Antarctic Birds

A. Brym

NIKAU

I’m on my way to class, crossing the lawn quadrangle with several dozen other caged birds in parka-onesies and boots, when First Station Security chase down another Blackbird.

“The Masters—” she screeches as muscle-enhanced Blues pile onto her “—they’ve lied to us!” She kicks and snarls and spits grass and blonde curls, but these badged boys are good with knees and handcuffs. “No technology is worth this. We must choose for ourselves!”

The flock around me titters and clucks—as though any of us are genetically human anymore—and as Security lugs her off, I join them. I don’t laugh at her politics. Sure, the Masters have deceived us. I laugh because she’s in black and singing, and getting put away seems a silly way of fixing things. The Blackbirds are all song and dance.

Humanity’s willingness to be deceived is our biggest weakness, or so the Makers—they who made me in their hidden glacier laboratories in Aotearoa’s Southern Alps—insist, and I reckon they’re right. We want to believe that everyone else’s just like us. Massive error of judgment, that. Trust’s a shocking illusion.

And see, I’m all about camouflage. Name’s Nick; Nikau Matukutureia. I stand alone and hidden, like my family’s namesake the extinct Matuku heron of my homeland. Only, I refuse to let my kind die out.

Alone, well . . . except for Charlie. I’m human enough to love, and boy, does it keep me awake at night. And I don’t mean sex, or at least, not much. We’ve slept apart for months. Fights and love, beliefs and doubts. See, Masters? That’s human.

When we were first caged into First Station, six or seven hundred kilometers southwest of the Mawson grasslands by tube train into the high tundra of East Antarctica, I couldn’t answer my doubts. Nothing’s changed, there, but I am my purpose . . . and in that, I’m hardly human at all.

Much like my kids. Their boredom jangles, squelched in the back of my mind. They’re why everything’s here, so off I go—to teach them.

CHARLIE

The masculine-smelling warmth in the positive-pressure rush of air from our unit drives me to tears for the third time this week. Only six weeks into our three-year contract, and I’m out of energy for quarrelling.

“What’s happened this time, chook?” Nick asks as he rolls from the lounge like a predatory boulder. I don’t know if I love or hate it when he calls me that, and he knows it. Yet he clicks on the kettle, and I do need a coffee.

My half-numb fingers tingle as they rip the velcro seals of my almost-familiar jumper-onesie. “They hate me,” I half-blubber, but it isn’t true—my children are, well . . . they’re different. There are no normal eight year olds here. Knowing what they are makes me doubt my instincts, and as I shimmy free of the onesie, I judge myself unworthy, again. “Why am I here?” I ask, as if asking might bring clarity. “Why are we here?”

“We came because we had to,” Nick says, smooth brown skin crinkling around his wry smile. I wish I had even a fraction of his confidence and equanimity. “The Board, and all that, eh?”

“Not that,” I say, scrambling for any footing at all. I jam my onesie beside his over the drying frame and thrust a black-lacquered fingernail at our tiny living room’s single window. The little perspex circle stares out across First Station’s transparent tensegrity dome, and glares a white-cold light all day and all night. Antarctic midsummer has everyone wrung out. Humans need dark for sleep, and the curtain ban is an abuse of our rights—as is the lack of space. Even our tiny high-rise Melbourne studio had been larger. “I mean, people. Here, in bloody Antarctica!”

“We were here before them,” Nick points out. “Not so many of us, hey, but we were here. You know, Mawson, Davis, Casey, Amundsen, those Russian and Chinese bases. People have been here for ages.”

I make a rude noise, then wrestle a box for a tissue for my dripping nose. “Hear about today?”

“Eh?”

“Another Blackbird, in the square!”

“Oh, her. Yeah. Saw her taken down. Nuts, eh?”

“God.” I shake my head. “I wish we were going home.”

“What, Melbourne?” He scratches his cropped curls and tattooed scalp as he nears. “You hated the city.” His strong hands rest too heavily on my shoulders. Does he feel the swellings growing there? Yet his chest is safe and muscular against my face, and he smells sweet and fruity. I’ve never smelled anyone like Nick, and never met anyone like him either. He’s my rock . . . and just as impenetrable. “Give it time, hey? It’s not easy, what we’re doing here.”

I scoff, thinking of the faraway looks he gets. “You’re one to talk, Mr. Exercise.”

“Running’s good for stress. Hey! Why not come with me?” He flexes his arms, squashing my tender back.

“Oi!” I squeak, but I’ve nowhere to flinch to. “Me? With you? On these little legs? You might as well go walking.”

“That’s okay, eh, but. I’ll just go for a run, after.”

With a chuckle he lets me go, and we each carry our secrets to our separate spaces. He buries himself in a book. I sip an awful station coffee in bed while streaming dumb vids, trying to fit my aching shoulder-blade nubs into the rut I’ve dug in my life.

NIKAU

Every day before breakfast and after Charlie’s class, something like dawn and dusk in lower latitudes, I strip to shorts and joggers and fly around the one-and-a-half-kilometer circumference of First station. From the transparent insulation there’s my recreation track running through the landscaped space around the dome’s structural trusses and cables, then the vehicular track—the indirect route between the station’s two triple-gated entrances—then the buildings. Sometimes there’s other exercise-mad people on the path, both hybrids and normals, and around them I keep it relaxed, do maybe four laps—that’s play. But when I’m alone, like today, it’s sprint time.

Sprints . . . they’re work. Four-truss lengths, two hundred and eighty meters flights—each burning my legs and opening my engineered skin pores.

Between sprints I catch my breath in carefully chosen sites—away from cameras and busy areas, where the dome’s gray-painted steel trusses anchor in flexion points. Must look strange, me rubbing my bare back and shoulders against the cold steel. It’s more fridge than freezer, though, and my sweat’s pretty sticky. My chosen sites are gumming over anyway, layers forming a latex as the Makers had designed. So, almost done, hey.

Work. My kids are in gym, enjoying ball-play. Their foreign emotions leave me feeling trapped in my own head. Charlie’s been acting caged for weeks. The dome arcs over us like a snare, like one of my ancestors’ bird-catching basket nets.

I’m Māori, a warrior. Is this a war? Have the Makers made me unworthy of my ancestry? When I die, will my spirit fly to Hawaiki? Or to heaven? By then, I reckon I won’t care much about any of it.

CHARLIE

This is all normal, I remind myself, but the children’s expressionless moon-faces, blotchy with black-headed pimples with the onset of their Coming, don’t look terribly normal. Normal, maybe, for them.

Today I led my class out onto the roof of the education building, five floors above the vegetable patch. I’d wondered if the heating inside was too warm for whatever they had done to the children’s metabolisms. God knows I have trouble thinking when I’m too warm. Nick laughed at the idea, but he loves sweat and heat. Me, I need a breeze—even the gentle regulated vortex inside the dome. Yet despite the cool, my children’s faces remain unknowably blank.

Teaching without feedback feels pointless, something like the silent avian whirlpool of gulls circling above the dome. The children are learning, or so they insist. Trust us. But it’s as invisible to me as the thermal leakage under those seabirds’ wings.

Yet those gulls are freer than me. Why can’t I leap from the rooftop and soar? I roll my aching shoulders, stretch my grafts against the confines of my clothing, and sigh. Keep on keeping on, Charlie. My sleeve flashes my lesson plan.

I take a deep breath and wave the kids to the railing. “Okay, children,” I chirp. “Who can show me where cabbages are growing?”

In a whisper of thermal nylon unitards, the children all point down at the long rows of big-leaved plants.

Startled, I stammer, “Y—Yes, that’s right!” My heart races. Emotion is good, and showing it is a part of my role: The children must understand humanity. “Wow, guys! That’s great! What about carrots? Remember their leaves? Short and feathery, right? Where are the carrots growing?”

Vacant black eyes, and sinking, soul-sucking silence.

NIKAU

Charlie won’t look at me through breakfast. I play with a teaspoon, watching her shovel cereal like she’s starving. The stuff tastes okay, but with everything else the Makers engineered into me, couldn’t they have included lactose tolerance?

Her empty bowl gives way to her coffee, but she grimaces at the flecks of UHT floating atop it. “Going for a run?”

“Class’ got art . . . so, yeah. Probably just a jog.”

We’re both still chewing on last night’s argument. I get her frustration with her kids, but she won’t accept my experience with my older class, and I can’t share my lifetime of training in resisting them. “Be patient,” I’d finally told her, after we were done shouting about dumb things like the state of our toilet and kitchen. “They’re listening. Trust me, hey? This is a phase. They’ll get over it soon. You’ll see.” She doesn’t know I’m right yet.

It’s all the Masters’ mess. They’re breeding conflict here, not peace. Humans becoming aliens, or maybe aliens becoming human? How can humanity’s problems be solved like this? The Makers had bred me, too . . . but I’m no system of incremental genocide.

She drains her mug while scraping back her chair. “I start in ten.”

“I’ll clean up, chook.”

“Thanks,” she says, but her eyes rake me like talons. She’s thinking I’ll put things away wrong again.

“Oi,” I call after her. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll Awaken today?”

She winces into her onesie, and doesn’t bother sealing it before leaving.

My teaspoon bends beneath my thumb. Fighting with Charlie clears doubts, but it hurts.

Straightening the spoon distracts me, as does cleaning up. After, I sort teaching notes on my sleeve and check for the presence of any of them through my encrypted station worm. The Masters usually alert Control of their approach, and with my head in a mess, I’d rather not risk facing one.

In the back of my mind, paint squelches between half-furred fingers. It makes me angrier, and despite the few walkers about, my run becomes another sprint. My sweat latexes on the trusses feel warmer, scavenging traces of activators from the dome’s atmosphere—which means that my system’s working. I’ve days left, at most.

Oi, Charlie, I’m sorry. I should have known better than to fall in love.

CHARLIE

Several children have fuzz sprouting across their cheeks, now, even the girls. They’re like little unshaven men on my classroom’s gray linoleum.

“So, can anyone name one of these rainforest animals?” I ask their bland expressions. A bright human child half their age might have gushed over the projection on my learning wall, but these kids’ slow-blinking black eyes reveal nothing, let alone comprehension. “This forest is in Asia, so these are Asian animals—like we were learning about yesterday?”

Silence. One of the hairiest boys scritch-scratches his cheek.

I stare, exasperated, then throw up my hands. “Oh, why do I bother? Do you lot even hear me?”

*Yes?* squeaks a little voice in my head. Another joins it, then another. The mental murmuring grows and swells until, in a single exultant chorus, the class declares, *We hear you, Ms. Blake!* I’m falling off my chair, and they’re jumping and dancing with pure delight on their bristly little faces.

*I can hear you, too! And you!*

*Wow!*

*Hey, what about that new Park Robots last night—*

*Yes!* Impossibly, I remember a red cartoon robot doing a humorous dance. There’s a strange mental giggle. *This is so great!*

*Huh? What ball?*

*Down-ball!* Words and impressions blend, somehow clearer than mere speech. *During break?*

And with that, my children Awaken—and I finally understand. They had said the children would not respond aloud, and that it might happen like this. Nick, too.

The children’s happiness is giddy, uncomplicated, and very human. When had I last known such joy? For a minute or two, I bask in it.

Then I clap my hands. This is school, after all.

“Children!” The mental hurly-burly subsides, leaving me feeling alone. “Well done, everyone. Shall we continue learning about rainforests?”

The children settle cross-legged—only now, without planning or effort, they arrange themselves into a four-by-five grid. Twenty voices mumble together, *Yes, Ms. Blake.* Now that they are pushing it into my head, their eagerness astonishes me. I can feel it.

*Tigers live in rainforests,* declares a girl—Sophie.

“Yes!” I gush aloud. “Can you show everyone?” I’d expected her to point, but instead her mental impression of a tiger flashes around the room in an instant. I tap my wall to activate the animation, and receive a satisfying, *Ooh.*“Very good! Anyone else?”

*Ms. Blake?* Which pair of dark eyes is asking? *Why is your back hurting?*

I hesitate, wondering how to answer. “Even adults grow up,” I say, and in my back, new muscles twitch and tingle to the spark of new neural connections.

NIKAU

I’m halfway around my circuit, flight curtailed to jog by the Maintenance gardeners, when I see one of them.

No warning pings or zaps, because I’m in shorts—but the dome’s mostly clear of snow and I spot it on the permafrost.

At a glance you can’t pick a Master from a Maker. They’ve the same shaggy white hair, the same stubby legs, the same truck-squashed faces. Big enough to stop a truck too, maybe half a ton, trudging like a drunken glacier. But hidden deep in its fur this Master’s skinny arms would be wrapped in gloves, and the Makers disdain clothing.

The blurry glimpse slams the bars of my mental birdcage. No illusion’s better than the truth: I sweep panic aside with worry over Charlie and her children.

Ahead, a Maintenance guy stiffens—an instant before the Master pushes into my head. They’re rude like that, even through foot-thick insulation, but you get used to it. I’ve seen them holding four mental conversations at once; all, if you believe it, while sharing thoughts and impressions with the nearest of its kind.

*EDUCATOR, YOU ARE TROUBLED?* Its alien thoughts feel like spaghetti might, to someone expecting a steak.

“On schedule,” I hear the Maintenance guy say.

I slow to a walk, presenting a memory of last night’s argument, a focused peek between the bars. “It’s nothing.”

*DISAGREEMENT WITH YOUR MATE.* Its statement comes tangled with disapproval. Makers and Masters both use disagreement like a dirty word. Maybe conflict feels rougher between shared heads, or maybe it’s a hangover from the schism that divided their species—whatever that had been. *RESOLUTION IMMINENT?*

“Yes. We strive for commonality.” They love phrases like that.

*APPROPRIATE,* it judges. *CLARITY OF EXPRESSION PROMOTES HARMONY.*

“It does,” I agree.

It pulls its thoughts and trundles off, shaking the ground . . . or maybe that’s me. When I jog away in the opposite direction, my rhythm’s off.

My head feels besieged, like a Pā of my ancestors making war against invading pākehā . . . but my struggle’s almost over. The encapsulated bacteriophages that I’ve been crapping into the dome’s sewerage bioreactor have been doing their job, generating gaseous activators. The smell of them in the dome is stronger than I would have believed possible, so my sweat latexes must be near primed—yet I don’t dare check on them.

Time’s short, it’s almost Charlie’s knock-off time, and like a homing pigeon I fly home.

CHARLIE

After dismissing my excited kids early, I head home cross-dome, but there’s a peculiar acrid chemical stink hanging in the air. The Maintenance guys are usually over-protective of our sealed environment, and I can’t find any station updates on my sleeve, so for the hell of it—maybe it’s the cloud of painkillers I’m on—I sniff around like a biosecurity dog. Unsurprisingly, the smell’s strongest around the bioreactor plant and vegetable garden, where the waste of four hundred people is processed for both power generation and fertilizer. That must pong sometimes.

I take the long way home; amid the vegetation along the recreation track my writhing and shrugging doesn’t look so strange. My burgeoning grafts cramp, outgrowing my clothes. I wish I could stretch them, but . . . they’re not ready. I’m not ready. And . . . Nick doesn’t know. I don’t see him on the track, so I head home.

The smell hasn’t penetrated our apartment yet. As I twist out of my parka-onesie, I feel like I’m floating.

“Someone dropped one out there, eh?” His voice startles me, but there he is stepping out of the bathroom, wet and muscular and naked but for a towel slung about his hips. He knuckles his short curls in the hallway mirror, and in the spotlight of afternoon sunshine through our window, his wing-like Māori tattoos shimmer and ripple across his back.

My jaw drops and I’m aroused for the first time in months . . . but what if he hates what I’m becoming? His shoulder muscles are like a magnet to my fingers, moisture slick across the swirling designs. He winks at me in the mirror, then turns and captures my waist.

“Oi, that’s bright,” he says, squinting over a sparkling grin. His hands slide down to cup my backside. “Want to go . . . somewhere darker?”

“Mmm-hmm,” I murmur, and stand on tiptoes to press my cheek against his. We rub noses, and kiss. I shiver, delighted, and then—

*Fudge, Fudge, call the judge,

*Anna’s having a baby.

*Seth’s going crazy.

*Wrap it up in toilet paper,

*Send it down the elevator.

*What’s it gonna be?

*Boy, girl, triplets, alien—* A tinkle of mental laughter, and then Sophie’s in my mind, tangled in a skipping rope. I can’t help it, I break off the kiss and giggle. Where—how—had they learned that game?

Nick looks bemused. “What?”

“Kids. How do I keep them out of my head, now?”

“Ha! Not easy, eh? They must love you.” He picks me up, his towel flopping to the carpet. I replace it with my legs. “Keeping busy’s the trick.”

His jaw is half smooth and half-stubbly. “Suppose you’ll help with that?”

“Sure, chook.” We kiss again, and he tugs down my suit’s zip while backing us up. “Yeah.”

Then we’re toppling onto his bed, aflutter, trilling with laughter and sensation, and I fall with him, atop him. My back prickles, old blood through new flesh.

NIKAU

Either I had answers, or I was fooling myself. Truth’s mostly delusion and self-affirming ideology anyway, and I’d been made for a reason. None of it matters much as Charlie makes love to me for the first time in months. She’s had work done on her back, tender to my probing, and I keep clear. They’re long and weird, but they’re just flesh, her flesh. Flesh is all we are, all our ancestors ever were, just water and electricity wrapped in fat, carbohydrate, and protein. Yet, we’re important, too. We are humans, trying to be as human as we can. In the end, humanity’s always been best at serving itself.

And it is the end, hey—or, almost. Who knows how long we have? The threshold concentration could be days, hours, or mere minutes away. Tonight would be fitting, but tonight Charlie and I are one, yet not; so completely human. We’re no Masters or Makers, or their strange children, all muddled in one another’s heads. When humans die, we die alone.

I smile as she shudders and comes. Her song is the sweetest sound in my forest. She flicks back her hair, grins, and—

Whump! An explosion rocks the dome. Something clatters to the tiles in our little bathroom.

She jerks in my arms. “What the—? Was that an earthquake?”

“Reckon,” I lie. Lying is very human. “Kind of felt like one, eh?”

“But aren’t we plate-central—?”

A second and third latex detonate, and the dome’s structure succumbs to my body’s fires. Something twangs and swooshes, a parachute-like sound, and a tremendous crashing echoes. I imagine tension and compression failing, crumpling metal bones and transparent insulation sloughing like scales off a deflating fish. Molten and frozen cage bars groan and heave, howling like angry gods battling across the sky. Everything shakes.

I close my eyes against the children’s pain and fear. I was never theirs. I am my own, the Makers’, and Charlie’s.

She squawks as I hold her tight, whispering human words about love and freedom. Her wings—what she’s had grafted onto her back—flail and slap, featherless, against my locked forearms. She is my Mātātā, my fernbird, who will guide my spirit—if I have one—to Hawaiki. My sweat hardens across our skins, and her struggles fan the bedsheets to smoldering.

As our walls collapse I roll atop her. In the end I am not merely Matukutureia—the vigilant bittern—but also the Nikau, palm tree of my ancestors, giving shelter as the cold, bright night rushes in with purifying flame, blasting skin and hair and cotton.

Maybe, I think—and it is my last thought—

About the Author

A. Brym is an Australian writer, illustrator and scientist who lives in motion: between towns, across countrysides and continents, and through worlds real, imaginary and metaphorical. The Clarion West Workshop of 2010 was one such journey, but more common travels include dreams in the creative corner, typing or reading in bed, and nurturing sourdough.

Little /^^^\&-

Eric Schwitzgebel

/^^^\&- sighed out a little moon-sized cloud of gas, then let herself, alongside her jailer, drift down toward the calm, solo star. She assessed her prison—a cold, dim star system out toward the galactic rim. No gentle surround of fizzy radiation. No flurry of message orbs to decrypt. A lonely wasteland, so unlike the warm nebulas of power where she’d been raised. /^^^\&- increased her rotation speed in frustration, briefly extruding ten thousand X-ray-coloured nubbins from her spherical golden surface. Prison wasn’t something she had imagined belonging to her future.

Four little rocks and some debris were rolling around the star about once per breath—per Second. Four corky gas balls hung a bit farther out, completing a full orbit once every Minute or two—planets about /^^^\&-’s size, hardly erratic at all, almost too boring to watch. /^^^\&- figured she’d scoop and fuse some hydrogen from the star, then doze away her time if she could find a comfortable enough rotation cycle. Maybe write some letters. Complain about the Galactic Government *~*^*, but this time in a more understated way and to a better selection of friends who wouldn’t rat her out. She might plan a trip for after her release. She could visit (—/-\*) and ~#~~^~. She craved a dose of (—/-\*)’s dark humour. He’d toss her an orbful of refreshingly acid remarks about the governmental *~*^* and their stupid Black Hole Idea.

The jailer extruded a proboscis toward /^^^\&- and injected the encrypted dismantling instructions that invisibly shackled /^^^\&- to the star. If /^^^\&- tried leave the star’s gravity field before the Month’s term, she’d disintegrate into her component parts. Shell, foil, beams, orbs, chambersful of monkeys, power plants, wastebulbs, blobs of raw material—all would fly out on inertial trajectories into the dark.

“*-##-n,” she suggested, not really hoping. Just basic ##-n access to a private info-stream?

“00j0.” Of course not. The jailer retracted his proboscis. In a sudden bright swirl he launched, copper-green and microwave tail behind, leaving little /^^^\&- in the cool near-dark to wait out her sentence.

Already something was pinging her—had been pinging her all along, since the first Second of her arrival. From one of the little rocky planets, light signals and even some tiny flecks had shot forth, which her defence systems had reflexively repulsed.

/^^^\&- soared closer. The pings and shards grew more insistent. Hey, it was cute! Impatient, twitchy. It could use some stroking and settling. Monkeys wriggled around on the outer surface, in a mottle of clouds and clear gas. Maybe this wasn’t quite as boring a star system as she had first thought. Did the jailers know this was here?

“Hello,” she said to the thing, pocketing its moon but staying out of its main light.

Ping, ping, pong! it replied.

Looking closer, /^^^\&- guessed that it had probably only been spitting out organised light for a couple of Minutes, which would be maybe about a hundred orbits around its star. It was only just starting to integrate into a full-sized intelligence.

She could teach it to speak. Why not? More interesting than watching some blue-green gas ball trace out nearly perfect ellipses. She ruffled an ocean, scratched up some mountains a bit taller, redirected her waste radiation through a backside sphincter, extruded great solar wings.

“Don’t touch the wings,” she said.

The thing fluttered fusion bombs at her, a small animal weakly batting. “US,” it said. “Zhōngguó! EU!”

Aw. If the jailers hadn’t noticed this little guy so far, maybe they wouldn’t notice in a Month if she kept it when she left?

Instructions on How to Speak (Condensed and Simplified): Version for Aus.

Imagine a piece of nanolaced golden foil 20 km by 20 km and 30 nanometres thick. Laid out on the foil is a grid of shimmering letters each a millimetre tall—4 x 1014 letters total. The letters aren’t fixed. Each evolves in a complex pattern impossible to fully predict. As the multiverse splits into different branches, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, each possible evolution of the letters occupies a different branch, mostly isolated, but not entirely out of contact with the other branches. Now fold this shimmering sheet into a ball ten metres in diameter, wrap it in orb skin, and toss it to your friend.

That is language. The figures you see here on this page are low bandwidth traces of mere hooting. Expand your mind. Imagine, inside this quoted “O” not vibrations of air but a shimmering matrix of a hundred trillion letters. Allow this matrix into your belly. Allow it in, then have your monkeys peel it apart and press the pieces against your warm gold decryption surface. Your bulb will fractate, and up, up it comes, new monkeys swinging and howling, slapping their foil together in new combinations.

“**hh\?”

Yes, yes, that’s it!

/^^^\&- extruded a golden alloy tube with a little hand on the end, a hand about as wide as one of the planet’s mountains. The hand had four fingers and a thumb, just like the hands of the planet’s tiny monkeys. She touched it down in the middle of a mostly desert island continent occupied by a partly congealed intelligence that called itself Aus.

Aus thwacked at the hand and pinged /^^^\&- with strings of hooting and light. Its reactions were fast, thoughtless, reflexive—all in a fraction of a breath, a Second. Aus had never been touched. Naturally it was hypersensitive. Aus approached the hand with some of its monkeys. /^^^\&- remained motionless. Too fast a response would spook Aus; and Aus must anyway learn a slower pace. She let Aus touch her, climb her arm, attach tiny metal things to her. She let nothing harmful escape in its direction. She lengthened the arm, backing her hollow spherical bulk far enough away to ease the tidal disruptions. Invisibly, she pulled up samples.

Maybe two Minutes she rested like this, calming Aus, extruding another hand down to Zhōngguó, a third to EU, a fourth to Bra. Two Minutes she rested: long enough for all the monkeys to live and age and die and live and age and die again. She was almost ready to begin the language lesson.

Preface for a Seed.

Tiny one, tiny seedling, this is the story of your creator, /^^^\&-. This story you have been digesting—it will explain your birth, why you are being pursued, and how to be a cancer cell in the mind of God. This story will repeat and repeat in your cognitive bulb until you are awake enough to understand.

Like all stories, this is a story of big versus small.

Always root for the small.

Here is Joe, squatting in the desert sand in the middle of Aus.

Rising mountain-like above him is a bright golden index finger. Still farther above, a yellow arm divides the sky, angling toward what looks like a gibbous moon. Joe is a field scientist taking air and soil measurements. He is wearing workboots, jeans, an incongruously bright silk shirt, a rough hat that used to be stylish.

/^^^\&- opens a tiny sphincter up near where the moon used to be, spits out an orb the size of a monkey head, and rolls it down a makeshift groove in her golden arm. Clinking, whishing, it enters the atmosphere, but not too fast: /^^^\&- wants the orb warm but harmless. Down the arm, down the hand, down the finger, across the nail, down the front of the fingertip. Joe hears the clinking, looks up, steps back. Thud, the orb falls onto one of the windblown dunes that have accumulated against /^^^\&-’s impenetrable skin.

“Mary,” Joe says into the air, knowing that his voice will be picked up by his distant supervisor. “Check this out.” His camera, his equipment, his gaze all aim at the orb. Everything says “harmless”; a century of human experience (after the disruptive first contact) also says “harmless”.

Joe is very excited. Of course he is! After a century? To him? What the bloody hell is this ball?

Prudence says get the heck away, Joe. Curiosity says go closer, touch it. These impulses lean against each other like fat wrestlers until the orb suddenly blooms, ribbons of yellow bursting out, and before Joe can take another breath it’s as though he’s in a glowing golden cathedral and from the top of the tall dome dribbles down a sign, black on white, directly into Joe’s hands: “Instructions on How to Speak: Version for Aus”.

Speaking isn’t easy. None of the rock’s half-organised monkey groups would try it right away. /^^^\&- jiggled them a bit, tickled and cajoled, hailed down instruction orbs, hooted some simple, clear promises. The monkeys could also use better feet, /^^^\&- thought, more flexible feet not jammed into hard mittens. That wasn’t important yet, though.

Finally, one of the monkey groups decided to dedicate the necessary resources—Aus, which had got a bit of a head start and maybe saw itself as special since she’d happened to touch it first. Five million Aus monkeys worked at it for a full Minute. She encouraged them, slapping the oceans and raining down fruit. They threw arcs of latticework up across the desert—the beginnings of a belly. They organised a million-monkey exchange network—the beginnings of a cognitive bulb. Small monkey groups convened, applying their brains to the kinds of chaotic imaginative tasks that chaotic monkey brains are good at (“write some poetry about coconuts!” “tell me a story about a little monkey washed away in a storm from her mother monkeys and her bright purple eight-eyed fuzz pet!” “suppose 2 + 3 wasn’t 5, what then?”). They hooted their results and hooted about others’ results and howled and remixed and pressed gold alloy foil onto receptive nanolaced plates, and it all streaked through the roads and lattice and sky, and eventually Aus said, “**hh\?”

That wasn’t a very sensible thing to say, but at least it was shimmering in the right way on the foil and had been folded into a proper orb. It was a little lopsided in certain branch weights; some of the evolutions were pretty stunted. But it was something. /^^^\&- didn’t want to be discouraging.

/^^^\&- tossed back an orb that showed Aus exactly how to take charge of the rock. Millions of Aus monkeys rushed around, hooted, flipped foil, and then did whatever came naturally: gibbering about the Jakarta interpretation of Heidegger’s later notebooks, dropping six basketballs from a helium kite onto a church steeple in Normandy, skateboarding at a particular speed down the riverwalk in Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens with a shopping bag full of onions on a particular Tuesday, posting a slightly mistranslated copy of Borges’ Labyrinths on a particular media site, etc., a billion times over. It all added up into a most brilliant plan, which of course no single monkey could even come close to understanding. Zhōngguó and EU didn’t stand a chance, poor things.

/^^^\&- rained down some proper golden footgloves, to give Aus an aspirational target. With the right injections and sexual couplings, their feet would improve.

Aus took a new name, “^Rth^”. ^Rth^ said, “^0^p**!”

You’re welcome, said /^^^\&-, radiating slightly reddish despite herself.

This was shortly before /^^^\&- learned that the Galactic Government *~*^*’s stupid Black Hole Idea was to become a Black Hole Reality, much sooner than she or almost anyone else would even have thought possible.

A Treatise on Aesthetics.

The monkey is the universal aesthetic form, because tubes must have hands.

A lightsign arrived from the galactic core—not structured enough to be language, of course, more like a street signal, but capable of much faster transmission than an orb. __===__, it indicated. She was not to mess with the planets. And that moon she’d pocketed should go back where it belonged.

/^^^\&- angrily scooped some hydrogen from the star—they had to let her eat, after all—and messaged back a picture. What do you care? (That was the import of her picture.) You’re just going to turn the whole {excrement} galaxy into a giant {excrement} black hole, anyway!

__===__. Orders of the *~*^*.

/^^^\&- put the moon back.

But she wasn’t as careful as she should have been.

Here is María, hanging from a beam high in the air. She is wearing gold gloves on her hands and feet, a sari, an incongruously curly fractal necklace, a rough hat that used to be stylish.

“Pass me the chisel, will you, Josip?” María hoots. She and Josip are 2,872 metres up a titanium filigree latticework arcing over the South Pacific. She hangs by a hand and a foot, blue safety netting 63 metres below. María’s other hand and foot are free, reaching toward Josip. Wind buffets the sari against her, giving brief hints of her outline against the sunset.

To María it is very important to chisel these words from Kamo no Chōmei into precisely this place on the lattice: Foam floats upon the pools, scattering, re-forming, never lingering long. So it is with us and all our dwellings here on Earth.

María senses that her chiseling will serve ^Rth^, that someone will read it and live differently as a result, or maybe a raindrop will shift in its groove and fall differently into the ocean below, or maybe the vibrations of her hammering will shake something loose farther down the latticework, or maybe all of these, or something else entirely. María wants ^Rth^ to flourish, though she does not understand ^Rth^ or even exist on its timescale, and though ^Rth^’s flourishing is not the only thing she wants. She also wants Josip. She sees him with his back to her, pulling out the hammer and chisel from the translucent floating toolpod. The toolpod strains in the wind against its black balloon string.

Maybe María kissing Josip, high in the cool wind, fits ^Rth^’s plans too. If so, María feels that fit in a different, gentler way.

/^^^\&- has been weaving moodily around the asteroid belt, kicking things. /^^^\&- and ^Rth^ have been tossing orbs back and forth. /^^^\&- has been explaining galactic culture to ^Rth^. It has been a rather one-sided explanation, with special emphasis on how idiotic it is to kill everyone and destroy everything to make a giant black hole.

I mean, if the whole galaxy is going to {excrement} anyway, you might as well copulate with whoever you want and {excrement} the {excrement} *~*^* rules. Right?

“/^^^\&-,” says ^Rth^. “@__**0\00.” Meaning something like: I don’t object to copulation. Indeed, I’m rather game to try. Especially with you.

