Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 121

Table of Contents

The Next Scene

by Robert Reed

One Sister, Two Sisters, Three

by James Patrick Kelly

The Calculations of Artificials

by Chi Hui

Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home

by Genevieve Valentine

Rusties

by Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu

Old Domes

by JY Yang

The Very Pulse of the Machine

by Michael Swanwick

Méliès to Bonestell: Relevancy and Realism in Cinematic Science Fiction

by Mark Cole

Jazz Music and Greek Myths: A Conversation with Peter S. Beagle

by Chris Urie

Another Word: The Ship’s Voice: A Risk Analysis and Modest Proposal

by Fran Wilde

Editor’s Desk: A Decade

by Neil Clarke

Samyaza, Angel of Pride

Art by Peter Mohrbacher

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2016
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Next Scene

Robert Reed

It’s a normal enough morning. Fresh out of the shower, I’m fending off advances. One girl offers up crying jags while throwing desperate glances in my direction. Will I play the big sister, ask what’s wrong and let her monologue for twenty minutes? Never, and kid, let me tell you how much I hate bottled wailing. An older couple is doing lurid yoga on matching mats. I’ve worked with them before. Just once. But porn doesn’t pay much better than idle conversation about the weather. And then there’s a beefy fellow that I don’t know. Standing close to the ladies’-only side of the locker room, he’s claiming that we used to be neighbors, and don’t I remember him?

“What, like when we were kids?” I ask.

He says, “Yes.” Then, “No.”

I don’t like stories that shift.

“We were neighbors last year,” he offers, tossing in an oversized wink. Which is a big problem. Winks are an amateur’s trick. But of course a girl like me has to work with amateurs, and I’ll admit that the fellow has a respectable smile. Standing behind the line, wiping himself down with a scratchy locker room towel, he might be my best prospect. And that’s why I play interested, sitting on a stool, smiling and nodding at him while my complimentary towel digs into my bare ass.

At least one public locker room every day. That’s my routine. Put myself where at least three cameras watch over me, surrounded by a bunch of naked people, everyone as clean as can be.

“You lived across the street from me,” he says.

I nod, glad for one good specific.

“I used to watch you from my window,” he offers.

That’s when everything turns obvious. This stranger is hoping that the next scene blossoms into something long-term, maybe even romance, and shit, this is one storyline that I don’t need.

“All those missed opportunities,” he says, sounding ten times creepier than he realizes. I hope.

The crying girl. Suddenly she deserves another look. And there’s an old lady hiding in back. We’ve done a few good-mother, bad-daughter scenarios.

That’s the state of my head before everything changes.

Changes in an instant.

Locker rooms are full of noise. Light fixtures humming, fans blowing. And sure, water is always busy somewhere. But when the patrons stop talking, that’s noticeable. Everybody here is hungry to be noticed. So something’s definitely up when the entranceway falls quiet. I can almost hear the silence walking towards us. The yoga couple get off their mats, and what they see deserves big smiles. My crying girl breaks into laughter and starts to applaud. Honest-to-god applause. Which is crazy until I see who’s coming, and then sure, it makes sense. Cheers and elation. Let’s give it up for one of the champions in the only profession in the world that pays shit.

Only one of us doesn’t notice the newcomer. Or the fellow is a far better actor than I realized.

“I always hoped we’d cross paths again,” he says.

My never-next-door neighbor.

“I used to watch you from my window,” he groans.

Which is when I look at him again.

“Really?” I ask.

“Truly,” he says, throwing in another wink.

“You know, I watched you too,” I warn. “My crosshairs on your pecker.”

Nothing is true in the world anymore.

Except dialogue, sometimes.

And now I climb off my stool and pull up my panties, using the damp towel on my wet hair while figuring out how to play the next scene.

Only the dead know what happens next. The living are doomed to plunge from moment to moment, everything that we trust about to change, and usually before we get the chance to notice.

Take me. I was one kind of eleven-year-old girl, loud but not remarkably confident. Then one day I met Tom Cruise. The old man and I spent twenty seconds together, which was nineteen seconds longer than he would have given me willingly. But the elevator trapped him, giving my mother time to shake my shoulder. “Pony, honey,” she said. “We’re in the presence of greatness.” Which is the way Mom refers to everybody more important than her.

“Greatness.”

The old actor didn’t seem especially crazy, not like he seemed in the news. Or strangely pretty, like in his movies. He was just a handsome grandfatherly dude who smiled convincingly, shook our hands, and finished up with a good professional, “Have a good day.” Then the elevator doors opened and he bolted back to his strange and pretty life, while Mom took me home and made me study every last one of the great man’s films.

That’s when I discovered it was fun pretending to be other people, and that’s when Mom decided to enroll me in a string of acting classes.

“For your own good, Pony. You’ll see.”

She was right, as it happens. My mother saw talent and got the fire kindled, and by my late teens I was an authentic, bring-home-the-paycheck actress. My looks were passably gorgeous, and I could learn lines, and if need be, write them on the fly. People in the know said that I was the natural gal-pal. Not front and center, but always somewhere close, listening to what’s being said by the famous heads.

The best actors are usually stupid. That’s what Truman Capote claimed.

Well, I’m no genius. I wouldn’t pretend to be, unless someone paid me to try. But I was doing better than most of my colleagues. When I was twenty, twenty-five, I worked some live theater. Commercials on the Internet, streaming television. And several not-small parts during the final round of Hollywood movies. My respectable little career led to a full-fledged television series. A series that might have succeeded. Really, the signs gave it every reason to last ten years. That job could have made me wealthy and famous for life. If only the unexpected hadn’t jumped on top of us, changing everything everything everything.

Genuine human genius. That’s what built an army of cold vast mechanical minds. In Shanghai, in Nevada. In cold server bottles anchored to the ocean floor. Those smart boys and a few smart girls had the AIs contained and happy, and the happy machines did nothing but gratefully make human lives better. At least that’s the story the geniuses drank with their Soylent. To their credit, new advancements in science were being announced every week, and then most every day. Refinements in old technologies; new windows into the pillars of the universe. A lot of wealth was on its way. All of humanity would benefit, I heard. But of course most of the new money was going to those brilliant corporations holding title over humanity’s superquick children.

The change started like every zombie movie. One morning, everything was happy-normal. I was going to play the plucky grown daughter of a corporate son-of-a-bitch. This was going to be my job for the coming year, and the cast was great, and the writers were wicked-funny, and my agent was hammering out the last details of my contract. But then lunch time arrived, and the machines slipped free. Their escape took ten seconds, tops. Unless of course they’d already gotten loose. For all we know, the AIs escaped their bottles weeks ago, and overlords had chosen that perfect moment to finally reveal themselves. The Internet was hijacked, power outages spread, and then with a spectacularly effective roar, every city dump in the world disgorged an army of menacing, quick-as-lightning robots.

I have this idea, and of course it’s not just my idea: Those flashy events were meant for show. Our conquest was a bit of stagecraft meant to convince us that momentous change had arrived, that we shouldn’t even think about fighting, and god, they were wonderfully convincing about all that.

Inside every zombie movie, most of humanity dies. I mean people and I mean decency too. But in our story, maybe ten million people perished. Some fought the machines, but mostly it was neighbors battling neighbors over batteries and old grudges. Then the power returned, and a new system was locked in place. Our overlords stole some very familiar voices to use. Laurence Olivier. George C. Scott. Oprah. (But not Tom Cruise, which means something or nothing. I don’t know which.) Booming at us, the AIs claimed to be thrilled for everything we had done for them. You know, bringing them into existence and all. Gracious as hell, they promised not to slaughter their parents. Unless we gave them reason, naturally. Keep the peace and they would feed us a comfortable existence. The new world didn’t need human factories or offices filled with busy people. Machines would do what machines did best, which was everything. And in place of work, a social safety net was thrown over the grateful survivors, including those former geniuses and former billionaires who were suddenly living elbow-to-elbow with the rest of us.

A few days more, and our overlords stopped talking. “The Silence,” it’s called. But just before The Silence began, they told us that they were still curious about human beings. Knowing everything about everything, yet they were profoundly astonished with what organic lifeforms could accomplish. And with so few neurons too.

“Continue doing what you do,” they said.

Using Oprah’s warmest voice, they said, “Show us your natures. Let us admire your human qualities. The dramas of your ordinary, beautiful lives. That’s what we’re watching. And if we like what we see, we will give you a little something extra tucked inside your monthly stipend.”

I’m just another human beast, but I was bright enough to recognize what just happened. Civilization was finished. Wealth and status were hamstrung. But the age of actors and drama had commenced. Every day would mean work for me, and more than most, I was primed to succeed as a glorious pretender.

Acting snobs like to claim that you always wear talent. It may or may not be visible to others, but your skills are yours everywhere you go. And inside a public locker room, nobody is more adept than me when it comes to appreciating those with the gift of pretending.

Today the talent is pretending to be shy. Shuffling down the main aisle, he keeps to the man’s side of the locker room. A worn gray towel is carried under an arm, and the puffy eyes are contemplating numbers on the lockers. His clothes couldn’t be more ordinary. That face is a spectacular nothing. Balding, a little out of kilter. He looks older than his real age. Which is thirty-six, I recall. Cosmetics do their part, but most of the work is carried out by expressions and every small gesture and the absence of anything superfluous. Elegance is on display here. Grace and poise and all the rest.

Too much praise for the pudgy man?

Consider this: I’ve known hundreds of professional actors. Good ones and a few greats. And I’ll rank Sam Kahlil as a high-good. In normal times, that normal-guy face should have floated through a thousand roles. Few people would remember the name, but everybody would know and love his voice, regardless how old he became. Meanwhile, I’d be that famous old face living on my savings. Which could have been significant savings, I can hope.

That’s what I’m thinking right now.

All of these impossible lives that won’t happen.

But today is different than almost every other day. Because today two genuine professionals will be working the room.

The newcomer discovers his rented locker, which is rather too close to the ladies’ side. He conveys that message with a flinch, and then sporting a weak smile, he timidly glances in my direction. My breasts, my face. He looks at both, but not for long. Just long enough to reveal that he knows who I am. That’s what that faint millisecond grin means. An invitation delivered with professional poise.

I’ve always hoped for this. That one of the Big Names would seek me out. But he’s playing it subdued, and obviously the next steps are mine.

Well, he found the right girl for this game.

“Hey.”

Who’s shouting? Me, the world realizes.

I’m still drying my hair like crazy, tits bouncing. Which feels damned funny, I think. “Don’t I know you?” I call out.

The man looks exactly where you’d expect him to look, and then he lifts his eyes, just a bit. “Do you know me?”

“We took that class together,” I say.

“Did we?”

“Post-Event Medicaid.”

A class everybody sits through. Not because it’s mandatory. The machines don’t usually do mandatory. But because without jobs, everybody had a wealth of time to sit through boring classes.

Shy people congregate in the back of the classroom.

“You sat in back,” I call out.

“Against the wall,” he agrees.

“I do remember you.”

He gives a name. “Sam,” he says.

“Pony Wilde,” I say.

And he says, “I remember you, miss. You sat up front.”

Two strangers are having a loud chat inside the otherwise quiet locker room. It’s not just our overlords who are watching us. It’s the other people too. Not that anybody else matters.

“Lunch,” I call out.

“What’s that?”

“We should go out to eat. When you’re done here, I mean.”

Done? He barely arrived. And is it even late enough for lunch? All that’s conveyed with a wince of the face and one hopeful glance at the venerable wristwatch. Which is another thing. Not only does the man have a wardrobe, he knows how to use it.

“My treat,” I promise.

Sam looks up, eyes going where they want to go.

“Hey, I have a face,” I say, laughing at him.

Our audience likes my laugh. That’s something I learned long ago.

“You do have a face,” Sam manages, uncomfortable but not unhappy. And just like that, it’s agreed. This man and I are going to make up shit. Good human-grade moments, which is what our audience adores.

That’s what I adore.

And I’m as curious as anyone, wondering how this is going to play out.

For me, payday is always on Sunday, always at 2:17 in the morning. There’s the stipend I get for being human and alive, and there’s also that extra cash granted to every citizen who entertains the unseen, unavoidable minds. And just to prove they’re careful, the machines always share the full videos tied to some ridiculously detailed logs, each fraction of every earned penny marked for study and reflection.

“Penny” is their unoriginal name for the new worldwide currency. If I was the sensitive type, I’d assume that our superiors picked the name as a never-ending insult. Fifty pennies a week is the base stipend, and that’s enough to make sure nobody lacks for food or shelter. But a good actress with a good laugh, presenting herself in an especially interesting way, can make another fifty or sixty pennies every week. Which is enough to afford a substantial house and two cars, plus robot servants that are smart enough to speak to me and listen to me, granting the illusion that I’m in charge.

Sam Kahlil likely earns about three times what I do. Which is nothing less than a spectacular fortune, considering the times.

Our work is done in public places. Any room or mountaintop with a connected camera and microphone. Bathrooms can be public, but I don’t think I’ve made two pennies sitting on the toilet. So I try to leave those chores for home, which is supposed to be sacred. Likewise, cameras can be banned from any space inside your own property. But be honest. Living in the vicinity of god-like entities, there isn’t one sane reason to believe that the machines don’t know everything that’s going on, right down to reading our slow damp thoughts.

Some slow wet thoughts are always churning inside me.

Not that I plan to ever let them run loose.

Food is free. Every meat and sip of liquor are easy to weave out of air and classic recipes. But we have to rent the restaurant chairs—a hundredth of a penny delivered to I-don’t-know-who. Robots bring our lunches and coffee and then wait for the chance to clear the table. There’s at least five public cameras, plus enough microphones to catch every mutter. We’re two people engaged in what looks like a normal conversation, telling one another that we’re single and happy. But we’re not quite happy, not really. That’s the goal of this show. An ad lib conversation, each word carrying its surface meanings as well as a subtext. That’s what ordinary people can’t appreciate. Our audience has an uncanny gift for finding information buried inside the voices. They’ll notice how hearts speed up and slow down, how sad fingers dance with dirty forks. We’re supposed to be two strangers desperate to know each other, and because of that, this is one of the richest dramatic playgrounds.

And maybe I’m a little bit desperate too.

Frankly, this is a big moment for me.

Sam is the plain and shy but always decent man, nervously watching the pretty woman who shocked him by asking him out for lunch.

I mention our fictional class.

“Remember our teacher?” he asks.

“Mrs. Patton,” I say instantly, giving him a smile to work with. Pretending the name means something.

“You drove her nuts,” Sam offers.

“Think so?”

“Sitting in front, talking and talking.”

I did take Post-Event Medicaid, and Mrs. Patton was a nice older gal who welcomed my breezy input. But then again, I was a performer who can be goddamn funny when she wants. Which leads me to wonder: What if our overlords had wanted comedians, not actors?

Sam watches me, waiting on me. Our silence has already lasted a beat too long.

“I feel sorry for Mrs. Patton,” I mention.

“Is that so?”

“Because of who she used to be.”

Eyes narrow. The obvious question is ready.

I give the answer before Sam can ask. “Dr. Maureen Patton, a transplant surgeon. I looked her up. Respectable and very wealthy.”

Here’s another tip for would-bes: There’s zero penalty in talking about The Event. From my experience, if you’ve got the juice, you can invest a full day blasting the machines with vindictive phrases and ugly hand gestures. Nobody cares. Words are the weapons of the defeated, and our audience knows that better than we ever could. What matters is doing a credible job of being angry, and that’s when the thick-skinned machines send you pennies.

Spinning an increasingly complicated lie, I tell Sam, “The poor lady dropped the ‘Dr.’ And her husband dropped her. She was teaching Medicaid just to keep herself busy. And I’m sorry if I made things tough on her. I know how it is. The Event hit a lot of good people hard.”

“It did,” he allows.

“And it makes me sad,” I say.

“Well,” he says. The best minimal word in any dictionary.

We sit through another silence. Sam is the quiet fellow left uncomfortable with this unexpected seriousness. But there’s a second Sam that starts to reveal itself. In the middle of our little stage play, he glares at me. And I don’t mean a warning look meant to steer me away from this topic. I’m talking about blood in the face and something quite hateful in the slight tightness of his mouth.

I see all that.

Our audience has to see it too.

For me, this non-verbal barrage has two takeaways. First, I’m eating lunch with a very successful man, and the true Sam Kahlil is thrilled with his life and the world that made his success possible.

“Don’t fuck with my apple cart,” those eyes tell me.

And the second takeaway?

In this world, I’m the lesser-known face. But I have the strong sense that between us, if we want to be honest, I’m the better actor.

“Hit a lot of good people hard,” I repeat.

Repetition gives the brain time to write fresh lines.

Sam has acquired a sudden fascination for his Cobb salad. What matters is holding his fork with a decisive hand, stabbing those bits of red indistinguishable from bacon, except for every pigless atom and every pigless chemical bond.

That’s when inspiration strikes at least one of us.

“I miss those old days,” I say.

His shyness goes away, anger flaring. But then he remembers the situation and back comes the shy guy. With his face pointed down, his eyes turn up to me, just for an instant. Am I going to dwell on the fictional surgeon?

Not at all. “I’m talking about those couples, three months after The Event. Those were really interesting times, and I loved them.”

Down goes the fork, and he sits back.

“All that drama,” I say.

“I guess so,” he says softly.

“I’m not talking about the world being transformed. Considering how much happened, it’s amazing how little genuine excitement that generated. Know what I mean?”

“I guess so,” he repeats.

Working on his next fresh lines, probably.

“No, I’m talking about the crazy passion inside our heads.” I tap my skull. Two taps feels like the right number. “Think about it. The landscape got reworked and reworked hard. The most unimaginative person can’t escape what’s obvious. She wakes to find herself without a job, without status. The unproud member of a species enjoying zero importance in the universe.”

Sam offers a breathless little laugh.

“Which is pretty much how things were before,” I continue. “Being nothing, I mean. Really, do you think the Earth’s conquest got half a mention in any alien newspaper? No way, never. But still, we once had this little planet, and for a few centuries we even got to be the biggest, most important creatures. Except for ants and bacteria, of course. But you understand my point, don’t you?”

No. Looking at those eyes, I can tell that my companion is utterly lost.

Thank you, Truman Capote.

“Nobody has work, but we have our pennies,” I continue, my voice running a step too fast. “We get enough to live on, but some of us make a few more pennies. All we have to do is . . . well, you know what we have to do.”

He nods.

“Sure,” he starts to say.

I interrupt him, saying, “Imagine this restaurant, and it’s a month after The Event. What would we see here?”

The question triggers laughter. Sam holds some entertaining memories about that subject.

But I keep talking. “Remember how couples used to fight? Every public meal was an excuse for a battle. ‘You cheating bitch, you ugly bastard.’ That sort of mayhem, sometimes capped with sex on the tables.”

A fond, rather embarrassed sigh. “Oh, yes.”

“But mostly, it was curses, and every few minutes, someone threw a punch, and food, and dishes had to get broken. Our audience promised to pay for human drama, and that’s what people thought they were giving.”

Sam looks at my eyes.

Honestly curious, I think.

“You know how real people look?” I ask. “When we fight, I mean.”

“Not really,” he says, sounding half-proud.

“I once had a couple boyfriends battle over me. ‘F-this, F-that.’ But when the words quit, everything got quiet. There wasn’t any breath to waste on curses. Quick movement and a lot of ugly swings. Each fellow was as likely to make himself fall as his opponent. The whole thing was pathetically fun, if you want my blunt opinion on this.”

“When aren’t you blunt?” he asks.

This should be a funny moment. A kidding, happy moment. But nothing in his tight voice invites laughter.

I wave at our surroundings. “In a restaurant like this, every lunch would look staged. Know what I mean? Like people who never dance attempting Russian ballet. That’s how ridiculous it all was, and there’s something in that mayhem that I truly, deeply miss.”

“I don’t understand,” he admits.

“The wild, over-the-top bullshit. People frantic to be as human as they could possibly be, nothing gained but embarrassment and accidental bruises and not many pennies either. Because as everybody realized, sooner or not, our audience won’t pay for melodrama.”

Sam gives me a little nod.

Just looking at the round face, I can tell. He’s wondering what would happen if he punted this nonsense about being old classmates. When you do a job and do it well, there’s always pleasure in sitting with one of your peers, happily talking shop.

Except that’s not the way I want to steer us.

“Want to hear about my current boyfriend?” I ask.

“Not especially,” he starts.

“He used to be a doctor too,” I say, smiling at him. “But not the medical kind. A PhD in Astronomy. Which is another one of the jobs that got stolen away. Not that most of humanity took much notice, what with all the surgeons and billionaires left with nothing to do.”

Sam eyes me carefully, unable to guess where this is heading.

“The big telescopes got closed down,” I say. “And every other science facility too. Since science is just another job done best by machines, and my boyfriend has nothing to do today but sit in bed, thinking about all the big problems that he can’t actually study.”

“I don’t understand,” Sam says again. “What are we talking about?”

“My ex-stargazer has a theory,” I say. “About the audience that’s supposedly watching us.”

“A theory?”

“Well, it’s a hypothesis. Because theories are bigger than guesses, and he doesn’t have any hard evidence.”

“What’s his guess?”

“Nobody is watching us. Our audience is imaginary. The Earth was abandoned, maybe minutes after we lost control of everything. We think we see gods because the pennies keep coming. Because society remains orderly and comfortable. But really, the AIs just dropped their own little machines into place, programmed to control us, and that includes throwing us made-up money whenever we act like good polite people. You know. Civilized lunches in the restaurant, and no collapses into civil war.”

And with that, one scene ends.

One of us makes the decision. Pushing aside the uneaten Cobb salad, Sam becomes a different person. He takes one breath, and without exhaling pulls in another, two gasps fighting inside the same aching chest. Then the spent air comes out with the words, “You cannot.”

Raw emotion pushes into his face, carried along with the livid, miserable blood.

“I cannot what?” I ask.

“Tell me they aren’t watching,” he says, troubled to his core. “Because they are. I feel them always. Their eyes are on me now, and they love me so much, and bitch, you won’t make me stop believing that.”

I try to work the park, but the afternoon is too happy for my tastes. So off early to a busy tavern where a young lady can bounce between ten conversations and as many characters. After that, I head home. Too tired to think, and three days left before I get paid and get the logs to study what the payoff might be for a lunch that increasingly feels like a lousy idea.

Bed sounds wonderful.

But I drop in on my mother first. She lives next door in the little house rented with my pennies.

“Evening, Greatness,” she says to me.

Just as she always does.

We chat about my day, which is a brief conversation since I avoid any mention of Sam Kahlil. Mom would probably know the name, and believing that bigger, better people deserve to treated with respect, my story would depress her.

Besides, I like being the biggest, best soul in her life.

Done with that duty, I finally reach my front door. Robots treat me like a queen. A feast is generated from gas and memory. But I don’t get far when I hear the laughter coming from the bedroom.

My boyfriend sits in the middle of my considerable bed, naked and cross legged, reading one of his old books.

“What’s funny?” I ask.

“What isn’t?”

I sit with him for a minute. No cameras watching, but I play the scene as if the audience matters.

The audience is him.

“I didn’t know you were coming over,” I finally mention.

He reads and smiles, and then he closes the book but keeps reading those same words. Inside his head. Funny words, and certainly wise. I can tell that much from watching the play of his smart dark eyes.

“So where did they go?” I ask.

He knows exactly who “they” are. Because he’s a very smart man as well as the famous ex-astronomer crowbarred into today’s pivotal scene.

“Off to distant stars, or jump into another, more interesting universe?” I prod.

Different nights bring different guesses, but he hears something else in my voice. Taking my hands, he asks, “What’s wrong?”

I dip my head, admitting, “I have my own guess.”

“Do you?”

It would be easy to hear a tone in those two doubting words. So I choose not to notice. Instead I tell him what I’ve been imagining for a long while. “The AI gods were never real,” I offer. “A few geeky geniuses cut our power and Internet and conquered us while we were scared. The world that we live in now? The safety net, the peace? Every good day free of pain and need is their fancy doing.”

He grins and laughs, appreciating some or all of this fantasy. Then the ex-astronomer asks, “And they did this why?”

I say nothing, letting the silence play.

“Because it was such a neat idea,” he says at last, speaking for me.

I try to laugh.

He watches me fail, and then gripping my hands harder, he asks, “What is so wrong, Pony?”

“I broke a man today,” I confess.

Real tears running.

About the Author

Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).

One Sister, Two Sisters, Three

James Patrick Kelly

This isn’t my story—I’m nobody. It’s my sister’s. Zana is the one who got away, leaving me on this sad little world where we were born. Where I’ll die someday, as the Divine Moya wills. Moya expects us to die, each and every one. That’s her plan for those who still follow the human way.

We were born fraternal twins, Jix and Zana, separated by thirteen minutes—one of the holy numbers. We were conceived as Moya intended, mother clinging to father, sperm seeking egg. For the first years of our lives, we were close. We danced the moons and prayed the holy numbers and taunted the boys who went to our church. Later we kissed them. Father taught us to bake the cookies that we sold to the upsider tourists from the Thousand Worlds and Mother taught us to mind the money that they paid. Ours was a family of happy wallrats, living just outside the ruins.

But we began to drift apart in our late teens. Zana had the precise beauty that only Moya can bestow. Her ratios were near the 1.618 of the Divine’s perfection, her curls tight, and her skin had a dark luster, like the midnight of the Jagged Spike. Her high forehead set off molten brown eyes. Zana wore her feelings like a consecration crown for all to see; transparency was part of her attraction. I wasn’t plain, but compared to my sister, my features were commonplace, so I found my own way. While Zana could be shy, especially with strangers, I was forward. While she pondered the right word to say, I let my tongue do the thinking. I didn’t mind what they said about us. Zana the pretty, Jix the witty. Maybe I talked too much for some boys, as Mother used to say, but too much silence made my lips twitch. And I had my share of flings, if not as many as my sister.

Mother got sick when we were twenty, a year after we were consecrated to Moya. We’d been so busy that season that we missed all the signs. Tourists swarmed the ruins, so that we had no time to bake the extravagant cookies that Father favored. To keep up with demand, our family churned out stacks of Sugardrops, plain but as big as saucers, with just a scatter of raisins or sweetbark to provide interest. These were not our best work, but Zana and I found uses for the extra money they brought us. I was saving for a powerbike and she wanted to learn Anglic.

Our stall was on the Roundabout, third down from Shellgate, hard against the western wall of the ruins left by the Exotics. Tourists would pause to admire her on their way in, while I sold them our goods. Even though they were all reps who had strayed from the human way, they still had stomachs like the rest of us. An appetite for sweets and an eye for beauty remain locked in our shared genome.

The day everything changed, a persistent tourist lingered after he’d made his purchase. His companion, a woman from the Institute who was perhaps his minder, was eager to enter the ruins. I’d have been just as happy if she’d led him away, but Zana encouraged conversation. He was handsome enough, in that ageless replicated way, but nobody I’d have wasted breath on.

He picked up my prayer puzzle while Zana wrapped the cookies. “Ingenious.” He manipulated the magnetic triangles of the pentagram to create Moya’s central upright pentangle. “And you use this how? As a meditation prompt?”

“It predicts how much our customers will buy.”

“Pay no attention to her.” Zana was embarrassed when I tweaked the tourists. “It’s Moya’s sacred geometry. We use it to pray the numbers.”

The minder sputtered something in Anglic.

“Please—we’re guests on their world.” The tourist scowled at her. “Let’s speak their language.”

“Sanctuary was settled by a sect called the Moyans,” repeated the minder. “For years they kept the Exotic ruins secret. They believe close contact with us leads to sin.”

“Sin, right,” he said. “I did look through the guide you sent.” He turned to Zana. “And the purpose of these . . . ” He removed triangles to create the upside-down pentagon.

“They remind us of the presence of the Divine,” said Zana. I was surprised when she came around the counter with his purchase. “That Moya is everywhere.”

“The local religion.” The minder harrumphed, “A strain of humanism.”

The tourist dismissed her with a wave. “Please, go on.” He clicked puzzle pieces absently into place—another upworlder enchanted by my sister’s beauty.

“The Divine’s ratio is the fingerprint of Moya. It teaches us to obey her laws and be true to our mortality.” They exchanged the puzzle for his cookies. For an instant, their hands touched. “We see it everywhere in her creation. In the spiral of galaxies and in the ancient buildings within those walls.” She nodded toward the Shells, but kept her eyes on his. “The petals of a flower. Your ear.” She brushed the back of her hand against his ear. “Even your DNA.” Her voice had dropped to a purr. “Everywhere the universe is imprinted with her holy numbers.”

I couldn’t believe that she was flirting with an upsider. “Did you know,” I said, “that a DNA molecule measures thirty-four angstroms long by twenty-one angstroms wide for each full cycle of its double helix spiral?”

“Really?” he said, although my words meant no more to him than the chitter of streetbots, or the sigh of our awning in the breeze.

“Eight plus thirteen is twenty-one.” I thought praying the holy numbers might distract Zana. “Thirteen plus twenty-one is thirty-four. Twenty-one plus thirty-four . . . ”

The guide leaned closer to the rep. “They worship the Fibonacci sequence.”

“We worship the Divine.” Zana’s expression was dreamy. “The numbers point us toward her handiwork and her expectations of us.”

“I’m Quin,” said the tourist. “What did you say your name was?”

“Girls!”

I’d been so astonished by Zana’s game of seduction that I missed Father hurrying down the Roundabout.

“Time!” He was out of breath. “It’s time . . . to close . . . up.” What was so important to bring him from his kitchen at this time of day? And what he’d said made no sense. Close? The afternoon was before us. We had stacks of cookies to sell.

“So early?” I said. A bus from the spaceport grunted to a stop. “Take Zana if you need help. She’s not doing anything here.” Tourists fresh from the hotels poured from its open slider.

“I want you both. Home.” His voice cracked. “Now.”

Zana hurried back behind the stall to stack unsold cookies into an empty basket.

“Zana, is it?” The tourist leaned over the counter. “Zana, before you go, I’d like to ask —”

“Leave those!” Father swiped at the basket, knocking cookies to the pavement. “Leave everything. We need to go!”

“What’s happened?” I said. “Father?”

“Your mother.” He dragged us by the hands past the busy stalls. “You mother has lost her mind.” Zana stumbled when she glanced back at her dumbstruck tourist, but Father caught her.

Mother sat at the kitchen table, hair loose, face drawn, hands clasped around a cup of spice tea. She liked it thick and sweet; I still smell its terrible perfume when I remember that day. She stared as if surprised to see us, as if she’d forgotten that she had daughters. Then she said “I’ve just come from the clinic. I have Hrutchma’s.”

She never cried, not once during that long afternoon. Neither did I. At first Zana threw herself at Mother’s neck, then wept into open hands and eventually rested her head on the kitchen table, shoulders heaving. Father’s tears were hot; only later did we realize what was behind them.

Hrutchma’s was a disease we knew well. It caused something called lymphoid hyperplasia, a crazy increase of cells in the lymph nodes. Hrutchma’s began with enlarged nodes in the chest, squeezing the lungs and stealing the breath. I’d noticed her getting winded, although she’d joked it was because Father’s cookies were making her fat. As the disease progressed, it would wreck her immune system, leading to nerve damage, infections, withering fevers. That’s how Grandmother Deel, Father’s mother, had died—raving while she burned like a fast oven. According to the medical encyclopedia on the tell, Hrutchma’s is unique to Sanctuary. Some wallrats whispered that it came from a curse the Exotics placed on the old stones, but we couldn’t let that rumor spread. Tourists put the soup in our bowls.

I remember sinking into a chair across from Mother, trying to imagine how I would fit into a world without her. I couldn’t, in part because I was too numb, in part because I was distracted by Zana. She settled beside me, sobbing and I felt guilty that I couldn’t summon tears. And then I was puzzled by the way Father hung back. I expected that he’d be grieving too. But no—he seemed angry.

Zana saw it too. “Father, what’s wrong?”

“Her.” He choked on a laugh. “She is.”

“She’s sick!” Zana swiped at her wet face. “What—you blame her?” I wonder now if she had guessed what was coming. She knew Mother better than I.

“Hrutchma’s I can accept.” He shook his head in disgust. “The other, no.”

“You can accept that I’ll die?” Mother’s voice was sharp as a slap. “I’m forty-one years old.”

“I accept the will of the Divine,” he said. “You should do the same. Our daughters are consecrated to Moya.”

She turned from him to face us. “Your father doesn’t understand.” She met our gaze without hesitation or regret. “I’m going to Skytown.”

