Marshmallows

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

It’s the first day of December which means out goes all those pesky oranges—no more pumpkin pies, gobbling turkeys, and angular pilgrim hats. Instead, the world around Chunfei shifts to snow, piles of it on the ground and reindeer that soar across the azure skies, free of clouds. Rows of candy canes line her view. She marvels at the sight, sighing with a smile.

As she turns the corner, a wind whips her face, cold and sharp. Wet like the humidity of the city around her.

She blinks and a sudden bleakness befalls her surroundings. The colors feel like they’re leaking off her retinas. A pain in the back of her eyeballs gains momentum. She looks down at the gray granite and her flared work pants. A rat, no mini-elf, no rat, scuttles across her shoe. It wavers between elf and mouse, topped with a cute green hat in one instance and hissing with a tail swishing about in another. The rats have no fear anymore—and this one bounds across her pant leg, before scampering past the ripped-up plastic bags and into a garbage pile.

Decrepit branches hang over her, as she moves along with the well-dressed crowd. Others not in the crowd lie in tatters around her, some quiet, some crying out in periodic shouts. About guns and fires and bombs. And Hong who is lost. Or Tingting. For a few seconds, they become silent and motionless as marshmallows, and another second brings them back as grimy flesh, shouting, eyes quivering with PTSD. She turns away from the fearful faces.

Chunfei fishes in her purse, her hands trembling, and her fingers make contact with the soothing smoothness of the eyedropper. She steps to the side, avoiding a bent over street sign, and huddles next to an abandoned shop. It smells like sewage. She steps on a few pieces of broken glass and winces as she hears it crunch under her heels. She squeezes a few droplets from the eyedropper down each eye, blinks the wetness so it coats her orbital cavities—and the view is back. She calms as the connections course through channels of her nervous system. Her cochlea implants and olfacpierce do that buzz they do when they’re syncing up and again she hears the soft tinkling of the bells, discerns the sound of angels singing to Christmas carols and smells the faint scent of artificial nutmeg once more.

In the distance, gingerbread houses line the streets, with prominent white signs advertising for deodorant and hand soaps. The gingerbread houses are too beige and flaky. She knows it must be one of the Asian companies designing the ads, infiltrating the Canadian mock-up version she bought.

Curiosity draws her closer. She leaves the crowd of green and red robed Santa helpers (office workers on their commute), sidesteps a giant marshmallow (a sleeping man in an overcoat), and approaches the row of gingerbread houses (derelict pawnshop, abandoned liquor store, an empty space that used to be a bank). Her daily commute makes it impossible to not know what they really are, but with her contacts on, she smiles. She’s adept at masquerading, after all, now impervious to the cold and drudgery.

She bends towards one of the gingerbread houses and her face is up close, inhaling fragrant spices. She reaches out but doesn’t dare touch. You never know what will bite you, she thinks. She sees that the houses are made of saltines, white crackers, not the dark brown cookie slabs she knows from her homestay in Toronto to be the gingerbread that is associated with authentic Christmas festivities. It’s not a big deal, just a blip in the system, a piece of cultural ignorance that managed to pay its way into the construct. She taps her forehead twice to compose the misalignment report.

She notes the advertisements on the gingerbread houses are for the sweets shop, the chain at the other side of town. Fitting. No errors in the English translation for the Chinese as far as she can see. At least they got that part down. A series of addresses point towards popular streets beyond the lake. On that side, the factories produce for the war, with their lasting legacy being prosperity. On that side, she works.

No advertisements ever point to this side of town, where she stands now, with only smog as its tangible output. This is where you leave your contacts switched on and hop over anything unsightly.

A hum travels through her ear and the stench of sewage creeps towards her again. She experiences a moment of pixel distortion and a drag in the rendering. The angular lines of the spurious gingerbreads erected in saltines pull out and swirl like a van Gogh painting. The ads; they’re undoing, fading. They coalesce to a blur, and dissolve into the grayness of the chemical haze that permeates this once-vibrant city.

She pulls up a holoform, thumbs around and she sees the violent red flash of zero creds, and for a moment all she hears is her own sharp intake of breath. She tries to transfer creds to the environs. No luck. A furry bunny head shakes its head. Her next try draws a puppy who barks a “no.” A gentle voice tells Chunfei that she maxed out on her cutestock account on the last seasonal upgrade purchase. It prods her to add creds, showing her the trailer for the newest environmental updates. There’s a sinking feeling in her chest that gives way to irritation as she shuts it off midway. The holoform dissipates. Its colorful, vibrant twinkling disappearance emphasizes the ashen hue of what remains.

Yamei lied, thinks Chunfei. Her little sister, that weasel, must have used up her creds again. Yamei said she didn’t know her password this time, but she must have gotten her sticky hands on it. Chunfei seethes, feeling a scratchiness clawing at her throat. She sneezes at the touch of suspended particulates tickling her nostrils. It’s her sensitivity, dulled by the digital filters, returning. She slips on a cloth face mask that envelops her mouth and nose. The elastic bands press tight against her cheeks. This won’t do, she thinks, adjusting the bands.

She faces the world as best she can. The world all the commuters hide in their virtual perfumes, their virtual veils, and virtual sounds. She misses the candy canes infused with messages about minty toothpaste brands that substitute for jagged, broken signposts. She longs for the translucent, sugared gumdrops floating on sidewalks with insurance mascots standing in for scuttling cockroaches. Now she sees the street undistilled: cockroaches dart; the craggy edges of signposts pointing towards a humorless city sky. She rushes along with the well-dressed commuters, tucked into suits, buttoned up, crisp. A second ago, they were her elf-buddies ready to head to the toy shop. The upbeat march has become a hurried trudge. She traipses along with them, their feet no longer spirited, no longer pointy-toed conviviality, but solemn, as her insides itch for digital mediation.

She hears a bell ringing and her heart leaps; maybe she hasn’t drained all her creds after all. Maybe someone has passed along a free cred or two over to her? Maria, perhaps? she thinks. She still owes me for lunch on Tuesday—when she rounds the bend and sees a man in a stained red suit, a distended belly that makes the red look pink in that area, so diffused are the bristles of faux fur stretched across his bulging abdomen. She blinks; it’s too drab to be a mock-up, (no such thing as a dull cardinal hue in the mocks) but she kind of hoped it was. Ruddy, sooty cheeks. Wrinkles.

Droplets don’t help, she decides, after she dribbles some in and bats her eyes. He’s really there.

He’s holding a rusty bell, faded in the handle where many previous costumed Santas must have grasped it. He must have caught her looking, really looking, not the glazed-over expression of remote concentration on the transient denizens of layered mock-ups, but real human engagement—and it’s too late to pretend otherwise. His cracked lips part, emitting a breath of stale air like fermented cheese. The sound of the ring, of a clapper hitting copper, so loud and vibrant, rushes into her ears and interacts with them in ways she hasn’t experienced for who knows how long. The ring reverberates in absurd decibels, past the broken glass windows, looted stores, and bored-looking itinerants, some of whom were mumbling. She realizes she is approaching this costumed Santa, despite herself, despite her rush to work. She moves at an oblique angle, approaching but pretending to go somewhere else.

As she trips over a keeled-over rat, she feels it—the nausea. A stink of decay accompanies the intense queasiness. Hypervirtuale, they call it, but she knows it’s psychosis-speak for your mind renouncing jarring transitions. She wonders how long it’s been—she couldn’t have possibly OD-ed on the mock-ups this time. She barely had them on that long.

The shift to reality punches her in the gut; fills her head with a searing pain, just as the Santa laughs a “Ho, ho, ho!” She takes her hands from her gut and looks up. He’s right next to her now, his puffed-out crimson suit filling her view. She quickens her pace and passes him in a few quick steps.

Something in his presence is disgusting and attractive at once. Makes her twist around, face him, rubbernecking like people did at traffic accidents decades ago. She can’t help but look. Everyone else passes by, ignoring him as if he isn’t there—and to them, he isn’t, maybe a Christmas tree or a giant cube of a present—but she sees his dilated pupils and his mouth poised in mid-hearty laugh. He chuckles twice again. He rings the bell and slaps the can. She eyes the red can hanging from a tripod, unevenly painted, now swinging side to side. An invitation for something. The sign says it’s for charity.

Charity, charity! She laughs. Not an ad selling hair removal products, hair clips, or toenail fungus treatments. Not an ad to teach her how to market her brand effectively, not one of fifteen steps to success to be uncovered only when she draws from her mockcash account. It’s so quaint, oh, charity, she thinks.

“What’s the cause?” she asks. Her voice sounds strange and husky without the mods. No tinkling cuteness and squeals accompany her delivery. The question hangs.

The stale breath comes her way and settles into smog, as the fake beard speckled in dirt answers. The mouth is subsumed by the curls of polyester, so it really looks like the beard is doing the talking. “Reality detox,” it says, “for the sick and the needy.” His eyes are strange. Clear and bright, not yet dulled by the incessant use of drops. More dilated, unlike the shrunken dots of those in constant virtual sunlight. Not watery and fishlike, like the rest of mocked-up mankind.

“Sorry, I’m out of cred. Mockcash basket is fresh out,” she says, holding her hands up. He shakes his head, “We don’t operate in cred,” the beard answers and the eyes smile, leaving her mystified. She feels an urge to contribute something. Maybe it is his pupils that draw her in, goading her on. She feels a rush of blood coursing through her veins, surging upward. She’s blushing and she doesn’t know why. Certainly, it’s not because this Santa is handsome. Far from it, bedraggled, disheveled with even a fake mustache of grime. Yet, his conviction. She can see the firmness in the eyes, the unwavering sense of righteousness. She shivers. It can’t be the first time she is interacting with a Luddud, as her friends call them. The ones who scorn the mocks. But, she realizes, well, perhaps it is.

She wishes again she could see the snow covering the tattered ground around her. Instead, she views the brick building lined with bullet holes that this Santa has backed up into and is now leaning against, his beard whistling a coarse tune.

She digs in her purse and finds tucked in its seams a golden coin, something she had hidden there years ago, on the rare chance her mock-up account got hacked. She never thought she would actually run out of cred. She holds it between her fingers, feeling its grooves.

A plane flies above, another one ready for war, no longer Rudolph the reindeer lighting up the sky, but instead, loud, gray, and demanding. She waits for it to pass.

As the plane’s booming sound fades, she drops the coin in the bucket. It clangs around, as if searching for the bottom of the can. It bothers her hypervirtuale and she rubs her temples as she steps away, closing her eyes.

“Hey, are you okay?” a voice of concern emanates from this costumed Santa. He steps forward. For a second, he reaches out and holds her hand, in thanks or in concern, she doesn’t know, but she feels a kind of warmth that something in her says could never be reproduced by a virtual engine. Hands have heat and oils and character, she thinks, with roughness that feels substantial.

She recalls when her parents used to hug her before the war, before she became an adult, before she got her job and before everyone became trapped in their own realities. She remembers the scent of maternal skin, the earthy trace of dad’s cologne. And the accompaniment of reassuring whispers that told her with all their indulgent confidence, that things would be different, better in her generation.

The warmth leaves an impression on her skin and she stumbles back, smiling, saying something silly to excuse herself, while still blinking her eyes open and shut. They hurt. Maybe even inflamed. A consequence of the hypervirtuale.

She turns around and trips over an—oh, she doesn’t even want to bother to look to see what it is, her eyes are hurting that bad. It squishes under her heels. She hears the Santa’s voice “Ho ho ho!” biting into her and her head rings. It rings in tune with the bells that pound from within Santa’s fist, so imminent, and she can’t for the life of her figure out why she gave away her last physical coin that she could have traded for some cred at a solidbank. She walks away, fast quick steps. “Blessed,” she remembers him saying. “You are blessed.”

She laces her right hand in her left, trying to feel the warmth, but it just feels cold. Maybe she was never born with such a warmth, or maybe it left her. She doesn’t know. To distract herself, she counts her steps: eight, nine, ten . . . she gets caught up in it, tapping her fingers, pursing her lips to form the number “seventeen” and, with the next step, a pleasurable fullness surges in her.

A buzz in her ear announces that she is back in the mock-up. She startles, loses count, but realizes she no longer needs the distraction.

The streets fill with snow again and penguins in festive red and green suits waddle by (what they are in real life she cannot even imagine, and decides she doesn’t need to, as she is off the course of her usual commute) and she hears the glossy chiming of her best friend Miki’s voice saying she has paid for half the creds she owes her now and that she’ll get the other half next week.

What? Chunfei pings back.

Her friend, now dressed in an angel costume and an animated kitten’s face says, “It was for the new mock-up outfits, remember?” Her voice is tinny and high, adorable to match her friendly feline face.

Chunfei remembers the wardrobe now—winterfest. In preparation for the mock-up upgrades. Miki got the French one, not the Canadian environment. Maybe they’ll switch next week, so Chunfei can experience Miki’s mocks. She pulls up the remittance balance and smiles. Twenty creds. Enough to keep afloat for now.

