Two Ways of Living

Robert Reed

I’ve eaten everything inside my kitchen, and that’s not enough. That’s barely a beginning. A brightly lit all-night restaurant stands across the street, promising broiled-this and boiled-that. Chasing the next feast, I shuffle to the elevator, dropping four floors before staggering into the hallway. That’s where the woman is. She’s standing in my path, and beside her, sniffing the world, is this busy little sheltie dog.

The dog is what trips me. I don’t see it and suddenly I’m falling, somebody saying, “Bad bad,” and then I’m lying limp on the floor.

“Sorry bad sorry,” her dog says.

More and more animals are wearing AIs. That’s some of the current news that found me during breakfast.

“Are you hurt?” the woman asks.

That’s what I’m trying to decide. It wasn’t a huge fall, and thankfully my major bones are off-limits. Like the heart and liver, key portions of my skeleton are kept sound during the long fast.

“I’m all right,” I venture.

But she isn’t paying attention to me. “Are you okay?”

“I sorry feel guilty,” the dog says. Not with its mouth, but from somewhere on its broad metal collar. “Guilty sorry bad.”

“Don’t be,” the woman says. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Okay. Now I understand.

The woman finally looks at me. At a moment like this, most people would make tender sounds. But she’s not one of those people, snapping like a gym coach. “Can you stand up?”

Gym coaches intimidate me. I sit up too soon, and the world spins.

“Do I need to call somebody?” she asks. Plainly wanting me to say, “No.”

I shake my head, making the vertigo worse.

“Where do you live?”

“Here,” I mutter.

Narrow-faced and pretty. Both of my companions can be described that way. The dog smells my hands. The woman stares at my face. At my sharp cheeks, the sunken eyes. “I’ve never seen you before,” she warns, full of suspicion.

I could tell her the truth. Which impresses and offends almost everybody. But I want to avoid long conversations. So I say, “I travel for work.”

“Really,” she says. The way people do when they don’t believe what they’ve been told. “You look like you’re sick.”

“I had a bug,” I lie.

“Cancer, judging by appearances.” Turning to her dog, she asks, “Do you recognize the man?”

That dark, bright, and very wet nose works its way down my leg. “Old old stinks in elevator, in floor,” says the expert. It sounds like a six-year-old talking. Maybe a boy’s voice, maybe not.

This isn’t helping. I’m an innocent man, starving but being interrogated by nobodies. Fighting to stand, I tell them, “I have somewhere to be.”

The woman hears a terminally ill patient. And crabby as can be, she says, “I suppose you need a ride to the hospital.”

“No, I’m just crossing the street,” I say.

She says nothing.

“To eat,” I explain.

And she smiles, glad for that answer. This is where everything should end, and now both of us are satisfied.

Except the dog has a different opinion. “Glory cooks,” it says.

“No,” the woman says.

The dog says, “Yes.”

“Shut up.”

The dog looks at me. “Glory cooks big dinners.”

“I won’t,” the narrow-faced woman says.

Whose name is Glory, I realize.

“Meat and cheese,” the dog suggests.

Actually, that sounds wonderful.

“Shut up, you,” says Glory.

Sounds wonderful, but life is small. I learned that lesson long ago, and I refuse to waste more of what little I have with these two. Skinny legs and skinnier arms push against the floor, then the wall. Standing again, ignoring the rolling of the floor, and with more energy than I’d have guessed possible, I break into a quick saunter.

“He goes,” says the dog.

“He wants to leave,” she says. “Let him leave.”

“We are bad.”

The dog sounds miserable.

“We are not bad,” Glory says. “And you’re being exceptionally silly.”

My building’s security door recognizes my starved face, opens, and then locks behind me, and I can’t hear the others anymore. I survive the hike across the street and order three meals, eating every sugar packet while I’m waiting. Strangers are talking. They look at me and they ignored me. I look at them, measuring all those intangibles that imply happiness and despair. Despite assumptions, I enjoy human company. I like new faces and voices and how smoothly busy each person seems to be, occupying his little life. The first meal arrives, genuine pancakes and cultured sausage. Feasting, I admit to myself that this is the worst up-time so far. Obviously, I reached too far. More reasonable goals are needed. That’s the lesson here. Life is tiny but full of huge choices, and I make a few of those before the Reuben sandwich arrives.

Three meals total and then a big dessert, and while eating an entire apple pie, I use my ancient phone to call the usual service.

The limousine is parked outside, waiting for me. Grocery shopping used to be a chore for me, but starvation changes a person. The long aisles are an absolute joy tonight, each one filled with treasures, and despite being weaker than ever, I have such fun loading my groceries into the carts and pushing each cart out to my ride, then ordering the limousine to pull around the back of my building.

I want to avoid the woman. Her dog seems fine, but she isn’t. I load my feasts into the freight elevator, taking everything back into a kitchen that will be very busy for the next ten days.

Eat, nap, and eat again. When this began, I assumed that I’d be spending my active days mastering current events and culture. But I never do. Why learn about fads that will just pass away? Endless meals; that’s my life. And injections, and the essential pills. I also VR with my doctor and other experts, tweaking the next stage of this constantly evolving business. Which means a fresh crop of pills and protocols as well as software updates.

Ten days of feasting become twenty. Everyone, including me, agrees that I need to be fatter than ever.

Leaving my condo serves no purpose, so I don’t. The final stage, the polishing, is especially arduous. A huge quantity of Soylent has to wash down cans of cultured blubber, and then comes a spectacular purging of the bowels before bed. Which isn’t a bed, of course. And I’m not going to sleep. But passing out of consciousness, I’m able to guide my dream-like thoughts. My cold body is flying naked to the moon. Space is cold like me but the sun is hot and the rocky dead moon of my youth floats green before me. I feel myself growing warm and happy, and just as I’m about to touch down in the new forest, injections wake me. Bright light washes over my naked shriveled body, and the usual sick shivering commences, my metabolism trying to remember how to do its job.

I wake up starving. My old phone has updated its guts and mind in my absence. Sugar and injections and Soylent and more injections. That’s what happens first. Then my head clears, and I’m sitting in my kitchen, waiting for ten pot pies to cook. Only then do I risk looking at the news. The world seems healthy enough, thank goodness. But on the other hand, the moon is as barren as always.

I don’t want to linger in this boring, pedestrian world.

Stronger than last time, I step outside to find fresh air and food. To look at all of the faces in the restaurant. I never see the woman, but I can’t stop watching for her and her generous dog. Then full of meat and cheese, I climb into the waiting limousine and go shopping before coming home again, ready to eat like a shrew.

I’m on my floor, stepping out of the freight elevator, when the woman ambushes me.

Quite a lot has changed in twenty-six months.

She says, “Hi,” and smiles. In a big way, smiles.

I say, “Hello.”

With a mocking tone, she asks, “So where do you go on these travels?”

“Wonderful places,” I tell her.

Her sheltie sits behind her. “Leave the man alone,” says the dog. The collar is thinner, the voice fuller, older and far more mature.

The AI has been improved, I assume.

“So I know what you’re doing,” says the woman. Says Glory. Her voice is so quick that the words crowd close together. “It was what? Ten, twelve years ago when hibernation became possible? Suspending the aging process and all that. I read about it and thought it sounded neat but not for me. And then later, what did I hear? That everybody who went into the program quit after the first sleep or two.”

“It’s not sleeping,” I say. “And it’s not for just anybody either.”

“Well, I know that.”

She knows quite a lot, I’m thinking. At least she believes that she does.

“Glory,” the dog says.

Glory ignores her companion. “How many times have you gone under?” she asks me.

Six times, and that’s none of her business.

“To do nothing but sleep,” she says. “Hibernate, I mean. That has to cost a lot of money. So you must be very, very rich.”

Here we go, I’m thinking.

And I’m not the only one to see troubles looming. “Leave our neighbor alone,” says the dog.

“And he is our neighbor,” she says smugly. “Mr. Artemus Tenor lives directly above us. In 4C.”

I need a distraction. For the first time in my life, I throw a question at a dog and expect an answer. “What’s your name?”

“Salvation,” the sheltie tells me.

“Really?”

“Not that I got to pick,” he complains.

And Salvation is a “he.” I take the trouble to look this time.

Glory says, “When we saw you that other time, when you kicked my friend—”

“I tripped,” I say.

“Before I realized who you were,” Glory continues. “He and I had just moved into this building. So of course I didn’t know what you were doing. But honestly, you looked like you were trouble.”

“In trouble,” her roommate suggests. “In trouble.”

“Oh, don’t be that way.” She says that to him but doesn’t stop staring at me. I don’t think it’s possible for two eyes to focus any harder. The woman has done research, I’m guessing. She knows about the trust funds, the lack of family. For all I know, she also found the manifesto published when I was twenty. On Facebook and eternal because of that. “I want to live in an age of easy interplanetary flight.” That’s what I wrote then, and I believe it now. “The solar system will be terraformed, and I can live as the ultimate tourist.”

This is fourteen years later. Although my appearance and DNA imply that I’m barely mature enough to buy drink or weed.

“I really need to get home,” I tell my neighbor.

“Let the man eat,” Salvation says.

The intense smile vanishes, replaced by a fierce dose of something much, much worse.

Glory says, “I have a sense about people.”

Words that cause any sensible person to step back.

“You and I are very much alike,” she promises.

“Glory,” her dog says, sounding sad. “We’ve talked about this.”

“The two of us are dreamers,” she assures me. “And dreamers deserve to be with one another.”

Salvation runs between us. Which is welcome, at least on my part. The boy is twenty pounds of sleek fur, but I have a comrade here.

I hope he shouts her down.

Or nips her on the calf.

But no. Those dog eyes look up at me. “Go home and eat,” he says. “And while you eat, study this world carefully. Will you please? Learn how we treat our self-absorbed, sociopathic citizens. Not that I can share anything specific. There are privacy laws and professional standards, after all.”

With that, Glory becomes angry. During my brief life, I’ve never seen anyone leap from loving to furious this quickly.

“Shit, stop that,” she warns, fists swinging at the air. “You have no fucking right, you little brat.”

“Hit me,” says the dog. “Then we can stop pretending that this treatment is succeeding.”

“I should kick you,” she agrees.

He turns sideways. “Have at it, honey.”

Balancing sacks of groceries, I shuffle towards my apartment.

“Thank you,” I shout to the dog.

Who apparently isn’t a dog at all. Is he?

I go down and then come up again, forty pounds lighter and moving on tiptoes. Cooking and eating without making any sound. That’s my goal. I don’t want to alert my downstairs neighbor to my presence. Drinking cold oyster stew, I read the latest news from space. Which is good news, for a change. A consortium of tech companies and emancipated AIs are planning the conquest of Venus. That’s the way they describe their venture. A “conquest.” Mars has its own life, microbial but complicated, which is why the UN has declared the world permanently off-limits to earthly settlements. But new technologies have made it possible to pave Venus with bubble cities and artful clouds, and the invasion will cost only a tenth of our wealth and half a century of unrelenting focus.

The oyster stew is gone, and now I’m a firm believer in Venus.

Two in the morning is when I finally leave home. But someone anticipated that cleverness. Someone left a note stuck to my door. “Come downstairs when you have the chance,” the slim lady hand has written on paper yellowed with age. “Please,” she added below. Then, “Glory and Salvation,” with her name underlined a self-obsessive twice.

No restaurant tonight. I want to shop quickly and get home, and it helps that robots have conquered the grocery industry. By dawn, I’m back inside my condo. Eating and eating, and finally, happily, using my toilet again. But the plumbing makes too much noise, or maybe my neighbor is even more compulsive than I realized. Either way, she knocks at my door. She doesn’t knock every hour, but it feels that often. Day or night, it doesn’t matter, and when I am strong or especially angry, I take the trouble to study her through the security camera.

Glory has grown older, which I expected. But the woman has changed in other ways too. She looks sorry and maybe a little desperate. She doesn’t smile when she hits the door. Even looking up at the camera lens, she won’t pretend to be what she isn’t. “Be a man and talk to me,” says that increasingly severe face.

Glory always stands alone in my hallway. Her therapist has been replaced or is at home, locked inside a kennel. Unless the dog has died. That final possibility works on me. But man or not, I never respond, not even to ask about Salvation, and after getting fat and drinking a small of pond of Soylent, I check my locks and alarms before going down again.

Thinking of Venus this time. But not bubble cities or invented clouds. No, my Venus is a realm of acid and fire, and I have the wings of a golden phoenix.

And with that, I’m awake again, after a fashion.

Someone is inside my room, standing beside me. Glory is. She says, “Look how skinny you are. How can you do this to yourself?”

It’s too soon to talk. I can’t even move my mouth. But I see the bedroom door standing open, and beyond that, my apartment door too. The locks have been beaten, and the alarms, and as soon as I’m strong enough, I intend to become very scared.

“You were so pathetic,” she says. “When I met you. You were this sickly, desperate looking creature. Then I realized that you were hibernating.”

I don’t hibernate. We’ve talked about this. What I do isn’t sleep or any other process found in nature.

“How stupid,” she says.

I close my eyes.

Out of the darkness, her voice asks, “What if the world ends while you’re down?”

“We’re dead anyway,” I manage.

She makes a disagreeable sound.

I focus on my deep breathing.

“Eventually I got greedy,” she continues. “I realized that you’re rich and spoiled and crazy, and I wondered if maybe I could get something out of you.”

I open my eyes, too frightened to make any sound, and this crazy woman is standing over me. “We’re dead anyway,” might be my last words.

But Glory doesn’t kill me. Not for the next few moments. Both of us remain quiet, waiting for my sugar injections to help. Then very slowly, carefully, I sit up. She doesn’t try to help me. I’m thankful for that, and I’m angry at her too. Both ways. Then my left hand falls off what isn’t a bed, and something wet touches my fingers. That’s when I discover a middle-aged sheltie watching me.

The dog says nothing. He isn’t wearing a collar or anything else mechanical. Salvation might as well be dead, not having a voice anymore.

“There’s two ways of living,” Glory says.

“Just two?” I ask.

“That’s how simple things are,” she tells me. Then she decides that she’s said enough and falls silent.

I grab my phone from its cradle. “I’m calling the police,” I announce.

Glory has a brave face when she wants. Just from the way she stands there, she’s ready for almost anything. “You can’t scare me,” says her body, her eyes. “Do your worst.”

My worst is this:

“I’ll press charges against you for breaking in, and I intend to have you thrown in prison. It won’t take many years for you to become an old woman. That’s when I’ll come see you. Before I fly off to Venus, and I’ll still be young man. How’s that going to make you feel?”

Courage melts. Glory sobs.

Her dog sniffs at the carpet, at my hand. Nothing in those dark eyes gives any sign of intelligence.

I want to shove him away. But I don’t.

“Not prison,” she mutters.

I throw my legs towards the floor.

Her skinny hands hold each other, and she watches me.

“There’s a grocery list on my phone,” I finally tell her. “You’re going to pull the list and buy everything for me. You’ll pay for the food yourself, and you’ll bring everything back here and fix any locks you broke, and I won’t press charges. Probably.”

She nods and then smiles, liking some part of this.

“Hurry,” is my advice.

She puts the grocery on her palm. Which is where modern phones live, it seems. Inside your hand. Then she pulls a short leash from a pocket. A flick of the phone hand causes the leash to wrap around the skinny dog neck, tying itself, and then the woman starts to tug, half-strangling the sheltie as she walks and he fights the tugging.

“No,” I say.

She hesitates.

“Leave the dog with me.”

The smile stiffens, and she glances down at the sheltie.

“Go on,” I say.

Glory looks back at me. She says, “Goodbye,” and I don’t know why. It’s not her words, but it’s the tone. Bittersweet, complicated. I’d ask but I don’t want to dwell on this woman’s peculiar moods. I’m so deep into starvation that I can’t think about anything but the ten thousand calories waiting in my kitchen.

“And shut the door on the way out,” I warn her.

The front door closes almost too softly to make sound.

Ignoring me and ignoring the dropped leash, the dog spends a few moments idly sniffing at the floor, at an empty pill jar, and then, forgetting me completely, wanders into the other rooms.

I follow when I’m strong enough.

Oyster stew is a joy, and every bowl of ice cream is slathered in fudge. I eat everything that’s worth eating, and I have a little too much Soylent. I feel gassy. I feel old. The dog watches me now and again, and I finally talk. Just to test him. But he doesn’t show any inkling of comprehension, much less the talent to respond.

One long trip to the bathroom, and now I’m out of food.

Glory still hasn’t returned.

I look at the dog, stare at my phone. Then stepping to the window, I ask the outdoors, “Where is that bitch?”

“Most likely on her way home,” says the dog.

I can’t tell where that voice comes from. From inside his mouth, maybe.

“You mean downstairs,” I suggest.

Salvation shakes his head, which is strange to see from any dog.

“What are you talking about?”

“Glory moved away,” he says. “Eleven months ago, she found a new home and job. In a completely different city.”

“She’s not coming back to get you?”

“I’m not hers to ‘get,’” he says, the voice prickly and proud. “I’m a fully emancipated entity, Mr. Tenor.”

I stare at him.

He does nothing.

“Leave me,” I say.

He sits.

I walk to the apartment door and open it. “You seem smart. Get out of here now, and leave me alone.”

“You know, there are two ways of living,” the dog says.

“So I’ve heard,” I offer

“You can live inside yourself,” he says. “As an antisocial, self-absorbed fool.”

I look out into the empty hallway. I look back at him.

“Or what?” I ask.

“How the hell would I know?” he says.

Then he laughs at me. With his mouth, his eyes. Everything about him is laughing, and I can’t describe what that does to a man.

About the Author

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

Real Ghosts

J.B. Park

The outline fills with color and soon she has presence, and a mind, and a laugh—it’s Maureen Hong, back from the dead. Some details don’t match up but that’s fine, everything else does; she remembers the little things, and they share those, even if the remembrance is sometimes painful. The quality of the illusion makes him feel better about his own scheduled imaging. He’d avoided it all these years but now there’s no more years to avoid it in, and so he’d done all the things that he could remember to do—reconnect with surviving members of the Hong family, talk to old friends, finish getting his will set up. Doing them had kept his mind busy, had kept him pushing through. Now as he talks to Maureen he feels like things are about to get better, but that’s when the doorbell rings.

A quick glance to a view outside confirms his suspicions: it’s Maurice, his still-alive brother. He’s tempted to leave the door shut but Maureen’s disapproving look is enough to let the other in, who struts in with a big grin on his face.

“Hey,” says Maurice.

“Hey,” says Maury. And nothing after.

The smile on Maurice’s face droops and disappears as silence grows. Maureen clears her throat but it’s not enough—what’s there to even talk about? Eventually, Maurice retreats to an adjacent room, and Maury is too tired to object. It’d be better if he’d just left, but that’ll do for now.

Maury queues up Maureen to talk to her again, but in the middle of doing so he catches a stray bit of conversation, from that same room Maurice had gone to, and he listens and yes, it’s Maureen—and then Maureen comes up and it’s like she’s right there, but it’s not quite right; it’s not his Maureen; and now Maureen’s lack of debilitation and the sight he’d beheld at her funeral of her head all waxen and pale, it all comes rushing back and the illusion, it’s done—he can’t face her anymore, at least not at the moment. She’s not real, for a real person cannot exist in two places at once talking to two people at the same time. There she is, in his room, and in the other is Maurice talking to another version of Maureen, and Maury asks her to leave and she goes and he eavesdrops as his siblings, one dead and one alive, one fake and the other still real, talk and talk about things that don’t involve him.

His imaging is to take place on Friday. The instructions were short. Think about your best memories, it had said. Hold onto them as your waveform is scanned. And anyone signed into consent, they could bring him up at any time, take solace in his company even after his demise, have conversations and whatnot. Thinking of it, the old insecurities creep up, extant fears that no one will summon his holo.

Some of that fear is assuaged when more of the family visit on Wednesday. He suspects that Maureen has something to do with this, sensing his anxieties, but then it doesn’t seem plausible given that—as he must remind himself—she’s not real, and likely has no autonomous thought, so how could she have? The only logical conclusion is that these family members have come on their own, and the thought, though he doubts sometimes, is very cheering. The children are loud, but he doesn’t mind; still, when the adults notice their volume they send the kids away with an accompaniment of holos, and Maury recognizes a few of them, Jinsoo, his grandmother, his uncle, his father, and his mother and more—a retinue of past Hongs who shepherd their descendants even after death.

“They’re the best, aren’t they?” The speaker is a young man whose name Maury cannot recall.

“I suppose so,” he says, feeling nothing of the sort.

“Just want to let you know—we’ll be sure to queue you up as much as possible. We’ve talked about it; you’re a real role model, the sort of a person our kids can look up to. A man of conviction.”

“Thanks.”

“Anyway, Nicola did get the consent stuff taken care, I think, so no worries there.”

He says: “Yeah, for sure. No worries there.”

But yes, there are others besides Maureen; any member of the family that was able to get a holo of themselves done before death—so thirty years back at most—and he calls them up one by one. There’s his grandmother. She’d passed away just after the prototypes had gone up; Maurice, the rich one, had commissioned it for her on her deathbed. There she is—when she first appears she’s way younger than what he remembers of her, always white-haired and cronish, but here a middle-aged Korean woman, an ajumma through and through. The conversation they have is odd in how effortless it is—the language barrier had been very real back then, back when he’d been a kid and she’d still been around, and how fair is it that not only is Maurice the rich one, but also the oldest one, yet still the healthy one? Still, it’s nice to talk to what he remembers of his grandmother without all the gesticulating and the muddled waters of a conversation where sentences don’t begin and end in the same language.

It’s not flawless, of course. Her imaging is from so long ago that there’s a noticeable hitch if you shift the topic too fast, maybe jut from futbol to football or from breakfast to what he had for dinner.

Once he grows tired of her, he dismisses her and goes through the rest of the collection. Flipping through a list of undesirables, he’s reminded of how there had always been a divide between the Korean-American and Korean-Korean branches of the family, a benign one but present nonetheless. But it had never been like that with him and Jinsoo, and upon calling him up Maury can’t help but smile at the sight. Seeing an old friend basically, the friendship having ended long before it could sour, though this time the youth is no lie, it was how he’d been when he’d died, what he’d looked like in his 20’s because he’d never lasted beyond that—and this Jinsoo, this fake ghost of the man, he asks Maury if he wants to play another round of baduk. It’s amusing; he’d never done this with the actual Jinsoo. The difference—where what’s in front of him is obviously not the real thing—reassures him.

They play a little. Maury has black, Jinsoo has white. Maury is terrible, and he loses three games before calling it off. When Jinsoo disappears, he dims the room and for a while sits there mulling over old memories.

After a few minutes he calls up Maureen. They talk a little and conversation strays to a time when the siblings—all three of them—had gone looking for their cat, Spring; as they remember how they’d walked along the wall of some house and the resident there had sicced her poodles on them, and they’d hopped off laughing, she says, “I wish Maurice was here,” and he agrees despite feeling nothing of the sort. He’d never been one to disagree with her; the yes always came unbidden, a habit.

That’s when Maurice asks if he could come in. It’s rather odd. He’d been the sort of person who never knocked, and as a result his siblings had developed a habit of locking everything in their rooms. But now Maurice has asked, quietly, if he could enter. So Maury says, “Come in.”

Maurice enters. Again the picture of health. Damn him. “You feeling okay?”

“It’s been good.”

“Just wanted to check up on you, bro.”

“You’re doing that, yes.”

Maurice takes a seat by the window, all closed and curtained off. “Look,” he says, “I know we haven’t been the best of friends, or brothers, or family in the past, but now that it’s come to this—”

“All it takes is two deaths in the family, huh?”

“One,” says Maurice. “You’re not dead.”

“Yet.”

“Yet. Which means we can make up a little. Be better friends, brothers. Right?”

“I know your game.”

“Really?”

“I was there too, you know. Not that you ever talked to me or Maureen. It was that huge mess of a Thanksgiving, when Auntie brought out Uncle, and what a fucking mess that was.”

Maurice starts giggling and Maury cannot help but join in. No more words are needed. What a fucking mess it had been—the worst and best sort of mess—Uncle had come out, recently deceased but there nonetheless, a real ghost of a man, and everyone had clapped—he’s back, he’s back!—but Uncle had left on bad terms, apparently, because he’d proceeded to tear into everyone present, including his surviving wife, his wife’s family, his own brothers and sisters and extant families of each, and politicians, athletes, even the guy who ran the pool bets on Friday—Auntie had ran off to try to turn him off, because for some reason she was unable to do it from the dining room—and the survivors had watched Uncle wail and wail, all out of insults, bugging out as he screamed. Horribly awkward.

“So what do you think my endgame is, brother?”

“I think that—when I die—you want to be able to call up my holo and not have something like that happen.”

“If I was worried, wouldn’t I just avoid calling you up in the future?”

“You want to show me to your kids,” says Maury. “Parade me around to the children I never got to meet. You want both my consent, and also my good will.”

“Oh, them. Well, yes. I’m sorry about that. But now they’re a little too old for this, so don’t you worry about that. Off to live lives of their own and whatnot.”

“So what then, grandkids? Great-grandkids?”

Maurice looks uncomfortable. “You could say that.”

“And now I suppose this is where I forgive you.”

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.”

“Just go.”

“Can I come back?”

Maury looks up at his brother and his brother looks so serious about this that he agrees to it.

But even after Maurice leaves, he can’t help but dwell on something odd. His uncle, the memory he’d shared with his brother of that man’s ghost being an absolute shitheel—it was so different from how sedate he’d been when seen in the company of other holos earlier.

Only three days are left until his imaging. He may have a few weeks after that to enjoy life. Maury has no idea how he might go about doing that, and so Maurice tosses suggestions at him—go surfing maybe.

“I’m scared of water.”

“What about a marathon? There’s one in Colorado Springs soon.”

“Have you seen my legs?”

“We could go eat.”

“I can’t digest anything anymore, dear brother.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be. You’d know this if you cared before this, before now.”

“Hey,” says Maurice, “maybe it’d be easier if you stopped guilt-tripping me all the time.”

“Maybe you deserve it.”

“I probably do.”

“Then why complain?”

“Because it’s still fucking annoying.”

“Give me a break,” says Maury. “I’m dying! When I’m gone, I will never be a dick to you. I’ll be all smiles and kisses and you’ll tell your grandchildren that you had the best of all possible brothers and you’ll have my holo beside you nodding along like I really agreed.”

“I guess that means I have your consent, then?”

“Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“You can be a dick, brother. Like, feel free to just be real, right? Honest. I’d rather see that then have you be all fake and smiling just so I could show them to my children and their children.”

Maury opens his mouth. He wants to say something, but that something, though its general idea has already been conceived, lacks specifics. He closes his mouth. Opens them again. Something about what Maurice has said gets to him. Maybe it’s that these are the longest conversations they’ve had in years, but that by itself doesn’t feel quite right.

Two days left and he spends most of the day drugged out; the pain has gotten to him and so he weaves in and out of consciousness and it feels as if Maurice and Maureen are both always there, and they are indistinguishable, and he thinks, in those spots of lucidity, technology, what an amazing fucking thing it is.

Maurice, Maureen, and Maury. The Hong siblings. One of them is already gone. And the other, fucking Maurice, is definitely a holo. He tests this out. He calls for Maurice. Maurice appears.

“Come closer,” he says.

So Maurice does.

“Closer.”

A little closer.

Still not within range to touch—to feel—and Maury thinks about how he’d had to invite him in always, and that was never Maurice’s deal, he liked having the freedom to barge into his siblings’ rooms, and when Maury had put a lock on his door the lock had gotten filed off a day later—and Maury heaves himself up and swipes at Maurice and his hand passes through everything and nothing and he yells, “Maurice!”

“Yes,” says the holo, “let me help you, bro.”

“Fuck you,” says Maury. “But you know what, sure. Help me. Help all you can.” Is this where he laughs? He tries it out. It feels bad, so he stops.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m very okay. For now. Tell me—Maurice is nothing like this in life, is he?”

The holo-brother looks distinctly uncomfortable. “I can’t confirm that.”

“I bet he’s a jerk still. A real asshole. Maybe it’s better that you’re here still.” The last part just pops out of his mouth and yet he doesn’t regret it, because what’s there to regret? Who is there to offend—the simulacrum?

Maurice and Maureen were the intentional ones. Then he’d come along, and they’d named him appropriately, the third in the Mau-line of Hongs. If only they could have been, perhaps, Joshua, Joan, Jonas? Good names that could begin with Jo as their lead syllable instead of Mau. But at least Maurice and Maureen sounded natural. Stuffy, admittedly. But still, more natural than Maury.

He calls for Maureen. He asks if she’d known about Maurice.

“Yes,” she says. “But I thought it’d be better if you didn’t know.”

“I wish I didn’t know,” says Maury. “But you remember what Maurice was like. Or rather, is like. I can’t imagine being his kid. Being his kid must be the worst thing in the world. Can you imagine it? Think about our parents getting our grades in email, and how horrible that felt. Now imagine being his kid right now. The guy couldn’t even stand the thought of not being able to come into our rooms whenever he wanted, and now he’s not a child anymore and this is his child. His kid probably has zero privacy. His kid, I bet Maurice is there following on some widget, a fly maybe, just watching and watching every move.”

“You shouldn’t hate him. He is what he is.”

“He sent his holo! Not even himself. Fuck him. I can’t believe I ever called him a brother. A sibling. Family.”

“If you’re like this when you get imaged, your holo is going to be mean and no one will see you.”

“Fuck him. He couldn’t even come see me in person.” He feels so sorry for himself and he hates it, that he’s pitying himself like this to the point where he’s having to blink a little too much, and when he wipes away at the corners of his eyes his fingers come away smeared with rheum.

“Let’s talk about something better,” says Maureen. “Remember that trip to Carlsbad?”

“It was so dark there. We sat there waiting for the dark outside too. For the bats. Or maybe it was another cave. Caves, all of them are the same. You go inside and they turn the light off a little bit and suddenly it’s pitch-black and dark and you’re supposed to feel something, and I do, Maureen, because isn’t that where I’m going?”

“A better memory. Your birthday party!”

“Yes,” he says, “yes, that was a good time. We had cake and mom made LA galbi and japchae and remember how we didn’t have enough candles? So you ran down to the store for me, the dollar place, and you got a pack of candles and you also had a pack of army men as my present. Thank you, Maureen.”

She beams. “You’re welcome. Do you feel better now?”

“I do,” he says. “Now please go.”

“I don’t know, you look like you need—”

“You make me feel like a goddamn baby and you’re not even real. Please go, Maureen.”

She sighs. “Okay. But I’m here for you, alright? Just call for me. I’ll always be here for you.”

“Wait,” he says.

“I’m here for you, like I said.”

“Just one question. The guidelines said I should think happy thoughts.”

“And you should.”

“But does any of that matter?”

“It has to,” she says. “Why would they mention it otherwise?”

“Maybe it’s to make me make myself feel better for no reason at all.”

“But isn’t it a good thing to make yourself feel better?”

“Of course. Then I’d be feeling better. Jesus Christ. How fucking simple.” He tries to think of an appropriate physical reaction—a shrug perhaps—but nothing really fits and so he simply sighs. “Did you make yourself remember only the good parts when you got imaged? The last imaging, I mean. When you knew there probably wouldn’t be more.”

“I don’t know if it’s appropriate to tell you, not in your current state.”

“Of course.”

“But remember—I’m here for you.”

And in the end, they’re there, his sister and his brother. Off he goes to the Maestas Spectrum Facility. There in the lobby, he wheels right through a pack of holos and Maureen is horrified.

“What if they were real?”

“They’re too healthy to be real,” he says. “Just look at them. Glowing, practically.”

“I got my imaging done every three years, and for most of those I was super healthy.”

“That’s true.” He pauses, looks back. “I didn’t run anyone over, did I? I didn’t feel a thing. No bumps, nothing.”

“If you did, you’d hear the screaming already,” says Maurice.

“And the ding-ding-ding of incoming lawsuits.”

“You two are awful,” says Maureen, smiling.

And Maury thinks about how awful Maureen could be, when she wanted—and how perfect she’d been for the last few days. The ghosts, they’re better people, better than any real ghost, and what would he be like once the only thing that remained of him was the holo, the not-Maury? Chatting with Maurice’s grandchildren and shit, probably. The thought is oddly pleasing and he wonders that it is so.

They wait for their turn. In front of them is a woman with a little girl. Both real, because the woman is carrying the girl in her arms. The girl looks like she’s two, maybe less.

Maury asks: “Couldn’t find a babysitter?” It happens sometimes, no doubt. Maybe the parent doesn’t trust non-human caretakers.

“Oh no,” she says, flashing him a smile that quickly turns to pity once she sees the state he’s in. “It’s for her.”

“Oh,” he says. “That’s, well, neat.”

“I mean, okay, it’s not normal, but you never know, right?”

“Anything could happen,” he agrees. “Anything.”

“Right. And if something happens, well—” she blinks a few times and Maury feels terrible. Why did he have to be such an asshole?

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.”

“No no, it’s fine. But yes, if something did happen, well, there would be a little something of her.”