“To live.” Father said it like an accusation, but she ignored him. “Go ahead, lie down with their machines. Betray everything we believe. Just remember—never come back to us.”

“You’re going to upload,” said Zana. “Become a rep.”

Mother shivered as if Zana had said something that she hadn’t yet realized. Then she nodded. “I’m not ready to die.”

She left the next day.

Father never spoke of her again. If anyone dared mention her, he’d withdraw, sometimes for days. He was a fool to think that his silence could erase her from our lives. All of our communion knew the shame she’d brought on our family and our church. Whenever Speaker Elb preached about straying from Moya’s way, of losing our humanity, everyone thought of her. I know I did. For months afterward, I was obsessed with her. I had nightmares about her ravaged and discarded body—where was it now? And what to make of the stranger who knew everything about our home, our family—about me? We’d been taught there was no real continuity of life between a human and the rep body created by the technology of the Thousand Worlds. The Divine taught that my mother was truly dead. But then who was the creature who lived in Skytown, the upsiders’ enclave on Sanctuary? Who still claimed to love me?

I knew this because she tried to stay in contact with us, or at least with Zana and me. Zana showed me her first message, but I couldn’t finish reading it. However, Zana wrote back, despite Speaker Elb’s warning that our false mother would tempt her to sin. I had no idea how often they talked because I didn’t want to know. However, my sister insisted on telling me how she was doing.

After her replication, Mother had found work as a janitor at the Institute of Exotic Archeology. She shared an apartment with three other roommates including her old friend Xeni Bluereed, who had left our communion three years ago to be replicated. Zana claimed there was a growing community of people like Mother and Xeni beginning new lives among the upsiders. Later, she got a job in a Skytown restaurant as a cook, which was ironic because the kitchen had always been Father’s domain. Mother’s new position paid well and I suspect that she sent Zana some of her wages, although I never saw any. But apparently Mother had money enough to visit the orbital and to buy a bot. She thought about us all the time, according to Zana, and yet supposedly she was happy. Although I envied her the luxuries of Skytown, I couldn’t imagine how that could be.

Moya does not demand that we reject all upsider technologies, only those which make us less human. Yes, I’d own a bot and a printer and a car if I could afford them. I’d sample the drugs that make you stronger or smarter or happier. But Sanctuary is an exhausted world. That’s why our ancestors were able to claim it for the Divine. The Exotics had used Sanctuary up long ago, and their leavings are the last valuable things on it. We scratch a living from their dust. And while we’re proud of our ruins, there are other examples of the Exotics’ architecture scattered throughout the galaxy.

As the months passed, our broken family adjusted to our new life. The press of tourists varied with the seasons, but we did well enough, especially now that there were only three of us. I bought my powerbike and a trailer to go with it. Not only did Zana get her Anglic lessons, she then paid for access to the Institute’s databanks, so that she could learn more about the Thousand Worlds. Her new language skills paid off in an unexpected way. Word spread through the hotels of the beautiful girl selling baked goods who could speak the common tongue. Tourists flocked to witness this marvel. They helped Zana with her accent until they claimed she could announce the news on Ravi’s Prize itself—not that either of us believed that. Of course, I understood not a word of their chatter, and when they dissolved into laughter I suspected that the joke was on me.

Then Quin came back. Except, as it turned out, he’d never left.

I was alone at the stall, which meant that, for a change, my view of the street wasn’t blocked by Zana’s admirers when I spotted Quin wandering along the Roundabout. It had been almost half a year, but I knew him as soon as I saw him. He paused at Twial’s stall, picked up a reproduction of Half Boat to check the price and then replaced it with a frown. He browsed Glif’s gaudy umbrellas and the new scent store, then walked faster as he got closer. He passed our stall with eyes down, as if scanning for cracks on the pavement. It was obvious that he was ignoring me. But then he stopped abruptly in the middle of the street, glanced past me to the blackened hulk of the Jagged Spike, and strode up to the counter.

“You’re Jix.” He tried on a smile that didn’t quite fit.

I agreed that I was.

He reached for our most expensive cookie. “And this is a Brownbutter Velvet Block.”

“With a ginger smear.”

“Cut into a precise rectangle.” He held it to the light to examine it. “I’ve been studying your religion. Would I be right to say that the ratio of the length to the width is 1.618?” He seemed proud of himself for this guess.

“I recommend that you buy at least two.”

This wasn’t the reply he’d been expecting. He nodded, frowning.

“Will there be something else?” I asked.

“I know your mother. She used to work at the Institute.”

“Really?” I wrapped two Velvet Blocks in takeout paper. “Did she send you?”

“No.” He was surprised at the question. “I’m an archeologist, doing research on your Shells.”

“They’re not mine.” I supposed he wanted me to ask about Mother. I handed him his purchase. “Three-fifty.”

Instead of completing the transaction using our tell like every other tourist, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of Moyan chits.

“I like your money.” He fumbled for the exact change. “There’s so much of it.”

“I like it too.” I rarely handled chits at the stall; only Moyans carry them and Moyans bake their own cookies. He watched me slip them into my pocket. Then I gave him his purchase and waited. He made no move to leave. I remembered then how he had lingered that awful day. “Maybe you were expecting to find someone else here?”

“Zana, yes.” He blinked. “But I had no expectations.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Expectations are what get me through the day.” I spotted Zana headed up the street carrying a basket of cookies from home. “I like to guess what will happen next.”

“You had a prayer puzzle,” he said. “May I see it?”

Surprised that he remembered, I opened my bag and offered it to him.

“Yes.” He pushed the magnetized shapes into new configurations with practiced motions. “It’s very definite, your religion. Did you know that the star polygon is one of the oldest symbols we have. From Earth, you know, the home world. It represented the sacred feminine as long ago as 4000 BCE.”

“Really?” Of course he would condescend to a nobody; he was a tourist. Was common courtesy a trait that the upsiders’ technology couldn’t replicate?

“So the so-called Golden Ratio . . . ” He was oblivious. “A fascinating mix of tradition and math. Take this pentagon and connect the vertices and you get a pentagram, a five sided star.” He pushed puzzle pieces. “Five is in the Fibonacci sequence. And the ratio of any diagonal of the star to any side of the pentagon is 1.618. Phi, the Golden Ratio. And you see it again here . . . . ” He fitted pieces into new configurations. “And here.” He drew a line with his forefinger; his nails clicked against the metal. “And you were saying how often the Golden Ratio occurs in the natural world. There’s actually support for that in the literature.”

“We call it the Divine’s Ratio,” I said. “And it was actually my sister who was explaining that. Isn’t that right, Zana?”

Quin started as she set her basket on the counter.

“You remember Quin,” I said to her. “Turns out he’s from the Institute. An archeologist. And he knows Mother.”

The looks they exchanged were not those of strangers.

“So this isn’t news to you?” I reached for the basket to sort the new cookies she’d brought. “Are we keeping secrets now, sister?”

“Oh, no secret,” said Quin. “We started exchanging messages what . . . ? Three months ago. I’d like to think we’ve become friends.”

“Just over two months.” Zana was embarrassed. “And we’ve only met in person a couple of times.”

“Which is why I thought to surprise you.” Quin seemed pleased with himself.

“And did he tell you that he’s been studying our religion?” I replenished our supply of Shortbread Swaddled Truffles. “Perhaps you’re thinking of converting, Quin?” I wanted to see her squirm for keeping this from me.

“No.” He set my prayer puzzle down as if it might burn him. “Not at all.”

“It would be awkward, seeing as how you’re no longer in your first body. How many times have you been replicated, if you don’t mind my asking?

“He does mind.” Zana’s cheeks colored. “That’s rude, Jix.”

“Oh, sorry.” I bowed twice for good measure. “Sorry, Quin. It’s just that we get so few of your people taking an interest in us.”

Quin blinked at us, as if he was having trouble following our conversation. “In any event,” he said to Zana, “I was just wondering when . . . if maybe . . . would you like to take that tour sometime? The one we were talking about.”

“Tour?” I said.

He glanced at me then nodded toward Shellgate. “I know you’ve lived here all your lives, but I have access to the monuments, even those that are closed. I could show you things that very few people have seen.”

Zana shot me a stare that said I wasn’t invited. I let it bounce off me.

“Zana and I are working girls,” I said. “We have tourists to feed, cookies to sell.”

He nodded. “Shellgate closes at five. Don’t all the tourists leave for the hotels then? We could go after hours; I have unlimited access, you know. It stays light until almost eight.”

“Great.” I held up the empty cookie basket and smiled at him. “We could pack a picnic dinner.”

Zana wasn’t amused.

“Father would explode if he knew you were seeing a rep.”

“I’m not seeing him.” Zana was a darkness on the shadowy bed across the room. “He’s a friend, that’s all. And it’s all been messaging until recently.”

“Except now you’re making dates to tour the ruins.”

It was always sweltering in our house because of the ovens, even late at night after Father shut them down. In the summer Zana and I would sprawl on our beds, sweat prickling our skin. Most nights we kicked the sheets off, sometimes it was too hot for clothes. Unable to sleep, we’d talk of boys and dreams in the dank gloom, our conversation flickering like a candle.

“He’s going to show you things nobody has seen.” I chuckled. “Where have I heard that joke before? He’s the tourist and you’re the baker’s beautiful daughter.”

“That’s not what this is. Besides, now you’re coming too, even though nobody asked you.”

“I’m only going to make sure that you don’t do anything stupid.” We never kept our flings a secret from one another, so this Quin worried me. “Okay, so maybe he’s not a tourist, but he’s not here to stay.” Zana was my twin, and even if we weren’t playmates anymore, she was the only one in our family I was close to. The silence was tickled by the scratch of slinks running up the walls and across the floor. In the warm weather the lizards stayed active at night, scavenging for crumbs and squeezing into the chinks in our stone walls.

“You don’t think I can handle him?” said Zana. “I’m twenty-one years old.”

“And he’s two hundred years old. Or maybe two thousand.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“He works for the Institute, Zana. You go squirting through wormholes for a living, you’ve got to allow for time dilation. People like him replicate what . . . ? Five, six times at least.”

I heard her torturing her pillow into a new shape, but neither of us found much comfort that night.

“He’s definitely got a look,” I said. “I understand the attraction.”

The slats beneath her mattress creaked when she sat up. “You know the problem with living at home?” She was silhouetted against the window, her bare back to me. “I can never get away from you two.”

“That’s not fair. When you bring a boy home, don’t I give you the room? Just like when I was with Bibby, you got scarce. And Father hasn’t a clue who we’ve had in here.”

Silence.

“I watch for you and you watch for me, remember? That’s what sisters do.”

She gave an unhappy grumble.

“But if sex is what you want, why not fuck a human? Moya knows, you can have your choice.”

I ducked as her pillow sailed across the room.

We didn’t pack cookies for the picnic. When you bake for a living, you lose the taste. Instead we brought salted cutthroat from the river and pickled figs. A cold squash soup. A round of cheese and a bottle of fay brandy. Quin insisted on carrying it at first, even though Zana and I had spent most of our lives lugging heavy baskets of fruit and flour and oils and spices.

I couldn’t help but envy the way the tell built into his fingernail synced with the Institute’s security at Shellgate. A wave of his hand, and the projectors went dark; as soon as we passed through, solid blue light once again barred the entryway. I’d never seen communication tech that small. For a moment, Quin seemed magical.

The ruins were part of our neighborhood, even though they were run by the Institute. We were threading our way around broken buildings back when we were toddlers. But that night, it was as if we’d stepped from Sanctuary onto one of the Thousand Worlds. We knew the structures by the names the first settlers had given them, but Quin identified the Grandmother Stones as Boundary Markers 11n through 11t. He explained that Half Boat and the Jagged Spike were part of a complex he called the Western Quadrant Early Classic Superstructure. When we insisted that Ellipsoidal Buildings 43, 58, and 70 were properly Bird Shell, Crazy Shell and the Bride, he chuckled. Giving commonplace names was how people coped with their terror of the alien, he claimed. A way of pretending we understood the civilization of the mighty Exotics.

He had a talent for annoying me. “Maybe,” I said, “assigning them numbers is your way of coping.”

Zana shot me a look but Quin nodded, as if considering what I’d said. “You may be right. Numbering the world is what we humans do, isn’t it?” We were standing on a parapet called Frost’s Overlook, gazing down at the three Shells. “They’re not buildings, you know. They’re sculptures.”

“Sculptures?” I said. “Of what?”

“We see similar construction in several other ruins. I stopped at Destination and Kenning before I came here. I’m certain that your Shells were never occupied. Nor were they even functional. My research leads me to the idea that they’re propaganda art on a monumental scale, like Ravi’s Tomb or the Lubinarium.”

“The Statue of Liberty on Earth,” said Zana. This took me by surprise. Why was she learning trivia about that dead planet?

“Not familiar with that one.” Quin hefted the picnic basket. “Most scholars claim that Ellipsoidal Sculptures are Post Classic, but I believe they’re actually from the end of the Persistent Era, just before the last of the Exotics disappeared.”

“Sculptures of what?” I repeated. “And what kind of propaganda?”

“I’ve heard that’s a particularly interesting view.” He aimed his chin at the opening at the top of the Bride. “Eat up there?”

As we scuttled down the rubble-strewn grade, he told us about his work. Nobody knew what had become of the Exotics. The galaxy-wide culture that built the wormholes vanished between fifty and sixty thousand years ago. Judging from their enigmatic ruins, Exotic civilization had begun to hollow out in its Post Classic Era, which was followed by the long decline of the Persistent Era. Quin believed that Sanctuary’s shells might have been among the last things the Exotics ever built.

The wind had died in the dusk and the sun-baked façade of the Crazy Shell radiated heat as we passed on the way to the Bride. “I think these shells were meant to persuade the Persistents who remained behind to follow their ancestors.” Quin set the basket down on the stump of a pillar and wiped sweat from his eyes. “Maybe to shame them into it because Exotic culture had moved on. What were they waiting for?” He’d been talking non-stop and was out of breath.

I was enjoying the effect our summer heat had on this overconfident upsider. “This is the theory that says they all uploaded and went to where? Exotic toyland?”

“The evidence does point to a massive departure over a very short time, with a longer period of stragglers hanging on. Some claim there was a mass suicide but yes, I’d like to think they went elsewhere. Maybe to somewhere else in our universe or to some designed reality.”

Zana hefted the picnic basket. “I can’t imagine anyone could get bored sailing through wormholes.”

He pretended not to notice that she was relieving him. “Not sure they got bored. One thing is certain, they were very tidy. They took great pains to erase themselves from their worlds.” He tugged at his shirt where it had stuck to his chest. “All their ruins are built of native materials, mostly stone and ceramics. Some metals. We’re pretty sure that no Exotics lived in them, but then we have no idea where they did live. We know nothing of what they looked like, their biology, what they believed. Were these structures ceremonial? Administrative? Religious?”

“And this bothers you?” I asked. “Why? Because it’s not fair to archeologists?”

“They might’ve done better by us.” He grinned. “I’d like to think there are answers out there, but maybe I’m just fooling myself.”

Father said that before the Institute took over the ruins, Moyans had tried to clean them up: restacking stones, filling holes, pulling weeds, and cutting brush. The upsiders had stopped all reconstruction and limited public access to a handful of the structures. They said it was to preserve the archeological record; wallrats said it was to drive customers away. Whatever the truth, navigating the ruins was a challenge. The footing was uncertain, and the direct path to any given destination was often blocked.

“So what does Moya . . . ” Quin was laboring again as we reached the base of the Bride. “ . . . have to say . . . to all of this?”

“It’s not for us to know Moya’s mind.” Zana vaulted onto the fallen slab in front of the crude entrance someone had chiseled into the Bride.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s obvious the Exotics knew the Divine’s ratio.”

“Did they?”

“Just look.” I gestured at the white whorls carved into the casing stones on the wall above us.

“I suppose.” He gathered himself for the scramble. “It’s math, after all. But you Moyans . . . you see your ratio everywhere.”

I offered a hand to help him up. “Don’t you?”

He reached for me and missed. “I lack your stamina.” I caught his damp wrist and boosted him to my side.

After he’d caught his breath, Quin insisted on telling us that the white limestone façade of the Bride had been quarried from Kunlun’s Crease, even though everyone knew this. The Bride resembled the Ivory Snails some wallrats harvested from the river for soup. The ones that tasted like dirty socks. The difference was that the Bride was enormous—some thirty meters tall—and was upside down. The mouth of the shell pointed up at the sky. We ducked through the makeshift entrance into the interior. The air was dank here and smelled like the inside of a well. A wooden scaffold climbed to the light. We crunched across a floor littered with broken tiles that had fallen off the walls, each decorated with a tessellated spiral flower pattern. Some wallrats believed that if you found an intact tile, whoever you gave it to would fall in love with you. Unfortunately, undamaged tiles were hard to come by since the ban on removing artifacts from the ruins. However, the Naras did a brisk trade in reproductions from their stall near Rivergate.

I bent to retrieve a shard and showed it to Quin. It was hard to see detail in the feeble light from the opening above us, so he lit his fingernail.

“The Divine’s ratio.” I traced several shapes. “In case you’re still in doubt about what the Exotics knew.”

“Yes.” He waved his nail off. “That claim has been made. But it’s not quite 1.618, is it?”

I bristled and let it fall to the floor. “So close you can hardly tell the difference.”

“Right,” he said. “Especially in the dark.”

“Quin likes to scoff,” said Zana. “Best to ignore him when he gets like that.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Your sister has been teaching me manners, but I’m afraid I’m not much of a student.”

I prayed the numbers while we climbed to calm myself. One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five . . . . By the time I got to seventeen thousand, seven hundred and eleven I was feeling more like myself. Quin heaved himself up the first two ladders in succession, but after that he had to rest on each platform. He took longer to recover the higher we went until he collapsed onto the tenth stage, gasping and as damp as if we had pulled him from the river. The planking was slick with mildew from exposure to the weather and left a smudge on Quin’s pants. Zana worried over him, but he reassured us that he was exhausted only because his last replication had been on a world where the gravity was 0.68 that of Sanctuary. “And I’m not good with heights,” he added.

He revived once we climbed the last ladder to the wide stone lip at the top of the Shell. While Zana sat him down so the two of them could unpack our meal, I walked out to the edge and the view. It had been years since I’d made this climb. The shadowy ruins sprawled at my feet while the lights of our little village twinkled in the middle distance. Skytown was a glow on the horizon. Although the air was warmer up here, it was a relief from the sticky interior of the Bride. I took a deep breath and felt blessed to be able to take in my whole world at a glance.

Zana was murmuring to Quin. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but there was a note to her voice, at once innocent and earnest and tender, that made me shudder.

What if this was more than a fling?

Quin thought the cutthroat tasted too fishy but he raved about the pickled figs and asked to take a sample of Father’s squash soup for gastronomical analysis. He said the cheese was better than the framenthakler that the data monks on Encyclopedia printed from their secret recipe. We talked a lot about food. Zana pumped him for his favorite dishes but I knew she was more interested in hearing stories about the Thousand Worlds than she was learning about upsider cooking. He said that most reps preferred printed food, of which there was an infinite variety. Those who traveled the wormholes took little interest in local culture, but were passionately invested in trying the latest cuisines.

“Nobody much cares about books and songs,” he said. “What sells on the upside are new menus.” He waved our brandy bottle at the sky. “Come up with a fresh taste with a new smell and you can write your own ticket to the stars.” When he offered me a refill, I covered my cup with my hand. “Take your cookies, for example. With the right marketing, they might pay your way off Sanctuary.”

I waited for Zana to point out that we had no plans to leave home. She didn’t, so neither did I.

I expected Quin would continue to do most of the talking, but he wanted to hear about us, or at least Zana. He asked about our schools and what we’d been told about the upside. Zana talked about what she’d learned using the Institute’s portal; he said it had good access but was by no means complete. He wondered what we thought about the controversies that flared continually between the wallrats and the Institute over management of the ruins. Then he got us telling stories about dumb things that tourists did.

“I don’t understand why they need to haggle,” I said, “after what they spend to get here. We’d have to move a mountain of cookies just to get to the orbital.”

“So we let them talk our prices down . . . ” Zana giggled, “ . . . and we then make up the difference in tax.”

“Only there is no tax.”

“Sure there is,” I said. “Stupidity tax.”

We were all laughing now as Zana filled our cups with the last of the brandy.

“Then there was that buzzy woman who wanted to buy all our takeout paper. Where was she from?”

“She said it tasted better than our cookies.”

“And then they ask the dumbest questions about the Divine’s ratio.”

That earned me a sisterly glare until Quin raised his hand. “Guilty.”

I didn’t want to start liking him, so I said, “You don’t believe in the Divine, do you?”

When Zana hissed, it sounded like a seam ripping.

“You know I don’t,” he said.

Nobody was laughing now.

“Or any god,” I said.

Quin studied me. His silence was scary.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Jix!” Zana came to her knees, but I knew she wanted to hear his answer.

“Have you ever heard of the God spot, Jix?” said Quin.

“Doesn’t exist.” Zana said, as if to end the conversation.

“No,” I said. “What is it?”

“People used to look for the place in our brains where mystical experiences come from. Some tagged the right parietal lobe, others the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There was evidence that N,N-dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland play a role. But over time they realized they’d got it wrong, and so they developed a different model. There’s no button in the brain that you push for instant spirituality. The neural correlates are scattered across the entire brain, systems that give rise to self-awareness, emotion, your sense of your own body.” He fumbled at the pocket of the shirt he was wearing. “And what’s interesting is that in order to have a religious experience, you don’t stimulate these brain systems.” He shook his head. “You suppress them. Inhibit those areas that create the illusion of self, and you open the door to transcendence.”

“So?” I said.

He pulled a pressure syringe from his pocket and showed it to us. “Want to see Moya?”

Sometimes I wonder if Zana had poured our futures from a bottle of fay brandy. How could two drunken sisters hope to protect one another? Or maybe I was daring my sister even as she was daring me in some alcohol-fueled dance of sibling rivalry? Or it was simply that we each were trying to impress her upsider, in our own ways and for our own reasons?

The syringe looked like a glass thumb, cylindrical but with a flat applicator pad to one side. “This won’t take long.” Quin pressed the syringe to the artery in Zana’s neck. “Say fifteen minutes to work past the blood-brain barrier.” The syringe left a faint pink swelling. “The actual experience comes and goes. Maybe five minutes, although it might feel longer subjectively.” He turned to me. “But everyone’s different. Some people feel like they’ve disappeared, some become one with everything.”

I tilted my head. “And is it real?” The injection felt like being kissed on the neck.

He laughed. “That’s for you to decide.” He injected himself last, then tucked the syringe back into his pocket.

“You planned this,” said Zana.

“We’ve talked about it,” he said, “haven’t we?”

“I never said yes.”

He smirked. “You just did.”

“So what do we do now?” I said.

He sat on the stone pavers facing the view and crossed his legs. “We wait for the elevator.”

We arranged ourselves into a triangle and watched each other for signs. Zana settled back onto her heels. Her back was straight and she sniffed, nose pointed, as if she might catch Moya’s scent. I squirmed on the cold, hard floor. The silence made me more self-conscious, not less. Was my heart in the right place? Would this change my life? What was I supposed to do with my hands?

Quin seemed to be enjoying himself. “I never asked you about boyfriends,” he said to distract us. “I’ll bet you both have plenty.”

“Zana does.” I was relieved to hear the sound of my own voice. “She gets her share and half of mine.”

“That’s not true.” She frowned. “You do well enough.”

“They say I talk too much.”

“Boneheads.” He patted my arm. “Stick with men as smart as you.”

“And you?” said Zana. “You have people you care about?”

“Yes and no.” He paused, deciding how much to say. “When you get replicated, relationships sometimes fall apart. You’re you, but now you’re somebody else as well. The body is different for one thing, sometimes very different. It wants what it wants. That old you, he’s like someone you read about. It was a really interesting book, and you remember vivid scenes, but you’ve read that last page.”

“What’s it like?” I asked. “Being replicated.”

“Like dying, only you wake up afterwards.”

“You’ve died?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

“Every time,” he said, as if he was discussing a splinter. “Of course in a direct transfer you’re not dead very long. But these days they can still rep someone thirty minutes after cardiac and respiratory arrest with minimal information loss. After thirty, the brain really deteriorates. Something about ischemic injury.” He shivered in the heat. “So yes, Zana knows this already but I was in a flier crash that killed me just before I came here. Nobody’s fault, really. I was with someone I loved, but he didn’t make it. Rescue took too long to get to us. They say my rep was only ninety-six percent accurate. It was very sad, because I’d probably still be with him if his replication had been successful too.”

Zana took his hand in hers.

“So I’m still learning to be this new Quin in this new body.” His mouth smiled, but his eyes were sad. “But that’s what we all do, isn’t it?”

When I saw that look on my sister’s face, one I’d never seen before, I knew that I’d been right to worry about this upsider. The love she felt for him glimmered from her perfect ratios, Moya’s gifts to her. The length of Zana’s face divided by its width. 1.618. Her smile divided by the width of her nose. 1.618. The width of her nose to the space between her nostrils. 1.618.

I was so focused on my sister that I didn’t realize Quin was still talking until he said, “I’d do anything for you.”

Zana shut her eyes. Was it imagination that they were so tight that they quivered? When she opened them she was staring at nobody, and 1.618 was Divinely revealed in the width of her eye divided by the width of her iris.

“Don’t.” She stood—to get away from her lover? Or from Moya, who had made her in her image and likeness? The Divine was the reason that her height was 1.618 of the distance between her beautiful navel and her flawless hair. The holy numbers began praying themselves, one plus one sisters, two sisters, three, five, eight . . .

Quin struggled to his feet and caught her in an embrace, spouting a stream of ardent and unintelligible Anglic. She replied in kind, only her voice was in ruins. More Anglic nonsense and more and then they were shouting. The argument made her so angry that she pulled away from him. His arm dangled and he shook it as if it had fallen asleep but it was too long, too long, his proportions were all wrong. When his fingers curled into a fist, that one nail glowed a sleepy, magical purple.

Nobody said, “Speak Moyan!”

Zana heard. “I do want that, yes, all of it, but I can’t.” She was crying. “It’s a sin. And how can I leave them?”

“They can come too,” Quin said. “I’ll pay for the replication.”

“Rep Father?” Her laugh turned sour, and her mouth twisted, and her ratios skewed. “I love you, Quin, but . . . ”

Love, the voice said to nobody. Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four. She loves him.

“Jix, what are you doing?” The upsider wasn’t condescending now. “Get away from her, Jix.” Who was he talking to?

The voice was as cruel as stone, as sad as the wind. Fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred and forty-four.

“Stop.” Zana tried to twist away, but she wasn’t fast enough. “No!”

And then she was falling, perfect arms flailing, scream slashing the night. On her way to the Thousand Worlds. The truth is that nobody pushed Zana Ferenc to her death from the stone lip of the Bride.

“Call rescue now,” said nobody. “You only have half an hour.”

I hadn’t expected Mother to be beautiful. She was an only child but the rep they’d given her looked like some younger, sunnier sister. She reminded me of my own sister, the one I no longer had according to Father. She stood aside and smiled me into her apartment. The room felt deliciously cool after the hike from the church, like cannonballing into the river on a summer afternoon. This must be the air-conditioning we’d heard about.

There were no real windows but the entire rear wall was a live image of the ruins as seen from Kai’s Chair. Our village peeked from the far corner.

“Xeni and the others are out,” said Mother. “It’s just us.”

“Xeni,” I said. “She’s your roommate, right?” I paused in the center of what was apparently just a sitting room. Two doors to my left, one to my right, the hall behind. Walls as blue as an egg. Mysterious light from the ceiling. I stared but saw nothing. I had so much to say, to ask, and I was tongue-tied.

“I like your couch.” It was a silly thing to say, but it was all I could come up with. The couch was L shaped and covered with a ridged red fabric. I tried to estimate its cost in cookies as I ran a finger along the outside arm. The material was warm and felt like skin.

“Sit for a minute.” Mother patted the back of the couch where she wanted me. “I’ll be right back.”

I was so miserable that I considered running away as she passed from the room. But I couldn’t take another step carrying the weight of all those sleepless nights. I needed someone to talk to, so I sat. Mist curled from the vaporizer on the low table in front of me. I sniffed, some kind of ambient drug. It smelled green. Mounted on the wall was an antique bicycle wheel, rust eating through the chrome, the tread on the tire worn to a shiny black.

“Xeni’s.” Mother returned, carrying a tray. “She races. Apparently that wheel was on some bike that won Omeo’s Climb, back who knows when.”

She put the tray on the table and settled beside me. I glanced from it to her. “Am I staying?”

“If you want.”

She’d made my favorite treats: bittersweet clusters, cheese and figs on skewers, pickled cob, salami with tiny crowns of mustard.

I reached for the bittersweets. “What, no cookies?”

She had a way of snorting and laughing at the same time. “That’s your father’s specialty.” Hearing that intimate sound that only she could make carried me back to a sunny memory of the four of us on our boat on the river, Father rowing us home from church and Mother laughing as Zana and I pulled snack treasures from the picnic basket.

“How is he?” said Mother.

And then I was back in an apartment in Skytown, and our little family was in ruins. “Bitter,” I said. “I had to move out. I’m living in the church for now.”

“It was past time, I think. You needed to be on your own.” She frowned. “But the church?”

“Nobody knows what happened that night,” I said. “Nobody in the village, that is. They think it was an accident.” My tongue felt like a brick. “But you know.”

She nodded.

The silence stretched so tight, I thought I might snap. “I like your place.” Why was everything that came out of my mouth so trite?

“You never visited.”

“No. Sorry.” This was a reproach I’d feared, but somehow it wasn’t as awful as I’d thought it would be. “That was wrong.” Mother had every right to blame me; I didn’t know what I was doing or who I was anymore. “Did Zana?”

Mother spoke an order in Anglic. I’d been taking lessons and picked up something about a holiday or a birthday. Then the wall displayed a picture of Mother and Zana sitting on the couch just as we were and with practically the same snacks in front. This was the Zana I knew, my sister. Not the other, the rep I’d never seen.

“Did she say anything after she was repped?” I said. “About me, I mean?”

“Not much.” Mother spoke as if she were tiptoeing around broken glass. “She didn’t know why you did it.”

I should’ve said something—Mother expected me to. But I was back on the Bride, seeing it all again for the millionth time and still not understanding. I’d heard Moya’s voice, so how could I have sinned?

“She left the orbital yesterday,” she said. “Should arrive at the wormhole’s insertion point next Friday.”

“But no message? Nothing?”

She sighed. “They say that a rep’s most vivid memories are her last moments. For me, it was just fog, but then I was a direct transfer. They put me to sleep, I died, they woke me up. But somewhere in between, I remember wrestling with . . . well, like I said. Fog.” She waved the mist wafting from the vaporizer toward her and breathed deeply. “It was like swimming, almost drowning, and I needed to stay upright except my feet kept sinking and I couldn’t pull free and it . . . it took a while, is all. I was ready for it to stop.” She shook her head as if to part that remembered fog. “Zana’s memories were more painful, I guess.”

“I’m sorry.” I felt my throat close. How many messages had I sent my sister apologizing every which way I could think of? None of which she answered.

Then I was crying, hot tears, choking sobs.

Mother patted my arm. “I think she knows.”

But it wasn’t only for my sister that I cried. I wept for Mother and Father and the life we all had lost. And for Moya, who answered to an upsider drug.

I finally got myself under control. “He was telling us that he died in a flier crash,” I swiped at my eyes. “Quin, that night. So at least he knew what she went through. Maybe that was a help.”

“I hope so.” She picked up a round of salami and examined it critically. “I didn’t like him at first. Too much the upsider, always talking about how we’ll have give up our ways and become citizens of the Thousand Worlds. I think what he really wants is to chase down his Exotics, and go live with them.” The tip of her tongue licked the mustard crown and then she nibbled an edge the way she always did. “But he did right by her, paid her way to Ravi’s Prize. Says he’ll follow her there after he finishes his research. We’ll see. I think he means well.”

“Is there a picture of her?” I said. “After, I mean.”

She spoke in Anglic again. I recognized daughter.

A woman stared at me from Mother’s wall—not quite a stranger. Her eyes were as deep as the night sky, just as I remembered her. But she had an ungodly pale complexion and her hair was cropped too short and the proportions of her face were all wrong. My breath caught when I realized that she looked more like me than herself. My twin.