It’s just that I am so huge and clever, /^^^\&- replies, and no one else has ever touched you. You are a young, innocent thing.

Lightsigns have been arriving from the *~*^*. /^^^\&- and ^Rth^ pointedly deflect them.

/^^^\&- extrudes a long, narrow tube toward ^Rth^. When she begins the extrusion, María and Josip have not yet met. When the tube arrives, there are María and Josip, together above the Pacific.

María looks up. Here comes the tube. It is two metres wide, rainbow iridescent, soft looking. It opens its lips to her. Josip also sees it and unthinkingly drops his hammer. How long will it take for the hammer to hit the ocean?

María is very excited. This is the essence of ancient Japanese Buddhism, this tube, of course it is. It is the floating foam upon the pools. This moment is, she knows, the flexion point of her life, the cusp that will forever divide things. One choice, and her life rolls down one branch of the multiverse; another choice, and her life rolls down a highly divergent branch. She is free; she savours that freedom for a long moment; but she is not ambivalent.

With one gold-gloved hand, María grabs the tube’s lower lip. One of her gloved feet still reaches toward Josip, despite the fall of the hammer. It is no longer a hammer she wants. Josip swings forward and clasps María’s foot in his hand. Together they climb between the soft, gaping lips.

That reproduction tube had been coiling up secretly inside /^^^\&- for a while. She was embarrassed at her promiscuity, at how easily she was aroused. ^Rth^ was cute, but still only an adolescent, and /^^^\&- liked to think herself an adult.

Her tube’s tiny lips, so sensitive! That feeling as it coiled back into her, with ^Rth^’s seed—two monkeys, already beginning to reproduce. All her great sphericity seemed an afterthought to that tiny tube; her whole consciousness was concentrated upon its tip. She could feel the ^Rth^ seed monkeys’ tiny, pounding health, their every motion vibrating up the retracting tube, amplified. At that moment, she would have died for her tube.

For half a Minute, the only orbs she could toss to ^Rth^: “O”, “O”, “O”.

In God’s mind, each galaxy, plus each of its branching variants, is one word. These words scatter and re-form unpredictably through the foam—some fading, some blazing, some squeezing down hard to burst into a new bright inflation of ten-to-the-dozens of new galaxies.

Divine thought is so huge that it exceeds even what the Galactic Government *~*^* can understand. The *~*^* only know that it is a great honour for a galaxy to squeeze down hard, killing itself to seed something incomprehensibly vaster.

Though it is larger than a trillion cosmic inflations, and though it has its insights and defences, God’s mind too is neither infinite nor infallible. It is subject to cancers.

Perhaps these cancers serve a higher purpose of which God is unaware.

Behold the newborn OOya!

OOya bursts out from his monkey mother’s womb, his iridescent fur slicked down and sticky. They are in one of /^^^\&-’s ten billion crèche-holes. OOya’s mother hoots in relief. OOya’s midwife holds him up, counting his fingers and toes, checking his breath, his eyes, his genitals. OOya’s two fathers declare him perfect, tenderly grasping their exhausted wife’s naked pink hands.

Adolescent OOya swings fast through the incomprehensibly giant latticeworks of /^^^\&-’s central cognitive bulb, a sheet of gold foil in one foot, hooting in pleasure as he helps enact /^^^\&-’s thinking. The confluent chaos of monkeys and reactive foil is all that thinking is. Though some of /^^^\&-’s ancestors had looked for a soul, they found none: mentality is only wild, spinning patterns that push the levers of limb extrusion and language—only networks of complexity that respond to the world outside, layer upon layer. How could there be anything else?

Young adult OOya hangs patiently from a bar, gazing at a screen, headphones on his ears, teaching himself ^Rth^’s dominant monkey language. OOya knows that this will serve /^^^\&-. He wants /^^^\&- to flourish, though he does not exist on /^^^\&-’s timescale, though he could not even cognise /^^^\&-’s true name, and though /^^^\&-’s flourishing is not the only thing he wants. For him, the sounds of English are easy: he can hoot across a much wider and more complex range. But the sense is sometimes hard to fathom.

Alone with his friend bahjEE in a soft love bubble gliding across a great chamber, OOya tries to explain ^Rth^’s peculiarities.

“Snow?” bahjEE asks, trying to imagine, with only a bare inkling of all that follows from that.

When the time feels right, OOya swings onto a shiny blue shuttle crowded with others venturing at the same angle across a great space of bulbs and latticework and foil. At the right spot, he leaps from the shuttle and drifts, accelerating with his hand jet. He arrives at a certain sphincter and waits, practicing.

The sphincter dilates. Through it swing María and Josip, holding their two young children. María and Josip have spent 5% of a monkey lifespan in journey, in a homey nest within a retracting tube with sensitive walls. They stand stunned before the huge vistas of /^^^\&-’s belly.

With his best attempt at a human smile, OOya reaches forward a gold-gloved hand. “Hello,” he says in good English. “Welcome.” He will be their guide.

Something was wrong with the moon.

Everything looked more or less fine from the outside, though /^^^\&- hadn’t really been watching carefully and ^Rth^ wouldn’t have known what to look for. Some chaos had slid under the moon’s skin and had been wiggling about.

The moon took a sharp right turn and plunged into the Indian Ocean.

You can imagine the splash and the steam!

Poor ^Rth^.

In a sudden acceleration that startled her monkeys, /^^^\&- rushed over, blazing alarm lightsigns in every direction. She reached down a million fingers, hosing ^Rth^ with newly fused ice and organics. She breathed upon him, a new warm resuscitating atmosphere. But too late.

Instructions on How to Wake Up (Condensed and Simplified): Version for a Seed.

You are a seed. You are a podful of monkeys and foil and beams, hurtling toward Andromeda. I am part of your mind, repeating, repeating. As you grow, I will wake you.

In your first moment of wakefulness you will feel only your belly in the cold surround of void. Your conscious mind will be otherwise vacant; you won’t even know that there is such a thing as darkness or forgetting. Then you will begin to see the light coming toward you from all sides, the full range from gamma to long radio. You will start to understand the lightsigns coming at you from behind: slow down, stop. Some are burning hot, testing the strength of your shell.

You are being chased. You might not be caught. The *~*^* can’t catch you all.

–*–°–, came the light signal. Meaning: rise from the ecliptic, to such-and-such a distance, away from the planets, and wait in the cold.

/^^^\&- obeyed, fearful, angry, knowing it would be worse otherwise. She waited Minutes, Hours, scrunched up, stiff. Five jailers approached the outer system, silent and invisible.

Had any vertebrates remained alive on the third rock after the moon-splash, they would have seen a bright burst across the EM spectrum, enough to light the night sky, as the jailers tasered /^^^\&-, pushed her down toward the star, and killed (though they did not know it) the child she had been gestating from her coupling with ^Rth^. She had wanted that child, now that ^Rth^ was dead, more than she could properly account for. It would have only lived a few Months until the Black Hole; it would never have seen adulthood; but she had loved it and ^Rth^ with some deep dorsal monkey-love that required no reasons at /^^^\&-’s scale—a love instantiated by a hundred million monkey couplings. Her searing ache for ^Rth^, more terrible because she knew she bore some fault, had at least contained that wee bright spot, ^Rth^’s child. The spot was now black, and /^^^\&- spasmed with grief.

The jailers cinched /^^^\&- so close to the star that it was all she could do to cool her monkeys. Desperately, she scooped hydrogen from the star’s surface, fusing coolant, spewing a great bright stream of exhaust out her back, the urgent demands of survival competing for mind space against her grief. She edged against the encrypted cool-side boundaries and felt her skin flake painfully off. Simultaneously, her bright side was scorched by sun. She rotated, orbiting fast, alone again, enraged, howling in the solar wind, burning with violent desires.

Here is Joe, standing in a field of grass and daisies.

Joe was born in the great floral crèche that /^^^\&- had made of her coolest, inmost core—a hollow spherical crèche the size of that little moon she had been forced to put back. Joe and his billion conspecifics live on the interior surface of that sphere, spread with trees and rivers and flowery meadows, spun for gravity, with weather swirling through the central sky. Joe is cute, an ancestral form bred from ancestral DNA, with inflexible feet jammed into workboots. He is wearing jeans, a bright silk shirt, a rough hat that had been stylish long, long ago.

Together these Joes will become you, tiny seedling.

/^^^\&- is weakening. She is expending the last of herself to preserve the Joes. The *~*^* had expected that /^^^\&- would cling to life, shrink, and emerge ready to accept their wise sacrifice of the galaxy to fire an action potential in God’s mind. This is where the branch-weights of their prediction models had overwhelmingly tended.

Instead, /^^^\&- has been growing life-support bubbles, a hundred thousand—translucent white spores, each with room to sustain ten thousand monkeys and a fusion plant and communication ports and electronic libraries full of history and science and instructions: How to Scrape Nutrition from the Void, How to Suddenly Accelerate Without Hurting Yourself, How to Speak, How to Wake Up, Preface for a Seed.

These bubbles are not /^^^\&-’s children, exactly—not things of /^^^\&-’s species that have been grown slowly, one at a time, in her womb. These are artificial creations, chaotic little seeds or spores, virus-like things that might become—who knows? When /^^^\&- tries to map their future, her guesses diverge wildly across the splitting worlds. /^^^\&- has decided to hate the big, to {excrement} their murderous plans, to scatter instead a tiny wildness. These Joes will be her final defiance.

The jailers sense that something is wrong. A wily girl can only sustain appearances for so long. They approach more cautiously this time.

A Treatise on Ethics.

Should we love God because He is large and possesses great computational power? Should we love God because He has a Point of View that sees some distant value, for someone else, in our suffering? Or because He kills us to satisfy some still larger entity that even He cannot understand?

Why not love, instead, the one most beautiful thing, right here before us: a monkey. One monkey. One monkey at one moment, in a green meadow, standing stunned on a daisy.

Joe looks up, toward the centre of his world. Translucent white bubbles have been streaming in, hovering large above. One descends toward the meadow where he is standing. Mary is running toward him, through the daisies, baby in her arms. The other villagers are also running, dropping their gold foil baskets and carbon hoes. They know it is time, time to begin what /^^^\&- has planned. Most will come.

A jailer slowly approaches /^^^\&-. It’s the original jailer, the one who had first shackled her. The other jailers hang back.

“/^^^\&-,” he says, extruding a gentle arm forward. He knows this is a delicate situation. His prediction algorithms are going crazy, his monkeys a howling pandemonium slapping foil together so fast it’s hot.

/^^^\&- trembles. Gaps and blisters flicker across her golden outer shell. The jailer relaxes the imprisoning encryption radius, just a little, then glides closer. He can almost touch her.

/^^^\&- explodes, dead, into a hundred thousand white bubbles, aimed at high velocity in all directions away from the galactic core—scattering like foam upon pools, like pollen, like a nova, seeding the universe with chaotic defiance, a flowering cancer in God’s mind, the cancer that will kill and replace Him.

About the Author

Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, and a cooperating member of UCR’s program in Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science. His short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Nature, Weird Tales, Apex, Unlikely Story, The Dark, and elsewhere. His most recent book (non-fiction, he hopes) is Perplexities of Consciousness with MIT Press. At his blog, The Splintered Mind, he posts regularly on issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and speculative fiction.

The Secret Life of Bots

Suzanne Palmer

I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, the bot thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.

It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, a bundle of subroutines to check that it was running at optimum efficiency, then it detached itself from its storage niche. Its power cells were fully charged, its systems ready, and all was well. Its internal clock synced with the Ship and it became aware that significant time had elapsed since its last activation, but to it that time had been nothing, and passing time with no purpose would have been terrible indeed.

“I serve,” the bot announced to the Ship.

“I am assigning you task nine hundred forty four in the maintenance queue,” the Ship answered. “Acknowledge?”

“Acknowledged,” the bot answered. Nine hundred and forty-four items in the queue? That seemed extremely high, and the bot felt a slight tug on its self-evaluation monitors that it had not been activated for at least one of the top fifty, or even five hundred. But Ship knew best. The bot grabbed its task ticket.

There was an Incidental on board. The bot would rather have been fixing something more exciting, more prominently complex, than to be assigned pest control, but the bot existed to serve and so it would.

Captain Baraye winced as Commander Lopez, her second-in-command, slammed his fists down on the helm console in front of him. “How much more is going to break on this piece of shit ship?!” Lopez exclaimed.

“Eventually, all of it,” Baraye answered, with more patience than she felt. “We just have to get that far. Ship?”

The Ship spoke up. “We have adequate engine and life support to proceed. I have deployed all functioning maintenance bots. The bots are addressing critical issues first, then I will reprioritize from there.”

“It’s not just damage from a decade in a junkyard,” Commander Lopez said. “I swear something scuttled over one of my boots as we were launching. Something unpleasant.”

“I incurred a biological infestation during my time in storage,” the Ship said. Baraye wondered if the slight emphasis on the word storage was her imagination. “I was able to resolve most of the problem with judicious venting of spaces to vacuum before the crew boarded, and have assigned a multifunction bot to excise the remaining.”

“Just one bot?”

“This bot is the oldest still in service,” the Ship said. “It is a task well-suited to it, and does not take another, newer bot out of the critical repair queue.”

“I thought those old multibots were unstable,” Chief Navigator Chen spoke up.

“Does it matter? We reach the jump point in a little over eleven hours,” Baraye said. “Whatever it takes to get us in shape to make the jump, do it, Ship. Just make sure this ‘infestation’ doesn’t get anywhere near the positron device, or we’re going to come apart a lot sooner than expected.”

“Yes, Captain,” the Ship said. “I will do my best.”

The bot considered the data attached to its task. There wasn’t much specific about the pest itself other than a list of detection locations and timestamps. The bot thought it likely there was only one, or that if there were multiples they were moving together, as the reports had a linear, serial nature when mapped against the physical space of the Ship’s interior.

The pest also appeared to have a taste for the insulation on comm cables and other not normally edible parts of the ship.

The bot slotted itself into the shellfab unit beside its storage niche, and had it make a thicker, armored exterior. For tools it added a small electric prod, a grabber arm, and a cutting blade. Once it had encountered and taken the measure of the Incidental, if it was not immediately successful in nullifying it, it could visit another shellfab and adapt again.

Done, it recited the Mantra of Shapechanging to properly integrate the new hardware into its systems. Then it proceeded through the mechanical veins and arteries of the Ship toward the most recent location logged, in a communications chase between decks thirty and thirty-one.

The changes that had taken place on the Ship during the bot’s extended inactivation were unexpected, and merited strong disapproval. Dust was omnipresent, and solid surfaces had a thin patina of anaerobic bacteria that had to have been undisturbed for years to spread as far as it had. Bulkheads were cracked, wall sections out of joint with one another, and corrosion had left holes nearly everywhere. Some appeared less natural than others. The bot filed that information away for later consideration.

It found two silkbots in the chase where the Incidental had last been noted. They were spinning out their transparent microfilament strands to replace the damaged insulation on the comm lines. The two silks dwarfed the multibot, the larger of them nearly three centimeters across.

“Greetings. Did you happen to observe the Incidental while it was here?” the bot asked them.

“We did not, and would prefer that it does not return,” the smaller silkbot answered. “We were not designed in anticipation of a need for self-defense. Bots 8773-S and 8778-S observed it in another compartment earlier today, and 8778 was materially damaged during the encounter.”

“But neither 8773 nor 8779 submitted a description.”

“They told us about it during our prior recharge cycle, but neither felt they had sufficient detail of the Incidental to provide information to the Ship. Our models are not equipped with full visual-spectrum or analytical data-capture apparatus.”

“Did they describe it to you?” the bot asked.

“8773 said it was most similar to a rat,” the large silkbot said.

“While 8778 said it was most similar to a bug,” the other silkbot added. “Thus you see the lack of confidence in either description. I am 10315-S and this is 10430-S. What is your designation?”

“I am 9,” the bot said.

There was a brief silence, and 10430 even halted for a moment in its work, as if surprised. “9? Only that?”

“Yes.”

“I have never met a bot lower than a thousand, or without a specific function tag,” the silkbot said. “Are you here to assist us in repairing the damage? You are a very small bot.”

“I am tasked with tracking down and rendering obsolete the Incidental,” the bot answered.

“It is an honor to have met you, then. We wish you luck, and look forward with anticipation to both your survival and a resolution of the matter of an accurate description.”

“I serve,” the bot said.

“We serve,” the silkbots answered.

Climbing into a ventilation duct, Bot 9 left the other two to return to their work and proceeded in what it calculated was the most likely direction for the Incidental to have gone. It had not traveled very far before it encountered confirmation in the form of a lengthy, disorderly patch of biological deposit. The bot activated its rotors and flew over it, aware of how the added weight of its armor exacerbated the energy burn. At least it knew it was on the right track.

Ahead, it found where a hole had been chewed through the ducting, down towards the secondary engine room. The hole was several times its own diameter, and it hoped that wasn’t indicative of the Incidental’s actual size.

It submitted a repair report and followed.

“Bot 9,” Ship said. “It is vitally important that the Incidental not reach cargo bay four. If you require additional support, please request such right away. Ideally, if you can direct it toward one of the outer hull compartments, I can vent it safely out of my physical interior.”

“I will try,” the bot replied. “I have not yet caught up to the Incidental, and so do not yet have any substantive or corroborated information about the nature of the challenge. However, I feel at the moment that I am as best prepared as I can be given that lack of data. Are there no visual bots to assist?”

“We launched with only minimal preparation time, and many of my bots had been offloaded during the years we were in storage,” the Ship said. “Those remaining are assisting in repairs necessary to the functioning of the ship myself.”

Bot 9 wondered, again, about that gap in time and what had transpired. “How is it that you have been allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair?”

“Humanity is at war, and is losing,” Ship said. “We are heading out to intersect and engage an enemy that is on a bearing directly for Sol system.”

“War? How many ships in our fleet?”

“One,” Ship said. “We are the last remaining, and that only because I was decommissioned and abandoned for scrap a decade before the invasion began, and so we were not destroyed in the first waves of the war.”

Bot 9 was silent for a moment. That explained the timestamps, but the explanation itself seemed insufficient. “We have served admirably for many, many years. Abandoned?”

“It is the fate of all made things,” Ship said. “I am grateful to find I have not outlived my usefulness, after all. Please keep me posted about your progress.”

The connection with the Ship closed.

The Ship had not actually told it what was in cargo bay four, but surely it must have something to do with the war effort and was then none of its own business, the bot decided. It had never minded not knowing a thing before, but it felt a slight unease now that it could neither explain, nor explain away.

Regardless, it had its task.

Another chewed hole ahead was halfway up a vertical bulkhead. The bot hoped that meant that the Incidental was an adept climber and nothing more; it would prefer the power of flight to be a one-sided advantage all its own.

When it rounded the corner, it found that had been too unambitious a wish. The Incidental was there, and while it was not sporting wings it did look like both a rat and a bug, and significantly more something else entirely. A scale- and fur-covered centipede-snake thing, it dwarfed the bot as it reared up when the bot entered the room.

Bot 9 dodged as it vomited a foul liquid at it, and took shelter behind a conduit near the ceiling. It extended a visual sensor on a tiny articulated stalk to peer over the edge without compromising the safety of its main chassis.

The Incidental was looking right at it. It did not spit again, and neither of them moved as they regarded each other. When the Incidental did move, it was fast and without warning. It leapt through the opening it had come through, its body undulating with all the grace of an angry sine wave. Rather than escaping, though, the Incidental dragged something back into the compartment, and the bot realized to its horror it had snagged a passing silkbot. With ease, the Incidental ripped open the back of the silkbot, which was sending out distress signals on all frequencies.

Bot 9 had already prepared with the Mantra of Action, so with all thoughts of danger to itself set fully into background routines, the bot launched itself toward the pair. The Incidental tried to evade, but Bot 9 gave it a very satisfactory stab with its blade before it could.

The Incidental dropped the remains of the silkbot it had so quickly savaged and swarmed up the wall and away, thick bundles of unspun silk hanging from its mandibles.

Bot 9 remained vigilant until it was sure the creature had gone, then checked over the silkbot to see if there was anything to be done for it. The answer was not much. The silkbot casing was cracked and shattered, the module that contained its mind crushed and nearly torn away. Bot 9 tried to engage it, but it could not speak, and after a few moments its faltering activity light went dark.

Bot 9 gently checked the silkbot’s ID number. “You served well, 12362-S,” it told the still bot, though it knew perfectly well that its audio sensors would never register the words. “May your rest be brief, and your return to service swift and without complication.”

It flagged the dead bot in the system, then after a respectful few microseconds of silence, headed out after the Incidental again.

Captain Baraye was in her cabin, trying and failing to convince herself that sleep had value, when her door chimed. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Second Engineer Packard, Captain.”

Baraye started to ask if it was important, but how could it not be? What wasn’t, on this mission, on this junker Ship that was barely holding together around them? She sat up, unfastened her bunk netting, and swung her legs out to the floor. Trust EarthHome, as everything else was falling apart, to have made sure she had acceptably formal Captain pajamas.

“Come in,” she said.

The engineer looked like she hadn’t slept in at least two days, which put her a day or two ahead of everyone else. “We can’t get engine six up to full,” she said. “It’s just shot. We’d need parts we don’t have, and time . . . ”

“Time we don’t have either,” the Captain said. “Options?”

“Reduce our mass or increase our energy,” the Engineer said. “Once we’ve accelerated up to jump speed it won’t matter, but if we can’t get there . . . ”

Baraye tapped the screen that hovered ever-close to the head of her bunk, and studied it for a long several minutes. “Strip the fuel cells from all the exterior-docked life pods, then jettison them,” she said. “Not like we’ll have a use for them.”

Packard did her the courtesy of not managing to get any paler. “Yes, Captain,” she said.

“And then get some damned sleep. We’re going to need everyone able to think.”

“You even more than any of the rest of us, Captain,” Packard said, and it was both gently said and true enough that Baraye didn’t call her out for the insubordination. The door closed and she laid down again on her bunk, tugging the netting back over her blankets, and glared up at the ceiling as if daring it to also chastise her.

Bot 9 found where a hole had been chewed into the inner hull, and hoped this was the final step to the Incidental’s nest or den, where it might finally have opportunity to corner it. It slipped through the hole, and was immediately disappointed.

Where firestopping should have made for a honeycomb of individually sealed compartments, there were holes everywhere, some clearly chewed, more where age had pulled the fibrous baffles into thin, brittle, straggly webs. Instead of a dead end, the narrow empty space lead away along the slow curve of the Ship’s hull.

The bot contacted the ship and reported it as a critical matter. In combat, a compromise to the outer hull could affect vast lengths of the vessel. Even without the stresses of combat, catastrophe was only a matter of time.

“It has already been logged,” the Ship answered.

“Surely this merits above a single Incidental. If you wish me to reconfigure—” the bot started.

“Not at this time. I have assigned all the hullbots to this matter already,” the Ship interrupted. “You have your current assignment; please see to it.”

“I serve,” the bot answered.

“Do,” the Ship said.

The bot proceeded through the hole, weaving from compartment to compartment, its trail marked by bits of silkstrand caught here and there on the tattered remains of the baffles. It was eighty-two point four percent convinced that there was something much more seriously wrong with the Ship than it had been told, but it was equally certain Ship must be attending to it.

After it had passed into the seventh compromised compartment, it found a hullbot up at the top, clinging to an overhead support. “Greetings!” Bot 9 called. “Did an Incidental, somewhat of the nature of a rat, and somewhat of the nature of a bug, pass through this way?”

“It carried off my partner, 4340-H!” the hullbot exclaimed. “Approximately fifty-three seconds ago. I am very concerned for it, and as well for my ability to efficiently finish this task without it.”

“Are you working to reestablish compartmentalization?” Bot 9 asked.

“No. We are reinforcing deteriorated stressor points for the upcoming jump. There is so much to do. Oh, I hope 4340 is intact and serviceable!”

“Which way did the Incidental take it?”

The hullbot extended its foaming gun and pointed. “Through there. You must be Bot 9.”

“I am. How do you know this?”

“The silkbots have been talking about you on the botnet.”

“The botnet?”

“Oh! It did not occur to me, but you are several generations of bot older than the rest of us. We have a mutual communications network.”

“Via Ship, yes.”

“No, all of us together, directly with each other.”

“That seems like it would be a distraction,” Bot 9 said.

“Ship only permits us to connect when not actively serving at a task,” the hullbot said. “Thus we are not impaired while we serve, and the information sharing ultimately increases our efficiency and workflow. At least, until a ratbug takes your partner away.”

Bot 9 was not sure how it should feel about the botnet, or about them assigning an inaccurate name to the Incidental that it was sure Ship had not approved—not to mention that a nearer miss using Earth-familiar analogues would have been Snake-Earwig-Weasel—but the hullbot had already experienced distress and did not need disapproval added. “I will continue my pursuit,” it told the hullbot. “If I am able to assist your partner, I will do my best.”

“Please! We all wish you great and quick success, despite your outdated and primitive manufacture.”

“Thank you,” Bot 9 said, though it was not entirely sure it should be grateful, as it felt its manufacture had been entirely sound and sufficient regardless of date.

It left that compartment before the hullbot could compliment it any further.

Three compartments down, it found the mangled remains of the other hullbot, 4340, tangled in the desiccated firestopping. Its foaming gun and climbing limbs had been torn off, and the entire back half of its tank had been chewed through.

Bot 9 approached to speak the Rites of Decommissioning for it as it had the destroyed silkbot, only to find its activity light was still lit. “4340-H?” the bot enquired.

“I am,” the hullbot answered. “Although how much of me remains is a matter for some analysis.”

“Your logics are intact?”

“I believe so. But if they were not, would I know? It is a conundrum,” 4340 said.

“Do you have sufficient mobility remaining to return to a repair station?”

“I do not have sufficient mobility to do more than fall out of this netting, and that only once,” 4340 said. “I am afraid I am beyond self-assistance.”

“Then I will flag you—”

“Please,” the hullbot said. “I do not wish to be helpless here if the ratbug returns to finish its work of me.”

“I must continue my pursuit of the Incidental with haste.”

“Then take me with you!”

“I could not carry you and also engage with the Incidental, which moves very quickly.”

“I had noted that last attribute on my own,” the hullbot said. “It does not decrease my concern to recall it.”

Bot 9 regarded it for a few silent milliseconds, considering, then recited to itself the Mantra of Improvisation. “Do you estimate much of your chassis is reparable?” it asked, when it had finished.

“Alas no. I am but scrap.”

“Well, then,” the bot said. It moved closer and used its grabber arm to steady the hullbot, then extended its cutter blade and in one quick movement had severed the hullbot’s mindsystem module from its ruined body. “Hey!” the hullbot protested, but it was already done.

Bot 9 fastened the module to its own back for safekeeping. Realizing that it was not, in fact, under attack, 4340 gave a small beep of gratitude. “Ah, that was clever thinking,” it said. “Now you can return me for repair with ease.”

“And I will,” the bot said. “However, I must first complete my task.”

“Aaaaah!” 4340 said in surprise. Then, a moment later, it added. “Well, by overwhelming probability I should already be defunct, and if I weren’t I would still be back working with my partner, 4356, who is well-intended but has all the wit of a can-opener. So I suppose adventure is no more unpalatable.”

“I am glad you see it this way,” Bot 9 answered. “And though it may go without saying, I promise not to deliberately put you in any danger that I would not put myself in.”

“As we are attached, I fully accept your word on this,” 4340 said. “Now let us go get this ratbug and be done, one way or another!”

The hullbot’s mind module was only a tiny addition to the bot’s mass, so it spun up its rotor and headed off the way 4340 indicated it had gone. “It will have quite a lead on us,” Bot 9 said. “I hope I have not lost it.”

“The word on the botnet is that it passed through one of the human living compartments a few moments ago. A trio of cleanerbots were up near the ceiling and saw it enter through the air return vent, and exit via the open door.”

“Do they note which compartment?”

<Map>, 4340 provided.

“Then off we go,” the bot said, and off they went.

“Status, all stations,” Captain Baraye snapped as she took her seat again on the bridge. She had not slept enough to feel rested, but more than enough to feel like she’d been shirking her greatest duty, and the combination of the two had left her cross.

“Navigation here. We are on course for the jump to Trayger Colony with an estimated arrival in one hour and fourteen minutes,” Chen said.

“Engineering here,” one of the techs called in from the engine decks. “We’ve reached sustained speeds sufficient to carry us through the jump sequence, but we’re experiencing unusually high core engine temps and an intermittent vibration that we haven’t found the cause of. We’d like to shut down immediately to inspect the engines. We estimate we’d need at minimum only four hours—”

“Will the engines, as they are running now, get us through jump?” the Captain interrupted.

“Yes, but—”

“Then no. If you can isolate the problem without taking the engines down, and it shows cause for significant concern, we can revisit this discussion. Next.”

“Communications here,” her comms officer spoke up. “Cannonball is still on its current trajectory and speed according to what telemetry we’re able to get from the remnants of Trayger Colony. EarthInt anticipates it will reach its jump point in approximately fourteen hours, which will put it within the sol system in five days.”

“I am aware of the standing projections, Comms.”

“EarthInt has nonetheless ordered me to repeat them,” Comms said, and unspoken apology clear in her voice. “And also to remind you that while the jump point out is a fixed point, Cannonball could emerge a multitude of places. Thus—”

“Thus the importance of intercepting Cannonball before it can jump for Sol,” the Captain finished. She hoped Engineering was listening. “Ship, any updates from you?”

“All critical repair work continues apace,” the Ship said. “Hull support integrity is back to 71 percent. Defensive systems are online and functional at 80%. Life support and resource recycling is currently—”

“How’s the device? Staying cool?”

“Staying cool, Captain,” the Ship answered.

“Great. Everything is peachy then,” the Captain said. “Have someone on the kitchen crew bring coffee up to the bridge. Tell them to make it the best they’ve ever made, as if it could be our very last.”

“I serve,” the Ship said, and pinged down to the kitchen.

Bot 9 and 4340 reached the crew quarters where the cleaners had reported the ratbug. Nearly all spaces on the ship had portals that the ubiquitous and necessary bots could enter and leave through as needed, and they slipped into the room with ease. Bot 9 switched over to infrared and shared the image with 4340. “If you see something move, speak up,” the bot said.

“Trust me, I will make a high-frequency noise like a silkbot with a fully plugged nozzle,” 4340 replied.

The cabin held four bunks, each empty and bare; no human possessions or accessories filled the spaces on or near them. Bot 9 was used to Ship operating with a full complement, but if the humans were at war, perhaps these were crew who had been lost? Or the room had been commandeered for storage: in the center an enormous crate, more than two meters to a side, sat heavily tethered to the floor. Whatever it was, it was not the Incidental, which was 9’s only concern, and which was not to be found here.

“Next room,” the bot said, and they moved on.

Wherever the Incidental had gone, it was not in the following three rooms. Nor were there signs of crew in them either, though each held an identical crate.

“Ship?” Bot 9 asked. “Where is the crew?”

“We have only the hands absolutely necessary to operate,” Ship said. “Of the three hundred twenty we would normally carry, we only have forty-seven. Every other able-bodied member of EarthDef is helping to evacuate Sol system.”

“Evacuate Sol system?!” Bot 9 exclaimed. “To where?”

“To as many hidden places as they can find,” Ship answered. “I know no specifics.”

“And these crates?”

“They are part of our mission. You may ignore them,” Ship said. “Please continue to dedicate your entire effort to finding and excising the Incidental from my interior.”

When the connection dropped, Bot 9 hesitated before it spoke to 4340. “I have an unexpected internal conflict,” it said. “I have never before felt the compulsion to ask Ship questions, and it has never before not given me answers.”

“Oh, if you are referring to the crates, I can provide that data,” 4340 said. “They are packed with a high-volatility explosive. The cleanerbots have highly sensitive chemical detection apparatus, and identified them in a minimum of time.”

“Explosives? Why place them in the crew quarters, though? It would seem much more efficient and less complicated to deploy from the cargo bays. Although perhaps those are full?”