Chunfei doesn’t know why, but after she collects the creds, she craves saltines and gingerbread cookies all at once. She pulls off her face mask, tossing it aside. “An implantation?” she says aloud. “Or was it that ad?” She hears one of the marshmallows talking, responding to her speculations. One of their typical rants.

“Passive ads and intrusive implantations now combined. Seamless facets built into mock-up design, provoking appetites, evoking desires. Used for massive military recruitment for the war, now reworked for civvies like you,” the voice said. It coughed.

A glitch. He should have been rendered inert. She waits for the audiosync. The mock-up still must be loading.

Strange to see a marshmallow cough, she thinks, as she tilts her head upwards and dribbles a few drops from the eyedropper.

A buzz and the silky voice from the mock-up administrator. “Layering complete.”

The marshmallow is still and silent again, as silent as a marshmallow can be. It regained a second layer of sheen and its characteristic sparkles, completing the festive scene.

Chunfei can’t help but feel uplifted. Her mind reels in a touch of ecstasy at the idea of saltines, as she licks her lips.

She sees the giant marshmallows that surround her, trying to pretend they really are marshmallows and not the slumped bodies of neglected veterans.

Her mind focuses. Yes, saltines. That sounds good. She imagines the grains of salt touching her lips.

No matter, I’ll make a pit stop, she thinks. I’m already late to work. What’s another ten minutes?

Just then she hears a faraway ring of a bell. An ominous ring. Flying through the air, one of the reindeers suddenly has Santa pulling it. The vision glides across the sky, obfuscating where a plane would be in the underlying reality.

It’s not too far off, she thinks, as she squints. They’re made to be visible, after all. She sees the splotchy beard, the uneven coloring of the mustache, the cutting eyes, while leaving behind a cloud of messages. Commodity or donation or charity, all the words fly about their head until they have no meaning. Have the Ludduds bought ads on the mock-ups? Or is this all some giant campaign for some other company? Maybe some hipster mod planting wrinkles from the solid sphere into the mock-up for comic hyperrealistic simulation juxtaposition? She’s heard about these groups before—these hackers bypassing roadblocks and taking you in and out of mock-ups seamlessly as a kind of sick entertainment.

Ah, I got fooled, she says, thinking of her light purse, which once held a single coin, which feels even lighter in this holiday air. Who did she even end up helping? She shook her head. Ah, but what does she care? Christmas and evergreen trees are in the air and not a trace of smog. She breathes deep and notes a hint of pine and what must be eggnog, a new release of smells she’s not quite familiar with yet.

She sidesteps around the marshmallows and skips over the little elves and enters a giant gingerbread house at the edge of the frozen lake. She smells the electric whiff of synthetic cinnamon and chocolate in this house and bags up a couple of perfectly circular disks of cookies. She sees the crackers from the Chinese ad, so innocuous. Square-chiseled saltines. She picks a few up.

Once she takes the exit at the other side of this giant gingerbread house, she knows she can turn off the mocks. Over there, the smog’s controlled and any itinerants are neutralized. It’s an agreeable space, not festive, but habitable. Maybe I’ll leave the mocks on, she thinks, even over there. The Christmas environment is really growing on her. She likes the chimes of the carols, she decides, as she bobs her head and counts the confections and crackers in her hands. “Five creds,” the mock-up admin says.

She looks up, out through one of the windows, and Santa’s gone, along with his stale breath and his warm hands. She pays for the cookies and saltines with acquiescence, wishing they were warm, but they just feel like a kind of static-charged pleasantness, like everything else in these mocks. Not exactly comforting, but agreeable. She picks up a few saltines out of the green gift bag and bites.

About the Author

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Mithila Review, LONTAR, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, Deep Signal, Battling in All Her Finery, and Broad Knowledge.

She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter.

Bringing Down the Sky

Alan Bao

Boy

The wind howls over Big Sky Ridge.

Flecks of sour rain fall from the sky, and we waste no time putting on our breathers to ward off the stinging droplets. We look for smog sign—up, down—valley and sky. The sky-smog is always the trickiest to manage—especially on wet days, when the moisture brings it lower towards the peaks. If we start imploding at the wrong turn of the wind, it could mean wasting an entire expedition’s worth of sky.

Old man Li watches the swirling mists and sniffs the air. When he gives the go-ahead, we switch on the L-boxes. The machine booms its defiance against the clouds. I take the chance to stretch out my back, while Fong and Xiaoling take turns lifting up their breathers and spitting off the edge of the cliff. We started our trek before dawn, and it will be nightfall by the time we get back.

The valley-smog lies dark and still below us.

We return to the city in the dark. The highway we walk is silent except for our footsteps and the occasional passing bicycle. A faded road sign overhead proclaims the city’s name—Xin Xi’an, to the schoolbooks—Xiao Hui Cheng, the Little Gray City, to those of us who live here. The city splays on the plateau like a dried-out husk, its boom years long forgotten, shanties and dead street lamps creeping half-heartedly up the mountainside. Aside from old man Li, none of us can remember a time when petrol-cars drove on these wide, empty streets.

We squirrel through skeletal alleyways, spines creaking against the weight of the canisters on our backs. The pitter-patter of little feet greets us as we come to the edge of the migrants’ quarters.

“Foreigners!” Jinjin flies squealing out of the night. “Did you hear? There are foreigners at the shop!”

“Yeah right, you little fibber.”

Fong hustles him out of the way. Foreigners do not come to Xiao Hui Cheng. The few who do stay at the city center, or are driven up by mule-cart into one of the bureaucrat lodges where they do business. The city is about as far as you can get from a tourist attraction, and Dhampa’s street is by far one of the dirtiest neighborhoods in town.

“Nuh-uh. I saw them. Even Dhampa said so. Did you know they live inside domes and make their own air?”

Jinjin places himself between me and Fong and tugs on our arms as we walk.

“And nobody wears a breather, even during the summer!”

We round the corner, past the crumbling brickwork of the old roti shop, until we come to the peeling aluminum eaves where old Mama Liu waves us in.

“And their cities are so full of light that it’s like daytime, even at night!”

We drop off our canisters at the shop window. Jinjin dances around as we pull out the cricks in our backs. Mama Liu shoos him away and ushers us inside.

“Stew’s in the pot. One bowl of rice each. Don’t get greedy, Fong.”

Fong pulls a face. We find a spot among the other troupes in the mess hall and tiredly suck down our stew. Jinjin casts furtive glances at Dhampa, chatting with two pale-skinned foreigners over his countertop.

“Ask them.” Jinjin whispers, peeking over the table with bashful eyes. “Ask them about the fans and the domes!”

Fong looks up from his stew.

“Hey, laowai!”

The fat foreigner looks up with surprise on his face. The other glares at us. Fong ploughs on: “Is it true that you build giant fans to blow away smog from your cities?”

Dhampa growls our way.

“Shut it, Fong. Don’t you go starting anything.”

“Hey, I’m just asking—”

“It’s all right, it’s fine,” the first foreigner says in a rolling accent, a smile over his friendly face. “Yes, we do have climate control programs in America—but nothing as crude as giant fans!” He laughs. “Where I’m from, microclimate domes are the way of the future.”

“See, see! I told you they live in domes!” Jinjin squeals.

Dhampa harrumphs and taps his liquor glass impatiently.

“ . . . I was saying, white man—all my sky goes out to channels in Beijing and Shanghai. Only rich people in big cities can afford to pay for imported air. It’s always been a cutthroat business, and now that big companies like Xintian are elbowing their way in . . . ”

He let the sentence hang. Fong returns to his stew, spooning it into his rice and slurping it down.

“And anyway, what about planes? You must still have a few somewhere. Why not just write to the government and fly your planes up there?”

The fat foreigner shakes his head.

“Transportation is a balancing act these days. Michael Fineman wrote a wonderful book on the subject—it’s the economic hairsplitting between the value of the load and the cost of oil. Only low-mass, high-value payloads get any time in the air these days—so a speculative venture like ours . . . ”

“So even you foreigners are feeling it now, huh? Times sure have changed.”

The flabby foreigner nods his agreement. “Do you know, they used to fly people around commercially, back in the day? Everyday folks like you and me, eh? Fineman says in his book . . . ”

The rest of his sentence trail into unintelligible technobabble. But Dhampa seems to understand well enough, and engages the foreigner in deeper conversation. After a while, he looks up from the table and waves me over, as if having an afterthought:

“Hey, boy, didn’t your father used to teach you English?”

After dinner, Fong and the others head out to the shop front to play dice, while I take my turn at cleaning duty with Mama Liu. I toss the night’s wash-gunk into the ditch lining the alley, where it oozes to the pits like thick congee. The bones go to the strays. Stephan (the talkative foreigner) watches me as I clean.

“You know, I’m surprised you’re not wearing a breather right now,” he says through the silver mask on his face. “Untreated air just kills my throat.”

He speaks in Mandarin, for my benefit. I try my best to return the courtesy.

“We’re used to it. We’re high enough up here that the black smog only comes around in summer. There are people in the lowlands who have to keep their breathers on all the time, even when they sleep.”

I scrape the last bit of grit from the pots with a moistened cloth and head back to the kitchen. Stephan shadows me uncomfortably close, asking questions like a child might. What is the weather usually like here? How much money do we make each day? How many troupes work out of the shop?

“What about other foreigners? Your landlord was talking about other sky-running companies moving into town—are they all domestic Chinese, or . . . ?”

I shrug.

“I don’t know about foreigners, but we have a doctors’ charity from Shanghai that visits us sometimes . . . ”

“Zhang and his do-gooders,” Dhampa and the other American saunter into the room, shooing me away. Stephan sits up and nods their way.

“Where’d you get off to, Wes?”

“Washroom,” says the one called Wes. I’m shocked by the disgust and hostility in his voice. Dhampa winks at me and engages Stephan in rumbling English again, leaving me in the company of the sulking foreigner.

“Hey kid. You understand what I’m saying? I’ll give you an American dollar if you fetch me a drink.”

Dhampa looks up.

“We’re not a bank. It’s forty yuan for the drink.”

The one called Wes shrugs. He puts his money on the table and tosses me a coin.

“Name’s Wesley, by the way.”

I extend my hand, the way my father had taught me.

“It is good to meet you, Wesley.”

“Yeah, yeah. You were talking to my friend Stephan back there?”

I nod.

“Well, he is what we in America call a pontificating cunt.”

I do not understand the words, and Wesley does not stop to explain what he means.

Wesley 

We start our trek before dawn. The local boy tells me it’ll be dark before we get back again.

Everything in my body hurts.

Look: it wasn’t supposed to be difficult. Just go in, get the lay of the business, pay off a few officials, and establish the contacts needed to circumvent the usual routes of imported air. Cut, dry, fucking simple. We’d talked about it beforehand. Normal business ethics didn’t apply here. Here, the bureaucrats dealt in guanxi—personal connections—and the line between good networking and corruption didn’t exist. We’d gone through the wringer just to get here, landing in Manila on a company cargo plane (the pilot complaining bitterly about the extra poundage), then hopping a nuke-barge to Shanghai, where we boarded the ancient Qinghai line among a crush of bodies and breather-masks. The Chinese had clearly neglected to modernize their rails when they made the switch to electric: the train could barely break 50 km, the way stations were glorified shacks, and when you opened your eyes in the 8-beds-per-cabin bunks, you felt like you’d woken up in a coffin.

Sometimes, I wonder where Stephan got off being such a moralizing ass. A sour meeting and a pissed-off bureaucrat later, we were not only on the outs in business talks, but had our accommodations at the guest lodge revoked.

When we get back stateside, there’s going to be a few bitter words to be had between us.

“Did you and Stephan have good rest last night?”

Our boy-guide treks ahead on the mountain, hauling a disproportionate pack of canisters on his back. He’s making brisk conversation even as I struggle to keep up. The rest of the troupe has already disappeared into the mist. Stephan lags behind on the mountainside.

“Oh yeah, terrific,” I gasp. The sarcasm’s mostly lost on the kid. The bunk we slept on was so small that you couldn’t lie down flat. The sheets smelled like straw and stale sweat. Taking a shit was a nightmare—your balls shriveled up from the cold, and you could physically see your body heat leaking away in steam as you squatted over that outhouse hole. My nose clogged up fast as hell—a blessing and a curse, since I couldn’t smell the stink of human feces, but instead had to gulp the fetid air with my mouth.

“At least it’s winter. No flies!” The landlord Dhampa had chuckled at me when I finished my business. I’d cleaned my shivering hands in a trough of still water as the gremlin walked off chortling.

“Yeah,” I sigh at the swirling mists above. “We’re just short a space heater and a flushing toilet for maximum livability, but we’ll make do.”

The boy looks back and smiles politely. I get the feeling that maybe he’s never even seen a flushing toilet before. Christ. I’ve lived in my share of shitholes back in my college days—leaky plumbing and insta-ramen and rats in the floorboards—New York living at its finest, you know—but this takes me to a whole new level. I think back to the fetid outhouse, and am doubly thankful that I had at least brought my own tissues, and didn’t have to use the scrap paper that the locals used to wipe.

The boy stops at an outcrop, waiting for us to catch up.

“We are quarter of the way up, now,” he gestures at the horizon. “The sun is rising.”