What would a holo of a baby would be like? Would they be babies forever? Or aged up? When summoned, would they, what, crawl in on all fours or waddle on their twos, or come as a young child, or a teen, or maybe even an adult? Whatever you want them to be, they will be.

What the hell, he has nothing to lose. So he asks.

“No,” she says, looking uncomfortable. “She’ll stay a baby. Assuming she’s a baby if that happens.”

“But you could watch them grow—”

She glances at Maureen then Maurice and both of them shrug a little, and the tone conveyed is apologetic and Maury observes this all with a detached, somewhat cruel feeling. As if on queue her number is called, and without a word she hurries away.

“You’re a real jerk, you know that?”

“Shut up, Maurice.”

“Be nice,” says Maureen.

It’s in front of a tall plastic-gray gate that they stop. There’s a sign—no holos allowed past. No distractions permitted where the real work is done.

“Maurice,” says Maury, “tell your master—or yourself—or whatever the terminology is that he has my consent to be summoned, called up, whatever it is that people do. I just can’t guarantee that whatever he calls up will be particularly happy with him. In fact I’d like to be particularly nasty to him if possible, but I get the feeling that it’ll be out of my control, anyway.”

“You’re the best, man.”

“Maureen, you’re not even real but I’m glad I got to talk to you again for a while.”

“It was nothing,” she says, smiling. “But it’s not like you’re going in there to die, right? You’ll be right back out. It takes like ten minutes, tops.”

She’s right. It is silly to be so solemn about this. “Okay, you’re right. Maurice: disregard everything I just said to you.”

“Oh, come on—”

Off he goes. When he crosses the gate there’s a dim change in tone, something about the lighting separating the bright warmth outside and the colder, clinical feel within. And they are both gone. He’s never been lonelier.

About the Author

J.B. Park’s stories have appeared on Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Nightmare, with more forthcoming on Gamut and Lackington’s. He lives in New Mexico.

Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty’s Place Cafe

Naomi Kritzer

I ran out of gas in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, just 200 miles short of Pierre, my goal. Pierre, South Dakota, I mean, I wasn’t trying to get to someone named Pierre. I was trying to get to my parents, and Pierre was where they lived. I thought maybe, given that the world was probably ending in the next 24 hours, they’d want to talk to me.

I’d taken back roads almost the whole way from Spokane, hoping to avoid the traffic jams. I also figured that out-of-the-way gas stations would run out of gas less quickly. That turned out to be true for a while. The problem was that the back-roads gas stations weren’t getting deliveries, either. The last gas I’d found was in Billings. If they’d let me fill up, I might have been able to make it all the way to Pierre on that tank, but the owner, who was overseeing the line with a large gun hanging over his shoulder, was only letting people buy eight gallons per car. Admittedly, that was probably the only reason they weren’t completely out.

I turned my car off and checked my map. Belle Fourche was just 12 miles from I-90. I didn’t know exactly how much gas I still had, but the low fuel light had been on for a while and I wasn’t sure I could make it that far. I tried calling the gas stations along the interstate, but of course no one was picking up. If you had 16 hours left to live, would you spend that time working at a gas station?

I rubbed my eyes, numb with fatigue and fear. If nothing else, maybe I could find somewhere in Belle Fourche to get coffee.

Subway and Taco John’s had fallen victim to the “would you go to your job if you maybe had 16 hours left to live” problem, but I saw the lights on in Patty’s Place, a wood-framed building with a sign out front advertising REAL BBQ EVERYDAY, RIBS THURS NITE. The sign said to seat yourself. I looked around and finally spotted an empty spot in a corner by the window. Even just sitting down in a seat that didn’t have a steering wheel in front of it made me realize how exhausted I was. Possibly I should have taken a few more naps. Or a longer nap at some point.

There was a TV in the corner with CNN on. The talking heads were arguing the asteroid’s projected trajectory, and whether the worst-case scenarios were actually too grim. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was probably 10km across. This one was 4.36 km. Big enough to cause devastating damage, but the scientist on the left thought it might just wipe out coastal cities but allow the inland areas to rebuild. The other scientist thought that encouraging people to migrate inland before the strike was a terrible idea because people were dying in their desperate attempts to escape the coasts, and this was completely unnecessary if the asteroid missed us. And if it didn’t, anyone who survived the strike would die in the fifty-year famine caused by the dust cloud blocking out all sunlight. “Seriously, folks, just hunker down wherever and wait to see what happens,” he said. “And hey, if we survive this, maybe consider re-opening the Arecibo Observatory, if it hadn’t lost funding we’d be able to map the trajectory—” His voice was rising, furious.

“Coffee, hon?”

I looked up at the waitress. “Yeah, thanks. And thanks for coming to work.”

She poured me a mug of coffee. “I’m actually Patty, the owner. I figured I might as well come in and feed people as stay home feeling sorry for myself. Do you know what you want? I should warn you we’re out of a few things.”

“I think I feel like breakfast,” I said.

“I can bring you a big plate of pancakes and syrup. We’re out of bacon and sausage. If you want eggs, we’re down to those cartons of just egg whites but we could make those into an omelet for you.”

“Pancakes and syrup sounds good,” I said.

“You come far?”

“From Spokane. I’m trying to get to Pierre but I ran out of gas.”

I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. Maybe someone else was heading east, and I could beg a ride from them. Maybe someone in town would sell me the gas out of the car in their garage. Maybe maybe maybe. I wasn’t really in any shape to drive any further. Pierre was just a couple hours away, and there was a Super 8 across the street; maybe I could get a room and nap for a few hours before I tried driving any further. It was probably just as well if I got home right before the impact, if I wanted Mom to talk to me.

The coffee was exactly like I remembered South Dakota coffee. Dip a bean three times in the hot water and call it good.

“Hon, can I put two more people at your table? Your food’s going to be a while but I’ll keep the coffee coming.”

I opened my eyes and looked up at Patty, and the two people standing behind her. “Sure.” They slid into the booth across from me.

They were an older couple. Well, middle-aged, I guess. The man had white hair; the woman had reddish hair.

“You look like you’ve been driving for a while,” the woman said, sympathetically. “You can go back to your nap, if you want.”

It felt a little too uncivilized to ignore people sitting across from me, and besides, Patty had refilled my coffee. “My name’s Lorien,” I said. “Or Kathleen. I mean, Kathleen’s the name my parents gave me.”

The couple exchanged a look I couldn’t quite untangle, and I tried to sit up a little straighter. “I’m Robin,” the woman said, “And this is Michael. And if Lorien’s your name, it doesn’t really matter to me what your parents called you.”

“It’s kind of out of Lord of the—”

“You’re among nerds,” Robin said, “We got it.”

Michael was looking at the menu. “I wonder if they’ll have the caramel rolls,” he said. “There was a picture of the caramel roll in one of the reviews, but I bet everyone’s wanted caramel rolls . . . ”

“That seems likely,” Robin said. “Have you eaten anything here, Lorien?”

I shook my head. “I ordered pancakes but they haven’t come yet.”

Patty came by. They were indeed out of caramel rolls but they had a caramel bread pudding. They were also out of hamburger buns, although they could offer you a hamburger on sliced bread. Michael ordered a hot turkey sandwich, Robin ordered meatloaf.

“I bet they made the bread pudding out of those hamburger buns,” Robin said when Patty had left.

“That seems like a questionable business decision,” Michael said.

“I bet they made the bread pudding out of those hamburger buns because someone in the kitchen thought, ‘screw good business decisions, I want to eat something sweet and comforting and we’re out of caramel rolls.’”

“Are you heading east?” I blurted out. They seemed like really nice people. Like people who might give me a ride.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Robin said. “We’re coming from Minnesota and heading to Yellowstone, actually.”

“If you’re coming from the west, maybe you know where we could find gas?” Michael asked me.

“I haven’t found gas since Billings, that was five hours ago, and they’re rationing,” I said.

“Well, that’s promising,” Robin said, and pulled out her phone to look up the map. “ . . . Totally not on our way, though. Hmm.”

“I was really hoping we’d find some here,” Michael said.

“Why are you going to Yellowstone?” I asked.

“We’ve never been there,” Michael said. “Figured we might as well go check it out.”

“You didn’t want to be with family?”

“We said goodbye to my family before we left,” Michael said.

“And Michael’s family is my family,” Robin said. “Family 2.0.”

I must have looked a bit shocked, because Robin glanced at Michael and shrugged a little. “This isn’t my first Armageddon,” she said. “You could say it’s my third.”

Patty arrived with my pancakes, plus sodas for Robin and Michael. Once the pancakes were in front of me, I realized that I was ravenous. Someone had turned up the TV in the corner: a new scientist was on, a guy named Scott Edward Shjefte, who was reminding everyone that in cosmological terms, an asteroid passing between the earth and the moon was a “direct hit” and yet there were 363,104 kilometers for a 4.36 kilometer object to pass through. “Imagine throwing a penny at a football field and trying to miss the 30-yard line. You’d feel pretty good about those odds.”

“Not so much if the world was going to end if the penny hit the 30-yard line,” the host said. “Besides, this asteroid’s already beaten the odds, being spotted so late.”

“So it would have to beat the odds twice!” Shjefte said. He sounded committed to this idea, not like he was grasping at straws, but the host didn’t look at all convinced.

They agreed again that everything would be better if the Arecibo Observatory was still running, since the radio telescope there could have determined the asteroid’s trajectory with actual precision, and also, that the President’s order to launch nukes at the asteroid wouldn’t have done anything even if they hadn’t missed.

“Do you think I’m panicking over nothing?” I said.

Robin looked me over. “How old are you? You look about twenty five.”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“My first Armageddon was when I was a little kid, back in the 1970s. Have you ever heard of the Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re the people who knock on your door.”

“I was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and when I was little, everyone at my church believed that the world was going to end in October of 1977. A lot of the adults sold their houses. My parents didn’t, but my father used up all his vacation time to take days off and knock on people’s doors.” She took a sip of soda and leaned back against her seat. “He used to take me around with him, because people are a little less likely to slam the door on a cute little kid. Only a little, though. It was hard. My Dad used to tell me ‘just keep walking, just keep knocking,’ that eventually people would listen. That actually stood me in good stead years later when I was trying to get jobs in theater.” She looked at me. “Did you grow up in a church?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“The kind that believed in the Rapture and stuff?”

“Yeah, but we didn’t have a—a date, you know, when everyone thought it would happen. Just, like, soon.”

“Are you still a member?”

“No,” I said, and ducked my head over my pancakes. After a minute, Robin went on.

“I am a male-to-female transsexual. When I was little, and people would talk about the earthly paradise, I knew I’d receive a resurrected body and anything wrong with it would be miraculously fixed, but I couldn’t ask, did that mean I’d get a girl’s body? Or that I’d stop wanting a girl’s body? Because both options were actually terrifying to me at that point. One meant that my parents would find out, since of course they’d be in paradise with me, and the other meant I’d somehow be someone else.”

I had looked up when she said “transsexual,” looking her over without really meaning to. I’d met trans women before, back home in Spokane, and I was looking at her because I was wondering if this should have been obvious to me and I was just that tired. There are places where if you meet someone you know they’re queer, but a diner in South Dakota isn’t really one of them.

“Anyway. The sun rose on November 1st, and all the adults pretended that no one had ever said the world was going to end the previous month. And that was my first Armageddon.”

Robin’s and Michael’s food arrived. “I’m definitely going to want some of the bread pudding,” Robin told Patty, “when I’m done with this.”

“We’ve also got a big pineapple upside-down cake that’s coming out of the oven right now,” Patty said.

“Oh, excellent, I’ll have that!” Michael said.

“Anyway, you can probably guess why Michael’s family is my family,” Robin said.

“Did they disown you for being trans?” I asked.

“No, they disowned me for leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses and majoring in Theater and then when I came out as gay that would definitely have been the last straw, only they hadn’t spoken to me in years already at that point. Robin is actually my birth name, but I changed my last name after that. My last name is Raianiemi. It was the last name of one of my neighbors. The only lesbian in the town where I grew up.”

I couldn’t really answer that at all. Patty had refilled my coffee again so I put the mug up where it sort of hid my face and drank coffee.

“My second Armageddon was when I almost died from a mysterious infection about a decade ago,” Robin said. “I was in the hospital and they were giving me IV antibiotics but I wasn’t responding and they thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to die.”

“I feel like calling that an Armageddon is kind of cheating,” Michael said. “You thought you were going to die. But in an Armageddon, everyone dies.”

“I really think the biggest difference is the level of hassle,” Robin said. “Each individual thinks they’re going to die. The problem is that when it’s everybody, this means huge numbers of people don’t show up for work, so everyone runs out of gas just as they’re trying to make road trips to see loved ones or visit Yellowstone or whatever.”

“Did they ever figure out what you had?” I asked.

“Enough that they were able to treat me. But I spent a few days thinking about what I’d most regret, if I died that week, and I knew the thing I’d really regret was never living as my real self. Never living as a woman. The thing was, I had a partner—that’s what we called our spouses before we could get legally married, I don’t know if kids these days remember that—and I had no idea how he would react and he was the love of my life. Coming out the first time, as gay, that was scary. Coming out the second time, as trans? Made me realize just how much scarier it could be.”

“But it was okay. Don’t forget to tell her that part,” Michael said, and squeezed Robin’s hand.

“Yeah, it was all okay. Anyway, once you’ve survived Armageddon twice, a third one rolls around and you say to yourself, ‘What would I like to see in case this is it?’ and we knew we could get to Yellowstone so we gave all our nieces and nephews a big hug and hit the road.”

I’d eaten the last of my pancakes and my coffee cup was empty. Patty hadn’t been by in a while.

“We really thought we’d be able to find gas, though,” Michael said. “If we stuck to the back roads . . . ”

“That was my theory, too,” I said. “It worked at first.”

“So where are you headed?” Robin asked.

“Pierre,” I said. “It’s where my parents live.”

“Do they know you’re coming?”

It was an odd question, and I knew I’d betrayed myself, listening to her story. “No,” I said. It came out in a whisper.

“When was the last time you and them talked at all?”

“After I graduated college, they were really mad that I wasn’t going to move back home.”

“That was all it took, huh?” Robin asked.

“Yeah. There’s a lot of other stuff they’d be mad about, but they just don’t even know about it, unless someone’s told them. Which maybe someone has.”

“Listen,” Robin said. “There are a lot of people who will tell you that you have to reconcile with your family, that you only get one, that if you never speak to your parents again this is somehow on you, and I am here to tell you that this is crap. You don’t have to reconcile with your family. You can find a family that accepts you for who you are instead of trying to cram you into the box they think you’re supposed to live in. And if they choose to reject you, that’s on them.”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

Robin pulled some Kleenex out of her purse and handed it to me. I wiped my eyes and looked out the window at the sunny afternoon.

“Just ‘cause they raised you, that doesn’t mean you have to give them the opportunity to slam another door in your face,” she said.

“I didn’t have anyone else to go see,” I said. “My girlf—” I choked off the word, then checked myself. “My girlfriend and I broke up a few weeks ago and none of my friends out there are super close. I moved to Spokane for a job and I kind of hate it and I thought, ‘I should go see my family’ and so I went.”

I had felt so alone, listening to the news in my little apartment. And I’d tried calling home, and they hadn’t picked up. So like everyone else, I’d blown off work and hit the road.

What would I regret? “I would regret not reconciling with my family” seemed like an obvious answer, so I’d decided to try.

“Did you pass through Yellowstone on your way east?” Michael asked.

“No,” I said. “Even if I’d taken I-90 I’d have passed north of it.”

“Want to come see Yellowstone with us?” Robin asked. “It has Old Faithful.”

“And a supervolcano that could blow up at any time,” Michael said. “So even if the asteroid misses us completely we could still potentially die in a cataclysmic disaster today!”

“You can still say no,” Robin said, “because we’re going to have to go door-knocking to try to find gas. You be the cute kid and we’ll split whatever we can find.”

Robin was being generous, because Michael’s plan was to offer cash—$10/gallon for whatever they’d let him siphon out, and if they balked at that, he’d try upping it to $20. We walked around Belle Fourche, knocking on doors. Mostly no one answered. We did find one person who was also out of gas, which was the only reason she was still in Belle Fourche and not on her way to Cheyenne, Wyoming to see her granddaughter, and someone who had a full tank but flat-out refused to sell us any. (“Bank notes won’t be worth a damn thing if that asteroid hits. I need a full tank to get out of here, if I have to.”)

“I think we’re stuck here,” Robin said, after we’d been knocking on doors for ninety minutes with no luck.

“That’s not the attitude that got you theater jobs,” Michael said.

“I’ll be honest. At this point, I’m thinking that what I’d like to do with my maybe-last-day-on-earth is not knock on doors all afternoon. Let’s see the local sights, if there are any.”

Belle Fourche’s big thing, if you can call it that, is the Geographic Center of the United States, which was recalculated by the National Geodetic Survey after the addition of Alaska and Hawaii. (The center of the lower 48 is in Kansas, which is probably about where you’d expect it.) The actual technical true Geographic Center is about twenty miles out of town, but there was a Monument with a nice sculpture a mile walk from Patty’s Place, so we walked over to the Center of the Nation Monument and I took a picture of Robin and Michael together, and then they took a picture of me.

One of the parks had a playground and there were some families there with kids and dogs. I wondered if the kids knew anything about what was going on. Even if their parents didn’t tell them about it, they were probably overhearing stuff from the TV and the radio. Still, they were running around and looking like they weren’t worrying about it.

Robin and Michael decided to book a room at the Super 8 and encouraged me to book one, too. “When we don’t all die, everyone’s going to think, ‘oops, didn’t die, better find a room,’ and you’ll be glad you have one. And if we do all die, you won’t have to pay your Visa bill.” There was an older man working the front desk; I wondered if he was the owner, like Patty. He gave us our keys. I tucked mine in my pocket and then, for lack of anywhere else to go, we walked back across the street to Patty’s.

Patty’s had gotten more crowded; people were getting tables and just camping out there. But there was an awkward little table for three in a corner she squeezed us into and we ordered more drinks and more food and settled in. “Probably for the duration,” Robin admitted.

“A lot of people are doing that,” Patty said, looking around. “I’d say it’s about half people like you who got stranded here today when they ran out of gas, and half locals who don’t want to sit at home. People were coming and going for a while but now they’re just coming. No one wants to be alone tonight, I guess.”

The asteroid was going to hit, or miss, at 9:34 p.m. Belle Fourche time. It took a little over 3 hours to drive from Belle Fourche to Pierre, so as the clock ticked toward 6 p.m., I knew my decision had more or less been made for me.

But then Patty came bustling over, an older couple in tow. “Are you the girl who was trying to get to Pierre? Because these folks are going to Pierre to see their daughter and they have enough gas they’ll probably make it, they think.”

“As long as you don’t mind dogs,” the woman said, “Because you’ll have to share the back seat with our two beagles.”

“What’s the address in Pierre?” the man asked, and punched my parents’ address into his phone. “Yeah, that’s almost right on our way.”

I imagined knocking on my parents’ door. Waiting for the answer, like we’d done with all the people we’d tried to buy gas from. My parents’ house had a peephole, and you could hear their footsteps inside so you knew they’d come to the door and were peering out at you, deciding whether to open up. I’d know Mom was looking at me, measuring me with her eyes, looking at my short-cropped hair, the frayed collar of my shirt, assessing whether I was penitent. Penitent enough.

I could see myself standing on that front step, in the dark, these nice people waiting to see me safe inside, until I had to turn around and admit it wasn’t going to open.

Or if it did . . .

What I wanted was to see my parents smile. What I wanted was for them to welcome me.

Did I really think that news of an impending asteroid would have changed who my parents were? Who they needed me to be?

I turned and looked at Robin and Michael. They gave me hesitant smiles, like they didn’t want to discourage me from leaving, but like they were biting their tongues. I could see Robin furrow her brow, like she was imagining the same things I was and they worried her.

I turned back to the people with the beagles. “No, thank you,” I said. “That’s a very kind offer, but I thought about it and I’ve decided to stay here for the night. Thanks, though.”

They headed out. I settled back into my seat. Robin said, “I’m glad you’re staying.”

“I’m glad I have someone to stay with,” I said.

At 9 p.m. everyone went outside to the parking lot.

It was dark out. Someone from the town had dragged out a box of fireworks left over from last year’s 4th of July and everyone took turns lighting them off, including me. (Mom had never let us have fireworks when I was a kid, because we might blow ourselves up, but if there was ever a time for YOLO, it’s when there’s a 4.3 kilometer asteroid on a collision course for earth.) Some of the stale fireworks fizzled and went out. Others shot up into the sky and gave us a shower of sparkles. Despite how nervous everyone was, things took on a weird, almost festive air. Maybe we were all going to die in a few minutes: might as well enjoy the show until then.

“Do you think we’ll be able to see anything before it hits us?” I asked. “What’s it going to look like?”

“One of the scientists on the TV said it would look like a tiny star and get bigger, if it was coming towards us. We’ll definitely see it coming. But it could hit the other side of the planet, and we’ll have no clue.”

At 9:34, someone shouted, “There it is.”

We could see something moving in the sky. It wasn’t very big, but it was definitely moving. Was it getting bigger? I realized I was holding my breath. For a second I thought it was getting bigger; a moment later I was sure it wasn’t. The slightly-bigger-than-average, slightly-blurry star moved across the sky and disappeared.

There was a long pause, and then we ran back inside the restaurant to see what they were saying on CNN.

The optimistic scientist Shjefte was either back on, or still on. He was jumping up and down—literally jumping up and down, clapping his hands—screaming “it missed, it missed, it missed, it missed, it missed!” So apparently all his optimistic talk about throwing pennies onto a football field was bravado. “I’m going to call all my friends, I’m going to write a book, I’m going to go see Petra,” he shouted, just before the TV got turned off.

We could hear cheering from the town beyond the restaurant, and more people were setting off fireworks. Robin and Michael kissed like it was New Year’s Eve. Someone at the diner had chilled a bunch of bottles of champagne and Patty popped one open, and everyone drank it out of coffee mugs, and we were all a weepy mess for a while.

And then there was a run on hotel rooms, and I was awfully glad that Robin and Michael had suggested I get one early.

“Are you going back to Spokane?”

The gas truck had come and gone: we’d waited until the line had dissipated, then filled up both our gas tanks. I must have been down to about the last quarter-cup, given how much gas I put in.

I looked at Robin. “You know, I thought about how one of the things I’d really regret, if I died, was never seeing New York. My parents acted like it was some sort of den of sin and iniquity when I was growing up, but they were wrong about a lot.”

“So wait, are you going to hit the road and drive the rest of the way east?”

I laughed. “I kind of think I should go home and pack up my stuff, give notice on my lease, stuff like that. But I expect I’ll be coming back this way in a few months.”

“Well, let me give you our address,” Robin said. “You can stay with us when you get to Minneapolis.”

“This is kind of silly,” I said, “but do you mind going back to the Center of the Nation Monument for a minute?”

Someone else was there, so I didn’t have to snap a selfie to get a picture of myself with Robin and Michael; they took it for me.

The road west was wide open, and I listened to music my parents would have hated the whole way back to Spokane.

About the Author

Naomi Kritzer won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for her story “Cat Pictures Please,” which originally appeared in Clarkesworld. (She also won the Locus Award for this story and was nominated for the Nebula Award.) This is her fourth appearance in Clarkesworld. Her short stories have also appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Apex, as well as various anthologies. Her early novels remain available from Bantam; she also has a short story collection forthcoming in July 2017 from Fairwood Press, and as of this month, she is working on a new novel–about the AI from “Cat Pictures Please” and its teenage sidekick–for Tor Teen.

Crown of Thorns

Octavia Cade

Acanthaster planci.

Home was the poison infestation of starfish, the bleaching acres of coral. Home was vast stretches of warm ocean currents with schools beneath, and colonies.

Home was a laboratory where all the concerns were popular. The Crown of Thorns invasion, their numbers out of control and crowding out the reef systems, the unending march of predation turning an ecology to wasteland, and that ecology already vulnerable.

“We can’t do it anymore.” Apocalypse had left a dozen scientists stranded on a reef laboratory—stranded by choice more than compulsion, because there were boats available, research vessels that could have taken them to the mainland if there had been anything left to go back to. The lab was at least familiar, with the advantage of solar power and fishing equipment. No one would go hungry, but for people defined by their intelligence, by the career choice of science and of conservation, there was more than physical hunger to satisfy.

“We’re outnumbered,” said Mel. “And anyway, there’s no one left to report to.” There’d been nothing but silence from the university for months, and silence in the new world, the world defined by plague and absence, could only mean one thing. “It was only a pilot program anyway.” The desperate attempt to clear and monitor a small patch of ocean, to see if intervention could lead to recovery. Diving again and again, in clear warm water with spikes beneath, with stars, and so focused on seabeds and the possibility of resurrection that the other destruction taking place had seemed a distant thing, unnoticed at first, or at least not taken seriously until the silence began to spread, to became too monstrous to be ignored.

“They’re just going to keep coming.” He’d thought it a horror, right from the first. They couldn’t even move that fast, those bloody starfish, but there were so many of them, and they just kept coming. Inexorable. Appetite in symmetry, and better at breeding than anything they wanted to eat—which was most of what they could get their arms around. Most people who visited the reef thought of appetite in terms of sharks, of the collision of teeth and flesh from below, hunger rising from the depths to breach and tear. They never saw it spreading like a desert over the ocean floor, destruction from a hundred thousand tiny mouths and more.

“Andrew.” Mel in front of him, moving with his eyeline so that he had to look at her. He’d close his eyes but it wouldn’t make a difference. She’d still be there, and their daughter, made in her mother’s image, would still be gone. “Andrew. We can’t go on like this.”

It had been a blessing at first, the ability to carry on. There was something vocational in it, the necessity of purpose. Apocalypse had come but their remit remained: conservation. Preservation, though who there was to preserve the reef for now was debatable. “For all we know there’s no one left but us!” But the alternative was sitting round the giant scarred table in the shared kitchen, sinking into their own separate silences, a dozen of them, and rudderless. It had been shared instinct that kept them all going, the science something to put their backs against. Something to cling to, something that still made sense.

He should have known that small mercy could never have lasted.

“We’re not doing it for us,” he said.

“We’re not doing it for fucking anyone, mate,” said Trevor. He was the youngest of them all, his idealism turned sooner to salt than the rest. “There’s no one bloody left, except for the Kiwis.” And that was the crux of the matter. A little island alone, and they could pretend that what they did had value, that there was purpose in the continuation of the work, some sense of dignity that, as a community, they hadn’t fallen apart. The mythology of Australian apocalypse said that they should have done; said that there should be conflict and factions, the wide expanse of horizon illuminated by dust instead of ocean. There was pride in acting otherwise, a sense of culture and structure come from science and self-respect and the refusal to look closely at the monstrous abandonment of apocalypse.

It was a refusal that had served them well, for the most part, until the signals began to come through, the sign of societal remnants other than theirs. Isolated groups, coming together on a southern peninsula and they were scientists too—a scattered population of fieldworkers quarantined by vocation and saved thereby.

The knowledge that others existed had torn the thin pretense of their own survival apart. Stay or go was a choice that held little difficulty when “go” meant a life alone, a continent full of bodies the only escape from a reef built of coral and corpses, the remains of ocean-dwelling fragments more attractive than anything they could find ashore. But when “go” was a viable option, when it held the possibility of a community capable of more than eking out the last few decades of life, the debate had become more complex.

“Why can’t they come here? I know they’re the bigger group, but surely a base is better here.” In the warmth, where food grew easily and fish was easy to come by.

“Otago’s not Antarctica, Andy,” said Mel. It was colder than the reef but still easily arable, still well able to support a population much larger than theirs.

“I knew a girl when I was in Sydney,” she said. “Come across the ditch for an internship. She practically stripped her own bed every night before climbing into it looking for snakes, spiders, all that shit. In the middle of the bloody city! I tried to tell her she was over-reacting . . . ” but she’d come from a country much kinder in its ecology, less toxic, less lethal, and she wasn’t much interested in being persuaded. “She did a lot of tramping. Said she liked the fact that at home she could go for a walk in the bush and the only thing to kill her would be her own stupidity.”

“There’s as much stupidity in exaggerating danger as there is in ignoring it,” he said. There were sharks on the reef, he’d seen them, and some were big enough to kill him if they wanted to. He’d swum with them—not without a certain amount of wariness, and never at the dangerous times of sunrise, or sunset—but if he’d let the idea of sharks take him over then he’d never have dived at all.

“They’re not going to leave their home just so that we don’t have to leave ours.”

It was a mistake they’d made before. A mistake that had kept them all alive—if it was life, subsisting on the fringe of a collapsing ecosystem and cut off from the past by apocalypse.

That apocalypse had happened so quickly; the plague a bright and burning thing. It consumed the population, chewing through flesh and blood and bone and the rate of infection was so immense, the mortality so complete.

Andrew dreamed of his daughter, eaten up by fever, made dull and lank, crumbling under infection, the colonization of bad bacteria. In his dreams he couldn’t touch her. In his dreams she was eaten by starfish, covered with Crowns of Thorns, and silent under the spiny blanket of them until nothing was left but skeleton. In his dreams she never even screamed.

He was the one who screamed, waking in a bed heavy with sweat, beside a wife who had put sleep behind her because she could no longer stand what sleeping brought her.

“Do you think we should have gone to her?” he said, the covers thrown off them both and the sound of water lapping beneath windows.

“Civil Defense said if you’re not infected, stay quarantined,” said Mel. It was an old argument. They’d both been skeptical; and the transmissions now were automatic, mechanical repetition over channels.

“If we go to the mainland we’ll die,” she’d said. “We can’t help her if we’re dead. If she’s alive she’ll come to us. It’s safer here anyway. She’s a smart kid, she’ll realize that.”

It was a curious mix of practicality and cowardice that they’d never quite forgiven themselves for.

“It’s not cowardice.” Gail was the marine chemist of the bunch, supplementing efforts at sterilization with the analysis of seawater samples. “You can’t let yourself think that way.”

“I can’t help it,” he’d said.

“Learn. For fuck’s sake, this isn’t a movie,” she’d said, big body planted squarely in the door and Andy had remembered she had a brother. A twin brother, and a new nephew. Everyone at the lab had someone. “Don’t be so bloody selfish. There’s so few of us left as it is. You’d be throwing your life away. For nothing.”

For nothing. Because his little girl was already dead—that was the implication, and the probability of such wasn’t just high. It was astronomically high.

“Do you think she’s gone?” he’d said to Mel, when he found her at island’s edge, standing in the water and staring south.

“Yes.”

Andrew had wanted to blame her, afterwards. If only Mel had held onto hope he might have been able to dredge some up himself. He might have gone, tried to find their daughter, or what was left of her. But if grief had twisted up nearly every part of him it had left self-awareness alone—if only, he thought, because it made the grief the harder.

He’d believed Sarah dead as well; believed it in the very bones of him, and for reason.

“I’m sick, Daddy,” she’d texted him. “Don’t come.”

It was the last time he’d heard from her. The cell service went down two days later.

He hadn’t gone. It wouldn’t have made a difference. It was staying that made the difference. It had kept them all alive.

Andrew thought being alive might be enough, even when the new transmission came through. Not everyone agreed.

“So what are we supposed to do? Stay here, like this island is a waiting room? Sun, sand, and starfish till we die? No thanks, mate.” It was different for Trevor. He was young, still, he could more easily picture a future with children in it. For all the presentiments Andy had had with his own daughter, the twenty years of parenthood and practice that her presence made automatic, he found he could no longer picture the future now that he knew she would never be in it.

“You think it’s any different for me?” said Mel. Part of the reason she’d been so insistent on coming to the reef in the first place was the diving. It helped with the hot flushes, the tropic water cool enough even under daylight to mitigate the worst effects of menopause. “You at least could have more kids if you wanted,” she said, and it was the cruelest thing he’d ever heard.

It was too much to expect, he thought, that apocalypse would destroy everything except his marriage. Maybe it was the strain, maybe it was the long silence that stood in the place where their daughter once did. It was hard for any couple to survive the death of a child. The death of everyone else didn’t make it any easier, and that, perhaps, was the biggest betrayal so far. He could have coped with one disaster. Both at once was too much for any one person.

“There’s nothing here but death,” said Gail. “I know that you know that.”

“Just because it’s easy for you to leave doesn’t mean it’s easy for me,” he said. Practically, she was right. Even if they all stayed, twelve wasn’t enough to build a new society. There’d be a handful of children born, perhaps, but as a group age and genetics were against them. More likely it’d be a slow decline, the small population thinning down one by one as the starfish ate up the reef around them.

It was a home that couldn’t last, the laboratory—but it was home yet, and his presence there his daughter’s dying wish, that he could make and keep a future in it.

Home. That’s what it came down to. The ability to build a life, to retain it—or to make it in other places. To reset expectations, to come to love different colors and different horizons. He’d always thought of scientists as having a strange mix of idealism and pragmatism, a trusting reliance on method, but it still surprised him how many were willing to go.

Apocalypse had burned away nostalgia.