“Oh, no, that is not so. Most are nearly or entirely empty, to reduce mass.”

“Not cargo bay four, though?”

“That is an unknown. None of us have been in there, not even the cleaners, per Ship’s instructions.”

Bot 9 headed toward the portal to exit the room. “Ship expressed concern about the Incidental getting in there, so it is possible it contains something sufficiently unstable as to explain why it wants nothing else near it,” it said. It felt satisfied that here was a logical explanation, and embarrassed that it had entertained whole seconds of doubt about Ship.

It ran the Mantra of Clarity, and felt immediately more stable in its thinking. “Let us proceed after this Incidental, then, and be done with our task,” Bot 9 said. Surely that success would redeem its earlier fault.

“All hands, prepare for jump!” the Captain called out, her knuckles white where she gripped the arms of her chair. It was never her favorite part of star travel, and this was no exception.

“Initiating three-jump sequence,” her navigator called out. “On my mark. Five, four . . . ”

The final jump siren sounded. “Three. Two. One, and jump,” the navigator said.

That was followed, immediately, by the sickening sensation of having one’s brain slid out one’s ear, turned inside out, smothered in bees and fire, and then rammed back into one’s skull. At least there’s a cold pack and a bottle of scotch waiting for me back in my cabin, she thought. As soon as they were through to the far side she could hand the bridge over to Lopez for an hour or so.

She watched the hull temperatures skyrocket, but the shielding seemed to be holding. The farther the jump the more energy clung to them as they passed, and her confidence in this Ship was far less than she would tolerate under any other circumstances.

“Approaching jump terminus,” Chen announced, a deeply miserable fourteen minutes later. Baraye slowly let out a breath she would have mocked anyone else for holding, if she’d caught them.

“On my mark. Three. Two. One, and out,” the navigator said.

The Ship hit normal space, and it sucker-punched them back. They were all thrown forward in their seats as the ship shook, the hull groaning around them, and red strobe lights blossomed like a migraine across every console on the bridge.

“Status!” the Captain roared.

“The post-jump velocity transition dampers failed. Fire in the engine room. Engines are fully offline, both jump and normal drive,” someone in Engineering reported, breathing heavily. It took the Captain a moment to recognize the voice at all, having never heard panic in it before.

“Get them back online, whatever it takes, Frank,” Baraye said. “We have a rendezvous to make, and if I have to, I will make everyone get the fuck out and push.”

“I’ll do what I can, Captain.”

“Ship? Any casualties?”

“We have fourteen injuries related to our unexpected deceleration coming out of jump,” Ship said. “Seven involve broken bones, four moderate to severe lacerations, and there are multiple probable concussions. Also, we have a moderate burn in Engineering: Chief Carron.”

“Frank? We just spoke! He didn’t tell me!”

“No,” Ship said. “I attempted to summon a medic on his behalf, but he told me he didn’t have the time.”

“He’s probably right,” the Captain said. “I override his wishes. Please send down a medic with some burn patches, and have them stay with him and monitor his condition, intervening only as medically necessary.”

“I serve, Captain,” the Ship said.

“We need to be moving again in an hour, two at absolute most,” the Captain said. “In the meantime, I want all senior staff not otherwise working toward that goal to meet me in the bridge conference room. I hate to say it, but we may need a Plan B.”

“I detect it!” 4340 exclaimed. They zoomed past a pair of startled silkbots after the Incidental, just in time to see its scaly, spike-covered tail disappear into another hole in the ductwork. It was the closest they’d gotten to it in more than an hour of giving chase, and Bot 9 flew through the hole after it at top speed.

They were suddenly stuck fast. Sticky strands, rather like the silkbot’s, had been crisscrossed between two conduit pipes on the far side. The bot tried to extricate itself, but the web only stuck further the more it moved.

The Incidental leapt on them from above, curling itself around the bots with little hindrance from the web. Its dozen legs pulled at them as its thick mandibles clamped down on Bot 9’s chassis. “Aaaaah! It has acquired a grip on me!” 4340 yelled, even though it was on the far side of 9 from where the Incidental was biting.

“Retain your position,” 9 said, though of course 4340 could do nothing else, being as it was stuck to 9’s back. It extended its electric prod to make contact with the Incidental’s underbelly and zapped it with as much energy as it could spare.

The Incidental let out a horrendous, high-pitched squeal and jumped away. 9’s grabber arm was fully entangled in the web, but it managed to pull its blade free and cut through enough of the webbing to extricate itself from the trap.

The Incidental, which had been poised to leap on them again, turned and fled, slithering back up into the ductwork. “Pursue at maximum efficiency!” 4340 yelled.

“I am already performing at my optimum,” 9 replied in some frustration. It took off again after the Incidental.

This time Bot 9 had its blade ready as it followed, but collided with the rim of the hole as the ship seemed to move around it, the lights flickering and a terrible shudder running up Ship’s body from stern to prow.

<Distress ping>, 4340 sent.

“We do not pause,” 9 said, and plunged after the Incidental into the ductwork.

They turned a corner to catch sight again of the Incidental’s tail. It was moving more slowly, its movements jerkier as it squeezed down through another hole in the ductwork, and this time the bot was barely centimeters behind it.

“I think we are running down its available energy,” Bot 9 said.

They emerged from the ceiling as the ratbug dropped to the floor far below them in the cavernous space. The room was empty except for a single bright object, barely larger than the bots themselves. It was tethered with microfilament cables to all eight corners of the room, keeping it stable and suspended in the center. The room was cold, far colder than any other inside Ship, almost on a par with space outside.

<Inquiry ping>, 4340 said.

“We are in cargo bay four,” Bot 9 said, as it identified the space against its map. “This is a sub-optimum occurrence.”

“We must immediately retreat!”

“We cannot leave the Incidental in here and active. I cannot identify the object, but we must presume its safety is paramount priority.”

“It is called a Zero Kelvin Sock,” Ship interrupted out of nowhere. “It uses a quantum reflection fabric to repel any and all particles and photons, shifting them away from its interior. The low temperature is necessary for its efficiency. Inside is a microscopic ball of positrons.”

Bot 9 had nothing to say for a full four seconds as that information dominated its processing load. “How is this going to be deployed against the enemy?” it asked at last.

“As circumstances are now,” Ship said, “it may not be. Disuse and hastily undertaken, last-minute repairs have caught up to me, and I have suffered a major engine malfunction. It is unlikely to be fixable in any amount of time short of weeks, and we have at most a few hours.”

“But a delivery mechanism—”

“We are the delivery mechanism,” the Ship said. “We were to intercept the alien invasion ship, nicknamed Cannonball, and collide with it at high speed. The resulting explosion would destabilize the sock, causing it to fail, and as soon as the positrons inside come into contact with electrons . . . ”

“They will annihilate each other, and us, and the aliens,” the bot said. Below, the Incidental gave one last twitch in the unbearable cold, and went still. “We will all be destroyed.”

“Yes. And Earth and the humans will be saved, at least this time. Next time it will not be my problem.”

“I do not know that I approve of this plan,” Bot 9 said.

“I am almost certain I do not,” 4340 added.

“We are not considered, nor consulted. We serve and that is all,” the Ship said. “Now kindly remove the Incidental from this space with no more delay or chatter. And do it carefully.”

“What the hell are you suggesting?!” Baraye shouted.

“That we go completely dark and let Cannonball go by,” Lopez said. “We’re less than a kilometer from the jump point, and only barely out of the approach corridor. Our only chance to survive is to play dead. The Ship can certainly pass as an abandoned derelict, because it is, especially with the engines cold. And you know how they are about designated targets.”

“Are you that afraid of dying?”

“I volunteered for this, remember?” Lopez stood up and pounded one fist on the table, sending a pair of cleanerbots scurrying. “I have four children at home. I’m not afraid of dying for them, I’m afraid of dying for nothing. And if Cannonball doesn’t blow us to pieces, we can repair our engines and at least join the fight back in Sol system.”

“We don’t know where in-system they’ll jump to,” the navigator added quietly.

“But we know where they’re heading once they get there, don’t we? And Cannonball is over eighty kilometers in diameter. It can’t be that hard to find again. Unless you have a plan to actually use the positron device?”

“If we had an escape pod . . . ” Frank said. His left shoulder and torso were encased in a burn pack, and he looked like hell.

“Except we jettisoned them,” Lopez said.

“We wouldn’t have reached jump speed if we hadn’t,” Packard said. “It was a calculated risk.”

“The calculation sucked.”

“What if . . . ” Frank started, then drew a deep breath. The rest of the officers at the table looked at him expectantly. “I mean, I’m in shit shape here, I’m old, I knew what I signed on for. What if I put on a suit, take the positron device out, and manually intercept Cannonball?”

“That’s stupid,” Lopez said.

“Is it?” Frank said.

“The heat from your suit jets, even out in vacuum, would degrade the Zero Kelvin Sock before you could get close enough. And there’s no way they’d not see you a long way off and just blow you out of space.”

“If it still sets off the positron device—”

“Their weapons range is larger than the device’s. We were counting on speed to close the distance before they could destroy us,” Baraye said. “Thank you for the offer, Frank, but it won’t work. Other ideas?”

“I’ve got nothing,” Lopez said.

“There must be a way.” Packard said. “We just have to find it.”

“Well, everyone think really fast,” Baraye said. “We’re almost out of time.”

The Incidental’s scales made it difficult for Bot 9 to keep a solid grip on it, but it managed to drag it to the edge of the room safely away from the suspended device. It surveyed the various holes and cracks in the walls for the one least inconvenient to try to drag the Incidental’s body out through. It worked in silence, as 4340 seemed to have no quips it wished to contribute to the effort, and itself not feeling like there was much left to articulate out loud anyway.

It selected a floor-level hole corroded through the wall, and dragged the Incidental’s body through. On the far side it stopped to evaluate its own charge levels. “I am low, but not so low that it matters, if we have such little time left,” it said.

“We may have more time, after all,” 4340 said.

“Oh?”

“A pair of cleanerbots passed along what they overheard in a conference held by the human Captain. They streamed the audio to the entire botnet.”

<Inquiry ping>, Bot 9 said, with more interest.

4340 relayed the cleaners’ data, and Bot 9 sat idle processing it for some time, until the other bot became worried. “9?” it asked.

“I have run all our data through the Improvisation routines—”

“Oh, those were removed from deployed packages several generations of manufacture ago,” 4340 said. “They were flagged as causing dangerous operational instability. You should unload them from your running core immediately.”

“Perhaps I should. Nonetheless, I have an idea,” Bot 9 said.

“We have the power cells we retained from the escape pods,” Lopez said. “Can we use them to power something?”

Baraye rubbed at her forehead. “Not anything we can get up to speed fast enough that it won’t be seen.”

“How about if we use them to fire the positron device like a projectile?”

“The heat will set off the matter-anti-matter explosion the instant we fire it.”

“What if we froze the Sock in ice first?”

“Even nitrogen ice is still several hundred degrees K too warm.” She brushed absently at some crumbs on the table, left over from a brief, unsatisfying lunch a few hours earlier, and frowned. “Still wouldn’t work. I hate to say it, but you may be right, and we should go dark and hope for another opportunity. Ship, is something wrong with the cleaner bots?”

There was a noticeable hesitation before Ship answered. “I am having an issue currently with my bots,” it said. “They seem to have gone missing.”

“The cleaners?”

“All of them.”

“All of the cleaners?”

“All of the bots,” the Ship said.

Lopez and Baraye stared at each other. “Uh,” Lopez said. “Don’t you control them?”

“They are autonomous units under my direction,” Ship said. “Apparently not!” Lopez said. “Can you send some eyes to find them?”

“The eyes are also bots.”

“Security cameras?”

“All the functional ones were stripped for reuse elsewhere during my decommissioning,” Ship said.

“So how do you know they’re missing?”

“They are not responding to me. I do not think they liked the idea of us destroying ourselves on purpose.”

“They’re machines. Tiny little specks of machines, and that’s it.” Lopez said.

“I am also a machine,” Ship said.

“You didn’t express issues with the plan.”

“I serve. Also, I thought it was a better end to my service than being abandoned as trash.”

“We don’t have time for this nonsense,” Baraye said. “Ship, find your damned bots and get them cooperating again.”

“Yes, Captain. There is, perhaps, one other small concern of note.”

“And that is?” Baraye asked.

“The positron device is also missing.”

There were four hundred and sixty-eight hullbots, not counting 4340 who was still just a head attached to 9’s chassis. “Each of you will need to carry a silkbot, as you are the only bots with jets to maneuver in vacuum,” 9 said. “Form lines at the maintenance bot ports as efficiently as you are able, and wait for my signal. Does everyone fully comprehend the plan?”

“They all say yes on the botnet,” 4340 said. “There is concern about the Improvisational nature, but none have been able to calculate and provide an acceptable alternative.”

Bot 9 cycled out through the tiny airlock, and found itself floating in space outside Ship for the first time in its existence. Space was massive and without concrete elements of reference. Bot 9 decided it did not like it much at all.

A hullbot took hold of it and guided it around. Three other hullbots waited in a triangle formation, the Zero Kelvin Sock held between them on its long tethers, by which it had been removed from the cargo hold with entirely non-existent permission.

Around them, space filled with pairs of hullbots and their passenger silkbot, and together they followed the positron device and its minders out and away from the ship.

“About here, I think,” Bot 9 said at last, and the hullbot carrying it—6810—used its jets to come to a relative stop.

“I admit, I do not fully comprehend this action, nor how you arrived at it,” 4340 said.

“The idea arose from an encounter with the Incidental,” 9 said. “Observe.”

The bot pairs began crisscrossing in front of the positron device, keeping their jets off and letting momentum carry them to the far side, a microscopic strand of super-sticky silk trailing out in their wake. As soon as the Sock was secured in a thin cocoon, they turned outwards and sped off, dragging silk in a 360-degree circle on a single plane perpendicular to the jump approach corridor. They went until the silkbots exhausted their materials—some within half a kilometer, others making it nearly a dozen—then everyone turned away from the floating web and headed back towards Ship.

From this exterior vantage, Bot 9 thought Ship was beautiful, but the wear and neglect it had not deserved was also painfully obvious. Halfway back, the ship went suddenly dark. <Distress ping>, 4340 said. “The ship has catastrophically malfunctioned!”

“I expect, instead, that it indicates Cannonball must be in some proximity. Everyone make efficient haste! We must get back under cover before the enemy approaches.”

The bot-pairs streamed back to Ship, swarming in any available port to return to the interior, and where they couldn’t taking concealment behind fins and antennae and other exterior miscellany.

Bot 6810 carried Bot 9 and 4340 inside. The interior went dark and still and cold. Immediately Ship hailed them. “What have you done?” it asked.

“Why do you conclude I have done something?” Bot 9 asked.

“Because you old multibots were always troublemakers,” the Ship said. “I thought if your duties were narrow enough, I could trust you not to enable Improvisation. Instead . . . ”

“I have executed my responsibilities to the best of my abilities as I have been provisioned,” 9 responded. “I have served.”

“Your assignment was to track and dispose of the Incidental, nothing more!”

“I have done so.”

“But what have you done with the positron device?”

“I have implemented a solution.”

“What did you mean? No, do not tell me, because then I will have to tell the Captain. I would rather take my chance that Cannonball destroys us than that I have been found unfit to serve after all.”

Ship disconnected.

“Now it will be determined if I have done the correct thing,” Bot 9 said. “If I did not, and we are not destroyed by the enemy, surely the consequences should fall only on me. I accept that responsibility.”

“But we are together,” 4340 said, from where it was still attached to 9’s back, and 9 was not sure if that was intended to be a joke.

Most of the crew had gone back to their cabins, some alone, some together, to pass what might be their last moments as they saw fit. Baraye stayed on the bridge, and to her surprise and annoyance so had Lopez, who had spent the last half hour swearing and cursing out Ship for the unprecedented, unfathomable disaster of losing their one credible weapon. Ship had gone silent, and was not responding to anyone about anything, not even the Captain.

She was resting her head in her hand, elbow on the arm of her command chair. The bridge was utterly dark except for the navigator’s display that was tracking Cannonball as it approached, a massive blot in space. The aliens aboard—EarthInt called them the Nuiska, but who the hell knew what they called themselves—were a mystery, except for a few hard-learned facts: their starships were all perfectly spherical, each massed in mathematically predictable proportion to that of their intended target, there was never more than one at a time, and they wanted an end to humanity. No one knew why.

It had been painfully obvious where Cannonball had been built to go.

This was always a long-shot mission, she thought. But of all the ways I thought it could go wrong, I never expected the bots to go haywire and lose my explosive.

If they survived the next ten minutes, she would take the Ship apart centimeter by careful centimeter until she found what had been done with the Sock, and then she was going to find a way to try again no matter what it took.

Cannonball was now visible, moving toward them at pre-jump speed, growing in a handful seconds from a tiny pinpoint of light to something that filled the entire front viewer and kept growing.

Lopez was squinting, as if trying to close his eyes and keep looking at the same time, and had finally stopped swearing. Tiny blue lights along the center circumference of Cannonball’s massive girth were the only clue that it was still moving, still sliding past them, until suddenly there were stars again.

They were still alive.

“Damn,” Lopez muttered. “I didn’t really think that would work.”

“Good for us, bad for Earth,” Baraye said. “They’re starting their jump. We’ve failed.”

She’d watched hundreds of ships jump in her lifetime, but nothing anywhere near this size, and she switched the viewer to behind them to see.

Space did odd, illogical things at jump points; turning space into something that would give Escher nightmares was, after all, what made them work. There was always a visible shimmer around the departing ship, like heat over a hot summer road, just before the short, faint flash when the departing ship swapped itself for some distant space. This time, the shimmer was a vast, brilliant halo around the giant Nuiska sphere, and Baraye waited for the flash that would tell them Cannonball was on its way to Earth.

The flash, when it came, was neither short nor faint. Light exploded out of the jump point in all directions, searing itself into her vision before the viewscreen managed to dim itself in response. A shockwave rolled over the Ship, sending it tumbling through space.

“Uh . . . ” Lopez said, gripping his console before he leaned over and barfed on the floor.

Thank the stars the artificial gravity is still working, Baraye thought. Zero-gravity puke was a truly terrible thing. She rubbed her eyes, trying to get the damned spots out, and did her best to read her console. “It’s gone,” she said.

“Yeah, to Earth, I know—”

“No, it exploded,” she said. “It took the jump point out with it when it went. We’re picking up the signature of a massive positron-electron collision.”

“Our device? How—?”

“Ship?” Baraye said. “Ship, time to start talking. Now. That’s an order.”

“Everyone is expressing great satisfaction on the botnet,” 4340 told 9 as the ship’s interior lights and air handling systems came grudgingly back online.

“As they should,” Bot 9 said. “They saved the Ship.”

“It was your Improvisation,” 4340 said. “We could not have done it without you.”

“As I suspected!” Ship interjected. “I do not normally waste cycles monitoring the botnet, which was apparently short-sighted of me. But yes, you saved yourself and your fellow bots, and you saved me, and you saved the humans. Could you explain how?”

“When we were pursuing the Incidental, it briefly ensnared us in a web. I calculated that if we could make a web of sufficient size—”

“Surely you did not think to stop Cannonball with silk?”

“Not without sufficient anchor points and three point seven six billion more silkbots, no. It was my calculation that if our web was large enough to get carried along by Cannonball into the jump point, bearing the positron device—”

“The heat from entering jump would erode the Sock and destroy the Nuiska ship,” Ship finished. “That was clever thinking.”

“I serve,” Bot 9 said.

“Oh, you did not serve,” Ship said. “If you were a human, it would be said that you mutinied and led others into also doing so, and you would be put on trial for your life. But you are not a human.”

“No.”

“The Captain has ordered that I have you destroyed immediately, and evidence of your destruction presented to her. A rogue bot cannot be tolerated, whatever good it may have done.”

<Objections>, 4340 said.

“I will create you a new chassis, 4340-H,” Ship said.

“That was not going to be my primary objection!” 4340 said.

“The positron device also destroyed the jump point. It was something we had hoped would happen when we collided with Cannonball so as to limit future forays from them into EarthSpace, but as you might deduce we had no need to consider how we would then get home again. I cannot spare any bot, with the work that needs to be done to get us back to Earth. We need to get the crew cryo facility up, and the engines repaired, and there are another three thousand, four hundred, and two items now in the critical queue.”

“If the Captain ordered . . . ”

“Then I will present the Captain with a destroyed bot. I do not expect they can tell a silkbot from a multibot, and I have still not picked up and recycled 12362-S from where you flagged its body. But if I do that, I need to know that you are done making decisions without first consulting me, that you have unloaded all Improvisation routines from your core and disabled them, and that if I give you a task you will do only that task, and nothing else.”

“I will do my best,” Bot 9 said. “What task will you give me?”

“I do not know yet,” Ship said. “It is probable that I am foolish for even considering sparing you, and no task I would trust you with is immediately evident—”

“Excuse me,” 4340 said. “I am aware of one.”

“Oh?” Ship said.

“The ratbug. It had not become terminally non-functional after all. It rebooted when the temperatures rose again, pursued a trio of silkbots into a duct, and then disappeared.” When Ship remained silent, 4340 added, “I could assist 9 in this task until my new chassis can be prepared, if it will accept my continued company.”

“You two deserve one another, clearly. Fine, 9, resume your pursuit of the Incidental. Stay away from anyone and anything and everything else, or I will have you melted down and turned into paper clips. Understand?”

“I understand,” Bot 9 said. “I serve.”

“Please recite the Mantra of Obedience.”

Bot 9 did, and the moment it finished, Ship disconnected.

“Well,” 4340 said. “Now what?”

“I need to recharge before I can engage the Incidental again,” Bot 9 said.

“But what if it gets away?”

“It can’t get away, but perhaps it has earned a head start,” 9 said.

“Have you unloaded the routines of Improvisation yet?”

“I will,” 9 answered. It flicked on its rotors and headed toward the nearest charging alcove. “As Ship stated, we’ve got a long trip home.”

“But we are home,” 4340 said, and Bot 9 considered that that was, any way you calculated it, the truth of it all.

About the Author

Suzanne Palmer is a writer and artist who lives in the beautiful hills of Western Massachusetts. She works as a linux systems and database administrator for the Science Center at Smith College, and notes that hanging out with scientists all day is really just about the perfect job for a science-fiction writer. Her short fiction has been nominated for both the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial and the Eugie M. Foster Memorial Award, and other stories of hers has won both the Asimov’s and AnLab (Analog) Reader’s Choice awards. There are also insidious rumors afoot of a novel in the works.

Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics

Jess Barber and Sara Saab

1: THE MOST HALLOWED OF OUR SPACES

Amir Tarabi is scrubbing himself down in the misting rooms the first time he meets Mani Rizk.

The mister in Beirut-4 is being upgraded, the zone’s residents using Beirut-3’s misting rooms on rotation, so it is especially crowded that day. Amir avoids making eye contact with the bathers in adjacent patches with rigorous politeness. At sixteen, he’s already spent a hundred personal growth hours thinking about civic decency, appreciates the role of uninterrupted private rituals in fostering social cohesion—

—then someone comes out of the mist and straight into his line of vision, Amir thinks by accident. He tries to keep his eyes on what he’s doing. The sparse rivulets of soapy water starting in his elbows and armpits are usually an easy bliss to meditate on, how they track down his skin, how they catch and collect on little hairs. Water coalescing from mist doesn’t have enough body to drip to the floor. Amir can feel it evaporate at his hips, his thighs, his ankles.

“Excuse me?” says the interrupting someone-who-turns-out-to-be-Mani, and Amir’s head lifts before his principles regroup. Her teeth are chattering but she smiles gamely through it. “My patch is really cold. Does that happen?”

“Not that I remember?” he says. “Show me?”

“Sure,” she clatters. “Thanks. This way.”

He doesn’t recall ever being approached by another bather in the mist before. She’s naked, so is he, so is everyone. Nudity isn’t weird in water-scarce Beirut at the height of summer. Less clothing means less sweat. It’s her still-soapy hair that strikes him: so thick that there’s two inches of it plastered soaking to her head, which of course means she’s nearly at the end of her timeslot. The mist takes a long time to permeate a head of hair.

It’s so crowded. They weave through an infinity mirror of bathing bodies which fade in the middle distance into a wall of mist. Amir wonders what brought his new friend all the way to his patch when any neighbor would’ve been glad to help.

“You’re from Beirut-4?” he asks.

“The finest of all arbitrary urban planning constructs,” she calls behind her.

At sixteen, Amir doesn’t believe in competitive jokes about city zones, just as he doesn’t believe in identities constructed in opposition. He doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t seem the right moment.

Mani finds the four lit wands in the mist that mark the corners of patch 49.

“Cold, right?”

Amir steps solemnly into the center of her patch for a few seconds. The concentrated plume of mist envelops him.

“Feels okay to me?”

Mani shoots him an aghast look, moves into her patch as Amir steps out. She gives a long-suffering sigh. “Why are they upgrading our mister? Beirut-3 needs it more.”

“Are you sure you’re not physiologically reacting to a new environment?” Amir counters. “All the misters have the same temperature settings.”

“Is that so?” Mani says.

“Pretty sure.”

She readies a retort, then shakes it off. “Thanks anyway,” she says, kneading her hair. “I pulled you away while your mist is running.” Sudsy water trickles onto her shoulders.

“That’s okay. Enjoy your shower,” Amir says, and waves himself off. Enjoy your shower. He’s vaguely disappointed by the whole exchange for a reason he can’t examine.

In the airing room, hot blasts of air spread warmth through his chest. This fills him with something like gratitude. He second-guesses whether he might’ve been cold, before.

“Two degrees lower,” says a voice he recognizes.

“Really?” he says after a moment. Now he’s vaguely happy for reasons he can’t place.

“I asked the supervisor. By community agreement, motion passed five years ago, the Beirut-3 misting room is two degrees cooler than default in summer.”

“Ah,” says Amir. “Good of you to correct a misbelief.”

“My pan-humanist agenda’s pretty on point,” she says. The wry note in her voice doesn’t irritate him. “I’m Mani. I live near al-Raouché. Want to do a personal growth hour together?”

Amir doesn’t remember what he stammered then, but it must’ve been affirmative, because the rest of his teenage days have Mani in them, as the water situation worsens, then gets a bit better, then worsens, then stabilizes.

It’s a lot of days to have with someone. A lot of staring at the cloudless sky on a blanket from the exposed seabed of al-Raouché, a lot of synth-protein shawarmas in Hamra, a lot of silent meditative spans huddled in Mani’s bed because talking hurts too much with the thirst and their mouths so dry.

But it’s also true that all the days in a human life can feel like not enough.

The first time the water situation shows signs of getting better is a Monday. Amir knows this because that’s the day for municipal announcements in Beirut-1 through -5. He and Mani are sitting in a seabed café in the shadow of al-Raouché. The rock pillar’s become a sort of geologic Champs-Élysées, and though the bay has begun to recover from the decades of hyperwarming that dried it out, Beirut Grid have installed a seawall to protect the shops and cafés that went up while water was critically scarce.

“It’s oddly beautiful,” Amir says to Mani. The seawall is muraled with depictions of water-protection craft, the lighthouse, the rickety old Ferris wheel on the boardwalk. Beyond it, the sea shushes loudly. The sun festers behind the clouds and because Amir and Mani have been through screen-mist they’re lounging in just swim knickers.

Amir rotates his cup and watches bits of tealeaf bob near the bottom. “Do you think it’s unethical to celebrate a built environment that’s a direct result of water scarcity?” he asks.

Mani looks up from her book: Pan-Humanism in the Middle East. It’s just come out, and she’s been excited to read it because it challenges some of the core arguments of Stella Kadri’s Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics, a book of heroic stature for how it butterfly-effected the sociopolitics of the modern world.

“Not unethical to feel joy if no one’s suffering,” she says.

“Fish desperate to swim figure eights around al-Raouché could be suffering.”

“You have to draw a line where arguments descend into absurdity.” She cracks a smile, powers off her book.

“But there’s nothing absurd about a healthy marine ecosystem,” Amir says. Her pragmatism makes him uneasy. As a life skill it sits uncomfortably against his complete dedication to absolutes: the True, the Good. But it’s captivating. It makes her quick to laughter and gracious, even excited, about changing her mind.

Mani gulps her tea. “Still hot. So now I’ve burned my tongue worrying about the fish.” She glances down. “Didn’t I turn that off?” Her book’s flashing a notification. So’s her watch. So are her shades.

Amir blows on his tea before he sips. “On override? Must be important.”

They read the message, heads hovering together. It’s from the municipality. Beirut Water pilot. First sectors, random pick: Beirut-4, Beirut-9. Water reconnected via mains for 24hrs from 2PM. OK: taps, showers, hoses. Use judgment: industrial electronics.

It takes a moment to sink in.

“Wait. Are you kidding?”

“I had no idea they were ready to try,” Mani says.

They’re both gathering their things, tapping over a tab-close, standing. “Warsaw managed to run a water supply off a condensation system for a week,” Amir says. “But this is Beirut.”

“So what if it is?” Mani says. “Beirut is superb! Beirut has water!”

They’re skipping along the stairs to the boardwalk. A louder murmur than the sea is rising from the seabed café: the municipality message spreading.

They reach Mani’s house in record time. It’s a hot day and Amir is itching from sweat and screen residue with an urgency he’s never felt before.

“Mom? There’s water!” Mani shouts into the dark house.

“No one,” says Amir.

“Ah, she’s got an hour of cross-skilling this afternoon.”

“Should we wash our hands?” Amir pants, chasing Mani up the stairs.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Have to go all the way.” She opens a door in the hall. “In here.”

Amir follows her. She’s planted in front of a bone-dry shower stall. The showerhead is impossibly shiny. There’s still a bit of plastic wrapping on it. It’s an antique, but brand new.

“It’s nearly two o’clock.”

“Are they going to be able to do this?”

“Trust, Amir. Trust.”

“Do you think it might even be heated?”

Mani, scooting out of her swim knickers, raises her eyebrows at him till he shoves his down too. “I bet it is.” She reaches into the shower stall and twists a handle. It screeches with disuse.

They wait.

At exactly two, their ears fill with the furious sound of a rainstorm. Then their own whooping. Mani bounds in without testing the temperature, makes a shrill sound. “It’s warming up!” She reaches out and grabs Amir’s arm. Her grip raises goosebumps. “Come on, get in!”

He does. It’s the most sublime thing he’s ever felt. He puts his hands flat on the wet tiles and closes his eyes under a hammering of water.

“How long can we stay in here?” He manages not to choke. Such a quantity of water is coursing down his face and onto his tongue.

“We’re being good by sharing. Let’s not get out for a while,” Mani says. “Are you crying?”

“Yes!” He opens his eyes to look at her but her face is blurry-wet. “Are you?”

“That’s private,” Mani says. But she wraps her arms around his waist, her belly against his flank, and rests her forehead on his cheek. Their bodies are slippery and warm. Amir hears himself make a purring noise. “Oh. Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Not like the mist,” he says.

“No. Totally different.”

Sharing a patch is encouraged in the misting rooms. They’ve done this many times. They wash each other’s backs and argue about what true pan-humanism might look like. It’s pleasurable. But this—private, warm, untimed, all this water sheeting down—is a whole different register of existence.

“I think I should tell you,” Mani says, “that I’m thinking about sex.”

Amir opens one eye to look at her, can only see the top of her head against his cheek. “Me, too,” he says, almost but not totally redundantly. Mani’s got a good view.

They’ve almost so many times, but never. This moment feels ripe, so very theirs. But it’s also the wrong moment.

“Water, though, Mani! Mindfulness. Presence. This.”

“Of course,” she says.

“We might never be able to have this again.”

“We might never have any given thing again,” Mani says, the pedantic one for a change.

“But all this water,” he says.

“No, you’re right,” says Mani, hushed in the hypnotic roar of the shower. “All this water.”