We wait as Stephan hacks his way up the hill toward us. Our guide tries to engage me in conversation, falling into Mandarin and onomatopoeia when his vocabulary fails him. Considering his background, his English is quite good—but there’s room enough for misunderstandings. Mispronounced words and overemphasized consonants. Weh-suh-lee. Suh-teh-fan.

“Stephan Anderson. The fat one.” I point at Stephan and then at myself. “Wesley Hughes.”

“Weh-suh-lee Hew-seh.”

The sun breaks over the mountains just as Stephan heaves up to us, retching as he tries to catch breath. I run a hand along my stomach—flatter and more well-toned than Stephan’s (I gym), but probably not as fat-starved as our boy-guide’s. The light washes across the mountaintops, painting the plains below an orange hue that makes the entire landscape look like effervescent fire. Even through the nausea in my stomach and the headache in my skull—the early fingers of altitude sickness—I feel awed and exhilarated.

Stephan ruins the moment by moaning pathetically and collapsing into the snow. I fight down the urge to smack him across the skull.

“Oh, get up, you wuss. Could you get any softer?”

I wave our boy guide towards us.

“How much farther from the summit?”

The boy shakes his head.

“We don’t go to the summit. It takes us too close to sky-smog.” He points upwards past the swirling mist. “We go there—Big Sky Ridge. Old man Li found it, most troupes don’t know it. It is a reasonable climb, and you can get very clean sky up there.”

The mountain stretches precipitously in front of us. Following the boy’s finger with my gaze, I begin to have serious doubts over his understanding of the word “reasonable.”

It’s late afternoon by the time we stop and bring out the L-box. The boy tells us that we haven’t yet reached Big Sky Ridge, but at our pace, the path would’ve taken us back to the city after midnight. Stephan wheezes to himself in the distance, and I throw a couple of pastry-themed insults at him. Meanwhile, a tendon in my foot seemed determined to curl in on itself like a snake eating its own tail.

“Foreigners shouldn’t climb the paths after dark. It is easy to fall.”

He unhooks the Leibenstein apparatus from his back, hands dancing around the tangle with practiced speed. I wipe down the goggles on my breather, my thumb coming away black and sticky. Behind me, the L-box begins to boom in its contained implosions. Pressure valves hiss and air crystals tinkle in their canisters.

A flash from the tangle catches my eye.

“Hey, what is that?” I ask. Our boy guide looks up at me, then down at the vial of talcum-looking powder that he was tipping into the L-box.

“This? This is tian-zhi powder. It helps seed the crystal and keep it solid, outside a pressure canister. We use it when we run out of canisters to store the good sky.”

Stephan wheezes and stumbles past me for a better look.

“That’s—that’s really, very interesting. We’ve never heard of anything like this in America. I suppose it’s some nucleation agent for the crystal to precipitate around? Can you show us how it works?”

Our boy-guide smiles politely. He feeds the vial into the L-box, and after a few booming seconds, detaches the canister and pours out a cluster of crystals—porous and opaque, unlike the translucent lapis of the market-ready air-cubes. He tips a few into Stephan’s palm, and the shards sit quiet and inert, not sublimating in the mountain air.

“Fascinating,” Stephan mumbles. “What’s the nucleation agent made out of?”

The boy shrugs.

“Old Man Li showed it to us. It’s a powder made with tian-zhi, the sap of a plant that grows on the mountain.” He mimes out the contours with his hands. “Big, thick stem, tiny leaves; red speckles all over.”

“And it keeps the Leibenstein crystals solid outside of a cooled, pressurized container?”

The boy nods. “But it is not very good sky. None of the vendors will buy it, but some people in town like to use them as jewelry.”

“Very, very fascinating.”

Our guide pressurizes the last of the canisters and lashes them back onto the tangle. We make small talk as we trundle down the mountain—some business, some personal. He seems happy enough to oblige our curiosity.

“I used to work in the mines with my father,” the boy says as he tramps on ahead. “We lived inland. The mine went out of business when I was twelve, so we came to work out here. He was sick with the miner’s cough, by then. He learned English when he was working for an American sweatshop, back when the big inland boom happened. He taught me a little before he died.”

His words are calm and unsentimental. I see Stephan trying to catch the boy’s eyes with this mawkish, puppy-dog expression on his face. I cut him off before he has the chance to say anything stupid.

“What about the sky you’ve got?” I ask, fighting for breath against the rake-thin air. “Any particulars you watch out for?”

“All we do is get sky and avoid smog,” the boy shrugs. “The black smog is the most poisonous, but it is heavy and stays in the valleys, so we needn’t worry about it unless it’s a hot day in summer.” He points upwards. “When we go into the high mountains, we look out for sky-smog. It gets brought downwards by the wind and rain. Sky-smog is always unpredictable—so the high peaks are a bad place to get sky.”

I receive this information with a grunt. Stephan wheezes to my right, his face the gray color of dead fish. The more we march, the more I think that he’s not so much walking as he is falling forward, barely catching himself with his legs with every step. The boy continues blithely ahead.

“The places in the middle, where Big Sky Ridge is,” he throws a thumb backwards, “that’s the cleanest sky. You can get a very good price per tank with that. And we never try to be clever about it—the dealers can always tell the mountain air from the cheap cubes that the townspeople make on a clear day.”

I suck at the thin air and make mental notes. I can hear Stephan dry heaving to himself behind me. About forty yards on, I stop to look back, and find him standing by the side of the path, unmoving, pointing to something on the mountain slope.

“What?” I snap.

Stephan wheezes as he moves towards the edge.

“The tian-zhi—red-speckled—with thick stems?” His limbs move stupidly with oxygen deprivation. I wonder if he’ll accidentally overstep and fall. The vague panic of it snaps at my brain—and I am suddenly fed up—with Stephan, with this trip, with the bureaucrats, the smog and the kid and the entire goddamned mountain, and I fight down my own nausea to yell at the pontificating, bumbling fool.

“Stick to the path, you pastry-ass idiot!”

And now the boy:

“You must be careful on the snow!”

Stephan doesn’t even acknowledge us. I wonder if altitude sickness has compromised his judgment, or if he’s trying to prove something after my ribbing earlier. I turn to our guide.

“That idiot. If he dies, we leave him. I swear to God, we leave him to get eaten by wolves or vultures or whatever the fuck lives in these goddamned mountains, and—”

Our boy-guide interrupts me with a loud shriek, and rushes clanking back up the path.

I look back in time to see Stephan tumbling over the edge.

Dhampa 

The foreigners left the shop with a full troupe at five in the morning.

They came back alone after midnight, clattering into the alley on a mule-cart, with one of them moaning in the back, clutching a mess of plant stems.

“We need to get him to a hospital—a real hospital, not a local one.”

I brush off the scowling one called Wesley. I know the kind of hospital he means—the foreigner hospitals like they have in Chengdu or Hyderabad; expensive beyond the means of the locals, where rich tourists are treated like royalty.

“We only have one hospital in town, dōsta.” I smile a little: “Of course, the bureaucrats have their own private clinics. You can always have him treated there, if you have the clout.”

The one called Stephan moans in his makeshift stretcher. The boy tells me that he fell off a slope while reaching for some tian-zhi plants. Lucky it’s been a wet winter, he says. Lucky the slope was snowy. Lucky he fell into an outcrop.

Lucky.

I shake my head. That’s the problem with these foreigners—rich and soft and lucky. And always too keen to overestimate their own worth because of it.

“Look, dōsta: there are no fancy foreigner hospitals in Xin Xi’an. And the city closed the 24/7 ward years ago, for lack of doctors.”

“To hell with that . . . is there anything we can do now?”

I shrug.

“I can call my friend Zhang from the doctors’ charity to come take a look at him. It is late, and it will cost you a lot of money—for his trouble, and for using my rooms as a hospital bed.” I heave a sigh and look down at the broken foreigner with theatrical exasperation. “But you say he’s your friend. Shall I make the call?”

The one called Wesley looks at me like he is about to have a stroke.

Dr. Zhang arrives at one o’clock, pulling up to the alley on his bicycle. I have Wesley and the boy make a room ready. The hurt foreigner is placed on one of the dining tables, and Zhang wastes no time in examining him.

The one called Wesley look incredulous.

“He’s not even going to take an X-ray?”

I pull the boy out of the room. My pockets are full with two thousand yuan from Wesley, and a promise to square up the rest before they head out to the rail station. The day has not been a waste after all—at least it would cover some of the shop’s losses from last month. As the rectangle of light narrows, the last pieces of conversation float out from inside:

“ . . . I can splint the leg for now, but you’ll want to get to a hospital, as soon as you can. I’ve brought some medication for the pain.”

Outside, the air is acerbic and cold. The boy and I sit like Bodhisattvas at the mouth of our alleyway, our breaths turning into wisps under the smog-hidden moon.

“You ought to get rested up for tomorrow,” I tell him. The boy grumbles bitterly, but gets up nonetheless. A shrewder negotiator might have known to leverage the foreigners’ payment against tomorrow’s haul—but the boy apparently hasn’t inherited his father’s talent in negotiating for small comforts.

I shrug and sip my tharra. Nothing asked-for, nothing given. In another two hours, he will be roused from his nap to head out with the troupe. The climb is tiring on the best of days (I would not have relished it even when I was a young man), but after a long night and so little sleep, his workday will be nothing short of brutal. I make a mental note to have old lady Liu feed him better for a few days.

“Do you think Stephan will be okay?” The boy mumbles, swaying slightly with exhaustion.

I laugh and take another swig from my flask.

“Smug, fat American. Can’t even climb a mountain without breaking in half. What a joke.”

“He is not a joke. Stephan wants to give clean sky to everyone—that’s why he’s here. He wants to help people, while you only care about making money.”

“He is an American. He already has the luxury of money, so he can afford to be a smug, self-satisfied pug. And anyway, who do you think he really means by ‘everyone’? Not you or me, for sure. He means rich folks in a big city, where people can get anything they want by throwing money at it. They only need people like us to get it to them.”

The boy heaves one last column of wispy breath into the night before dragging himself sideways towards the bunks.

“And you only need people like me to bring it to you, so you can sell it to them,” he murmurs.

The frankness in his voice is a pleasant surprise. No self-pity or rancor—just the acknowledgement of a simple truth: the starving will sell to the poor, who will sell to the middlemen, who will sell to the rich. The chain goes on and on, and those at the top will always find a way to live well, even when the world chokes and starves around them.

I tip my drink to the boy’s silhouette.

I’m going to make sure that old lady Liu feeds him well for an entire month.

The next morning, the foreigners are loaded onto a mule-cart as a muggy red sun crests over the peaks. Bound for the hospital, or the rail station—it didn’t matter which, so long as they were gone from my shop. The one called Wesley had paid up the rest of our agreement in full, and as they made their way out of the shop doors, I’d heard him complaining bitterly:

“Back in my dad’s day, they would’ve sent a whole fucking chopper out to get us. Now we’re not worth the gas it takes to get a truck out here. I told you all that humanist talk is just moral posturing for the rich.”

He said this as though he considered himself one of the poor. I’d laughed loud enough to startle the mule.

Before the cart pulled away, the injured one had grabbed me and pressed a hundred yuan and a stack of handwritten notes into my hand.

“Look, I just wanted to thank the boy for everything he’s done,” he slurred through Zhang’s painkillers. “Tell him I said thank you, all right? Tell him I said thank you and to keep in touch. I saw an old computer back there in the shop. You’ll let him keep in touch, won’t you?”

I nodded vaguely, and put the papers in my pocket.

Zhang strolls out of the shop in time to wave the foreigners off. The sun shines coldly overhead, a muggy red sphere cradled in a jagged-peak horizon. The air is almost fresh enough to sell.

“Had a comfortable sleep, Zhang?” The good doctor had decided not to cycle back to the hotel in the dark, and had slept instead on a spare cot in the mess room. The working troupes had almost trampled him flat when they got up in the early morning.

“It’s no luxury resort.” He throws me an eyebrow. “Why did you call me last night, Dhampa? You must’ve known I couldn’t do much without seeing an X-ray.”

I shrug and count out a wad of bills from my pocket.

“Scared foreigners are good money. Here’s your share.”

Zhang stares at me. He shakes his head vigorously, as I knew he would—and I pocket his share of the money, as I knew I would.

“I’m going back to the coast in a few days, Dhampa. Next time, leave me out of your money-grubbing schemes.”

Heat rises in my face. I grit my teeth. As much as I respect the good doctor, he is still a big-city man: a child of middle-upper-class academics, indulging the self-gratifying charity of the comfortably rich.

“You’re right.” I stuff the bills in my pocket. “I suppose I should be more like you, Zhang. Take some time away from my penthouse in Shanghai, travel a few weeks each year for a round of inoculating the poor and pooh-poohing at what the little people must do to make their living. Go back home to a round of applause from my rich, academic friends.”

“Everything is about money with you, isn’t it?”

I laugh at the sanctimony in his voice. There are few things the rich love more than complaining about the penny-pinching habits of the poor. Money certainly isn’t everything—especially to those who have an abundance of it.

