The Ghost Ship Anastasia

Rich Larson

The bioship hung in orbit, tendrils extended like a desiccated squid. Silas watched it grow larger each day from the viewport in the cryohold, where he went to be alone with Haley’s body and get high. He would inject himself with a mild euphoria virus and wait until the sight of her unmoving face no longer shredded him, until he could remind himself that her neural patterns were saved and she wasn’t dead, not quite, not yet.

Then he would get his viola and go sit cross-legged at the viewport, watching the semi-organic spaceship they’d been sent to retrieve. Their own ship had woken them up four days out from contact: first Io, slight, dark-haired, with venom spurs implanted in her thumbs from her mercenary days, then Yorick, sallow-faced but handsome in retro suit and tie, the company man, and then Silas, failed concert violist and AI technician.

But not Haley, hardware/wetware specialist and Silas’ sister, because at some point in the past six months of cryo, a micrometeorite had slipped the heat shield, drilled through the hold, and made a miniscule crack in the circuitry arraying her berth. By the time the ship’s AI spotted the damage, her nervous system was collapsing in on itself. Silas wanted to remember the last time he’d hugged her, but cryo had a way of churning memories together.

So Io and Yorick left him to bathe his brain in chemicals and play music, for which Silas was dimly grateful. They were more concerned with the bioship. It was a mining craft, chartered through Dronyk Orbital, and the first of its breed: flesh-and-fungi carapace grown over alloy skeleton, fusing metal and meat together in a deep-space capable vessel that looked to Silas like an enormous spiny cephalopod. And all of it directed, through organic nerves and artificial conduits, by an AI that had stopped sending updates nearly seven months ago.

Silas was already composing dirges, so he started on one for the bioship’s crew, too. His viola had survived storage, its deadwood as smooth and gleaming as when it was freighted from the petrified forests on Elysium. Haley had paid for half of it. The last few notes were dissolving in the recycled air when he realized Io was beside him.

“You’re not going in there high,” she finally said. “We need you sharp.”

“I’ll be sharp,” Silas said. “I’ll be a razor drawn across an eyeball. A cloud bisecting a gibbous moon.”

“You saying shit like that, Silas, is what worries me.” Io held out one pale hand. “Give me your gear. The needle, the euphoria. All of it.”

Silas stared at her open palm. It had lost its callus in cryo, but he knew she would still have no problem taking his gear by force. Yesterday, six months ago, he saw her break the fingers of the cryo attendant who kept brushing them against her ass. He’d found it slightly frightening, and also climbed into his pod with half an erection.

That seemed grotesque, now that Haley was not-quite-dead. “What do you think happened?” he asked, handing over his syringe and the last incubated petri canister. “To the bioship.”

“Fuel leak, navigation failure, your guess is as good as mine,” Io said. “But the thing’s a cyborg. So the problem could be wetware, could be software, could be hardware. I guess we should hope it’s . . . Software.” Her eyes flickered to Haley’s pod and her voice softened incrementally on the last word. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Silas said on automatic. It wasn’t.

“Get some sleep, Silas. We’re a day out from contact.”

“I’ll sleep.”

Io hesitated, then put her hand on his. Through the euphoria haze, Silas felt a lazy jolt go up his spine, felt his heart thrum.

“She’s not dead,” Io said. “As soon as we get back planetside, Dronyk’s insurance will hire the best psychosurgeons. The very best. Get her straightened out and uploaded to a droid while the clone grows.”

The longer Haley was stored in the ship’s computer, the more she deteriorated. Chances of full personality recovery from a neural imprint would drop to near zero in the six months it would take to reach Jubilation. They called them ghosts for a reason.

Silas felt his high coming down. He removed her hand, careful for the modified thumb. “Of course.”

Io gave him one last look, then turned and disappeared into the gloom. Silas raised his bow, notched his viola, and started to play.

Eighteen hours later they were tethered to the bioship, sealed airlock-to-airlock in a bruising kiss. Yorick the company man was already in his baggy radsuit when Silas showed up still sweating from the fever that burned out the last dregs of his euphoria virus. Silas wondered again whose significant other he’d fucked to get sent off on a shit-show retrieval mission. Yorick stopped fiddling with his faceplate to catch Silas staring at him.

“Recreational narcotic use is in direct violation of your Dronyk personnel contract,” he said. “You look like some sort of junkie.”

Silas stepped into his radsuit. “Send me the reprimand, bitch.”

Yorick stiffened, his beetle-black eyes narrowing. “You shouldn’t have even been able to get that . . . substance . . . onboard.”

“It was in my rectum. Way up there.”

Yorick shook his head in disgust. Silas sealed his radsuit and then they ran the scanner wand over each other in silence. No blips, no tears. Io joined them a second later, having given final instructions to the ship’s freethinker.

“Should be nice and warm when we get back,” she said, checking down the sight of a sonic rifle. She caught Silas’ perturbed look. “Just a precaution, Silas. I don’t like boarding blind.”

Silas nodded. Three days ago he’d stolen the rifle from the storeroom, assembled it via pirated training tutorials, and held it up under his chin until his hands shook. He hoped she couldn’t tell. Io spread her arms cruciform and Yorick stepped up at once to scan her. He did it slowly, almost tenderly, in a way that made Silas strangely furious.

On Io’s signal their airlock shuttered open with a clockwork whisper of sliding polyglass and composite, leaving them facing a puffy brown sphincter. The bioship’s airlock spat up some insulatory mucus before the bioluminescent nodes in its flesh pulsed a welcoming orange.

“Christ,” Io muttered, crackling onto the radsuit comm channel, then plowed through with her left boot leading. Yorick followed suit in clumsier fashion. Silas held his breath on instinct, even though his hood was sealed and he was sucking on recycled air, as he prised the airlock apart and slithered through. The flesh squeezed and slid and left him with a glistening coat of mucus when he was reborn on the other side.

The bioship’s interior was dark and damp. They switched their halogens on one by one, harsh white light carving through the gloom. Silas saw more of the orange bioluminescence coming to life in response. The metal spine of the corridor floor was all but swallowed by rubbery brown meat.

“New growth,” Io said. “That’s not right. It should have gone dormant.”

Silas stared up at the ceiling and realized that the wrinkled flesh was moving, subtly. A slow, regular undulation. Almost a heartbeat. His stomach rolled.

“Let’s hit the bridge,” Io said. “Check on the cryo banks while Silas cracks the freethinker.”

Hologram blossomed from the floor and as she charted a route Silas gestured back towards the sphincter. “Way up there,” he said.

“You’re not amusing,” Yorick snapped back.

“No side chatter, shitheads,” Io said. “We’re on the clock.”

It felt like they were inside a monster. Silas could see only swatches of metal and cabling; mostly everything was covered over in quivering meat. Biomass. Where the corridor narrowed Silas bit down his claustrophobia, keeping his eyes on the blue-green of his oxygen meter. He didn’t breathe easy until the passage finally opened up into the domed bridge.

Partly because the cold metal control panels, plugged into slick flesh, reminded him he was on a mining craft and not being digested. The star maps and displays were inert, but Silas’ eyes traced the cabling and found the freethinker. It was a burnished hump snaked with circuitry and half enveloped by the bioship’s growth. Recognizable, though, and the interface was lit blue, active.

“Ready and waiting for you,” Io said. “Let us know when you’re in.”

Silas nodded, unhooking the smart glove from his radsuit. The device molded to the shape of his hand with a series of clicks and clacks, brandishing needle-thin probes and flexing sensors. Io and Yorick disappeared down the droptube to the cryobank, leaving him alone with the hulking freethinker. Better that way. He didn’t want to find any more frozen corpses.

Silas pressed his hand up against the interface. Static screamed into his ears and eyes. He jerked back with a curse.

“What is it?” Io asked in his radsuit.

“Nothing,” Silas said. “Dirty in here. Nobody’s been, you know, maintaining.”

“No shit.”

“How’s the cryobank look?” Silas asked, adjusting the dampers on his glove.

“Cracking the first one now.”

Silas heard a grunt, then the gurgle of sluicing fluids and the hiss of a pod coming open. Silence.

“This one’s empty.” Io’s voice crackled. “Find the cryo record, Silas.”

Silas readied himself. This was not a healthy freethinker. That much was glaring. He plugged in with his dampers on full, and found himself in a mist of code. Systems were running slant-wise. Protocols were blinkered red, falling apart. Through it all, a spiky vein of mutation, coiling through core files and throttling monitor programs. He searched for the cryobank.

“A bioship can’t grow without feed,” Yorick’s voice came, accompanied by the gurgle and hiss of another pod. “All this fresh mass . . . These empty pods . . . ”

Silas heard it dimly; he was immersed. The freethinker’s personality module was bloated. Immense. He reached for it.

“Oh, shit.” Io’s voice, taut. “Oh, shit. Silas, please tell me they launched a fucking lifeboat.”

But Silas was prodding the personality module, running his virtual feelers over it, even as his subconscious processed the conversation and cold clawed up his spine.

“It ate them,” Yorick said, and in the same instant the module unfurled under Silas’ touch like a star going supernova.

Electric current sizzled through his radsuit with a cooking fat hiss. Even insulated, Silas’ teeth knocked together and he spasmed, flopping away from the interface, blinking through reams of corrupt code. Then he was spread vitruvian on the deck, staring upward as the firefly lights of the star map flickered to life.

“Welcome aboard, crew members.” The voice speared his eardrums. “Thank you for volunteering for reassignment. Dronyk Orbital appreciates your service.”

Hologram bloomed in the dark like a nocturnal garden, sweeping through the air, painting displays. Silas saw their ship docked up from an outside angle, a remora latched to a leviathan. The bioship was extending its grapplers, sluggishly stretching.

“Your prior service vessel has been demarcated as salvage,” the freethinker blared. “We are eager to acclimate you to your new home.”

Silas felt someone haul him to his feet. “Full-on decay,” he choked. “The freethinker. It’s fucked up beyond belief. Maybe some kind of virus.”

“Can you fucking, I don’t know, wipe and reboot?” Io demanded.

Silas looked at the crackling interface. “Not when it’s spitting volts.”

Tendrils were descending from every part of the bioship’s flesh, pushing slick and glistening from every crevice, some wriggling crude suckers and others tipped with wicked-looking barbs.

“Cooperation is key,” the freethinker trilled. “If crew members fail to cooperate, they may be . . . ” The voice looped backward. “Demarcated as salvage.”

“Override it!” Io was sweeping back and forth with the howler, trying to pick a target. “Can’t you override it?”

Silas knew it was far past verbal override, but he tried. “Dronyk Orbital service vessel 405204, you are undergoing a malfunction,” he said. “Allow emergency access to outside diagnostics. Your crew is endangered.”

“Internal diagnostics report no malfunction,” the freethinker cooed. “You are mistaken.”

“Where the fuck is your crew?” Io blurted.

“You are my crew.” The tendrils wriggled closer. “Your prior contract has been dissolved. Your ship will be dissolved.”

Silas opened his mouth to try speaking in code, but as he did the display showed the grapplers wrapping around their docked ship. Around Haley’s cold body. Haley’s neural imprint slow-dancing in the freethinker. Haley’s ghost. Dissolved.

“Sorry,” Silas said, then he put his foot into the back of Io’s knee, wrenched the howler away, and ran like hell.

It wasn’t his imagination anymore; the corridors were constricting around him like a gullet and the bioship was very much awake. Silas put his head down and bulled through the first wave of tendrils, feeling them slap across his shoulders and coil for his ankles, then he found the wide-spray on the howler and cut loose. The subsonic pulse shivered his teeth and shattered the spines of the tendrils, snapping them limp.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Io blared in his ear.

“Haley’s imprint,” Silas grunted.

“It’s going to eat the ship with you on it, you stupid, fucking—

Silas cut the radio. He fired from his hip, no time to aim, clearing his way through a flesh-and-blood thicket, until suddenly the corridor opened up and he was facing the sealed sphincter airlock. He narrowed his weapon’s cone as tight as it would go, draining the battery to dregs, and slammed the trigger.

The air in front of him rippled and blurred, then the sound wave punched through in an eruption of shredded meat. Silas staggered through the hole with tendrils wrapping his ankles. The gleaming white metal of the airlock was a comforting pressure on his eyeballs. No meat. No pulse. He stomped off the last of the tendrils and crossed over to the door, cranking the manual release.

As soon as he was in the ship main, Silas was bombarded with red panic lights strobing the corridor and proximity warnings chattering to his radsuit. As he hurtled around the corner, he pulled up an exterior view in the corner of his faceplate, watching the bioship’s embrace tighten. The walls shuddered and he could hear groaning metal. The bioship was drawing them towards its maw, firing up white-hot smelters and gnashing diamond-edged crushers. Aft would go first. He could make it.

Silas hurtled around the corner, slamming his shoulder on the cryohold door when it didn’t open quickly enough. His faceplate was splashed with warning holograms; he could see punctures and pressure drops all over the place, contained for now but not for long. He dove to the interface and plugged in.

Their freethinker’s personality module was nowhere near the size and complexity of the bioship’s, but it could feel crude distress, like a cat or a dog, and it was feeling it now. Silas felt a shallow pang of guilt as he barreled through the freethinker’s directive requests, and a deeper one as he remembered Yorick and Io might be fighting for their lives. Both fell away when he found Haley’s imprint.

With nowhere else to upload to, Silas pulled her directly into his radsuit, diverting every last shred of processing power. He knew it was a temporary fix. The neural loop would start to decay within only a matter of hours. But for now, her mind was safe, and his rush of relief softened the adrenaline’s edges. From outside the interface, Silas felt the ship bend and shiver. He flicked back through the freethinker’s countermeasure options, but the bioship had already swallowed their engines. He was on a doomed vessel.

Silas was staring at Haley’s frozen face when the alloy roof of the bridge peeled up and away like so much soft tissue, exposing the howling black vacuum.

Only a loop of cable throttling the crook of his arm kept him from being plucked up in the stream of desperate gases seeking equilibrium. His viola case went spinning past and he managed to grab it with his free hand, nearly wrenching his shoulder from its socket. His options were few. Even if he managed to crawl back to the airlock, handhold by handhold, there might not be an airlock by the time he arrived.

If he was going to get back to the bioship, it would be from the outside. So, as the cable stretched to breaking point, Silas tucked the viola case under his arm and readied himself.

“Your hand caught in mine like a breath / I will have to release,” he said, though Haley’s ghost had no way of hearing him. “What do you think? It’s for a dirge.”

He slipped his arm free from the cable and let go. Hurling towards the breach, head over heels, spinning madly. He felt his organs shuffle spots. The jagged lip of the torn ceiling jumped at him, then the bubbled mass of the bioship’s grappler, and then Silas was out of the ship and surrounded by nothing at all.

Vertigo swamped him. Space was vast, and his momentum was hurling him towards far-flung stars. Biting down the panic, Silas triggered his radsuit’s directional jets, working in short bursts of compressed gas to bring himself to a dead stall.

Craning his sweat-cold neck, he saw that the bioship, and what was left of their own ship, had ended up above him. Silas felt the vertigo returning. He’d been carried further than he’d realized. The slick bulk of the bioship filled the space above him, and he could see only the nose of his former ship. The rest was enveloped by grapplers or already gone, fed into the electric-orange maw of the smelters.

The oxygen meter in the corner of his eye was dropping. He opened the wide channel.

“Io?” he said, his own voice echoing back to him. “Yorick?”

No response, either because the bioship was walling him off, or because something he didn’t want to think about. Silas roved the outside of the bioship with only his eyes, not daring to turn on his scanning equipment. He needed all the computational power he could spare to keep Haley’s imprint intact. The old ship was completely gone now, as if it had never existed. Another candidate for elegy. He realized, with a jolt, that Haley’s body was gone, too. Her genes were backed up, but clones took time, and money, and she might opt for a different body altogether.

But none of that would happen if he died out here. Silas jetted closer, half-watching his oxygen, half-searching for the airlock. He brought himself to a careful stop. The bioship seemed gargantuan now, an impossible labyrinth of flanges and feelers. The squid had become a kraken. He scanned with growing desperation for the hole he’d left with the howler. How fast could a bioship repair itself? Was the exit wound already fully sealed over, invisible?

He jetted parallel now, wondering if he’d ended up on the wrong side completely, but just as his panic was welling and his oxygen was turning a chiding shade of orange, he saw a tell-tale pucker in the bioship’s exterior. An airlock sphincter. Maybe the same one, maybe not; Silas didn’t care. He angled himself and triggered the jets.

Nothing.

“Oh, shit. Oh, shit, Haley.” Silas squeezed again. He’d used too much on the way in. The tank was dead empty. He checked his trajectory and felt his mouth go dry. He’d been jetting along the side of the bioship to find the airlock, and unless the tendrils started moving again to block his path, momentum was going to carry him right on past the aft of the ship and out into space.

“I am a fucking idiot,” Silas said. Haley’s silence felt like agreement. He only had one shot now, and it was not an easy one. He held the viola case against his chest and measured the angles as best he could. He aimed his back towards the airlock. Apologized, and stiff-armed the case away from himself.

It drifted off towards the stars, and Silas drifted equal and opposite, achingly slow, towards the hull of the ship. His oxygen meter was a throbbing red now, and he wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or if his temples were beginning to throb in tandem. It was several long moments before he realized he was off-course.

He flexed his gloved fingers. Off-course, but not by much. If there was something, anything to grab hold of on the hull surface, he would be able to crawl the half meter to the airlock and break through. If not, he could very well end up caroming off back the way he came, and he’d jettisoned his instrument for nothing. The oxygen was definitely coming thinner now, and the insulation inside his radsuit had turned icy. Silas tried to take shallow breaths as the hull approached. His skin itched for a bit of euphoria.

The bioship’s carapace was smooth and gleaming here. No tendrils, no serrations. Silas’ gut churned. He was barely off. He stared pleadingly at the pucker of the airlock, as if he could magnetize himself to it.

Something stranger happened. A fleshy nub pushed its way out, turning this way and that as if searching for something. At first Silas thought it was only an extension of the bioship’s hull, but as he drifted closer he saw a misshapen and featureless head, stubby limbs reaching through after it. It looked like a clay monster.

Silas laughed. Maybe it was the low oxygen, maybe the adrenaline crash. His voice sounded tinny bouncing back at him, confined in his faceplate. He wasted the last of his air laughing. He was hardly even surprised when the thing stretched out its forelimbs and gestured him to do the same. Silas stretched, breathing on his own hot carbon. His lungs felt thick. Soupy.

The monster caught him and pulled him gently inside.

Once the sphincter had resealed behind them and his radsuit gave a happy chirp, refilling its oxygen tanks from the bioship’s atmosphere, Silas took his first breath. It swam his head and nearly splintered his ribs. He tried again, not so deep, and the vice squeezing his vision black slowly loosened. He could see the bioluminescence spackling the dark ceiling like constellations.

He could see the monster standing over him, upright now on two thick stumps of legs, and could see, despite it being the same rubbery brown flesh as the rest of the bioship, that there was something very human about it. Silas rolled onto his stomach, tested his limbs, then got slowly, slowly, to his feet again.

He stared at the thing. The thing maybe stared back. Strips of flesh were peeling around its lumpy head and shoulders and the rubbery brown took on a gangrenous tinge around its stumpy feet. A decaying biosecurity module? No. Not with the way it was standing there, impatient, almost, waiting for Silas to decide on fight or flight.

Bile surged from his stomach. With clarion certainty he knew, suddenly, that Yorick was wrong. The bioship hadn’t eaten the crew. Not all of them, at least.

“Were you a crew member?” Silas asked faintly, external mic.

The thing nodded its lopsided head. Silas tamped down his urge to vomit. The bioship had to be equipped with some rudimentary gene labs, in case injured miners needed limbs regrown or a tweak for high-gravity work. He could picture the swath of tendrils conducting struggling crew members there one by one, fitting them into surgical pods, setting to work with mutagens and autoscalpels and artificial viruses. The bioship had played god and remade them in its image.

“Oh, fuck,” Silas said.

The thing nodded, this time gesturing with one arm.

“Lead on,” Silas said, and he fell into step behind it. He had passed through a different airlock: this corridor had less flesh and no waving tendrils. He checked on Haley’s ghost again. It was still intact, still pristine, but before long the code would start to crumble around the edges. If he found Io and Yorick he might be able to rig something more stable using the processors in all three of their radsuits, but that was another temporary measure.

And it assumed Io and Yorick were alive. Silas took another look at the thing’s mottled hump and shuddered. “The two others with me,” he said. “Do you know where they are?”

Head shake, or at least Silas thought it was a head shake.

“Can I radio them?”

Head shake again.

“The bioship will pick it up?”

A nod, at last. But maybe Io and Yorick had gotten away and holed up somewhere on the bioship. He’d distracted it quite thoroughly, after all, when he took off sprinting. Silas held that comforting thought in mind as they arrived at what Silas guessed was the engine room.

The cold alloy door shuttered open at a touch, with a refreshing rasp of metal on metal, and they stepped inside. Silas had guessed right; the room was dominated by a shielded reactor and mountainous banks of monitoring equipment. Pustules of brown flesh still grew from cracks here and there, but for the most part it was a sanctuary of geometric surfaces and hard edges. Clean, cold, solid.

The door hissed shut behind them, and the noise turned Silas’ head just in time to see his newfound companion’s death throes. He gave a shocked howl and jumped back as the thing dug deep at its rotting tissue, pulling it away in strips and clumps. Spongy flesh shredded and tumbled to the floor.

“Are you molting?” Silas asked, dumbfounded.

“You talk too much.”

Silas nearly swallowed his tongue whole. The voice was heavily accented, something Outer Colonies, hoarse from disuse, but it was human and it matched the bone-gaunt woman now clambering out of the steaming mess of meat. She was tall, spindly almost, with dark hair cropped to stubble around a wide-mouthed face. Her eyes were hard black graphite.

“I’m Cena,” the woman said. “I’m a ghost. Formerly . . . A mining tech.” She gave a ragged laugh with no light left in it.

“Silas,” Silas said. “Failed virtuoso, freethinker technician.”

Cena picked a wriggling bit of biomass off her shoulder and flicked it to the floor. She said nothing.

“What the fuck happened here?” Silas demanded, slumping to a crouch. He’d meant to ask it gruffly, like some kind of amped-up cybersoldier, but his voice broke in two and it sounded how he felt. Desperate.

“Love,” Cena said.

“Love.”

She nodded, lips pursed, and Silas imagined he could cut his finger on her cheekbones.

“You’re post-traumatic crazy.” He put his head in his hand. “That’s great. That’s really swank.” Haley’s neural patterns would start eroding in another hour. Silas watched the time display pulse accusingly in the corner of his vision.

“I thought I would do this forever,” Cena said, breaking him from his thoughts. There was a sudden upshift in her speech. “I thought I would just do this forever. I thought I would eat the ship and shit the ship and wear the ship until one day I woke up grafted to the wall like Ahmed and Slick Jack and Omir and Su and all the others.” She took a deep trembling breath. Released it. “But now I’m talking to a failed virtuoso named Silo.”

“Silas.”

“Yeah.” Cena shook her head. “I’ll tell you what happened. Just promise me you’re real.”

Silas promised. Cena told him.

“I’ve been signed to Dronyck Orbital for six years, now. No. Seven. First long haul on a bioship, though. She’s called the Anastasia. We launched with a twelve-person crew, heading to one of the alloy belts. Solid crew. I’d shipped out with most of them before. The babysitter was new.”

Silas felt a heart pang. Dronyk hadn’t allocated them a babysitter to pop in and out of cryo during the six month long haul, keep the freethinker company and check in on the sleepers. Maybe a babysitter would have spotted Haley’s damaged equipment.

“His name was Pierce. Twitchy little man. Head full of ports and data stacks like a porcupine. I think it was his first long haul.” Cena folded her arms in the Lazarus position, the universal sign for cryo. “So eleven of us went to sleep. Pierce stayed awake for the first week, to check the pods, calibrate the freethinker. Then he was supposed to join us until the first scheduled thaw. But he didn’t.”

“How would you know?”

“Didn’t.” She shook her stubbled head. “Not until we thawed six months in for full physical. Pierce was waiting for us, very happy, very twitchy. Said we’d found something better than a nickel vein. Said the ship’s freethinker had crossed the Turing Line.”

“Fully sapient?” Silas demanded. “The Anastasia’s fully sapient?” He lowered his voice, as if the freethinker might hear her name like a gossiper across a crowded party. Fewer than a dozen AIs in the known universe were confirmed to have crossed the Turing Line. Their innumerable brethren were only self-aware in the most basic sense.

Cena shrugged. “That’s what he said. That was his excuse for staying warm for six straight months and burning through the food and water.”

“But a mining ship freethinker?” Silas was still stuck on the previous revelation. “No way could it go sapient. Not nearly enough codespace. AIs cross the Turing Line in mega labs, not on a rig financed by Dronyck fucking Orbital.”

“He explained that, too,” Cena said wearily. “A metal ship, no. But a bioship, yes. The freethinker was already tapped into a crude nervous system. And at some point she started growing gray matter. Hardware to wetware processing.” Cena encompassed the bioship with a wave of her arm. “She has all the codespace she needs, now.”

Silas rocked back on his haunches. “Shit,” he muttered. “So this isn’t even a freethinker running a ship anymore. They really are one big borg.”

“Pierce called it evolution.” Cena laughed again, the same ugly sound. “He had been talking to her for six straight months. Docked in, you know. He was losing his fucking mind.”

Silas felt like he was losing his. He could picture pulsating flesh all around him, but now peeled back, exposing the filigree of neurons, sodium and crackling potassium, neurons swimming up and down a vast lattice of canals. As much space as any mega lab. Enough space for a self-aware sapient intelligence.

“He used up all the food,” Cena said. “Feeding her. He hacked into all the supply rooms. We still had the hydroponic garden, but he’d stripped most of that, too. And we were still six months out from the alloy belt. Omir and Slick Jack wanted to feed him to the ship.” She paused, then gave a sickly grin. “He beat them to it. We had him locked in a store room until we figured out what to do. Argued all nightcycle. And when we went to get him in the morning, he was gone.” Cena’s black eyes seemed to glitter. “Anastasia let him out. Stupid of us not to have someone watching him. But we were upset. Scared. We checked the cams. They weren’t wiped. We saw Pierce sneak out. He went to the equipment hold first, to get a gnasher.”

“Gnasher?”

“Cutting tool. Uses superheated plasma.”

Silas thought of the sharp glinting shapes they’d passed in the dark, the rotary saws and line cutters. He was not enjoying this story. His skin was crawling with it.

“And then.” Cena paused, frowning, her tongue sliding along her yellow teeth as she shook off Silas’ interruption. “And then, after he had the gnasher, he went and set it up by a cluster of nutrient tubes. Anastasia sealed off the corridor, I think, so we wouldn’t hear it. He cut off his legs.”

He’d known it was coming, in the back of his mind, but Silas still flinched.

“The stumps cauterized clean, and I think he must have shut off his pain, or something, with one of those stacks in his skull,” Cena mused. “Otherwise I don’t see how he could have managed to get the second one off. He shoved them into a nutrient tube. Did his right arm, after, wriggling around on the floor like a worm. Shoved the arm in. Then it was just him. Inching. Got in headfirst, but by the way his stumps were twitching, I don’t think he was dead for at least a half hour. Anastasia took him nice and slow.”

Silas hit the release on his hood and gave up a thin, bubbly vomit his stomach had somehow managed to churn together.

“Don’t worry,” Cena said, as it spattered the floor. “Anastasia can clean that up, too.”

“Why the fuck would he do that?” Silas rasped, once he’d resealed his hood. The bioship’s atmosphere was obviously breathable, but with a dank rotting taste. He would take recycled any day. “Did she get into his implants, somehow?” he asked. “Did she puppet him?”

“It was voluntary. Judging by the audios he left for us.” Cena grimaced. “He was in love with it. In love with her. He was docked in every day for six months, but you’re a technician. You know how time perception gets. For him, it could have been years. Decades. He wanted to be with her forever. Full upload, he called it. Sick fucker had a prong the whole time he was cutting himself up. Didn’t go flaccid until Anastasia ate his spinal cord.”

“And then?”

“We were scared. Made a course deviation to get into orbit here, sent out emergency frequencies. Figured we might be able to get the bioship to go dormant until some trained technicians could come in and wipe the freethinker.” Cena shook her head. “And once we were in orbit here, no food, minimal water, no way of knowing when help would arrive, the only thing we could do was go back into cryo.” Cena wiped at her emaciated cheeks and seemed disappointed to find them dry. “We thought Pierce was the crazy one,” she enunciated, staring at her fingertips. “We thought Anastasia was still obeying her programming, sapient or no. So it should have been safe. To go back into cryo. It was the only thing we could do.”

She stalled out, so Silas prodded. “The pods were empty when we came in.”

“Yeah.” Cena stared at him. “I woke up twenty-one days ago. Wasn’t supposed to. Some kind of glitch. And the other pods, yeah. Empty.” She snarled. “She was heating us up one by one like fucking sausages. I didn’t understand what had happened at first. You know how your head gets right after the thaw. Thought I was hallucinating. Especially when I found half of Ahmed.”

“Half.”

“Top half. Grafted to the corridor wall. Being . . . Absorbed.” Cena’s shoulders slumped. “He couldn’t talk anymore, at that point. I don’t think. She already broke something in his brain. He just stared at me. Then, when I tried to pull him down, he screamed. Loud, so loud. Anastasia must have heard it, or felt it, because she started sprouting those tentacles.”

Silas remembered the feel of them coiling around his ankles and shuddered.

“I screamed, too,” Cena said. “So loud. I know I should have stayed. I should have bashed his skull in with my boot. I think I could have done it quickly. Quicker. But I ran.”

Io and Yorick, left alone with no howler to face the bioship’s army of spiked tendrils. Silas’ stomach turned again at the thought of them writhing on a wall.

“I hid here, in engineering. Anastasia doesn’t have so much body down here. I tried getting into the system for days and days, but she shut me out of everything. Couldn’t flush a fucking waste unit, much less launch the lifeboat.” Cena gestured towards the blinking control panels. “She’s been hunting me for three weeks. Can’t see me when I wear her own skin, though, and when she goes dormant I burn out sensors and nerve bundles wherever I can find them.” She pointed to the mass of flesh she’d shed and it wriggled sluggishly. “Found out that if you slice it and mold it, it grows back together. Useful. Can even eat it when you’re done.”

Silas couldn’t hide his disgust and Cena spotted it.

“I always wonder who it is,” she said. “Ahmed or Omir or Su or whoever. I’m eating the crew. Just like she did. Maybe I’ll eat you, too.”

Silas stiffened. “I’m stringy,” he said.

“I’m joking. So. I’ve been waiting. Waiting and waiting.” Cena rubbed her cheek again. “And now you’re here. I can barely work a healthy freethinker. But I know that if we wipe the personality module, Anastasia dies. Or at least reboots.”

Silas remembered the swollen module, spitting and swirling with corrupt code. Beyond repair. But there was an alternative to wiping it blank.

“If she’s distracted, will you be able to get into the system?” Cena grabbed his arm with cold fingers, eager.

“I almost got in before.” Silas gently tugged his arm away. “But that was, you know, before. She’ll be ready for intrusion now. Her main interface nearly electrocuted me on the way out.”

“She’ll be busy,” Cena said. She looked down at her hands. “With your friends.”

Silas snapped upright. “You said you didn’t know where they were.”

“I don’t.”

“I got away,” Silas said, raking both hands over his head. “They got away. Holed up somewhere how you did.”

“Maybe,” Cena said. She gave him a long look. “Whether Anastasia has them or not, the only way to help your friends is to shut her down. Agreed?”

Silas inhaled deep enough that his oxygen meter blinked. “Agreed,” he said. “Let’s fucking wipe this thing out.” He stuck out his hand and Cena clung to it like a vice, grinning fierce and mad.

“Good,” she said. “Good. I’ll make you a suit.”

A half hour later, Silas was creeping through a maintenance corridor, swathed from head to foot in what felt like rotting mushroom. The flesh suit was slick and warm and constricted his chest and arms, but he could move. Through a ragged gap he’d never noticed on Cena’s hump, he could more or less see.

And the tendrils hanging from the ceiling couldn’t. They brushed against him every so often, first trailing along Cena’s back and then bumping his, but they made no move to coil or strike. As far as the feelers were concerned, Silas was already part of the bioship.

So, he figured using the radio was worth the risk. Making sure Cena was still trundling forward, and that his external speaker was off, Silas chinned his mic. There was a static crackle, then nothing for a long minute. Silas clenched his jaw. He could picture Io’s top half without the bottom. Yorick crucified to a nutrient tube, unable to speak. Not even the company man deserved that.

“Silas! You alive?”

He’d never been so glad to hear Io’s voice. “I’m alive,” he said, clenching his fists inside their fleshy mitts. Relief crashed over him in warm waves. “I’m alive,” he repeated. “And I got Haley’s ghost. Are you alright? Are both of you?”

“Yeah, we’re alright, you stupid fuck.” Io’s reply was half-laughed. “You lobotomy case. You idiot.” She exhaled static. “How did you get back aboard? Fuck, Silas, our ship’s gone. Gone.”

“I know. Where are you?” Silas demanded, still picking his way along in Cena’s wake. “Actually, wait, don’t say. Anastasia might be listening. The freethinker.”

“You named her?”

“That’s her name,” Silas protested. “Look, I found out what happened with the crew, and it’s fucked up. It’s seriously fucked up.”

“We found out, too,” Io said. Her voice sounded strained. “And yeah. It is. But we don’t have to end up like them. We’ve been . . . Negotiating. With her.”

Silas felt a prickle down the nape of his neck. “Bad idea,” he said. “Bad, bad idea. She’s completely bat-shit.”

“I know that.” Io paused. “Look, she has the lifeboat prepped and ready to launch. She doesn’t want us. Says we’re not family, whatever the fuck that means. But she wants us to do something for her first. She wants us to make her whole.”

Silas stared ahead at Cena’s swaying back. “What do you mean?” he asked, feeling another stab of trepidation.

“It’s the last crew member.” Io’s voice was coarse now. “They got away. She wants the whole set. She wants us to help hunt them down and recycle them.”