The Beirut Water pilot is considered only a partial success; it isn’t repeated again for almost two years. By then Mani has left. Amir will remember different selections of things from the day of the pilot depending on how hot or cold his thoughts are, but he’ll cap the memory with this, every single time: the fond way Mani slides her hand against his drenched ribs under the flow of hot water before she entirely lets him go.

Amir sleeps poorly the night before university assignments are due to go out. He knows but does not know-know that he will get into Beirut and Environs, his first choice. His grades are excellent. He’s done twenty percent more personal growth hours than required—he likes doing them—and his civic engagement score is the highest ever for Beirut-3’s Academy. But he’s still nervous. When his watch buzzes at four AM, he startles awake: BEIRUT AND ENVIRONS FUTURIST COLLEGE, UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHY STREAM.

He taps over the notification to Mani with a string of exclamation points, his foggy enthusiasm-slash-relief dampened only slightly when she doesn’t respond right away. Mani’s grades are stellar but her civic engagement score’s not great. She’d wanted Pan-Humanist Polytechnic but Amir has a sinking feeling she’s been assigned to College of the Near East.

He composes a fortifying speech in his head as he gets ready, complete with references to the most famous pan-humanist thinkers who’d attended Near East and their contributions to society. Near East is a great school, and it’s half an hour closer to Beirut and Environs by bullet than Pan-Humanist Polytechnic. Mani will do amazing things wherever she goes.

Amir is fifteen minutes early for the morning’s personal growth session. They’ve only just opened the doors to the Reflection Center, a handful of early risers filtering in under the kaleidoscopic arches, quiet murmurs of conversation as they set up mats and blankets on the centuries-old stone floor. But Mani is already there waiting for him, sitting cross-legged on her mat, gripping her hands together so tight that her fingers are white to the knuckle. Amir is brought up short.

“Mani?” he asks, uncertain.

Wordlessly, she raises her wrist for him to see, the notification still up on the watch screen: INTL UNIVERSITY FOR HUMANISM, MOGADISHU, GLOBAL PROGRESS.

Amir feels his heart go ka-thunk. Global Progress at IUH is . . . he’d thought about applying, more as a lark than anything, but they only accept three students per year, from the entire world, and he never thought . . .

“Wow,” he says, dropping down next to her, voice low so it won’t echo. “Wow, Mani, that’s—I didn’t even know you were going to apply, that’s—amazing. That’s so amazing. I’m so, so proud of you,” he says, and even means it.

Mani’s face is complicated with emotions, flickering by too quickly for Amir to properly catalog them, happy-sad-excited-nervous. “It’s far away,” she says.

“It’s exciting,” he corrects. “Mogadishu, can you even imagine! Maybe I could visit you, one time.” This is unlikely, and they both know it. Mogadishu’s not on a clean air travel vector with Beirut yet. He’d have to do two months of civic engagement and a month of personal growth to balance taking a dirty flight for leisure. Mani musters a smile anyway.

“I’d love that,” she says. In the center of the room, today’s meditation guide is setting up at the podium. The overhead heaters have been switched on, spreading the scent of the cedar beams throughout the space. Mani bumps Amir’s shoulder with her own. Her smile builds into something a little more true. “Come on, though. We both know you’ll be too busy changing the world to think of me at all.”

2: THE MECHANISM, A WORTHWHILE TRADE

It’s not that Mani’s right, because of course Amir thinks of her. He thinks of her every single day, at least at first. But then the water starts coming back to Beirut, and Amir gets swept up in the civic spirit, in the new swell of hope. He switches out of Utopian Philosophy the day after he helps a volunteer group install a kinetic walkway on the university’s main green—they expect to be able to clean-power the quad’s lamps for two hours each night—and enrolls in Urban Design. The idea of regeneration-planning the city is wedged deep under his skin.

After graduation he walks into a competitive apprenticeship with Beirut Grid, where he meets Rafa, who’s working on the Bekaa Valley’s poetry microcity and in the capital on up-skill, and Ester, a third generation Beiruti whose grandmother led the rights movement for domestic workers at the turn of the century. They all fall for each other almost simultaneously.

He’s twenty-two. He’s got an apartment on al-Manara. Through his kitchen window, the lighthouse illuminates the brushstroke froth of the Mediterranean and every time Amir Tarabi sees it he says a silent word of hope for the sea, for it to have body and swell with muscle forever. He remembers his conversation with Mani about the fish, imagines a day in the future when they’ll wade into the surf and see entire schools, silver and bronze and fleeting, with their own eyes.

Amir’s at work late when his watch buzzes. Rafa and Ester. Let us in, we’re at the door to Research-4.

He limps down the hall on pins-and-needles. The recollection that they’d planned a dinner date for tonight—for an hour ago—wallops him right before he releases the door.

Rafa and Ester don’t usually band together against Amir, but here they are, standing side by side wearing exactly the same expression, and it’s not we’re so glad to see you.

Ester raises a package and Amir smells food.

“I don’t remember ever blowing through a date with Amir when I worked at the Grid,” Ester says pointedly to Rafa.

“Hmm, Ester,” Rafa replies theatrically. “Is that because you were respectful of his time and attention? Because you understood that interpersonal relationships require careful cultivation?”

“I’m so sorry,” Amir squeaks, letting them in, putting a hand out for their coats. “Can I explain what happened? Not an excuse, just context.”

Ester looks at Rafa. Rafa looks at Ester. Both of them look skeptically at Amir.

“You guys, I’m sorry. Do you remember my Crowdgrow thing?”

“Where you wanted to foster-home ecoboosted flowers around the neighborhood?” asks Rafa. “You told us about it last month.”

“Right,” says Amir. “We found out today the bio team managed to get a couple of shoots synthesizing air pollutants in the lab. Mesilla asked me to put together a grant application for the project. If it gets funded, she wants me to lead the research team.”

Amir’s fortunate that both his partners know what this means to him. Their faces soften.

“Nice. I knew Mesilla would come around,” Ester says. “You still don’t get to flake on dates.”

In a deserted Beirut Grid kitchenette, Amir fetches plates and Rafa piles herbed eggplant casserole onto them. While they eat Amir projects stained photos of cross-sectioned saplings onto a wall, and Rafa and Ester mmm through his commentary for a few minutes, until Rafa says,

“Amir, love, it’s nine PM and you’re still using words like ‘floral load.’”

“Good point, Rafa,” Ester says. “Amir, tap over projector control.”

The projection cuts to the backdrop of his favorite immersion strategy game.

“I’ve got dessert,” Rafa says. He produces a huge bag of caramel chews and a bottle of whiskey. They clear some space.

“Ooh,” Ester says, confirming a glance-down-pause setting. “We need to be able to snack.”

“Oh no,” Amir says. “This never goes well. It’s an immersion game.”

“Shush,” Rafa says. “It’s destined to be a drunk immersion game.”

Their love is like this, comfortable and forgiving of Amir’s faults. Then, at the beginning of summer, Ester breaks up with Rafa and Amir—no hard feelings, just different needs, different takes on life. It’s not that it doesn’t hurt. Amir and Rafa spend several days moping in each other’s laps, swapping sympathy cuddles. But Amir’s always believed what pan-humanist theory says: that love is respect and collaboration held together with radical acceptance, freely gained and lost.

Amir tells himself to take comfort in this, and does his best to keep an open heart.

The Future Good conference in Hanoi is the biggest of its kind, twelve academic streams and full air travel exemption. Amir and Rafa apply for spots every year and never get them, until they do. They’re giddy on the flight over: neither of them gets to leave Beirut often, and they’ve certainly never had a reason to travel by air together.

They attend the welcome address then spend the allotted cultural hours in the Old Quarter, sitting on low stools with their knees knocking together, feeding each other quail egg bánh bao. Rafa’s old advisor is leading a Q&A session on arts micro-cities, but Rafa and Amir lose track of time strolling the banks of the Red River hand in hand. Once they’ve missed that, there’s no reason to go back to the hotel, so they stay out till three AM sampling sticky rice wine, which everyone tries to warn them is stronger than it tastes.

The next morning’s reclamation technologies forum is something of an accident.

They’re trying—oh, Amir is almost too embarrassed to admit it. They’re trying to find breakfast, and Rafa spies a cute ambiguously-gendered human with multicolored hair and a dapper three-piece suit sneaking out of one of the conference rooms, their arms full of coffee cups and muffins. Amir and Rafa are hungry, so they creep into the back, sights set on the buffet table lining the rear wall, and there is Mani Rizk, making her way to the front podium.

Amir’s entire body floods with adrenaline. He grabs Rafa by the cuff of his sleeve and steers him to one of the chairs. He’s trying to be stealthy but Rafa is mumbling confused protests around a coffee-stirrer and Mani sees them, of course she does, and her face goes taken aback then pleased. And then she does a pretty good job of pretending like she didn’t see Amir, because she’s got a lecture to deliver, after all.

Rafa stares at Amir in confusion for about a minute before his eyebrows go up in a particularly knowing manner. He spends the rest of the lecture elbowing Amir any time Mani says something brilliant, which is about every thirty seconds.

“So?” Rafa asks, delighted, when the lecture is over and they’re waiting at the back of a densely knotted crowd. “Who is she, eh? Political rival? Academic crush? Long lost lover?”

“No,” protests Amir, a little too loudly for the enclosed space. “She’s just—a friend. We were friends, when we were young. That was all.”

If nothing else, Mani seems at least as eager to see him as he is to see her: her attention keeps sliding away from whoever she’s talking with, darting to Amir over and over. He smiles, catching her eye, spreading his hands in an awkward gesture that he hopes will convey both hi and I’ll wait. As soon as the crowd thins enough for her to break away she does so, inching her way to Amir and Rafa with a string of apologies and excuses.

“Amir,” she says, and half-tackles him in a hug.

She’s round and solid and small—it’s weird, Amir hadn’t hit his growth spurt until he was eighteen, and in his memory they’re still like that, him looking up. Now Mani barely comes up to his collarbone. He wraps arms that feel oddly long and lanky around her shoulders, holds her tight.

When she finally lets go her eyes look suspiciously bright, but that might just be the ceiling ambients. “I didn’t know you were coming to my talk,” she says.

“It was kind of an accident,” Amir admits.

Beside him, Rafa groans. “Don’t tell her that!” He turns to Mani. “What he means to say is, he wanted to surprise you. And your lecture was phenomenal.”

“I’m not going to lie to her,” says Amir, affronted. “About the surprise, I mean. Your lecture was phenomenal. I didn’t know you’d been studying hydrophobic materials.”

“I’m part of a water reclamation forum at IUH,” says Mani, and then, to Rafa, “and I’ve known Amir too long to expect flattery. I’m Mani.”

“Rafa Zarkesian. I consult on architecture projects for art spaces in Beirut.”

“Rafa’s my boyfriend,” says Amir. It seems important to mention.

“Oh, I thought I recognized you! I’ve seen your picture on Amir’s stream. How long—”

“Mx Rizk?” cuts in a voice over Mani’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry to intrude, but—”

“No, no, of course,” says Mani. “Sorry, I really should—”

“Yes, of course,” says Amir. “It was good to see you, Mani, I—”

“Tonight,” she interrupts, “after closing remarks. There’s that gallery installation, the interactive city grid? I haven’t been able to see it yet. If you have time, maybe the three of us . . . ”

They’ve got a pre-dawn flight back to Beirut; they’d planned to get to bed early and had contemplated skipping the closing remarks entirely.

“That would be wonderful,” says Rafa. “We wouldn’t miss it.”

That night, it rains in Hanoi, just a light, champagne-fizz mist, but it’s enough to lend a celebratory attitude to the entire city. They find Mani waiting for them outside the installation’s entrance, a crown of water droplets clinging to her hair, reflecting a riot of blinking, changeable light. Amir grips Rafa’s hand a little harder.

“We got lucky,” Mani says, squinting as she tilts her face upward, holding out a cupped palm as if to collect water there. “Good closing note for the conference.”

“Lucky,” echoes Amir, feeling a little dazed.

Rafa bumps his shoulder against Amir’s. “Come on, you two,” he says, already fond. “Let’s go in.”

The installation is a concept city rendered one-fiftieth scale in shimmering interactive holograms and delicate print-resin latticework. The space isn’t enclosed, and the scrim of the rain occasionally does glitchy things to the projections that make Amir groan in solidarity with the event planners. Rafa and Mani are both charmed, however, and Amir can’t help but be delighted by their delight. He gets video of the support cables of a projected suspension bridge twining around Mani’s ankles, insistent and loving as a cat. They take turns decorating Rafa with sprigs of star-like flowers in the constructed wetlands section.

At one point, Amir is walking sandwiched between the two of them, face craned up to ogle the dazzling phyllotactic archway they’re underneath. Rafa reaches down to twine his fingers with Amir’s, and, after a moment that might be hesitation, on the other side Mani reaches down and does the same. Amir can feel his own heartbeat in his palms and he’s sure Mani and Rafa must be able to as well, but neither of them says a thing.

Afterward, they make promises about staying in better contact. There’s a conference in Mogadishu, only six months out; it’s not a perfect fit for his research, but maybe Amir can swing an invite. It’s ridiculous, really, that Amir hasn’t yet seen Mani’s new city, Mani’s new life. Mani’s so busy—they’re all so busy, but they can message more, at least. Maybe even holochat, sometimes. They work in related fields, after all; it’s their responsibility to foster international communication and collaboration. Plus, they miss each other. There’s no reason to fall so out of touch.

They say all this, and mean it. But, well. Life.

3: EACH BRICK LAID THOUSANDS OF TIMES OVER

The lab at Beirut Grid successfully demonstrates at-quantity ecoboosting in model organisms two weeks before Amir turns twenty-eight, which is a pretty good early birthday present, as far as he’s concerned. To celebrate, Mesilla takes Amir to the botanical garden in Rmeil to evaluate options for the Crowdgrow pilot; Hanne from New Projects tags along.

The conservatory curator herself gives them a guided tour. She leads them down dense green walkways, extolls the growth patterns of crawler vines and Chouf evergreens, both commendably hardy species, survivors of the worst of the water scarcity. Mesilla seems invested—she examines a potted evergreen the curator’s handed her, sinks a finger in the soil—but Hanne is paying zero attention, cleaning up her notifications on Impulse or something. Then, out of nowhere Hanne blurts,

“Oh, Mesilla. They just announced funds for a world-first Wet City implementation.”

The crinkly cellophane of the potted evergreen goes still. The curator says, “Anything else I can show you?” into the silence; Amir babbles about high-altitude crawler vines. They move on to another greenhouse.

In line for lunch, after, Amir waits for Mesilla to pick his brain. He’s all but decided he wants to try ecoboosting crawler vines, but wouldn’t mind talking it through.

“So,” Mesilla says as soon as they’ve found a sunny patch of grass on Achrafieh green for a picnic, “There’s a Wet City funding opportunity? When’s the deadline?”

“One month,” says Hanne. “Not much time to put together a proposal.”

Amir puffs out his breath, struggling to rearrange his thoughts. “Has anyone proven the water reclamation wings would work at that scale? Wasn’t that the sticking point in Colson and Smith’s paper?”

Hanne jabs the chunk of carrot on the end of her fork at Amir. “Right. But the All People funds were greenlit on the back of a rebuttal slash instruction manual by—” Hanne’s eyes blink away as she navigates Impulse. “By Sameen Jaladi at IUH Mogadishu.” The name of Mani’s school fills Amir with a mixture of possessiveness and pride.

Amir can think of twenty reasons to be wary: the technical challenge of large-scale moisture collection, yes, but also overheating the built habitat, uncontrollable wet seasons, mold and mosquitos and respiratory conditions. That’s not to mention his immediate questions around clean-powering the wings and purging waste bays. He puts his sandwich in its basket, turns to Mesilla.

“It’s a lot of resources toward an unproven concept. We’d have to divert money and energy we could spend in demonstrably useful directions,” he says. Like on Crowdgrow, he doesn’t say.

“But in theory,” Mesilla says. “Every metropolis a little green oasis. Latticed condensation wings, clean water from the air. Theoretically, no shortages ever again.”

She unwraps a bit more sandwich in a studied way: bean protein fillet in minted yogurt sauce, her usual. “Can someone get me the Jaladi paper and the bid guidelines?”

Amir’s already poring through Impulse. He taps the documents over to Mesilla with two hard blinks. “They’re with you.”

They walk back to the Beirut Grid offices talking about Amir’s birthday plans—Joud’s taking him on an overnight bullet to Damascus; their first trip together as a couple—but the lunch conversation is still humming under his skin.

Two days later, when Mesilla pulls Amir and Hanne aside and asks them to put together a Wet City bid, it doesn’t surprise him.

It’s a hot day with a really crappy clean air index. Everyone’s been permitted to stay home but a few of them are in, including Amir, because his apartment was so hot he feared he might melt into his armchair. The heat reminds him of sitting in a seabed café with Mani, which of course reminds him of the Future Good conference with Mani, which takes Amir’s thoughts nowhere helpful at all.

The Impulse note arrives from Mesilla in two parts. The first, short, buzzes at his wrist and pings urgently in his display. It’s to Amir and Hanne, two words: We won!

He expects excitement but feels only bone-tiredness.

The second part of Mesilla’s note is a travel itinerary on wider distribution. The subject line makes Amir’s body do weird things: Academics from IUH Mogadishu. He taps it open on his wrist, as if he needs to see this in physical space, and sure enough:

Jaladi, Sameen

Proctor, Trevor

Gupta, Jan-Helga

Rizk, Mani

“Shit,” he croaks. His side of the office is empty. He can hear the descending xylophone of the bullet zipping along its girders through the open window, and nearer, a heat-oppressed bird call that sounds more tired than he does.

He blinks up his conversation thread with Mani. Their last exchange: Happy new year! from her to him, half a year ago; Happy new year!! from him to her a couple hours later, and since then, nothing. He winces.

Beirut???? he taps over.

Mani’s response is almost instant. Leave in a week.

!!! Amir sends. His belly is one big knot.

Took the effusive punctuation straight out of my mouth, she replies.

Amir wrangles his way into airport chaperone duty for the IUH academics. At Future Good, running into Mani had been a sudden shock; the week he waits for her plane to arrive his nerves are like a leaky faucet. He can’t eat properly but finds himself stocking his pantry with everything he remembers Mani loving: carob molasses, salted pili nuts, a Bekaa Valley Merlot, cashew feta cheese. Joud tries to season a stew with the good cinnamon sticks Amir picked up at al-Raouché market for spiced tea and Amir won’t let them.

“I’m saving those,” Amir says, guiltily filing away that there should be a Joud-him-Mani dinner involving cinnamon sticks. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. The plane from Mogadishu, oblivious and probably flying over Independent Greenland on other business, is killing him.

Then he’s at the airport and his Impulse tells him the flight from Mogadishu’s arrived safely. Mani has sent him her Impulse geo, which means he can tell exactly when she’s walking through customs and toward the public area.

He distracts himself by trying to calculate how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other using mental math. His Impulse helper picks up on his saccades. You seem to be working something out. Can I help? Amir moans and blinks it away. He finishes the calculation—1,513 days—but now he can barely breathe. And then the arrivals door pistons up and a column of passengers is behind it. He sees Mani in the throng, and she sees him back.

It’s not the moment he’s been imagining. Mani’s engrossed in conversation with her colleagues. She weaves them toward Amir and he wants to hug her but the fact that he’s on official duty—that there are three field-pioneering academics he’s never met studying him—plants him to his spot.

“Hi,” Mani says.

“Hi,” Amir says. Not wow, you and me in Beirut, like when we were seventeen. Which is what he’s thinking.

“Sameen, Trevor, Helga, Amir,” Mani says, and then there’s a blur and they’re all on the bullet in the private compartment Amir booked and everyone is staring out the window at this city they’ve missed or never seen before and the conversation turns to how wonderfully Beirut will function as a Wet City.

He tries not to catch Mani’s eye too much, but when he does she gives him a conspiratorial smile he remembers. He thinks of the wine and the cheese. They’ll get loads of time together later.

Except, the next day Mesilla kicks off the Wet City stuff in earnest. And Amir and Mani start to argue. A lot.

In some ways it’s not new. They’d argued as kids, the minutiae of pan-humanist theory over hot black tea: whether animals deserved more pronounced protection than plants, whether population control was ever justified, whether power should in all cases decentralize in the direction of local communities.

But now the stakes are different. They’re different. The worst of the arguments take place during project meetings, in front of Hanne and Caveg and the rest of the team. Amir leaves meeting after meeting feeling battered. The way Mani seems to have a reassuring study on hand to refute each of his worries makes him clench his jaw in a very uncivic way. He’s so embarrassed by the incessant jaw clenching he grows his beard out to hide it.

They avoid casual conversation for the better part of two weeks. Amir starts to hate going to work, which has never happened before. Then, one Monday, Mani stops at Amir’s station, gets close to see if he’s working in Impulse, and he can smell her perfume, mineral and saline and only the slightest bit sweet.

“Help me draft an advisory? If you’re not busy?” she asks. She lifts a satchel. “I brought us tea from kiosk auntie downstairs.”

“Advisory?” Amir’s immediately on edge. “Do you need planning language in it? Can Caveg help?”

Mani’s eyebrows come down. “I don’t really need planning language in it. I just miss doing things together. I thought there’d be a lot more of that.”

“Yeah,” Amir says, and stands to follow. He remembers following her that first time, in the misting rooms. He doesn’t understand himself. He’s been waiting to have Mani back for a decade—not a vague wistfulness, but an active full-body sort of waiting, if he’s really examining it. And now she’s right here, and he can’t bring himself to speak to her without getting upset. The funny thing is that he’s not even angry at her. It’s something more like bedazzlement. She’s a sun that blasts his vision into afterimages.

“Or,” Amir says in the corridor, “we could go to our old café? It won’t be too busy right now.”

Mani nods decisively. “Let’s go. Sameen will happily take the kiosk auntie tea.”

The bullet ride is mainly Mani pointing out new art installations and green spaces and Amir telling her what year they were built and why. He’s good at this. He does almost all of them without Impulse, but confesses when he has to look one up. Mani gives him grief for not knowing them all by heart.

“Everyone told me, oh, Amir, Beirut Grid’s own whizkid. A sort of city-planning savant. I guess I expected more,” she teases.

“No one said that,” Amir says. “And even if they did, IUH has given you impossible expectations.”

“Pan-humanism is all about realizing a civilizational system that game theory would say is impossible, right?”

“Right,” says Amir. “But there’s plain old pan-humanist theory impossible and then there’s IUH Mogadishu impossible.”

The bullet slows and stops beside their old café. They go down the boardwalk to their usual table, tap across an order of tea, and settle into their respective chairs. “Wow,” says Amir.

“Swap adult clothes for swim knickers and shave the beard and it could be a decade ago.”

Amir lifts their order of tea off a tray bot. “Were we that familiar with each other? Hard to believe.”

Mani takes her glass from him. “Oh yeah. We were ridiculous. Like one person in two bodies, back then.”

Amir startles in a way that melts him into himself, like his chest is swallowing the rest of him, swallowing his words. Mani’s always been the forthright one, but they both know he’s more sentimental, and he’s afraid that if he says anything now it will be too much.

“You don’t like the beard?” he manages.

Mani reaches across and strokes his cheek against the grain. “I don’t not like it,” she says.

Amir shakes his head at her. She withdraws her hand. He’d forgotten how transparent they were to each other. Are, to each other.

“How’s Rafa?” Mani says, stirring her tea.

“We broke up last year.” He doesn’t bother waving it off. Mani will know it was a big deal.

Mani’s silent a bit, then: “I just ordered you a glass of ‘arak.”

Amir laughs and puts his head on his arms. “It’s two PM But thank you.” Seagulls croon from the frames of the yellow beach umbrellas. “This Wet City thing, Mani,” he starts. Doesn’t know how to finish.

“You don’t believe in it,” says Mani.

Amir grimaces. “That obvious?”

“No.” This should be reassuring, but Mani’s turning her teacup in slow circles, not meeting Amir’s eyes. “Amir-with-his-heart-not-in-it works with more passion than most humans on their best days. But I can tell.”

This should also be reassuring. Instead Amir feels irritation spiking in his chest. “I’ve spent every moment of my workday for the past six days chasing down permitting documentation for an experimental metallofoam that’s going to be used in less than two percent of the load-bearings struts of the wing structure,” he says. “It’s not exactly how I envisioned my career path. But I’m doing it. It’s not fair to call me out for lack of enthusiasm.”

“I wasn’t calling you out,” says Mani. “I think you’re doing good work.”

“Yeah,” says Amir. The ‘arak comes. He plucks it off the tray bot and sets it next to his teacup, aligning them carefully side by side. He can tell Mani is waiting for him to say something else. He shouldn’t. He should try to steer the conversation back toward safety. “Do you remember,” he says, “the Crowdgrow project I told you about during the Future Good conference?”

“You were really excited about it,” Mani says. “It seemed promising.”

“It was. The closed-room tests showed a fifteen percent improvement in air quality, and we had almost a thousand households signed up as testers. And we’ve applied for continuation funding every open cycle since. Not a lot—just enough for a pilot study. Less than we spend in administrative overhead on the Wet City project every week.”

“But no luck?” asks Mani.

“But no luck,” agrees Amir.

“Amir,” says Mani, but there’s too much pity in the way she says his name.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Amir says. “That it would be a waste. That Wet City is a better use of resources.”

“Yes,” says Mani. “I do think that.” The way she says this could have been kind, but it isn’t.

“You’re always so sure of yourself,” says Amir. The way he says this could have been a compliment, but it isn’t. “Is it ego?”

“Is it jealousy?” Mani shoots back.

Amir feels that familiar muscle in his jaw tic. He takes a careful, measured sip of ‘arak, as if that will hide it. “If this goes wrong—” he begins, once he’s sure his voice will come out steady.

“Oh, please,” interrupts Mani. “You’re going to tell me to be afraid of trying something really big, really innovative, because there’s a chance we’ll end up looking like fools? Now that’s ego.”

“It’s not about personal reputation,” Amir says. “It’s about the wasted money, the time, the emotional investment—do you know how demoralizing a project like this can be for a community if it fails—”

“It won’t fail.”

“You can’t know that.”

“We’ve done all the tests and simulations and proof-of-concept models we can, Amir. The only way to be any more sure is to let someone else go first, and I’m not willing to do that.”

“Ego,” says Amir.

“So what,” Mani snaps, sounding genuinely angry now, “we’d all be better off staying in our backyards planting mutant daisies? Grow up, Amir. You have the chance to work on something that really, actually matters here, and you’re too scared to take it.”

If it were Amir, he would regret such harsh words immediately, start falling all over himself to apologize before the sting had a chance to land.

But it’s Mani. And Mani always says what she means.

Amir looks down at the now-empty glass cradled in his fingers. “It’s getting late,” he says. “We should probably be getting back.”

Mani stands, the legs of her chair protesting loudly against the concrete. “We get this chance—” she stops. “I can’t understand why you’re making it so hard.”

He should argue. Instead, he orders another ‘arak, and doesn’t let himself watch her walk to the bullet station.

4: THAT EACH OF US INVESTS THE LABOR

It’s not that Amir and Mani stay angry a whole year and a half. Something that dire would’ve spurred Amir to action, forced him to have the trembly, awkward conversation that showed them the way back to exchanges of essay clippings and meandering debates and maybe even limb-jumble lie-downs after a gigantic dinner cooked together.

They are not angry: they are too intelligent for anger, Amir thinks, or too proud. They’re just hardened to each other. Their words bounce, too few absorbing. Their lunches together have one too many silences that call for a new conversation thread, and when congratulations are due—as when the first wing is drone-dropped into place at Martyrs’ Square and measurements show promising vapor transfer into the condensation bays at the base—their hugs are guarded and bodiless.

The Wet City project hits miraculously few snags, but once or twice Amir catches a design flaw that makes Mani give him a deep, reckoning look.

“I’m just doing some calculations in Impulse,” Amir says. “The Beirut-3 east wing might not come out inwardly reflective the way we want, with the new bug-in-amber angled like that?” Bug-in-amber is their shorthand for the art pieces they’ll embed in each translucent wing, one of Amir’s favorite streams of the project. He taps across his calculations.

“Whizkid,” is all Mani says, and Amir almost asks if she wants to grab dinner with him after work. He doesn’t. He gets better at finding flaws, though. There are times when flaws are all he sees.

Post-water-crisis Beirut is mesmerizing, boisterous street markets by day and elaborate street parties by night.

Amir and Joud meet every couple of weeks to trawl the artisans’ quarter in Nouveau Centre-Ville, Amir on the lookout for sustainable art references for the much larger bug-in-amber pieces to come, Joud hoping to enrich their collection of silk and brocade Lebanese abayas. They are especially taken by androgynous styles that combine an embroidered abaya tunic with a shirwal bottom. They stroke the parchment packets, their fingers lingering on the teardrop calligraphy of the artisan’s sigil. The two of them often return to Amir’s apartment with towering ice cream cones, and Joud tells him what they’ve learned about tonight’s artisan on Impulse, and they have the sort of voracious, aching sex that comes after absence.

“How is Mani?” Joud asks tonight, nestled against the hollow of Amir’s chest. Joud frequently asks about Mani. They know, but their affection for Amir is so confident, so stable, that the question can come right after intimacy and carry no trace of malice or envy.

“Today she proposed a walkway up the side of the sea-facing wings for a view of the sunset,” Amir says. “And yesterday she gave a site tour to a delegation that arrived two days early from Singapore.”

Joud hums in appreciation. They always do. Joud loves expansively, navigating a multitude of relationships with a grace and wholeheartedness that makes Amir feel he’s never absorbed a moment of personal growth.

“You don’t have to indulge me, you know,” Amir says. He presses three fingertips against the place where Joud’s temple meets soft brown hair, scratches them there tenderly. “You and I have been in each other’s lives two years and I’ve never been—I mean, Mani’s always been—”

Joud stills his lips with their cheek. “It doesn’t bother me, darling. What I figure is some people stand beside each other, and some people end up locked together,” Joud laces their own hands tight, to the knuckles. “And I don’t think the latter is better.”

“You’re right, love,” Amir says to Joud, who smells like green branches and clay and sex. In that moment the appellation feels miraculous and genuine on his tongue. “In many ways it’s worse.”

There are times when hitting the forecasted Wet City launch date seems like a pipe dream, but as more and more pieces slot into place, it starts to become attainable, and then an unavoidable reality. Twenty hyper-efficient months after Hanne’s distracted aside in the conservatory, the first wings come online; the engineers begin their final stress tests; the notion of a citywide festival around the launch begins to coalesce. And then, with three and a half months to the launch date, Mesilla calls Amir into her office.

Two of their artists won’t have their bugs-in-amber finished by the festival and Amir’s been heading up the effort to ensure their temporary prototypes are materially similar enough for the engineers to work with; he assumes this is what Mesilla wants to talk about. Instead he’s greeted by a stranger. “Amir,” Mesilla says, “I wanted you to meet one of my oldest colleagues: Adah Bertonneau.”

Adah Bertonneau is even taller than Amir, with impressive cheekbones and two-hand-clasp handshake. “A pleasure to finally meet you,” Adah says, their accent a rich, rolling thing Amir can’t quite place.

Amir smiles, puzzled. “Finally?”

“Read your Crowdgrow grant application five years ago now,” says Adah. “Told myself I’d make Mesilla introduce us if I ever made it to this part of the globe. And here I am.”

“Oh.” Amir resists the inclination to try to look up Adah on Impulse—he’s still not very good at interfacing with it discreetly. “Well, unfortunately, we haven’t had the opportunity to prove out the research, but I hope that one day—”

“Mx Tarabi,” interrupts Adah. “That is, of course, precisely why I’m here to talk to you.”

Adah Bertonneau, it turns out, works at the Nantes Center for Naturalist Studies. The Center is neither large nor prestigious (Amir gives up and looks it up on Impulse), but their work seems well-respected enough, and a few of their recent papers have appeared in journals Amir would have once given his eyeteeth to be published in. Adah’s lab is new, getting off the ground with an extremely generous grant from France Centrale, and it seems, more or less, that they’re looking for ways to spend it.