“Oh, you’re right, Zhang. Money hasn’t done a thing for you, I’m sure. Maybe you can spare me that valueless suburban home you own sometime? Maybe you can gift me the assurance of food and shelter and a lazy, comfortable retirement, and the similarly valueless lifestyle that you provide for your family?”

“I give to charity,” Zhang snaps. “Those foreigners—you had no right—”

“No right? You and the Americans are the same. You have no right. Your cities spew out smog, but you breathe clean air from our skies. Your factories spew out waste, but you drink clean water from our rivers. You buy your daily injustice with the money that you don’t even appreciate—but you condemn me, because I conned a money-fat foreigner out of some traveling cash?”

“I do what I can to help, Dhampa. But if that’s not enough, then what would you do? Tear down the infrastructure of the domed world? Make the quenched ones thirsty, make the fed ones starve, in order that everyone can become equals?”

“At least then the thirsty might be spared the sanctimony of the quenched.”

Zhang gives me a pitying look. I ignore him. On matters of medicine, the man may be an expert; but on matters of life, he knows nothing. There are certain truths about the world that the well-fed and -watered cannot know. Without money, a man cannot make a life for the woman he loves. Without money, one cannot buy justice, as the rich do in their courts of law; cannot buy mercy, as politicians do in their courts of public opinion; he cannot buy the voice to express himself, locked out as he is from the satellite and intranet stations that would otherwise happily broadcast the most puerile of opinions from the rich and famous. Penniless peons die every day, anonymously and under terrible duress; but it is the wealthy folks in the big cities who fill the tribute sections of newspapers when they drop dead, having bought their legacy in sponsorship deals and billion-yuan houses.

Zhang and I are silent for a while, and content ourselves with watching the sunrise. I invite him back inside for some tea and steamed buns, and he accepts graciously—perhaps a little apologetic after such an early-morning argument. Ten minutes later, I wave him off down the street, tinkling back to the hotel on his bicycle.

I do not think I will see him again before he leaves for the coast.

Stephan 

Rain falls over Pleasant Valley. The neighborhood’s microclimate dome arches overhead, its chromatophoric cells reflecting a sweep of metallic gray instead of its usual sunny blue. The ratio of simulated rain days is something like 1:14 this year—Jaine and I had been at the community meeting when they voted on it. Pleasant Valley is one of the nicer domed communities in Stamford, and its developers have always responded well to residential opinions.

I take the stairs to the living room like an awkward crab-thing. It has been six months since Xin Xi’an, and my leg still cannot take too much weight. The soft hum of the massage chair saturates the living room. Jaine smiles as I lean in to kiss her cheek—then covers up her head with her hands.

“Don’t look at me. Dana had an off day at the salon last night. I look like I should be in some pre-millennial boy band.”

I laugh. The glow of the telewall fills the room, and I spend the next five minutes trying to coax her hands from her hair. Outside the window, beyond the simulated rain and the siliglass canopy, the coastline sits in its usual haze of smog.

“Oh, hey,” Jaine says suddenly, forgetting about her hair-related woes. “You have mail from your Tibetan boy.”

She grabs the mo-flip, pulling up a short message in broken English.

“There was even a picture in it. Have you seen? Oh, it’s just horrible what these poor people have to live with, Stephan. Just heartbreaking. I meant to tell you about it yesterday, but I was so distraught after the salon it completely slipped my mind . . . ”

I shake my head sadly at the picture: a sky-running troupe, hooded and masked, staring like blank-eyed ghosts out of a smog bank. I dress myself in double-time and try to shake off the weekend-morning haze. Monday was going to be the second round of advisory reports to Scott Timwell, the Special Projects manager at Weidmann-Colliers—a recap of all the data analysis following our Xin Xi’an trip. Between our conflicting work schedules, Saturday was the only time Wesley and I had to get together and finalize the presentation.

“Hey, will you be seeing your friend Wesley today?”

“He’s not my friend, hon. We’ve just known each other since college, that’s all.”

“Well, just tell him about my fundraiser if you do, will you? We could use his business.”

I groan inwardly, picturing Wes’ smirking face over his trademark, sardonic swank.

“I can already tell you what he’s going to say—‘no’—in the most insulting way he can manage. Remember the Dance for Somalia bash at St. James? He called it the ‘new-age White Man’s Burden.’”

“Did he really?”

I nod. Jaine purses her lips, her eyes flickering as she leans deeper into the massage pads.

“Everyone’s so spiritually empty, these days. They don’t know how to empathize with the common folks, the way we do. People like Wesley need our help as much as that Tibetan boy.”

I nod in agreement.

“Anyway, have yourself a wonderful day, dear. And don’t forget to collect your overtime this time around.”

My ears pop with the air pressure as I step out of the neighborhood airlock. I take the underground path for the tram on foot, its dank, municipally-filtered air in sharp contrast to the imported quality of Pleasant Valley.

We pull out of the station in good time. Pleasant Valley fades small on the horizon. We blaze through Greenwich and Port Chester, flashing between bustling domes and abandoned suburbs. The skeletal houses of the old suburban sprawl blur in the haze. We pass the open-air grime of South Bronx, where masked people stalk the acid-rain streets, their breathers as surreal as staring ghosts. My flip beeps as we duck back underground at upper Manhattan. A few minutes later, Wesley comes slogging through the cabin, clutching a coffee and a breather, and what looks like a terrible hangover.

“Christ, you will not believe the riffraff in the public cars. Some people just can’t control their kids.” He elbows past some tourists in the adjacent seats. “Thank God for business-level seating.”

I nod absently. When the oil market collapsed, some folks fell back on cycling, and some shelled out a fortune to continue running on gas—AlternaCorp even launched a line of solar- and nuke-cars to some serious marketing fanfare back in ’49, though that venture never really took off. In the end, the big money proved to be in public infrastructure, as the cities converted to hydrogen and electric. The system in the tristate is managed by Transat, who run their commuters’ trams with an executive lounge in the first car, business seats following up after, and public seating for the next fifteen lengths—each section with its own exits and loading platforms, to avoid congestion for the high rollers. Wesley, as always, prefers to travel business—but personally, I’m more of a man of the people, so I’ve never really minded the squeeze.

“You look wasted.”

“Hrmph,” says Wesley, downing his coffee. “Me and Crosby went out with a bunch of chicks from PR last night. We drank. Everything.”

“Ah.”

“Not as exciting as it sounds, I promise. Cheap club. Municipal-aired shithole.” He starts up from his coffee as if remembering something. “One of the girls said she knows you, apparently. A delightful career bitch under Ronscelles. Angela Whitman, you know her?”

We pull into the financial district and squeeze through the throng, mostly shoppers and tourists in town for the weekend. One level above us, the private single-cars of the exclusive service come and go with easy precision.

“I know her mother, for heaven’s sake. Please don’t put your moves on this girl, Wes. And for heaven’s sake, don’t call her the b-word.”

We walk out of the station, into the noise of the Manhattan streetscape, gleaming steel and plastimer in its perpetual upward sprawl. A sprinkling of hydrogen cars trudge doggedly through the tide of cyclists under the microclimate canopies. Wesley shakes his head in front of me as we weave through the crowd.

“You know, sometimes I have trouble believing that we’re the same age, Steve. You’re fat and disapproving enough to be my father.”

The rest of the morning passes in a flurry of datapads. We work nonstop until three, when Wesley decides he can’t hold up anymore and calls for delivery. We root around for our flips, throwing open the window as the gunmetal gray of the delivery drone buzzes its way towards our floor.

“Thank you for ordering at Rubarb’s Deli.”

Wesley makes the payment with his flip and digs into his Reuben—New York style with mustard—the lump of salted meats bursting from the bread like a cow stuffed between two crackers. He casts around for conversation, eyes lingering over the miscellany on my desk.

“That’s new,” he says, gesturing at the handful of talcum crystals by the keyboard. “What is it?”

“Some of the Leibenstein crystals from the mountain—the ones our guide seeded with the local tian-zhi, remember? Look,” I pull out a vial from my drawer. “I had Stephano from R&D collect some plant extract from the stems I got.”

Wesley laughs, looking down at my bad leg and the cane leaning awkwardly against my desk. I turn a little red.

“There might be practical uses for this tian-zhi stuff, you know. It’s not purely sentimental.”

Wesley chews skeptically.

“The locals said they’re hardly worth a buck.”

“Well, yes—but I’ve been thinking—what if we were able to precipitate the tian-zhi out of the solid? Stephano thinks it might be possible to isolate the nucleating agent . . . ”

Wesley wolfs down the rest of his sandwich and misses the wastebasket with the balled-up wrapper.

“So, what, you alchemy the shit out of this thing and remove the tian-stuff? What would you have left over?” He picks a crystal from my desk, squinting at it through the flexiglass glare like a gold appraiser.

“Something like a Leibenstein cube, most likely. The catch is, the locals use these unrefined crystals for decoration—which means they can be kept for years, outside of a cooled and pressurized container . . . ”

I let the sentence hang. Wesley licks a sliver of meat out of his teeth.

“Are you saying you could distill market-ready, Leibenstein air-cubes from this chaff?”

“Well, maybe not market-ready—but theoretically . . . ” I watch with some satisfaction as he snaps from the desk, to the window, to the datawall. Files open and bleep as he brings up the company’s inventory and shipping manifestos.

“Steve. This is alchemy,” he mumbles, scrolling through the wall frenetically. “Fucking, volume, man. Lead into gold.”

“Well, look: let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. It’s just a theory that we started thinking about the other day—”

“How many people have you told?”

I stop. Wesley looks at me like a shark that’s just smelled blood.

“Uh. Just Stephano, so far.”

“Good. Tell him not to breathe a word of this to anyone else.”

He turns back to the datawall and starts scrolling again.

“The first mention of this in print is damn well going to have our names on it.”

Angela 

“Down with Weidman-Colliers! No foreign air!”

“Move on, get out of the way!”

The canopy hangs above in its usual cloudless blue, throwing stark patches of light and shadow onto the crowd. A thin woman with teeth like a leopard grabs my arm and gives me a face-full of bile.

“American jobs are not a commodity!” She screeches. “NO FOREIGN AIR!”

I shake her off. There’s nothing I can say to her—nothing she’d listen to, anyway. Historically, every domestic attempt at sky-running has always been hobbled by expensive labor and unsustainable profit margins. What she should have been doing was yelling at the geriatric men in Congress—they were the ones who’d legislated against the WC biotech that would have made the domestic air trade viable again. Their arguments boiled down to the fear that it could damage the ecology of the clean-air zones. Late and reactionary, as usual; sixty years ago, the entire country was a clean-air zone.

“Can you believe this, Angie?” Loris says as we duck into the foyer. It’d been no small surprise when Ronscelles suddenly retired last month and dumped the whole PR clusterfuck on us. The atrium doors slide shut on the chanting protestors outside, and a voice in my head slaps me with a stern little reprimand.

No, not a clusterfuck—that was the wrong way to think about it.

An opportunity.

“American jobs are not a commodity!”

“Down with Weidman-Colliers!”

We pile in line for the lobby bistro, behind tired-eyed suits looking frazzled by the protestors outside. Halfway through our line up, I spot a familiar smirk drifting past the procession. The Hughes half of our proprietary Anderson-Hughes compound. The great Mr. Ego himself.

“Jaysus Christ. Can you believe this riffraff?”

“Morning, Wes.”

He slips into the line as if we were saving him a spot all along.

“I hear Burnham’s been throwing a fit over these protests,” he says, tossing a distasteful glace at the crowd outside. “You got a game plan for the meeting today?”

I yawn and wave my flip noncommittally.

“Present a human face to the news outlets. Work the consumer benefits angle. The classic.”

“Same as Ronscelles?”

I shake my head, remembering the defensive, smarmy ad sketches that Loris had forwarded to me. Apologetic little numbers that started off with “we know you don’t know who to trust, and you’re pretty sure it isn’t us . . . ”

“Ronscelles played it way too passive.” I grab a frothing latte out of the barista’s hands. “If we’re going to be that apologetic, we might as well be guilty. You don’t win public confidence by being a quivering, defensive quim.”

“What’s your take, then?”

I shrug.

“They’re playing up the blue-collar advocate angle—well, we can play that game too. If our ops go through, we can provide people with clean air for a fraction of the current market price, effectively putting it within range of working-class families.” I gesture at the sign-waving crowd outside. “And what kind of snooty protectionist would fight against that?”

Loris munches his Danish skeptically. “People tend to approach these things with their minds already made up.”

Wesley nods. I take a deep draught of my coffee, tasting the scalding latte on my tongue.

“There’s a reason you don’t work in PR, boys. The point is, we don’t need to win over everyone. At the end of the day, there are more Americans who want clean air than there are sky-runners who want jobs.”

Loris smiles and nods.

Blue-collar sympathy is worth its weight in gold these days.

My father used to say that the biggest mistake of the uninitiated mind is to divide the world into truths and falsehoods, as if they’re two equal sections of a pie. The world is more complicated than that. Leave the black-and-white thinking to the children and the partisans, he’d say—there’s always a truth and a more marketable counter-truth. The point is to steer the public towards a truth that’s more convenient for you.