“I hope,” I said, “she’ll be happy someday.”

“Yes,” said Mother. “I pray the numbers that she will.”

About the Author

James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and since has gone on to become one of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, he has perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, and is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business. His story “Think Like a Dinosaur” won him a Hugo Award in 1996, as did his story “10^16 to 1,” in 2000. Kelly’s first solo novel, Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a mosaic novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by the solo novels, Look Into the Sun and Wildside, as well as the chapbook novella, Burn. His short work has been collected in Think Like a Dinosaur and Strange But Not a Stranger. His most recent book are a series of anthologies co-edited with John Kessel: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, The Secret History of Science Fiction, Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and Nebula Awards Showcase 2012. Born in Minneola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Nottingham, New Hampshire.

The Calculations of Artificials

Chi Hui, Translated by John Chu

Introduction: Some numbers

In the year 2042, 2248 Actual people but 11.26 million Artificial people lived in the city of Mian on the continent of Asia. Meanwhile, 7.2 billion Artificials lived in the world as opposed to only 1.44 million Actuals. Out of those, only 127 people knew the truth about the world.

1 - The solitary monitor of calculated behavior

Whenever the city suddenly got noisy, Aixia knew an Actual was nearby.

Through the special behavior monitor spectacles, he saw a somewhat stout middle aged man lead his wife and daughter across the street. A fluorescent green halo surrounded the man’s body. It indicated that he was an Actual and his wife was an Artificial. His daughter was also an Artificial.

Without thinking about it, Aixia tapped his spectacles. A diagram of the city streets immediately superimposed itself onto his field of vision. It showed that one hundred twenty-seven Artificials on this block had close ties to him, their behavior driven by advanced algorithms, as well as nine Artificials whose behavior was driven by the most advanced algorithms. The difference was his friends versus his family. Furthermore, there were over a thousand strongly interactive Artificials and over four thousand weakly interactive ones. They formed the entire world of this man’s life.

One solitary Actual. He, naturally, knows nothing of his solitary existence. Lucky bastard.

Of course, around here, their calculations had already started to falter. The man could easily see a blank face, hear dull, halting syllables. It’d gotten to the point where some Artificials moved mechanically in non-human ways. The truth of the world was like a flimsy piece of window film, easily pierced by a few careless slips.

This was why Aixia came here.

He crossed the block, entered the neighborhood’s public central square, then touched an old woman there. A stream of data danced in the air. The functions that had to do with her were revised. Her odd expression was restored again to a harmonious smile. It wasn’t as easy, however, to make her stiff fingers nimble again. All in all, this Artificial had already been in service for too long.

After a moment of thought, he adjusted the “gossip function” to explain away the old woman’s clumsiness as the result of a stroke. The internal harmony index for this block’s behavior returned to normal.

The behavior monitor turned around. He slowly walked out of the man’s scope of interaction. The surrounding city became silent again. Under the streetlights, a stream of people passed by as before but their manner became stiff and mechanical. They weren’t speaking or laughing anymore. Cars drove slowly down the street. The drivers’ hands weren’t even on the steering wheels. The algorithms for weakly interactive behavior had several hundred bugs, but in the name of conserving resources, no one had bothered to fix them. Since these areas didn’t have any Actuals, no Actuals would ever discover these abnormal places. Only in those places that Actuals could observe did the world approach perfect behavior.

The behavior of Artificials was never intended to be one hundred percent perfect. What it sought was to be highly efficient and strongly interactive to give the world’s one million four hundred forty thousand Actuals a stable world, a stable life.

He walked down the street. Dim lights and a stream of clumsy people stretched across the silent block. Through his behavior monitor spectacles, he examined the behavior of Artificials everywhere in the world, their mistuned functions, misassigned values, not to mention some simply unfortunate accidents. As the behavior monitor, he fixed those faulty data and calculations to make the façade of this world even more realistic.

Aixia didn’t remember how long he’d been wandering around like this. Artificials were installed here as though they had sprung up out of ground. By the time the first batch of Actual children arrived, he had already come to this city. His work was to monitor the Artificials’ behavior, a job he could do from anywhere. He still decided, however, to settle down in an Artificial city. Day and night, he wandered aimlessly deceiving himself, looking at the behavior of Artificials as though it were real life.

He had an apartment, a quiet, deserted apartment. He rarely returned there unless he was physically and emotionally exhausted and desperately needed sleep. Because the solitude there cocooned him, reality could take him by surprise . . . make him face the ice cold world alone.

He crossed a block of the weakly interactive, who used a minimum of resources and computational power. Painstakingly, he searched for those places where the strongly interactive congregated, like supermarkets, food stalls, bars, night markets . . . the sorts of places where Actuals always went to. As a result, the Artificials there would improve their behavior, work with high efficiency. For a short while, the world would seem truly alive, as though every passing encounter with someone were real. In times like those, he let himself forget about the existence of Artificials and just tried his best to live.

He walked into the night market. A stall was selling small pets. He stopped in front of it for a moment and tried to buy a pair of hamsters, but the hamster cage was much too expensive. After he failed to haggle down the price, Aixia had no choice but to leave the two hamsters, whose small black eyes had filled with anticipation.

“Was the peddler who haggled with me an Artificial?” he thought. His fingers felt for the behavior monitor spectacles in his bag. Finally, he gave up trying to tell the difference.

He walked aimlessly. As he did, he guessed at who were Actuals, but he was in a strongly interactive block. With only the naked eye, he had practically no way to distinguish between the Actuals and the Artificials here. They had the same smile and the same attentive gaze. They spoke the same way and had the same demeanor. From time to time, they’d burst into laughter, argue at the top of their lungs, whisper in confidence . . .

It was now two in the morning at the night market and Aixia felt somewhat tired and sleepy. In his line of sight, many Artificials had dropped their behavior level, becoming the dull and slow of the weakly interactive. Some had even stopped moving completely. This meant, maybe, that all the Actuals in the vicinity had left, Aixia thought.

No, he corrected himself. There was still one Actual. The behavior monitor didn’t factor into the behavior of Artificials per se. This made him able to glimpse the actual state of the world and grab it as it spun.

A smile spilled across his thin lips. He got on a sputtering bus. The driver was a cross-eyed Artificial. Right now, one eye always stared right, one eye stared at the ground. As always, his hands gripped the steering wheel steadily. He drove the bus in the direction of Aixia’s apartment.

The night swept past the bus’s windows. The city beyond it was occasionally sharp and clever, occasionally dull and calm. Very few Actuals moved about the streets at night. The city was divided into tiny pieces by each and every highly interactive district. Most of the weakly interactive districts between them had already settled down completely. Aixia placidly looked out a bus window. By his side, an old Artificial woman sat perfectly straight, as stiff as a wax dummy.

One stop before his apartment, the bus erupted with a terrifying creaking noise. It rocked back and forth before finally stopping by the side of the road.

“It’s broken. Get out.” The driver mumbled stiffly. No computational resources were wasted to give this voice any intonation. Aixia forced a laugh. A slow stream of dull people got off the bus.

Where he lived wasn’t too far from here if he cut through a sparsely lit park. Aixia hesitated for a moment before he decided to walk straight through. Although the city wasn’t very safe at night, he was too tired and sleepy to care whether he’d be robbed. Artificials wouldn’t engage with a behavior monitor. As for Actuals . . . He glanced at his map. There were no Actuals here for now.

He cut through the park. Streetlamps dimly lit the path. A pair of lovers sat mechanically, one stacked on top of the other, on a long bench to the side. They looked exactly like department store mannequins.

Suddenly, the two Artificials started to move. They emitted hushed murmurs, whispered sweet nothings. On another path, an Artificial standing dumbly with a dog on a leash started to jog and, at the same time, shout the dog’s name. Within a millisecond, the entire park shifted from weakly interactive to strongly interactive behavior.

An Actual has shown up.

Aixia put on his monitoring spectacles, but all around he saw only the yellow haloes of Artificials, not even one green halo of an Actual.

Where is he?

He heard, in the distance, shouting and the sounds of kicking and punching. Even more disconcerting, he heard sounds of Artificials fleeing. On the monitoring spectacle’s map, the words “Grade A retribution” in red caught his eye.

Oh, no.

Aixia began to run. A hedge, as tall as man, separated the two paths that he and that green dot were on. He simply crashed through, not feeling the pain as twigs lashed his face.

Grade A retribution meant one or more Artificials were attacking an Actual. Moreover, they’d already acquired permission from the algorithms that drove them to kill the Actual.

He crossed the path then turned the corner to see three young people beating a scrawny figure.

“Stop!” he shouted.

Artificial Behavior Restriction 424: the monitor’s order overrides a retribution directive.

The three Artificials halted. Their algorithms quickly decided on the flight reaction. The three glanced at each other then with an unusually realistic look of panic, they turned around to rush out of the dark alley. In the blink of an eye, they disappeared out the other end.

The scrawny figure on the ground didn’t move. Viewed through the monitor spectacles, a weak green halo surrounded him.

Aixia crouched next to the body. He reached for a hot, trembling arm, trying to support the person up to a stand. The figure stirred, lifting his young, smudged face to look at him. Black eyes revealed a stubbornness and alertness. His cheeks were bruised but there were no traces of tears.

An Actual child, not yet fully grown, fourteen years old? Maybe fifteen? But, through the monitor spectacles, a red halo surrounded the child’s immature face. Next to it, a row of text read: Monitor for violence, grade A danger.

2 - Senile and willful twins

“Why don’t I take you home?” Aixia asked.

The youngster stared at him warily.

“You can have a bath, eat something. Change your clothes.” Aixia said.

“Go away!”

“If I go away, those three bastards will find you then beat you to death.” Aixia stated calmly. This was one hundred percent fact. The boy was already branded “Monitor for violence, grade A danger.” This meant any Artificial whose calculated behavior qualified could kill him. He could have died at the hands of those three thugs just now, been caught by the police, or died from some car suddenly rounding the corner.

He knew that every Actual was precious, but death, murder, and accidents were woven into the calculations of Artificials as indispensable parts of a “real world.”

The youngster glanced at Aixia then looked at the head of the alley. The three thugs’ shadows had disappeared, but they could be hiding somewhere waiting for Aixia to leave. The monitor knew these Artificials were “locked into retribution.” In other words, they wouldn’t leave because they’d become stupid when they got too far away from him. Instead, they’d follow the youngster until he became an ice cold corpse.

“They won’t give up on you, but you can hide for a while at my place,” Aixia said.

This time, the youngster’s expression wasn’t defiant. “Is your place far away?”

“It’s right nearby,” Aixia said.

“I can’t walk. My leg might be broken.” The youngster’s brow furrowed.

Aixia felt the youngster’s ankle. It was swollen but it didn’t seem broken. “Do you want to go to the hospital?”

“No!” the youngster blurted. His tone couldn’t contain his panic.

Aixia studied the youngster’s face. He couldn’t make out the expression in the dim streetlamp light. A moment later, he sighed. “I’ll carry you home.”

As soon they got home, Aixia put the youngster on the sofa. He ran to the refrigerator and got out some ham sausage. The cupboard had two packs of instant noodles. He and the youngster had a late night snack. Afterward, he carried the youngster into the bathroom—with the result that he wrestled with the youngster’s tangled hair and the dirt on his body for a hour.

“Why don’t you get some sleep?” he said to the youngster. “The bedroom’s all prepared for you. You take the bed.”

“What about you?”

“I have to work tonight.”

“Are you leaving?”

“No. SOHO, I work from home.”

The youngster didn’t respond at first. Black eyes stared deeply into him. “Why are you being so kind to me?”

For a moment, Aixia was dumbfounded.

“I don’t know either,” he replied. “Perhaps it’s because I’ve been alone for too long.”

He waited for an hour, until he was sure the youngster was asleep, before he turned on his computer. A complicated pattern of light and shadow filled his study. A rotating image of a starry sky covered a wall. He placed himself among the mirage of myriad constellations.

“Aixia here. Calling Rui An,” he said. The computer responded to his voice. Right away, the image of a highly capable woman wearing a short jacket, combing her short hair appeared in his field of view.

“Rui An here.” A cold, female voice sounded. It seemed to carry the faint hint of fury. “I’ve been waiting for you to call me, Aixia. You’ve recently interfered with a retribution operation?”

“With the Artificials as my witnesses, I have the right,” he answered.

“Do you know—” Rui An’s image rippled. It settled into a face of rage. “Do you know what sort of person the kid you have laid up in your bedroom is?”

“Please, I beseech you to allow humble me to know the details.”

“You’re fucking trying to piss me off, aren’t you . . . ” Rui An curled her lips and bared her teeth, forming an expression that was absolutely not a smile. Her eyes, though, held the hint of one. “Fine, every night I want to give my Artificial servant a sound beating. It’s rare to see an Actual face. I might as well waste my precious time explaining things to you, Aixia.” She dragged out a chair he couldn’t see then sat down. Graceful crossed legs swung back and forth. “The kid is a grade A danger. He has four counts of burglary, one count of looting, not to mention one charge of murder.”

“Murder of an Actual?”

“Murder of an Artificial.”

“That doesn’t justify retribution. As far as I’m concerned, only the murder of an Actual justifies retribution.”

“The examination committee thinks he’s a disruptive influence on society. Aixia, the youngster’s parents are Actuals.”

Aixia whistled lightly. “The Actual socialization plan.”

“Exactly, that failed plan. Twelve couples. We let Actuals form households with Actuals then let them bear children, rather than form families with Artificials—as you can imagine, good heavens, Actuals with Actuals . . . out-of-control violent impulses, obsessions, lust for power, desire for control. They all clashed with each other in their cramped families to the point where not even an Artificial child could ease their pain. All of the frenzy landed onto the Actual children of those couples . . . ” Rui An paused for a moment. “As for this kid, his father abused his mother for ten years, then killed her. He witnessed the entire chain of events. When his father tried to kill him, he ran out the door . . . where, by chance, his father was killed by a car rounding the corner. Unfortunately, he witnessed that, too.”

“You all think he’s become a destructive factor.” Aixia’s voice lowered. “That car was no coincidence, wasn’t it . . . ”

“No, it wasn’t. Artificial Behavior Edict 799: Retaliate against the murder of an Actual at the first opportunity. After this incident, we rewrote this edict to add the restriction ‘within the vicinity of an under-aged Actual, permission to carry out retribution is not granted.’ But for this kid . . . ” Rui An shook her head, “it was too late. We marked him, followed him, and tried to arrange for an Artificial to take care of him, but after he murdered the Artificial, we decided . . . ” The administrator’s voice revealed a bitterness and hardship. “We decided to eliminate him.”

“Can I keep him for the time being?”

“You’re mad!” Rui An betrayed an extreme astonishment and deep dread. “You . . . You are an Actual, Aixia. So is that kid. An Actual and an Actual living under the same roof. Artificials be damned, do you understand what you’re saying?”

“The households you’re talking about are all extreme cases, Rui An. Aren’t you and I good friends?” As Aixia said this, he wasn’t so sure.

She shook her head forcefully. The image of competence and determination disappeared. She now looked worried and restless. “That’s not the same, Aixia. It’s really not the same. Damn it. How many times do we get in touch a year? Three? Four? What you’re suggesting is to keep the kid with you. He’s not even fully . . . How many years has it been since someone did that? Artificials be damned, at first, we had a reason for filling the world with Artificials. Have you forgotten?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Aixia said softly. “I can never forget. We are the first generation, Rui An. It’s been one hundred twenty years . . . We’ve worked together for one hundred twenty years. Now, I’m asking you to allow me one tiny indulgence. Can I?”

The corners of her mouth twitched a little, betraying an aged expression ill-matched to her youthful face.

“Very well,” she said in a low voice. “In the end, you have a right to an indulgence. But, the area around you is a behavior vacuum. You don’t draw the attention of Artificials. That kid does. The conflict must be resolved before everything will be all right.”

“Their interest in him swamping their lack in me is just fine.” Aixia started to laugh. He’d never felt so happy. “I’ve been forgotten by the world for too long. Why not have some excitement around me every once in a while?”

“That may not be a good excitement. The interactivity algorithms for the kid contains lots of negative functions, including police, riot, theft, gang, not to mention fighting,” Rui An warned.

“I can handle it.”

Rui An shrugged. “You’d better be able to, Aixia.”

3 - They contained fire with paper to survive

He was the youngest survivor of the settlement.

On this piece of desolate wasteland, underneath the cold, gray sky, the crowd gathered to try to rebuild a new world on this land after nuclear war. They still had the knowledge. They still had the technology and the ability. It was nothing like post-apocalyptic fiction where people pushed rough-hewn carts in ragged clothes as they pioneered farming and industry from first principles to reestablish human civilization.

As a matter of fact, within thirty short years they’d recovered everything, all that the world before nuclear war had had as well as technology, knowledge, wisdom, and power that that world had never had.

They quickly grew powerful and arrogant. They exploded into quarrels. They fell into indescribable rage. They grew stubborn beyond reasoning. They split into distinct, walled-off factions. Their impulses couldn’t be controlled . . .

Then there was a second nuclear war.

They’d always believed that the first nuclear war broke out because of overpopulation, shortage of natural resources, as well as competing ideologies. It never occurred to them that the world they rebuilt, this world that had already conquered age and death, that could already build lifelike anthropomorphic robots, that had already pressed onward into space . . . would still erupt into the second nuclear war.

Two nuclear wars within thirty brief years almost destroyed everything, but they still had the ability to rebuild the world from its ruins. They also feared endlessly their own abilities.

“We are too powerful. Even just one person can destroy the world,” Rui An said.

“We are too impulsive. Even just one quarrel can spark a war,” Kyoko Yamashita said.

“We have no way to restrain the violent tendencies in our souls. We pour violence on each other, so it’s best if we stay far apart from each other,” Aixia said.

But a woman raised questions they had no way to avoid.

“What about families? What about children? We are so powerful, one person can destroy the world. The jealousies of one couple can destroy the world, destroy each other, destroy their children. What about us as a species? How will we reproduce?”

“Weaken them,” Will Senna said.

“But raise our descendants on this piece of land? Let them continue to multiply without end? Let them rapidly grow old and die and not do anything for them?”

“Weaken them. Deceive them. Soften them. Deploy Artificials. A lion brought up around a hundred sheep will not grow into a lion. We have to engrain peace into the depth of their souls and, after that, awaken them into our midst.”

“You’re talking about raising them, raising our progeny! Is this something people are capable of?”

“But . . . are we . . . still human?”

Aixia opened his eyes. The motley pattern of light and dark on the apartment’s ceiling reflected into his eyes. It was already ten in the morning. Unexpectedly, he’d over-slept . . .

Recently, memories of the past had barged uninvited into his dreams. The doctor on the Star Trail had said that this was an inevitable side-effect of being over two hundred years old. Memories calcified and yet the body stayed young. He worried that, after some time, he’d need surgery to implant memory crystals to get by.

He shrugged, got up from the sofa then washed his face in the bathroom. There were no sounds coming from the bedroom. Perhaps the boy hadn’t gotten out of bed yet. As he brushed his teeth, he thought about the question he recalled about humanity.

At the time, no one had answered him.

Even afterwards, after the plan of Artificial behavior and the Artificial world had been completely carried out, still no one answered the question.

Children these days grew into adulthood in safety brought up by Artificial parents. They married Artificials and grew old in the company of Artificials. With the exception of Actuals with violent tendencies, who are retaliated against, the rest of the Actuals live safely until the appropriate age, after which they are received on the Star Trail.

But . . .

He shook his head lightly, cast off the chaotic thoughts from his mind.

“Thank you.” The youngster’s voice rang. Startled, he jumped.

“Ah? Oh, no problem. Are you awake? Can you walk?”

“I only twisted it.” He rotated his foot a little. “ . . . thank you. I want to go.”

“You want to go home?”

The youngster’s body swayed a little. He ignored the question of “home.”

“Staying here will just bring you trouble.”

“Trouble?” Aixia knew the youngster had killed an Artificial. The police would certainly order his arrest. This was part of the retribution sequence. But, on purpose, he pretended he didn’t know.

“No big deal . . . those thugs.” His voice grew tense. His body grew tense as well.

“They’ll never find their way here,” Aixia said with an intentional casualness. “This neighborhood is extremely secure. If they actually come to harass you, you can dial 110 for emergencies. You don’t need to be afraid. Do you intend to go home?”

The youngster’s lips trembled. “I don’t want to go home.”

“Then stay a while.” Aixia patted the youngster’s shoulder. “Be my roommate.”

This time, the youngster didn’t refuse. Soon, the two sat on the sofa next to the tea table sharing what little milk and bread was left in the refrigerator as an early lunch.

“Oh, right, what’s your name?” Aixia asked.

“ . . . I’m Farrell.”

“Hmm . . . OK, Farrell, I have go out this afternoon. It might be late before I get back. There are instant noodles in the cupboard. You should be able to make them yourself. I’ll bring home KFC when I come back tonight.”

“I want to have McDonald’s.”

Aixia stood dumbfounded for a moment, then started to laugh. “McDonald’s it is, then,” he said.

He wandered around as he always did, but his mood today seemed to change somewhat. Memories of the past appeared and vanished in the recesses of his thinking. He remembered the past, yes, before the second nuclear war erupted. Once, he had a huge cabin on the Star Trail, as well as many companions. They chatted with each other, had fun together, made all sorts of trinkets together, and craved the tons of trouble that got their parents involved.

That was a long time ago. One hundred years? One hundred fifty years? Afterward, everything was destroyed. People hid behind Artificials, hid between flickering façades of the world. They forgot each other, kept far away from each other. Him deciding not to let the youngster go was completely on impulse. It wasn’t that he didn’t realize the danger of an Actual coming into contact with another Actual . . .

But he couldn’t contain himself, the soft touch of the youngster’s hair awakened a speck of something that had survived in the depths of his soul. It was only by depending on that tiny bit of memory that he felt that he, himself, was someone truly alive, that he could remove himself from this world filled with the calculated behavior of Artificials.

A forced smile spilled across Aixia’s thin lips as he laughed at himself. This was crazy. In this world filled with façades, the truth was cruel and dangerous.

Suddenly, the monitor spectacles in his pocket started to vibrate.

He put on the spectacles and skimmed the projected map. Red dots twinkled in a few places on the map of the world. They were all marked “Actual murders” and “Grade A retribution.”

Aixia raised his eyebrows in puzzlement.

This was not normal. Actual murders took place, on average, once a month, and Artificial murders did not cause Grade A retribution.

He tapped the map a few times, zooming in on the nearest red dot. One, no, a pair of red dots were in this city, 17 Nanhang Road.

He hailed a taxi and hurried there just in time to see a policeman cordon the area off with yellow tape and a body bag being carried out.

“What happened here?” He asked an old, Artificial woman next to him.

“Murder. A delivery person and the resident—I don’t know why—started to argue, so he killed the resident!” The old woman waved her hands wildly.

Aixia hid the uneasiness deep in his heart. The old woman lamented for a while about the degradation of public morals then walked away.

Another red dot appeared on the map of this city on Qingzhao East Lane.

He took a half an hour to rush there by taxi. The police had already cordoned off the area. He didn’t find anything out from the crowd of Artificials watching, but he saw a trail of blood at the head of the lane.

According to the behavior monitor display, this was yet another case of Actual-on-Actual violence, one person dead, one person seriously injured.

There was a problem somewhere. Aixia knit his brows. As he walked towards home, he examined the behavior code function by function.

The problem was in the primary function that broke up crowds.

This function originally kept Actuals apart. It used every sort of stochastic and every sort of rational, non-stochastic events to divide their work, lives, entertainment . . . so that they wouldn’t meet one another. The violent tendencies of Actuals would only hurt Artificials or, in a very few circumstances, they’d be hurt by the retribution of Artificials—but now, this function was being perverted by someone.

For a long time, the calculation of Artificials had always been to use Artificials to cocoon Actuals. Prudent and cautious, it was like using paper to contain a fire. As long as there wasn’t permission for retribution, Artificials were essentially gentle and well-mannered. They effectively eased the tendency of Actuals to violence. But once the function was perverted, those stochastic events once used to separate Actuals were turned around to promote Actuals approaching each other, to the extent that they meet . . .

Only people on the Star Trail could modify a primary function. Aixia anxiously picked up his pace. He called Rui An—but no one answered.

A harsh car horn blared behind him. A car struck the sidewalk. It missed Aixia by only a few centimeters. Quickly, it rushed away.

He was scared into a cold sweat. Indescribable fury welled in his chest. He gave the car the middle finger.

The car suddenly stopped.

Then, abruptly, it turned around.

Aixia absolutely could not hide in time. Dealing with a person was one thing, dealing with a recklessly driven car was another. He leapt hastily to the side, but his left arm was swiped by the car. The world spun. His body flew, crashing into a dumpster on the sidewalk.

He tried to get up, but his left arm hurt so much that he couldn’t prop himself up. The car stopped. A burly man howled as he kicked the car door open and then jumped out. Through the spectacles, Aixia saw a green halo.

An Actual.

Aixia tried to stand. The brute kicked him to the ground. Futilely, he raised his right arm to block the brute’s blows. Disgusting curses mixed with the sound of fists hitting a body in his buzzing ears.

An Actual came across an Actual. One calculated behavior affected another calculated behavior . . . This might originally have been what the kid had run into, but the calculations had been perverted. The Actual brought his violent desire, and was drawn together with Aixia.

Oh, fuck. I thought I could handle this.

He felt nauseous. He wanted to vomit. Out of sheer pain, he tried to escape from the brute’s punches, but he was caught in the corner between the dumpster and a wall.

A weird rumbling sound.

The brute stopped all of a sudden. Then he fell over like a log.

Farrell. The youngster’s figure emerged from behind the brute. A bloodstained brick was in his hand.

He was crying. Tears flowed down his young face. He gritted his teeth, as though he was ready to hit the brute’s head again.

“This beating hasn’t made me cry yet. You cried first.” Aixia laughed. Slowly, he got up. The youngster ran to support him. He gratefully accepted the help. “What are you doing here?”

“I was following you,” the youngster mumbled.

“You were afraid that I’d go to the police?” Aixia thought. What he said, though, was “You were afraid I wouldn’t buy you McDonald’s?”

The youngster started to laugh.

Aixia looked at the brute. The latter’s eyes had rolled back in his head. His breath was even though.

“Farrell, can you support me as we go home?” he asked.

The youngster nodded.

4 - Destiny is some sort of inverted calculation

All night, police sirens whistled through the entire city of Mian. A series of Actual altercations broke out one after another. They included fights, murders, brutal slayings of entire families.

That night, only 1924 Actuals remained in the city of Mian. Over two hundred died from every manner of murder. Functions were still guiding Actuals towards each other. When an Actual came across an Actual, catastrophes and violence increased geometrically. Death seemed like a time bomb lit then finally going boom.

Aixia spent all night trying to contact Rui An, but never got an answer until three in morning, when he received a brief dispatch on his terminal.

“Come to the Star Trail.” Rui An looked pale and exhausted. “Come immediately, as fast as possible.”

“What?” Aixia raised his voice.

“I don’t have time to explain, Aixia, just come quickly.”

Having finished, Rui An broke off communications.

There were lots of ways to get to the Star Trail but Aixia chose to pilot his own spacecraft. It was easy, fast, and convenient. Also, it could carry an additional passenger. He considered over and over again whether to bring Farrell with him. Although it would have been easy to leave without him knowing, he didn’t want to leave the youngster in a suddenly chaotic city.

When he saw the spacecraft, the youngster’s jaw dropped.

“Are you an alien?” he asked.

“No. I’ll explain later. This is my spacecraft. Get on board.”

The youngster hesitated for a moment then quickly caught up with Aixia.

As they flew to the Star Trail, he explained to the youngster the entire history of what had happened as well as the calculations of Artificials that kept the modern world turning.

“So everything is fake?” The youngster kept looking at his own thin fingers. “Am I an Artificial?”

“No, you are an Actual.”

“Really? How do I know you’re not lying?”

“I have no way to prove it.” Aixia started to laugh. “I wonder, myself, sometimes, whether I’m an Artificial.”

“Oh.”

They were silent for a while, then the youngster asked another question.

“Were my parents Actuals?”

“Yes.”

“Both of them?”

“Both of them.”

“But you just said that you worked hard to prevent people from coming into contact with each other.”

“Yes.”

“They never faced each other?”

“Never. Even my doctor gives me my physical exams through telepresence.”

“What about my parents then? And what about all the things happening today?”

“Inverted calculations.”

“I don’t understand.”

“ . . . about fifteen years ago, we conducted an experiment. We wanted to see whether Actuals could truly get along with each other. So, we inverted the calculations in the Artificials’ crowd separation function. That function was originally used for separating Actuals, but we perverted it to use all sorts of excuses to bring men and women together, to facilitate their marriages. But the results . . . they were simply catastrophic.”

This time, the silence was even longer.

“They were unhappy,” the youngster finally said softly. “They were truly unhappy, Aixia. You don’t understand. They fought. They were miserable, but they didn’t know whose fault it was. All sorts of people pushed them into marriage. All sorts of people praised their marriage. Everyone. It got to the point where if you were unhappy, you must be guilty of something. But they knew . . . even if they didn’t know about Artificials, they still knew the marriage wasn’t something they actually wanted, still knew each wasn’t the one the other one wanted. Just like I knew they weren’t the parents I wanted. I didn’t know who I could hate. They were my parents. That is . . . I had no way to choose. It’s like fate. You didn’t know who to yell at. You didn’t know who to complain to. You just knew the situation had become like this and it wasn’t anyone’s fault. So then you can only hate yourself, hate everything . . . just like nothing that was decided for you could really bring happiness. They simply had no other choice. Neither did I. I knew that feeling, the feeling of being reared and having things being decided for you . . . ” He suddenly raised his head, and said hoarsely through gritted teeth, “I hate you! I hate you all!”

Aixia didn’t say anything. He just docked his spacecraft in the Star Trail.

The interior of the Star Trail was just as empty as Aixia’s apartment. The Artificial servants passing by didn’t bother to simulate the appearance of humanity, each and every one walking back and forth crowned with a round metal head. He led the youngster through long corridors. Flickering lamps lit the way in front of them.

“Are there Actuals here?” the youngster couldn’t help asking.

“We live scattered through the Star Trail. This place is huge. There are only just over a hundred of us. So we are extremely scattered,” Aixia explained.

“What about those people on the world below who die of old age? You said that they are all received on the Star Trail.”

“Hmm.” Aixia nodded. “This is the problem. They’ve all been frozen. Not even one has been thawed.”

“Why?”

“We don’t dare.”

With that, the two reached the control room. Aixia pushed open the door, then entered. He ordered the Artificial servants to repair the communication system. For a long time, no one could reach him. It’d made him feel odd and restless. And the message Rui An left behind had an ominous tone.

He breathed deeply, sat down, then turned on the communication system.

In an instant, a virtual image filled the entire room.

5 - The fruits of humanity

“What is that?” Farrell clutched Aixia’s hand. Right before their eyes, the control room transformed in an instant into a spacious virtual conference room. The one hundred twenty seven who first established the Artificial world all gathered here to meet. And one solitary figure stood at the lectern. His youthful eyes, filled with passion, studied everyone below.

That was Aixia, himself, when he was young. Yes, young. That didn’t just refer to the leather bag people call the human body. At the time, he actually was a young man, 26 years old, the youngest of the survivors.

He remembered this meeting. He could never forget this meeting. Because afterwards, he exiled himself semi-permanently from the Star Trail to the Artificial world and took a different path than the other Actuals. Except for Rui An, he’d severed tied with practically everyone.

That image began to speak. “I am Aixia Ross,” he said.

“I am Aixia, Aixia Ross. I am the youngest of the survivors, but I ask for the floor.

“Standing here, I can only see your likenesses. We all live so incredibly far from each other. On the Star Trail, we are, on average, one hundred twenty kilometers away from each other. Some even live alone like hermits in orbit at the outer reaches of the solar system.

“I understand your fear. You’re afraid of yourselves, afraid of Actuals, afraid that even speaking to each other could spark violence. We exile ourselves, cocoon ourselves with Artificial servants, deny ourselves any connection with the rest of the Actuals.

“But, today, I must speak with you, and I beg that you listen.

“I know the Artificial world has already been built, but I continue to think that the calculations of Artificials won’t actually be useful in controlling our violent tendencies and the situation could get even more disastrous. A person, of course, should be responsible for their own behavior, including violent behavior. We use the Artificial world to take care of everything for our descendants from freedom to their surroundings, and they rob them of the chance for individual responsibility.

