerous as well and you sound like a radical loony when you call for their abolition. Nevertheless, it seems pretty obvious to me that companies have done all kinds of crazy and terrible things, all over the world, all the time.

Does your being Canadian give you a clearer few of all this? Does it help you see through the “poor person in waiting” idea?

There are lots of Americans who don’t feel that way. I don’t think it’s unique to Canadians. And Canadians have elected four consecutive conservative governments. So we certainly don’t have a monopoly on progressive thought.

Canadians do have a small advantage, at the best of times, understanding American society because we’re close to it but not inside of it. It’s the same advantage that the unpopular kid has in becoming an anthropologist of the schoolyard. He’s there, in the thick of it, but he’s not a part of it. Its cherished illusions pass him by. That’s why there are so many Canadian comedians and writers who are so well liked in America.

Speaking of schools and schoolyards, I recently taught in a high school that required all students to have a laptop. I was continually surprised by the growing antagonism and hostility toward computers and computer games from other teachers and parents. Elsewhere you’ve said — and I’m paraphrasing — that with technology fluency comes from play, experimentation, and failure. That suggests that computers and other technologies are ideally suited for the classroom.

In some ways it’s not new. There’s a wonderful Tom Standish article in Wired Magazine some years ago about the moral panic over games which is a retrospective look at other moral panics. The first one he was able to identify was over the waltz and the negative effect the waltz would have on America’s young people’s morals. It would distract them from more serious and important things and so on. You can almost trade the word “game” for “waltz.”

The other media that have been villainized in America include the novel, which was going to be the corrupting downfall of young ladies, jazz (of course), rock and roll (doubly, of course), movies, comics, science fiction. We burned comics by the mountain full after Seduction of the Innocent [by Fredric Wertham] was published [in 1954].

In some ways it’s not video games, it’s whatever it is that young people are doing that is not immediately accessible to their elders. Video games, of course, have the double whammy of not only being a medium whose virtues may not be immediately accessible to their elders but also a medium that provides for a kids-only conversational space that elders can’t effectively wire-tap or control. It’s a place where kids can actually talk to each other.

When you play a World of Warcraft mission that requires that you gather up 50 or 60 other people and go make war on some imaginary monster for four hours together — that’s the second game you play. The first game you play is the old game of “how do you convince 50 or 60 people to come and hang out with you for several hours.” That’s a game we’ve been playing since we got neocortices and it’s probably the most satisfying game our brains know about.

Is it somehow less of a human interaction if we do it through a machine? Is there less communication, less developing of empathy, more hiding behind a screen name? These seem to be many of the concerns floating about.

There’s another example of selective amnesia, right? Of causality going in the wrong direction. The reason kids don’t go outside is because we prohibit them from all public spaces. If they play video games more avidly than they might’ve a generation ago, it’s partly due to the fact that we’ve replaced parks with malls that don’t allow kids to hang out in them.

In England, we have this thing called the “Mosquito.” Do you know about the Mosquito? It’s a sound generator that creates a tone that you can’t hear when you get older. It’s incredibly annoying. It’s used to keep young people from congregating. It’s a one-two punch. On the one hand, you fear young people in groups and their delinquency and, on the other hand, you fear for young people in groups and the notional stalking pedophile who will come and snatch them up. We’ve essentially prevented young people from going anywhere. Video games present a really important escape valve from adult scrutiny and restrictions on mobility.

This is an extremely convenient way to think about video games after fifteen years of listening to fear mongers tell you that you must never let your children out of your sight. To then say, “My kid never goes out of doors is because he plays too many games because I’ve prohibited him from doing so.” I think we do have an intuition that bubble-wrapping our kids and chaining them to the front yard is pretty bad for them, but at the same time we’ve been told over and over again that failing to do so makes you a bad parent because of all the stalkery pedophiles out there then you’re kind of caught as a parent between a rock and a hard place.

In terms of whether or not games constitute a real form of communication… mediated communication is real communication. We’ve had that question for a long time. There were people who thought the interstate highway system would destroy community because real conversation was talking to people who lived close to you. It wasn’t conversations with random drifters who came in and out of town. You couldn’t have a meaningful conversation unless you were having it with someone who shared your frame of reference and who was talking about stuff that mattered to you.

Neil Postman wrote a pretty good book about this called Amusing Ourselves to Death. He pointed out Thoreau saying we’re so anxious to complete the telegraph between Atlanta and Boston, I think it was, but it may be that Atlanta and Boston have nothing to say to one another. We’re so eager to complete the trans-Atlantic telegraph line, but it may be that the first thing that crosses that line and enters the broad, flapping American ear is that Princess Anne has the whooping cough.

People have been saying the communications that are sui generis to new media are trivial and illegitimate or less real for as long as we’ve had new media. Maybe this is part of the aphorism my friend Jim Griffon likes, which I think maybe Douglas Adams originated, which is, [something to the effect of], Everything invented before you were twenty has been there forever. Everything invented before you were thirty is the most revolutionary technology ever, and anything invented after that should be banned.

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.