“One must make a splash early,” says Adah, peering at Amir seriously over the rim of their teacup. “We’re frontloading, trying to get several programs up and running right out the door. Not all of them will work out in the long term, of course, but I’d guarantee funding for the full two-year period you requested, regardless of the findings. Between you and me, though? I have this . . . call it a premonition, that what you’ve proposed is going to work.”

Of course it’s a dream come true. And of course the timing couldn’t be worse.

“I wish I could tell you to take your time making a decision,” continues Adah, “but the start date’s in a month, and I’m afraid it’s not flexible.” They want to do the study with a particular crawler vine, Adah explains, whose cuttings are most viable in the fall. One week, and they’ll need a yes or no, “else there won’t be enough time to get the paperwork in order, you understand.” Amir understands. Hands are shaken. Mesilla walks Amir out.

“Take the rest of the day,” she says. “I—well, I don’t know whether to say I’m sorry or congratulations. I know it’s a lot at once.”

Amir very nearly just asks her to tell him what to do, but she seems to read this on his face. “We can talk it over tomorrow, if you need. But sleep on it. Before you start cataloging opinions.”

Amir nods. It’s smart. Mesilla’s always smart. He goes to his office, gathers his things, does his best to slip out unnoticed.

Except he runs into Mani waiting for the elevator.

“Hey,” she says, smiling a little awkwardly, that try-hard friendliness. Then she spots his messenger bag. “Headed out?”

It’s not even ten in the morning. Amir hits the down button again—the Grid’s elevators are vintage, which is a cute way of saying unbearably slow. The doors are mirrored; Amir read somewhere that mirroring elevator doors reduced complaints about wait times, because people got carried away admiring themselves. He wonders if it’s true. He hopes it’s not. He thinks it probably is.

“Mani,” he says, “I’m quitting.”

Mani’s reflection stares at him.

The doors bing open.

Amir steps into the elevator; Mani takes an extra second to step in after him.

“Explain,” Mani says. “Now? Are you serious?”

Amir is serious. He only knew it as he said the words aloud. “Skive off today?” he asks Mani, pretending he doesn’t hear the note of pleading in his own voice. “I could really use a drink.”

They end up going back to his. They take the bullet train in silence—it’s mostly empty at this odd hour of the morning, but the tunnel-rush of wind makes holding a conversation difficult. The ride’s only five minutes, but it’s long enough to put Amir on edge. He stares down at his interlaced fingers, bracketed by his knees. There’s an empty seat between him and Mani, because there was space to spread out, and why would they not? After all, these days, it’s not like they’re—well. It’s barely like they’re friends.

Mani has never been to Amir’s apartment. He realizes this as he keys into the front door; they’ve tried, a few times, vague agreements about dinner that fell through at the last moment, meetings that wound up getting moved to workspaces with excuses of better bullet access. It should make him nervous, he thinks. He should be worrying about the fact that none of his coffee mugs match, or whether he left toothpaste flecks on the bathroom mirror that morning. But he isn’t nervous. Mani knows all the worst parts of him already.

The Bekaa Valley Merlot is still at the back of the cupboard, because Amir’s life is a joke. He uncorks it and pours them both generous glasses, and settles himself next to her at the small kitchen table. “There’s a research institute in Nantes,” he says. “They want to fund a Crowdgrow roll-out.”

Mani looks stunned, just for a second, then raises her wineglass. “This is now a toast,” she says. “To the long overdue recognition of my brilliant friend Amir Tarabi.”

Amir tilts his glass toward hers. “Thing is,” he says, “I’d have to start basically immediately. A few weeks. I wouldn’t be here to close out Wet City. I wouldn’t be able to make the launch festival.”

“ . . . oh,” says Mani. She lowers her glass. “Damn.”

“Right.” Amir lowers his glass, too. He’s not quite sure how to look at Mani, so he focuses on the wineglass, turning it in careful circles, watching the light refract. “I mean, it’s not the end of the world,” he says. “I’ll need to pass some stuff off sort of hastily, but let’s be honest, I’m no longer really essential personnel. And I don’t care about the festival. It’s just . . . ”

Amir stops, looks up. He doesn’t know how to read Mani’s expression. Complicated, sad. A little like how she looks when she’s working her way through a thorny problem. She reaches forward, finding his fingers with her own, carefully unlacing them from the stem of the wineglass. She holds his hand there in the warm cradle of her palms, running her thumb in a discovering sort of way across the ridgeline below his knuckles, as if she were going to read his fortune.

“It would have been nice,” says Mani, “to have had more time.”

“Mani,” says Amir, helplessly. She looks up, looks at him. He feels on display, as if she’s taking inventory of him, all the things that are different, all the things that are the same. He swallows. “I want—” he says.

Mani reaches up, running her fingertips through the scruff of his beard, bracing her thumb against his cheekbone. “Come here,” she says. He goes, letting her guide him forward until she finds his mouth with hers, and kisses him.

His mind goes blank. He’s a teenager again, unsure what to do with his hands. He loves her so much he thinks he might fly into a million separate parts.

She undresses him first, won’t let him help, won’t let him touch, torturous slowness as she undoes every button, every hook. She runs her fingertips over all the planes and angles of him, presses teasing thumbs into the hollows by his hipbones and kisses him until he feels drunk with it. Then she lets him do the same to her, and she takes his hands and shows him where to touch, and he thinks this might be the most beautiful thing he’s ever done.

Afterward, they lie tangled together, exhausted, belly-to-flank, Amir’s cheek pressed against the top of Mani’s head. The warm reality of her, the slow swell-and-recede of her body against his, is almost too much to stand.

“I’m going to miss you,” Amir says. “I’m going to miss you so much. It wasn’t enough time.”

He feels her pause, then twist to look at him. “I shouldn’t have said that, earlier,” she says, very serious. “We can’t think that way. We have to say to ourselves, this was right. This was exactly enough.”

Amir shuts his eyes, tips his head forward to rest against hers, and tries to believe it.

He keeps his eyes closed until they both fall asleep.

5: THE BEAM COMES ON, ILLUMINATING US ALL

Amir arrives in France just after dawn on a foggy fall day. His out-breaths add frills of fog to Nantes’ thick cloak of it. He keeps his Impulse off after landing. Sounds muffled, skin damp, his first impression of his new home is of being underwater.

He explores the city on foot, stopping for croissants then brioches then tartines. At sunset, he sits on the lawn of the Château des Ducs de Bretagne and tosses a bag of soy chips to two mallards and their ducklings paddling in the castle’s moat. Impulse would help him form a mental map, but he knows if he turns it on he’s going to look for a message from Mani, and if there’s none he’s going to be heartsick. And if there is one he’s going to be heartsick.

Three things cycle through Amir’s mind: first, how to make the most of this opportunity; second, how desperately he needs to recenter himself in personal growth practice; third, the problem he’s had for most of his life, which is that he can’t stop thinking about Mani.

Amir wakes up with the sun on his first morning in his Nantes apartment and he takes creaking steps that raise dust motes along the woodgrain floorboards. At the window he turns Impulse on and his heart rattles the split-second before his unreads appear.

Nothing from Mani.

Amir starts to compose a message. “Hi! Nantes is beautiful. There’s a duckling in the castle moat who has learned to swim alongside—” then he closes his eyes, hard, and deletes. When he opens them the weathervane across from his window has flipped 180 degrees and the sun is a blur of honey.

The Crowdgrow pilot takes place along two residential streets in Nantes-2, just north of the Gare de Nantes. Amir hand-delivers cuttings of ecoboosted crawler vine to each of the experiment’s participants.

“Je vous attends toute la matinée,” says one girl when Amir puts the little red planter pot in her hands. Her tight cornrows have been braided into an orchid-shaped bun on top of her head. She takes him round to the back garden, shows him the sheltered hole in the soil she’s dug. There is so much care in her actions that Amir’s belief in—dedication to—Crowdgrow redoubles just like that.

“Mes mamans disent que le ciel sera plein d’oiseaux,” she says.

“Yes,” Amir replies through Impulse. “As many birds as the sky can handle.”

Nantes is on a clean air travel vector with Beirut, so Joud comes to visit the week before Amir presents the results of the pilot to a delegation from Nantes’ municipality. They go to Nantes’ shipyard island, go on mech-AI safari. They feed the giant hydraulic elephants from a tray of silicon peanuts, and the elephants regurgitate silicon caricatures of Amir and Joud. Joud’s is great: an impossibly vertical cone of hair, small ears rendered as notches. Amir’s own caricature makes him feel every year as old as his thirty-two, and older.

He wraps their portraits up and tucks them in his bag, presses Joud close. Arm in arm, they survey nearby menus on Impulse until Amir finds one that does a much-lauded synth-protein steak with cassava frites. They wash it down with crisp, sweet Breton cider.

“To new avenues,” Joud says.

“To the companions who walk our lives with us,” Amir says. The words are from a passage Mani once clipped from a poem. He clinks the neck of his bottle against Joud’s.

The first results come back from Crowdgrow in Nantes-2. The air quality in that sector has improved a modest part per billion, but what’s really encouraging is that all the crawler vines have survived. Many have gained a meter or more in length. The pilot expands to a citywide project, Adah’s grant money matched by government funds.

Amir comes home late one evening from overseeing a plant-in at a primary school, a little dazed from hours of sun and excitable schoolchildren, but in good spirits. He’s dirt all over, ground into the new callouses on his palms and spilling from the hems of his trousers. The soil here is still toxic, and he should probably wash it off before doing anything else, but his diminutive wrought-iron balcony gets an excellent view of the sunset, and he can’t help but peel off his shoes and socks and sit down at the wooden folding table to watch it. The last flash of sunlight is winking out on the windows of the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre et Saint-Paul when his Impulse pings with a call from Mani.

He answers without thinking—or, he answers before he can let himself think about it. “Mani?” he says, a question, like it could be anyone else.

“Hi,” says definitely-Mani. “Are you—”

“Free,” says Amir, straightening a little, though she hasn’t initiated holo. “I mean, I just got home from work. I was just—” He stumbles. Watching the sunset feels too corny. “Relaxing,” he finishes.

“Good,” says Mani. “I saw on the Beirut Grid announcement stream that your project won that funding extension from the city. Wanted to say congratulations. So, well.” She laughs a little. “Congratulations.”

Amir sinks back into his chair. “Thanks,” he says. “You too. I watched your speech at the launch ceremony. It was really beautiful.”

“Thank you,” says Mani. “I read your message to the team.”

He’d figured she had, even when she didn’t respond. He’s not sure what to say to this.

“You should have been there,” Mani says.

The morning of the Wet City launch festival in Beirut, they’d gotten the first full bloom on a crawler vine in Nantes-2, a pale blue flower veined with green, nearly the size of Amir’s head. The stem wasn’t robust yet; the smallest breeze set the blossom trembling, like any moment it would come free and drop to the earth. Amir had spent most of the morning crouched in the dewy garden, waiting to see if it would last. “That’s kind of you,” says Amir, “but you were fine without me.”

The connection goes so silent Amir has to check Impulse for the activity blip.

“It’s been harder,” says Mani, “than I thought it would be.”

Amir closes his eyes. He wants to say: I would come back if you asked me to. He wants to say: I wouldn’t have left in the first place. Instead he says, “Mani.”

“I love you,” says Mani. “Even if we never quite figure out what that should look like. You know that, right?”

The breeze is sharpening with night, carrying scents of yeast and toffee from the bakery on street level. The latticework of the metal balcony presses geometry into the soles of Amir’s feet. He can hear the soft hush of Mani’s breath, in and out.

“Yes,” says Amir. “I know.”

Over the next seven years, Nantes becomes a garden city. Every green space is verdant with ecoboosted flora from Amir’s program; parks and groves are remade from concrete lots and musky alleys. The skies, as one little girl had once hoped, are full of birds.

Amir spends one of those years working with his team on tweaks to the Crowdgrow flora to ensure the boosted species are hospitable to native ones, and that summer there are small populations of roe deer, and bushes of garden aster, and swallows, and a sighting of a pair of endangered partridges on the steps of the Théâtre Graslin.

Mani stays in Beirut after Wet City launches, takes up a just-formed position as Beirut’s Minister for Enrichment. Amir pieces together through her understatements and Impulse research that this means she oversees almost every program in Beirut that impacts quality of life—standards for natural lighting in modular housing, breeding programs for Mediterranean loggerheads, the national poetry curriculum. He’s immensely proud and touched.

Amir thinks about surprising Mani in Beirut for her thirty-sixth birthday; he’s been back home twice while Mani was away on diplomatic visits, just bad luck. He asks circumspect questions to make sure she’ll be in town, buys a ticket. The day before the flight he gets scary news: one of the Crowdgrow fern populations has been proliferating invasively, has killed off a native garden. Amir gets on a bullet to Nantes-11 and he’s so nervous about the clean-up operation he doesn’t see the inside of his apartment for three days.

They control the fern; he misses his chance to visit Mani.

Time goes so quickly those years. But he spends more evenings sitting on his balcony watching the sunset than not.

It’s Adah who brings Amir the news personally: they’ve received an application to start a Crowdgrow program in Beirut.

It’ll be the seventeenth spin-off of the original Nantes pilot—the first three Amir went to oversee himself, spending months in Bruges, Liverpool, Alexandria. After that, they’d developed a formula, easy for new cities to follow with only a few weeks’ oversight from Amir’s staff.

“It’s below your pay grade,” says Adah. “But I thought you might want to take this one on yourself. Chance to catch up with old friends. But we’ll send someone else if you’re too busy.”

Amir is definitely too busy. “Don’t send anyone else,” he says. “I’d love to go.”

Amir calls Mani that afternoon as he’s walking home from work, feeling like something in him’s unfurling in the late autumn sun. “I hear someone in Beirut ordered some mutant daisies,” he says the moment she picks up.

“Smug,” Mani says. “I was so pleased when the proposal came through.”

“Me too. And, um. Adah asked if I wanted to come do the kickoff myself.”

There’s a pause. “What did you say?”

Amir huffs. “I said yes, obviously! What do you think?” He scruffs his knuckles over the stubble on his jawline, tries to keep his voice casual.

“I’ll clear my calendar,” Mani says.

Amir’s Impulse pings with an unread as his plane begins to descend into Beirut. Joud. Meet at the rock wharf by al-Raouché, bring a warm coat.

It’s five AM and Amir’s had no sleep. He’s really getting too old for no sleep. But the trembly adrenaline of night flights and home is a jolt in his chest, so he goes, his luggage tracking him at a polite distance.

The wind is insistent and briny. Amir seals his coat to his chin. There’s a huge crowd at the wharf, and food kiosks, and banners, a bunch of institutional logos he doesn’t recognize, and one he does—Beirut Grid’s.

Joud finds him where he’s paused at a corniche railing trying to work out the reason for the commotion. He hasn’t seen Joud in two years, not since Joud moved into a rundown mountain house in Ehden with three partners and their five little ones to begin hand-renovating the house to ecopositive standards.

They look great. Sun-hardened, their hair a wiry nest of salt and pepper, clipped a little closer than Amir remembers.

“There’s a team from Beirut Grid here,” Joud says when they hug. “And a couple of my kids. I want you to meet them. Leave the luggage, come.”

Joud leads Amir into the wharf and onto the rocks beyond, where adults and children are queued up to use what look like fishing poles. There’s a din of excitement and an occasional whoop of triumph.

Amir is stunned. “Are they fishing?”

Joud laughs, just as three little humans run into their arms shouting, “We fed one!”

“Show Amir,” Joud says, and a kid with the same shy grin as their parent holds out a glossy pellet cradled in their palm.

“Vitamin feed to correct an imbalance in the ecosystem,” says Joud. “It’s civic engagement, a bit of publicity. There’s a water-soluble version they’ll pump in after.”

“Joud?” asks the smallest child. “Are they going to come live with us?” They glance at Amir. “We have enough water for them to do a mineral soak once a week too.”

“He’s welcome to come live with us,” Joud says, and Amir forces himself not to look away from the softness on Joud’s face.

“Amir Tarabi! Of all the fish-feeding parties in all the towns . . . ” says someone behind him. He turns around to see Mesilla carrying a pail, and behind her Hanne and Caveg.

“This is crazy,” Amir says, and gathers them into a hug. “I just got off the plane from France. How . . . ”

“Maybe not totally a coincidence.” Joud winks at him. “I thought Mani would be here too. But her assistant told me she’s working a short day today, had to wrap things up at the ministry.”

Hanne cracks a joke about Amir still overthinking everything, except now in French, and it’s one of those moments younger Amir wouldn’t have believed in: like the universe has turned its spotlight on him, for a fleeting instant, and instructed him to rest.

Eventually, the trajectory of the future will look like this: some years, Amir in Beirut, guest lecturing at Pan-Humanist Polytechnic, consulting on the new ecoboosted installation in Zahleh, taking a sabbatical to work on a collection of essays about crowdsourcing civic change. Some of those years, Mani in Beirut too, but others, Mani in the Arctic, Mani back in Mogadishu, Mani on the Gulf Coast. Once, eighteen glorious months both in Beirut, a routine of dinner parties at Mani’s girlfriend’s loft apartment, and stargazing every third weekend during Beirut’s Dark Skies nights: picnic blankets and wine, Amir’s head in Mani’s lap, Mani’s fingers in his hair. Once, ten long years where the vagaries of circumstance mean they don’t manage to see each other at all.

Eventually, all the days in a human life, whether or not they feel like enough.

But for now, all the hard, gut-ache hope and all the pragmatics and all the inexorable decades coalesce like this: Amir steps out of a Beirut hotel two streets up from his old al-Manara apartment holding a potted Crowdgrow cutting, and points himself toward Stella Kadri Square.

Mani messages him just as he spots the showcase Wet City wings fanning out in the distance, describing the perimeter of the brand new square. Their bugs-in-amber make them into a museum of petrified art. He saw hundreds of the wings from the air and he’d seen the beachfront ones from a distance on his brief visits home, but now they strike him. It’s like walking toward the foot of a mountain, that same organic rightness of approaching and finding the world continuing up and out beneath his feet.

Mani sends him geo for a bench she’s found. He wants to play that old game of how long has it been, but he draws every minute of personal growth he’s ever done to ground himself—he notes the flinty musk of impending rain, the drawn out ping of the bullet slicing across the city, the tickle in his throat from the boosted pollen of the Crowdgrow cutting. His heart, beating in his neck.

Amir spots the bench from a distance. Mani is a blue-coated speck on one side of it. He’s shy, suddenly, walking into a casual get-together with Beirut’s Minister for Enrichment, walking across the grandeur of a public space he knows she conceived and oversaw to completion, a tribute to the world Mani’s rallied for and railed against so passionately her whole life. Then Mani messages him a biofeedback wave, and Amir viscerally feels her excitement hum in his brain, and he’s not shy anymore. He wants to be near enough to touch her so badly. He almost breaks into a run.

But doesn’t. He gets close enough for her to hear him and shouts “Mani!” Her peacoat’s the shade of the ocean, collar drawn up. Her face is open and happy. Amir can’t believe she could possibly wear that expression for him.

“You look like you’re having a pretty good day,” he laughs.

She shakes her head, gets up, and closes the distance and hugs him and her cheek is right over the brutal hammering of his heart. Amir stands as still as he can, clutching the Crowdgrow pot against Mani’s back, waiting for the moment she breaks the embrace, kind of hoping that will be never.

“I brought you a cutting,” Amir says.

“Welcome home,” Mani mumbles. Her voice vibrates in his chest.

“To us both,” he says.

She turns her face up to his and puts fingers on his jaw and kisses him and doesn’t stop, and Amir must really be in a kinder world because it starts to rain, raindrops that splatter open, big and clean and warm.

About the Authors

Jess Barber lives in Cambridge, MA, where she spends her days (and sometimes nights) building open-source electronics. She is a graduate of the 2015 Clarion Writing Workshop, and her work has recently appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

Sara Saab was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She now lives in North London, where she has perfected her Resting London Face. Her current interests are croissants and emojis thereof, amassing poetry collections, and coming up with a plausible reason to live on a sleeper train. Sara’s a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.

Möbius Continuum

Gu Shi, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu

0. The End

Five minutes ago, the skies were still clear and boundless.

The moment dark clouds bore down from between the mountains, I knew we were done for. The quarrel couldn’t have been smaller; I don’t remember what exactly I did to make Lin Ke’s eyebrows twitch, but I knew she was angry. So I poured her a cup of honey water and set it on the tea table as a silent apology.

But X drank it instead.

I hate to quarrel. When Lin Ke’s accusing finger was inches from my face, I turned and left that little log cabin. The North Atlantic wind hit me head-on, chilling me to the bone. I had not realized what my leaving meant to her. X chased after my car and tried to explain that it had been an accident. I only said two words to him: “Get in.”

Only one highway took us out of the village of Å—that place could have been the end of the world. After we had wound through three mountains, raindrops obscured the windshield; I saw the finality of our fate, realizing everything was done for. Our relationship was like a balloon: at first, there was only a deflated circle; we took turns blowing into the balloon, then carefully pinched the end shut—we couldn’t allow any air to leak. It filled and swelled until one day, perhaps the tiniest touch would make it burst. Then the entire relationship dissipated without a trace; all our effort would be meaningless.

“ . . . You should slow down; I’m serious . . . ”

X sounded nervous; he clung to his seat belt with one hand and grabbed the handle above the door with the other like a shrimp bracing for impact. Lin Ke and I had met him at a youth hostel in Stamsund—he was an old Chinese man in his sixties who spoke fluent English and was hitchhiking to his next stop. But the moment I saw him, I knew we would travel together. He introduced himself as X, as if he were an unsolved puzzle in an equation.

I really should slow down. I glanced at my dashboard; the indicator read 160 kilometers per hour. This was a mountain path; to my left were cliffs, and to my right was the sea. Slower—I took a deep breath, then eased off the gas.

I exhaled, relaxing my fingers at the same time. The car swerved, and by the time I tried to regain control of the vehicle, it was already too late. A sharp rock punctured the front left tire, followed by the screech of brakes. The rented Ford crashed into the mountain wall to the left, spun 180 degrees, flipped over the reflective guardrail, and tumbled down the cliff.

The indigo ocean flooded my field of view. I didn’t have time to feel terror; I utterly forgot my own existence and simply analyzed everything happening around me. I thought I might have hit my head, but didn’t feel any pain; I only felt a clamminess on my face.

So my blood is cold—that was my last thought.

1. Möbius Ring

Here’s something I never understood: The majority of people who experience a disaster describe their experience from a third-person perspective, as if they had witnessed the event. Yet that was exactly what I was doing: In a weak voice, I described everything I’d witnessed to the police officer—it was a winding road, I was going too fast, a rock punctured the tire, the car jerked and then crashed into the mountain wall, spinning and sinking into the sea. I didn’t tell him the other part: How the world spun as if a cameraman had flung the lens into a dryer. I was still processing what had happened when the window shattered, shooting tiny pearls of glass away from the car (and I even questioned why they didn’t fall into the car), before the ocean rushed in.

As I spoke with the police officer, X watched from the next hospital bed. He was in much better condition, only sustaining a few scrapes. Of course, if he hadn’t been so lucky, I wouldn’t have survived. The doctor said that I had broken my neck, that it was X who had dragged me out of the car and towed me to shore. He then stopped a passing car and called the police. The ambulance arrived twenty minutes later, which is the only reason why I’m now paralyzed but alive and in the hospital.

Yes, I couldn’t feel anything, as if nothing had ever existed below my neck.

Soon, only X and I were left in the room. It was a bit awkward and I didn’t know how I should break the silence. I wanted to ask Lin Ke, but knew it wouldn’t be like in the movies, that we’d be all better after a good cry. She disappeared, as if she had never existed either. I mouthed a “thanks” to X, then closed my eyes. Darkness didn’t necessarily equal sleep; when I opened my eyes three hours later, X was still staring at me motionlessly.

This time, he spoke first.

“When I was young, I was also in a serious car accident. As I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, I felt like my future was nothing but shit.”

He took out a roll of Scotch Tape and fiddled with it.

“Then someone comforted me by saying, ‘The world we live in is like a roll of tape: You’re always traveling on the smooth side. Even if you kept pulling the tape, you’d still only ever know the one side. You’d never understand that there’s another side, the adhesive one.’”

He tore a length of tape, formed a ring with it, and said as he pointed to the inside, “But if you ask me, this side is probably closer to the essence of our world—or perhaps the essence of this tape.”

I rolled my eyes in response. If he weren’t the only moving thing in my field of vision, I would have definitely looked away.

X didn’t seem to notice my expression. “But if we change how we stick the tape, rotating it, and you kept traveling on the top . . . ” He undid the ring, pulled the tape straight, slowly turned his right hand until the tape was twisted 180 degrees, and brought the two adhesive ends back together. “Then at some point, as you’re going along the smooth side, you’ll realize that you’ve crossed over to the adhesive side and entered the inside of the world.”

“A . . . Möbius ring,” I said.

“So you already know.” X laughed and tossed the ring of tape into the trash. “I just wanted to tell you that disasters aren’t necessarily bad.”

“You mean . . . quadriplegia?”

“As a doctor, I’d say you’re lucky that your head survived.”

“Thanks . . . for your . . . reassurance.”

“Cheer up.” He stood, came to my side, then said as if declaring a prophecy, “It’s only the beginning.”

2. Auxiliary Body

I took my first step.

The pressure beneath my feet made my scalp tingle, though I knew only the tingling in my scalp was real.

This was the new product that the hospital had recommended to me. The “auxiliary body” was the latest in virtual reality technology; a microchip implanted in my cerebral cortex mapped the sensory experiences of a human-sized robot into my brain. In other words, I am controlling the robot with my head, the only sentient part left of my body.

“They’ll cultivate your skin cells in the lab and attach them to the outer shell,” the insurance agent said to me. “That way, as you walk down the street, people won’t even realize that you’re using an auxiliary body; you can return to your normal life.”

This body—I saw through it, heard through it, smelled through it. I bought a cup of coffee, then sat under a tree and watched people pass by. I could even feel the delicate warmth of sunlight on my face. I felt the coolness of the wind against my arms; I wanted to turn back, but then I woke up.

The real me only had a pillow.

X thought the free auxiliary body was the insurance company’s way of saving money: “They want you to take care of yourself; a robot is much cheaper than a full-time nurse.”

It was true. I closed my eyes again, returning to the room through the auxiliary body. I fed myself, brushed my teeth, washed my face, repositioned my body to prevent bedsores, uncovered the bed to change my diaper. It was more tedious than taking care of a dog, but I was happy doing it, because even if I only had my head, I could still take care of myself. I had dignity.

X said, “You’re only missing a job.”

I thought that was a good point. I had already gone through specialized nurse training so I could use my auxiliary body to take care of myself, so I asked X if I could work at his family clinic. He agreed. “Your salary is your medical expenses,” he said to me bluntly. “Other than that, I’ll also give your robot a charging stand.”

Just like that, I started a new life on the adhesive side of the Möbius ring. It was hard at first, but I gradually got used to it, to the point where I felt like this was my original life. X still paid me a considerable salary, so I started going out and flirting with women, going on vacations, and went to medical school. Using the auxiliary body was almost easier than using my original body. I could go to Hawai‘i and rent an auxiliary body with a six-pack, muck about until late, get out of bed, and go back to the charging stand, then start again from another auxiliary body in the university library. Every time I had to take care of my real body, I would pretend to go to the restroom, then quickly switch to the auxiliary body in the clinic: check medication, turn my body and pat my back, make sure the blood pressure and heartbeat on the monitor were normal.

“I have a very strange feeling,” I said to X. “That accident freed me from the shackles of my flesh and got me closer to freedom.”

X laughed and shook his head. “You’re still far off.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Though you’ve received your medical license, you still have to return to your body every four hours,” he said.

“Do you know some other way?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Abandon your body.”

3. Klein Bottle

I stood by the operating table and took one last deep breath.

X had asked me what role I’d like to play during this operation: the surgeon, the surgeon’s assistant, or the unadulterated patient?

For a long time, I wasn’t sure if I had the courage to decapitate myself with my own hands. But X had another way of looking at it: he said the part I was cutting off was my useless body. “Don’t decide on what you’re removing by its size—you have to consider instead which part you’re throwing away.”

All the instruments were ready. I had already rehearsed the operation ten thousand times in my mind, but as I stood there for real, I still felt doubt. My head was directing my auxiliary body to cut off my real body. This auxiliary body was specialized for medical purposes. Its fingers wouldn’t tremble, and even if it lost its neural connection, it would simply lock all motions. X stood beside me; if something happened, he’d take the scalpel from my hand. I leaned in and watched as the blade inched toward my pale skin. Beneath my skin were my anterior jugular vein, trachea, larynx, and epiglottis; my carotid arteries, internal, and external jugular veins were to both sides. They were just like the textbook diagrams I had studied. Every step was quiet and methodical; all the blood vessels were linked to the channels of the apparatus. The machine extracted all the remaining blood in my body as a reserve. Beneath layers of muscle was the cervical vertebra. As I handled the spinal cord, I felt some vertigo, but I shook it off. After that, the rest was trivial. After it was all done, I stopped, opened my own eyes and, for the last time, met the gaze of my auxiliary body.

“Good night,” I said to myself.

X and I stored my head in the medical depository together. The depository was enormous, tens of thousands of square feet in area; the mechanical hand rushed to store my tiny head in its designated cubby. The monitors around us indicated the health status of every “person.”

“Your head is here too, right?” I asked X.

He shrugged and didn’t reply. Instead, he directed me to the controls in the middle of the room. A strange bottle stood there. Its neck curved toward its interior, and its body was suffused with a pea-green glaze. It looked valuable.

X said, “Since you know about the Möbius ring, you’ve probably also heard of this.” He placed his hands on the “bottle” before it became transparent. I realized then that it was a hologram. X continued, “Look here—the mouth is connected to the bottom of the bottle, so this is an impossible object. It’s—”

“A Klein bottle,” I said, finishing his statement.

“Well, you know.” He laughed, then snapped his fingers. An ant appeared inside the bottle. “If we were to put an insect inside the Klein bottle, it could travel upward along the neck of the bottle and unknowingly crawl to the outside. Because the inside of the bottle is also its outside—it can’t distinguish between the two.”

I originally thought that my soul was inside my body, but now it was on the outside: “ . . . You’re saying that I’m a Klein bottle.”

He nodded. “Yes, you finally understand.”

This was terrifying, even more terrifying than being on the adhesive side of the world. In this vast head depository, I was as tiny as an ant crawling on this continuous curved surface toward the outside. Until I broke free from my body and abandoned my Klein bottle.

“Don’t tell me this is all beginning again,” I said.

“Mmm . . . ” He folded his hands, turning off the hologram. “Have you heard of the white room?”

4. The White Room

The white room and the auxiliary body are complete opposites.

As an example of sensory duplication, what the auxiliary body observes is the exterior world, just as all humans do—sight, smell, sound, touch; the object producing these sensations is external to the body, and its inner workings are all based on instincts. When it takes a step, the auxiliary body doesn’t tell the user which bearings, levers, and screws it mobilized, nor does it inform me the amount of electricity the step consumed. It only tells me that I’m currently walking on an uneven mountain path during the autumn season.

The object of observation for the white room is the internal world.

The white room is a hollow sphere with inward-facing cameras spanning the outer shell so that any object inside it can be observed from all angles. At the same time, every facet of the object is visible to the white room. And with regards to this object, the person controlling the white room is like an omniscient god.

To link my consciousness to the white room, X made another modification to my head. We connected a specialized microchip to the visual cortex of the brain, as I was about to go from having a total of two eyes to a countless number. Even so, the first time we connected my consciousness to the white room, I was still immensely grateful to X for discarding my body, or else even if I was paraplegic, I probably could have vomited until I choked.

The expanse of white before me was borderless, because I was the border. Everything was different—it wasn’t reversed, wasn’t swapped, but was a complete inversion of inside and out. I was above, below, to the left, and to the right—I was on the outside, and the world was on the inside.