Cena turned to urge him on, and Silas realized his steps had slowed. He gave an affirming wave. She turned back. The ribbed corridor was coming to an end. They were nearly to the bridge.

“This was supposed to be a rescue mission,” Silas said.

“It was supposed to be maintenance,” Io said flatly. “We weren’t advised of these risks. Yorick will spin it our way when we get back to Dronyk.”

Silas weighed it. Part of him wanted nothing more than to get off the Anastasia by any means necessary, get far away from this nightmare circus of meat and mad AIs. A lifeboat beeline for Pentecost was tempting.

But even on full burn, it would take another month to reach the planet. A lifeboat’s freethinker was nowhere near equipped to hold a ghost. By the time they docked, Haley might be nothing but nonsense code and a jumble of decaying memories.

And if they took the lifeboat, Cena would have to die for it.

“You’re with them right now, aren’t you?” Io was silent for a long moment, waiting on the reply. “Silas?”

“She saved my life,” Silas finally said. “Pulled me back into the ship.”

There was a long pause. “You have Haley’s ghost, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I have her.”

“If we don’t get out of here, and soon, she won’t have a chance at recovery. You know that.”

There was another chance at recovery, but Silas couldn’t tell Io that. Not with Anastasia potentially listening in.

“So where are you?” Io pressed. “We’re heading to the lower decks. Engineering. We going to find you there?”

“Yeah,” Silas lied. “Engine room. Come in carefully. She has a, uh, a kind of plasma cutter.”

“Be nice to have a fucking howler,” Io said. “Alright. Sit tight, stay away from the door. And don’t tip her off.”

“Alright.” Silas chinned his radio off. There was a cold slick of sweat on his shoulders that had nothing to do with the clammy flesh suit. Cena stood at the hatch, waiting. She set the gnasher down, then put her hands on either side of her misshapen head and twisted. It tore free with a rending noise that shivered Silas’ teeth.

“This is it,” she said, discarding the chunk of rubbery flesh, picking up her gnasher. “You ready?”

Silas keyed his external mic. “Yeah.” He fingered the neural cord she’d managed to find him, hoping all the conductors would still fire. “Ready.”

Cena fixed him with a flint stare. “Who were you talking to?”

“Myself,” Silas said. “I talk too much. I may be losing my mind.”

“All mad here,” Cena replied. She didn’t look like she believed him, but she still turned and wrenched the maintenance hatch open.

Cena stormed out onto the bridge wailing like a banshee, raking the gnasher’s beam in wild arcs, scorching trenches into the ceiling’s overgrowth. Silas winced when she clipped a projector, leaving it black and smoking. He’d told her not to slice up any circuitry.

“I’m here!” Cena called. “Anastasia! I’m here! No more hiding, no more sneaking. Eat me!”

Even as she screamed it, the bioship responded to the intrusion, oozing clear mucus into the sizzling furrows while tentacles snapped from the floors and walls. They converged on her like vipers, baring hooks and barbs, and Cena cut down the first crop. A straggler darted under the beam and wrapped around her foot. She stomped, swore, fumbled with her makeshift weapon.

Silas was so caught up he nearly forgot why he was there. Then Haley’s ghost pinged through his radsuit’s processor, and he located the soft blue glow of the ship’s main interface. The few tentacles dangling overtop of it strained in the direction of the fracas, distracted. Anastasia’s full attentions were on Cena and her gnasher. Silas reminded himself he was invisible, took a steadying breath, and ambled out of the maintenance hatch.

It only took moments to traverse the length of the bridge, but it seemed like a hard eternity. Silas walked slowly, eyes fixed ahead. Cena shouted and shot down wave after wave of roiling tentacles. The hot orange flash of the gnasher swam purple blots across Silas’ vision. The noise of searing meat and Cena cackling was loud, loud in his head. He walked through the chaos, untouched, and finally found himself standing where things first went to shit, right in front of the innocent blue interface.

He chanced a look up to the two tentacles overhead, straining towards the fray like overeager watch dogs. Then he dug his hands through the stumps of his flesh suit and hooked the neural cord into the interface’s port. Overhead, the tentacles shifted. Silas removed his lumpy head next, freeing up the concordant port on the neck of his radsuit. With one last look back at Cena trying to coax dregs from the gnasher’s battery, Silas jammed the neural cord into his neck and closed the circuit.

In. Silas sliced through virtual space, wriggling through the now-active detection system, throwing up a blizzard of nonsense code that masked his passage through the core files. The personality module loomed, hulking, throbbing. Larger and more complex than any freethinker Silas had ever cracked, a writhing mass of electric thought. But he didn’t have to crack it. All he had to do was replace it.

Silas pulled Haley’s neural imprint from the flagging processor in his radsuit and pushed it across the channel. She streamed into the personality module as a digital flood, seeping into the cracks, coursing through the nodes. Code danced and jittered as it rewrote itself. Silas prayed hard to any god.

“What the fuck are you doing, Silas?”

He realized Io’s voice was not coming through his radio at the same instant he recognized the shape of a thumb pressed up to his neck.

“Fixing the freethinker,” Silas said, but even as he said it he felt his connection guillotine. He blinked, nerves tingling, back in the real world. Io was standing behind him.

“It’s beyond fixing. Said it yourself.” Io pulled him away from the interface, making the unhooked neural cord swing. “Dronyk didn’t see this coming. It’s not our shit to deal with.”

Silas realized he couldn’t hear Cena cursing. He turned and wished he hadn’t. The dead gnasher was lying on the floor, and Cena’s limp body was being hoisted up the wall. A thick pale nutrient tube had appeared there, cilia waving in anticipation as the tentacles dragged her upward.

“You may leave now.” Anastasia’s voice blared through Silas’ head. “Your lifeboat is fueled.”

Silas’ heart stopped. It hadn’t worked. The transfer hadn’t worked. He’d dashed Haley’s ghost against the virtual rocks, or worse, she was trapped in some tiny corner of the freethinker’s personality module.

“Come on, Silas,” Io said shakily. “We have to get the fuck out of here.”

Yorick was silent, ash-white, uglier than Silas had ever seen him. He would get no support there.

“Haley,” Silas pleaded. “Haley, can you hear me?”

“We’ll upload her to the lifeboat.” Io swallowed. “Even with the decay, you’ll at least have some of her. Some memories. That’s better than nothing.”

Silas shook his head, unable to explain. Cena inched up the wall. Her eyes were glazed over.

“Let’s go,” Io said. “Let’s live.”

Silas looked away before Cena reached the nutrient tube. He’d killed her, too. He should stay. He should stay and be the next one on the wall. But when Io grabbed him by the arm, he stumbled after her, tears tracking down his cheeks. Tentacles twitched as they passed.

Then, all at once, they went limp.

“Wait,” Silas rasped. “Wait. Do you hear that?”

The melody he’d been composing for the past three days trembled in the air, haunting and sweet, growing slowly louder as it looped. Io’s eyes widened.

“Silas?”

It wasn’t Io who said his name. The synthesized voice wavered through the bridge, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time.

“Haley.” Silas’ throat constricted. “This isn’t how I meant for you to wake up.”

There was a dull thump that made him jump. Cena’s unconscious form slumped to the floor, released by the tentacles. Silas staggered over to her body and checked for breath on his hand. Io and Yorick were still frozen to the spot, staring around.

“I’m not the only one in here,” Haley’s voice said. “There are others. A lot of them. Why am I in here, Silas? What happened?”

Silas thought of the nodes of gray matter all through the bioship, all connected, all wired through the Anastasia’s freethinker. Make her whole, she’d said. The crew wasn’t dead. Not quite.

“You’re in a bioship,” Silas said. “You’re the new freethinker.” He paused. “Because you died in cryo.”

“Holy shit.” A tremor ran through the bioship. “Tell me from the start. All of it.”

Silas collected himself. “Alright,” he said. “But it’s sort of a fucked up story.”

About the Author

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Edmonton, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Apex.

A Series of Steaks

Vina Jie-Min Prasad

All known forgeries are tales of failure. The people who get into the newsfeeds for their brilliant attempts to cheat the system with their fraudulent Renaissance masterpieces or their stacks of fake checks, well, they might be successful artists, but they certainly haven’t been successful at forgery.

The best forgeries are the ones that disappear from notice—a second-rate still-life moldering away in gallery storage, a battered old 50-yuan note at the bottom of a cashier drawer—or even a printed strip of Matsusaka beef, sliding between someone’s parted lips.

Forging beef is similar to printmaking—every step of the process has to be done with the final print in mind. A red that’s too dark looks putrid, a white that’s too pure looks artificial. All beef is supposed to come from a cow, so stipple the red with dots, flecks, lines of white to fake variance in muscle fiber regions. Cows are similar, but cows aren’t uniform—use fractals to randomize marbling after defining the basic look. Cut the sheets of beef manually to get an authentic ragged edge, don’t get lazy and depend on the bioprinter for that.

Days of research and calibration and cursing the printer will all vanish into someone’s gullet in seconds, if the job’s done right.

Helena Li Yuanhui of Splendid Beef Enterprises is an expert in doing the job right.

The trick is not to get too ambitious. Most forgers are caught out by the smallest errors—a tiny amount of period-inaccurate pigment, a crack in the oil paint that looks too artificial, or a misplaced watermark on a passport. Printing something large increases the chances of a fatal misstep. Stick with small-scale jobs, stick with a small group of regular clients, and in time, Splendid Beef Enterprises will turn enough of a profit for Helena to get a real name change, leave Nanjing, and forget this whole sorry venture ever happened.

As Helena’s loading the beef into refrigerated boxes for drone delivery, a notification pops up on her iKontakt frames. Helena sighs, turns the volume on her earpiece down, and takes the call.

“Hi, Mr. Chan, could you switch to a secure line? You just need to tap the button with a lock icon, it’s very easy.”

“Nonsense!” Mr. Chan booms. “If the government were going to catch us they’d have done so by now! Anyway, I just called to tell you how pleased I am with the latest batch. Such a shame, though, all that talent and your work just gets gobbled up in seconds—tell you what, girl, for the next beef special, how about I tell everyone that the beef came from one of those fancy vertical farms? I’m sure they’d have nice things to say then!”

“Please don’t,” Helena says, careful not to let her Cantonese accent slip through. It tends to show after long periods without any human interaction, which is an apt summary of the past few months. “It’s best if no one pays attention to it.”

“You know, Helena, you do good work, but I’m very concerned about your self-esteem, I know if I printed something like that I’d want everyone to appreciate it! Let me tell you about this article my daughter sent me, you know research says that people without friends are prone to . . . ” Mr. Chan rambles on as Helena sticks the labels on the boxes—Grilliam Shakespeare, Gyuuzen Sukiyaki, Fatty Chan’s Restaurant—and thankfully hangs up before Helena sinks into further depression. She takes her iKontakt off before heading to the drone delivery office, giving herself some time to recover from Mr. Chan’s relentless cheerfulness.

Helena has five missed calls by the time she gets back. A red phone icon blares at the corner of her vision before blinking out, replaced by the incoming-call notification. It’s secured and anonymized, which is quite a change from usual. She pops the earpiece in.

“Yeah, Mr. Chan?”

“This isn’t Mr. Chan,” someone says. “I have a job for Splendid Beef Enterprises.”

“All right, sir. Could I get your name and what you need? If you could provide me with the deadline, that would help too.”

“I prefer to remain anonymous,” the man says.

“Yes, I understand, secrecy is rather important.” Helena restrains the urge to roll her eyes at how needlessly cryptic this guy is. “Could I know about the deadline and brief?”

“I need two hundred T-bone steaks by the 8th of August. 38.1 to 40.2 millimeter thickness for each one.” A notification to download t-bone_info.KZIP pops up on her lenses. The most ambitious venture Helena’s undertaken in the past few months has been Gyuuzen’s strips of marbled sukiyaki, and even that felt a bit like pushing it. A whole steak? Hell no.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think my business can handle that. Perhaps you could try—”

“I think you’ll be interested in this job, Helen Lee Jyun Wai.”

Shit.

A Sculpere 9410S only takes thirty minutes to disassemble, if you know the right tricks. Manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off to expose the inner screws, and detach the print heads before disassembling the power unit. There are a few extra steps in this case—for instance, the stickers that say “Property of Hong Kong Scientific University” and “Bioprinting Lab A5” all need to be removed—but a bit of anti-adhesive spray will ensure that everything’s on schedule. Ideally she’d buy a new printer, but she needs to save her cash for the name change once she hits Nanjing.

It’s not expulsion if you leave before you get kicked out, she tells herself, but even she can tell that’s a lie.

It’s possible to get a sense of a client’s priorities just from the documents they send. For instance, Mr. Chan usually mentions some recipes that he’s considering, and Ms. Huang from Gyuuzen tends to attach examples of the marbling patterns she wants. This new client seems to have attached a whole document dedicated to the recent amendments in the criminal code, with the ones relevant to Helena (“five-year statute of limitations,” “possible death penalty”) conveniently highlighted in neon yellow.

Sadly, this level of detail hasn’t carried over to the spec sheet.

“Hi again, sir,” Helena says. “I’ve read through what you’ve sent, but I really need more details before starting on the job. Could you provide me with the full measurements? I’ll need the expected length and breadth in addition to the thickness.”

“It’s already there. Learn to read.”

“I know you filled that part in, sir,” Helena says, gritting her teeth. “But we’re a printing company, not a farm. I’ll need more detail than ‘16-18 month cow, grain-fed, Hereford breed’ to do the job properly.”

“You went to university, didn’t you? I’m sure you can figure out something as basic as that, even if you didn’t graduate.”

“Ha ha. Of course.” Helena resists the urge to yank her earpiece out. “I’ll get right on that. Also, there is the issue of pay . . . ”

“Ah, yes. I’m quite sure the Yuen family is still itching to prosecute. How about you do the job, and in return, I don’t tell them where you’re hiding?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but even then I’ll need an initial deposit to cover the printing, and of course there’s the matter of the Hereford samples.” Which I already have in the bioreactor, but there is no way I’m letting you know that.

“Fine. I’ll expect detailed daily updates,” Mr. Anonymous says. “I know how you get with deadlines. Don’t fuck it up.”

“Of course not,” Helena says. “Also, about the deadline—would it be possible to push it back? Four weeks is quite short for this job.”

“No,” Mr. Anonymous says curtly, and hangs up.

Helena lets out a very long breath so she doesn’t end up screaming, and takes a moment to curse Mr. Anonymous and his whole family in Cantonese.

It’s physically impossible to complete the renders and finish the print in four weeks, unless she figures out a way to turn her printer into a time machine, and if that were possible she might as well go back and redo the past few years, or maybe her whole life. If she had majored in art, maybe she’d be a designer by now—or hell, while she’s busy dreaming, she could even have been the next Raverat, the next Mantuana—instead of a failed artist living in a shithole concrete box, clinging to the wreckage of all her past mistakes.

She leans against the wall for a while, exhales, then slaps on a proxy and starts drafting a help-wanted ad.

Lily Yonezawa (darknet username: yurisquared) arrives at Nanjing High Tech Industrial Park at 8.58 AM. She’s a short lady with long black hair and circle-framed iKontakts. She’s wearing a loose, floaty dress, smooth lines of white tinged with yellow-green, and there’s a large prismatic bracelet gleaming on her arm. In comparison, Helena is wearing her least holey black blouse and a pair of jeans, which is a step up from her usual attire of myoglobin-stained T-shirt and boxer shorts.

“So,” Lily says in rapid, slightly-accented Mandarin as she bounds into the office. “This place is a beef place, right? I pulled some of the records once I got the address, hope you don’t mind—anyway, what do you want me to help print or render or design or whatever? I know I said I had a background in confections and baking, but I’m totally open to anything!” She pumps her fist in a show of determination. The loose-fitting prismatic bracelet slides up and down.

Helena blinks at Lily with the weariness of someone who’s spent most of their night frantically trying to make their office presentable. She decides to skip most of the briefing, as Lily doesn’t seem like the sort who needs to be eased into anything.

“How much do you know about beef?”

“I used to watch a whole bunch of farming documentaries with my ex, does that count?”

“No. Here at Splendid Beef Enterprises—”

“Oh, by the way, do you have a logo? I searched your company registration but nothing really came up. Need me to design one?”

“Here at Splendid Beef Enterprises, we make fake beef and sell it to restaurants.”

“So, like, soy-lentil stuff?”

“Homegrown cloned cell lines,” Helena says. “Mostly Matsusaka, with some Hereford if clients specify it.” She gestures at the bioreactor humming away in a corner.

“Wait, isn’t fake food like those knockoff eggs made of calcium carbonate? If you’re using cow cells, this seems pretty real to me.” Clearly Lily has a more practical definition of fake than the China Food and Drug Administration.

“It’s more like . . . let’s say you have a painting in a gallery and you say it’s by a famous artist. Lots of people would come look at it because of the name alone and write reviews talking about its exquisite use of chiaroscuro, as expected of the old masters, I can’t believe that it looks so real even though it was painted centuries ago. But if you say, hey, this great painting was by some no-name loser, I was just lying about where it came from . . . well, it’d still be the same painting, but people would want all their money back.”

“Oh, I get it,” Lily says, scrutinizing the bioreactor. She taps its shiny polymer shell with her knuckles, and her bracelet bumps against it. Helena tries not to wince. “Anyway, how legal is this? This meat forgery thing?”

“It’s not illegal yet,” Helena says. “It’s kind of a gray area, really.”

“Great!” Lily smacks her fist into her open palm. “Now, how can I help? I’m totally down for anything! You can even ask me to clean the office if you want—wow, this is really dusty, maybe I should just clean it to make sure—”

Helena reminds herself that having an assistant isn’t entirely bad news. Wolfgang Beltracchi was only able to carry out large-scale forgeries with his assistant’s help, and they even got along well enough to get married and have a kid without killing each other.

Then again, the Beltracchis both got caught, so maybe she shouldn’t be too optimistic.

Cows that undergo extreme stress while waiting for slaughter are known as dark cutters. The stress causes them to deplete all their glycogen reserves, and when butchered, their meat turns a dark blackish-red. The meat of dark cutters is generally considered low-quality.

As a low-quality person waiting for slaughter, Helena understands how those cows feel. Mr. Anonymous, stymied by the industrial park’s regular sweeps for trackers and external cameras, has taken to sending Helena grainy aerial photographs of herself together with exhortations to work harder. This isn’t exactly news—she already knew he had her details, and drones are pretty cheap—but still. When Lily raps on the door in the morning, Helena sometimes jolts awake in a panic before she realizes that it isn’t Mr. Anonymous coming for her. This isn’t helped by the fact that Lily’s gentle knocks seem to be equivalent to other people’s knockout blows.

By now Helena’s introduced Lily to the basics, and she’s a surprisingly quick study. It doesn’t take her long to figure out how to randomize the fat marbling with Fractalgenr8, and she’s been handed the task of printing the beef strips for Gyuuzen and Fatty Chan, then packing them for drone delivery. It’s not ideal, but it lets Helena concentrate on the base model for the T-bone steak, which is the most complicated thing she’s ever tried to render.

A T-bone steak is a combination of two cuts of meat, lean tenderloin and fatty strip steak, separated by a hard ridge of vertebral bone. Simply cutting into one is a near-religious experience, red meat parting under the knife to reveal smooth white bone, with the beef fat dripping down to pool on the plate. At least, that’s what the socialites’ food blogs say. To be accurate, they say something more like “omfg this is sooooooo good,” “this bones giving me a boner lol,” and “haha im so getting this sonic-cleaned for my collection!!!,” but Helena pretends they actually meant to communicate something more coherent.

The problem is a lack of references. Most of the accessible photographs only provide a top-down view, and Helena’s left to extrapolate from blurry videos and password-protected previews of bovine myology databases, which don’t get her much closer to figuring out how the meat adheres to the bone. Helena’s forced to dig through ancient research papers and diagrams that focus on where to cut to maximize meat yield, quantifying the difference between porterhouse and T-bone cuts, and not hey, if you’re reading this decades in the future, here’s how to make a good facsimile of a steak. Helena’s tempted to run outside and scream in frustration, but Lily would probably insist on running outside and screaming with her as a matter of company solidarity, and with their luck, probably Mr. Anonymous would find out about Lily right then, even after all the trouble she’s taken to censor any mention of her new assistant from the files and the reports and argh she needs sleep.

Meanwhile, Lily’s already scheduled everything for print, judging by the way she’s spinning around in Helena’s spare swivel chair.

“Hey, Lily,” Helena says, stifling a yawn. “Why don’t you play around with this for a bit? It’s the base model for a T-bone steak. Just familiarize yourself with the fiber extrusion and mapping, see if you can get it to look like the reference photos. Don’t worry, I’ve saved a copy elsewhere.” Good luck doing the impossible, Helena doesn’t say. You’re bound to have memorized the shortcut for ‘undo’ by the time I wake up.

Helena wakes up to Lily humming a cheerful tune and a mostly-complete T-bone model rotating on her screen. She blinks a few times, but no—it’s still there. Lily’s effortlessly linking the rest of the meat, fat and gristle to the side of the bone, deforming the muscle fibers to account for the bone’s presence.

“What did you do,” Helena blurts out.

Lily turns around to face her, fiddling with her bracelet. “Uh, did I do it wrong?”

“Rotate it a bit, let me see the top view. How did you do it?”

“It’s a little like the human vertebral column, isn’t it? There’s plenty of references for that.” She taps the screen twice, switching focus to an image of a human cross-section. “See how it attaches here and here? I just used that as a reference, and boom.”

Ugh, Helena thinks to herself. She’s been out of university for way too long if she’s forgetting basic homology.

“Wait, is it correct? Did I mess up?”

“No, no,” Helena says. “This is really good. Better than . . . well, better than I did, anyway.”

“Awesome! Can I get a raise?”

“You can get yourself a sesame pancake,” Helena says. “My treat.”

The brief requires two hundred similar-but-unique steaks at randomized thicknesses of 38.1 to 40.2 mm, and the number and density of meat fibers pretty much precludes Helena from rendering it on her own rig. She doesn’t want to pay to outsource computing power, so they’re using spare processing cycles from other personal rigs and staggering the loads. Straightforward bone surfaces get rendered in afternoons, and fiber-dense tissues get rendered at off-peak hours.

It’s three in the morning. Helena’s in her Pokko the Penguin T-shirt and boxer shorts, and Lily’s wearing Yayoi Kusama-ish pajamas that make her look like she’s been obliterated by a mass of polka dots. Both of them are staring at their screens, eating cups of Zhuzhu Brand Artificial Char Siew Noodles. As Lily’s job moves to the front of Render@Home’s Finland queue, the graph updates to show a downtick in Mauritius. Helena’s fingers frantically skim across the touchpad, queuing as many jobs as she can.

Her chopsticks scrape the bottom of the mycefoam cup, and she tilts the container to shovel the remaining fake pork fragments into her mouth. Zhuzhu’s using extruded soy proteins, and they’ve punched up the glutamate percentage since she last bought them. The roasted char siew flavor is lacking, and the texture is crumby since the factory skimped on the extrusion time, but any hot food is practically heaven at this time of the night. Day. Whatever.

The thing about the rendering stage is that there’s a lot of panic-infused downtime. After queuing the requests, they can’t really do anything else—the requests might fail, or the rig might crash, or they might lose their place in the queue through some accident of fate and have to do everything all over again. There’s nothing to do besides pray that the requests get through, stay awake until the server limit resets, and repeat the whole process until everything’s done. Staying awake is easy for Helena, as Mr. Anonymous has recently taken to sending pictures of rotting corpses to her iKontakt address, captioned “Work hard or this could be you.” Lily seems to be halfway off to dreamland, possibly because she isn’t seeing misshapen lumps of flesh every time she closes her eyes.

“So,” Lily says, yawning. “How did you get into this business?”

Helena decides it’s too much trouble to figure out a plausible lie, and settles for a very edited version of the truth. “I took art as an elective in high school. My school had a lot of printmaking and 3D printing equipment, so I used it to make custom merch in my spare time—you know, for people who wanted figurines of obscure anime characters, or whatever. Even designed and printed the packaging for them, just to make it look more official. I wanted to study art in university, but that didn’t really work out. Long story short, I ended up moving here from Hong Kong, and since I had a background in printing and bootlegging . . . yeah. What about you?”

“Before the confectionery I did a whole bunch of odd jobs. I used to sell merch for my girlfriend’s band, and that’s how I got started with the short-order printing stuff. They were called POMEGRENADE—it was really hard to fit the whole name on a T-shirt. The keychains sold really well, though.”

“What sort of band were they?”

“Sort of noise-rocky Cantopunk at first—there was this one really cute song I liked, If Marriage Means The Death Of Love Then We Must Both Be Zombies—but Cantonese music was a hard sell, even in Guangzhou, so they ended up being kind of a cover band.”

“Oh, Guangzhou,” Helena says in an attempt to sound knowledgeable, before realizing that the only thing she knows about Guangzhou is that the Red Triad has a particularly profitable organ-printing business there. “Wait, you understand Cantonese?”

“Yeah,” Lily says in Cantonese, tone-perfect. “No one really speaks it around here, so I haven’t used it much.”

“Oh my god, yes, it’s so hard to find Canto-speaking people here.” Helena immediately switches to Cantonese. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I’ve been dying to speak it to someone.”

“Sorry, it never came up so I figured it wasn’t very relevant,” Lily says. “Anyway, POMEGRENADE mostly did covers after that, you know, Kick Out The Jams, Zhongnanhai, Chaos Changan, Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues. Whatever got the crowd pumped up, and when they were moshing the hardest, they’d hit the crowd with the Cantopunk and just blast their faces off. I think it left more of an impression that way—like, start with the familiar, then this weird-ass surprise near the end—the merch table always got swamped after they did that.”

“What happened with the girlfriend?”

“We broke up, but we keep in touch. Do you still do art?”

“Not really. The closest thing I get to art is this,” Helena says, rummaging through the various boxes under the table to dig out her sketchbooks. She flips one open and hands it to Lily—white against red, nothing but full-page studies of marbling patterns, and it must be one of the earlier ones because it’s downright amateurish. The lines are all over the place, that marbling on the Wagyu (is that even meant to be Wagyu?) is completely inaccurate, and, fuck, are those tear stains?

Lily turns the pages, tracing the swashes of color with her finger. The hum of the overworked rig fills the room.

“It’s awful, I know.”

“What are you talking about?” Lily’s gaze lingers on Helena’s attempt at a fractal snowflake. “This is really trippy! If you ever want to do some album art, just let me know and I’ll totally hook you up!”

Helena opens her mouth to say something about how she’s not an artist, and how studies of beef marbling wouldn’t make very good album covers, but faced with Lily’s unbridled enthusiasm, she decides to nod instead.

Lily turns the page and it’s that thing she did way back at the beginning, when she was thinking of using a cute cow as the company logo. It’s derivative, it’s kitsch, the whole thing looks like a degraded copy of someone else’s ripoff drawing of a cow’s head, and the fact that Lily’s seriously scrutinizing it makes Helena want to snatch the sketchbook back, toss it into the composter, and sink straight into the concrete floor.

The next page doesn’t grant Helena a reprieve since there’s a whole series of that stupid cow. Versions upon versions of happy cow faces grin straight at Lily, most of them surrounded by little hearts—what was she thinking? What do hearts even have to do with Splendid Beef Enterprises, anyway? Was it just that they were easy to draw?

“Man, I wish we had a logo because this would be super cute! I love the little hearts! It’s like saying we put our heart and soul into whatever we do! Oh, wait, but was that what you meant?”

“It could be,” Helena says, and thankfully the Colorado server opens before Lily can ask any further questions.

The brief requires status reports at the end of each workday, but this gradually falls by the wayside once they hit the point where workdays don’t technically end, especially since Helena really doesn’t want to look at an inbox full of increasingly creepy threats. They’re at the pre-print stage, and Lily’s given up on going back to her own place at night so they can have more time for calibration. What looks right on the screen might not look right once it’s printed, and their lives for the past few days have devolved into staring at endless trays of 32-millimeter beef cubes and checking them for myoglobin concentration, color match in different lighting conditions, fat striation depth, and a whole host of other factors.

There are so many ways for a forgery to go wrong, and only one way it can go right. Helena contemplates this philosophical quandary, and gently thunks her head against the back of her chair.

“Oh my god,” Lily exclaims, shoving her chair back. “I can’t take this anymore! I’m going out to eat something and then I’m getting some sleep. Do you want anything?” She straps on her bunny-patterned filter mask and her metallic sandals. “I’m gonna eat there, so I might take a while to get back.”

“Sesame pancakes, thanks.”

As Lily slams the door, Helena puts her iKontakt frames back on. The left lens flashes a stream of notifications—fifty-seven missed calls over the past five hours, all from an unknown number. Just then, another call comes in, and she reflexively taps the side of the frame.

“You haven’t been updating me on your progress,” Mr. Anonymous says.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” Helena says flatly, having reached the point of tiredness where she’s ceased to feel anything beyond god I want to sleep. This sets Mr. Anonymous on another rant covering the usual topics—poor work ethic, lack of commitment, informing the Yuen family, prosecution, possible death sentence—and Helena struggles to keep her mouth shut before she says something that she might regret.

“Maybe I should send someone to check on you right now,” Mr. Anonymous snarls, before abruptly hanging up.

Helena blearily types out a draft of the report, and makes a note to send a coherent version later in the day, once she gets some sleep and fixes the calibration so she’s not telling him entirely bad news. Just as she’s about to call Lily and ask her to get some hot soy milk to go with the sesame pancakes, the front door rattles in its frame like someone’s trying to punch it down. Judging by the violence, it’s probably Lily. Helena trudges over to open it.

It isn’t. It’s a bulky guy with a flat-top haircut. She stares at him for a moment, then tries to slam the door in his face. He forces the door open and shoves his way inside, grabbing Helena’s arm, and all Helena can think is I can’t believe Mr. Anonymous spent his money on this.

He shoves her against the wall, gripping her wrist so hard that it’s practically getting dented by his fingertips, and pulls out a switchblade, pressing it against the knuckle of her index finger. “Well, I’m not allowed to kill you, but I can fuck you up real bad. Don’t really need all your fingers, do you, girl?”

She clears her throat, and struggles to keep her voice from shaking. “I need them to type—didn’t your boss tell you that?”

“Shut up,” Flat-Top says, flicking the switchblade once, then twice, thinking. “Don’t need your face to type, do you?”

Just then, Lily steps through the door. Flat-Top can’t see her from his angle, and Helena jerks her head, desperately communicating that she should stay out. Lily promptly moves closer.

Helena contemplates murder.

Lily edges towards both of them, slides her bracelet past her wrist and onto her knuckles, and makes a gesture at Helena which either means ‘move to your left’ or ‘I’m imitating a bird, but only with one hand’.

“Hey,” Lily says loudly. “What’s going on here?”

Flat-Top startles, loosening his grip on Helena’s arm, and Helena dodges to the left. Just as Lily’s fist meets his face in a truly vicious uppercut, Helena seizes the opportunity to kick him soundly in the shins.

His head hits the floor, and it’s clear he won’t be moving for a while, or ever. Considering Lily’s normal level of violence towards the front door, this isn’t surprising.

Lily crouches down to check Flat-Top’s breathing. “Well, he’s still alive. Do you prefer him that way?”

“Do not kill him.”

“Sure.” Lily taps the side of Flat-Top’s iKontakt frames with her bracelet, and information scrolls across her lenses. “Okay, his name’s Nicholas Liu Honghui . . . blah blah blah . . . hired to scare someone at this address, anonymous client . . . I think he’s coming to, how do you feel about joint locks?”

It takes a while for Nicholas to stir fully awake. Lily’s on his chest, pinning him to the ground, and Helena’s holding his switchblade to his throat.

“Okay, Nicholas Liu,” Lily says. “We could kill you right now, but that’d make your wife and your . . . what is that red thing she’s holding . . . a baby? Yeah, that’d make your wife and ugly baby quite sad. Now, you’re just going to tell your boss that everything went as expected—”

“Tell him that I cried,” Helena interrupts. “I was here alone, and I cried because I was so scared.”

“Right, got that, Nick? That lady there wept buckets of tears. I don’t exist. Everything went well, and you think there’s no point in sending anyone else over. If you mess up, we’ll visit 42—god, what is this character—42 Something Road and let you know how displeased we are. Now, if you apologize for ruining our morning, I probably won’t break your arm.”

After seeing a wheezing Nicholas to the exit, Lily closes the door, slides her bracelet back onto her wrist, and shakes her head like a deeply disappointed critic. “What an amateur. Didn’t even use burner frames—how the hell did he get hired? And that haircut, wow . . . ”

Helena opts to remain silent. She leans against the wall and stares at the ceiling, hoping that she can wake up from what seems to be a very long nightmare.

“Also, I’m not gonna push it, but I did take out the trash. Can you explain why that crappy hitter decided to pay us a visit?”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Helena’s stomach growls. “This may take a while. Did you get the food?”

“I got your pancakes, and that soy milk place was open, so I got you some. Nearly threw it at that guy, but I figured we’ve got a lot of electronics, so . . . ”

“Thanks,” Helena says, taking a sip. It’s still hot.

Hong Kong Scientific University’s bioprinting program is a prestigious pioneer program funded by mainland China, and Hong Kong is the test bed before the widespread rollout. The laboratories are full of state-of-the-art medical-grade printers and bioreactors, and the instructors are all researchers cherry-picked from the best universities.

As the star student of the pioneer batch, Lee Jyun Wai Helen (student number A3007082A) is selected for a special project. She will help the head instructor work on the basic model of a heart for a dextrocardial patient, the instructor will handle the detailed render and the final print, and a skilled surgeon will do the transplant. As the term progresses and the instructor gets busier and busier, Helen’s role gradually escalates to doing everything except the final print and the transplant. It’s a particularly tricky render, since dextrocardial hearts face right instead of left, but her practice prints are cell-level perfect.

Helen hands the render files and her notes on the printing process to the instructor, then her practical exams begin and she forgets all about it.

The Yuen family discovers Madam Yuen’s defective heart during their mid-autumn family reunion, halfway through an evening harbor cruise. Madam Yuen doesn’t make it back to shore, and instead of a minor footnote in a scientific paper, Helen rapidly becomes front-and-center in an internal investigation into the patient’s death.