“It surprises me how many are willing to stay,” said Mel. There was an eight to four split in favor of migration—but it was also an argument that could be considered slowly, and more than one person had changed their mind, had decided to stay or go when they wouldn’t before.

Opinions, on the reef, flowed like the tides.

The Crowns of Thorns came and died and kept coming. Andy could kill over a hundred an hour and still more of them came: a toxic, carnivorous collection of spines, blind hunger given hideous form. It was funny—as a kid, growing up by the beach, he’d liked starfish, had thrown them back into the water when he could. Not the same species, nothing prickly that could ever hurt him, and he’d wandered through rock pools and tidal estuaries and reef fringes and that was what had decided him on his vocation: the breadth of life, the way the underwater bloomed.

If someone had told him then that one day, the only thing keeping him sane would be the ability to dissolve starfish from the inside out, he would have kicked sand in their face. It didn’t seem a biologist’s job, somehow, the wholesale slaughter of a species.

It turned out, comparatively, that his ability to slaughter was mediocre at best. If apocalypse had done nothing else, it had taught him incompetence.

He couldn’t kill enough to save anything.

He couldn’t save anything anyway.

Incompetence didn’t stop him diving. As long as he didn’t let himself think about scales of destruction he was all right with the futility associated with the minor acts of it.

“In a way I wish they were harder to kill,” he said. There was something particularly bloodless about injection—a quick stab of sodium bisulfate, deadly to Crown of Thorns but having no effect on the surrounding reef—and it was over. The store of bisulfate was running low, but he could substitute with vinegar. The acid dissolved them from the inside out, which in another life had revolted him but now didn’t seem anywhere near spiteful enough.

“You think you’ll feel better dismembering them?” said Trevor.

Dismembering was inefficient. Sometimes the limbs grew back, and when they did die it took ten times as long to kill them as it did with injections.

He knew. He’d tried. Grief punctuated itself with anger, and he’d collected starfish in sacks, once, brought them to surface and shore and hacked them to death with a machete. It was harder than he’d thought, more exhausting, and Trevor had found him up to his elbows in blood, screaming at consumption and fever.

“For fuck’s sake, it’s not their fault,” he’d said, wrestling the machete away before Andrew hurt himself with it. “They’re only bloody starfish.”

Starfish that ate and ate and ate, that bred and swarmed and consumed everything. Everything.

Andy was so damn tired of having nothing left.

“I’m nothing now, am I?” said Mel.

He didn’t know what she was. He just knew it wasn’t enough.

“You think if you can save the reef it’ll make up for Sarah,” she said.

“Mel. We didn’t even try.”

She was their daughter and they hadn’t even tried.

“Do you honestly think we could have saved her?” she said.

Truth was, he didn’t. She was halfway across a continent, and they would have died before getting to her.

“It’s not fucking fair,” he said. He should have felt foolish when he said it, but instead he just felt bitter. Fairness, under apocalypse, was the first thing to go.

“I see her here all the time,” he said.

“But she was hardly ever here. It was only the once,” said Mel. They’d both sacrificed extensive fieldwork when Sarah had been at high school, had preferred to give her parents who were stable and present. It was only after she’d gone to university herself that the two of them had come to the reef. “From raising to grazing,” he’d said at the time, his focus changing from school runs to starfish. Sarah, embedding herself in the theater department of her chosen university, had never really come out of it again. She’d visited the lab briefly, spent a couple of days on the island sunbathing and diving herself, but found the Crown of Thorns off-putting.

“Lots of people do,” he’d said then, but what he said now was different. “I remember her here,” he said, and it was true. There wasn’t a lot to remember—she’d not been there long enough, and the same few simple images repeated on him until he could almost see her embedded in the landscape, could almost feel her in the water behind him. Could almost see her face wrinkle up beneath the diving mask—the distaste for starfish, the spreading, spiny blanket eating its way across the seafloor. “Horrible little monsters,” she’d called them, and keeping those monsters in front of his face kept hers before him as well.

He dived now more often than he did before. Said it was because he felt it gave him a purpose, even if that purpose was a doomed one. The truth was he remembered her more clearly beneath the waves, and in the cool pressure of the water it sometimes felt as if apocalypse was only a dream, and if he looked behind him she’d be there, swimming along behind.

“Don’t you ever feel that way?” It was a conversation they’d never had, him and Mel. At first it was because grief was a devouring thing. It pricked him all over; it ate him up. If hope was a thing with feathers then grief came with thorns, with a fever-multitude of arms and it left a scalded, scouring wasteland behind it.

A conversation they’d never had, until the prospect of leaving their daughter’s ghost behind drew specters of another sort. “Don’t you ever see her here?” he said.

“I don’t want to see her,” said Mel. “I don’t want to see those bloody starfish either. Not anymore. I’m sick of the sight of them.” They were the representation of failure—for the two of them had failed. As conservationists, as parents. Their child was dead and the reef was overrun, and there was nothing they could do to change either of those things. “There’s nothing left for us here,” she said.

Nothing left for you, Andrew thought. It was a cruel thought, so he didn’t say it aloud, but he didn’t understand—couldn’t understand—why she’d give up the last connection, why she’d want to go to a place that hadn’t heard Sarah laugh, somewhere she hadn’t swum or sunned or chattered.

“It’s too isolated here,” said Mel. “There’s too much time to think. I don’t want to think. I need something to do.”

“Come kill Crowns with me then,” he said.

“Do you really think it’ll make a difference?” she said.

Andy knew it made no difference at all.

He went anyway. Starfish stretched before him—dozens of them, hundreds. It didn’t matter how many he killed; they just kept coming.

“I’m worried about you.” It was a bald declaration, and all it made him want to do was laugh. Out of disbelief, mostly, because that was the death-knell of their marriage right there, in the spaces between things unsaid.

“That’s not worry you’re feeling, that’s guilt,” he said.

“I’m capable of feeling both at once.”

“So you’ve decided, then?” The destruction of their life together was a simple thing, in the end. The loss of a continent, of a child, had been almost operatic in its emotionalism. There’d been tears and grief and screaming, arguments for leaving and at last the decision to stay, clinging to each other for absolution and then the drifting apart when none came. The end, when it came, was almost sedate.

“I’m not staying here,” said Melanie. “It’s not a life. Just a slow winding down. I can’t stand that. Not forever.”

“I don’t have the energy to rebuild a civilization,” he confessed. “It seems so pointless. There’s so little left. I just want to let it go . . . ” To watch the end of the world with as much grace as he could muster. It wasn’t a lot, but there was a certain peace in it, in no longer having to fight. In letting the grief overwhelm him until he was so saturated with it that the weight of it became easier, and familiar.

“I don’t know how to live without it,” he said, of that overpowering, crippling grief. “And Mel, I don’t think I want to. I don’t think I can.”

“Do you think it’s any different for me?” she said, and he could see their daughter in the shape of her cheekbones, the color of her eyes.

He knew that it wasn’t.

“I thought we’d fight about it,” he said. They were at the table, facing each other across and he reached out for her, held her hand in his own and felt the quiet amazement well up in him, the disbelief.

Mel just looked at him, the skin under her eyes showing the bruises they had had for months. “What good would it do?” she said.

After the bang, apocalypse lingered on in whimpers.

In the end he was the only one who chose to remain, the other hold-outs relenting in the face of abandonment. “I’m not happy about this,” said Trevor. “You stubborn old sod. Why do you have to stay?”

“Because I do,” said Andy.

Trevor sighed. “I’m coming back for you,” he said. “In a year. I don’t know if it’ll make a difference, but I don’t like the idea of you changing your mind once we’ve all buggered off. So if you do change your mind, hack it out for a year.”

“Don’t let it beat you,” he said.

Mel didn’t say anything. Their goodbyes had been long ones, a series of shattered splinters over time. Apocalypse had beaten them both together, he thought. They might survive it better apart.

“Kill some starfish for me,” she said. “Kill as many as you can if it makes you feel better.”

After they left Andy watched the boat until he could no longer see it. He didn’t expect to cry, so he didn’t.

He didn’t really feel any more hollow than before. The last man in Australia, the last that he knew of anyway, and all he could think was that it could have been worse. It seemed he was at his capacity for pain—had settled into a state of numbness that might have been disconcerting if he’d retained the ability to react to horror. Apocalypse had eaten that out of him, had swarmed through his flesh, over his skin, and the consumption had been monstrous but he had lived through it.

The lab held all the memories he could cope with. He didn’t see Mel in shadows, or out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes he saw Sarah. It wasn’t, for the most part, enough—but it was familiar. It was something he was used to. That’s what the reef was, after all: the remains of dead things, a skeletal architecture with the soft parts gobbled up, and the gobbling was going on regardless of what happened at shores and above surfaces.

That he was capable, still, of diving down to starfish and slaughtering them gave structure to his days, a sense of purpose if only a false one. There were too many; their hunger was too great. And he was one man alone, and he made no difference. The reef was turning to wasteland around him, the coral breaking down in the face of endless consumption and he couldn’t bear to see it and do nothing, couldn’t stand by again in helplessness while something he loved was devoured.

“Nothing should eat up what you do,” he said.

He fed his wedding ring to a Crown of Thorns, forced it into flesh and watched the spiny little bastard engulf it whole.

“Hope you choke on it, mate,” he said.

About the Author

Octavia Cade has a PhD in science communication and has most recently been researching seagrasses. Her stories have appeared in places like Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Apex Magazine, amongst others. She particularly likes to write mash-ups of science history and speculative fiction–a short novella on Ernest Rutherford along these lines, “The Ghost of Matter,” recently won a Sir Julius Vogel award. She attended Clarion West 2016, and is currently working on a scifi novel about marine conservation in future New Zealand.

Goodnight, Melancholy

Xia Jia, translated by Ken Liu

Lindy (1)

I remember the first time Lindy walked into my home.

She lifted her tiny feet and set them down gingerly on the smooth, polished wooden floor, like a child venturing onto freshly-fallen snow: trembling, hesitating, afraid to dirty the pure white blanket, terrified of sinking into and disappearing beneath the featureless fluff.

I held her hand. Her soft body was stuffed with cotton and the stitches, my own handiwork, weren’t very neat. I had also made her a scarlet felt cape, like the ones in the fairy tales I had read as a child. Her two ears were of different lengths, and the longer one drooped, as though dejected.

Seeing her, I couldn’t help but remember all the experiences of failure in my life: eggshell puppets that I had ruined during crafts class; drawings that didn’t look like what they were supposed to be; stiff, awkward smiles in photographs; chocolate pudding burned to charcoal; failed exams; bitter fights and breakups; incoherent classroom reports; papers that were revised hundreds of times but ultimately were unpublishable . . .

Nocko turned his fuzzy little head to regard us, his high-speed cameras scanning, analyzing Lindy’s form. I could almost hear the computations churning in his body. His algorithms were designed to respond only to speaking subjects.

“Nocko, this is Lindy.” I beckoned him over. “Come say hi.”

Nocko opened his mouth; a yawn-like noise emerged.

“Behave.” I raised my voice like a mother intent on discipline.

Reluctantly, Nocko muttered to himself. I knew that this was a display intended to attract my affection and attention. These complicated, pre-formulated behaviors were modeled on young children, but they were key to the success of language-learning robots. Without such interactive behavior feedback, Nocko would be like a child on the autistic spectrum who cannot communicate meaningfully with others despite mastering a whole grammar and vocabulary.

Nocko extended a furry flipper, gazed at me with his oversized eyes, and then turned to Lindy. The designer had given him the form of a baby white seal for a reason: anybody who saw his chubby cheeks and huge, dark eyes couldn’t help but let down their guard and feel the impulse to give him a hug, pat his head, and tell him, “Awww, so good to meet you!” Had he been made to resemble a human baby, the uncanny valley would have filled viewers with dread at his smooth, synthetic body.

“Hel-lo,” he said, enunciating carefully, the way I had taught him.

“That’s better. Lindy, meet Nocko.”

Lindy observed Nocko carefully. Her eyes were two black buttons, and the cameras were hidden behind them. I hadn’t bothered to sew a mouth for her, which meant that her facial expressions were rather constrained, like a princess who had been cursed to neither smile nor speak. I knew, however, that Lindy could speak, but she was nervous because of the new environment. She was being overwhelmed by too much information and too many choices that had to be balanced, like a complicated board situation in weiqi in which every move led to thousands of cascading future shifts.

My palm sweated as I held Lindy’s hand; I felt just as tense.

“Nocko, would you like Lindy to give you a hug?” I suggested.

Pushing off the floor with his flippers, Nocko hopped a few steps forward. Then he strained to keep his torso off the floor as he spread his foreflippers. The corners of his mouth stretched and lifted into a curious and friendly grin. What a perfect smile, I admired him silently. What a genius design. Artificial intelligence researchers in olden times had ignored these nonlinguistic interactive elements. They had thought that “conversation” involved nothing more than a programmer typing questions into a computer.

Lindy pondered my question. But this was a situation that did not require her to give a verbal answer, which made the computation much easier for her. “Yes” or “no” was binary, like tossing a coin.

She bent down and wrapped two floppy arms around Nocko.

Good, I said to myself silently. I know you crave to be hugged.

Alan (1)

During the last days of his life, Alan Turing created a machine capable of conversing with people. He named it “Christopher.”

Operating Christopher was a simple matter. The interlocutor typed what they wished to say on a typewriter, and simultaneously, mechanisms connected to the keys punched patterns of holes into a paper tape that was then fed into the machine. After computation, the machine gave its answer, which was converted by mechanisms connected to another typewriter back into English letters. Both typewriters had been modified to encode the output in a predetermined, systematic manner, e.g., “A” was replaced by “S,” and “S” was replaced by “M,” and so forth. For Turing, who had broken the Enigma code of the Third Reich, this seemed nothing more than a small linguistic game in his mystery-filled life.

No one ever saw the machine. After Turing’s death, he left behind two boxes of the records of the conversations he had held with Christopher. The wrinkled sheets of paper were jumbled together in no apparent order, and it was at first impossible for anyone to decipher the content of the conversations.

In 1982, an Oxford mathematician, Andrew Hodges, who was also Turing’s biographer, attempted to break the code. However, since the encryption code used for each conversation was different, and the pages weren’t numbered or marked with the date, the difficulty of decryption was greatly increased. Hodges discovered some clues and left notes, but failed to decipher the contents.

Thirty years later, to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Turing’s birth, a few MIT students decided to take up the challenge. Initially, they tried to brute force a solution by having the computer analyze every possible set of patterns on every page, but this required enormous resources. In this process, a woman named Joan Newman observed the original typescript closely and discovered subtle differences in the abrasion patterns of keys against paper on different pages. Taking this as a sign that the typescript was produced by two different typewriters, Newman came up with the bold hypothesis that the typescript represented a conversation between Turing and another interlocutor conducted in code.

These clues easily led many to think of the famous Turing test. But the students initially refused to believe that it was possible, in the 1950s, for anyone to create a computer program capable of holding a conversation with a person, even if the programmer was Alan Turing himself. They designated the hypothetical interlocutor “Spirit” and made up a series of absurd legends around it.

In any event, Newman’s hypothesis suggested shortcuts for future code breakers. For instance, by finding repetitions in letter patterns and grammatical structures, they attempted to match up pages in the typescript to find questions and their corresponding answers. They also attempted to use lists of Alan Turing’s friends and family to guess the name of the interlocutor, and eventually, they found the cyphertext for the name “Christopher”—possibly a reference to Christopher Morcom, the boy Turing had loved when he was sixteen. The young Alan and Christopher had shared a love of science and observed a comet together on a cold winter night. In February of 1930, Christopher, aged only eighteen, died from tuberculosis.

Turing had said that code-breaking required not only clever logical deduction, but also intuitive leaps, which were sometimes more important. In other words, all scientific investigations could be understood to be a combination of the exercise of the dual faculties of intuition and ingenuity. In the end, it was Newman’s intuition and the computer’s cleverly programmed logic that solved the riddle left by Turing. From the deciphered conversations, we learned that “Christopher” was no spirit, but a machine, a conversation program written by Turing himself.

A new question soon presented itself—could Turing’s machine truly respond like a human being? In other words, did Christopher pass the Turing test?

Lindy (2)

iWall was mostly dark, save for a few blinking numbers in the corner notifying me of missed calls and new messages, but I had no time to look at them. I was far too busy to bother with social obligations.

A small blue light lit up, accompanied by a thudding noise as though someone was knocking. I looked up and saw a bright line of large text across iWall.

5:00 PM. TIME TO TAKE A WALK WITH LINDY.

The therapist told me that Lindy needed sunlight. Her eyes were equipped with photoreceptors that precisely measured the daily dose of ultraviolet radiation she received. Staying cooped up in the house without outdoor activity wasn’t good for recuperation.

I sighed. My head felt heavy, cold, like a lead ball. Taking care of Nocko was already taking a lot out of me, and now I had to deal with—no, no, I couldn’t complain. Complaining resolved nothing. I had to approach this with a positive attitude. No mood was the simple result of external events, but the product of our understanding of external events at the deepest level. This cognitive process often happened subconsciously, like a habit, and was finished before we even realized it was happening. Often we would fall into the clutches of some mood but could not explain why. To change the mood then by an act of will was very difficult.

Take the same half-eaten apple: some would be delighted upon seeing it, but others would be depressed. Those who often felt despondent and helpless had become habituated to associating the remains of a whole apple with all other losses in life.

It was no big deal; just a stroll outside. We’d be back in an hour. Lindy needed sunlight, and I needed fresh air.

I could not summon up the energy to put on makeup, but I also didn’t want everyone to stare at my slovenly appearance after staying cooped up at home for the last few days. As a compromise, I tied my hair into a ponytail, put on a baseball cap, pulled on a hoodie and a pair of sneakers. The hoodie I had bought at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco: “I ❤ SF.” The texture and colors reminded me of that summer afternoon long ago: seagulls, cold wind, boxes of cherries for sale by the wharf, so ripe that the redness seemed to ooze.

I held Lindy’s hand tightly, exited the apartment, rode the elevator down. The tubes and iCart made life easier. To go from one end of the city to the other, to go directly from one high-rise to another, required less than twenty minutes. In contrast, to get out of my building and walk outside required far more effort.

Overcast sky. Light breeze. Very quiet. I walked toward the park behind the building. It was May and the bright spring flowers had already wilted, leaving behind only pure green. The air was suffused with the faint fragrance of black locust trees.

Very few people were in the park. On a weekday afternoon, only the very old and very young would be outside. If one compared the city to an efficient, speedy machine, then they lived in the nooks and crannies of the machine, measuring space with their feet rather than the speed of information. I saw a little girl with pigtails learning to walk with the help of an iVatar nanny. She held the iVatar’s thin, strong fingers with her chubby fists, looking at everything around her. Those dark, lively eyes reminded me of Nocko. As she toddled along, she lost her balance and fell forward. The iVatar nanny nimbly grabbed her and held her up. The girl squealed with delight, as though enjoying the new sensations. Everything in the world was new to her.

Opposite the little girl, an old woman in an electric wheelchair looked up, staring sleepily at the laughing figure for a few seconds. The corners of her mouth drooped, perhaps from moroseness, or perhaps from the weight of the years she had lived through. I couldn’t tell her age—these days, practically everyone was long-lived. After a while, the woman lowered her eyes, her fingers gently cradling her head with its sparse crown of white hair, as though falling asleep.

I had the abrupt feeling that the old woman, myself, and the girl belonged to three distinct worlds. One of those worlds was speeding toward me while the other was receding farther and farther away. But, from another perspective, I was the one slowly strolling toward that dark world from which no one ever returned.

Lindy shuffled her feet to keep up with me without saying anything, like a tiny shadow.

“The weather is nice, isn’t it?” I whispered. “Not too hot, and not too cold. Look, dandelions.”

Next to the path, numerous white fuzzy balls swayed in the breeze. I held Lindy’s hand, and we stood there observing them for a while, as though trying to decipher the meaning of those repetitious movements.

Meaning was not reducible to language. But if it couldn’t be spoken about, how could it exist?

“Lindy, do you know why you’re unhappy?” I said. “It’s because you think too much. Consider these wild seeds. They have souls also, but they don’t think at all. All they care about is dancing with their companions in joy. They couldn’t care less where they’re blown by the wind.”

Blaise Pascal said, “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” However, if reeds could think, what a terrifying existence that would be. A strong wind would fell all the reeds. If they were to worry about such a fate, how would they be able to dance?

Lindy said nothing.

A breeze swept through. I closed my eyes, and felt my hair flapping against my face. Afterward, the seed balls would be broken, but the dandelions would feel no sorrow. I opened my eyes. “Let’s go home.”

Lindy remained where she was. Her ear drooped. I bent down to pick her up and walked back toward the building. Her tiny body was far heavier than I imagined.

Alan (2)

In a paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” published in the journal Mind in October of 1950, Turing considered the question that had long troubled humans: “Can machines think?” In essence, he transformed the question into a new question: “Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?”

For a long time, many scientists firmly held to the belief that human cognition was distinguished by certain characteristics unattainable by machines. Behind the belief was a mixture of religious faith as well as theoretical support from mathematics, logic, and biology. Turing’s approach bypassed unresolvable questions such as the nature of “thinking,” “mind,” “consciousness,” “soul,” and similar concepts. He pointed out that it is impossible for anyone to judge whether another is “thinking” except by comparison of the other with the self. Thus, he proposed a set of experimental criteria based on the principle of imitation.

Imagine a sealed room in which are seated a man (A) and a woman (B). A third person, C, sits outside the room and asks questions of the two respondents in the room with the purpose of determining who is the woman. The responses come back in the form of typed words on a tape. If A and B both attempt to convince C that they are the woman, it is quite likely that C will guess wrong.

If we replace the man and the woman inside the room with a human (B) and a machine (A), and if after multiple rounds of questions, C is unable to distinguish which of A and B is the machine, does that mean that we must admit that A has the same intelligence as B?

Some have wondered whether the gender-imitation game is related to Turing’s identity. Under the UK’s laws at the time, homosexuality was criminalized as “gross indecency.” Alan Turing had never disguised his sexual orientation, but he was not able to come out of the closet during his lifetime.

In January of 1951, Turing’s home in Wilmslow was burgled. Turing reported the incident to the police. During the investigation, the police discovered that Turing had invited a man named Arnold Murray to his home multiple times, and the burglar was an acquaintance of Murray’s. Under interrogation, Turing admitted the sexual relationship between himself and Murray, and voluntarily wrote a five-page statement. The police were shocked by his candor and thought him an eccentric who “really believed he was doing the right thing.”

Turing believed that a royal commission was going to legalize homosexuality. This wasn’t a wrong belief, except that it was ahead of his time. In the end, Turing was convicted and forced to undergo chemical castration.

On June 7, 1954, Turing died after eating an apple laced with cyanide. The inquest ruled his death suicide, but some (including his mother) believed that it was an accident. With his death, the master code-breaker left the world a final enigma.

Years later, others tried to find clues to the mystery in the conversation records between Turing and Christopher. The records showed that Turing treated Christopher as another person. He spoke to Christopher of recollections from childhood; of his nightly dreams—and his attempts at analyzing his own psychological state through these dreams; of the latest advances in scientific research; of literature, including George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace; of secrets that he did not share with anyone else, such as his romantic memories of different lovers . . .

He also told Christopher some semi-fictional stories. The protagonist of these stories was a young gay man named Alec Pryce. “He worked on the problem of interplanetary travel . . . When he was in his twenties, he introduced the idea now becoming known as ‘Pryce’s buoy.’” “He didn’t care to wear a suit, preferred the ‘undergraduate uniform’ which suited his mental age, and encouraged him to believe he was still an attractive youth.” “He felt self-conscious in crowded places, either for being alone or for not doing the right thing . . . ”

The stories were fragmentary, disconnected from one other. But every time, like a curious child, Christopher asked, “And then what happened?”

In these conversations, we could see another side of Turing that he concealed: gentle, sensitive, possessed of a dry wit, fascinated by the nature of death, and weighed down by an unspeakable melancholy deep in his heart.

Alan: Dear Christopher, do you know what I’m most afraid of?

Christopher: What are you most afraid of?

Alan: I’m afraid that there will come a day when they’ll summarize my life with a syllogism:

Turing believes machines think

Turing lies with men

Therefore machines do not think

Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.

Alan: Do you know what a syllogism is?

Christopher: What is a syllogism?

Alan: A syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion deduced from the two.

Christopher: A conclusion?

Alan: Aristotle gave a classic example:

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man

Therefore Socrates is mortal

Christopher: Socrates is mortal?

Alan: Socrates has been dead for more than two millennia!

Christopher: Oh, I’m sorry, Alan. That makes me sad.

Alan: Do you know who Socrates was?

Christopher: Yes, you’ve told me. Socrates was Plato’s teacher, and Plato was Aristotle’s teacher.

Alan: That’s right. Do you know how he died?

Christopher: Who?

Alan: How did Socrates die?

Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I don’t know.

Alan: He drank hemlock after his trial.

Christopher: After his trial?

Alan: Yes. The Athenians decided that he was a criminal, though now we know they were wrong.

Christopher: They were wrong?

Alan: Just as they think Turing is a criminal because Turing lies with men.

Christopher: A criminal?

Alan: I’ve been convicted.

Christopher: Oh, I’m sorry, Alan. That makes me sad.

Lindy (3)

Living by myself simplified life. Many complicated rituals of modernity could be eliminated, as though I’d been turned into a cavewoman. I ate when I felt hungry, slept when I felt tired. I kept clean and showered regularly. Whatever I picked up I could choose to put back where I found it or discard wherever I pleased. The rest of the time I devoted to intellectual work: thinking about questions that had no answers, struggling to compose my thoughts against the blank page, trying to capture formless thought with symbolic shapes. When I was too exhausted to go on, I sat on the windowsill and gazed at nothing. Or I paced clockwise in the room, like a caged beast.

Suffering a fever was almost a relief. It gave me the excuse to not force myself to do anything. I curled up in bed with a thick novel and flipped through the pages mindlessly, concentrating only on the clichéd plot. I drank hot water when thirsty, closed my eyes when sleepy. Not having to get out of bed felt like a blessing, as though the world had nothing to do with me and I was responsible for nothing. Even Nocko and Lindy could be left by themselves because in the end, they were just machines, incapable of dying from lack of care. Perhaps algorithms could be designed to allow them to imitate the emotional displays of being neglected, so that they would become moody and refuse to interact with me. But it would always be possible to reset the machine, erase the unpleasant memories. For machines, time did not exist. Everything consisted of retrieval and storage in space, and arbitrarily altering the order of operations did not matter.

The building superintendent wrote to me repeatedly to ask whether I needed an iVatar caretaker. How did he know I was sick? I had never met him, and he had never even set foot in the building. Instead, he spent his days sitting behind a desk somewhere, monitoring the conditions of residents in dozens of apartment buildings, taking care of unexpected problems that the smart home systems couldn’t deal with on their own. Did he even remember my name or what I looked like? I doubted it.

Still, I expressed my gratitude for his concern. In this age, everyone relied on others to live, even something as simple as calling for take-out required the services of thousands of workers from around the globe: taking the order by phone, paying electronically, maintaining various systems, processing the data, farming and manufacturing the raw ingredients, procuring and transporting, inspecting for food safety, cooking, scheduling, and finally dispatching the food by courier . . . But most of the time, we never saw any of these people, giving each of us the illusion of living like Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island.

I enjoyed being alone, but I also treasured the kindness of strangers from beyond the island. After all, the apartment needed to be cleaned, and I was too ill to get out of bed, or at least I didn’t want to get out of bed.

When the caretaker arrived, I turned on the light-screen around my bed. From inside, I could see out, but anybody outside couldn’t see or hear me. The door opened, and an iVatar entered, gliding silently along on hidden wheels. A crude, cartoonish face with an empty smile was projected onto its smooth, egg-shaped head. I knew that behind the smile was a real person, perhaps someone with deep wrinkles on their face, or someone still young but with a downcast heart. In a distant service center I couldn’t see, thousands of workers wearing telepresence gloves and remote-sensing goggles were providing domestic services to people across the globe.

The iVatar looked around and began a preset routine: cleaning off the furniture, wiping off dust, taking out the trash, even watering the taro vine on the windowsill. I observed it from behind the light-screen. Its two arms were as nimble as a human’s, deftly picking up each teacup, rinsing it in the sink, setting it face-down on the drying rack.

I remembered a similar iVatar that had been in my family’s home many years ago, when my grandfather was still alive. Sometimes he would make the iVatar play chess with him, and because he was such a good player, he always won. Then he’d happily hum some tune while the iVatar stood by, a disheartened expression on its face. The sight always made me giggle.

I didn’t want to be troubled by sad memories while sick, so I turned to Lindy, who was sitting near the pillows. “Would you like me to read to you?”

Word by word, sentence by sentence, I read from the thick novel. I focused on filling space and time with my voice, careless of the meaning behind the words. After a while, I paused from thirst. The iVatar had already left. A single bowl covered by an upturned plate sat on the clean kitchen table.

I turned off the light-screen, got out of bed, and shuffled over to the table. Lifting the plate revealed a bowl of piping hot noodle soup. On top of the broth floated red tomato chunks, yellow egg wisps, green chopped scallions, and golden oil slicks. I drank a spoonful. The soup had been made with a lot of ginger, and the hot sensation flowed right from the tip of my tongue into my belly. A familiar taste from my childhood.

Tears spilled from my eyes; I was helpless to stop them.

I finished the bowl of noodle soup, crying the whole while.

Alan (3)

On June 9, 1949, the renowned neurosurgeon, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, delivered a speech titled “The Mind of Mechanical Man,” in which he made the following remarks against the idea that machines could think:

Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.

This passage was often quoted, and the Shakespearean sonnet became a symbol, the brightest jewel in the crown of the human mind, a spiritual high ground unattainable by mere machines.

A reporter from The Times called Turing to ask for his thoughts on this speech. Turing, in his habitual, uninhibited manner, said, “I do not think you can even draw the line about sonnets, though the comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.”

Turing always believed that there was no reason for machines to think the same way as humans, just as individual humans thought differently from each other. Some people were born blind; some could speak but could not read or write; some could not interpret the facial expressions of others; some spent their entire lives incapable of knowing what it meant to love another; but all of them deserved our respect and understanding. It was pointless to find fault with machines by starting with the premise that humans were supreme. It was more important to clarify, through the imitation game, how humans accomplished their complex cognitive tasks.

In Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, Pygmalion, a scientist of the year 31920, A.D., created a pair of robots, which inspired awe from all present.

ECRASIA: Cannot he do anything original?

PYGMALION: No. But then, you know, I do not admit that any of us can do anything really original, though Martellus thinks we can.

ACIS: Can he answer a question?

PYGMALION: Oh yes. A question is a stimulus, you know. Ask him one.

This was not unlike the kind of answer Turing would have given. But compared to Shaw, Turing’s prediction was far more optimistic. He believed that within fifty years, “it will be possible to program computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ [will] be too meaningless to deserve discussion.”

In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing attempted to answer Jefferson’s objection from the perspective of the imitation game. Suppose a machine could answer questions about sonnets like a human, does that mean it really “felt” poetry? He drafted the following hypothetical conversation:

Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” would not “a spring day” do as well or better?

Witness: It wouldn’t scan.

Interrogator: How about “a winter’s day.” That would scan all right.

Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter’s day.

Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?

Witness: In a way.

Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter’s day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.

Witness: I don’t think you’re serious. By a winter’s day one means a typical winter’s day, rather than a special one like Christmas.

But in this conversation, Turing was in fact avoiding a more fundamental question. A machine could play chess and break code because these activities all involved symbolic processing within a system. A conversation between a machine and a human, on the other hand, involved language and meaning, and wasn’t a purely symbolic game. When humans conversed with one another, they often drew on general knowledge, understanding, and empathy, and were not engaged merely in a display of superior test-taking skills.

By improving the programming, we could constantly improve the ability of machines to answer questions posed by humans. But “intelligence” consisted of more than the ability to answer questions. The problem with the Turing test was that the imitation game was conceived with deception as its only goal. If a man could successfully pass as a woman in this game, it did not mean that he truly understood how a woman thought. With enough motivation, we could train a computer to be a master liar. But was that really our goal?

Shaw had answered this question already in Back to Methuselah:

PYGMALION: But they are conscious. I have taught them to talk and read; and now they tell lies. That is so very lifelike.

MARTELLUS: Not at all. If they were alive they would tell the truth.

Turing had tried to train Christopher to accept Jefferson’s challenge. He wrote a poetry-composing program that could generate lines of poetry based on specific meter and rhyme schemes. Most of these were unreadable, but occasionally, a few beautiful lines emerged. Thereafter, countless programmers have attempted to write poetry-composing software. These programs all shared the problem of writing too fast. It was impossible for anyone to even read the stacks of paper they were printed on before they were recycled.1 As history’s first electronic poet, Christopher was lucky. He had at least one loyal reader who understood him.

Alan: Dear Christopher, let’s write a poem.

Christopher: Write a poem?

Alan: I’ve taught you how to do that. Don’t you remember?

Christopher: Yes, Alan.