Truth: The American sky-runner is now a superfluous commodity in a free market of twelve billion, each willing to work heavier loads, longer hours, for a fraction of the cost.

Truth: The move to foreign air will drive floundering domestic operators under completely, resulting in a net loss of American jobs.

Counter-truth: Moving to foreign air will allow the new WC biotech to be used on a commercial level, which will in turn lower prices of Lebenstein air-cubes to within the reach of working class families, reducing the rate of asthma, emphysema, and other air-quality diseases, and improving overall quality of life—especially for those on the bottom ends of society.

All of these things are true. The job of a good PR doc is to make sure that the more convenient truth gets picked up and talked about by the general public. It’s the same doublespeak that allowed millennial ideologues to march under banners of “pro-choice” and “pro-life”, instead of the more-accurate-but-less-marketable, “pro-abortion” and “anti-abortion.” You can call cigarettes “cancer-sticks,” or cheese graters “sponge-ruiners”—twist meaning and perception all around in a catchy sound bite—and still end up with the same net quanta of truth. The screeching protectionists had no objections fifty years ago, when the doublespeak was working to their benefit—but now that they’ve realized the system runs both ways . . .

“Down with Weidman-Colliers!”

In the end, it was another six months of finagling press releases and calling in favors from people I haven’t seen since university before we put the controversy to bed.

The hologlass banners of the 36th Annual Business Innovation Gala glow like mirages overhead, our Weidman-Colliers sponsorship ad dominating the bottom quarter. The lights dim and the music rises. I thank the MC and the band—I thank the guests and the Chamber of Commerce. When the applause dies down, I make my way out of the limelight, shuddering at the thought of how many favors I now owe. Snippets of conversation assault my ears as I push through the guest area:

“I liked the presentation from Kaltec. Outside-the-box thinking: seeding the Anderson-Hughes right into the atmosphere, using open-air implosions for maximum volume.”

“Well, they’d better work out a clean-zone for heavy and light particulates—”

“Of course.”

“And obviously figure out some kind of collection process—”

“—obviously.”

“There’s my Golden Girl,” Ted Burnham thunders as I approach the WC tables. There’s a round of obligatory flattery from the assembled faces. I tip them a toast in mock humility.

“Let me see, let me see—have you met Avery Rhaman, our CTO? And I think you know our very own Stephan Anderson and Wesley Hughes?”

“Yeah, we’re acquainted.”

I take the empty seat next to Loris.

“Damn good turnout tonight. Damn good,” Burnham says, patting his paunch. “Hell of a turnaround from where we were six months ago.”

I take a swig of champagne and massage my tired eyes. A suit pipes up from the other end of the table:

“Good show on getting the boys in the Chamber, too. Our guy in Washington says we can expect some solid support next election cycle—maybe find a way around the domestic ban . . . ”

I recognize the speaker: Larry Brzozowski, one of mine. It’s a classic line that’s been bouncing around the department—but the truth is, half of it is bravado. Ever since the gas markets collapsed, the DC field has normalized around a staunch lip service to conservation—dogmatic and overbearingly shrill, in the way of most way-too-late-to-matter reactionaries. The epithet “robber baron” has made a comeback, and accusing an opponent of being a heartless industrialist is now the go-to smear for spin-doctors and character-assassins across the political spectrum.

I down my drink and excuse myself for a smoke. Reactionary old men and their reactionary caucuses. A few months ago, a couple of protestors found their way into our press conference and tried to storm the stage. As they were dragged out, one of them turned to me and said:

“You don’t know, girl. You gray-gens have no idea what a blue sky even looks like . . . ”

The old man obviously thought he’d made some kind of point, because he stopped resisting security after that. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. You gray-gens—you gray-gens. As if it was somehow our fault for being born after the last generation smothered the sky.

I blow a column of smoke at the twinkling canopy overhead. I’m no stranger to sentiment, but that sort of mawkish obsession with the greener pastures of the past has always irked me. I’ve seen my fill of starry nights and sweeping sunrises on old holotapes. It’s nothing the chromatiphores can’t replicate. Yet if the old men and the stuffy politicians are to be believed, my entire generation should feel guilty because we learned to make our own blue skies, rather than pining for the one our parents destroyed before we were born.

I finish my cig and toss it into the path of a humming sweeperbot.

I’m twenty-seven, and I’ve never seen the stars.

Frankly, I don’t miss them at all.

Dr. Zhang 

The tram blazes through the Chengdu prefecture, turning the landscape outside into expressionist art. A cup of barley tea sits to my left. Big Zhou is on my right, squinting at the grayscale tide of humanity below. Rickshaws and bicycles ply the open-air streets. Out in the distance, we can just make out the gleaming domes of the state-run greenhouses on the Chengdu Plains.

“Thirty-nine years, Zhou,” I sigh over the steaming cup. “That’s how long it’s been since we’ve been here.”

Zhou chuckles.

“I was here last year, but I take your point. The world moves fast when you’re old, huh?”

I yawn and massage my eyes feverishly, feeling the unpleasant grit of eye-gunk on my thumbs. Old is not the word I have in mind. Old is respected. Old is venerable. But this empty, scraped-out feeling, this weariness in my bones that has nothing to do with sleep . . .

Last time I was here, I could still see the sky.

My flip beeps with an incoming message, but I swipe away the alerts and try to return to the budget spreadsheet. Numbers roll like mnemonics through my brain. Zhou once said that in business, profit is king, and in life, money is freedom. To exist without money is to exist without station, on the whims of another’s charity. It makes me wonder why he’s stuck it out with me as long as he has, begging at the hems of businessmen and bureaucrats, over an idealism that should’ve died long ago, when we were young men.

I swipe my flip shut and chug down the scalding cup of tea.

“I’ve come to a conclusion, old friend.”

“What’s that now?”

“I fucking hate nonprofit administration.”

Big Zhou guffaws over his tea like a jolly old Buddha. The city center glitters like a swelling jewel on the horizon.

I stare out the window, futilely hoping to spot a shred of blue in the haze.

We make it to the city center with twenty minutes to spare. The district pulses with a stylish beat under the glittering canopies, and we take the Wenxi chute skywards, coming up to the Hundredth-Floor restaurant in a swoop of acceleration.

The private bureaucrats’ room opens in a blur of light and import-quality air. We do our usual scan around the room, finding and paying respects to the senior officials gathered around the table. I shake hands with the city’s Party Secretary. Down the table, the directors of Xintian busy themselves in conversation with a few SOE reps on the logistic side of things. I groan as the last smarmy face comes into focus: the infamous NGO-eater, Ji Wenxiou. As a by-product of the Communist Party’s institutional paranoia, he had the distinction of having the most stupidly ironic job title I’ve ever seen: General Supervisor of the G-NGOs—the “Governmental Non-Governmental Organizations.”

“This guy,” I mumble into Big Zhou’s ear, “has been going around shutting down half the NGOs in the southwest. Are we supposed to buddy up to that snake?”

Zhou’s beaming smile doesn’t miss a beat.

“You never were any good at this game, Zhang. Follow my lead, and remember: guanxi. Be kind, be pleasant, do a favor and get one in turn.”

He grips Ji Wenxiou’s hand and lavishes him with praise. When the bureaucrat turns away to greet the other guests, Zhou turns back to me with a sardonic smile.

“We do, after all, exist on the charity of others.”

The rest of the dinner goes as well as I expect. The opening salvo of small talk is fairly harmless—a few references to my previous tenure at Jiaotong University, and some disingenuous praise of a collection of essays I published last year. A fat party official to my right comments that the volume would’ve been bestseller material, were it not for its bleak overtones.

“The point is to engender positive conversation about the party’s vision for society. My wife used to work with poor children in Chongqing—so I know all about the concerns on the ground. But still, you’ve got to try to find some romance in it. You’ll never be on a bestseller list if you’re always, hrm, doom-and-gloom all the time.”

Taking a sip of his rice wine, he adds:

“My boy volunteered all over Yunnan, you know,” as if that settled the matter. “My daughter went to Cambodia.”

I smile politely and defer to the authority of his poverty-tourist kin. Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, the conversation is winding toward business: the proposed Expedited Processing Zone in Xizang, and the experimental tech that a foreign importer had tabled at the Shanghai International Summit. Big Zhou nudges me to pay closer attention.

“As for the amount of volume this new tech is supposed to generate—if anyone’s worried about devaluing the product—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. The central government has enough fingers in that pie to prevent any undercutting of our domestic market—the SOE’s, too. This is about exports. We get their tech, and they get a break on tariffs as a state-sanctioned partner.”

“And what about the ecological damage? I heard the only reason they’re here is because their own government blocked their tech in America.”

Their eyes turn toward me and Zhou. I clear my throat and pull up the introduction holo on my flip.

“Well, full disclosure, gentlemen: I’m no ecologist. But our organization has a long track record of health and environmental monitoring all across the southwest—including sky-running hot spots like Xin Xi’an. We’ve already expressed our willingness to come on board and observe the enterprise as a third-party—”

Ji Wenxiou clears his throat from across the table. The room is silent as the NGO-eater speaks, rolling his r’s in a thick northern accent.

“Monitoring is one thing, Dr. Zhang—perhaps that’s something that we’ll ask of you, in time. As of now, we envision your organization to fit a more—hrm, advisory role.”

I say nothing, waiting for him to elaborate.

“Speaking frankly, doctor, we want your reputation. Your involvement helps to reassure the general public against rumormongers on the intranet—but please understand that any publication of health or environmental issues will be handled exclusively by the central publicity department.”

“So, the actual monitoring—”

“Will not be any of your concern. The publicity department will provide you with briefs, and you are expected to deliver them to the public.”

“In other words, you’re looking for yes-men—not a third-party watchdog.”

Big Zhou gives me a warning nudge under the table.

“Call it what you will, doctor—we simply offer this partnership as a win-win arrangement. There are significant sponsorship opportunities for you if you do decide to come on board.” He fixes his eyes on mine. “And those would be funds that you can freely use elsewhere.”

A murmur of consensus passes around the Xintian and SOE representatives. Big Zhou nudges me again under the table. I smile stiffly and swipe away the holo with shaking hands.

“I—we will definitely take that into account.” My face feels like cracked glass as I smile at each of the bureaucrats in turn. “Thank you all very much for the opportunity.”

“Well. I think that went as well as expected, don’t you?”

Chengdu passes in a blur of humanity and neon. We walk the city center on foot, having made our excuses at the various “extracurricular” offers that were extended to us. The fat party official had been insistent on going to some luxury sauna that sells love by the hour. Big Zhou had laughed him off when he made his overtures.

“Central is launching its biggest anti-graft campaign in decades, and the idiot still can’t keep it in his pants. He’s going to get shuanggui’d by the CCDI sooner or later, you mark my words.”

I sigh and massage my eyes. The sinusoidal dance of intra-party corruption is an old, tired refrain. A sweeping anti-graft campaign every time a new strongman crops up in Beijing—and then a slow, gradual resettlement into the familiar web of backroom nepotism. Culling the flies while breeding the maggots, the netizens called it.

The noisy cityscape pounds a drumbeat against the inside of my skull. The lingering rice wine in my system makes me hot and hazy, and the faces of bureaucrats merge with the figures on my budget spreadsheet. I stop to lean against an artificial tree, suddenly aware of the aches in my joints, the gray in my hair. The rolling accent of the NGO-eater fills my mind.

“There are significant sponsorship opportunities for you if you do decide to come on board—and those would be funds you can freely use elsewhere.”

Overhead, lights from the skyscrapers heliograph through a translucent canopy. The sky-chutes flow upwards, channeling all towards those inscrutable, artificial peaks. Up, up—the power and the wealth. I crane my neck and wonder if there’s any end to it—if there is still an inflection point at which they might blow through the ceiling, catapulted into a gray, dusty grave by their own inertia, like all the pre-peak pundits had so wrongly predicted they would. I’m reminded of something I once heard in Xin Xi’an: the rich will always find a way to live well, even when the world chokes and starves around them.

I sigh as we move through the station, squinting at my reflection in the moving tram doors.

“Tell me the truth, Zhou. Do you think we’re actually doing any good here?” The tram hisses to a stop. “Or are we just a pair of self-righteous old men, bargain hunting for our own moral gratification?”

My knees pop as we sit down by the window. Above us, there’s only smog and darkness: no moon, no stars. Below, the feeble firefly lights of crank-lamps dance among the bicycles and rickshaws on the open-air street. Zhou busies himself with his complimentary barley tea, then turns to me and grins.

“I don’t see why it can’t be a little bit of both.”

Boy 

The wind howls over Big Sky Ridge.

A light acid drizzle settles into droplets on our breather-lens. I wipe my thumb across the American-made surface—Stephan had accidentally left it behind years ago, and had passed it on to me with his blessings. We’ve kept in touch the best we could over the years, though lately, he has stopped writing.

Old man Li holds his finger up to the wind. A straight-angled shadow passes over the mountain. He looks up and frowns. Then, a mighty roar—thundering, bone-rattling, as though the mountain itself were coming to life.