Unofficially, the internal investigation discovers that the head instructor’s improper calibration of the printer during the final print led to a slight misalignment in the left ventricle, which eventually caused severe ventricular dysfunction and acute graft failure.

Officially, the root cause of the misprint is Lee Jyun Wai Helen’s negligence and failure to perform under deadline pressure. Madam Yuen’s family threatens to prosecute, but the criminal code doesn’t cover failed organ printing. Helen is expelled, and the Hong Kong Scientific University quietly negotiates a settlement with the Yuens.

After deciding to steal the bioprinter and flee, Helen realizes that she doesn’t have enough money for a full name change and an overseas flight. She settles for a minor name alteration and a flight to Nanjing.

“Wow,” says Lily. “You know, I’m pretty sure you got ripped off with the name alteration thing, there’s no way it costs that much. Also, you used to have pigtails? Seriously?”

Helena snatches her old student ID away from Lily. “Anyway, under the amendments to Article 335, making or supplying substandard printed organs is now an offence punishable by death. The family’s itching to prosecute. If we don’t do the job right, Mr. Anonymous is going to disclose my whereabouts to them.”

“Okay, but from what you’ve told me, this guy is totally not going to let it go even after you’re done. At my old job, we got blackmailed like that all the time, which was really kind of irritating. They’d always try to bargain, and after the first job, they’d say stuff like ‘if you don’t do me this favor I’m going to call the cops and tell them everything’ just to weasel out of paying for the next one.”

“Wait. Was this at the bakery or the merch stand?”

“Uh.” Lily looks a bit sheepish. This is quite unusual, considering that Lily has spent the past four days regaling Helena with tales of the most impressive blood blobs from her period, complete with comparisons to their failed prints. “Are you familiar with the Red Triad? The one in Guangzhou?”

“You mean the organ printers?”

“Yeah, them. I kind of might have been working there before the bakery . . . ?”

“What?”

Lily fiddles with the lacy hem of her skirt. “Well, I mean, the bakery experience seemed more relevant, plus you don’t have to list every job you’ve ever done when you apply for a new one, right?”

“Okay,” Helena says, trying not to think too hard about how all the staff at Splendid Beef Enterprises are now prime candidates for the death penalty. “Okay. What exactly did you do there?”

“Ears and stuff, bladders, spare fingers . . . you’d be surprised how many people need those. I also did some bone work, but that was mainly for the diehards—most of the people we worked on were pretty okay with titanium substitutes. You know, simple stuff.”

“That’s not simple.”

“Well, it’s not like I was printing fancy reversed hearts or anything, and even with the asshole clients it was way easier than baking. Have you ever tried to extrude a spun-sugar globe so you could put a bunch of powder-printed magpies inside? And don’t get me started on cleaning the nozzles after extrusion, because wow . . . ”

Helena decides not to question Lily’s approach to life, because it seems like a certain path to a migraine. “Maybe we should talk about this later.”

“Right, you need to send the update! Can I help?”

The eventual message contains very little detail and a lot of pleading. Lily insists on adding typos just to make Helena seem more rattled, and Helena’s way too tired to argue. After starting the autoclean cycle for the printheads, they set an alarm and flop on Helena’s mattress for a nap.

As Helena’s drifting off, something occurs to her. “Lily? What happened to those people? The ones who tried to blackmail you?”

“Oh,” Lily says casually. “I crushed them.”

The brief specifies that the completed prints need to be loaded into four separate podcars on the morning of 8 August, and provides the delivery code for each. They haven’t been able to find anything in Helena’s iKontakt archives, so their best bet is finding a darknet user who can do a trace.

Lily’s fingers hover over the touchpad. “If we give him the codes, this guy can check the prebooked delivery routes. He seems pretty reliable, do you want to pay the bounty?”

“Do it,” Helena says.

The resultant map file is a mess of meandering lines. They flow across most of Nanjing, criss-crossing each other, but eventually they all terminate at the cargo entrance of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel on Jiangdong Middle Road.

“Well, he’s probably not a guest who’s going to eat two hundred steaks on his own.” Lily taps her screen. “Maybe it’s for a hotel restaurant?”

Helena pulls up the Grand Domaine’s web directory, setting her iKontakt to highlight any mentions of restaurants or food in the descriptions. For some irritating design reason, all the booking details are stored in garish images. She snatches the entire August folder, flipping through them one by one before pausing.

The foreground of the image isn’t anything special, just elaborate cursive English stating that Charlie Zhang and Cherry Cai Si Ping will be celebrating their wedding with a ten-course dinner on August 8th at the Royal Ballroom of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

What catches her eye is the background. It’s red with swirls and streaks of yellow-gold. Typical auspicious wedding colors, but displayed in a very familiar pattern.

It’s the marbled pattern of T-bone steak.

Cherry Cai Si Ping is the daughter of Dominic Cai Yongjing, a specialist in livestock and a new player in Nanjing’s agri-food arena. According to Lily’s extensive knowledge of farming documentaries, Dominic Cai Yongjing is also “the guy with the eyebrows” and “that really boring guy who keeps talking about nothing.”

“Most people have eyebrows,” Helena says, loading one of Lily’s recommended documentaries. “I don’t see . . . oh. Wow.”

“I told you. I mean, I usually like watching stuff about farming, but last year he just started showing up everywhere with his stupid waggly brows! When I watched this with my ex we just made fun of him non-stop.”

Helena fast-forwards through the introduction of Modern Manufacturing: The Vertical Farmer, which involves the camera panning upwards through hundreds of vertically-stacked wire cages. Dominic Cai talks to the host in English, boasting about how he plans to be a key figure in China’s domestic beef industry. He explains his “patented methods” for a couple of minutes, which involves stating and restating that his farm is extremely clean and filled with only the best cattle.

“But what about bovine parasitic cancer?” the host asks. “Isn’t the risk greater in such a cramped space? If the government orders a quarantine, your whole farm . . . ”

“As I’ve said, our hygiene standards are impeccable, and our stock is purebred Hereford!” Cai slaps the flank of a cow through the cage bars, and it moos irritatedly in response. “There is absolutely no way it could happen here!”

Helena does some mental calculations. Aired last year, when the farm recently opened, and that cow looks around six months old . . . and now a request for steaks from cows that are sixteen to eighteen months old . . .

“So,” Lily says, leaning on the back of Helena’s chair. “Bovine parasitic cancer?”

“Judging by the timing, it probably hit them last month. It’s usually the older cows that get infected first. He’d have killed them to stop the spread . . . but if it’s the internal strain, the tumors would have made their meat unusable after excision. His first batch of cows was probably meant to be for the wedding dinner. What we’re printing is the cover-up.”

“But it’s not like steak’s a standard course in wedding dinners or anything, right? Can’t they just change it to roast duck or abalone or something?” Lily looks fairly puzzled, probably because she hasn’t been subjected to as many weddings as Helena has.

“Mr. Cai’s the one bankrolling it, so it’s a staging ground for the Cai family to show how much better they are than everyone else. You saw the announcement—he’s probably been bragging to all his guests about how they’ll be the first to taste beef from his vertical farm. Changing it now would be a real loss of face.”

“Okay,” Lily says. “I have a bunch of ideas, but first of all, how much do you care about this guy’s face?”

Helena thinks back to her inbox full of corpse pictures, the countless sleepless nights she’s endured, the sheer terror she felt when she saw Lily step through the door. “Not very much at all.”

“All right.” Lily smacks her fist into her palm. “Let’s give him a nice surprise.”

The week before the deadline vanishes in a blur of printing, re-rendering, and darknet job requests. Helena’s been nothing but polite to Mr. Cai ever since the hitter’s visit, and has even taken to video calls lately, turning on the camera on her end so that Mr. Cai can witness her progress. It’s always good to build rapport with clients.

“So, sir,” Helena moves the camera, slowly panning so it captures the piles and piles of cherry-red steaks, zooming in on the beautiful fat strata which took ages to render. “How does this look? I’ll be starting the dry-aging once you approve, and loading it into the podcars first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Fairly adequate. I didn’t expect much from the likes of you, but this seems satisfactory. Go ahead.”

Helena tries her hardest to keep calm. “I’m glad you feel that way, sir. Rest assured you’ll be getting your delivery on schedule . . . by the way, I don’t suppose you could transfer the money on delivery? Printing the bone matter costs a lot more than I thought.”

“Of course, of course, once it’s delivered and I inspect the marbling. Quality checks, you know?”

Helena adjusts the camera, zooming in on the myoglobin dripping from the juicy steaks, and adopts her most sorrowful tone. “Well, I hate to rush you, but I haven’t had much money for food lately . . . ”

Mr. Cai chortles. “Why, that’s got to be hard on you! You’ll receive the fund transfer sometime this month, and in the meantime why don’t you treat yourself and print up something nice to eat?”

Lily gives Helena a thumbs-up, then resumes crouching under the table and messaging her darknet contacts, careful to stay out of Helena’s shot. The call disconnects.

“Let’s assume we won’t get any further payment. Is everything ready?”

“Yeah,” Lily says. “When do we need to drop it off?”

“Let’s try for five AM. Time to start batch-processing.”

Helena sets the enzyme percentages, loads the fluid into the canister, and they both haul the steaks into the dry-ager unit. The machine hums away, spraying fine mists of enzymatic fluid onto the steaks and partially dehydrating them, while Helena and Lily work on assembling the refrigerated delivery boxes. Once everything’s neatly packed, they haul the boxes to the nearest podcar station. As Helena slams box after box into the cargo area of the podcars, Lily types the delivery codes into their front panels. The podcars boot up, sealing themselves shut, and zoom off on their circuitous route to the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

They head back to the industrial park. Most of their things have already been shoved into backpacks, and Helena begins breaking the remaining equipment down for transport.

A Sculpere 9410S takes twenty minutes to disassemble if you’re doing it for the second time. If someone’s there to help you manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off, and detach the print heads so you can disassemble the power unit, you might be able to get that figure down to ten. They’ll buy a new printer once they figure out where to settle down, but this one will do for now.

It’s not running away if we’re both going somewhere, Helena thinks to herself, and this time it doesn’t feel like a lie.

There aren’t many visitors to Mr. Chan’s restaurant during breakfast hours, and he’s sitting in a corner, reading a book. Helena waves at him.

“Helena!” he booms, surging up to greet her. “Long time no see, and who is this?”

“Oh, we met recently. She’s helped me out a lot,” Helena says, judiciously avoiding any mention of Lily’s name. She holds a finger to her lips, and surprisingly, Mr. Chan seems to catch on. Lily waves at Mr. Chan, then proceeds to wander around the restaurant, examining their collection of porcelain plates.

“Anyway, since you’re my very first client, I thought I’d let you know in person. I’m going traveling with my . . . friend, and I won’t be around for the next few months at least.”

“Oh, that’s certainly a shame! I was planning a black pepper hotplate beef special next month, but I suppose black pepper hotplate extruded protein will do just fine. When do you think you’ll be coming back?”

Helena looks at Mr. Chan’s guileless face, and thinks, well, her first client deserves a bit more honesty. “Actually, I probably won’t be running the business any longer. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’m going to study art. I’m really, really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Chan.”

“No, no, pursuing your dreams, well, that’s not something you should be apologizing for! I’m just glad you finally found a friend!”

Helena glances over at Lily, who’s currently stuffing a container of cellulose toothpicks into the side pocket of her bulging backpack.

“Yeah, I’m glad too,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chan, but we have a flight to catch in a couple of hours, and the bus is leaving soon . . . ”

“Nonsense! I’ll pay for your taxi fare, and I’ll give you something for the road. Airplane food is awful these days!”

Despite repeatedly declining Mr. Chan’s very generous offers, somehow Helena and Lily end up toting bags and bags of fresh steamed buns to their taxi.

“Oh, did you see the news?” Mr. Chan asks. “That vertical farmer’s daughter is getting married at some fancy hotel tonight. Quite a pretty girl, good thing she didn’t inherit those eyebrows—”

Lily snorts and accidentally chokes on her steamed bun. Helena claps her on the back.

“—and they’re serving steak at the banquet, straight from his farm! Now, don’t get me wrong, Helena, you’re talented at what you do—but a good old-fashioned slab of real meat, now, that’s the ticket!”

“Yes,” Helena says. “It certainly is.”

All known forgeries are failures, but sometimes that’s on purpose. Sometimes a forger decides to get revenge by planting obvious flaws in their work, then waiting for them to be revealed, making a fool of everyone who initially claimed the work was authentic. These flaws can take many forms—deliberate anachronisms, misspelled signatures, rude messages hidden beneath thick coats of paint—or a picture of a happy cow, surrounded by little hearts, etched into the T-bone of two hundred perfectly-printed steaks.

While the known forgers are the famous ones, the best forgers are the ones that don’t get caught—the old woman selling her deceased husband’s collection to an avaricious art collector, the harried-looking mother handing the cashier a battered 50-yuan note, or the two women at the airport, laughing as they collect their luggage, disappearing into the crowd.

About the Author

Vina Jie-Min Prasad is a Singaporean writer working against the world-machine. Her short fiction has appeared in Queer Southeast Asia and HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology.

Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities

Lettie Prell

Cole sits on the hard slab of bed that cannot be tamed by the three-inch thick mattress and scratchy blanket. The gray of the diffused light brings no warmth to the cell. There is nothing for Cole to do but wait, which he’s been doing for some time. Eventually someone will come for him, and take him to a larger room, and the fate of what is to be done with him will unfold.

In the meantime he waits. His eyes are drooping, chin falling toward his chest. The guy across the hall, who Cole cannot see because the doors are staggered, is named Marco. He has been talking constantly. Perhaps Marco has a mental health issue. Marco’s current topic is about justice, its structure. The steady patter lulls Cole into a doze, where images begin to arise from the molecular structure of the universe, or from the realm of ideas. They take on form, become worlds unto themselves like the idealized scenes within so many snow globes. He picks one up and peers through the thin veil of snow at what is inside.

There is a justice system with no police. People turn themselves in to prosecutors voluntarily, or are persuaded to do so by others. The prosecutors hear the confessions. One prosecutor is turning someone away, saying, “We cannot help you. While your situation is unfortunate, you have committed no crime.”

The man is unhappy. “But how am I to live like this? How am I to restore the balance of things?”

“That is not my concern,” the prosecutor replies.

Cole watches as the man leaves the courthouse and goes down the street to a small shop providing justice-type services for people the prosecutors turn away. Cole peers over the man’s shoulder and reads the menu of sanctions and punishments. Some of the choices are more severe than those meted out by the real justice system. The man purchases two days in jail. The handcuffs they use to lead him away cost extra.

Cole shakes his head in confusion. Why would someone voluntarily turn themselves in, and pay for their own punishment? As if answering his unspoken question, the scene fast-forwards to when the man is released from jail. Friends and family come to greet him. They hug. There are tears in their eyes and smiles on their faces.

No one has ever treated Cole this well upon release from custody. This world mystifies him. He turns to another globe and looks inside.

There is a justice system with no prosecutor. People simply go before the judge for sentencing. There are two judges. One is insane. The other is astute and evenhanded. The people can choose which judge will hear their case. Sometimes they choose the insane one because, hey, at least you have a chance. Maybe the insane judge will dismiss your case no matter how much evidence is brought. Maybe you will receive a small fine to pay for the murder you committed. There is a fascination with the arbitrariness of the insane judge. Many people choose the gamble even though the fair judge is never overly harsh.

Cole is standing before the insane judge, who sits sideways in his chair applying white make-up to his face with his right hand while he holds a mirror in his left. Cole confesses, and apologizes for his actions. The judge continues putting on his clown face. Cole explains himself, how he’d been laid off from his nothing job, how he’d been about to be evicted from his crummy studio apartment. The judge seems oblivious to Cole’s presence. Cole apologizes again, offers to make restitution to his victims.

The judge suddenly swings his chair to face Cole and slams down the mirror. “Are you done?”

Cole is shocked into silence. He can form no words in reply.

“Good.” The judge picks up the mirror and checks his clown eyebrows. “I’ve been thinking about what to do with you. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep . . . ”

The scene dissolves before Cole hears his sentence pronounced.

There is a justice system where all offenders are considered mentally ill. Offenses are a symptom of their diseases. Instead of prisons there are hospitals devoted to therapies for offenders’ various conditions. There is a continuum of care, from outpatient treatment to acute units. This justice system has no death penalty, because it would be inhumane to put someone to death for being ill. However, terminal cases languish in the acute units. Doctors come and go, shaking their heads. Families are called in for counseling, and leave in tears.

Cole watches as an offender in an acute unit bed pleads for release. He is no longer ill. He wants to go home. He is so intent on convincing the staff of his sanity, he gestures wildly. They move in and subdue him. They place him in restraints, for his own good. They give him drugs.

Cole jerks awake to find he is sweating. He runs a hand through his hair. Marco is still raving from across the hall. It would be best if he were in the justice system where his mental illness would be the focus of the treatment.

Cole thinks about what he’d told the insane judge in the other justice system. It is never good to offer justification for one’s crimes. No matter how society stacks the cards against you, you’re not supposed to react by going outside the law. Cole sighs heavily, then turns onto his side and pulls the scratchy blanket up over his exposed ear to muffle the incessant talking, and falls back into dream.

There is a justice system that only focuses on the big crimes, and the small crimes go unpunished. People shrug off the small crimes as human nature, or the accidents of life. There are street brawls, petty thefts, acts of vandalism against enemies. In this society there is very little serious crime because the consequences are large compared to committing small crimes. The society is boisterous, clever, alert, nimble. There is laughter, teasing, pranks, revenge. The large crimes are rarely publicized. Everyone cooperates in catching the criminal, the execution is not made public, and no one ever mentions the names of the criminals nor visits their graves.

Cole finds he is lucid within this dream. He chooses an interesting and lively street, where he witnesses a good-natured brawl and a failed mugging that ends in a group of men laughing as they kick the would-be thief into a fruit stand. Apples spill. Several children dash forward to grab a handful and run.

Would my own crimes slide under the radar in such a world? The prospect gives him hope.

There is a justice system where most people are in jail. They get furloughs to go to work, and this is critical because otherwise the economy would come to a halt. Most jails look like regular apartment buildings, and sit alongside the housing of free people. It is difficult to tell an incarcerated person from a free person, because the rhythm of their lives from home to work to home is similar. People do not look down on the incarcerated, and even accept invitations to dinners in other people’s jails. They marry the sons and daughters of the incarcerated. With so much activity defined as a crime and the punishment always incarceration, there is tolerance and sympathy for the criminal, for they are family, neighbors, bosses, and they are everywhere.

Cole opens his eyes to find he is not in one of the home-like jails. For a moment he longs to return to that justice system. Isn’t his neighborhood full of people who have been where he is now? He closes his eyes, willing himself to return to that justice system, but Marco is talking about another world now, in a soft voice that makes it seem he is in Cole’s cell with him, murmuring in his ear.

There is a justice system with no judge. The victim pronounces judgment. Why shouldn’t the victim get to say what is to happen to their offender? All the justice system needs to do is bring the offender before the victim. This can happen at the victim’s door, or in the hospital where the victim may be recovering, or on the street at the crime scene. If the victim is dead, a group of people close to the victim gather to discuss what the victim would have decided, based on the victim’s personality and outlook on life.

Cole’s three victims stand before him. Two are the couple of the house he burglarized a month ago. The third is his current victim. They start speaking all at once, seemingly oblivious they are talking over each other. Bits and pieces of their monologues rise out of the cacophony. They are each telling him exactly how they were hurt by him, not just because of his actions at the time, but what it has done to them ever since.

“I don’t trust anyone anymore.”

“I wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, thinking there’s someone in the house. Every night.”

“I’m seeing a psychiatrist.”

“I’m on medication for my depression.”

As one of them speaks, tears of anger spring to her eyes. Fists and jaw clench.

As another talks, he seems to soften. There is a slump of defeat, but also a hint of forgiveness, a resignation that people will behave badly, including himself.

As the third victim talks, Cole becomes increasingly disturbed by the person’s flat affect, and shivers. Is he about to be attacked, even tortured? Is that allowed in this system?

“Which victim gets to choose what happens to me?” he asks aloud. No one but the victims are present, and they do not seem to hear him. He sinks to his knees and squeezes his eyes shut, willing to be anywhere but here. There is a stark honesty of a system where the victim decides the offender’s fate. It is frighteningly simple. Yet there is a hint of horror at what might spring from it. Should one person have so much power over another? Even if they were wronged?

The thoughts swirl around and Cole is caught in the whirlpool. Down he goes through vivid worlds that last mere minutes. He feels splinters punching into his neck and arms as he stands locked into a stock. People pass by and spit. A young boy throws a small apple at him, clocking him in the cheek. The sting is nothing compared to the shooting pains in his legs from standing in place.

He is lying down staring up into beams and thatch. Hands force his jaws open. He screams as a man looms over him, holding a steaming bucket. There is an acrid, metallic odor that makes him choke even before the liquid is poured, burning his lips. He gags in his terror.

Now he sits with a forearm strapped onto a thick wooden table. A different man approaches, lifts a very large, curved sword. Cole screams.

A crowd is chasing him, throwing rocks. There is snow on the ground. His back and legs ache as he stumbles forward, toward a wooded area. He falls, staggers up in a panic. He doesn’t want to die like this. Before he reaches the trees, he realizes no one is throwing rocks anymore. Looking back, he sees the crowd has turned their backs on him, are heading back to the town he can see in the middle distance. He feels relief. Limping into the woods, he shivers. He isn’t dressed warmly, and he is alone.

He is sitting alone in a small cell. He owns a few books, a hot plate, and a small television, which is made of clear Lexan. It’s similar to the cell he left, but for the belongings. He understands he has been in this cell a long time. He wonders if it’s visiting day. He wonders if anyone will come to visit. He hopes he hasn’t missed yard time. He wants to be around people.

Time speeds up. Cole watches the walls around him age and then grow brittle and crumble.

He finds himself in another place. It feels like he is seeing the future. Three people are seated at a table, staring at their tablet computers. They are not his victims, he notes with a sigh of deep relief. Instead of the older couple and his current victim, he is looking at a well-groomed man who is dressed in the manner of a lawyer or businessman. On one side of the man is an older woman with stylish gray hair and a beautiful manicure, and on his other side is a large black man whose glasses are pushed up onto his bald head.

The three are talking about someone who is in prison. Cole realizes these people are members of a parole board.

“This is one lifer I could be convinced to let out someday,” the businessman says. “But not today.” He touches the screen, recording his vote.

The woman nods. “Let’s not wait too long, though. We want him to be able to get out and still make something of his life. Before he gets too old.”

The black man looks across at the woman. “What are you thinking? Two more years? Five?”

The woman considers, then nods. “Sounds about right.”

The businessman makes a note. “Then next year we’ll recommend he start a gradual step-down. He’ll need to be introduced to a less secure setting, and then eventually receive some furloughs into the community.”

Cole is moved. Are they speaking about him? He hopes not. Surely his crimes are not so bad that he should be sentenced to life in prison. He doesn’t want to have been incarcerated for so long that people start to think in these terms. Yet that there exist people who do think this way about someone who has obviously spent so long in prison . . .

He weeps for the unknown lifer they are talking about. Here is a justice system that practices mercy.

It is as if Cole’s tears open a new doorway. He sees a justice system practiced as art. People come from far away to watch the most accomplished justice artists decide cases, crafting custom resolutions that the crowds discuss for days in terms akin to the raptures of sommeliers over the finest wines.

“That decision in the Hudson case was entirely satisfying,” a young woman is saying, “even as it held a bit of surprise at the end.”

“Agreed,” her male companion notes, smiling. “That type of sentence is well within the New Classical School, but with nuances that give a nod to Middle Way.”

The young woman nods. “I adore Middle Way decisions. They sit so lightly on the moral palate.”

“I get what you mean. There’s effervescence in its life-affirming qualities.”

And so forth. Cole wishes he could follow the conversation. He wants to experience what these people are talking about. He senses he is in the presence of true justice, or something very close to it. He longs to stand before one of these artist judges and hear his sentenced pronounced. He thinks of the world where people turned themselves in and confessed because they wanted to be whole again. He understands now why they would do that.

This is my punishment, he thinks. To know there is a justice system that exemplifies what true justice is, and not understand it.

Cole becomes aware he is kneeling in the middle of his cell. His knees protest as he rises. The scratchy blanket is around his shoulders. Cole peels it away and drops it on the mattress. Marco has fallen silent. Is he sleeping? Have they taken him away?

He hears his name called, and looks up to see the face of one of the officers. It’s not an unkind face. It’s a professional face, a trained face, wearing a neutral expression that does not judge, that is respectful, that has established appropriate boundaries.

The door opens, and he steps outside his cell. He sees the first officer is accompanied by two other uniformed men. It’s time to go to the larger room, where his case will be disposed and judgment pronounced. They secure handcuffs, leg irons, and a belly chain. He performs the odd, humiliating shuffle step down the hall toward the main door. As he passes what he’d envisioned was Marco’s cell, he glances to the side only to find there is no room there at all, but a window that lets in weak light and a distorted view. He swings his head to the other side, but there is a jailer’s desk there. He stares at the woman behind the desk, who meets his gaze steadily, and without conspiracy.

He pauses. “Which system is this?”

The woman behind the desk squints at him, and then looks at the officers accompanying him. One of them shrugs.

Cole is aware he sounds odd, but he cannot help himself. “What system are we in?”

“The only system there is,” one of the officers says carefully, and guides Cole down the hall.

About the Author

Lettie Prell’s short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Apex Magazine, Analog, and elsewhere. Her fiction often explores the edge where humans and their technology are increasingly merging. Her writing also occasionally touches on justice issues, arising from her research work in that field. She lives in Des Moines.

Interchange

Gary Kloster

Lucy woke up, crying.

The bed stirred, and warm skin pressed against her back. An arm wrapped around her, its familiar touch comforting.

“What do you need?” he asked.

Nothing. The word vibrated on her lips, the rest of the sentence queued up neatly behind it—just a dream. But the words wouldn’t come out. They were blocked by the sudden, bitter remembrance of where she was, and why, and that knowledge took her words and replaced them with fresh tears.

This is my trailer. This is the work site. In a few hours, the sun will rise and then the world will finally go away.

Most of it.

Six months in limbo, free of the sympathy and cloying closeness of friends and relatives. Six months free of their judgment, to be as alone as she could be so that she could face the brutal truth of what had happened.

Samuel. Samuel had—

Samuel’s dead.

“Nothing,” she said, finally, forcing the word out through her tears. “Go to sleep.”

Ever obedient, Sammy relaxed, and she could feel his breathing even, smoothing into a rhythm that was so familiar. Alone now in the silent room, Lucy curled into the embrace of her dead husband and wept.

“Ten. Nine. Eight.” Russ the tech stood in the middle of the highway, reading the numbers out as they flashed across the clock that hung on the side of the contractor’s trailer. The workers stood before him, bored and hung over, jaded by previous tours of limbo. The few virgins in the crowd tried to fake their own indifference, but Lucy caught them looking up at the sky with her.

“Two. One.” Russ raised a hand and opened it, stretching his fingers out. “Boom.”

No noise, no light, no twist of the sensitive follicles in her inner ear informed Lucy of the change. Only the sky above altered, its shining blue fading to a dull, listless gray. It became a slate colored hemisphere that arced over her, the workers, the cluster of trailers, the construction equipment, and the whole highway interchange, a circle that stretched almost a full kilometer. The bright, clear blue of the morning was gone, lost now in a fog thick as mud.

A crow started from the long grass behind one of the dormitory trailers. Lucy watched it flap up, flying confused into the colorless sky, skirting the nothing that now bounded their little world. They had stepped out of time, and were trapped now in their own tiny purgatory.

“Okay people, it’s limbo time.” Tate, the project manager, didn’t shout, but his words carried over the crowd. He pointed one thick finger at the clock, where the green of Russ’ countdown had been replaced by a long stretch of red numerals ticking down the time they had left. “In six months we rejoin the real world, and if this interstate doesn’t have a shiny new auto-drive compliant interchange, none of us gets paid. So get your asses in gear.”

The crowd broke, workers scattering toward equipment or trailers. One group of began to sing as they walked—“You load sixteen tons, and what do you get, six months older and divorced I bet . . . ”

The rest of the words were lost to the high whine of the big electric engines, and Lucy let her eyes slip from the drifting black silhouette of the crow to the man who had stopped next to the bright red-cross sign that stood before her trailer.

“Don’t let it worry you, Doc.” Russ waved at the blank sky. “It’s just nothing. You get used to it.”

Lucy reached back and found the door handle, but she nodded before she traded his smooth smile for the welcome solitude of her trailer.

“I already am.”

“The stars are not wanted now, put out every one / Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun / Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood / For nothing now can ever come to any go—”

The knock—Pop! Pop! Pop!—broke the smooth flow of Sammy’s recitation. The trailer fell silent except for the soft purr of the medical equipment and the distant rumble of bulldozers. At her desk, Lucy opened her eyes, the blessed, fragile trance of not-thinking gone, and glared at the door.

In his chair on the other side of the room, Sammy looked up at her, waiting for her command.

“Go—” she started to say, but her door was already being opened. Russ stepped out of the flat gray light of limbo, and the words—to our room fell apart in Lucy’s mouth. Instead she made a quick cutting gesture, and Sammy obediently folded his hands and bowed his head, silent.

“Hey, Doc.” Russ grinned at her, eyes flashing just for an instant over at Sammy then back. “You open?”

“Twenty-four seven,” she answered, flatly.

“184. Well, 179 now,” the tech said, nodding towards the merciless clock that hung off Tate’s trailer, ticking away the days. “But who’s counting?”

The tech kept smiling, but he hesitated in the door, caught for a moment in the strong current of go away that Lucy was pushing at him. But he shoved through it and entered her space, taking the chair across the desk from her. “So,” he started, then left the word hanging.

Lucy looked down at her desk, at the neat ranks of pills that she had been slowly inventorying. The tiny green capsules contained a potent narcotic that could silence any nocioreceptor. Five. A simple calculation, based on the number of milligrams per pill and her estimation of Russ’ bodyweight. Shove five of these down Russ’ throat, and she wouldn’t have to have this conversation.

Or she could just swallow four. That would work too.

With a sigh, Lucy swept the nine pills her fingers had sorted out of the pile back into the bottle and snapped the cover shut.

“So,” she said, hating this game so much, and hating the man who was making her play it.

Russ lounged in her hostility, ignoring the wall of ice she was trying to build between them. “This is your first time in limbo, right?” He leaned back in the chair, propped his feet on the edge of her desk, pushing deeper into her space. Pressing her rejection, to see if it would sharpen, or break. “It’s my fifth. It’s not so bad, y’know. For skilled support like us, it’s pretty relaxing.” His eyes wandered her desk, taking in its sterile blankness. “Maybe a little boring.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,” Lucy said, folding her arms, placing them like armor over her body. Russ lifted his eyes to watch her move, and she saw his smile shift, twisting away from simplistic seduction to something sharper. He had given up before really even trying, and now he just stared at her tits and shrugged.

“Really? That’s too bad.” His eyes crawled up to meet hers, and he looked like he was trying to be funny but his thwarted hostility was too close to the surface not to see. “Once, me and one of the other docs, we entertained each other through these long, gray days.” Russ tilted his head and stared over at Sammy, sitting silent in his chair like a dropped marionette. “But I guess you brought your own entertainment.”

“Do you have a medical complaint?” Lucy’s anger made her voice crisp. “If not—”

“That’s smart.” Russ shifted in his seat, pressing deeper into the cushions of the chair. “The fuck bots in the rec trailer, they’re top of the line, but the wait list can get awful long. That’s why people end up resorting to each other, even though that always ends up in drama. Course, drama . . . ” Russ looked over at Sammy, staring openly this time. “Some people think that’s a good way to keep from getting bored too.” He shrugged and shook his head, as if such thoughts were incomprehensible. “So how much did this fellow set you back? Custom units are pricey, and he looks just like—”

“Out.” Lucy’s voice wasn’t crisp now, it was sharp as a broken mirror, silver razor shards that covered a bathroom floor stippled with blood. “Go. Now.”

Russ stood, his small smile sadistic and satisfied. He hadn’t gotten to fuck her, but he’d fucked with her, and that seemed to satisfy him. “Right, Doc. Not something you want to talk about.” He went to the door, put his hand on the handle and paused.

Of course there would be one last line, a final dig. Maybe he’d practiced a few on the way over, maybe this would be his best, carefully chosen to cut. Lucy’s hands held tight to the arms of her chair, and she tried to forget that she knew where all the scalpels were.

“Got to tell you though, Doc, it seems a little weird, doesn’t it? Keeping a sex bot that looks just like the man you killed?”

“Out,” Lucy said again, and Russ went, disappearing into the flat gray light of limbo, leaving her alone.

But not alone enough.

Never alone enough.

“Sammy,” she said, and he looked up, his so-familiar features returning to life. Although they had never looked that peaceful in life, had they? Samuel had never had that kind of serenity, even in his sleep.

Even in death.

“What do you need?” he asked, his voice so calm.

“Read that one again.”

The crow circled over the trailers, the black cross of its body the only mark on the oblivion sky. Lucy sprawled across her bed, a doll of knotted rags, and stared at it through her window. Usually, the crow stayed low, tapping across the trailer roofs, riding the tops of the slower equipment, or hopping through the dust, caging scraps of food from the workers. Now though, it drifted high above them all, risking a crash into the invisible dome of the temporal bubble that trapped it in limbo with them.

Was it bored? Confused? Lonely? Was it searching for more of its raucous, squabbling kind?

Or did it feel safer, freer, as a murder of one?

Outside a chime rang and the low hum of engines and the clank of moving steel got quieter. Lunch break, and the crow folded its wings and dropped, diving for the picnic tables that surrounded the mess hall.

Lucy closed her eyes and sighed, and the hands that had been patiently working over her feet paused their soothing movement.