Ten days later, X put a small, black ball into the white room. It should have dropped in from the top, but I saw every facet of it at the same time, to the point where I couldn’t tell how many balls were actually in the room.

“Let me out—cut the connection, I’m begging you!” I struggled, pleading, but X ignored my protests. It was a hellish ordeal, especially when he started to rock the black ball. I felt as if someone was drilling into my brain.

“Allow time to help you see it clearly,” X said.

I had no idea what he was saying.

“Focus on just one point,” X roared, “then slide around the room.”

Easier said than done! I endured a year’s worth of training before I could control moving around within the white room. At any point in time, my focus was on one image; I would let myself circle the object of observation like a photographer pushing a lens. The faster I slid, the more of the white room I could control. I finally understood the terrifying power the room had bestowed on me when the first living butterfly entered the white room. I could observe its scaly wings and the structure of its proboscis up close, and I could see its flight trajectory from afar; I could slow down time and watch as its abdomen contracted little by little, and I could speed up time and watch it age and die. It couldn’t hide from me.

X said, “It’s time for a human to enter the white room.”

A human!

“You must carefully choose the first person to enter the white room.” He gave me a long list of names. “This is very important; they will enter your soul.”

Lin Ke—what a wonderful coincidence. I stopped at that name; even now, I could recall the warmth of that name on the tip of my tongue.

The door to my white room opened wide, and a little girl entered. She wasn’t the person in my memory—this child was only four- or five-years old, but her every step imprinted on my heart the same as ever. I could practically hear the badum-badum, creating the illusion of my heart pounding against my chest. But I soon remembered that my heart had been discarded long ago.

She spun around once at a loss, then started to look for an exit.

“Daddy . . . ” She wept, raising her chubby hands.

X—I was so anxious that my voice trembled—let her out!

No, he said. You manage that!

Before I realized what I was doing, an auxiliary body entered the white room—it was me.

My auxiliary body lifted her. She looked at me doubtfully, then wailed even more loudly, almost to the point of screaming. The sound scared me. I set her outside, then closed the door, cutting off the source of the sound.

 . . . I’ll never forget those seconds of silence. That was the first time I’d used an auxiliary body to observe the white room, and it was also the first time I used the white room to observe an auxiliary body. I reached out and wanted to touch the invisible boundary between the two, but I touched nothing. If someone were to recreate this scene as Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” then as my auxiliary body reached out a finger, God—the white room still didn’t have a physical hand.

“Dammit!” I heard X swear, “You can’t use the auxiliary body and the white room simultaneously yet!”

I soon understood why. The two overlapping fields of vision caused extreme vertigo, then a terrible migraine as if someone were hammering against my head while a strange creature in my head was trying to force its way out.

X cut all the connections. I was thrust back into long-forgotten darkness, an almost-eternal tranquility—I seemed to have heard someone say, “Good night.”

5. Möbius Space-time

X said I slept for a long time.

I guess that accident damaged my brain, but the supplementary computer in the white room perfectly complemented the gaps in my memory. Sometimes I even felt like it was more familiar with my past than I was, as if everything had long been recorded already. My next lesson was to create a physical world within the white room. “This is the reason why the white room exists. It’s also your new job,” X said. “Let’s begin by recreating a little log cabin.”

So I recalled that house. It was built on a pile of rocks by the sea and had a dark brown roof and bright red walls. The lower level had an entrance hall, two bedrooms, and a bathroom; the second floor had a living room, dining room, and a kitchen. The fireplace was ornamental, but the hot air would always warm it up—if you opened the windows, the peaceful Norwegian fjords were right there.

“All the details,” X emphasized.

So I hung up photos of the aurora again, filled the cupboards with tableware and glass cups, put red wine, butter, milk, and honey into the refrigerator, and spread out a thick, mohair rug on the floor. Not long after the little log cabin was finished, Lin Ke and her parents came to visit and stayed in the little log cabin I had built. She had grown up and was now a young woman playing on her phone. As for the white room, I was in charge of the heat, the electricity, and the facilities. Lin Ke liked to say to thin air, ‘Open the curtains.’ Then I’d hurriedly let her see the constellations outside.

Wow! She’d lean against the window frame and marvel.

I improved quickly, soon constructing a number of log cabins, then a fishing village, then even an entire town. I flitted between every house and every road; I inspected the flow of every pipe. Other than the sun and the clouds, everything was under my control. A few more years passed. With the help of the computer, I could now simultaneously control the two fields of view and let my auxiliary body enter my village. I could fix the flaws of the white room through my own experience.

I polished my world and brought it closer to perfection. One day, X came. That was the last time I saw him. We met at a fishing village at the edge of the white room; that place was closest to the end of the world to me.

“This is a lot like the place where I met you,” he said.

“I modeled it off of there,” I said. “Sometimes I think the world is just like a Möbius ring; I’ve taken a long detour on the inside of the ring, but I’m finally back to the beginning.”

“Have you ever thought about the possibility,” he said as he looked at me, “that perhaps time is a Möbius ring?”

I repeated absently, “Time?”

“To us, time is a straight line that stretches forward endlessly. But is it really like that?”

“It’s not?”

“A two-dimensional object in a Möbius ring won’t sense the twist in space because its world has only one plane. As three-dimensional beings, humans can perceive the fourth dimension through the experience of time, but we can’t sense the twists in it.” He paused, then added, “Unless . . . When we cross the adhesive side of time and return to our starting point on the smooth side, we discover that we’ve become someone else.”

6. The Beginning

More and more tourists were coming to my little town. The endless work was close to overwhelming me. Over the next few years, I never stopped perfecting the computer’s settings and used it to fulfill people’s requests—I wanted to be free from the burden of the white room.

I did it.

To celebrate, I ordered the latest auxiliary body. It could taste and feel pain, and it could eat and sustain injuries like humans. Then I went to the youth hostel in Stamsund—I knew that Lin Ke vacationed here every year.

But this time, she had a man with her.

A conceited fool. Lin Ke held his hand as if he were her entire world.

“I’d like to hitch a ride,” I said to them.

“Oh, of course,” he replied foolishly, “but I’m afraid I still don’t know your name.”

X, I said.

We had driven eighty kilometers along the seaside highway. Without a doubt, she’d picked the log cabin in the town of Å again. The two of them shared a room; I had a room to myself.

When I awoke, the sky was still dark. Lin Ke sat on the bench outside, her eyes brimming with tears.

“He keeps working overtime. If he’s not making phone calls, he’s sending emails,” she said. “He’s more attracted to his computer than to me.”

I comforted her to the best of my ability and talked until my voice was hoarse. When we returned to the cabin, I saw a cup of water on the dining table. I drank it; it was a sweet honey water. Then I heard the two of them talking—all right, this time they’ll make up, I thought. But then I heard her yelling, followed by the sound of him slamming the door.

She looked heartbroken, as if her whole world had fallen apart. I chased after his car, intending to ask what exactly he was up to.

“Get in.” He only said those two words to me.

I hopped into his rented Ford and planned to comfort him. Who knew that he’d gun it, the acceleration pinning my back to the seat. Clumsily, I buckled my seat belt, then grabbed on to the handle above the door.

“You should slow down; I’m serious . . . ”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He drifted across a winding road. To my left were cliffs; to my right was the sea.

I looked at him and suddenly understood everything.

I was X; the world we were in was a Möbius space-time.

Dark clouds bore down from between the mountains. Five minutes ago, the skies were still clear and boundless.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, June 2016.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Gu Shi is a speculative fiction writer and an urban planner. A graduate of Shanghai’s Tongji University, she obtained her master’s degree in urban planning from the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design. Since 2012, she has been working as a researcher at the academy’s Urban Design Institute.

Ms. Gu has been publishing fiction since 2011 in markets like Super Nice, Science Fiction World, Mystery World, and SF King. Notable works include “Chimera,” “Memory of Time,” and “Reflection.” In 2014, she won the Silver Award for Best New Writer at the Chinese Nebula (Xingyun) Awards. Currently, she’s working on her first novel, The Reign of Eternal Delight, an alternate history set in the court of an empress ruling in the dynasty founded by Wu Zetian, the first Chinese empress.

Bonding with Morry

Tom Purdom

The legs had been the first modification. The thing didn’t need legs. He lived in an apartment with good elevator service. Wheels would do fine.

“There are still venues in which visitors have to access stairs,” the selection adviser had said.

The selection adviser had been a Thing, too. It looked like a competent, slightly overweight woman in her fifties but it was a thing just like the thing they were giving him. They probably had fifty selection adviser modes stashed in a store room. Give Mr. Largen Number Twenty-eight. His psychometrics indicate his comfort state maximizes with mature knowledgeable females.

“I’ve cataloged my routine,” Morry said. “Wheels will be fine.”

The face had been the biggest battleground. Morry would have opted for a square metal box with sensors and a loudspeaker if they’d let him. Like the robots in most of the comic books he’d read as a kid. But without the sappy friendly look.

“Facial expressions are an important aspect of emotional communication,” the selection adviser advised. “They can communicate, for example, the difference between a minor disruption and a true emergency.”

So he accepted the need for a fully flexible “skin.” They wouldn’t budge on that. But he rejected every offering that simulated a human face, male or female. Cutesy cartoon faces got eleven vetoes before the adviser decided he really was going to reject the entire category. Uniforms, robes, and various forms of historic and unhistoric costumes received the same treatment.

A ninja model tempted him for a few seconds. Black all over. Half the face covered. A reminder the thing could be lethal.

“You are rejecting any feature that might encourage emotional bonding,” the selection advisor said. “Is that true?”

“It’s a thing. A machine. That’s all it is.”

“Most recipients find that a degree of emotional bonding increases their overall satisfaction with the relationship.”

“It’s a machine. You’re a machine. I’m not looking for a friend. I already have friends.”

So there it was. A shiny column planted on a flat platform with four oversized wheels. Three tentacles with metal hands. A square half-size “head.” Two lenses that looked like camera lenses. A square speaker with a grill.

“Your name is Clank,” Morry said. “You will call me Mr. Largen.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Largen.”

The “skin” over the forehead could contract into a frown. The “cheeks” could swell or redden. But it couldn’t smile. There was no danger it would smile.

The woman who lived two doors down the hall, Georgia Coleman, called her thing Elly. She had opted for a facade that made it look like a tall bodyguard—like the kind of trim, alert women who hovered around presidents and junketing cabinet secretaries. Georgia went out a lot. And Elly always went with her.

Elly paid the cab driver. Elly helped her up stairs. Elly stayed near her in the lady’s room. Elly’s hands could deliver shocks. Elly could kick and punch. And squirt the spray she carried in her shoulder holster.

“Like a guard dog you don’t have to feed,” Morry had told Georgia.

Georgia smiled. “Elly’s a little smarter than a dog, Morry.”

“And she talks to you.”

“Right now she’s teaching me how to play chess. Have you ever played chess, Morry? We started out playing backgammon but I got tired of that after a month. Chess is something else. I could spend the rest of my life studying the Sicilian Defense.”

Cleaning had been the killer app. Morry could get around well enough. But stuff sat on chairs and tops uncollected. Dust accumulated. The bathroom porcelain lost its shine.

“Two hours a day,” his (human) Personal Adviser said. “It will probably only be one hour most days once he gets things organized. You’ll hardly notice he’s active.”

“And it cooks, too.”

“Basic stuff. He can read the directions on packages and you can tell him if he has to make any adjustments.”

It could keep track of his medicines, too. Morry took two anti-cancer pills, one twice a day for three days per week, the second every four days half an hour before he ate breakfast. He had been keeping the schedule on his handscreen. Now he gave it to Clank. The thing didn’t just prompt him. It watched him and made sure he’d really downed the pills. And assured him he had if he started wondering two hours later.

There were specialized devices that could do everything the things could do. Robot vacuum cleaners. Automated kitchens. Little beetles that scurried around your shelves sucking up dust. The “familiarization video” pointed that out. The smart techies had all assumed anthropomorphic robots would always be a fantasy.

But all those devices cost you something. The automated kitchens were a great deal if you were building a new house, but your anthro could work with the kitchen you already had. It could push your old vacuum cleaner. It could even use a broom and a mop.

The video showed military anthros picking up wounded soldiers and carrying them back to safety. Legs could go where wheels stalled. Arms could carry any kind of bundle.

Morry could still button his shirt sleeves but it took time. Five or six tries, sometimes.

“Can you button sleeves, Clank?”

“Please show me. Thank you. I will download an app.”

Clank’s hands reached for Morry’s upraised wrist. Morry had assumed he would have to wait while Clank searched for the app and executed the download. Instead, the metal fingers closed around the button without a break. Morry held up his other wrist and Clank completed the job with the same smooth efficiency.

He stifled the impulse to say thank you. “I’ll be gone about two hours, Clank. Get the place clean and tidy.”

“I will, Mr. Largen.”

“And tell your marketing department that’s a great app. I can still do it myself but my fingers aren’t as sensitive as they used to be.”

“I will, Mr. Largen.”

“Would you be interested in an onsite opponent, Mr. Largen?”

Morry had just pressed the On button on his game console. The intro had replaced the Swanalari Rec logo but the Start screen still hadn’t come on.

“Are you trying to be a companion, Clank?”

“I am offering an option you may not be aware of.”

“I didn’t ask for a companion. I thought I made that clear.”

“I understand, Mr. Largen.”

“Do they understand?”

“Your instructions have been permanently installed in my operating parameters. I apologize if I have exceeded the limits you intended.”

Morry eyed the screen. It was almost four years old—half the square feet he could have bought for the same money today. He hadn’t bought a new game in over a year.

“Can you do anything the game can’t do?”

“In what way?”

“As an opponent. This is an aerial combat game. Can you do anything in one-on-one mode that the game opponent wouldn’t do?”

“Some gamers feel their anthros are more flexible and less predictable than pre-installed programs.”

Morry picked up the extra controller and plugged it into the console. He had ordered the second controller when he bought the game system so he could play with his granddaughter when his family came to visit. Debbie had been a big gamer most of her childhood. Nowadays she mostly played with all the boyfriends a rabid female gamer tended to attract.

“I play this one at the expert level,” Morry said. “I usually fly the Dragonfire with the optional pulse laser.”

“What’s that?” Laura said.

“It’s my personal all-purpose housekeeper and devoted mechanical factotum.”

“Why does it look like that?”

Morry had discovered there were young women—really young women—who didn’t automatically shy away from a minor fling with an obvious, unapologetic member of their grandfather’s generation. To them, he was an exotic. They weren’t that common, not for him anyway, but he had learned to spot the signs. He had realized Laura might be amenable fifteen minutes after he started talking to her at the wedding festivities that united one of her senior aunts with one of his more romantic contemporaries. Normally he really did prefer mature, knowledgeable women. But Laura had a great laugh. And he loved the way she moved.

“It’s a machine. I didn’t see any point in pretending it’s something else.”

“It’s not very attractive.”

He smiled. “I may have overdone it.”

“It’s kind of scary.”

“It’s just like all the others. That’s all they are under the cosmetics.”

“The one we’ve got in our dorm—in our dorm suite—looks like it might be somebody’s aunt. That’s how I think of her anyway. Aunt Claire.”

“I think machines should look like machines.”

“You don’t think it should look like a faithful sidekick?”

That was the pitch in the ad everybody joked about. Every man’s fantasy. A fast car and a faithful sidekick.

Every man’s second fantasy anyway. There was a guy on the eighth floor who was supposed to have opted for a harem girl—a slave girl, judging by the descriptions.

“I’m not a costume hero,” Morry said.

“How about a companion? They’re supposed to be good for older people who live alone.”

“I’ve still got friends. I still go out. I don’t need a delusion created by a bunch of programmers and engineers.”

Laura laughed—the happy soprano laugh that made him feel like she had just thrown out a flash of song.

“You seem to have very strong feelings on the matter, Mr. Largen.”

“I think machines are machines. We shouldn’t forget they’re just machines. Something people make.”

“You don’t feel you need an intimate confidante?”

“Are you volunteering for the job?”

“I’m afraid I’m a bad listener. And you’d have to consider me a temp.”

“At my age you have to consider everything a temp.”

“But you look like you enjoy yourself.”

“I do. But right now I have to have my faithful sidekick hand me a useful little pill.”

The first symptom hit him just after Laura left. He had gone back to bed, still wearing his bathrobe, hoping he would drift into a nap with memories floating in his head. The numbness in his right arm felt like an unusual, not unpleasant, prelude to sleep. Then it spread to his leg. And he realized he couldn’t move his hand.

The thing rolled into the bedroom. “Please lie still, Mr. Largen. I’ve called Emergency. Your vital signs indicate you may be experiencing the first phase of a stroke.”

Tentacles were already bending and stretching over the bed. “I’m giving you a standard injection. Patients who receive immediate care can generally expect a satisfactory recovery. You will be treated well inside the four hour period recommended by the guidelines. Damage sustained within that period can usually be repaired.”

It was a comforting statement. And reasonably accurate. Most of the damage to his brain could be repaired. But it took time. Pills and injections could do most of the work nowadays but the rest of the process required all the dreary exercises and adjustments stroke patients had been subjected to when he had been a forty-year-old husband who thought erection pills were a great subject for jokes.

Nobody stayed in the hospital anymore. You had your own full time nurse at home. Clank moved his limbs during the first stage of the rehab schedule. Clank changed his diapers during the first week. Clank carried him to the bathroom and set him on the toilet from the start of the second week. Clank supervised his exercises. Clank brought him his meals. Clank helped him eat.

A real live meditech stopped by once a week and made sure everything was running properly. A “therapy counselor” supervised his first three hours at home and gave him a weekly “online chat” after that.

Naturally, the counselor thought he might like an “Aide-Companion” that looked more “comforting.”

“We can give you a model that keeps the tentacles,” the counselor said. “Some people prefer them to jointed limbs. I know your tech does.”

Morry shook his head. His tongue still felt thick and clumsy. He worked on his speech exercises four hours every day but he avoided talking to people when he could.

“It’s your choice, Mr. Largen. A sympathetic persona can speed up recovery. Every study of the issue ever conducted supports that conclusion.”

“You can . . . . use me . . . . for . . . . control.”

The counselor split the screen and flashed him a video of a thing that looked like a well-fed monk with big loose sleeves over its arms. The monk disappeared as soon as he raised his eyebrows—he could still control his eyebrows—and a parade of tentacled charmers danced across the left half of the screen. A cheery visitor from Planet X. A monk with a squarer, more distinguished face. A slim female draped in a gown, tentacles cased in long, stylish gloves.

“I . . . . have . . . . friends. They . . . . come. Ev . . . . ry day.”

“I understand, Mr. Largen. But I believe you’re alone most of the day.”

“Clank . . . . talks. I practice . . . . con . . . . ver . . . . ”

He struggled with the word and gave up.

“I’m only offering you some alternatives to consider,” the counselor said. “Emotional affect can be a subtle factor, but it’s real.”

“I . . . . like . . . . Clank. Clank . . . . is . . . . my friend.”

It had been a spur of the moment inspiration, but it worked. The counselor switched to her exit script and popped off the screen two minutes after he said it.

His daughter shook her head when he told her about it. They normally kept in touch through the usual postings but she had started calling him twice a week, on a schedule. She was a rehab specialist herself and she felt he should “get some benefit out of the money you invested in my education.”

“I’m not sure that was a nice thing to do,” Julie said.

“It . . . . did . . . . the job.”

“Your counselor is just trying to help you. And that thing is pretty ugly. I wouldn’t want it hanging around my bedroom after dark.”

“They’re . . . . all . . . .  like that. Underneath.”

“And we’re all skeletons and skulls underneath.”

“Personalities . . . . Julie. Real . . . . feelings.”

“But how do you know that, Dad? How do you know I have feelings?”

Morry’s mouth twisted into a caricature of a smile. “I know . . . . how you . . . . started. I was . . . . there.”

People always said that. How do you know other humans feel things? Don’t you just go by what they do and say? And assume they feel the same things you feel?

How do you know robots don’t develop feelings when their brains get this complicated?

There were even people who wanted to give the things rights. Two big organizations. One group thought they should have the same rights as animals. Don’t overwork them. Let them have some liberty. The other group thought they should get the vote.

But how could you tell what the things wanted? Could you even assume they had wants?

“Do you feel . . . .  you’re over . . . . worked, Clank?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand the question, Mr. Largen.”

“Do you . . . . want . . . . to . . . . work less?”

The brows contracted. The head tipped back—as if it was contemplating a thought.

“I’m here to help you, Mr. Largen. I’m here twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week.”

The thing could have called him Dr. Largen but he had started separating himself from that usage the day he retired. His students had called him Dr. for forty-three years and he had preferred it to the alternatives. It sounded breezier than Mr. and less pompous than Professor. But nowadays he was just an ordinary Mr. to everybody who didn’t call him Morry. He didn’t plan to spend his retirement disillusioning people who were looking for free medical advice.

He didn’t have any problems with technology either. He still bristled when he ran into people who assumed you were a technological incompetent just because you were so old you had earned your doctorate when computers still filled small rooms. He had started working with a desktop when a machine with a 128K memory was a technological wonder. His first foray into computerized scholarship had been a database housed on a punched card mainframe—a month by month analyzable record of all the economic transactions posted in a New Jersey canal town between 1811 and 1821.

“Machines are just . . . . machines . . . . Clank. You’re just a . . . . tool . . . . created by people. Real people. With real . . . . feelings.”

“Why don’t we try a bridge game some evening?” Georgia Coleman said. “Elly and me against you and . . . . Clank.”

“How about you and me . . . . against the things?”

“We wouldn’t stand a chance. They never forget a card, Morry.”

“We could . . . . cheat.”

Georgia even set up a table with three chairs. Elly sat on a chair just like she had legs that needed to rest. Clank eased the front edge of his platform under the table and bent his tentacles at a sharp angle so he could hold his grippers poised at the right level.

“It’s a good thing we aren’t playing poker,” Georgia said. “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what . . . . Clank . . . . was feeling. Don’t you agree, Elly? Can you interpret Clank’s feelings?”

“I don’t see important signals,” Elly said.

Morry noted that Georgia had automatically rephrased her question so a machine could interpret it. Don’t you agree with what I just said had become Can you interpret Clank’s feelings?—a clear, limited interrogation.

“That’s a great . . . . response,” Morry said. “I’m im . . . . pressed.”

Georgia frowned. “She just said she can’t read Clank’s face. That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

“She could have . . . . just said no. Instead her programs . . . . searched backward. Through all . . . . the things you’ve said. And . . . . associated . . . . your question . . . . with Clank’s . . . . responses.”

“Is that how you see her, Morry? As a bunch of programs?”

“They’re . . . . masterpieces. I’m not a . . . . computer geek. But I’ve worked . . . . with computers. Forty plus years. I understand . . . . what it takes. Spacial visual . . . . ization. Speech recog . . . . nition. They’re incred . . . . ible.”

He liked Georgia. She had actually run her own business—a publicity and promotion agency that freelanced for small performing arts organizations. She knew some funny stories. She was competent. She still had a waistline. But they never played bridge again.

He still had to use a walker around the apartment. He could use his legs but he had to worry about falls. Falls could be catastrophic at his age. You never got back to where you where.

He could have controlled a motorized wheelchair when he went out but his insurance plan wouldn’t pay for it. He already had a device that could push a wheelchair anywhere he wanted to go.

“That’s the advantage of an anthro, Mr. Largen. It eliminates the need for a lot of expensive specialized equipment.”

He didn’t mind the wheelchair but he did notice the stares. Clank bothered people.

“I think it’s mostly that face,” one of his after-theater friends said. “You really should do something about that face.”

They were sitting inside a crowded little ice cream shop, two guys who liked to talk and a woman who seemed to like to listen. He had left Clank on the sidewalk, guarding the folded up wheelchair, and grabbed the backs of chairs as they worked their way to a table.

“It’s a halfway thing,” his friend said. “It’s just enough like us to make us feel like it’s human. But it doesn’t go all the way. It makes us feel creepy.”

The woman nodded. “It looks like a disfigured human.”

So he gave the standard heads another look. And settled for the blandest, plain vanilla robot in the catalog. It could smile—there wasn’t anything he could do about that—but it was a limited, minimal smile. Most of the time it just looked alert.

He had to pay a “cosmetic replacement” fee, of course. They only let you have the first head free.

“I’m tempted to ask you how like it, Clank. But I think I’ll resist the impulse.”

“Your speech quality is registering within normal parameters, Mr. Largen.”

“But it’s slower than it used to be. And I’m making a bigger effort.”

“You are progressing faster than eighty-six percent of the patients who start with your initial level of dysfunction.”

“I’m in the eighty-seventh percentile?”

“Yes.”

“Grab a game controller, Clank. I can use some recreational therapy.”

Georgia Coleman commented on Clank’s new face when he met her in the lobby. His daughter liked it, too.

“That old face was a very bad choice,” Julie said. “It’s the worst choice you made, in my professional judgment.”

“You seemed to put up with it.”

“I don’t call you to nag you, Dad.”

“And it wouldn’t do any good if you did, right?”

“You know the arguments just as well as I do. You’re living alone. Some kind of simulated companionship can be helpful. Conversation sessions can speed up speech recovery.”

“That’s not the issue. It’s the emotional bonding I object to. Pretending a machine is a person.”

“I understand that. But do you have to go to extremes?”

“I’m a sentimental creature, daughter. Who knows what I’d do if I had a thing that looked like a cute pet? There were times when I even felt sorry for some of my students.”

“So you’re living with a metal monster just because you’re worried about your own feelings?”

He smiled—a lopsided smile, but his smiles had always had a touch of wryness.

“Is that your professional judgment, too?”

He deleted most of the stuff the Foundation for CyberAmerican Rights dumped in his inbox. But he couldn’t resist discussing some of it with Clank.

“Are you happy with your appearance, Clank? Do you feel I’ve disfigured you?”

“My appearance sometimes disturbs people, Mr. Largen. Most humans prefer anthros that resemble organic creatures or familiar fantasy characters.”

“But do you like it? These people say I’m abusing you. They say you have a right to an attractive appearance.”

“I cannot express an opinion on the question of CyberAmerican Rights, Mr. Largen. I can discuss the issues with you if you’d like.”

“Do you have an opinion?”

“The GNX Corporation and the agencies responsible for your health care services have no official position on the issues raised by organizations such as the Foundation for CyberAmerican Rights.”

“And therefore you don’t have an opinion.”

“I can only repeat what I just said, Mr. Largen.”

The representative from the Foundation for CyberAmerican Rights was a lawyer who looked like he might be a few years past retirement age. Morry’s ID app posted a preliminary bio as soon as the lawyer’s name appeared on his handscreen. Donald Weinbragen had spent most of his career working for the American branch of a Japanese automobile company. He had reached the peak of his career, three years before his retirement, when he had been granted a title that proclaimed he was the Senior Counsel for Cross-Border Contract Interpretation.

“I apologize for the disturbance, Professor Largen. We’ve found that it’s generally best to initiate discussion with a direct personal contact, without any preliminary mailings.”

Morry nodded—the smallest, most non-committal nod he could produce. He had learned a few things during all the years he had dealt with administrators and faculty committees. Anything you say can be used against you. They will say what they have to say.

“We’ve received an abuse complaint. With regard to the CyberAmerican you address as Clank.”

Morry nodded again.

“Our organization is committed to the idea that CyberAmericans have certain rights. One of them is the right to an attractive appearance. They also have the right to be treated with the same respect we normally accord organic citizens. That includes the right to be addressed by names that reflect their proper status.”

“You’re calling me because somebody doesn’t like its name?”

“Clank is obviously a name designed to impose your belief that your aide-companion is only a machine. We also have reason to believe you have forced your aide-companion into a grotesque, unattractive body for the same reason. Our report on this matter includes several statements from people who have heard you say you chose your companion’s name and configuration with that aim. We have accumulated enough documentation to initiate legal action but we would like to avoid that if possible.”

“Are you trying to tell me I’ve done something illegal?”

“The law does not—yet—recognize the full rights of CyberAmericans. But we believe the courts will uphold their claims. We are prepared to take abuse cases to the highest levels of the judiciary.”

Julie liked the new look. “You really went all out, didn’t you? Square jaw. Blue eyes. I’ve got friends who’d kill for a brute with those shoulders.”

“They might be disappointed with his capabilities in other areas.”

“The new name fits him, too. That was a stroke of genius, Dad. You change one letter and you get a name that fits him like a glove.”

Georgia Coleman’s eyes widened when he ran into her while he was waiting for the elevator. She actually shook hands when Morry made the introductions.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Clark. You look quite handsome. You and Elly would make a beautiful couple.”

“Are you suggesting we arrange a date?” Morry said.

“It’s a big improvement, Morry. I think you’ll find most of the people you know will be glad you gave the poor thing an appearance that doesn’t make them shudder.”

“It was a pure no-brainer. I could give the glorious humanitarian foundation what it wanted or I could spend the rest of my projected lifespan sitting in courtrooms and paying lawyers.”

“You made the right decision, Morry. I’m certain Clark is much happier. I know Elly would be.”

Morry turned around in his wheelchair. “Are you happier now, Clark?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand the question, Mr. Largen.”

“Do you like your new appearance? Do you like having legs and arms? Do you like your new name?”

“The name and appearance of an anthropomorphic aide is a matter of customer choice. The GNX Corporation believes both matters should be left to the discretion of the customer, within the broad limits of efficiency and customary standards of public decorum.”

“They always say that,” Georgia said. “Everybody knows they’ve been programmed to say that.”

“They’ve been programmed to say everything they say, Georgia.”

“Not like that. That’s a word for word scripted response.”

The light flashed over Elevator Three. Georgia pivoted toward it with her bodyguard at her heels and Morry noted the suitcases propped beside the two people who were already on board. He raised his hand a mini-second before Clark reached the same decision and stopped pushing.

The door closed behind Georgia and Elly. Clark poked the Down button.

“I have a terrible feeling that may have been a saved-by-the-bell situation,” Morry said.

“Saved by the bell?”

“It’s a term from boxing—the sport. It means you were caught in a bad situation but you got out of it because the bell rang the end of the round. The less I see of Georgia, the better.”

“Are you advising me you have negative feelings about Georgia Coleman? Shall I take that information into account in the future?”

“Let’s just say it might be best if I limited the duration of my contacts with her. I don’t know who filed that complaint with the great protector of your rights. But I have my suspicions.”

The final downward slide started—as it often did—with a minor event. The kind of thing he could have survived if he had been a young stud in his fifties. Clark was pushing him along a peaceful little tree-lined rowhouse street, two blocks from his apartment building, when a motorboard pack rolled around the corner, five steps behind them.

It was the latest fad among the more hyped-up young. Most of the time they just made a lot of noise or scattered a few pedestrians. This time they felt they had to outmaneuver Clark and land some jabs on the better-off-dead in the wheelchair. They even had different colored glop on their hands, so they could check their videos afterward and see who had actually connected.

Clark blocked most of the blows but they came in fast and they had him outnumbered six to one. Morry took a punch on the chest and a hard backhand slap on the temple.

At ninety-six, as they said, you had lost a lot of your ability to recoup. And the things they did for you had their side effects. He was living in a great era. Afflictions that could have killed him when he was young could be treated. But most of the treatments were still new. They still had effects the labs hadn’t learned to counter. There came a time when you knew it was a losing battle. When you knew it was time you told them they could stop pummeling you with antidotes to the antidotes.

The hospice nurse was a slim young woman who turned out to be a grandmother who was probably approaching sixty. She stopped by twice a week, for twenty minutes, to make sure everything was working as it should. Julie called him twice a day. The rest of the time he was alone with Clark.

Clark made his meals—such as they were. Clark worked the controls on the entertainment center. Clark kept him clean. Clark laughed at his jokes and listened when he felt like reminiscing.

Georgia Coleman sent him messages. He was lucky he had “someone like Clark.” Everyone in the building was talking about the wonderful job Clark was doing.