“What the hell?” Fong yells, gripping his ears under his breather. Our troupe presses back against the shadow of the cliffs. Only Jinjin, still green and oblivious to danger of rockslides, steps out into the open for a better look.

“What is it?”

“A bird?”

“It’s too high. Going too fast.”

I squint at the silhouette cutting through the sky-smog. Fong is right. A bird that high up would have been poisoned by now. The roaring continues, a deep, dark timbre that rattles our bones. We look at each other, but none of us want to be the first one to say it.

“It’s a petrol plane!” Jinjin squeals, not caring about sounding stupid.

“It can’t be.”

“A real-life petrol plane!”

We squint at the shape fading into the smog: the straight, unyielding cut of the wings, the wide plumes trailing behind, just like the pictures on Dhampa’s TV.

“It must be billionaire Americans!”

“I bet it’s the premier of China!”

“Is it the army? A secret weapon. Nobody will expect a plane!”

Another thundering roar echoes across the mountain, and Jinjin almost loses his footing as he jumps and whoops in excitement. I pull at his back to stop him from plummeting. A second plane strafes between the peaks. Up above, in the distance, a third, trailing wide plumes from its tail that seems to spread and dance in the wind. The smell of tian-zhi fills the air.

“Three planes! Three!”

“They’re stirring up the sky-smog,” Old man Li grumbles.

We watch the stiff-angled shadows strafe back towards us, parting the smog as they come. Jinjin shakes with excitement. Fong and Xiaoling have taken off their breathers entirely, squinting red-eyed against the acid drizzle.

They are still busy gawping when the world explodes.

The first blast knocks me off my feet. The mountain shakes as a shower of rocks rain down on our heads. A huge gust of wind catches me in the chest, nearly hurling me off the edge. I scramble instinctively towards the shelter of the cliff-face as talcum rocks scatter around our feet.

“What the hell is happening?”

Three more blasts pummel us in reply. Old man Li is yelling, straining against the wind, dragging a shell-shocked Fong in one arm and the unstrapped L-box in the other. I feel rather than hear the next few blasts. By then, we’re all flying down the rock-shard slope like all the hounds of hell were after us. Talcum shards rain down like hailstones, welting our necks and clipping our ears. We run until our joints creak, until our lungs ache.

It is a long time before the blasts stop—even longer before our ringing ears can hear again. We pad dumbly down the mountainside on legs as soft as rice pudding, occasionally catching each others’ eyes as we turn to look at the swirling mess of sky-smog the planes had left behind. Down in the lowlands, the blackness of the valley-smog seems to be stirring too.

As we reach the foot of the long cliff, Fong grunts from behind me.

“Looks like it’s going to be a smog night.”

Old Li grumbles, staring at the roiling blackness in the valleys below.

“At this time of year.”

Dhampa is livid when we get back to the shop.

“That damned L-box is worth more than all of your salaries combined!”

His hands fly back and forth over the dented contraption, like a father trying to comfort an injured child. He flicks the box on for a few test implosions, and only softens when he sees that it still works.

“And where the hell did you get this sky, anyway? It won’t fetch half the price of your usual haul . . . ” He squints at the evanescing lapis that we’d gotten halfway down the mountain.

“Something happened up on the mountain, Dhampa.”

“We told you, boss,” says a middle-aged man from another troupe. “Something big happened. Something exploded.”

Dhampa stares us down as if waiting for an answer.

“Well?”

Old man Li shrugs. Our feet are bruised and our ears still thrum to the aftershocks of explosions. We are stiff-faced and silent, like a troupe that’s just lost a member to a rockslide or a loose footing. We know that something big has happened—we know in our bones that something has changed. But we haven’t the words to say anything out loud, not even to ourselves.

At night, we sleep with our breathers on. Mornings come in an indistinguishable haze of gray and black. Most days, we manage to make it three-quarters of the way to Big Sky Ridge before the explosions drive us away again. Our habitual climb up the mountain has become an unfamiliar minefield, and even the smog of the skies and valleys no longer follow their old, familiar convections. Through the breaks in the haze, we can see dark swirls churning up from the lowlands, as if the earth itself had opened up and was hungrily clawing for the sky.

“It’s the middle of winter,” Old Li grumbles daily into the gray. “The valley-smog should have cleared up by now.”

On the sixth day, we’re almost run down on the road as we return to the city in the dark. A sudden halo of light swallows the smog-veiled highway behind us, and the convoy roars by in a blast of sound and grit, forcing Fong to jump the crumbling divider to avoid being hit. We gape dumbly in their wake. The night is silent, except for Fong cussing his brains out on the roadside.

“Petrol cars,” Jinjin trembles with excitement. “Real-life petrol cars! They must be rich out of their minds!”

“Only one place in town that lot can be headed,” old man Li mumbles.

We detour through the bureaucrats’ district on our way back to the shop. Most of the trucks have disappeared into the bowels of the canopied complex, but a few sit on the street outside, crouching like mythical beasts in the smog. Rough-looking army men flank the gates, ushering people in expensive-looking clothes into the compound. Some of their breathers look American-made, and I have to fight down a sudden urge to shout Stephan’s name down the street, as if he would perk up and come right out of the complex to greet me.

By the time we get back to the shop, dinner is already over. Fong grumbles as old lady Liu scoops the bottom-of-the-pot dregs into our bowls, and we suck down the gristle as quickly as we can. The mood in the shop is gloomier than usual. Dhampa does not even comment on the quality of our sky as we take inventory.

“You hear about the petrol-trucks at the bureaucrats’ compound today?” Fong says, dumping his canisters on the counter. Dhampa hands him a meager wad of bills, eyes dark under his breather-mask. “Damn near ran us over on the main road . . . ”

“It’s the same buggers who are making a mess up on the mountains, I’ll bet,” says one of the other troupe leaders. “Who else would be rich enough to ride around in petrol-machines?”

“I heard they’re foreigners.” Jinjin bounces up and dumps his stash of canisters onto the counter.

“Don’t be daft. We saw the army out there—they wouldn’t be working for foreigners.”

“Nuh-uh. I heard they’ve come for the sky. Mama Liu says they’re going to put Dhampa out of business.”

A collective hush falls on the hall. Dhampa slams the next few canisters onto the counter, and practically throws the money at Jinjin’s face.

“Ah, come on, Dhampa. The kid doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

Dhampa does not respond. He stares bitterly out the pitch-black window, slamming canisters down on automatic. When the accounts are paid and the room has emptied, he pulls off his breather-mask and pours an entire flask of his foul-smelling tharra down his throat.

“Goddamned rich folks and their petrol machines,” he mumbles as he stalks away. “Wave a profit in their face, and they bring down the entire goddamned sky.”

Dhampa’s old computer hums fitfully in the back room. I stuff my clothes into improvised rucksacks and wait for the machine to load. Fiber weave strains and cardboard groans as the bulging sacks are tied together.

Dhampa hadn’t given us much of a warning when he sold the shop, but most of us had seen it coming. The army men had been turning people away from the mountains for months, with incomprehensible explanations of “foreign partners” and “state-controlled enterprises.” Most troupes had no trouble taking the footpaths to get around them, but between the implosions and the constant smog, the entire operation had become a risky, unprofitable business. Every day is a smog day now, and we barely get the chance to take off our breathers, even during the cold nights.

I turn and check on Dhampa’s old, clunking machine. There is nothing new in my electronic mailbox. Nothing from Stephan. Dhampa had laughed in my face when I told him that I was going to ask the foreigner’s advice.

“You think a rich pug like him is going to care about your peasant problems?”

“Why not? He said before that he was concerned about our situation—”

“Your situation, boy. After all, you have nothing and you demand nothing. You are their perfect, doe-eyed little victim.”

He emptied his flask and walked away.

I did not tell him that I hadn’t heard from Stephan in more than a year.

That night, I sleep in an empty room. Fong and Jinjin had left for the inland three days ago, and old man Li had gone down to the valleys. Most of the other troupes were finding work with the army men, who were supposedly paying two yuan per kilo to anyone interested in collecting the tian-zhi rocks that had fallen in the mountains.

I close my eyes. Everything I own sits underneath my bunk, tied up in cardboard and fiber weave. The savings in my pocket are just enough to buy one train ticket as far as Chongqing. I pull my covers over my face, and try my best to shut out the what ifs and maybes that whirl around my mind.

Maybe one day, I will follow Fong inland.

Maybe one day, I will save up enough money to go to the rich cities along the coast, like Shanghai or Beijing. Maybe I will even travel far, far west, to America, and I will walk the streets of those impossible, gleaming cities, and find the people who brought the sky down on Xiao Hui Cheng.

Maybe one day, I will get the chance to tell them to give it back.

About the Author

Alan Bao is an illustrator and multimedia designer currently bouncing around East Asia with no real plans or life goals. He has been known to occasionally write poetry and prose in order to cope with the bone-breaking emotional strain of drawing pretty pictures for a living.

His work has been published sporadically in places like Ricepaper and Cicada Magazine. He spends his free time traveling, jamming, and feeling vaguely under-qualified while browsing other people’s author biographies.

When We Find Our Voices

Eleanna Castroianni

They load us on a boat on the night when the moon’s egg cracks. I put one foot behind the other on unsteady cedar wood planks, my ankle ornaments shaking. We are veiled in purple damask, our hair and feathers oiled with aromatic resin. By the time we reach the shore, the smells of tar and stale water will have latched onto us, baptizing us in the memory of blood.

The lake shimmers crimson against the lantern light. Nyalu huddles close to me and I’m trapped between his spicy breath and the lacquered boxes that contain our few possessions. Beneath our veils, he links a talon to mine, our feathers brushing one against the other in comfort. He is looking away from me, beyond the boats floating around us, towards the bonfires waiting on the other side. His profile is glowing red-white, aquiline nose and swanlike cheekbones.

When he’s not watching I steal a glance back, to our island. They say it’s bad luck to look over your shoulder on weddings and on funerals, because you’re looking back at a life that needs to end.

“You’re still close,” Nyalu whispers without lifting his eyes from the bonfires. I can barely hear him over the sound of oars against water. “Take in as much as you can.”

As we draw farther from our shore and closer to our new homes, I follow his eyes. The faces of our husbands stare at us. Each of them is holding a torch as if they’re about to set things on fire. Each of them is wearing undecipherable expressions on smooth faces, the highlights and the shadows of the torch flame dancing over their features like moths.

Nyalu squeezes my hand, burying a blunt talon into my flesh as if to wake me up from sleep. It’s time to wear our wedding rings—the gifts sent to the island two moons ago, for our husband to mark us as his. Nyalu slips one pearl-white ring over my wrist, then traces the chain to find the other one; I push it down gently over his hand. His fingers shake—it’s not the boat’s rocking. The pairs of brides around us are already restless, already standing on their feet inside the boats, wings flapping anxiously underneath their veils.

The hairless, featherless arms of men are tying our boats to the pier, unloading the stacks of lacquered boxes. A gloved hand reaches out. Nyalu is behind me and almost loses his balance as he hops from wood over water and onto the earth.

Beneath our feet we find flat, concrete rock. We careen through the silent faces of husbands, through a swarm of veils, feathers, hands, and feet covered in bridal tattoos. No words of welcome, no music or dance to celebrate the group wedding. No mothers-in-law to host us. This is a nation of men.

When our feet touch the shore, we’re married to the land. When we reach the country of the Un-Adapted, we belong to them.

The stars unfurl like ribbons above us. Between unsmiling faces of stark shadows, between the chains of gold and silver, bone, iron, and coral, I see the man that carries a pearl-white chain. Our eyes lock and I float his way, dragging Nyalu behind me.

“Is that him?” he whispers into my ear and I squeeze his hand in response. Our husband turns his back to us and, without a word, without a touch, starts walking home.

Nyalu and I will share a room. A servant takes us to the bridecote and we are left to stare at each other. Since we found him on the pier, our husband hasn’t spoken a word to us.

The room is small and dark, but it smells of roses and is equipped with every possible comfort—although weapons, knives and anything that could be used to cause harm are strictly forbidden. We are shown a little protrusion on the wall. When down, it’s dark. When up, the room is full of artificial light, making evenings as bright as days. The room is warm, but we see no fire. What strikes me most is the tub that can be filled with hot water. We are used to bathing in the lake and warming tubs of water sounds wasteful. The Sons of Man have all these tek-magics we barely remember, although even they must use them wisely now. For our husband to have all these luxuries in his home he truly must be a powerful man.

On the table, there’s an earthenware bowl of thick cream littered with flower petals, and a plate of thin biscuits smelling of seed grass and rain. The smell is enough for me to notice how hungry I am. The full, buttery taste of the cream leaves me stunned. We’ve never had food as good as this. We grew up in scarcity, yet here is the land of plenty. All I can hear is my teeth’s clatter and suddenly I see Nyalu’s tears.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not brave.”

Nyalu first tells me the same thing three years ago. It is the time when the moon cracks and acidic blood colors the water of the lake red. The time when brides leave to meet their husbands.