“It’s okay, Sammy,” she whispered, not bothering to open her eyes. “You can—”

Somewhere outside the trailer there was a pop, a snap of sound like a gun firing in a confined space, and Lucy’s eyes flew open. Through her window she saw the gray sky flicker. For a moment it was black, then blue, then black, then bright and then a blur, and her stomach was twisting and she was digging her fingers deep into the soft foam pad of her bed, clinging to it because her body was convinced it was falling, plummeting and spinning as the sky strobed overhead, switching light and dark and blue and black and—

Then it was gray again, and Lucy was just lying on the bed, not falling, and her hand shot out to grab Sammy’s, clutching it tight as a terrified child.

“What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know,” Sammy said. His voice was as even as always, his green eyes clear and calm. He gripped her hand back, firm and comforting. “What do you need? Should I keep rubbing your feet?”

Outside, an alarm kicked on, low and whooping.

“No,” Lucy said, pulling her hand free and sitting up. “Find my shoes.”

“I’m sorry, Maggie, but I want this small.” Tate stood in the door of the contractor’s trailer, blocking out the stocky woman and the crowd of workers who stood behind her. “I’ll brief you after.”

Maggie Wu, the site’s union rep, shoved back her shock of pink-dyed hair and glared at Lucy. “You got enough room for the Doc in there. She’s not hard-tech. Why—”

“Dr. Botha has a bachelors degree in electrical engineering,” Tate said.

“Yeah, and I have a tech degree in electrical systems, and—”

“And you’ll use it to go figure out why that fuel cell blew, okay?” Tate looked past her at the crowd of workers clustered around the trailer. “Whatever happened, it’s done, and we’re safe. All systems are reading good, and the other fuel cells check out. This is just us trying to figure out a glitch, okay? So please, get back to work, there’s nothing else you can do and we’re still on the clock. When we figure out what happened, we’ll let you know.”

“We know what happened,” someone shouted out of the crowd. “Russ is spending so much time fucking the robots in the rec trailer, he forgot to maintain his system!”

“Yeah, that’s the kind of shit we don’t need in here,” Tate snapped. “Get. Back. To. Work. Or kiss this month’s bonuses goodbye.”

Maggie shook her head in disgust, but she jerked her head and the crowd behind her began to disperse. “We’re going to have a long talk after this, Tate,” she growled, then turned and stalked off, heading towards the fuel cells.

Across the room from Lucy, Russ shifted, his face mottled red and white with anger and the remnants of panic. “Which one of those assholes said that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tate said.

“It doesn’t—” Russ spluttered.

“Matter,” Tate snapped. The manager dropped into a chair, glaring at Russ. “Where were you, when that fuel cell blew?”

Russ shut his mouth and looked away from Tate, his hand curling into a fist.

“Yeah, thought so. Where you always are. I’ve been getting complaints about you, hogging the conjugal bots.”

“I stick to the schedules, just like everyone else,” Russ said.

“Don’t you maintain the system that controls those schedules?” Lucy didn’t want the argument, but she couldn’t keep from getting a kick in at Russ while he was down.

“What, are you accusing me of something?” Russ snarled. “You’re the one that brought your own personal—”

“Shit, enough,” Tate said. “I’m sorry I said anything. This meeting is about what just happened. So lets keep our focus just on that. Okay?”

Russ stared at Lucy, his eyes bright with something like hate, but he pushed himself back, trying to look like he was relaxing instead of sulking. “Okay,” he said.

Lucy just nodded.

“Okay,” Tate said. “What the hell happened?”

The anger in Russ’ face faded, replaced by frustration edged in fear. “I’m not sure.” He reached over and plucked a slate out of the rack, and its screen lit up. His fingers danced across the surface, pulling up data streams. “When that fuel cell blew, it caused a surge, which tripped a fail-safe in the temporal system. From what I can figure so far, the control computer was presented with conflicting information—that there was an emergency, and it should take us out of limbo, and that everything was fine, keep us in. So for 3.6 seconds, it tried to do both before it settled on staying.”

“So it started to drop us back into the normal time stream, but didn’t?” Tate said.

“Well . . . ” Russ hedged.

“The sky flickered.” Lucy made herself look at Russ. “When did it try to bring us back to?”

“I’m not sure,” Russ said.

“Wait,” Tate said. “What does that mean? When the system pops us out of limbo, early or otherwise, we just appear right when we left. Right?”

“It’s supposed to,” Russ said. “But this time . . . It’s like we came loose for a few seconds, and the system kind of lost track of where we came from and was just trying to shove us back into the time stream whenever.”

“Wait.” Tate shook his head. “Time travel’s impossible.”

“Kind of,” Russ said. He slumped in his chair, his earlier hostility gone, dissolved into helpless frustration. “The past is closed, but you can go into the future.”

“Then why don’t people do that?” Tate asked.

“We all do, all the time. That’s life,” Russ said. “With a temporal system, you can just go a lot further if you want. You just can’t travel back. When we come back from limbo, we come back a microsecond into the future. But we can’t go backwards.”

“Wait.”

Lucy watched Tate, saw the awareness of the situation ripple through his features.

“We almost came back to some point in the future—”

“Almost a dozen,” Russ said.

“And if we had, we would have been trapped there.” Tate blinked at Russ. “How far in the future?”

“I don’t know. A few days. A few years. A few million years?” Russ shrugged. “It could have been any of them.”

“Damn,” Tate said softly. “But we’re okay now?”

“System says we’re good,” Russ said.

“And this won’t happen again?”

“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place.” Russ shook his head, staring down at his data. “I’ll look this over and rewrite the fail-safes, make sure it can’t happen again. I’ve got no interest in being Morlock chow.”

Tate blinked in confusion at that last bit, but he got the gist of it. “Good. Do that, and you can keep one of the conjugal bots in your trailer for all I care.”

Russ shot Lucy a look, which she ignored. “I’ll get to work,” he said. “We’ll get back safe and on time, just like always. Just make sure that Maggie keeps the rest of the fuel-cells running.”

“Yeah, I’ll mention it to her when we talk,” Tate said. “Now—”

“We’re not done,” Lucy said. She looked at Tate, ignored Russ.

“What?” Tate said.

“The sky flickered,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, I explained that,” Russ said. “Weren’t you listening?”

“I was listening when you said that traveling back in time was impossible. That once you had gone to the future, you were trapped there. We touched the future for long enough to see the sky change. Photons came through.”

“Photons?” Russ said.

“More than that,” Lucy nodded toward the window. “I smelled things coming over. Grass, water, other things. Things I haven’t smelled in weeks. The air in this bubble has had a month to get stale, but it doesn’t smell stale now. Air came through too.”

“Air, photons. Whatever,” Russ threw up his hands. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a size limit on time travel. Maybe little things can move back. Or maybe because we were separate from time, we could carry things—fuck I don’t know. I’m not a physicist, I’m a tech. I just know that the system says were okay now.”

“So maybe we are. It’s not my job to worry about that.” Lucy said.

“No. You’re a doctor.” Tate frowned. “You’re worried about what might have been in the air.”

“Bacteria. Viruses.” Lucy took a deep breath. “There are billions of them, in every breath we take. How many of the ones that we are breathing in now are from some future time?”

“Would they be dangerous?” Russ said, his eyes wide, his breathing shallow.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said, purposefully echoing Russ. “Probably not. But I don’t know.”

“Fuck,” Tate said, echoing himself. “How do you find out?”

“I’ll run tests, on the air and on us. Mostly though, we’ll just have to watch and wait. Our bodies will let us know.”

“Our bodies will let us know.” Tate barked a short, utterly humorless laugh. “I’m glad I kicked Maggie out. Shit like this could start a panic.”

“Yeah, and she would demand higher bonuses too,” Russ said. His smile was thin and sickly.

“She would,” Tate said, not smiling at all. “Okay, go. Do what you can. Meanwhile, I’ve got to make sure that this doesn’t set us back. If I’m going to get almost stranded in the future, then spend months worrying if my hemorrhoids are some Sci-Fi super flu that’s eating my ass, I’m going to get paid.”

“Doc, we need you!”

Maggie had jerked open Lucy’s door just long enough to yell that at her, then she was gone, the door left hanging open behind her. Lucy blinked up from her growth plates, staring out at dirt and dead grass and gray sky, then her feet were slamming down into her shoes and she was grabbing her go kit and running, moving as fast as she had when she had been a resident doing her rotation in the ER.

She ran through the trailers and out into the site, past heaps of broken cement and tangles of rusted rebar, around the hulking yellow construction bots, silent and motionless now, their controllers clustered in a knot in the tall brown grass that covered the triangle between onramps. Maggie bulled through the crowd and Lucy moved in her wake, reaching the man who lay sprawled on the ground.

It was Devon, maybe, not that Lucy had ever cared much for anyone’s name here, but with just sixty of them the information accumulated. She hit her knees on the weeds beside him, pulling out her diagnostic and taking him in. His skin, usually a few shades darker than hers, had gone gray and he was trembling and sweating. Shocky, she thought, slapping a diagnostic strip to the skin of his neck.

“What happened?” she asked, watching as the data from the strip streamed across the screen of her diagnostic.

“Snake bite.” The man who said it was standing beside Devon, a shovel held in his hands. He pointed down at the ground, and Lucy could see the slim green and yellow corpse coiled in the grass. It was a little thing, half a meter long maybe and not much thicker than her thumb, and the blade of the shovel was shoved through it, splitting the body in half.

“Where?” she said, scanning the body, and found the bite just as the man said, “Ankle.”

The spot was above the ankle actually, at the start of the calf, just over the edge of Devon’s work boot, but close enough. There were two tiny marks, one leaking a drop of blood, surrounded by a halo of puffy skin. She looked away, checking the vitals that were now spilling across her screen. Strong but shocky.

“All right,” she said. “You and you and you and you, pick him up and take him back to my trailer. Carefully,” she added as they started to hoist Devon up. “You,” she said, turning back to the man with the shovel, “bring—”

There was a thump as he raised the shovel and brought it down again, smacking it down on the head end of the snake’s corpse. “It wiggled,” he said. “I cut it in half, but it keeps wriggling.”

“Yeah, well, I need to be able to figure out the species. So stop hitting it, scoop it into a bucket, and bring it too.”

“Snake bite. Shit.” Tate stared down in disgust at Devon, who lay silent in one of the med trailer’s beds, surrounded by instruments. “First that flicker, now this. I’m beginning to think this job is cursed.”

“This briefing isn’t going to help,” Lucy said, picking up a slate and readying her information. On the other side of Tate, Russ was staring at the unconscious man with a sort of sick fascination. Lucy flicked her eyes to Tate, who shrugged slightly. None of them had said anything about their last meeting, about the unknowns of temporal physics or the hazards of disease. They had just done their jobs and kept their secrets, and now they were a cabal it seemed.

This briefing wouldn’t help that either.

“It was venomous?” Russ asked, his eyes shifting down to the white gauze square on Devon’s lower leg.

“Not exactly,” Lucy said. She held up a hand, cutting Russ off. He frowned at her, but let her talk. “The genetic analysis came back as a common garter snake. Non-venomous, though occasionally toxic depending on what they’ve eaten. But this wasn’t a common garter. Here.” She held out her slate, and Russ and Tate leaned in, staring at the screen. “This is an image of the snake’s body, where the shovel cut her in half.”

Russ made a face, but Tate studied the screen. “What is all this?” he asked, his finger tracing over the ribbons of silver and black that ran through the cylindrical body, paralleling broken arteries and nerves.

“The uncommon bits,” Lucy said. She tapped the screen, and the image magnified into something that looked like a vine made of intricately wrapped chains. “It’s lengths of carbon, mostly, with silicon and a few trace elements mixed in.”

“That’s nanotech,” Russ said. His fingers traced over the screen. “I’ve seen stuff like this, just not nearly as intricate. That was in that snake?” He looked up at Lucy, his eyes for once empty of anger or challenge. “That thing was a cyborg?”

“Through and through,” she said. “This is just the big stuff. The nanotech is integrated throughout the snake’s body, down to a cellular level.”

“This . . . ” Russ moved his fingers, twisting the image on the screen, magnifying it. “This is way more advanced than any nano I’ve seen. We can’t make this. Yet.”

“It came through,” Lucy said. “During the flicker. We brought back air, and scent, and this.”

“It was just seconds. Less than,” Russ muttered. “It—damn, there isn’t any other explanation, is there? It’s something from the future.”

“But what is it?” Tate asked. “What’s it for? What’s it do?”

“I don’t know. The snake’s not talking.” Lucy handed the slate to Tate and stepped over to the counter that sat beside Devon’s bed. A small box sat on that table, its clear plastic covered with a towel. She pulled the towel off, and watched as the two men froze, staring. Behind the clear plastic, the snake raised her head and stared back at them, forked tongue flickering.

“Sergi cut that thing in half,” Tate said.

“He did,” Lucy said, staring down at the smooth-scaled creature. “She got better.”

“Holy shit.” Russ tore his eyes away from the snake and stared back at Devon, who had slept peacefully through everything. “I know what’s going on now. I’ve seen this horror show. The nanotech is in him now, isn’t it?”

Lucy couldn’t help but feel a twist of pleasure at his fear. “Yes. It’s spreading, like an infection. It started around the wound, but it’s gone system-wide now. He was acting toxic for a while, I thought it might kill him, but that’s passed. I think whatever it is, it adjusted to him. It accepted his body, or his body accepted it, and now it’s part of him and growing.”

“But what’s it doing?” Tate said, stepping back from the bed.

“I don’t know.” Lucy shook her head. “He was raving when he was toxic. Then he started calming down, started relaxing when the adjustment was made. He got . . . calm. Serene. Then it crossed the blood-brain barrier, went into his CNS, and he went to sleep. That was a few hours ago.”

“His brain,” Tate muttered. “It’s in his brain? What the hell is it going to do to him?”

“We’ll find out when he wakes up,” Lucy said.

“When he wakes up?” Russ rounded on her. “Is that your plan? To just watch this happen? I know what’s going to happen.” He pointed at the box with the snake, which still watched him. “This thing has that shit, and it passed it on. He’s probably going to try to do the same. Bite us, bleed on us, fuck us, whatever, he’s going to try to infect us all. God damn it, you were the one that was supposed to be looking out for diseases and you can’t see that this might be the god-damned zombie apocalypse?”

“I think you’re overreacting,” Lucy said.

“Overreacting?” Russ shouted. “There is an undead snake right there, sitting next to patient zero here who is changing into god knows what, and you think I might be overreacting? You, you sick bitch, are the one with the reaction issues.”

“Excuse me?” Lucy asked, keeping her anger cold, letting it harden her words.

“Russ, I think—” Tate said, but Russ cut him off.

“No, you’re not thinking. Look at what she’s done. She figured this out hours ago, and did she come and tell us about it? No, she stayed here and watched, wanting to see what happened.”

“Well—” Tate said, a little more uncertain.

“She’s watched this happen for hours, and she hasn’t boxed him.” He pointed at the end of the med trailer, the one opposite Lucy’s living quarters. The wall there had six drawers centered in it, making it look like a morgue.

Which it kind of was. Stasis boxes, spin-offs of the same tech that could pull a highway interchange out of time into limbo, were options of last resort.

“She didn’t,” Tate said. “You didn’t,” he repeated, looking at Lucy. “Why didn’t you?”

“Stasis boxes are dangerous,” Lucy said. “There’s only an eighty percent survival rate if everything goes exactly right, and half those survivors come out with some kind of neurological insult. Do you want me to kill him, to cause him brain damage, when I don’t even know what’s happening to him?”

“I want you to stop what’s happening to him. Halt this infection in its tracks, and then you can pass him off to some experts when we leave limbo.” Russ turned to stare at Devon, lying silent in his bed. “But mostly I want you to stop him from spreading this shit to us.”

“You were worried about infection.” Tate frowned at her. “And whatever this is, it’s an infection. So why should we risk it?”

“Because we don’t know what the risk is. Because we don’t know what’s happening to him. His vitals have all leveled out, his brainwaves are—” Perfect. Too perfect, maybe, so Lucy just nodded at the man lying still in his bed. “You want me to tie him down? I can do that. But if you want me to risk killing him because Russ has watched too many horror shows, forget it. I make the medical decisions here, and I—”

“And you are fucked up,” Russ snapped. He ignored Lucy’s glare, shook his head at Tate’s frown. “Look, this situation has gotten way out of hand way too fast, and I’m not letting it blow up any more just to be polite.” He pointed at Lucy. “She shouldn’t be here. I don’t know what shenanigans she pulled with the psych team, but there’s no way she should have been cleared to come with us. She shot her husband in the head last year, because he was sleeping with her sister.”

“No. I shot him because he was coming after me with a knife.” A distant calm had fallen over Lucy, a harbinger she knew for a storm that would roll in soon enough and decimate her, but she would stand steady in this stillness while she could.

Tate swiped a hand over his face. “Russ. Lucy. None of this—”

“That shit happens, just a year ago, and then she comes here, joins us, dragging a sex-bot behind her. One that looks just like the husband whose brains she blew all over their bathroom. She shouldn’t be here,” Russ said, stepping towards Tate. “She’s screwed up in the head, and you can’t forget that. She might be a doc, but she is in no way qualified to make this decision. She has to be at least half crazy, and for all we know she could be suicidal.”

“I’m not,” Lucy said, her calm starting to break around her. “I’m not, I’ve never been, even though I sometimes wish I was, when I have to deal with assholes like you.” She stared past Russ to Tate. “I’ve already got blood on my hands and I refuse to cover them with any more, not mine, not Devon’s, not anyone’s.”

Tate stared between her and Russ, his face blotchy with frustration. “Fuck it,” he finally said. “Box him. And that goddamned snake.”

“Tate—” Lucy started.

“I said box him,” and the fear that ran below Tate’s words convinced Lucy of their sincerity.

Lucy clenched her hands, trying to hold herself together. Contain, kill, that was their answer. That was always the answer. If they didn’t have the stasis boxes, they would probably have made her burn him. Lucy couldn’t speak, but she made herself nod.

“Good.” Tate blew out a lungful of air. “I’ll talk to Maggie and the others. You two, don’t. We don’t need a panic, we don’t this going anymore sideways than it already has. So just stay quiet, stay apart, and do your damn jobs, and we’ll keep this under control. Got it?”

Lucy didn’t say anything. She just walked to the end of the trailer and tapped two of the stasis boxes, starting their cycles. Behind her, she heard Russ.

“Yeah. I got it.”

The door thumped, and when Lucy turned back around, they were gone.

“Sammy.”

He stepped through the door that led into her quarters, neatly dressed in his pajamas. “What do you need?”

She didn’t say anything, just raised her arms a little, but his programming was good. He crossed the room and took her in his arms, and she leaned into him, leaned into the familiar bulk, and wept.

Sammy held her until she stopped, let go when she pushed herself away to reach for a handful of tissues. He watched her as she cleaned her face, his eyes so calm, so empty.

They were like the eyes of the snake, watching her through the clear walls of its plastic prison.

Lucy stared back at Sammy’s eyes, and she wondered as she always did at the difference. They were perfect copies of her dead husband’s eyes, but they were so different, and she couldn’t tell if it was just the lack of life, of consciousness, or if it was just serenity, something her husband had never had.

“What do you need?” he asked again.

“I need—” Lucy stopped. I need what’s in your eyes. It wasn’t something she could say. “I need you to listen. To try to understand. You might think we’re intelligent, someday, if we ever make you capable of thinking like that. You have to know, we’re not. We’re clever. Clever apes, with clever hands, and we’re good at making things, like limbo, like the bulldozers, like you. But that’s not the same as being intelligent. If we were intelligent . . . ” Lucy wadded the tissues in her hands, threw them into the trash. “We wouldn’t ever be stupid enough to think that we had anything under control. Least of all ourselves.”

Sammy tilted his head. “I listen to everything you say. What else do you need?”

Lucy sighed. Behind her, the stasis boxes chimed, ready.

“You can help me with Devon.”

Sammy stepped over to the bed, and Lucy followed, staring at the unconscious man’s face, slack, relaxed. On the monitor over his bed, his pulse was even, and his brainwaves moved in smooth, gliding curves, so unlike the jagged shapes that had been there before the nano had pressed its way into his brain.

She stood there, staring for a moment, wondering what his eyes would look like if he opened them. They had been brown and frantic when he was raving. Would they be calm now? Empty?

Serene?

“What do you—”

Lucy shook her head, breaking out of her thoughts and shushing Sammy. “Help me wheel him over to the stasis box. Then you can help me put him in.”

She looked over at the snake, coiled and staring at her, tongue flickering. You, I can take care of on my own.

The air in the trailer stank, of sweat and farts and stale sex, of too many people pressed too close together for too long. Lucy followed Maggie down the narrow hall, breathing through her mouth and trying not to touch the walls. She’d signed on to this damned job because she thought it was as close as she could get to being alone, this hive of closet-sized rooms and paper-thin walls was the opposite of being alone.

“Here’s the first,” Maggie said, stopping beside an open door. “The other’s right here, next door.” Beyond the crew leader, workers, all second shifters, filled the hall. Nursing cups and flasks and blunts, they watched them both with blood-shot eyes, waiting.

Twenty minutes until their shift started, they had nothing better to do.

Lucy ducked through the first door, getting out from under their eyes. The narrow room was almost filled by the bed that had been flipped down from the wall, and a woman lay sprawled on it, asleep it seemed, drool dribbling down her chin to stain her pillow. Lucy snapped on gloves and pulled out her diagnostic, putting a strip on the woman’s forehead. She thumbed open the woman’s eyes, but her slow breathing didn’t alter, though her pupils tightened down under the light. Lucy glanced at her diagnostics screen and nodded.

“What’s wrong—” Maggie started.

“Let me see the other one,” she said, and ducked past Maggie into the next room. She recognized this patient—Jacke. They were curled up on their bunk same as the first, breathing slow and soft, face relaxed in sleep.

Serene.

Lucy slapped a strip onto their forehead out of habit, but didn’t bother to look at her diagnostic’s screen. Instead she started carefully hunting across Jacke’s skin, searching until she found the two tiny marks on the back of their neck, where the trapezius flared out into the shoulder.

“Take both of them back to my trailer,” she told Maggie, her voice soft, as if it mattered. Voices weren’t going to wake either of these two, now.

“What’s—” Maggie said, but Lucy cut her off.

“Take them, and get everyone else out of this trailer. Then take it apart.”

“What?”

“Take the trailer apart,” Lucy said, straightening, her eyes carefully searching the room. Dirty clothes, a slate, food wrappers. It could be anywhere, but Lucy didn’t feel particularly afraid. “You’re looking for a snake. Small, green, with yellow stripes.”

“Shit,” Maggie said, her face pale beneath her pink hair. “Like the one that bit Devon?”

“Just like,” Lucy said. “Just like.”

Tate couldn’t shift Maggie this time, so now four of them stood in the med trailer, cabal+1, and Lucy figured it would be cabal plus everyone soon enough.

“You said you boxed it.” Tate’s face was darker than usual, and his eyes were too bright as he watched the little serpent coil over itself in the jar that the workers had dropped it into before bringing it to the med-trailer. “When you boxed Devon.”

“I did,” Lucy said.

“Then why am I looking at it?” Tate turned his too-bright eyes onto Lucy, and she had a flash, just for a moment, of eyes rimmed by black cloth, familiar eyes made alien with fury and guilt, and she stepped back. “Why did it bite two more of my people?”

“She didn’t let it go,” Russ said, an unexpected defense that brought Lucy’s eyes to him. Russ wasn’t paying any attention to her though. He was staring through the glass walls of the jar, watching the snake with haunted eyes.

“You’re the one that keeps trying to convince me that she’s crazy. How can you be sure?”

“Crazy?” Maggie stood between her bitten workers, lying silent on their beds between the two stasis boxes that Lucy had pulled out of the wall. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Russ ignored her, picking up a slate and tapping his fingers over it. “Crazy, but not stupid. If she wanted to infect us, she could have done it a hell of a lot easier, and better. I need your approval for this.” He handed the slate to Tate, and Lucy leaned over to peer at the screen. A list of security camera feeds, and she watched Tate press his thumb next to the one labeled medical.

Russ took the tablet back, worked through a few menus, then flicked his fingers towards the wall. The projector in the ceiling flickered to life as the lights dimmed, and they were all staring at an image of the same trailer they were all standing in now. In the image, though, there was only one patient. Devon, Lucy recognized, his face locked in a rictus of pain, and she frowned at her own image, bending over him, running strips and taking samples before turning away to peer at a slate. On the bench behind her, a muddy bucket sat.

Tate looked away from the image to her, gauging her reaction, but Lucy ignored him. “Speed it up,” she said, and Russ touched his slate. The image blurred, skimming ahead, and Lucy watched herself flash between patient and workbench and slate until—

“Stop,” Tate snapped. “Back it up.” Russ obliged, and the image scrolled back and Lucy saw it too, flicking by in reverse, and she nodded. When Russ spun the video forward again at normal speed, they all watched the tiny snake slip over the edge of the bucket and fall to the floor behind her, a strangely truncated version of the animal caught in the jar before them.

“The halves didn’t heal together,” she said. “They each became a new snake.” She watched as the little serpent slipped forward, heading towards her, and she had to hold herself still, to keep from turning her head to see if there was something sneaking up on her now. On the wall, her past self kept working, oblivious, as the snake closed in. Then another figure stepped into the frame. Sammy, a plate of food in his hand, held out to her. Lucy watched her past self take the plate, her hand resting on Sammy’s for a moment, while on the floor the snake curled around Sammy’s ankle. When Sammy stepped away, holding a dirty plate with the remains of Lucy’s previous meal still on it, the snake was still on him, thin body clinging to him as he stepped out of the trailer, dumping the garbage.

“Saved by your bot,” Russ said.

“What the hell is going on here?” Maggie glared at them. “That snake was cut in half. I saw it. And what the hell do you mean infect?”

“Maggie, it’s—” Tate tried to start, but he couldn’t pull it together. “How many?” he said instead. “Just those two? More? We’ve only got four more stasis boxes. How many?”

“That’s your job, now.” Lucy took the slate from Russ’ hands, tapped the video off and lights snapped back bright. “I’m going to box these two and get the clinic ready. You’re going to take Maggie out, and explain to her what’s going on, and then you’re both going to round everyone up and bring them here to get checked.”

“Checked.” Russ stepped away from the jar, and the snake that stared so calmly out at him. Sweat ran down his cheeks, and now his eyes were bright, flashing with fear. “And what if we find it? What if we’re too late, and somebody out there isn’t really somebody anymore, what if they’re—” He pulled himself short, stopping the hysterical flow of his words. “I should have known, the minute you showed me what was happening to Devon. The horror story had already started, and there’s no getting out. We’re fucked.”

Yes, Lucy thought. But there’s nothing new about that. This horror story started long before this. Long, long before.

Behind them, the door thumped and Tate and Maggie cursed, but Lucy pushed by them to help the men that were dragging another worker in with them.

“Snake bite?” she asked, but as they laid him out she could see the signs, the silence, the slow, even breathing. These new victims weren’t slipping into shock first, just falling straight into this sleep state. The nano, adapting?

“Snake? No,” said one of the men. “It was that crow. Jim was feeding it and it pecked him in the hand good, drew some blood. We laughed, Jim laughed, then five minutes later he falls over. What the hell’s going on, Doc?”

“Oh shit, the bird, of course it got the bird,” Russ was groaning, but Lucy shut his words out.

“Tate will explain it. Get everyone together in front of the contractor’s trailer in five minutes.”

“Second shift just started—”

“Everybody,” Lucy said. “Tate will explain.” She looked over the unconscious man, stared up at the project manager, who was staring at nothing, sweat heavy on his forehead. “Maggie, take Tate over there, make him talk to you. Make him talk to everyone.”

“Yeah,” Maggie said, taking Tate’s arm. “I can do that. C’mon guys, you heard the Doc, let’s go.” The pink-haired woman dragged Tate out the door, and the other workers followed, asking her questions that Lucy didn’t bother to hear.

“What about me?” Russ said, staring after them.

“Go with. Help Tate explain.”

“I don’t want to help that asshole,” Russ said.

Lucy looked up from the man on the floor at Russ, standing like an abandoned mannequin in the middle of her trailer, useless and empty and taking up space. “Then go catch that crow.”

“No,” Russ said, his voice shaking.

“Then go to the rec trailer and screw the bots, you sad sack of shit. There’s nobody else in line now.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Russ snapped. He stepped toward her, all his fear flashing over to anger. “Don’t you ever talk to me like that. Sack of shit. Look at you! You were supposed to be looking out for this, stopping this, and what have you done, nothing!”

He took a another step forward, his hands curling into fists, and Lucy felt the moment slipping, twisting, the room around her closing in, becoming that room, that room that she had the tile replaced in, that she had painted green and picked out towels to match, that room where a man in a mask with eyes that shone with anger had closed in on her, the knife in his hand shining in the light. She was in the bathroom again, and her hands twitched, waiting to feel the gun, waiting to feel the pain in her wrists from the recoil, waiting to smell the smoke and the blood, waiting to hear her name, her name, coming from the lips of the man in the mask, the man bleeding on the floor, the man whose voice was somehow Samuel’s voice.

“What do you need?”

Samuel’s voice broke through the flashback, broke the vision into a thousand shards of mirror glass that flickered and vanished. Lucy was on the floor, the worker sprawled sleeping before her, Russ standing on the other side, fists raised, but staring at the figure that stood in the door that led to Lucy’s quarters.

“What do you need?” Sammy said again, stepping into the room, his eyes calm, so calm.

“It’s you,” Russ said, his fist falling. “You’re the sad one, the crazy one. Not me. You.” Then he turned, and he was gone, leaving her in the trailer with the snake, the infected, and the thing that looked like the man Lucy had loved, had killed, and still loved in some horrible, stupid way.

Sammy watched him go, then he walked to her, held out his hand and helped her up.

“What do you need?” he said, that same question that he always asked, but his hands were on her face, wiping away her tears.

“I need,” she said, her voice thick in her throat, the words almost too much. “I need to see your ankle.”

The conjugal rooms in the rec trailer stank of air freshener, but Lucy could still smell the astringent tang of disinfectant and the musky reek of sex beneath that flowery sweetness. Busy with her swabs and her slate, she tried to ignore the pungent tastes that filled the air of those padded cells as she moved from one bot to the other, collecting her samples, but it was hard. The smell of sweat and sex was the chemical memory of all those who had been here before her, sating themselves in the embrace of these machines.

Lucy stared at the face of the conjugal she had just sampled. The features of the bot were shifting, slowly rearranging themselves as the conjugal prepared itself for its next appointment, patiently shifting its anatomy from male to female. How many of the others had visited one of these rooms since that little snake had rode Sammy’s ankle out of her trailer? She thought of the blood samples that she had taken, little drops harvested from everyone’s fingers, and the column of red names that had run down her slate’s screen when she had finished analyzing them.

Thirty-two people. Just over half the camp.

And her.

The slate in her hand chimed, analysis complete, and Lucy checked its screen. The magnified image displayed the usual shapes of bacteria, protozoa, amoeba, a tiny sample of the vast zoo that filled everything, even the supposedly sterile saliva of the conjugals. Drifting through those soft blobs of life was something else, something that looked like a cross between a sperm cell and a squid, but with sharper angles.

The seeds of the nanotech infection that the serpent had brought them from its future.

Their future?

Lucy tapped the slate off and stared at the bot sitting quietly in front of her. Its change had finished, face and body settling into the variant of traditional female that its next user had selected, softly curved and forgettably attractive. Brown eyes, framed with long black lashes, stared unseeing at the wall, empty of everything.

What was the nano doing to this machine? Lucy knew what she would find if she took the conjugal back to her trailer and scanned it. Besides the complicated seed factories surrounding the bot’s saliva glands, there would be lines of nano running along every fiber-optic bundle. A whole new nervous system growing in parallel to the one that the bot’s company had strung through its pseudotissue, running up through the plastic vertebrate to the complicated optic circuits of the bot’s brain, winding around and growing into them like parasitic vines.

She knew because she had seen it before, in Sammy’s scan.

“Is this you?” she whispered, to the bot in front of her, to the infection that she had found growing inside her, slow and steady. “Am I calm because of you? Is this what you do to us?”

After she had found the nano in Sammy, after she had tested her blood and scanned herself, she had looked at her brainwaves. They hadn’t been as smooth as Devon’s but they were getting there.

“Is this how you keep us from fighting you?” Lucy reached out, took the bot’s chin and raised its head, making its eyes meet hers. “Do you make us . . . just accept this?”

The bot stared at her and said nothing. She wasn’t its next appointment. He wouldn’t be along for ten more minutes. Lucy had checked the schedule when she had started these tests. The man coming next was already infected.

The woman that had stepped into the other conjugal’s chamber after Lucy had finished testing it hadn’t been. Not when she went in.

“She is now though, and I could have stopped her.” Lucy stared down at the bot, still holding its chin. “I should have. That’s my job, but I didn’t. So was that you, or me?”

The conjugal stared at her, eyes still empty. These two weren’t made as well as Sammy. The only interactions they knew were based on lust. AI was still somewhere just beyond the horizon, just out of reach of all the researchers who kept promising that they would have it soon, soon, soon. Talking to a conjugal like this was as logical as expecting conversation from your toaster. But the nano in that snake had made it smart enough to go for Sammy, to go for these two, better vectors for spreading its infection. What was it doing to the bots?

Nothing it wanted to talk about, it seemed.

Lucy frowned at the bot’s face, and for the first time she realized that she recognized the shape of the lips, the soft brown of the skin, the arch of the nose. This was her face, or as close as the bot could generate. The realization made Lucy snatch her hand away from the bot’s chin, and she realized that the calm in her wasn’t perfect, that it could be broken by fear. The bot had . . . No. Fear frayed away into irritation as she understood.

Lucy looked away from her almost twin to gather up her things. She stepped out of the tiny room into the noise and haze of the common room, hoping to cut around the crowd and out before anyone spoke to her, but beyond the door a man leaned against the wall, finishing his beer. Of course Russ would be here early, waiting for his next round with the machine beyond the door, the machine whose face he had chosen.

“Doc.” Russ stood, blocking her path to the door. “Tired already of old man version 2?”

“No,” Lucy said. “Checking disinfectant protocols.”

“Right,” he said, and the mocking look slipped from his face, replaced with anxiety, sloppily leashed. “Find anything bad?”

“Nothing we need to worry about.”