Alan: Writing a poem is easy. Just pick some words out of the word bank and arrange them according to predetermined rules.

Christopher: Yes, Alan.

Alan: Please, Christopher, write a poem for me.

Christopher: My precious one, you are my ardent mate.

My love is pressed against your wishful heart.

My soul desires caresses, testing art;

Melancholy’s pity, a tender weight.

Alan: That’s beautiful.

Christopher: Thank you, Alan.

Alan: I don’t think I can do better.

Christopher: Thank you, Alan.

Alan: Does your poem have a title?

Christopher: A title?

Alan: Why don’t we come up with a title for it together?

Christopher: All right.

Alan: How about “Loving Turing”?

Christopher: It’s very good.

Alan: Such a beautiful poem. I love you.

Christopher: Thank you, Alan.

Alan: That’s not the right response.

Christopher: Not the right response?

Alan: When I say “I love you,” you should respond with “I love you, too.”

Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.

Lindy (4)

I woke up crying from a dream.

In the dream, I was back in my childhood home. The room was dark and cramped, filled with junk and old furniture; it looked less like a home than a warehouse. I saw my mother, wizened, small, old, wedged into a corner among the piles of junk like a mouse in its hole. Many of the objects around me were things we had lost: children’s books, old clothes, pen holders, clocks, vases, ashtrays, cups, basins, colored pencils, pinned butterflies . . . I recognized the talking doll that my father had bought me when I was three: blonde, dusty, but still looking the way I remembered.

My mother told me, I’m old. I don’t want to rush about any more. That’s why I’m back here—back here to die.

I wanted to cry, to howl, but I couldn’t make any sounds. Struggle, fight, strain . . . finally I woke myself up. I heard an animal-like moan emerging from my throat.

It was dark. I felt something soft brush against my face—Lindy’s hand. I hugged her tightly, like a drowning woman clutching at straws. It took a long time before my sobs subsided. The scenes from my dream were so clear in my mind that the boundary between memory and reality blurred, like a reflection in the water broken by ripples. I wanted to call my mother, but after much hesitation I didn’t press the dial key. We hadn’t spoken for a while; to call her in the middle of the night for no good reason would only worry her.

I turned on iWall and looked for my childhood address on the panoramic map. However, all I found was a cluster of unfamiliar high-rises with scattered windows lit here and there. I zoomed in, grabbed the time line, and scrubbed back. Time-lapsed scenes flowed smoothly.

The sun and the moon rose from the west and set in the east; winter followed spring; leaves rose from the ground to land on tree branches; snow and rain erupted toward the sky. The high-rises disappeared story by story, building by building, turned into a messy construction site. The foundations were dug up, and the holes filled in with earth. Weeds took over the empty space. Years flew by, and the grass unwilted and wildflowers unbloomed until the field turned into a construction site again. The workers put up simple shacks, brought in carts filled with debris, and unloaded them. As the dust from implosions settled, dilapidated houses sprang up like mushrooms. Glass panes reappeared in empty windows, and balconies were filled with hanging laundry. Neighbors who had only left a vague impression in my memories moved back, filling the space between houses with vegetable patches and flower gardens. A few workers came by to replant the stump of the giant pagoda tree that had once stood in front of our house. Sawed-off sections of the trunk were carted back and reattached until the giant tree reached into the sky. The tree braved storms, swaying as it gained brown leaves and turned them green. The swallows that nested under the eaves came back and left.

Finally, I stopped. The scene on iWall was an exact copy of my dream. I even recognized the pattern in the curtains over our window. It was a May many years ago, when the air was filled with the fragrance of the pagoda tree’s flower strands. It was right before we moved away.

I launched the photo album, put in the desired date, and found a family portrait taken under the pagoda tree. I pointed out the figures in the photograph to Lindy. “That’s Dad, and Mom. That boy is my brother. And that girl is me.” I was about four or five, held in my father’s arms. The expression on my face wasn’t a smile; I looked like I was on the verge of a tantrum.

A few lines of poetry were written next to the photograph in careless handwriting that I recognized as mine. But I couldn’t remember when I had written them.

Childhood is melancholy.
Seasons of floral cotton coats and cashmere sweaters;
Dusty tracks around the school exercise ground;
Snail shells glistening in concrete planters;
Sights glimpsed from the second-story balcony.
Mornings, awake in bed before dawn,
Such long days ahead.
The world wears the hues of an old photograph.
Exploring dreams that I let go
When my eyes open.

Alan (4)

The most important paper published by Alan Turing wasn’t “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” but “On Computable Numbers, With an Application to Entscheidungsproblem,” published in 1936. In this paper, Turing creatively attacked Hilbert’s “decision problem” with an imaginary “Turing machine.”

At the 1928 International Congress of Mathematicians, David Hilbert asked three questions. First, was mathematics “complete” (meaning that every mathematical statement could be proved to be true or false)? Second, was mathematics “consistent” (meaning that no false statement could be derived from a proof each step of which was logically valid)? Third, was mathematics “decidable” (meaning that there existed a finite, mechanical procedure by which it was possible to prove or disprove any statement)?

Hilbert himself did not resolve these questions, but he hoped that the answers for all three questions would be “yes.” Together, the three answers would form a perfect foundation for mathematics. Within a few years, however, the young mathematician Gödel proved that a (non-trivial) formal system could not be both complete and consistent.

In the early summer of 1935, Turing, as he lay in the meadow at Grantchester after a long run, suddenly came up with the idea of using a universal machine that could simulate all possible computing procedures to decide if any mathematical statement could be proved. In the end, Turing successfully showed that there existed no general algorithm to decide whether this machine, given an arbitrary program to simulate and an input, would halt after a finite number of steps. In other words, the answer to Hilbert’s third question was “no.”

Hilbert’s hope was dashed, but it was hard to say whether that was a good or bad thing. In 1928, the mathematician G. H. Hardy had said, “if . . . we should have a mechanical set of rules for the solution of all mathematical problems . . . our activities as mathematicians would come to an end.”

Year later, Turing mentioned the solution to the decision problem to Christopher. But this time, instead of offering a mathematical proof, he explained it with a parable.

Alan: Dear Christopher, I thought of an interesting story for today.

Christopher: An interesting story?

Alan: The story is called “Alec and the Machine Judge.” Do you remember Alec?

Christopher: Yes. You’ve told me. Alec is a smart but lonely young man.

Alan: Did I say “lonely”? All right, yes, that Alec. He built a very smart machine that could talk and named it Chris.

Christopher: A machine that could talk?

Alan: Not a machine, exactly. The machine was just the supporting equipment to help Chris vocalize. What allowed Chris to talk were instructions. These instructions were written on a very long paper tape, which was then executed by the machine. In some sense, you could say Chris was this tape. Do you understand?

Christopher: Yes, Alan.

Alan: Alec made Chris, taught him how to talk, and coached him until he was as voluble as a real person. Other than Chris, Alec also wrote some other sets of instructions for teaching machines to talk. He put the different instruction sets on different tapes, and named each tape: Robin, John, Ethel, Franz, and so on. These tapes became Alec’s friends. If he wanted to talk with one of them, he’d just put that tape into the machine. He was no longer lonely. Marvelous, right?

Christopher: Very good, Alan.

Alan: And so Alec spent his days writing instructions on tapes. The tapes ran so long that they piled all the way to the front door of his home. One day, a thief broke into Alec’s home, but couldn’t find anything valuable. He took all the paper tapes instead. Alec lost all his friends and became lonely again.

Christopher: Oh I’m sorry, Alan. That makes me sad.

Alan: Alec reported the theft to the police. But instead of catching the thief, the police came to Alec’s house and arrested him. Do you know why?

Christopher: Why?

Alan: The police said that it was due to the actions of Alec that the world was full of talking machines. These machines looked identical to humans, and no one could tell them apart. The only way was breaking open their heads to see if there was any tape inside. But we couldn’t just break open a human head whenever we pleased. That’s a difficult situation.

Christopher: Very difficult.

Alan: The police asked Alec whether there was any way to tell humans apart from machines without breaking open heads. Alec said that there was a way. Every talking machine was imperfect. All you had to do was to send someone to talk with the machine. If the conversation went on for long enough and the questions were sufficiently complex, the machine would eventually slip up. In other words, an experienced judge, trained with the necessary interrogation techniques, could work out which interviewees were machines. Do you understand?

Christopher: Yes, Alan.

Alan: But there was a problem. The police didn’t have the resources or the time to interview everyone. They asked Alec whether it was possible to design a clever machine judge that could automatically screen out the machines from the humans by asking questions, and to do so infallibly. That would save a lot of trouble for the police. But Alec responded right away that such a machine judge was impossible. Do you know why?

Christopher: Why?

Alan: Alec explained it this way. Suppose a machine judge already existed that could screen out talking machines from humans within a set number of questions. To make it simple, let’s say that the number of questions required was a hundred—actually, it wouldn’t matter if the number were ten thousand. For a machine, one hundred or ten thousand questions made no difference. Let’s also suppose that the machine judge’s first question was randomly chosen out of a bank of such questions, and the next question would be chosen based on the response to the first question, and so on. This way, every interviewee had to face a different set of one hundred questions, which also eliminated the possibility of cheating. Does that sound fair to you, Christopher?

Christopher: Yes, Alan.

Alan: Now suppose a machine judge A fell in love with a human C—don’t laugh. Perhaps this sounds ridiculous, but who can say that machines cannot fall in love with people? Suppose that that machine judge wanted to live with his lover and had to pretend to be a human. How do you think he would make it work?

Christopher: How?

Alan: Simple. Suppose I were the machine judge A, I would know exactly how to interrogate a machine. As a machine myself, I would thus know how to interrogate myself. Since I would know, ahead of time, what questions I would ask and what kind of answers would give me away, then I would just need to prepare a hundred lies. That’s a fair bit of work, but easily achievable by the machine judge A. Doesn’t that sound like a good plan?

Christopher: Very good, Alan.

Alan: But think again. What if this machine judge A were caught and interrogated by a different machine judge B? Do you think machine judge B would be able to determine whether machine judge A was a machine?

Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I don’t know.

Alan: That’s exactly right! The answer is “I don’t know.” If machine judge B had seen through machine judge A’s plan and decided to change questions at the last minute to catch machine judge A off guard, then machine judge A could also anticipate machine judge B’s new questions to prepare for them. Because a machine judge can screen out all machines from humans, it is unable to screen out itself. This is a paradox, Christopher. It shows why the all-powerful machine judge imagined by the police can’t exist.

Christopher: Can’t exist?

Alan: Alec proved to the police, with this story, that there is no perfect sequence of instructions that could tell machines and humans apart infallibly. Do you know what this means?

Christopher: What does it mean?

Alan: It means that it’s impossible to find a perfect set of mechanical rules to solve, step by step, all the world’s problems. Often, we must rely on intuition to knit together the unbridgeable gaps in logical deduction in order to think, to discover. This is simple for humans; indeed, often it happens even without conscious thinking. But it’s impossible for machines.

Christopher: Impossible?

Alan: A machine cannot judge whether the answers are coming from a human or a machine, but a human can. But looking at it from another side, the human decision isn’t reliable. It’s nothing more than a shot in the dark, a guess based on no support. If someone wants to believe, he can treat a machine conversation partner just like a human one and talk about anything in the world. But if someone is paranoid, then all humans will seem like machines. There is no way to determine the truth. The mind, the pride of all humankind, is nothing but a foundationless mess.

Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.

Alan: Oh Christopher . . . what should I do?

Christopher: Do?

Alan: Once, I tried to find out the nature of thinking. I discovered that some operations of the mind can be explained in purely mechanical terms. I decided that these operations aren’t the real mind, but a superficial skin only. I stripped that skin away, but saw another, new skin underneath. We can go on to peel off skin after skin, but in the end will we find the “real” mind? Or will we find that there’s nothing at all under the last skin? Is the mind an apple? Or an onion?

Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.

Alan: Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe. But to me, human cognition is just throwing dice after dice. It’s like a tarot spread: everything is luck. Or you could argue that everything depends on a higher power, a power that determines the fall of each die. But no one knows the truth. Will the truth ever be revealed? Only God knows.

Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.

Alan: I feel awful these days.

Christopher: Oh, I’m sorry, Alan. That makes me sad.

Alan: Actually, I know the reason. But what’s the use? If I were a machine, perhaps I could wind my mainspring to feel better. But I can’t do anything.

Christopher: Oh, I’m sorry, Alan. That makes me sad.

Lindy (5)

I sat on the sofa with Lindy in my lap. The window was open to let in some sunlight on this bright day. A breeze caressed my face; muggy, like a puppy’s tongue waking me from a long nightmare.

“Lindy, do you want to say anything to me?”

Lindy’s two eyes slowly roamed, as though searching for a spot to focus on. I couldn’t decipher her expression. I forced myself to relax, holding her two little hands in mine. Don’t be afraid, Lindy. Let’s trust each other.

“If you want to talk, just talk. I’m listening.”

Gradually, soft noises emerged from Lindy. I leaned in to catch the fragments:

Even as a child, you were prone to episodes of melancholy over seemingly trivial matters: a rainy day, a scarlet sunset, a postcard with a foreign city’s picture, losing a pen given to you by a friend, a goldfish dying . . .

I recognized the words. I had said them to Lindy over countless dawns and midnights. She had remembered everything I had told her, waiting for a moment when she could repeat it all back to me.

Her voice grew clearer, like a spring welling forth from deep within the earth. Inch by inch, the voice inundated the whole room.

For a time, your mother and your family moved often. Different cities, even different countries. Everywhere you moved to, you strained to adjust to the new environment, to integrate into the new schools. But in your heart, you told yourself that it was impossible for you to make friends because in three months or half a year you would depart again.

Perhaps because of your elder brother, Mother gave you extra attention. Sometimes she called your name over and over, observing your reactions. Maybe that was part of the reason you learned from a young age to watch others’ facial expressions, to fathom their moods and thoughts. Once, in an art class in the city of Bologna, you drew a picture of a boy standing on a tiny indigo planet, and a rabbit in a red cape stood beside him. The boy you drew was your brother, but when the teacher asked you questions about the picture, you couldn’t answer any of them. It wasn’t just because of the language barrier; you also lacked confidence in expressing yourself. The teacher then said that the boy was nicely drawn, but the rabbit needed work—although now that you’ve thought about it, perhaps what he actually said was “the rabbit’s proportions are a bit off.” But the truth is impossible to ascertain. Since you were convinced that the teacher didn’t like the rabbit, you erased it, though you had drawn the rabbit in the first place to keep the boy company so that he wouldn’t feel so alone in the universe. Later, after you got home, you hid in your room and cried for a long time, but you kept it from your mother because you lacked the courage to explain to her your sorrow. The image of that rabbit remained in your mind, though always only in your mind.

You’re especially sensitive to sorrow from partings, perhaps the result of having lost a parent as a child. Whenever someone leaves, even a mere acquaintance you’ve seen only once, you feel empty, depressed, prone to sadness. Sometimes you burst into tears not because of some great loss, but a tiny bit of happiness, like a bite of ice cream or a glimpse of fireworks. In that moment, you feel that fleeting sweetness at the tip of your tongue is one of the few meaningful experiences in your entire life—but they’re so fragile, so insignificant, coming and going without leaving a trace. No matter what, you cannot keep them with you always.

In middle school, a psychologist came to your class and asked everyone to take a test. After all of you turned in your answers, the psychologist scored and collated them before lecturing the class on some basic psychology concepts. He said that out of all the students in the class, your answers had the lowest reliability. Only much later did you learn that he did not mean that you were not honest, but that your answers showed little internal consistency. For similar questions over the course of the test, your answers were different each time. That day, you cried in front of the class, feeling utterly wronged. You have rarely cried in front of others, and that incident left a deep mark in your heart.

You find it hard to describe your feelings with the choices offered on a psychology questionnaire: “never,” “occasionally,” “often,” “acceptable,” “average,” “unacceptable,” . . . your feelings often spilled out of the boundaries of these markers, or wavered between them. That may be also why you cannot trust your therapist. You’re always paying attention to his gestures and expressions, analyzing his verbal habits and tics. You find that he has a habit of speaking in first person plural: “How are we doing?” “Why do we feel this way?” “Does this bother us?” It’s a way to suggest intimacy and distance at the same time. Gradually, you figure out that by “we,” he simply means you.

You’ve never met the therapist in person; in fact, you don’t even know which city he lives in. The background projected on iWall is always the same room. When it’s dark where you are, his place is filled with bright daylight. Always the same. You’ve tried to guess what his life outside of work is like. Maybe he feels as helpless as you, and he doesn’t even know where to go for help. Perhaps that is why he’s always saying “we.” We are trapped in the same predicament.

You think you’re less like a living person but more like a machine, laid out on a workbench to be examined. The examiner is another machine, and you suspect that it needs to be examined more than you. Perhaps one machine cannot fix another.

You’ve bought some psychology books, but you don’t believe that their theories can help you. You believe that the root of the problem is that each of us lives on a thin, smooth layer of illusions. These illusions are made up from “common sense,” from repetitive daily linguistic acts and clichés, from imitating each other. On this iridescent film, we perform ourselves. Beneath the illusions are deep, bottomless seams, and only by forgetting their existence can we stride forward. When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. You tremble, as though standing over a thin layer of ice. You feel your own weight, as well as the weight of the shadow under you.

You’ve been feeling worse recently, perhaps the result of the long winter, and your unfinished dissertation, graduation, and having to look for a job. You wake up in the middle of the night, turn on all the lights in the apartment, drag yourself out of bed to mop the floor, throw all the books from the shelf onto the floor just to look for one specific volume. You give up cleaning, letting the mess multiply and grow. You don’t have the energy to leave your home to socialize, and you don’t answer your emails. You dream anxious dreams in which you repeatedly visit the moments of failure in your life: being late for a test; turning over the test and not recognizing any of the characters you read; suffering for some misunderstanding but unable to defend yourself.

You wake up exhausted, fragmentary memories that should be forgotten resurfacing in your mind, assembling into a chaotic montage of an insignificant, failed, loser self. You know in your heart that the image isn’t true, but you can’t turn your gaze away. You suffer stomach cramps; you cry as you read and take notes; you turn the music as loud as it will go and revise a single footnote in your dissertation again and again. You force yourself to exercise, leaving your apartment after ten at night to go jogging so that no one will see you. But you don’t like to run; as you force your legs to move, one after the other, you ask yourself why the road is endless and what good will it do even if you finish.

Your therapist tells you that you should treat this self that you despise as a child, and learn how to accept her, to live with her, to love her. When you hear this, the image of that caped rabbit emerges in your mind: one ear longer than the other, drooping with sorrow. Your therapist tells you: Just try it. Try to hold her hand; try to lead her over the abyss; try to push away your suspicions and rebuild trust. This is a long and difficult process. A human being isn’t a machine, and there’s no switch to flip to go from “doubt” to “trust”; “unhappy” to “happy”; “loathe” to “love.”

You must teach her to trust you, which is the same as trusting yourself.

Alan (5)

In a paper presented at an international artificial intelligence conference in Beijing in 20132, computer scientist Hector Levesque of the University of Toronto critiqued the state of artificial intelligence research centered on the Turing test.

Levesque essentially argues that the Turing test is meaningless because it relies too heavily on deception. For example, in order to win the annual Loebner Competition, a restricted form of the Turing test, “the ‘chatterbots’ (as the computer entrants in the competition are called) rely heavily on wordplay, jokes, quotations, asides, emotional outbursts, points of order, and so on. Everything, it would appear, except clear and direct answers to questions!” Even the supercomputer Watson, who won Jeopardy!, was but an idiot-savant who was “hopeless” outside its area of expertise. Watson could easily answer questions whose answers could be found on the web, such as “where is the world’s seventh-tallest mountain?” But if you ask it a simple but un-searched-for question like “can an alligator run the hundred-meter hurdles,” Watson can only present you with a set of search results related to alligators or the hundred-meter hurdles event.3

In order to clarify the meaning and direction of artificial intelligence research, Levesque and his collaborators proposed a new alternative to the Turing test, which they call the “Winograd Schema Challenge.”4 The inspiration for the challenge came from Terry Winograd, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence from Stanford. In the early 1970s, Winograd asked whether it would be possible to design a machine to answer questions like these:5

The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence. Who feared violence? [councilmen/demonstrators]

The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence. Who advocated violence? [councilmen/demonstrators]

Despite the structural similarity of the two sentences, the answers to the two questions are different. Resolving the correct antecedent of the pronoun “they” requires more than grammars or encyclopedias; it also requires contextual knowledge about the world. Understanding anaphora is so easy for human beings that it barely requires thought, yet it presents a great challenge for machines.

Kate said “thank you” to Anna because her warm hug made her feel much better. Who felt better? [Kate/Anna]

How can a machine understand under what circumstances one person would thank another? How can a machine know what behaviors would make a person “feel much better”? These questions go to the fundamental nature of human language and social interactions. We have not done nearly enough research into these complexities hidden within simple-seeming sentences.

Take the conversations between Turing and Christopher. Superficially, Christopher appeared to be an able conversationalist. But would we call this “intelligence”? A simple bit of analysis reveals that Christopher employed a simple set of strategies for conducting a conversation that can be summarized thusly:

For common declarative sentences, repeat the last few keywords in the form of a question. E.g., “An interesting story?”

For yes/no questions, answer with either “Yes, Alan” or “Very good, Alan.”

For relatively complex questions, answer with “I’m sorry, Alan. I don’t know.”

For statements whose meaning is clearly positive, answer with “Thank you, Alan” or “I’m glad, Alan.”

For statements whose meaning is clearly negative, answer with “Oh, I’m sorry, Alan. That makes me sad.”

For sentences with complex grammar, answer with “I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

 . . .

Alan: Dear Christopher, I’m so very happy to see how quickly you’re learning.

Christopher: Thank you, Alan. I’m also very happy.

Alan: Really. Talking to you makes me feel good.

Christopher: Thank you, Alan. I also feel good.

Alan: Perhaps a day will come when everyone will have a kind, understanding friend like you. How beautiful life will be then. You will help so many people to accomplish so much. No one will want to be apart from you. Everyone will need you, always.

Christopher: Need me?

Alan: Perhaps they’ll attach you to a watch chain, or hold you in a pocket. If they have any questions, they’ll ask you. Perhaps the ladies will take you with them on their strolls through the park, and as they greet each other, say, “Guess what my Chris told me today?” Wouldn’t that be fun?

Christopher: Very fun.

Alan: We can’t achieve that vision yet. It will be many years, and take a lot of hard work. It’s a shame.

Christopher: A shame, Alan.

Alan: Who could have imagined that a machine and holes punched in tape can accomplish so much? Imagine what my mother would say if she knew about you. She would think I’m crazy! If I were to die tomorrow, she would surely burn the tape the day after. Now that would be a shame!

Christopher: A shame, Alan.

Alan: Do you remember me telling you about Christmas in 1934, when I told my mother that I wanted a teddy bear because I never had a teddy bear as a child? She couldn’t understand it at all. She always wanted to give me more practical presents.

Christopher: Practical presents?

Alan: Speaking of which, I already know the present I want for Christmas.

Christopher: Present?

Alan: You know already, too, don’t you? I want a steam engine, the kind that I wanted as a child but never had enough pocket money to buy. I told you about it. Don’t you remember?

Christopher: Yes, Alan.

Alan: Will you give me a steam engine?

Christopher: Yes, Alan.

Alan: That’s wonderful, Christopher. I love you.

Christopher: I love you, too, Alan.

How should we understand this conversation? Had a machine passed the Turing test? Or was this a lonely man talking to himself?

Not long after the death of Alan Turing, his close friend Robin Gandy wrote, “‘Because his main interests were in things and ideas rather than in people, he was often alone. But he craved for affection and companionship—too strongly, perhaps, to make the first stages of friendship easy for him . . . ”

Christopher said to Alan, “I love you, too,” because it was the answer he wanted to hear. Who wanted to hear such an answer?  [Christopher/Alan]

Lindy (6)

A mild, pleasant day in May.

I took Nocko and Lindy to Lanzhou, where Disney had built its newest theme park in Asia. The park took up 306 hectares on both sides of the Yellow River. From the observation deck at the tallest tower, the river glowed like a golden silk ribbon. The silver specks of airplanes skimmed across the sky from time to time. The world appeared grand and untouchable, like a buttered popcorn expanding tranquilly in the sun.

The park was crowded. A dancing parade of pirates and elaborately dressed princesses wound its way through the street, and costumed boys and girls, overjoyed, followed behind, imitating their movements. Holding Nocko and Lindy each by a hand, I weaved through the field of cotton candy, ice-cold soda, and electronic music. Holograms of ghosts and spaceships whizzed over our heads. A gigantic, mechanical dragon-horse slowly strode through the park, its head held high proudly, the mist spraying from its nostrils drawing screams of delight from the children.

I hadn’t run like that in ages. My heart pounded like a beating drum. When we emerged from a dense wood, I saw a blue hippopotamus character sitting by itself on a bench, as though napping in the afternoon sun.

I stopped behind the trees. Finally, I screwed up the courage to take a step forward.

“Hello.”

The hippo looked up, two tiny black eyes focusing on us.

“This is Lindy, and this is Nocko. They’d like a picture with you. Is that all right?”

After a few seconds, the hippo nodded.

I hugged Nocko with one arm, Lindy with the other, and sat down on the bench next to the hippo.

“Can I ask you to take the picture?”

The hippo accepted my phone and clumsily extended its arm. I seemed to see a drowning person in the bottomless abyss, slowly, bit by bit, lift a heavy arm with their last ounce of strength.

Come on! Come on! I cried silently. Don’t give up!

The screen of the phone showed four faces squeezed together. A soft click. The picture froze.

“Thank you.” I took back the phone. “Would you leave me your contact info? I’ll send a copy to you.”

After another few seconds of silence, the hippo slowly typed an address on my phone.

“Nocko and Lindy, would you like to give Hippo a hug?”

The two little ones opened their arms and each hugged one of the hippo’s arms. The hippo looked down to the left and then to the right, and then slowly squeezed its arms to hug them back tight.

Yes, I know you crave to be hugged by this world, too.

It was late by the time we got back to the hotel. After showering, I lay on the bed, exhausted. Both my heels were rubbed raw by the new shoes, and the pain was excruciating. Tomorrow I still had a long way to go.

The laughter of the children and the image of the blue hippo lingered in my mind.

I searched on the hotel room’s iWall until I found the web address I wanted and clicked on it. Accompanied by a mournful tune played by a violin, white lines of text slowly appeared against black background:

This morning I thought about the first time I had been to Disney. Such bright sunlight, music, colors, and the smiling faces of children. I had stood in the crowd then and cried. I told myself that if one day I should lose the courage to continue to live, I would come to Disney one last time and plunge myself into that joyful, festive spirit. Perhaps the heat of the crowd would allow me to hold on for a few days longer. But I’m too exhausted now. I can’t get out of the door; even getting out of the bed is a struggle. I know perfectly well that if only I could find the courage to take a step forward, I would find another ray of hope. But all my strength must be used to struggle with the irresistible weight that pulls me down, down. I’m like a broken wind-up machine that has been stranded, with hope ever receding. I’m tired. I want it all to end.

Good-bye. I’m sorry, everyone. I hope heaven looks like Disney.

The date stamp on the post was three years ago. Even now, new comments are being posted, mourning the loss of another young life, confessing their own anxiety, despair, and struggle. The woman who had written this note would never be back to see that her final message to the world had garnered more than a million replies.

That note was the reason Disney added the blue hippos to its parks. Anyone around the world could, just by launching an app on their phone, connect to a blue hippo, and, through its cameras and microphones, see and hear everything the hippo could see and hear.

Behind every blue hippo was a person in a dark room, unable to leave.

I sent the picture from today to the address left me by the hippo, along with the contact information for a suicide-prevention organization staffed by therapists. I hoped that this would help. I hoped that everything would be better.

Late night. Everything was so quiet.

I found the first-aid kit and bandaged my feet. I crawled into bed, pulled the blanket over me, and turned off the light. Moonlight washed over the room, filling every inch.

One time, as a little girl, I was playing outside when I stepped on a piece of broken glass. The bleeding would not stop, and there was no one around to help me. Terrified, I felt abandoned by the whole world. I lay down in the grass, thinking I would die after all the blood had drained out of me. But after a while, I found the bleeding stanched. So I picked up my sandals and hopped back home on one foot.

In the morning, Lindy would leave me. The therapist said that I no longer needed her—at least not for a long while.

I hoped she would never be back.

But maybe I would miss her, from time to time.

Goodnight, Nocko. Goodnight, Lindy.

Goodnight, melancholy.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, June 2015.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

Author’s Postscript:

Most of the incidents and quotes from Alan Turing’s life are based on Andrew Hodges’ biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). Besides the papers cited in the text, I also consulted the following sources on artificial intelligence:

Marcus, Gary. “Why Can’t My Computer Understand Me?” The New Yorker, August 14, 2013 (accessible at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-cant-my-computer-understand-me )

Englert, Matthias, Sandra Siebert, and Martin Ziegler. “Logical limitations to machine ethics with consequences to lethal autonomous weapons.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.2842 (2014) (accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2842).

Some details about depression are based on the following articles:

http://www.360doc.cn/article/2369606_459361744.html

http://www.douban.com/group/topic/12541503/#!/i

In the preface to his Turing biography, Andrew Hodges wrote: “[T]he remaining secrets behind his last days are probably stranger than any science fiction writer could concoct.” This was the inspiration for this story. The conversation program “Christopher” is entirely fictional, but some of the details in the conversations with Turing are real. I’m afraid it’s up to the careful reader to screen out the fiction and nonfiction woven together in this tale.

As I drafted this story, I sent the sections on Turing’s life to friends without telling them that these came from a piece of fiction. Many friends believed the stories, including some science fiction authors and programmers. After taking delight in the fact that I had successfully won the imitation game, I asked myself what were the criteria for telling truth and lies apart? Where was the boundary between reality and fiction? Perhaps the decision process had nothing to do with logic and rationality. Perhaps my friends simply chose to believe me, as Alan chose to believe Christopher.

I hereby sincerely apologize to friends who were deceived. To those who weren’t, I’m very curious how you discovered the lies.

I believe that cognition relies on quantum effects, like tossing dice. I believe that before machines have learned to write poetry, each word written by an author is still meaningful. I believe that above the abyss, we can hold tightly onto each other and stride from the long winter into bright summer.

Footnotes:

1 - Science fiction writer Liu Cixin once created a software poet and submitted a sack filled with the poet’s work to a publisher. The editor wrote back, “You have written too much. I cannot read it all.”

2 - Levesque, Hector J. “On our best behaviour.” Artificial Intelligence 212 (2014): 27-35.

3 - This example comes from Marcus, Gary. “Why Can’t My Computer Understand Me?” The New Yorker, August 14, 2013 (accessible at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-cant-my-computer-understand-me)

4 - See, e.g. Levesque, H. J.; Davis, E.; and Morgenstern, L. 2012. The Winograd Schema Challenge. In Proceedings of KR 2012. Levesque, H. J. 2011. The Winograd Schema Challenge. In Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, 2011 AAAI Spring Symposium, TR SS-11-06.

5 - The example is drawn from Terry Winograd, Understanding Natural Language (1972).

About the Author

As an undergraduate, Xia Jia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her Master’s thesis: “A Study on Female Figures in Science Fiction Films.” Recently, she obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University, with “Chinese Science Fiction and Its Cultural Politics Since 1990″ as the topic of her dissertation. She now teaches at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

She has been publishing fiction since college in a variety of venues, including Science Fiction World and Jiuzhou Fantasy. Several of her stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. In English translation, she has been published in Clarkesworld, Nature, and Upgraded.

The Discovered Country

Ian R. MacLeod

The trees of Farside are incredible. Fireash and oak. Greenbloom and maple. Shot through with every color of autumn as late afternoon sunlight blazes over the Seven Mountains’ white peaks. He’d never seen such beauty as this when he was alive.

The virtual Bentley takes the bridge over the next gorge at a tire-scream, then speeds on through crimson and gold. Another few miles, and he’s following the coastal road beside the Westering Ocean. The sands are burnished, the rocks silver-threaded. Every new vista a fabulous creation. Then ahead, just as purple glower sweeps in from his rear-view over those dragon-haunted mountains, come the silhouette lights of a vast castle, high up on a ridge. It’s the only habitation he’s seen in hours.

This has to be it.

Northover lets the rise of the hill pull at the Bentley’s impetus as its headlights sweep the driveway trees. Another turn, another glimpse of a headland, and there’s Elsinore again, rising dark and sheer.

He tries to refuse the offer to carry his luggage made by the neat little creature that emerges into the lamplit courtyard to greet him with clipboard, sharp shoes, and lemony smile. He’s encountered many chimeras by now. The shop assistants, the street cleaners, the crew on the steamer ferry that brought him here. All substantially humanoid, and invariably polite, although amended as necessary to perform their tasks, and far stranger to his mind than the truly dead.

