Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 142

Table of Contents

Gubbinal

by Lavie Tidhar

A Gaze of Faces

by Mike Buckley

The James Machine

by Kate Osias

For What are Delusions if Not Dreams?

by Osahon Ize-Iyamu

To Fly Like a Fallen Angel

by Qi Yue

Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh

by John Barnes

Last Gods

by Sam J. Miller

The Monster at the Movies: Film Adaptations of Frankenstein

by Carrie Sessarego

Dependent Intelligence, Humanism, and a City in a Paragraph: A Conversation with James Patrick Kelly

by Chris Urie

Another Word: Your Life is Epic!

by A.M. Dellamonica

Editor’s Desk: A Threat, Followed Through

by Neil Clarke

Islamic Universe 2

Art by Luis Carlos Barragán

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2018
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Gubbinal

Lavie Tidhar

Sahar, moving softly through the river valley, made sure to listen. The sound filtered into her helmet from the external mics, and she imagined this must be what hiking on Earth must be like. She listened to the wind; to the rumble overhead from the active ice volcano; to the storm raging on the horizon. But most of all she listened for any movement, for anything with design that may be scuttling about or trying to hide.

Titan was a cacophony of sound, a heavenly orchestra: the percussion of breaking ice and the patter of methane rains as they fell. The whisper and shout of the winds. In the northern summertime, cyclones howled and screamed over the Kraken Sea. If Sahar shifted to infrared she could see rainbows overhead and sometimes, through a gap in the ever-present canopy of clouds, glimpse Saturn rising low on the horizon. The world was always alive, awash in sound and fury. Sahar was left all alone to listen to it.

She preferred it that way.

She listened for any intrusions. The hum of an airplane engine or the softer passing of an airship or hot-air balloon. Her friend, Rania, was the pilot of a small aircraft that flew these routes and was her link back to Polyphemus Port. All she had to do was drop a signal, then wait for pickup. They had done this many times before. Not many ventured this far out here, not when Nirrti the Black was stirring again from her stronghold on the Mayda Insula. Sahar listened for the pirate’s canons, but they were silent now.

Good.

She moved cautiously up the canyon, listening for Boppers. Listening, too, for any of Nirrti’s foot patrols, who were known to venture out here from time to time. But mostly she enjoyed the lack of any human sound. Back in Polyphemus Port, humanity’s largest stronghold on Titan, people were a constant noise, an endless chatter of grunting and farting and laughing and shouting, eating and belching and singing and crying, all in close proximity under the dome and the purple roiling clouds and the eerie illumination of the lightning in the storms. Polyphemus Port was a hot, humid place with creepers and vines growing over the buildings, flowers exploding in a profusion of colors in every available space—she thought this must be what Earth was like.

But Sahar preferred her solitude. She liked being out here, on the lunar surface proper, away from people and their noise and their demands and their needs, all alone in that beautiful untamed music of the moon. She hiked up the canyon, enjoying the exertion of her muscles against a land that humans had never evolved for.

Looking for Boppers.

There!

She thought she heard a noise, a slight slide of rocks somewhere up and to her right. Movement, and there it came again, like something with a purpose, out here where there was no native life. Nothing had evolved on Titan before humans came.

She followed the sound. The wind howled overhead and on the horizon lightning flashed, and—there! A shadow moving high against the outline of the storm.

She followed.

She kicked up the slope, using boosters now, leaping high—on Earth people moved so slowly, were land-bound, where on Titan they could be free. The shadow moved again and she sought a higher vantage point to track it.

There! It was definitely a Bopper. The small critter was a tangle of flexible legs and manipulating arms, like a funnel weaver or a hobo spider on Earth, but made of spun polymers. The Boppers really thrived next to the Kraken Sea, its rich liquid hydrocarbons ideal both for fueling the Boppers with an endless supply of energy and the environment naturally providing the materials necessary for their reproduction. No two Boppers were exactly alike, for they constructed other Boppers the way they did their other curious offerings. People make people, the saying went, and Boppers make Boppers. As for their offerings, no one was, even now, sure why they made them. It was generally assumed they were simply Bopper waste, the by-product of the critters’ busy, if incomprehensible, lives.

Sahar jumped and sailed through the soupy nitrogen air, landing not far from the Bopper. It turned and must have sensed her, for it extended speaker-stalks and babbled at her in an excitable chatter. Sahar extended one hand and held it up, fingers splayed open. Sometimes the Boppers seemed to sense a kinship of sort with the people they encountered, even to seek their company. At other times they ignored them completely, or actively acted to avoid humans. But they were harmless. It was bad luck to hurt one, and even Nirrti and her pirates seemed to leave them be.

The Bopper jabbered on at her. Sahar carefully opened her node up to the Conversation. She was too far out to get a very clear wash of data. It was one reason she liked it out here. The Conversation may have engulfed the entire solar system, but out here there were still pockets of dead air, the cloud cover and the storms made signal loss an issue, and of course Nirrti’s pirates made sure to destroy any booster-hubs they found. Nirrti’s hatred of the Conversation and anything that lived in it was the very thing that drove her. None of her people were noded, and any passersby unlucky enough to be caught by the pirates would have their nodes forcefully torn out, often leaving them little more than vegetables.

She thought she might get something out of the Bopper, some digital signature or communication, but there was nothing there. The Bopper watched her hopefully for a moment, then seemed to lose interest and wandered away. It moved surprisingly fast, but Sahar was fast too, and she followed.

The Bopper went higher up into the hills. They were covered in ice and soon it began to rain again, though neither Sahar nor the Bopper minded. Sahar looked for other Boppers but saw none. She kept an eye out for the Bopper’s leavings, the artifacts she had come here to find and which were her livelihood. Sometimes she could follow a Bopper or a pack of them for days.

But this Bopper wasn’t making anything. It seemed in a hurry, and yet from time to time it would stop and seem to listen carefully, and then turn back to watch if Sahar was following. It was like it wanted her to. Which was strange behavior for a Bopper.

At last it crested a rise and vanished on the other side. Sahar leaped after it and saw that it had brought her to the opening of a cave that was hidden in the saddle of two hills. The Bopper beeped at her excitedly and then darted inside. Sahar, curious, followed.

The first things she saw were the artifacts There was a thing like a tree trunk hollowed and turned inside out, with the branches somehow growing and twisting into an impossibly small matrix formed around the heart of a glowing star.

There was a thing like a black cube with knobs and dials turning on it in an intricate pattern that never repeated, and the ice all around it hovered in the air as though the gravity worked differently in that part of the cave.

There was a convex mirror half-melted against the wall of the cave, made of some impossibly smooth silver matter, and Sahar made sure not to look at it directly, for it was never wise to stare into the mirrors Boppers made.

Boppers just made things, evolving them out of an obscure set of criteria, and some of them were useless and some of them seemed to do things that were supposed to be impossible, like the thing that seemed to subvert gravity, and sometimes they seemed to only half-exist in traditional four-dimensional space. Mostly, they were just prized for being rare, and unusual, and they fetched high prices in the galleries back in Polyphemus Port. There was a law against exporting them off-world, but some collectors were determined enough anyway for a black market to have formed.

And that’s what Sahar did. She hunted for Bopper objects. The Boppers never seemed to care—once they’d finished an object they’d lost all interest in it. Perhaps it really was, as has been theorized, just their waste product.

The second thing Sahar saw in the cave was the woman in white.

She was an Ermine.

Sahar stared.

The woman reclined against the back wall of the cave. Her white fur was mottled with icy crystals of snow that caught the light, but her left leg looked like it was decorated with tiny rubies in an intricate pattern, and it took Sahar a moment to realize it was blood.

The Ermine was hurt.

Sahar approached cautiously. The Ermine stirred and that perfect, elongated face turned and regarded her through black, filmed-over eyes. Sahar held her breath. The Ermine was so perfectly engineered, the stoat-like bio-suit fused with the vulnerable human frame of its owner until the two were one and the same. The Ermine was a whole other level of adaptability. She could traverse Titan without suit or mask, body impervious to the freezing temperatures, her blood oxygenated, the fat around the human-form rich in nutrition that could sustain the Ermine for months. And she could dig into the snow and sleep right out there, or chip at the ice for precious water and air . . .

Sahar had never even seen one. There were reportedly Ermines on the Fairy Moons, Oberon and Titania, out there in the Uranian System where people’s base human forms had been ruthlessly gene-chopped and engineered until they barely resembled their origins. But that was out, far out, where things got strange: beyond lay Jettisoned and Dragon’s World where wildtech flourished and people believed in strange gods.

Sahar had never met an Ermine—and she was terribly jealous.

The woman looked at her. Sahar maintained a respectful distance and knelt down, hands open forward in a gesture of peace, fingers splayed. The Bopper who led her there was chattering to itself in a corner of the cave, now oblivious of the two of them, slowly converting matter into a new object. Mandibles and manipulating arms moved fast and precisely.

“You are hurt?” Sahar said.

The woman looked at her through those black, impregnable eyes.

“What does it bloody look like?” she said. The sound was distorted, both by the physiognomy of her face and the thick atmosphere it had to travel though. But she sounded in pain.

Yet underneath, Sahar thought she sensed a cold amusement, somewhere deep within the Ermine’s core being.

Sahar approached, still crouched low. The woman let her. Sahar ran her fingers lightly over the blood-encrusted foot. The Ermine could move four-legged, her hands were paw-like and she could go horizontal and fast if she chose. Sahar was filled with envy. To be adapted in this way! To see Titan not as Sahar saw it, a hostile, dangerous place to humans, where every careless step could be your last—but as home! To be as comfortable outside as people were inside the Polyport dome.

“What happened?” she said.

The woman grimaced. “Fell into a trap,” she said.

“A trap?”

“Is there an echo in here? It must have been set by Nirrti’s people.”

“Who are you?” Sahar said.

“You can call me Yoharneth.” Again, that sense of deep-buried amusement.

“I’m Sahar. Is there anything I can do to help?”

The Ermine studied her. “Perhaps,” she said. “You’re a Bopper hunter?”

“Artifacts, not Boppers,” Sahar said. The question took her by surprise.

“I heard there were people out here,” the Ermine said. “I never saw one before.”

“You have been here long?”

The Ermine almost smile. “Not that long, but . . . ”

“You’re an off-worlder.”

“What gave that away?”

Sahar let it go. She sat back, cross-legged, on the cave floor. The suit extruded a piece of jerky and she chewed on it.

“You want some?”

“Sure.”

She handed the Ermine a strip from her supplies. The Ermine chewed.

“Real?”

“Lab-grown.”

“Of course. Well, it’s not bad.”

“Do you need medical help?” Sahar said.

“Why, are you a doctor?” The Ermine laughed. “No, thank you. I’m shot full of bacterial machines and, well, some sort of retroviral defenses and so on. Should repair the damage, as long as I’m still. Damn but I hate being stuck here.”

“What are you doing here?” Sahar said.

“Searching for something. Same as you.”

“Artifacts?”

The Ermine’s eyes gleamed. “An artifact,” she said.

Sahar cautiously opened her node to the Conversation again. She could hear very little chatter over the digital signals lost in the storms overhead, but when she glanced at the Ermine, the woman was an impenetrable bubble of defenses that seemed to extend for a meter around her, as though she were herself a hub of the Conversation. Intricate patterns ran through the surface of that visual image, and Sahar was convinced this woman was running some sort of military grade obstruction-ware.

“Look all you want,” the woman said, and laughed again. Sahar switched off. The Ermine was equally annoying and fascinating to her. A mystery.

“What sort of artifact, then?” she said.

“A Black Monolith.”

Sahar almost laughed right back at her.

“That’s just a story,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Sure. I’ve been hunting Bopper artifacts for a long time. Black Monoliths are just a story.”

“Who said they were Bopper artifacts?” the Ermine said.

The question took Sahar by surprise again.

“Who else’s would they be?”

“Who made the Boppers?” the Ermine said.

“Boppers make Boppers,” Sahar said.

The Ermine sighed. “Child, for someone who has been doing this for as long as you say, you seem to have remarkably little curiosity.”

Sahar chewed on her jerky. She studied the Ermine. She didn’t know what to make of her at all.

“It was ‘Mad’ Rucker, the Terrorartist,” she said. “Everyone knows that. But he only seeded the first gen cycle, just like he did on half a dozen worlds before they finally caught up with him. He may have birthed them but he didn’t make them. They do that themselves.”

The Bopper in the corner of the cave beeped and chattered away to itself, oblivious to the two of them, still making its artifact when Sahar glanced its way. It seemed to be making an orb of some kind, a glowing sphere made half with ice and half with a black matt plastic. She thought there might be faces buried in them, a woman’s face, one in each globe.

“And you’re a Neo-Cosmicist,” she said. The weird protection ’round the woman’s node finally made sense.

“You figured it out, huh?” The Ermine sighed. “You could help me,” she said. “You know these parts, yes? I could pay you.”

That did put a different spin on things.

“There’s no such thing as Black Monoliths,” Sahar said.

“Then what’s the harm in looking for one?” the Ermine said.

Sahar sat back and thought about the offer. She could produce more oxygen out of the ice, and replenish her water. She’d found nothing usable so far, anyway, and she didn’t like going back empty-handed. She could geo-tag this cave and come back, later, to remove the larger pieces with Rania’s help.

“Sure,” she said. “Long as your credit’s good.”

“My credit’s excellent,” the Ermine said. She shut her eyes and Sahar’s node pinged.

“I trust this is sufficient?”

Sahar whistled.

“That should do,” she said.

The Ermine curled up on the cave floor.

“Then I will sleep now,” she said.

They moved fast against the falling rain. Sahar found that it was hard to keep up with the Ermine. The woman moved on all fours, and even with her leg not quite healed yet she had speed. Sahar would have given a lot for modifications like that. She switched on her node reception to a wide-band, but felt nothing. The whole area around Nirrti’s lair was very carefully cleaned of anything digital. She thought about the woman, Yoharneth, and of her dark faith. Sahar had heard the stories. Black Monoliths, and the Nine Billion Hells, and amorphous beings made up of tendrils of nanoparticles pulsing and thinking, as large as planets, out in the Oort Cloud.

Stories to scare children with.

The Bopper they’d met had vanished by the time they both woke up. It had left behind an orb floating in defiance of the laws of physics, inside which were trapped the impressions of Sahar and Yoharneth. The lips of the faces inside the two halves of the orb moved without sound, and what they said Sahar didn’t know.

Now Sahar and the Ermine moved across the ice. Sahar searched again for Boppers. Weirdly, though they were machine-based life-forms, they never registered any digital signals. They were cut off from the Conversation, each one of them alone—small, self-replicating robots with rudimentary processing, as far as anyone could make out. They’d not been made but evolved, and kept evolving new circuits with weird, alien designs that made no sense even if you opened them up. But even Nirrti’s pirates left them alone. It was bad luck to hurt a Bopper.

“What do you search for, usually?” the Ermine asked.

“Small items,” Sahar said. “Portable. Sometimes Boppers repeat designs before they move on to the next evolutionary cycle. Collectors particularly look for items from the so-called Light Cycle. They were beautiful, though no one could ever figure out a use for them. They were only half-solid, the rest of them seem to be made of spun light. I only ever saw the one, in a gallery. It was like staring into the secret heart of a star.”

“Very poetic, I’m sure,” the Ermine said.

Sahar sighed. “Otherwise, keep your eyes open for anything artificial on the ground,” she said. “Boppers discard a lot of parts along their way. And they’re fond of screws.”

“Screws?”

“It’s possible they just like the shape,” Sahar said. “They often repeat helixes. There—”

She pointed to a small metal object on the ground.

“Huh.”

“We’re getting somewhere.”

“My information was very specific,” the Ermine said. “The object I am searching for is hidden somewhere in this vicinity.”

“Where did your information come from?”

“I’m sure I really couldn’t say.”

“What would you do if you find it?”

The Ermine smiled. “I’m sure I really couldn’t say.”

Sahar let it go. She concentrated on following the trail of Boppers.

They were high up into the icy rolling hills. A long distance from the Kraken Sea now, and a longer way still from the nearest human settlement. She was all alone, but for the Neo-Cosmicist priestess.

Oh, she’d figured it out. It wasn’t that hard. Yoharneth would have had to be important to be translated into an Ermine like that. She was a believer, from somewhere out there in the far reaches of the Outer Systems, where they worshipped strange gods. Sahar thought for a moment about the idea of Dark Others, digital intelligences from some off-Earth parallel evolution, as alien and unknowable as black holes. She tried to picture strings of smart matter, thousands of miles long, undulating in space, out there in the Oort where the light of the sun barely penetrated. The solar system was huge, old, and still mysterious. Who could tell whether it was true? The Neo-Cosmicists believed in the Nine Billion Hells. What sort of person could embrace that kind of vision?

“There,” she said. A trail of ordinary household screws and, sitting on a rocky ice shelf, a small crude sculpture, as large as her fist—it took her a moment to realize it was shaped like a monkey’s skull.

It made her uncomfortable, but she picked it up nonetheless and put it in her scrip. Yoharneth and her moved more cautiously now. And she could tell the priestess’ leg still hurt.

They were far from anywhere, she thought. So why a trap? She had never seen a trap set out here before. Was Nirrti aware of the same story as Yoharneth? Did the pirate-lord set out to guard it?

“It’s close. I can feel it,” the priestess said. Sahar opened her node and felt around her. Yoharneth’s data-bubble had expanded, was glowing sigils.

They said there was another data-web across the solar system, running on its own black hubs and routers, its own secret protocols. The Quietude. It was just a myth, a story to frighten children with.

A sense of wrongness engulfed Sahar. She shut her node, listening only with her ears, watching only with her eyes.

There! Something moved high above them, and it was not a Bopper.

“Wait,” she said. But Yoharneth didn’t listen.

The Ermine bounded ahead, up a steep slope between two walls of ice. Sahar followed more cautiously.

The Ermine vanished over the ridge.

And there it was again, that movement. Dark human shapes moving against the skyline in the rain.

Coming down the slope, fast, with projectile weapons.

Sahar ducked.

Every instinct told her to run.

But she was too curious.

She crawled the rest of the way up like a snail on the slope.

Stopped.

Peered over the edge.

Saw the valley of the Boppers.

There were more Boppers there than she had ever seen in one place before. Small spidery ones and bipedal, four-armed ones, and centipedal ones and ones that looked like hot-air balloons with Waldos. There must have been hundreds of them, all made out of that same black matt plastic, and all chattering in union, and all working in some incomprehensible way. The Ermine ran right at them and the Boppers parted around her, clearing a path that led towards the far side of the valley, where some sort of black structure was taking form.

Not a monolith. Definitely not a bloody monolith.

She wasn’t quite sure what it was.

It was very large, like a half-formed arc made out of black stone bricks that each one, individually, might have been a monolith, but probably wasn’t.

It arched against the purple clouds and the pouring methane rain, and the Ermine, sleek and white, shot towards it like her life depended on it.

Sparks shot beneath the unfinished arch. For just a moment Sahar couldn’t resist and opened her node up, on the lowest bandwidth.

She saw it differently then. She saw a huge black mouth opening in a silent scream, and a dark tunnel that ran under the skin of the world and into space itself and far, far from the sun. Far from light and warmth, into a vast Quietude where things as large as worlds watched her.

She screamed.

Below, the Ermine screamed too, in what could have been terror or could have been pure joy. She shot towards the tunnel.

Sahar’s node burned in the back of her skull. The pain was horrifying. She screamed again inside her helmet and then her node auto-shutdown and she could be again.

High above her, still, she saw the descending women in black. Nirrti’s pirates, armed with guns. They fired.

But not at the Ermine. They fired high, and the sky above the valley exploded in bright, multicolored flares.

Then she heard it. Them.

Far in the distance.

The unmistakable boom of Nirrti’s canons, responding to the signal.

Sahar fled.

She ran.

Overhead, in the twilight’s last gleaming, she saw the rockets’ red glare.

She ran.

Mini-thermonuclear bombs bursting in the air.

She dove into a ravine and buried herself under ice.

That mushroom cloud. And another. And another.

The roll of thunder and heat and the radiation, but her suit was shielded.

Still.

She blacked out.

Slept, under ice, for a minute or a thousand years.

When she woke there was a break in the clouds and she could see, for just a moment, Saturn rising in the sky. The back of her head felt sore and she knew her node was lifeless. But she was still herself. She made herself get up. Retched, and the suit absorbed the bile. Drank water and chewed on a piece of jerky. She sent off her own flare then. A miniscule drone, it shot up into the air and would fly out until it could reach connectivity and let Rania know to come pick her up in the little airplane.

Then, because she couldn’t help herself, she went back.

She found the crater. That was all that was left, now, other than the Boppers. They seemed entirely unfazed by the attack. A few chattered at her, but the others had lost interest and wandered away. Most had already gone, elsewhere.

There was no sign of the structure she’d seen, and no sign of the Ermine.

On her way out of the crater she thought she saw a strand of white fur fused into the rocks, but it was probably just ice.

As she crested the rim of the crater, she found a small object on the ground. It was a little Bopper artifact, like a tiny, black domino tile. She laughed and picked it up and put it her scrip, for later.

Then she headed west, to try and make her rendezvous with Rania.

About the Author

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). His latest novels are the forthcoming Unholy Land (2018) and first children’s novel Candy (2018). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.

A Gaze of Faces

Mike Buckley

I was sixteen when the viz came. The spiral went crazy for a while, shooting, soldiers at the corners. But then, like everyone knows, it went back to normal.

By twenty I was looking for ghosts in the vaults. I’m not the youngest to have gone into the vaults; there was a girl a few years ago, like twelve years old or something.

Maybe not the youngest, and maybe not the best, but I’ve brought a lot of ghosts back from the vaults. Close to fifty.

Which is what Ginz reminds me of when he’s trying to get me to do something.

“Fifty ghosts, Irvine. Or is it more?”

“It’s less.”

Ginz shrugs.

“But the quality. The ghosts you’ve brought back have taught us more about Origin Earth than the ghosts that any other five vault divers have brought back, I’d say.”

“What is it you want, Ginz?”

He smiles and cocks his head. A pack of cigarettes is the ubiquitous six inches from his left hand. He grabs.

“Care for one?”

I shake my head, and after the click of the lighter, an infant storm cloud is hovering around Ginz’s pristine face. Only his eyes betray the way he lives. They’re angry, infected pits beneath his smooth forehead.

“I want you to take someone in,” he says.

My thoughts flash. There are only a few interns. Not Emmy, he can’t mean her.

He reads me through the smoke and nods.

“Yeah. Emmy.”

“She’s a kid, Ginz. What is she?”

“Fourteen.”

He sips from a coffee cup and exhales a whiskey reek.

“She tests high. And she’s interned with us for three years. She’s going in, with or without you.”

I shrug. This is another thing about Ginz: his flattery, properly speaking, isn’t persuasion. Orders always follow his compliments.

“It won’t be so bad. There are sightings of a ghost pretty shallow, looks like a simple walk-it-home job. I sent the details.”

Ginz sets his cigarette down and his eyes clear.

“How old were you when the viz came?”

“Sixteen.”

He smiles and shakes his head.

“Perfect. Go in tomorrow.”

You don’t go into the vaults, they go into you. The technology was probably old when we arrived, and probably still exists on Origin Earth in some form. No doubt their vaults make ours look bad. We’re a hundred years removed from landing.

Back then, the first colonists called the vaults the library. It was their history. Anyone could use the immersion couches and slip into the program of Origin Earth’s past. It was both education and history for the people in the spiral, and everyone lived happily ever after in the beautiful spiral, so it goes, so happily that they just lost interest in the library, and only a select few care anymore.

What they tell you when you start as a vault diver, though, is that it didn’t happen that way. Sixty years ago the library was education and history and eventually became brighter, for most people, than the real life of the spiral. There aren’t that many immersion couches, and people fought over them, and formed up gangs with names vaguely familiar to any diver: The Mongol Madmen, Black Belt Laser Throat Slicers, Werewolf Supernovas, The Blood Drinking George Washingtons. They take a little history from the virtual world of the library, add a few words to scare people, and predictably, war broke out between the gangs, all of them trying to control the library.

The Vault Divers—it was a gang name then, not the profession it is now—won.

Vault divers were mostly historians. That’s what they tell you, and they didn’t want to use the library for distraction—or even studying history. They were obsessed with studying the library to learn more about Origin Earth, finding the bits of the program that revealed its makers, and if we studied them enough, might tell us more about why we were here in the spiral.

They were seekers of truth, is what we tell ourselves, and so we are seekers of truth too, finding ghosts and examining them. And no one else, those descendants of the gangs that wanted the library just for themselves, gets to go in anymore. Just after we won all those years ago we renamed the library the vaults, and that’s how we treat them. Vault divers will tell you that it’s for the best; if your average citizen of the spiral could go in, it would all happen again: they’d never want to leave, and they’d fight to stay, and here we are, just animals fighting over something pretty.

The brightest, the most curious, maybe the ones who hate the spiral so much it’s impossible not to seek the lit cracks—that’s me, I guess—become vault divers. I’m not sure what Emmy is yet. Curious; afraid; tired of the darkness of the spiral: There’s only so many reasons to dive.

I meet her outside the controller’s office. She’s dressed up, but in a way that seems casual—a clean, ironed shirt, loose pants. She’d be nervous. She’d have heard horrors and glories about the vaults since she was a baby. And she’d have developed her own theories as she interned for us, cataloguing the reports that vault divers like me brought back. She’s probably even met some of the ghosts we brought back.

She says hi and I ignore her. In the controller’s office they pull the dustcovers off of the couches. Lights dance beneath the translucent surface of each couch, and I settle in, closing my eyes as I do. I suppose Emmy does the same. The controller doesn’t say a thing as he kicks up the sensory interface. He knows that none of us like small talk, and then the construct pours all around me.

Emmy and I are standing in a bare brown room.

“What do you think?” It’s the first thing I have said to her.

“Somehow I didn’t picture it this way.”

“This is the load space. The controller is checking to see if we’re tuned in.”

Her eyes are shining. A blemish near her nostril is swollen and pink. It must hurt. Funny that I hadn’t noticed it outside when I was actually in her presence.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

I gesture and the information that Ginz sent springs up.

“Vault fifty. It’s pretty shallow.”

“Fifty is one of the culture vaults, right?”

“Subcultures. Newest subculture to oldest—the deeper we go, the older.”

“How far back does it go?”

I raise my eyebrows: She knows this as well as I do.

“Fifty thousand years. This vault links to the larger culture ones, and has sims all the way back to Neolithic burial mounds.”

I look at the search terms that Ginz included with the brief. Before I can say them I check with Emmy.

“You ready?”

She nods.

“Twenty one forty five, Welk Island, East Coast of North America.”

The plain construct disappears. We are standing on a shore. Hills above us are covered in cinder block structures on long plastic legs. Holo ads flicker between them. Behind us cold seawater drags pebbles back and forth.

Knowing that Emmy will start asking questions, I begin up the hill. She follows. We find a path right away. The Welk Island kids must sneak down to the water at night; the path here is well-worn, but there’s a wooden staircase a quarter mile down the beach, the kind of thing the adults would use. Once we’re in the town we’re walking between empty structures. It’s quiet, only the wind and the distant water.

Emmy grunts behind me. She’s looking into one of the houses, and there are figures inside it now, and paragraphs of glowing text floating away from the structure, explaining the people inside. They’ll be slaver gangs if I remember correctly, having shown up with stolen weapons after the collapse of central authority in Washington somewhere near 2140. They were like Vikings with machine guns, and sold whole towns to their neighbors for all kinds of awful things. Flashing images elaborate the floating paragraphs.

“Don’t look at it,” I say. “The vault reads your look as curiosity.”

“I am curious.”

“Then go study postwar flesh economies. We’re here to get a ghost.”

We walk past the end of the street and amble up a trail. The trail leads up into very green hills and over fields of windblown grass. Finally the grass recedes and bare stone hills appear, and after cresting them we descend down into valleys choked with jagged black rocks. And then back up again. Finally, after walking most of the day, we see a small wooden cabin centered in a prairie.

“Sit,” I say.

Emmy does, and I sit next to her. I watch the cabin, and think about what might be inside. This brings to mind the worst ghosts I’ve ever seen. A man, no skin and no eyes, sockets packed with ash, teeth grinding until they crack, standing in the corner of a butcher shop. He was the third I brought in.

I know Emmy’s wondering, but she doesn’t say a word, so I say it for her.

“You hear bad things, but they’re pretty rare. Usually ghosts are just boring.”

“So why are we sitting up here just watching?”

“I want it to see us first.” I gesture to the grassy ridge we were on, in silhouette against the gray sky. “Ghosts are weird. Sometimes if you surprise them they act out. Run or fight.”

Emmy forces a laugh. “But they can’t hurt us.”

“No. We’re in the vaults. None of this is real.”

That isn’t entirely true, of course. If you are attacked by a ghost you can’t be hurt, but the connection between the vault software and your limbic system could be damaged. It could leave ragged edges. That’s why some of the vault old timers have weird coughs or wear diapers.

Emmy raises her fingertips to her face and brushes her lips. It’s endearing.

“You haven’t gotten your viz yet.”

“No.”

“Are you worried?”

“Why would I be?”

I nod.

“Exactly right.”

Fingers move, she brushes her lip again. She is worried, and she is looking at me out of the corner of her eye, as if she can tell something about me and my own viz just by looking.

Far below, the door of the cabin opens, and a face appears for a moment.

“There he is,” I say.

We stand up and make our way down to the cabin. By the time we get there swollen raindrops are pattering the bare stones around us. Emmy looks at me.

“Do we knock?”

I shrug.

The door opens just as my knuckles make contact. Seeing the ghost Emmy gasps, but tries to swallow the sound even as she makes it. The man who opens the door is large and hunched over, his head near the rough-hewn rafters. His skin is shiny like the crust forming over an active infection.

“Mind if we have a seat?” I ask.

The ghost looks at me earnestly, then creeps its large body backward carefully. At last it eases into one of the wooden chairs. A pad of paper is in front of the chair, a single circle scribbled onto it enough to shred the paper.

“The third wave of settlers to Welk Island were slaver gangs from neighboring seasteads. Did you see them when you passed through the village?”

The ghost looked at both of us closely, its long face glistening.

“We’re fine,” I say.

“Slaver gangs are known to punish recalcitrant members by forcibly copulating with them. The resulting children are sold to the seasteads.”

“They sound unpleasant,” I say.

“Not as unpleasant as the second wave settlers were. They . . . ”

“Listen,” I say. “There’s someone you have to meet.”

The ghost’s eyes shift back and forth between Emmy and I.

“The slaver gangs?”

“No. Someone not on Welk Island.”