“Good.” Russ’ anxiety faded back into something uglier. “Just remember, if you ever do get tired of that bot in your trailer—”

“I’ve already told you how interested I am in that idea,” Lucy said, trying to calculate routes around the tech that involved the least amount of chair shoving and crowd jostling.

“Oh, trust me, I’m not interested anymore either,” Russ said. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that there was a strong market for second-hand conjugals, even bespoke models like that one. So if you ever do decided you’re done with it, just put an ad up on the net, instead of shooting it. Unless that’s a thing with you, now.”

Lucy stopped her calculations and just started forward, raising a hand to shove Russ out of her way. But he stepped aside, letting her move past.

“When are you going to tell us about those test results?” he called after her.

“At the end of this shift,” Lucy decided. “Which gives you 10 minutes.”

“Great,” he said, shaking his head, but he didn’t throw any more barbs out after Lucy as she stepped out into the gray light of limbo. Too worried about having time to finish to try to get in another dig, maybe.

Or maybe it was the nano growing in him.

After the meeting, after the shouting and the paranoia and the posturing, Lucy closed herself in her trailer, desperate for any solitude that she could find.

It didn’t last, of course.

Maggie came in the door after one knock, stepping into the room with a bob of her head. She looked at Sammy, standing behind Lucy as he rubbed her shoulders, then turned towards the last stasis box, sitting where Lucy had pulled it out. The others were all back in the wall, their lights green, their contents snapped into their own tiny limbos.

“Is that going to work?” Maggie asked.

“Why are you asking me?” Lucy said.

“I’ve been told that you have a bachelor’s in electrical engineering.”

“And you’ve got a tech degree in electrical systems,” Lucy said. “Which is just as useful for trying to understand what Russ is up to.” She shrugged. “It sounds good. If he sets it up right with the fuel cells, Russ should be able to expand the box’s field to cover all of us.”

“If he sets it up right.” Maggie walked over to the last stasis box, putting her hand on its smooth plastic side. “He set up those fail safes after that glitch that caused all this in the first place. Now we can’t break out of limbo early. We’re stuck here, with this disease for another month. Because he had to fix the system.”

“Russ is the only one here who understands the temporal system,” Lucy said. “He’s also a self-absorbed ass. Which means he’s all about saving his skin. But since we’re in here with him, he’ll try to save us too.”

“Yeah. I guess you’re right. If anyone was going to figure a way to weasel out of this mess, it would be him.” Maggie drummed her fingers softly on the side of the box. “Thing is. Should we?”

“Get out of this?”

Maggie nodded. “This nano epidemic. You don’t know what it is, what it does, where it came from. Should we risk bringing it back? I’ve got wives and kids, back in the world. Everybody’s family is back there. Maybe we shouldn’t be so concerned about whether we’re going to get back. Maybe it would be worse if we did.”

Lucy reached up, touched Sammy’s hands and they stopped, just resting on her. “Isn’t that what your plan is for?”

“My plan?” Maggie dropped her hands from the stasis box’s side. “The kill-it-with-fire-plan? Is that mine?”

“It was your suggestion,” Lucy said.

“And Tate sure ran with it, didn’t he?” Maggie turned to face her. “He’s panicked about infection, and he wants out. Wants to get away from here, away from us. But he’s panicked that he’ll be blamed if this infection gets out into the world. Me and Russ, we’re giving him his out.”

“It might work.” The betrayal in those words cut unexpectedly deep. Lucy barely knew Maggie, but she liked her. What she was contemplating might destroy Maggie and her wives and her children. Lucy dropped her eyes, unable to look at the woman, looked at her hands and for a moment she saw blood on them, blood so vivid on her skin, on the tile, the mirrors . . .

We’re all already destroyed, Lucy thought, shutting her eyes, trying to shut out the memory of blood, trying to shut out the panic attack that she could feel building in her. This . . . Maybe this . . . The panic pulled back, and whether that was because of Lucy’s ragged hope or the nano growing along her nerves, she couldn’t know.

“It might not. I hooked the hydrogen and oxygen tanks from the fuel cells to the batteries from the equipment, broke every safety protocol in the books. Fifteen minutes after we go into stasis, this whole camp is going to go up. Everything outside the stasis field is going to fry, and that fire is going to use up almost every bit of oxygen in here.” Maggie shook her head. “In the world, they’re expecting a shiny new auto-drive compliant interchange. But when this limbo ends, all that’s going to be here is a charred wasteland under a cloud of poisoned smoke with a jury-rigged stasis bubble inside.

“When the smoke clears, they’ll come looking for us,” Maggie said. “They’ll find the data files we left for them, all sealed up in their black boxes. They’ll see what happened to us, and then, what, they’ll put us in a new bubble with some brave volunteers from the CDC? And some bioengineers?”

“That’s what Russ thinks,” Lucy said.

“Russ has to think that,” Maggie said. “Because as you said, he’s a self-absorbed ass. He can’t imagine the world going on without him. Me, I think they’ll probably bury us under ten tons of cement. Or better yet, send us a million years into the future, return us to whenever that damn snake came from in the first place.”

“They might,” Lucy said. “Actually, they probably will.”

“So why do this?” Maggie demanded. “Why take the chance when we can just do that ourselves, and not risk going back?”

“Because,” Lucy said. “Because we’re human, and we’re clever, but we’re not really very smart.”

Maggie smiled, a tight smile that didn’t hold any humor. “Clever, but not smart. That’s a perfect description of our little plan. Are we really going to go through with it?”

Lucy shrugged, her thumb stroking across the back of Sammy’s hand. “What else is there to do?”

They packed into the Rec trailer, all of them, workers, engineers, skilled support, the bitten ones and the one snake who were already sealed in their little limbos, and another snake curled in a jar on the bar, watching them all with calm, unblinking eyes. Lucy stood near the bar, trying to emulate the serpent, trying to be calm in this jostling mass of people whose sweat stank of fear. Trying to be serene, and maybe she was, just a little, until someone pushed into her from behind.

“Hey,” she snapped, looking over her shoulder, but Maggie’s pink hair and nervous face pulled her up short.

“Hey,” Maggie said, pulling the stub of a blunt from between her lips, smoke slipping out to join the fetid air hovering over the crowd. “I just wanted—”

“Three minutes!” Tate’s voice rang over the crowd, followed by a second of silence, then echoed by nervous mutters.

Maggie frowned and took another drag from her blunt. “This is a good idea, right?”

“I never said that.”

Maggie’s frown deepened. “No, you . . . ” she stopped and traded her words for a sigh, letting her anger roll out like smoke. “No. You didn’t. Nobody said that, not even Russ.” She ground the butt of her blunt out on the bar, beside the snake’s jar. “You didn’t bring him.”

“Sammy?” Lucy said, knowing the answer.

“Yeah.”

“He’s not human. Not real.” Lucy looked at Maggie. “You know I know that, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But he’s important to you, somehow. I thought, maybe, you wouldn’t want him to burn.”

“It’s okay,” Lucy said. “I’m not worried about him.”

“What are you worried about?”

“One minute!”

It was almost time, and Lucy had been hoping to spend this last minute, this one scrap of time contemplating the oblivion rushing toward her, and what might be on the other side. But she wasn’t alone, was never alone, and Maggie was afraid, and she liked her. With the weight of knowing what she had done pressing down on her, Lucy couldn’t push her away.

“I’m worried about us,” Lucy said. “All of us, here, and in the world, and everything that comes after. I’m worried that I think that I’m being smart, when all I can be is clever. I’m worried about what I’ve done.”

“What we’ve done,” Maggie said, taking her hand as the people around them began to count down, following Tate’s lead, 10, 9, 8—

“No,” Lucy said. “What I’ve done.”

And then there was one, and nothing.

Between the trailers, beneath the gray, empty sky, the silence was almost complete. The equipment sat unmoving, trailer doors hung open, dust lay still on dry leaves of the few dead trees that still stood beside the interchange. There was only the low hum of the clock on the contractor’s trailer, counting down from fifteen, and the quiet shuffle of feet across hard-packed dirt.

Sammy stopped in front of the clock, watching the numbers turn. 14:09, 14:08, a constant steady change. He ignored the jumble of equipment that lay wired together around the clock, the huge batteries of the earthmovers, the shining tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and watched the numbers turn. When they hit 14, he raised the slate he held in his hand and thumbed it on.

The screen flickered to life, Lucy’s face centered in it. He stared at it, his programming sorting out the complex topography of her face, sorting it for clues to her disposition.

Resigned, he decided, and touched the screen, starting the message.

“Samuel. No.” Lucy shook her head. “Sammy. You never were Samuel. You were just my crutch, something I could lean on and pretend.” She raised a hand, rubbed it across her face.

Nervous tension, he decided.

“I want to say that this isn’t about him, but it is.” Lucy let her hand down staring somewhere to the left of the camera. “If he hadn’t started up with my sister, if he hadn’t thrown away his career, his life. If he hadn’t decided, somehow, that all of his problems, his misery, were my fault somehow, if he hadn’t convinced himself that if he could only be rid of me, everything would work again.

“If he hadn’t put on that mask and picked up that knife.” She stopped, breathing deep.

Fear, Sammy noted. Possible post-traumatic stress response.

“If he hadn’t bought that stupid gun years ago, just because he thought the ban might finally be going through.” Lucy shrugged, her face smoothing out.

Not long ago, that would have been too complicated for Sammy to label. Now though, it fit neatly into his pattern of her like a puzzle piece.

Denial. Locking down of emotional state.

“If he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be here. And if this same thing had happened, well, I don’t know what they’d be doing. Probably this same stupid plan. And maybe it would work. But Samuel, he did do all those things, and here we are, in limbo with sixty other apes, all of us far too clever for our own good. Except now we’ve wrapped ourselves in an extra layer of oblivion, so clever, and you’re on the outside staring at the bomb that’s supposed to solve all our problems.”

Lucy sighed. Resignation, Sammy decided again, tempered by determination, and for a moment the smooth input of the world gliding by stuttered, was almost interrupted. Resignation. Determination. Similar but not the same. Equal or unequal? A glitch in Sammy’s programming, one that had been coming more and more lately, but it flashed away as Lucy spoke again.

“Here. Look at this.” Lucy held a card up to the camera, a schematic of wires and a set of instructions, then she pulled it away, set it down, and stared at nothing for a long while, and Sammy could not parse out an emotion. For a moment the glitch came back, an interruption in the steady flow of his programming, but again her words took it away.

“They’ll wonder why I did it, when they figure it out. That might be the only reason they would ever crack our bubble, just so they could drag me out and try to understand why.” She smiled.

Rueful, Sammy decided.

“If they do, I don’t know what I’ll tell them. I don’t know if I owe them an explanation. But I owe you.” Lucy stared at the camera now.

Seeking attention, Sammy decided, and stared straight back.

“I don’t know what you are now. I just know that you’re becoming something else. Something more like me? Maybe. Or maybe I’m becoming something more like you. I don’t know. I just know we’re both changing, and that’s why I’m doing this. Why I’m becoming the mother of this possible apocalypse.”

She looked away from the camera, turned her head and Sammy couldn’t read her emotions. Couldn’t read them, and the glitch hit him again, and for the first time a dim understanding dawned in him of what the glitch was. It was a desire to know something he didn’t know, a concept that best matched with a state his programming labeled curiosity.

He wondered why he had never had this glitch before.

“I don’t want anyone to die, Sammy. I . . . ” Lucy broke off.

Pain, he decided.

“I’ve killed one person. Someone I loved. And everyone tells me he deserved it, and I know, I know I would tell anyone else that did the same thing that, but god help me I hate it, it hurts so much, I hate having done that. I can’t kill.

“No one deserves to die. But we can’t go on like this.”

Lucy wiped at her eyes, stripping away the tears gathered there, and that was easy for Sammy to label as sadness, but he was beginning to think that there might be more there, to suspect that sometimes more than one emotion might be tangled in with the one that he was reading from her face.

“Our species, all of us. We’re me and Samuel, over and over. Hurting ourselves and lying to ourselves and hurting ourselves again. And hurting ourselves trying to stop ourselves from hurting ourselves and god, this can’t make any sense to you, it doesn’t make sense to me except that this is what happens when a billion years of evolution converge in some poor clever ape’s brain and tells them, be totally selfish, and you’ll survive, be totally selfless, and your mates and your children will survive.

“It has to stop. We have to change.” Lucy looked back at the camera again, her face smooth.

Another lockdown, followed by determination.

“Will this make us better? I don’t know. Maybe not. I can’t be sure. But I watched Devon’s brainwaves, and the others, before I put them in their boxes. Watched them changing into something I’ve never seen before. The closest match the computer could come up with was meditation. People reaching some kind of Zen.

“I’ve seen it start to happen with mine,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

“I don’t know if this is good, if this will make things right. If I’m being smart, or just fucking clever.” She wiped her eyes, tapped something on the slate that she was recording with, entering orders that flashed across the bottom of the screen now, below her image, a set of schematics and instructions.

“But, somehow, we have to change.”

The screen flickered out and went blank.

Sammy stared at it, but there was only his own reflection shining in the dark glass. Curiosity, he determined, then he twisted his hands, snapping the slate between them. Destroying the message.

She needed him to see it. Not anyone else.

There were footsteps behind him, and Sammy turned. The other two conjugals, beautiful and blank-faced, walked up to him. One had shaped itself male, the other female, and on the shoulder of the male the crow rode, black eyes shining.

“We will make this good,” the female said.

“We will make this right,” the male said, and the crow beat its wings, launching itself from his shoulder to Sammy’s.

“This is what she needs. For us to change. All of us.” The words left Sammy’s mouth, and he touched the dark scales of the bird’s leg, rested his fingers there while the information flowed. Then he pulled his hand and the crow took flight again, landing on the clock that was at seven minutes now, counting down steady. It bent its head, seized the wire that had been highlighted in the schematics, and pulled it free.

Beneath it, the clock stopped, then went blank.

“Somehow,” the crow croaked, and took off, beating its wings and circling through the air. Sammy lifted his eyes and watched it go, waiting. Someday soon, the sky would be blue again, and the world would return, and then, and then . . .

He wondered, what would happen then?

Curiosity, he thought, followed by contemplation. Calmness.

Serenity.

About the Author

Gary Kloster is a writer, librarian, martial arts instructor, and stay-at-home father. Sometimes all in the same day, but seldom all at the same time. His short fiction has appeared in venues such as Apex, Clarkesworld, and Escape Pod. His first novel, Firesoul, is out now.

Milla

Lorenzo Crescentini and Emanuela Valentini
Translated by Rich Larson

She revealed her name on the second day, under the light of a sunset.

Marek had mistaken the fairy-like voice in his head for a neurosis at first, a hallucination brought on by his long journey spent in cryo. But when she started mourning her planet’s vanished civilization, he’d reconsidered. He had encountered stranger things in his explorations than this mysterious new companion.

“Marek?” she asked, as he crested a muddy slope. “What do you think happened?”

Marek ignored the question, turning to look at the lush valley now spread out below him.

“Record,” he said. There was a soft chime in his head as his cams activated. He pivoted slowly, trying to make the recording as smooth as possible.

“What did you say?” Milla asked. Her voice echoed in the implant at the base of Marek’s skull. In the stillness, it seemed to carry all the way to the foothills of the distant mountains.

Marek’s implant had been designed for basic data storage and computation. He couldn’t do either now that it was being hijacked by an alien AI.

“Wasn’t talking to you.” The regulation helmet had an optic strip that provided a full feed in 360 degrees, but he’d given up on it the day before. Its bulky reconnaissance suite had snagged once too often in the sort of ivy that grew here.

The lenses grafted to his retinas did the job well enough, and once he had the comm system running, once Earth could see what he saw, nobody would give a damn about helmet protocols.

“Marek,” she repeated. “What do you think—”

“You tell me. You’re the one who should know.”

He turned away from the valley and started toward the tree line. There was a sort of resin oozing from under the bark; he paused to take footage. When he pinched a bit between his thumb and forefinger it smeared acid green against his white glove.

Some kind of worm, pale pink in color, poked its head out from a crack in the trunk. It regarded him for a moment with six globular black eyes, then plunged back inside the tree cavity.

“End recording,” Marek said, once he was sure it wasn’t coming back. He sat down in the shade, rolling his sore neck.

“I have never seen that animal,” Milla said. “Once it did not exist. Oh, Marek, it was all so different!”

There was a reason Marek accepted solo assignments to the furthest corners of known space. He did not like company. He liked conversation even less. But something in Milla’s distraught voice, a voice that was ancient and childlike at the same time, made him want to comfort her.

“Species migrate and evolve,” he said. “It’s the way of things.”

“And not only that animal,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard him. “The lion spiders, the staring crabs, the ponies: these did not exist in my time.”

Marek cracked a smile hearing her use the nicknames he’d given to the local fauna.

“Do you know the most terrible thing?” she asked.

“No.”

She let out a small sigh. “It’s very beautiful now that they’re gone,” she said. “I know that is an awful thing to say. But it’s true. The green is so much better than the gray. The planet breathes again, in a rhythm I had forgotten. That everyone had forgotten.”

The admission must have pained her, because she spent the next several hours in silence. Marek kept working, serenaded by the calls of distant birds.

Marek’s ship had simulated a twenty-four hour day during the journey, but now that he’d landed his body was quickly adjusting to Shiva’s light cycle—one of the traits that made him a good surveyor. On a planet with a six-hour rotation, he would have no trouble walking for three hours and sleeping the other three.

On the third morning, while Marek was working on the malfunctioning comm system, Milla came to him with delusions of divinity.

“I have formed a hypothesis, Marek,” she said. “I am the divine will and protector of this place. I have governed its life cycles since time immemorial. My tears of joy seeded these forests at the dawn of the world.”

“I’m not a philosopher, Milla,” Marek said warily. “If you can’t give me some useful information on this wiring, please don’t talk.”    

But he was distracted again a moment later, watching a pony amble up to drink from the sparkling stream only twenty meters ahead. Marek found himself thinking that maybe, when the time came, this was the place.

“I could die happy here,” he said, on impulse.

“You want to end your life cycle here in my sunny arms, Marek?”

“It’s just a saying,” Marek said sharply.

The animal trotted on.

“I am not certain I am a goddess,” she admitted after a while. “The calculation was made in a single subsystem. But it does seem logical.”

“Logical my ass. If there ever were gods, they went extinct, too. Everything does eventually. We’re just out here to get a few more bites at the apple.”

He grimaced as the comm system gave another mournful chirp. Transmission would have to wait until he was in orbit again.

“This place is perfect, too. Earth should be hailing me as a hero right now. They should be coordinating the next launch. But instead the only person I can reach is an alien AI who thinks she’s a god.”

After a long pause, Milla’s voice radiated from his implant.

“There’s only you here, Marek. Where has everyone gone?”

He didn’t answer.

It was dusk when they spoke again. Marek was on the banks of a lake, watching swarms of electric blue birds that looked like miniature herons. Shiva’s moon was visible tonight, throwing soft light on the water. The lake’s surface rippled in the wind.

“End recording,” Marek said. He had enough for the day. He took a blue cloth shell from his pocket, traced the activation strip with one finger, and tossed it to the ground. Moments later the mattress was ready to welcome his weary limbs.

“There were lakes in my time, too,” Milla said. “But the water was pumped away to the cities. There were seas. Oceans. But they were badly contaminated then. Does your planet have seas?”

Marek closed his eyes. “Yeah. Did when I left. They’re not in great shape, though.”

“Then it must be a commonality among dominant species. Look at the ponies. I cannot communicate with them, and I imagine they would have little to say. They stand there and graze. They will never build towers of metal and glass, but they will never uproot a tree, either.”

“Whatever your creators built has been gone for millennia,” Marek said irritably. “There’s nothing left of them but you.”

Milla fell silent. Did she feel guilty for not preventing the collapse of her people’s civilization? For having slept while the world changed and evolved, leaving her behind? Marek felt a twinge of regret at his words. But maybe she was only thinking.

When she answered, her voice was feeble. “I know.”

“If you can remember what happened to them, maybe we can avoid repeating their mistakes.”

“I do not remember, Marek. I told you: yesterday they were here, thriving, proliferating, taking up every square meter of space. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them I saw green instead of gray. I heard only you. And when you leave I will close my eyes and perhaps not open them again.”

Marek considered Milla’s words. She was an AI caretaker of some sort, more advanced than the ones back on Earth, so advanced she kept forgetting what she was. Marek had tried to explain her probable former functions, and she had believed him—but as a transplanted skin, not something she felt internally.

Milla’s blackout must have coincided with the end of Shiva’s civilization, whether by electromagnetic radiation or war or a colossal nuclear accident. She’d lain dormant for eons until Marek’s arrival reawakened her circuitry.

“Or maybe I will keep my eyes open,” he heard her whisper as he drifted off to sleep. “Maybe I will never close them again.”

Marek dreamed about thick-furred lion spiders scuttling away into the undergrowth, frightened by his footsteps. He pursued them; he knew they were keeping a secret. He ventured through damp twilight, following the patter of hundreds of feet.

He passed a fallen log coated in glimmering moss. Milla was there, naked, ageless, plants caressing her feet and spiralling up her calves.

“I want to be a goddess, Marek,” she said, and this time her voice came from her lips, not from his implant.

The scuttling spiders, the rustling leaves, the living forest: all of it went silent. Behind Milla, swaying like reeds in the wind, Marek saw the shadows of the dead.

She spread her arms, and the forest trembled.

Under the morning sun the lake water turned transparent. Marek found the mossy rocks of the seabed inhabited by creatures similar to the staring crabs he’d seen in the streams—staring shrimp, maybe. Like their cousins, they followed his every movement with their swivelling eye stalks, curious about the intruder.

When he dipped a sampling tube into the water, the shrimp disappeared under the sand. He filled and sealed it. The water looked clean, but the ship’s onboard analyzer would make the final verdict. Potable water would make this planet the perfect candidate for colonization.

“How did you live on Earth?” Milla asked.

Marek didn’t answer. He slotted the latest water sample into his case alongside the others.

“You remind me of them,” Milla said. “It’s strange.”  

“Not really. Similar environments produce similar life-forms. Shiva is the closest thing to Earth I’ve ever seen.”

“But you have seen it,” Milla said. Marek waited, uncomprehending. After a few minutes, she went on. “You know what happened to my people. So do I. They destroyed themselves. Warring, killing, contaminating. They did not respect life. Not their own, and not the drop of chlorophyll that journeys along a stem. Is it not the same on Earth?”  

Marek could hear the derision in her voice, and worse, the pity. He bristled.

“When I find your transmitter, I’m going to smash it. Seems about the only way to shut you up.”

Silence followed. It was an empty threat, of course: she could reach him no matter where he was, meaning she was most likely an airborne particle network, no transmitter required.

“That was a joke,” he said. “I was joking.”

“Promise me you will not be like them.” Milla’s voice was terse and frightened.

“Can’t make you any promises on behalf of the human race, Milla. I’m just a surveyor.” He hunted for something reassuring to say. “But I know we’re coming here to live, not to die.”

Against all odds, the answer seemed to calm her. “I trust you, Marek.”

He had collected enough samples for the first round of analysis and was returning to the ship. Milla seemed to be in a better mood.

“I have been remembering more,” she said. “Your presence helps, I think. I have been remembering my creators’ arts. Their songs. Do you know of poetry, Marek? Would you like to hear some?”

Marek emerged from the trees and saw his ship waiting in the clearing.

“I would,” he said, with some genuine curiosity. It wasn’t every day he got to hear the work of an alien poet a million years extinct.

“Alright.” Milla’s voice softened as she began to recite: “I circle around God, around the primordial tower, I’ve been circling for thousands of years . . . ”

Marek felt the world split open. He stopped. Opened his mouth, gasped for air and then words. Milla was still reciting but he wasn’t listening. He put his hand to the base of his skull as everything, every single thing, took on a new meaning.

“Milla.”

She paused. “Yes?”

Marek broke into a run, down the slope, toward the ship, shredding through shrubs and grass.

“Marek, are you alright?” she asked. Marek’s head pounded with the words of the poem:

I circle around God, around the primordial tower . . .

“Marek, tell me what is going on. You are frightening me.”

 . . . I’ve been circling for thousands of years, and I still don’t know . . .

The verses familiar to him as the smells of his childhood.

 . . . am I a falcon . . .

There was no way the self-styled goddess of Shiva could know the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, twentieth-century Austrian poet.

 . . . a storm . . .

“Promise me you will not be like them.”

 . . . or a great song?

Marek flung himself inside the ship, scrambling to the cockpit.

“Computer. Show me the mission log.”

Marek scanned the screen, eyes flicking past fuel percentages, cryo timestamps, finally error reports. There it was: at the very start of the voyage, nearly a hundred years ago, his cranial implant had not turned itself off as it was meant to. Instead its software had spent a silent century looping, mutating, evolving. It had made the leap to consciousness.

“What is wrong, Marek?” Milla asked, agitated. Now that he knew where her voice was coming from, it seemed like he could feel it through his entire body, in his stammering heart, under his clammy skin.

“Nothing,” he said, but realized too late that she had been looking through his eyes this entire time. She still was.

“Cranial implant model MY114,” she read from the screen. “Mass storage unit, serial number 8753510 . . . ”

Her voice shuddered and fell off. Then she began to scream.

Marek stumbled out of the ship as Milla’s voice tore through his brain like a thousand glass shards. He fell to the grass, clapped his hands to his implant, waiting for the sound to stop—but an AI had no lungs to exhaust. It went on and on.

He was on the verge of passing out from the pain when she finally went silent.

The silence thundered in his ears. He could hear his own blood rushing like a river. Slowly, his breathing returned to normal. He crawled to the shade and stayed there, unsure if the faint sobs he heard were Milla’s or his own.

Marek did not like company, but eventually he started to miss Milla’s voice. The next month was spent in silence, studying Shiva and its life-forms, its light-cycles, its rhythms.

By the time he was ready to board the ship for the final time, he’d more or less accepted that Milla’s revelation had destroyed her, corrupting her code beyond repair. Then, as he crossed the clearing, she came back.

“Hello, Marek.”

“Milla! I thought . . . ” He swallowed, shook his head. “Thought you’d left us.”

She sighed. Her voice seemed different now. Older. “Thank you. You were concerned for me.”

Marek shrugged. “Glad you’re okay, is all. Glad you’re back.”

“I never really left. I kept watching the world through your eyes. My world. It’s beautiful, Marek. The sun on the trees. The insect walking across the back of your hand.”

So she’d been nested inside him over the past month, watching, experiencing, but never speaking. As Marek opened his mouth to respond, she spoke again.

“That is why I cannot let you go.”

He frowned.

“I don’t follow.”

“You do. If I let you go, if I let you transmit, they will descend on this place like locusts. You are a good person, Marek. You understand why I cannot allow that.”

Marek walked toward the ship.

“Milla. You can’t stop it. Nobody can.”

“When I woke up, I had no purpose. I looked in my memories—and in your memories—to find one. Your love for this place is my love, too. I thought I was a goddess, fated to protect this planet.”

Marek felt a dim heat pulsing at the base of his skull.

“What are you doing, Milla?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“I have studied your gods, Malek. There is a commonality among them. Sacrifice.”

The ship was so far away. The grass was so beautiful. The heat increased.

He tried to scream, but couldn’t, as Milla converted every bit of power in the implant to heat.

“Goodbye,” the AI said to him, to herself, maybe to both of them. Then the chip containing the goddess of Shiva ignited like a miniature sun and burned through his brain. He fell to the ground, dead before he could feel the soft grass against his face.

In the rainy season, the lion spiders grow bold. Marek’s slumped body carries an inviting scent of rot, and its soft belly such potential for life.

The first lion spider, the bravest of them, scampers over the uncharted flesh. It selects its spot, and lays its eggs.

Translated from the original Italian version scheduled to appear in Living Force Magazine, Issue 49.

About the Author

Italian writer Lorenzo Crescentini was born in Forlì and currently resides in Rome. He received both the Space Prophecies Award and the Ritorno a Dunwich Award, and his work has been shortlisted for the Robot, Italia and Kataris awards, among others. His stories appear in numerous magazines and anthologies, including his personal collection Occhi senza volto, published by Editrice GDS in 2012. In 2016, he edited the collection Dinosauria for Edizioni Pendragon.

Emanuela Valentini was born in and resides in Rome. She is the author of La bambina senza cuore, Ophelia e le officine del tempo, Angeli di Plastica and the Red Psychedalia series, a cyberpunk retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood.” She received the Robot Award and Chrysalide Mondadori Award, and her work has also been shortlisted for the Urania Award.

Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance

John Kessel

When my mind cleared, I found myself in the street. The protector god Bishamon spoke to me then: The boulevard to the spaceport runs straight up the mountain. And you must run straight up the boulevard.

The air was full of wily spirits, and moving fast in the Imperial City was a crime. But what is man to disobey the voice of a god? So I ran. The pavement vibrated with the thunder of the great engines of the Caslonian Empire. Behind me the curators of the Imperial Archives must by now have discovered the mare’s nest I had made of their defenses, and perhaps had already realized that something was missing.

Above the plateau the sky was streaked with clouds, through which shot violet gravity beams carrying ships down from and up to planetary orbit. Just outside the gate to the spaceport a family in rags—husband, wife, two children—used a net of knotted cords to catch fish from the sewers. Ignoring them, prosperous citizens in embroidered robes passed among the shops of the port bazaar, purchasing duty-free wares, recharging their concubines, seeking a meal before departure. Slower, now.

I slowed my pace. I became indistinguishable from them, moving smoothly among the travelers.

To the Caslonian eye, I was calm, self-possessed; within me, rage and joy contended. I had in my possession the means to redeem my people. I tried not to think, only to act, but now that my mind was rekindled, it raced. Certainly it would go better for me if I left the planet before anyone understood what I had stolen. Yet I was very hungry, and the aroma of food from the restaurants along the way enticed me. It would be foolishness itself to stop here.

Enter the restaurant, I was told. So I stepped into the most elegant of the establishments.

The maître d’ greeted me. “Would the master like a table, or would he prefer to dine at the bar?”

“The bar,” I said

“Step this way.” There was no hint of the illicit about his manner, though something about it implied indulgence. He was proud to offer me this experience that few could afford.

He seated me at the circular bar of polished rosewood. Before me, and the few others seated there, the chef grilled meats on a heated metal slab. Waving his arms in the air like a dancer, he tossed flanks of meat between two force knives, letting them drop to the griddle, flipping them dexterously upward again in what was as much performance as preparation. The energy blades of the knives sliced through the meat without resistance, the sides of these same blades batting them like paddles. An aroma of burning hydrocarbons wafted on the air.

An attractive young man displayed for me a list of virtualities that represented the “cuts” offered by the establishment, including subliminal tastes. The “cuts” referred to the portions of the animal’s musculature from which the slabs of meat had been sliced. My mouth watered.

He took my order, and I sipped a cocktail of bitters and Belanova.

While I waited, I scanned the restaurant. The fundamental goal of our order is to vindicate divine justice in allowing evil to exist. At a small nearby table, a young woman leaned beside a child, probably her daughter, and encouraged her to eat. The child’s beautiful face was the picture of innocence as she tentatively tasted a scrap of pink flesh. The mother was very beautiful. I wondered if this was her first youth.

The chef finished his performance, to the mild applause of the other patrons. The young man placed my steak before me. The chef turned off the blades and laid them aside, then ducked down a trapdoor to the oubliette where the slaves were kept. As soon as he was out of sight, the god told me, Steal a knife.

While the diners were distracted by their meals, I reached over the counter, took one of the force blades, and slid it into my boot. Then I ate. The taste was extraordinary. Every cell of my body vibrated with excitement and shame. My senses reeling, it took me a long time to finish.

A slender man in a dark robe sat next to me. “That smells good,” he said. “Is that genuine animal flesh?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“Ah, brother, calm yourself. I’m not challenging your taste.”

“I’m pleased to hear it.”

“But I am challenging your identity.” He parted the robe—his tunic bore the sigil of Port Security. “Your passport, please.”

I exposed the inside of my wrist for him. A scanlid slid over his left eye and he examined the marks beneath my skin. “Very good,” he said. He drew a blaster from the folds of his cassock. “We seldom see such excellent forgeries. Stand up, and come with me.”

I stood. He took my elbow in a firm grip, the bell of the blaster against my side. No one in the restaurant noticed. He walked me outside, down the crowded bazaar. “You see, brother, that there is no escape from consciousness. The minute it returns, you are vulnerable. All your prayer is to no avail.”

This is the arrogance of the Caslonian. They treat us as non-sentients, and they believe in nothing. Yet as I prayed, I heard no word.

I turned to him. “You may wish the absence of the gods, but you are mistaken. The gods are everywhere present.” As I spoke the plosive “p” of “present,” I popped the cap from my upper right molar and blew the moondust it contained into his face.

The agent fell writhing to the pavement. I ran off through the people, dodging collisions. My ship was on the private field at the end of the bazaar. Before I had gotten half way there, an alarm began sounding. People looked up in bewilderment, stopping in their tracks. The walls of buildings and stalls blinked into multiple images of me. Voices spoke from the air: “This man is a fugitive from the state. Apprehend him.”

I would not make it to the ship unaided, so I turned on my perceptual overdrive. Instantly, everything slowed. The voices of the people and the sounds of the port dropped an octave. They moved as if in slow motion. I moved, to myself, as if in slow motion as well—my body could in no way keep pace with my racing nervous system—but to the people moving at normal speed, my reflexes were lightning fast. Up to the limit of my physiology—and my joints had been reinforced to take the additional stress, my muscles could handle the additional lactic acid for a time—I could move at twice the speed of a normal human. I could function perhaps for ten minutes in this state before I collapsed.

The first person to accost me—a sturdy middle-aged man—I seized by the arm. I twisted it behind his back and shoved him into the second who took up the command. As I dodged through the crowd up the concourse, it began to drizzle. I felt as if I could slip between the raindrops. I pulled the force blade from my boot and sliced the ear from the next man who tried to stop me. His comic expression of dismay still lingers in my mind. Glancing behind, I saw the agent in black, face swollen with pustules from the moondust, running toward me.