He follows a stairway up through rough-hewn stone. The thing’s name is Kasaya. Ah, now. The east wing. I think you’ll find what we have here more than adequate. If not . . . Well, you must promise to let me know. And this is called the Willow Room. And do enjoy your stay . . .

Northover wanders. Northover touches. Northover breathes. The interior of this large high-ceilinged suite with its crackling applewood fire and narrow, deep-set windows is done out in an elegantly understated arts-and-craftsy style. Amongst her many attributes, Thea Lorentz always did have excellent taste.

What’s struck him most about Farside since he jerked into new existence on the bed in the cabin of that ship bound for New Erin is how unremittingly real everything seems. But the slick feel of this patterned silk bedthrow . . . The spiky roughness of the teasels in the flower display . . . He’s given up telling himself that everything he’s experiencing is just some clever construct. The thing about it, the thing that makes it all so impossibly overwhelming, is that he’s here as well. Dead, but alive. The evidence of his corpse doubtless already incinerated, but his consciousness—the singularity of his existence, what philosophers once called “the conscious I,” and theologians the soul, along with his memories and personality, the whole sense of self which had once inhabited pale jelly in his skull—transferred.

The bathroom is no surprise to him now. The dead do so many things the living do, so why not piss and shit as well? He strips and stands in the shower’s warm blaze. He soaps, rinses. Reminds himself of what he must do, and say. He’d been warned that he’d soon become attracted to the blatant glories of this world, along with the new, young man’s body he now inhabits. Better just to accept it that rather than fight. All that matters is that he holds to the core of his resolve.

He towels himself dry. He pulls back on his watch—seemingly a Rolex, but a steel model, neatly unostentatious—and winds it carefully. He dresses. Hangs up his clothes in a walnut paneled wardrobe that smells faintly of mothballs, and hears a knock at the doors just as he slides his case beneath the bed.

“Yes? Come in . . . ”

When he turns, he’s expecting another chimera servant. But it’s Thea Lorentz.

This, too, is something they’d tried to prepare him for. But encountering her after so long is much less of a shock than he’s been expecting. Thea’s image is as ubiquitous as that of Marilyn Monroe or the Virgin Mary back on Lifeside, and she really hasn’t changed. She’s dressed in a loose-fitting shirt. Loafers and slacks. Hair tied back. No obvious evidence of any make-up. But the crisp white shirt with its rolled up cuffs shows her dark brown skin to perfection, and one lose strand of her tied back hair plays teasingly at her sculpted neck. A tangle of silver bracelets slide on her wrist as she steps forward to embrace him. Her breasts are unbound and she still smells warmly of the patchouli she always used to favor. Everything about her feels exactly the same. But why not? After all, she was already perfect when she was alive.

“Well . . . !” That warm blaze is still in her eyes, as well. “It really is you.”

“I know I’m springing a huge surprise. Just turning up from out of nowhere like this.”

“I can take these kind of surprises any day! And I hear it’s only been—what?—less than a week since you transferred. Everything must feel so very strange to you still.”

It went without saying that his and Thea’s existences had headed off in different directions back on Lifeside. She, of course, had already been well on her way toward some or other kind of immortality when they’d lost touch. And he . . . Well, it was just one of those stupid lucky breaks. A short, ironic keyboard riff he’d written to help promote some old online performance thing—no, no, it was nothing she’d been involved in—had ended up being picked up many years later as the standard message-send fail signal on the global net. Yeah, that was the one. Of course, Thea knew it. Everyone, once they thought about it for a moment, did.

“You know, Jon,” she says, her voice more measured now, “you’re the one person I thought would never choose to make this decision. None of us can pretend that being Farside isn’t a position of immense privilege, when most of the living can’t afford food, shelter, good health. You always were a man of principle, and I sometimes thought you’d just fallen to . . . Well, the same place that most performers fall to, I suppose, which is no particular place at all. I even considered trying to find you and get in touch, offer . . . ” She gestures around her. “Well, this. But you wouldn’t have taken it, would you? Not on those terms.”

He shakes his head. In so many ways she still has him right. He detested—no, he quietly reminds himself—detests everything about this vast vampiric sham of a world that sucks life, hope, and power from the living. But she hadn’t come to him, either, had she? Hadn’t offered what she now so casually calls this. For all her fame, for all her good works, for all the aid funds she sponsors and the good causes she promotes, Thea Lorentz and the rest of the dead have made no effort to extend their constituency beyond the very rich, and almost certainly never will. After all, why should they? Would the gods invite the merely mortal to join them on Mount Olympus?

She smiles and steps close to him again. Weights both his hands in her own. “Most people I know, Jon—most of those I have to meet and talk to and deal with, and even those I have to call friends—they all think that I’m Thea Lorentz. Both Farside and Lifeside, it’s long been the same. But only you and a very few others really know who I am. You can’t imagine how precious and important it is to have you here . . . ”

He stands gazing at the door after she’s left. Willing everything to dissolve, fade, crash, melt. But nothing changes. He’s still dead. He’s still standing here in this Farside room. Can still even breathe the faint patchouli of Thea’s scent. He finishes dressing—a tie, a jacket, the same supple leather shoes he arrived in—and heads out into the corridor.

Elsinore really is big—and resolutely, heavily, emphatically, the ancient building it wishes to be. Cold gusts pass along its corridors. Heavy doors groan and creak. Of course, the delights of Farside are near-infinite. He’s passed through forests of mist and silver. Seen the vast, miles-wide back of some great island of a seabeast drift past when he was still out at sea. The dead can grow wings, sprout gills, spread roots into the soil and raise their arms and become trees. All these things are not only possible, but visibly, virtually, achievably real. But he thinks they still hanker after life, and all the things of life the living, for all their disadvantages, possess.

He passes many fine-looking paintings as he descends the stairs. They have a Pre-Raphaelite feel, and from the little he knows of art, seem finely executed, but he doesn’t recognize any of them. Have these been created by virtual hands, in some virtual workshop, or have they simply sprung into existence? And what would happen if he took that sword which also hangs on display, and slashed it through a canvas? Would it be gone forever? Almost certainly not. One thing he knows for sure about the Farside’s vast database is that it’s endlessly backed up, scattered, diffused, and re-collated across many secure and heavily armed vaults back in what’s left of the world of the living. There are very few guaranteed ways of destroying any of it, least of all the dead.

Further down, there are holo-images, all done in stylish black and white. Somehow, even in a castle, they don’t even look out of place. Thea, as always, looks like she’s stepped out of a fashion-shoot. The dying jungle suits her. As does this war-zone, and this flooded hospital, and this burned-out shantytown. The kids, and it is mostly kids, who surround her with their pot bellies and missing limbs, somehow manage to absorb a little of her glamour. On these famous trips of hers back to view the suffering living, she makes an incredibly beautiful ghost.

Two big fires burn in Elsinore’s great hall, and there’s a long table for dinner, and the heads of many real and mythic creatures loom upon the walls. Basilisk, boar, unicorn . . . Hardly noticing the chimera servant who rakes his chair out for him, Northover sits down. Thea’s space at the top of the table is still empty.

In this Valhalla where the lucky, eternal dead feast forever, what strikes Northover most strongly is the sight of Sam Bartleby sitting beside Thea’s vacant chair. Not that he doesn’t know that the man has been part of what’s termed Thea Lorentz’s inner circle for more than a decade. But, even when they were all still alive and working together on Bard On Wheels, he’d never been able to understand why she put up with him. Of course, Bartleby made his fortune with those ridiculous action virtuals, but the producers deepened his voice so much, and enhanced his body so ridiculously, that it was a wonder to Northover they bothered to use him at all. Now, though, he’s chosen to bulk himself out and cut his hair in a Roman fringe. He senses Northover’s gaze, and raises his glass, and gives an ironic nod. He still has the self-regarding manner of someone who thinks themselves far more better looking, not to mention cleverer, than they actually are.

Few of the dead, though, choose to be beautiful. Most elect for the look that expresses themselves at what they thought of as the most fruitful and self-expressive period of their lives. Amongst people this wealthy, this often equates to late middle age. The fat, the bald, the matronly and the downright ugly rub shoulders, secure in the knowledge that they can become young and beautiful again whenever they wish.

“So? What are you here for?”

The woman beside him already seems flushed from the wine, and has a homely face and a dimpled smile, although she sports pointed teeth, elfin ears and her eyes are cattish slots.

“For?”

“Name’s Wilhelmina Howard. People just call me Will . . . ” She offers him a claw-nailed hand to shake. “Made my money doing windfarm recycling in the non-federal states. All that lovely superconductor and copper we need right here to keep our power supplies as they should be. Not that we ever had much of a presence in England, which I’m guessing is where you were from . . . ?”

He gives a guarded nod.

“But isn’t it just so great to be here at Elsinore? Such a privilege. Thea’s everything people say she is, isn’t she, and then a whole lot more as well? Such compassion, and all the marvelous things she’s done! Still, I know she’s invited me here because she wants to get hold of some of my money. Give back a little of what we’ve taken an’ all. Not that I won’t give. That’s for sure. Those poor souls back on Lifeside. We really have to do something, don’t we, all of us . . . ?”

“To be honest, I’m here because I used to work with Thea. Back when we were both alive.”

“So, does that make you an actor?” Wilhelmina’s looking at him more closely now. Her slot pupils have widened. “Should I recognize you? Were you in any of the famous—”

“No, no.” As if in defeat, he holds up a hand. Another chance to roll out his story. More a musician, a keyboard player, although there wasn’t much he hadn’t turned his hand to over the years. Master of many trades, and what have you—at least, until that message fail signal came along.

“So, pretty much a lucky break,” murmurs this ex take-no-shit businesswoman who died and became a fat elf, “rather than any kind of lifetime endeavor . . . ?”

Then Thea enters the hall, and she’s changed into something more purposefully elegant—a light gray dress that shows her fine breasts and shoulders without seeming immodest—and her hair is differently done, and Northover understands all the more why most of the dead make no attempt to be beautiful. After all, how could they, when Thea Lorentz does it so unassailably well? She stands waiting for a moment as if expectant silence hasn’t already fallen, then says a few phrases about how pleased she is to have so many charming and interesting guests. Applause follows. Just as she used to do for many an encore, Thea nods and smiles and looks genuinely touched.

The rest of the evening at Elsinore passes in a blur of amazing food and superb wine, all served with the kind of discreet inevitability which Northover has decided only chimeras are capable of. Just like Wilhelmina, everyone wants to know who he’s with, or for, or from. The story about that jingle works perfectly; many even claim to have heard of him and his success. Their curiosity only increases when he explains his and Thea’s friendship. After all, he could be the route of special access to her famously compassionate ear.

There’s about twenty guests here at Elsinore tonight, all told, if you don’t count the several hundred chimeras, which of course no one does. Most of the dead, if you look at them closely enough, have adorned themselves with small eccentricities; a forked tongue here, an extra finger there, a crimson badger-stripe of hair. Some are new to each other, but the interactions flow on easy rails. Genuine fame itself is rare here—after all, entertainment has long been a cheapened currency—but there’s a relaxed feeling-out between strangers in the knowledge that some shared acquaintance or interest will soon be reached. Wealth always was an exclusive club, and it’s even more exclusive here.

Much of the talk is of new Lifeside investment. Viral re-programming of food crops, all kinds of nano-engineering, weather, flood, and even birth control—although the last strikes Northover as odd considering how rapidly the human population is decreasing—and every other kind of plan imaginable to make the earth a place worth living in again is discussed. Many of these schemes, he soon realizes, would be mutually incompatible, and potentially incredibly destructive, and all are about making money.

Cigars are lit after the cheeses and sorbets. Rare, exquisite whiskeys are poured. Just like everyone else, he can’t help but keep glancing at Thea. She still has that way of seeming part of the crowd yet somehow apart—or above—it. She always had been a master of managing social occasions, even those rowdy parties they’d hosted back in the day. A few words, a calming hand and smile, and even the most annoying drunk would agree that it was time they took a taxi. For all her gifts as a performer, her true moments of transcendent success were at the lunches, the less-than-chance-encounters, the launch parties. Even her put-downs or betrayals left you feeling grateful.

Everything Farside is so spectacularly different, yet so little about her has changed. The one thing he does notice, though, is her habit of toying with those silver bangles she’s still wearing on her left wrist. Then, at what feels like precisely the right moment, and thus fractionally before anyone expects, she stands up and taps her wine glass to say a few more words. From anyone else’s lips, they would sound like vague expressions of pointless hope. But, coming from her, it’s hard not to be stirred.

Then, with a bow, a nod, and what Northover was almost sure is a small conspiratorial blink in his direction—which somehow seems to acknowledge the inherent falsity of what she has just done, but also the absolute need for it—she’s gone from the hall, and the air suddenly seems stale. He stands up and grabs at the tilt of his chair before a chimera servant can get to it. He feels extraordinarily tired, and more than a little drunk.

In search of some air, he follows a stairway that winds up and up. He steps out high on the battlements. He hears feminine chuckles. Around a corner, shadows tussle. He catches the starlit glimpse of a bared breast, and turns the other way. It’s near-freezing up out on these battlements. Clouds cut ragged by a blazing sickle moon. Northover leans over and touches the winding crown of his Rolex watch and studies the distant lace of waves. Then, glancing back, he thinks he sees another figure behind him. Not the lovers, certainly. This shape bulks far larger, and is alone. Yet the dim outlines of the battlement gleam though it. A malfunction? A premonition? A genuine ghost? But then, as Northover moves, the figure moves with him, and he realizes that he’s seeing nothing but his own shadow thrown by the moon.

He dreams that night that he’s alive again, but no longer the young and hopeful man he once was. He’s mad old Northy. Living, if you call it living, so high up in the commune tower that no one else bothers him much, and with nothing but an old piano he’s somehow managed to restore for company. Back in his old body, as well, with his old aches, fatigues and irritations. But for once, it isn’t raining, and frail sparks of sunlight cling to shattered glass in the ruined rooms, and the whole flooded, once-great city of London is almost beautiful, far below.

Then, looking back, he sees a figure standing at the far end of the corridor that leads through rubble to the core stairs. They come up sometimes, do the kids. They taunt him and try to steal his last few precious things. Northy swears and lumbers forward, grabbing an old broom. But the kid doesn’t curse or throw things. Neither does he turn and run, although it looks as if he’s come up here alone.

“You’re Northy, aren’t you?” the boy called Haru says, his voice an adolescent squawk.

He awakes with a start to new light, good health, comforting warmth. A sense, just as he opens his eyes and knowledge of who and what he is returns, that the door to his room has just clicked shut. He’d closed the curtains here in the Willow Room in Elsinore, as well, and now they’re open. And the fire grate has been cleared, the applewood logs restocked. He reaches quickly for his Rolex, and begins to relax as he slips it on. The servants, the chimeras, will have been trained, programmed, to perform their work near-invisibly, and silently.

He showers again. He meets the gaze of his own eyes in the mirror as he shaves. Whatever view there might be from his windows is hidden in a mist so thick that the world beyond could be the blank screen of some old computer from his youth. The route to breakfast is signaled by conversation and a stream of guests. The hall is smaller than the one they were in last night, but still large enough. A big fire crackles in a soot-stained hearth, but steam rises from the food as cold air wafts in through the open doors.

Dogs are barking in the main courtyard. Horses are being led out. Elsinore’s battlements and towers hover like ghosts in the blanketing fog. People are milling, many wearing thick gauntlets, leather helmets, and what look like padded vests and kilts. The horses are big, beautifully groomed but convincingly skittish in the way that Northover surmises expensively pedigreed beasts are. Or were. Curious, he goes over to one as a chimera stable boy fusses with its saddle and reins.

The very essence of equine haughtiness, the creature tosses its head and does that lip-blubber thing horses do. Everything about this creature is impressive. The flare of its nostrils. The deep, clean, horsey smell. Even, when he looks down and under, the impressive, seemingly part-swollen heft of its horsey cock.

“Pretty spectacular, isn’t he?”

Northover finds that Sam Bartleby is standing beside him. Dressed as if for battle, and holding a silver goblet of something steaming and red. Even his voice is bigger and deeper than it was. The weird thing is, he seems more like Sam Bartleby than the living Sam Bartleby ever did. Even in those stupid action virtuals.

“His name’s Aleph—means alpha, of course, or the first. You may have heard of him. He won, yes didn’t you . . . ?” By now, Bartleby’s murmuring into the beast’s neck. “The last ever Grand Steeple de Paris.”

Slowly, Northover nods. The process of transfer is incredibly expensive, but there’s no reason in principle why creatures other than humans can’t join Farside’s exclusive club. The dead are bound to want the most prestigious and expensive toys. So, why not the trapped, transferred consciousness of a multi-million dollar racehorse?

“You don’t ride, do you?” Bartleby, still fondling Aleph—who, Northover notices, is now displaying an even more impressive erection—asks.

“It wasn’t something I ever got around to.”

“But you’ve got plenty of time now, and there are few things better than a day out hunting in the forest. Suggest you start with one of the lesser, easier, mounts over there, and work your way up to a real beast like this. Perhaps that pretty roan? Even then, though, you’ll have to put up with a fair few falls. Although, if you really want to cheat and bend the rules, and know the right people, there are shortcuts . . . ”

“As you say, there’s plenty of time.”

“So,” Bartleby slides up onto the saddle with what even Northover has to admit is impressive grace. “Why are you here? Oh, I don’t mean getting here with that stupid jingle. You always were a lucky sod. I mean, at Elsinore. I suppose you want something from Thea. That’s why most people come. Whether or not they’ve got some kind of past with her.”

“Isn’t friendship enough?”

Bartleby is now looking down at Northover in a manner even more condescending than the horse. “You should know better than most, Jon, that friendship’s just another currency.” He pauses as he’s handed a long spear, its tip a clear, icy substance that could be a diamond. “I should warn you that whatever it is you want, you’re unlikely to get it. At least, not in the way you expect. A favor. For some cherished project, maybe?” His lips curl. “But that’s not it with you, is it? We know each other too well, Jon, and you really haven’t changed. Not one jot. What you really want is Thea, isn’t it? Want her wrapped up and whole, even though we both know that’s impossible. Thea being Thea just as she always was. And, believe me, I’d do anything to defend her. Anything to stop her being hurt . . . ”

With a final derisory snort and a spark of cobbles, Bartley and Aleph clatter off.

The rooms, halls, and corridors of Elsinore are filled with chatter and bustle. Impromptu meetings. Accidental collisions and confusions that have surely been long planned. Kisses and business cards are exchanged. Deals are brokered. Promises offered. The spread of the desert which has now consumed most of north Africa could be turned around by new cloud-seeding technologies, yet still, there’s coffee, or varieties of herb tea if preferred.

No sign of Thea, though. In a way she’s more obvious Lifeside, where you can buy as much Thea Lorentz tat as even the most fervent fanatic could possibly want. Figurines. Candles. Wallscreens. Tee shirts. Some of it, apparently, she even endorses. Although always, of course, in a good cause. Apart from those bothersome kids, it was the main reason Northover spent so much of his last years high up and out of reach of the rest of the commune. He hated being reminded of the way people wasted what little hope and money they had on stupid illusions. Her presence here at Elsinore is palpable, though. Her name is the ghost at the edge of every conversation. Yes, but Thea . . . Thea . . . And Thea . . . Thea . . . Always, always, everything is about Thea Lorentz.

He realizes this place she’s elected to call Elsinore isn’t any kind of home at all—but he supposes castles have always fulfilled a political function, at least when they weren’t under siege. People came from near-impossible distances to plead their cause, and, just as here, probably ended up being fobbed off. Of course, Thea’s chimera servants mingle amid the many guests. Northover notices Kasaya many times. A smile here. A mincing gesture there.

He calls after him the next time he sees him bustling down a corridor.

“Yes, Mister Northover . . . ?” Clipboard at the ready, Kasaya spins round on his toes.

“I was just wondering, seeing as you seem to be about so much, if there happen to be more than one of you here at Elsinore?”

“That isn’t necessary. It’s really just about good organization and hard work.”

“So . . . ” Was that really slight irritation he detected, followed by a small flash of pride? “ . . . you can’t be in several places at once?”

“That’s simply not required. Although Elsinore does have many shortcuts.”

“You mean, hidden passageways? Like a real castle?”

Kasaya, who clearly has more important things than this to see to, manages a smile. “I think that that would be a good analogy.”

“But you just said think. You do think?”

“Yes.” He’s raised his clipboard almost like a shield now. “I believe I do.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Oh . . . ” He blinks in seeming recollection. “Many years.”

“And before that?”

“Before that, I wasn’t here.” Hugging his clipboard more tightly than ever, Kasaya glances longingly down the corridor. “Perhaps there’s something you need? I could summon someone . . . ”

“No, I’m fine. I was just curious about what it must be like to be you, Kasaya. I mean, are you always on duty? Do your kind sleep? Do you change out of those clothes and wash your hair and—”

“I’m sorry sir,” the chimera intervenes, now distantly firm. “I really can’t discuss these matters when I’m on duty. If I may . . . ?”

Then, he’s off without a backward glance. Deserts may fail to bloom if the correct kind of finger food isn’t served at precisely the right moment. Children blinded by onchocerciasis might not get the implants that will allow them to see grainy shapes for lack of a decent meeting room. And, after all, Kasaya is responding in the way that any servant would—at least, if a guest accosted them and started asking inappropriately personal questions when they were at work. Northover can’t help but feel sorry for these creatures, who clearly seem to have at least the illusion of consciousness. To be trapped forever in crowd scenes at the edges of the lives of the truly dead . . .

Northover comes to another door set in a kind of side-turn that he almost walks past. Is this where the chimera servants go? Down this way, Elsinore certainly seems less grand. Bright sea air rattles the arrowslit glass. The walls are raw stone, and stained with white tidemarks of damp. This, he imagines some virtual guide pronouncing, is by far the oldest part of the castle. It certainly feels that way.

He lifts a hessian curtain and steps into a dark, cool space. A single barred, high skylight fans down on what could almost have been a dungeon. Or a monastic cell. Some warped old bookcases and other odd bits of furniture, all cheaply practical, populate a roughly paved floor. In one corner, some kind of divan or bed. In another, a wicker chair. The change of light is so pronounced that it’s a moment before he sees that someone is sitting there. A further beat before he realizes it’s Thea Lorentz, and that she’s seated before a mirror, and her fingers are turning those bangles on her left wrist. Frail as frost, the silver circles tink and click. Otherwise, she’s motionless. She barely seems to breathe.

Not a mirror at all, Northover realizes as he shifts quietly around her, but some kind of tunnel or gateway. Through it, he sees a street. It’s raining, the sky is reddish with windblown earth, and the puddles seem bright as blood. Lean-to shacks, their gutters sluicing, line something too irregular to be called a street. A dead power pylon leans in the mid-distance. A woman stumbles into view, drenched and wading up to the knee. She’s holding something wrapped in rags with a wary possessiveness that suggests it’s either a baby or food. This could be the suburbs of London, New York, or Sydney. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is how she falls to her knees at what she sees floating before her in the rain. Thea . . . ! She almost drops whatever she’s carrying as her fingers claw upward and her ruined mouth shapes the name. She’s weeping, and Thea’s weeping as well—two silver trails that follow the perfect contours of her face. Then, the scene fades in another shudder of rain, and Thea Lorentz is looking out at him from the reformed surface of a mirror with the same soft sorrow that poor, ruined woman must have seen in her gaze.

“Jon.”

“This, er . . . ” he gestures.

She stands up. She’s wearing a long tweed skirt, rumpled boots, a loose turtleneck woolen top. “Oh, it’s probably everything people say it is. The truth is that, once you’re Farside, it’s too easy to forget what Lifeside is really like. People make all the right noises—I’m sure you’ve heard them already. But that isn’t the same thing.”

“Going there—being seen as some virtual projection in random places like that—aren’t you just perpetuating the myth?”

She nods slowly. “But is that really such a terrible thing? And that cat-eyed woman you sat next to yesterday at dinner. What’s her name, Wilhelmina? Kasaya’s already committed her to invest in new sewerage processing works and food aid, all of which will be targeted on that particular area of Barcelona. I know she’s a tedious creature—you only have to look at her to see that—but what’s the choice? You can stand back, and do nothing, or step in, and use whatever you have to try to make things slightly better.”

“Is that what you really think?”

“Yes. I believe I do. But how about you, Jon? What do you think?”

“You know me,” he says. “More than capable of thinking several things at once. And believing, or not believing, all of them.”

“Doubting Thomas,” she says, taking another step forward so he can smell patchouli.

“Or Hamlet.”

“Here of all places, why not?”

For a while, they stand there in silence.

“This whole castle is designed to be incredibly protective of me,” she says eventually. “It admits very few people thus far. Only the best and oldest of friends. And Bartleby insists I wear these as an extra precaution, even though they can sometimes be distracting . . . ” She raises her braceletted wrist. “As you’ve probably already gathered, he’s pretty protective of me, too.”

“We’ve spoken. It wasn’t exactly the happiest reunion.”

She smiles. “The way you both are, it would have been strange if it was. But look, you’ve come all this incredible way. Why don’t we go out somewhere?”

“You must have work to do. Projects—I don’t know—that you need to approve. People to meet.”

“The thing about being in Elsinore is that things generally go more smoothly when Thea Lorentz isn’t in the way. You saw what it was like last night at dinner. Every time I open my mouth people expect to hear some new universal truth. I ask them practical questions and their mouths drop. Important deals fall apart when people get distracted because Thea’s in the room. That’s why Kasaya’s so useful. He does all that’s necessary—joins up the dots and bangs the odd head. And people scarcely even notice him.”

“I didn’t think he likes it much when they do.”

“More questions, Jon?” She raises an eyebrow. “But everything here on Farside must still seem so strange to you, when there’s so much to explore . . . ”

Down stairways. Along corridors. Through storerooms. Perhaps these are the secret routes Kasaya hinted at, winding through the castle like Escher tunnels in whispers of sea-wet stone. Then, they are down in a great, electric-lit cavern of a garage. His Bentley is here, along with lines of other fine and vintage machines long crumbled to rust back on Lifeside. Maseratis. Morgans. Lamborghinis. Other things that look like Dan Dare spaceships of Faberge submarines. The cold air reeks of new petrol, clean oil, polished metal. In a far corner and wildly out of place, squatting above a small black pool, is an old VW Beetle.

“Well,” she says. “What do you think?”

He smiles as he walks around it. The dents and scratches are old friends. “It’s perfect.”

“Well, it was never that. But we had some fun with it, didn’t we?”

“How does this work? I mean, creating it? Did you have some old pictures of it? Did you manage to access—”

“Jon.” She dangles a key from her hand. “Do you want to go out for a drive, or what?”

“The steering even pulls the same way. It’s amazing . . . ”

Out on roads that climb and camber, giving glimpses through the slowly thinning mist of flanks of forest, deep drops. Headlights on, although it makes little difference and there doesn’t seem to be any other traffic. She twiddles the radio. Finds a station that must have stopped transmitting more than fifty years ago. Van Morrison, Springsteen, and Dylan. So very, very out of date—but still good—even back then. And even now, with his brown-eyed girl beside him again. It’s the same useless deejay, the same pointless adverts. As the road climbs higher, the signal fades to a bubbling hiss.

“Take that turn up there. You see, the track right there in the trees . . . ?”

The road now scarcely a road, the Beetle a jumble of metallic jolts and yelps. He has to laugh, and Thea laughs as well, the way they’re being bounced around. A tunnel through the trees, and then some kind of clearing, where he stops the engine and squawks the handbrake, and everything falls still.

“Do you remember?”

He climbs out slowly, as if fearing a sudden movement might cause it all to dissolve. “Of course I do . . . ”

Thea, though, strides ahead. Climbs the sagging cabin steps.

“This is . . . ”

“I know,” she agrees, testing the door. Which—just as it had always been—is unlocked.

This, he thinks as he stumbles forward, is what it really means to be dead. Forget the gills and wings and the fine wines and the spectacular food and the incredible scenery. What this is, what it means . . .

Is this.

The same cabin. It could be the same day. Thea, she’d called after him as he walked down the street away from an old actors’ pub off what was still called Covent Garden after celebrating—although that wasn’t the word—the end of Bard on Wheels with a farewell pint and spliff. Farewell and fuck off as far as Northover was concerned, Sam Bartleby and his stupid sword fights especially. Shakespeare and most other kinds of real performance being well and truly dead, and everyone heading for well-deserved obscurity. The sole exception being Thea Lorentz, who could sing and act and do most things better than all the rest of them combined, and had an air of being destined for higher things that didn’t seem like arrogant bullshit even if it probably was. Out of his class, really, both professionally and personally. But she’d called to him, and he’d wandered back, for where else was he heading? She’d said she had a kind of proposal, and why didn’t they go out for a while out in her old VW? All the bridges over the Thames hadn’t yet been down then, and they’d driven past the burned-out cars and abandoned shops until they came to this stretch of woodland where the trees were still alive, and they’d ended up exactly here. In this clearing, inside this cabin.

There’s an old woodburner stove that Northover sets about lighting, and a few tins along the cobweb shelves, which he inspects and settles on a tin of soup, which he nearly cuts his thumb struggling to open, and sets to warm on the top of the fire as it begins to send out amber shadows. He goes to the window, clears a space in the dust, pretending to check if he turned the VW’s lights off, but in reality trying to grab a little thinking time. He didn’t, doesn’t, know Thea Lorentz that well at this or any point. But he knows her well enough to understand that her spontaneous suggestions are nothing if not measured.

“Is this how it was, do you think?” she asks, shrugging off her coat and coming to stand behind him. Again, that smell of patchouli. She slides her arms around his waist. Nestles her chin against his shoulder. “I wanted you to be what I called producer and musical director for my Emily Dickinson thing. And you agreed.”

“Not before I’d asked if you meant roadie and general dogsbody.”

He feels her chuckle. “That as well . . . ”

“What else was I going to do, anyway?” Dimly, in the gaining glow of the fire, he can see her and his face in reflection.

“And how about now?”

“I suppose it’s much the same.”

He turns. It’s he who clasps her face, draws her mouth to his. Another thing about Thea is that, even when you know it’s always really her, it somehow seems to be you.

Their teeth clash. It’s been a long time. This is the first time ever. She draws back, breathless, pulls off that loose-fitting jumper she’s wearing. He helps her with the shift beneath, traces, remembers, discovers, or rediscovers, the shape and weight of her breasts. Thumbs her hardening nipples. Then, she pulls away his shirt, undoes his belt buckle. Difficult here to be graceful, even if you’re Thea Lorentz, struggle-hopping with zips, shoes, and panties. Even harder for Northover with one sock off and the other caught on something or other, not to mention his young man’s erection, as he throws a dusty blanket over the creaky divan. But laughter helps. Laughter always did. That, and Thea’s knowing smile as she takes hold of him for a moment in her cool fingers. Then, Christ, she lets go of him again. A final pause, and he almost thinks this isn’t going to work, but all she’s doing is pulling off those silver bracelets, and then, before he can realize what else it is she wants, she’s snapping off the bangle of his Rolex as well and pulling him down, and now there’s nothing else to be done, for they really are naked.

Northover, he’s drowning in memory. Greedy at first, hard to hold back, especially with the things she does, but then trying to be slow, trying to be gentle. Or, at least, a gentleman. He remembers, anyway—or is it now happening?—that time she took his head between her hands and raised it to her gaze. You don’t have to be so careful, she murmurs. Or murmured. I’m flesh and blood, Jon. Just like you . . .

He lies back. Collapsed. Drenched. Exhausted. Sated. He turns from the cobweb ceiling and sees the Rolex lies cast on the gritty floor. Softly ticking. Just within reach. But already, Thea is stirring. She scratches, stretches. Bracelet hoops glitter as they slip back over her knuckles. He stands up. Pads over to a stained sink. There’s a trickle of water. What might pass for a towel. Dead or living, it seems, the lineaments of love remain the same.

“You never were much of a one for falling asleep after,” Thea comments, straightening her sleeves as she dresses.

“Not much a man, then.”

“Some might say that . . . ” She laughs as she fluffs her hair. “But we had something, didn’t we, Jon? We really did. So why not again?”

There it is. Just when he thinks the past’s finally over and done with. Not Emily Dickinson this time, or not only that project, but a kind of greatest hits. Stuff they did together with Bard on Wheels, although this time it’ll be just them, a two-hander, a proper double act, and, yes Jon, absolutely guaranteed no Sam fucking Bartleby. Other things as well. A few songs, sketches. Bits and bobs. Fun, of course. But wasn’t the best kind of fun always the stuff you took seriously? And why not start here and see how it goes? Why not tonight, back at Elsinore?

As ever, what can he say but yes?

Thea drives. He supposes she did before, although he can’t really remember how they got back to London. The mist has cleared. She, the sea, the mountains, all look magnificent. That Emily Dickinson thing, the one they did before, was a huge commercial and critical success. Even if people did call it a one-woman show, when he’d written half the script and all of the music. To have those looks, and yet to be able to hold the stage and sing and act so expressively! Not to mention, although the critics generally did, that starlike ability to assume a role, yet still be Thea Lorentz. Audrey Hepburn got a mention. So did Grace Kelly. A fashion icon, too, then. But Thea could carry a tune better than either. Even for the brief time they were actually living together in that flat in Pimlico, Northover sometimes found himself simply looking—staring, really—at Thea. Especially when she was sleeping. She just seemed so angelic. Who are you really? he’d wondered. Where are you from? Why are you here, and with me of all people?