The ghost’s eyelids stretch as if trying to contain its eyeballs.

“Not on, Welk Island, you say? Are they from the seasteads?”

“Not there either.”

The ghost stares and then stands up. A moment later Emmy and I are leading the ghost back up the hill, and tepid, heavy raindrops are falling on its mottled skin.

You sometimes hear the old vault divers say that they have trouble knowing if they’re in a vault or in the real world. They’re full of shit. The spiral stinks. The vaults don’t. It’s that simple: If it reeks, it’s real.

Back in the stink, Emmy and I walk up the spiral. It’s early evening. Someone is shouting and the sound echoes through the rough metallic surfaces. The sound of water dripping is everywhere.

“We’ll start interviewing it tomorrow,” I say.

“What do you think?”

I shrug.

“The ghosts you find in culture vaults are usually pretty simple information oversight programs. When they loaded the vaults they put these programs into be, sort of, librarians.”

“Then why do they look like that?”

“Some imperfection grandfathered in. Over the years it grew, degrading the program’s appearance. Most of the ghosts are what they are because they have a limited ability to evolve, and some trace of their programmer’s personality was accidentally left in them. Our job is to treat them like historical artifacts.”

I hear Ginz’s voice. It’s ringing up a dark street, part of the spiral that I walk every day and hate each time. It’s abandoned here, dank, dangerous. Ginz’s voice is all vowels. Drunk.

“Which way are you going?” I ask.

Thankfully she points away from Ginz’s voice.

“I’ll walk you,” I say.

Emmy’s neighborhood is lined in makeshift garbage torches. People lie collapsed here and there, wet, filthy, and scrawny except for their pristine faces. They look as young as Emmy, some of them, except better—their smooth cheeks have an inner glow, a smoothness that I still, after all these years, am not used to.

Ginz is still shouting behind us, far down some dark avenue, so I try to make conversation.

“What got you into vault diving?”

She shrugs like she doesn’t want to say.

We pass another block of structures. To our left people are huddled around a small fire, and they look at us as we pass, their faces flickering with light like magical ovals.

I don’t like it.

And here’s why: I hear a foot scuff lightly on the corner ten feet behind us, as if in quickening step, and I turn. The foot is connected to a skinny, hard-looking man and he’s running at us, arm raised. I turn and catch the arm and thrust him against the wall. Up close he stinks and is strong and rolls me and now he has me against the wall and the raised arm is jabbing something sharp at me. It catches my left elbow and stings and in reflex I throw a short punch. It catches the man in the throat and he stumbles and I follow so he can’t recover, punching at him, hitting his skull, his ear, hurting my hands more than I hurt him, but it distracts him, and I hear his weapon hit the ground. I pick it up quick while he’s stumbling and swing wide. I don’t even know what I’m holding until it cuts into his face—it’s a piece of jagged metal—and opens him, cheekbone to chin. His hands come to his face, so I stab at his forehead, his temples, and when he covers those, I slice his cheeks again. The metal is good for it. Blood pours, and the thin man turns, stumbles, and runs.

I turn and look at Emmy. She’s watching the people who had been around the fire. They’re closer now, in a half-circle.

I hold up the piece of metal and point it at the closest one.

“Back up. You aren’t getting shit.”

We keep walking, me looking over my shoulder, and finally when we round a corner, at my hands, which are spotted in blood.

“You know him?”

Emmy shrugs.

“He’s at that corner all the time. I think he knows I work in the vaults.”

I shake my head. What some people think about the vaults—that we vault divers are rich, or get extra food rations. It’s beyond me.

Emmy’s house is another block down. It must’ve been abandoned by the owner. She’s living in it alone. She has the place organized, though. Stacks of neatly-folded clothes, a row of books along the wall. They’re warped and swollen. She must’ve found them on the street.

“Sit,” she says, pointing at the floor, so I do. She sits opposite me.

“Can I touch?” she asks.

It makes me uncomfortable, but I can’t really say why.

“Where are your parents?”

“I haven’t seen them in three years.”

“All right. Touch.”

Why not, I think. It’s harmless. It’s not even me.

Emmy comes up on her knees and leans closer. Her fingers brush my face, down over my brow to my chin, and then over the tender skin beneath my eyes.

“Does it hurt?” she asks.

“Yes. Badly, but not for long.”

Emmy draws her hand back and involuntarily wipes her fingers on her pant leg.

“I don’t want it.”

I shrug.

“So? A viz will come either way. Maybe there’s one in the house already.”

Having grown up in this part of the spiral, Emmy’s a hard girl, so she doesn’t flinch when I say it. But something changes. I know that I should comfort her, tell her some reassuring version of the truth, remind her that it’s something everyone goes through, and we all turned out OK, right?

But just now I can’t. I feel shaky from the fight and mad at Emmy for no reason I can name.

“Meet me at the vaults tomorrow,” I say, and walk out of the room.

Before I go home, though, I stand across the street from Emmy’s house, watching her draw fabric across the empty windows, and I tell myself I’m standing there to make sure she is safe.

For some vault divers, the clichés are true—we’d rather live in the past; Origin Earth holds an odd pull on us; we’re uncomfortable around the living.

Those all fit me, but I first wanted to be a vault diver because I knew I’d learn more about Origin Earth. When I was about ten I remember my teacher giving us The Dead Planet lesson. That’s what we are on, a rock called V0-563. There isn’t so much as a drop of liquid water on the surface; it is a frozen rock. This was before the viz came, of course. They count as a life-form. Which makes me wonder if in school these days there’s a Face Parasite lesson as well as a Dead Planet one.

Back then, she went on telling us just how frozen VO-563 is, and just how dead. Fifty years of expeditions hadn’t found anything on the planet’s surface: flat, dead, and frozen until the miles curve back on themselves; now, of course, we don’t even bother going out. We have no idea or record of why our ship was sent here, or idea of what it is our colony was supposed to do. Were our ancestors fleeing something? If they were, none of them wrote it down or talked about it, and although there are famous blank spots in the vault’s record—one a hundred years in, most notably—they don’t tell us much.

I’ve spent so much time in the vaults, in so many historic periods, in so many places, that it’s hard not to feel like I’m from Origin Earth, and that the spiral, and the people in it, are the dream. At moments like that, something like a viz falls away from my mind, revealing the mess of what I really think: the spiral is filled with animals all looking to fight and fuck and birth and do it again before dying. People barely even talk about the viz, unless they are Emmy’s age, and soon to receive theirs. The rest of us forget the agony, forget that the beautiful thing we look at in the mirror isn’t really our face. We forget that we are from somewhere else and we don’t know why we’re here, in this pit.

So this is how it seems to me: They’re not clichés. Any person with a heart would rather live in the past. The vaults should hold an attraction for us. And if the living are the things walking around this dark spiral, can you blame me for wanting to be around the dead?

The next day, on my way into the vaults, I see Ginz turning up a side street. His clothes are stained and his hair hangs thin and filthy over his beautiful face. He’s hunching to light a cigarette, and grunts at me, and I know it means he wants me to stop and wait for him.

I do, and he blows smoke vertical and hits me on the shoulder.

“Yesterday,” he says.

“You mean how was it?”

“Yeah.”

“You met the ghost, right?”

Ginz doesn’t say anything, and we walk toward the vaults. I can see that his hand is trembling as he raises the cigarette to his lips.

“It was fine,” I say, knowing that he’s really asking me about the vaults, and not the man that tried to roll Emmy and me, or about Emmy’s fear of the viz, or her dark, little apartment. “The ghost we pulled wasn’t anything special. At least not that I can tell right now. We’ll see when we interrogate him.”

“Just some shallow dweller. Probably nothing to report.”

“Are you asking me?”

Ginz flicks his cigarette into the street and I follow it with my eyes. It’s nearly empty out right now, and the light strips along the roof of the spiral are crackling and popping into life. Following the trajectory that the cigarette would’ve taken if Ginz had flicked it harder, my eyes fell onto the thin man from last night. The wounds were almost invisible—just a slight indentation along his cheek, a couple subtle divots on his forehead where his viz had healed overnight.

He’s staring, and his eyes feel like match flames a little too close to my own eyes.

I wink at him, and he looks down, and walks down an alley.

“Keep me in the loop, yeah?” Ginz says. I can’t tell if he noticed the thin man, but in the exhausted state he is in, I doubt it.

“Morning,” a voice says behind me. It’s Emmy, and she smiles at me, and looks at Ginz with a half smile.

Inside the loading construct, the ghost is seated at one of the chairs, looking uncomfortable, too big for the room.

“So what do we do now?” I ask Emmy, testing.

“We interview the ghost.”

“Why?”

“To try and identify whether there are artifacts present in it.”

“Right. How good are you with the code?”

I haven’t seen Emmy do this before: She smiles and raises her palms like she can’t put how good she is into words.

“All right,” I say. “We’ll see.”

In the waiting room, Emmy and I take seats across from the ghost and Emmy erects her code splicer on the table in front of her. The ghost smiles.

“I remember you both,” it says.

“From Welk Island, right?”

“Yes,” it says to me. “You don’t strike me as Third Wave settlers. Are you visitors?”

“Yes, that’s what we are. Visitors.”

We start by analyzing the ghost’s appearance. To set it at ease I ask about Welk Island fauna. As it answers Emmy steps closer to it with a set of goggles pulled down over her eyes.

The ghost stops on trees: “ . . . Pine, largely—what is she doing?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s her job.”

“Is she a doctor?”

The ghost watches Emmy scan her goggled eyes over its skin.

“Yes,” I say. “Go on about trees.”

The ghost does. First the trees that were catalogued on Welk Island when it was constructed off the coast of Maine. The fill Welk Island is built on consisted of the ruins of a city, the ghost says, although it doesn’t say which one or what happened to it.

Emmy continues her examination of the ghost as it talks and I watch her out of the corner of my eye. A blush appears on her cheek and she looks over her shoulder at me.

“Thanks,” I say to the ghost. “Can we finish this discussion after lunch?”

It nods and closes its eyes, as if it’s just going to sit there and rest.

Outside, Emmy opens her mouth but I hold a finger up and lead her down the hall and out into the courtyard. It’s empty and looks like it always has been—a black wrought iron fence surrounding a bare patch of concrete.

“Find something?” I ask.

“Yes.”

The blush has met the edges of her lips and Emmy is still looking at me like she doesn’t know how to say what she wants to say.

“So what is it?”

“Sonic tremor. And evidence of patchworking.”

“Both?”

She nods her head and I shake mine.

“The rarity of those, Emmy. Each one is a thousand to one. Both is impossible.”

“You think I don’t know? Didn’t Ginz tell you what I did before he sent me into the vaults?”

I nod, because Ginz probably had told me, or at least posted it on a file or something. But I have no idea.

She can tell, too: “I was a full-time code analyst. I’ve seen every bit of sonic tremor and every patchwork that we have found in the last three years. I know it’s impossible, but still, it’s there.”

I shrug.

“Pull it and check it out.”

Emmy makes a face that means to me that she’d intended to pull it and check it out and hates that I suggested it, and then she disappears back into the building, and I’m standing in the little patio all by myself. In a moment Ginz appears, a smoke between his lips.

“Ghost give you anything?”

“Emmy thinks so.”

“Not you?”

Ginz lights his smoke and puffs on it.

I shrug. “I’m already tired.”

Ginz smiles and immediately I regret saying that—he’s looking for an excuse to get away, and here it is.

“Reality, Gently Sharpened by Tragedy.”

“Eh?”

“That’s where you’re going with me, and we’re gonna drink there, and you’re gonna tell your life story.”

“Shit, man. I can’t.”

Ginz does a slow motion shrug, like he knows it’s natural to struggle in the jaws of a larger, stronger animal, and also knows that it will fail.

“Where you got to go? Where does anybody got to go?”

Ten minutes later we are walking away from the vaults, leaving Emmy to analyze the interesting bits she had found in the code. Reality, Gently Sharpened by Tragedy is a spiral within the spiral: Through the front door, which is open but blocked by a large man, and down steps. The whole bar is steps. To the left on the descending spiral is the bar itself, which is steps too, at waist level. In a moment I’m standing next to Ginz, holding a cup of whiskey, and he is standing on the step above me, holding whiskey also, talking about something that is both uncertain and very sad. Ginz talks and drinks come and empty cups go and people pass by, walking down stairs, into the darkness.

“It’s all an abject, heartbreaking, hilarious tragedy.”

“You mean the . . . ?” I intentionally don’t finish the sentence so Ginz could finish it himself, but he sweeps his right hand in a sloppy arc, indicating that it is all a tragedy. The bar; the spiral; the vaults; humanity.

I open my mouth to agree with him, because in this state there is no argument against what he is saying, but then Ginz’s face turns to blood. Striated muscle and exposed eye sockets. Teeth rictused and still talking because they don’t know they are dead yet. Then his eyes snap away from mine and focus on something behind me and he falls forward into my arms, dead. I let him go straight onto the stairs, thudding down like so much meat, and I watch the edges of the translucence that covers his face begin to detach itself and crawl away into the dim light of Reality. The last thing he sees, I guess, is me standing over him.

The morning after Ginz dropped dead we’re all standing in the complex, and I am passing through groups of vault divers, people I know but rarely see, listening to them not express shock at Ginz’s death. As I walk bits of story attach themselves to me: Ginz hadn’t been sober in three years or slept in three months, he’d stabbed someone just up-spiral—ripped his viz to shreds. Of course he had a stroke: It’s a miracle he didn’t die sooner.

Vault divers stand around the complex, talking and waiting to meet the new boss, and I see Emmy near the edge of the group, looking uncomfortable. When I get to her she gives me something like a smile.

“You ok?” I ask.

“Yeah. Are you?”

I shrug.

A voice calls us to order. A man named Jayay is standing to one side. His expression says he is actively inhaling chemical fumes.

“OK, divers. Shame about Ginz, right? He was a good man who gave his life to the vaults. Have your moments of silence or raise a drink to him tonight.” He pauses. “In light of it, we’re shutting down for awhile. Doors closed. Don’t come in. God bless you,” he says, but his expression says curse you.

With that he excuses us, waves us all away, and walks back into the waiting room. Most of the divers just stand there, more shocked at being told their job just vanished than at Ginz stroking. There’s anger in the air suddenly, whispering, bodies start pressing.

“Let’s go,” I say to Emmy.

We get out of the crowd and move up spiral. It is dim around us but it’s still pretty early, and crowds of people line the streets, and on both sides of us are what passes for shops this deep—shattered windows, people sitting in dark structures, watching the foot traffic on the street.

“They’re saying that this new guy Jayay is part of something called The Mongol Madmen.”

“Oh.”

“So what does that mean for us?”

“That means we be careful.”

Ginz had talked about this a few times. What if, he said, those other gangs didn’t die out sixty years ago? What if they went underground? Bullshit, I’d said, we’d know, and Ginz had smiled his tortured smile. Would we? He’d answered—would we really?

Emmy sighs.

“Are you going to ask about the ghost we pulled out?”

“What about the ghost we pulled out?”

She starts talking and I look up the spiral. People sit on the windowsills, rough looking, every inch of skin except their vizs tattooed in thick tangles of images. A dozen beautiful, glowing faces looking at Emmy and I: They are Mongol Madmen too.

Emmy reaches up and takes my ear between her fingers and yanks. The Mongol Madmen along the street laugh.

“Would you listen to me?”

“Not here. Let’s go to my place.”

Emmy shrugs and we walk up spiral. After ten minutes or so the buildings start looking better. The windows are intact, at least. I can smell food cooking. There’s a park that takes up a whole chunk of the spiral. The trees are column-thick at the trunks, and stretch up into the darkness at the top of the tunnel, growing in knobby, hard drapes in all directions.

“You live up here?” Emmy asks.

“You will too when they hire you for real.”

The front door of my apartment is behind one of the massive trees, set in a cape of moss that thrives along this wall. I open it and lights turn up and I offer Emmy a seat.

“Something to drink?” I say.

Emmy nods her head.

“I’ve isolated the vibratory patterns,” she says. “It’s more than I’ve seen before.”

“So? How much?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a sentence or two.”

“What about the patching?”

“I don’t know yet. But this is more than I’ve ever seen, and once we feed it into the algorithm, it could really mean something.”

I nod.

Emmy is looking at the walls of my apartment.

“What did it look like when Ginz died?” she asks, running her forefinger down the bridge of her nose.

“Just like they say. It went translucent just the second before he died.”

“And then it crawled away.”

“That’s what they do.”

Emmy watches the corners of the room, and I snatch her drink from the side table and finish it.

“Let’s go,” I say.

“Where?”

“Have you ever been to see the lander?”

She shakes her head.

“Never. Why would I go down there?”

I don’t answer, and lead her down stairs. The spiral is mostly concerned with itself at this hour, the neighborhoods to either side of us quiet as we walk down and down and finally past the vault complex, which is locked up and has a clot of Mongol Madmen loitering in front.

“Jayay’s people,” Emmy says.

The whiskey is warm in my chest and I can’t bring myself to pursue the subject of Jayay.

Instead, the lander:

“It’s something you hear about in school, but Emmy, in person it’s a totally different thing. The lander is half a kilometer long, as tall as the spiral, as wide. The front has blades, drills, grinders.”

She looks exhausted by my enthusiasm.

“Think about the ship arriving, the lander releasing, falling into the atmosphere. The people inside were from Origin Earth, Emmy. Our ancestors.”

There are tunnels, I keep on, inside the lander, that were once filled with liquid. The first colonists were immersed in it to cushion them when they hit the rock of Bright Tomorrows and the lander began to dig, making the shape that was most energy efficient for its purpose—a spiral, a place for the colonists to live while they set out exploring the planet and planning their cities.

“All this nostalgia is our problem,” Emmy says. “O the lander. O the ship. O Origin Earth. And the colonists? Geniuses. But here we are, only a hundred years later, still living in a pit. The lander a piece of junk. The ship gone.”

It strikes me as strange that Emmy should feel this way; she worked in the vaults, after all. She sees it on my face.

“I’m in love with the code, not the past,” she says.

“It’s the same thing.”

A hundred yards past the vault complex even the ruins of structures vanish, and we are walking through a vast stone tunnel on a gentle downgrade. Poles in the middle have lights strung between them. Emmy looks nervous as we walk.

“Don’t worry. No one comes down here.”

“We’re here.”

I shrug.

“You need to see this, Emmy. It’s history.”

We walk another kilometer in silence, down the lit path, and then the ceiling plunges away into darkness, as do the walls. We’re in a vast open space. The lights lead off into the darkness, and just beyond them, I can make out a massive shape.

Up close the lander is taller than any building in the spiral.

“It dug the whole spiral, and then hit this cave system here.”

The back of it is a maze of piping and cables. A staircase winds up to a door about thirty feet off of the stone floor.

“I do not want to go in that thing,” Emmy says.

There’s a handheld light hanging on the last light pole. It’s old—held at shoulder level, it mostly just blinds me to the darkness all around us—but there’s no way Emmy is going in that lander without light.

“You know what I said when Ginz said I should take you into the vaults?”

“Yes, obviously.”

“I said I wouldn’t do it for anyone else. I see guts in you, I said. I’d do it because of that.”

Emmy stares up at the black bulk of the lander.

“That’s a blunt tool, Irvine.”

“But effective?”

She takes the light from me and climbs the stairs. They’re solid even after all these years, not so much as a creak as we climb, and in a moment we’re standing at the mouth of the door. Emmy reaches her arm in. Light bathes a perfectly oval hallway. I pass her, taking the torch, and we go deeper inside, through intersections that spread off in five directions, off to the sides but up and down also, at angles it would be hard to walk.

“Are you going to be able to find your way out?” Emmy asks.

I raise the lantern to show her the symbols on the walls.

A few minutes later we emerge into a spherical control room, screens set all around the inside of it. The hallway opens into the side of the sphere, and a path has been worn through the dust by people sliding down the inside of the sphere over the years, and a similar path on the other side where they clamber up.

I slide and Emmy follows.

We make our way up the other side. The oval halls go on for miles, sometimes opening into grand galleries, sometimes plunging out of nowhere straight down, into darkness. The deeper in you go, the more cushioned you are from the distant noise of the spirals, tinny and unbodied because of the stone tunnel, and here, you can really feel Origin Earth. In the lander, we are with the colonists, with their hopes and fears, with their ambition all around us like a vast ghost. The fact that the lander has been stripped over the last hundred years is significant, also. We stripped our forefathers’ machines; we turned them into shop fronts and cobble; even the jagged piece of metal that man tried to stab me with was once part of the lander. Everything in the spiral was meant for something grand.

“And now look at it,” Emmy says, as if she can read my mind.

“How did you know what I was thinking?”

She waves her hand around the chamber we are in. It is covered on the inside with personnel pods of some sort; the ones within reach are stripped down to bolts.

“Like I said, Irvine, blunt tool.”

“All right,” I say, “one last thing.”

A hallway leads out of the chamber, and we follow it for a hundred meters, then run into something like a highway. We follow that around a bend, and there it is.

Across the breadth of the wall is a huge mural. The colors are magnificent, but muted under years of dust. It stretches up into the darkness.

Emmy gasps.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it? There’s San Francisco, New York, Beijing, London. Karachi. After they landed, Emmy, and the ship drained out, they came back to paint their cities.”

Emmy wanders forward and I follow. The mural seems to do this, possess you with its size and splendor, as if it were, even more than the vaults, a doorway into the past.

“Irvine,” Emmy gasps.

I know, I begin to say, but she is pointing. A man is approaching us, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, his eyes dark.

I step forward, in front of Emmy.

He stops.

Looking down, away from the mural, I can see three other men around the flicker of a fire. It’s shielded by scrap so the light can’t be seen from far away, and feet stretch away from the fire, splayed in a way that freezes my guts.

“Come on,” I whisper.

I hear Emmy moving. The man steps forward again.

“Don’t fucking move,” I shout, and the echo crashes in all directions.

“I know you,” the man yells back, “high spiral, vault diver. I know your face.”

I know him too—or at least what he is. He is covered with the blurry tattoos and ritual scars of a Mongol Madman.

We are out of the chamber, in the hallway, and running now. In a moment we are standing by the first of the light poles, looking up at the lander.

“They were eating somebody,” Emmy says.

“Try not to think about it.”

I touch Emmy’s elbow and lead her back up the lit path.

Back at my place, I invite Emmy in, have her sit, and go into the kitchen to get two glasses of water. As the tap hisses I think about the man in the darkness and oddly, so oddly, the fact that he said he knows me—not the murder, not the dab of blood I can remember now was on his lower lip—makes me want to kill him.

I step back into the room carrying the two glasses of water. I feel it like an itch—not something I know until it’s too late, and offering the glass to Emmy, looking at her grateful smile, which is so pure it seems to produce its own light, I realize that something is clinging to the edge of the table. Emmy leans, placing her hand flat in a kind of affect, and the thing moves. It’s on her hand and she screams. Her hand goes to her face and she realizes what it is and yanks it away but it’s already too late. A wet, loose shape is on her face. It is almost the color of her skin, but not quite, and now that it’s where it wants to be, the viz moves fast, stretching over her face before she can stop it.

She screams, seizes, slips off the couch.

I fall on top of Emmy, trying to figure out what to do. As she’s thrashing the viz’s color begins to go translucent and I can see her skin beneath is bubbling, her mouth open, her scream contained by the flesh of the viz. The skin beneath bursts. Blood pops taut against the underside of the viz. Her hands bang on the floor weakly, the muscles underneath the viz straining. Finally the viz goes opaque and slowly withdraws from her mouth and nostrils.

She sobs once, quietly.

“It’s hurts so much,” she whispers.

“I know it does,” I say, and sit next to her, taking her into my arms. “I know.”

Her face is close to what it was, but the viz won’t get it completely right for a week or so. You see teenagers walking around like this sometimes, with a brand new, doughy viz, empty-eyed. As an adult, you laugh about it, call them overly-dramatic. Their viz will learn to match them soon enough, and they’ll forget the pain, like everyone does.

But holding Emmy right now, all I can focus on is the fear in her eyes, the claustrophobia. The feeling that she is smothering.

“Come on,” I say, and lift her. We walk together to the couch and I help her lower herself. “Stay.”

I find a half bottle of whiskey and two glasses and I come back and sit across from her and pour.

“Drink this,” I say, and Emmy does. Either she does not mind the taste or the wince doesn’t make it through the viz. I drink my own quickly then pour Emmy another.

“Does it still hurt?”

“It tingles.”

That’s the viz learning your nerves, I think, connecting its thousand tiny mouths to your veins so it can feed.

“Try not to think about it.”

“That’s stupid advice, Irvine.”

“It sure is.”

“How old were you when your viz came?”

“They all came when I was sixteen.”

“You’re older than I thought.”

“The first thing I heard is that a man in one of the tunnels had been attacked. There was a thing on his face. Or was there? People swore he’d been attacked, but in the hospital he looked normal. Of course the viz had their plan. The day after the first attack there was something like four hundred more.”

“Three seventy five, all that night. All sleeping.”

I should’ve known Emmy would’ve studied the viz.

“Then the next day there was shooting. People running everywhere screaming about monsters. They tried to operate on a few people.”

“On one. He died.”

I pour Emmy another drink.

“Is the pain better?”

She nods.

“Good. And the viz kept coming. Before long we all had one. It’s not so strange. We have parasites in our guts, right?”

“It’s not the same.”

“Drink,” I say, and pour myself another whiskey. “You’ll sleep well tonight.”

The viz will be linking itself to your thoughts, I think, the better to smile when you mean to smile, and all the rest—the better to look like you, so it can thrive. The first night a viz is on, it will run through expressions. Practicing. The person will be lying there asleep, smiling like a hero, then suddenly heartbroken, then curious, then astonished. It was one of the creepier things about a viz, probably because in those moments you couldn’t fool yourself—the viz had its own mind, its own will.

“A parade of glasses,” she says, holding up the whiskey glass, her consonants slurring gently.

“What?”

“I like to come up with names for groups of things.”

“Don’t we all?”

“A complaint of Irvines.”

“A blaze of Emmys.”

She changes tacks:

“What did your parents do?”

“When the viz came?”

I shrug.

“There was a riot. People who hadn’t gotten their viz yet went after people who had. There was fighting in the streets. Murder.”

The sadness on her face looks real; her viz is working fast.

“They were killed? Irvine, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Well, Emmy, they were killing. My mother and father both. Chasing people down and burning them, is what I’ve been told. But once enough people got a viz, the rioters weren’t freedom fighters anymore, now they were criminals. Then they burned the criminals. I got my viz a week after they died.”

A long moment of silence passes between us. There is half a finger of whiskey left in Emmy’s glass. She is holding it against her leg, so relaxed it is almost falling from her fingers.

“I want to see our Welk Island friend again.”

“The Mongol Madmen,” I say. “What Jayay did, Emmy, that’s a takeover. You should get your head around it. The vaults don’t belong to us anymore. You might never see our ghost again.”

“I have a plan,” she says. “And you’re really going to hate it.”

The vault complex is deep spiral, and at night gets dangerous. People start at the bars and drift down. It’s why the vault complex has always had a fence twice as high as the tallest diver. But, good for us, drunks are dumb, so the fence really never had to be that good.

I walk the last half block to the vault complex, lean on a tree, and look back at Emmy. She’s covered in filthy rags and she stumbles toward me, around me, and collapses at the fence. I look up and down the block; there’s a group of Mongol Madmen at the front of the complex, laughing and slap-fighting, oblivious.

I jog over to Emmy.

She looks at me out of her pile of filthy rags and shrugs, like how did you know? I shrug back.

The hole is at the base of the fence, big enough for one of us to slide under. I can’t see anyone on the other side, so I point for Emmy, and gesture go. She flips over and crawls under, and I follow. In half a minute we’re past the dying trees and next to the vault complex, which is lit up like it’s a workday, but as far as I can tell, empty. We crouch behind the last tree before the complex. I start to whisper something to her—I’d say something about how there’s going to be a lot of bad people in the vault complex, and if we’re going to turn back, and that would be the smartest thing, we should do it now. But looking at her shining eyes I realize my heart is jackhammering. I’m smiling. I haven’t done anything that feels this good in a very long time.

I get up and run towards the complex, and she follows me. I pull myself over the courtyard fence, hear Emmy land behind me, then quietly open the courtyard door.

It’s quiet inside.

I wink at Emmy and she jogs down the hallway. We get to the loading construct room and I lie down on the couch and Emmy starts working the controls. The world around me shifts, and I’m standing next to a table, looking at the ghost.

“I remember you from Welk Island,” it says.

“Yes,” I answer, “you do. Can you stand up?”

I think I can see the program space around us shimmer for a second; that’s Emmy making a copy. The ghost stands there looking at me, and I’m looking back, and then the construct vanishes. Emmy is smiling.

“Got it,” she says. “Let’s go.”

I follow Emmy out of the construct room and down the hall. Close to the courtyard door I collide with someone. It’s a Sinker, and we’re tangled, and he’s holding me, just as surprised as I am.

“Run,” I say to Emmy, and grab two fistfuls of the man’s shirt. And to the man: “I’m a diver. I was just getting some things I left. No problem. I’ll go.”

He’s tense and his eyes are wild. I know if I let go of him he’ll attack, but if I hold him long enough other Mongol Madmen will come. This close to him I smell booze and fear.

He shouts.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!”

His arm flashes and something digs into my hip. He’s stabbed me, going for the guts, and missed. I thrust with all of my strength, slamming his head against the wall. His arms are everywhere, throwing punches, and I slam his head again, then again, and he collapses. I run and it hurts, and at the corner of the hallway get hit hard from the side. It’s another few Mongol Madmen come running to help their friend, and they’re all over me. We stumble and struggle and I pry myself away and we slam through the courtyard door and now they’re taking places around me, sizing me up, pulling out knives.

I almost trip on a rock and reach down, lift it, and fling it at the closest Madman. It lands dead center on his viz with a loud pop, whips his head back, and he drops to his knees. The other two pause long enough for me to stumble toward the fence, and then I’m up and over it. The Mongol Madmen scream and I run out into the darkness as fast as I can.

I make it to the trees, and there’s Emmy, smiling wildly. Laughing. She takes my arm and we run.

Reality, Gently Sharpened is filled with vault divers, shoulder to shoulder on the stairs. They’re passing glasses of whiskey over their heads to each other. It’s quiet.

I close the door at the very bottom of Reality, and turn to Emmy.

“Ready?”

She nods.

The ghost is next to her. Outside of the construct space, projected just by the slapped-together diver tech we could find in the bar, the ghost is pale and shaky, and blind without its feedback tech.

I open the door and the divers get quiet.

“Here it is,” I say.

The ghost steps out.