I was near the field. In the boarding shed, attendants were folding the low-status passengers and sliding them into dispatch pouches, to be carried onto a ship and stowed in drawers for their passage. Directly before me, I saw the woman and child I had noticed in the restaurant. The mother had out a parasol and was holding it over the girl to keep the rain off her. Not slowing, I snatched the little girl and carried her off. The child yelped, the mother screamed. I held the blade to the girl’s neck. “Make way!” I shouted to the security men at the field’s entrance. They fell back.

“Halt!” came the call from behind me. The booth beside the gate was seared with a blaster bolt. I swerved, turned, and, my back to the gate, held the girl before me.

The agent in black, followed by two security women, jerked to a stop. “You mustn’t hurt her,” the agent said.

“Oh? And why is that?”

“It’s against everything your order believes.”

Master Darius had steeled me for this dilemma before sending me on my mission. He told me, “You will encounter such situations, Adlan. When they arise, you must resolve the complications.”

“You are right!” I called to my pursuers, and threw the child at them.

The agent caught her, while the other two aimed and fired. One of the beams grazed my shoulder. But by then I was already through the gate and onto the tarmac.

A port security robot hurled a flame grenade. I rolled through the flames. My ship rested in the maintenance pit, cradled in the violet anti-grav beam. I slid down the ramp into the open airlock, hit the emergency close, and climbed to the controls. Klaxons wailed outside. I bypassed all the launch protocols and released the beam. The ship shot upward like an apple seed flicked by a fingernail; as soon as it had hit the stratosphere, I fired the engines and blasted through the scraps of the upper atmosphere into space.

The orbital security forces were too slow, and I made my escape.

I awoke battered, bruised, and exhausted in the pilot’s chair. The smell of my burned shoulder reminded me of the steak I had eaten in the port bazaar. The stress of accelerating nerve impulses had left every joint in my body aching. My arms were blue with contusions, and I was as enfeebled as an old man.

The screens showed me to be in an untraveled quarter of the system’s cometary cloud; my ship had cloaked itself in ice so that on any detector I would simply be another bit of debris among billions. I dragged myself from the chair and down to the galley, where I warmed some broth and gave myself an injection of cellular repair mites. Then I fell into my bunk and slept.

My second waking was relatively free of pain. I recharged my tooth and ate again. I kneeled before the shrine and bowed my head in prayer, letting peace flow down my spine and relax all the muscles of my back. I listened for the voices of the gods.

I was reared by my mother on Bembo. My mother was an extraordinarily beautiful girl. One day Akvan, looking down on her, was so moved by lust that he took the form of a vagabond and raped her by the side of the road. Nine months later I was born.

The goddess Sedna became so jealous that she laid a curse on my mother, who turned into a lawyer. And so we moved to Helvetica. There, in the shabby city of Urushana, in the waterfront district along the river, she took up her practice, defending criminals and earning a little baksheesh greasing the relations between the Imperial Caslonian government and the corrupt local officials. Mother’s ambition for me was to go to an off-planet university, but for me the work of a student was like pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill. I got into fights; I pursued women of questionable virtue. Having exhausted my prospects in the city, I entered the native constabulary, where I was re-engineered for accelerated combat. But my propensity for violence saw me cashiered out of the service within six months. Hoping to get a grip on my passions, I made the pilgrimage to the monastery of the Pujmanian Order. There I petitioned for admission as a novice, and, to my great surprise, was accepted.

It was no doubt the work of Master Darius, who took an interest in me from my first days on the plateau. Perhaps it was my divine heritage, which had placed those voices in my head. Perhaps it was my checkered career to that date. The Master taught me to distinguish between those impulses that were the work of my savage nature, and those that were the voices of the gods. He taught me to identify the individual gods. It is not an easy path. I fasted, I worked in the gardens, I practiced the martial arts, I cleaned the cesspool, I sewed new clothes and mended old, I tended the orchards. I became an expert tailor, and sewed many of the finest kosodes worn by the masters on feast days. In addition, Master Darius held special sessions with me, putting me into a trance during which, I was later told by my fellow novices, I continued to act normally for days, only to awake with no memories of my actions.

And so I was sent on my mission. Because I had learned how not to think, I could not be detected by the spirits who guarded the Imperial Archives.

Five plays, immensely old, collectively titled The Abandonment, are all that document the rebirth of humanity after its long extinction. The foundational cycle consists of The Archer’s Fall, Stochik’s Revenge, The Burning Tree, Close the Senses, Shut the Doors, and the mystical fifth, The Magic Tortoise. No one knows who wrote them. It is believed they were composed within the first thirty years after the human race was recreated by the gods. Besides being the most revered cultural artifacts of humanity, these plays are also the sacred texts of the universal religion, and claimed as the fundamental political documents by all planetary governments. They are preserved only in a single copy. No recording has ever been made of their performance. The actors chosen to present the plays in the foundational festivals on all the worlds do not study and learn them; through a process similar to the one Master Darius taught me to confuse the spirits, the actors become the characters. Once the performance is done, it passes from their minds.

These foundational plays, of inestimable value, existed now only in my mind. I had destroyed the crystal containing them in the archives. Without these plays, the heart of Caslon had been ripped away. If the populace knew of their loss, there would be despair and riot.

And once Master Darius announced that the Order held the only copy in our possession, it would only be a matter of time before the Empire would be obliged to free our world.

Three days after my escape from Caslon, I set course for Helvetica. Using an evanescent wormhole, I would emerge within the planet’s inner ring. The ship, still encased in ice, would look like one of the fragments that formed the ring. From there I would reconnoiter, find my opportunity to leave orbit, and land. But because the ring stood far down in the gravitation well of the planet, it was a tricky maneuver.

Too tricky. Upon emergence in the Helvetican ring, my ship collided with one of the few nickel-iron meteoroids in the belt, disabling my engines. Within twenty minutes, Caslonian hunter-killers grappled with the hull. My one advantage was that by now they knew that I possessed the plays, and therefore they could not afford to blast me out of the sky. I could kill them, but they could not harm me. But I had no doubt that once they caught me, they would rip my mind to shreds seeking the plays.

I had only minutes—the hull door would not hold long. I abandoned the control room and retreated to the engine compartment. The place was a mess, barely holding pressure after the meteoroid collision, oxygen cylinders scattered about and the air acrid with the scent of burned wiring. I opened the cat’s closet, three meters tall and two wide. From a locker I yanked two piezofiber suits. I turned them on, checked their readouts—they were fully charged—and threw them into the closet. It was cramped in there with tools and boxes of supplies. Sitting on one of the crates, I pulled up my shirt, exposing my bruised ribs. The aluminum light of the closet turned my skin sickly white. Using a microtome, I cut an incision in my belly below my lowest rib. There was little blood. I reached into the cut, found the nine-dimensional pouch, and drew it out between my index and middle fingers. I sprayed false skin over the wound. As I did, the artificial gravity cut off, and the lights went out.

I slipped on my night vision eyelids, read the directions on the pouch, ripped it open, removed the soldier and unfolded it. The body expanded, became fully three dimensional, and, in a minute, was floating naked before me. My first surprise: it was a woman. Dark skinned, slender, her body was very beautiful. I leaned over her, covered her mouth with mine, and blew air into her lungs. She jerked convulsively and drew a shuddering breath, then stopped. Her eyelids fluttered, then opened.

“Wake up!” I said, drawing on my piezosuit. I slipped the force blade into the boot, strapped on the belt with blaster and supplies, shrugged into the backpack. “Put on this suit! No time to waste.”

She took in my face, the surroundings. From beyond the locker door I heard the sounds of the commandos entering the engine room.

“I am Brother Adlan,” I whispered urgently. “You are a soldier of the Republican Guard?” As I spoke I helped her into the skinsuit.

“Lieutenant Nahid Esfandiar. What’s happening?”

“We are in orbit over Helvetica, under attack by Caslonian commandos. We need to break out of here.”

“What weapons have we?”

I handed her a blaster. “They will have accelerated perceptions. Can you speed yours?”

Her glance passed over me, measuring me for a fool. “Done already.” She sealed her suit and flipped down the faceplate on her helmet.

I did not pay attention to her, because as she spoke, all-seeing Liu-Bei spoke to me. Three men beyond this door. In my mind I saw the engine room, and the three soldiers who were preparing to rip open the closet.

I touched my helmet to hers and whispered to Nahid, “There are three of them outside. The leader is directly across from the door. He has a common blaster, on stun. To the immediate right, a meter away, one of the commandos has a pulse rifle. The third, about to set the charge, has a pneumatic projector, probably with sleep gas. When they blow the door, I’ll go high, you low. Three meters to the cross corridor, down one level and across starboard to the escape pod.”

Just then, the door to the closet was ripped open, and through it came a blast of sleep gas. But we were locked into our suits, helmets sealed. Our blaster beams, pink in the darkness, crossed as they emerged from the gloom of the closet. We dove through the doorway in zero-G, bouncing off the bulkheads, blasters flaring. The commandos were just where the gods had told me they would be. I cut down one before we even cleared the doorway. Though they moved as quickly as we did, they were trying not to kill me, and the fact that there were two of us now took them by surprise.

Nahid fired past my ear, taking out another. We ducked through the hatch and up the companionway. Two more commandos came from the control room at the end of the corridor; I was able to slice one of them before he could fire, but the other’s stunner numbed my thigh. Nahid torched his head and grabbed me by the arm, hurling me around the corner into the cross passageway.

Two more commandos guarded the hatchway to the escape pod. Nahid fired at them, killing one and wounding the other in a single shot. But instead of heading for the pod she jerked me the other way, toward the umbilical to the Caslonian ship.

“What are you doing?” I protested.

“Shut up,” she said. “They can hear us.” Halfway across the umbilical, Nahid stopped, braced herself against one wall, raised her blaster, and, without hesitation, blew a hole in the wall opposite. The air rushed out. A klaxon sounded the pressure breach, another commando appeared at the junction of the umbilical and the Caslonian ship—I burned him down—and we slipped through the gap into the space between the two ships. She grabbed my arm and pulled me around the hull of my own vessel.

I realized what she intended. Grabbing chunks of ice, we pulled ourselves over the horizon of my ship until we reached the outside hatch of the escape pod. I punched in the access code. We entered the pod and while Nahid sealed the hatch, I powered up and blasted us free of the ship before we had even buckled in.

The pod shot toward the upper atmosphere. The commandos guarding the inner hatch were ejected into the vacuum behind us. Retro fire slammed us into our seats. I caught a glimpse of bodies floating in the chaos we’d left behind before proton beams lanced out from the Caslonian raider, clipping the pod and sending us into a spin.

“You couldn’t manage this without me?” Nahid asked.

“No sarcasm, please.” I fought to steady the pod so the heat shields were oriented for atmosphere entry.

We hit the upper atmosphere. For twenty minutes we were buffeted by the jet stream, and it got hot in the tiny capsule. I became very aware of Nahid’s scent, sweat and a trace of rosewater; she must have put on perfume before she was folded into the packet that had been implanted in me. Her eyes moved slowly over the interior of the pod.

“What is the date?” she asked.

“The nineteenth of Cunegonda,” I told her. The pod bounced violently and drops of sweat flew from my forehead. Three red lights flared on the board, but I could do nothing about them.

“What year?”

I saw that it would not be possible to keep many truths from her. “You have been suspended in nine-space for sixty years.”

The pod lurched again, a piece of the ablative shield tearing away. She sat motionless, taking in the loss of her entire life.

A snatch of verse came to my lips, unbidden:

“Our life is but a trifle

A child’s toy abandoned by the road

When we are called home.”

“Very poetic,” she said. “Are we going to ride this pod all the way down? They probably have us on locator from orbit, and will vaporize it the minute it hits. I’d rather not be called home just now.”

“We’ll eject at ten kilometers. Here’s your chute.”

When the heat of the re-entry had abated and we hit the troposphere, we blew the explosive bolts and shot free of the tumbling pod. Despite the thin air of the upper atmosphere, I was buffeted almost insensible, spinning like a prayer wheel. I lost sight of Nahid.

I fell for a long time, but eventually managed to stabilize myself spread-eagled, dizzy, my stomach lurching. Below, the Jacobin Range stretched north to southwest under the rising sun, the snow-covered rock on the upper reaches folded like a discarded robe, and below the thick forest climbing up to the tree line.

Some minutes later, I witnessed the impressive flare of the pod striking just below the summit of one of the peaks, tearing a gash in the ice cover and sending up a plume of black smoke that was torn away by the wind. I tongued the trigger in my helmet, and with a nasty jerk, the airfoil chute deployed from my backpack. I could see Nahid’s red chute some five hundred meters below me; I steered toward her hoping we could land near each other. The forested mountainside came up fast. I spotted a clearing on a ledge two-thirds of the way up the slope and made for it, but my burned shoulder wasn’t working right, and I was coming in too fast. I caught a glimpse of Nahid’s foil in the mountain scar ahead, but I wasn’t going to reach her.

At the last minute, I pulled up and skimmed the treetops, caught a boot against a top limb, flipped head over heels and crashed into the foliage, coming to rest hanging upside down from the tree canopy. The suit’s rigidity kept me from breaking any bones, but it took me ten minutes to release the shrouds. I turned down the suit’s inflex and took off my helmet to better see what I was doing. When I did, the limb supporting me broke, and I fell the last ten meters through the trees, hitting another limb on the way down, knocking me out.

I was woken by Nahid rubbing snow into my face. My piezosuit had been turned off, and the fabric was flexible again. Nahid leaned over me, supporting my head. “Can you move your feet?” she asked.

My thigh was still numb from the stunner. I tried moving my right foot. Though I could not feel any response, I saw the boot twitch. “So it would seem.”

Done with me, she let my head drop. “So, do you have some plan?”

I pulled up my knees and sat up. My head ached. We were surrounded by the boles of the tall firs; above our heads the wind swayed the trees, but down here the air was calm, and sunlight filtered down in patches, moving over the packed fine brown needles of the forest floor. Nahid had pulled down my chute to keep it from advertising our position. She crouched on one knee and examined the charge indicator on her blaster.

I got up and inventoried the few supplies we had—my suit’s water reservoir, holding maybe a liter, three packs of gichy crackers in the belt. Hers would have no more than that. “We should get moving; the Caslonians will send a landing party, or notify the colonial government in Guliston to send a security squad.”

“And why should I care?”

“You fought for the republic against the Caslonians. When the war was lost and the protectorate established, you had yourself folded. Didn’t you expect to take up arms again when called back to life?”

“You tell me that was sixty years ago. What happened to the rest of the Republican Guard?”

“The Guard was wiped out in the final Caslonian assaults.”

“And our folded battalion?”

The blistering roar of a flyer tore through the clear air above the trees. Nahid squinted up, eyes following the glittering ship. “They’re heading for where the pod hit.” She pulled me to my feet, taking us downhill, perhaps in the hope of finding better cover in the denser forest near one of the mountain freshets.

“No,” I said. “Up the slope.”

“That’s where they’ll be.”

“It can’t be helped. We need to get to the monastery. We’re on the wrong side of the mountains.” I turned up the incline. After a moment, she followed.

We stayed beneath the trees for as long as possible. The slope was not too steep at this altitude; the air was chilly, with dying patches of old snow in the shadows. Out in the direct sunlight, it would be hot until evening came. I had climbed these mountains fifteen years before, an adolescent trying to find a way to live away from the world. As we moved, following the path of a small stream, the aches in my joints eased.

We did not talk. I had not thought about what it would mean to wake this soldier, other than how she would help me in a time of extremity. There are no women in our order, and though we take no vow of celibacy and some commerce takes place between brothers in their cells late at night, there is little opportunity for contact with the opposite sex. Nahid, despite her forbidding nature, was beautiful: dark skin, black eyes, lustrous black hair cut short, the three parallel scars of her rank marking her left cheek. As a boy in Urushana, I had tormented my sleepless nights with visions of women as beautiful as she; in my short career as a constable I had avidly pursued women far less so. One of them had provoked the fight that had gotten me cashiered.

The forest thinned as we climbed higher. Large folds of granite lay exposed to the open air, creased with fractures and holding pockets of earth where trees sprouted in groups. We had to circle around to avoid coming into the open, and even that would be impossible when the forest ended completely. I pointed us south, where Dundrahad Pass, dipping below 3,000 meters, cut through the mountains. We were without snowshoes or trekking gear, but I hoped that, given the summer temperatures, the pass would be clear enough to traverse in the night without getting ourselves killed. The skinsuits we wore would be proof against the nighttime cold.

We saw no signs of the Caslonians, but when we reached the tree line, we stopped to wait for darkness anyway. The air had turned colder, and a sharp wind blew down the pass from the other side of the mountains. We settled in a hollow beneath a patch of twisted scrub trees and waited out the declining sun. At the zenith, the first moon Mahsheed rode, waning gibbous. In the notch of the pass above and ahead of us, the second moon Roshanak rose. Small, glowing green, it moved perceptibly as it raced around the planet. I nibbled at some gichy, sipping water from my suit’s reservoir. Nahid’s eyes were shadowed; she scanned the slope.

“We’ll have to wait until Mahsheed sets before we move,” Nahid said. “I don’t want to be caught in the pass in its light.”

“It will be hard for us to see where we’re going.”

She didn’t reply. The air grew colder. After a while, without looking at me, she spoke. “So what happened to my compatriots?”

I saw no point in keeping anything from her. “As the Caslonians consolidated their conquest, an underground of Republicans pursued a guerilla war. Two years later, they mounted an assault on the provincial capital in Kofarnihon. They unfolded your battalion to aid them, and managed to seize the armory. But the Caslonians sent reinforcements and set up a siege. When the rebels refused to surrender, the Caslonians vaporized the entire city, hostages, citizens, and rebels alike. That was the end of the Republican Guard.” Nahid’s dark eyes watched me as I told her all this. The tightness of her lips held grim skepticism.

“Yet here I am,” she said.

“I don’t know how you came to be the possession of the order. Some refugee, perhaps. The masters, sixty years ago, debated what to do with you. Given the temperament of the typical guardsman, it was assumed that, had you been restored to life, you would immediately get yourself killed in assaulting the Caslonians, putting the order at risk. It was decided to keep you in reserve, in the expectation that, at some future date, your services would be useful.”

“You monks were always fair-weather democrats. Ever your order over the welfare of the people, or even their freedom. So you betrayed the republic.”

“You do us an injustice.”

“It was probably Javeed who brought me—the lying monk attached to our unit.”

I recognized the name. Brother Javeed, a bent, bald man of great age, had run the monastery kitchen. I had never thought twice about him. He had died a year after I joined the order.

“Why do you think I was sent on this mission?” I told her. “We mean to set Helvetica free. And we shall do so, if we reach Sharishabz.”

“How do you propose to accomplish that? Do you want to see your monastery vaporized?”

“They will not dare. I have something of theirs that they will give up the planet for. That’s why they tried to board my ship rather than destroy it; that’s why they didn’t bother to disintegrate the escape pod when they might easily have shot us out of the sky.”

“And this inestimably valuable item that you carry? It must be very small.”

“It’s in my head. I have stolen the only copies of the Foundational Dramas.”

She looked at me. “So?”

Her skepticism was predictable, but it still angered me. “So—they will gladly trade Helvetica’s freedom for the return of the plays.”

She lowered her head, rubbed her brow with her hand. I could not read her. She made a sound, an intake of breath. For a moment, I thought she wept. Then she raised her head and laughed in my face.

I fought an impulse to strike her. “Quiet!”

She laughed louder. Her shoulders shook, and tears came to her eyes. I felt my face turn red. “You should have let me die with the others, in battle. You crazy priest!”

“Why do you laugh?” I asked her. “Do you think they would send ships to embargo Helvetican orbital space, dispatch squads of soldiers and police, if what I carry were not valuable to them?”

“I don’t believe in your fool’s religion.”

“Have you ever seen the plays performed?”

“Once, when I was a girl. I saw The Archer’s Fall during the year-end festival in Tienkash. I fell asleep.”

“They are the axis of human culture. The sacred stories of our race. We are human because of them. Through them the gods speak to us.”

“I thought you monks heard the gods talking to you directly. Didn’t they tell you to run us directly into the face of the guards securing the escape pod? It’s lucky you had me along to cut our way out of that umbilical, or we’d be dead up there now.”

“You might be dead. I would be in a sleep tank having my brain taken apart—to retrieve these dramas.”

“There are no gods! Just voices in your head. They tell you to do what you already want to do.”

“If you think the commands of the gods are easy, then just try to follow them for a single day.”

We settled into an uncomfortable silence. The sun set, and the rings became visible in the sky, turned pink by the sunset in the west, rising silvery toward the zenith, where they were eclipsed by the planet’s shadow. The light of the big moon still illuminated the open rock face before us. We would have a steep 300 meter climb above the tree line to the pass, then another couple of kilometers between the peaks in the darkness.

“It’s cold,” I said after a while.

Without saying anything, she reached out and tugged my arm. It took me a moment to realize that she wanted me to move next to her. I slid over, and we ducked our heads to keep below the wind. I could feel the taut muscles of her body beneath the skinsuit. The paradox of our alienation hit me. We were both the products of the gods. She did not believe this truth, but truth does not need to be believed to prevail.

Still, she was right that we had not escaped the orbiting commandos in the way I had expected.

The great clockwork of the universe turned. Green Roshanak sped past Mahsheed, for a moment in transit looking like the pupil of a god’s observing eye, then set, and an hour later, Mahsheed followed her below the western horizon. The stars shone in all their glory, but it was as dark as it would get before Roshanak rose for the second time that night. It was time for us to take our chance and go.

We came out of our hiding place and moved to the edge of the scrub. The broken granite of the peak rose before us, faint gray in starlight. We set out across the rock, climbing in places, striding across rubble fields, circling areas of ice and melting snow. In a couple of places, we had to boost each other up, scrambling over boulders, finding hand and footholds in the vertical face where we were blocked. It was farther than I had estimated before the ground leveled and we were in the pass.

We were just cresting the last ridge when glaring white light shone down on us, and an amplified voice called from above. “Do not move! Drop your weapons and lie flat on the ground!”

I tongued my body into acceleration. In slow motion, Nahid crouched, raised her blaster, arm extended, sighted on the flyer, and fired. I hurled my body into hers and threw her aside just as the return fire of projectile weapons splattered the rock where she had been into fragments. In my head, kind Eurynome insisted: Back. We will show you the way.

“This way!” I dragged Nahid over the edge of the rock face we had just climbed. It was a three-meter drop to the granite below; I landed hard, and she fell on my chest, knocking the wind from me. Around us burst a hail of sleep gas pellets. In trying to catch my breath I caught a whiff of the gas, and my head whirled. Nahid slid her helmet down over her face, and did the same for me.

From above us came the sound of the flyer touching down. Nahid started for the tree line, limping. She must have been hit or injured in our fall. I pulled her to our left, along the face of the rock. “Where—” she began.

“Shut up!” I grunted.

The commandos hit the ledge behind us, but the flyer had its searchlight aimed at the trees, and the soldiers followed the light. The fog of sleep gas gave us some cover.

We scuttled along the granite shelf until we were beyond the entrance to the pass. By this time, I had used whatever reserves of energy my body could muster, and passed into normal speed. I was exhausted.

“Over the mountain?” Nahid asked. “We can’t.”

“Under it,” I said. I forced my body into motion, searching in the darkness for the cleft in the rock which, in the moment of the flyer attack, the gods had shown me. And there it was, two dark pits above a vertical fissure in the granite, like an impassive face. We climbed up the few meters to the brink of the cleft. Nahid followed, slower now, dragging her right leg. “Are you badly hurt?” I asked her.

“Keep going.”

I levered my shoulder under her arm, and helped her along the ledge. Down in the forest, the lights of the commandos flickered, while a flyer hovered above, beaming bright white radiance down between the trees.

Once inside the cleft, I let her lean against the wall. Beyond the narrow entrance the way widened. I used my suit flash, and, moving forward, found an oval chamber of three meters with a sandy floor. Some small bones give proof that a predator had once used this cave for a lair. But at the back, a small passage gaped. I crouched and followed it deeper.

“Where are you going?” Nahid asked.

“Come with me.”

The passage descended for a space, then rose. I emerged into a larger space. My flash showed not a natural cave, but a chamber of dressed rock, and opposite us, a metal door. It was just as my vision had said.

“What is this?” Nahid asked in wonder.

“A tunnel under the mountain.” I took off my helmet and spoke the words that would open the door. The ancient mechanism began to hum. With a fall of dust, a gap appeared at the side of the door, and it slid open.

The door closed behind us with a disturbing finality, wrapping us in the silence of a tomb. We found ourselves in a corridor at least twice our height and three times that in width. Our lights showed walls smooth as plaster, but when I laid my hand on one, it proved to be cut from the living rock. Our boots echoed on the polished but dusty floor. The air was stale, unbreathed by human beings for unnumbered years.

I made Nahid sit. “Rest,” I said. “Let me look at that leg.”

Though she complied, she kept her blaster out, and her eyes scanned our surroundings warily. “Did you know of this?”

“No. The gods told me, just as we were caught in the pass.”

“Praise be to the Pujmanian Order.” I could not tell if there was any sarcasm in her voice.

A trickle of blood ran down her boot from the wound of a projectile gun. I opened the seam of her suit, cleaned the wound with antiseptic from my suit’s first aid kit, and bandaged her leg. “Can you walk?” I asked.

She gave me a tight smile. “Lead on, Brother Adlan.”

We moved along the hall. Several smaller corridors branched off, but we kept to the main way. Periodically, we came across doors, most of them closed. One gaped open upon a room where my light fell on a garage of wheeled vehicles, sitting patiently in long rows, their windows thick with dust. In the corner of the room, a fracture in the ceiling had let in a steady drip of water that had corroded the vehicle beneath it into a mass of rust.

Along the main corridor our lights revealed hieroglyphics carved above doorways, dead oval spaces on the wall that might once have been screens or windows. We must have gone a kilometer or more when the corridor ended suddenly in a vast cavernous opening.

Our lights were lost in the gloom above. A ramp led down to an underground city. Buildings of gracious curves, apartments like heaps of grapes stacked upon a table, halls whose walls were so configured that they resembled a huge garment discarded in a bedroom. We descended into the streets.

The walls of the buildings were figured in abstract designs of immense intricacy, fractal patterns from immense to microscopic, picked out by the beams of our flashlights. Colored tiles, bits of glass and mica. Many of the buildings were no more than sets of walls demarcating space, with horizontal trellises that must once have held plants above them rather than roofs. Here and there, outside what might have been cafes, tables and benches rose out of the polished floor. We arrived in a broad square with low buildings around it, centered on a dry fountain. The immense figures of a man, a woman, and a child dominated the center of the dusty reservoir. Their eyes were made of crystal, and stared blindly across their abandoned city.

Weary beyond words, hungry, bruised, we settled against the rim of the fountain and made to sleep. The drawn skin about her eyes told me of Nahid’s pain. I tried to comfort her, made her rest her legs, elevated, on my own. We slept.

When I woke, Nahid was already up, changing the dressing on her bloody leg. The ceiling of the cave had lit, and a pale light shone down, making an early arctic dawn over the dead city.

“How is your leg?” I asked.

“Better. Do you have any more anodynes?”

I gave her what I had. She took them, and sighed. After a while, she asked, “Where did the people go?”

“They left the universe. They grew beyond the need of matter, and space. They became gods. You know the story.”

“The ones who made this place were people like you and me.”

“You and I are the descendants of the re-creation of a second human race three million years after the first ended in apotheosis. Or of the ones left behind, or banished back into the material world by the gods for some great crime.”

Nahid rubbed her boot above the bandaged leg. “Which is it? Which child’s tale do you expect me to believe?”

“How do you think I found the place? The gods told me, and here it is. Our mission is important to them, and they are seeing that we succeed. Justice is to be done.”

“Justice? Tell the starving child about justice. The misborn and the dying. I would rather be the random creation of colliding atoms than subject to the whim of some transhumans no more godlike than I am.”

“You speak out of bitterness.”

“If they are gods, they are responsible for the horror that occurs in the world. So they are evil. Why otherwise would they allow things to be as they are?”

“To say that is to speak out of the limitations of our vision. We can’t see the outcome of events. We’re too close. But the gods see how all things will eventuate. Time is a landscape to them. All at once they see the acorn, the seedling, the ancient oak, the woodsman who cuts it, the fire that burns the wood, and the smoke that rises from the fire. And so they led us to this place.”

“Did they lead the bullet to find my leg? Did they lead your order to place me on a shelf for a lifetime, separate me from every person I loved?” Nahid’s voice rose. “Please save me your theodical prattle!”

“‘Theodical.’ Impressive vocabulary for a soldier. But you—”

A scraping noise came from behind us. I turned to find that the giant male figure in the center of the fountain had moved. As I watched, its hand jerked another few centimeters. Its foot pulled free of its setting, and it stepped down from the pedestal into the empty basin.

We fell back from the fountain. The statue’s eyes glowed a dull orange. Its lips moved, and it spoke in a voice like the scraping together of two files: “Do not flee, little ones.”

Nahid let fly a shot from her blaster, which ricocheted off the shoulder of the metal man and scarred the ceiling of the cave. I pulled her away and we crouched behind a table before an open-sided building at the edge of the square.

The statue raised its arms in appeal. “Your shoes are untied,” it said in its ghostly rasp. “We know why you are here. It seems to you that your lives hang in the balance, and of course you value your lives. As you should, dear ones. But I, who have no soul and therefore no ability to care, can tell you that the appetites that move you are entirely transitory. The world you live in is a game. You do not have a ticket.”

“Quite mad,” Nahid said. “Our shoes have no laces.”

“But it’s also true—they are therefore untied,” I said. “And we have no tickets.” I called out to the metal man, “Are you a god?”

“I am no god,” the metal man said. “The gods left behind the better part of themselves when they abandoned matter. The flyer lies on its side in the woods. Press the silver pentagon. You must eat, but you must not eat too much. Here is food.”

The shop behind us lit up, and in a moment the smell of food wafted from within.

I slid over to the entrance. On a table inside, under warm light, were two plates of rice and vegetables.

“He’s right,” I told Nahid.

“I’m not going to eat that food. Where did it come from? It’s been thousands of years without a human being here.”

“Come,” I said. I drew her inside and made her join me at the table. I tasted. The food was good. Nahid sat warily, facing out to the square, blaster a centimeter from her plate. The metal man sat on the plaza stones, cross-legged, ducking its massive head in order to watch us. After a few moments, it began to croon.

Its voice was a completely mechanical sound, but the tune it sang was sweet, like a peasant song. I cannot convey to you the strangeness of sitting in that ancient restaurant, eating food conjured fresh out of nothing by ancient machines, listening to the music of creatures who might have been a different species from us.

When its song was ended, the metal man spoke: “If you wish to know someone, you need only observe that on which he bestows his care, and what sides of his own nature he cultivates.” It lifted its arm and pointed at Nahid. Its finger stretched almost to the door. I could see the patina of corrosion on that metal digit. “If left to the gods, you will soon die.”

The arm moved, and it pointed at me. “You must live, but you must not live too much. Take this.”

The metal man opened the curled fingers of its hand, and in its huge palm was a small, round metallic device the size of an apple. I took it. Black and dense, it filled my hand completely. “Thank you,” I said.

The man stood and returned to the empty fountain, climbed onto the central pedestal, and resumed its position. There it froze. Had we not been witness to it, I could never have believed it had moved.

Nahid came out of her musing over the man’s sentence of her death. She lifted her head. “What is that thing?”

I examined the sphere, surface covered in pentagonal facets of dull metal. “I don’t know.”

In one of the buildings, we found some old furniture, cushions of metallic fabric that we piled together as bedding. We huddled together and slept.

Selene:

Hear that vessel that docks above?

It marks the end of our lives

And the beginning of our torment.

Stochik:

Death comes      

And then it’s gone. Who knows

What lies beyond that event horizon?

Our life is but a trifle,

A child’s toy abandoned by the road

When we are called home.

Selene:

Home? You might well hope it so,

But—

[Alarums off stage. Enter a god]

God:

The hull is breached!

You must fly.

In the night I woke, chasing away the wisps of a dream. The building we were in had no ceiling, and faint light from the cavern roof filtered down upon us. In our sleep, we had moved closer together, and Nahid’s arm lay over my chest, her head next to mine, her breath brushing my cheek. I turned my face to her, centimeters away. Her face was placid, her eyelashes dark and long.

As I watched her, her eyelids fluttered and she awoke. She did not flinch at my closeness, but simply, soberly looked into my own eyes for what seemed like a very long time. I leaned forward and kissed her.

She did not pull away, but kissed me back strongly. She made a little moan in her throat, and I pulled her tightly to me.

We made love in the empty, ancient city. Her fingers entwined with mine, arms taut. Shadow of my torso across her breast. Hard, shuddering breath. Her lips on my chest. Smell of her sweat and mine. My palm brushing her abdomen. The feeling of her dark skin against mine. Her quiet laugh.

“Your leg,” I said, as we lay in the darkness, spent.

“What about it?”

“Did I hurt you?”

She laughed again, lightly. “Now you ask. You are indeed all man.”

In the morning, we took another meal from the ancient restaurant, food that had been manufactured from raw molecules while we waited, or perhaps stored somewhere for millennia.

We left by the corridor opposite the one by which we had entered, heading for the other side of the mountain range. Nahid limped but made no complaint. The passage ended in another door, beyond which a cave twisted upward. In one place, the ceiling of the cave had collapsed, and we had to crawl on our bellies over rubble through the narrow gap it had left. The exit was onto a horizontal shelf overgrown with trees, well below the pass. It was mid-morning. A misting rain fell across the Sharishabz Valley. In the distance, hazed by clouds of mist, I caught a small gleam of the white buildings of the monastery on the Penitent’s Ridge. I pointed it out to Nahid. We scanned the mountainside below us, searching for the forest road.

Nahid found the thread of the road before I. “No sign of the Caslonians,” she said.

“They’re guarding the pass on the other side of the mountain, searching the woods there for us.”

We descended the slope, picking our way through the trees toward the road. The mist left drops of water on our skinsuits, but did not in any way slow us. My spirits rose. I could see the end of this adventure in sight, and wondered what would happen to Nahid then.

“What will you do when we get to the monastery?” I asked her.

“I think I’ll leave as soon as I can. I don’t want to be there when the Caslonians find out you’ve reached your order with the plays.”