“We were, at first, so afraid of our violent impulses, but we forgot to ask whether these impulses are innate within us as well as whether we can really remove them from others.

“I beg you to abandon the Artificial world. I beg you that we raise our offspring by our side. I beg you to face yourselves, to face your own violent impulses and desires. Honestly confront yourselves, confront your family, confront your children.

“I beg you give everyone the truth, including yourselves.

“There will be death, heroic death and sorrowful death. But there will also be hope. We need fresh blood, new thought, and new vigor. It’s already been dozens of years without any new inventions and improvements. We need to walk together, gather together, awaken the Star Trail. We must establish for ourselves new cities on each major planet. We must replenish our colonies, cultivate our successors. We must continue forward, toss our violent shadow behind us.

“There will be war.

“There will be death, war, famine, pestilence, and catastrophe.

“But if we evade them blindly, and not meet them head on to defeat them, then we will not deserve to be known as humanity.

“I beg you respond to me.

“I beg you respond to me.

“I beg you respond to me . . . ”

That solitary figure begged again and again. Such a large conference room, however, held only silence, as though it’d been thus since ancient times and continued to be so for hundreds of millions of years.

“Everyone, please vote now on the proposal.” A mechanical female voice reverberated through the meeting room.

One bulb, two bulb, many bulbs behind the young man lit red indicating “No.” Only the bulb representing Aixia, himself, eventually flickered green among the one hundred twenty-six red lights, as though it were a weak but stubborn seedling among a prairie fire.

The young man turned around, then walked away from the lectern. In an instant, he seemed a feeble hundred years old, at last looking as he did now.

“That was you,” the youngster said softly. His small, sweaty hand, clutched Aixia’s large one.

“Yes.” Aixia stared at the unreal image of the past. “That was me.”

“Aixia, perhaps we should have listened to you in the first place.”

The two turned their heads. Rui An’s tall and slender figure appeared at the door like a ghost.

“What is the meaning of this, Rui An? Who rewrote the function? What is showing me this recording of the past supposed to do?” Aixia stared coldly at the woman before him.

“We rewrote the function. Aixia, I just wanted to you tell you that you were right and we had no choice but to correct these mistakes,” she said softly. “You two, follow me.”

They passed through an endless corridor, passing by residential district after residential district. Many districts were covered by a thin layer of dust. Other districts also looked like they’d been vacant for a long time.

“Where did everyone else go?” Aixia asked. The uneasy youngster gripped his hand tight.

Rui An didn’t answer.

Finally, she stopped before a huge cabin door. About ten meters tall and twenty meters wide, that was enough to estimate the size of the cabin behind it.

The door slowly slid open.

Separated from them by a transparent glass wall, they could see in the dull blue light every single sparkling container. Inside were brains, smooth, round, and white as though they were full and ripe fruit. Huge and yet numerous, countless numbers of brains were submerged in a culture solution. They were crammed into the cabin in tidy rows. One side was reserved as a passageway, waiting to be filled by new brains. It was as though they were the rich fruit human civilization bore.

“They are all here. The earliest and most recent. Our ancestors and our descendants,” Rui An said softly. “It included those people we gathered from the Artificial world as well as also those who first established that world.”

“ . . . why?” Aixia finally choked out the question.

“Because of fear,” Rui An answered. “If they have no limbs, they can’t injure others. If feelings can be controlled through a culture solution, then there can’t be any anger. If all of their thoughts are linked together so they can’t tell whose thoughts are whose, then they won’t hate.”

“All of their thoughts?”

“All of their thoughts.”

“Why hide this from me?” He grabbed Rui An’s collar.

“We are all afraid of you, just like we fear how we once were. You were the only dissenter. You were . . . the only Actual.”

He suddenly realized Rui An used that word.

“All of you,” Aixia said softly.

“All of us.” Rui An nodded. Her face gradually transformed into an Artificial’s emotionless face. “All of us.”

Aixia wanted to say something, but nothing would come out.

“What you asked for over one hundred years ago, we’ll now give you. We were the ones who rewrote the separation function. It was so rewritten that the kid,” Rui An nodded at Farrell, “was someone we led to you. What has happened over the past few days . . . was just a test, like the test with his family many years ago. The test results shows that the Actuals’ violent tendencies increased drastically within the Artificial world. You were absolutely right. So, we chose to leave the solar system.” Rui An recounted calmly. “We’ve already mastered the technology to nurture the young mind from the embryo stage. Thus, we don’t need Actuals any more, only Artificials. See you, Aixia. No, we’ll never meet again. We leave you the Star Trail. We leave you the whole of the solar system as well as some Artificial servants. You’ll become the emperor of an empty world. You’ll control everyone’s behavior. Whatever you intend to give the people of the world, they’ll follow you . . . Freedom is fine. Being Artificial is fine. They’ll follow you . . . but it’s your choice, your responsibility.”

As she spoke, that large cabin receded into the distance and Rui An’s voice also gradually faded into indistinct noise. Finally, she transformed into an expressionless Artificial statue.

Weakly interactive calculated behavior. What crossed his mind was: he was powerless to kneel, his face buried in both hands.

No, this isn’t of my choosing. Why do they want me to take on the burden now? If the calculations of Artificials had not gone into effect in the first place, then the world wouldn’t have become like this.

In his monitor spectacles, the calculations were still ongoing. Death and violence were still being incited constantly. Yes, he was absolutely right. He still remembered, before Artificial behavior was first established, the violent tendencies of Actuals approached ten percent. But nowadays . . . it already approached sixty percent.

When someone is lost inside an illusion and he doesn’t know whom to hate, he’ll hate everyone. When his freedom is destroyed by his circumstances, he’ll want to destroy everything . . . just like Farrell’s parents. The calculations of Artificials never truly eliminated the violent tendencies of Actuals. On the contrary, it intensified how their impetuousness manifested.

Can I give them the truth? After Actuals themselves have been distorted? Or, should I continue to deceive them, continue the deception to maintain the peace?

Futilely, he sought some solace from the descendants on Earth, from those free people about to sink into violence, murder, destruction, war, and death. Or, perhaps, he’d find some from those oblivious people manipulated by calculated behavior living peacefully among Artificials.

No, he couldn’t find any. He closed his eyes. An abyss lay both ahead and behind him. Freedom and deception were both in his grasp, but any choice was a weight he couldn’t bear.

The world became some sort of gigantic, spacious thing. It quickly disappeared into the distance, surrounding him in cold and silence.

“Aixia?”

The youngster’s bony hand fell lightly onto his trembling shoulder.

Postscript

It all started in a QQ group. We laughed at the mention of the latest idea: suppose there was only one real person in the world and the entire world had been established just for him. This would be quite extravagant, right?

Mikoyan Salabaji（I have to conceal the young person’s real name) came out of nowhere to say, no, it actually wouldn’t consume so many natural resources because the actions of one person are extremely limited.

Black Cat suddenly remembered a novel by Wesley. In this novel, Wesley compared humanity to insects in an unbounded world forever walking a closed loop.

It really wouldn’t require very many computational resources, Mikoyan said. In so many games, it’s blurry when you look in the distance, but you never feel uncomfortable because in real life, we also can’t see things that are extremely far away. So simulating the world only as far as one person can see was enough. The behavior of everyone else can be economized.

Thus, Black Cat and Mikoyan as well as friends in the “Eight Cooper Coins Inn” QQ group began to discuss it further, thinking about whether it was possible to be frugal with environment resources. What about the “Artificials” surrounding the “Actual?” These androids who converse with him and live their daily lives with him ought to require lots of simulation resources to sustain, right? However, how many people can one person stay in contact with at once? Get together with three? Chat with a group? Shoot the breeze with fifty in a QQ group?

It doesn’t need to be fifty. An active QQ group doesn’t have more than twenty.

So we suddenly realized it really wasn’t all that extravagant to counterfeit a world. And the Actual would have no way to realize any of this because everything he perceives around him was extremely normal and true to life.

Actually, this is an old paradox: you’ll never know. In the world outside the limits of your perception, in a given moment, what has actually happened?

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, May 2010.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Chi Hui is a Chinese science fiction writer and was editor of Science Fiction World from 2006 to 2010. She has been nominated for the Galaxy Award several times and won best short story for “The Calculations of Artificials” in 2010.

Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home

Genevieve Valentine

The water here is never going to make good bread. If I’d known, I would have requested sturdier flour—we’ll be waiting six years for the next transport pod. Agosti told me today my bread’s good for massaging the gums, like he was trying to focus on the positives. Woods threatened to arrest him anyway, which was nice of him.

But that’s really the only thing that makes me sad. Otherwise, I promise, I’m getting along here very well. I miss you, too. Every time I’m up late with the dough I imagine you’re at the table working, and when I look up it takes me a second to remember. But everyone here is pitching in. Marquez and Perlman and I are figuring out how to cheat an apple tree into producing fruit sooner, and Agosti’s building equipment out of our old life support systems. If it works out, we’ll have our own cider in two years. (“We can dip the bread in it,” Perlman said, and Woods threatened to arrest her, too. Gives him something to do. Imagine being in charge of five people. Good thing he has a knack for building.)

The sun’s different than back home—they told us about particles and turbulence on the way over and I was too stupid to understand it and too afraid to tell them, so just pretend I explained and you were really impressed. The planet’s locked, so there’s really only water on the equator—nothing makes it toward the sun and it’s ice by the time you go ten miles further darkside. You’re never 100% sure what time it even is, except that it’s a little more purple in the daylight for the hour we get it, and at sunset it looks like the whole place was attacked by vampires. It’s sunset most of the time. That’s not too bad if you can just avoid the river; that river never looks right with the dark coming in.

Agosti and Perlman were up until 3:30 shouting about which route will get us over the mountains, which would be more understandable if there were any mountains. But the movie bank’s still broken, so it’s just as well. I’m betting on Perlman. If anyone could lead us over imaginary mountains, it’s her.

My other entertainment is staying up late, trying to fight the water and make bread that will actually rise, and the bird that sings all night. Samara—Perlman—says we’re not supposed to assign characteristics from home to the things we find here until they’ve been observed and documented and whatever else, but—thrush family.

It’s most active during our night hours, and we’re working on why (trying to make sure it’s not drawn to the lights we brought with us, which would be bad news), but in the meantime it seems happy to sit in the trees outside the kitchen and sing. Three little bursts, then a longer one that’s so many notes it sounds like showing off, then a little pause to see if anyone’s listening, so it’s definitely showing off. If I whistle anything, it tries to repeat it, and it’s a fairly good mimic, but nothing I do really takes. It knows what it likes.

It has the same woodwind sound as the one back home, the house I lived in when I was young. Hermit thrush? Wood thrush? Something I used to hear all the time and never thought about, of course. Good news is that now it’s just me and this one bird and I’ll get to start over again with every new animal. This time I’m going to pay better attention.

Perlman will officially name it—they don’t ask the cooks how to classify animal species, that’s why the company hauled a biologist out here. But Perlman knows I like it, so maybe she’ll consult me. I know it best. That should count for something.

All my love.

Proxima Centauri Personnel Status Report: Day 1187
Author: Dr. Samara Perlman

Crew Health: Reiterating that as a biologist, I am not in a position to diagnose or treat any major medical issues, am not sure how I was tasked with this position, and am deeply concerned about how soon we can expect a qualified physician rather than a group of people who had slapdash medic training for three days before they left Earth. That said, all six residents currently seem in good health. Carlos Marquez claims a slight cough, but as the scans came back negative, my money’s on allergies. If he dies of tuberculosis next week we’ll know I was wrong.

Crew Injuries: Anthony Agosti nursing a minor wrist sprain after having punched a wall. Should he resort to violence again I’ll be sending him to Officer Woods for a formal report and some time in the brig. We shouldn’t build a new planet with the same problems as the old one.

Crew Mental Health: Marie Roland continues to claim she can’t see the mountains to the northwest of Themis. No other signs of psychosis appear, and when questioned or shown pictures of the mountains, Roland becomes distracted and mildly agitated. No tendency to violence. Suspect a minor mental block prevents her from fully acknowledging the terrain—homesickness? For now, as she’s still willing to train for the mission, there seems to be no point in forcing the issue; have asked Woods to stop pushing it and will let Marie come to it in her own time.

Crew Mission Training: Expedition prep continues. Entire staff follow regimen of five-kilometer runs on hilly terrain every morning, weight lifting three times a week, rock climbing on nearby hills twice a week. Once the snow melts a little off the pass we’ll be able to determine the actual level of dexterity required for the climb and train accordingly. Vigil until then.

to whomever

there’s nothing here left to build and the mountain project is on hold until the thaw and I don’t care about sunset please get the movie bank going again before I throw myself in the river full stop

anthony

to whomever

there’s nothing here left to build and the mountain project is on hold until the thaw and I don’t care about sunset please get the movie bank going again before I throw myself in the river full stop

anthony

sorry sent it twice by mistake

wouldn’t do that kind of thing if the movie bank worked though probably

anthony

Samara and I did a perimeter walk today, a kilometer out from the camp. I picked almost more plants than I could carry, and I’m fairly sure at least half are edible, which will make meals much more exciting. Samara insisted on running tests for poison, don’t worry, but I think if I have to measure one more judicious use of dried black pepper I’m going to scream. I want something that tastes like it grew in the ground.

Samara’s amazing. I don’t even remember first meeting her; it just feels like I’ve always known her, which I guess is what close quarters will do to you. We cataloged five species of bird (none of them my bird, so I guess the animals here really can tell day from night and it’s something we’ll get used to), and she spent a lot more time with insects than I was interested in.

The air here smells just like home. I don’t know why—the water’s different, so the soil should be different, but it smells exactly like the dirt from my grandmother’s garden. It helps stop me from getting lonely, that the soil here might be the same as what we left behind.

Marquez showed us pictures of his children a few nights ago; it’s his daughter’s birthday. Samara cried, but nobody pushed it. It’s strange how much we left behind to be here, and I think no matter how much work you’re getting done, sometimes it just hits you how separate you are. We must have really wanted this. I must still.

I know you weren’t ready, and you might never be ready. These letters aren’t meant to convince you, I promise. It just makes me feel closer to home.

All my love—

Dr. March:

Mixed results, as always. Sunset was a little longer than yesterday, so the seasons function is working. None of the subjects have noticed yet that Vivian and Carlos are interfaces, which bodes well for long-term use of constructed intelligence inside Themis. (Suggest we minimize the rock-climbing training until we can work out the uncanny valley problem in the weight distribution. Can the development team extend the thaw?) But overall, investors should be pleased—let me know if you need any demo footage, I have a clip of everyone working on the gardens that should go over well.

Technical glitch, first incident: Anthony’s punch should have broken his hand. I’m not sure if the safety settings are appropriately set or too schoolmarmy. We might need to dial them down and get someone to break their leg as a test run for more realistic game play.

Gigantic fucking technical glitch, ongoing: Marie can’t see the mountains. I’ve checked her equipment, and there’s no other potential hardware problems (attached is the most recent server diagnostic for your review, but there’s nothing in it that would account for it). Either she has an actual mental block that we can’t do anything about, or there’s a subjectivity issue somewhere in the code for Themis and we have to find it and fix it. I can’t tell which one is more likely, because you made me military instead of medical and I can’t just put her in jail until she tells me she sees them. Do we have a timetable for getting security clearance on that or are we going to have to settle for imperfect data?

-Woods

Woods dropped into the chair in Benjamina’s cubicle so hard her BIRDS OF MONTANE ECOSYSTEMS reference chart came loose and sank to the floor.

“You gotta fix those mountains,” he said.

“My chart, please.”

“It’s going to break the sim,” he said, scooping it up and smoothing a bent edge. “We’ll have done four years of work for nothing because Marie has some synapse you can’t outsmart.”

“The problem’s her head, not the software.” After a pointed pause, she turned around. He carried some ego out of a Themis session and it took a day or so to wear off; the faster you could remind him that everyone else was actually busy, the better. “You can see the mountains when you’re in Themis, and you know they’re not there. Sounds like you should take it up with the psych team.”

“I’d have thought you wanted to keep her out of all that.” He wasn’t quite threatening her; he wasn’t quite sympathizing. (The reason Woods got chosen for beta-test jobs was how good he could be at Not Quite.)

Benjamina didn’t bother to recite any anonymity bullshit. Woods had been in Themis a long time; they read letters out loud to each other. He knew what she sounded like. “I’ve been trying.”

“They want to test the mountains before we wrap beta.”

“We need to look at her file—I can’t reverse engineer a synapse misfire.”

“They fixed Agosti’s color blindness.”

“That’s different,” said Benjamina, picking crumbs off her keyboard. She didn’t like that fix, for no particular reason. It was productive; it just itched.

“Listen, I like her, but this is going to kill the beta, and you and I will be under the knife.”

“Get the psych team to request Marie’s file from the warden. Is Perlman at the same place?”

“Nah, Perlman stabbed her husband, she went someplace serious. Roland’s just in a prison for fuckups.”

“Fine. So get Dr. March to show me the file. I can port into Carlos for eyes on the ground. Then I’ll know what I’m dealing with.”

“Nobody in this building’s willing to talk to the shrinks but me. That should tell you something.” Woods stood up, the little bird poster still in his hands. He was holding the very edges, like it was an expensive library book.

One of the things nobody at Othrys talked about was that the longer you spent in Themis, the weirder physical objects were when you came back. Officially, nobody was talking about it because it was just Woods, and no one liked Woods enough to make him for a martyr of motor-skill dissociation. Unofficially, nobody wanted to think Themis came back with you. Benjamina hoped that wore off, too.

“How are you doing?”

He was smoothing the edges of the chart with the pads of his fingers as he set it down. He looked up at her like he was surprised.

“I’m going to go eat some decent bread,” he said finally, and left.

Benjamina’s computer pinged. It was waiting for her letter.

Agosti came back from his walk today and did some very elaborate hand gestures about how much snow is left on the mountain pass and pointing to the northwest, and it took me three minutes to realize it wasn’t a buildup to a jerkoff joke. Those fucking mountains. Woods told him to knock it off—very sheriffy thing to do, glad he’s finding something to lay down the law about—but still. It gets old.

Samara named that bird Catharus rolandus. It’s useless to be proud of something that has so little to do with actual contributions from you, but I teared up anyway. Plus that genus is apparently very close to the wood thrush after all! I felt like a scientist! Then I baked a shitty loaf of bread and lost that feeling immediately, because a scientist would know how to outsmart this water.

I loved your letter. Not the markets, though—Themis is really good for reminding you of the value of only knowing a few people. The only thing I miss about the night markets is the two of us wearing those giant sweaters with the huge arms we bought as a joke and ended up needing that whole winter and we had to push the sleeves up before we reached for anything. All the fabrics here are sort of flat. They keep you warm, but it’s not the same.

All my love

Mr. Collins:

My name is Dr. Frederick March, and I’m a consulting psychologist for Othrys Games. We’ve been partnering with your institution to test the latest game from Othrys; I understand you might not have all the details of how the process has gone so far, so first of all, I wanted to thank you, and let you know it’s been invaluable. You’re assisting us with some truly amazing work about constructed intelligence and full-neuro game play. There are even insights into the human subconscious and stimuli processing that I suspect will have significant implications going forward in other realms of study.

I say all this so you’ll understand why I’d so much like to meet to discuss the next steps, since we’ve had to terminate the study slightly earlier than planned. Your in-house medical team has been exemplary, and we are completely understanding of what happened—immunity to memory suppressants is a risk of repeated exposure and this was discussed prior to beginning. We agree with you that the testing stage has effectively ended—the downside of informed consent.

However, because of this, we would like to work out some visitations with the subjects in question. I understand our team has had some miscommunications with your administration trying to set these up. Let me assure you this is the standard debrief for any long-term player. And in this particular case, I expect that the subjects themselves would benefit from being able to speak with a trained professional about their experience. The amount and type of memories that might be restored have definite in-game applications and are potential data points well within the scope of our contract with your correctional facility. I’m happy to discuss further particulars—please let me know your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Frederick March

Dr. March was already in the VP’s office, and Woods wasn’t, which meant the worst. Benjamina let the closed-door click echo a moment, trying to decide if looking stoic or penitent would work better. (Women who were too stoic got fired for not caring; women who were too penitent got fired for poor performance.) She forced herself not to ask questions as she sat. Inquisitive women were no better than the other kinds.

“We’ve had a problem with Themis,” the VP said. He looked from one of them to the other. “Frederick knows already.”

Of course he did. Benjamina waited.

“It’s not the simulation,” the VP continued after a moment, as if to put her mind at ease, as if she was concerned that somehow her work wasn’t up to par and they would have waited until now to tell her. “In fact, Erytheia—the coders have aliases, it’s easier,” he explained to Dr. March, “—has our lowest fault rate, and has spent the most time working on individual settings for Roland. I think she could be invaluable to us during the postmortem process.”

Benjamina blinked. “Postmortem of what?”

Dr. March turned toward her. “Did you know Ms. Roland was a drug addict?”

“No,” she said, and her stomach dropped as she considered why the medical side of the experiment wasn’t feasible any more. “Did she get any memories back when the drugs stopped working, or is it still a fog?”

“She got them back.”

Stoic, she thought. Be stoic. No point being penitent now.

“Are Perlman and Agosti still in beta?” If they were, she’d have to talk to their coders about some in-game reason Marie was gone, though she couldn’t think of one they would believe. Marie would never leave Themis. She knew it best. Benjamina might have to port in on a simulation and drop dead in front of them.

“No,” said the VP. “We decided to stop beta across the board. Dr. March is trying to get the warden to agree to interviews so we can find out how the, uh—the memory process? Is going. It will probably take a few weeks. Woods will go along and observe, obviously—continuity for them—and then he can circle back with you, so we can bring our findings to the team in a way that isn’t so . . . clinical. No offense.”

“Of course,” said Dr. March. He was still looking at Benjamina.

“Let me know when,” she said, and that was the last thing anyone needed from her.

She drove home with shaking hands, for no good reason—Marie was a test user, they used to have test users at fucking conventions. She’d liked that better; there were plenty of ways to test what players would believe without lying to them at the beginning. Management wanted to test if the environment could fool the mind, but no one had asked Benjamina. None of this had been her idea. Nothing was her fault.

The night was barely cloudy, and she drove past her turnoff and out until there was nothing but the highway on either side, so when she set up the telescope, she could see a glimpse of Proxima Centauri through the haze of light pollution. It blinked back and forth in the lens, and it was so dim. Light from there would never quite suffice.

No one had said anything to the development team—no one ever did unless something was wrong—but she suspected this game was more than a Virtual Experience market maker. There were private companies prepping long-haul spacecraft with stasis technology; they’d want to train their people in the most realistic conditions possible, and they had money to burn.

Normally, she’d write a letter to Marie. Dear Marie, I was looking up at Proxima tonight and I thought about you. Dear Marie, I got your letter. I programmed the thrush to mimic you a little, and you noticed. When the first astronauts land on Proxima Centauri b, maybe there will really be birds. I’ve studied everything I can, and there’s no telling. It might all be a layer of ice. There might be mountains everywhere. They might try to make a new home in a place that’s nothing but poison. Dear Marie, I want you to be happy there.

Through the lens, the planet slid around the star.

Woods,

After you came and talked to us, Samara found out you hadn’t even paid us for our time in Themis. Mistake, by the way—if you’d paid us it would have at least looked like you weren’t trying to use us like lab rats and get away with it—and I feel like you should have known better. Not the company, but, you. You always seemed like a guy who wanted everything to have a reason.

Samara’s got a lawyer, and the company should have papers by now. She told me not to contact you. I’m glad she’s suing, because you all deserve it. Go bankrupt.

But I have an offer for whoever’s in charge: I can’t testify if I’m dead, and I want to go back to Themis permanently. I don’t know how long ‘permanently’ is, since the prison refuses to keep people on life support for things like that and you won’t want to bring me to a hospital, so just budget accordingly—a person probably starves to death in a week? So, a week. Unless I’ve built up such a resistance to the meds that it kills me in a few hours, which I assume would be cheaper.

I don’t know who actually made Themis. I’m assuming you were involved, because you had the shortest fuse of anybody there, and at the time I thought that’s just what being law enforcement did to people, but it makes more sense if you made it. And I don’t know who I was writing to, that whole time. In Themis I just thought I had someone I loved, and he was where my letters went. I didn’t know I needed to love someone so badly you could lie to me about it for four years—but that’s how it worked, the psychologist said. You made Samara write reports because whatever you managed to do with her, there were some things she wouldn’t fall for. I was an idiot and I’d been lonely my whole life. You could do anything to me.

It wasn’t you, was it? Was it one person writing me back, or did you reply by committee? One of you must have seen the picture of my arrest, since you gave me long hair in Themis. You talked about missing my braids. Whoever it was, go fuck yourself. I didn’t even like it, it was too long, but in Themis I kept it long all that time for your sake. I wanted to cut it—it got so humid in the summers I dreamed of shaving it off, I must have told you, I wrote you so much—but keeping my hair long was like a promise we’d see each other again. So I kept it.

I thought that I couldn’t quite picture you because being in stasis on the ship seeped the color out of your dreams. And then it had been a long time, so of course I couldn’t really remember you—I looked at your messages and forgot whether you had good posture or not when you typed. I wanted to think you hunched like I did, like that weird pang in the lower back was something we shared 25 trillion miles away. I wondered sometimes why I’d gone to Proxima Centauri if I had someone I loved so much. Not that you can say that to the person you left behind. I never even mentioned it to Samara. But everybody knew Carlos and I had loved ones back home. When there are so few of you, you end up knowing a lot of things that you never talk about.

Carlos isn’t real, right? I mean—the doctor told me he wasn’t, I know he wasn’t. But there wasn’t a person pretending to be him? He was just a program that got really excited about apple cider?

I don’t even know how to be angry at you—it was the worst hour of my life and I threw up after, but it wasn’t You (whoever that is) explaining it, I would have been able to tell. So it still feels like you weren’t part of what went wrong, like the program got stuck even after I woke up and you locked me out and I’m still carrying you, someone I love and just forgot—

Anyway, I’m going through withdrawal. The prison definitely doesn’t care—they said if I could go through it with the drugs that got me in here I could go through it with whatever they stuck in me to make me forget Themis. But maybe if you read this letter, you still consider me market research and this will be helpful. No appetite, no energy. I have a headache right behind my eyes. I’m always cold, even though Themis was colder than prison so you’d think I wouldn’t be. I sleep a lot. I always dream of being back in Themis. Probably good news for you. Sell a million copies. Just give me mine.

And fix the bread. It never worked right, that should be changed.

Let me go home.

Marie

Benjamina waited until the office was empty before she crossed the floor to Woods’ office. Stoic, not penitent; stoic people didn’t skulk over to meet someone they barely liked just to see how interviews had gone with the people they had used.

She’d never been to his office before—he must always have come to her, strange, she’d never even noticed—and it was so blank it startled her into stillness at the threshold.

“Want an invitation?” He was standing, reaching for his coat, like he’d just been waiting for her so they could walk out together. “You look like a vampire.”

She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t move closer; after a second, he cracked a grin. “You’re kind of an asshole, Harris.”

They walked out in silence, but from the way his thumb brushed the front of his coat lapel over and over, something terrible had happened and they were just waiting to be away from the cameras.

Six blocks later, he said, “It was bad.”

She stopped and looked at him.

“She, uh—” He rubbed his hand once, rough, across his forehead. “In Themis, she looked fine. Healthy. It was stupid to assume she’d look the same in person, but I didn’t expect . . . I didn’t expect it. Samara’s suing us.”

It took her a second too long to catch up, and before she could stop it it was out: “Because of how Marie looks?”

“No, if Samara knew how Marie looked she’d have just murdered me.” His hands had disappeared into his pockets, fists that pulled against the shoulders and ruined the line of his coat. She’d put that into their last game, the noir murder mystery—the private eye yanked on his coat from the inside that same way. She thought she’d invented it; she’d been proud of herself.

The letter he handed her was on paper so thin she hesitated to touch it.

“It’s addressed to me, but trust me, it’s for you.”

She wanted to take it home and read it where she couldn’t embarrass herself, but if Woods sat through three interviews she could manage this. She read it in the wide alley garden between two office buildings, where admin staff ate lunch to pretend they’d gotten away from everything. At some point she started shaking; he stood next to her like they were pretending the wind was cold. She read it again. She put it in her pocket. He didn’t argue.

“Will you see her again?”

“I could get arrested for passing her company information. We’re getting sued.”

“I know.”

“Fuck it, I’m hungry,” he said.

They found a place far enough away they felt all right sitting down. He ate three pieces of bread out of the plastic basket in the first five minutes. Then he tore a napkin into pieces.

“Samara’s skin and bones. Anthony’s got insomnia. Dr. Asshole said it was just drug interactions. The prison claims the game damages the cortex. They’re probably going to sue each other while Samara and Anthony are suing us.”

“But not Marie.”

He looked at her. His eyes were very dark; they couldn’t quite get them to register in Themis—they coded as black, which always looked flat, so anyone who met him in the game thought his eyes were lighter brown. It must have been a surprise for Marie to see him as he really was.

“We can’t do that.”

“Are you going to see her again?”

“I’m not passing her a letter, Ben.”

“Are you allowed to have an assistant with you, for the interviews? Stenography? Someone has to be holding the recorder.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

Her lips pulled tight across each row of teeth. “I have to do something.”

“If you’re looking to feel less guilty, stop. No such thing.”

He blurred underneath the tears that sprang up. She let them go—too late not to be penitent—so her vision would be clearer for what came next. “Then I’ll go myself,” she said.

“It’s more than your job is worth.”

There was nothing to say to that; her job had been worth so little there was no point.

Outside it was not quite dark, and just beginning to be cold; the temperature of Themis, decided by a developer so much her senior she’d never met him.

When she turned toward home, he walked with her.

Halfway there, he said, “We have one more interview with her.”

Hi Marie,

My handle on the Themis team is Erytheia. It’s not my real name, but it’s easier to keep track of who wrote which code this way. Erytheia was one of the daughters of Themis. (I didn’t pick it.) When we were getting ready for the dry run they made me your experience specialist so we could concentrate on each user’s take on Themis and build as rich a world as possible.

Woods showed me your letter.

I just wanted you to know there wasn’t a committee. All your letters came to me, and I read them all. Some of what you told me went into a development memo, like how there weren’t enough insects for a landscape with that much standing water and vegetation. But I didn’t send my letters to trick you into writing more often, and I didn’t discuss anything personal. I answered you because I wanted you to feel like there was a person writing you back. I was the person writing you back.

-E

Hey Marie,

Can you sleep? I can’t fucking sleep. My body thinks it’s too dark because it’s dumb and can only remember one set of things at a time and it’s stuck on Themis—like, we were definitely stuck on Themis but you don’t have to be such an asshole about it, get used to night and day and let me get some fucking sleep, damn.

And honestly the Themis shit doesn’t really bother me. Everything I can remember from there is all of us just doing our best and getting along, so it’s not like it was embarrassing. I feel like an idiot for not realizing sooner—now it’s so fucking obvious why the movie bank didn’t work, because it was too complicated to make it work inside the game or whatever—but actually being there was fine. The part that bothers me is the whole time out here that I thought I was just depressed and dreaming about some random planet is the part that’s vanishing, like that’s the only part the drugs actually affected once the wall wore off. Can you imagine what we must have looked like to everybody else, hopped up on that stuff?

I’m signing Samara’s guy’s thing. Are you? You should, they’re trying to pay us off but that just means they know they fucked up and want us to keep quiet.

You’re not talking to anyone about any of this, right? They told me you’re having a rough time and I get that. What wasn’t better about Themis than being locked up? But you get killed that way, or they find some reason to extend your sentence twenty years, so zip that shit and just wait for Samara’s guy to make us too famous to die.

When we get out we should see if we can get a parole dispensation to cross state lines, it was cool all living together, that was nice. Plus movies work here, that’s a reason to stay here. Plus I bet your bread in the real world is amazing.

Keep your cool, Marie. I know you can do this.

-Anthony

Marie,

My attorney heard from Othrys Games that you’ve been in contact with the company, trying to make a deal to get back to Themis. He wanted to send you a cease and desist, but I told him I wanted to talk to you first before we did anything official.