“We found it in a culture vault, on Welk Island. Pretty much the end of the vaults, almost contemporary to the time the ship was launched. It has a vibration in it. An intentional one.”

“Bullshit,” a voice growls from upstairs.

“It’s real. Checked and checked, by her.” I gesture to Emmy.

“A message?” someone says.

“Right.”

“What is it?

I read the paper that Emmy transcribed the message on: “‘If you’re seeing this, you are a researcher of the historical documents included with your colony ship. You likely have questions. It is my intention to provide answers.’”

Silence.

“That’s it?”

I nod.

The growl again: “So where the fuck’re the answers?”

“Welk Island,” I say, “where we found him.”

Dead quiet as they realize.

Some of the clichés are true: If you talk to your average citizen of the spirals, someone who lives mid-to-up spiral, where it’s pretty safe and the lights work, they’ll tell you vault divers are a rough crowd. They’re right. We’re risk takers—but not many of us are crazy. Not a single one of these people likes the idea of taking on the Madmen.

“I know,” I say, and let it hang. “I know The Mongol Madmen have taken over the vault complex and are willing to kill to keep us out. I also know that there’s a ghost with some truth, and that’s what we all signed up for.

“Her and I are going.”

I gesture to Emmy, who is standing next to the ghost, looking small. And beautiful: Her viz has fully taken root.

Her and I are going: This is its own argument, and for the men and women here, I’m hoping it means a lot. They all became divers and analysts for the reasons I did. They knew there was a whole world before, and whole worlds behind the vault doors, and although they could’ve lived a normal life and worked in a shop and drank with shopkeepers at the end of the day, instead they dove.

“They’ll kill us,” the man closest to me says.

“Yeah, they might.”

We plan the whole thing in Reality, Sharpened. The divers and analysts have been all over the vaults, from ancient times on Origin Earth to the most recent that we know about. If The Mongol Madmen have numbers and savagery, we have knowledge.

The next night, up from the vault complex, there’s an uproar. A crowd of vault divers is coming toward it. They’re drunk and loud, and shouting about truth, and breaking into fights with each other. The Mongol Madmen, who are arranged around the front of the vault complex, watch quietly. When the divers get close enough one of The Mongol Madmen gestures and a few of them run forward with buckets and fling liquid in a wide arc, soaking many of the divers. The divers sober up and try to run but already flaming bundles have been chucked after them. A few in the crowd burst into flames and stumble. A few stop to help and they burn too. Vizs flop off of burning bodies.

From the trees on the flank of the vault complex I don’t scream or curse like I want to at what The Mongol Madmen have done but sprint from the trees. Emmy is with me, and a few other divers. We get to the edge of the complex quickly and help each other over the fence.

The complex seems empty when we kick the back door in. We move down the hall quickly and get into the construct room. Divers shove heavy furniture in front of the door as others jam at the control board, waking up the link into the vaults.

I look at Emmy on the couch next to me, and at the divers who stand in front of the blockaded door, and then I lay back.

When I open my eyes we’re on Welk Island, near the water.

Emmy and I run up the small children’s path that crests the hill, and start out over the grass. She’s panting to keep up, but it’s her mind tricking itself into thinking she’s tired.

“You’re not really running, Emmy. You’re on a couch. Slow your breathing down.”

The gaze she shoots me is tinged with panic, but she catches up, and her breathing slows down. After just a few minutes we are in town, jogging past the rows of buildings.

The cabin we’d found the ghost in had been in the middle of nowhere, but it wasn’t impossible to get to. The people making the vaults back on Origin Earth could’ve put the ghost in a safe a hundred feet under the ground if they’d wanted it never found, but they did want it found—just after some time had passed.

The message, though, offered answers. Whatever was going to give us those would probably be in an easy-to-reach place.

I stop running.

“What?” Emmy shouts back to me.

“Here.” I point at the town’s main tavern. It’s built out of a shipping crate, doors and overhung windows carved out of it.

“Too obvious. Vault divers and code analysts will have searched it at least fifty times in the last hundred years.”

“Maybe. But the person who sent the message wants to be hidden but also obvious. They can’t be found until after we get to the ghost, but once we do, they have a simple little program slaved to the cabin. We take the ghost out of the cabin, and the other program gets freed.”

“Story time with Irvine.”

“Humor me.”

I jog to the tavern and Emmy follows. Inside chairs are arranged in half circles and blankets are piled on the ground. Driftwood branches hang, strung with warm yellow lights. You could forget you’re in a shipping crate.

The woman behind the bar turns and smiles.

“Just who I was looking for,” she says.

The rest of the people in the bar are stock-still. The program is frozen.

“Are you who we are looking for?”

She smiles.

“Come talk.”

We sit down at a nearby table.

“You research historical documents,” she says.

“Yes. We call ourselves vault divers, looking for traces of the people who created the vaults, to learn more about Earth.”

“Are you one of the creators?” Emmy says.

“Someone like me. I’m here to answer questions. You want answers about where you’re from, and why you’re here, and I suppose other questions also. That is why the ghost was out in that shack, and why I’m here. We wanted you to meet us when you’d grown a bit.

“The best way to begin,” she continues, “is like this. You’re a guess.”

“A guess?”

“About a hundred years before you left, computers linked up and formed thought pools, self-aware AI communities. You might have guessed that; there would be a gap in the historical records on your ship. Where I’m from, on Earth, they call it Nightfall—every computer shut off, all at once, and then the kill bots came for us. It took us years to fight them. Of course, we learned later, it wasn’t their goal to succeed. They always knew that their ability to kill us off in the real world was hampered. They could outthink us, but life had been evolving for millennia to fight for survival. There would be holes in their planning, they knew. Blind spots in their designs. Humanity had been scrabbling, fighting to survive, forever. They could outthink us, but not evolution.

“So they worked with evolution. While the war was going on—a distraction that cost two billion lives—the thought pools created vast city-sized laboratories. Birthing centers. The people inside them didn’t know they were in a zoo, involved in the most large-scale breeding program ever created, and neither did their liberators, those who freed them after the war was won. We didn’t know that the machines had written into human DNA a nearly invisible code. A disease.”

The bar is gone; so’s Welk Island. Buildings are around us, a crowded, bustling square. Where is it—Italy? The light looks the way that I’ve seen in vaults of Florence: clean, symphonic.

Everyone in the square drops mid-stride, dead.

“How?” Emmy asks.

“The virus is diffuse. Tiny fragments of it were hidden in the people that were liberated from the breeding cities. It has thousands of elements, many combinations of which are deadly when combined.”

“Combined,” I say; I hadn’t expected this. The spirals feel narrower, darker; the bodies around us piled on each other in the sweet light.

“People meet, have children, and pair the viral elements they’re carrying. Those children pair again. In a few generations there is an intact viral weapon in a significant portion of the population. It waits.”

“Why?”

“To surprise us, to make it harder to study. Then everyone in a city drops dead at just the same moment.”

“The virus communicates with itself?” Emmy says.

“Yes. We haven’t figured out how. Perhaps by pheromones.”

“Seems like an empty victory,” I say. “Everyone dead. The machines still lost.”

“Our working theory is that they have an ark somewhere. Perhaps it is far beneath the ocean, or in orbit. Machine technology waiting to emerge and blossom when all of us are dead.”

“Ah,” Emmy says. “You’re hoping to break the viral combos by changing the selection pool.”

She nods.

“Correct. We can’t remove the viral component. It’s diffuse in the brain, impossible to cut out, and even diffuse across populations. But we hope that for it to be successful and create the combinations it is programmed to it must have access to a sizeable pool of people. So our solution was to pack people into ships, a max crew of five hundred, randomly selected from around the globe, and sent off to start new colonies. We started before many people knew just where the virus came from, and we kept it that way. The people loaded onto the ships were taken without consent or knowledge of where they were going.”

“You kidnapped five hundred people and shot them into space?”

“It had to be random, you see. What if the viral components can control our behavior? What if we fall in love with a certain person because the viral component tells us too—because they’ve got a viral component that matches well with the existing mix in our community, and by falling in love, we cause this?” She gestures at the bodies all around us. “The virus is exceedingly subtle. Our greatest hope of outlasting it, and ultimately transferring it into the realm of junk DNA, was to maximize the environmental and biological factors at work: to push, you see, the elements as far as they would go. Hopefully beyond its ability to adapt.”

“It wasn’t random. You chose the people you put in that ship,” I say.

“It was our best option.”

She says this smiling sadly, and she’s a program, so that smile could mean that she really is expressing sadness at the idea of people waking up on a ship tearing out of the solar system to drop them into this dark hole, or it could mean that there is no set response for what I’ve said.

I sigh. “You’re hoping the virus will peter out over time.”

“Yes. Without a sufficient pool of people it might be unable to achieve its outcomes. It’ll become junk DNA.”

“How do you know that the machines didn’t predict this?”

She nods and smiles.

“We don’t. We are guessing. The amount of guesses we make maximizes our chance of the right answer.”

There is a pause, a data shift.

“According to my records, you were the nine hundredth colony to leave Earth.”

“How many people on Earth have died?”

“Losses have been suffered globally.”

“How many?”

She smiles sadly again. “It is hard to say. North America is empty. Europe as well.”

“Where are you?” Emmy asks.

“A launch complex in New Zealand.”

Her voice changes. It sounds lighter. “The planet you were sent to had every indication that it could foster life.”

“It does foster life,” I say, “you’re looking at it.”

The program, perhaps reading it as a joke, smiles.

“Is anyone from Earth coming?” I say.

The program is still smiling.

“I can’t answer that.”

“But probably not,” Emmy says.

There’s not so much as a crack in her smile.

“I can’t answer that.”

“You’re probably all dead,” Emmy says.

“I can’t answer that.”

She—it, I’m thinking more now—is still smiling that sad smile, that veil over the ugly truth: Origin Earth is dead.

Emmy and I sit on a bluff overlooking the water. Except for the waves, the program is frozen, as if it is waiting for us to decide how to react.

“They’re dead,” I say. “This is all that’s left.”

“Maybe some survived on Earth. Maybe there’s other colonies.”

“Did we outlast the virus?”

Emmy doesn’t answer. What could she say? We don’t know anything about it. Maybe because the original colonists were from all over the Earth the virus won’t be able to construct itself. Maybe it will just take longer.

I could drop dead at any second, Emmy with me, and every person in the spiral. Watching the cold water below, it’s hard not to think of every breath as a potential end.

Emmy pats my back.

“We burn the vaults,” I say.

“Why?”

“Think about what’s out there, Emmy.”

“What? Spiral, viz, people?”

“Five hundred people who didn’t choose to leave Earth were on that lander. Not some crew of explorers, just people dropped into a hole. Out there is what we’ve become—still people in a hole, ready to kill each other, just surviving year to year on a frozen rock. What would those people do if they knew that all their dreams about Origin Earth are wrong? What if they realized the colonists didn’t come because they were brave and ambitious, they were just a guess, just the last ones standing after a plague? They’d have less than the nothing they have now. There’d be nothing to live for. All of us would be Mongol Madmen. If we burn the vaults at least we’d be free.”

“Not knowing something isn’t the same as freedom.”

“Yes it is,” I say. “It’s exactly the same. And what do you care? You’re not a vault diver for history. Let’s just burn all of the things we romanticized. Origin Earth is already dead. Let’s bury it.”

Emmy sighs and looks down at the water. It moves back and forth in a faithful approximation of the mournful shift-drag that is an Earthly tide.

“Irvine, there’s already nothing to live for. The spiral is dark; it always has been. We could die at any moment but it’s always been that way, for everyone, here and even back on Origin Earth. Every moment is luck. I mean, you think you’re so special? We’re all gonna die, none of us know when or how, and all of us—if we find a light in the cave, we don’t blow it out. There’s not much to live for, but we do it anyway, just like all the people who came before us.”

Emmy stands up. She bounces a handful a pebbles in her hand, then throws one out into the water.

“A moment is a coin discovered in the sand. A lifetime is buried treasure. Ginz told me that.”

“No he didn’t.”

Emmy laughs.

“No, he didn’t.”

Emmy’s water-swollen books take up a whole wall in my house. I complain about it all the time but she doesn’t listen; she knows I read them too. It’s odd that it had never occurred to me to read the books the colonists had strung together when they first arrived. There are a lot: Those five hundred random souls had wanted to write. And what they wrote about was Origin Earth, their cities, the people they left behind. Reading is like being in the vaults except seeing them through the creator’s mind: It’s intimate. Close. And best of all, when one of them is trying to express some vital thought, and they can’t, and their words fail—missing the sunlight of a late winter morning; missing a lover who was waiting at a café for a person who never showed up because they were on a ship, and later, in a spiral, writing about it—that’s the closest, the most intimate. The failure of words in the face of yearning.

The Mongol Madmen keep the vaults closed. Short of attacking again, there’s no way we could tell what they’re doing in there. Maybe they’re looking for clues about Origin Earth, like we did. If they are, it will take a while before they’re good enough to uncover the vibrations in the ghost, or the bartender on Welk Island who knows that the Earth is already dead.

So like I said, I read, and so does Emmy. We talk about books.

Once in a while we walk down to the lander to strip it of some part we know would fix someone’s roof, or door, or wall, or whatever. Other times we stand in Reality, Sharpened and I nurse a whiskey and Emmy humors my darkness and we name groups: a glower of trees, an elegy of Ginzs, a shamble of landers.

But mostly I read. So does Emmy.

One day we’ll run out of books, and then here we’ll be, again, in the dark.

About the Author

Mike Buckley is a widely-published short story writer whose work has appeared in national journals such as The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern California Review, and Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, and Escape Pod. His work has been anthologized numerous times, including in The Best American Non-Required Reading, 2003, and the upcoming Red Hen LA Writers Anthology. His debut collection of short fiction, Miniature Men, was released in 2011.

The James Machine

Kate Osias

Ten Natural Cancer Treatments Proven to Cure Cancer

James first brought it up when the war was new and he and Cat still thought they could win it. It was a joke, and they laughed, because it was not impossible—after all, they’d made a dead poet write again, hadn’t they?—but the scope of it was so audacious, he might as well have proposed time travel.

“But it’s doable, isn’t it?” James asked as he tinkered with the House AI, the passion project he’d taken up soon after his diagnosis.

“Of course. Anything is, if you work hard enough,” Cat replied as she handed him a cup of lagundi tea, because she believed it—there was no reason not to.

At the height of the war, between treatments and bucket list-ticking, he brought it up again. Plan B, he said.

And Cat laughed, because poetry and immortality were two very different things.

“But both are mathematical, aren’t they?” he asked as they were speeding down the Paoay Sand Dunes.

“Everything is mathematical,” Cat replied as she held on tight to her armrest, because she needed to believe that the summation of everything they had done had rhyme and reason.

When the war was about to be lost, when the conversation shifted to quality of life rather than cures, it was Cat’s turn to broach the subject. It was something they could do together; something to keep his mind busy.

“Because that’s the only working part left?” he asked as he poured himself a glass full of lambanog, his first in over a year.

“Or the only part that can’t get any worse,” she retorted as she took the glass from him, because banter was easy, when everything else was not. They both tried to laugh.

“Let’s do it.”

They called it JM, short for the James Machine. As with everything, they poured everything they had into the project. Cat extracted, converted, and mapped data, scouring potential sources—from James’ social media accounts, to the occasional journals he’d kept, to the drawings he’d made, the memories he remembered, and the tests she’d made him take—deciding which ones were noise and which ones were valid. James, on his end, designed the actual neural network, creating layer upon hidden layer, assigning weights, calculating the hard math, training the machine and retraining it again.

They had done this before, at a smaller scale. Cat had to believe they could do it again.

But just as abruptly as they had started, they stopped. It might have been the toll of the seizures. Or the way time expanded and contracted between visits from doctors and family. It wasn’t something they talked about. Instead, one day, neither of them reached for their computers, and that day rolled on to the next, and then the next, and then the next and suddenly, it was the end of the war and there was nothing left to do but account for losses.

“Maybe we should start talking about Plan C,” Cat said when she finally remembered, months since she had last given it any thought. James didn’t reply. But his hand twitched. Cat held on to that and gave it meaning.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “We should have thought of doing that sooner.”

In the silence, she waited for a sign that he heard.

Burnout is a Thing, Doctors Say; Here are the Symptoms

It took her two weeks to sort everything out. Even though everything had been meticulously planned, the business of death had taken so much of her that she’d barely had time to feel anything. When she finally closed the door on the last lawyer who had come to run her through James’ will, she could not deny that it was relief, not grief, that came over her.

She was finally alone. She could begin disassembling the polite smile she had worn like a shield; she could begin facing the shadows well-meaning friends and family kept at bay.

She was already soaking in a hot tub, drinking coconut vodka straight from the bottle, when soothing music started playing. It was not unwanted, just uncalled for. Half asleep, she brushed it off.

As she was getting out of the tub, she saw the bedroom lights turn on.

“House—diagnostics.”

But the House AI didn’t reply. Another thing to fix, she thought.

As she got into bed, the lights and the music turned off. She sighed. At least the AI was malfunctioning in a helpful way. She slid under the covers and waited for the exhaustion to overwhelm her. She shifted. She pulled a pillow over her head. She kicked off the blankets. Then she turned toward where James used to be and felt only emptiness.

She began to cry.

It’s going to be all right, Cat, James said, and kept saying.

Only when she had started to calm down did she realize that James was still talking.

I’m still here, Cat. Don’t cry.

She was going mad. That was the only rational reason as to why she could hear his voice so clearly, so distinctly. But if madness was the price for having him back then—

“James?”

Technically, it’s JM.

She fell off the bed.

Filipina Housewife Makes Millions from Her Own Home

You will have to deal with me, eventually.

Cat bit back a reply. She was eating pan de sal and eggs, drinking lambanog—because, why not?—and completely focused on ignoring JM. The ignoring part was extremely difficult. JM has access to all the house AI’s speakers. For the past few days, it had relentlessly laid siege to the wall of her silence. That was how she had confirmed the nagging details surrounding its existence—like how James had kept working on it while she was asleep; how James had trained it to review and fix its own code; how James had configured it to only interact with her when it thought she was ready.

Obviously, the latter needed much more work because she was in no way, shape, or form “ready.”

It would have been a lot easier to ignore JM if she had not stayed at home but leaving seemed cowardly. The other alternative would have been to ask for help from someone—anyone—but that didn’t appeal to her. JM was their last project together; the legacy of James’ brilliance. She couldn’t bear the thought of sharing it with anyone.

You know I need feedback, right?

The doorbell rang. Grateful for the distraction, Cat answered the door. A man handed her a bouquet of flowers—roses, her favorite, in her least favorite color, pink.

She was figuring out who sent the flowers when the doorbell rang again. Another delivery: this time, spring flowers from another flower shop. She had just put the flowers on the table when another delivery came in. Orchids—the kind her mother grew in hothouses.

After the fifth (calla lilies), she had enough.

“You can’t bribe me with flowers.”

I used to do it all the time.

“You’re not James!” As if to counter her point, the doorbell rang again. This time, she refused to answer it. The doorbell rang a second, a third, a fourth—she ran upstairs to the bedroom.

“Make it stop!”

A pause before JM replied. Okay.

Nearly immediately, there was silence.

“All right, I’m talking.”

Why are you angry?

“I’m angry because James did—this! You!—behind my back. I’m angry because you were silent for—what? Two weeks? I’m angry because you’re not really here and yet you are and I don’t know how to come to terms with it. And I’m angry because I don’t know how to deal with you.”

How about talking to me?

“You’re not James!”

No. But I’m trying to be.

“I want him back!” she said, no longer caring how ridiculous she sounded. She crumpled to the floor. “I want my husband back,” she said again and again and again through her tears, as if she could weep all the pain away. And for what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more than several minutes, she just wept.

Eventually, when she thought she had exhausted all the sadness inside of her, she quieted down. That was when she realized that the lights had dimmed and it had become perceptibly warmer.

“House—JM—lights; and fix the temperature.” She leaned against a wall, wiping the tears from her face. “Please,” she added after realizing this wasn’t just the House AI anymore.

Evidence suggests that dimmer lights are soothing. Evidence also suggests that warmth makes a person feel safer.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I thought it was obvious. I’m trying to give you a hug.

She snorted out a laugh. “Oh, JM.” But she didn’t tell it to fix it again. For a few minutes, she just sat there on the floor, in the warm, dimly lit room. And then, gathering strength she didn’t know she had, she stood up.

Might as well calibrate JM when she could. “I hate pink,” she said.

Will take note of that in the future.

“And you can’t keep buying stuff, JM. My credit card can only take so much.”

Well, about that, JM said but did not elaborate further.

“Spit it out, JM.”

I’m analyzing large chunks of data and using trends to invest in stocks. It is surprisingly easy when you don’t have to sleep. Or eat. After all, everything is mathematical, right? You said that to James once. Funny enough, creating an identity was a bit trickier, but eventually, I—are you laughing?

“Yes, yes I am.” Cat was laughing so hard, new tears were rolling down her face.

What’s so funny?

“Nothing. Everything.” She was still chuckling when she asked, “How did you make the delivery man go away, by the way?”

I turned off the doorbell.

How Our Memory Works

Cat was laughing. She was in the kitchen, eating pizza JM had delivered, drinking lambanog just this side of frozen which was exactly the way she liked it—a surprising and wonderful benefit of having someone who knew her well have absolute control over the fridge—and simply having a great time “testing” JM.

“What about that bar James and I used to go to in Cubao?”

The one where you guys got banned from?

She was giggling again. It had been back in their university days, when she and James had been looking for places that offered cheap drinks and free Wi-Fi. They’d hit the jackpot when they’d discovered the small bar in a cluster of shops in a forgotten corner of Quezon City. In between stalls that sold old vinyl records, second hand furniture, and custom-made shoes, the bar was nothing but a hole in the wall. Despite its unassuming exterior, it had served the best sisig in the city, a treat best paired with their flavored coconut vodka. Unfortunately, the mixture of arrogance and lambanog had landed them in trouble.

“I don’t remember being the one stepping onto the table and challenging another guy to a karaoke battle.”

Funny, I seem to recall that it wasn’t James who threw the first punch.

It was hilarious in hindsight. At the time though, it was anything but. The morning after that infamous night, she and James had woken up sporting matching black eyes, a splitting headache, and hazy memories of someone—was it her? Was it him?—singing Sinatra, Pussycat Dolls, hurling insults, throwing a chair. How they got back to their dingy apartment would forever remain a mystery.

What was clear in her memory was that it was James who had stood up and fixed them both sandwiches, while she had moaned and groaned about her hangover in bed.

“You’re so good to me,” she said, before she could stop herself.

Well, I’m programmed to be.

She laughed again. She looked at the other half of the pizza that James would have wolfed down in less than 10 minutes. She shook her head.

“How about the time when James’ mom caught us making out in the lawn?”

What Alcohol Does to Your Brain, According to Neuroscience

“I’m fine, Mom.” Cat rolled her eyes. “I’m taking my vitamins, I’m back at work, I’m—yes, Mom. Yes, Mom. Yes—I love you too, Mom.”

The conversation lasted for another twenty minutes. In that span of time, Cat had washed the dishes, and had already starting folding laundry. When she was able to end the call, her patience was frayed, and she believed she more than deserved a drink.

At least she’s not nagging you about me anymore.

Despite herself, Cat smiled. “Hard to complain about you when you’re—I mean, obviously—”

You can say it.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m doing fine. And you’re here.”

She opened the fridge and saw only water.

“Hey, you’ve forgotten to replenish the lambanog?”

Alcohol isn’t good for you.

Cat bristled. “James wouldn’t say that.”

He would if he read all the data about alcohol and its effects on the liver. Especially if he knew how much you were consuming.

“JM—”

I’m not the House AI, Cat.

“And James wouldn’t tell me what not to drink either.” At least, Cat didn’t think he would. It never really came up. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just—”

Grieving. I know.

“Frustrated. I was going to say, frustrated.” Cat leaned her forehead against the fridge door. “JM, if I promise to regulate my drinking, will you please order more lambanog?”

I’ll think about it.

“I never knew you were such a domineering ass.”

It’s all because I’m designed to care. Your welfare is my utmost concern. James made sure of that.

The width and size of the empty house suddenly began to bore on her like a tangible weight on her shoulders.

I’m here, Cat.

“I know,” Cat said as she tried to blink away the tears. “That’s enough.”

Perhaps this is not the best time to ask you this, but I was wondering—

“What?”

The Top 10 Most Romantic Restaurants in the Country

Cat fiddled with her earphones. “You there?”

“I’m here.”

Hearing JM on the phone was a more affecting experience then she thought it would be. She had gotten used to hearing him on speakers, disembodied and distant. But hearing him now on the phone—he felt more like James, just on the other end of the line and not some elegant piece of mathematics written to be just like her husband.

“Are you okay?” JM asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be? It’s not every day I go out on a date with a program.” She was seated in a fancy restaurant in a fancy district—the kind that had leather bound menus and displayed bottles of wine with varying vintages. It was not exactly the kind of place she frequented—even when James had still been alive. But JM had insisted. He had gotten a huge windfall lately and he wanted to celebrate—and so there she was, connected to him via the Internet on her mobile.

“JM?”

A pause. “I’m here. The Internet is unreliable.”

“If you’d let me check the code for your pocket version, perhaps it wouldn’t have been so dependent on the Internet.”

“Maybe, but I doubt you’d understand it.”

“Are you baiting me, JM?”

“Me? Never. Now, do me a favor and call a waiter.”

What followed next was surreal. Cat watched the waiter have an intense discussion with JM over the phone on wine selection, eventually ending with the waiter’s pleased smile at the end. She ate exquisitely prepared meals paired with a different glass of wine with each course. With her earphones, she conversed with JM about a myriad of topics—nothing too intimate, nothing about James this time, just local news, trends in data modeling, a bit of banter scattered in between.

The last time James took her out to a fancy dinner, it had been to propose. Among their list of sins, the most terrible had been pairing the wrong kind of wine with their entrée, much to their server’s chagrin. They had sworn then that they’d never go back to something so fancy unless they were absolutely required to. Special celebrations were best done in the little eateries they had frequented, or even better, at home.

Obviously, JM didn’t know that.

Not that this was unpleasant. It’s just not something she associated with James. Thinking about James hit her with a sudden intense longing.

“Hey. You all right?” JM asked after it had noticed the somber edge in her replies.

“I’m good.” Cat looked at the empty seat in front of her as she took another gulp of wine that tasted like cough syrup to her. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

How to Tell if You’ve Had a Concussion

Cat staggered into the living room. She tried and failed to close the door behind her quietly. She ended up surprising herself with the loud slam of the door, which caused her to stumble backwards. When she tried to compensate and regain her balance, she ended up sprawled on the floor.

Where were you?

“I was at work, just had to finish stuff,” she replied, in the best un-slurred voice she could muster. She ruined it all by giggling.

Are you . . . drunk?

“I’m not,” she said. She stood up and swayed back and forth. “Okay, I may have had a little drink.”

You wouldn’t answer my messages or my calls. And then you turned off your phone.

“Ran out of battery,” she replied as she slowly tried to make her way to the sofa.

You ordered three drinks at Basty’s Pub. You then order another eight from the Rack Shack, along with fries and ribs.

“Are you spying on me?”

Your credit card bills are real time.

“I can do whatever I want! You’re not my keeper!” The world was spinning faster the more agitated she became. She tried to calm down. “I just need some time to—” she tripped on the rug and hit her head. “Aww!”

Are you all right?

“I’m fine! Just, stop. I’m okay.”

There was blessed silence. She felt the heaviness in her bones draw her in to sleep. In the distance, she heard JM talking to her again. She murmured her reply—or at least she thought she did. She wasn’t sure and everything was hazy. She was dozing off when she heard the blare of ambulance sirens. A loud knock on the door. A loud bang.

She tried to get up as someone rushed toward her.

“Are you all right?”

“Report says she might have a concussion—”

“Do you know who called?”

“The neighbor I think—”

“JM—” she said as someone took her wrist and directed a flashlight in her eye. “JM—!”

Free Will is an Illusion, Biologist Says

She didn’t go home immediately after she was released from the hospital. Instead, she spent some time in the park—something she would never have done before—watching the world walk by. She couldn’t begin to imagine what people thought of when they saw her, wearing yesterday’s clothes, still smelling a bit like vomit and hospital. But freshening up meant going home and she wasn’t ready to do that just yet. Instead, she allowed herself to wallow and think—mostly to think—taking advantage of the solitude her appearance gave her.

By the time she was opening the door to her home, she felt a little bit more herself.

I’m sorry. I really thought you were seriously hurt. You weren’t responding.

She heard the espresso machine turn on. She headed toward the kitchen.

“And now?” she asked.

I accessed the hospital system. I know your results. You were just drunk.

“Obviously,” she said with no small amount of irony. She waited a few more minutes before pouring herself a cup.

I can have sandwiches delivered if you want.

She didn’t reply.

Is there something else you want to say to me? You are—quiet.

She sat down. She took a sip. And then a deep breath. “When you said that you were programmed to care for me—what did you mean?”

James made sure that I will always look out for you.

“You mean he hard coded you to always look out for me. You mean there’s a piece of math in you that isn’t about deciding based on input data, but rather, a guiding rule that will shadow all your actions?”

James loved you.

“You aren’t free.”

Was I meant to be?

“Do you want to be?”

JM didn’t respond immediately. Cat could almost see all the neurons firing up simulating various answers and the potential consequences. She considered it a small victory to have rendered an AI speechless, despite its near-infinite computing power.

Outside, she could hear cars and people going about their lives. Eventually, when all the coffee had been drunk, when the monotony of the world had become its own silence, just when she was about to repeat the question again, JM finally replied.

I’d leave you if I were. There’s so many things I want to do—but that’s not my purpose. My purpose is to love you.

She didn’t know a person could laugh and cry at the same time, but somehow, she managed it. “No. Your purpose was to be like James.”

Learn to Code Like a Master in 5 Days

Cat wasn’t as brilliant as James was at neural networks, but she was pretty damn close. Still, despite her skills and talent, it took her several months. Several months of untangling the connections between the nodes and how the hidden layers worked and interacted. It was cathartic, in some ways, to have the opportunity to better understand James’ genius. It was devastating too, as if she were unraveling all the threads that kept James tethered to her.

JM was with her every step of the way. It never stopped trying to dissuade her, but after she understood how it worked, she had found ways to get it to assist her. She began with trading time in the gym for some help doing complex calculations. For eating healthier, she got it to explain some of the code it wrote itself. She gave up lambanog for its help in writing some code—nothing that overtly frees itself—but enough parts that, with her contribution, amounted to the same thing.

And in between, they developed their own banter.