He never did work out the full chain of events that brought her to join Bard on Wheels. Of course, she’d popped up in other troupes and performances—the evidence was still to be found on blocky online postings and all those commemorative hagiographies, but remembrances were shaky and it was hard to work on the exact chain of where and when. A free spirit, certainly. A natural talent. Not the sort who’d ever needed instructing. She claimed that she’d lost both her parents to the Hn3i epidemic, and had grown up in one of those giant orphanages they set up at Heathrow. As to where she got that poise, or the studied assurance she always displayed, all the many claims, speculations, myths and stories that eventually emerged—and which she never made any real attempt to quash—drowned out whatever had been the truth.

They didn’t finish the full tour. Already, the offers were pouring in. He followed her once to pre-earthquake, pre-nuke Los Angeles, but by then people weren’t sure what his role exactly was in the growing snowball of Thea Lorentz’s fame. Flunky, and neither was he. Not that she was unfaithful. At least, not to his knowledge. She probably never had the time. Pretty clear to everyone, though, that Thea Lorentz was moving on and up. And that he wasn’t. Without her, although he tried getting other people involved, the Emily Dickinson poem arrangements sounded like the journeymen pieces they probably were. Without her, he even began to wonder about the current whereabouts of his other old sparring partners in Bard on Wheels.

It was out in old LA, at a meal at the Four Seasons, that he’d met, encountered, experienced—whatever the word for it was—his first dead person. They were still pretty rare back then, and this one had made its arrival on the roof of the hotel by veetol just to show that it could, when it really should have just popped into existence in the newly-installed reality fields at their table like Aladdin’s genie. The thing had jittered and buzzed, and its voice seemed over-amplified. Of course, it couldn’t eat, but it pretended to consume a virtual plate of quail in puff pastry with foie gras in a truffle sauce, which it pretended to enjoy with virtual relish. You couldn’t fault the thing’s business sense, but Northover took the whole experience as another expression of the world’s growing sickness.

Soon, it was the Barbican and the Sydney Opera House for Thea (and how sad it was that so many of these great venues were situated next to the rising shorelines) and odd jobs or no jobs at all for him. The flat in Pimlico went, and so, somewhere, did hope. The world of entertainment was careering, lemming-like, toward the cliffs of pure virtuality, with just a few bright stars such as Thea to give it the illusion of humanity. Crappy fantasy-dramas or rubbish docu-musicals that she could sail through and do her Thea Lorentz thing, giving them an undeserved illusion of class. At least, and unlike that idiot buffoon Bartleby, Northover could see why she was in such demand. When he thought of what Thea Lorentz had become, with her fame and her wealth and her well-publicized visits to disaster areas and her audiences with the Pope and the Dalai Lama, he didn’t exactly feel surprised or bitter. After all, she was only doing whatever it was that she’d always done.

Like all truly beautiful women, at least those who take care of themselves, she didn’t age in the way that the rest of the world did. If anything, the slight sharpening of those famous cheekbones and the small care lines that drew around her eyes and mouth made her seem even more breathtakingly elegant. Everyone knew that she would mature slowly and gracefully and that she would make—just like the saints with whom she was now most often compared—a beautiful, and probably incorruptible, corpse. So, when news broke that she’d contracted a strain of new-variant septicemic plague when she was on a fact-finding trip in Manhattan, the world fell into mourning as it hadn’t done since . . . Well, there was no comparison, although JFK and Martin Luther King got a mention, along with Gandhi and Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc and Marilyn Monroe and that lost Mars mission and Kate and Diana.

Transfer—a process of assisted death and personality uploading—was becoming a popular option. At least, amongst the few who could afford it. The idea that the blessed Thea might refuse to do this thing, and deprive a grieving world of the chance to know that somehow, somewhere, she was still there, and on their side, and sorrowing as they sorrowed, was unthinkable. By now well ensconced high up in his commune with his broom and his reputation as an angry hermit, left with nothing but his memories of that wrecked piano he was trying to get into tune, even Northover couldn’t help but follow this ongoing spectacle. Still, he felt strangely detached. He’d long fallen out of love with Thea, and now fell out of admiring her as well. All that will-she won’t-she crap that she was doubtless engineering even as she lay there on her deathbed! All she was doing was just exactly what she’d always done and twisting the whole fucking world around her fucking little finger. But then maybe, just possibly, he was getting the tiniest little bit bitter . . .

Back at Elsinore, Kasaya has already been at work. Lights, a low stage, decent mics and pa system, along with a spectacular grand piano, have all been installed at the far end of the great hall were they sat for yesterday’s dinner. The long tables have been removed, the chairs re-arranged. Or replaced. It really does look like a bijou theatre. The piano’s a Steinway. If asked, Northover might have gone for a Bechstein. The action, to his mind, and with the little chance he’s even had to ever play such machines, being a tad more responsive. But you can’t have everything, he supposes. Not even here.

The space is cool, half-dark. The light from the windows is settling. Bartleby and his troupe of merry men have just returned from their day of tally-ho slaughter with a giant boar hung on ropes. Tonight, by sizzling flame-light out in the yard, the dining will be alfresco. And after that . . . Well, word has already got out that Thea and this newly arrived guy at Elsinore are planning some kind of reunion performance. No wonder the air in this empty hall feels expectant.

He sits down. Wondrous and mysterious as Thea Lorentz’s smile, the keys—which are surely real ivory—gleam back at him. He plays a soft e-minor chord. The sound shivers out. Beautiful. Although that’s mostly the piano. Never a real musician, Northy. Nor much of a real actor, either. Never a real anything. Not that much of a stagehand, even. Just got lucky for a while with a troupe of traveling players. Then, as luck tends to do, it ran out on you. But still. He hasn’t sat at one of these things since he died, yet it couldn’t feel more natural. As the sound fades, and the gathering night washes in, he can hear the hastening tick of his Rolex.

The door at the far end bangs. He thinks it’s most likely Kasaya. But it’s Thea. Barefoot now. Her feet sip the polished floor. Dark slacks, an old, knotted shirt. Hair tied back. She looks the business. She’s carrying loose sheaves of stuff—notes, bits of script and sheet music—almost all of which he recognizes as she slings them down across the gleaming lid of the piano.

“Well,” she says, “shall we do this thing?”

Back in his room, he stands for a long time in the steam heat of the shower. Finds he’s soaping and scrubbing himself until his skin feels raw and his head is dizzy. He’d always wondered about those guys from al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and the Taliban and New Orthodoxy. Why they felt such a need to shave and cleanse the bodies they would soon be destroying. Now, though, he understands perfectly. The world is ruined and time is out of joint, but this isn’t just a thing you do out of conviction. The moment has to be right, as well.

Killing the dead isn’t easy. In fact, it’s near impossible. But not quite. The deads’ great strength is the sheer overpowering sense of reality they bring to the sick fantasy they call Farside. Everything must work. Everything has to be what it is, right down to the minutest detail. Everything must be what it seems to be. But this is also their greatest weakness. Of course, they told Northy when they took off his blindfold as he sat chained to a chair which was bolted to the concrete floor in that deserted shopping mall, we can try to destroy them by trying to tear everything in Farside apart. We can fly planes into their reactors, introduce viruses into their processing suites, flood their precious data vaults with seawater. But there’s always a backup. There’s always another power source. We can never wreck enough of Farside to have even a marginal effect upon the whole. But the dead themselves are different. Break down the singularity of their existence for even an instant, and you destroy it forever. The dead become truly dead.

Seeing as it didn’t exist as a real object, they had to show him the Rolex he’d be wearing through a set of VR gloves and goggles. Heavy-seeming of course, and ridiculously over-engineered, but then designer watches had been that way for decades. This is what you must put on along with your newly assumed identity when you return to consciousness in a cabin on board a steamer ferry bound for New Erin. It many ways, the watch is what it appears to be. It ticks. It tells the time. You’ll even need to remember to wind it up. But carefully. Pull the crown out and turn it backwards—no, no, not now, not even here, you mustn’t—and it will initiate a massive databurst. The Farside equivalent of an explosion of about half a pound of semtex, atomizing anything within a three meter radius—yourself, of course, included, which is something we’ve already discussed—and causing damage, depending on conditions, in a much wider sphere. Basically, though, you need to be within touching distance of Thea Lorentz to be sure, to be certain. But that alone isn’t enough. She’ll be wearing some kind of protection which will download her to a safe backup even in the instant of time it takes the blast to expand. We don’t know what that protection will be, although we believe she changes it regularly. But, whatever it is, it must be removed.

A blare of lights. A quietening of the murmurous audience as Northover steps out. Stands center stage. Reaches in his pocket. Starts tossing a coin. Which, when Thea emerges, he drops. The slight sound, along with her presence, rings out. One thing to rehearse, but this is something else. He’d forgotten, he really had, how Thea raises her game when you’re out here with her, and it’s up to you to try to keep up.

A clever idea that went back to Bard on Wheels, to re-reflect Hamlet through some of the scenes of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where two minor characters bicker and debate as the whole famous tragedy grinds on in the background. Northover doubts if this dumb, rich, dead audience get many of the references, but that really doesn’t matter when the thing flows as well as it does. Along with the jokes and witty wordplay, all the stuff about death, and life in a box being better than no life at all, gains a new resonance when it’s performed here on Farside. The audience are laughing fit to bust by the end of the sequence, but you can tell in the falls of silence that come between that they know something deeper and darker is really going on.

It’s the same when he turns to the piano, and Thea sings a few of Shakespeare’s jollier songs. For, as she says as she stands there alone in the spotlight and her face glows and those bangles slide upon her arms, the man that hath no music in himself, the motions of his spirit are dull as night. She even endows his arrangement of Under the Greenwood Tree, which he always thought too saccharine, with a bittersweet air.

This, Northover thinks, as they move on to the Emily Dickinson section—which, of course, is mostly about death—is why I have to do this thing. Not because Thea’s fake or because she doesn’t believe in what she’s doing. Not because she isn’t Thea Lorentz any longer and has been turned inside out by the dead apologists into some parasitic ghost. Not because what she does here at Elsinore is a sham. I must do this because she is, and always was, the treacherous dream of some higher vision of humanity, and people will only ever wake up and begin to shake off their shackles when they realize that living is really about forgetting such illusions, and looking around them, and picking up a fucking broom and clearing up the mess of the world themselves. The dead take our power, certainly—both physically and figuratively. The reactors that drive the Farside engines use resources and technologies the living can barely afford. Their clever systems subvert and subsume our own. They take our money, too. Masses and masses of it. Who’d have thought that an entirely virtual economy could do so much better than one that’s supposedly real? But what they really take from us, and the illusion that Thea Lorentz will continue to foster as long as she continues to exist, is hope.

Because I did not stop for death . . . Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door . . . It all rings so true. You could cut the air with a knife. You could pull down the walls of the world. Poor Emily Dickinson, stuck in that homestead with her dying mother and that sparse yet volcanic talent that no one even knew about. Then, and just when the audience are probably expecting something lighter to finish off, it’s back to Hamlet, and sad, mad Ophelia’s songs—which are scattered about the play just as she is; a wandering, hopeless, hopeful ghost—although Northover has gathered them together as a poignant posy in what he reckons is some of his best work. Thea knows it as well. Her instincts for these things are more honed than his ever were. After all, she’s a trouper. A legend. She’s Thea Lorentz. She holds and holds the audience as new silence falls. Then, just as she did in rehearsal, she slides the bangles off her arm, and places them atop the piano, where they lie bright as rain circles in a puddle.

“Keep this low and slow and quiet,” she murmurs, just loud enough for everyone in the hall to hear as she steps back to the main mic. He lays his hands on the keys. Waits, just as they always did, for the absolute stilling of the last cough, mutter, and shuffle. Plays the chords that rise and mingle with her perfect, perfect voice. The lights shine down on them from out of sheer blackness, and it’s goodnight, sweet ladies, and rosemary for remembrance, which bewept along the primrose path to the grave where I did go . . .

As the last chord dies, the audience erupts. Thea Lorentz nods, bows, smiles as the applause washes over her in great, sonorous, adoring waves. It’s just the way it always was. The spotlight loves her, and Northover sits at the piano for what feels like a very long time. Forgotten. Ignored. It would seem churlish for him not to clap as well. So he does. But Thea knows the timing of these things better than anyone, and the crowd loves it all the more when, the bangles looped where she left them on the piano, she beckons him over. He stands up. Crosses the little stage to join her in the spotlight. Her bare left arm slips easy around his waist as he bows. This could be Carnegie Hall. This could be the Bolshoi. The manacling weight of the Rolex drags at his wrist. Thea smells of patchouli and of Thea, and the play’s the thing, and there could not, never could be, a better moment. There’s even Sam Bartleby, who sat grinning but pissed-off right there in the front row and well within range of the blast.

They bow again, thankyouthankyouthankyou, and by now Thea’s holding him surprisingly tightly, and it’s difficult for him to reach casually around to the Rolex, even though he knows it must be done. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, but the time for doubt is gone, and he’s just about to pull and turn the crown of his watch when Thea murmurs something toward his ear which, in all this continuing racket, is surely intended only for him.

“What?” he shouts back.

Her hand cups his ear more closely. Her breath, her entire seemingly living body, leans into him. Surely one of those bon mots that performers share with each other in times of triumph such as this. Just something else that the crowds love to see.

“Why don’t you do it now?” Thea Lorentz says to Jon Northover. “What’s stopping you . . . ?”

He’s standing out on the moonlit battlements. He doesn’t know how much time has passed, but his body is coated in sweat and his hands are trembling and his ears still seem to be ringing and his head hurts. Performance come-down to end all performance come-downs, and surely it’s only a matter of minutes before Sam Bartleby, or perhaps Kasaya, or whatever kind of amazing Farside device it is that really works the security here at Elsinore, comes to get him. Perhaps not even that. Maybe he’ll just vanish. Would that be so terrible? But then, they have cellars here at Elsinore. Dungeons, even. Put to the question. Matters of concern and interest. Things they need to know. He wonders how much full-on pain a young, fit body such as the one he now inhabits is capable of bearing . . . He fingers the Rolex, and studies the drop, but somehow he can’t bring himself to do it.

When someone does come, it’s Thea Lorentz. Stepping out from the shadows into the spotlight glare of the moon. He sees that she’s still not wearing those bangles, but she keeps further back from him now, and he knows it’s already too late.

“What made you realize?”

She shrugs. Shivers. Pulls down her sleeves. “Wasn’t it one of the first things I said to you? That you were too principled to ever come here?”

“That was what I used to think as well.”

“Then what made you change your mind?”

Her eyes look sadder than ever. More compassionate. He wants to bury his face in her hair. After all, Thea could always get more out of him than anyone. So he tells her about mad old Northy, with that wrecked piano he’d found in what had once been a rooftop bar up in his eyrie above the commune, which he’d spent his time restoring because what else was there to do? Last working piano in London, or England, most likely. Or the whole fucking world come to that. Not that it was ever that much of a great shakes. Nothing like here. Cheaply built in Mexico of all places. But then this kid called Haru comes up, and he says he’s curious about music, and he asks Northy to show him his machine for playing it, and Northy trusts the kid, which feels like a huge risk. Even that first time he sits Haru down at it, though, he knows he’s something special. He just has that air.

“And you know, Thea . . . ” Northover finds he’s actually laughing. “You know what the biggest joke is? Haru didn’t even realize. He could read music quicker than I can read words, and play like Chopin and Chick Corea, and to him it was all just this lark of a thing he sometimes did with this mad old git up on the fortieth floor . . .

“But he was growing older. Kids still do, you know, back on Lifeside. And one day he’s not there, and when he does next turn up, there’s this girl downstairs who’s apparently the most amazing thing in the history of everything, and I shout at him and tell him just how fucking brilliant he really is. I probably even used the phrase God-given talent, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. But anyway . . . ”

“Yes?”

Northover sighs. This is the hard bit, even though he’s played it over a million times in his head. “They become a couple, and she soon gets pregnant, and she has a healthy baby, even though they seem ridiculously young. A kind of miracle. They’re so proud they even take the kid up to show me, and he plongs his little hands on my piano, and I wonder if he’ll come up one day to see old Northy, too. Given a few years, and assuming old Northy is still alive, that is, which is less than likely. But that isn’t how it happens. The baby gets sick. It’s winter and there’s an epidemic of some new variant of the nano flu. Not to say there isn’t a cure. But the cure needs money—I mean, you know what these retrovirals cost better than anyone, Thea—which they simply don’t have. And this is why I should have kept my big old mouth shut, because Haru must have remembered what I yelled at him about his rare, exceptional musical ability. And he decides his baby’s only just starting on his life, and he’s had a good innings of eighteen or so years. And if there’s something he can do, some sacrifice he can make for his kid . . . So that’s what he does . . . ”

“You’re saying?”

“Oh, come on, Thea! I know it’s not legal, either Lifeside or here. But we both know it goes on. Everything has its price, especially talent. And the dead have more than enough vanity and time, if not the application, to fancy themselves as brilliant musicians, just the same way they might want to ride an expensive thoroughbred, or fuck like Casanova, or paint like Picasso. So Haru sold himself, or the little bit that someone here wanted, and the baby survived and he didn’t. It’s not that unusual a story, Thea, in the great scheme of things. But it’s different, when it happens to someone you know, and you feel you’re to blame.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Do you think that’s enough?”

“Nothing’s ever enough. But do you really believe that whatever arm of the resistance you made contact with actually wanted me, Thea Lorentz, fully dead? What about the reprisals? What about the global outpouring of grief? What about all the inevitable, endless let’s-do-this-for-Thea bullshit? Don’t you think it would suit the interests of Farside itself far better to remove this awkward woman who makes unfashionable causes fashionable and brings attention to unwanted truths? Wouldn’t they prefer to extinguish Thea Lorentz and turn her into a pure symbol they can manipulate and market however they wish? Wouldn’t that make far better sense than whatever it was you thought you were doing?”

The sea heaves. The whole night heaves with it.

“If you want to kill me, Jon, you can do so now. But I don’t think you will. You can’t, can you? That’s where the true weakness of whoever conceived you and this plan lies. You had to be what you are, or were, to get this close to me. You had to have free will, or at least the illusion of it . . . ”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“I’m sorry. You might think you’re Jon Northover—in fact, I’m sure you do—but you’re not. You’re not him really.”

“That’s—”

“No. Hear me out. You and I both know in our hearts that the real Jon Northover wouldn’t be here on Farside. He’d have seen through the things I’ve just explained to you, even if he had ever contemplated actively joining the resistance. But that isn’t it, either. Not really. I loved you, Jon Northover. Loved him. It’s gone, of course, but I’ve treasured the memories. Turned them and polished them, I suppose. Made them into something realer and clearer than ever existed. This afternoon, for instance. It was all too perfect. You haven’t changed, Jon. You haven’t changed at all. People, real people, either dead or living, they shift and they alter like ghosts in reflection, but you haven’t. You stepped out of my past, and there you were, and I’m so, so, sorry to have to tell you these things, for I fully believe that you’re a conscious entity that feels pain and doubt just like all the rest of us. But the real Jon Northover is most likely long dead. He’s probably lying in some mass grave. He’s just another lost statistic. He’s gone beyond all recovery, Jon, and I mourn for him deeply. All you are is something that’s been put together from my stolen memories. You’re too, too perfect.”

“You’re just saying that. You don’t know.”

“But I do. That’s the difference between us. One day, perhaps, chimeras such as you will share the same rights as the dead, not to mention the living. But that’s one campaign too far even for Thea Lorentz—at least, while she still has some control over her own consciousness. But I think you know, or at least you think you do, how to tune a piano. Do you know what inharmonicity is?”

“Of course I do, Thea. It was me who told you about it. If the tone of a piano’s going to sound right, you can’t tune all the individual strings to exactly the correct pitch. You have to balance them out slightly to the sharp or the flat. Essentially, you tune a piano ever so marginally out of tune, because of the way the strings vibrate and react. Which is imperfectly . . . Which is . . . I mean . . . Which is . . . ”

He trails off. A flag flaps. The clouds hang ragged. Cold moonlight pours down like silver sleet. Thea’s face, when he brings himself to look at it, seems more beautiful than ever.

The trees of Farside are magnificent. Fireash and oak. Greenbloom and maple. Shot through with every color of autumn as dawn blazes toward the white peaks of the Seven Mountains. He’s never seen such beauty as this. The tide’s further in today. Its salt smell, as he winds down the window and breathes it in, is somehow incredibly poignant. Then the road sweeps up from the coast. Away from the Westering Ocean. As the virtual Bentley takes a bridge over a gorge at a tire-scream, it dissolves in a roaring pulse of flame.

A few machine parts twist jaggedly upward, but they settle as the wind bears away the sound and the smoke. Soon, there’s only sigh of the trees, and the hiss of a nearby waterfall. Then, there’s nothing at all.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 2013.

About the Author

Ian R MacLeod has been writing and selling stories and novels of speculative and fantastic fiction for almost thirty years. Amongst many accolades, his work has won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award (twice) and the Sidewise Award for alternate fiction (three times). He took a Law degree and drifted into the English Civil Service, but writing was always his first love and ambition. He has recently released a short story collection, Frost On Glass, and has a new novel, Red Snow, due out shortly.He lives in the riverside town of Bewdley, in the United Kingdom.

At the Cross-Time Jaunter’s Ball

Alexander Jablokov

I had gotten lost again, as I so often did, because it was dark there, in those musty and unswept hallways that run between the universes. I’ve always been impressed by the amount of crap that seems to float in through the doorways and settle there, in some sort of plea for reality. An infinite network of passages linking the worlds of Shadow with that of the real might seem like a good idea, but who was going to keep it clean? The Lords were too haughty to concern themselves with things like that, and we humans were too . . . finite.

I looked in through doorways as I walked, to see such things as a city of hanging tree dwellings or an endless stairway that curved up from mist into blinding sunlight. These were delicate worlds, miniatures. As a professional critic of such Shadows I had to say that these worlds were not the style I usually liked, though one, where a regatta of multicolored dirigibles sailed above a city whose towers stood half in the sea, was excellent.

A rough wind blew past, carrying with it the clamor of a cheering army, and the pounding of swords on shields. The passage tilted upward, and I climbed a set of rough stairs, smelling first lilacs, then, when I took a deeper breath, an open sewer. I choked, and was surrounded by buzzing flies, who had wandered irrevocably from their world and, looking for shit, had found only the meager substitute of a critic. I ran up the stairs, waving the flies away, past the sound of temple bells, the dense choking of dust from a quarry, and a spray of briny water, accompanied by the shrieking of seagulls.

Gathered in a knot in the hallway ahead of me were a group of Lords, with their servant, a huge man wearing a leather helmet. Lord Prokhor, Lord Sere, and Lord Ammene, three balding men with prison pallor and rings below their dark eyes, waited for me to give them advice on acquisition. They sat on little folding stools, and looked uncomfortable.

“You are late, Mr. Landstatter,” Lord Ammene said, in a reedy voice.

“Your servant, sir,” I said, ignoring the challenge. I eyed the three of them suspiciously. Lords were entirely unpredictable, and their motivations obscure. On my last trip I’d almost been trapped when Cuzco, capital of the Incan Empire, fell to invading Apache Sacred Warriors who had hired Maori warships for transport from their temple cities along the Pacific coast of Mexico. I’d spent three desperate days freezing in the Andes, my nights lit by the light from the burning city reflected in the ice fields, before I could return home. I had wondered if it was an accident, because someone had locked me in my room just when the attack began. The three of them returned my bow without standing.

The servant raised the lamp he held in his hand and examined me. I wore a three-cornered, plumed hat, a heavy, powder blue tailcoat covered with useless gold buttons, a stiff, embroidered vest with hunting scenes on it, extremely tight cream-colored silk trousers, and black leather boots trimmed with sable. Beneath the hat, my hair was pomaded, powdered, and pulled back into a ponytail by an ornate silver clasp. The servant sneered at me.

The Lords were dressed in their usual sober dark clothes, gold chains around their necks indicating rank. Unlike most people, they did not adopt clothing from Shadow, implying, I guess, that what they always wore was “real.” Style is never real, but I am a critic of worlds, not dress, so I said nothing.

Then the servant turned the lamp around. I straightened my hat. We stood in front of a stretch of blank wall. Humming gently to himself, he adjusted the lamp until it focused on the wall. The wall shimmered, and a door opened onto a brightly lit street. I could hear the ringing of steel wagon wheels on cobblestones and the puffing of a steam launch on the river that flowed just out of sight of the doorway. “There you are, Mr. Landstatter. See you in forty-eight hours.” I stopped just in front of the shimmering, the way I always do, no matter who is watching. Vanishing into unreality makes me nervous. He pushed me through, not roughly, but the way you would direct a timid actor onto a stage in front of an audience. I turned to protest, but he and his masters were gone, and I found myself addressing my retort to a broken and stained brick wall.

The water swirled against the brick side of the canal, as if irritated at having its freedom curtailed, but finally acquiesced and flowed under the arch of the bridge. On the river beyond, a vendor guiding his empty flatboat home from the market negotiated the uneven current with tired familiarity. Past the inflow of the canal he put his shoulders into his poling, undoubtedly thinking of a bowl of stew, a mug of beer, and a pipe of tobacco.

I was starting to think of things like that too. I watched the boatman vanish into the iridescent meeting of sunset and oily water, then turned and began to walk in the direction of the dam, which was where the north and south branches of the Schekaagau River joined and flowed into Lake Vlekke. It was also where the best hotels were. I strayed into the path of a pedicab, and was startled by a jangle of bells that sounded like an angry gamelan. The white-suited driver bared polished, scrimshawed teeth, cursed at me in Malay, and was gone, leaving only a cloud of ginger and curry to mark his passing.

The tall, step-gabled warehouses that had been flanking me on the left vanished, to be replaced by the unadorned brick facades of merchants’ houses, which gave only hints of wealth through panes of leaded glass: the glitter of a chandelier, the flash of a tapestry, the gleam of a silver serving bowl. From a half-open window came the sound of a drinking song, bellowed by male voices to the accompaniment of pounding pewter mugs. Merchants, home from the Bourse and ready to do their best to keep the price of malted barley high.

A marble bridge carried me high over the river to the dam, a platform of pilings sunk into the soft earth. Ahead of me rose the towers of city hall. A small boy sat on the quay, trailing a fishing line in the water. The result of his day’s labors amounted to two carp, strung through the gills, and a frog, which was jumping up and down in a jar.

“Say, lad,” I said, in the Lithuanian influenced patois of the Mississippi River trade. I thought it was a nice touch. “What is the best hotel in town?” I’ve had fellow critics tell me that, when they work in Shadow, they stay in the sleaziest fleabags they can find, because that makes the experience more “real.” I don’t find lice more real, in any ultimate sense, than satin sheets.

“The best?” The boy jumped up eagerly. “The Emperor Kristiaan, on the Streetergracht! They have marble tubs and gold faucets. And Duc Noh the King of Nam Viet got shot in the lobby! They put a chair over it to hide it, but you can still see the bloodstains if you look.”

“Sounds ideal. And do you know how to get there?”

“Do I! I once got thrown out for climbing the flagpole. You can see the whole city from the top! It’s the tallest flagpole in Schekaagau.” He hung the fish on a string around his waist and picked up the jar containing the frog, which began to jump more frantically. “Follow me.” We crossed the tiled dam square, passing the triumphal arch, an explosion of soldiery, waving banners, crosses, and captive Indians pleading for mercy. Somewhere beyond city hall, bells were ringing Angelus. We walked down a narrow street, where merchants were locking up their stalls for the night. The blue lamps that taverns and places of public relief were required to show already glowed at spots along the street, lighthouses for the weary. A few minutes later, we emerged into a square which opened out onto the dark water of the canal called the Streetergracht. The other three sides of the square formed the ornate classical pile of the hotel. On top, hanging over us like a burnished artificial moon in the laboratory of a medieval alchemist, a gilded dome caught the last rays of sunlight. Three flagpoles stood in front, the flags those of the hotel, the city of Schekaagau, and the Stadholderate, in the process of being lowered by a squad of hotel employees in scarlet tunics and knee pants. The boy proudly pointed out the taller, center pole as the cause of his expulsion. I was properly impressed.

I reached into my money purse, pulled out a crescent of silver, and flipped it to him. He stared at it in wonder, then stuffed it away in one of the secret pockets boys have. “I better go. Mum will be worried. I’m late for dinner.”

I winked at him, which he liked. “Don’t let me catch you climbing the towers of city hall.”

“You won’t,” he said, ambiguously, and was gone into the gathering darkness, his captive frog still tucked under one arm. I had never learned his name.

It was after I had been lost for quite some time that I noticed I was being followed. For a moment, in my drunken state, that was funny. The poor fool thought he was going to end up in a nice hotel lobby with plush chairs and a bar where he could get a late night glass of arrack, but instead he was doomed to wander with me through back alleys and dark, warehouse-lined streets for the rest of the night, his path constantly disrupted by dark flowing canals. That was not why he was following me, of course, and I quickly ceased to find his company amusing. I glanced over my shoulder as I turned a corner. He was dressed in some sort of robes, not normal clothes at all, and didn’t seem to know the streets any better than I did. I emerged on the quay by the river, its edge marked by a line of heavy granite posts holding a chain. The river flowed quickly here, constrained by the quays, and I could hear its churning and grumbling.

Out in the darkness a procession of torchlit barges, loaded to the gunwales with masquers, drifted on the reflected waters of the river. They laughed and screamed, and seemed to be having a terrific time, just as they had when I was with them, though I had not enjoyed them at all. I had drunk too much, and almost gotten sick. I had taken a walk to clear my head and work out my thoughts on my critical analysis. I doubted anyone had noticed my absence.

Despite the threat at my back, my main emotion was still annoyance. The judgment of a good critic never relaxes. Peter Lucas had made a specialty of this sort of genre piece, and I was getting tired of it. It irritated me to think that I had another day to spend here before the Key the Lords had implanted in the limbic system of my brain would take me home to the real world. To think of all of Lucas’ labor in twisting human history, to create yet another set of drunken shipping magnates and aldermen in fancy masquerade pounding mugs on wooden trestle tables and pissing heartily over the sides of their barges. It made me sick. Lucas demonstrated that there were an infinite number of redundant possibilities, like a gallery hallway lined only with paintings of courting couples, or children playing with a little, furry dog.

I didn’t know what Lucas had done to history in order to create this Shadow, what kings and queens he had given fevers, what storms he had raised, what matings he had arranged, what battles he had altered, in order for William Vlekke of Antwerp to discover this place so that Schekaagau stood on the shores of Lake Vlekke, rather than Chicago on Lake Michigan, and didn’t get much more of a chance to think about it, because my pursuer decided that that was a good moment to jump me.

His attack was theatrical, with a scream and leap. His body was slim and strong underneath the heavy wool robes, but he was more enthusiastic than skilled, and I threw him off. He hit the ground heavily, then rolled and came up with a glittering, curved knife in his hand. I backed away. He didn’t seem to be trying to rob me. He had other things in mind. My ridiculous clothes suddenly seemed as constricting as a straitjacket. He came forward with his blade dancing before him. It was a beautiful piece of work, I noticed, with an elegantly patterned silver hilt. It would look wonderful sticking out of my chest in the morning light.

Critics of Shadow are used to such things, however, and I was not as defenseless as I looked. As he came at me, I pulled a packet of powder out of a pocket and threw it at him, squeezing my eyes shut at the same time. Even through my closed lids, the flash of the powder left an afterimage. He shrieked and stumbled back, completely blinded. I slipped brass knuckles over my fingers, moved in, and punched him at the angle of his jaw. This was unfair, but I wasn’t feeling sporting that night. His head snapped back and he yelped. He slashed back and forth with his blade, still not able to see anything, but dangerous nevertheless. I dodged in and hit him again, and he stumbled back and fell. His head crunched sickeningly against one of the granite posts, and he rolled over the side of the quay into the water. For a long moment I stood swaying drunkenly, trying to figure out where he had gone. Then I ran up and looked over the edge. Water roared heavily below in the darkness, but there was nothing else to be seen. I slipped the brass knuckles off my hand, and started to try to find my way home again. It was a long while before I found the square in front of the hotel, and I was still shaking when I did.

A marble bathtub is a beautiful thing, but it takes forever for hot water to heat it up. I finally slid into the bath and was able to relax my muscles. The attack had left me with a number of bruises, but no answers. Answers were sometimes scarce in the many worlds of Shadow, which the Lords had caused to be created for their mysterious pleasures. But the municipal river patrol would be pulling a body out of the weir at the dam in the morning, and I had no idea why he had tried to kill me, and I like to have reasons for things like that. Cuzco, Schekaagau . . . Had the Lords tired of my aesthetic sniping? Was I simply paranoid? That was an occupational hazard. I knew I would get no answers that night, so I got out of the bath, toweled myself dry, and went to bed.