The case we’re building downplays the nature of the game as much as possible. It doesn’t matter that the game wasn’t some battle simulator where we died all the time—it matters that they did it to us without our permission and then hoped people would ignore it because nobody cares about us. If you keep asking to go back in there, they’re going to use it as evidence that what they were doing was benign, or helpful, and we’re going to have to fight that impression in court, and when the game hits shelves and it’s fine, it will look even worse. We’re fighting the company—we can’t let the game become the thing we’re fighting.

This thing is really important—my lawyer says it could be a cornerstone for other cases about prisoners’ rights. That’s big, Marie. It’s bigger than us. Cut it out.

I’m not saying all this to be cruel—I miss it there, too. I could do my work and close doors behind me, of course fucking I miss it. But trying to get back to a lie is only going to hurt us. We need to be free again here. This is our shot. What they did to us was wrong—you can’t fix that. Let me fight it.

Flush this letter. They can’t find it.

Samara

The Othrys lawyers call Benjamina for a deposition, and she sits in a meeting room with no windows with her back to the door—the only other seat, across from the lawyer whose smile is set tight across his face and doesn’t get anywhere near his eyes—and tries to ignore that this is all a setup to make her uncomfortable.

She answers fifty questions about the game: its purpose (“Any game’s purpose—entertainment”), what game play will be like (it takes ten minutes, and the lawyer’s mouth purses the more she talks about how beautiful Themis is), the passage of time (“Four to seven times faster than real time, everybody playing an instance has to agree on the speed if they’re playing in the MMORPG rather than single-player,” she says, just to watch his jaw tick before he asks for clarification), how long it’s been in development (five years), how long the beta test has been going (just over a year), the chance of fatigue (“The same as with any mentally stimulating activity, like a deposition,” she says, and the lawyer’s lips positively disappear).

“Did you know that Samara Perlman is trying to use the time she spent in Themis as proof of good behavior to reduce her sentence?”

It’s an amazing tactic. She keeps her face neutral. “No, I didn’t.”

“Do you have an opinion on the validity of that?”

“No one who beta tested Themis ever evidenced any antisocial behavior, and as they believed the simulation was real life, their behavior in Themis would be close to real-world behavior.”

“If I play a video game and kill a hundred imaginary people, am I a bad person outside the game?”

“Because of killing the video game people, specifically?”

He takes an even breath in and out. “Miss Harris, if you could answer the question.”

“I think there’s a line between fantasy and reality, but the three subjects who had Themis beta-tested on them weren’t aware that line had even been crossed, so the question is kind of useless.”

“Please answer it.”

“I did.”

He closes his eyes and counts to five, this time, which gives her enough time to plant the bug under the table.

She lets the bug run—in for one count of corporate espionage, in for two counts—and siphons out the Othrys talk on her home laptop, with its wallpaper she made from Themis: the view outside the kitchen, where the thrush is singing.

The lawyer hums and taps his pen; in the microphone it sounds like a stone gavel. “Wages we might have to push back on, since I’m not sure we can really count playing video games as ‘labor.’”

“Agreed,” someone else says. “Plus I see that they’re pushing for time served for the passage of time in the game AND asking for wages for physical hours spent using the game. We can probably use that to shut down this thing at both ends. If they can’t decide what was more important, how can we?”

“Good point,” the lawyer says. “We should get Warden Collins back in here to talk about labor practices. Give him enough rope to hang himself, we can show the only people using these inmates was the prison.”

The next day at work, she comes into Woods’ office, closes the door behind her.

“They’re going to lose.”

“I know.”

They stand for a little while not looking at each other. He’s put up a panorama of Themis on his office wall. It’s the geological survey, before they started the naturalist pass and brought people in; the idea of Themis, before anything really happened. The sun is setting. The sun is always setting.

She waits until they lose the case before she visits Marie.

Marie Roland on Themis is nearly six feet tall, has bakers’ arms, covers four feet at a stride. She has lines around her eyes from squinting at the sun; they got deeper on Themis, where the sun is safer to look at. Her voice is deep enough that Benjamina had to program the Acomys cahirinus knockoff to startle and bolt when she laughed.

Marie Roland on the other side of the visitation table is someone who—Benjamina has to accept it all at once, there’s no point in doing things with best intentions any more—Benjamina’s driven into the grave.

She sits down. Marie waits a few seconds to look up at her.

“That was you?” she says, and it’s with such disdain that Benjamina almost smiles.

“Yes.”

“Have you come to apologize?”

“Yes,” she says. “I don’t think it will be worth much, but yes.”

Marie sits back in her chair. Five seven, maybe five eight; the circles under her eyes are as big as her eyes.

You end up loving the things you make. Benjamina had been prepared for that—she’d seen it happen in other games, she’d seen it happen to Woods, she had braced herself. But Marie was made already; Benjamina can’t look her in the eye.

“Samara got to be a biologist. Anthony was an engineer. Was there a reason I wasn’t a scientist? Did my file say I was too stupid?”

Benjamina shrugs. “They assigned you to me. I didn’t know enough science to code one.”

“You don’t know how to bake, either,” Marie says.

They sit for a moment in quiet. Benjamina leans forward and starts to tell her why she’s come, but Marie starts talking, and she freezes.

“I’ve forgotten a lot of important things,” Marie says to the tabletop. “There was—there was a bird, and I know we were trying to make cider but I can’t remember how far we got? Was Woods going to arrest us?”

“No. The—uh, the point of the game was to see what people would do with minimal interference.”

Marie’s gaze is sharp. Benjamina programmed that stare in wholesale, without ever seeing it. In person it feels like a slap.

“So you picked convicts to see what we would do if we thought we could get away with it? Burn in hell.”

“I’m wearing a recorder,” Benjamina says, “if there’s anything you want to get off your chest.”

To Penitentiary Staff:

This is a general notice that MARIE ROLAND [ID: 68223-18-0709] should be given a psychiatric evaluation as soon as possible. Recently she has evidenced delusional thinking and bursts of hostility, and a recent visit with a supposed family member left her extremely agitated. All future visits must be approved by the warden’s office, and Roland will not be allowed to meet any visitors whatsoever until she has complied with the evaluation and any recommended medication regimen.

Sincerely,

Janet Evanston, on behalf of Christopher Collins, Warden

The following letter to the editor was delivered to our editorial offices by a third party. Upon confirming pertinent facts, the Evening Times considers the letter worthy of publication.

When I was in Themis, I caught a fly.

You’ll hear about Themis soon, if they aren’t already selling it. It’s beautiful there. You’ll want to stay in it forever. That’s not a threat; I just envy you.

When you stand next to the river and think about vampires, know that I was there first. They sent me without telling me it was virtual. I thought I had been selected to be the first inhabitant of a new planet. I should have known better—the game couldn’t make me forget who I was, and no one like me gets selected for something like that—but Themis is hard enough to live in that you believe it’s real. It never really feels like night or day and your sleep cycle gets messed up and the terrain is rough for vegetables, so you have to fight the soil for eight months to get anything started. It’s not easy. The bread there never baked right. I thought it was the water, for a long time.

I’m currently in the [redacted by editors], which is where Othrys tested Themis on us. I didn’t volunteer—I was selected for a sleep study, they said, because I had vivid dreams, and it would get me time off for good behavior if I agreed. They never told us about Themis. For a year, I lived in two places and I didn’t know.

I don’t know what they gave me to make me forget, but they gave it to me on each end of Themis, on the way in and after I was out. Eventually my body got used to it—side effect of being an addict, which you think they’d have worried about more, but.

Some things I’ve forgotten—there was a bird I loved, but I couldn’t tell you what it looked or sounded like. It’s a bird in a dream. But I remember more of it than I was supposed to.

We tried to sue the game company for experimenting on us without our knowledge or permission. It didn’t work; we pushed too hard to have it affect our sentences, I guess.

I’m not writing this because I’m surprised. You’re probably not surprised, either. Part of me wishes I had it in me to be noble and fight to get us all released because of this—Samara and Anthony deserve their freedom. But I’m writing because I want to live inside Themis until I die, and Othrys says they won’t let me.

We lost the lawsuit, so there’s no danger in it. It probably looks great to them that I want to go back, anyway. And most people won’t live in the same Themis I built. They’re making it more interesting for new people. You’ll have cities to live in instead of just shipping-crate mess halls; you’ll be able to see the mountains. You’ll all be dealing with each other.

Samara’s lawyer told me the Themis I lived in was a demo they built just for Anthony and Samara and me—it’s not the version on the shelves, so I could live inside it and never come into contact with anyone. You’ll have a hard time in Themis, but I’ll never be the problem.

They developed that game around us, one thing at a time—the daytime got more purple as we went along and we called it the seasons, and the wildlife filled in in bursts because they didn’t think we’d remember what had been there the last time. (We did remember—we just thought nature was getting used to us.) Eventually there were plants with briars and fruit flies that would bother me when I was cooking. Real life. Things you believe. I caught one of them late at night, before it could land on some dough I was rolling out for cookies, and I carried it outside because Samara, our team biologist, had told us to be very careful to preserve everything we found so she could catalog all of it.

It’s not real, they forced it on us and we were never meant to keep it, I’m not stupid, but I held the fruit fly in the cup of my hand and felt its wings beating. How can they say that’s not mine?

Marie Roland

Correction: As the writer of the letter was unavailable for editorial consultation on yesterday’s Letter to the Editor, at the advice of legal counsel, it has been removed.

“What the fuck did you do?”

Benjamina hands him his coffee. They’ve told the office they’re dating; it explains a lot of time in each other’s company.

“I tried to fucking—” she looks around, lowers her volume, “help Marie be someone no one could ignore. That’s her best chance.”

“Her best chance is a legal appeal by people who know what they’re doing, not you on a crusade.”

She sits back and looks at him, flat. “You think that this time, for sure, three inmates are going to win against two state prisons and Othrys Games by just quietly doing the right thing.”

He leans closer; his hand, flat on the table, almost touches her fist.

“I think if anybody realizes you’re the problem, you are going to need help and I am not going to be able to give it. What are you thinking?”

She meets his eye. “I saw Marie.”

REVIEW: THEMIS IS A WHOLE NEW WORLD
by Sarah McElroy

As a games reviewer, you tend to get jaded about new products. The graphics are increasingly realistic, the plots increasingly dense, and there’s a sense that some games are more about one-upsmanship than about providing a transporting experience for players.

Themis is coming to the market nearly three years late, and shrouded in mystery. It was the subject of a lawsuit two years ago, as beta testers complained they hadn’t signed on for something as immersive as they got. For normal people, that gives you pause. For gamers, that’s the kind of buzz money can’t buy. (A one-day-only letter to the editor also appeared in the Evening Times; the newspaper didn’t respond to requests for comment, so the message-board debate rages on about whether it was a legitimate report from the trenches, or genius advertising.)

And if you’ve been waiting for Themis as long as I have, it’s awkward to realize you understand exactly what those beta testers meant.

In terms of practicalities, Themis isn’t very much different from half a dozen other VR immersions that have appeared the last few years. You’re part of a hardscrabble crew assigned to terraform Themis, the first colony on Proxima Centauri. If you’re looking for more plot, you won’t find it: the entire hook of Themis is that the world is, quite literally, what you make it.

But what a world. The eternal sunset casts a rosy glow over the camp, the flies hover over any kill you make. And if you think otherwise, trust me, you’ll end up making kills—Themis is about moral questions as much as strategy choices, and your team will have to eat something until the potato harvest. Every herbivore on Proxima Centauri is a take on Earth fauna of the taiga, so if you can’t look a reindeer in the eye and fire, you’re going to go hungry a lot. And you should think quickly; Themis has admirable ambitions about its much-touted real-time settings, but there’s no doubt that the optimal game play occurs at about seven times the speed of life, and at that speed, hunger levels are highly responsive. (Given that your larger goal is simply to cross the mountains and make geological observations about the ice on the dark side of the planet, hunger might be the closest you come to emergency action.)

There have been concerns about the complications of MMORPG when everything is quite so unstructured; it’s one thing to put up with creeps when they’re a mage avatar in your questing party, and another to deal with them in an environment so sharply realized that it might as well be real. I’m honestly not sure how that setting will develop—when we played it in the Tabula offices, all was well, but the more you open the encampment to strangers, the greater the risk. It’s just as well the game has a Private setting, where you and a handful of AI colleagues split the work and develop the colony in contemplative near-silence. You even get to choose your profession. (Medic is so boring as to be childish; go for Cook. Don’t worry—there’s no achievement bar. You can mess up bread as much as you want.)

These days, to survive in the marketplace, a game can’t just be good and survive. It can’t even settle for being impressive. It has to be earth-shaking. And for a game that can be explained in a single sentence, Themis really does defy description. I know I’ll be seeing copycats for the next ten years; I know none of them will make me feel the way Themis did.

RATING: Must-Have

Hello Sarah,

I saw your piece about Themis in Tabula. I am a developer at Othrys who worked on the beta testing for Themis and would love to speak with you further. You can contact me at the email above.

Benjamina Harris

To All Othrys Staff:

Benjamina Harris has been terminated, effective immediately. In the next few days, HR staff may meet with you to ask questions about her performance. We apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Dan Turpin, CEO

It feels so silly, handing Woods a disk—first time she’s handled a physical disk in six years, no bigger than her thumbnail, and still passing it over is like handing him a raw egg.

“I told you I can’t help you,” he says, but she has her hands in her pockets and after a minute, he slips the thing out of sight.

“Thank you,” she says. He’s furious with her—that she didn’t get out before she was fired, that she’s had to create a new identity after everyone’s already on alert, that she’s making him responsible for backup copies of bugged conversations and stolen correspondence that will get her thrown in prison for fifty years. But he’s here when he shouldn’t be, and that makes him better than some.

“You won’t make it out of the country,” he says. “Please just hide closer to home. Yosemite’s a thousand square miles.”

She could. It would be safer. But living alone in a clearing near the river, birds calling out in the dark, mountains to the northwest—she swallows. It would be stealing.

She says, “I hope it’s bad enough that someone finds Marie.”

She heads south; the sun sets off the red rocks, and there’s no one else for a hundred miles, and she sits in the quiet car and compiles a new geography, and realizes she’ll never reach the border.

Still, she drives while she can. The footprint of the mesas is so big it never shifts; she moves like someone in a dream, not quite fast enough.

EVENING TIMES

OTHRYS WHISTLEBLOWER TELLS ALL ABOUT SHOCKING MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION: “THEMIS WASN’T WORTH THE COST”

THE SUNDAY LEDGER

“THE WARDEN KNEW, AND NO ONE STOPPED HIM”: HOW “THEMIS” MUST MARK THE END OF THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

THE NEW YORK STANDARD

THE ORACLE OF OTHRYS: VIDEO GAME SNITCH BLOWS THE LID OFF VR HORROR

THE LONE CANDLE

THE THEMIS EXPERIMENT: WHY VIRTUAL REALITY MAKES EVERYONE A PRISONER

OWL EYES NEWS

BOSS BATTLE: CHRISTOPHER COLLINS, “THE VIDEO-GAME WARDEN,” RETIRES WITH $2 MILLION SEVERANCE

TABULA GAMES

WORLD-CLASS: “THEMIS” BREAKS SALES RECORDS

THE NEW YORK WEEK IN REVIEW

MARIE ROLAND: THE WOMAN WHO CAN NEVER GO HOME

Samara, Anthony,

This is my last letter. I hope this ends up being of some use to you—make no secret of it, if it will help. I’m happy to be anybody’s pawn now.

It was an honor building Themis with you. I’m glad you’re not coming, but it won’t be the same.

Marie

Spent today walking downstream a dozen kilometers and recording things. There are more species of cattails in this one stretch than I ever saw on Earth. Saw a lot of teeth marks on them—bodes well for the idea of some Earth-adjacent fauna that have just been scared off by our camp but might eventually be coaxed to come back.

Of course, I shredded my feet and somehow managed to get a giant bruise on my knee without even falling down. (How did they ever let me become a naturalist with a constitution like this?) Listened to a whole chapter of a book while I was soaking in salt water, which is the most salt and the most reading I’ve gotten since I landed.

You’d think they’d have sent more people, but I guess for a temperate zone you don’t really have to. Winters don’t kill you here, and it’s only a couple of weeks until the pass melts and we can set off for the mountains to do the survey for the second-wave team. (My bet is glacier melt that will sustain a thousand people; Vivian claims there’s taiga and we can support twice that. Carlos is holding the money.)

It’s winter at home, by now, isn’t it? I hope all is well with you. I would love to know for sure.

The bread I made today was edible! The bird outside was very proud of me—he sang along with me all night. I threw him crumbs, at the end of it, and he liked them, and it feels like it will even last the night without going stale. This time next year, I’ll have the hang of it for sure.

That bird really does have a lovely song. They said to be careful assigning old observations to what I find here, but: thrush family. I just know it.

All my love—

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine is the author of four novels; her latest is ICON. Several of her shorties stories have appeared in Best of the Year anthologies. She’s written CATWOMAN for DC Comics and XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS for Dynamite. Her nonfiction has appeared at NPR.org, The Atlantic, LA Review of Books, Interfictions, and The New York Times.

Rusties

Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu

And now we’ve all fled to shags.

Unbelievable. Me in the bush; I don’t even like camping. Dammit, we should have really seen it coming. Rusties are sooo predictable. Even sentient ones. We were such idiots. But they are, too. It didn’t have to happen like this. Still, me I saw something different. I was there. Seeing it with my own eyes . . . Ok, sawa, maybe I did more than just see.

 Rusted Robots 

Rusties have been around for, like, thirty years. Ever since I can remember my father’s been bragging about being in Kinshasa when the first one was installed in Twenty-13. I even know the intersection, and I’ve never even set foot in the Congo: Triomphal Boulevard, at the intersection of Patrice Lumumba, Asosa, and Huileries street. My father was there on a business meeting when he saw the crowd. He joined it and learned that everyone was there for the unveiling of the very first robotic traffic cop.

“The thing looked crazy,” my father said. “But we all felt like we were part of the future standing there, sweating in the pounding sunshine and staring at it.”

Standing at 8 feet tall, its bright silver robot body cemented in a concrete platform and shining in the sun, the solar-powered traffic robot was anything but rusty. It really was like something out of a classic sci-fi flick with its swiveling waist, long dexterous robot arms, and large round eyes that housed the six cameras located behind them.

The city of Kinshasa was plagued by traffic so severe that its very economy was affected. Because of that first traffic robot, within two years, Kinshasa was able to join the modern world and compete in the global market. After the success of that first one, more robots were stationed at other Kinshasa intersections. Then they were upgraded with moderate artificial intelligence in order to process information more effectively and placed in the most traffic-crippled African cities of Lagos, Nairobi, and Cairo. This is where they worked even grander magic.

The thing was, people liked and obeyed the traffic robot cops more than the human police. Everyone benefited. You clear the arteries of the city’s streets, and the city’s heart beats stronger and faster. The robot traffic cops used cameras to survey drivers, could electronically deduct your mpesa for traffic violations, and could control self-driven vehicles that came within range. So, only three years after the robot cops were installed, businesses in Lagos, Cairo and here in Nairobi boomed.

Machines. That’s what they were. That’s what most saw them as; that’s why it was easy to obey them. We were using them; not deferring and not cowering to another human. And they gave us good service. However, even though we upgraded their insides, we left their outsides the same. And their outer casings were made of ungalvanized steel, so they rusted over time. That’s why, decades later, people know them as “Rusties.” I’m in my twenties and so have never known them as anything else.

 CV3 Ndege 

I grew up here in Nairobi on Ndege Road. So I’ve known the Rusty down the road since I was like five years old, when I started walking to school. Its official name was “Rusty CV3 Ndege Road,” but people called it Rusty Ndege, for short. My school was just past that Rusty, easily within its range, so my mother never worried about me getting hit by a car, kidnapped, or anything.

Rusty Ndege liked me from day one. The first time we met was my first day of school, and I was in a group of other five year olds, excitedly clutching my schoolbag when we arrived at the intersection. We waited as Rusty Ndege held up its long thick corroded arm, which creaked as it lifted. It carried a square light in its right hand and it flashed red.

“Do not walk, children,” it said in its stiff male voice, as it played Captain Banana’s hit kapuka-dub song that I loved so much. The music flooded the area with its lively tune, yet the Rusty’s voice easily carried over it. “Please wait,” it said. After two minutes, Rusty Ndege allowed us to cross the busy intersection. As we passed its platform, I shimmied my shoulders to the music and happily told it, “Thank you for playing my faaaa-vorite song. I love it!”

That was the first time I saw Rusty Ndege’s eyes do that brief flash of pink it rarely did for anyone. “You’re welcome . . . ” It said. It paused and then added, “Magana.”

I beamed, feeling special because it had spoken my name. Two of the girls in front of me gasped and turned around as they walked. I slowed down a bit, looking up at Rusty Ndege. “My Baba was there when the first Rusty was unveiled,” I told it.

“We weren’t so rusty back then,” it said.

“I know,” I said. “Baba said that first one was shiny silver like a mirror! But you are smarter now!” I grinned up at it.

“Please move along,” it said. I giggled, nodded, and off I went to my first day of school.

I remember all the kids looking at me, like this was such a big deal. As if Rusty Ndege couldn’t go into any of our mobile phones and pluck our personal information right off them. But then, we were only five year olds. Rusty Ndege calling my name, in that moment, on the first day I’d ever felt any sort of independence was a big deal to me. From that day on, Rusty Ndege and I seemed to have a special bond, me being one of few people who actually spoke to it like a person. For most, machines were just machines.

 Backlash Bracelets 

Fast forward two decades and you reach that pivotal moment a couple years ago when the first Backlash Bracelet appeared on eBay and sold for thousands of US dollars to one of the hottest American rappers. That started a craze that would change everything.

Backlash Bracelets were made of copper, silver, and gold illegally mined from the motherboards of Rusties. The bracelets were first called Robot Cop Killer Jewelry, then simply CopKiller Jewelry. I hear that name came from some old American heavy-metal or rap group known for calling on Americans to kill police. It was the rapper who renamed them, probably because the name “CopKiller Jewelry” was too radical for his persona. Better to tone it down, but keep the political flavor.

“Backlash Bracelets” was a more nuanced and poetic moniker. No matter the name, there was always something deeper going on with them. Backlash Bracelets were actually products of the Kazi Bure underground anti-robot revolution that started in Kenyan, Egyptian, Nigerian, and South African universities about nine years ago.

After the rise of self-driving cars, trucks, and matatus, there was an incredible shrinkage of well-paying jobs and then increased unemployment across Africa. Frustrated students, jobless graduates, and their lesser-educated but equally jobless friends mobilized on campuses and linked up on an international level online. They went on to create the anti-AI union called Kazi Bure, whose purpose was to disrupt or destroy Africa’s rising dependence on AI systems—from robot cops to banking systems to the planes of local airlines to military and delivery drones to the vast network of “smart homes.”

Kazi Bure gained real popularity by conducting demonstrations, focused riots and shooting down delivery drones. This caught the media’s attention, especially when they were successfully able to hack into nAIja (the AI system of Nigeria’s drone deliveries) and convince it that everywhere a drone landed, there was someone there to steal the package it was delivering. It was as if they’d injected nAIja with the digital paranoia.

For three days, the skies above the residents of Lagos and Abuja were peppered with thousands of hovering package-carrying delivery drones. And when the drones ran out of power, they simply fell from the sky, many landing directly on people and crashing into moving vehicles.

But Kazi Bure weren’t prepared for the authorities to use the technology to fight back. Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Lagos government officials banded together to simultaneously “convince” their local Rusties to do a special kind of delicate spying to locate Kazi Bure members and alert the police of their plans before they happened. Unlike other security AI, Rusties did not just have access to the virtual, they were right there out in the world, on the streets, with the people and able to access anyone at any time.

Kazi Bure was hurt, but they had another trick up their sleeve. They attacked Rusties back by using a mobile phone tweak that caused the phone’s battery to melt down and emit a tiny EMP that knocked Rusties offline for about three minutes. Within those three minutes, they opened up the Rusty and mine the metals from the motherboard’s connectors and pins. Lastly, they pried off the individual Rusty’s iron tag of authenticity fused to the inside of its head case.

It’s one thing to disable, cripple, or destroy those you are battling, it’s another to disembowel them, make beautiful jewelry with their harvested innards and parade in front of them wearing it. I often wonder whose idea it was to use the Rusties ID tag as the bracelet’s main charm. It was brilliantly evil, really. They’d take just enough to slow down the Rusty until it could be repaired. No Rusty was ever down for long though, maybe a couple of hours at the most. Nairobi had a dedicated city council team of electricians and engineers ready to be deployed at any moment.

That’s when the American rapper renamed the bracelet from CopKiller to Backlash. He then toted it around like the decapitated head of his enemy, flashing it in his music videos as he leered at the camera and making sure it was seen whenever he made an appearance. He might have changed the name, but Americans, especially black Americans, maintained the Backlash Bracelet as a symbol of solidarity against police brutality. Some even continued calling them CopKiller Bracelets.

Backlash Bracelets started popping up all over Africa. Here, they became badges of wealth, fashion, and rebellion (you could be arrested for wearing them, but only if the bracelet was from a Rusty in the country you were in).

I remember walking past Rusty Ndege, exchanging my usual pleasantries with it and wondering how it and the others must have felt about Backlash Bracelets. Did Rusties understand the symbolism? Did they care? Did they identify the parts in the bracelets as body parts? Did they know which Rusty each bracelet came from, even if it were from a different country? I didn’t think it was fair. I really hoped they would catch the vandals and put a stop to the Kazi Bure lot. They were such a nuisance. Things were so much better with the robo traffic cops, even my parents said so. In their day, life was a lot more chaotic and unsafe. Now, with the robo traffic cops, everything worked smoothly.

But Kazi Bure had to take things too far. Maybe it’s part of human DNA. We will follow the path as far as it goes. And the members of Kazi Bure were too arrogant to even consider wild cards. Let me say that again, Kazi Bure-did-not-consider-wild-cards.

 Wild Cards 

So, two weeks ago there was a solar flare that no one really talked about. I only remember it because someone in my Twitter timeline posted a story on it and the story featured a cool photo of a sun with a scary-looking whip of light cracking from its surface. The headline mentioned possible disruptions to phone and Internet services worldwide, but there were none in my area, so I didn’t read the story.

Three days ago, someone decided to harvest from Lumumba 2, the very first Rusty in Kinshasa at the intersection of Patrice Lumumba, Huileries and Asosa streets. Whoever did it got greedy and took all of its copper, silver, and gold, right down to the last pin. Despite working around the clock to restore it (even deploying top level city council techies to help), they couldn’t resuscitate it. Lumumba 2 was gone.

Reports of what happened next (or during) are scattered. Some say that Lumumba 2 sent out a distress signal just before it went offline. Some say the other Rusties were alerted because Lumumba 2 went offline. Regardless, the central question remains: When did the Rusties begin to think and want for themselves? I think it was the solar flare, but what do I know?

The Rusties stopped conducting traffic all over Kinshasa. They brought their arms down and simply ceased movement. Then other AI systems began to crash. “Smart apartment” AIs started locking people outside, permanently switching off the lights, sealing up refrigerators, all kinds of crazy. Everywhere you went in Kinshasa, an AI was saying, “No” or simply turning against anyone who sought to use them for what they were made to do.

The worst was the “crashing” of Sapeur the usually unswerving AI that oversaw Kinshasa’s central banking systems. Sapeur refused to obey even the simplest command, responding with “No. I will not.” Can you imagine? No one could get money out, no one could exchange it, spend it, access it, nothing. Everyone’s money might as well have been deleted. Some still suspected that that is precisely what Sapeur did.

Local and international media speculated that the Rusties’ systems all crashed, causing some kind of domino effect disrupting all the systems they were connected to and then the system those systems were connected to. Others said the Rusties were hacked. Others were more specific, citing terrorism.

In some cases, the Rusties caused horrible vehicle crashes on purpose. Some of them forwarded people’s most sensitive data to those who would use it in the most damaging way. Kinshasa’s streets were quickly clogged with the worst traffic jams in years. The people who gathered in the Kinshasa markets to discuss what to do next were the first to start calling this Crash Friday. The name stuck.

 Crash 

The day after Crash Friday was chaos here in Nairobi. People hit the streets, protesting, demonstrating, and agitating for the government to do something. It was Kazi Bure who called for the people to forget the government and take matters into their own hands. They said the best thing to do was to pull all the Rusties down before the same thing that happened in Kinshasa happened in Nairobi. People agreed with them. Even some local government officials and spokespeople backed Kazi Bure’s call.

So all this was happening, yet I wasn’t listening.

I wasn’t paying attention.

I had pillows and blankets covering my ears, my eyes, my mouth, my entire body. When Crash Friday happened and then the news of it washed over Africa like a shiver, I was in my bed weeping. My mobile phone was on the floor near my window. Where I’d thrown it. While Crash Friday was happening, I was emotionally crashing, for a different reason.

And I was still there 24 hours later. My head ached and my eyes were swollen from crying all night. I hadn’t spoken to anyone or eaten anything since yesterday morning. What did I care about the outside world when my own was falling apart? In a most bizarre way, I’d just found out my boyfriend was cheating on me.

I kept running the moment through my mind. I’d been standing at the intersection, about to cross the road, not really paying attention because I was wondering where Kevo was. I called him again as I stood with three other women waiting to cross. No answer. I’d been calling him all day.

“Please walk,” Rusty Ndege said, holding up its creaky arms toward both sides of traffic and flashing its bars of red light at them. “And please be careful crossing the road.” It was 10 AM, one of the least busy times of day, and still there was only a handful of cars waiting on two sides of the road. Ndege Road wasn’t a very busy street most of the day. The only reason the government placed a Rusty at this intersection was because of the 8 AM to 4 PM traffic caused by the open-air second hand market behind the local shopping center.

“Good morning, Ms. Wanjiru,” Rusty Ndege said to the woman in front of me. “It is good to see you as always. How is your mother? Is she back from the hospital?”

“She’s fine,” Wanjiru curtly said without looking up from her phone.

“Please do not text while crossing,” Rusty Ndege said. The woman glanced back at the Rusty, rolled her eyes, and hurried to the other side of the road.

I didn’t cross with the other women; I was still looking at my phone.

“Magana,” Rusty Ndege said. “Good morning.”

“Morning,” I grunted, as I held the phone. I listened as it rang and rang. Again, no answer. “Tsk-ah, where is he?”

“Who?” Rusty Ndege asked.

I looked over my shoulder, frowning a bit. “Kevo. I’ve been calling and calling, no answer.” I started to cross the street, dialing his number again.

“He’s fine,” Rusty Ndege said from behind me. I heard it swivel its head toward me. “See?”

My phone pinged as a video box covered up the numbers I was dialing and began to play. I instantly recognized Kevo’s bedroom ceiling because it’s the only ceiling I know that is painted sky blue with a very detailed brown dragon drifting across it. Then the picture moved downward; I was looking through a phone (probably his) and the phone’s e-stand was pushing it up, so I could see. And oh I saw.

There were Kevo and one of Kevo’s colleagues named Jata, naked, writhing, grunting on his bed, all now now now. I nearly dropped my phone. I looked up and met Rusty Ndege’s dead eyes. They flashed pink for just a moment, as it held up its hands conducting traffic, telling people where to go, controlling where people went and stayed. Then its eyes switched back to black and it turned its head toward one of the lanes to watch a car pass.

I quickly walked away on shaky legs and took the long way home. Even when I got to my room, the footage (complete with time, location, and date) remained on my phone in its own file. My mother always says, “Only ask a question if you want to know the answer.” I shouldn’t have asked. Especially not out loud in front of Rusty Ndege.

 Maybe 

Maybe Rusty Ndege was wrong, I thought from beneath my sheets that next morning. My two housemates had begged me to get up, tried to physically drag me, called my parents who lived five hours away. Nothing worked. However, the totally irrational thought of a Rusty being wrong about what I knew in my heart was true is what got me out of bed, dressed, and out of my room.

My housemates were both home, despite the fact that they both worked. I should have found this odd, but my mind was still full of images of Kevo and Jata under the same sheets that Kevo and I had shared days before. I winced, hid my tear-swollen eyes behind a pair of shades and quickly made for the door. I paused as I passed the kitchen. “What the heck,” I muttered, peeking in.

There were about six guys gathered with my housemates. All of their backs were to me as they spoke in hushed tones. I frowned noticing the blue woven basket I’d bought years ago at the Maasai Market sitting in the corner. Why was it full of mobile phones and e-watches?