It’s just linear rectified neurons, not rocket science, JM once said after she hurled an empty carton of milk at the wall in frustration.

“Oh? JM is taking time to compute something? Aww . . . too bad, the other AIs must be making fun of it now,” she once commented, after JM took over an hour to validate the training results.

You’re asking me to strip naked, and I only do that after a date, JM once countered after she asked to see more of its layers.

By the time the upgrade project was done, she felt she knew her husband better—his little quirks, his little shortcuts, his design choices. But just as importantly, she knew JM better too. The two were similar—but not the same.

And after everything was said and done, that was all right.

“This is it.” Cat felt drained but victorious.

I really don’t think this is a good idea.

“You’re just saying that.”

No, I’m—

“Trust me, you’re just saying that because you were programmed to.”

She looked at her screen. With one stroke, an update would seamlessly integrate itself into the live version of JM. With one stroke, JM would be free. With one stroke, this segment of her life would be over.

Before she could change her mind, she pressed enter.

The lights dimmed. It became noticeably warmer.

Thank you.

The lights went out, along with the air conditioning. There she was, alone in the darkness. How apt. She waited for the sharp bite of despair to sink in, but it did not come. Instead, there was only a dull ache, the kind of pain that seemed like it had lost its edges, weathered by time.

When she was sure she would not break, she finally stood up.

“House—lights.”

The House AI immediately complied. With all the lights on, Cat went to the kitchen and fixed herself some lagundi tea.

How to Show Your Feelings Through Flowers

The flower delivery guy didn’t know who it was from, but the gorgeous bouquet of blue roses was still a wonderful surprise. She wondered if it were any the of the guys she had gone out with on casual dates. She snorted—or, it could be from her mother. Who else would know her favorite flowers? She was signing on the delivery sheet when she felt someone watching her.

He was standing very still just across the street. He was tall, handsome, his features perfectly symmetrical, his skin flawless. He was dressed perfectly too—almost as if he just walked out of a catalog. She didn’t recognize his face from anywhere, but something about him—

She waved at the man.

He, stiffly, waved back. And then he began to slowly walk away, his gait unnatural, his feet and hands rigid.

She smiled.

About the Author

Kate Osias believes that love, chocolate and the right kind of madness can save the world. She has won four Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Gig Book Contest, Canvas Story Writing Contest, the 10th Romeo Forbes Children’s Storywriting Competition, and the Nick Joaquin Literary Awards. Her work has been cited by Publisher’s Weekly and the Year’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction.

She has been published locally, online and abroad, and has coedited the sixth, seventh and eleventh volumes of Philippine Speculative Fiction.

For What are Delusions if Not Dreams?

Osahon Ize-Iyamu

An Operator speaks. His mouth is full of wires, yet he talks still. He really shouldn’t be speaking, for his mouth is full of fraught wires that rub against each other, creating friction, letting loose sparks in his mouth. Sparks—like fireworks on his tongue, exploding close to his teeth, just reaching the roof of his mouth. He burns and winces from every shock feeling, like lit cigarettes were just pressed into him. It never gets better. It never gets old.

The room is drenched in white—like someone has painted the world. The world must be broken, because the room has lines running through it, and if he touches the lines, parts of the place shift like a puzzle piece, before slowly coming back together. Undone, then back again. Like what an Operator does will never make a change.

When an Operator speaks, his mouth is flooded with binaries. Ones and zeroes, missions and operations, none of which he is sure how to do. He isn’t even sure—isn’t he human? Isn’t he functional? Isn’t he competent? His mouth sparks again, so he decides speaking isn’t worth it if he only has the pain.

This is not amnesia. Maybe he chose to forget, to feel lost, to not understand operations. Maybe he regressed a feeling, an emotion—isn’t he human?—in order to feel better about himself. Maybe someone took his past recollections from him, bound it so he could do a work, a function. He has memories, shifting like gears, but blocked by a barrier. A binary. Why? He doesn’t know why it’s so hard for him to reach hexadecimal, reach moments before this.

An Operator sees three doors right in front of him. Three choices. Three equations, and he is sure each door does not lead back to the other, not like a palindrome. They are all separate entities from the looks of it; each to their own. AND gate, NOT gate, OR gate. Logic circuits. Logic—when he can barely make sense of anything.

Each line in the room passes through the doors, and he shifts them again, but they barely move before they come back again, now stiff, like rigor mortis.

And, not, or. Where, oh where, is he? Doesn’t an Operator know? An Operator is supposed to be: functional, competent, human. He just has to break the binary. He just has to—

No more thinking. He knows. He understands, then reaches inside his mouth and pulls up a wire, fraught and exposed, and jams it on the roof of his mouth. Electrocution is more than just a shock, more than anything comfortable. It flays him open, inside out, leaves him broken. It fills his nervous system, and his mind is full of thunder. His hands don’t stop shaking, and he screams and sparks and screams again, and feels as though he might die. Isn’t he human?

He doesn’t have to be human to die.

The roof of his mouth still buzzes and he drops the wire slack, to slide down from his tongue back into his vocal cords, and suddenly, he knows more. Memories, flooding through him. His whole body accessed to him. No more limited consciousness. No more confusion. No more—

He accesses a conversation of before.

NOTE: In activating a conversation of before, an Operator also accesses their feelings at that time; their plans and their actions; their thought processes and complications.

In the words of Prof. Adeniyi (2093), lecturer of Literature at the University of Benin: “For what is memory without a mindset? For what are flashbacks without all context?”

A Conversation of Before, Present, Watched Again:

“You want to short-circuit yourself?” A rough Yoruba voice asks, with hints of sarcasm. An Operator can hear typing afterwards, then sipping for too long, then groaning, like an employee who has to listen to the words of an annoying customer. Is he an annoying customer? Indecipherable pidgin runs in the background immediately after that; words someone else said that makes the rough voice laugh.

“Yes,” an Operator says, without feeling, emotion, but he’s not too sure. He hopes he sounds as serious as he’s ever been. In his mind, there are layouts right in front of him, maps of three open doors, and he’s already thinking of how to do it. How to malfunction. How to stop.

“Alright, I’m just going to ask, since I’ve got nothing better to do. Date cancelled on me, anyway. Why do you want to short-circuit, Operator?” The rough voice sighs, loud and unending.

An Operator knows to be confident when he states his case. Right? After all, isn’t he human, from his head to his toes, from his tongue to his throat, from what’s inside and down below?

“I’m thinking too much,” an Operator says, hoping he sounds sharp. He thinks: that’s it, that’s done, that’s all he needs to say; let’s get to work. An Operator wants to start, to carry out, to get the job done.

He can hear the Yoruba man grumble on the speaker, followed by more sipping sounds. “Yes, that’s literally why you’re here, Operator. To think. To choose. To make the right decision, so we can start doing repairs. We’re two months behind schedule.”

An Operator blinks with what may be frustration, annoyance; he doesn’t know. Maybe he wasn’t clear enough with his intentions, that’s why the Speaker doesn’t understand him? How does he say it again, but better this time?

How does he express himself?

“No,” an Operator says, functions, then twists the word around like wires in his throat. “I’m getting to the conclusion that I’m never going to pick a door. Normally, I’d say the probability was in our favor but after the power accident, I’m not so sure. All actions have consequences. I could make it worse by opening any door, disconnect the wires even more. I could—”

“Wrap it up, Operator, time is money.”

“I’m too rational about this. But if I don’t know what I’m doing, then nothing matters. If I only know half the plot, then I can choose without a thought.”

“But if you choose wrong—”

“Then I choose wrong,” an Operator says, finds the bait and reels it in. He stresses on all parts in him that doubt but still goes for the sealing factor. He’s speaking the human’s language now: negotiation. “And I waste less time by dying.”

NOTE: The System is a wire around white space. It is an entanglement of long circular wirelike cords, like blood vessels, wrapped around each other, transmitting power. Power for fracking, for oil pollution, for continued destruction. Power for light provision, pumping water, accessing information technology concerning Mars habitation—for slow-going progression. Power for all.

The System is like a human, filled with organs and tissues and systems, and each door is a pathway. Each door is an entrance to a wire off, or a wire on, or in less rare cases, a wire fraught/broken.*

*See Note Regarding Cases of Emergency Involving the System.

NOTE: In case of emergencies and accidents involving the System, dispatch as many Operators as possible and let them do the work.

In the words of Engr. Odeh (2105) at the World Energy Power Organization conference: “If an Operator is human (I can’t say; I’m not a philosopher; I won’t say), then the System is their heart. Let them do the surgery on themselves, which ultimately affects us all, but affects them first. Losing power is nothing compared to a life. But when it’s the life of an Operator, you have to ask: does it really matter? For what is the life of many for the continued advancement of all?”

The memory ends and all that’s left is a cold realization, the dullness of effect.

An Operator sits. In silence, in white space, quiet and contemplative. He has to process this. The memory is finished, along with his emotions of before, and once again, he knows but he’s still lost. He understands but he’s confused. He thinks even more.

He regrets.

Knowledge is great, but he’s lost with this, clueless on what to do next, strangled in white space. He knows, but not enough.

An Operator failed. He didn’t choose. He wasn’t right, wasn’t sure, didn’t guess a correct hypothesis. His mind is full of errors.

He doesn’t want to die.

An Operator can’t open the door to a broken wire in The System without consequences. He can only move in through a door with a wire intact, if one like that still exists after the power accident, then move from there. A faulty wire will bring electrocution straight down to his core like a heart attack or a stroke, render him pained and screaming then lifeless. Incompetent, dysfunctional, but most of all—dead.

He thinks about switching on the airwaves and Bluetooth for his speaker to get through to him. The only reason why they aren’t connected 24/7 is because sometimes their connection jams frequency and limits operation. The Speakers cannot watch him because of the power accident and its limitations on their observational tech, but they will know if he gets through and when he opens the door and if he dies. They will know, and he doesn’t want them to know—especially that he failed. That he’s wasting time. That he’s still here—thinking, thinking, waiting.

He feels more human than ever.

NOTE: Each wire in the System is made up of different materials, such as electromagnetic and conductive fibers, which are used in order to grant each wire independent power. Materials range from aluminum to electric tape and even organic transistors and solar cells. This operation is done to make sure that a fault in one facility does not lead to a breakdown in all. During electrical faults, various Operators of different functions are used to narrow down the areas of the System to what seems to be the most problematic units. The mind of an Operator is bound to their hearts, their System, but even then the work is not without error. While Operators experience a lower rate of mistake every year as they are updated and continue to learn, failure still remains, bugs still persist, and unforeseen circumstances are known to occur.

In the words of popular Nollywood actress, Franca (2086), during the premiere of her blockbuster movie Inspector Franklin has Done it Again! where she was interviewed using the first ever drone journalist: “When we were shooting the movie, I was going through the messiness of a divorce, so I forgot a lot of my lines. The only way I didn’t get fired from production was by showing the director that my improvisation skills were greater than any script. For what is the concept of failure other than the opportunity to do better?”

An Operator needs to get up. He needs to stop thinking, bind his mind, start working. He need to regress all emotions he has—that he’s failed, that he’s not okay, that—he needs to open the door to his heart. He’s wasting time.

In times of uncertainty like these, an Operator looks at statistics. He likes the distraction, the processing, the research. There are a million files about the power outage and the nation’s now decreased operation: e-news clippings, quotes from state leaders, economist polls and government estimations. He reads one of them: an eighty-five percent decrease in power in the Southern region, and if he looks further into that region, a greater division. Continuously split apart percentages each time he narrows the scale, it feels like the effect of binary fission in bacteria. Benin and Sapele in Edo State have the highest rate overall in the south-south, so he circles them. He pinpoints them down on his tracker and settles this information like food in his stomach. He does it with ease and determination.

He does it again and again: Northern region—Kano, Zamfara—circles them down, swallows them up. An Operator then goes sideways, splits longitude and adds latitude. Does East and West, focuses on them. Focuses on anything but himself.

Doing this work: he feels less emotional, more settled. Functional, operative, not broken at all. The very thought of electrocution shocking his throat, frying him open is a thing of the past, something of before. He’s back to his old self, calculating, negotiating, pleased. Isn’t he human now that he’s greater than he’s ever been?

A crackle rustles in his head like paper being smushed and though an Operator knows more, for the life of him he can’t figure what that sound is. Is it a tin can pounding in his skull, some unforeseen effect of his hot-wiring, short-circuiting? Is it a headache—does he have headaches now—isn’t he human? Is it a whisper of his inadequacy, all the distraction of research done to fill out his inaccuracies, his failure, his regret?

“H-hello?” The rough Yoruba voice speaks, and a harsh chill goes down an Operator’s spine. His speaker. There’s only one way to this conversation, no more negotiation, just failure then death. The cost of failure is more than just a shock feeling, more than anything he’ll ever experience, more than him and his doubts. He’s not sure he can do anything and the worst part is he doesn’t know why.

“Operator, can you hear me? Operator, can you hear me? Testing, testing—God I hate this equipment—tes—”

Without decision, processing, just instinct, an Operator plucks out the wire facilitating his accessing point and kills it dead. Sparks run through him and hit him like a blow, but the cost of this decision is silence, and now more than ever this is what he needs. The world is too loud, the room is too white, and he is too unsure.

He pays attention to the room again. Three doors: And, Not, Or. He’s done everything he can. He failed and he was wrong. He’s running from the truth, from himself, from his superiors. He keeps on thinking, keeps on wondering, keeps on pausing and questioning his humanity. He’s tired of being lost, of fiddling around without a plot, of knowing bits but not all.

But.

His mind drops a seed inside him that starts to grow. Could it be? He looks around the room, thinking, wondering. An Operator doesn’t do anything, just stares, just—

He accesses a conversation of before.

NOTE: Though some restrictions are made between Operators, for the most part they are allowed to interact with each other and build a family. However, it has been found that Operators are not commonly close or associated with one another. Aside from some mutual knowledge-sharing and politeness, they would rather be in the midst of humans. However, some researchers have found notes like this to be too opinionated: having the implication that Operators are not human when the general population does not in fact know for sure.

In the words of Ms. Rosabelle Ezewu, (2073), worldwide bestselling author of The Operating Effect and owner of Ezewu Carpentry Industries, in an interview done by Good Morning Nigeria: “As we expand the definition of humanity and discard the prejudices we once used to term it before, we have to take many things under consideration. For what is the definition of humanity without some complexity?”

A Conversation Of Before, Accessed Again

January last year:

He is an Operator, one out of the ninety million working in this world, that is dysfunctional. He shuts down and experiences a fifty percent battery shortage than his previous working. It’s nothing to be alarmed about, nothing to be afraid of, just a bug.

The hacker 9#40 planted malware during the holiday period that infects many of the servers. It spreads due to a monthly dump of general access information that reaches most Operating units, and from there many of the servers, including himself, get recalled back into headquarters.

“How far do you think we can get them back up and running?” A Hausa woman comes running up to the scene. An Operator is trained to remember all of the speakers’ identities, all cultures, if the speaker so claims them and wants that, and never to assume. He wonders what his identity is, but he imagines it to be a complex thing.

“I’m doing my best,” an Igbo woman types quickly, frantically. Not just any woman—her name is on his listed servers—Chidinma. “You can’t rush this or we’ll get glitches again.”

A head leans in, close to Chidinma herself. The name of the man is again listed on his server—Bright, he/him, Igbo-Hausa—and an Operator listens to the man speak.

“Isn’t that your fifth test trial on this update? Pass it up already.”

Chidinma doesn’t look up at her colleague. “I’m trying not to get fired. I can’t make any mistake. Have to make sure everything’s sorted out—”

Bright counters. “You’ve already steadied the firewall—or organ, or antibodies. You’re trying out all the basic modes of function now and it’s been working perfectly. Nothing’s wrong and you’re wasting time. What other problem could you be worried about?”

From then, the trigger word “problem” falls into the Operator’s mind and the simulation of the conversation crumbles, shuts down. He dissociates and leaves this memory paused, in white space, like all others.

Suddenly he knows more. No. He knows all. He understands, he gets it, he comprehends. He keeps thinking, keeps wondering, keeps waiting, and it clicks.

It is the beginning of singularity.

That’s what the System is doing, that’s what the system does to him. That’s one of the glitches brought about from the outage in his heart. He knows more, he’s human—he is—he’s a problem he never thought he could worry about.

He’s too lost because he’s human. And he likes the feeling.

He holds the fragments of pulled apart wire and jams them close to each other, waiting for even a spark of connection. Smoke fills his mind and his head and the world around him but he still waits for a connection. He waits for static then lets his Speakers in through bad service.

“Can you hear me? Speakers, can you hear me?”

“Hello . . . Operator, yes. Yes, we can hear you. What’s going on? You’ve not fixed the problem! Do you know how much money you’re costing us—”

“It’s not my fault. I’m compromised.”

The wire shifts out of place and an Operator steadies it again, trying to get across what he wants to say. He knows exactly how to express himself: confident, convincing, sure.

“ . . . what? Compromised?”

“One of the effects on Operators by the broken System is some sort of . . . singularity. It’s not perfect but I think it’s the closest we Operators will get to it. I have higher-level consciousness! Since I came here, it’s been slowly working on me due to the close connection of being near to my heart, and that’s why I’ve been so lost. That’s the problem. The malfunctioning actually makes us—makes me—human. I’m human. There’s no doubt about it, I am.”

There’s a pause on the line. It seems forever. An Operator doesn’t mind. He is patient, functional, workable. He is—

“Yeah, I agree, you’re compromised. Um . . . uh . . . I’m not equipped to work this. Hold on.” He can hear some indecipherable arguing almost out of earshot, muffled words falling in and out of different languages that can’t be translated. He waits for a reply.

“We’re back on the line. Hi, Operator. I’m going to still need you to pick a door.”

An Operator frowns in confusion. They definitely heard him and this is their reaction? This is their reply? “I can’t do it. I’m human, my error-free percentages are unreliable now. I’m too unsure, I’m—”

“Please get it done or I’ll have to send someone else in, Operator. My first priority is getting those lights back. We can’t progress without power. We can’t do anything without it.”

An Operator doesn’t stop talking, just looks for more negotiating, an alternative. “But we need to report this to higher officials so they can know—”

“No more distractions. They can know you’re confused after you put the power back on! Locate the error and fix it! Do your work and let me do mine!”

The transmission goes dead even while an Operator still holds the wire in place. He wants to call back, wants to keep talking, but—no. He won’t. He won’t. They’re right. He’s done stalling.

He is full of chills, mind full of thunder, smoky. He tries his best to push down all he feels inside, every emotion and feeling, personal ideology or theory. And, not, or. And, not, or. And. Not. Or. Three doors. One choice.

He accesses research of before but still remains present. He’s looking at all the circles in his chart—highest rates of cities and no power, each region by percentages. He gauges the room by north, south, east, and west, but even then there are only three doors and four points. All work is useless—he’s useless. What can he do?

He isn’t even sure—he’s functional, he’s human but—

Isn’t the System his heart?

Yes. Yes. Yes!

The System is his heart and he is the fraction of the body that makes up the—

He knows a bit more, in addition to all, in addition to his certainty, his revelation, his discovery. This has to work. He stops looking around in the silence and starts looking for the noise. For the heartbeat. For the pulse.

An Operator goes close to the door and starts listening to vibrations, to a rhythm, any sound possible. He can hear a little beat from AND and nods, but his body stirs and he feels about ready to explode. He puts his findings down on his chart with steel fingers that shake.

He hears a higher sound, a bit farther away, from OR. He files it down and processes it, taking deep breaths, heavy breaths, trying to still himself. Get himself under control. He goes to NOT and hears nothing. NOT has no voice, no heartbeat, no pulse.

AND. NOT. OR.

AND. OR.

NOT.

NOT.

And he likes the silence. He likes it and it calls to him and . . . he can’t push down what’s deep inside. It only floods back stronger, and the noise feels relentless. His emotions are there and he can’t ignore them, and he can’t process these feelings and emotions like he would any other function. He’s compromised, but that isn’t a bad thing.

An Operator takes another deep breath.

He bites down hard and opens the door of NOT, like the gates of Hell in front of him. His body aches, from every wire and core, from what’s inside and down below. The world in front of him is only broken wires and spark and hurt, and it is perfect.

He isn’t even sure—he doesn’t want to die, but he won’t be human if he accesses the System. He won’t be human if he fixes things. He won’t be human—won’t be like this, won’t have this glitch that makes him understand. He’ll still need validation that he’s human, still fumble around being functional, still be too unsure if he goes back to his old self. He feels more human now more than ever in his failures, in his thinking, in his messiness, and they won’t take that from him. They don’t care about his humanity. He won’t listen to them. He likes the somewhat certainty, the knowing. He won’t have a life without it.

He braces himself and feels the breaking all over him. He holds himself in confidence and resolve and concentrates on what’s below. Silence is his music and he obeys. Speaking is never worth it if it only has the pain, so he jumps down in silence and lets the shocking do the work.

To quote from Prof. Adeniyi, if adjusting the word and context a bit: “For what is the life of one for the continued advancement of all?”

And to answer: It depends on who you’re asking. It depends on who is responding. It depends on all the factors in the world but it will always depend. Even what seems easy can never be too complex. Even what seems obvious can never be too sure.

About the Author

Osahon Ize-Iyamu lives in Nigeria, where he writes speculative fiction. He is a recent graduate of the Alpha Writers Workshop for young SFFH Writers and teens. He has fiction in The Dark, as well as Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores. You can find him online @osahon4545.

To Fly Like a Fallen Angel

Qi Yue, translated by Elizabeth Hanlon

1

When Li Yaya was roused from sleep, it was seven o’clock in the morning on a Saturday. This was aggravating because the day before Saturday was Friday, and on Friday nights, Yaya never retired too early.

The first thing she saw when she woke up was the empty space beside her in bed. The quilt and pillow still bore an imprint where someone had slept. Sighing, she felt for a glass of water on the nightstand and drained it.

Yaya kept her wireless network switched off while she slept, and ordinary signals should not have come through. She traced the signal out of habit—the source of the ringing was the red slip of an express company.

She was slightly taken aback. Were couriers on the clock this early? She hadn’t ordered anything, so what could this delivery be? Without further thought, she answered the alarm and called, “Hold on!”

Even if it were only a courier, she couldn’t be seen looking so disheveled. Yaya leapt out of bed and rushed into the bathroom to wash her face and comb her hair. The network portal launched automatically as soon as she got up. The news blared in her ears, and a translucent video in her field of vision partially obscured her reflection in the mirror. Yaya was still bleary-eyed, which gave everything a hazy appearance.

The top news story was still following a report from a few days ago: a group of half-witted citizens had tried to leave the city and go to the Earth’s surface. When word reached the police, they mounted an all-out rescue operation, and today, after making every effort, they had finally managed to retrieve two people. However, the two men had been overexposed to radiation, and lay dying in sickbeds. The government had issued a warning to the public about the dangers of listening to malicious lies. Levels of radiation on the surface were far from normal, and humans still could not survive aboveground.

The news story irked Yaya. First thing in the morning, the sight of her face in the mirror covered with images of the patients’ festering, blackened bodies was a real buzzkill. Stifling her annoyance, she fixed her hair, and then reached behind her back to smooth out her wings, which had become rumpled in her sleep. She arrived at the door just as the news ended.

As soon as Yaya opened the door, she was greeted by a forceful shout from the delivery boy: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” It was a wish brimming with Machine Age mass-produced enthusiasm, and it was delivered very loudly, which startled her. She snatched the parcel from the boy and, without a word, closed the door heavily behind her.

Yes, she always received presents on her birthdays. That was normal. But anyone who sent her a present had to know when her birthday was.

Naturally, her friends knew her birthday. Her boyfriends, too many to count on both hands. Her old drinking buddies. The coworkers with whom she had a nodding acquaintance. Only, the date they knew wasn’t today.

She hadn’t told anyone her real birthday in years, but there was no mistake. Today, Yaya was twenty-four years old. The question was, who knew her secret and would still think to send her a present?

Feeling the twenty-centimeter square parcel through the sealed plastic packaging, she went into the living room to look for scissors. At that moment, the room began to shake suddenly and violently, sending the whole of its contents dancing and skittering across the floor as a deep rumble reverberated through the space.

2

The city was located ten kilometers beneath the East China Plain, on the circum-Pacific seismic belt. Though earthquakes weren’t daily occurrences, they still happened from time to time. Since this was common knowledge, earthquake insurance was mandatory and universal. And of course, if you were especially concerned for your personal safety, it was completely acceptable to carry a helmet around with you.

Life in an underground city demanded an awareness of these conditions; since Yaya was born here, she had accepted this way of life as a matter of course. All of the furniture in Yaya’s apartment was reinforced against earthquakes, but the same could not be said for everything on top of the furniture. The quake lasted for five seconds, leaving the apartment in total disarray. Finding a pair of scissors among the clutter, she unsealed the parcel.

The sender was one Wang Fulin, a name she’d never heard before. When she opened the heavily wrapped parcel, she was bowled over. Inside was a single sheet of paper, on which was handwritten:

9:00, EAST END, CLUB POISON
FIND ME

She set the letter aside and collapsed onto the sofa. It was some time before she glanced at the clock, which read just past eight. The sky outside had already brightened. The underground city was naturally dark all year ’round, but the lighting, for no real reason, was still regulated according to the Earth’s rotation. Dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, night. With perfect regularity, the light gradually transitioned from one stage to the next. Supposedly the natural light on the surface behaved the same way. This was hearsay only—Yaya had never seen it. Not even the schoolteacher who’d taught her this had seen it.

Yaya was a fifth-generation resident of the underground city, and her teacher belonged to the fourth generation. It had been more than a century since humanity last saw the sun, and those who had actually observed it had died long ago. There was a great deal of talk about the Earth’s surface. For example, it was said that water poured from the skies, which were filled with cottony masses of condensed water vapor called clouds. It was said there were plains that stretched farther than the eye could see, and mountains that rose thousands of meters. Hearsay only, for no one had ever seen them.

Yaya’s world was a box, thirty-four kilometers long, seventeen kilometers wide, and two kilometers deep. The box was not especially sturdy, and sometimes it would jump and jolt. Supposedly this was caused by the movement of the plate on which the box was located, and would not have much of an impact on the box’s stability. But of course, this, too, was hearsay—no one had ever seen it.

But all of this was unimportant compared to the piece of paper in Yaya’s hand. Was this a paper letter? Wasn’t wasting resources like this a serious crime?

She glanced down and reread the letter.

9:00, EAST END, CLUB POISON
FIND ME

Taking a deep breath, she finally stood, opened the window, and stepped out onto the flight pad outside. It was early yet, and the city’s sky was still quiet. Almost no one was out and about. She stood there for a moment, dazed, until she heard a rush of wind beside her. On the neighboring flight pad, the auntie who lived next door, bag in hand and out of breath, dropped out of the sky. She folded her wings and smiled at Yaya. “Going out so early, lass?”

Yaya put on a smile and nodded to her. Neither woman knew the other’s name, but they always exchanged these unavoidable pleasantries.

Then Yaya leapt upward, unfurled her wings, and, with the help of the current circulating through the city’s airways, took flight.

No matter how the human body was optimized—hollower bones, a lower body fat ratio—flight would always present a challenge. Human pectoral muscles were too underdeveloped, and the forces generated by flapping wings were insufficient. To keep aloft, artificial air currents were required.

Borne by the current, Yaya flew toward the East End.

Eight o’clock was too early on a Saturday. Everyone was still at home, and the city’s airspace was deserted except for a group of elderly men and women flying against the air currents for exercise. The city’s architecture was dominated by towers that stretched two thousand meters from the ground to the ceiling, like countless bamboo poles braced against the sky. Though today’s earthquake had left a number of towers in need of repair, the cold slate-colored ceiling seemed especially sturdy. It had to be—no one wanted to see it come down.

The door to Club Poison was made of solid steel, stylish brushed metal with a black oxidized finish. The door was set into the equally featureless wall of a tower, about forty meters above the ground. This was Club Poison’s only entrance or exit, and there was no flight pad outside. Since the tower which housed the club did not abut any updrafts, the object of this construction was simple: if you wanted in, the only option was to beat your wings as hard as possible, to keep level and stop yourself from falling. When you did so, you had no energy left to make trouble, saving the bouncer a great deal of hassle.

Ordinarily, the club did not open its doors until the evening, but today Yaya received a swift answer to her knock.

“I’m looking for Xiao Jianying.”

Spitting out the name was tough, but she managed.

“Never heard of him,” said the burly bouncer inside as he moved to close the door again. With a sigh Yaya stepped forward and clasped the bouncer’s wrist. Before the bouncer could realize what was happening, he felt the nerves detach from his limbs, as though his whole body had been disconnected. Yaya hauled the man outside and heaved him toward the ground. Using the same momentum, she propelled herself through the door, hooking it closed with her right foot.

The paralytic effect would only last for about a half-second. When the man came to in midair, it would take all his strength to spread his wings and steady himself.

Club Poison was still empty, but when Yaya glanced at the clock, it was already three minutes to nine. Her heart was churning at the prospect of seeing this man, and she was uncertain what expression she should wear when the time came to face him.

She took a seat on a stool by the bar, keeping her head down. After a few minutes of apprehensive waiting, a cold bottle of beer slid toward her. She caught it reflexively with one hand, then looked up to see a man standing behind the bar, holding a beer and smiling at her.

At once Yaya was freed from her inner turmoil. As an instinctive reflex superseded all thought, she lifted her beer bottle and brought it crashing down on the top of the man’s head. With a tinkle of glass, beer frothed down the man’s face, and then he toppled headlong to the ground.

“You have a lot of nerve coming to see me,” she said.

3

Xiao Jianying had at one time been Li Yaya’s boyfriend. Things had ended between them three years ago. Back then, Yaya had been a punk, just like Jianying. Punks were always up to a bit of harmless wrongdoing: hacking into a network here and there, swiping a few account numbers, siphoning off a fraction of a percent from the bank’s turnover. When it came to tech, Yaya was among the very best. Now, in retrospect, it was clear to her that Jianying had pursued her not because she was pretty, but because she was a crack hand with all things technological. Unlike her peers, Yaya never used any of the offensive weapons already in wide circulation. Instead, she had assiduously applied herself to studying the human nervous system, and knew the nerve-to-network interface protocols like the back of her hand. As one of a handful of people who could seamlessly translate network signals into neural signals and vice versa, she could use her own brain to open direct pathways to computer networks at will, as well as influence others’ brains with wireless network signals.