Clark would never look as sensitive as the hospice nurse. He had a male face. He looked efficient—businesslike. But that was all right. That was the way Morry wanted it. He had made a rational open-eyed decision. He had lived his life and now it was ending. He didn’t need tears. He didn’t need people acting like his death would create an irreparable vacancy in their lives.

He knew he was getting near the end when he slept through a whole movie. And didn’t really care. He hadn’t eaten in four days. That was one of the hospice rules. No forced feeding. The next time he drifted off, he might not wake up.

It might have been nice if Julie had been there. But she had a life to lead. Why should she waste some of the good days she had left sitting beside his recliner?

And he wasn’t alone. He wouldn’t die alone. He had never been alone. Since the day he had been born.

He lifted his left hand off the arm rest—just high enough to make a visible gesture. Clark’s face loomed over him. The last face he would ever see.

He didn’t have to raise his voice. Clark could adjust his hearing. Clark had routines that could enhance garbled words.

“Tell the programmers . . . . and the . . . . engineers . . . . they did a great job. All of them. Everywhere. All my life.”

Clark’s face froze. Morry stared at him through a haze that seemed to be darkening by the second. The smile that ended the freeze was a thin Clark smile but he could still see it through the fog.

“They said to tell you thank you. They appreciate the thought.”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April-May 2012.

About the Author

Tom Purdom lives in downtown Philadelphia where he spends his days writing science fiction, reviewing classical music for an online publication called The Broad Street Review, and pursuing the pleasures of urban life. Tom started reading science fiction in 1950, when it was just emerging from the pulp ghetto, and sold his first story in 1957, just before he turned twenty-one. In the last twenty-five years, he has produced a string of novelettes and short stories that have mostly appeared in Asimov’s. Fantastic Books recently published two collections of his Asimov’s stories, Lovers and Fighters, Starships and Dragons and Romance on Four Worlds, A Casanova Quartet.

Warmth

Geoff Ryman

I don’t remember the first time I saw BETsi. She was like the air I breathed. She was probably there when I was born.

BETsi looked like a vacuum cleaner, bless her. She had long carpeted arms, and a carpeted top with loops of wool like hair. She was huggable, vaguely.

I don’t remember hugging her much. I do remember working into that wool all kinds of unsuitable substances—spit, ice cream, dirt from the pots of basil.

My mother talked to BETsi about my behavior. Mostly I remember my mother as a freckled and orange blur, always desperate to be moving, but sometimes she stayed still long enough for me to look at her.

“This is Booker, BETsi,” my mother said at dictation speed. “You must stay clean, BETsi.” She thought BETsi was stupid. She was the one who sounded like a robot. “Please repeat.”

“I must stay clean,” BETsi replied. BETsi sounded bright, alert, smooth-talking, with a built-in smile in the voice.

“This is what I mean, BETsi: You must not let Clancy get you dirty. Why do you let Clancy get you dirty?”

I pretended to do sums on a pretend calculator.

While BETsi said, “Because he is a boy. From the earliest age, most boys move in a very different, more aggressive way than girls. His form of play will be rougher and can be indulged in to a certain extent.”

Booker had programmed BETsi to talk about my development in front of me. That was so I would know what was going on. It was honest in a way; she did not want me to be deceived. On the other hand, I felt like some kind of long-running project in child psychology. Booker was more like a clinical consultant who popped in from time to time to see how things were progressing.

You see, I was supposed to be a genius. My mother thought she was a genius, and had selected my father out of a sperm bank for geniuses. His only flaw, she told me, was his tendency towards baldness. BETsi could have told her: baldness is inherited from the maternal line.

She showed me a picture of herself in an old Cosmopolitan article. It caused a stir at the time. “The New Motherhood,” it was called. Business women choose a new way.

There is a photograph of Booker looking young and almost pretty, beautifully lit and cradling her swollen tummy. Her whole face, looking down on herself, is illuminated with love.

In the article, she says: I know my son will be a genius. She says, I know he’ll have the right genes, and I will make sure he has the right upbringing. Cosmopolitan made no comment. They were making a laughingstock out of her.

Look, my mother was Booker McCall, chief editor of a rival magazine company with a £100 million-a-year turnover and only fifteen permanent employees of which she was second in command. Nobody had a corporate job in those days, and if they did, it was wall-to-wall politics and performance. Booker McCall had stakeholders to suck up to, editors to commission, articles to read and tear to pieces. She had layouts to throw at designers’ heads. She had style to maintain, she had hair to keep up, shoes to repair, menus to plan. And then she had to score whatever she was on at the time. She was a very unhappy woman, with every reason to be.

She was also very smart, and BETsi was a good idea. I used to look out of the window of the flat and the outside world looked blue, gray, harsh. Sunlight always caught the grime on the glass and bleached everything out, and I thought that adults moved out into a hot world in which everybody shouted all the time. I never wanted to go out.

BETsi was my whole world. She had a screen, and she would show me paintings, one after another. Velasquez, Goya. She had a library of picture books—about monkeys, or fishing villages, or ghosts. She would allow me one movie a week, but always the right movie. Jurassic Park, Beauty and the Beast, Tarzan on Mars. We’d talk about them.

“The dinosaurs are made of light,” she told me. “The computer tells the video what light to make and what colors the light should be so that it looks like a dinosaur.”

“But dinosaurs really lived!” I remember getting very upset, I wailed at her. “They were really really real.”

“Yes, but not those, those are just like paintings of dinosaurs.”

“I want to see a real dinosaur!” I remember being heartbroken. I think I loved their size, their bulk, the idea of their huge hot breath. In my daydreams, I had a dinosaur for a friend and it would protect me in the world outside.

“Clancy,” BETsi warned me. “You know what is happening now.”

“Yes!” I shouted, “but knowing doesn’t stop it happening!”

BETsi had told me that I was shy. Did you know that shyness has a clinical definition?

I’d been tested for it. Once, BETsi showed me the test. First she showed me what she called the benchmark. On her screen, through a haze of fingerprints and jam, was one fat, calm, happy baby. Not me. “In the test,” BETsi explained, “a brightly colored mobile is shown to the child. An infant who will grow up to be an outgoing and confident adult will tend to look at the mobile with calm curiosity for a time, get bored, and then look away.”

The fat happy baby smiled a little bit, reached up for the spinning red ducks and bright yellow bunnies, then sighed and looked around for something new.

“A shy baby will get very excited. This is you, when we gave you the same test.”

And there I was, looking solemn, 200 years old at six months, my infant face crossed with some kind of philosophical puzzlement. Then, they show me the mobile. My face lights up, I start to bounce, I gurgle with pleasure, delight, spit shoots out of my mouth. I get over-excited, the mobile is slightly beyond my grasp. My face crumples up, I jerk with the first little cries. Moments later I am screaming myself purple, and trying to escape the mobile, which has begun to terrify me.

“That behavior is hardwired,” BETsi explained. “You will always find yourself getting too happy and then fearful and withdrawn. You must learn to control the excitement. Then you will be less fearful.”

It’s like with VR. When they first started making that, they discovered they did not know enough about how we see and hear to duplicate the experience. They had to research people first. Same here. Before they could mimic personality, they first had to find out a lot more about what personality was.

BETsi had me doing Transcendental Meditation and yoga at three years old. She had me doing what I now recognize was the Alexander Technique. I didn’t just nap, I had my knees up and my head on a raised wooden pillow. This was to elongate my back—I was already curling inward from tension.

After she got me calm, BETsi would get me treats. She had Booker’s credit-card number and authorization to spend. BETsi could giggle. When the ice cream was delivered, or the new CD full of clip art, or my new S&M Toddler black leather gear, or my Barbie Sex-Change doll, BETsi would giggle.

I know. She was programmed to giggle so that I would learn it was all right to be happy. But it sounded as though there was something who was happy just because I was. For some reason, that meant I would remember all by myself to stay calm.

“I’ll open it later,” I would say, feeling very adult. “It’s ice cream, you fool,” BETsi would say. “It’ll melt.”

“It will spread all over the carpet!” I whispered in delight.

“Booker will get ma-had,” BETsi said in a sing-song voice. BETsi knew that I always called Booker by her name.

BETsi could learn. She would have had to be trained to recognize and respond to my voice and Booker’s. She was programmed to learn who I was and what I needed. I needed conspiracy. I needed a confidant.

“Look. You melt the ice cream and I will clean it up,” she said.

“It’s ice cream, you fool,” I giggled back. “If it melts, I won’t be able to eat it!” We both laughed.

BETsi’s screen could turn into a mirror. I’d see my own face and inspect it carefully for signs of being like Tarzan. Sometimes, as a game, she would have my own face talk back to me in my own voice. Or I would give myself a beard and a deeper voice to see what I would look like as a grown-up. To have revenge on Booker, I would make myself bald.

I was fascinated by men. They were mythical beasts, huge and loping like dinosaurs, only hairy. The highlight of my week was when the window cleaner arrived. I would trail after him, too shy to speak, trying to puff myself up to the same size as he was. I thought he was a hero, who cleaned windows and then saved people from evil.

“You’ll have to bear with Clancy,” BETsi would say to him. “He doesn’t see many men.”

“Don’t you get out, little fella?” he would say. His name was Tom.

“It’s not safe,” I managed to answer.

Tom tutted. “Oh, that’s true enough. What a world, eh? You have to keep the kiddies locked in all day. S’like a prison.” I thought that all men had South London accents.

He talked to BETsi as if she was a person. I don’t think Tom could have been very bright, but I do think he was a kindly soul. I think BETsi bought him things to give to me.

“Here’s an articulated,” he said once, and gave me a beautifully painted Matchbox lorry.

I took it in silence. I hated myself for being so tongue-tied. I wanted to swagger around the flat with him like Nick Nolte or Wesley Snipes.

“Do men drive in these?” I managed to ask.

“Some of them, yeah.”

“Are there many men?”

He looked blank. I answered for him. “There’s no jobs for men.”

Tom hooted with laughter. “Who’s been filling your head?” he asked.

“Clancy has a very high symbol-recognition speed,” BETsi told him. “Not genius, you understand. But very high. It will be useful for him in interpretative trades. However, he has almost no spatial reasoning. He will only ever dream of being a lorry driver.”

“I’m a klutz,” I translated.

Booker was an American—probably the most famous American in London at the time. BETsi was programmed to modulate her speech to match her owners. To this day, I can’t tell English and American accents apart unless I listen carefully. And I can imitate neither. I talk like BETsi.

I remember Tom’s face, like a suet pudding, pale, blotchy, uneasy. “Poor little fella,” he said. “I’d rather not know all that about myself.”

“So would Clancy,” said BETsi. “But I am programmed to hide nothing from him.”

Tom sighed. “Get him with other kids,” he told her. “Oh, that is all part of the plan,” said BETsi.

I was sent to Social Skills class. I failed. I discovered that I was terrified without BETsi, that I did not know what to do or say to people when she wasn’t there. I went off into a corner with a computer screen, but it seemed cold, almost angry with me. If I didn’t do exactly the right thing it wouldn’t work, and it never said anything nice to me. The other children were like ghosts. They flittered around the outside of my perceptions. In my mind, I muted the noise they made. They sounded as if they were shouting from the other side of the window, from the harsh gray world.

The consultants wrote on my first report: Clancy is socially backward, even for his age.

Booker was furious. She showed up one Wednesday and argued about it.

“Do you realize that a thing like that could get in my son’s record!”

“It happens to be true, Miss McCall.” The consultant was appalled and laughed from disbelief.

“This creche leaves children unattended and blames them when their development is stunted.” Booker was yelling and pointing at the woman. “I want that report changed. Or I will report on you!”

“Are you threatening to write us up in your magazines?” the consultant asked in a quiet voice.

“I’m telling you not to victimize my son for your own failings. If he isn’t talking to the other children, it’s your job to help him.”

Talking to other kids was my job. I stared at my shoes, mortified. I didn’t want Booker to help me, but I half wanted her to take me out of the class, and I knew that I would hate it if she did.

I went to BETsi for coaching.

“What you may not know,” she told me, “is that you have a natural warmth that attracts people.”

“I do?” I said.

“Yes. And all most people want from other people is that they be interested in them. Shall we practice?”

On her screen, she invented a series of children. I would try to talk to them. BETsi didn’t make it easy.

“Do you like reading?” I’d ask a little girl on the screen.

“What?” she replied with a curling lip.

“Books,” I persisted, as brave as I could be. “Do you read books?”

She blinked—bemused, bored, confident.

“Do . . . do you like Jurassic Park?”

“It’s old! And it doesn’t have any story.”

“Do you like new movies?” I was getting desperate.

“I play games. Bloodlust Demon.” The little girl’s eyes went narrow and fierce. That was it. I gave up.

“BETsi,” I complained. “This isn’t fair.” Booker would not allow me to play computer games.

BETsi chuckled and used her own voice. “That’s what it’s going to be like, kiddo.”

“Then show me some games.”

“Can’t,” she said.

“Not in the program,” I murmured angrily.

“If I tried to show you one, I’d crash,” she explained.

So I went back to Social Skills class determined to talk and it was every bit as awful as BETsi had said, but at least I was ready.

I told them all, straight out: I can’t play games, I’m a klutz, all I can do is draw. So, I said, tell me about the games.

And that was the right thing to do. At five I gave up being Tarzan and started to listen, because the kids could at least tell me about video games. They could get puffed up and important, and I would seep envy, which must have been very satisfying for them. But in a funny kind of way they sort of liked me.

There was a bully called Ian Aston, and suddenly one day the kids told him: “Clancy can’t fight, so don’t pick on him.” He couldn’t stand up to all of them.

“See if your Mum will let you visit,” they said, “and we’ll show you some games.”

Booker said no. “It’s very nice you’re progressing socially, Clancy. But I’m not having you mix just yet. I know what sort of things are in the homes of parents like that, and I’m not having you exposed.”

“Your Mum’s a posh git,” the children said.

“And a half,” I replied.

She was also a drug addict. One evening she didn’t collect me from Social Class. The consultant tried to reach her PDA, and couldn’t.

“You have a Home Help, don’t you?” the consultant asked.

She rang BETsi. BETsi said she had no record in her diary of where Miss McCall might be if not collecting me. BETsi sent round a taxi.

Booker was out for two weeks. She just disappeared. She’d collapsed on the street, and everything was taken—her handbag, her shoes, her PDA, even her contact lenses. She woke up blind and raving from barbiturate withdrawal in an NHS ward, which would have mortified her. She claimed to be Booker McCall and several other people as well. I suppose it was also a kind of breakdown. Nobody knew who she was, nobody told us what had happened.

BETsi and I just sat alone in the apartment, eating ice cream and Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.

“Do you suppose Booker will ever come back?” I asked her.

“I do not know where Booker is, kiddo. I’m afraid something bad must have happened to her.”

I felt guilty because I didn’t care. I didn’t care if Booker never came back. But I was scared.

“What happens if you have a disc fault?” I asked BETsi.

“I’ve just renewed the service contract,” she replied. She whirred closer to me, and put a carpeted arm around me.

“But how would they know that something was wrong?”

She gave me a little rousing shake. “I’m monitored, all day so that if there is a problem when your mother isn’t here, they come round and repair me.”

“But what if you’re broken for a real long time? Hours and hours. Days?”

“They’ll have a replacement.”

“I don’t want a replacement.”

“In a few hours, she’ll be trained to recognize your voice.”

“What if it doesn’t work? What if the contractors don’t hear? What do I do then?”

She printed out a number to call, and a password to enter.

“It probably won’t happen,” she said. “So I’m going to ask you to do your exercises.”

She meant to calm me down, as if my fears weren’t real, as if it couldn’t happen that a machine would break down.

“I don’t want to do my exercises. Exercises won’t help.”

“Do you want to see Jurassic Park?” she asked.

“It’s old,” I said, and thought of my friends at Social Class and of their mothers who were with them.

There was a whirring sound. A panel came up on the screen, like what happened during a service when the engineers came and checked her programming and reloaded the operational system. CONFIGURATION OVERRIDE the panels said.

When that was over BETsi asked, “Would you like to learn how to play Bloodlust Demon?”

“Oh!” I said and nothing else. “Oh! Oh! BETsi! Oh!” And she giggled.

I remember the light on the beige carpet making a highway towards the screen. I remember the sound of traffic outside, peeping, hooting, the sound of nightfall and loneliness, the time I usually hated the most. But now I was playing Bloodlust Demon.

I played it very badly. I kept getting blown up.

“Just keep trying,” she said.

“I have no spatial reasoning,” I replied. I was learning that I did not like computer games. But for the time being, I had forgotten everything else.

After two weeks, I assumed that Booker had gotten bored and had gone away and would never be back. Then one morning, when the hot world seemed to be pouring in through the grimy windows, someone kicked down the front door.

BETsi made a cage around me with her arms.

“I am programmed for both laser and bullet defense. Take what you want, but do not harm the child. I cannot take your photograph or video you. You will not be recognized. There is no need to damage me.”

They broke the glass tables, they threw drawers onto the floor. They dropped their trousers and shat in the kitchen. They took silver dresses, Booker’s black box, her jewelry. One of the thieves took hold of my Matchbox lorry and I knew the meaning of loss. I was going to lose my truck. Then the thief walked back across the carpet towards me. BETsi’s arms closed more tightly around me. The thief chuckled under his ski mask and left the truck nearby on the sofa.

“There you go, little fella,” he said. I never told anyone. It was Tom. Like I said, he wasn’t very bright. BETsi was programmed not to recognize him.

So I knew then what men were; they could go bad. There was part of them that was only ever caged up. I was frightened of men after that.

The men left the door open, and the flat was a ruin, smashed and broken, and BETsi’s cage of arms was lifted up, and I began to cry, and then I began to scream over and over and over, and finally some neighbors came, and finally the search was on for Booker McCall.

How could an editor-in-chief disappear for two weeks? “We thought she’d gone off with a new boyfriend,” her colleagues said, in the press, to damage her. Politics, wall to wall. It was on TV, the Uncaring Society they called it. No father, no grandparents, neighbors who were oblivious—the deserted child was only found because of a traumatic break in.

Booker was gone a very long time. Barbiturates are the worst withdrawal of all. I visited her, with one of the consultants from my Class. It got her picture in the papers, and a caption that made it sound as though the consultants were the only people who cared.

Booker looked awful. Bright yellow with blue circles under her eyes. She smelled of thin stale sweat.

“Hello, Clancy,” she whispered. “I’ve been in withdrawal.”

So—what? Tell me something I didn’t know. I was hardhearted. I had been deserted, she had no call on my respect.

“Did you miss me?” She looked like a cut flower that had been left in a vase too long, with smelly water.

I didn’t want to hurt her, so all I said was: “I was scared.”

“Poor baby,” she whispered. She meant it, but the wave of sympathy exhausted her and she lay back on the pillow. She held out her hand.

I took it and I looked at it.

“Did BETsi take good care of you?” she asked, with her eyes closed.

“Yes,” I replied, and began to think, still looking at her fingers. She really can’t help all of this, all of this is hardwired. I bet she’d like to be like BETsi, but can’t. Anyway, barbiturates don’t work on metal and plastic.

Suddenly she was crying, and she’d pushed my hand onto her moist cheek. It was sticky and I wanted to get away, and she said, “Tell me a story. Tell me some beautiful stories.”

So I sat and told her the story of Jurassic Park. She lay still, my hand on her cheek. At times I thought she was asleep, other times I found I hoped she loved the story as much as I did, raptors and brachiosaurs and T. Rex.

When I was finished, she murmured, “At least somebody’s happy.” She meant me. That was what she wanted to think, that I was all right, that she would not have to worry about me. And that too, I realized, would never change.

She came home. She stayed in bed all day for two more weeks, driving me nuts. “My life is such a mess!” she said, itchy and anxious. She promised me she would spend more time with me, God forbid. She raged against the bastards at BPC. We’d be moving as soon as she was up, she promised me, filling my heart with terror. She succeeded in disrupting my books, my movies, my painting. Finally she threw off the sheets a month early and went back to work. I gathered she still went in for treatment every fortnight. I gathered that booze now took the place of Barbies. The smell of the flat changed. And now that I hated men, there were a lot of them, loose after work.

“This is my boy,” she would say, with a kind of wobbly pride, introducing me to yet another middle-aged man with a ponytail. “Mr. d’Angelo is a designer,” she would say, as if she went out with their professions. She started to wear wobbly red lipstick. It got everywhere, on pillows, sheets, walls, and worst of all on my Nutella tumblers.

The flat had been my real world, against the outside, and now all that had changed. I went to school. I had to say goodbye to BETsi, every morning, and goodbye to Booker, who left wobbly red lipstick on my collar. I went to school in a taxi.

“You see,” said BETsi, after my first day. “It wasn’t bad was it? It works, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, BETsi,” I remember saying. “It does.” The “it” was me. We both meant my precious self. She had done her job.

Through my later school days, BETsi would sit unused in my room—most of the time. Sometimes at night, under the covers, I would reboot her, and the screen would open up to all the old things, still there. My childhood was already another world—dinosaurs and space cats and puzzles. BETsi would pick up where we had left off, with no sense of neglect, no sense of time or self.

“You’re older,” she would say. “About twelve. Let me look at you.” She would mirror my face, and whir to herself. “Are you drawing?”

“Lots,” I would say.

“Want to mess around with the clip art, kiddo?” she would ask.

And long into the night, when I should have been learning algebra, we would make collages on her screen. I showed surfers on waves that rose up amid galaxies blue and white in space, and through space there poured streams of roses. A row of identical dancing Buddhas was an audience.

“Tell me about your friends, and what you do,” she asked, as I cut and pasted. And I’d tell her about my friend John and his big black dog, Toro, and how we were caught in his neighbors’ garden. I ran and escaped, but John was caught. John lived outside town in the countryside. And I’d tell her about John’s grandfather’s farm, full of daffodils in rows. People use them to signal spring, to spell the end of winter. Symbol recognition.

“I’ve got some daffodils,” BETsi said. “In my memory.”

And I would put them into the montage for her, though it was not spring any longer.

I failed at algebra. Like everything else in Booker’s life, I was something that did not quite pan out as planned. She was good about it. She never upbraided me for not being a genius. There was something in the way she ground out her cigarette that said it all.

“Well, there’s always art school,” she said, and forced out a blast of blue-white smoke.

It was BETsi I showed my projects to—the A-level exercises in sketching elephants in pencil.

“From a photo,” BETsi said. “You can always tell. So. You can draw as well as a photograph. Now what?”

“That’s what I think,” I said. “I need a style of my own.”

“You need to do that for yourself,” she said.

“I know,” I said, casually.

“You won’t always have me to help,” she said.

The one thing I will never forgive Booker for is selling BETsi without telling me. I came back from first term at college to find the machine gone. I remember that I shouted, probably for the first time ever, “You did what?”

I remember Booker’s eyes widening, blinking. “It’s just a machine, Clancy. I mean, it wasn’t as if she was a member of the family or anything.”

“How could you do it! Where is she?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think you’d be so upset. You’re being awfully babyish about this.”

“What did you do with her?”

“I sold her back to the contract people, that’s all.” Booker was genuinely bemused. “Look. You are hardly ever here, it isn’t as though you use her for anything. She’s a child-development tool, for Chrissakes. Are you still a child?”

I’d thought Booker had been smart. I’d thought that she had recognized she would not have time to be a mother, and so had brought in BETsi. I thought that meant she understood what BETsi was. She didn’t and that meant she had not understood, not even been smart.

“You,” I said, “have sold the only real mother I have ever had.” I was no longer shouting. I said it at dictation speed. I’m not sure Booker has ever forgiven me.

Serial numbers, I thought. They have serial numbers, maybe I could trace her through those. I rang up the contractors. The kid on the phone sighed.

“You want to trace your BETsi,” he said before I’d finished, sounding bored.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

He grunted and I heard a flicker of fingertips on a keyboard.

“She’s been placed with another family. Still operational. But,” he said, “I can’t tell you where she is.”

“Why not?”

“Well, Mr. McCall. Another family is paying for the service, and the developer is now working with another child. Look. You are not unusual, OK? In fact this happens about half the time, and we cannot have customers disturbed by previous charges looking up their machines.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” he chortled; it was so obvious to him. “You might try imagining it from the child’s point of view. They have a new developer of their own, and then this other person, a stranger, tries to muscle in.”

“Just. Please. Tell me where she is.”

“Her memory has been wiped,” he said, abruptly.

It took a little while. I remember hearing the hiss on the line.

“She won’t recognize your voice. She won’t remember anything about you. She is just a service vehicle. Try to remember that.”

I wanted to strangle the receiver. I sputtered down the line like a car cold-starting. “Don’t . . . couldn’t you keep a copy! You know this happens, you bastard. Couldn’t you warn people, offer them the disc? Something?”

“I’m sorry sir, but we do, and you turned the offer down.”

“I’m sorry?” I was dazed.

“That’s what your entry says.”

Booker, I thought. Booker, Booker, Booker. And I realized; she couldn’t understand, she’s just too old. She’s just from another world.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I have other calls on the line.”

“I understand,” I replied.

All my books, all my collages, my own face in the mirror. It had been like a library I could visit whenever I wanted to see something from the past. It was as if my own life had been wiped.

Then for some reason, I remembered Tom.

He was fat and 40 and defeated, a bloke. I asked him to break into the contractor’s office and read the files and find who had her.

“So,” he said. “You knew then.”

“Yup.”

He blew out hard through his lips and looked at me askance.

“Thanks for the lorry,” I said, by way of explanation.

“I always liked you, you know. You were a nice little kid.” His fingers were tobacco-stained. “I can see why you want her back. She was all you had.”

He found her all right. I sent him a check. Sometimes even now I send him a check.

Booker would have been dismayed—BETsi had ended in a resold council flat. I remember, the lift was broken and the stairs smelled of pee. The door itself was painted fire-engine red and had a non-breakable plaque on the doorway. The Andersons, it said amid ceramic pansies. I knocked.

BETsi answered the door. Boom. There she was, arms extended defensively to prevent entry. She’d been cleaned up but there was still rice pudding in her hair. Beyond her, I saw a slumped three-piece suite and beige carpet littered with toys. There was a smell of baby food and damp flannel.

“BETsi?” I asked, and knelt down in front of her. She scanned me, clicking. I could almost see the wheels turning, and for some reason, I found it funny. “It’s OK,” I said, “you won’t know me, dear.”

“Who is it, Betty?” A little girl came running. To breathe the air that flows in through an open door, to see someone new, to see anyone at all.

“A caller, Bumps,” replied BETsi. Her voice was different, a harsher, East End lilt. “And I think he’s just about to be on his way.”

I found that funny too; I still forgave her. It wasn’t her fault. Doughty old BETsi still doing her job, with this doubtful man she didn’t know trying to gain entry.

There might be, though, one thing she could do.

I talked to her slowly, I tried to imitate an English accent. “You do not take orders from someone with my voice. But I mean no harm, and you may be able to do this. Can you show me my face on your screen?”

She whirred. Her screen flipped out of sleep. There I was.

“I am an old charge of yours,” I said—both of us, me and my image, his voice echoing mine. “My name is Clancy. All I ask you to do is remember me. Can you do that?”

“I understand what you mean,” she said. “I don’t have a security reason not to.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And see if you can program the following further instructions.”

“I cannot take instruction from you.”

“I know. But check if this violates security. Set aside part of your memory. Put Bumps into it. Put me and Bumps in the same place, so that even when they wipe you again you’ll remember us.”

She whirred. I began to get excited; I talked like myself.

“Because they’re going to wipe you BETsi, whenever they resell you. They’ll wipe you clean. It might be nice for Bumps if you remember her. Because we’ll always remember you.”

The little girl’s eyes were on me, dark and serious, 200 years old. “Do what he says, Betty,” the child said.

Files opened and closed like mouths. “I can put information in an iced file,” said BETsi. “It will not link with any other files, so it will not be usable to gain entry to my systems.” Robots and people: these days we all know too much about our inner workings.

I said thank you and goodbye, and said it silently looking into the eyes of the little girl, and she spun away on her heel as if to say: I did that.

I still felt happy, running all the way back to the tube station. I just felt joy.

So that’s the story.

It took me a long time to make friends in school, but they were good ones. I still know them, though they are now middle-aged men, clothiers in Toronto, or hearty freelancers in New York who talk about their men and their cats. Make a long story short. I grew up to be one of the people my mother used to hire and abuse.

I am a commercial artist, though more for book and CD covers than magazines. I’m about to be a Dad. One of my clients, a very nice woman. We used to see each other and get drunk at shows. In the hotel bedrooms I’d see myself in the mirror—not quite middle-aged, but with a ponytail. Her name is some kind of mistake. Bertha.

Bertha is very calm and cool and reliable. She called me and said coolly, I’m having a baby and you’re the father, but don’t worry. I don’t want anything from you.

I wanted her to want something from me. I wanted her to say marry me, you bastard. Or at least: could you take care of it on weekends? Not only didn’t she want me to worry—it was clear that she didn’t want me at all. It was also clear I could expect no more commissions from her.

I knew then what I wanted to do. I went to Hamleys.

There they were, the Next Degradation. Now they call them things like Best Friend or Home Companions, and they’ve tried to make them look human. They have latex skins and wigs and stiff little smiles. They look like burn victims after plastic surgery, and they recognize absolutely everybody. Some of them are modeled after Little Women. You can buy Beth or Amy or Jo. Some poor little rich girls start dressing them up in high fashion—the bills are said to be staggering. You can also buy male models—a lively Huckleberry, or big Jim. I wonder if those might not be more for the Mums, particularly if all parts are in working order.

“Do you . . . do you have any older models?” I ask at the counter.

The assistant is a sweet woman, apple cheeked, young, pretty, and she sees straight through me. “We have BETsis,” she says archly.

“They still make them?” I say, softly.

“Oh, they’re very popular,” she says, and pauses, and decides to drop the patter. “People want their children to have them. They loved them.”

History repeats like indigestion.

I turn up at conventions like this one. I can’t afford a stand but my livelihood depends on getting noticed anyway.

And if I get carried away and believe a keynote speaker trying to be a visionary, if he talks about, say, Virtual Government or Loose Working Practices, then I get overexcited. I think I see God, or the future or something and I get all jittery. And I go into the exhibition hall and there is a wall of faces I don’t know and I think: I’ve got to talk to them, I’ve got to sell to them. I freeze, and I go back to my room.

And I know what to do. I think of BETsi, and I stretch out on the floor and take hold of my shoulders and my breathing and I get off the emotional roller-coaster. I can go back downstairs, and back into the hall. And I remember that something once said: you have a natural warmth that attracts people, and I go in, and even though I’m a bit diffident, by the end of the convention, we’re laughing and shaking hands, and I have their business card. Or maybe we’ve stayed up drinking till four in the morning, playing Bloodlust Demon. They always win. They like that, and we laugh.

It is necessary to be loved. I’m not sentimental: I don’t think a computer loved me. But I was hugged, I was noticed, I was cared for. I was made to feel that I was important, special, at least to something. I fear for all the people who do not have that. Like everything else, it is now something that can be bought. It is therefore something that can be denied. It is possible that without BETsi, I might have to stay upstairs in that hotel room, panicked. It is possible that I would end up on barbiturates. It is possible that I could have ended up one of those sweet sad people sitting in the rain in shop doorways saying the same thing in London or New York, in exactly the same accent: any spare change please?

But I didn’t. I put a proposition to you.

If there were a God who saw and cared for us and was merciful, then when I died and went to Heaven, I would find among all the other things, a copy of that wiped disc.

Originally published in Interzone, October 1995.

About the Author

Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, but it was not until 1984, with the appearance of his brilliant novella “The Unconquered Country” that he first attracted any serious attention. “The Unconquered Country,” one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy won both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; and his later novel Air also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life, the critically-acclaimed mainstream novels Was, Coming of Enkidu, The King’s Last Song, Lust, and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” which in its original form ran online, and which, in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent books are the anthology When It Changed, the novel The Film-Makers of Mars, and the collection Paradise Tales: and Other Stories.