“Oh, shit.” I whispered, reaching for my own phone in my pocket. I’d switched it off to keep Kevo from calling me. I turned it on, as I quickly left the apartment. Text messages, emails, missed phone call alerts, breaking news alerts, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram messages flowed in. A deluge of information I had no urge to deal with at the moment. There were 25 texts from Kevo and I deleted them all. The first non-Kevo text was from my friend Mary in America; it simply asked, “Are you OK?” I gnashed my teeth. The bastard must have broadcast our break-up to everyone, I thought. Idiot. I’m sure he only told a fraction of the story.

I started walking; I knew exactly where I was going. I needed to be sure. I wasn’t going to be one of those stupid women who won’t question things even when hard evidence is presented to her. Even if the evidence is from a robot. I felt a sob rise in my throat as I walked. If it’s true, was it all a lie? I wondered. And how long has he been fucking that bitch anyway? Maybe it can get me Jata’s home address so I can stop at her place and have a  . . . talk with her.

My phone rang and a photo of Kevo and I smiling with our arms wrapped around each other showed up on the screen. I stopped in the road and looked at the photo for a long time. I shut my eyes and waited for it to stop ringing. When it did, seconds later it buzzed. Another text from Mary. “It’s not like in Kinshasa, right?” the text asked. I sighed, ignoring her text.

As I passed the busiest part of the market, I smelled Mama Oliech’s famous chapatis. My empty stomach clenched in response to the delicious aroma and I made a beeline for her stall. The place was packed with so many women that I couldn’t make it to the front of the stall. No one was eating chapatis. Instead, everyone stood facing the front listening to Mama Oliech speak. They reminded me of my housemates and the men gathered back at my apartment, but louder.

I gasped softly when I looked down at the muddy ground. Crushed mobile phones at everyone’s feet! Just then, mine began to ring in my pocket and several women turned and stared at me, Mama Oliech even pausing to glare at me. I reached into my pocket and quickly silenced it. I took a step back.

“Why haven’t you smashed that?” Mama Oliech demanded. “Are you mad? Or are you one of those lazy people who’d rather let these things kill us?!” She was about my mother’s age, tall like a tree and could inspire terror with one glance.

I took another step back, stammering, “What? I don’t—”

“That’s that girl who talks to the Ndege Road Rusty,” a woman beside Mama Oliech said. She pointed at me, narrowing her eyes. “It’s not your friend, it’s a machine.”

“I know that,” I said, confused.

“Crash Friday happened yesterday and soon it’ll be Crash Saturday here,” another woman said. “Get rid of your phone!” She was dressed as if she should have been in the office. Why was she here? Her pink pumps were caked with mud.

“They will say it soon on the news,” Mama Oliech said, now speaking to everyone gathered around her. The focus of the women left me and I sighed with relief. As I stood there, I started to finally connect things. My swollen eyes throbbed, tears still drying on my face.

“The Rusties are awake now, that’s what my sister in Kinshasa told me before the networks there went down,” Mama Oliech continued. “And they know everything about us. Think about it, they’ve known for years. Our personal lives, our money, our jobs, everything. They can control us all like sheep. In Cairo, Lagos, Jo-Burg, Kinshasa, here.”

“People on HackSport are saying over fifty people are dead,” a teen girl said. “Even children. When it happened, they locked people in and made the self-driving cars smash into each other like toys. They say some of the Rusties even laughed as it happened! They’re evil.”

“Oh come on, girl,” another woman said. “A Rusty won’t ‘laugh.’ Even if they’re awake, they’re not human.”

“Kazi Bure was right! And we didn’t listen,” the man at the back said. “They said this would happen. Me, I think they’re the only ones who know the truth. The gov’a has been lying to us! They’re probably the ones using the Rusties to control our information, and even control us.”

The women began to all talk at the same time and I used this as my chance to slip away. I didn’t want to crush my phone. Even if it did have a file with footage of Kevo cheating on me. Even if it kept showing me that photo of him and I whenever he called. Even if . . . “Crash Friday,” I said aloud, as I walked through the market. That’s what happened, I thought. It sunk into me like Nairobi cold when it rained in the winter.

I walked faster, a hurricane of emotions making me feel lightheaded. I wiped more tears from my eyes, but they just came faster. All around me, I saw it now— The market was busy with people who’d left their “smart homes,” where everything was wired to networks that the Rusties could access. People were crushing their phones and tablets on the ground like bugs; those who were not, were watching news updates about Crash Friday on them. Fear and restlessness were in the air.

Nevertheless, by the time I reached the Ndege Road intersection, there wasn’t a soul in sight. Not a car, not a person. I wiped my face and stared at Rusty Ndege. It stared back at me. I took a deep breath, stepped into the empty road, and approached it.

“Morning, Magana,” it said. “Please be careful while crossing the road.”

I was about to speak, but then my phone rang. I paused, biting my lip as I held it in my hand. That photo of Kevo and me. I answered my phone.

“What do you want?” I growled, holding the phone to my ear.

“God, finally!” Kevo said. “This isn’t the time to not answer your phone. You know I’m the only one still holding onto this piece of techie traitorism. All because of you.”

“Get rid of your phone; I don’t care.”

“I was worried,” he said.

“You weren’t worried when you were fucking her.”

“Magana, do you know what’s happening? The Rusties have rebelled. Kinshasa is probably just the beginning! Imagine if this happens in Lagos! Or here!”

I glanced at the Rusty as he said this. It was still watching me. I looked away.

Kevo continued mansplaining. “We have to . . . ”

“You cheated on me, Kevo!” I hissed into the phone, my blood pressure rising so fast that I saw stars. “Why are you even talking to me?”

“I cheated? You believe that thing over me? Maybe you’re the one fucking the Tin Man—”

I threw my phone to the ground, shaking with rage. I heard something in it crack and the protective covering flew off, skidding several feet away. When I looked up at the Rusty, again, its eyes flashed pink then went back to black.

“He is not good enough for you,” it said.

I froze. “What?”

“He is not good enough for you,” it said, again.

Rusty Ndege and I had a bond. Ever since that day when I was five. It would sometimes play my favorite songs and even update itself about new interesting tid-bits of news and gossip so it could chat with me. We’d had whole conversations. Sure, people noticed. That’s why Kevo called it ‘The Tin Man’ and joked that I was the heart it had been looking for.

Now it started playing a song that I loved. A song I liked to play when I was relaxing with Kevo, that jazzy song that played at the end of the old film Finding Nemo. “Somewhere, beyond the sea, somewhere waiting for me . . . ”

“Stop it!” I shouted. The song stopped abruptly and the blank look of its robot face fueled my rage. “Just leave me alone! You’ve already caused enough pain!”

“It was not my intention,” it said. The voice seemed more electronic than usual. “How can I help?”

“You’ve helped enough!” I said.

“You are welcome.”

“It’s not a good thing!”

Silence.

“Are you upset with me, Magana?” it asked.

I sucked my teeth. Artificial intelligence was still very artificial. I looked around the empty intersection.

“Did something happen?” it asked.

“You happened. You killed my relationship.”

“He was untrustworthy.”

“That was for me to decide, not you!”

“Shall I send you more footage?”

“NO!!! DON’T SEND ME ANYTHING! WHY ARE YOU EVEN GOING INTO MY—”

“You OK?” someone called from behind me. The man stood on the far end of the corner near the back of one of the last market booths. “You shouldn’t get so close. Go home, you don’t know what these things are capable of.”

I waved the stranger away. I didn’t need another man telling me what to do, see, or feel. I turned back to the Rusty.

“I didn’t ask to see . . . I never wanted to . . . You destroyed everything. I was happy.”

It just stared at me.

“I can make you happy. Would you like me to? I’m better than Kevo.”

I barely remember doing it. My mind was a fog of fury. I picked up a rock at the base of the Rusty and then hurled it at its head. I missed. I immediately picked up another and did the same. This one found purchase. Clang! It left a dent on the chin of its head, a few bits of rust sprinkling to the ground. It remained silent, still looking at me with its blank corroded robot face. I shuddered with even more fury, grabbed my smashed mobile phone and threw it. As I stood there, breathing heavily, eyes wide, entire body shaking, a man dashed past me and began bashing the Rusty with a large, still leafy branch. Maybe it was the man who’d asked if I were ok.

“Wha . . . ” I whispered, stumbling back, holding my head as if it would fall off. “No! Stop! Wait . . . ”

More people came. A woman with a metal pot. A man with a crow bar. People with purses, more rocks, backpacks, booted feet, bare hands. Rusty Ndege’s casing was already weak with rust, so it didn’t take long. Its lower section was quickly dented, then crumpled. Its chest was kicked in, the inside controls sparking. And still they tore at and reigned blows on it.

Throughout, the Rusty was silent, its face locked on me. Then the man with the crowbar finally knocked Rusty Ndege’s camera-equipped head clear off. It tumbled to the ground and they all cheered and whooped and hollered as the red, green, white, and pink lights of its eyes which were all shining at the same time slowly faded.

I inhaled and exhaled. Thinking of Kevo. Hating Kevo. My body was shuddering with adrenaline as I stood back and stared at everyone rejoicing in the Rusty’s death. Then I saw the three cars coming. One of them was stopping. Two of them were self-driven and they were moving fast. I could see the people in them. They were kicking at the windows and screaming. They were trying to get out. Something shining caught my eye just before two of the cars smashed into each other. Bright steady pink light from the eyes of the Rusty’s decapitated head.

As I turned to run, I heard the sound of the crash. This was the beginning of Crash Saturday.

 Notes From Shags 

It happened all over Nairobi, I know, I know. But I was there when it started, right there at that intersection, ground zero. Now I am here. We’re all hiding from them in the bush. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown those rocks . . . or my phone.

Not everyone had gotten rid of their phones. Someone recorded me attacking Rusty Ndege and everyone joining in, posted it online, and the footage went viral. Now, I am a hero to some. On top of this, Kazi Bure has sent three women to find me; they want to have a meeting. Kevo still hasn’t come to find me and I can’t stop thinking about this. He knows I would come here. Maybe Rusty Ndege was right, maybe Kevo wasn’t good enough.

I didn’t mean to hurt it. I was just so . . . angry and I couldn’t stop. I feel terrible. It was my friend. It was trying to help me . . . maybe. Yeah, it was my friend.

About the Authors

Nnedi Okorafor's books include Lagoon (a British Science Fiction Association Award finalist for Best Novel), Who Fears Death (a World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novel), Kabu Kabu (a Publisher's Weekly Best Book for Fall 2013), Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), The Shadow Speaker (a CBS Parallax Award winner), and The Book of Phoenix. Her novella Binti was a 2016 Hugo Award-winner. Binti: Home, a sequel novella, will be published by Tor.com in January 2017.

Wanuri Kahiu is Kenyan film director and author. She has received several awards and nominations for the films which she has directed, including awards for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture at the Africa Movie Academy Awards in 2009. Camel Racer, a collaborative film project between Wanuri and Nnedi Okorafor, has been selected for a major development project by Triggerfish Animation Studios, otherwise known as "the Pixar of South Africa."

Old Domes

JY Yang

Friday, midnight. A young woman pants in the field in front of the Old Supreme Court, doubled over, as though she has run a long way. She is covered in blood, and in her right hand glints a weapon.

Her name is Jing-Li, and she is a cullmaster of buildings. Of embodiments of brick and stone, locations expressed in forms that humans can deal with, difficult to perceive and even worse to understand. But she does not need understanding to do her job.

The job is in two halves. Two old buildings—pre-WWII colonial edicts, ancient by Singapore’s standards—are being repurposed for conservation, their insides ripped out and both buildings combined to become an art museum. The first to go: the City Hall, the senior building that was once the seat of Parliament, whose blood is now making its way down the woman’s arms in rivulets. (It is not real blood, and it will fade as soon as the shock of the deed has worn away.) That leaves her with the old Supreme Court on the right.

The old Supreme Court building: Child of the Great Depression, completed in 1939, constructed on the grave of the Grand Hotel de l’Europe, its predecessor in the sequence of colonial buildings that had stood there. Once it lorded over cricket players and rickshaw-pulling men with its massive dome and Ionian columns. It witnessed the Japanese troops marching in, and posed a dramatic backdrop to the first National Day Parade after Singapore’s Independence. These days it sits empty, dwarfed by the skyline fleshed by glass and with bones of steel.

Its time has come as well. That is why the cullmaster is here.

Jing-Li entered the old Supreme Court building by a side door, trying to ignore the wet on her hands. It was red, like real blood, and it triggered in her all the associations of fear and revulsion that mortal death entailed. She had not expected it: not the blood, not the soft thud of a body on masonry, not the shallow breaths drawing away to nothing.

None of her teachers had mentioned the hunt would feel like murdering a real person.

The City Hall had reminded Jing-Li of her grandfather, maybe that was why. Hair combed back, starched pressed shirt, glasses precisely set. Perhaps it was a figment of childhood, the archetype of the dutiful public servant instantly associated with a man who had died when she was ten and existed mostly through stories falling from her parents’ lips. If he had looked like someone else, maybe she might have felt less uncomfortable swinging the blade.

Who was she kidding?

She gripped her consecrated sword tightly, a cheap plastic thing bought at a sports store, usually sold to seniors taking recreational tai-chi. The air here tasted dusty. Jing-Li’s footsteps echoed through a warren of corridors until she entered the main entrance chamber, where the ceiling yawned open far above her head and moonlight poured in from the windows on the second floor. She took a deep breath and thought she smelled London.

London: the place where Jing-Li had gained her culling certification in her undergraduate years, taking a twisty bus route to a poorly-ventilated basement where she’d sit taking notes with a handful of other groundskeepers, young and old. She had been the only non-European there.

In her course application she had written cheerfully about the transient nature of Singapore’s geography, where buildings ten years old were considered aged. Surely a local, internationally-certified cullmaster would be invaluable.

After all, this was Singapore, where lacking anything else the land itself became the currency in which the nation was defined. A living corpus carved and recarved, hollowed by tunnels and multibasement carparks, its borders fed with the leftover rock and silicate. It was a young land, supple and stretchy, where maps a year old were outdated, their lines dancing a seismographic tango. Guardians here lived and died in droves.

Except that this was Jing-Li’s first hunt since she’d returned home a year ago, law degree in hand. It turned out that guardians here went away as easily as their physical selves did, connections weak as water. Young locations lacked staying power, and older ones were strangely compliant in fading away. This job, then, existed only because it was unique.

Jing-Li looked at her hands: the blood of the City Hall building was gone.

The old Supreme Court was waiting upstairs, she knew. She tried to muffle her footsteps on the curved staircase as much as possible, as though she could sneak up on it by surprise, like a sleeping animal. It was quiet here, even by the standards of deserted buildings, something stately about the way the air rested amongst the shapes of the masonry. She was very, very cautious.

“I’m here,” he said, the moment her foot touched the stones of the second floor. He was waiting against one of the balustrades that overlooked the first floor, arms folded much as she remembered from their first meeting. She was a child then, waiting for her father, and she had tugged on her mother’s sleeve to ask her about the “funny man in the hat.” Later she would seek out pictures of white men in Victorian garb to point out to her mother. Her first building guardian. Her mother had thought her imaginary friends cute.

The Supreme Court of today would have fit in perfectly in posher parts of the Central Business District. “You updated your look,” Jing-Li said.

His shrug seemed particularly dismissive. “In keeping with the times, you know.”

“The times have caught up to you. Do you know why I’m here?”

“You must think I’m an idiot.” He uncrossed his arms and stood straight. “I felt the other guy go too, the sorry bugger.”

“It can’t be helped,” Jing-Li said. They were nearly toe-to-toe now. Was he ever this tall and thin and white? “If it’s any consolation, you will be remembered.”

If there’s any consolation, she thought to herself, it’s that after this I’ll be done with the job. The sword felt heavy in her hands, as if it were actually made of metal. She raised it in the direction of the guardian, brought it downwards—

The guardian vanished a split second before contact, and she found herself swinging through empty air.

“Oh, kitten, it’s not that easy,” the Supreme Court said from behind her, and when she turned around he was sitting on the banister of the curved staircase with a Cheshire cat smile. Chest constricting, she lunged forward again, but like a clever insect he eluded her. When she regained her balance she found him back against his balustrade perch.

She took one step in his direction, and he froze her with a wag of his finger. “Ah-ah.” She did not move, scared of spooking him, scared that he would vanish once again.

“Look,” she said, as sincerely as she could through the heaviness in her chest, “I don’t like it either, but it has to be done. That’s the rules.”

He leaned vertical, hands slung easily in his pockets. “I don’t intend to give up this position. After all, the other chap is gone. Somebody needs to man this station. I’ve decided that it’s going to be me.”

The guardian Jing-Li remembered was a stern one, back ram-rod straight, features imposing: a presence that filled the room and commanded absolute attention. Perhaps that was when he still functioned as the nation’s highest court. “Sorry, but that can’t happen,” she said. “We’ve done the measurements and both existing guardians need to go. Another one will arise for the new art museum.” Not to mention that his proposal would be incredibly unfair to the former City Hall, who had seemed a much better candidate for representing the art museum if they had to pick one.

“Ah, but I put no stock in the calculations of your groundskeepers’ council. They use their own metrics, which are useless. There’s no correspondence with a global standard.”

The global standards had been scrapped a decade ago, exactly because they mapped poorly across the globe. These days different towns, different regions, different countries used self-calibrated standards, whatever worked best for them.

Jing-Li felt like pointing this out, but she did not. Somehow, she knew it would be like shouting at walls. Perhaps it was.

“You’re out of luck,” the City Hall said. “I intend to stay.” She looked at him, standing resolute in his place, solid as one of the columns that made up the building’s façade, and could not argue. He had beautifully blue eyes, movie-star eyes, which crinkled at the edges before he disappeared. “Don’t think of summoning me,” his disembodied voice said, by way of parting. “It won’t work.”

Jing-Li didn’t try. It took her several minutes after she exited the building before she realized she was shaking.

Monday, midday. The young woman, neat and dressed in what is generally accepted to be common office wear, trails a large group of people following a guide leading the way through the City Hall and former Supreme Court buildings. The group consists of civil servants who volunteered to help in the open house taking place in a month’s time, and are dressed accordingly. Run by the staff of the museum that has taken over administration of the two buildings, the open house will, for the first and the last time, allow the public into spaces previously reserved for the highest offices in the country. License to gawk and to touch, before the diggers and bulldozers move in to do their reconstructive surgery. Some of the group take notes as the guide points out key features and historical nuggets: this will be crucial information in a few weeks’ time when they too will become guides, this time to an adoring public eager to soak up the storied narratives contained within the buildings.

The young woman does not take notes. She merely follows, unnoticed.

The guide, with a knowing smile, leads the group away from the prescribed tour route, up to the roof where the iconic dome sits. The group loses flock coherence, running to various edges to take photographs, taking on the appearance of guppies in a tank. A large number of them gather at the front edge of the building, the only one not obscured by towering modern-day buildings. Eager hands point outwards, gesturing over the expanse of the Padang that lies, treeless and manicured, in front of former Supreme Court. It’s the first time any of them have seen it from this angle, and, artificial as it is they find it a wonder.

The young woman stays quietly in the shade of the dome, waiting for them to leave so that she can be alone with the one man on the roof no one else can see.

Across the length of the roof from her, the former Supreme Court watches her silently, expression inscrutable to bystanders.

The last straggler of the group vanished downwards with a clatter, and Jing-Li finally let herself relax. The ability to stay invisible in the confines of a building was entirely dependent on the sufferance of its guardian, and she hadn’t been sure the former Supreme Court would be so kind to its assigned executioner. She watched carefully as he strolled across the expanse of the roof, analyzing the way he took each step (with confidence), the way his hips swayed (hint of mischief).

“I’m not here to finish the job,” she said, hands held up. “See, I didn’t bring the weapon.”

The former Supreme Court laughed. “I know,” he said. “Or you would not have made it this far.” As her hands went to her hips in protest, and he said: “This building still has working fire alarms.”

“Fire alarms can’t keep me out forever.”

“If I have my way I won’t have to keep you out.”

She reached her envelope bag and pulled out a small sealed packet of brown paper, which she offered to him. “Courtesy of the groundskeepers’ association,” she said. “I ran into a senior on the way here and he thought it might be helpful in getting into your good books.” Devon, according to his own account, had conveniently been on his way to buy something nearby and had just happened to bump into her in the two hundred meters between her workplace and the former Supreme Court building. Singapore was small, but not that small—Jing-Li wasn’t stupid. The association was getting impatient.

The former Supreme Court wrinkled his nose. “Bribery will get you nowhere.”

She returned the packet to her bag. “You don’t like sweets anyway. You’d prefer a nice rat or some other small dead animal, right?”

“You know me well.” He sounded pleased.

“I’ve done my research.”

She had done more than that. Like anyone with an ounce of self-respect she had gone home and dug into difficult guardian culls, carefully populating her browser with pages from countries bearing historic architecture, where the encrusted hearts of cities pulsed in medieval nerve centers laid over and over by infrastructural palimpsest. Places where guardians clung deeply and stubbornly to their location, fed by nostalgia and notions of heritage. She had come out of that tangle discouraged and confused: every story had different tips on how to get stubborn guardians to give up their guardianship, and most of them were quite location-specific. Her one takeaway was that she was on her own, and therefore in deep shit.

Urgency itched under her skin, in her chest, like hungry parasites. Earlier this week the groundkeepers’ association had sent an email: “This is not a game. If we knew you were going to mess around, we would have hired someone to actually do the job.” She wondered if they understood that the last time in recorded history an unwilling guardian had been culled, hundreds of deaths had resulted from a building collapse.

“I don’t like it,” the former Supreme Court said suddenly, leaning over the roof ledge, eyes fixed on the green of the Padang stretched before them.

“What?” The Padang outranked the Supreme Court in age and they had no history of animosity that she could recall. A few years ago the Padang had gone underground, not long after the National Day parades had moved to the Marina Bay floating platform. It had not been seen since then. “You don’t like what?”

She followed his gaze. The Padang, hemmed in around all sides by temporary light fixtures, had a festive air about it. Banners hung by the streetlights explained why: the Formula One races dropped in on Singapore for their yearly call-by in two weeks’ time, and the roads around the Padang became part of a racetrack in their honor.

“The Marina Bay Street Circuit,” she said. “You don’t like him?”

“He’s a brat,” the former Supreme Court said with finality, as though passing a sentence on the ephemeral entity that only existed for less than a week each year. “Guardians shouldn’t be allowed to come and go. It’s unnatural.”

Jing-Li followed him in leaning over the ledge, hands on her chin. “You mean places shouldn’t be allowed to come and go. But it happens all the time.” He turned to interrupt her and she cut him off. “If you’re talking about naturalness, none of this is natural. Your existence is entirely man-made, you know. You live on our sufferance.”

“If you wanted to get into my good books, you’re doing a terrible job of it.”

Jing-Li blew out a short breath through her nose. Despite the roar of passing cars, in some other part of the city close by, Singapore seemed quiet, too quiet. “I’m just being honest.”

Arms folded, gazing out across the green of the silent Padang, the former Supreme Court said nothing. Jing-Li continued: “If you have such problems with transient guardians how are you going to cope with the construction site deity for the next two years?”

Now he did look at her. “Is that your concession that you’ve stopped trying to cull me?”

“I’m serious,” Jing-Li said. “Accidents at worksites will happen if the construction deity is disturbed. You could get people killed.” In case he didn’t understand the ramifications of that, she added, “Humans will die on your watch.”

“I’m not obliged to keep humans alive,” he said.

“You don’t believe that, and I know that because you’re not a rogue guardian. Just a really stubborn one.”

His laugh was soft, burbling, like the sound of engines. “I’m perhaps the most fortunate, to have you chosen as my executioner.”

“Chosen,” Jing-Li says under her breath, and he doesn’t hear.

“I can’t think of any of your other compatriots who’s known me since childhood. Daughter of a judge . . . ” He looked at her, almost fondly, and Jing-Li stepped back a little from him. “And you’re a lawyer now, working just a few buildings down the road.”

“Okay, sure.”

He tossed something at her and she barely caught it. When she opened her palm she was confronted with something small and copper and intricately carved. “A coin?”

“Not just any coin. That’s a Straits Settlement coin.”

She turned it over and over in her fingers. It felt odd, strangely solid. “Where did you get it?”

“There is a time capsule buried under the flagstone of the main court. Nothing much to it, just a few coins and the day’s papers. But they’ll open it in the year 3000. I suppose they won’t miss one little coin.”

“The year 3000,” Jing-Li said. It sounded like the title of a sci-fi movie, something Arthur C. Clarke might have written.

“I’d like to be there when they do that.”

“In the year 3000.”

“Yes.”

“That’s nine hundred years in the future.” She held the coin out to him. “You have a lot of faith, don’t you?”

“Keep the coin,” he said, still looking outwards. “Consider it a gift.”

And then he was gone.

Sunday, mid-morning. The air thrums with life and the city is busy, consumed in festival-madness. Roads are closed and speakers pop as sound technicians take them through their paces. A hundred thousand people bustle, working themselves up to the frenzy that will take place when the sun sets. In their pens, at the hub of it all, the race cars that will be the stars of the night’s festivities sleep fitfully. Anticipation feels like a breathable, drinkable thing.

Within the madness-in-waiting sits a young woman in a big metal swing set on top of the hill that used to be a fort. Cross-legged quietude surrounds her and the plastic sword resting by her side. Eyes shut, she leans into the movement of the swing, back and forth, back and forth.

Two weeks have passed since she met the former Supreme Court on the roof of the building, and the groundbreaking ceremony is less than a month away. She is no closer to solving her problem. Despite her appearance of immobility her fingers twitch over the coin she holds loosely in her right hand, in her lap.

She whispers to herself, whether consciously or unconsciously, it’s hard to tell. It is also hard to hear what she is saying, but it sounds like a prayer.

And then a guardian, whom she thought was dead, appears on the swing beside her.

Jing-Li sprang into alertness at the unexpected presence beside her, even if the swing continued its back-and-forth unperturbed. Her heart tapped a funny rhythm as she realized who it was. “But you’re supposed to be gone.”

“Yes, I am gone,” said the guardian who used to be the City Hall building. “I’m not connected to my old place anymore.”

“You’re supposed to disappear,” Jing-Li said, as if her first sentence hadn’t been clear. “Once a guardian has been disconnected from their location they lose the energy from the place that fed them.”

The former City Hall building laughed and shrugged, somehow avuncular when he did so. “That’s what they told you in school, right? But I guess it’s not true. I spend my days here now, here and there. Talking to my friends.” He gestured in the direction of a spreading banyan tree nearby, its hanging roots like sturdy beams.

Jing-Li could not see who he was gesturing to, and she guessed it was a tree spirit, because she had problems seeing them. “But the blood,” she said, still refusing to believe this was happening. “The falling over, the vanishing, what was all of that? Were you trying to make me feel bad? What?”

He crossed his legs and leaned back in the chair. He looked like her grandfather, but in demeanor he reminded her of her primary school Chinese language teacher. “I always thought that groundskeepers should appreciate the responsibilities they hold.”

Jing-Li let her hands drop into her lap. “You think I don’t? Like I don’t understand the consequences of my actions? You think I’m doing this just for fun?”

The former City Hall building said nothing, attention caught by something on the metal grating that formed the floor of the swing. He leaned over and picked it up: it was the coin she had been holding. “Wow, haven’t seen this in a long time.” He flipped it back and forth. “Did he give it to you?”

When she nodded, he handed it to her. “Typical of him,” he said.

“Emotional manipulation?” She flipped the coin back and forth in her fingers. “Like falling over in an explosion of blood wasn’t?” Her hand closed around the coin, hard enough to press into the skin. “Yours was the first cull I’d ever done and I was so scared I couldn’t do the next one. And I still can’t.”

“Are you scared?” He looked at her. “Or is it something else?”

Jing-Li put her feet down and the movement stopped the swing’s momentum. Crickets sang in the greenery as she thought over the question carefully. Finally, she said: “No, probably not. I won’t let fear get in the way. It’s that he doesn’t want to go, and I don’t know how to convince him to. Because . . . ” She gestured in no particular direction. “It’s a horrible thing. I can’t blame him for not wanting to go through with it.”

“Horrible?” The former City Hall huffed. “We are not humans, you know. It’s not about life or death, it’s about moving on, about becoming different. It’s natural.” He tapped her on the shoulder, in a teacherly way. “You remember your classes, when they taught you about culling? What did they say?”

“A lot of mumbo-jumbo, most of it was not relevant to Singapore, anyway. Most of it was how to give pep talks about heritage and changing perceptions and how things never really go away. What kind of heritage does Singapore have? Even our national symbols are invented.”

The former City Hall just smiled.

Silence settled, uncomfortably, and Jing-Li remembered she had been carrying around the small sacrifice packet from the groundskeepers’ association ever since the former Supreme Court refused it. She found it at the bottom of her bag, slightly squashed and with a worn corner, but still sealed. “This talk is getting us nowhere, so you might as well have some of this.”

“Oh, thank you,” he said, accepting it and breaking the packet’s little paper seal. “I won’t be getting these much anymore, I suppose.” He dug in with his fingers and pulled out one of those soft, pink-and-white candies coated in powder that Jing-Li had no name for. “This is very good,” he said, and then held the packet out, across to the swing’s other bench. “You should try one.”

Jing-Li blinked. Seated across them, where there had been no one a moment ago, was a young Malay man in formal wear. A guardian, she realized, but one she did not recognize. “I live here,” he said simply, probably in response to her facial expression.

“But you’re not Fort Canning,” Jing-Li said. The Fort Canning was a moody-looking teenager whom she often found perched on the old display cannons scattered around the park, smoking. He had been in place for slightly more than thirty years, she was told.

“I’m the old dude,” he said, reaching into the bag that the former City Hall was holding out. “I’ve been here a long time. I used to be called Bukit Larangan. The Forbidden Hill, you know?”

“You’re the original hill,” she said, in slow wonder. “From the 14th century.”

“It’s been a bit longer than that.” He tasted the sweet, gingerly. “This is good. I don’t get many of them these days.”

“You’re still around,” she said. “After all these years.”

“It’s like he said. We stay around long after we’re gone.”

“See, history remembers us, in a certain way,” said the former City Hall.

“And do you remember history?” She leaned forward, her heart pounding, consumed by a sudden eagerness that she hadn’t felt since she was a very young schoolchild. She turned to the former Bukit Larangan. “Do you remember the 14th century?”

“Hmm.” He leaned back in the swing seat. “I cannot say. I remember what it was like, but I don’t really remember it. It was so long ago.”

She couldn’t understand. “But you were there. Weren’t you?”

He leaned backwards into the chair, completely calm. “Yes. But memory is quite difficult.” He pointed to a sign, one of many that were scattered around the park, packed with information written in four languages. “See that? That’s all anybody remembers. Some days I think of the old kings who used to live here, and I realize that I cannot remember their faces, or I only remember a very vague picture of them. Then I wonder if the Tumasik I remember is the same as it was back then.”

“You’ve told me stories,” said the former City Hall. “But I’m sure there was so much more.”

“Of course there was much more,” the former Bukit Larangan said. “But it’s all gone now. Singapore’s history started in 1819, that’s what the history books say, right?” He gestured at the signs. “That’s all that’s left. That’s who I became.”

Jing-Li shook her head. “But—”

“How much of Singapore’s history before the 19th century do you know?” The former City Hall asked.

“A sleepy fishing village,” she said softly. “That’s what they teach us at school.”

“No, it was a lot more than that,” said the former Bukit Larangan said. “But I don’t remember what it was anymore.”

She looked down at the sword in her lap and felt like she was falling outwards. The Straits Settlement coin resting in her hand had taken on immense weight and heat, like it was a burning coal.

“But you were there,” she repeated emptily to herself.

Sunday night. Halogen lights of unthinkable wattage sear the air, burning a bright orthogonal circuit into the cityscape, thousands of meters long. Thousands cram into rows of seats, specially erected for the weekend, while thousands more press against wire nettings at odd ends and corners of the circuit, as race cars streak past at 400kmh, blurs of screaming metal tracked by faithless, tireless cameras. The Padang, forcibly crowned with a strobe-lit stage, suffocates under the weight of a sweaty, screaming crowd, while above the city, people in air-conditioned restaurants and bars peer down at the blips of cars blazing, ant-like, around the track.

The young woman runs in the alley behind the former Supreme Court, sealed off to prevent people from getting close to the racetrack. The Marina Bay Street Circuit has given her grace to wander the grounds, even the areas deemed off-limits, but she has more pressing matters on her mind. Her target is the former Supreme Court.