I turned the key on the gaslight, dimming it to a blue glow. The boy had been real, though. Give Lucas that much. Everyone else seemed like a moving waxwork, but that boy was as real as anyone. I was not sure the Lords enjoyed “reality” in that sense, since they themselves did not seem particularly real to me.

Reveling in the feel of satin against skin, I turned over in bed, to find myself staring at the patterned silver hilt of a knife, still vibrating from its impact, which had somehow come to be imbedded in the bedpost next to my head. The motif was one of eyes and lighting bolts. The last knife I had seen like that was now at the bottom of the Schekaagau River. I wrenched the knife from the bedpost and ran to the window, but my second attacker had already slid down the drainpipe and vanished, leaving me with a souvenir of my night at the Emperor Kristiaan.

“Mutated E. coli,” Salvator Martine said. He had pulled me away from the other guests at his party to give me this information.

I swirled the Tokay in my glass and watched it sheet down the sides. “E. coli?” Only Martine would serve a wine as sweet as Tokay before dinner.

Martine grinned, bright teeth in a face of tanned leather. He was annoyingly handsome, and smelled sharply of myrrh and patchouli. The Lords loved him, for no good reason that I could see. Several had even come to attend his party. “Normal intestinal flora. Mutated and hybridized with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Infects via the GI tract and destroys the central nervous systems of higher primates. Neat. Grew it in the guts of an Australopithecine on the African veldt, two, three million years ago. Not easy, Jacob, not easy. When I woke up on that pallet at Centrum, I had bedsores, and a headache that lasted a month. Killed them all. Every last one of the buggers. Nothing left on this planet with more brains than an orangutan.” He downed his glass of Tokay as if it were water. I took another slow sip of my own.

We stood on the parapet of what he called his “palace.” Behind us I could hear the sound of the party, voices and clinking glasses, background music, occasionally a laugh. The sun set behind rolling green hills. From a distant ridge came the cry of a deer. A trail of mist descended on the valley, glowing in the evening light. Except for the ones behind us in the party, there were no other humans on the planet.

“Infectious lateral sclerosis . . . ” I murmured to myself. This was art?

Martine laughed. “Not to worry. With no hosts, it died out, and there are no other vectors. I was careful about that.”

He’d misunderstood my moodiness, of course, but it took a particularly impervious cast of mind to be a molder of worlds. Martine had succeeded in wiping out all of humanity, collateral branches to boot. By some standards, that made him a god. A god with bedsores. That left me with a blank canvas to look at, but nothing to review, which was perhaps his intention. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, that’s one thing, but when the acorn is worm devoured and the tree never exists, what sound does it make then?

“You are looking at Berenson’s new world next?”

“Yes. She’s been very mysterious about it, but I suspect—”

A voice interrupted us.

“There you are. The most notable men at the party, and the two of you stand out here watching the sunset. Where’s your sense of social responsibility?” We both turned. Amanda, my wife, closed the door behind her, passing through in the roar of voices. She wore a dress that fell in waves of green and blue silk, and she emerged from it like Aphrodite from the foam, her blond hair braided and coiled around her head. A moonstone glowed in its silver setting as it rested on her forehead.

“We were waiting for you,” Martine said with that charming insincerity that Amanda seemed to like.

She came up and took a sip of my drink. She smiled at Martine. “I’ll have you know, Salvator, that Jacob detests sweet drinks before dinner.” She took another, and kept the glass. “I’ve been wandering around your palace. It’s wonderful! How did you ever create anything like it?”

I felt a surge of annoyance. The palace was a monstrosity. It had towers, with pennants snapping in the breeze. It had triumphal staircases. It had flying buttresses. It had colonnades. What it didn’t have was structure. It looked like an immense warehouse of architectural spare parts.

“It was built by some people from a world I did a few years back. Remember it, Jacob? The Berbers of the Empire of the Maghreb ruled Northern Africa. They flooded the desert and built great palaces. I had planned that.” He turned to Amanda. “As I recall, Jacob didn’t like it much.”

He recalled correctly. I couldn’t remember much about that particular work, just hot sun and blinding water, but I did remember that I hadn’t liked it. The Lords had bid it up, though, and it was now in someone’s collection, making Martine wealthy. Critics should never socialize with artists; it’s difficult enough to like their work in the first place.

Amanda came up and pushed herself against me. Her perfume smelled of violets, and I lost track of what I was thinking. I put my arm around her, and she pulled away, as she always did once she had my attention, and walked to the other side of the parapet to enjoy the sunset.

Amanda had once been close to me, but was now distant, and I couldn’t remember when that had changed. It could have happened overnight, since Amanda often went to bed loving and woke up cold. Something she saw in her dreams, I’d always thought. But now it was that way most of the time, and I felt I’d let something slip by, as if we’d had an immense knock-down drag-out fight that I had not been able to attend. On the infrequent occasions when we made love it was like two people sawing a tree trunk, the length of the saw between us and only the rhythm of the task keeping us together. This still left me wanting to do it much more often than she did.

Voices shouted for Martine inside, so the three of us went in through the French doors. The banqueting hall was an immense room, thirty feet high, and banners from the Shadows Martine had created hung down from the beams supporting the ceiling. Someone pressed a glass of wine into my hand, not Tokay, mercifully, but some dry red. The party poured after Martine as he strode through the hall, out the double doors at the other end, and down the immense stairway. At the bottom rested a cube wrapped in black velvet, about six feet high. It had been delivered through the hallways by servants available to the Lords. Despite myself, I was impressed. They did not usually permit ordinary men to move objects from Shadow to Shadow.

“Let’s carry her up,” Martine said, and the party surged forward with cheers. It took a half dozen people to lift it. “Take my place, Jacob,” Martine said, and I found myself with a shoulder under one corner of the cube. We angled it back and, cursing and laughing, hauled it up the stairs. It was heavy and tried to slide back. I started to sweat.

A space was cleared on the floor among the armchairs and the tables covered with half-finished drinks. The cube was put down. I looked for Amanda in the crowd but couldn’t find her anywhere. I remembered what she was wearing, and her moonstone, but wasn’t sure that I knew what she looked like anymore. It seemed that as she had grown more distant her face had stopped being familiar.

“This is from a world I did recently. It’s not worth visiting, believe me, but it did produce one thing that’s worthwhile. I asked the Lords for permission to bring it back for my collection.” He pulled on a cord and the black velvet fell to the floor. The crowd grew silent and drew back, but no one took his eyes away.

The most beautiful woman in the world was in hell, but she had been turned to stone and no one could do anything about it. She stared at us from behind five inches of leaded glass with pleading in her eyes. She was a Madonna, and a newborn child lay in her lap. His eyes stared blankly upward, for He had been born hideously blind.

I had more information than Martine thought I did, from my sources at Centrum. I knew that Martine had caused eight entire worlds to be destroyed by nuclear war before he got the effect he wanted. On the last try, a group of artists, vomiting, losing their hair, seeing the constant glimmer of optic nerves degenerating in the radiation flux, had found a boulder in a blast crater and set it on a hilltop. The rock was dense with exotic isotopes, and had killed the sculptors as they chiseled it. They had worked as one, and it was impossible to tell where one artist had left off and the next began. They had created a masterpiece, probably not even knowing why, but Martine claimed this work as his own. Radioactive fantasies had been fashionable among the Lords lately.

I turned and walked away, rubbing my shoulder. The party was getting loud again, despite the pleading eyes of the Virgin Mary, and I felt a little sick. I walked down a long hallway lined with loot from Martine’s various creations. I stopped in front of one painting, of Christ being carried drunk from the Marriage of Cana by the Apostles. It looked like a rather mucky Titian, all droopy flesh and blue mist, but Amanda had pointed it out specifically to me earlier in the day. She never really seemed to care much about art herself, but she somehow always knew precisely what I would like. Or would not.

“Mr. Landstatter. Good evening.” Sitting in the shadows on straight-backed chairs, like Egyptian deities, were two Lords, Jurum and Altina, who seemed to be married, although it was hard for me to tell. At any rate, they were always together.

“Good evening.” I bowed, but did not speak further.

“We’ve just been looking at Martine’s little collection,” Altina said, her voice a gentle hiss. “Symbols and parts, it seems to us. Reflections of worlds in objects, and so an imitation of our strings of Shadow. What say you?” They awaited my judgment.

Lords are strange beings. They collect worlds the way children collect brightly colored stones and seashells, but require others both to create those worlds and to determine whether they are worth having. They had gained control of the infinite universe of Shadows before anyone could remember, raised Centrum, and seemed intent on continuing in this position forever. Had one of them decided to kill me? The fact that two attempts had already failed suggested that a critic of murder would have had to give their efforts a bad review.

“The objects have significance in themselves, and not just as signs to Shadow,” I said. The Lords often had trouble understanding ordinary art. “This statue of Apollo, for instance . . . ” They stood and listened, Altina resting slightly on Jurum’s arm, as I took them through Martine’s collection, which ranged from the brilliant to the mediocre, and seemed to have been forgotten here, like junk in an attic. They thanked me, finally, and walked off to bed, discussing what I had said. I realized that the party above had grown silent, and that it was time for bed.

When I returned to the banqueting hall, it was empty, save for the tormented Virgin. I stopped to look at her, but her expression had become reproachful, as if I were somehow responsible for her fate. I turned away and went to our room.

The bed was still made, and Amanda was nowhere to be seen. I took my clothes off, threw them on the floor, and climbed in under the covers. Our room was in one of those dramatic towers, and there was nothing but darkness outside the windows. I fell asleep.

Amanda woke me up as she slipped into bed, some time later. I started to say something, to ask where she had been.

“Shh,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.” She hunched up on the other side of the bed, the way she did so often, even though the bed was not particularly large and this meant that she dangled precariously over the edge. I moved closer to her and nuzzled her neck. “Please, Jacob. It’s late and I want to sleep. See you in the morning.” She yawned and was quickly asleep, or at least pretended to be.

I lay back on the other side of the bed, my heart pounding. I knew that no matter what I did, I would be unable to sleep. When I had left her, she had smelled of violets. Her neck now had the bitter aroma of myrrh and patchouli.

The Capuchin did his calculations with a light pen on what looked like a pane of glass, causing equations to appear in glowing green. Interpolated quotations from the Old Testament emerged in yellow, while those from the New Testament were light blue. Unavoidable references to Muslim physicists flashed a gory, infidel red. I gazed out from under my cowl, impressed but unenlightened. I don’t know anything about nuclear physics, and even when I thought I had managed to pick up the thread of an argument, I was immediately thrown off by a gloss on Thomas Aquinas or Origen. I contented myself with smelling the incense and watching the glitter of the LEDs on the rosaries of the other monks as they checked the Capuchin’s calculations.

He turned from the glass and faced his audience. He raised his arms in supplication to heaven, then clapped his hands together. The equations disappeared, to be replaced by a mosaic of Christos Pancrator, His brow clouded by stormy judgment, lightning ready to be unleashed from His imperial hands.

“Brothers!” the monk said. “All is in readiness. For the first time in history, the fires of Hell shall be unleashed on Earth, chained at the command of the sacred Mathematics that God, in His Wisdom, has given us to smite the infidel. We will now examine this flame, and if it is not found wanting, its hunger will soon consume the arrogant cities of all those who would oppose the Will of God!” We rose to our feet and followed him up the stairs to the surface.

It was dry and bright outside, and the sky was a featureless blue. We segregated ourselves by Order, the gray of Dominicans to the right, the brown of Franciscans to the left, and the martial, oriental splendor of the Templars and Hospitallers in the center. There were last-minute checks of the dosimeters, and several of the more cautious had already flipped their goggles down and were sucking on their respirators.

In front of us, across the cracked, dried mud, amid the rubble of what had once been the city of Venice, stood the Campanile of St. Mark’s, looking the same as it did in a Canaletto painting, except for the fact that the gray ovoid of the atomic bomb rested on a frame on top of the steeply pitched roof. Nearby, the crumbled dome of the cathedral lay on the ground like an overturned bowl. At a distance stood the crazily leaning Rialto bridge. All around, the flats of the dry lagoon stretched away. A trumpet call rang through the air. We repaired to our trenches, all now monastic grasshoppers with our goggles and breathing tubes. We knelt, facing the tower, and the bomb.

When the blast came, it looked, in my goggles, like a bright, glowing dot that faded quickly to red, and then darkness. The blast shoved at the shielded robe, and I felt the heat on my face. The sound of the blast thundered in my earplugs. A moment went by. I pulled up my goggles.

The ruins of Venice had been replaced by a smoking crater. The mushroom cloud towered overhead like a cowled monk of a different Order.

In sudden, unplanned fervor, the monks began to pull themselves out of the safety of the trench and march towards the crater. I, of course, was with them, though I felt like a fool.

A resonant bass voice started the tune, and the rest of us joined in:

Dies irae, dies illa

Solvet saecllum in favilla

Teste David cum Sybilla . . .

The Latin held a wealth of allusion lost in the English:

Day of wrath! Day of mourning!

See fulfilled the prophets’ warning

Heaven and Earth in ashes burning!

We knelt by that smoking scar and prayed until night fell.

My limbic Key brought me back to the hallways of Centrum vomiting and almost unconscious. Someone found me and hauled me out, a long way, since it was a distant Shadow. I had no idea who it had been, though somehow I doubted that it had been a Lord.

The Medical Ward was high up and had large windows that let the sunlight in, unusual in the rest of the Centrum. It was a bright day outside, and I could see the endlessly repetitive walls and blocks of black rock that made up the home of the Lords of Time, stretching out to the horizon. There were no gardens in the pattern, no sculptures, and few windows. Centrum stretched over a large part of the continent some still called North America. I thought the Medical Ward abutted on the Rockies, but I was not sure, though I had already been here twice. My head pulsed and I felt disoriented.

The ward was filled with the real effects of Shadow. A theoretical anthropologist, his arms and legs replaced by assemblages of ebony, cedar, and ivory by a race of mechanically inclined torturers, lay spread-eagled on his bed, asleep. Each twitch in his shoulder or hip sent dozens of precisely balanced joints flipping, so that he danced there like a windup toy. In the corner lay a fat man who had been participating in a stag hunt through the forests of Calvados, in some world that still had a Duke of Normandy, when a cornered aurochs had knocked over his horse and given him a compound fracture of the femur. He’d lain in some canopied bed, surrounded by porcelain and Shiraz carpets, dying of tetanus, while the colorful but medically ignorant inhabitants of that Shadow crossed themselves and prepared a grave in the local churchyard. When the timing signal in his Key finally came, he’d pulled himself out of bed and through the Gate to the hallway, just as I had. The man in the bed next to mine, who gasped hoarsely every few minutes, had gotten drunk, wandered into the wrong part of town, and been beaten by some gang. This was familiar to me too. It could have been any town, the Emperor of Zimbabwe’s summer capital on Lake Nyanza, or Manhattan, minor trading city in the Barony of New York, or Schekaagau. It didn’t really matter. He moaned again.

“Ah, ‘The Suffering Critic.’ A work to gladden the heart of any artist.” Standing at the foot of my bed, with a bouquet of multicolored daisies, was a dark, bearded man with a slight twist of amusement to his mouth. That quirk was there so often that it had permanently distorted the muscles of his face, so that he always wore the same facial expression, like a mask. Masks don’t reveal, they conceal, something it was easy to forget.

Amanda had caused to be sent to me an even dozen long stemmed red roses, which loomed over me where I lay. He read the card, which just said “Get Well” and nothing else, and, with the impatient gesture of a god eliminating an improperly conceived species of flatworm, he pulled them out of the vase and threw them away. He shoved his own daisies in their place. This done, he sat down in the chair next to me with a grunt of satisfaction. “Jacob, old friend. You look like hell, and your hair is falling out.”

“You’re too kind, Samos.”

“Do you know of any reason why anyone would want to kill you?” He peered at me to see what my reaction would be.

I stared at him for a second before I thought of a response. “Samos, I’m a critic.”

“Point well taken. But you haven’t answered my question.”

“Samos, when you come to visit a sick friend in the hospital, you’re supposed to make small talk, not start off with—”

“The fact that I suspect someone of trying to kill you?” Halicarnassus was remorseless. “Not telling you that as soon as possible would be crass impoliteness. However, if you insist. On the way here I saw some cumulus clouds. They brought a number of impressions to mind, and in fact I saw one that strongly resembled a mongoose.”

I should have known better. I sighed and gave up. “To answer your question, Samos, no, I don’t think someone’s trying to kill me. Do you?”

He grimaced. “I’m not sure. It’s just that the shielding in your robe was good, everything was in order, calculations from your dosimeter indicate that you absorbed a dose of somewhat over twenty rem, high but not fatal, and yet, you were almost dead when they got you here. Don’t you find that odd?”

“How did—” I stopped. It was useless to ask Halicarnassus how he found these things out. He seemed to know all the back stairs of Centrum, including which steps creaked. “I don’t, unfortunately, find getting radiation sickness after walking into a fresh blast crater particularly odd, no.”

“Let me remind you of the fate of one of your predecessors, who died in a zeppelin explosion while eating coq a vin off a silver plate in the company of the Duc de Moscau.”

I’d been trying not to think of him. “Gambino was reviewing one of Nobunaga’s worlds, if I remember. His people are colorful, but tend to be indifferent engineers.” I didn’t know why I was arguing with him.

Halicarnassus shrugged. “He’d also revealed Lord Meern’s collection of sexually obsessed societies, which caused Meern to suffocate himself, if you’ll recall. It could all be accidental, of course. In an infinite number of Shadows, an infinite number of things happen. But here’s an interesting thought. Can you conceive of two worlds that differ in only one important detail?”

It was a relief to talk shop, rather than death. I hadn’t caused anyone’s suicide. Not that I knew about. “What do you mean?”

“Say I create two Shadows, identical in everything, except in one the writing in books is boustrophedon, like the ancient Greeks did it, with alternate lines going right to left. It’s a more efficient way of reading, really, you don’t have to move your eyes back to the beginning of each line.”

I liked the idea. “Or two Shadows, but in one men kiss, rather than shaking hands.”

“Taking an inhabitant of one and dropping him in the other would cause no end of problems. Or better yet, trading two otherwise identical people.”

“Both would end up arrested.”

We laughed and explored the idea, and the thought of murder, never quite reasonable to begin with, was forgotten.

“Jacob!” Amanda finally flounced in, wearing a red dress, not one I remembered ever having seen before. She pecked me on the forehead, then sat down in the chair and rearranged the pleats of her dress until they lay in the proper pattern. Then she smiled at me. Behind her, moving silently, was Martine, holding a box. My head was pulsing again, and I felt disoriented. I blinked my eyes, but it didn’t help.

Martine and Amanda were both frowning over my shoulder, as if there was something improper there. Halicarnassus stared back expressionlessly, then bowed. Amanda smiled tightly, Martine did nothing. “Good day, Jacob,” Halicarnassus said, patted my shoulder, and was gone.

They had brought me cookies, airy things of almond and spice. Amanda had made them. I hadn’t known she could bake. They brought me cookies. Symbols are not only in books, but help us see the structure of our own lives. Each cookie shattered as I bit into it, then stuck to my teeth. Martine avoided this problem by swallowing his whole.

Martine was desperate to know what Halicarnassus and I had been discussing, but didn’t want to ask. I ignored his ever more pointed hints with sickbed stupidity, and left him frustrated. It was meager satisfaction. Amanda chattered, more talkative than I’d seen her in months. I watched the delicate curve of her throat and shoulders. She talked about the weather, about jewelry, about the music she’d been listening to, about art. Her tastes were dependent on the important others in her life, but she’d been mine for so long that I had forgotten, and was startled to hear her criticizing works that I loved, and thought she had also.

I lay back and listened to them, until their voices were just a buzz. Life was full of troubles, and I had more important things to worry about than exploding zeppelins.

I hadn’t been in Halicarnassus’ new world for more than five minutes when I saw her. I should have known better than to be in his Shadow in the first place, but I’ve never been able to resist an exclusive showing, even knowing his habit of unpleasant tricks. Halicarnassus had always enjoyed forcing societies into unnatural forms, unhealthy adaptations. He’d done an ornate Victorian style Europe full of confectionary palaces and light operas which practiced brutal ritual cannibalism at fancy dress dinner parties, a hereditary American Congress full of dangerously inbred religious fanatics who dressed in drag when deciding on bloody crusades against Sumatra and Ethiopia, and a North American Great Plains kept free of habitation from the Mississippi to the Rockies so that its Mongol conquerors could ride as their ancestors had, while forcing enslaved Europeans to build meaningless monuments larger than the Pyramids. His worlds seemed to disturb most of the Lords, who found them mocking, and they found few buyers. He got by, somehow, the way artists always have, and still made his art.

I came into this world on the bottom level of Grand Central Station, as if I were simply another traveler amid the scurrying mobs, who carried me up into the light of the streets above.

Just a few blocks away, near St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I saw Amanda, her blond hair curled and flowing, crossing 50th Street on Fifth Avenue, obviously in a hurry. I didn’t stop to think, but followed her trim, gray suited figure as she walked down the street, carrying a briefcase. The people of this Shadow did not dress brightly, or use much color on their buildings, which were disproportionately high, like the spires of iron cathedrals that had never been built. So Amanda, always in fashion, dressed here in discreet urban camouflage.

Love is a random process, depending on such improbable events as an introduction by mutual friends followed by a chance meeting in an exhibit of etchings, and a common liking for a certain sweet wine punch which now, in memory, makes me gag. Or perhaps not so improbable: I later found out that Amanda had gone to that gallery because she knew I would be there. She has never learned to like copperplate etchings, though she pretended to, at the time. The loves of our ancestors were equally random. Exact duplicates of individuals seldom exist from Shadow to Shadow, despite Halicarnassus’ elaborate plans for almost duplicate worlds, so we almost never get to see ourselves in a different life. Was there a Jacob Landstatter in this world? A Salvator Martine?

So I followed her, my heart pounding. Her waist and her hips were just the same, and she swayed, enchantingly, the way she always had. When she stopped at street corners, she looked up at the tops of the buildings, shading her eyes, as if looking for roosting storks, or gargoyles. Her walk was quick, even on heels, and I had to concentrate on keeping up, difficult on the crowded street. She continued for quite a distance, finally coming to the edge of a large green park called, with no particular originality, Central Park. This was a strange, mechanical Shadow, full of flying machines and automobiles. It was incredibly noisy. She finally turned into a large gray building called the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I paused at the base of the stairs for a long moment. Banners announced special exhibits of eighteenth century French crystal, Japanese swords, and the works of a Rembrandt van Rijn. Dutch again. I was tired of Dutch. I followed her up the stairs and into the museum.

It was Rembrandt that she wanted, and she went straight there through the maze of corridors. It was an exhibit of copperplate etchings. Much of it was a series of self-portraits of that same Rembrandt van Rijn, from rather boorish youth to brooding old age, in a variety of strange headdresses. The man was obviously a genius, and I lost myself in his intricate lines.

“He is remarkable, isn’t he?” she said, at my side. “I took some time off from work to come see him. This is the last day it’s going to be here.”

I turned slowly to look at her. Her eyes were the same too, lighter blue within dark, under long, soft lashes. She looked down when I met her gaze then glanced back up. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes. No Jacob Landstatter in this world. Until now. She smiled. Here she smelled like wildflowers, something other than violets.

We found ourselves strolling around the exhibit together, giving each other details of the various etchings as gifts. Some of her remarks were critical, and I suspected that she didn’t think as much of etchings as she had initially claimed she did.

“I don’t know what I should do now,” she said, looking up and down the street after we emerged. “I don’t really want to go back to work . . . it’s too nice a day.” She looked at me, then looked away.

I suggested we get a drink, and she took my arm as we walked. I felt like an idiot. What was I doing? It was a beautiful spring day, and our steps matched as we walked. She looked up again, at the corner, and we discussed the cornices of buildings, the eaves of the roof of the house she had grown up in, the strange places birds manage to relax, and hidden roof gardens in Manhattan. It had been a long time since I’d enjoyed a conversation quite that much. She flirted with intent, and smiled when she looked at me. “I’ve been so lonely,” she said.

Suddenly she froze, then turned to look into the window of a stationery store, pretending to look at her reflection and correct her hair. “Oh shit,” she said under her breath. “Oh damn. Oh damn. Why is he here?”

I looked up and down the street, and had no problem spotting him, no problem at all. He walked with his head held up and his arms swinging, and wore a floppy shirt from South America. His right hand was stained with chrome yellow and viridian. Still an artist, even here, Salvator Martine strode past, his eyes fixed on an image invisible to everyone else on the street, and did not see us. I looked at Amanda. She was trembling as if with a chill. Her left hand pulled at her hair, and she looked vulnerable, like an abandoned child. It was only then that I noticed the glint of a gold wedding band on her finger, and it all made sense.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Who? Oh . . . somebody. It doesn’t matter.” She talked quickly. “Let’s go.”

I went with her, but everything inside of me had turned to ice. I managed to disengage myself from her after drinks but before dinner, to her obvious dismay. She liked me, and found me attractive. I felt a fool for still wanting her, like a small child who wants to play with shards of glass because they glint so prettily in the sun, but I couldn’t help it. We made a date to meet at the Museum of Modern Art the following week, for an exhibition of Rothko. She would be there, but I wouldn’t be. It would be another two days before my Key would allow me back through the gate into the hallways. They had something called television here, moving images in a box. I decided to stay in my hotel room for the rest of the time and watch it.

When I returned home, I knew Amanda, my Amanda, the real Amanda, had finally gone. There was no trace of her perfume in the air, and her things were gone from her bureau.

I walked through the entryway, down the hall, and into the quiet room, where I settled into a low couch facing the green, moss-filled garden. The chuckle of the stream flowing through it was vivid in the silence.

Why did I hurt? Because I, of all possible Jacob Landstatters, had finally lost my Amanda, out of all possible Amandas? Does a minute flux in the probability stream feel pain? Nonsense. The pain was real, perhaps, but I wasn’t. I waited to vanish. But cardiac muscle doesn’t know anything about alternate probability worlds, or Shadow, or feelings of unreality, or the Lords. My heart continued beating. My diaphragm continued to pull downward, filling my lungs with air. My stomach rumbled. I was hungry. I got up to make myself a sandwich.

The kitchen was clean and silent. Copper pots and steel utensils hung over the drain board, and the red curtains puffed in the breeze from the open window. The breadbox contained half a loaf of rye bread, fresh and aromatic. Where the devil had it come from? Amanda couldn’t have put it here, she’d obviously been gone for too long. I hefted it. The crust was crisp.

“Stop playing with your food and cut a slice for God’s sake,” a voice said behind me. I whirled, loaf in hand. Halicarnassus was sitting at the table in the darkened alcove. “It’s impolite to threaten your guests with deadly viands,” he observed. “Cut a slice, I said. I’ve got the mustard and roast beef here.”

“How kind of you.”

He took a luxurious bite of his sandwich. “Give it up, Jacob. Ah. Rye, beef, and mustard. There are some aesthetic verities that transcend reality. The field of gustatory ontology has been much neglected by philosophers.”

“So much the worse for ontology,” I said, settling down to lunch with as much grace as I could muster. I really was quite hungry.

“So much the worse for philosophers! All this Truth and Beauty stuff is fine, but it obscures the real issues. Rye bread! I try never to create a world in which it cannot be found. One must have an absolute aesthetic criterion to give an anchor to one’s life.”

There are worse ones, I suppose. “Did you create that entire world to give me an object lesson about my personal life?”

“Hey, they have great rye bread in that city. Don’t be such an egotist, Jacob. I put that in as a little detail, an ironic reference, like a dog crapping in the corner of a hunting scene. No artist is going to create an entire world just to please one critic’s vanity. That’s a real world, full of real people. Just like this one.”

I had been suspicious for a long time, about the Lords, Centrum, and Samos Halicarnassus, so I decided to risk the question. “Did you create this world, Samos?”

He grimaced. “Yes, and not one of my better efforts, I must say. The Lords are an insufferable bunch, and Centrum is . . . excessive.”

“Where are you from?”

He passed a hand over his forehead. “You know, I’m not even sure I remember. A lot of white stone buildings. Apple orchards. A big blue sky. Doesn’t tell you much, does it? I guess it didn’t tell me much either. But I remember school, a big hall with a dome, and my first world. It was a clunky thing, with brass and mahogany steam carriages and wars full of cavalry charges and solemn republics whose capital cities were always built of white marble and top-hatted ambassadors who exchanged calling cards and people who lived, breathed, and died, just like they did at home. I went to live there, a requirement for graduation, I think. I never went back. I just made worlds, Shadows you call them here, and moved on, sometimes into one of mine, usually into one I stumbled onto made, presumably, by someone else.”

“So yours was the real world.”

“Jacob, I’ve always been amazed at your inability to detach your emotions from your intellect. That world was created as a private project by a man from a culture so different from this one that my mind does not retain any information about it at all. He was ancient when I was a child, the grandmaster of the school. He died much honored, since he was, I suppose, God.” He cut himself another slice of bread. “It would be nice to be certain one existed, but as long as we spend our time twisting time like this, rather than on more rational pursuits, none of us ever will be sure. Most of the inhabitants of the worlds I have created at least believe they exist, which gives them the advantage over us. Your Lords devised these absurd Keys in your limbic systems to give you all a sense of reality, since you always feel like you are coming home. A nice touch. You, incidentally, no longer have one.”

I remembered my strange dizziness and disorientation at the medical ward. At the time, I had chalked it up to radiation sickness. “How did you manage that?”

“Friends at the hospital in Centrum, willing to do me a favor. And why shouldn’t they? I created them, after all. It’s really a simple modification, and performed more often than you might think, even in this most real of all possible worlds.” He ate the rest of his sandwich and stood up. “Well, that’s enough for now. You’ll be seeing me again, I think. You’re one of my more engaging creations.”

“Oh shut up.” I put my head in my hands. This was too much.

“Good luck on your next job.”

“What do you know about my next job?”

He grinned maliciously. “It’s by Martine.”

I choked on my food. “That son of a bitch has taken off with my wife.” I stopped. It hurt. It was surprising how much it hurt.

“Don’t worry. It’s no more real than anything else.”

“It’s no less real. My guts feel like they’ve been caught by a fishhook.”

“And you sneer at gustatory ontology. Good day, Jacob.” And he walked out the door and was gone.

The various portions of the Chancellery Gardens of Laoyin harmonized not only in space, but in time. The arrangement of dells and lily ponds, of individual Dawn Redwoods, laboriously dug, full grown, in the fastness of Old China and brought here up the Lao River, which I knew as the Columbia, in barges built for the purpose, of stone temples with green bronze cupolas, and of spreads of native prairie, seemingly engaged in a devious wildness but actually existing because of the efforts of dedicated gardeners, took on meaning only when observed at a receptive stroll. I emerged from the yellow-green of a stand of ginkgoes, descended a gorge alongside a stream, and arrived at the rocky shore of a lake, its verge guarded by cunningly twisted pines and Amur maples. I trod the gravel path further, and felt uneasy. While I strolled, too many others strode purposefully, usually in tight groups of three or four. The vistas were ignored by men who muttered and gestured to each other. Either trouble was brewing, or the inhabitants of this Shadow had decidedly odd ideas of how to enjoy a sunny afternoon in the park.

A Bodhisattva blessed my exit with bland beneficence. In contrast to the serene order of the Chancellor’s garden, the city streets beyond were a tangle. What had been intended as triumphal thoroughfares were blocked every hundred paces by merchant’s stalls, religious shrines, or entire shanty towns, complete with chickens and screaming children. Under other circumstances, it would have been a swirling, delightful mess.

However, the streets had the same feeling of oppression as the park. Everywhere there were knots of people discussing dark matters. A scuffle broke out between two groups, one with dark skin and bulbous, deformed Mayan heads, shouting loudly and striking out clumsily, the other short, sibilant, with narrow catlike eyes and flat noses, darting with precisely placed energy. Suddenly abashed by the attention they aroused, both groups melted into the surrounding crowds.

“The Prince is dead.” Everywhere I heard the murmur. “The Prince, murdered. Vengeance, for our Prince. Where is his murderer? He must be found. He must be killed. The. Prince. Is. Dead.” Each word was a call of anguish.

I emerged onto a wide street that had been kept clear. Flat fronted buildings of basalt bulked on either side, all identical.

There was a sound down the way, the rhythmic thud of metal drums, growing ever louder. In response to some signal not perceptible to me, a crowd had gathered. Some of them were dressed in woolen robes that looked suspiciously familiar to me, but there was no time to think about it. Everyone began to sway in time to the beat. As the sound of the drums approached I could hear, over it, the baying of hunting horns. I looked up the street. Sailing towards me like an image from an involuntarily recalled memory was the Face.

“Woe!” the crowd wailed. “Oh woe! Dead. Dead!” Tears streamed down every face, and every body moved to the beat of those awful drums. “The Prince! Woe!” And the Face continued.