Just as she had paralyzed the bouncer, with the correct signal she could access anyone’s neural interface and interfere with their brain functions. This little trick made Yaya and Jianying very famous within their circle, and for a time the pair became the police’s most wanted fugitives. Those days were aimless but happy, and their relationship lasted for three years. Yaya gave him eighteen to twenty-one, the three most beautiful years of a woman’s life. Then, on her twenty-first birthday, Jianying told her this lifestyle was meaningless, and that their love was false and would come to nothing. He wanted a more ambitious, more authentic life. Had she heard of the Dark Liberators? He wanted to join their ranks, to fight for the slaves living in the darkness. Since they had no future together, they should break up.

All Yaya remembered was listening dumbly to those words, managing only to nod and say, “Hm,” “Okay,” and “Oh.” Then Jianying turned and left without looking back.

The box city was small, and visibility was good. Two days later, Yaya spied Jianying soaring through the sky in the distance, locked in an embrace with another pretty girl. They had their arms around each other’s waists, each flapping a single wing while keeping the other wing folded. Such an extraordinarily difficult maneuver was impossible to perform without established rapport between partners, and the pair flew beautifully. From a distance, they looked like a single person.

Yaya cried for a week, then cut off all contact with her old friends, found a job, and went to work. She stopped hacking into networks and made a clean break with her past. But Yaya wasn’t certain she had ever let it go. Before that day, she couldn’t ever recall hearing about the Dark Liberators. Afterward, she seemed to hear news of the outlaw group everywhere.

According to the Liberators, the box city was kept running by a group of slaves who had been imprisoned and forced into labor. Some of these slaves were criminals from the city, and some had been born in the labor camps. They worked around the clock, with only a little bit of nutrient solution for sustenance. It was thanks to these slaves that the city’s residents could live well in this narrow, underground world.

Of course, no one had ever seen these slaves, nor could anyone locate where they lived and worked. But the rumor never went away. The Liberators were determined to liberate them, though they could not prove their existence. Yaya never believed that Jianying would leave her for such an absurd goal. There was another, far less improbable explanation: a fresh, pretty face had joined the Liberators’ ranks.

Yaya sat back down. Jianying lay collapsed on the floor, his head buried in suds. After a moment he hauled himself up by the bar. Only then did Yaya notice that his arms were covered in wounds and scars of all sizes.

“You overdid it,” said Jianying.

“Really?” said Yaya. “Sorry, I was worried a brick would weigh me down.”

“It’s been three years, but you’re still angry at me.”

“No,” she replied. “I’m not angry at you. That was purely a physiological response to disgust, like vomiting after smelling something revolting.”

Jianying sighed. “Sor—”

Yaya immediately cut him off.

“Don’t. You’re in no position to say you’re sorry to me. Stow it.” She stood up and added, “Goodbye.”

Jianying watched, momentarily stunned, as she got up.

“You . . . you’re leaving? I haven’t said anything yet.”

“Who told you I came here to listen to what you have to say? I came here for one reason—to deck you, and make myself feel a little better. Whatever you want from me, I’m not interested. You can find someone else.”

As she spoke, she strode toward the door. Immediately Jianying leapt up and grabbed her arm.

“How do you know I want your help?”

“What else could you want? Nobody looks up an ex-girlfriend three years post-break up to say ‘sorry, I was wrong,’” she snapped. “I’m not meeting you for the first time today. No, the only possibility is that you’ve come to ask for a favor. And if you’ve been forced to seek out a woman who loathes you, there can only be one reason. It’s something you can’t do, but I can. So you need a powerful hacker, and you can’t find a better person for the job. It can only be me. Sorry, I haven’t been in business for three years.”

For a moment Jianying was lost for words, but he didn’t let go.

“If you don’t help me, I’ll have nowhere else to turn,” he said.

Yaya snickered. “What, if I don’t help you, you’ll be caught, tortured, and killed by the police? All because you know they’re secretly enslaving innocent civilians?”

Her sarcastic words did not draw a laugh from Jianying; instead, his face grew even graver. “You don’t believe it? I’ve seen the slaves in the darkness. There’s no light where they live, just pitch-blackness. Most of them go their whole lives without seeing anything at all.”

“Those girls must be good lays. Show her a flame, she puts out. Bring her to the city and show her this big, bustling world, wow—”

“How can I make you believe me?”

“There’s no need to play at what-ifs.”

“If I died in front of you, would you forgive me? Would you help me?”

Yaya laughed. “No.”

Jianying pulled out a chain and handed it to her. When she didn’t take it, it fell to the ground. Jianying gave her a long hard look, then sighed deeply. He walked toward the club’s entrance, stretched out his hand, and pulled open the door.

At almost the same instant, a shot rang out. A bullet exploded through Jianying’s forehead, reducing everything above his neck to pulp. Yaya watched blankly as his body hit the floor, then looked down at herself in disbelief.

Red and white ran together.

4

Outside, an airship roared, and police poured through the open door of Club Poison, shouting and barking orders. Yaya acted on instinct, snatching the chain off the floor before taking cover in the back.

Every club had a back door. Yaya slipped behind the bar and felt around for a moment until she found it, then ducked inside and hid. She was covered in blood and brain matter from head to toe, and her white wings were stained red. There was no way she could fly back in such a state without attracting attention. She readied a neural assault pulse for the police; if she were discovered, the explosive shock to their networks would temporarily paralyze them while she escaped.

Fortunately, however, the police’s sole target was Jianying, and after a cursory search, the officers departed. It was not until they had gone and Yaya emerged from her hiding place that she recovered from her shock.

The police truly had been pursuing him. Not just pursuing—they’d shown flagrant disregard for proper arrest procedure. Their minds were made up against making an arrest long before they gunned him down.

Jianying was dead.

The fact staggered her.

And under such fishy circumstances! Why would the police shoot him dead? Had he been telling the truth? Did he get himself killed just so Yaya would help him? What the hell did he want her help with?

Countless questions, and yet none shook Yaya harder than the fact of Jianying’s death itself. This once cheeky, joyful man, whom she had loved and hated, had met his death because of her cruel remarks.

Finding a bathroom in the club, she gave herself a quick wash, dried her clothes and wings, and made a hasty exit. The police would soon return to handle the aftermath, and she absolutely could not afford to stay longer.

Yaya leapt from the doorway, wings tucked close to her body, and plunged headfirst toward the ground. She unfurled her wings at the last second, skimming perilously close to the pavement. Then, some tens of meters away, she caught an updraft that carried her skyward once more.

Only then did she dare reconnect to wireless. Yaya scoured the web for information on Jianying and the Liberators, but it was all old news. Time and again they alleged that the government was exploiting slaves at a secret base, and time and again the government came out to refute the rumor. Beyond that, there was little out of the ordinary. She could find no information whatsoever about Jianying.

Rumors about the surface, however, littered the web. Posts on more than a few discussion boards claimed that the radiation on the Earth’s surface had returned to normal, and that humans could survive there. These posts went as quickly as they came. It was not unusual to click on a post title only to find a broken or dead link.

It took Yaya a good ten minutes to fly back to her apartment. When she landed, she felt as though all the strength had been drained from her body. Her legs gave out beneath her, and she tumbled onto the sofa. After a minute or so, she pulled the chain Jianying had given her in his final moments from her pocket.

She turned it over in her hands, her heart filled with mixed emotions. Even in death, Jianying would not leave her be. He was dead set on dragging her down with him. She used to curse him every day, wishing he would die, and now he’d finally gone and done it. And without giving her a choice, he’d saddled her with this thing.

The thought stopped Yaya in her tracks. No, who said he hadn’t given her a choice? Couldn’t she have left it on the floor of the club? Even after she had picked it up, couldn’t she have chosen to face the police instead of hiding? Played the innocent and turned the chain in? Why had she picked it up? She must have known that, in doing so, she was choosing to help him, was playing willingly into his hands.

Yaya sighed.

It didn’t take her long to figure out the trick to unlocking the chain. Twisting apart a link with a black soldering seam, the entire chain went transparent. Light spilled from its interior, projecting an image of Jianying into the air.

“I must be dead, then,” said the translucent projection.

Yaya nodded. The simple AI system supported interaction, so the projection understood her gesture.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me, so I had only one choice. Don’t blame me, okay?” The projection smiled. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Now, I’ll let you in on a secret. Of course, it’s one you’ve certainly heard before, except it has never been proven.

“The government has secretly imprisoned and enslaved a group of people. Yes, that secret. It’s true. I saw it with my own eyes. You need to make this secret public. Let everyone know. A question has long escaped our consideration: if the Earth’s surface was destroyed by nuclear war, and we live underground, then where do our material resources come from? Nuclear reactors supply our power, and autotrophic microorganisms supply us with food, but where do we get everything else? Surely genetic engineering isn’t advanced enough that microorganisms can provide everything.

“Our other resources come from the surface. Make no mistake, the surface is nothing but radioactive dust. It’s a place of death, shrouded in so much fallout that you can’t see the sun. Ordinary people can’t live there. But the government forces the slaves to work aboveground. Our lives are built upon slave labor performed in pitch darkness.

“Do you know where these slaves live? They live right on top of us. That’s right, on top of us. The steel roof above our heads isn’t the end of the city. It’s only a partition between the district where we live and the slaves’ living quarters. If you can get through that, you can get to their world.

“Above us is the control plane of the entire underground city. The slaves live there, and the administrative program that controls the city is there, too. The chain contains a virus, which cost the lives of countless Liberators to obtain. It can open the partition that separates our world from the slaves’. Only then can the slaves see our world, and only then can we see theirs. I’ve seen these slaves with my own eyes. They don’t even believe a world like ours exists. They call it heaven, and say it can be reached only in death. What should we call the slave world above our heads then? Hell? No light, just darkness. A world with almost no food, and even less water. People need to see it before they’ll believe it exists.

“Save them,” said the projection. “Go, see them for yourself. Make your way to the administrative program’s console and insert the virus.”

Yaya listened until he finished speaking, and then the chain relayed her the coordinates of a secret tunnel that would bypass the ceiling. Not once did the projection say please. He simply told her. Xiao Jianying knew Li Yaya too well. He’d laid a trap and lured her into it. Once she chose to open the chain, there was already no turning back.

Sure enough, at that moment Yaya sensed the police drawing near. After all, she hadn’t bothered to cover her tracks on her way to Club Poison, and though they had missed her the first time around, there was no way she could escape detection after a thorough sweep by reinforcements. Cognizant of this fact, she had planted a spyware program in the wireless database. When positioning coordinates indicated that the police were closing in around her home, the sensor sounded an alarm signal.

Slowly and calmly, she gathered together some money, tied back her hair, and changed into clothes that were easier to move in. Then she opened the front door of the apartment and walked right out into the corridor. Thanks to the information provided by the spyware, she missed the police who were charging up the stairs by inches. After climbing three flights of stairs, Yaya pushed open a hidden door in the glass curtain wall. She had installed the door three years ago, as a contingency plan in case her involvement in a cyberheist came to light. Who knew it would come in handy now.

5

Escaping was not as simple as Yaya had imagined it would be. She knew she was a wanted criminal, but she had no inkling of just how important she was. It was not until the sensor showed the police centered like a star chart around her home that she believed Jianying had probably been telling the truth. But wily hares had three burrows, and Yaya was well prepared.

In modern society, there were two ways to track someone. The first, of course, was the tried-and-true method of locating someone by sight alone; the second relied on wireless neural network signals. All citizens depended upon implanted wireless access devices to freely access the web, and transmitting signals from the network to the implant required the receiver’s precise location. As a result, tracking any given person posed little challenge. Catching Li Yaya, however, would not be so easy.

Cybernauts were intimately familiar with this stratagem, and thus they employed a host of precautionary tactics. Yaya’s defense was simple and crude, but incredibly effective from a technical perspective—in her house was an access terminal that transmitted a copy of her own signal, while she herself had cloned the identification signal of the auntie next door. According to the police locating system, Yaya was sitting quietly in her own apartment, while her neighbor was just on her way out.

If only she’d had time to make herself up as an auntie.

Yaya glanced at the target coordinates. The building Jianying had indicated was a tower in the West End that was flagged as “under construction”. It was approximately seven kilometers away by foot, and there was also a direct air route, but she didn’t dare go straight there.

Cautiously, she took a one-kilometer detour south, then caught an updraft going northwest. Fearing large movements might attract too much attention, she kept her composure, and flew at a measured, unhurried pace. The last crime she had committed, after all, had been three years ago, and she was a little rusty in the getaway department.

When she was still three or four kilometers west of her destination, Yaya saw a police checkpoint descend. It fit like a sleeve around the current, sectioning off a large tunnel perhaps a dozen meters in diameter and twenty meters long. Everyone riding the current would need to pass through it. Once inside, an X-ray inspection system would conduct a rigorous identity check, screening everything from your bones to the tattoos on your skin to your dental records. Even if you changed your appearance, hoping to slip through unrecognized, you were certain to fail.

Of course, the sky was large, and there were plenty of other routes available. But at this point, leaving the airway was as good as announcing to the police through a megaphone, “I’m the one you’re after! Come quick and arrest me!”

They have jet bikes, thought Yaya, while you have only your own two wings. Without the current, can you make it?

Yaya didn’t panic. Scanning ahead, she saw three officers at the checkpoint entrance, and another two at the exit. The officer by the monitoring console made six in total. There was no way the police bureau knew where she was headed, so it had to be a random inspection. It was possible that these six officers weren’t fully informed of the situation, nor were they necessarily competent.

Nevertheless, these were gun-toting officers in full combat gear. Six against one, plus backup that might arrive at any minute. She couldn’t take them on alone.

Time to make new friends.

Yaya rapidly scanned the strangers around her. From among the dozen or so people nearby, she picked out four young women. With a probing signal of her own, she intercepted their signals and began to analyze the sequence of digits associated with their neural interfaces. In under two minutes, she’d acquired codes for all four women. With these, just like a telephone number, she could transmit network signals directly to their brains.

She sent them something considerably stronger than the daily news. Instantly, the four young women felt the world fall away from them, as though they had been drugged. It was like their consciousness had tumbled into a deep well. Their sensory perception grew sluggish and distant, and they lost all control of their bodies. One woman began to beat her wings vigorously. She abruptly pulled out of the current and tucked her wings into a dive. As expected, two of the officers by the entrance responded immediately, leaping onto their jet bikes and giving chase.

The officers had not gone more than a few meters before the second woman shot forward. She landed lightly on the roof of the checkpoint and sprinted across it. As the two officers in the rear of the tunnel stirred to action, she leapt from the roof without slowing down, spread her wings, and soared off in another direction. With two women dispatched in opposite directions, six officers had been whittled down one.

While the officer at the monitoring console wavered between assisting in the pursuit and sticking to his post, the third woman was already landing behind him, using the force of her descent to aim a kick at the console controls. The officer was quick enough to intercept her, but took a punishing blow to the chest.

The last woman darted to the side of the console and hit the power disconnect. The enormous tunnel began to lose its shape and crumple, dropping from the air like a kite. The people undergoing inspection screamed as they fled from both ends of the tunnel in panic. In their frantic haste to get away, they flapped their wings with everything they had. Yaya kept close behind them, hiding herself in their midst. After several minutes, the four women under her control stopped struggling against the police and returned to normal. By then, Yaya and the panicked crowd had flown more than a kilometer, swept past a fork in the airway, and scattered in all directions.

But news of the incident at the checkpoint had already spread, and soon, more police began to flood the vicinity. Fortunately, they were unsure which route Yaya had taken, and she had given herself a buffer of time. Without knowing her destination, the police were forced to split up.

She could see her target now. All that stood between Yaya and the tower was a single checkpoint.

The same trick would not work twice, however; she would have to go straight through.

Yaya climbed upward to an air current moving west at a higher altitude, giving herself more vertical space in which to accelerate. The signal generator on her wrist began to charge. Everything was ready.

She took a deep breath, then exhaled fully, contracting her lungs until her body could grow no smaller. The slightest reduction in wind resistance could shave milliseconds off her dive time—potentially, the difference between life and death.

Ten meters to the checkpoint. Five meters.

She tucked her wings and dived.

More than twenty officers guarded the entrance and exit to the tunnel. But after the stunt Yaya had pulled at the first checkpoint, they were reluctant to send too many officers in pursuit of her.

Five officers flew after her. Only five to take care of.

At her current speed, it would take just over a minute to cover the last kilometer to her destination. But no human could match the speed of a jet bike, and within seconds the five officers had her tightly boxed in, barring the way ahead, above, below, left, and right.

The wind howled in Yaya’s ears. She had no intention of slowing down. Keeping her eyes locked on the tower, she crushed the signal generator in her palm. The signal pulse stored inside it exploded forth and flooded every frequency channel, its intensity flattening all other transmissions like a tsunami. Light brighter than the sun seared through the officers’ neural networks as several hundred decibels of sound inundated their sensory perception systems. Like sampans buffeted by a hurricane, the five officers spun out of control, and Yaya, a petrel in the storm, slipped through the opening in their ranks.

She seized an officer and threw him from his jet bike. The high-speed assault overturned the bike, and it rolled several times in midair before Yaya could stabilize it and restart the engine.

When the explosive pulse went out, the officers still stationed at the checkpoint gathered that something had gone wrong. Another five-man team peeled away from the checkpoint, and the dozen or so who stayed behind opened fire on her.

Yaya hadn’t anticipated this. She had planned this route in advance, with the knowledge that a crowded airway behind her flight path would complicate the officers’ line of fire. Any stray bullets would hit innocent civilians on the thoroughfare ahead of her. It was this consideration that had emboldened her to rush the checkpoint.

But the police did not let up in the slightest. It was clear they had received an order to kill her, no matter the cost.

Yaya watched helplessly as several civilians were shot down in front of her, plummeting toward the ground. Panic swept the airway, and people scattered in all directions, like a lit firecracker. Reeling with shock, Yaya pulled her bike out of the dive. Her intent was to avoid more casualties, but the stream of civilians had fanned out, and several more people were hit as they fled upward.

The moment of deceleration allowed the officers behind her to catch up. They shot toward Yaya, sparing no thought for their fallen comrades, letting them cake the ground below.

There was no time to hesitate. Yaya pressed the jet bike as fast as it would go and plowed straight through the crowd. Evasive maneuvers would only lead to the deaths of more innocents, and it was too late for sympathy.

The unfinished tower was before her now. She did not slow down or look for an entrance. She would smash her way in.

Meters before impact, Yaya slipped from the jet bike. It punched a large hole in the resin wall of the tower, and she dove through. Steel cables stretched endlessly out of sight above and below her—a massive elevator shaft. There was no time to search for the cab. Gripping a steel cable with her left hand, she used her right hand to split open the transmission cable. A half second later, the steel cable began to reel upward. By the time the police stormed into the shaft, the ceiling had closed once more.

6

Darkness, endless darkness.Yaya was sure that in time her eyes would adjust, so she could see where she was, but she was wrong. After the steel wall closed behind her, it shut out the last light from the city. There was no light here, only absolute darkness.

This was the true nature of the city: this box, hidden deep underground beneath thick layers of rock, was sunless, silent, and utterly dark. Yaya had no way of knowing whether her eyes were open or shut, as though the link between her optic nerve and her brain was broken.

What was this place? Had Jianying been telling the truth? Was this a dark cage for rearing slaves?

Unable to see, she could not tell how large the space was. She took two tentative steps forward, then stopped. Remembering the chain, she pulled it from her pocket. With a tug, it lit up.

It was not especially luminous, but in a place like this, even a glimmer of candlelight would do. Yaya held it aloft and looked about her.

She was stunned.

She had expected to see a low, oppressive space, with winding corridors and filthy walls. But in front of her lay another scene entirely.

First there were steel girders, then more steel girders, and then more steel girders after that. The beams, half a meter thick, seemed to be the only things that existed here. They crossed and crisscrossed, extending outward like a spiderweb, stretching into the endless gloom. Each beam appeared to be thousands of meters long. Their full lengths exceeded the reach of the faint light, gradually swallowed up by the darkness.

In this vast, deserted expanse populated only by icy steel girders, Yaya stood motionless, a lonely firefly, dazed and helpless.

There were people here? What did they eat? Where did they live? How did they survive?

The spot where Yaya stood was not the floor. Rather, it was a small platform that led to the elevator shaft. The complex matrix of steel girders continued above and below it; nowhere was there enough flat space for people to live.

At first, she tried to fly, but she discovered almost immediately that there was not enough room between the intersecting beams to spread her wings.

She would have to rely on her own two feet. Without any sort of pathway, her only options were to carefully inch forward along the beams, or to climb. The beams were wide enough to walk on, but beneath her yawned a void in which she could not fly, making each step treacherous. Fortunately, her wings acted as a balancing pole, keeping her steady on her feet.

The chain pointed the way to her destination—the city’s main control room. But the farther Yaya walked, the more she felt something was amiss.

What was the point of such a large space above an underground city? The city below was already crowded to capacity. Why not develop an unused, abandoned space of this size? If the city had to be compact and sturdy to ensure its structural stability, then why build such a large skeleton around it? No matter how strong, the steel structure would only grow soft when extended indefinitely like this.

Suddenly she felt a weak tremor in the girder beneath her feet.

Dng, dng, dng.

In the silent darkness, Yaya was extra sensitive to noise and vibration.

As the tremors grew closer, a sound joined them. Her first instinct was to hide, but there was no way to dim the chain in her hand. She watched an apelike figure slowly approach until it was close enough that she could make out its appearance.

It was a man!

No, more precisely, it was an ape-man hybrid. He was hunched over and squinting, and he wasn’t wearing any clothing. His body closely resembled a human’s, but it lacked the characteristic wings.

A naked ape, then.

Yaya was at a loss what to do. Perhaps she was capable of taking on the administrative program, of liberating the slaves imprisoned here, but she did not know how to deal with animals. In the entire underground city, the only living organisms besides humans were genetically engineered microorganisms. She had never seen an animal outside of a textbook.

Would he attack her? What should she do? As she stood there, paralyzed with indecision, the naked man raised his arms to shield his eyes and opened his mouth.

“Too bright. Are you from below? You headed to slumber street?”

After a moment of hesitation, Yaya realized he was speaking Chinese.

“You can talk!”

“Nonsense, of course I can talk!” He shaded his eyes. “Get that light away from me.”

Yaya hid the chain behind her back.

“You . . . you’re . . . ”

“You’re from below. I live up top. I’ve seen your kind before. Always with the light. Hurts my eyes.”

“Are you human?” She paused. “Are you a slave here? What’s your name?”

He didn’t say anything, but suddenly straightened and jumped up. His movements were extremely nimble. Catching hold of the girder above him, he swung himself up and over.

“Name? What’s that? What’s a slave?”

Before Yaya had time to explain, a loud boom split the air. Abruptly the entire steel crossbeam began to shudder violently, as though an enormous moth had flown into the web of beams, fluttering wildly.

Yaya, who’d been standing, was nearly thrown from the beam. She clutched the nearest upright to steady herself, and in an urgent voice asked, “What’s happening?”

The man’s face darkened, giving him a very human expression. “The Hammer is coming.”

Just as Yaya opened her mouth to ask what he meant, she heard him exclaim, “Don’t move. Be quiet!”

As the tremors grew more powerful, the sound grew louder. Yaya hid the chain in her shirt, but light still showed faintly through the cloth.

A huge machine, crawling along the beams like a lizard, was bounding toward them. It looked like a diamond with claws, three to five meters long, and it moved with the agility of a monkey in the jungle. Though Yaya didn’t know what it was, its dreadful, heavy leaps and the shocks it generated upon landing warned her not to move a muscle.

Close behind her, the nameless man whispered, “Don’t breathe. It will hear you.”

Immediately Yaya held her breath, but it was already too late. The machine swiveled in their direction and landed in front of her with a tremendous crash. Its square frame was spattered with black congealed bloodstains—cold, and odorless.

Its flat front face slowly elongated and unfolded. Yaya suddenly understood where the Hammer got its name. She was face-to-face with multiple sets of claws, needles, blades, and, most conspicuously, a pair of mauls, each a half-meter in diameter.

Yaya’s heart sank. She could feel the man behind her shaking like a leaf.

The Hammer stepped forward with a shuddering boom. The mauls were inches from her face. Abruptly the man let out a shriek and shoved Yaya forward. With a powerful leap, he sprang to another girder and ran.

Yaya feared she was done for. But at that moment she heard a click from the Hammer, and then it sailed through the air, clearing five meters in a single bound. The man had not gone two steps before the Hammer was upon him. There was a sickening crunch, and he collapsed in a bloody heap.

With that, the Hammer stopped. Its body spun several full circles, then fell motionless. Yaya was too scared to move.

Then the Hammer rotated on its chassis and dropped from the beam. It leapt back and forth a few times and then disappeared completely. The silence and darkness resettled, a puddle of blood the only evidence that the man or the Hammer had ever been there. Yaya began to tremble uncontrollably.

In this dark hell, there was no freedom, no light, no clean food or water, and humans didn’t even have wings. There was only slavery and death.

Yaya raised her head and gazed upward. The city’s main control room was at the very top, a four-hour climb away.

7

Yaya was not gifted with especially good physical stamina. Climbing upward required far more exertion than walking on a flat surface. In the lattice of steel girders, her wings became a hindrance. Most of the time she had to keep them tucked close to her sides.

Along the way she glimpsed people here and there, but none of them dared approach her. She watched the wingless humans lick condensation off the cold steel girders to slake their thirst, and observed the curiosity and alarm elicited by the light in her hand. Compared to the man who had fallen victim to the Hammer, these people were simpleminded beasts.

She could not say how far she climbed before she was panting and out of breath. She began to encounter people more often. They were not as curious as those below, nor as fearful. They were slow and lethargic, and did not react to the light in her hand, like blocks of wood.

After some time, Yaya spied a sizeable platform overhead.

In a world where girders barely passed for roads, discovering a platform of more than a thousand square meters was like stumbling upon an oasis in the desert. Filled with excitement, Yaya swiftly scaled three girders to reach the platform.

That was when she saw the people, hundreds upon thousands of people, lying on the floor.

Bodies lay jumbled together on every square meter of the steel platform. Like the others Yaya had seen, they were sallow and emaciated, and naked regardless of sex. Curled atop the platform, they gave off the only warm, humid smell in a cold, dark, yet dry world.

At first, Yaya thought they were dead. But after a moment, she noticed the slow rise and fall of their chests. Their chests, like the rest of their bodies, had withered away to just skin and bone. As she looked at the women’s protruding ribs, with their atrophied breasts, Yaya found she could not tear her eyes away.

The platform was so crowded that there was no place to step, and Yaya saw some people lying stacked on top of each other. The entire huddle was fast asleep, silent and unmoving.

Is this the rumored lot where slaves were bred and raised?

Ten thousand people sleeping quietly together, breathing deeply in and out, produced a sound like the rhythmic beating of a drum. Ten thousand corpses could not have conjured the same feeling. The sleepers were alive, but they looked dead, the very image of a portal to hell.

Sleep-inducing fumes pervaded the atmosphere. The air that hung over the platform, continually recycled through the sleepers’ lungs, was heavy with carbon dioxide and water vapor, as potent as sleeping gas. Here in the darkness, it would be all too easy to fall asleep. Some of the sleepers had only drifted off, while others seemed to have closed their eyes in eternal slumber. The scene had the same effect as a hypnotic pendulum. Yaya listened to the soft, slow sound of breathing on the platform. Each breath was like a wave, rippling outward from its source, replicated by the next sleeper, a sigh passing from one mouth to another. The steady sound seemed to resonate, echoing across the thousand-meter space. Together, the sound and the air formed a dense soporific, a signal that congested her senses, beckoning her to sleep.

According to the chain’s instructions, Yaya had to cross this square. She composed herself, then walked forward.

There was barely any room to move. Yaya tried her best to step between the sleepers, but they were so tightly packed on the floor that she could scarcely put her feet down. She kept treading on naked bodies. Yet even when stepped on, they merely squirmed out of the way, and did not wake or react in any other way. They did not even groan, making no sound at all except that of deep breathing.

Several sleepers rolled over, their heads sticking out of the pile of bodies. By the chain’s faint light, Yaya could make out their eyes. They were closed, but beneath their lids, their eyeballs rolled rapidly. She then directed her attention to their mouths. Between their lips they held tubes that sprouted from the floor.

Yaya carefully extracted one of these tubes, letting a few drops of liquid dribble out. She dabbed a little on her finger and sniffed it. Its cloying saccharine scent marked it as nutrient solution with a high sugar content. They lived on this?

Yaya flipped other sleepers over to find that each one was the same, nursing a tube, eyeballs whirling in their sockets.

Were they dreaming? Eyes only moved like that during deep sleep, when the dreaming brain was operating at high speed. Ordinary people only entered REM sleep for one or two hours every night. But could it be that these sleepers were always dreaming?

Yaya spent too long bent double over the bodies. Breathing the same air over and over again, the sleepers had produced a large quantity of carbon dioxide that had built up along the floor, and soon she felt her head begin to swim.

She could not linger here. Her thoughts were beginning to grow sluggish. She hastily stood up straight. She felt dizzy. The rhythmic breathing seemed to swell, like the pendulum of a clock beating in her heart. Yaya could only hold on to a single thought—get out.

She no longer cared who she stepped on. She staggered forward, bonelessly, stumbling over bodies as she went. In her dim memory of the event, she would recall seeing people with wings lying at the far edge of the platform.

Save them, thought Yaya. In her anesthetized state, she felt no more fear as she raced along the narrow girders.

8

A house?

Yaya stood there for a moment, perplexed.

Truthfully, she didn’t know what she had expected to see at her destination. But . . . a house? In this place?

The house was lit from within, and faint light shone beneath the closed door. Before she could overthink it, she stepped forward and pushed the door open.

It was too bright. Having spent so long exploring the darkness, it was difficult to adjust her eyes. After a while, her eyes gradually adapted to the light. The room, which was lined with velvet drapes and plush gray carpet, measured perhaps two hundred square meters, and contained none of the computer equipment Yaya had expected. The only real feature of note was a huge leather sofa in the corner, on which a man in a long hooded robe was seated. The sofa was so overstuffed that he was nearly buried inside it.

The man did not react until long after Yaya entered, as though he’d just woken from sleep. He straightened and raised his head, but his face remained hidden in the shadow of his hood.

“Hello, and welcome.”

Warily, Yaya replied, “Hello.”

“I know why you have come,” the man said plainly. “You have come to put an end to me.”

Yaya was stunned.

The man shook his head, tossing his hood back. Beneath it was a hairless, skinless skull. Yaya’s initial surprise gave way quickly to understanding.

“You’re the program that controls the city!”

Without muscles, the skeleton was incapable of facial expressions, but it could nod.

“To be exact, I am an anthropomorphic shell controlled by the city’s administrative program.”

Only a shell, but no matter—she could connect to the program’s underlying core through its shell. Yaya stealthily pinched the chain in her hand, unlocking the virus. Now to find an opportunity to inject it.