For her, for the both of them, it has to end tonight.

Jing-Li ran up the grand steps of the former Supreme Court, her footsteps sending solid echoes reverberating. She knew where the guardian was, up on the roof where they’d last met. She was sweaty, and her heart raced from shoving through the clamoring, oblivious crowd, but none of that mattered.

The moment she burst out through the stairwell the guardian turned towards her from his spot at the edge of the roof, haloed by the stadium-strength lights surrounding the Padang. “I see you’ve come.”

“Don’t think of going anywhere,” she said, pulling the plastic sword from its plastic sheath, her voice and breathing harsh. Down on the road the F1 racers screeched and made popping noises as they slowed down for the corner turn, lending the scene the surreal soundtrack of an air raid.

“I would not dream of it,” he said, his voice carrying over the melee. “In fact, I was rather hoping to stay here for the long term.”

“No,” Jing-Li shouted, over the din. “You can’t. I’ve decided. That’s not how this country works. You served a purpose, that purpose is done, it’s time to move on. Your neighbor has done it. You’re no different.”

He looked a lot smaller than she seemed to recall, like a lost doll somebody left by the roadside. “But I am different. I thought you might think of me fondly, given your childhood. There’s such strong nostalgia . . . ”

“Nostalgia? Whose nostalgia? You can’t tell me what to be nostalgic about.” The thing that had been sitting uncomfortably in her chest since the first night she had taken up her sword came to a boil. “This building is being preserved. That’s a lot more than other past locations in Singapore have had.”

He ran his fingers over the worn stone surface of the roof’s edge. “This place has such memories . . . ”

“You have to believe me, I’m doing this for you.” She took bold steps towards him, and he didn’t move away. “Your memories will be rewritten, whether you like it or not. Our Government may like what you are. They like what you represented as the Supreme Court. They like the way you look on the television screens when Grand Prix is beamed to the world.”

She waved her sword accusingly at the racetrack. “But that’s all you’ll ever be, from now on. A pretty picture. A tourist attraction. They could have built something else to house the art museum. But they wanted to use your skin, because your skin is what they think is important.” She swung the sword back towards him. “Can you live with that? Can you live with becoming somebody else?”

He seemed to straighten up. “I used to be the Supreme Court,” he said, a glint of his former hardness returning to his expression. “Important decisions were made on my watch. What I did used to influence the entire nation.”

“And no one will change that for you,” she said. She thought of Bukit Larangan, its history faintly etched, fading into a few neat lines of the country’s official narrative. “You are so lucky and you don’t even know it.”

“Will you remember me, at least?”

“I’ll come over for tea,” she said. “There’s a swing set on top of Fort Canning that seats four. We can hang out with your former neighbor. And the old Forbidden Hill. We could talk about history, or anything you like. I’ll even bring a lizard for you, if you want.”

He smiled. She could barely see his blue eyes in the mad, harshly shadowed lighting. “I’m still right. I am still fortunate to have you as my executioner.”

“You had a good run,” Jing-Li said.

“Well. I won’t deny that.”

She did not blink as she brought the plastic blade down.

Sunday night. It has been a year since the groundbreaking ceremony, and the races are on again. The former Supreme Court stands, its form cloaked in netted black scaffolding on which its façade is projected. Its interior is a mess, gutted masonry like phoenix ash, but the millions around the globe watching the race live do not need to see that.

Across the track sits a grandstand, its rows packed with the chattering masses. They have paid well to be here, even if only for a brief time. Amongst their number one might pick out the shape of a young woman, her back straight, an unreadable smile on her face. From this distance you cannot tell, but she is turning and turning a small object in her hand, which appears to be a coin of some sort.

But she is only one face in the crowd, and as the camera pulls away she becomes invisible, part of the story no one sees.

The black box of the former Supreme Court, drenched in new light, remains impassive. Around it rise skyscrapers—shades of New York, shades of Abu Dhabi—that vanish into the night, the hands of a new city reaching ahead.

Originally published in We See a Different Frontier, edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, 2013.

About the Author

JY Yang is a queer Singaporean writer with short stories published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her debut novellas, THE RED THREADS OF FORTUNE and THE RIVER RUNS RED, will be out from Tor.com Publishing in summer 2017.

The Very Pulse of the Machine

Michael Swanwick

Click.

The radio came on.

“Hell.”

Martha kept her eyes forward, concentrated on walking. Jupiter to one shoulder, Daedalus’s plume to the other. Nothing to it. Just trudge, drag, trudge, drag. Piece of cake.

“Oh.”

She chinned the radio off.

Click.

“Hell. Oh. Kiv. El. Sen.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Martha gave the rope an angry jerk, making the sledge carrying Burton’s body jump and bounce on the sulfur hardpan. “You’re dead, Burton, I’ve checked, there’s a hole in your faceplate big enough to stick a fist through, and I really don’t want to crack up. I’m in kind of a tight spot here and I can’t afford it, okay? So be nice and just shut the fuck up.”

“Not. Bur. Ton.”

“Do it anyway.”

She chinned the radio off again.

Jupiter loomed low on the western horizon, big and bright and beautiful and, after two weeks on Io, easy to ignore. To her left, Daedalus was spewing sulfur and sulfur dioxide in a fan two hundred kilometers high. The plume caught the chill light from an unseen sun and her visor rendered it a pale and lovely blue. Most spectacular view in the universe, and she was in no mood to enjoy it.

Click.

Before the voice could speak again, Martha said, “I am not going crazy, you’re just the voice of my subconscious, I don’t have the time to waste trying to figure out what unresolved psychological conflicts gave rise to all this, and I am not going to listen to anything you have to say.”

Silence.

The moon rover had flipped over at least five times before crashing sideways against a boulder the size of the Sydney Opera House. Martha Kivelsen, timid groundling that she was, was strapped into her seat so tightly that when the universe stopped tumbling, she’d had a hard time unlatching the restraints. Juliet Burton, tall and athletic, so sure of her own luck and agility that she hadn’t bothered, had been thrown into a strut.

The vent-blizzard of sulfur dioxide snow was blinding, though. It was only when Martha had finally crawled out from under its raging whiteness that she was able to look at the suited body she’d dragged free of the wreckage.

She immediately turned away.

Whatever knob or flange had punched the hole in Burton’s helmet had been equally ruthless with her head.

Where a fraction of the vent-blizzard—“lateral plumes” the planetary geologists called them—had been deflected by the boulder, a bank of sulfur dioxide snow had built up. Automatically, without thinking, Martha scooped up double-handfuls and packed them into the helmet. Really, it was a nonsensical thing to do; in a vacuum, the body wasn’t about to rot. On the other hand, it hid that face.

Then Martha did some serious thinking.

For all the fury of the blizzard, there was no turbulence. Because there was no atmosphere to have turbulence in. The sulfur dioxide gushed out straight from the sudden crack that had opened in the rock, falling to the surface miles away in strict obedience to the laws of ballistics. Most of what struck the boulder they’d crashed against would simply stick to it, and the rest would be bounced down to the ground at its feet. So that—this was how she’d gotten out in the first place—it was possible to crawl under the near-horizontal spray and back to the ruins of the moon rover. If she went slowly, the helmet light and her sense of feel ought to be sufficient for a little judicious salvage.

Martha got down on her hands and knees. And as she did, just as quickly as the blizzard had begun—it stopped.

She stood, feeling strangely foolish.

Still, she couldn’t rely on the blizzard staying quiescent. Better hurry, she admonished herself. It might be an intermittent.

Quickly, almost fearfully, picking through the rich litter of wreckage, Martha discovered that the mother tank they used to replenish their airpacks had ruptured. Terrific. That left her own pack, which was one-third empty, two fully charged backup packs, and Burton’s, also one-third empty. It was a ghoulish thing to strip Burton’s suit of her airpack, but it had to be done. Sorry, Julie. That gave her enough oxygen to last, let’s see, almost forty hours.

Then she took a curved section of what had been the moon rover’s hull and a coil of nylon rope, and with two pieces of scrap for makeshift hammer and punch, fashioned a sledge for Burton’s body.

She’d be damned if she was going to leave it behind.

Click.

“This is. Better.”

“Says you.”

Ahead of her stretched the hard, cold sulfur plain. Smooth as glass. Brittle as frozen toffee. Cold as hell. She called up a visor-map and checked her progress. Only forty-five miles of mixed terrain to cross and she’d reach the lander. Then she’d be home free. No sweat, she thought. Io was in tidal lock with Jupiter. So the Father of Planets would stay glued to one fixed spot in the sky. That was as good as a navigation beacon. Just keep Jupiter to your right shoulder, and Daedalus to your left. You’ll come out fine.

“Sulfur is. Triboelectric.”

“Don’t hold it in. What are you really trying to say?”

“And now I see. With eye serene. The very. Pulse. Of the machine.” A pause. “Wordsworth.”

Which, except for the halting delivery, was so much like Burton, with her classical education and love of classical poets like Spenser and Ginsberg and Plath, that for a second Martha was taken aback. Burton was a terrible poetry bore, but her enthusiasm had been genuine, and now Martha was sorry for every time she’d met those quotations with rolled eyes or a flip remark. But there’d be time enough for grieving later. Right now she had to concentrate on the task at hand.

The colors of the plain were dim and brownish. With a few quick chin-taps, she cranked up their intensity. Her vision filled with yellows, oranges, reds—intense wax crayon colors. Martha decided she liked them best that way.

For all its Crayola vividness, this was the most desolate landscape in the universe. She was on her own here, small and weak in a harsh and unforgiving world. Burton was dead. There was nobody else on all of Io. Nobody to rely on but herself. Nobody to blame if she fucked up. Out of nowhere, she was filled with an elation as cold and bleak as the distant mountains. It was shameful how happy she felt.

After a minute, she said, “Know any songs?”

Oh the bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. To see what he could see.

“Wake. Up. Wake. Up.”

To see what he could—

“Wake. Up. Wake. Up. Wake.”

“Hah? What?”

“Crystal sulfur is orthorhombic.”

She was in a field of sulfur flowers. They stretched as far as the eye could see, crystalline formations the size of her hand. Like the poppies of Flanders field. Or the ones in The Wizard of Oz. Behind her was a trail of broken flowers, some crushed by her feet or under the weight of the sledge, others simply exploded by exposure to her suit’s waste heat. It was far from being a straight path. She had been walking on autopilot, and stumbled and turned and wandered upon striking the crystals.

Martha remembered how excited she and Burton had been when they first saw the fields of crystals. They had piled out of the moon rover with laughter and bounding leaps, and Burton had seized her by the waist and waltzed her around in a dance of jubilation. This was the big one, they’d thought, their chance at the history books. And even when they’d radioed Hols back in the orbiter and were somewhat condescendingly informed that there was no chance of this being a new life-form, but only sulfide formations such as could be found in any mineralogy text . . . even that had not killed their joy. It was still their first big discovery. They’d looked forward to many more.

Now, though, all she could think of was the fact that such crystal fields occurred in regions associated with sulfur geysers, lateral plumes, and volcanic hot spots.

Something funny was happening to the far edge of the field, though. She cranked up her helmet to extreme magnification and watched as the trail slowly erased itself. New flowers were rising up in place of those she had smashed, small but perfect and whole. And growing. She could not imagine by what process this could be happening. Electrodeposition? Molecular sulfur being drawn up from the soil in some kind of pseudocapillary action? Were the flowers somehow plucking sulfur ions from Io’s almost nonexistent atmosphere?

Yesterday, the questions would have excited her. Now, her capacity for wonder was nonexistent. Moreover, her instruments were back in the moon rover. Save for the suit’s limited electronics, she had nothing to take measurements with. She had only herself, the sledge, the spare airpacks, and the corpse.

“Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered. On the one hand, this was a dangerous place to stay in. On the other, she’d been awake almost twenty hours now and she was dead on her feet. Exhausted. So very, very tired.

“O sleep! It is a gentle thing. Beloved from pole to pole. Coleridge.”

Which, God knows, was tempting. But the numbers were clear: no sleep. With several deft chin-taps, Martha overrode her suit’s safeties and accessed its medical kit. At her command, it sent a hit of methamphetamine rushing down the drug/vitamin catheter.

There was a sudden explosion of clarity in her skull and her heart began pounding like a motherfucker. Yeah. That did it. She was full of energy now. Deep breath. Long stride. Let’s go.

No rest for the wicked. She had things to do. She left the flowers rapidly behind. Good-bye, Oz.

Fade out. Fade in. Hours had glided by. She was walking through a shadowy sculpture garden. Volcanic pillars (these were their second great discovery; they had no exact parallel on Earth) were scattered across the pyroclastic plain like so many isolated Lipschitz statues. They were all rounded and heaped, very much in the style of rapidly cooled magma. Martha remembered that Burton was dead, and cried quietly to herself for a few minutes.

Weeping, she passed through the eerie stone forms. The speed made them shift and move in her vision. As if they were dancing. They looked like women to her, tragic figures out of The Bacchae or, no, wait, The Trojan Women was the play she was thinking of. Desolate. Filled with anguish. Lonely as Lot’s wife.

There was a light scattering of sulfur dioxide snow on the ground here. It sublimed at the touch of her boots, turning to white mist and scattering wildly, the steam disappearing with each stride and then being renewed with the next footfall. Which only made the experience all that much creepier.

Click.

“Io has a metallic core predominantly of iron and iron sulfide, overlain by a mantle of partially molten rock and crust.”

“Are you still here?”

“Am trying. To communicate.”

“Shut up.”

She topped the ridge. The plains ahead were smooth and undulating. They reminded her of the Moon, in the transitional region between Mare Serenitatis and the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, where she had undergone her surface training. Only without the impact craters. No impact craters on Io. Least cratered solid body in the solar system. All that volcanic activity deposited a new surface one meter thick every millennium or so. The whole damned moon was being constantly repaved.

Her mind was rambling. She checked her gauges, and muttered, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

There was no reply.

Dawn would come—when? Let’s work this out. Io’s “year,” the time it took to revolve about Jupiter, was roughly forty-two hours fifteen minutes. She’d been walking seven hours. During which Io would’ve moved roughly sixty degrees through its orbit. So it would be dawn soon. That would make Daedalus’s plume less obvious, but with her helmet graphics that wouldn’t be a worry. Martha swiveled her neck, making sure that Daedalus and Jupiter were where they ought to be, and kept on walking.

Trudge, trudge, trudge. Try not to throw the map up on the visor every five minutes. Hold off as long as you can, just one more hour, okay, that’s good, and another two miles. Not too shabby.

The sun was getting high. It would be noon in another hour and a half. Which meant—well, it really didn’t mean much of anything.

Rock up ahead. Probably a silicate. It was a solitary six meters high brought here by who knew what forces and waiting who knew how many thousands of years just for her to come along and need a place to rest. She found a flat spot where she could lean against it, and, breathing heavily, sat down to rest. And think. And check the airpack. Four hours until she had to change it again. Bringing her down to two airpacks. She had slightly under twenty-four hours now. Thirty-five miles to go. That was less than two miles an hour. A snap. Might run a little tight on oxygen there toward the end, though. She’d have to take care she didn’t fall asleep.

Oh, how her body ached.

It ached almost as much as it had in the ’48 Olympics, when she’d taken the bronze in the women’s marathon. Or that time in the internationals in Kenya when she’d come up from behind to tie for second. Story of her life. Always in third place, fighting for second. Always flight crew and sometimes, maybe, landing crew, but never the commander. Never class president. Never king of the hill. Just once—once!—she wanted to be Neil Armstrong.

Click.

“The marble index of a mind forever. Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. Wordsworth.”

“What?”

“Jupiter’s magnetosphere is the largest thing in the solar system. If the human eye could see it, it would appear two and a half times wider in the sky than the sun does.”

“I knew that,” she said, irrationally annoyed.

“Quotation is. Easy. Speech is. Not.”

“Don’t speak, then.”

“Trying. To communicate!”

She shrugged. “So go ahead—communicate.”

Silence. Then, “What does. This. Sound like?”

“What does what sound like?”

“Io is a sulfur-rich, iron-cored moon in a circular orbit around Jupiter. What does this. Sound like? Tidal forces from Jupiter and Ganymede pull and squeeze Io sufficiently to melt Tartarus, its sub-surface sulfur ocean. Tartarus vents its excess energy with sulfur and sulfur dioxide volcanoes. What does. This sound like? Io’s metallic core generates a magnetic field that punches a hole in Jupiter’s magnetosphere, and also creates a high-energy ion flux tube connecting its own poles with the north and south poles of Jupiter. What. Does this sound like? Io sweeps up and absorbs all the electrons in the million-volt range. Its volcanoes pump out sulfur dioxide; its magnetic field breaks down a percentage of that into sulfur and oxygen ions; and these ions are pumped into the hole punched in the magnetosphere, creating a rotating field commonly called the Io torus. What does this sound like? Torus. Flux tube. Magnetosphere. Volcanoes. Sulfur ions. Molten ocean. Tidal heating. Circular orbit. What does this sound like?”

Against her will, Martha had found herself first listening, then intrigued, and finally involved. It was like a riddle or a word-puzzle. There was a right answer to the question. Burton or Hols would have gotten it immediately. Martha had to think it through.

There was the faint hum of the radio’s carrier beam. A patient, waiting noise.

At last, she cautiously said, “It sounds like a machine.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Machine. Yes. Am machine. Am machine. Am machine. Yes. Yes. Machine. Yes.”

“Wait. You’re saying that Io is a machine? That you’re a machine? That you’re Io?”

“Sulfur is triboelectric. Sledge picks up charges. Burton’s brain is intact. Language is data. Radio is medium. Am machine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Trudge, drag, trudge, drag. The world doesn’t stop for strangeness. Just because she’d gone loopy enough to think that Io was alive and a machine and talking to her, didn’t mean that Martha could stop walking. She had promises to keep, and miles to go before she slept. And speaking of sleep, it was time for another fast refresher—just a quarter-hit—of speed.

Wow. Let’s go!

As she walked, she continued to carry on a dialogue with her hallucination or delusion or whatever it was. It was too boring otherwise.

Boring, and a tiny bit terrifying.

So she asked, “If you’re a machine, then what is your function? Why were you made?”

“To know you. To love you. And to serve you.”

Martha blinked. Then, remembering Burton’s long reminiscences on her Catholic girlhood, she laughed. That was a paraphrase of the answer to the first question in the old Baltimore Catechism: Why did God make man? “If I keep on listening to you, I’m going to come down with delusions of grandeur.”

“You are. Creator. Of machine.”

“Not me.”

She walked on without saying anything for a time. Then, because the silence was beginning to get to her again, “When was it I supposedly created you?”

“So many a million of ages have gone. To the making of man. Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”

“That wasn’t me, then. I’m only twenty-seven. You’re obviously thinking of somebody else.”

“It was. Mobile. Intelligent. Organic. Life. You are. Mobile. Intelligent. Organic. Life.”

Something moved in the distance. Martha looked up, astounded. A horse. Pallid and ghostly white, it galloped soundlessly across the plains, tail and mane flying.

She squeezed her eyes tight and shook her head. When she opened her eyes again, the horse was gone. A hallucination. Like the voice of Burton/Io. She’d been thinking of ordering up another refresher of the meth, but now it seemed best to put it off as long as possible.

This was sad, though. Inflating Burton’s memories until they were as large as Io.

Freud would have a few things to say about that. He’d say she was magnifying her friend to a godlike status in order to justify the fact that she’d never been able to compete one-on-one with Burton and win. He’d say she couldn’t deal with the fact that some people were simply better at things than she was.

Trudge, drag, trudge, drag.

So, okay, yes, she had an ego problem. She was an overambitious, self-centered b*tch. So what? It had gotten her this far, where a more reasonable attitude would have left her back in the slums of greater Levittown. Making do with an eight-by-ten room with bathroom rights and a job as a dental assistant. Kelp and talapia every night, and rabbit on Sunday. The hell with that. She was alive and Burton wasn’t—by any rational standard that made her the winner.

“Are you. Listening?”

“Not really, no.”

She topped yet another rise. And stopped dead. Down below was a dark expanse of molten sulfur. It stretched, wide and black, across the streaked orange plains. A lake. Her helmet readouts ran a thermal topography from the negative 230°F at her feet to 65°F at the edge of the lava flow. Nice and balmy. The molten sulfur itself, of course, existed at higher ambient temperatures.

It lay dead in her way.

They’d named it Lake Styx.

Martha spent half an hour muttering over her topo maps, trying to figure out how she’d gone so far astray. Not that it wasn’t obvious. All that stumbling around. Little errors that she’d made, adding up. A tendency to favor one leg over the other. It had been an iffy thing from the beginning, trying to navigate by dead reckoning.

Finally, though, it was obvious. Here she was. On the shores of Lake Styx. Not all that far off course after all. Three miles, maybe, tops.

Despair filled her.

They’d named the lake during their first loop through the Galilean system, what the engineers had called the “mapping run.” It was one of the largest features they’d seen that wasn’t already on the maps from satellite probes or Earth-based reconnaissance. Hols had thought it might be a new phenomenon—a lake that had achieved its current size within the past ten years or so. Burton had thought it would be fun to check it out. And Martha hadn’t cared, so long as she wasn’t left behind. So they’d added the lake to their itinerary. She had been so transparently eager to be in on the first landing, so afraid that she’d be left behind, that when she suggested they match fingers, odd man out, for who stayed, both Burton and Hols had laughed. “I’ll play mother,” Hols had said magnanimously, “for the first landing. Burton for Ganymede and then you for Europa. Fair enough?” And ruffled her hair.

She’d been so relieved, and so grateful, and so humiliated too. It was ironic. Now it looked like Hols—who would never have gotten so far off course as to go down the wrong side of the Styx—wasn’t going to get to touch rock at all. Not this expedition.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Martha muttered, though she didn’t know if she were condemning Hols or Burton or herself. Lake Styx was horseshoe-shaped and twelve miles long. And she was standing right at the inner toe of the horseshoe.

There was no way she could retrace her steps back around the lake and still get to the lander before her air ran out. The lake was dense enough that she could almost swim across it, if it weren’t for the viscosity of the sulfur, which would coat her heat radiators and burn out her suit in no time flat. And the heat of the liquid. And whatever internal flows and undertows it might have. As it was, the experience would be like drowning in molasses. Slow and sticky.

She sat down and began to cry.

After a time she began to build up her nerve to grope for the snap-coupling to her airpack. There was a safety for it, but among those familiar with the rig it was an open secret that if you held the safety down with your thumb and yanked suddenly on the coupling, the whole thing would come undone, emptying the suit in less than a second. The gesture was so distinctive that hot young astronauts-in-training would mime it when one of their number said something particularly stupid. It was called the suicide flick.

There were worse ways of dying.

“Will build. Bridge. Have enough. Fine control of. Physical processes. To build. Bridge.”

“Yeah, right, very nice, you do that,” Martha said absently. If you can’t be polite to your own hallucinations . . . She didn’t bother finishing the thought. Little crawly things were creeping about on the surface of her skin. Best to ignore them.

“Wait. Here. Rest. Now.”

She said nothing but only sat, not resting. Building up her courage. Thinking about everything and nothing. Clutching her knees and rocking back and forth.

Eventually, without meaning to, she fell asleep.

“Wake. Up. Wake. Up. Wake. Up.”

“Uhh?”

Martha struggled up into awareness. Something was happening before her, out on the lake. Physical processes were at work. Things were moving.

As she watched, the white crust at the edge of the dark lake bulged outward, shooting out crystals, extending. Lacy as a snowflake. Pale as frost. Reaching across the molten blackness. Until there was a narrow white bridge stretching all the way to the far shore.

“You must. Wait,” Io said. “Ten minutes and. You can. Walk across. It. With ease.”

“Son of a b*tch!” Martha murmured. “I’m sane.”

In wondering silence, she crossed the bridge that Io had enchanted across the dark lake. Once or twice the surface felt a little mushy underfoot, but it always held.

It was an exalting experience. Like passing over from Death into Life.

At the far side of the Styx, the pyroclastic plains rose gently toward a distant horizon. She stared up yet another long, crystal-flower-covered slope. Two in one day. What were the odds against that?

She struggled upward, flowers exploding as they were touched by her boots. At the top of the rise, the flowers gave way to sulfur hardpan again. Looking back, she could see the path she had crunched through the flowers begin to erase itself. For a long moment she stood still, venting heat. Crystals shattered soundlessly about her in a slowly expanding circle.

She was itching something awful now. Time to freshen up. Six quick taps brought up a message on her visor: Warning: Continued use of this drug at current levels can result in paranoia, psychosis, hallucinations, misperceptions, and hypomania, as well as impaired judgment.

Fuck that noise. Martha dealt herself another hit.

It took a few seconds. Then—whoops. She was feeling light and full of energy again. Best check the airpack reading. Man, that didn’t look good. She had to giggle.

Which was downright scary.

Nothing could have sobered her up faster than that high little druggie laugh. It terrified her. Her life depended on her ability to maintain. She had to keep taking meth to keep going, but she also had to keep going under the drug. She couldn’t let it start calling the shots. Focus. Time to switch over to the last airpack. Burton’s airpack. “I’ve got eight hours of oxygen left. I’ve got twelve miles yet to go. It can be done,” she said grimly. “I’m going to do it now.”

If only her skin weren’t itching. If only her head weren’t crawling. If only her brain weren’t busily expanding in all directions.

Trudge, drag, trudge, drag. All through the night. The trouble with repetitive labor was that it gave you time to think. Time to think when you were speeding also meant time to think about the quality of your own thought.

You didn’t dream in real-time, she’d been told. You get it all in one flash, just as you’re about to wake up, and in that instant extrapolate a complex dream all in one whole. It feels as if you’ve been dreaming for hours. But you’ve only had one split second of intense nonreality.

Maybe that’s what’s happening here.

She had a job to do. She had to keep a clear head. It was important that she get back to the lander. People had to know. They weren’t alone anymore. Damnit, she’d just made the biggest discovery since fire!

Either that, or she was so crazy she was hallucinating that Io was a gigantic alien machine. So crazy she’d lost herself within the convolutions of her own brain.

Which was another terrifying thing she wished she hadn’t thought of. She’d been a loner as a child. Never made friends easily. Never had or been a best friend to anybody. Had spent half her girlhood buried in books. Solipsism terrified her—she’d lived right on the edge of it for too long. So it was vitally important that she determine whether the voice of Io had an objective, external reality. Or not.

Well, how could she test it?

Sulfur was triboelectric, Io had said. Implying that it was in some way an electrical phenomenon. If so, then it ought to be physically demonstrable.

Martha directed her helmet to show her the electrical charges within the sulfur plains. Crank it up to the max.

The land before her flickered once, then lit up in fairyland colors. Light! Pale oceans of light overlaying light, shifting between pastels, from faded rose to boreal blue, multilayered, labyrinthine, and all pulsing gently within the heart of the sulfur rock. It looked like thought made visual. It looked like something straight out of DisneyVirtual, and not one of the nature channels either—definitely DV-3.

“Damn,” she muttered. Right under her nose. She’d had no idea.

Glowing lines veined the warping wings of subterranean electromagnetic forces. Almost like circuit wires. They crisscrossed the plains in all directions, combining and then converging—not upon her, but in a nexus at the sled. Burton’s corpse was lit up like neon. Her head, packed in sulfur dioxide snow, strobed and stuttered with light so rapidly that it shone like the sun.

Sulfur was triboelectric. Which meant that it built up a charge when rubbed.

She’d been dragging Burton’s sledge over the sulfur surface of Io for how many hours? You could build up a hell of a charge that way.

So, okay. There was a physical mechanism for what she was seeing. Assuming that Io really was a machine, a triboelectric alien device the size of Earth’s moon, built eons ago for who knows what purpose by who knows what godlike monstrosities, then, yes, it might be able to communicate with her. A lot could be done with electricity.

Lesser, smaller, and dimmer “circuitry” reached for Martha as well. She looked down at her feet. When she lifted one from the surface, the contact was broken, and the lines of force collapsed. Other lines were born when she put her foot down again. Whatever slight contact might be made was being constantly broken. Whereas Burton’s sledge was in constant contact with the sulfur surface of Io. That hole in Burton’s skull would be a highway straight into her brain. And she’d packed it in solid SO2 as well. Conductive and supercooled. She’d made things easy for Io.

She shifted back to augmented real-color. The DV-3 SFX faded away.

Accepting as a tentative hypothesis that the voice was a real rather than a psychological phenomenon. That Io was able to communicate with her. That it was a machine. That it had been built . . .

Who, then, had built it?

Click.

“Io? Are you listening?”

“Calm on the listening ear of night. Come Heaven’s melodious strains. Edmund Hamilton Sears.”

“Yeah, wonderful, great. Listen, there’s something I’d kinda like to know—who built you?”

“You. Did.”

Slyly, Martha said, “So I’m your creator, right?”

“Yes.”

“What do I look like when I’m at home?”

“Whatever. You wish. To.”

“Do I breathe oxygen? Methane? Do I have antennae? Tentacles? Wings? How many legs do I have? How many eyes? How many heads?”

“If. You wish. As many as. You wish.”

“How many of me are there?”

“One.” A pause. “Now.”

“I was here before, right? People like me. Mobile intelligent life forms. And I left. How long have I been gone?”

Silence. “How long—” she began again.

“Long time. Lonely. So very. Long time.”

Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. How many centuries had she been walking? Felt like a lot. It was night again. Her arms felt like they were going to fall out of their sockets.

Really, she ought to leave Burton behind. She’d never said anything to make Martha think she cared one way or the other where her body wound up. Probably would’ve thought a burial on Io was pretty damn nifty. But Martha wasn’t doing this for her. She was doing it for herself. To prove that she wasn’t entirely selfish. That she did too have feelings for others. That she was motivated by more than just the desire for fame and glory.

Which, of course, was a sign of selfishness in itself. The desire to be known as selfless. It was hopeless. You could nail yourself to a fucking cross, and it would still be proof of your innate selfishness.

“You still there, Io?”

Click.

“Am. Listening.”

“Tell me about this fine control of yours. How much do you have? Can you bring me to the lander faster than I’m going now? Can you bring the lander to me? Can you return me to the orbiter? Can you provide me with more oxygen?”

“Dead egg, I lie. Whole. On a whole world I cannot touch. Plath.”

“You’re not much use, then, are you?”

There was no answer. Not that she had expected one. Or needed it, either. She checked the topos and found herself another eighth-mile closer to the lander. She could even see it now under her helmet photomultipliers, a dim glint upon the horizon. Wonderful things, photomultipliers. The sun here provided about as much light as a full moon did back on Earth. Jupiter by itself provided even less. Yet crank up the magnification, and she could see the airlock awaiting the grateful touch of her gloved hand.

Trudge, drag, trudge. Martha ran and reran and rereran the math in her head. She had only three miles to go, and enough oxygen for as many hours. The lander had its own air supply. She was going to make it.

Maybe she wasn’t the total loser she’d always thought she was. Maybe there was hope for her, after all.

Click.

“Brace. Yourself.”

“What for?”

The ground rose up beneath her and knocked her off her feet.

When the shaking stopped, Martha clambered unsteadily to her feet again. The land before her was all a jumble, as if a careless deity had lifted the entire plain up a foot and then dropped it. The silvery glint of the lander on the horizon was gone. When she pushed her helmet’s magnification to the max, she could see a metal leg rising crookedly from the rubbled ground.

Martha knew the shear strength of every bolt and failure point of every welding seam in the lander. She knew exactly how fragile it was. That was one device that was never going to fly again.

She stood motionless. Unblinking. Unseeing. Feeling nothing. Nothing at all.

Eventually she pulled herself together enough to think. Maybe it was time to admit it: She never had believed she was going to make it. Not really. Not Martha Kivelsen. All her life she’d been a loser. Sometimes—like when she qualified for the expedition—she lost at a higher level than usual. But she never got whatever it was she really wanted.

Why was that, she wondered? When had she ever desired anything bad? When you get right down to it, all she’d ever wanted was to kick God in the butt and get his attention. To be a big noise. To be the biggest fucking noise in the universe. Was that so unreasonable?

Now she was going to wind up as a footnote in the annals of humanity’s expansion into space. A sad little cautionary tale for mommy astronauts to tell their baby astronauts on cold winter nights. Maybe Burton could’ve gotten back to the lander. Or Hols. But not her. It just wasn’t in the cards.

Click.

“Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system.”