On this day, the year of our first birthday after we turn twelve, we are designated a bridal couple by a paya elder and we are asked to bathe our arm-wings in the bloodied lake and burn the tips of our feathers, to brandish them in the vitriol that will dye them scarlet forever. They give us roses to eat and mine are salted with Nyalu’s tears. Men and women of our kind are allowed to show emotion—men are supposed to lean more toward anger and passion, women toward sadness and exuberance. But I’m neither man nor woman; I’m etu, and it is not acceptable for us to display any emotional extreme. Sometimes people tend to think we don’t feel at all.

“Keredi, I’m not sad because you’re my pair,” he says, wiping his tears hastily. Some of these, I think, are tears of happiness. “I’m so glad we’ll be brides together. I wouldn’t want anyone else.”

I say that I know and that I feel the same. I let him cry inside my arms and feel my own forbidden tears finding a way out through his.

He lifts his head to look into my eyes. His irises, awash in saltwater, have faded from tree-bark brown to a golden honey hue. His breath smells of roses. “I cry because I’m not brave,” he says.

Our world once cracked like the moon’s edge does, once every three years. Blood water rained from the skies and burned us, changed us. To survive, we were made into what we are today: Descendants of Bird. When I travel further back inside my mind’s time, I remember paya Alti saying it was the things that the Sons of Man did to our land, when they arrived from their faraway homeland. Those were the things that ruined our world, that changed it forever. Once they destroyed their own, they sought other worlds to satisfy their greed.

“They harnessed the forbidden power of beasts to fuel their perverse visions and desires,” the paya says, eyebrows curling fiercely like shiny beetles. We are sitting inside a grove’s cool shade, paya on a rock, we on the ground.

“So the Sons of Man tamed the gru?” a girl asks, her jaw slightly ajar in a foolish manner.

We watch the paya’s eyes widen with well-controlled indignation. “Idiot!” the paya exclaims, as they do every time. Paya Alti is etu—but also very old and very opinionated and their failed efforts to control emotion are endearing to our eyes. “Idiot!” We are holding our bellies from laughter, yet paya Alti is oblivious to our amusement. They take a piece of calico fabric out of a pocket and wipe the sweat trickling down their temples. Hot summer days are tough because of all the thick, black-and-white feather ruffle around their neck. This makes the paya look even more comic to our eyes. “Not gru, of course not gru! You think a trunked beast could crack the ground in two and make rain of blood? Beasts of power, idiot! The beast that made light. The beast that made warmth. And so on. These are the gods of the Sons of Man. The gods they made for themselves. The gods that almost destroyed them!”

“Why don’t the Sons of Man have women or etu?” another child asks, a slight lisp in their diction. “Did they run away and leave them?”

“The men claimed they never had etu,” the paya says, lips pursed with the weight of knowledge. “I don’t believe it. I think they had, but perhaps they were different from us. Now we’ll never know. The women—they killed them all in an accident.”

“An accident that only kills women?” Horrified gasps and whispers, especially from the girls. I am among the older children in this group and I’ve heard all of this before.

The paya nods. “Another one of their beasts. They thought they could overcome illness and death! Such arrogance! They made worms that went out of control and killed everyone who could carry a child—that was their women. They could carry children inside them, like gru ewes. You can’t play around with illness, can you? You’ll get sick yourself.”

“Why do they take us as their women? What do we owe them?”

These words are mine. These words make paya Alti stop and share a stare with me, a measured glance that marks me a rival and an equal: an etu with the power of wording the truth in questions. And it’s the moment Nyalu first notices me and decides to befriend me later that day, because, just like he sheds the tears I can’t shed, I speak the truths he cannot utter. Early on, we learn that we need each other.

After a long pause, the paya whispers: “Idiot.” No one laughs this time. “Don’t you know one does not bite the hand that feeds them? You think we’d survive without the Sons of Man? They have all the food. And all the weapons. And our Voices.”

I am on the losing side of this etu argument, but I’m young and want to win. “But we’re the Changed ones,” I say, my voice coming out too high-pitched for anyone to take me seriously. “They’re the Un-Adapted. They should perish—”

“Idiots!” Paya Alti screams at our faces and walks away. The children are left to stare at each other embarrassed. Only Nyalu comes to me that day and declares me friend.

No one asks the paya this question again.

I see our husband only once each day—in the morning, when he gives every member of his household their list of duties and chores. From between my eyelashes, I watch him: young, confident, with rich dark curls and cold eyes. What must their women have looked like? I understand enough of his tongue to know that our husband calls us both “she” although neither of us is a she back home. Here, we’re brides, we’re a category, we are their women. He never says our names, only “she for the bed” and “she for the egg.” I doubt he even knows what our names sound like.

Nyalu sees him twice each day, once in the morning with the rest of us and once in the evening, alone. After the sun sets and after we finish our dinner of wrinkled dates and gru milk pudding, Nyalu opens the door and heads to our husband’s bedroom. He comes back half an hour later, somewhat fidgety but always with a little smile. He never cries now—he cried only that first evening when we arrived, then stopped. I don’t know if this means he’s gotten braver. I think bravery has nothing to do with not shedding tears, anyway.

I lift a blanket and let him curl inside, my own body too warm against his gentle coolness. Like a child, he closes his eyes and his grin widens. His feathers smell of lemon balm and something I cannot recognize.

When we live on the island we have washing days—warm afternoons when we go to the lakeshore to bathe ourselves. Nyalu has been brushing a talon obsessively and I know something is on his mind. “Our Voices are in the land of the Sons of Man. They keep them locked,” he says at last, after many, many questions and answers around the bush.

We have been designated a couple; we have seen the Voice of Kitu. We are walking inexorably toward our fate. The Voice of Kitu left me changed, and I see how it has changed Nyalu too. Once he saw it, he couldn’t put it out of his mind. Have the paya ever wondered the point in showing us the only Voice we have? I see none, except planting obsessions in the minds of youngsters.

I comb my hair with the spinebone of a grass trout, spreading flower scents along its length. I am careful what to say to Nyalu sometimes, because he takes things to heart. But I can only speak the truth, like the paragon of etu that I must be. “No one is supposed to ever get their Voice, Nyalu,” I say softly. “Not even in times before the Sons of Man arrived.”

“I thought you shared these thoughts.” A small wound in his voice.

I stop my combing and breathe deeply for a few moments. “I do,” I admit. “I am angry. But remember what paya Alti said. Remember what happens to us when we transgress.”

To my surprise, he doesn’t look shaken. He pours more water over himself—droplets clinging onto his eyelashes like dew—then shakes his head violently, hair and feathers flying around. The way his eyes harden like ice scares me—it’s the first time I see them this way. “I’ll find a way,” he says. “I’ll get my Voice. And I’ll get yours too.”

“Keredi. I think it’s time.” He tells me these words in the middle of the field, when my hands are raw and the basket on my back almost full of water yam.

I take a moment to breathe, to squint at the blinding sunlight. “Are you certain?”

He laughs and I realize how silly I must have sounded. “Look,” he says and turns his back to me. He drops his basket and reveals the feathers attached on his back-wings, glowing magenta and blue. The shimmer travels all the way down to his wing-arms, clinging tightly onto each feather-spine.

“Is this the Glow?” I ask and he nods from over his shoulder. Nyalu is smiling and I can’t help but smile back. “Alright.” I pull yam from the earth again. Its sweet and salty smell fills my nostrils. We are both excited. “Tonight we head to the Temple.”

We never learn who our parents are. We never learn because it doesn’t matter—children don’t belong to their parents, as Sons of Man like to think. Among us, the paya raise the children, because they’re older and wiser, because they’ve been brides, mothers, women, and then Sintar again. And often, children raise themselves.

“Come, we’re playing Blood Water Wedding!” By this time I am older and I know better what these words mean. But the allure of the game is too strong.

On one side of the creek, children are standing in a row. We are on the other side.

A girl gives us flower crowns to ornament ourselves with—we are the brides. Then Nyalu takes the impromptu role of a paya that pairs the brides: for every male or female, an etu. He is giggling the whole time, thoroughly enjoying the power in his hands. When he stands in front of me, his smile grows bigger. We are still young and not paired, but Nyalu anticipates the future in this small game. “O, my favorite etu!” he says in an imitation of paya Alti’s raspy voice. “You’re paired . . . with me!” He finishes his words in his own, mischievous voice as he holds hands with me. He is back in his role as bride and we are ready to cross the lake and find our husbands.

Once we are on the other side of the creek, a much younger etu asks, “What do we do now?”

A grave Nyalu knits his eyebrows. “We make the children, of course.”

Whispers follow, some giggling. Most of us know how it goes, but my eye catches a couple of children staring at each other blankly until someone elucidates them: “You go to bed. Then we make the egg.” Nyalu shoots me another little smirk before heading off with our “husband” behind a bush, where I suppose they act out whatever they think lovemaking is. All “etu” have stayed awkwardly behind, anxious for the two thirds of their marriage to come back. “Why can’t we go?” the young etu asks. They are staring at me with big eyes and I’m feeling impatient and uncomfortable.

“Men and women collect the seeds. Etu make the eggs,” I repeat the words the paya taught us.

“But I want to go,” the small etu pleads in a low voice.

“You can pretend you’re Son of Man in the next game. Now, see? They’re coming back.”

Nyalu is once again heading the procession, reveling in the drama of it all. “We bring you the seeds,” he announces. For additional gravity, he is holding his taloned palms cupped, as if protecting a secret. “One seed of Son of Man, one seed of Sintar, Descendant of Bird. Etu, you now make the egg.”

He drops in my hands a dandelion stalk and a tiny yellow stone. Meticulously, I kneel and start making a small egg out of mud as the other ‘etu’ imitate me using whatever seeds their spouses bring them. I shove Nyalu’s and his husband’s “seeds” inside the mud, then hand it back to them. “Now we wait,” I say and turn to the other children. This is always our favorite moment of the game. “What will hatch?” I ask.

“Son of Man! Son of Man!” the children shout, ecstatic.

To make the egg, we must leave the house. To mark the importance of the event, our husband’s servants put us in a palanquin and carry us to the Temple of our ancestors. At the sight of it, the magnitude of our culture, of what we used to be, strikes me for the first time. Statues of giant birds—much like us, but also, very different from us—grace the entrance. Our ancient gods are broken in several places and claimed by vegetation, rain stains, and lichen. Even like this, they’re still our own. As we enter, I wonder how many more places inland used to be ours, how many traces of my people were erased by Sons of Man as if we never existed.

Instead of the Temple hall we’re led down, down inside the basements in the belly of the building, where the eggs are kept in rows of shelves, clearly labeled with the fathers’ names. The only moment we are given any privacy is when they put us in a small, windowless room from which we cannot leave unless we have produced an egg.

In the dimness, I look at Nyalu’s bright eye-light. “Are you ready?” I whisper.

His excitement beats my nervousness. “I’ve always wanted to make an egg with you,” he says and my heart wavers inside my ribcage.

He turns his back to me and I can see everything clearly. The Glow and shimmer have amassed, painting every rib of every feather in light. I gently touch one with the soft pad of my finger and the bright light sticks on it as if it’s solid.

“Ah!” Nyalu gasps over his shoulder. “It always slips from my hand! Is this an etu’s touch?”

I say nothing, only wrap the Glow around my talon as if I have always known what I’m doing. We’ve received training, of course, but a lot of this is pure instinct. I start to soften the light into a thread, then maintain a steady pace: with one hand I pick up and soften the light, with the other I mash it into concrete. I try to reference the long lessons intended only for etu and all I can remember is that the Glow is truly but a watery sack in which Nyalu’s body keeps his own and our husband’s seeds. The “egg” is the case where the combined seeds can grow.

Although Nyalu and our husband produce the same type of seed, the egg can join them as long as there are three distinct parents involved. This is the wonder of Sintar, who join in threes just like the bird we merged with—unlike the gru and other animals that join in twos. I think a paya once mentioned this highly advanced tek—never to be repeated, as it is lost forever—is one of the reasons why we survived the damage to our world: we mixed with another species, so we learned how to adapt. We were changed, so we can now change the world. We can mix with Sons of Man and keep them from perishing. In a way, all Sons of Man are now part Sintar.

Nyalu lifts his head, stares at the desolate ceiling. “Our Voices are in this building,” he whispers. “They’re sleeping somewhere above us.” It’s a punch in my stomach; I thought he had forgotten all about them. Visiting the Temple rekindled his obsession.

Within a few moments, he is very, very far away, and I’m all alone with a half-made egg in a half-ruined world.

Our first child is etu. Naturally, since our kind is about half etu, and the other half shared between men and women. We never see the egg hatching; they hatch in the Temple. We never hold our child in our hands; it is not ours. “You made a neuter.” We are only told this fact, so as to know that our duty has not ended. Tonight, Nyalu goes upstairs to our husband’s room again.

I lie wide-eyed in the darkness, the moonlight holding me. Somewhere on this shore of the lake, my and Nyalu’s child is waiting to be shipped back to the island. I close my eyes, trying to feel grateful that our offspring is going home, to the care of the paya. I’ve heard what Sons of Man call etu babies when they are born—sexless, neuters, freaks—and I wouldn’t want young etu anywhere near here.