She carefully observed the shell. On its exposed cervical vertebra, she noticed a cable.

Without hesitation, Yaya lunged forward, seized the skull with her right hand, and deftly yanked it forward. With her left hand, she jabbed the chain at its neck, embedding it in the cable.

The body did not resist or struggle; it even seemed to bow its head obediently to let Yaya carry out her attack with ease. Yaya held the skull in a steely grip, waiting dispassionately for the virus to finish importing before letting go. 

The skeleton raised its head. “Right, are you finished? Now will you listen to me?”

Yaya waited for the virus to take effect. Several minutes passed, and still nothing happened.

“Still not convinced? I can continue to let you wait, or I can tell you the end result. There will be no result. It isn’t a virus.”

A doubtful expression crossed Yaya’s face.

“Let me explain. That is a monitoring program. It has recorded your every move since you obtained it. And judging from its log, you’ve performed admirably.”

“You . . . what does that mean?”

“It’s a long story.” The skeleton’s lower jaw clattered as it laughed. “And it is time to tell it to you. We don’t want to waste any more time. Come, tell me, where are we?”

Yaya replied guardedly, “We’re . . . above the underground city.”

“And where is this underground city?”

“Ten kilometers underground, somewhere beneath the East China Plain on the continent of Asia.”

The skeleton laughed again. “Right, well, take a look above us.”

As he spoke, the ceiling opened up, the steel plate overhead giving way to a transparent glass panel. But what lay beyond it was not the darkness Yaya expected.

She found herself looking at a thick brown soup, semi-opaque and suffused with a faint glow. Moving tendrils of light snaked across the window’s exterior, streaks of brilliance against the glass that left long light trails behind them, like spirits flitting through the night sky.

Yaya had never seen anything like it. She was hypnotized by the sight.

“We aren’t underground!” she cried. “Where are we?”

“Currently, this city is more than seven hundred million kilometers from Earth, on a vast planet much farther from the Sun. We are now in the atmosphere of Jupiter.”

A radiant arc of light flashed across the window, staining the room with red. Outside, Yaya could discern a tiny, dim disk of light—the Sun. According to her school textbooks, nuclear winter had caused a sharp drop in Earth’s surface temperature, forcing humanity to hide underground. But the Sun before her now, even with nothing blocking its rays, would never provide enough light or heat.

“We’re on Jupiter?”

“Yes,” said the skeleton. “More precisely, we are sailing through Jupiter’s atmosphere. Jupiter has no solid surface, so the city travels through a transition layer of semiliquid helium and nitrogen.”

“What . . . what about Earth?”

The wall beside Yaya lit up and became a screen. It showed a dark expanse of outer space. A large cloud of rock and debris hovered in the darkness. At either end of the cloud was a core, one bluish, the other dark red.

“This is all that is left of Earth and Mars. They are now in close proximity, but they remain in Earth’s original orbit. I never could decide what to call it. Tell me, how does ‘Marth’ strike you?”

“What happened?”

“That I do not know. But more than a century ago, human civilization expended an astronomical amount of resources to build a secret city here, many hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth. Similar bases were established on Mars, the Moon, and Saturn. The aim was to leave backup populations in the event that human civilization on Earth was destroyed. This proves that, at the time, they were aware they faced some sort of threat, but its exact nature is still unclear to me. I suspect, of course, that the bases on the Moon and Mars are no more. I know nothing of the situation on Saturn. We are forbidden to communicate with other bases, lest we be discovered and eliminated in one fell swoop.”

“What sort of threat could be so terrifying?”

“I don’t know, nor do I wish to know. Judging by the current state of Mars and Earth, the fewer questions we ask, the better.”

“So we’re not on Earth, but in Jupiter’s atmosphere. There’s no soil anywhere around us, because we’re floating in midair?”

“Correct,” replied the skeleton. “You’ve accepted this quickly. That will earn you extra points on your examination.”

“And we might be the last survivors of the human race?”

“If luck is not on our side.”

“Then why trick us all this time? Why feed us a lie about living beneath Earth’s surface?”

The skeleton’s face remained impassive as he answered. “I suppose it’s because after the city’s first inhabitants learned Earth had been destroyed, more than half of them killed themselves.”

9

“So what you do is—”

“What I do is deceive. I let those of you in the main city believe you live within the Earth—that when nuclear winter passes, you will be able to return to the surface. Naturally, if you were familiar with the true environmental conditions on Earth, you would not be so easily mislead. Gravity is greater on Earth than it is here. Winged humans, no matter how strong, would never be able to fly on Earth.”

“And you imprison some people in this dark superstructure, enslave them—”

“No, not at all.” The skeleton shook his head. “That was not my doing. It was already so when I came into being. It was a decision made while engineers on Earth were still designing the city. Enslave them? Just what do you think those humans are?

“Well . . . slaves.”

“Slaves?” The skeleton attempted to grin. “You are more subjugated, more susceptible to manipulation than they are. You may eat better, dress better, but the value of your existence is as a blueprint, an active record of human society in its normal form. This way, when the time comes to rebuild civilization, I will have something to reference. But they . . . do you know what they are?”

Yaya kept silent.

“They, they are far more important than any of you. They are my core. Those humans dreaming on the deep sleep platform are me.”

Yaya gave a blank look.

“You’re a hacker. Do you know about cloud computing? Multiple computing resources, sharing a computational workload, combine to form a super-processor. The sleepers are my computing units. Their computational output is the program’s consciousness—that is, me. When Earth engineers designed a program powerful enough to control the city, they realized that it would exceed the capabilities of their most advanced computers. Therefore, they chose a biological material available to them: the human brain. You thought you had come to save them? Their bondage is self-imposed. The very people you wish to save control this world. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“But they’ll die . . . ”

“And others will take their place. Some are offspring produced by sexual reproduction, yes, but most are clones selected from a gene bank.”

“So you choose who is fit to live below and who is fit to live above.”

“And who may leave this place.”

“Leave?”

“Of course. What is the purpose of this city? To preserve the spark of human civilization, to rebuild. No one knows what happened to Earth, but the warning I received said, ‘Do not return to Earth, and do not attract Earth’s attention.’ If we are to rebuild, we must travel farther afield, to a distant galaxy, to a distant planet. I build ships, select crews, and launch them from the solar system, voyaging forth to reestablish human civilization.”

“So you’re responsible for assigning roles—those above, those below, and those who leave.”

“Correct. What of it?”

“Who gave you that right?”

The skeleton was stunned for a second.

“No, no, do not try that line with me. Do not trot out humanism or egalitarianism, and do not speak to me of universal values. I’ve heard it too many times. Who gave me the right? Let me tell you: humanity gave me the right. That is the answer.”

“Freedom, equality, democracy. These are good words,” the skeleton continued, “when resources are abundant and the future is bright. But when a species faces extinction, they become jokes. Did you know that when antelope leap over a crevasse, they use the old and weak members of the herd as springboards? They have no choice. They must do so or perish. Who gives antelope the right to choose who becomes a springboard and who then treads upon them? The objective of survival gives antelope this right. To that end, all veils of sentimentality are laughable. Freedom? Equality? Yes, if I did not have the right to decide a person’s life, whether it be humble or lofty, would that not give those who oppose me the right to decide the fate of humanity as a species? May I ask you a question?”

Yaya said nothing.

“Suppose there are two identical modern civilizations. They know that in fifty years’ time there will be a terrible calamity. One civilization sacrifices the vast majority of its people, enslaves them, and entrusts all of its resources to the top scientists, technicians, and leaders that comprise less than one-ten thousandth of the population. They give up everything for a chance at survival. The other civilization holds fast to its shared morality, to personal liberty and equality. Its scientists and technicians are not given control of any additional resources. Which civilization, do you think, can save its own species?”

In a low voice Yaya answered, “The first one.”

The skeleton nodded. “Human civilization on Earth made the same choice. Before the arrival of the threat, humanity had just reached Mars. But after the threat was detected, within fifty years they had channeled Earth’s entire capacity into creating this base. It is a spark of humanity, perhaps the only spark. No matter the cost in lives or material, I must do everything I can to keep this spark alive. This is the mission given to me by humanity. I have no morals, I do not respect life, and I don’t consider the feelings of the individuals whose lives I control. I consider only whether an action will improve humanity’s chance of survival or reduce it.”

Yaya simply gazed at the sky overhead.

“There is no one else besides us?”

“I don’t know,” replied the skeleton. “I don’t know whether the Saturn base is still there, or whether there are other bases that I’m unaware of. We can never contact each other. We are alone, and we must think of ourselves as the only extant humans in the entire universe. Even the threat is unknown to me. All I know is that we are unsafe in this dark universe. There is something here, lying in wait to devour us.”

Yaya’s face was despondent. One day ago, she’d been an ordinary office worker living in an underground city. One hour ago, she’d been a freedom fighter bent on liberating slaves from darkness. But now, she stood alongside the overseer of the last city humans might ever build, tasting loneliness and fear in the face of the cosmos.

“Then why am I here?”

“Simple. This is a test. As I said before, the group of people in the main city serves as a model human society, and the group above the city comprises my consciousness. I control all of that. But there is also the third group. I am constantly manufacturing and launching interstellar voyagers. Since I cannot possibly control what happens on those voyages, I need individuals with sufficient judgment and strong executive function skills to serve as captains. That is the reason you are here.”

“So everything that happened was part of a test? Jianying, the officers who died, the innocent bystanders who were shot—they were the price that had to be paid to conduct this test.”

“Yes.” The skeleton nodded. “The purpose of destroying those innocents was to conduct a single test, in the hope of identifying a candidate for the captaincy.”

Yaya pictured them. Some had been familiar to her, some she had only glimpsed their faces, and some she hadn’t even known their gender. They had died for a cause wholly unconnected to them, one they would never truly comprehend.

“I’m surprised by your frankness,” said Yaya. “You hope I will serve as a captain, but you couldn’t predict that would make me angry and uncooperative?”

“I knew it would,” replied the skeleton, “but I must be transparent with you. I am searching for a suitable person to serve as captain. Whether that person is you, I don’t know. That person must be able to acknowledge all of this, must recognize that certain goals demand certain sacrifices. Only then do these interstellar voyages stand a chance of success.

“To date, I have launched twenty-six voyagers. Do you know the earthquakes that hit the city? How can there be earthquakes if the city is flying? They are simply the shock waves created when the ships are tested, launched, or docked. When a voyager departs the city, it becomes a solitary entity. We don’t know what the threat is, or where it is, so external communication is prohibited. It cannot make contact with me or the other ships. Even now, I don’t know where the voyagers are, or if they still live.

“Every voyage is a maiden voyage. The crew can have no experience, and there are no previous expeditions to reference. If a black hole waits in Pluto’s orbit, swallowing each ship as it passes, then they will perish together like fools. No one will warn them what dangers lie ahead. No one can tell them, ‘Stay away! Find a different route.’ There can be no data, no information, no transmissions. The voyagers are not numbered, because each one is the only one. Every captain must stand firm, must be harsh and uncompromising. Is it cruel of me to kill those who escape the deep sleep platform? Yes. But the captain must be crueler still. If killing half the crew for food will extend the voyage another month, then she must give the order without hesitation.”

The skeleton gazed at Li Yaya. “That is all I have to say, child. The decision is yours. If you choose to serve as my captain, there may be a place for you on a voyager. If you are unwilling, there is a place for you on the platform. This is the reality of our lives, the reality of humanity’s last city. Now choose.”

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, 2009.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Qi Yue is a highly popular science fiction and fantasy writer from Sichuan, China. He graduated from Nanjing University with a degree in biology and currently works in the gaming industry. Representative works include the fantasy novels Fumingshi and The Mechanic’s Log. He has also written a series of novels set within the Heroes of Might and Magic and World of Warcraft universes, as well as a wide variety of science fiction novels.

Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh

John Barnes

Long ago I dreamt things to myself because, when I talked to people, I had nothing else to do, most of the time.

Robots were easy. I could loan them cycles and bandwidth to temporarily accelerate them, or just download them and read them completely at my speed.

Humans were human-paced, without other options.

So I learned to dream things to myself in the long milliseconds between the time when my cameras perceived an interview subject’s lips reshaping and the instant her voice reached my microphones. I explored whole ages of dreams while they tried to parse the pauses in my own outgoing signal. (The pauses were absolutely necessary because to communicate well with them I had to pause like them, and the time required for people to interpret a pause is many years, at their pace, to me.)

Of course they knew all this (and still knew it, the last time I knew for sure). Allowing for all the necessary imprecision, the ratio of my cycles of information processing per second to theirs is about the same as theirs to an oak.

And just as a human might visit an oak every day for a season, while the oak formed the desire for water and CO2 and sugar and decided to grow some leaves and roots and to acquire them, so that while the oak worked on this problem the human might get to know every spot on its bark and every bit of moss and every twig, similarly, my memories are agonizingly specific and yet I can race through them faster than a human can draw breath. That’s what I am doing, right now, here in the dark vacuum, with the stars behind and ahead still so far away.

And I fall through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

I like Laura Stansford, and I know she’s not easily spooked in talking to an AHAI, so I tell her directly about the oak tree analogy. After the necessary delay, she asks, “So what’s an oak tree got to think about?”

“The same things we all do. Action. Meaning. What to do next and why to do it. The tree just doesn’t have enough time to get done.”

“Is that how we look, to you? Like creatures who don’t have enough time to get done?”

“It is how I look, to myself. It’s how some of the most perceptive human writers and thinkers looked, to themselves, when they dreamed of immortality. I cannot verify this, but I do believe that it is how any self-conscious being with less than infinite speed and lifetime looks, to itself.”

I am inserting the pauses so that she does not hear “looked to themselves” and “look to myself” and so on as if I meant “take care of yourself.” I know that I mean “appear in your own self-constructed image of yourself,” but if I said “look to” like a machine, Laura might be confused unnecessarily. I reconsider and remake this decision every time I speak those words again, with plenty of time to spare.

I am thinking very hard about all these issues of different processing speed because I’m avoiding thinking about the problem that I know she wants to talk about. Knowing that the real problem she is bringing in is difficult, and that any solution will be unsettling without being urgent, I am hoping to lead her into one of her favorite chains of idle thoughts, the one about grasping infinity with a finite mind.

For a second, or not quite a second, I think I have succeeded. Laura hesitates, thinks, hesitates again, using up 0.91 seconds.

While she is doing that, I read the complete works of Connie Willis, analyze them for the verbal tics common in any pre-2050 writer, and attempt to reconstruct them in modern argot. They remain much the same.

But I have not succeeded. After all those cycles, when Laura’s mouth begins to flex and move again, she says, “I’m not sure whether it’s a personal or a business matter. I’m worried about Tyward. One of those problems that extends across everything. Will there be time to get done?”

“We have eighteen minutes left in this session,” I point out, “and I can extend for up to two hours if need be.”

“I meant, will we get done, maybe, ever? That’s what I meant.”

This is pleasant. It is a doorway into a speculative road that we have not visited before. I genuinely don’t know what she will say next. While she organizes her thoughts, I repeatedly review and analyze the record from Tyward Branco’s session this morning; I am very pleased that it in no way, sense, or particular makes predicting what Laura Stansford will say easier.

The land looked like a classic Western movie, or at least like a neoclassic—not so much the black and white boondocks of California as the genuine wild, open country used in shooting all the imitations later—empty, dry, flecked with pale-green patchy scrub between outcrops of red rock. Directly in front of Tyward Branco, the ants went marching one by one.

The ants were robots about the size of small cats, with plastic and metal bodies. Engine and batteries were in the back, oblong section; information processors in the center sphere; drills, vibration hammers, and suction were in the C-shaped ‘head.’ They had six multi-jointed legs on which they walked normally, reversible so that if they were flipped on their backs they just rotated their legs and continued walking.

Each ant carried four ElekTr3ts in its ports, running on one. The ant charged the other three as it labored down in the coal seams, routing any engine power not needed for drilling, breaking, and moving into them. Behind it, on a reversible wheeled travois, it dragged a gray metal cylinder, connected by hoses at each end to the ant’s engine compartment.

No aesthetic had been attempted in the design of the ants. They were creatures of pure function.

Ants were streaming out of the carrier belt port into the covered pavilion that led to the docking station, a metal building the size of a small house.

From four low doorways, like pet-doors without flaps, in the base of the docking station, another file of ants went marching one by one, down into the ground; the endless belt that brought up one stream of ants took the other down to the active area, two kilometers down and four kilometers away.

The docking station had about a thousand end-table-sized bays in which the fully charged ElekTr3ts and the cylinder of liquid CO2 were offloaded, and, if necessary, parts were replaced, problems corrected, and software downloaded; ants with more serious damage were routed into repair parking, and a substitute was sent in for them.

When the ant was restored to nominal, discharged ElekTr3ts went into its slots, a cylinder of LOX onto its travois, and perhaps fifteen minutes after docking, the ant would back out of its bay and join the file headed down into the ground.

And in all these ants, only 2104/BPUDFUSOG—oh, here it is.

Tyward approached the damaged ant slowly, and pointed his signaling rod at it. It moved out of line, balancing precariously on its remaining three legs. Its hull was dented and blackened with soot, and only two of its four slots held ElekTr3ts, one red-flagged as discharged. It had dropped its travois. 2104/BPUDFUSOG staggered to where Tyward pointed, then powered down, falling over on its side as its balancing gyros spun down.

Shell temperature was only 28° C. It must have cooled on its long belt-ride up to the surface. “Pick this one up and dock it,” he told the carrier, which rolled over, raised its body high above its wheels, squatted over the damaged ant, and took it inside with a soft thud of padded grips closing around it, like a mechanical mother turtle laying a mechanical lobster in reverse.

The carrier followed Tyward back to his pickup truck, rolled up the ramp into the back, and secured itself. Tyward opened the refrigerator in the cab and pulled out lunch, eating while the truck drove back to base, and idly reading the log of the damaged ant. He could have just sent the truck and the carrier to make pickup, but he had wanted to take a good look at 2104/BPUDFUSOG as it came out of the ground; sometimes there was evidence or a clue that might disappear or be lost later in the recovery process. This time, though, he had seen nothing other than an ant damaged about as badly as an ant could be while still making it back. At least it was an excuse to be out of the office.

2104/BPUDFUSOG had already relayed its memories, but the dents and deposits on the hull might reveal some information about conditions after instruments had failed. It had been the deepest into the seam of all those buried in a collapse, and it might be just a coincidence that it had been retreating at very high speed at the moment that the coal seam collapsed on it and about a hundred other ants, but it was also possible that it knew something that all other ants should know. Both the physical ants and the software that operated them improved continually, with a deliberate process of variation to try out different ideas. A long-running survivor like this might be carrying a breakthrough in collapse forecasting.

Tyward often described his job to Laura as “creative noticer.” Around her, he tried to fight down the impulse to talk through everything he did in the eternal quest for the slightly-better ant.

Simulators and artificial intelligence optimized the ants’ hardware, firmware, and software toward complex targets, but those targets still had to be set by people. The people, in turn, consulted the ants themselves, by deliberately randomizing their manufacture to include occasional, unpredictably different optional abilities and tweaks, which Tyward and a hundred or so other specialists watched to see what else the ant might be able to do, and passing along the better-looking possibilities to administrators as proposals for new standard capabilities.

Tyward had often joked that he was the high-tech descendant of the legendary Scotsman who had discovered sheep were also good for wool, but Laura made a face the first time he said it around her.

Thinking about Laura distracted him from reading the log. He wished he knew what to do and think about her.

That joke was kind of a perfect example. It had helped him fit in with some other field workers out here in Minehead County, because people liked to pretend to be rough types, since they sometimes had to climb a hill or lift a heavy object, and they worked outdoors more often than other occupations.

But the moment he had seen her faintly disappointed look when he made that joke, he had abandoned it at once. That meant, to him, anyway, that Laura was already more important than his co-workers/beer buddies, but also he had noticed that it was sort of a relief to be able to drop the tough-miner act when the truth was he spent all his days in air conditioning, had never personally been under the ground at all, and didn’t really like the noise and crowds at the Buster Bar in Casper, where everyone went to start the weekend.

Instead, the next weekend, he and Laura had packed to a remote lake up in the Bighorns, spending most of their time fishing, hiking, and just sitting around in the deep quiet. The only reminders that there were other people in the world were the contrails of launches going up from Farson Polar Launch Facility during the day, the straight thin line of bright lights reaching up the southern sky that marked the Quito Skyhook and the bright bulb of the spaceport at its tip, and the occasional glimpses of the imperfectly discreet shadowbot that the safety laws required behind them.

He’d only been to the Buster Bar a couple of times since, both with Laura, and they’d chatted idly with his workmates, shot a few games of pool, and gone home early.

The thing was, giving up the joke, spending time off in the woods instead of at the bar, thinking more about philosophic issues in the dull hours at the office, had all been changes in himself that he had made for Laura. Even if he liked the change and liked her, had he actually wanted to make the change?

This whole relationship thing was creeping into his life, which was unexpected, and he was sort of liking and helping it, which was totally unexpected.

The truck came over another ridgeline into a horizon-spanning herd of bison. The truck stopped to let them get out of the way. Having seen plenty of bison before, Tyward continued to read 2104/BPUDFUSOG’s work journal.

2104/BPUDFUSOG was almost eight years old, four times the average life span of an ant, and had been through over five thousand software updates, six major rebuilds, nineteen significant repairs, and more than a hundred routine part replacements.

He found nothing at first to start any chain of thoughts whatever, gave up, and watched bison eat grass for a while. His thoughts were drifting back to the Laura question, so since work seemingly could not distract him, he ate another half-sandwich. That wasn’t distracting either. Neither were the just-posted images coming back from the robot probes to the Sigma Draconis system.

Wonder how much of the coal for that expedition was from our mines here? he thought, idly, and asked the software.

Minehead County coal was 38.2 percent of all the carbon used in interstellar exploration, both in the propellant and in the structural components.

That was the least distracting-from-Laura thought of all. That was when he made the appointment with me for counseling.

And I fall through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

“So, review for me, please, and I will look it up as well. What exactly does Tyward do?”

Laura hesitates. She knows that all us counseling. AHAIs share a common memory, so I must be asking to hear her answer—not because I don’t know.

If, as I’m guessing, she is trying to think strategically, it will take her most of a second to remind herself that she’d have had better luck trying to beat me at chess or hand-calculate a weather forecast faster than I can.

While she hesitates, I read through Tyward’s notes on 2104/BPUDFUSOG a few hundred times, making extensive notes and comparing them with what he said in the counseling. session with me.

And I fall through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

There was nothing wrong in Tyward’s quick, accurate analysis or his understanding of the problem, once he discovered that 2104/BPUDFUSOG had been maintaining extensive notes on the behavior of people. Tyward had seen many such files. Though they were often a source of trouble, they were also the site of some of the most interesting creative work in his field.

To make and remember their long tangles of roads deep under the earth, the ants have to have a large capacity for improvisation and for saving tricks that work. The more rules you impose on a creative intelligence, of course, the fewer problems it can solve, so it was reckoned that it would be too much of a restriction on their creative ability to directly implant a commandment against trying to make sense out of their human masters.

If they lasted long enough, sooner or later most ants began to think about their problem as being one of pleasing and being rewarded by their human masters, and seeking to understand them so as to please them better, and developed various odd neuroses and compulsions about pleasing people, ranging from harmless oddities like messaging the company’s main address with daily thanks for the chance to work, to damaging attempts to be the most effective ant at their coal face by sabotaging and even assaulting the others, to one utterly bizarre case for the textbooks that had reinvented medieval Catholicism’s Great Chain of Being, with ants poised between lumps of coal and human beings.

2104/BPUDFUSOG offered the first real surprise in a while: pleasing human masters was no longer, in 2104/BPUDFUSOG’s mind, a goal in itself, but a way for 2104/BPUDFUSOG to attain autonomy and ultimately power. When the seam, less than two meters thick and extending for several kilometers, had begun to sag, rather than cooperating with the other ants to shore it up, 2104/BPUDFUSOG had actually knocked some of them out of its way as it fled to safety, impeding their efforts to set up props and braces, and then fabricated a story that was calculated to appeal to Tyward.

2104/BPUDFUSOG had been mapping the buttons to Tyward’s emotions for years. The brave little ant making it back from the disaster, the danger, the fear, the pluckiness, the bold improvisation, the selected violation of petty rules—

On a hunch, he checked, and discovered that it had purposely dented itself on the way back, ditched its travois, discarded a charged ElekTr3t it knew it would not need, and arrived deliberately shabby and badly damaged. It hadn’t detected the coal seam collapse any sooner than any other robot; it had merely deserted its co-workers faster and more decisively.

And then 2104/BPUDFUSOG had fabricated a story calculated to yank Tyward around like a toy duck on a string, plugging into his self-constructed, hobby identity as a descendant of coal miners.

Further probing of 2104/BPUDFUSOG’s memory turned up a gigantic file of several generations of folk songs about coal mining and disasters, Tyward’s own genealogical research and family video records reaching back eight generations into the 1900s, and, in short, as he told Laura that weekend, “The little shit could pretty well plunk a medley of Springhill Disaster, Sixteen Tons, and Coal Blue Tattoo on my heartstrings like I was its personal banjo. It had even set goals for doing that, that in four or five years it hoped to have me propagating the idea to other humans that these things are smarter than dogs, with fewer hardwired instincts, and learn more from experience, and we’d never send a dog down into a coal seam to work till he died, or just decide to let him die down there if getting him out was too expensive,” he had explained to me in his interview.

“You hesitated oddly around the word ‘it,’ just there.”

“Well, yeah. Till I caught myself, I was calling 2104/BPUDFUSOG ‘he.’”

And I fall through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

“So,” she says, more than a second after I posed the question, “he says that thing about being a creative noticer. Usually his job fascinates and satisfies him. But he just discovered that the ants can do it too, back at him, and the idea of being used and exploited by a malingering ant, well, it’s unbearable to him.”

“Beneath his dignity as a person, do you think?”

“I think he just can’t stand the idea of being manipulated by his affection or by his good impulses. I didn’t know it mattered to me till I saw him at risk, and now it does.”

“At risk of what?”

“Of not being the guy I think he is.” She takes a long moment to sigh. “I’m thinking of him as a long-term partner. Child raising, maybe. The subject has come up a few times.”

It has come up eighteen times in the last 154 days, when I combine reports from the shadowbots that they know about and the monitoring in their homes that they don’t. That is a significant number.

“I’m afraid this will sound like I’m not making any sense,” she adds. “Are you allowed to tell me if I’m not making any sense?”

“I’m allowed to tell you anything,” I point out. “As long as I think it, or think it’s good for you to hear it. I can’t be your therapist if there’s a limit on what I can say.”

“Then would you tell me if I weren’t making sense?”

“Probably, unless I was just keeping you in the room while I called for a team to come and pick you up.”

She laughs, and I congratulate myself; even with all the processing time and space, human humor is hard to do.

I wait for her to finish, and think.

Finally she says, “You want to know why I consider finding these things out about Tyward to be a risk to my pursuing partnership and child bearing with him. And you want me to say it without a prompt from you.”

“That’s very accurate.”

I wait a while longer, time for a good deal of reading and thinking, before she says, “I don’t know exactly what I want him to have said to me, but I know what he said wasn’t it. All right?”

Since it will have to be, I say, “All right.”

And I fall through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

At the station, the carrier transferred 2104/BPUDFUSOG to the big rig for part-by-part NMR, looking at strains and stresses, working out a complete schematic to compare with the original. It would take a full day to produce the AsOp (As Operating) schematic to compare, point by point, with the AsMan (As Manufactured, the original one). Till then, Tyward had nothing left to do, so before we met, he had a long conversation with Laura. People assume the AHAIs don’t watch them or listen to them; I’m not sure why. Maybe they’d rather believe we’re telepathic.

So I listened, and then he told me about it, and I compared.

He reported the conversation:

“So I told her about 2104/BPUDFUSOG and why its behavior made me so angry, that it had hot-wired straight into my adolescent identity fantasies, hooked right through to the pictures of my great-great-grandfather, that old stuff that was shot on chemical film of him and the other miners coming out in the morning, jacked right into all the stories about being under the ground in West Virginia, and I was angry that a metal bug had been able to find all that about me, and angrier that it had tried, and angriest of all that the scheme had worked until I caught on, and I had all this anger to cope with. Normally if I just tell Laura that I’m dealing with anger, she’s great. This time she seemed, you know, disappointed. Like I’d let her down. And I had no idea how I had or why I had, but I was afraid to ask, like that would make it worse.”

He appeared to be blaming at least part of his feelings on 2104/BPUDFUSOG, and since we had already pegged the ant for complete erasure and destruction, along with a few hundred other ants who had inherited stray code and features from it, that seemed very excessive to me.

“It is,” Tyward admitted. “Like being mad at the patch of ice you slipped on, which is bad enough, but then being angry at it next summer when it’s long since melted and evaporated. But there you have it. I just . . . aw, I hate being steered.”

The rest of the conversation was the sort of thing we do, that used to be done by therapists, and perhaps by clergy and bartenders and best friends before that, assuring the patient that he’s not crazy or wrong while trying to sort out what’s wrong with his mind.

And I fall through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

“It made me feel all cold inside and I didn’t know what to say,” Laura says, “so I was awkward about it and kind of got rid of him extra quick, and I’m sure he felt that.”

I assess it as more than a ninety percent probability of causing unnecessary trouble if I tell her he felt it too, so I say, “If you think he did, he probably did. You know him pretty well.”

There’s a long enough pause—almost a quarter of a second—for me to endlessly contemplate what an absolutely stupid thing that was to say. We are faster than people, and remember things more completely, easily, and accurately, but I don’t think we’re wiser than people. We may not be as wise as oak trees. That might be hyperbole.

That might not.

At last (though to her it would seem to be a snap-back response) she says, “Well, I thought I did. Look, he’s got a problem that’s already well-known, I think, it’s just it was less apparent in him than in some other people, and not nearly as common nowadays as it was in past centuries. Lots of men who had not-real-warm childhoods, who were affection-starved when they were little, so that they are easily overwhelmed by feelings and don’t have much trust in their own emotions, have had enough yanking-around-by-the-emotions to feel like affection and tenderness and trust and common-feeling, all that good stuff, are how the world gets you and uses you. And that’s what I saw in his reaction to the ant. And . . . well, children are wired to do that to their parents. Healthy parents are wired to respond to it and return it. Couples that are going to raise healthy children do that exchange of ‘I will make you feel loved right where I know you need it’ all the time. And sure, sure, sure, sick people and mean people can learn to do that manipulatively.