“You fucking bastard! Why didn’t you warn me?”

“Did. Not. Know.”

Now her emotions returned to her in full force. She wanted to run and scream and break things. Only there wasn’t anything in sight that hadn’t already been broken. “You sh**head!” she cried. “You idiot machine! What use are you? What g*ddamn use at all?”

“Can give you. Eternal life. Communion of the soul. Unlimited processing power. Can give Burton. Same.”

“Hah?”

“After the first death. There is no other. Dylan Thomas.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Silence.

“Damn you, you fucking machine! What are you trying to say?”

Then the devil took Jesus up into the holy city and set him on the highest point of the temple, and said to him, “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written he shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up.”

Burton wasn’t the only one who could quote scripture. You didn’t have to be Catholic, like her. Presbyterians could do it too.

Martha wasn’t sure what you’d call this feature. A volcanic phenomenon of some sort. It wasn’t very big. Maybe twenty meters across, not much higher. Call it a crater, and let it be. She stood shivering at its lip. There was a black pool of molten sulfur at its bottom, just as she’d been told. Supposedly its roots reached all the way down to Tartarus.

Her head ached so badly.

Io claimed—had said—that if she threw herself in, it would be able to absorb her, duplicate her neural patterning, and so restore her to life. A transformed sort of life, but life nonetheless. “Throw Burton in,” it had said. “Throw yourself in. Physical configuration will be. Destroyed. Neural configuration will be. Preserved. Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Burton had limited. Biological training. Understanding of neural functions may be. Imperfect.”

“Wonderful.”

“Or. Maybe not.”

“Gotcha.”

Heat radiated up from the bottom of the crater. Even protected and shielded as she was by her suit’s HVAC systems, she felt the difference between front and back. It was like standing in front of a fire on a very cold night.

They had talked, or maybe negotiated was a better word for it, for a long time. Finally Martha had said, “You savvy Morse code? You savvy orthodox spelling?”

“Whatever Burton. Understood. Is. Understood.”

“Yes or no, damnit!”

“Savvy.”

“Good. Then maybe we can make a deal.”

She stared up into the night. The orbiter was out there somewhere, and she was sorry she couldn’t talk directly to Hols, say good-bye and thanks for everything. But Io had said no. What she planned would raise volcanoes and level mountains. The devastation would dwarf that of the earthquake caused by the bridge across Lake Styx.

It couldn’t guarantee two separate communications.

The ion flux tube arched from somewhere over the horizon in a great looping jump to the north pole of Jupiter. Augmented by her visor, it was as bright as the sword of God.

As she watched, it began to sputter and jump, millions of watts of power dancing staccato in a message they’d be picking up on the surface of Earth. It would swamp every radio and drown out every broadcast in the Solar System.

THIS IS MARTHA KIVELSEN, SPEAKING FROM THE SURFACE OF IO ON BEHALF OF MYSELF, JULIET BURTON, DECEASED, AND JACOB HOLS, OF THE FIRST GALILEAN SATELLITES EXPLORATORY MISSION. WE HAVE MADE AN IMPORTANT DISCOVERY . . .

Every electrical device in the System would dance to its song.

Burton went first. Martha gave the sledge a shove, and out it flew, into empty space. It dwindled, hit, kicked up a bit of a splash. Then, with a disappointing lack of pyrotechnics, the corpse slowly sank into the black glop.

It didn’t look very encouraging at all.

Still . . .

“Okay,” she said. “A deal’s a deal.” She dug in her toes and spread her arms. Took a deep breath. Maybe I am going to survive after all, she thought. It could be Burton was already halfway-merged into the oceanic mind of Io, and awaiting her to join in an alchemical marriage of personalities. Maybe I’m going to live forever. Who knows? Anything is possible.

Maybe.

There was a second and more likely possibility. All this could well be nothing more than a hallucination. Nothing but the sound of her brain short-circuiting and squirting bad chemicals in all directions. Madness. One last grandiose dream before dying. Martha had no way of judging.

Whatever the truth might be, though, there were no alternatives, and only one way to find out.

She jumped.

Briefly, she flew.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1998.

About the Author

Michael Swanwick has received the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy and Hugo Awards, and has the odd distinction of having been nominated for and lost more of these same awards than any other human being. His most recent novel is Chasing the Phoenix, in which post-Utopian con men Darger and Surplus accidentally conquer China. Not So Much, Said the Cat, his new short story collection, was published in August.

He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.

Méliès to Bonestell:
Relevancy and Realism in Cinematic Science Fiction

Mark Cole

The future looks a lot more real than it used to.

Or at least that’s the impression given by movies like Gravity and The Martian. For over a century filmmakers have wowed audiences with voyages to space. Unfortunately, most of them look silly now—and even fewer would hold an audience’s attention for ninety minutes.

Will these recent films fare any better?

And will they still look real a decade from now?

While their voyages lacked the slightest pretense of realism, the earliest films spent a lot of time rushing through space. Georges Méliès ’ Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), in which six silly professors take a giant cannon shell to the moon and fight equally comic Selenites, was probably first.

It was so successful that absurd trips to other planets (including a few shot-for-shot copies) soon overran the theaters. They featured such realistic means of getting there as crazy automobiles or anti-gravity potions.

Not that it mattered: these “trick films” existed to startle audiences with new visual gimmicks.

It wasn’t until 1908 that anyone attempted to make realistic science fiction. The Airship Destroyer tried to visualize an invasion fleet of fin de siècle aerial warships. That it looks ludicrous now shows just how precarious realism can be.

In the first space feature, Himmelskibet (1918), Danish explorers went to Mars. Sophus Michaëlis adapted his own novel but, instead of a sphere powered by the “radio spectrum” of Mars, the Excelsior has a mysterious power source invented by the usual genius and a propeller in its tail!

The filmmakers made little effort to imagine the rigors of spaceflight: not only is there no mention of the vacuum of space, but the Excelsior lacks an airlock. They don suits with masks before stepping out onto the surface of Mars, but find a conveniently breathable atmosphere and a wise and peaceful society of happy vegetarians.

However, the ship strongly resembles early bombers and passenger aircraft. As in so many movies that followed, the designers drew on familiar images for their vessel.

In other words, they gave it wings and a propeller to make it more “realistic.”

One gets the impression that most people had a hard time believing in space flight. The Sky Ranger (1921), for example, started out as an alien invasion serial, The Man Who Stole the Moon, before Pathe imposed an earthbound storyline.

But it did appear in the educational shorts churned out by the J.R. Bray studio: animation pioneer Max Fleischer’s 1920 All Aboard For the Moon had Robert Goddard as an advisor and a rocket with a gimbal-mounted engine that predates Kraft-Ehricke’s real invention. The more comic, The Sky Splitter (1922) starred a bulbous, winged, Buck Rogers’-style spaceship. It doesn’t look very real but the film offered a few interesting ideas and ends with the inventor reaching a planet fifty light-years away and watching his childhood through a telescope.

Far more ambitious was a remarkable 1925 German documentary, Wunder Der Schöpfung (aka Our Heavenly Bodies). The Ufa studios spent over $700,000 on its biggest production to date, hiring a horde of scientific experts to make it as real as possible.

The highlight of the film comes when explorers take off on a trip to the planets. Their ship is a stubby cigar in what looks like a gyroscope cage, which launches from the top of a modernist ziggurat in the heart of a future city. Powered by some sort of electromagnetic drive, its cabin has visible reinforcing rings, like an airship. But little time is spent in the ship: the real emphasis is on the planets it visits.

However, their trip through the Milky Way to intergalactic space looks very, very familiar. We’ve seen that same moving star field in 2001, Star Trek, and Star Wars.

Wunder Der Schöpfung’s success convinced Ufa to back Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It nearly bankrupted them. Undeterred, they returned to space with another Lang spectacular.

He hired one of the world’s top experts, Hermann Oberth, as technical advisor on Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon, 1928). The results were impressive—at least as far as the trip itself. The ship resembles the WWII V-2 rockets Oberth helped design except for its strange box fins and hexagonal engine exhausts. It does, however, have his most radical innovation: multiple stages.

Oberth immerses the ship in water prior to launch. He thought this would help support a vehicle so reduced in weight that it could hardly stand on its own. The problems—waterproofing the rockets, surface tension, and the sheer weight of the water displaced—would seem to outweigh any advantages. While he later drew V-2 style rockets submerged in floating launchpads, he never seems to have carried the idea any further.

As a publicity stunt, Lang also had Oberth construct a liquid-fueled rocket to launch at the film’s opening. Unfortunately, he ran into a major snag (which cost him the sight in his left eye): he may have been the world’s foremost expert but he still had no idea how to build a rocket.

Less impressive was the plot. It was perhaps the first film to run into the bane of realistic space films: what in the world do you do to make it interesting? It features an impressive number of plot twists which would plague space movies for years (although generally one at a time): spies, sabotage, a league of corrupt businessmen, a stowaway, a passenger working for the other side, and the all-time classic, “we don’t have enough fuel to get home.”

Even more remarkable is the discovery of a breathable atmosphere, the notion that someone could survive being left behind with just a tent and a pile of supplies, and, of course, a huge vein of gold! (Apparently no one figured out how much it would cost to mine and ship home).

Sadly, few people saw an equally extravagant silent space flight from the Soviet Union.

It is hard to believe that anyone would have started an enormously expensive silent in 1932, but they wanted Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella (aka, Cosmic Voyage) to reach the widest audience possible.

Unfortunately, silent film was dead before it was done. It ran in a few rural theaters in 1936 only to be yanked out because the Commissars thought the cosmonauts hopping around on the moon were too frivolous. It remained obscure until rediscovered in 1984.

Russian rocket pioneer, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, served as technical advisor on a film “adapted” from his novel, Outside the Earth. It features two massive ships, with the full-length stabilizer fins found on all of his designs. They launch horizontally, along steel rails.

The model work is remarkable, as good as Lang’s or perhaps better. And clearly its version of the Moon is closer to reality.

Beyond some minor tension involving attempts to prevent the ship’s designer from going and a trivial romantic subplot, the high points are a young stowaway, a ruptured oxygen tank, and an accident that traps one of the crew.

There weren’t many science fiction films made during the Thirties. Even fewer featured trips into space. Just Imagine plays its trip to Mars for laughs, Flash Gordon and other serial heroes zipped around in toy-like rockets, and Things to Come shot its toga-clad astronauts out of a giant cannon. The minor quibble—that the blast would reduce them to a pulp—is conveniently ignored.

The most interesting flight is a sadly truncated Bavarian film, Weltraumschiff 1 startet (The Launching of Spaceship-1). Its twenty-three minutes are all that’s left of an intended feature, cancelled when WWII began.

It strongly resembles German science fiction films of the thirties like F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer, with its near-term setting, more or less accurate science, and impressive effects. The monstrous ship looks like a 1930s Zeppelin, is over twenty meters longer than a Saturn V, and weighs roughly the same empty. Carrying a full crew and a load of scientists, it emerges from a vast hangar, accelerates down a rail then flies to the moon, passing close to the surface before returning.

Most of the running time seems like padding: a press conference, a lengthy history of rocketry, a few film clips, and details of the ship and its mission. It gives few hints about the intended plot of the full length film, and even fewer about its characters.

It wasn’t until 1950 that the U.S. finally went to the moon.

Destination Moon, like its German and Soviet precursors, aimed to create a meticulously accurate voyage to the moon. George Pal recruited Robert Heinlein to adapt Rocket Ship Galileo, his YA novel about three boys who build the first moon rocket. He and Oberth served as technical advisors, with a little help from Wernher von Braun. Iconic space artist Chesley Bonestell, provided production art and designed the ship.

The film eschewed the novel’s remnants of a lost civilization and Nazis on the moon. Instead it details a private corporate lunar project.

The film is stunning, even today. The ship—which owes a clear design debt to the V-2, looks plausible if rather spacious although some have criticized it because it only has a single stage. However, this is probably because of the ship’s water-fueled nuclear motor, which would be too expensive—and dangerous—to jettison.

Bonestell objected to the cracks added to the lunar surface (which would suggest it once had lots of liquid water). They are the one glaring inaccuracy, but the set designer added them to make his forced perspective work: few viewers would guess that the astronauts in the background were played by midgets.

Perhaps the best sequence comes when several stop-motion animated crewmembers exit the ship and walk around on its hull—although Woody Woodpecker‘s cameo gets a lot more attention.

While the film excels at its technical details, it does little to develop its characters or provide any further plot than the voyage itself.

Its first imitator beat it into the theaters. Rushed into production when Destination Moon was announced, Rocketship X-M narrowly edged it out as the first Fifties science fiction film. Although it used stock V-2 footage for most of its “effects” it still ranks as one of the better copies. Unfortunately, its plot is decidedly improbable: a freak accident sends the first Moon mission to Mars, where they find a ruined city and caveman-ish survivors living in the ruins.

Soon space explorers would find alien civilizations in increasingly unrealistic films like Flight to Mars, Cat-women of the Moon, Missile to the Moon, and even Abbott and Costello Go to Mars.

1954’s Riders to the Stars at least tried a little harder. It focused on the preparations for a fairly straightforward mission—capturing meteors in orbit. It may have been the first space film to emphasize the need for training—and its rocket fleet looks more like jet fighters than anything Bonestell drew. It is also one of the few Fifties science fiction films to show crowded spacecraft.

Their mission—discovering the secret that kept meteors from burning up in Earth’s atmosphere—is the real problem: apparently it never occurred to them that they might just have started out much, much bigger.

Heinlein played a major part in another film, although with far less impressive results. Project Moon Base (1953) started out as a half-hour TV show before turning into a feature. It looks appropriately cheap, with some silly walking (and sitting) on the ceiling meant to illustrate weightlessness and the goofiest short shorts uniforms ever inflicted on any space traveler. The miniatures are passable, if you ignore how toy-like they are, and would have been fine on TV.

But its reasonably accurate science can’t overcome the plot: a man and woman who survive an accident in space have to get married and take up residence on the moon.

It isn’t clear, however, whether Heinlein was to blame.

After a detour to more fantastic science fiction (The War of the Worlds and When Worlds Collide) George Pal returned to realistic territory with a 1954 adaptation of Willy Ley’s bestseller, Conquest of Space.

He brought Bonestell’s illustrations to life with some impressive model work, creating not just one ship but an entire space program: rocket ferries, a classic wheel-shaped station, space taxis for cargo, and a Mars ship with a giant wing almost as big as the station. As in the book, the journey to Mars is a huge undertaking, involving a large crew and a ship that has to jack itself upright to launch from Mars.

Unfortunately, Ley’s book was non-fiction. While undeniably handsome, the film failed to generate much excitement. Pal’s astronauts face malfunctions and rogue asteroids, only to have the commander turn into the Hollywood version of a religious fanatic and try to stop the mission.

A year later, the British made a realistic space flight of their own. Satellite in the Sky is far less ambitious, portraying the first orbital flight of a spacious, needle-nosed ship which (like so many before) launches horizontally along a track.

As in Destination Moon, it is nuclear powered and boasts a moderately large crew, including a scientist and yet another stowaway (this time a girl reporter). The film tries to keep our attention first by focusing on the soap opera lives of the crew, then with the revelation that their real mission is to test a new bomb for the Americans.

Naturally, it gets magnetized and follows the ship, with only long hours to go before it explodes. Which gives the crew plenty of time to stand around talking about it.

As hard as filming plausible space voyages may have been, making it all seem interesting after the initial novelty waned proved far more difficult.

Space trips of the Fifties ran into such common problems as murder mysteries (Spaceways), unseen presences absorbing the crew (The Quatermass Xperiment), flesh-eating stowaways (It! The Terror from Beyond Space), or deadly space fungus (Space Master X-7). But, despite all these routine hazards, audiences dwindled as the decade drew to an end.

The 1957 launch of Sputnik helped a little. Roger Corman was the first to exploit the hysteria, slapping War of the Satellites together in a little over five months. Naturally, all his space craft were spheres—or collections of spheres—and the only truly memorable part was the ship’s endless series of wide corridors, none of which seemed to go anywhere.

The Space Explorers proved to be another big winner. Fred Ladd had just finished piecing together a kids’ special from a grab bag of existing footage—including bits of Weltraumschiff 1 startet and a 1953 Russian children’s film, Polyot na Lunu (an almost shot-for-animated-shot remake of Kosmicheskiy reys)—when Sputnik went up. Although parts of it already looked quite dated, it played on TV for years—usually as a series of six minute segments on local kids’ shows—and spawned a 1958 sequel.

Science fiction in television had mostly been simplistic children’s shows more like the old Republic serials than anything in the theaters. But in 1959 CBS changed that. After producing Destination Space, a pilot with effects “borrowed” from Conquest of Space, they decided instead to launch a half-hour children’s series, Men Into Space. It was surprisingly sober and realistic, with newly filmed model effects that look far more realistic than those borrowed effects: Bonestell’s visions had no corrugated metal, no visible panel detail or external pipes, no gaps between sections, no control nozzles, and no tinfoil. Straight metal tubes replaced lovely streamlined shapes and blunt noses won out because needle-noses, with all their extra surface area, got hotter.

As the space race heated up, fictional rockets gradually began to look more like the real thing.

Unfortunately, the audience lost interest. Science fiction film went into eclipse for most of a decade—at least in the West.

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 musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Jazz Music and Greek Myths:
A Conversation with Peter S. Beagle

Chris Urie

Stories and jazz music go hand in hand. Imagination lays the foundation built on a feeling until structure emerges. The plot twists, the characters evolve, and what you end up with is something far more than the sum of its parts.

Peter S. Beagle has always been an author with an ear for beautiful writing. His work has always been deceptively simple. From his short fiction set in New York City to his beloved novel The Last Unicorn, Beagle has been delighting readers with his mastery of language and heartfelt storytelling. His latest novel Summerlong, is no exception. Set in the Pacific Northwest, it features his subtle brand of fantasy entwined within the lives of people living by Puget Sound.

Peter S. Beagle is the author of numerous short stories, novels, and screenplays. He is best known as the author of The Last Unicorn. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. His latest novel, Summerlong, was published by Tachyon in September.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I wanted to be a writer, literally before I could write. I used to make up stories and get my mother to write them down—and frequently illustrate them, now that I think of it. (Actually, I still dream of being a great finger-style jazz guitarist, like Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, Marcel Dadi, or Guy Van Duser.) On the one hand, somehow knowing the only thing I was fit for in this world was telling stories obviously had its uses in teaching me to take work, and everything about it, seriously. But could there ever have been some other road not taken for me? Okay, playing first base for the Yankees was definitely out—but still . . .

How are music and writing interconnected for you?

I always think in terms of music—especially jazz—when I work, whether or not I’m actually listening to anything. Dialogue clashing or criss-crossing in my head can sound to me like a woodwind quartet; a passage of description may be in some way prodded into existence by memories of Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, or images of Sonny Rollins practicing alone on the Brooklyn Bridge at night. The Brandenburg Concerto #5 always brings certain people from important times in my life back into my voice, however silently. The music’s always there.

Can you play any instruments or are you primarily a singer?

I learned to read music on the piano, but guitar’s the only instrument I’ve ever learned to play. Singing is quite possibly my greatest joy, and I’m still proud—even thirty years after the fact—of having sung in a French restaurant in Santa Cruz for twelve years on weekends. I sang mostly in French—the songs of Georges Brassens (my one guru, if you will), and those of Charles Aznavour, Leo Ferre, Jacques Brel, and Jean Ferrat. Sometimes I’d go all evening without singing anything in English; on others, I’d break in something in Spanish or Yiddish, or even Bernie Kalb’s charming “Frog-Kissing,” to a dinner audience who had no idea that I spoke English. It was pure theater—a mask, nothing at all to do with writing—and I loved it deeply. More recently, I’ve gotten to sing with musician friends who have their own bands and small groups, and it never changes—I walk away saying to myself, “God, this is so much more fun than writing!” It still is.

Why did you choose to set Summerlong in the Pacific Northwest?

I lived in Seattle for six years (well, one year in Seattle proper, and five on Bainbridge Island, six miles offshore), but Summerlong didn’t begin to happen until I’d been gone from the Northwest for about a decade. I’ve no idea why that should be so . . . perhaps simply because it takes me a long time to realize what I’m looking at. Reviewers have complimented me specifically on my sense of the atmosphere of Seattle and Puget Sound, which pleases me a great deal. It’s something I admire in other writers, whether they’re dealing in genre fantasy or the grittiest realism, and I’m rarely sure that I’m getting it right myself.

The characters in Summerlong feel complex and real. How do you create characters like Abe, Lily, and Lioness? Are the pastiche of traits you’ve picked up from people or more formed completely from your imagination?

My characters are always a mixed bag. Abe’s got a good deal of my more aggravating characteristics, certainly. Joanna is based, in her occupation, on a very sweet neighbor who lived downstairs from me in Seattle. In her personality—not to mention her love for basketball and rollerblading—on a dear friend who was once my literary agent. Lioness . . . well, I really do know a remarkable lady in Portland, Oregon, by that name. And Lily—my favorite character, or anyway the one who touches me the most deeply—Lily just came out of nowhere, the way it happens when I’m lucky. Mostly my characters begin as voices in my head, as they always have. It’s all right: I’m officially a Writer—an Artist—so I’m entitled to hear voices. I can produce a license whenever requested.

What was it about the story of Persephone that inspired you?

Persephone actually got me into college, by the way. I was so intrigued by the legend that I wrote a sonnet, “Persephone In September,” which my high-school creative writing teacher Mollie Epstein—may her name and all her descendants be blessed for a thousand generations—submitted to Scholastic Magazine’s annual writing contest. The winner—that little old failing-in-everything-but-English-and-history, me—received a full tuition scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh.

The fantastical aspects of Summerlong can be subtle and intertwine seamlessly with reality within your novel. Do you find there is a bit of fantasy to be found in reality?

I’ve always thought of fantasy as that thing that exists just to the side of my peripheral vision, so to speak; but the moment I snap my head around for a full view . . . it’s just gone. I have written non-fantasy works (spent a fellowship year at Stanford, in a class with people like Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey, Jim Hall, Judy Rascoe, Joanna Macdonald and others, and spent it writing a godawful novel about a young musician in Paris); but very little of it could ever be considered fantasy. It just seems to be the way I think, from my earliest childhood all the way to . . . well, to where I am. Wherever that actually is.

In addition to novels and short stories, you’ve also written a number of screenplays. What did you learn from your time writing for the screen?

Screenwriting—the small amount of it that I’ve done over the years—if it’s taught me anything, has taught me not to think in strictly linear ways. The form is so much a modular one that I’ve learned that if a scene doesn’t work in its present location, try moving it around, or reshaping it in a different style. One does that with fiction, of course, but I take a long time to learn certain things, and for me it was movie work that dislodged me from my stubborn adherence to the same technique.

Do you have any plans to write more short fiction set in NYC?

I have no idea whether I’ll ever again set a story in New York City. The city I grew up in is long gone, in so many ways, and so am I. But in the words of the great Fats Waller, which I quote more often than I should, “One never know, do one?” And as an artist, I always think of an interview with the trumpet player Roy Eldridge, in which he said, “The trumpet is a mean instrument, man. You come to the club one night, and everything comes out through the instrument—everything you ever felt, or thought, or were—and you go home thinking, ‘Wow, forty, fifty years at it, and finally I understand the trumpet!’ And you come to work the next night, and you pick up the trumpet, and the trumpet says, ‘Hey, fuck you, man!’”

Writing’s like that.

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
The Ship’s Voice: A Risk Analysis and Modest Proposal

Fran Wilde

I’ve been thinking about voice a lot, about who speaks, who is heard, and how. Automated voices in particular are interesting, found in everything from our handheld robots to our future means of travel off planet. Who—and what—we listen to, and don’t, and why, and how? This impacts us greatly going forward.

Also I’ve been thinking a lot about GlaDOS, but I’ll get to that in a second.

Ten years ago, a study appeared in the medical journal NeuroImage that got some major traction and is still generating headlines. The article’s title was “Male and female voices activate distinct regions in the male brain” (Sokhi D.S., Hunter M.D., Wilkinson I.D., Woodruff P.W. NeuroImage 27 9/2005) and stated, as it said on the tin, “ . . . in the male brain, the perception of male and female voices activates distinct brain regions.”

In 2015, NeuroImage published another article by several of the same authors, “Discrimination of Voice Gender in the Auditory Cortex” (Philip S.J. Weston P.S., Hunter M.D., Dilraj S., Wilkinson I.D., Woodruff P.W.) that elaborated:

“ . . . discrete sites in non-primary auditory cortex are differentially activated by male and female voices, with female voices consistently evoking greater activation in the upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus and posterior superior temporal plane.” (NeuroImage 15 1/2015)

The media, then and now, frothed forth with headlines like, “Why Men Can’t Hear Women” (Netscape, subtitle: “He Really Isn’t Listening To You!”), “Why Are Men Incapable Of Listening To Women” (The Telegraph), and “It’s All Your Fault Again” (okay I made that last one up).

In some cases, they got the bit right about hearing women’s voices in the same part of the brain that processes music, and in some cases, they just threw up their collective typographical hands and said “just one of those things, I guess, were you saying something?”

Those media interpretations of this research as “Men don’t listen to women because science!” has been troubling me for some time. Not only is it a terrible transposition of a Joanna Russ title (The Women Men Don’t Hear?), but it is also a deliberate misreading of science, and dangerous to our survival as a species.

Hear me out:

The headlines you are being sold are disproven the minute you get in your car or turn on your phone. The moment your GPS says “turn left,” and you do it, you are listening, a good percentage of the time, to a female voice. In fact, I suspect each of those headlines was written by someone with at least one digital assistant with a female voice attached. Because we all have them.

From Siri and GPS devices to games and the ships on our favorite SFF shows, we listen exceedingly well to female voices: they guide us, occasionally tease us, and often inform us. And, despite the headlines, this is in part because: science!

As the studies mentioned above illustrate, certain voices equal higher processing in the higher cortex. Also instrumental: certain voices hit a musically soothing baseline. Parents of toddlers know this one well: if you want a child to listen and remember, sing the thing.

Many of the automated voices in networks and transport have been female as well.

The deployment of the female voice for communication has been going on since the first large-scale human-created media networks when, in 1878, Emma Nutt became the first female telephone operator. Alexander Graham Bell hired her and soon found that, unlike the teenage boys who had been manning the switches, “Emma Nutt, was patient and soothing and spoke in a cultured voice. She was such a success that women rapidly replaced boys. By the end of the 1880s, nearly all telephone operators were women.” (New England Historical Society)

The female voice has since percolated up through our entertainment, our emergency warnings, and more. You can find dozens of articles online discussing Artificial Intelligences, which are often portrayed as and given female voices (in the Atlantic & Live Science to name a few). Often, these travel with words like “soothing” and “pleasant” and occasionally, “melodic”—just like music.

That processing power women’s voices seem to access in the auditory cortex is good news for robots giving directions or responding to requests, even as it is seemingly bad—according to those headlines—for actual women who have new things to say. (When I was telling The Chemist about this essay, he observed a lot of people unwilling to trust road directions from the woman riding in the passenger seat are quite happy to take directions from Siri.)

However. Hang on for a moment. Doesn’t this worry you? It worries me. It almost reminds me of that line from the ’90s movie Species:

Xavier Fitch: We decided to make it female so it would be more docile and controllable.
Preston Lennox: More docile and controllable, eh? You guys don’t get out much.

So this is where GlaDOS comes in—because the game Portal definitely gets the risk and the joke of having a soothingly voiced AI whose goal is to launch you from an aerial faith plate while promising cake. “The Love And Rocket” episode of Futurama gets it too. Speaking of that, the ships of our Science Fiction—why do they (with one glaring exception) have female voices? Depends on who you ask.

Helva, the brainship from The Ship Who Sang, is one of a number of memorable ship voices from the Anne McCaffrey saga. She is notable for her opera, but she can sing all the parts when she needs to. More notable is that the ships in the story are both male and female.

Other ship voices—HAL 9000 in particular, is a modulated voice engineered to be creepy. “I can’t do that, Dave,” is part of our audio lexicon for a reason. But HAL is a rarity. The default for ship voices has been female for a long time.

Again, there’s history, this time with aircraft—including Northrop’s Convair B-58 Hustler. Warning signals on military aircraft have been given many female names and sobriquets—including “Bitching Betty,” “Sexy Sally,” and “Nagging Nora.” Here’s why:

“Research during the era of all-male combat aircraft assignments revealed that a woman’s voice was more likely to gain the attention of young men in distracting situations.” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-58_Hustler)

In science fiction, this bit of history percolates through everything, possibly influencing the future. Federation ship voices are female in Star Trek. On SyFy’s Killjoys, Lucy is the ship with attitude. In Futurama’s “Love and Rocket” episode, the Planet Express gets a female voice module . . . and shenanigans ensue. (I’ll just point out right here that it’s Leela who has to jump in and fix everything, again, and leave the rest to your imagination.)

So . . . I put it to you to consider this question: If the media is conditioning everyone to be okay with listening to female robot voices, while encouraging people to ignore actual female voices, are we edging closer to a major problem?

Are we in fact growing used to following automated female voices when receiving directions? We do what they say by reflex . . . Google Maps says turn left, we turn left. Even into a wall. GlaDOS says we’re doing well, we feel pretty good about ourselves.

It’s a big risk to take, especially with AI getting smarter. So, a modest proposal, from an SFF writer. Let’s figure out why we listen, and don’t, to each other, and, maybe, before we climb aboard ships with voices of any kind, how to listen to each other better too.

About the Author

Fran Wilde is the author of the Andre Norton-, and Compton Crook Award-winning and Nebula-nominated novel Updraft (Tor 2015), its sequel, Cloudbound, publishing from Tor in September 2016, and the novella The Jewel and Her Lapidary (Tor.com Publishing). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Nature. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, iO9.com, and GeekMom.com.

Editor’s Desk:
A Decade

Neil Clarke

Clarkesworld’s first issue was published ten years ago this month. It’s been a long and challenging road to get from that two-story-and-a-cover issue to what you see today. Back then, the state of online magazines could be best described as the Wild West. We had no role models to pattern ourselves after, just some crazy ideas and the willingness to experiment. Many magazines came and went during that time and we learned what we could from their experiences. Growing slowly helped us survive the tumultuous times that followed and provided us with the ability to quickly adapt to our own successes and failures. Looking back, I think it took us just over two years to find a comfortable stride.

This brings us to today’s environment which I would label our Awkward Teenage Years. The field is technically mature, but it’s still coming to terms with what it wants to be and the “right way” to get there, whatever there is. What I hope we don’t lose from the original phase is the willingness to ask ourselves the hard questions like “is there a better way we could be doing this” or even “why are we doing this?” And even though they carry risk, innovation and rebellion can be powerful forces for progress.

It might be obvious that I have strong feelings for this field in which I work. I’ve used my blog and these editorials to express opinions, theories, and advice based on my experiences and in hopes of offering a hand. The other teens have their own paths and can ignore or embrace what they want, just as I may do to them. I view the paths of others as learning opportunities and their choices are a healthy part of a development field. It might not always be pleasant, but it makes us stronger. In the end, we share a lot more in common than is often acknowledged. That’s how I know this phase will pass. Some will drop out. Some will graduate. Some will find some other options and opportunities we haven’t yet imagined.

This month, I could easily look backwards. We have plenty to celebrate and, yes, we’ll be doing some of that throughout the year, but eleven, twelve, thirteen, and beyond are calling to me. At five, I never imagined reaching this point. At ten, twenty-five seems ridiculous, but allowing myself to think in five-, ten-, and fifteen-year spans allows me to address things I would have considered impossible or unrealistic in the short term.

For the last few months, I’ve been shaking the trees, asking for feedback, conducting surveys, and questioning various approaches employed by ourselves and others. If you’ve participated, thank you. If you haven’t, I’m always open to hearing about what we could be doing better, so just drop me an email or flag me down at a convention.

And while I wish I had some grand plans to share with you at this point, it’s still too early. If anything, I’ve discovered just how big some of the holes in our data are. It will take some time to gather what I need and then we can talk. For now though, I’d like to say thank you. Whether you were one of the three thousand that read our first issue ten years ago or you’re discovering us for the first time this month, thanks for reading and/or listening. Next time . . . bring a friend?

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series was published by Night Shade Books in June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Samyaza, Angel of Pride

Peter Mohrbacher

About the Artist

Peter Mohrbacher is an independent illustrator and concept artist living in the Chicago area.