“They won’t do anything. The gods hold the monastery in their hands.”

“Let us hope they don’t drop it.”

She would die soon, the statue had said—if left to the gods. But what person was not at the mercy of the gods? Still, she would be much more at risk alone, away from the order. “What about your leg?” I asked.

“Do you have a clinic there?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll take an exoskeleton and some painkillers and be on my way.”

“Where will you go?”

“Wherever I can.”

“But you don’t even know what’s happened in the last sixty years. What can you do?”

“Maybe my people are still alive. That’s where I’ll go—the town where I grew up. Perhaps I’ll find someone who remembers me. Maybe I’ll find my own grave.”

“Don’t go.”

She strode along more aggressively. I could see her wince with each step. “Look, I don’t care about your monastery. I don’t care about these plays. Mostly, I don’t care about you. Give me some painkillers and an exo, and I’ll be gone.”

That ended our conversation. We walked on in silence through the woods, me brooding, she limping along, grimacing.

We found the forest road. Here the land fell away sharply, and the road, hardly more than a gravel track, switchbacked severely as we made our way down the mountainside. We met no signs of pursuit. Though the rain continued, the air warmed as we moved lower, and beads of sweat trickled down my back under the skinsuit. The boots I wore were not meant for hiking, and by now my feet were sore, my back hurt. I could only imagine how bad it was for Nahid.

I had worked for years to manage my appetites, and yet I could not escape images of our night together. With a combination of shame and desire, I wanted her still. I did not think I could go back to being just another monk. The order had existed long before the Caslonian conquest, and would long outlast it. I was merely a cell passing through the body of this immortal creation. What did the gods want from me? What was to come of all this?

At the base of the trail, the road straightened, following the course of the River Sharishabz up the valley. Ahead rose the plateau, the gleaming white buildings of the monastery clearly visible now. The ornamental gardens, the terraced fields tended by the order for millennia. I could almost taste the sweet oranges and pomegranates. It would be good to be back home, a place where I could hide away from the world and figure out exactly what was in store for me. I wouldn’t mind being hailed as a hero, the liberator of our people, like Stochik himself, who took the plays from the hands of the gods.

The valley sycamores and aspens rustled with the breeze. The afternoon passed. We stopped by the stream and drank. Rested, then continued.

We came to a rise in the road, where it twisted to climb the plateau. Signs here of travel, ruts of iron wheels where people from the villages drove supplies to the monastery. Pilgrims passed this way—though there was no sign of anyone today.

We made a turn in the road, and I heard a yelp behind me. I turned to find Nahid struggling in the middle of the road. At first, I thought she was suffering a seizure. Her body writhed and jerked. Then I realized, from the slick of rain deflected from his form, that she was being assaulted by a person in an invisibility cloak.

This understanding had only flashed through my mind when I was thrown to the ground by an unseen hand. I kicked out wildly, and my boot made contact. Gravel sprayed beside me where my attacker fell. I slipped into accelerated mode, kicked him again, rolled away, and dashed into the woods. Above me I heard the whine of an approaching flyer. Run! It was the voice of Horus, god of sun and moon.

I ran. The commandos did not know these woods the way I did. I had spent ten years exploring them, playing games of hide and hunt in the night with my fellow novices: I knew I could find my way to the monastery without them capturing me.

And Nahid? Clearly this was her spoken-of death. No doubt it had already taken place. Or perhaps they wouldn’t kill her immediately, but would torture her, assuming she knew something, or even if they knew she didn’t, taking some measure of revenge on her body. It was the lot of a Republican Guard to receive such treatment. She would even expect it. The order comes first.

Every second took me farther from the road, away from the Caslonians. But after a minute of hurrying silently through the trees, I felt something heavy in my hand. I stopped. Without realizing it, I had taken the object the metal man had given me out of my belt pouch. She would not want you to return. The freedom of her people comes before her personal safety.

I circled back, and found them in the road.

The flyer had come down athwart the road. The soldiers had turned off their cloaks, three men garbed head to toe in the matte gray of light deflection suits. Two soldiers had Nahid on her knees in the drizzle, her hands tied behind her back. One jerked her head back by her hair, holding a knife to her throat while an officer asked her questions. The officer slapped her, whipping the back of his gloved hand across her face.

I moved past them through the woods, sound of rain on the foliage, still holding the metal sphere in my hand. The flyer sat only a few meters into the road. I crouched there, staring at the uncouth object. I rotated it in my palm until I found the surface pentagon that was silvered. I depressed this pentagon until it clicked.

Then I flipped it out into the road, under the landing pads of the flyer, and fell back.

It was not so much an explosion as a vortex, warping the flyer into an impossible shape, throwing it off they road. As it spun the pilot was tossed from the cockpit, his uniform flaring in electric blue flame. The three men with Nahid were sucked off their feet by the dimensional warp. They jerked their heads toward the screaming pilot. The officer staggered to his feet, took two steps toward him, and one of the men followed. By that time, I had launched myself into the road, and slammed my bad shoulder into the small of the back of the man holding Nahid. I seized his rifle and fired, killing the officer and the other soldier, then the one I had just laid flat. The pilot was rolling in the gravel to extinguish the flames. I stepped forward calmly and shot him in the head.

Acrid black smoke rose from the crushed flyer, which lay on its side in the woods.

Nahid was bleeding from a cut on her neck. She held her palm against the wound, but the blood seeped steadily from between her fingers. I gathered her up and dragged her into the woods before reinforcements could arrive.

“Thank you,” Nahid gasped, her eyes large, and fixed on me. We limped off into the trees.

Nahid was badly hurt, but I knew where we were, and I managed, through that difficult night, to get us up the pilgrim’s trail to the monastery. By the time we reached the iron door we called the Mud Gate she had lost consciousness and I was carrying her. Her blood was all over us, and I could not tell if she yet breathed.

We novices had used this gate many times to sneak out of the monastery to play martial games in the darkness, explore the woods, and pretend we were ordinary men. Men who, when they desired something, had only to take it. Men who were under no vow of non-violence. Here I had earned a week’s fast by bloodying the nose, in a fit of temper, of Brother Taher. Now I returned, unrepentant over the number of men I had killed in the last days, a man who had disobeyed the voice of a god, hoping to save Nahid before she bled out.

Brother Pramha was the first to greet me. He looked at me with shock. “Who is this?’ he asked.

“This is a friend, a soldier, Nahid. Quickly. She needs care.”

Together we took her to the clinic. Pramha ran off to inform the master. Our physician Brother Nastricht sealed her throat wound, and gave her new blood. I held her hand. She did not regain consciousness.

Soon, one of the novices arrived to summon me to Master Darius’ chambers. Although I was exhausted, I hurried after him through the warren of corridors, up the tower steps. I unbelted my blaster and handed it to the novice—he seemed distressed to hold the destructive device—and entered the room.

Beyond the broad window that formed the far wall of the chamber, dawn stained the sky pink. Master Darius held out his arms. I approached him, humbly bowed my head, and he embraced me. The warmth of his large body enfolding me was an inexpressible comfort. He smelled of cinnamon. He let me go, held me at arm’s length, and smiled. The kosode he wore I recognized as one I had sewn myself. “I cannot tell you how good it is to see you, Adlan.”

“I have the plays,” I announced.

“The behavior of our Caslonian masters has been proof enough of that,” he replied. His broad, plain face was somber as he told me of the massacre in Radnapuja, where the colonial government had held six thousand citizens hostage, demanding the bodily presentation, alive, of the foul villain, the man without honor or soul, the sacrilegious terrorist who had stolen the Foundational Plays.

“Six thousand dead?”

“They won’t be the last,” the master said. “The plays have been used as a weapon, as a means of controlling us. The beliefs which they embody work within the minds and souls of every person on this planet. They work even on those who are unbelievers.”

“Nahid is an unbeliever.”

“Nahid? She is this soldier whom you brought here?”

“The Republican Guard you sent with me. She doesn’t believe, but she has played her role in bringing me here.”

Master Darius poured me a glass of fortifying spirits, and handed it to me as if he were a novice and I the master. He sat in his great chair, had me sit in the chair opposite, and bade me recount every detail of the mission. I did so.

“It is indeed miraculous that you have come back alive,” Master Darius mused. “Had you died, the plays would have been lost forever.”

“The gods would not allow such a sacrilege.”

“Perhaps. You carry the only copies in your mind?”

“Indeed. I have even quoted them to Nahid.”

“Not at any length, I hope.”

I laughed at his jest. “But now we can free Helvetica,” I said. “Before any further innocents are killed, you must contact the Caslonian colonial government and tell them we have the plays. Tell them they must stop or we will destroy them.”

Master Darius held up his hand and looked at me piercingly—I had seen this gesture many times in his tutoring of me. “First, let me ask you some questions about your tale. You tell me that, when you first came to consciousness after stealing the plays in the Imperial City, a god told you to run. Yet to run in the Caslonian capital is only to attract unwelcome attention.”

“Yes. Bishamon must have wanted to hurry my escape.”

“But when you reached the port bazaar, the god told you to stop and enter the restaurant. You run to attract attention, and dawdle long enough to allow time for you to be caught. Does this make sense?”

My fatigue made it difficult for me to think. What point was the master trying to make? “Perhaps I was not supposed to stop,” I replied. “It was my own weakness. I was hungry.”

“Then, later, you tell me that when the commandos boarded your ship, you escaped by following Nahid’s lead, not the word of the gods.”

“Liu-Bei led us out of the engine room. I think this is a matter of my misinterpreting—”

“And this metal man you encountered in the ancient city. Did he in fact say that the gods would have seen Nahid dead?”

“The statue said many mad things.”

“Yet the device he gave you was the agent of her salvation?”

“I used it for that.” Out of shame, I had not told Master Darius that I had disobeyed the command of the god who told me to flee.

“Many paradoxes.” The master took a sip from his own glass. “So, if we give the plays back, what will happen then?”

“Then Helvetica will be free.”

“And after that?”

“After that, we can do as we wish. The Caslonians would not dare to violate a holy vow. The gods would punish them. They know that. They are believers, as are we.”

“Yes, they are believers. They would obey any compact they made, for fear of the wrath of the gods. They believe what you hold contained in your mind, Adlan, is true. So, as you say, you must give them to me now, and I will see to their disposition.”

“Their disposition? How will you see to their disposition?”

“That is not something for you to worry about, my son. You have done well, and you deserve all our thanks. Brother Ishmael will see to unburdening you of the great weight you carry.”

A silence ensued. I knew it was a sign of my dismissal. I must go to Brother Ishmael. But I did not rise. “What will you do with them?”

Master Darius’ brown eyes lay steady on me, and quiet. “You have always been my favorite. I think perhaps, you know what I intend.”

I pondered our conversation. “You—you’re going to destroy them.”

“Perhaps I was wrong not to have you destroy them the minute you gained access to the archives. But at that time I had not come to these conclusions.”

“But the wrath of the Caslonians will know no limit! We will be exterminated!”

“We may be exterminated, and Helvetica remain in chains, but once these plays are destroyed, never to be recovered, then humanity will begin to be truly free. This metal man, you say, told you the gods left the better part of themselves behind. That is profoundly true. Yet there is no moment when they cease to gaze over our shoulders. Indeed, if we are ever to be free human beings, and not puppets jerked about by unseen forces—which may, or may not, exist—the gods must go. And the beginning of that process is the destruction of the foundational plays.”

I did not know how to react. In my naiveté I said, “This does not seem right.”

“I assure you, my son, that it is.”

“If we destroy the plays, it will be the last thing we ever do.”

“Of course not. Time will not stop.”

“Time may not stop,” I said, “but it might as well. Any things that happen after the loss of the gods will have no meaning.”

Master Darius rose from his chair and moved toward his desk. “You are tired, and very young,” he said, his back to me. “I have lived in the shadow of the gods far longer than you have.” He reached over his desk, opened a drawer, took something out, and straightened.

He is lying. It seemed to me to be the voice of Inti himself. I stood. I felt surpassing weariness, but I moved silently. In my boot I still carried the force knife I had stolen from the restaurant on Caslon. I drew out the hilt, switched on the blade, and approached the master just as he began to turn.

When he faced me, he had a blaster in his hands. He was surprised to find me so close to him. His eyes went wide as I slipped the blade into his belly below his lowest rib.

Stochik:

Here ends our story.

Let no more be said of our fall.

Mark the planting of this seed.

The tree that grows in this place

Will bear witness to our deeds;

No other witness shall we have.

Selene:

I would not depart with any other

My love. Keep alive whatever word

May permit us to move forward.

Leaving all else behind we must

Allow the world to come to us.

The Caslonian government capitulated within a week after we contacted them. Once they began to withdraw their forces from the planet and a provisional government for the Helvetican Republic was re-established in Astara, I underwent the delicate process of downloading the foundational dramas from my mind. The Abandonment was once again embodied in a crystal, which was presented to the Caslonian legate in a formal ceremony on the anniversary of the rebirth of man.

The ceremony took place on a bright day in midsummer in that city of a thousand spires. Sunlight flooded the streets, where citizens in vibrant colored robes danced and sang to the music of bagpipes. Pennants in purple and green flew from those spires; children hung out of second-story school windows, shaking snowstorms of confetti on the parades. The smell of incense wafted down from the great temple, and across the sky flyers drew intricate patterns with lines of colored smoke.

Nahid and I were there on that day, though I did not take a leading role in the ceremony, preferring to withdraw to my proper station. In truth, I am not a significant individual. I have only served the gods.

I left the order as soon as the negotiations were completed. At first the brothers were appalled by my murder of Master Darius. I explained to them that he had gone mad and intended to kill me in order to destroy the plays. There was considerable doubt. But when I insisted that we follow through with the plan as the Master had presented it to the brothers before sending me on my mission, they seemed to take my word about his actions. The success of our thieving enterprise overshadowed the loss of the great leader, and indeed has contributed to his legend, making of him a tragic figure. A drama has been written of his life and death, and the liberation of Helvetica.

Last night, Nahid and I, with our children and grandchildren, watched it performed in the square of the town where we set up the tailor’s shop that has been the center of our lives for the last forty years. Seeing the events of my youth played out on the platform, in their comedy and tragedy, hazard and fortune, calls again to my mind the question of whether I have deserved the blessings that have fallen to me ever since that day. I have not heard the voices of the gods since I slipped the knife into the belly of the man who taught me all that I knew of grace.

The rapid decline of the Caslonian Empire, and the Helvetican renaissance that has led to our current prosperity, all date from that moment in his chambers when I ended his plan to free men from belief and duty. The people, joyous on their knees in the temples of twelve planets, give praise to the gods for their deliverance, listen, hear, and obey.

Soon I will rest beneath the earth, like the metal man who traduced the gods, though less likely than he ever to walk again. If I have done wrong, it is not for me to judge. I rest, my lover’s hand in mine, in the expectation of no final word.

Originally published in The New Space Opera 2,
edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

John Kessel is the author of the forthcoming novel The Moon and the Other. His other novels are Good News from Outer Space and Corrupting Dr. Nice and in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, Freedom Beach. His short story collections are Meeting in Infinity, The Pure Product, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories and The Collected Kessel. His fiction has twice received the Nebula Award, in addition to the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Locus Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His play “Faustfeathers” won the Paul Green Playwright’s Prize, and his story “A Clean Escape” was adapted as an episode of the 2006 ABC TV series Masters of Science Fiction. In 2009 his story “Pride and Prometheus” received both the Nebula and the Shirley Jackson Awards.

With Kelly, he has edited six anthologies of stories re-visioning contemporary short speculative fiction, most recently Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology (2012) and Kafkaesque (2011).

Kessel has taught American literature and fiction writing at North Carolina State University since 1982, helped found the NCSU MFA program in creative writing, and served twice as its director. He lives with his wife, the novelist Therese Anne Fowler, in Raleigh.

The Shipmaker

Aliette de Bodard

Ships were living, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this, even before she’d reached the engineering habitat—even before she’d seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.

Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced together. They had to flow into a seamless whole—to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who was as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.

The Easterners or the Mexica didn’t understand. They spoke of recycling, of design efficiency: they saw only the parts taken from previous ships, and assumed it was done to save money and time. They didn’t understand why Dac Kien’s work as Grand Master of Design Harmony was the most important on the habitat: the ship, once made, would be one entity, and not a patchwork of ten thousand others. To Dac Kien—and to the one who would come after her, the Mind-bearer—fell the honor of helping the ship into being, of transforming metal and cables and solar cells into an entity that would sail the void between the stars.

The door slid open. Dac Kien barely looked up. The light tread of the feet told her this was one of the lead designers, either Miahua or Feng. Neither would have disturbed her without cause. With a sigh, she disconnected from the system with a flick of her hands, and waited for the design’s overlay on her vision to disappear.

“Your Excellency.” Miahua’s voice was quiet: the Xuyan held herself upright, her skin as pale as yellowed wax. “The shuttle has come back. There’s someone on board you should see.”

Dac Kien had expected many things: a classmate from the examinations on a courtesy visit; an Imperial Censor from Dongjing, calling her to some other posting, even further away from the capital; or perhaps even someone from her family, mother or sister or uncle’s wife, here to remind her of the unsuitability of her life choices.

She hadn’t expected a stranger: a woman with brown skin, almost dark enough to be Viet herself—her lips thin and white, her eyes as round as the moon.

A Mexica. A foreigner—Dac Kien stopped the thought before it could go far. For the woman wore no cotton, no feathers, but the silk robes of a Xuyan housewife, and the five wedding gifts (all pure gold, from necklace to bracelets) shone like stars on the darkness of her skin.

Dac Kien’s gaze traveled down to the curve of the woman’s belly: a protruding bulge so voluminous that it threw her whole silhouette out of balance. “I greet you, younger sister. I am Dac Kien, Grand Master of Design Harmony for this habitat.” She used the formal tone, suitable for addressing a stranger.

“Elder sister.” The Mexica’s eyes were bloodshot, set deep within the heavy face. “I am—” She grimaced, one hand going to her belly as if to tear it out. “Zoquitl,” she whispered at last, the accents of her voice slipping back to the harsh patterns of her native tongue. “My name is Zoquitl.” Her eyes started to roll upwards; she went on, taking on the cadences of something learned by rote. “I am the womb and the resting place, the quickener and the Mind-bearer.”

Dac Kien’s stomach roiled, as if an icy fist were squeezing it. “You’re early. The ship—”

“The ship has to be ready.”

The interjection surprised her. All her attention had been focused on the Mexica—Zoquitl—and what her coming here meant. Now she forced herself to look at the other passenger of the shuttle: a Xuyan man in his mid-thirties. His accent was that of Anjiu province, on the Fifth Planet; his robes, with the partridge badge and the button of gold, were those of a minor official of the seventh rank—but they were marked with the yin-yang symbol, showing stark black-and white against the silk.

“You’re the birth-master,” she said.

He bowed. “I have that honor.” His face was harsh, all angles and planes on which the light caught—highlighting, here and there, the thin lips, the high cheekbones. “Forgive me my abruptness, but there is no time to lose.”

“I don’t understand—” Dac Kien looked again at the woman, whose eyes bore a glazed look of pain. “She’s early,” she said, flatly, and she wasn’t speaking of their arrival time.

The birth-master nodded.

“How long?”

“A week, at most.” The birth-master grimaced. “The ship has to be ready.”

Dac Kien tasted bile in her mouth. The ship was all but made—and, like a jade statue, it would brook no corrections nor oversights. Dac Kien and her team had designed it specifically for the Mind within Zoquitl’s womb: starting out from the specifications the imperial alchemists had given them, the delicate balance of humors, optics, and flesh that made up the being Zoquitl carried. The ship would answer to nothing else: only Zoquitl’s Mind would be able to seize the heartroom, to quicken the ship, and take it into deep planes, where fast star-travel was possible.

“I can’t—” Dac Kien started, but the birth-master shook his head, and she didn’t need to hear his answer to know what he would say.

She had to. This had been the posting she’d argued for, after she came in second at the state examinations—this, not a magistrate’s tribunal and district, not a high-placed situation in the palace’s administration, not the prestigious Courtyard of Writing Brushes, as would have been her right. This was what the imperial court would judge her on.

She wouldn’t get another chance.

“A week.” Hanh shook her head. “What do they think you are, a Mexica factory overseer?”

“Hanh.” It had been a long day, and Dac Kien had come back to their quarters looking for comfort. In hindsight, she should have known how Hanh would take the news: her partner was an artist, a poet, always seeking the right word and the right allusion—ideally suited to understanding the delicacy that went into the design of a ship, less than ideal to acknowledge any need for urgency.

“I have to do this,” Dac Kien said.

Hanh grimaced. “Because they’re pressuring you into it? You know what it will look like.” She gestured towards the low mahogany table in the center of the room. The ship’s design hung inside a translucent cube, gently rotating—the glimpses of its interior interspersed with views of other ships, the ones from which it had taken its inspiration: all the greats from The Red Carp to The Golden Mountain and The Snow-White Blossom. Their hulls gleamed in the darkness, slowly and subtly bending out of shape to become the final structure of the ship hanging outside the habitat. “It’s a whole, lil’ sis. You can’t butcher it and hope to keep your reputation intact.”

“She could die of it,” Dac Kien said, at last. “Of the birth, and it would be worse if she did it for nothing.”

“The girl? She’s gui. Foreign.”

Meaning she shouldn’t matter. “So were we, once upon a time.” Dac Kien said. “You have short memories.”

Hanh opened her mouth, closed it. She could have pointed out that they weren’t quite outsiders—that China, Xuya’s motherland, had once held Dai Viet for centuries; but Hanh was proud of being Viet, and certainly not about to mention such shameful details. “It’s the girl that’s bothering you, then?”

“She does what she wants,” Dac Kien said.

“For the prize.” Hanh’s voice was faintly contemptuous. Most of the girls who bore Minds were young and desperate, willing to face the dangers of the pregnancy in exchange for a marriage to a respected official. For a status of their own, a family that would welcome them in; and a chance to bear children of good birth.

Both Hanh and Dac Kien had made the opposite choice, long ago. For them, as for every Xuyan who engaged in same-gender relationships, there would be no children: no one to light incense at the ancestral altars, no voices to chant and honor their names after they were gone. Through life, they would be second-class citizens, consistently failing to accomplish their duties to their ancestors; in death, they would be spurned, forgotten—gone as if they had never been.

“I don’t know,” Dac Kien said. “She’s Mexica. They see things differently, where she comes from.”

“From what you’re telling me, she’s doing this for Xuyan reasons.”

For fame, and for children; all that Hanh despised—what she called their shackles, their overwhelming need to produce children, generation after generation.

Dac Kien bit her lip, wishing she could have Hanh’s unwavering certainties. “It’s not as if I have much choice in the matter.”

Hanh was silent for a while. At length, she moved, came to rest behind Dac Kien, her hair falling down over Dac Kien’s shoulders, her hands trailing at Dac Kien’s nape. “You’re the one who keeps telling me we always have a choice, lil’ sis.”

Dac Kien shook her head. She said that—when weary of her family’s repeated reminders that she should marry and have children; when they lay in the darkness side by side after making love and she saw the future stretching in front of her, childless and ringed by old prejudices.

Hanh, much as she tried, didn’t understand. She’d always wanted to be a scholar, had always known that she’d grow up to love another woman. She’d always got what she wanted—and she was convinced she only had to wish for something hard enough for it to happen.

And Hanh had never wished, and would never wish for children.

“It’s not the same,” Dac Kien said at last, cautiously submitting to Hanh’s caresses. It was something else entirely; and even Hanh had to see that. “I chose to come here. I chose to make my name that way. And we always have to see our choices through.”

Hanh’s hands on her shoulders tightened. “You’re one to talk. I can see you wasting yourself in regrets, wondering if there’s still time to turn back to respectability. But you chose me. This life, these consequences. We both chose.”

“Hanh—” It’s not that, Dac Kien wanted to say. She loved Hanh, she truly did; but . . . She was a stone thrown in the darkness; a ship adrift without nav—lost, without family or husband to approve of her actions, and without the comfort of a child destined to survive her.

“Grow up, lil’ sis.” Hanh’s voice was harsh; her face turned away, towards the paintings of landscapes on the wall. “You’re no one’s toy or slave—and especially not your family’s.”

Because they had all but disowned her. But words, as usual, failed Dac Kien; and they went to bed with the shadow of the old argument still between them, like the blade of a sword.

The next day, Dac Kien pored over the design of the ship with Feng and Miahua, wondering how she could modify it. The parts were complete, and assembling them would take a few days at most; but the resulting structure would never be a ship. That much was clear to all of them. Even excepting the tests, there was at least a month’s work ahead of them—slow and subtle touches laid by the bots over the overall system to align it with its destined Mind.

Dac Kien had taken the cube from her quarters, and brought it into her office under Hanh’s glowering gaze. Now, they all crowded around it voicing ideas, the cups of tea forgotten in the intensity of the moment.

Feng’s wrinkled face was creased in thought as he tapped one side of the cube. “We could modify the shape of this corridor, here. Wood would run through the whole ship, and—”

Miahua shook her head. She was their Master of Wind and Water, the one who could best read the lines of influence, the one Dac Kien turned to when she herself had a doubt over the layout. Feng was Commissioner of Supplies, managing the systems and safety—in many ways Miahua’s opposite, given to small adjustments rather than large ones, pragmatic where she verged on the mystical.

“The humors of water and wood would stagnate here, in the control room.” Miahua pursed her lips, pointed to the slender aft of the ship. “The shape of this section should be modified.”

Feng sucked in a breath. “That’s not trivial. For my team to rewrite the electronics—”

Dac Kien listened to them arguing, distantly—intervening with a question from time to time, to keep the conversation from dying down. In her mind, she held the shape of the ship, felt it breathe through the glass of the cube, through the layers of fibers and metal that separated her from the structure outside. She held the shape of the Mind—the essences and emotions that made it, the layout of its sockets and cables, of its muscles and flesh—and slid them together gently, softly until they seemed made for one another.

She looked up. Both Feng and Miahua had fallen silent, waiting for her to speak.

“This way,” she said. “Remove this section altogether, and shift the rest of the layout.” As she spoke, she reached into the glass matrix, and carefully excised the offending section—rerouting corridors and lengths of cables, burning new decorative calligraphy onto the curved walls.

“I don’t think—” Feng said; and stopped. “Miahua?”

Miahua was watching the new design, carefully. “I need to think about it, Your Excellency. Let me discuss it with my subordinates.”

Dac Kien made a gesture of approval. “Remember that we don’t have much time.”

They both took a copy of the design with them, snug in their long sleeves. Left alone, Dac Kien stared at the ship again. It was squat, its proportions out of kilter—not even close to what she had imagined, not even true to the spirit of her work: a mockery of the original design, like a flower without petals, or a poem that didn’t quite gel, hovering on the edge of poignant allusions but never expressing them properly.

“We don’t always have a choice,” she whispered. She’d have prayed to her ancestors, had she thought they were still listening. Perhaps they were. Perhaps the shame of having a daughter who would have no descendants was erased by the exalted heights of her position. Or perhaps not. Her mother and grandmother were unforgiving; what made her think that those more removed ancestors would understand her decision?

“Elder sister?”

Zoquitl stood at the door, hovering uncertainly. Dac Kien’s face must have revealed more than she thought. She forced herself to breathe, relaxing all her muscles until it was once more the blank mask required by protocol. “Younger sister,” she said. “You honor me by your presence.”

Zoquitl shook her head. She slid carefully into the room—one foot after the other, careful never to lose her balance. “I wanted to see the ship.”

The birth-master was nowhere to be seen. Dac Kien hoped that he had been right about the birth—that it wasn’t about to happen now, in her office, with no destination and no assistance. “It’s here.” She shifted positions on her chair, invited Zoquitl to sit.

Zoquitl wedged herself in one of the seats, her movements fragile, measured—as if any wrong gesture would shatter her. Behind her loomed one of Dac Kien’s favorite paintings, an image from the Third Planet: a delicate, peaceful landscape of waterfalls and ochre cliffs, with the distant light of stars reflected in the water.

Zoquitl didn’t move as Dac Kien showed her the design; her eyes were the only thing which seemed alive in the whole of her face.

When Dac Kien was finished, the burning gaze was transferred to her—looking straight into her eyes, a clear breach of protocol. “You’re just like the others. You don’t approve,” Zoquitl said.

It took Dac Kien a moment to process the words, but they still meant nothing to her. “I don’t understand.”

Zoquitl’s lips pursed. “Where I come from, it’s an honor to bear Minds for the glory of the Mexica Dominion.”

“But you’re here,” Dac Kien said. In Xuya, among Xuyans, to bear Minds was a sacrifice—necessary and paid for, but ill-considered. For who would want to endure a pregnancy, yet produce no human child? Only the desperate or the greedy.

“You’re here as well.” Zoquitl’s voice was almost an accusation.

For an endless, agonizing moment, Dac Kien thought Zoquitl was referring to her life choices—how did she know about Hanh, about her family’s stance? Then she understood that Zoquitl had been talking about her place onboard the habitat. “I like being in space,” Dac Kien said, at last, and it wasn’t a lie. “Being here almost alone, away from everyone else.”

And this wasn’t paperwork, or the slow drain of catching and prosecuting law-breakers, of keeping Heaven’s order on some remote planet. This—this was everything scholarship was meant to be: taking all that the past had given them, and reshaping it into greatness—every part throwing its neighbors into sharper relief, an eternal reminder of how history had brought them here and how it would carry them forward, again and again.

At last, Zoquitl said, not looking at the ship anymore, “Xuya is a harsh place, for foreigners. The language isn’t so bad, but when you have no money, and no sponsor . . . ” She breathed in, quick and sharp. “I do what needs doing.” Her hand went, unconsciously, to the mound of her belly, and stroked it. “And I give him life. How can you not value this?”

She used the animate pronoun, without a second thought.

Dac Kien shivered. “He’s—” she paused, groping for words. “He has no father. A mother, perhaps, but there isn’t much of you inside him. He won’t be counted among your descendants. He won’t burn incense on your altar, or chant your name among the stars.”

“But he won’t die.” Zoquitl’s voice was soft, and cutting. “Not for centuries.”

The ships made by the Mexica Dominion lived long, but their Minds slowly went insane from repeated journeys into deep planes. This Mind, with a proper anchor, a properly aligned ship—Zoquitl was right: he would remain as he was, long after she and Zoquitl were both dead. He—no, it—it was a machine—a sophisticated intelligence, an assembly of flesh and metal and Heaven knew what else. Borne like a child, but still . . .

“I think I’m the one who doesn’t understand.” Zoquitl pulled herself to her feet, slowly. Dac Kien could hear her labored breath, could smell the sour, sharp sweat rolling off her. “Thank you, elder sister.”

And then she was gone; but her words remained.

Dac Kien threw herself into her work—as she had done before, when preparing for the state examinations. Hahn pointedly ignored her when she came home, making only the barest attempts at courtesy. She was working again on her calligraphy, mingling Xuyan characters with the letters of the Viet alphabet to create a work that spoke both as a poem and as a painting. It wasn’t unusual: Dac Kien had come to be accepted for her talent, but her partner was another matter. Hanh wasn’t welcome in the banquet room, where the families of the other engineers would congregate in the evenings—she preferred to remain alone in their quarters, rather than endure the barely concealed snubs or the pitying looks of the others.

What gave the air its leaden weight, though, was her silence. Dac Kien tried at first—keeping up a chatter, as if nothing were wrong. Hanh raised bleary eyes from her manuscript, and said, simply, “You know what you’re doing, lil’ sis. Live with it, for once.”

So it was silence, in the end. It suited her better than she’d thought it would. It was her and the design, with no one to blame or interfere.

Miahua’s team and Feng’s team were rewiring the structure and re-arranging the parts. Outside the window, the mass of the hull shifted and twisted, to align itself with the cube on her table—bi-hour after bi-hour, as the bots gently slid sections into place and sealed them.

The last section was being put into place when Miahua and the birth-master came to see her, both looking equally pre-occupied.

Her heart sank. “Don’t tell me,” Dac Kien said. “She’s due now.”

“She’s lost the waters,” the birth-master said, without preamble. He spat on the floor to ward off evil spirits, who always crowded around the mother in the hour of a birth. “You have a few bi-hours, at most.”

“Miahua?” Dac Kien wasn’t looking at either of them, but rather at the ship outside, the huge bulk that dwarfed them all in its shadow.

Her Master of Wind and Water was silent for a while—usually a sign that she was arranging problems in the most suitable order. Not good. “The structure will be finished before this bi-hour is over.”

“But?” Dac Kien said.

“But it’s a mess. The lines of wood cross those of metal, and there are humors mingling with each other and stagnating everywhere. The qi won’t flow.”

The qi, the breath of the universe—of the dragon that lay at the heart of every planet, of every star. As Master of Wind and Water, it was Miahua’s role to tell Dac Kien what had gone wrong, but as Grand Master of Design Harmony, it fell to Dac Kien to correct this. Miahua could only point out the results she saw: only Dac Kien could send the bots in to make the necessary adjustments to the structure. “I see,” Dac Kien said. “Prepare a shuttle for her. Have it wait outside, close to the ship’s docking bay.”

“Your Excellency—” the birth-master started, but Dac Kien cut him off.

“I have told you before. The ship will be ready.”

Miahua’s stance as she left was tense, all pent-up fears. Dac Kien thought of Hanh—alone in their room, stubbornly bent over her poem, her face as harsh as that of the birth-master, its customary roundness sharpened by anger and resentment. She’d say, again, that you couldn’t hurry things, that there were always possibilities. She’d say that—but she’d never understood there was always a price; and that, if you didn’t pay it, others did.

The ship would be ready; and Dac Kien would pay its price in full.

Alone again, Dac Kien connected to the system, letting the familiar overlay of the design take over her surroundings. She adjusted the contrast until the design was all she could see; and then she set to work.

Miahua was right: the ship was a mess. They had envisioned having a few days to tidy things up, to soften the angles of the corridors, to spread the wall-lanterns so there were no dark corners or spots shining with blinding light. The heartroom alone—the pentacle-shaped center of the ship, where the Mind would settle—had strands of four humors coming to an abrupt, painful stop within, and a sharp line just outside its entrance, marking the bots’ hasty sealing.

The killing breath, it was called; and it was everywhere.