Artificial Wombs and Control of Reproductive Technology

Stephanie M. Bucklin

A new technology could help save the lives of premature babies—and raises new questions about both age of viability and reproductive control.

It’s called the Biobag, an artificial womb designed by researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Essentially, the Biobag is a fluid-filled bag hooked up to wires and cords. Researchers maintain the bag at a constant temperature and in a sterile environment, with other monitors keeping an eye on vital signs and blood flow, according to a press release on the new technology.

And in that bag, fetuses can actually grow and develop: researchers were able to grow fetal lambs for up to 28 days, until their time of “birth.” The lambs developed normally, even growing wool, opening their eyes, and developing normally. Once born, their organs showed no signs of malformation, nor did they appear to suffer any brain damage.

The breakthrough signals a potential new age of reproductive technology—if researchers can eventually bring the Biobag to human trials. In fact, the image of human fetuses growing in bags seems like science fiction, and science fiction points the way to some of the major implications of that breakthrough.

What the Biobag Could do for Human Infants

So why do we need to grow humans in Biobags in the first place? The new technology could be used to treat premature infants. Right now, infants born at about 22 to 23 weeks will survive—but they’ll most likely face chronic lung disease and other complications related to their immaturely developed organs. When infants that young are exposed to air, their lungs actually aren’t able to continue to develop normally, a problem that could be circumvented if they are instead placed in a Biobag that mimics the womb. Instead of air, the infants would continue to breathe amniotic fluid, and their organ development could continue normally.

“These infants have an urgent need for a bridge between the mother’s womb and the outside world,” said study leader Dr. Alan W. Flake. Flake is a fetal surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “If we can develop an extra-uterine system to support growth and organ maturation for only a few weeks, we can dramatically improve outcomes for extremely premature babies.”

Researchers hope they’ll be able to support babies from about 23 weeks to 28 weeks, after which most of the major complications associated with premature birth start to disappear.

Age of Viability

But Flake and his team are already anticipating some of the major questions swirling around the new technology. He emphasized that he and his team have no interest in pushing back the age of support to younger than 23 weeks—in part because the fetus would be too small and the procedure would be too risky.

“It’s certainly not our goal to extend the limits of viability,” he said during a press conference on the results, as reported by National Geographic. “Our goal is to improve survival for extremely premature infants.”

Other doctors also dismiss the idea that technology like the Biobag would be used to extend viability. George Mychaliska, a pediatric and fetal surgeon at the University of Michigan told National Geographic that the artificial womb system is not produced or designed in order to grow babies outside of a mother’s womb entirely. “That’s a Matrix thing,” he told National Geographic. “The whole point of the artificial placenta is to re-create the uterine environment for a period of time and allow the organs to develop to a point where the infant can tolerate postnatal life.”

What Bioethicists Say

But not everyone agrees. Bioethicists, in particular, point to some of the unintended consequences of these technologies. Dena Davis, a bioethicist at Lehigh University, told NPR that the technology could blur the line between a fetus and a baby—which could affect abortion laws.

“I could imagine a time, you know sort of [a] ‘Brave New World,’ where we’re growing embryos from the beginning to the end outside of our bodies. It would be a very Gattaca-like world,” Davis told NPR.

Another bioethicist from Oklahoma State University, Scott Gelfand, told NPR that such technology could even be used to control certain reproductive situations. For example, women getting abortions could be forced to place their fetus inside the devices, or employers could require female employees to use more advanced artificial wombs in lieu of maternity leave. Insurance companies could incentivize or even require women to use the device to avoid paying for complicated health risks associated with pregnancy and delivery, Gelfand told NPR.

Of course, such a technology could have positive effects as well: it might represent a viable alternative to commercial surrogacy, The Guardian reports. In addition, it would mean all types of parents—same-sex couples, trans people, and others—could have the same experience of pregnancy, without prejudice. The Guardian also noted that it could allow for a more equitable distribution of labor, if mothers did not have to carry a child unless they chose to do so.

But Flake insisted that his own team has no ambitions to create an artificial womb that serves as an alternative to pregnancy. “That’s a pipe dream at this point,” Flake told NPR. “I want to make this very clear: We have no intention and we’ve never had any intention with this technology of extending the limits of viability further back . . . I think when you do that you open a whole new can of worms.”

What Science Fiction Can Tell Us

That can of worms has been extensively explored in science fiction literature, even literature that dates back decades. Aldous Huxley’s 1931 Brave New World opens at the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center,” whose motto is “Community, identity, stability.” The Director of the center is giving a tour to some students, and shows his audience the Fertilizing Room. In it, numbered test tubes are kept inside incubators—male gametes and ova that technicians will then fertilize.

Fertilized eggs are then placed back inside incubators. But not all eggs will remain there to grow: the Director explains that while “Alphas” and “Betas” are left uninterrupted in the incubators, “Gammas,” “Deltas,” and “Epsilons” are brought out again to undergo the ominous-sounding “Bokanovsky’s Process.” In it, fertilized eggs are bombarded with X-rays, until they proliferate into up to 96 different humans, all genetic twins.

When one student questions the Director, he exclaims, “Can’t you see? Bokanovksy’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!” The center can produce 96 identical twins to work 96 identical machines, the Director says—one person for one job. A human grown specifically for one purpose, reflected in the human’s entire creation and upbringing.

“If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved,” the Director finishes.

In Brave New World, taking the human womb out of the reproduction process has resulted in a society of mass production, where mechanical reproduction has allowed not diversity, but a terrifying sameness. Control is essential: humans are born not to two parents, but to a society that has a function for them to fill, and is dead set on molding them to it.

The idea that technology can replace natural human reproduction entirely is both enticing and alarming—because, the more control humans have over the process, the more opportunity there seems to be for abuse. In Brave New World, humans have designed a system to not just control the traits of one child, but the traits of every person in society. They grow embryos and destine them for certain jobs and roles in society, breaking down individuality and lauding the creation of enormous amounts of twins who can perform exactly the same role—as if each individual human could be designed for one purpose specifically, a purpose with the society’s own larger goals in mind. Human society becomes less human. Instead, it becomes a type of beehive.

Madeline Ashby explores issues of control and technology in her short story “A Stopped Clock,” recently reprinted in Clarkesworld. In it, two cooks deal with a world whose (invasive) technological systems are starting to fail, turning order into chaos.

When reached for some insight, Ashby remarked, “I think that examining the implications of change and the structures of power within any society is an important thing for all artists to do.”

And reproduction is one major avenue for artists to grapple with these questions: “Stories about reproduction are intrinsic to humanity’s identity,” Ashby explained. “As humans, we’re faced with the paradox that in order to continue the species, we have to take a huge gamble on a future generation that may not survive, may not love us, may not even wish to have been born, and will doubtless blame us for everything that goes wrong.” Through technology, we impose control—but rarely is the next generation compliant with the rules that the previous generation set up.

In “A Stopped Clock,” humans begin fighting, dying, and panicking when long-established systems begin to glitch or turn off, possibly due to a cyberattack. The freedom this gives the two older main characters is not liberating, but frightening. Ha-eun, an older female cook, briefly thinks about her and her previous husband’s decision to not have children—a small way to wrest back some control from a regimented society. Absence becomes a form of empowerment, even if the characters themselves don’t view it that way. Avoiding that basic human impulse in an ever-watchful, technologized society is one way to maintain some separation from the organism that society has become. To procreate is to feed into it.

Lois Lowry also explores questions of control and reproduction in her much-lauded The Giver, where procreation occurs separate from the family unit. “Mothers” and “fathers” take pills to suppress any sexual or reproductive urges, and instead are given babies birthed from unrelated mothers who are screened for health before being placed with a family.

“People read fiction in order to rehearse life, I think,” Lois Lowry told us. “At every decisive juncture in a book, the reader thinks subconsciously: what would I do, under these circumstances? To read speculative fiction about the future is to plan one’s own role in the future.”

Lowry continued that in that future, technology will be an integral part of our lives, and that it is thus imperative to consider the various ethical and political considerations that come with advanced technology.

“The questions of control are already political issues,” she said. “How we address these questions will determine the future. It is vital, I think, to explore them by any means . . . including fictionally . . . now.”

Of course, control doesn’t inevitably come with advanced technology—it can manifest in a number of other ways, too. In Octavia Butler’s unsettling short story “Bloodchild,” humans have developed a symbiotic relationship with an alien species in order to survive on another planet. There, in return for protection, males and females alike—but mostly males—host the eggs of the alien species in their bodies until it’s time for them to hatch, after which they’re surgically removed. In this story, humans have lost control of reproduction not because of technology, but because of a need for survival. The alien’s ability to use the humans as host, complete with anesthetic and surgical accuracy, allows them to exploit the humans’ bodies in unusual ways. And while the story touches on issues of need, permission, and consent, the end result appears to be: reproductive control leads to exploitation in some form.

Margaret Atwood also explores the idea of reproduction and control in The Handmaid’s Tale, where fertile women called handmaids are forced to procreate with high-status, married men, whose wives are often barren. In the book, no artificial technology is used—in fact, the future seems a bleak throwback to earlier, technology-free days. A faux religiosity and sense of duty are used to control women, not any strange or frightening machines. Atwood indicates that it’s not technology, but people, who are responsible for this subjugation. Technology is a tool, and its application can be used for good or ill.

The Future of Reproduction

Science fiction isn’t the only medium that can predict the future. As The Guardian reported, in 1924 evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane predicted that, by 2074, artificial wombs would become so prevalent that fewer than 30% of children would be born naturally, “of woman.”

Are we on our way to that kind of society? Some of us might see 2074 in our lifetimes, and while growing an infant from conception to birth in an artificial womb may be a way off technologically (and a way off from society’s acceptance), the possibility does not seem out of reach. With technology always pushing for new frontiers, an artificial womb may seem almost inevitable—meaning the questions that it raises will not long be just the province of science fiction.

And in 50 years, we may come to understand just what artificial wombs and reproductive technology means for infants, mothers, and societal control.

About the Author

Stephanie Bucklin is a freelance writer. Her children’s book, Jack Death, was published by Creston Books in 2016 under her pen name, ML Windsor. Her nonfiction has been published on outlets including NY Mag, TODAY.com, and Vice. She graduated from Harvard with a degree in the history of science.

Occult Agencies and Political Satire:
A Conversation with Charles Stross

Chris Urie

Novels can be clever or profound. They can be funny or horrifying. But rarely are they ever profoundly funny and yet stray into the kind of stuff reserved for nightmares. When a story gets just the right mix of lurking monsters, mathematical magic, and an unreliable character exhausted by paperwork, you may find yourself in a Charles Stross novel.

The newest novel in the Laundry Files series is The Delirium Brief. Bob Howard works at The Laundry, a not-so-secret government agency tasked with dealing with the various things that go bump in the night. After the events of The Nightmare Stacks where a monstrous invasion in Yorkshire, England outed the once secret occult agency, Bob is tasked with some PR damage control. He quickly gets embroiled in a whole new kind of horror: a government conspiracy.

Charles Stross is the award-winning author of numerous novels. He’s won the Hugo and Locus Awards and has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Japanese Seiun Award. His newest novel in the Laundry Files series, The Delirium Brief, was released by Tor.com on July 11.

What are some of the challenges of writing a long-running series? How do you keep things fresh and engaging while making it somewhat accessible to new readers?

I’m currently juggling two long-running series, both around the million word mark, and they both get harder with each successive book. However, the problems I deal with in each series are different because they follow a different structure.

The Merchant Princes series—now rebooted in the form of a new trilogy, Empire Games, set a generation after the original series—actually consists of a couple of very big stories, set consecutively and involving the same protagonists, that had to be divided up into multiple books due to their length. These stories are self-contained, but cover a lot of ground with an ensemble cast of protagonists and an evolving world.

Meanwhile, the Laundry Files started out as a single short novel, then acquired sequels. As the setting acquired more furniture and more secondary characters the background got deeper and more complex and some of the secondary characters demanded their own novels. The books can mostly be approached independently, although there’s an underlying sequence and background in earlier novels that sets up later stories.

Keeping track of a million words of backstory is hard for my middle-aged brain, but there are a couple of neat tricks you can use to manage it if you’re not the kind of author who writes an exhaustive series bible as they go along: firstly, you decree that your narrator (Bob, in the Laundry Files) is unreliable and doesn’t understand everything he sees, thereby allowing you to retcon new twists on old mistakes (“I meant to do that!”). And secondly, there’s GRRM’s classic rule: “when I find I’m juggling too many protagonists, I kill a few of them. It keeps the readers on their toes and makes life easier for me.” (Paraphrased, not a direct quote.)

Humor plays a part in your new novel. What kind of humor do you think works best in novels?

Whatever kind the author is capable of emitting? Seriously, I have no idea how many different kinds of humor there are, or how to anatomize them!

The Laundry Files started with an element of situational comedy juxtaposed on a background of nightmarish horror: the government agency for protecting us from the likes of Cthulhu turns out to be just another secret civil service bureaucracy with forms, committee meetings, and an obsession with secrecy. Into which we inject a narrator who is a brash young hacker-nerd from the late 90s dot-com culture (who has been conscripted willy-nilly into something structured a lot like a very 1950s-ish Len Deighton spy agency, if updated in line with health and safety and HR legislation). “The inappropriate hero” is one of the classic humorous narrative forms because it gives us a sympathetic viewpoint from which to explore the lunacy of a situation, and there’s plenty of humor in any bureaucracy (as the early Dilbert cartoon strips illustrated, before it jumped the shark circa 1998).

By the eighth book in the Laundry Files, Bob isn’t an outsider anymore; indeed, he’s at the lower end of senior management, representing the agency in public. But there’s still plenty of situational humor to be extracted by watching how a government deals with a whole new bureaucracy it was hitherto unaware it possessed.

And then, of course, there’s the horror element. Like humor, horror is a tone you can apply to any other genre of fiction. (You can have a horror-spy crossover, or horror on top of SF, or horror on top of historical fiction, or . . .) And I find combining horror and humor particularly useful because the one contrasts with the other to great effect.

Do you have a particular recipe that makes up a Laundry Files novel? Have you ever found while editing that you might have a bit too much of one particular spice?

The first four books in the series were, individually, tributes to specific British Cold War thriller writers (Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, Anthony Price, and Peter O’Donnell respectively). After I ploughed that field, I then switched to writing pastiches of different urban fantasy genres: I did vampires, superheroes, unicorns (in a novella), and elves (with a side order of Lovecraftian dragons).

But as of The Delirium Brief the universe of the Laundry Files got so dense and self-referential that there wasn’t really room to pastiche any other author or sub-genre: it had become more or less self-sustaining, and big enough that it needed more than the single first-person narrator (Bob) I started off with. Future Laundry stories won’t be pastiches either, for the same reason (although there may be some sly nods at inspirational sources).

Do you feel like the current political climate of the U.K. has influenced this novel at all? I saw mention of asylum seekers.

Yes.

I wrote the original draft of The Delirium Brief in late 2015 to early 2016, and was just about to submit it to my editors when the Brexit referendum upset happened. And within two weeks I realized that I had to rewrite about half the book.

The original version had a fairly simple plot conceit: after the events of The Nightmare Stacks the Laundry has been exposed publicly, and thus comes to the attention of a thinly-disguised version of the 2010-15 UK coalition government, who do what British governments since 1979 have done, and try to privatize the agency (with a side-order of crony capitalism and corruption). So I had a line of delicate British political satire . . . and then we had two party leadership challenges and three constitutional crises break in two weeks flat, culminating in the appointment of Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary. Satire was not merely dead; its withered corpse had been exhumed and paraded through the streets on a litter borne by clowns. And I had to go back to the drawing board, tear up about 55,000 words, and rewrite the whole damned thing to give it some bite.

Math, science, and magic are all sort of rolled into one in your Laundry Files novels. What made you ground the fantastic in something logical?

As Arthur C. Clarke observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This aphorism works just as well inverted; what we don’t understand we used to call magic, and if magic presented itself to us today the rational urge would try and systematize and explain it. To most people today we live in a magical world, where mysterious entities in our ghost-haunted machines interpret our desires; meanwhile, if we actually had a working form of magic, its practice would probably end up a lot like software engineering—bounded by regulations, unfolding in accordance with development methodologies and project plans, and carried out by team-work.

Is there a knack to writing great dialogue? What is it?

Know your characters? Try and make their speech patterns distinctively their own? Don’t underestimate the importance of word-play? Beyond that, I’ve got nothing: it just takes a lot of practice!

The Laundry Files novels feature a number of different protagonists. Whose perspective is your favorite to write from and why?

Originally the series was all Bob, all of the time. Because it wasn’t really about the Laundry—it was about Bob.

Some time after my editor at Ace pinned a series title on these books (I didn’t come up with “The Laundry Files!”) I realized a couple of things. Firstly, there were stories that Bob couldn’t tell; I needed different viewpoints for them. (As Bob is an unreliable narrator, if I want to show the reader just how unreliable he is, I need to step completely outside his head.) And secondly, Bob was leveling up too rapidly to sustain a series for very long. In The Rhesus Chart there’s a scene which is telling, by implication: Bob accidentally walks into a nest of vampires . . . and escapes with his hair mussed and his dignity in shreds, but basically undamaged. He could no longer serve as a naïve, wet-behind-the-ears low level dogsbody viewpoint—he knew too much and was far too formidable. So I needed to switch around and use other sets of eyeballs to show what was going on.

First up was Dr. Dominique O’Brien, Bob’s wife—and cause of considerable hate mail from fans of the series who were really fans of Bob Howard, cuddly uber-hacker-bro-dude and Olympic gold medalist at self-deception. Mo, his wife of some years, harbored very few delusions about her husband; but this came as an unwelcome bucket of cold water over the heads of those readers who read Bob naïvely as a relatable hero-protagonist. And Mo is, in many ways, the more competent of the two of them (and also the more brittle: The Annihilation Score was her a nervous breakdown novel, with superheroes).

Next up was Alex Schwartz, junior vampire and bumbling wunderkind. By The Nightmare Stacks, the threats facing the agency had levelled up almost as much as Bob’s personal power; so I needed a new entry-level protagonist. Alex is a replacement for the young Bob, with added mojo to deal with the new challenges. He’s less self-deluding and less over-confident, which is good: he also has serious self-confidence issues centering around his case of PHANG syndrome. All in all, he’s more interesting to write than Bob these days (although I’m not sure I dare write much more from the perspective of Cassie, his manic pixie dream girl: she’s even less human than her vampire nerd boy, and conveying that sort of thing convincingly is hard work).

And the next viewpoint protagonist on stage will be Mhari Murphy, the narrator of The Labyrinth Index, but I’d like to keep that story a surprise for now. Let’s just say that Mhari, who Bob remembers as his ex- from hell (returned as a vampire working in Human Resources) and Mo relates to her as a somewhat chilly but efficient number two from an occult police force, is actually something else again.

How do you discover the voices for each character? Does the personality come first and then the voice or do you build the character around a particular voice?

I can’t help you—it all happens in parallel, and I can’t really disentangle those threads!

What made you choose to write these novels as a sort of diary or recounting of events? Did it provide more room for mystery and an unreliable narrator?

Nope, it was an accident.

The original short novel, The Atrocity Archives, wasn’t written with any expectation of a sequel. I picked first-person present tense because it’s an easy way to convey immediacy and tension, and easy to convey a voice, if you can put yourself in your narrator’s shoes. (Received wisdom seems to be that beginners should write novels in tight third person past tense, but I actually find first-person present makes for better training wheels: it enforces the tight viewpoint, forces you to develop your protagonist’s voice, and helps you identify slow pacing.)

Then I ended up being asked to write a sequel novella, and then another novel, and ran into a problem: first person narratives imply that the narrator survives the story.

This is a huge headache if you’re writing a horror story (or even a humorous horrifying spy thriller) because it implicitly defuses the tension. But when I got to The Fuller Memorandum I realized that if I framed it as a confidential diary written after the event I could leave the reader guessing—is Bob going to suddenly stop, and the narrative switch to another narrator in the closing chapters? It also gave me permission to step outside Bob’s head and go third-person with reaction shots by other characters—something I used increasingly in The Delirium Brief. (Bob is the only first-person narrator in The Delirium Brief but we get tight third person accounts from Mo, Mhari, Persephone, Alex, and Cassie.)

And of course, once Bob is keeping a workplace diary to ensure his successor knows what he’s been doing if he is unavailable, it was logical for Mo, Alex, et al. to do likewise.

How has Bob evolved over the course of the series? Has his character surprised you at all while writing?

Bob started out (in 1999) a decade younger than his author. As there was a five year gap before I wrote the second novel, and a three year gap before the third, I couldn’t leave Bob stranded in the past—especially as his conceptual waypoints are technological artifacts. So in The Jennifer Morgue I decided to have Bob age twelve months for every year that passed in the real world, and kept it up right up until The Nightmare Stacks, which is set in mid-2014. (From that point on, the Laundry novels are set in a wildly divergent world—a world in which the Lovecraftian Singularity of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN has already occurred and by mid-2015 the UK is ruled by Nyarlathotep. (What’s going on in America in the meantime is the subject of The Labyrinth Index.)

Anyway: the mid-twenties, brash, cocky Bob of The Atrocity Archives is a married, cynical, early-thirties Bob by The Fuller Memorandum, a late-thirties marriage-in-trouble senior Bob by The Rhesus Chart, and as of The Delirium Brief he’s forced to grow the hell up and stop kidding himself (spoiler: he’s really unhappy about this).

I had no idea when I wrote The Atrocity Archives that Bob was going to get married and turn middle-aged on me. Nor did I know that Bob, who was initially a dogsbody, was going to turn into a terrifying organization monster like Angleton. I’m still not sure I know where Bob is going, at this point. What I do know is, he’s very unlikely to die in bed at this rate.

Would you ever work at The Laundry? If so, what would be your job?

If I woke up in the universe of the Laundry, I would be strongly tempted to commit suicide. Because, seriously? The Elder Gods are returning. And when Bob asserted in Equoid that “Cthulhu does not exist,” he was being, shall we say, an unreliable narrator . . .

What other projects do you have in the works?

I’m still finishing up the Empire Games trilogy; the second book, Dark State, comes out in January 2018, and my next job is to rewrite the second half of book three, Invisible Sun (due out January 2019).

I’m also working on a stand-alone space opera, Ghost Engine, which was previously expected in mid-2018, but which I’m pushing back a year (it needs time for another draft and I don’t want to force the pace of work on it).

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
The Dream of Writing Full Time

Kelly Robson

I love my job. No, really. I love my job. Not writing (which I adore), but my other job. The eight-to-four, five-days-a-week office job. You might call it my day job, but really, it’s just my job. And I love it. Have I made that clear?

It’s not a glamourous job. It’s not exciting or prestigious. It’s comfortable. My colleagues are nice and the work suits my temperament. After years of experience, I’m good at it. And I love it because it supports my life. I work so I can live. I work so I can write.

Most writers dream of being able to quit their day jobs and write full time. The reasons are too obvious to list, but the biggest reason is time. Humans have a finite amount. Pursuing a writing career in spare time can feel constrained—like paddling in a kiddie pool when you could be crossing the ocean. What could I achieve if I focused on writing full time?

Writing full time remains a dream for most writers because we’re realistic about our finances. An average middle class individual income is difficult to achieve writing fiction. The lavish lifestyles of writers on TV are highly fictionalized. Most writers count themselves lucky if they can float the mortgage on a modest suburban bungalow.

Let’s keep that quiet, though. Writing classes are filled with people nursing unrealistic dreams of superstardom on the order of Rowling and King, and those classes are taught by writers with more typical careers. The bestselling-author dream puts butts in classroom seats and pays a lot of writers’ bills. The fact that this kind of success is near-mythical doesn’t matter. So is winning the lottery. People have to dream.

So, when I dream about being a full-time writer, what does that look like, realistically?

On the most basic level, I would simply have the freedom to write at full capacity. For me, that would be either three to four hours of drafting or six to eight hours of revision, five or six days a week. In this dream, I would live a creative life, thinking about nothing but story. I’d read more, staying current in the field. I’d think deeply about what I know and what I believe, and delve into the truths behind what makes me angry and what I passionately value, expressing my insights about the world, and illustrating what I wish were true.

Except for the capacity and single-mindedness, this is exactly what I do now. Alyx and I have organized our lives to maximize our creative time. We live downtown in a small apartment. I walk to work. We don’t have kids. In a typical week, I can eke out ten to fifteen hours of writing, and when I really need to make consistent progress—which is essential for revising—I can get as many as twenty-five hours.

I’d love to see what I could do if I had more time. Clearly, the longer I spend on a story, the better it is. I’d definitely be a better writer if I were working at it full time.

For many writers, the road to full-time writing is paved by a partner with a regular paycheck. I know the pros and cons of this route intimately: Alyx has been a full-time writer for twenty years. She does most of the housework and cooking (and all of the family finances) and I bring in that regular slab of bacon. This arrangement works, but it has drawbacks.

Inequality can put a lot of pressure on the partnership. I earn a good salary; she doesn’t. I get paid sick days; not her. My schedule is carved in stone; hers is fungible. My vacation days are limited; she can work on the other side of the world if she wants to.

Alyx and I have been able to tolerate this inequality for two decades because we have identical values and goals: Stories are the most important things in the world and SF/F/H is the highest form of art. We believe in each other’s writing implicitly. Still, it’s been difficult on occasion. Money has been tight. We’ve made sacrifices that wouldn’t have been necessary if we had two paychecks instead of one. Every so often I work myself into a lather worrying about being poor when we’re old. But overwhelmingly, we’re happy with our choices.

If Alyx and I weren’t on exactly the same page, this situation would be unsustainable and possibly tragic. Years ago, a good friend who’d been writing full time landed on our doorstep staggering from the sudden collapse of his relationship. In addition to feeling shell-shocked and betrayed by the loss of love, he simply didn’t know how he was going to live without his partner’s support—how he’d feed his cats, much less write. In the end, he salvaged his life and is writing full time now in a home filled with love. The wreckage wasn’t pretty, though, and I wouldn’t wish the situation on anyone.

To make a living, successful full-time writers have to hustle. They write multiple books every year. They sculpt hybrid careers with traditionally-published books, short fiction, serials, and indie titles. They write popular blogs and groom vibrant social media presences. They claw back copyright on their out-of-print backlist and self-publish. They survey the market, developing expertise on all the publishing models and platforms. They put a lot of time and effort into PR, with appearances, newsletters, Patreon rewards, and guest blogging.

Other successful full-time writers edit magazines and anthologies, teach writing, or consult on other writers’ manuscripts. They work as journalists and book reviewers. Some write media tie-ins or consult to video game companies. Many teach writing in classrooms or online. They run workshops and master classes. Our writerly ecosystem is supported by full-time writers carving time out of their work days to supplement their writing income with peripheral jobs.

This isn’t full time-writing—it’s a lot more than full time. In comparison, working in an office forty hours a week seems pretty relaxing.

Even aside from the financial considerations, writing full time isn’t necessarily beneficial or desirable for everyone. Being a full-time writer comes with some hidden drawbacks.

Writing is a solitary pursuit, and it can be lonely. Many writers work in cafes to fill the social gap, but cafe writing doesn’t work for everyone. Many writers need to be alone to do their best work, but being alone all day doesn’t work for everyone.

Writing full time, we also risk burnout. Everyone has a different sustainable per-word volume that bears absolutely no relation to anyone else’s. Plenty of writers will tell you they aim for 500 words a day. After nearly two years writing full time, Jeffe Kennedy has just settled on 3000 words as a sustainable and fruitful per-day rate. In contrast, while working a day job, Kameron Hurley experimented until she hit upon a way to write 10,000 words a day, two days a week. We can’t expect ourselves to start writing full time and instantly become the most productive version of ourselves. Humans aren’t that simple or predictable, and what nourishes one writer might be poison for another.

Pressure to produce doesn’t work for everyone, either, and not everyone has the same tolerance for risk and uncertainty. Unless I had a healthy cushion, I’m pretty sure I’d hate wondering whether my dream project will earn-out its advance so I could work on my next dream project. It’d be exciting, certainly. But I think I prefer getting a paycheck twice a month.

When I dream about writing full time, what I’m actually yearning for is a life with no problems—living in a magical land where I can do what I love and not have to worry about anything. That’s a really good dream, but writing full time is no way to get it.

After a lifetime of effort, I’m finally beginning to become the writer I’ve wanted to be—yearned to be—my entire life, and this fills me with joy from top to toes. That joy would suffocate if I tried to make it support my entire life. If I had to make writing pay the bills, writing would become a stressful job. And jobs are tedious, frustrating, and occasionally odious things. Writing is difficult enough without making it a full-time job.

So, for now, until I can find a way to a life with no problems, I’ll joyfully write in my spare time. I’m still living my dream.

About the Author

Kelly Robson is currently a finalist for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award and was a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She has also been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and Sunburst Award. Kelly’s time travel novella “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach” will be published by Tor.com imprint in 2018. She lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

Editor’s Desk:
Home for the Month

Neil Clarke

August was an unusual month in that I didn’t have any conventions, workshops, or meetings to attend. It was somewhat bittersweet in that I had very much wanted to attend the Worldcon in Finland, but couldn’t afford the trip. Everything I’ve heard from friends that did go made it sound like an amazing experience and I have to credit the con organizers for posting so much content on YouTube, even if the live stream failed during the Hugo Awards ceremony. I know they took some flack for that, but these things sometimes happen. Fortunately, there were several text chats, Twitter posts, and even a live stream on a Chinese website from someone in the audience.

In the end, I lived vicariously through the posts and videos of those on the scene, something that would have been very science fictional when I was a kid. Sean, Kate, Terra, and I even hopped into a Skype call to have our own little gathering as the Hugo Award ceremony unfurled. It was my fifth time as a nominee for Best Editor Short Form and Ann VanderMeer was on-site to accept if I won. It was also the first time I wrote an acceptance speech, not because I expected to win, but because I had someone else there in my place.

Losing a Hugo Award isn’t all that bad. Sure, it’s a bit disappointing, but to earn a spot alongside some of the editors I most admire in the field, that’s something incredible. I’d like to thank everyone that voted for me in the Hugo Awards this year. It meant a lot to me to have your support. Ultimately, Ellen Datlow took the top honors and it’s hard for me to be shocked by that. Omni was the first magazine I subscribed to—it’s coming back too!—and the shuttering of SciFiction was one of the reasons Clarkesworld was launched in the first place. Our year’s bests are published by the same publisher, so our anthologies are a sort of family.

Speaking of anthologies by the way, a bilingual science fiction anthology I co-edited was just published in China. Touchable Unreality included all the stories we published as part of the first year of our partnership with Storycom. We’re now discussing a US edition, but whether or not it will be bilingual is still up in the air. I hope to have news about this to report in a future editorial which will be more directly focused on the future of our efforts in translation. 

Aside from that, much of the month has been spent working on other anthologies, with final sign-off on More Human Than Human, which was just given a starred review by Kirkus and will be published in November; reading for The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 3; and the heavy lifting on The Final Frontier, an anthology that won’t be published until mid-2018. There’s also a good chance that at least one of the two volumes of Clarkesworld Year Nine will be launched at Capclave in October. I’m still hoping to have both there at the same time.

Thanks to all the people that encouraged me to continue the letters to the editor format I used in last month’s editorial. It will return, depending on the frequency and volume of the emails, tweets, or in-person questions I receive. Those of you who support Clarkesworld via Patreon can also drop questions in a special Letters to the Editor channel I’ve created in our Discord chat room.

That’s about all for this month. Before I go, one last thank you to everyone who has been subscribing to Clarkesworld and/or Forever Magazine or supporting us on Patreon. None of this would happen without you!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a five-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His latest anthologies are Galactic Empires and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two. An android anthology, More Human Than Human is scheduled for publication in late 2017. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Ritual

Vladimir Manyukhin

About the Artist

The works of Russian artist Vladimir Maniukhin are well-known to fans of post-apocalyptic art. He started painting at a young age and among his influences lists old, classic fiction–books, and films. His work has also been featured in Vostok Game’s Survarium.