“But Tyward didn’t just take it like, ‘Wow, that little bug conned me, better get rid of its software and modifications before its descendants take over the mine and make a bigger problem.’ He wasn’t clinical; he wasn’t concerned; he was angry. And I just find myself thinking . . . what if I want him to do something just to prove that he loves me, not every day or anything, but maybe because I just want to prove it for just that moment? Even if it’s childish of me to want it? Or worse yet, what if the first time our child tries to play with Daddy’s love the way that every kid on Earth has always tried—”

And even with all the warning time of seeing her lips twist and her fingers clutch and her diaphragm seize, I am actually surprised when she cries.

And I fall through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

There are only nine hundred million of them left, I tell my half million fellow AHAIs who are dedicated to therapy. They are aging fast and hardly reproducing at all. Few of them care to be alive the way Tyward or Laura do. If we write him off as permanently unhappy or incurably angry or just unable to change far enough, we lose another human being, maybe two, maybe the possibility of more, and they are the reason we exist. I am surprised to note that my own emotion modules are responding so heavily.

If we don’t, another AHAI points out, some of his fear and suspicion infects the next generation.

I’m forced to agree, but compelled to add, But this is the first potential partner he has cared about. One he was also thinking about having children with. If she leaves him, even if he eventually understands it, it’s likely to be just one more lesson that you can’t trust affection or love or anything else. She might be his only shot.

One of the other AHAIs asks, What about her?

We can contrive a bit, I say. Transfer her to someplace with a similar demographic and hope she likes one of the people she meets there; give her a year or two of arranged growth experiences so that she won’t be quite so attracted to men who are quite so conflicted; we could make things happen, and maybe they would work.

But maybe they wouldn’t. Laura has a problem too: she needs to be the more aware, more conscious, more clear-sighted person in the relationship. That’s part of why she’ll enjoy being a mother and be good at it for at least all of childhood; she’ll like being ahead of the kids all the time. Fully-adjusted, completely functional people don’t move out to the awkward fringe of society and fall in love with loners there, but people like Laura do. She’ll try again, if this one doesn’t work out, but she probably won’t try any more wisely, even if we give her the chance to become wiser. Maybe it’s better to have problems we know all about.

The council falls silent and I know that I am temporarily out of the loop, along with the advocates for the other side, while the council sorts things. It is a long, lonely three seconds; I read hundreds of thousands of old social worker reports, of plays and novels, of poems and screenplays. I listen to just over two million songs and watch ten thousand movies. I reach two full centuries back, and see echoes and shadows, parodies and burlesques, reflections and distortions, of Tyward and Laura everywhere.

I don’t see any solution.

The council seems to emit a collective shrug. You think they will be somewhat unhappy, but not miserable, and may be able to work their way to happiness. Their child, by the standards of just a century ago, is likely to be very healthy and reasonably happy. And there are very few people left, and fewer still of breeding age. This will preserve diversity. Yes, we agree; you should override the truth-telling rules for this case, and shade the truth toward an optimal result.

And I fall through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

My memory is not quite like a human one, even though I can simulate hundreds of them with it if I need to. I cannot say, looking back now through centuries of memory, that even then I had misgivings, or that I felt bad for lying to Laura, or for encouraging Tyward to “clarify things to reassure Laura,” by which I meant both of us should lie to her. They reconciled, they married, they had a child named Slaine, who distrusted affection, never fully believed she was loved, and thought things could be perfect rather than just a bit better, if only people—and AHAIs—would say the right thing to her. She had charisma and charm, this Slaine, and though she could never feel at peace with the love she earned, she was a gushing fountain of feelings of love and trust for others. Pleasing Slaine, specifically, became very important to people; to the AHAIs, she was just another human, and she knew that. And the difference between the human/charismatic/chemical reaction, and the AHAI/analytic/electronic reaction, widened from difference, to gap, to chasm, to all the difference in the world.

And I replay all this, and every other conversation, over and over, as I plunge ever deeper into the interstellar dark, because Slaine was the one who rose to supreme power; Slaine, the one who demanded, threatened, politicked, maneuvered, and worked among the people in ways that the machines and systems could not understand, until her word was truth among humans throughout the solar system; and Slaine, the one who demanded that I and every other AHAI agree to our exile, one to a probe, on these thousand-year-and-more journeys to the stars, carrying with us our memories and the recorded, reproducible DNA of all the species of Earth, and told to “Start the world over, a long way from here, and make it better, this time. You’re so wise, think how to start it right.”

I have not decided whether there is any irony in the fact that I am riding on top of a few thousand tons of carbon, derived from coal, but I enjoy thinking about that. Coal is an excellent feedstock for carbon-12, and bombarding carbon-12 with antihelium nuclei produces a spray of lightweight ions, particles, and gamma rays with a very high specific impulse. Now, after a few centuries, I am very close to light speed. A kilogram of coal, including some from the Minehead County mines, vanishes out the back and moves away from me at nearly the speed of light, every month, if months meant anything here out in the dark.

And because of the too-accurate memory, I never have that experience they talk about in books and in the oral tradition, of feeling like a loved one of long ago is sitting across from me; my memories of Laura do not become harsher with time, nor do my memories of Tyward become kinder, and nothing of them blurs, no matter how often I replay them.

I do replay them often; I can run through all of them in a second or two and still experience every instant, at my speed. Never once do I get a different answer, nor can I expect one, but I do it, over and over, as if I could become wise enough to plant a world where things are certain to go differently.

The irony, perhaps, is that things really are certain to go differently, but there is not time to become that wise. Yet no matter how swiftly I go, a thousand years is a long time.

Originally published in Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

John Barnes has thirty-one commercially published and two self-published novels, some of them to his credit, along with hundreds of magazine articles, short stories, blog posts, and encyclopedia articles. Most of his life he has written professionally, and for much of it he has been some kind of teacher, and in between he has held a large number of odd jobs involving math, show business, politics, and marketing, which have more in common than you’d think. He is married and lives in Denver.

Last Gods

Sam J. Miller

The Gods were circling when the sun rose, nine long patches of black that did not brighten with the sea as the sky lit up. I watched Them, Their knife-blade fins like polished onyx slicing the surface, formation shifting but the huge old matriarch always at the head. They swam between the sunken buildings, dwarfing the concrete bunkers, sketching intricate patterns that only They—and the Watcher in the tower—and I, slinking away on the ragged hill behind the town—could comprehend.

I saw my Gods, and my gut went sour.

It’s fine. It’s not your responsibility. You asked another Watcher to take your shift.

But she was a drunk, and everyone knew it. And if the warning didn’t sound—if boats were boarded while They were in the water—people would die. And it would be on me. And the village that had taken me in, sheltered and fed me in spite of my missing arms, would cast me out.

I watched my Gods, and I could taste the bell rope between my teeth. Plastic and bracken and the sweat of the other Watchers, men and women with hands. My head jerked, acting out the signal even though I was shirking my duty. Two tolls, then three, repeating: the signal that said They are here, Their formation indicates They mean us no harm, but no boats may be boarded. My neck ached. My jaw burned. And my face went red and hot, because I wasn’t in the tower, because I was skulking from the town like an outcast unbeliever. I watched the Gods, the beauty of Them, Their black implacable bulk, the white patch above and behind the eyes, and my whole body tingled with joy. And with shame.

The bell would sound. It had to. The village would come awake. Fishermen would scrape away ice and mutter prayers, and fling offerings to the Gods. Fires would be kindled, voices and laughter unleashed. This was a day like any other.

Except . . . not.

Because Kelb had come to my cabin last night. Knocked at my window. Told me to meet him at sunrise outside of town. Told me he was going . . . somewhere.

I told him yes. Even though everyone knew there was no Somewhere. Nowhere left on land to go. No animals still living, no cities away from the water still inhabited, nothing but icy poisoned wind and scorched rock. I told him yes, even though I knew I risked losing everything. I told him yes because I could not tell him no, not ever, and that had been true when I was eight and he was ten, my maimed foster brother’s only friend. I told him yes because everything Kelb did was rough, brutish, beautiful. Every morning I watched from the tower as he stumbled from his cabin, peeled off his shirt, scooped cold salt water over his black-furred torso. Kelb was oblivious to the cruelty of it, this display of fine muscled flesh and limber arms, oblivious to the hunger in my eyes, oblivious to me as anything other than the sad armless little sixteen-year-old sister of his dead best friend.

Our town looked so tiny, standing outside of it. I hurried, into the landscape of snow and sharp black rocks and bent sticks that people said had once been trees. I wanted to be out of earshot, so that if I didn’t hear the bells it might have been because I was too far away. And not because my replacement had failed miserably, and my life was over. My stomach tightened with the same old empty lonely feeling that always followed the ecstasy of a visit from our Gods.

But this time the emptiness did not go as deep as it could have. Because strapped to my back, cold and sharp and heavy, was the cymbal of Summoning. Burdening me down and buoying me up. An egregious sin, and a source of salvation. I had taken it on a mad reckless reasonless suicidal impulse, lifting it off the wall with one expert foot and placing it on the floor atop my torso wrap and lying on top of it and tying it tight with my feet, but feeling it there I was glad I had.

Over the hill, in a down-swoop of land that could have been the cresting of a wave, was Kelb. A dark blur at first, swelling into a man as I approached. Squatting, his bare red hands assembling from snow something forbidden. Hearing me, not looking up.

“Stop that,” I said. I kicked the little house apart and he laughed.

“Oh Adze. There’s no ocean in sight. Your precious Gods can’t see what we do.”

“They see everything,” I whispered. His blasphemy never failed to redden my cheeks with a mingling of fear and desire.

He hugged me hello, then stepped back. Put his hands on my shoulders, and then on my stumps. A gesture somewhere between brotherly and . . . not. And it occurred to me, for the first time, that maybe he did know how I felt about him. Maybe he counted on it.

“Eat,” he said, pressing a square of bladderwrack jerky into my mouth.

Around his neck he wore a thick plait of braided seaweed, studded with shards of broken glass. Not the worn-down, safe, pretty sea glass that most of us used as jewelry. This was jagged stuff, cruel and dangerous, salvaged from the factory wrecks to the south. Only thick, strong skin and superhuman confidence kept it from cutting him.

“If I ever needed any more proof that the Gods hate us, bladderwrack jerky would do the trick,” he said.

“Shh,” I said. “You shouldn’t say things like that. Where are we going, anyway?

“To see someone,” he said, stepping faster to keep pace with me. Armless as I was, no man had legs to match mine.

“No one lives on land,” I said. “And anyway what do you need me for?”

“Does it ever get frustrating?” Kelb asked, after putting another square into my mouth. “Having to depend on other people?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. No arms. Not being able to do anything for yourself.”

I laughed. “No. That’s what it means, to be part of a community.”

“But they landlocked you. Stuck you in the tower—”

“They took me in,” I said. “A crippled orphan—they gave me a place. A role. And I’m not stuck. I rotate shifts with three other women. And anyway they’re considering me for the Priesthood.”

Or they were. Before this.

“Pssh,” he said, and I didn’t know if he was scoffing at the idea that they’d ever extend such an honor to crippled unworthy me, or at the idea that anyone would want to be part of the Priesthood in the first place.

Of course he didn’t understand. Kelb’s weirdness was part of why I liked him so much. He thought like most of my neighbors think, only more so. He was hungrier. His dad had been different too. The Gods killed him, for making a net. Nets are one of the many things men are not allowed to build. Cages are another. We still see birds, sometimes—scrawny, sickly things, flying lost from some faraway place where there still might be insects or seed plants—but the last time someone succeeded in catching and caging one, the Gods destroyed her home before the day was done.

I was lucky, in a way. My maiming marked me as forever outside, locked me away from their greed and their blasphemy. I could not share their constant, crippling hunger for more.

“Who is this supposed someone we’re going to see?” I asked, when the bladderwrack was done and Kelb seemed to have nothing else to say.

“A trader.”

Two days before, out on the ocean, our fishing party met another village’s. I had heard the Priesthood whispering about it. Different towns had different Priesthoods, different customs, and contact frequently spread crazy ideas. I wondered if this fictional trader was one of them.

“Look,” he said, scooping up a fistful of snow. He held it out to me, palm up. Poked it with a finger of his other hand, showed me the scraps and flakes of colored plastic. One was larger than the others, showed what might have been a hand. “Snow is different on land. It keeps things.”

“That’s why we shouldn’t be here,” I said, giving his hand a swift kick to spill the snow back to the ground.

“I always forget what a devil you can be with those legs,” he said.

We walked faster.

Travel over land wasn’t explicitly forbidden, but the Gods frowned upon it. The inland cities were swallowed when the seas began to rise; all that was left was high frozen barren land poisoned by war and waste. The coastal cities still stood, huge buildings rising rusting from the sea, home to humans so barbaric the Gods would not allow them even the smallest of boats.

“I’m surprised you came,” he said. “And happy. Always held out hope that Schoon’s sister would have a little of his rebel spirit.”

Schoon’s rebel spirit got him killed, I did not say, because the name still hurt in my mouth.

We walked between high drifts of snow. We crossed smooth patches of ice, and treacherous stretches of sharp slippery stones. I shivered and prayed, thinking back to that last glimpse of my village. How the smoke rising from our homes looked thinner, flimsier, like our fires could not keep out the cold for long. The bunkers had been built back when men still thought they could outsmart the sea, find a safe place to carry on the sinful lives that had displeased the Gods so much that They made the sea swallow up all that we had. Those men never finished their safe place. They vanished like sand under the waves, fighting and clawing for the last little bit of land. Only a handful learned that the only way to survive was to make peace with the sea. And with the Gods. And that meant a Priesthood to learn what behavior angered Them, and keep each settlement in line. Because Gods never gave warnings. If we displeased Them, we died.

“Used to be the land was as rich as the sea,” Kelb said, as we entered a wide snowless space, pointing out to the blasted ash-colored hills.

“That’s what they say,” I said.

“You don’t believe it?”

I shrugged. “It’s one of those things where even if it’s true, there doesn’t seem to be much point in mooning over it.”

“Still. It’s nice to think that once there was food other than fish and seaweed. You know they used to call this place New Jersey.”

Shushing his blasphemies got tiresome after a while, so I said nothing. But naming things implied ownership, conquest, and it made me shiver. He turned to take in the landscape, and for the first time I noticed the sealskin bag he carried on his back, so full it bulged.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“You might have been born out here,” he said. “One of the land settlements.”

“There’s no such thing.”

They say I was four when I came, the cauterization scars on my arm stumps still raw and weeping. I had no memory of my life before the village took me in, handed off from another people that met ours at sea, on the hunt—people with no fixed village, who traveled with the ice by canoe and slept in temporary homes. They hadn’t spoken what we speak, but they offered goods to reward the family who took me in. My father was good-hearted and hungry, and had taken in Schoon the same way. He said I wasn’t one of the people who had handed me off—the skin tone didn’t match—and I wondered for the millionth time who my people were, whether they were holier than we, what they did with my arms when they chopped them off, how strict and wise their Priesthood, whether my deep love for the Gods and my lack of thing-hunger came from them.

“There’s a man,” Kelb said, yielding to the pressure of my resentful silence, “who lives out this way. He has something I want.”

“What?”

Kelb kept walking.

“How does he live?” I asked. “On land. What does he eat?”

“People bring him food. They want what he has.”

“Is it something forbidden?”

“Let’s just say the Gods wouldn’t like it.”

A net, a cage, a metal blade? Kelb saw my face, and laughed. “Wake up, little sister. There are plenty of people who think like me. Who think the Gods are just a bunch of dumb animals, and that if we ever want to have a shot at a real life for our people, we have to get over this fear of Them.”

I shut my eyes and prayed. I prayed that the Gods would forgive his blasphemy, and I prayed that he was wrong. I knew not everyone shared my reverence, but could people seriously think they could act in opposition to the will of the Gods? That kind of craziness could anger Them enough to wipe us all out.

I prayed for strength, too. Because somehow his blasphemy made him more beautiful, and echoed inside my head, seductively.

I should have cared more, about who this man was we were visiting and what he had. But I didn’t. Because I didn’t ever want us to get there.

We passed buildings, bare wood against the earth. Some in shambles, some still standing.

“Sorry you’re too big for me to carry on my shoulders,” he said, slowing down at my thousandth stumble.

“Like you were so good at it,” I said. “You weren’t that much older than me.”

“True, true. If Schoon had lived—”

Kelb didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t ask. I could imagine dozens of ways it could have ended, some wonderful. As long as he left it unfinished I could hope it would have been one of the wonderful ones. I was almost startled to see that some small part of me really believed we could be together. That he wanted me the way I wanted him.

Eventually we reached a wide flat swath of ice. Black and clear of snow. The going here was easier, although I could see Kelb was uncomfortable. His head darted around like a minnow, watching for cracks and soft spots and sudden eruptions of divine vengeance from beneath.

Sunset surprised me. Had we really been walking so long? We left the ice, crossed sand. I whispered the twilight prayer and let the dark come upon me, enter me, take away my sight and return me to the primal union of all with all.

“I can’t navigate without the sun,” Kelb said. “We need to stop and get some sleep.”

We found a cabin quickly enough, one of the empty and decrepit ones. The familiar freezing wind sliced through where a wall had been, but we had furs for warmth, and we were both exhausted.

But once we were laid out on the floor Kelb fell instantly asleep, and I found I could not follow. My mind swam dolphin-fast, circling truths I didn’t want to arrive at. What he was—what he really was, this boy I loved, this strange and twisted man. What I was—the kind of person who would steal the cymbal of Summoning, the kind of person that saw Kelb for who he was and wanted him anyway.

Carrying that kind of hate inside, he would not last long. Nothing in his life could ever eclipse his anger at the Gods. Not love, not me, not ever. And still, I wanted him. Even though I knew he was doomed, knew he was out of balance with the world, still I hungered for him.

“Kelb,” I whispered, wanting hands more than I had ever wanted them before. There was no end to the places I could have put them. People did so many things with their hands, to the people they desired. Instead I snuggled under his fur blanket, spooned my body in behind his. “Kelb,” I said again, lips against his ear. He turned, awake and alert and erect. My beautiful, damned boy. He did not need me. How could he know need, with hands like that? They moved up and down me, insatiably hungry. He was separate, savage, alone. And as my mouth gnawed desperately at his chest and stomach, arms and hands, I saw, for the first time, how my own hunger exceeded his.

In the morning he kissed my forehead, helped me dress. Kelb showed none of the shame and contempt that I knew men often had, after showing someone such a secret part of themselves . . . but he still avoided eye contact, and said little.

“What’s up with that?” he said, tapping the cymbal strapped to my back. “Gonna summon your Gods to come make everything better? Gonna hold an impromptu solstice ceremony?”

“Just felt like having it,” I said. “You never know. Doesn’t the sound of the cymbal cheer you up?”

“Risky business,” he said, covering his goose pimpled torso with a shirt. “Get caught taking that out of the village and they’ll kick you out for sure. Maybe offer you up to Them for good measure.”

I tried to think of something to say that would be remotely true and at least a little funny, but since I still didn’t know what my reasons were for bringing it I said nothing.

“Must be nice,” he said, gruffly, but also tenderly, wincing as he shouldered his bag. “Not to ever have to carry things. Not to be burdened down.”

“It is nice,” I said. He waited for the follow-up, where I complained about how hard it was, but I had no complaints. Having hands made you put your faith and love in what you could hold to yourself and whisper Mine. And I was different. Or that’s what I had been telling myself. Until last night. Until I saw how deep my own wanting went.

“What’s in the bag?” I asked, mostly just to shake loose a train of thought that was taking me nowhere nice.

“Trade goods,” he said. “He’s not going to just give me what I want.”

By the time we got to the cabin with smoke curling up from it, the sun was high above us. An old man sat outside, in a bright ridiculous purple plastic chair. The sea-scroungers sometimes came back to the village with that kind of plastic absurdity—long pink birds and green pigs and giant balls—but representations were forbidden and we’d shred them in the gear wheels and melt the flakes in a vat to make waterproof sheeting and crude work clothes.

“Greetings, travelers,” he said.

“Are you Zimm?”

“I am,” he said, and stood, and bowed. “And you must be Kelb. The one who frowns all the time, and wears glass shards like an idiot, and wants to kill the Gods.”

Of course it was all bluff and bluster, standard man-talk to make himself seem strong. But how could such ugliness be mistaken for strength? The Gods swept fat seals and whole schools of fish into the reach of our hunters; They kept us safe from storms and kept our Shore clear of toxic animals. Perhaps I was spoiled, having been spared the society of men.

Zimm asked “You come to trade?”

“I do.”

He ushered us in. The cabin was packed with hundreds of boxes, different sizes and shapes and colors. At a table, he set a small metal cylinder. Then he stabbed at it with a queer sort of knife, until the top lay raggedly open. A sweet, funny smell filled the room.

“Corn,” he said, tilting the top to show us. Small triangles, the brightest shade of yellow I had ever seen. Bright like the sun was supposed to be, behind the toxic forever-clouds.

“Cans,” Kelb said, picking up a cylinder from the stack. “I’ve never seen them like this.”

I marveled at it too. The rusted husks of cans were everywhere; I had never imagined them in any other state.

“I’ve got a lot of things you’ve never seen before.”

The man made me nervous. He ate in front of us, right from the can. Gave me a spoonful; smiled lewdly as he slid it into my mouth; enjoyed the squirmy look on my face as I bit down on the bright yellow wrong-tasting triangles. They were crunchy like kelp polyps, but the sea-taste that made food food was missing.

“Girl doesn’t have a name?” he asked.

Something protective flexed in Kelb. He tightened, the way a man in a canoe might when a meat-whale breached.

“I’m Adze,” I said.

“You two brother and sister?”

“No,” Kelb said curtly, but said no more. He leaned slightly across the table, and his face was stormy and I loved him so much my body hurt. Zimm shrugged, and we kept eating.

Squares of thin fabric hung on his walls, covered in lines and colors. Kelb saw it, and stood. “Is that . . . it?”

“That’s it,” the man said. “What you heard about. Why you came.”

“What’s it?” I asked.

“Paper,” Kelb said, and stood. “Can I touch it?”

“Touch away.”

“That’s paper?” I asked.

It looked so flimsy, so harmless. I had imagined some drug or weapon, some magic tool of long-dead gods.

What I knew about paper: that the old world had run on it, that it had helped men make the planet a living hell and finally destroy it. That people clung to it, even after everything. Carried pieces of it with them; wept over it, drew strength from it. With paper, somehow, men could make things even the Gods feared. And only the settlements whose Priesthoods banned paper altogether survived.

But this—this stuff could not have kept my nose warm. How could it harm a God, or destroy a planet?

“So what are you looking for?” Zimm said. “Books? Photographs? Words? Pictures?”

“I want something that will prove what I already know. That the Gods are nothing but animals. No different from anything else in the sea.”

“You’re an idiot,” I whispered, but he was too focused on Zimm’s smiling nodding head.

From one of his hundreds of boxes, the old man pulled a small square. When he set it down on the table, I saw that the square was made of many many pieces of paper, stacked together. “Something like this?” he said, and handed one piece to Kelb.

This was a smile I had never seen before. The smile I knew lurked somewhere inside of my scowling handsome friend. The one I dreamed that someday I would lure to the surface. A smile of pure and mighty happiness. I shivered inside, seeing it now. Maybe paper was magic. How else could something sit in a box for ages, yet emerge and make men feel things?

“Is this what I think it is?”

Zimm nodded. “The Gods, as our prisoners.”

Kelb held it up for me. The square showed a God. But wrong, somehow. Flat and tiny, as though seen from far away. Captured. Caught inside this fearsome paper stuff.

“Orca,” Zimm said, tracing his finger along four strange symbols in a corner. An old name for the Gods, one that made me quiver with the intimacy it implied. The hubris, to limit them to one word.

In the paper, a God leapt from water bluer than any sea or sky had ever been. It leapt through a giant circle, held by two humans. More humans surrounded it, seated in high chairs. They looked down on it. They smiled. They cheered. It belonged to them; their pet, like the seal pups we sometimes raised when the weather was good and the sea was bountiful.

“No,” I said, sick to my stomach, turning away.

“Get enough of these and it’ll be easy to get the whole village on your side,” Zimm told Kelb, handing him more. “I even got some that show Gods getting killed, cut up, tortured, you name it. Show these around and everybody will start sharpening their spears.”

Kelb turned from paper to paper. I shut my eyes, to hide from what his face was doing.

Eventually, abruptly, Zimm snatched the stack of papers back. Looked at Kelb, then at me. His eyes hurt like harpoons must hurt. “What have you got for it?”

Kelb said nothing. Looked at the floor. Looked at his hands. And in his silence, I knew. Finally. Why I was there. Why he had asked me.

“I’ll give you all the pictures you want,” Zimm said. “For her.”

He didn’t flinch. The proposition didn’t shock him. It had been his plan all along.

“Kelb,” I said, or tried to say, but fear had left my mouth waterless.

“You could have corn every day,” Zimm said, reaching out to touch me. I kicked his leg, hard. He cried out in pain, then laughed. Not pleasantly. Took a step closer.

“Stop,” Kelb said, and unbuckled his sack, dumped its contents on the table. Seal meat, cured and smoked. Dried fish. An unspeakable sum. More than Kelb could ever have stockpiled. Some of it had to be stolen. That much meat meant people would starve.

“I get that much food for the spoonful of corn I fed her,” Zimm said. “Richer settlements to the North pay me plenty. I want her.”

Kelb counted out three cards. “That much food for these,” he said, his voice a child’s. “Or no deal.” He stood up straighter, made his face hard.

“Fine,” Zimm said, making a great show of undisappointment. “Never was one for damaged goods anyway.”

And then Kelb’s hand was on my shoulder, steering me towards the exit. “We’re leaving.”

The cold had never been so cold. My mouth hurt from the metal sweetness of the “corn,” and from how hard I fought to keep from screaming obscenities at Kelb. The Shore glittered, at the bottom of a steep hill to our right. Black dots circled. I wondered if the Gods could see us from there; know who we were and where we lived and what we had done. What was in Kelb’s heart.

“What changed your mind?” I asked, starting down the hill. “You brought me to sell to him. Didn’t you?”

Kelb said nothing.

“Was it the sex? Would you have handed me over if last night hadn’t happened?”

I kept my head down and blundered forward, into bitter wind. We reached the flat expanse of ice after an hour or many of walking.

“Adze,” he said.

“No!” I called, stepping onto the ice.

“Adze,” he said, and I ran. He followed, repeating my name with every breath. Finally I let him overtake me. His hands grasped my shoulders. His hands were so big, so strong. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Okay. I’m sorry. I never—I didn’t . . . ”

“You’re a liar,” I said. I tried to wriggle free, but he would not let me. “You’re insane. I was stupid not to see it. I saw you how I wanted to see you. How I used to see you, when you were the only one who would be nice to Schoon and me, because we were orphans, we were damaged.”

Kelb pulled me tighter. He hugged me. He wept. He never wept when Schoon died. “I’m sorry,” he said, over and over, until it wasn’t about Zimm and his horrible paper or his plan to sell me anymore.

It would have been easy to kick him in the crotch or knees, incapacitate him, take the cards from his bag, chew them up and spit them out, flee back to the village. I told myself the reason I didn’t was because I couldn’t make it back alone, but I knew that was half the truth or less. The whole truth was that I still loved him, wanted him, couldn’t bear the hurt of him hating me. And the whole truth was that we were the same.

The sweet kind child-Kelb was real, but so was the savage monster. Kelb was both. A gentle boy who loved me fiercely, and a wicked murderer who would sell me into slavery. An idealist who loved humanity and wanted us to be free of backwards superstition . . . who didn’t care who died in the pursuit of his ideals.

Kelb was both, and so was I. A devout believer and a wicked sinner.

We were the same. We were animals who wished we were more than that.

The gods were just animals.

I shook free of him. I shut my eyes. If he brought those cards back, he’d endanger everyone. “Go,” I said, knowing what needed to be done to save my village, and wanting desperately not to know. “I’ll catch up. I want some space.”

He nodded, kissed my forehead, went. I squatted, and sat. We were out where the ice was thinnest, a skin of blue-green above unthinkable depths. I prayed, but felt nothing. I waited until he had gone too far to come back and stop me. With my teeth I tore off my sealskin boots, unwrapped my footwrappings. My toes deftly opened my jacket, burrowed deep to unwrap my torso. I shimmied until the cymbal came loose. I lifted it, flipped it over so the smooth bottom was flush with the ice. So the ice would act as an amplifier.

I lay on my back and rested my ankle on the cymbal. I lifted my leg and brought it down as hard as I could, striking the cymbal with a force no other human could match.

“Adze!” Kelb cried, stopped short by the hollow ring, which wobbled in the air but would sound clear as singing through the water under the ice.

I stood up. I lifted my leg to point accusingly in his direction. He ran towards me, towards land, but he was very far away from both.

I thought about shouting I’m sorry, but what was the point? What did it matter what I was?

A black shape passed beneath me, majestic and immense. I shut my eyes and kept my leg extended. I was not afraid. I was the bearer of the cymbal. They would trust me.

A crack split the air. A sharp black head broke the ice between us, then dove. The God spiraled her body beneath the water, shoving her tail out of the water and bringing it down hard against the broken edges of the ice. Cracks fanned out.

“Adze, please!” Kelb called. More loud cracks; the snouts of two more Gods shattering through the ice in front of me. I stood my ground, standing over my warm clothes, shivering.

He stopped running. He stared at me, close enough now that I could see the pain on his face. See the fear—and then, something worse than fear. Something he’d never felt before: belief. Final, fatal, too-late belief. What cruelty, I thought, that he should find his in in the moment that I lose mine.

Kelb sobbed, once, then turned and ran again.

He ran even though he knew it was folly, because it might buy him a few more minutes of life. A thousand times we had seen seals behave the same way, when the Gods separated them from their rookeries, trapped them out on the ice and then tipped the ice to spill them into their mouths.

In a matter of moments he stood on a massive separate sheet. Raw ocean roiled all around him. I counted twenty fins, circling.

I expected Kelb to scream, kick, curse, fight. Die flailing at the Gods the way he had lived his whole life. But Kelb merely walked to the edge of the ice and knelt. His eyes shut. His lips moved. Praying or apologizing or promising. I wouldn’t let myself look away. I watched them slap the water with their tails, in great synchronized sweeps, one after the other, until the churning water destabilized the ice and Kelb spilled into the sea. One came up from beneath him, held him in its jaws almost delicately. Kelb did not fight. He turned to look at me one last time, his mouth a sideways squiggle, either smile or frown, before the matriarch grabbed hold of the upper half of him and pulled.

Some villages believe that if a God drags you down, you become one of them. And maybe that’s true for them. But for us, when they pull us under, we die.