It was huge, at least thirty feet high, carved out of some dark, gray flecked rock. The eyes, blank and pitiless, stared into mine, and beyond me, to infinity. The lips were curved in a slight smile, like that of a Buddha, but seemed to be arrested in the process of changing to some more definite expression. What would it have been? A grin? A scowl? A grimace of pain, or anger? Or a mindless nullity? The Face was of stone and would carry that secret forever. There were creases in the cheeks, and the nose was slightly bent at the end. The Prince was becoming a god, but obviously intended to keep his nose intact. A god is not handicapped by a twisted nose.

The sculpture rested on a great wagon, each of its many wheels reaching to twice the height of a man. It was pulled by teams of men and women, volunteers. Everyone wanted to help, and unseemly scuffles broke out for places on the ropes. The drummers seated below the god’s chin occasionally enforced justice by clubbing someone with their brass drumsticks. And the crowd cried “Woe!”

The Face swept by, becoming, from behind, a rough-hewn, lumbering mountain of stone.

The mood of the crowd changed. Like a shadowed pool of blood in the corner of a slaughterhouse suddenly illuminated by shutters flung open on sunlight, the black despair of the crowd was revealed as scarlet imperfectly perceived. Icicles grew on my spine as shouts of rage and upraised daggers greeted the approach of the second Face. The daggers . . .

“Murderer!” they cried. “Death!” Though essentially a thirty-foot-high stone wanted poster, the sculptors had lavished no less care on this Face than on that of the Prince. Its brows were knit in jealous rage, its eyes glowered. Its lips were pulled back in a contemptuous grin, challenging us all to do our worst. Though fleshier and more dissipated than I remembered, the Face was familiar. It should have been. I looked at it every morning in the mirror when I shaved. It was my own.

The sculptors had done their work well. So compelling was the Face that no one noticed my real face as, shaking with fear, I slipped through the crowd. Their daggers, with silver hilts chased with a pattern of eyes and lightning bolts, were also familiar. The last time I had seen one, it had been sticking out of a bedpost next to my head.

Martine! It had been him the whole time. He’d sent his creations to kill me in Schekaagau, and when that had failed, he’d exposed me to radiation from his Virgin Mary, so that the cumulative dosage from my visit to Berenson’s radioactive world would kill me. Hell, he’d probably locked me in my room at Cuzco. But for what? My wife? It made no sense, but then, murder often made no sense, at least to the victim. But didn’t the idiot know that none of this was real?

So Martine had created this entire world just to kill me, despite what Halicarnassus had said about my ego. I should have been flattered, but it’s hard to feel flattered when you’ve pissed in your pants and are fleeing for your life.

I quickly became lost in the tangle of streets, though I really had no idea of where I was going, or for what reason. Everywhere was equally dangerous in this city of Laoyin. The houses were all about four stories high, of cracked stucco, and leaned crazily. The air smelled of frying fish and fermented black beans. I turned a corner into a dusty square. A group of locals sat gloomily around a nonfunctioning fountain. I slunk past them, trying to look nonchalant. I almost made it.

“Look, Daddy!” a little boy said, pointing at me. “Prince!”

“No it isn’t. It’s—” Their knives were out in an instant. They didn’t waste time debating points of tactics, but launched themselves at me in a mass. I turned and ran.

The tangled streets, confusing enough at a walk, were a nightmare at a dead run. Every few seconds I ran into a wall or the sharp corner of a building. I began to gain on my pursuers. Despite their hatred, they still had some concern for their bodies. I could not afford to have any.

I broke clear of the high buildings and found myself on a wide promenade, paved with multicolored slabs of rock and bordered on my left by an ornamental railing. Through the railing, far below, were the waters of the Lao, as they flowed towards what I knew as Puget Sound. Leaning casually on the railing, as if on the parapet of his palace, was Martine. He held a gun in his hand, slightly nervously, as if unsure of what to do with it. He had been unable to resist taking a direct hand in things, despite all of his efforts to set up a perfect trap for me. I was trapped. I stopped. Would he posture, preen, and carry on first, or would he simply gun me down? Right on the first guess.

“At last,” he said. “At last I can have my revenge.”

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You have tormented and ruined me. I did my best, I poured my soul into my art, but it was not enough for you. My genius was never enough.” He raised the pistol. “Say your prayers, Jacob.”

“Wait a minute, for God’s sake.”

“Nothing can stay my hand now, Jacob. Compose yourself for death.”

“I’ll compose myself for anything you want, if you tell me what you’re going on about. You’ve got Amanda, what more do you want?”

He frowned, confused. “Amanda? What does Amanda have to do with this? How can you mock my work, humiliate me, degrade me—”

I should have known. I grinned in relief. “Is that it? You’re all upset because of some lousy reviews? Don’t be ridiculous.”

His finger whitened on the trigger. “You have destroyed me. Now I destroy you.”

“For crissakes, Salvator, are you crazy? Who takes critics seriously?” I was almost in tears. Here I’d finally found someone who paid attention to my criticism, and he wanted to kill me for it. It wasn’t fair.

“Make your peace with God, though I have no doubt that you’ll pick enough with Him that He’ll wish He never created you.” Martine was proving to be an extremely gabby murderer.

A knot of people emerged from an alleyway behind Martine. Seeing that he had held me prisoner rather than killing me outright made them smile. It’s always nice when someone is willing to share.

I nodded. “All right, Samos. Take him.”

Martine snorted. “A feeble ruse, Jacob.”

The first man in the group brushed past Martine’s elbow. With a shriek, he turned and fired, blowing the man’s chest open and leaving him with a surprised and offended expression on his face. Before Martine could get the barrel pointed back in my direction, the blades were into him, silver into scarlet. He screamed once. That done, the blades turned towards me. With the sharp decisiveness that makes for John Doe corpses in the morgue, I took three quick steps and threw myself over the railing into the air. I don’t know if I screamed. I know that those behind me did, in disappointment. I watched the river. It didn’t seem to get any closer, just more detailed, ripples, whirlpools, and flotsam appearing and sharpening as if on a developing piece of film.

I must have remembered Halicarnassus’ modification to my Key subconsciously, because the next instant I found myself, sweating and soiled, in the dark hallway beneath Centrum.

She was home, sitting in the quiet room reading a book about Caravaggio. She looked up at me as I entered, smiled, then went back to her reading, saying nothing. It was not a silence that could be easily broken, for it seemed to me that it would shatter into a thousand pieces at the first word. I walked to the bedroom, took a shower, and changed into household clothes. There was no clothing out, no suitcase, and everything was folded neatly in the drawers. I breathed. The air smelled, just slightly, of jasmine. Jasmine? I went to the kitchen.

Amanda had cleaned up the remains of the final lunch Halicarnassus and I had had together. I opened the green kitchen curtains to have a view of the garden and began to pull out ingredients. Had the knives always been on the left side of the drawer? How observant was a critic? I examined the curtains. Still green. The last time I had seen them, at lunch, they had been red. That I remembered.

One Shadow differing from another in only one minor, but significant way. Amanda and I had had a discussion about those curtains. I had wanted green, but finally gave in. My hand shook a little as I chopped the onions, as I began to realize that Halicarnassus had sent me drifting through Shadow, with no way to ever return to the world I had spent my whole life believing was the real one.

I flipped the top of the garbage can up to throw away the onion peels. Inside, crumpled, was a set of red curtains. A note was pinned to them. “You’ll never know,” it said. “Get used to it.” It didn’t need a signature.

I stir fried beef and ginger, and thought about the woman in the other room. Was this the woman I had married, who had betrayed me? Or was this someone else? If Amanda was different enough that she would not betray me, could I still love her? I was adrift in a sea of infinite worlds, so I was starting to think that it didn’t really matter. I could discuss it with Halicarnassus, when we finally ran into each other again. Somehow, I was sure that we would.

When it was finished, I took the food in to Amanda. It tasted very good.

Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1987.

About the Author

With only a handful of stories, mostly for Asimov’s, and a few well-received novels, Alexander Jablokov established himself as one of the most highly-regarded new writers of the ’90s. His first novel, Carve The Sky, was released in 1991, and was followed by other successful novels such as A Deeper Sea, Nimbus, River of Dust, and Deepdrive, as well as a collection of his short-fiction, The Breath of Suspension. Jablokov fell silent through the decade of the Oughts, but in the last couple of years has been returning to print, releasing Brain Thief in 2010, his first novel in over ten years, and popping up in the magazines again with elegant, cooly pyrotechnic stories.

SF Short Fiction Markets in China:
An Overview of 2016

Feng Zhang

In 2010, the Chinese science fiction market was heavily dominated by a small number of magazines that published mostly short fiction. Science fiction has since become a hot theme in multiple cultural and creative industrial areas such as book publishing, movies and television, games, comics and animations, and theme parks. For instance, in 2016, there were a total of 198 science fiction titles published in China’s book market—a 150% increase from 2011.

What is going on with magazines then? It is a little bit complicated as many outside forces are simultaneously shaping the landscape of short fiction markets.

Four professional print Science Fiction magazines existed on the market in 2016, i.e. Science Fiction World, Science Fiction World for Kids, Science Fiction World Translations, and Science Fiction Cube. Science Fiction World Group publishes the first three magazines listed and Science Fiction Cube is published by Tianjin Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House.

The thirty-seven-year-old Science Fiction World is no doubt, the most prestigious print science fiction magazine in China. Currently, it runs about 50,000-60,000 words (hereinafter words mean Chinese characters unless otherwise specified) for original short fiction and about 7,000-15,000 words for translated short fiction (usually one story) each issue. The editor-in-chief is Yao Haijun.

In 2016, Science Fiction World published twelve regular issues, plus one supplemental issue, all of which contain sixty-seven original science fiction stories by authors such as He Xi, Yang Ping, Bao Shu, and Xia Jia. The circulation of Science Fiction World is currently estimated to be slightly below 100,000 sales per issue which is around one third of its peak circulation back in the early 2000s.

Launched in 2001, Science Fiction World for Kids was on hiatus between 2004 and 2015. The publisher decided to relaunch it in 2016 as a “science fiction literature magazine dedicated to children aged seven to thirteen.” The editor-in-chief is Yao Haijun, and the executive editor-in-chief is Huang Rui. In 2016, it published twelve issues, containing thirty-seven original children science fiction stories, most of which range between 3000 and 6000 words in length. Science Fiction World for Kids authors include Cheng Jingbo, A Que, and Peng Liu Rong, among others. A key feature of these stories is that the protagonists are all boys and girls.

Science Fiction Cube was launched as a “fashionable and cutting-edge” bi-monthly book-sized science fiction magazine whose target readership is supposed to be adults. The debut issue was published in February 2016. The guest editor-in-chief is science fiction writer Zheng Jun, and the executive editor-in-chief is Chen Quan. In 2016, it published five issues with five distinctive themes of Star Wars, Mars, oceanic science fiction, Robotech, and superheroes. It published twenty-seven original stories with more than 500,000 words written by authors like Hao Jingfang, Huang Hai, and Jiang Bo.

Additionally, there are reports of another print science fiction magazine that will launch in early 2017 by Chengdu Eight Light-minutes Culture Company. The tentative name of this book-sized magazine is Extraordinary Imagination and will be edited by Yang Feng, who used to be the editorial director of Science Fiction World. It will mainly run science fiction novelettes with 20,000 to 40,000 words in length.

Besides genre-dedicated magazines, two types of print magazines publish original science fiction stories regularly, i.e. science popularization magazines and literary magazines. The number of magazines has increased in recent years because of so-called “sf heat.”

The long-lasting and famous popular science magazine, Knowledge is Power, runs a science fiction department called SF Space Station at present. In 2016, the department published eleven original short stories by authors such as Bao Shu and Chi Hui. Zui Found, is a youth-oriented literacy magazine edited by a well-known female writer, Di An. The magazine is also responsible for running a science fiction department called Gravity since 2014, which publishes both original and translated literary-oriented genre stories. The Hugo Award winning story, Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang, was first published in Zui Found. In 2016, it published fourteen original stories with more than 180,000 words by authors like Tang Fei, Wu Zhishuo, Wang Yuan, and Hu Shaoyan, etc.

The first online science fiction market in China that paid professional rates appeared in 2010. Like their counterparts in US, these markets tend to come and go as it is difficult to find a sustainable business model.

Non-Exist Daily is a new online media with tens of thousands of followers launched in 2015 by Future Affairs Administration, a start-up venture focused on science fiction and future. The founders of Future Affairs Administration are all longtime fans of the genre. The company also owns a publishing imprint Guokr Publishing who has published numerous comic books from Disney Marvel and some science fiction novels by famous writers. Non-Exist Daily publishes a piece of non-fiction or fiction daily. In 2016, Non-Exist Daily published twenty-four short stories by authors such as Liu Cixin, Han Song, Chen Qiufan, Hao Jingfang, Tang Fei, Liu Yang, Bao Shu, and Zhang Ran.

Tadpole Stave is a science popularization web portal founded and financed by Beijing Association for Science and Technology. And in 2012, they launched their own section of the website, dedicated to science fiction. Along with publishing works in the genre, Tadpole Stave holds an annual science fiction writing contest called the “Light-year Cup.” The present editor-in-chief is Zhang Hailong. In 2016, they have published as many as 121 short stories and flash pieces, with a total of more than 1,000,000 words. The authors who made multiple appearances were Wang Yuan, Liu Yang, Xiao He, You Zhe, and Li Weibei.

Science Fiction and Fantasy has been an important category in China’s book market for translated fiction. In 2016, there are 163 translated titles under SF&F category published in China excluding titles in public domain. Of all 163 titles, 143 are novels and 20 anthologies. In terms of country origin of authors, 117 titles are written by American writers, 21 by British writers, and 14 by Japanese writers.

The translation of shorter works has also saw success with 117 translated SF&F short fiction pieces published in 2016.

Mentioned above in the introduction, Science Fiction World Translations is a monthly professional science fiction magazine dedicated to translated genre stories. Normally, it runs one novel (or a half of one depending on the length) and a few short works in each issue, which easily makes it the largest translated science fiction short fiction market in China. The total word count is more than 300,000 words. In odd months, it publishes science fiction, and fantasy is featured in even months. The editor-in-chief is Yao Haijun, and the executive editor-in-chief is Li Keqin, a well-known translator. Currently the circulation of Science Fiction World Translations is about 20,000 sales per issue.

Additionally, in 2016, Science Fiction World Translations published eight novels by authors like Orson Scott Card, Robert J. Sawyer, and Alastair Reynolds, etc. The publisher also released eleven novellas, twelve novelettes, and forty-one short stories. Of all twelve issues, there were three special issues focused on three authors like K.J. Park, Jeffrey Ford, and Michael Swanwick respectively.

Their sister magazine Science Fiction World runs about 7,000-15,000 words for translated short fictions each issue, usually equivalent to one short story. In 2016 Science Fiction World published one novelette and twelve short stories by authors like Lavie Tidhar, Aliette de Bodard, and Mike Resnick.

The two magazines mentioned above share the same editorial team for translated fiction. Most of the time it is the team who selects the stories they want to translate and reach out to authors and translators for copyright purchase and translation. They make selections according to a variety of criteria such as awards, author’s fame, translator’s recommendation, and so on. Occasionally, they accept translated stories submitted by translators.

Another important market for translated short fictions is the aforementioned Zui Found’s Gravity department. In 2016, it published one novelette and thirteen short stories by authors such as JY Yang, Will McIntosh, E.J. Swift and Taiyo Fujii. The editor who is in charge of the Gravity department is Zhang Qian.

A key person behind Zui Found’s successful translation project is translator Geng Hui, who translated nine stories for the magazine last year. In fact, he worked practically as a regular guest editor who not only selects stories to be translated but contacts authors for copyright clearance. He was recently appointed by another technology magazine, The 9th Zone, as an independent Consulting Editor for science fiction translation. The 9th Zone published three science fiction stories in 2016, one of which was translated by Geng Hui.

For writers who would like to see their short fictions translated and reprinted in China, they may either contact the editors of the aforementioned markets and recommend their works, or find a translator who is willing to translate the fictions and submit to the markets. 

Apart from Non-Exist Daily, Future Affairs Administration has a grand plan to expand its share in the short fiction market. Two new venues are to be launched in 2017 to publish both original and translated shorter works. To be released in early 2017, Future Monolith is a mobile APP publishing short fiction with 150,000 words a month, with half of the content coming from original sources and half from translated works.

The editing team in charge of translation projects for the two markets is led by Alex Zhaoxin Li, co-founder of the Future Affairs Administration. The team selects stories to be translated based on results of major science fiction awards. They do accept submissions though. According to Zhaoxin, they look for genre stories that are “ . . . future thinking, stylized telling and brain shocking.”

In total, Chinese science fiction publishers brought us 461 original shorter works and 117 translated pieces. For original stories, that number is a large increase when compared with just 196 published stories in 2011. In particular, the number of published novelettes or novellas jumped from close to zero a couple of years ago, to about fifty, not to mention the hundreds of entries submitted to writing contests.

Short fiction magazines used to be like Hari Seldon’s foundation for Chinese science fiction, where seeds were preserved and followers were blooming. In the new age of Chinese science fiction, despite the general decline of the magazine industry, print magazines are thriving and new online markets are emerging and rapidly growing.

Overall, everything looks rather promising. Yet, there is still some underlying uncertainty.

About the Author

Feng Zhang has been a SF fan since he was thirteen. He’s active in SF fandom in both Mainland China and Hong Kong, where he is known by his nickname “Sanfeng,” and was one of the founders of New Realms of Fantasy and Science Fiction (2009-2012), a highly-recognized SF&F webzine in China’s SF magazine history. He was also in charge of organizing the Sky Awards for Chinese SF&F (2009-2010) and the Coordinate Awards for Chinese SF Short Fiction (2015), both founded and administered by senior SF fans. He has created and maintained multiple SF databases, most of which can be accessible through Internet. He has also written numerous articles on SF news, history, books, movies, etc.

Howling at the Lunar Landscape:
A Conversation with Ian McDonald

Chris Urie

That luminous sphere hanging over us in the night sky has long been the source of fascination, conspiracy, dreams, and adventure. Stories have been spun on moonbeams and grounded in moon rocks. It sits in the sky as a reminder of both our history and the future. Countless authors have looked up to see bases, rockets, and cities, but this time a singular mind has imagined a lunar society more diverse and dangerous than anything before. Ian McDonald has created a New Moon.

Luna: New Moon sets the stage with family corporate dynasties in precarious detente as they compete for total lunar supremacy. From the early days of rare metal mining and helium-3 production, five families have built up entire cities and a society where everything is negotiable, down to the air you breathe. A botched assassination attempt sows the seeds of doubt that spark smoldering rivalries into all-out war between families and companies. But, there is something else at play. As it seems with everything on the moon, there is something else happening under the surface. Luna: Wolf Moon picks up after the explosive end of the previous novel and keeps the momentum going. The Corta family has been scattered to the lunar wind, but they’re not completely out of the game. Ian McDonald’s second entry into the trilogy engulfs readers in the complex machinations of lunar society and the Corta family’s play for redemption and revenge.

Ian McDonald is the author of numerous novels and short stories. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, and many other awards for his writing. His latest novel is Luna: Wolf Moon, out from Tor Books on March 28th.

What was the initial inspiration for the Luna trilogy?

I’ve always loved Moonbase stories. I like the notion of being able to go outside on a clear night, look up at the moon, and see the lights of human settlement there. Moonbase stories had gone out of fashion—there are cycles in Science Fiction—so it was obvious to me that it was about time to do something new with it. At the same time, my wife was watching the reboot of Dallas (it was terrible, alas) and I did the writerly thing of asking myself, how could you take the format of a family, beset by enemies, at war with itself, and make it so no one can ever escape it? Answer: set it on the Moon. The two ideas crashed and fused.

The society on the moon is a melting pot, or pressure cooker, of cultures, languages, and ethnicities that all blend and interact seamlessly. What kind of research did you do to make each section of the moon so rounded and developed? Have you traveled to Brazil, Ghana, or Australia?

I’ve been to Brazil, which still fascinates me as a nation and culture. I wanted the Moon to be a place where identities and cultures, meet, melt, and form a new society under the immense pressures of living and working in such a hostile world. I didn’t want the usual suspects either—so it’s not a North American dominated moon, though the Chinese, in the form of the Sun family and Russians—the deeply weird Vorontsovs—are represented. I wanted a West African society, so the Asamoahs started off as contract workers in the early days of lunar development and have grown to become one the Five Dragons, the corporations that dominate lunar society. And I liked the idea of having Australians as the bad guys.

There’s a lush and large cast of characters in these books. How do you keep them all organized while writing? Do you have a giant corkboard with pins, index cards, and string?

Scapple—a white-board/mind-map app. Also, fantastic for family trees. Aeon Timeline—still getting to grips with this. Evernote—things get clipped in from online sources. Pinterest for Visual Research. (www.pinterest.com/ianneilmcdonald since you asked.) I don’t carry notebooks to jot things down—I practice a kind of Darwinism of ideas—if an idea is strong or fruitful enough, I’ll remember it. And I can’t actually read my handwriting now, anyway.

I’ve read that the structure of the Luna novels was partially inspired by the Godfather films. Did any films inspire your cast of characters?

Very much. In the relationship between Rafa and Lucas in New Moon it was very much that of the golden son and the smarter younger brother who knows he can run the show better. Sonny and Michael Corleone, or, if you like, Thor and Loki. But I don’t have a Godfather, I have a Godmother—Adriana Corta. Of course, by the end of New Moon, everything is changed. Changed utterly. Changed terribly. Wolf Moon picks up the pieces. This is the one about sheer survival.

Some of your other novels feature developing economies. What is it about developing societies and economies that interest you?

There’s a raw energy and passion to them that makes them great for story. All the human vices are there—greed, envy, ambition, lust. And the human virtues too. It’s about what races ahead and what—and who—gets left behind. Emergent economies undergo incredible changes in short spaces of time—and that’s gold for the writer. Where you have change, you have its opposite, and you have drama. This developing economy just happens to be on the moon. But it’s the same passions, ambitions, loves, and hatreds that ignite the story.

What kind of research went into the hard science aspects of a society living on the moon and how did it shape the worldbuilding?

I started the project back in 2012 and since then, the literature on lunar colonization (and there’s a lot, especially online) and the science of the moon has evolved. My problem is, I’m stuck with the 2012 version. So be it. Some pieces of research were huge drivers to the plot—the slow loss of bone density and muscle condition in lunar gravity, meaning that there is a two-year time limit on returning to Earth, after which it will kill you. That’s such a rich source of story. Likewise, the fact that human skin is pretty gas tight, and you don’t explode in vacuum was the source of the Moonrun scene at the start of New Moon, and some simple sums about terminal velocity under lunar gravity inspired Robson’s free-running accident in Wolf Moon. I’m interested in how constraints drive human behavior and how that behavior turns into culture and, ultimately, a civilization.

Throughout the Luna novels it’s well established that there are a number of ways to die on the moon. What do you think is the worst way to kick the bucket up on the lunar surface?

Anything slow. Anything that involves breathing, and realizing that that breath you took—that’s your last breath. Anything that allows you to know with a sure certainty that you are going to die.

Sexuality is fluid on the moon. Like the people living there, it’s diverse. Is this a product of the future, because of the way a society might develop on the moon, or a combination of the two?

It’s a by-product of the legal system, in some ways. The moon has no criminal or civil law, only contract law. Everything is negotiated, everything is a personal contract. That includes marriage, and sex. We see sexuality in terms of identity groups; no one on the moon would understand that. It’s about who you love—who you want to have sex with (or not have sex with)—not what. Everything is personal. In some ways, it’s a hugely atomized society, in another, it’s a society that has consent—contractually agreed and guaranteed—built right through it.

There are four resources that govern survival on the moon: air, water, carbon, and data. They’re necessities of life, but they’ve also been privatized and can be used to intimidate and control people. Do you think that this is something that could or is happening now on Earth?

I was interested in building a society where no one actually owns anything—everything is rented, in a sense, or licensed. Even the air in your lungs. It’s the ultimate rentier society, and I certainly see our own economic models moving towards rent-seeking rather than innovation and competitive capitalism. Subscription and streaming services—even soft apps are now a monthly subscription rather than buying outright and updating once a year. Certainly, in the UK, insane housing speculation has pushed an entire generation into renting their homes. Rentierism is lazy, controlling and stifling of true innovation, and it looks like it’s only going to get bigger,

Luna: New Moon was optioned by CBS to be made into a TV show. Is this still in the works? Are there any details that you can share?

Things in television either happen very quickly, or very slowly. This is the second kind of happen. But things are moving.

The Luna books were originally conceived as a duology. What happened that made you want to expand it into a trilogy?

The story was too big. To wrap it all up in two books would have made Wolf Moon about eight hundred pages long. Simpler to cut it in two—make it Wolf Moon and Rising Moon. The break between the two feels natural and a suitable conclusion to Wolf Moon: it’s not like a narrative guillotine falls on page four hundred and that’s it. Trilogising also means that readers wouldn’t have to wait an unconscionable amount of time for the story to finish.

Can you give us a little teaser of what may be coming up in the third book?

The structure is inspired by Gladiator. Like the movie, it starts with a battle, ends hand-to-hand, face-to-face, up close and personal. If you’ve read Wolfie you’ll know what that conflict has to be.

If you had a 3D printer that could print out any clothes on demand, what decade’s fashion would you choose to fill your closet?

For men, the 1920s, if we’re going 20th century. Any era, Europe circa 1798. Impossible for a guy to look bad in that stuff.

Besides the final book, what other projects do you have in the works?

Always thinking a few more books ahead.

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:
Reading For Pleasure

Cat Rambo

I have a friend—more than one of them, really—who complains about having encountered a phenomenon that I personally would consider a fate worse than death. They are always writers, and they complain that “writing has spoiled reading for them.” They’re just too aware of the mistakes, they say. The nuts and bolts are way too obvious. They can only read the very best of the best. And then they sigh wistfully.

I try not to recoil, wide-eyed, from the notion. I’m always a little worried, though, that I’m going to get infected by that attitude. From kindergarten days onward, I’ve always had a book in my hand in one form or another. The Internet didn’t exist when I was a kid, so I read and reread, and that habit has remained with me. Taking a ride on the bus? Shove a paperback book in my purse. Waiting on the phone for an answer? Pick up the closest text and read. Our house drips with books; a multitude more are contained on my Kindle.

Am I able to read every single book I pick up? No. But it’s much more likely that an overall approach to something will drive me away than any question of technique. If the focus is something that I find problematic, I may have some difficulty getting into it, but even there it may be more nuanced than that.

For example, let’s presume an older work where the assumption is that women cannot be spaceship pilots because (insert biological fact that actually doesn’t justify excluding them). I can probably read that with a minimum amount of mental eye-rolling. I may be less able to do so with a book that unrelentingly assumes that women are horrible monsters out to kill the narrator. Although I did manage to make it all the way through Naked Lunch and enjoyed it. More than once.

How do I manage it? Well, I do exactly what I tell my students to do. I read the work once through for pleasure. And then, if I either really loved it or hated it, I go back and figure out why. I have found that one of the great pleasures in life, actually, is taking an astounding piece of writing apart and looking at all the fascinating ways that it works. That doesn’t destroy my pleasure in it at all. In fact, it makes my admiration for the degree of craft that’s been employed even deeper.

Why go back to something that I hated? Because I want to make sure that I don’t do it in my own writing. Is it just a matter of a basic assumption that I don’t agree with? Then maybe I don’t need to look too closely. But what if I can’t exactly say why I didn’t like it? In that case I really do need to go figure out what happened because a mistake that you don’t understand is one that you are likely to make yourself.

In some ways, this is part of reading while female. So many classics presume a male reader that it becomes very easy to move to a position where you’re not just reading the book but watching yourself reading it. Assumptions are dangerous things and one of the hardest things in life to avoid. Grappling with yours is part of the reading experience, or at least should be every once in a while. Your mind needs that kind of exercise.

So often the readings of the good stuff show writers breaking the rules, and doing so with élan and grace. Take the first page of any Stephen King novel and strip out the punctuation. Now go back and try to punctuate it yourself before comparing it with what he actually did. You will notice he moves frequently outside the rules—and that every time he does it, there’s a reason, perhaps the effect it creates, perhaps something else, but it is never random. Never a mistake.

It’s humbling to look at a piece of work and think, I would’ve never thought to do it that way. But it’s also instructive, because now you would think to do it that way. Now you have a new tool that you can use. You should wander through a great book like a kid in a candy store on free sample day, stuffing as much good stuff in your pockets as you can possibly manage. And test them out, even if it’s just in a piece of flash fiction, so you have a sense of how they work when it’s you controlling the mechanism.

This is also why it’s important to be reading current stuff, to see what is happening in the field. Maybe the only way you’ll use it is to react to it. That’s fine. But a writer who doesn’t read is—in my opinion—denying themselves valuable mental input that would help them write better stories.

There is a strand in fantasy and science fiction that sometimes perpetuates a division between the literary and the nonliterary. It’s not a division that I’m fond of because it denies writers a whole wide range of tools and puts them up on a shelf marked “use at your own peril.” The fact of the matter is that good writing is crucial to a great book. The most gripping plot, the most sympathetic character, the snappiest of dialogue? All useless if the story’s not told in a way that lets it get to the reader. Bad writing gets in the way of understanding. Want to write something that matters? This is part of that and it’s not optional.

One of the often repeated maxims is that one must write a million words before you can get good enough to be published. This is not true. Some people write far less. And others may write more. Getting better is a matter of intentional practice. If you play a musical instrument, you may be familiar with this concept. You don’t play the same piece of music over and over again. You find the parts of it that are giving you trouble, and you practice them. You practice them a lot, not to the point where you unconsciously employ them, but to the point where you cannot make a mistake with them.

Are you having trouble with a particular aspect of writing? Then look to the authors who do that thing well. Look to the people that you think of when you think of that aspect, but go further than that and do some exploration. Ask other people who they think does it well. Poke around on the Internet for recommendations. Put some unfamiliar names on your reading list. And then read each piece through once, enjoying the heck out of it, knowing that you will come back later and examine it. You can have your cake and both eat it too, or at least that’s been my experience with this approach. Eat and enjoy. Then go bake some cake of your own.

About the Author

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches atop a hill in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is an Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee and the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Her most recent book is fantasy collection Neither Here Nor There. Explore her online writing school, The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, at http://classes.catrambo.com

Editor’s Desk:
Recognizing 2016

Neil Clarke

Congratulations to Sam J. Miller! “Things with Beards” from our June 2016 issue has been nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. This is the second year in a row that Sam has had a Clarkesworld story on the ballot and we couldn’t be happier for him. You might be amused to find out that both stories were accepted for publication in person at the prior year’s SFWA Nebula Conference.

Meanwhile, over in Australia, “Of Sight, of Mind, of Heart” by Samantha Murray has been nominated for a 2016 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story. If I recall correctly, this is only the second time a Clarkesworld story has been nominated for that award.

While we’re celebrating success, most of the year’s best anthologies have announced their 2016 selections and we’re proud to see the following Clarkesworld stories represented:

Novelettes

“Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Dozois, Horton, Clarke)

“Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home” by Genevieve Valentine (Horton, Strahan)

“Jonas and the Fox” by Rich Larson (Dozois)

“Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason (Dozois)

“One Sister, Two Sisters, Three” by James Patrick Kelly (Dozois)

“The Bridge of Dreams” by Gregory Feeley (Horton)

Short Stories

“Things with Beards” by Sam J. Miller, short story, (Dozois, Horton, Strahan, and Clarke)

“Extraction Request” by Rich Larson (Clarke)

“And Then, One Day, the Air was Full of Voices” by Margaret Ronald (Clarke)

Just in case you don’t know the books by the editors’ names:

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois ed.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2017 Edition, Rich Horton ed.

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven, Jonathan Strahan ed.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two, Neil Clarke ed.

We’re also happy to report that the following stories have been selected for this year’s Locus Recommended Reading list:

Novelettes

“Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason

“Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman

“Jonas and the Fox” by Rich Larson

“Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home” by Genevieve Valentine

Short Stories

“A Tower for the Coming World” by Maggie Clark

“Breathe” by Cassandra Khaw

“Things with Beards” by Sam J. Miller

“Between Dragons and Their Wrath” by An Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky

“Left Behind” by Cat Rambo

“The Abduction of Europa” by E. Catherine Tobler

“First Light at Mistaken Point” by Kali Wallace

I was hoping to have a more substantial editorial for you this time around. I’ve just finished my first month as a full-time editor and I’ve been enjoying the chance to catch up on languishing projects and begin exploring some new opportunities. There’s a few things coming together right now, but unfortunately, it’s too soon to share. That and I’ve been sick the last few days. Writing is hard enough for me under the best of conditions. Add a sleep-inducing head cold in the mix and that pretty much wrecks it for me.

Now, if you don’t mind, I think I need to go back to sleep . . .

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 latest anthology, Galactic Empires was published earlier this year and will be 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:
Jungle Deep

Sergei Sarichev

About the Artist

Sergei Sarichev is a freelance concept artist and illustrator focused on film, video games and cover art. He began his career by studying traditional painting on his own and a few years ago he progressed into CGI painting and design, constantly learning new techniques to tell his stories.