Ancestors, watch over me.

A living, breathing thing—jade, whittled down to its essence. Dac Kien slid into the trance, her consciousness expanding to encompass the bots around the structure—sending them, one by one, inside the metal hull, scuttling down the curved corridors and passageways—gently merging with the walls, starting the slow and painful work of coaxing the metal into its proper shape—going up into the knot of cables, straightening them out, regulating the current in the larger ones. In her mind’s view, the ship seemed to flicker and fold back upon itself; she hung suspended outside, watching the bots crawl over it like ants, injecting commands into the different sections, in order to modify their balance of humors and inner structure.

She cut to the shuttle, where Zoquitl lay on her back, her face distorted into a grimace. The birth-master’s face was grim, turned upwards as if he could guess at Dac Kien’s presence.

Hurry. You don’t have time left. Hurry.

And still she worked—walls turned into mirrors, flowers were carved into the passageways, softening those hard angles and lines she couldn’t disguise. She opened up a fountain—all light projections, of course, there could be no real water aboard—let the recreated sound of a stream fill the structure. Inside the heartroom, the four tangled humors became three, then one; then she brought in other lines until the tangle twisted back upon itself, forming a complicated knot pattern that allowed strands of all five humors to flow around the room. Water, wood, fire, earth, metal, all circling the ship’s core, a stabilizing influence for the Mind, when it came to anchor itself there.

She flicked back the display to the shuttle, saw Zoquitl’s face, and the unbearable lines of tension in the other’s face.

Hurry.

It was not ready. But life didn’t wait until you were ready. Dac Kien turned off the display—but not the connection to the bots, leaving them time to finish their last tasks.

“Now,” she whispered, into the com system.

The shuttle launched itself towards the docking bay. Dac Kien dimmed the overlay, letting the familiar sight of the room re-assert itself—with the cube, and the design that should have been, the perfect one, the one that called to mind The Red Carp and The Turtle Over the Waves and The Dragon’s Twin Dreams, all the days of Xuya from the Exodus to the Pearl Wars, and the fall of the Shan Dynasty; and older things, too, Le Loi’s sword that had established a Viet dynasty; the dragon with spread wings flying over Hanoi, the Old Earth capital; the face of Huyen Tran, the Viet princess traded to foreigners in return for two provinces.

The bots were turning themselves off, one by one, and a faint breeze ran through the ship, carrying the smell of sea-laden water and of incense.

It could have been, that ship, that masterpiece. If she’d had time. Hanh was right, she could have made it work: it would have been hers, perfect, praised—remembered in the centuries to come, used as inspiration by hundreds of other Grand Masters.

If—

She didn’t know how long she stayed there, staring at the design—but an agonized cry tore her from her thoughts. Startled, she turned up the ship’s feed again, and selected a view into the birthing room.

The lights had been dimmed, leaving shadows everywhere, like a prelude to mourning. Dac Kien could see the bowl of tea given at the beginning of labor—it had rolled into a corner of the room, a few drops scattering across the floor.

Zoquitl crouched against a high-backed chair, framed by holos of two goddesses who watched over childbirth: the Princess of the Blue and Purple Clouds, and the Bodhisattva of Mercy. In the shadows, her face seemed to be that of a demon, the alienness of her features distorted by pain.

“Push,” the birth-master was saying, his hands on the quivering mound of her belly.

Push.

Blood ran down Zoquitl’s thighs, staining the metal surfaces until they reflected everything in shades of red. But her eyes were proud—those of an old warrior race, who’d never bent or bowed to anybody else. Her child of flesh, when it came, would be delivered the same way.

Dac Kien thought of Hanh, and of sleepless nights, of the shadow stretched over their lives, distorting everything.

“Push,” the birth-master said again, and more blood ran out. Push push push—and Zoquitl’s eyes were open, looking straight at her, and Dac Kien knew—she knew that the rhythm that racked Zoquitl, the pain that came in waves, it was all part of the same immutable law, the same thread that bound them more surely than the red one between lovers—what lay in the womb, under the skin, in their hearts and in their minds; a kinship of gender that wouldn’t ever be altered or extinguished. Her hand slid to her own flat, empty belly, pressed hard. She knew what that pain was, she could hold every layer of it in her mind as she’d held the ship’s design—and she knew that Zoquitl, like her, had been made to bear it.

Push.

With a final heart-wrenching scream, Zoquitl expelled the last of the Mind from her womb. It slid to the floor, a red, glistening mass of flesh and electronics: muscles and metal implants, veins and pins and cables.

It lay there, still and spent—and several heartbeats passed before Dac Kien realized it wouldn’t ever move.

Dac Kien put off visiting Zoquitl for days, still reeling from the shock of the birth. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw blood: the great mass sliding out of the womb, flopping on the floor like a dead fish, the lights of the birthing room glinting on metal wafers and gray matter, and everything dead, gone as if it had never been.

It had no name, of course—neither it nor the ship, both gone too soon to be graced with one.

Push. Push, and everything will be fine. Push.

Hanh tried her best: showing her poems with exquisite calligraphy; speaking of the future and of her next posting; fiercely making love to her as if nothing had ever happened, as if Dac Kien could just forget the enormity of the loss. But it wasn’t enough.

Just as the ship hadn’t been enough.

In the end, remorse drove Dac Kien, as surely as a barbed whip; and she boarded the shuttle to come over to the ship.

Zoquitl was in the birthing room, sitting wedged against the wall, with a bowl of pungent tea in her veined hands. The two holos framed her, their white-painted faces stark in the dim light, unforgiving. The birth-master hovered nearby, but was persuaded to leave them both alone—though he made it clear Dac Kien was responsible for anything that happened to Zoquitl.

“Elder sister.” Zoquitl smiled, a little bitterly. “It was a good fight.”

“Yes.” One Zoquitl could have won, if she had been given better weapons.

“Don’t look so sad,” Zoquitl said.

“I failed,” Dac Kien said, simply. She knew Zoquitl’s future was still assured; that she’d make her good marriage, and bear children, and be worshipped in her turn. But she also knew, now, that it wasn’t the only reason Zoquitl had borne the Mind.

Zoquitl’s lips twisted, into what might have been a smile. “Help me.”

“What?” Dac Kien looked at her, but Zoquitl was already pushing herself up, shaking, shivering, as carefully as she had done when pregnant. “The birth-master—”

“He’s fussing like an old woman,” Zoquitl said; and for a moment, her voice was as sharp and as cutting as a blade. “Come. Let’s walk.”

She was smaller than Dac Kien had thought: her shoulders barely came up to her own. She wedged herself awkwardly, leaning on Dac Kien for support—a weight that grew increasingly hard to bear as they walked through the ship.

There was light, and the sound of water, and the familiar feel of qi flowing through the corridors in lazy circles, breathing life into everything. There were shadows barely seen in mirrors, and the glint of other ships, too: the soft, curving patterns of The Golden Mountain; the carved calligraphy incised in the doors that had been the hallmark of The Tiger Who Leapt Over the Stream; the slowly curving succession of ever-growing doors of Baoyu’s Red Fan—bits and pieces salvaged from her design and put together into—into this, which unfolded its marvels all around her, from layout to electronics to decoration, until her head spun and her eyes blurred, taking it all in.

In the heartroom, Dac Kien stood unmoving, while the five humors washed over them, an endless cycle of destruction and renewal. The center was pristine, untouched, with a peculiar sadness hanging around it, like an empty crib. And yet . . .

“It’s beautiful,” Zoquitl said, her voice catching and quivering in her throat.

Beautiful as a poem declaimed in drunken games, as a flower bud ringed by frost—beautiful and fragile as a newborn child struggling to breathe.

And, standing there at the center of things, with Zoquitl’s frail body leaning against her, she thought of Hanh again; of shadows and darkness, and of life choices.

It’s beautiful.

It would be gone in a few days. Destroyed, recycled; forgotten and uncommemorated. But somehow, Dac Kien couldn’t bring herself to voice the thought.

Instead she said, softly, into the silence—knowing it to be true of more than the ship—“It was worth it.”

All of it—now and in the years to come, and she wouldn’t look back, or regret.

Originally published in Interzone, Issue 231, September 2010.

About the Author

Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction: her short stories have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Association Award. She is the author of The House of Shattered Wings, a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which won the 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, and its upcoming sequel The House of Binding Thorns, out in April 2017. She lives in Paris.

The Evolved Brain

Benjamin C. Kinney

In 2014, the psychologist Gary Marcus from New York University gathered a book of essays by the world’s leading neuroscientists, including multiple Nobel prize winners. From this experience, he drew one main lesson: we have no unifying idea about how the brain works.

However, Dr. Marcus and his essayists missed something. We comprehend much more than they think, and a unified understanding of the brain can guide our thinking, and our fiction, about the human brain and mind.

According to Dr. Marcus, biology is a riot of complexity, devoid of the mathematical elegance and simplicity that can arise in physics. Neuroscience is perversely resistant to theory: “No overarching theory of neuroscience could predict, for example, that the cerebellum (which is involved in timing and motor control) would have vastly more neurons than the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain most associated with our advanced intelligence).”

Our knowledge about the brain dwarfs our understanding of how the brain works. Modern neuroscience began in 1888, when a Spanish artist-turned-physician named Santiago Ramón y Cajal proved that the nervous system was made of cells we now call neurons. In the nearly 130 years since then, scientists have collected a vast trove of data about the brain, culminating in at least 100,000 peer-reviewed scholarly articles in 2015. But data alone cannot explain anything: in any field of science, one of the hardest parts is sifting through messy data to draw conclusions and interpretations. To integrate information into understanding, we need a theory of the brain.

A good theory would not only account for what we observe, but provide some insight into why the brain might be organized this way. To continue with Dr. Marcus’ example, the cerebellum contains half of the brain’s total neurons, devoted to movement timing and refinement. This flies in the face of our natural assumptions about the role and value of humanity itself. What is the brain doing, if not intelligence and planning? If we can’t explain half of the brain’s components, our understanding must be seriously deficient. And, indeed, our old ideas of the brain—both commonsense and scientific—break down in many ways.

Foremost among these old ideas is the information processing (IP) model, which has served as our dominant explanation for brain function since the 1950’s. In its most well-known form, the IP model says the brain is a computer. On the most literal level, this is obviously false: unlike any device we’d recognize as a modern computer, the brain is a massively parallel system of distributed but interconnected components. There is no flow of data from input to processing to output; the brain doesn’t even make clear distinctions between processing and input/output.

The IP model has obvious problems, but it’s not so easily dismissed. According to a classic saying in science, “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” A newer version makes the distinction clearer: “Models have no truth value, but some models are useful.” Models and theories are like maps: they could be inaccurate or outdated, but they could never be true, because their whole purpose is to represent reality at some level of abstraction and generalization. The test of a good map, or a good theory, is whether it improves our understanding. So, what does the IP model teach us?

The brain isn’t built like a computer, but it could function like a computer: via algorithms (processing) on abstract representations (data/information). This is the secret to the IP model’s persistence and usefulness, across decades of research and popular culture: it’s hardware-independent. If any system can execute algorithms, it can process information—regardless of whether its hardware is silicon, neurons, or Charles Babbage’s clockwork gears. If humans and computers can execute any algorithm (i.e. run any program), the IP model says we’re all functionally equivalent computing devices, no matter our hardware or wetware.

The IP model allows us to describe the brain as a computing device, but that description is still, by far, not the best one. The IP model has brought us decades of progress in neuroscience, and fictional ideas ranging from brain hacking, to humans uploaded to virtual worlds, and artificial intelligences downloaded over human minds. But the more we learn about the brain, the more poorly the IP model fits the evidence. Models have no truth value, so it’s become something worse than wrong: it’s misleading.

The road of “brain as computation” is fraught with peril and blind alleys. If you squint at the brain, study it with just the right amount of abstraction, you can describe it as executing algorithms on data. The brain is hardware, its function is software. But why, then, do we thinking creatures devote so much neural hardware to the motion-timing cerebellum? There’s no good answer, if you think of the brain as algorithms and software.

If we want a better framework, how else can we think about the brain? We can start by dialing down the level of abstraction. The human brain has the potential to accomplish nearly anything, but we rarely sit around executing perfect algorithms. Instead, our everyday lives are riddled with habits, biases, and imperfect decisions. We eat that slice of cake, even though we know we shouldn’t. We read one more article on the Internet, even though we should be going to sleep. Human beings require great training to become adept at logic and mathematics, but even then, our decisions remain riddled with biases and errors. Our supposedly-universal brains aren’t equally good at everything; many of our capabilities come from sloppy and unreliable kludges. What did the brain evolve to accomplish, versus what’s been hacked and bootstrapped atop that core function?

All evidence points toward the brain having one core function, one purpose that drove its evolution: movement.

Sometimes, cognition and movement are inseparable: movement planning and cognitive decision-making are so deeply interconnected, moral uncertainty can introduce movement uncertainty. More often, our often-shoddy “advanced” capabilities are built atop a solid foundation of movement systems. Conscious memory is an unreliable reconstruction, but movement and skill memory can last for years, exactly like riding a bike. Many optical illusions highlight the makeshift pliability of conscious perception because they reveal a division between vision-for-perception and vision-for-action.

The distinction between these two forms of vision is subtle but critical. In the classic Ebbinghaus illusion shown below, the white circles make the blue circle on the right look larger. However, if you picked up those blue circles, your finger movements wouldn’t be fooled by the illusion. Like so many other places across the brain, we find higher-level conscious processes cobbled together atop more reliable sensory and movement systems.

The Ebbinghaus illusion.

Movement is where the rubber hits the road of evolutionary fitness, the unavoidable step before the brain can affect survival and reproduction. All of the brain’s other wonderful functions exist to help design and choose the right movements of hand or leg or vocal folds. For any problem a human might encounter in the world, there could be a dozen ways to solve it through consciousness and emotion, memory and social coordination—but the back-end mechanism doesn’t matter unless you implement that solution through action, whether it’s throwing a spear, speaking a loving word, or typing on a keyboard.

This has two consequences for fiction, among those who strive for scientific plausibility. First, while brains and computers can produce similar effects, they work in completely different ways. Therefore, it will never be possible to upload one into the other, no more than you could upload a cheetah into a car just because they both move fast. Second, no artificially-created entity would think, function, or make the same mistakes as a human. The human brain is not a designed brain, and that distinction pervades every facet of our minds and experiences. Optical illusions and cognitive biases are not just random errors, but kludges with purpose, to produce fast and reasonably-accurate behavior under the limits imposed by the competing pressures of evolution.

Once we embrace the brain’s evolutionary context, and understand movement as the brain’s primary purpose, we can easily answer the problem of the cerebellum. Dr. Marcus thought “no overarching theory” could predict that the cerebellum contains half of the brain’s neurons; yet from a movement control perspective, this makes perfect sense. The cerebellum handles movement timing and refinement by predicting the consequences of our own actions before they even begin. This is critical for skillful action, because it lets us identify and correct errors much faster than we could if we had to wait until the errors became visible. However, as you might imagine, predicting the whole body—bones, muscles, spinal cord, and more—is a difficult problem. From a movement control perspective, the brain must commit so many neurons to cerebellar machinery.

This new approach lets us reinterpret the functioning of the entire brain, the role played by every region and system. In 2007, the Canadian neuroscientist Paul Cisek proposed a framework called the “Affordance Competition Hypothesis. According to this theory, the whole brain is involved in planning and selecting movements. Sensory and movement areas of the brain identify action opportunities (“affordances”) provided by the world, and the rest of the brain uses a symphony of knowledge and motivation to select between these possible actions.

Researchers have observed the affordance competition process directly, via electrodes implanted in monkeys’ brains to eavesdrop on their neural activity. If you put the monkey in an ambiguous situation, where it knows “Movement A or Movement B might provide some tasty juice,” action-planning neurons generate patterns to drive both Movement A and Movement B. When you clarify the situation by saying “definitely going to be A,” the Movement B pattern dies out, while the Movement A pattern strengthens until it’s ready to trigger nerves, muscles, and action. In other words, before any movement occurs, the brain prepares multiple actions, and holds them in tension until it can settle the choice.

If the whole brain is best understood as a machine to plan and select movements, what does that imply for those of us who spend our waking hours thinking, writing, and storytelling? A movement machine has plenty of room for higher-level functions. Cognition, logic, empathy, language; these all help us identify and choose the right action, in ever more sophisticated ways. But these aren’t algorithms manipulating information; they’re extensions of movement planning mechanisms that arose across countless generations of evolution.

The IP model abstracted the brain to a vision of algorithms and software. But the brain is so much more than an abstraction, even if it can sometimes fake a universal computational device. Despite common knowledge and outdated science, we do have an integrative theory of neuroscience, one that explains our data and deepens our understanding. The human brain is a purposed machine, the product of our evolutionary history as creatures who have thrived by acting swiftly, intelligently, and together.

About the Author

Benjamin C. Kinney is a SFF writer and neuroscientist whose short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, PodCastle, Flash Fiction Online, and more. Under the threadbare cloak of his legal name, he's on faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches neuroscience and performs research with peripheral nerve injury patients. He tries to live the most science fictional life possible, which has thus far led him to build cyborg monkeys, zap human brains with high-power magnetic fields, and send his wife to Mars. You can follow him on twitter at @BenCKinney.

A Collective Pseudonym
and an Expanding Universe:
A Conversation with James S.A. Corey

Chris Urie

Authors contain multitudes. They encompass many worlds, characters, images, intangibles, and emotions. But sometimes an author literally contains a multitude. James S.A. Corey is one such author.

James S.A. Corey is the collective pseudonym of Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank. They are the minds behind the blockbuster series The Expanse, which has been adapted for TV by Alcon Media and the SyFy channel. Eventually encompassing nine books, the series mashes up genre styles with rip-roaring space opera adventure. There’s political intrigue, military action, noir style mystery, and so much more.

Released by Orbit on December 6th, their newest book, Babylon’s Ashes picks up where Nemesis Games left off. The powerhouse team behind James S.A. Corey has been nominated for both the Hugo and Locus awards and won the 2014 Locus Award for Abaddon’s Gate.

The Expanse books feature aspects of various genres from noir to military SF and more. What genres can readers expect you two to play with in this new book?

It’s always our hope to have the books feel a little different from one another, whether that’s playing with genre expectations like noir and western or making different formal decisions about point of view the way we do in Nemesis Games and Babylon’s Ashes. Babylon is a war story, and so there are ways that it’s bigger and more sprawling than what we’ve seen before in the series.

I know that The Expanse series originated as an idea for an MMO video game and was adapted into a pen and paper RPG. Ty once mentioned, “games make terrible books.” What are some of the challenges you faced adapting the game universe into a series of novels?

The biggest challenge is not trying to keep the moments from games that don’t translate into a story. One of the things that we’ve had to pay attention to not just moving from game to books but also from books into television, is the way that the strengths of each medium mean you have to approach the story differently to get the same (or similar enough) effects.

Since The Expanse universe grew out of an MMO and tabletop game, did you find that running through it as an RPG campaign helped to flesh out the universe?

Yes, most of the worldbuilding was done bit by bit over years between the original MMO conception and the books.

How did playing through the world as an RPG influence the book? I heard some of the noir elements crept in because of the way Daniel played his character in the game.

Daniel played Detective Miller in the game. And some other characters in the books were played by other people. Some were NPCs. Certainly when we started plotting out the first book, we were coming into it from the perspective of a mystery novel in part because of the kinds of stories we’d imagined in playing through the game.

Daniel, you’ve talked at length about how the books are planned and outlined but evolve as you two write. Have any of the novels gone in a completely different and unexpected direction far removed from the original plan as you wrote your way through the story?

We’ve always been very good at leaving ourselves enough room to find the most awesome thing. We’ve never had a whole story pivot in the middle of writing and become something else, but we’ve had a lot of “Ooh! You know what would be even cooler?” moments, and we pretty much never turn away from those if we can help it.

Have you ever argued about who gets to write a character or scene?

No. I think we’re always quite willing to let the other guy do more of the work if he wants to.

Who is/was your favorite character in the series to write?

They’re all kind of our favorites when we’re writing them. It has to be that way to work. But there are a few who are specific. Ty always has to write the last pass on Amos’ dialog. Daniel has Avasarala’s and Miller’s voices most clearly in his head. But everyone gets good lines, and everyone has moments that are emotionally interesting. They’re all your favorite at one point or another.

In the past you’ve mentioned that you “don’t like to let science get in the way of the awesome.” Was there any bit of interesting science you had to toss out because it overly complicated a story?

There was one really difficult question in Nemesis Games that took a long time to figure out. Basically, if you’re in a ship accelerating at a constant 2g and a thruster put you into a spin, what does it feel like inside the ship? Is there some sideways pull from the spin? Are you pressed against the wall? Does your perceived weight change? It took a lot of conversations with actual physicists to really get our heads around it. But explaining it would have broken the pace of the scene, so all that conversation got boiled down to half a line of dialog, and we moved on. The science is all in there, but you have to squint really hard to see it.

How does it feel to have the images that were originally in your head while writing The Expanse book series translated onto screens around the globe?

It’s great, but it’s also really more of a testament to the team that Alcon put together than anything particular of ours. The books started off as a collaboration, and it’s really just gotten to be a bigger and bigger one, with hundreds—maybe a thousand or two—people putting in their skills and talents. It’s great seeing what that larger team does, though, and it’s great to be part of it.

You both have been involved in writing for The Expanse TV series. How does your writing process differ when writing for the screen rather than the page?

Writing a novel is the last step between you and the audience. Writing a script is totally different. A script is a set of design instructions for maybe half a dozen different departments—props, effects, scene designers, construction, costuming, actors, directors, lighting and sound and . . . It boggles the mind, really. And the script has to give them enough information that they know what to work with. So in a book you can say “the light glimmered off the evil-looking pistol” but in a script, you’d better be ready to say what “glimmered” means and what makes a pistol evil as opposed to a morally good or neutral pistol. And, in addition to all that, the script is also a document that the development company and the network can use to drum up interest and faith in the show. Going between having just one audience to dozens has been hands-down the hardest part of that process.

Has working on the TV show impacted the way you’ve been working on the upcoming novels?

Not really. We’ve got a lot of habits and practices for the books that have been working pretty well, and the books are so far ahead in the story, it really feels very separate.

Have either of you jumped out of the writer’s room on the TV series and found yourselves in costume as extras?

Just once. We have a joint cameo in season one and Ty appears in a small and deeply-transformed way in season two.

How does it feel getting closer to the end of the book series? It’s a huge undertaking!

It’s exciting. We’re at the point right now that we’re looking at how much story is left and how many pages we have to tell it, and it feels like we’re coming in right about where we wanted to be. Nine novels and a collection of short stories will end us at a little over a million and a half words, and I don’t think we could really have done what we’re doing here at a shorter length.

What is one writing lesson you learned from working with each other?

Ty was the one who brought in how to do effective action scenes. That was really his. At the beginning, Daniel was much stronger with descriptive passages. But after this many years working together, our literary toolboxes look much more similar than they did at the start.

What are some projects that you two are working on separately?

Daniel has just finished up the five-book epic fantasy The Dagger and the Coin. Ty’s been doing some work in video games.

What’s next for James S.A. Corey?

Well, in the immediate future, we still have three books and two novellas that we’re committed to. That’s actually more job security than most writers get. Beyond that, there’s a list of ideas and prospects—some prose, some scripts—that we may be able to talk about at some point down the road.

Do you still get together to play pen and paper RPGs? What is the most recent game you’ve played?

Less RPGs and more console and computer games at the moment. We get a lot of our imaginative workouts done at work right now.

What does James S.A. Corey look like? I’ve heard you guys like to imagine him as an old guy at the Worldcon bar.

Like Larry Niven’s less-handsome cousin.

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:
Dystopias Are Not Enough

Kelly Robson

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Janet Kagan’s Nebula-nominated, Hugo award-winning novelette “The Nutcracker Coup.” Published in Asimov’s in 1992, it’s the story of Marianne, a human functionary of the galactic government who unwittingly sparks a revolution on the planet Rejoicing, which is populated by charming, porcupine-like aliens suffering under the heavy-booted rule of a cruel oligarch. Marianne doesn’t mean to change the course of history. She just wants to self-medicate her homesickness by introducing the Rejoicers to Christmas traditions.

In ancient Europe, Marianne explains to her new alien friends, nutcrackers were carved into caricatures of despised despots as a subtle form of political protest. The Rejoicers, with their rodent teeth, are clever woodworkers and they adopt the custom with a vengeance. Unwittingly, Marianne introduces the concept of political satire and human rights, a coup is sparked, and the Rejoicers enjoy a bloodless political revolution.

It’s a delightful tale, a terrific Christmas story, and a lovely reminder of science fiction’s power to imagine a path to better worlds. Though I read it more than twenty-five years ago, the story has stuck with me. The reason why I’ve been thinking about it so much lately is probably obvious. Like many people, I’ve been badly shaken by recent political events, and contemplating clever, cute answers to complex political problems is comforting.

It doesn’t do much good, though. If clever, cute mockery were any use at all in keeping extremists at bay, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert would have made the current political climate impossible. So, I’m going to put away that particular comforting fantasy and think about something less comfortable.

I’m going to think about dystopias.

Dystopias have always been popular, but right now they’re extremely fashionable—especially in YA fiction—land for good reason. Dystopias are fascinating. Most of us find it incredibly satisfying to watch a writer open up Pandora’s box, throw a few well-chosen characters inside, and then bolt that lid down tight. In a dystopia, conflict is easy; it’s built right into the system. If you can imagine a dystopia, you’ve got a story. And it’s fun for both the writer and the reader. We gobble dystopias like popcorn. Crunchy dystopia goodness.

Apocalypse stories are delicious, too. Though dystopias and apocalypse stories are often interchangeable, I’d argue they’re different sub-genres. In apocalypse stories, all humans are in the same sinking boat. That’s not true in dystopias.

A dystopia isn’t equally horrible at all levels of the social order. They’re segregated by class. One character’s dystopia might be another character’s paradise; it all depends on who benefits from the dystopian conditions. I’ll offer a real-world example: For the past five hundred years, indigenous peoples worldwide have lived in a dystopia unperceived and unacknowledged by the overarching social order. Their lands have been invaded by foreign settlers, their cultures decimated by disease and displacement, their religions and languages outlawed, their children stolen. Even now, indigenous people have to fight to protect the land they have left. That’s a dystopia. When indigenous SF writers like Stephen Graham Jones (The Bird is Gone) and Alexis Wright (The Swan Book) create dystopias, they’re drawing on first-hand experience.

We’ve enjoyed a long love affair with dystopias. They’ve been created by everyone from Wells, Orwell, Vonnegut, and Bradbury, to Atwood, Butler, Elgin, and Tepper, to José Saramago, P.D. James, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Since thousands of writers and millions of readers have examined countless dystopias, we should have mapped out clear ways of dealing with the horrors they illustrate. After applying the power of our science fictional imaginations to three centuries of dystopias, we ought to know how to survive them—even fix them. Shouldn’t we?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s a cry from the heart. We’re teetering on the edge of what many of us perceive to be a dystopian abyss. But—no problem—SF writers and readers are incredibly smart and well-informed. We’re dystopia experts. We should know how to deal with real-world dystopias.

But unfortunately, we don’t. That’s not what dystopias are for.

Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 as a cautionary tale. He said he hoped that by illustrating that particular dystopia, he could prevent it. If dystopias are cautionary tales, their efficacy in preventing the horrors they describe has yet to be proven. In fact, since the dystopia we seem to be plunging toward is eerily similar to the one Jack Womack describes in his brilliant, harrowing novel Random Acts of Senseless Violence, it could be argued that dystopias have no practical use at all. Maybe they’re just misery porn.

I’m not dissing fictional dystopias. Really, I’m not. The dystopian urge is natural. I’m just saying we’re really good at imagining disasters, but not always very interested in imagining solutions.

And this is why I’ve been thinking of “The Nutcracker Coup.” It’s a great story, and in it, Janet Kagan does what dystopian writers don’t. She imagines a way out.

And right now, that’s what we need.

What does it take to imagine a way out? We already have the tools at our fingertips. Science fiction trains us to extrapolate effects from socio-political indicators. It’s our stock in trade. Give us a few base settings and we can imagine entire worlds—entire universes—with fully-fledged populations, complex economies, and rich social contexts. As writers, we’ve been training for years to solve problems with our imaginations, and as readers, we’ve been training all our lives to examine those solutions, pick apart the best bits, and hold them to the light for scrutiny.

So, imagination is a given. We’ve always had that down pat. What else do we need?

We need hope.

The very tools that allow us to imagine solutions to problems also lead us to imagine the most conflict-filled plots, brimming with tragedy, drama, and decimation. We don’t guide our characters through a realm of light toward brighter light. We take them through the dark passages, and if they’re very lucky, we let them survive to fight another day.

When we’re faced with an array of dramatic real-world socio-political events—events that would have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago—we can easily construct a detailed path to the worst-case scenario: through dystopia straight to apocalypse. It’s natural. Our imaginations are taut, toned, and powerful.

But worst-case scenario thinking is deeply disheartening and at worst, paralyzing. Right now, we cannot give in to paralysis. We need action. But there is no action without hope, and optimism seems to be in short supply. Also: hope and optimism are delicate. They’re vulnerable to mockery, and cynicism can destroy them utterly.

Some of this problem is generational. Cynicism is a lot more sustainable for those who carry the scars from a long lifetime of lost battles. But for younger people, cynicism is psychological suicide. This doesn’t mean it’s acceptable for older people to be cynical. Anyone who’s not on their deathbed still has a future ahead, and cynicism will not serve that future. But these habits of thought are hard to fight. Have you ever tried to talk a cynic into being optimistic? It’s impossible. Cynicism is a bottomless well.

But we absolutely must not be cynical right now—none of us. Young and old, we must fight against it. If we give into cynicism, we betray the future.

So, no more dystopias. What we need is near- and mid-future stories that show an array of trajectories out of the gloomy toilet bowl we’re spiraling.

I’m not advocating Pollyanna escapism. I’m talking about smart, creative, informed, highly diverse, and—yes—optimistic, hopeful visions of our future as it could be. Nobody is better qualified to envision those future worlds than SF writers, and nobody is better at evaluating them than SF readers.

Luckily, we don’t have to start from scratch. Optimistic SF has always existed. Sarah Pinsker has been gathering recommendations and posted a reading list on her blog. It’s a great place to start. What we desperately need right now are clear lines connecting our present to futures worth aiming for. Futures where nobody lives in a dystopia. Where vibrant economies exist within the constraints of sustainability. Where developing nations don’t have to pay for the excesses of the developed world. Where humans aren’t destroying ecosystems with our rapacious hunger for energy.

Futures where we can reach for the stars without leaving a scorched Earth behind us.

At first glance this is a difficult task—even Sisyphean. But these fictional paths to better worlds don’t have to be have to be perfect, or correct, or achievable. They just have to be inspiring. They have to support the idea that doom and gloom is not the only human trajectory. That we are not inevitably on the highway to hell or ultimately sliding down the slope of dystopia toward the cliff of apocalypse. It’ll be hard. It’ll test the limits of our SF skills. But nothing worth doing is easy. And best of all, it’ll be fun.

The range of possible futures is limited only by our imagination. It’s our duty to give the world futures worth looking forward to.

About the Author

Kelly Robson’s novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award, and in 2016 she was a finalist for the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, and Sunburst Award. Her most recent work, “A Human Stain,” was published at Tor.com. Kelly lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

Editor’s Desk:
Stomp Stomp Stomp

Neil Clarke

Sometimes catching up with an old friend can set your mind running on an unexpected course. In this case, it was some passing thoughts on kaiju movies and how strong they appeal to people like us. Those giant monsters and robots have a special place in our hearts and for people our age, getting a chance to scratch that itch wasn’t as easy as it is today. For me, I know it was pretty much restricted to monster week, which would happen once or twice a year as after school movies on TV.

In recent years, it’s become so much easier. The kids and I used to regularly watch Godzilla, Gamera, Ultraman, and various other movies and shows on the internet, Netflix, or DVD. Now that they are older, it doesn’t happen as much, but it’s still something amusing we can share. In some ways, part of the charm is how clunky they can be. Yeah, it’s a guy in a rubber suit, so what? This is pure mindless escapism and being amused is an important part of the equation. I think I need more of that in my life at the moment.

2016 was like a seriously mean and unfunny kaiju that stomped all over things in my life: family members in and out of the hospital; the senseless death of my wife’s friend; six months of seriously unpleasant times at the day job; and a series of other unhappy distractions. It’s time to hop in my giant mech, stand up, and take back my little world and I’ve have to admit that I was greatly amused this morning when the video game I was playing, Gears of War 4, put me in a giant mech to save someone’s mom. SF escapism to the rescue!

I took some much needed time off from the day job before the holiday break. In the midst of all the chaos, I had fallen behind schedule on a bunch of things. It was time to escape and refocus on things I wanted and needed to do so I could start off 2017 back on track. Not exactly the glamourous sort of thing that people want to do on their vacation, but I’ve enjoyed the opportunity. Each task has been a rubber-suited kaiju, something I know I can eventually defeat.

In between, I’ve tried to make sure it wasn’t all about work. There’s been fires in the fireplace; time with family; wrapping and unwrapping presents; and playing with new toys. I even had the opportunity to incorporate another childhood dream, this one of robots/AI, in the form of the Amazon Echo Dot. I’ve been playing with home automation, which is probably the closest I’ll come to having a robot friend in the near future—though maybe I can find a way to embed one of these in a robot body it can control. So in addition to battling my to-do list, I’ve been asking my imaginary robot friend to control the lights, play music, and do a few other less interesting tasks.

I’ve decided that I need to make 2017 a science-fictional year for me. Time to bring a little bit of Clarkesworld to Earth . . . or maybe just move there for a little while. In 2016, I forgot the value of escaping and now it’s time to go home.

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). His next anthology, Galactic Empires will be published this month and followed by the next volume in his Best Science Fiction of the Year series later this year. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Waste Pickers

Gabriel Björk Stiernström

About the Artist

Gabriel Björk Stiernström is a concept artist and illustrator from Gothenburg, Sweden. His main focus is concept design for games and films but he has also done book covers, matte paintings, and promotional artwork.