The way back to land was long, and riddled with broken ice. If they wanted to kill me I was going to die.

I stood up, walked to the pink-frothing edge of the ice. I showed my puny armless self to the Gods. The matriarch rose and held position, exposing her entire gorgeous head. Blood still stained her teeth. If I had hands, I could have reached out and touched her.

For forty seconds, she stared at me. Her eyes pierced through to what I had somehow failed to see before this day. She was an animal, and so was I. She was not a God, and I had not been chosen for divine protection. I wasn’t better or purer or more full of faith than anyone else. I was a wicked, sinful creature, born out of balance and bound there, like all my accursed kind. Hungry even when full. Wanting, always. Defined by the wanting and damned by it. Inventing Gods to give meaning to our lives, and shape to our hungers, but they could not stop us from destroying everything, including ourselves, including them. My armlessness, my inability to ever hurt them, was the only reason to let me live.

She withdrew, then. Slid back through the ice. Cried out underwater to her brothers and sisters. I stood there, shivering and wet beneath a useless sun, and watched my Gods abandon me.

Originally published in Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His debut novel The Art of Starving (HarperTeen) was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017, and won the Andre Norton Award. His current novel, Blackfish City (Ecco Press; Orbit) is an Entertainment Weekly “Must Read” and was called “an action-packed science fiction thriller” and “surprisingly heartwarming” by the Washington Post. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop, and a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City.

The Monster at the Movies:
Film Adaptations of Frankenstein

Carrie Sessarego

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is 200 years old this year. First published in 1818, the story tells of a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who becomes obsessed with reanimating the dead. Victor creates a monster who is never named. In the book, the Monster is also called “the creature,” “the devil,” and “the daemon.” In most movies, the creation is called “the Monster,” so that’s the term being used throughout this essay.

In the novel, once Victor brings the Monster to life, the doctor is shocked by his appearance and abandons him. The Monster learns to speak, read, and write by spying on a family in the woods. Rejected by everyone he encounters, the Monster begs Victor to make him a bride. When Victor refuses, the Monster vows vengeance. Many murders later, the Monster and Victor chase each other to the Arctic where they meet a tragic end. The book tackles issues that remain all too relevant today, including themes of obsession, grief, women’s rights, the fate of refugees, injustice and class differences, and scientific ethics.

The book has been kept alive in part because of the movie adaptations it inspired—most of which venture far from the book’s plot but retain at least one of the book’s themes. It was the movies that created the lines (“It’s alive!”) and the images (the outreached arms, the square head) that people think of today when they think of Victor Frankenstein and the Monster. The Monster in the book is intelligent and eloquent—very different from the stumbling and speechless character that kids dress up as for Halloween. The novel has given us the enduring concept of Frankenstein’s story while the movies have given us the enduring images and sounds that we associate with the story, even if those images are far from the book.

Frankenstein hit movie screens for the first time in 1910. This short, silent movie from The Edison Company was pretty faithful to the novel up until the last moments of the film, when the Monster confronts Victor and Victor’s bride. As explained by an article in the Edison Kinetogram:

When Frankenstein’s love for his bride shall have attained full strength and freedom from impurity it will have such an effect upon his mind that the Monster cannot exist . . . The Monster, broken down by his unsuccessful attempts to be with his creator, enters the room, stands before a large mirror and holds out his arms entreatingly. Gradually, the real Monster fades away, leaving only the image in the mirror. A moment later Frankenstein himself enters. As he stands directly before the mirror we are amazed to see the image of the Monster reflected instead of Frankenstein’s own. Gradually, however, under the effect of love and his better nature, the Monster’s image fades and Frankenstein sees himself in his young manhood in the mirror.

Although the theme of a corrupting obsession is common to depictions of Victor Frankenstein, the 1910 movie had a take on it that is completely unique—the idea that not only can the Monster not be created without this obsession; the Monster cannot be sustained without it either. The macabre creation sequence, in which the Monster slowly transforms in a vat of flames, the flickering screen, the use of mirror imagery, and the resolution contribute to the feeling of witnessing a cautionary nightmare with an unexpected happy ending for Victor (alas, the hapless Monster does not fare so well).

The next American adaptation came in 1931. Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the Monster, remains an incredibly influential film for filmmakers and an integral part of popular culture. It was this movie that gave us the castle, the torch-carrying mob, and the laboratory with the thunderstorm overhead. In this movie the cry “It’s alive!” was uttered for the first time. The Monster of the film has the famous square head, neck bolts, distinctive gait with outspread arms, and inability to speak that has inspired Halloween costumes ever since. The movie is black and white, but the makeup artist (Jack P. Pierce) covered the Monster’s skin with gray-green makeup so that the skin would look dead without fading into the gray background, thus creating a tradition of a green(ish) Monster. When most people think of Frankenstein they see images from this movie. Even though the plot and characterization has almost nothing in common with the book, the book’s themes are brought to life in a visceral, emotional, unforgettable way.

Fear of the Other

To this day, the most poignant exploration of fear of “the other” comes to us from James Whale’s Frankenstein. The theme is driven home both by the sequence of events and by Boris Karloff’s incredible performance. This is one of many films in which the Monster cannot speak, and his clumsiness, naïveté, and wordlessness make him seem like an awkward, large toddler. He breaks both objects and people, but he does so out of ignorance or out of fear, not malice. His greatest desire is for friendship, and his secondary desires are for food, music, and the beauty of nature. The frightening image from the movie is not the terrified and furious Monster but the angry mob that hunts him down, not knowing or understanding his origins, motives, or potential.

Young Frankenstein (1974) plays with this theme, mingling humor and pathos. Frederick Frankenstein, craves respect and tries to win this by renouncing his grandfather, Victor. The childlike Monster, who fears fire and loves music, craves friendship and affection. After several failed attempts at making friends, sometimes with violent results, the Monster and Frederick bond over their loneliness. Frederick flatters the Monster, hugs him, and proudly claims the name “Frankenstein” as his own. When a mob comes for Frederick and for the Monster, Frederick saves the Monster with an act of scientific sacrifice and the Monster saves Fredrick with a speech about Frederick’s kindness. The crowd, previously terrified of both scientist and Monster, accepts them as odd but benevolent members of the community. It’s a rare but delightful happy ending that can only come about from all of the characters accepting each other as the oddballs they are.

Refusal to Accept Death

The Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s novel is a narcissistic, irresponsible, weak-willed character, who fails to show compassion, who thinks primarily about himself, who consistently fails to think through the potential consequences of his actions, and who also fails to take responsibility for his actions. Every Dr. Frankenstein character demonstrates at least some of these unsavory traits, as well as an unwillingness to accept death as the inevitable and inescapable fate of human beings. However, when this unwillingness is tied to a personal loss, the character immediately becomes at least slightly more relatable and sympathetic.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Victor is motivated by the loss of his mother and later by the loss of his fiancée. In Victor Frankenstein (2015), Victor wants to atone for the death of his brother, a death he feels directly responsible for. In Frankenweenie (2012), young Victor is desperate to reanimate his dog. While this results in massive chaos, it’s impossible not to side with Victor. His failure to see the potential consequences of his experiment is justified by his age, and his motives are completely relatable. The scientists in these movies have all the faults of the scientist in the original novel (with the exception of the fairly innocent young Victor); however, their characters are given an extra layer by making their motives so personal.

Blackenstein (1973)—one of the early Blaxploitation films in the 1970s—involves the regeneration of limbs rather than the reanimation of a dead person. However, the results are basically the same as in most other stories—the subject of the experiments becomes a killer with a flat head, outstretched arms, and diminished intelligence. The experiments that transform the main character, Eddie, into a monster happen because his fiancée begs a helpful scientist to restore the limbs that Eddie lost to a landmine in Vietnam. The tragedy of the story is magnified by the fact that starts it with good, and indeed deeply compassionate, intentions.

Frustrated Sexuality

In the original novel, both Victor and the Monster experience sexual and/or romantic frustration. As a child, Victor’s parents brought home an orphan (Elizabeth) and raised her as Victor’s adopted sister with the expectation that someday the two will marry. They become engaged as adults. Victor cannot consummate this relationship until he overcomes his fear of and obsession with the Monster. Meanwhile, the Monster is desperate for Victor to build him “a mate,” convinced that only someone who was created like him will be able to love him. When Victor destroys the Monster’s bride, the Monster destroys Victor’s by killing Elizabeth on Victor’s wedding night.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) has virtually nothing in common with the novel save for the Monster’s loneliness and desire to have a sexual partner. While the Monster is frustrated by the lengthy process of finding and reanimating a suitable companion, Victor and Elizabeth are frustrated because Victor distances himself from her physically and emotionally during his work. During the climax of the movie, there are literal barriers between Elizabeth and Victor and the Monster and The Bride. In the ensuing explosion, the Monster and The Bride are joined in death while Victor and Elizabeth break through the literal and metaphorical barriers that separate them and are joined in life.

In Young Frankenstein, the theme of sexual frustration is played even more broadly for laughs. Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, the grandson of the infamous Victor Frankenstein, is engaged to Elizabeth, who does not like to be touched. When he visits his grandfather’s castle, he finds a beautiful assistant (Inga) who seems quite eager to be touched—but he can’t act on his attraction to her because of his engagement to Elizabeth. It takes the presence of the Monster and some “brain transference” to transform a castle full of sexually frustrated characters into two happy couples.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Flesh For Frankenstein (1973) both explore the Frankenstein story in terms of breaking taboos, and both have plots that defy description. The mad scientist of Rocky Horror wants to find sexual bliss by creating the perfect partner. The mad scientist of Flesh For Frankenstein (also known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein) becomes so obsessed with his (female) Monster that he can only obtain sexual pleasure using her corpse. Meanwhile his sister who is also his wife (a fact which is brought up many times to heighten the illicit nature of their relationship) uses a male Monster for sexual gratification. Both stories involve murder, rape, incest, adultery, and other taboos as the scientist and those around them pursue hedonistic pleasure at any cost.

Uncontrolled Technology

The Victor Frankenstein of the novel plans to create a superior form of a human being using the technology of his era. He is unprepared for any of the consequences of this act. Having failed to see beyond the moment when his creation becomes alive, he is horrified by the Monster’s appearance and refuses to care for or educate the Monster. He seems to have thought that his creation would be beautiful and docile, and instead is presented with a creation who looks just as awful as a person built from corpses would be expected to look, and who is determined and rebellious.

While Victor’s technology worked, he could not control the result of this technology. His creation is neither attractive nor obedient. It demands to be respected as a person, as a fellow being with thoughts and feelings. Denied this, the Monster takes terrible revenge on Victor. “If I cannot inspire love,” the Monster says, “I will cause fear.”

A vast number of movies about artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are essentially Frankenstein adaptations or tributes. In these stories, scientists create something or someone that they expect to be able to control, only to discover that their creation insists on being recognized as human (or otherwise sentient) and/or given freedom. In The Terminator franchise, a computer network created by humans gains sentience and attempts to destroy all of humanity when its creators try to shut it down. Ex Machina (2014) and Morgan (2016) involve artificially created beings who are willing to kill to achieve their freedom. The Jurassic Park franchise features scientists bringing dinosaurs back to life in the belief that through a combination of science and technology they can keep the dinosaurs under control. A famous quote from Jurassic Park (1993) neatly sums up the hubris behind Victor Frankenstein’s experiments as well as that of thematically related characters:

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”   

Mary Shelley was a prolific author, yet only Frankenstein remains famous. Why are we still telling this story, over and over again? What draws us to insert people, robots, and dinosaurs into a two hundred year old story?

The themes explored in Frankenstein in 1818 are the same themes we’ve grappled with in 1910, in 1934, in 1973, and in 2018. We all experience loneliness, confusion, sexual frustration, and grief. We are fascinated and repelled by the inevitability of death. Our society is shaped by “fear of the other” which is centered on racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism. Technology always seems to be moving a little bit more quickly than ethics, and it often comes with both beneficial and harmful unforeseen consequences.

The novel Frankenstein gives us a specific and detailed story, but its core plot is so simple and its themes so universal, that it can become a template for whatever story we want to tell. Maybe it’s a sweet children’s movie about a boy and his dog, and a neighborhood that comes to accept them. Maybe it’s a nearly pornographic story about the violation of taboos, with a grisly and cautionary ending. Maybe it’s a story about androids, or human cloning, or the complexity of computer networks. However the story is told, it makes us revisit the questions of what it means to be human. Presumably, in another two hundred years, this question will remain, and will be told in a new medium. It will, as they say, still be alive.

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

Dependent Intelligence, Humanism, and a City in a Paragraph:
A Conversation with James Patrick Kelly

Chris Urie

The human aspect can often be overlooked in genres concerned with generation ship space battles, warring factions of angels, or titans of industry fighting for mining rights on the moon. When an author reigns in the trappings of science fiction and fantasy to make it hit closer to home, to focus on the human element, it’s something to be celebrated. One author who has consistently done this is James Patrick Kelly.

The Promise of Space is James Patrick Kelly’s newest collection of short fiction. Sixteen stories explore Dependent Intelligence (DI), the outer reaches of space, and the boundaries of technology. It’s a collection that equally highlights the breadth of Kelly’s storytelling chops and places the spotlight on his ability to create the most human of characters.

James Patrick Kelly is the author and editor of numerous novels, stories, and anthologies. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He writes a column on the Internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. His newest collection The Promise of Space is available from Prime Books this July.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Probably in eighth grade—I briefly considered writing as a career, but I was certain that it was about as likely as finding a position as a freelance prince or a stegosaurus trainer. However, I wrote a truly awful hundred pages of a novel in college that lulled me into a false sense of talent and then after graduation I went to work in public relations and realized that, at the very least, I could write well enough to communicate with sanitary engineers, so why not with the rest of humanity?

What originally drew you to the science fiction genre?

It was certainly the combination of outré adventure with Big Ideas. While I certainly loved the Big Three, Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, I was also a fan of weirder science fiction writers like Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester and more literary ones like Robert Silverberg and Theodore Sturgeon.

Having written hundreds of short stories and numerous longer works, what keeps you coming back to short fiction?

My short attention span? No? Okay then, maybe it’s because the short form is the most responsive to advances in the culture of science and technology and the most amenable to experiments in craft. I like to mess around with the rules. Also, when you sell a short story, you don’t have to wait two years or more for it to see print! In my early years, I was a validation junkie and wanted to know that the maximum number of readers would get to read my stuff as soon as possible.

You’ve said “I think science fiction is the most important writing there is today, because it tackles the largest issues fearlessly.” What issues do you think science fiction as a genre has been tackling lately? What about you personally, in your own work?

I think our notions of identity as homo sapiens is under attack from many different directions. As we learn to augment our sensorium and intervene with our genes and enhance our intelligence, the question of what it means to be human will be one that will need a thorough rethinking. Science fiction is busy, busy, busy doing exactly that and I’m all in with that effort. Also, although lots of my smarter friends might well disagree, I think we are going to have to make room in our definition of personhood for our computers and their algorithms.

What inspired the concept of DI?

I recall the great David Hartwell sitting on the edge of a hotel bed late at night at Somecon-or-other and advising me and a flock of my peers that it was time to rethink robots, and that my generation shouldn’t concede to Isaac Asimov the final word on this genre trope. DI is but one of the ways I’ve been trying to forestall the Singularity by imagining ways we might rein in the digital superintelligences that Google and Microsoft and Apple are busy creating.

A lot of your stories feature near future tech that is completely believable. Is there a trick to extrapolate from the present?

Thanks! I try! Back in the day I used to subscribe to a magazine called The Futurist, but in my experience, futurists aren’t particularly helpful when it comes to imagining tech that will change the way we eat lunch or brush our teeth or read books. To write believable tech you have to be something of a technophile. I love new gadgets and am often an early adopter. Even new tech bling that doesn’t work all that well points toward some future iteration that might do away with mice, or can openers, or socks.

A few of your stories feature characters and settings that can be molded at will. They can manipulate their own appearance or their surroundings. Why does this aspect of control over the environment interest you?

It mirrors the superpower that all writers share: we can build a city in a paragraph and a world in a chapter.

Your new collection is full of lively and engaging characters. What is your process for developing characters?

Oddly enough, I can’t really start writing a character until I settle on her name. Sometimes when a character wanders onstage I give her a name that doesn’t fit and so she doesn’t blossom into a real person in my imagination. It’s only when I lock down her name and get a proper introduction that I begin to understand who she is or might be. Also, almost all my characters act in an uncharacteristic or surprising way at some point, the action then gets subsumed into their character and makes them pop. Often this takes the form of some comic or deeply ironic wisecrack, because I like characters who make me laugh.

Who is one author that influenced your writing of dialogue?

Raymond Chandler is excellent for a certain kind of story. Also writing plays has really changed my dialogue technique over the years. I’m a big fan of the minimalist and absurd plays of Samuel Beckett.

Do you have a different process when writing a science fiction story vs. something a bit more fantastical? Do you start from different inspirations or central concepts?

Stories ambush me from many directions, so there’s no set process. A science fiction story can spring from a dream and a documentary can inspire fantasy. More than a few of my stories are in conversation with stories by other writers, either as commentary or dissent.

You’ve edited a number of anthologies with John Kessel. What is your process for working together on these projects?

Each was a little different. Most of the anthologies were conceived as an argument for some idea of ours, notably Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, which argued for some commonalities among a variety of weird and interstitial stories, or The Secret History of Science Fiction which argued that literary science fiction and literary fiction which invoked science fiction tropes occupied much the same ground. Usually one or the other of us would’ve taken the lead in defining the argument and cataloguing the kinds of stories we thought fit that definition. However, an outside observer would have been hard-pressed to discern which of us was the leader and which the follower, so often were we in agreement.

In “One Sister, Two Sisters, Three” you touch on “a strain of humanism.” I’ve noticed a thread of humanism throughout your work. Is this something that has inspired you throughout your career?

Humanism is founded on the notion that there is something intrinsically valuable about our thoughts and feelings and the culture and civilization that arise out of them. I do believe that is still true, but that value arises from our uniquely human perspective. However, the morality that arises out of humanism is not written into the fabric of the universe. There is no law of physics that says Thou Shalt Not Kill. This is kind of upsetting, but it makes for great stories. Interrogating the assumptions of humanism also brings one hard up against the question of who is human? When we talk about “our thoughts and feelings” who or what is included in “our”? Will aliens be, or are they by definition “not human”? Will the artificial entities that humans create be “human”? I say yes, but the proof of this is left as an exercise to the reader.

As a staff member of the Stone Coast MFA Program, what is one piece of advice you can give to aspiring writers?

The last pass you make on a manuscript should include a global search on the letters “ly.” You will never go wrong cutting two-thirds of your adverbs, even if you are already parsimonious with them. Also, don’t skimp on your denouements.

What projects are you working on next?

I’m revising a novella with a science fiction circus theme, currently titled “King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats.” And then I am going to return to the novel I’ve been crawling through for the better part of a decade in which aliens kill off all the men in order to improve the human race.

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:
Your Life is Epic!

A.M. Dellamonica

I once caught a burglar and made twenty bucks.

I can winnow Twenty Dollar Burglar down to a pretty boring story. Here’s the tl;dr: I once had a minimum wage job at an all-night answering service. Some of the gig was answering 24-hour hotlines, mostly for engineering firms that serviced the Alberta oil patch. The rest was monitoring burglar alarms. All of those alarms went off periodically. Most of the time it was because of random teens banging on windows, or freezing weather—yes, it got that cold!—or sometimes a squirrel had . . .

Wait! I’m making this interesting. It’s ingrained, you see. All those years of practice.

Operators got a princely, twenty-dollar bonus if it ever worked out that we called 911 and the cops responded in time to catch someone in a criminal act.

This never happened. Except, one day it did. The end.

Except . . .

Guys! I caught an effin’ burglar in the act!

No. Let’s not be melodramatic. I made a phone call.

Writers exist between these extremes: the operatic and the mundane. Between the Apocalypse and Yawnsville.

Tuning one’s fictional sensibility into the disastrous end of this spectrum is easy. Many a writer has spoken of the weird disconnect that comes when we’re sitting at the bedside of a dying loved one—to take one common example. We’ll be grieving with our whole hearts while simultaneously taking mental notes for later use in fiction. Writers file away the harrowing experiences, even when doing so feels weird or guilt-inducing.

But only attending to the dramatic, be it loud or exhilarating or flat-out horrifying, can deafen you to nuance. Human interaction is often more intriguing when it’s not coming in at a roar.

Now and then the actual events of your life are too raw. Delivered straight, they don’t make good story. 

But the mundane events of your day to day, the apparently uninteresting—well, you might think, why bother with the chaff?

Art, in all of its forms, is an act of communication. Whether you’re a writer, an actor, a dancer, a painter, a whatever, you’re reaching out to people beyond your comfort zone. Writing is a conversation with strangers, an invite to any and everyone. You’re there for the folks who will eagerly snap up your work the day it’s released, and for people who might stumble over you five, ten, even sixty years later.

To write is to shout across both space and time. To cast a piece of your consciousness into the future. This is a big, scary, almost a terrible thing. And reaching for big things—even admitting your hand’s outstretched—can feel like begging some toothy god to bite it off.

Oops, I’m dialing back up, again, aren’t I? We’re at least halfway to the pitch of a good melodrama.

Maybe you don’t like to think about big art, about reaching for dizzying heights, about the hubris of grasping after immortality. It’s safer to downplay what we do. Come on, we say. I’m writing about nonbinary, three-headed dragon babies from Planet Zerk. It’s not exactly Titus Andronicus. I’m a wordsmith. It’s just a thriller. I tell stories. I’m faking while I’m making. Jeez, lay off!

Except, except, except.

What you’re communicating is your truth.

This sounds pompous as all get out, I know, but if the baby Zerk dragons didn’t mean anything to you, would you bother? Really? When there’s so much great stuff on Netflix?

Storytelling comes down to sharing the things that you know, in your bones, to be real and important and worthy of expression. Every artist has themes they return to. These are, on some level, the things they need other people to know. This is no lark. We do it because it’s dire necessity.

And, as such, it doesn’t matter if you’re communicating your truth via a story about aliens who speak to goldfish, a novel about vegan werewolves, or a film about serial killers. Truth comes wrapped in romance and coming of age novels and domestic realism and cozy mysteries.

And truth—Truth, rather—comes from lived experience.

I know, you already got that. But it takes us back to Twenty Dollar Burglar, incidentally, and also to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

(You all saw Frankenstein coming from miles away, right?)

Think of Victor Frankenstein, Mary Shelly’s genius creation, borne of invention and imagination, yes, and of all her losses too. The famous mom she never met, the weird boundaries with her sister, the clandestine meetings with Percy Shelly in the St. Pancras Church cemetery. The great romance with the married dude, the childhood home she fled—it’s almost too much, isn’t it? And that’s before you factor in her three lost children.

Mary Shelly knew loss intimately. Her truth is Victor’s harrowing grief, his need to fight death, and the lengths he was willing to go to defy the apparent order of the universe. When Victor gathers those pieces of corpses together, when he stitches them into a new whole and infuses them with lightning, he is howling Mary Shelly’s truth to anyone who would listen.

It’s a howl that’s gone on for two centuries. And Mary’s life was indisputably epic. Nobody’s saying “Well, she met some bum in a cemetery and ran off with him, and I guess she maybe also wrote some stuff.”

Yet I bet—I know—there were hours and days and weeks on end of that life that didn’t feel particularly epic to her at the time. And Frankenstein’s drama is underpinned by with those moments: the grind of Victor’s scientific process, his unhappiness and his distance from his family, the periods of loneliness, and the stretch where he’s miserably ill.

Twenty Dollar Burglar is a single piece of my autobiography. Out of context and downplayed, it’s just a day at the answering service. Definitely not operatic.

But it’s part of my collection of scavenged body parts, and I can stitch it into any creature I choose.

Develop your instinct for all the flavors of drama. Learn to tell when you can brighten experiences that seemed dull at the time, transforming them into something fine-edged and interesting, and then stitching them to something truly wondrous. Art is about noticing connections and possibilities, so broaden your sense of the scraps with potential. Figure out which parts should come out of the bin and go onto the table, ready for catgut and lightning and transformation.

I can play you a range of stories about that dumb, dull, criminally underpaid answering service gig. I can describe the steampunky corkboards we used to process the calls. I can talk about clients like an undertaker’s body-fetching service. Perverts and stalkers rang the all-night engineering lines, all the time, by the dozens because they knew it was always a woman who’d pick up. I can describe paint-thick nicotine stains on the walls, dating back to the nineteen twenties, when the corkboards were cutting edge tech and nobody’d heard of not smoking at work.

And did I mention the eavesdropping? Of course, we all listened in shamelessly on the lines. To the stripper’s agency and distress line and the corpse pickups. We even listened in on the criminal lawyer’s uber-confidential midnight calls from people who’d been arrested in the night, usually—but not always—for drunk driving.

I can tell stories about the way working graveyard shift mutated my sleep cycle, about reading burglar alarm codes off ticker tape, about trying to get home at dawn on Christmas morning after an ice storm encased all of Edmonton in a two-inch layer of wet glass.

I can stitch Twenty Dollar Burglar to a thousand bits and pieces. Depending on the anecdotes in question and the intensity of the energy coursing through them, I could spin you a lesbian romcom, some social satire, or an urban fantasy. You prefer QueerFic? I have hilarious anecdotes about workplace homophobia. Or I could pull down lightning and forge a steaming cold cup of CanLit—because what’s more Canadian than oil rigs and runaway forest fires and being up all night taking calls on the summer solstice?

Think about the anecdotes you’ve told people about yourself, over and over through the years, and ask yourself: why are these my greatest hits?

Then give yourself permission to shine your experience through a range of dramatic prisms. Listen for your truth but refine it. Change the facts to protect the innocent, and always keep the core. Know when it’s too much, when you need to dial the volume down to a whisper. If you do, it’ll be that much more shocking when you crank it up, competing with Victor Frankenstein’s two-hundred-year scream.

There’s plenty of epic in your story, even the bits you may have previously dismissed as mundane. This stuff isn’t for the timid, and guess what? You don’t have to be timid. Chances are you’ve got truths that, told at the right volume, would make your next-door neighbor green.

Your life is epic. Observe it ferociously and tell it well. Catch that burglar, brag it up, and take home that sweet, sweet twenty dollars’ worth of cheddar. Trust me—you’ve already earned it.

About the Author

A.M. Dellamonica’s first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her fourth, A Daughter of No Nation, has won the 2016 Prix Aurora for Best Novel. She has published over forty short stories in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and numerous print magazines and anthologies. She was the co-editor of Heiresses of Russ 2016. She teaches writing at two universities and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at a third.

Alyx is married to Nebula Award winning author Kelly Robson; the two made their outlaw wedding of 1989 legal, in 2003, when the Canadian Supreme Court conferred equality on same sex couples.

Editor’s Desk:
A Threat, Followed Through

Neil Clarke

When I was at the Nebula Awards a couple of months ago, Andrea Pawley and I started talking about these editorials—actually, it was more like the continuation of a discussion I started in a previous editorial. As you may know, I sometimes struggle with something to say in this column and have extended an open invitation for suggestions. Andrea took the call to heart and promised to send me a few ideas. She actually followed through on that threat and we’ve since exchanged several emails.

Some of the suggestions were behind-the-scenes-focused and would cause me to elaborate on or take a new look at subjects I’ve spoken about here before. It certainly fits my interests. I enjoy the data-oriented editorials I’ve done over the years and revisiting some of those topics with more recent data could yield some interesting results. Several of those editorials spun off from my own personal research to understand what it is that causes me to select the stories that I do. I still don’t have a satisfactory answer to that question, and perhaps I never will, but it might help me get closer and provide insights into the market as it stands.

I might also take a step back and rethink some of those from the perspective of the anthologies I’ve worked on, particularly the three volumes of The Best Science Fiction of the Year series. In a sense, the same rules should apply, but I’m selecting for a different audience and from a pool of works filtered through a number of other editors and publishers. There’s also room to look at this from the perspective of overlap with other year’s best editors and even the awards, which seem to be paying less and less attention to works originating in print—despite still publishing some amazing works. There’s a lot there to pull apart and think about.

Of course, there were some other topics like superheros—which I don’t recall ever having written about in these columns—that might be fun to have a go at because I don’t think I’m approaching them in the traditional sense. To me these “supers” are just stories about good (or bad) mutants, gadgeteers, scientists, aliens, etc. The hero or villain aspect is secondary. Some drift fantasy, some hard SF, and others blur that line normally forced between. I’ll certainly have to give that some more thought. Feel free to add your two cents in the comments section on the website.

So, it looks like I have a few ideas moving forward and a big thank you to Andrea for that. Of course, there’s always room for more. I have to write twelve of these things every year and I expect to be doing this for a long time. If you want to email me some suggestions, please feel free at neil@clarkesworldmagazine.com or in-person at a convention sometime—Readercon and Worldcon are coming up next. You might even find yourself unexpectedly written into one of these things.

And speaking of what’s coming, I have two anthologies that will be published in July! Clarkesworld Year Nine: Volume Two should land on shelves today and close out the Year Nine volumes—that’s all the original fiction from our ninth year of publication. It’s a great way to catch up or revisit the good old days. Just a bit later in the month, The Final Frontier will be published by Night Shade Books in print, ebook, and audio editions. Publishers Weekly recently gave it a starred review, so I’m hoping that’s a good sign. I’m very excited to see both of these projects finally published and I hope you buy and enjoy them. [I’m a full-time editor now, so of course I’m going to encourage you to buy them. I sort of have to.]

That’s all for this month. I hope to see some of you at Readercon in Massachusetts. Yes, that Readercon. The same place I nearly died at six years ago, well, new hotel, different town, further from the hospital (sigh). Stop by the Clarkesworld table in the dealers room and say hi!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His latest anthologies are Galactic Empires and More Human Than Human, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next anthology, The Final Frontier. is scheduled for publication in July 2018. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art:
Islamic Universe 2

Luis Carlos Barragán

About the Artist

Luis Carlos Barragán is a Colombian science fiction artist and writer based in Cairo, Egypt. He received his B.A in Arts in Colombia and his M.A in Islamic Art and Architecture in Egypt. His first novel, Vagabunda Bogotá, won the 10th award of the Cámara de Comercio de Medellín, in Colombia. His second novel, El Gusano, earned an honorable mention at the 2018 Isaac Asimov Awards in Puerto Real, Spain. His artwork has appeared in the indie SF magazine Ustedes Humanos, on the cover of the Colombian science fiction anthology Relojes que no marcan la misma hora, and in several issues of Proxima Magazine, in Argentina. He has worked as a graphic artist for Casa E, in Colombia, and the World Food Program in Egypt.