When Nyalu comes back his dragging feet wake me up. I don’t see him smile. He turns slightly away from me and I can’t find his eyes. “Did something happen?” I ask and open my arms wide. He doesn’t come in. He only lies at the edge of the bed, a sea of empty space between us.

“Are we so hideous?” His voice is like a funeral drum. He never says a thing about our child. Ever.

I dare not speak of what I heard as I passed by the common room last night, where our husband was entertaining guests. Winged pussies that can’t fly. Damn hens. Do you fuck with eyes closed? I need something to not feel the feathers. I ripped the talons from mine.

Perhaps Nyalu heard this too. I don’t wish to repeat it.

“Maybe we are, to them. Paya used to say our kinds were alike, but we Adapted and they didn’t. So they think we’re tainted or something.”

He turns to look at me and his eyes are ice-cold again. His whispers are screams.

“Tainted? We Adapted! We have adapted so well we can even mate with them and save their worthless kind! What do we get in return? Exile and servitude! They should depend on us, not we on them.”

I was waiting for this, waiting for it ever since the day we were designated a bridal couple and he was crying. Nyalu has been changing, day by day. I know I’m changing too, but my nature is more private and more taciturn. I can see change and not allow it to take over me. Change finds me and I try to make it my own; Nyalu is at its mercy.

I reach out to touch an arm, a soft, comforting rustle of feathers. I meet tense muscles, a desire to run away and yet, quietly, he melts into my arms.

“Soon we’ll have a human child and we can leave. Paya always said it’s better at the Women’s House. And when we’re old enough we can finally go back to the island.”

“We should let them perish,” he says into the darkness, as if he didn’t hear a word I said. “This was our land—this is our land! We work it! We should take over the Temple. Take back our Voices.”

Nyalu from our childhood is here, in his fancies and follies, and Nyalu of that time during our washing day when he announced he would one day steal our Voices back. I don’t know if I want this Nyalu or not. But I know I need to stop him.

“You don’t even know what the Voices do,” I rebuke him.

“All I know is that, now, we’re Voiceless.”

There’s not much I can say to that. I close my eyes and seek sleep.

Our kind’s biggest treasure is the Voice of Kitu. It’s the one and only, first and last Voice we’ve all seen during our Passage ritual. Even after that experience, I’m still not sure what a Voice is or does or how it can be used, but they say all of us have one and that it’s kept inside the Temple. But no one can go in and see their Voice or anyone else’s. I used to wonder if they even existed.

Because Kitu’s is the only Voice we have on the island, we’ve built a smaller temple to house it. Whenever we asked grown-ups to tell us what a Voice sounded like, they could never answer because—they said—you only look at a Voice, not hear it. This never made much sense.

All I can say is, when I see the Voice of Kitu, I feel I know him, not for what he was, all those hundreds of years ago when he lived, but for what he could have been. His Voice emanates from a small glass the color of bright blue sky—only brighter, brighter, so bright it hurts your eyes. It spreads everywhere around me in rings, it clings on the ivy leaves, on the small temple’s terra-cotta tiles, and the latter acquire a little of its glow. I think I can inhale it. Perhaps I can see the notes of his song, but I don’t understand. I can’t hear, because I have no Voice.

“Why are our Voices locked in the Temple?” I ask the paya. They have done something to the Voice and it is now slowly withdrawing, returning to the small glass where it is normally contained.

“Because they’re too strong for us. We must grow into them first.”

“Only that won’t ever happen,” I say, watching the Voice becoming smaller and smaller. A slightly intoxicating feeling suddenly pushes me to ask for more, more of it. I can see how one might even become addicted to Voice. It is probably wise to keep them locked. “We’ll never take them back, will we?”

The paya smiles. “They’re very dangerous,” is all they say, and I know they don’t tell me more because this is all they know.

Three years later, on the Blood Water Wedding night that follows ours, we make our second child. In the silence of the Temple’s entrails I weave the egg, round and calciferous, when Nyalu jolts up all of a sudden, nearly breaking my thread.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what? Please come back down, I need to finish.”

He sits in visible discomfort, tension lining his jaw.

“I thought I heard . . . I heard a song. From the Temple.”

“It’s not Voice,” I rush to warn him, although I’m not certain myself. “You only see Voice, remember?”

“In the form it’s kept in storage, yes, you see it. But we’re in the Temple. Maybe . . . ”

For his sake, I stretch my ears. I instantly regret it. “I hear nothing,” I say.

He stays quiet, trying to listen. “Maybe it was my imagination.”

We weave the egg for three nights. On the second night, every once in a while, he tenses like a feline, listening. On the third, he simply says, “Did you hear it?”

I did hear it. But I say nothing.

As we wait for the second egg to hatch, our husband wastes no time. He sees Nyalu night after night, hoping to attach enough seed on him for me to make another egg. When I ask to see him, to explain that making eggs is terribly hard and I can’t make another one that fast, he slams the door in my face. Nyalu is waiting for me at the edge of the corridor.

“Don’t mind him,” he says. “I’ve learned not to mind him.”

Every night takes longer now. At first I worry about him, but he always dismisses my worries gently. Then suspicion hits me along with the waspy sting of jealousy. Maybe he likes him, after all? Does he spend more and more time with him, reaching our bed only before dawn? I want to ask him those questions but my pride won’t let me. I iron our tunics and prepare our yam-bread lunches, but up in the hills where we herd the gru during winter, I always disappear, not wanting to talk. When he comes to our room I pretend to be asleep.

Tonight he arrives, smelling of roses and rolled incense. Maybe grass and mud too. Has he been outside? I’m about to turn and have a look when he kisses my cheek in the darkness, then wraps his arms around me, buries his face in my back, and falls asleep instantly. I press my lips tightly together and my teeth rattle. I want to toss his hand to the side, to start yelling. But his warmth is dear to me and I choose to stay silent one last time.

“Where do you go at nights?”

He isn’t expecting the question. We’re milking a gru—an early spring mother—one of us on each side of the massive breast. There’s nowhere to hide with the sour smells of the pachyderm’s sweat suffocating us. “It’s a secret,” he says eventually.

I can’t translate his tone. Is it playful? Is it serious? “Do you love him?” I dare ask after a while.

“Gods, no!” he says. A splash of warm milk ends up near my foot. “You . . . you don’t understand, do you? It’s okay. I’ll tell you soon. Please trust me.”

I have no idea what he has in mind and his secrecy is angering me. But I can trust him, even against my better judgement. This is the easiest task he could have given me.

Our second is a girl—a bird girl, because Sons of Man can’t have baby girls of their kind, not anymore. If they could, they wouldn’t need us.

They tell us of the birth at dinner. The servant leaves us alone and I stop eating. Nyalu’s spoon continues stroking the bowl rhythmically, as if nothing happened.

“I barely have thread for a third one,” I confess. An etu’s capacity for egg-making varies: two or three is among the lowest, four to five is normal. I can feel it in my bones that three is possibly the maximum I could ever achieve. We both know what this means. “We must make it this time.”

He is silent.

When we start making the third egg, a few nights later, he whispers, “I saw it. No, I heard it. I’ve seen what they’re doing here, Keredi.”

I’m taken by surprise. My head jolts up and I almost miss a thread. “What? What have you been up to, Nyalu?”

I realize it’s time to reveal his secret. I had been a fool to ever imagine his obsession had settled or that he enjoyed our husband’s intimate company. There has only been one thing in his mind.

“Every night I spy on them, waiting for a clue.”

It’s hard to believe him. As I go back to my thread, disappointment spreads inside me. I thought Nyalu to be wiser. “You’ll get caught,” is all I say.

“I don’t care,” he mutters over his shoulder and I know he means it. Such words sound courageous to some, but to me they reek of despair. “I need to know. We are born with the Voice and they cut it from us. I used to wonder, why don’t they just throw it away? But they’re using it, Keredi. Oh, I’ve seen it. They’re using the Voices. Ever wondered at the heated bath in our husband’s house, at the artificial light?”

I keep silent for a few moments, the slow rhythm of egg-making enfolding us. “Magic. Eeneertzee,” I say, the old, melodic word for tek-magics found only in our stories from the past. Eeneertzee: what beasts of light and warmth feed on.

Nyalu nods. “The Temple is where they make eeneertzee. Our Voices fuel it like wood into a fire. Now you know the true reason why our servitude won’t end. We make their babies, we make their food, we make their eeneertzee. In exchange, we are allowed to live. In segregation. Always.”

Sudden panic makes my hands shake. He has gone too far. “Nyalu,” I urge him with a trembling voice. “You learned what you wanted to learn. Promise me you won’t go again. It’s too dangerous, Nyalu. For you. For all of us. Promise me.”

Maybe it’s the first time he sees me on the verge of tears. He ought to look shaken, he ought to apologize and reassure me.

He stays quiet, possibly weighing if he’ll be able to keep such a promise. “I promise I won’t get caught,” he says and I can feel something inside me breaking.

For years, I didn’t know why paya Alti was so grumpy, a laughable excuse for normally reticent etu. For years, I couldn’t understand why all of us were so submissive, so obedient. The day I learn, fear lays bone-white fingers on my heart and snatches me. It never gets hold of Nyalu, not quite. This will always be the ravine between us, only growing wider, only love flying from one side to the other like the shadows of birds.

In times before our birth, Sintar tried to rebel several times. Every time they were thwarted, every time a bigger massacre, a bigger punishment. “Why are we forced to live on the island? Why are weapons forbidden to us? Ever wondered that?” Paya Alti says. They are calmer this time and I’ve limited my outrageous questions to the vicinity of my mind alone. “All this happened because we wouldn’t collaborate with them. There was war. There was bloodshed.”

This doesn’t justify their actions, though, I think, but hesitate to speak this time. The words that follow silence that voice inside me forever. “Last time we rebeled—I did it. I was the one.” The children watch the paya enraptured, their breaths audible in the thick quiet. At once the paya is dangerous, heroic, so much more than another grumpy old person. “I tried to lead us out of the Women’s House and take over the weapons. Take over the land. Want to know what happened?” Brief pause. Anxious eyes everywhere. “They starved the island. They killed wives and sent their parts to the island instead of food. Do you know now what Sons of Man are capable of? Do you understand why they have all that power, not us?”

Paya was looking straight into my eyes. It must have taken them a lot of courage to say this, when they could have let someone else inform us on our recent history. We locked eyes and, as much as I wanted to defy them, I lowered my glance.

But the paya didn’t notice Nyalu stiffening with anger at the atrocities done to us. The paya couldn’t hear the sound of a heart ossifying with rage.

Our last egg is a Son of Man. At the sound of the news my knees bend at my weight. Nyalu is patting my shoulder in comfort. I have no more eggs left and if no Son of Man had hatched out of this one, I would have had to leave alone for the Women’s House. Nyalu would have stayed behind and another etu would have taken my place.

For four years we raise our husband’s son, feeding him milk of gru, giving him all the care that Sons of Man seem to consider motherly. We alternate between us days of work in the fields and days of mothering, and it seems that we have set up a nice little household of our own in our small rooms. A servant inspects our work daily, but otherwise leaves us alone. His father looks at him once—the spitting image of himself—and pays no more attention. His own duty is done, too.

We must not teach our son the words of Sintar. It is forbidden, so we must raise him in silence. But he is growing smarter every day and I teach him the signs all Sintar know, the signs with which paya train us too. Now I understand why we have this extensive silent language—it is the only language we are allowed to use with our inland children. Secretly, I call him Thalu, as is our tradition, to take half a name from one parent and half his own. Lu means kind. I chose Tha because it means filial. It is my little weakness, because I hope he doesn’t forget us.

Four years pass quietly, Nyalu not repeating his wild ideas. I am not sure if he’s stopped believing or if he’s just being cautious. It is a sweet, quiet time of our lives and we both seem to enjoy it. Then at four years, we hand our son to his own kind: to the barracks where Sons of Man grow up and learn the arts of war.

“Just as I found something I wanted to keep,” I tell Nyalu the night before our separation, “and it has to be taken away from me.”

My etu truth seems to resonate with him. “Sounds that this is our fate, always,” he retorts, in a truthful manner that many etu would envy. Then he stretches his arms tenderly, our little son between us, and limbs knit like the petal layers of a rose, we are all holding each other one last time.

The day we leave is less ceremonial than any transition we’ve lived through. They take our son at dawn, before we have a chance to hear his cries. How he must be terrified, away from his home, a mere babe?

Every single one of the women, of our fellow Sintar, is waiting for us outside the oblong structure that is to be our home now. We are climbing the hill with our lacquered dowry boxes hanging from our backs. An older Sintar that reminds me of paya Alti is heading the welcome committee. From the headdress, I know they are etu. They hold me in their arms and kiss me three times. “Welcome home. I’m Essei.”

In the evening, the other Sintar make a feast for us. The thick gru milk pudding is delicious and the loud chatters in our tongue make me feel warm again. Soon, music starts, and dance.

We work during the day, then enjoy the nights between us, in laughter and music. Nyalu is sitting away from me, quietly watching the dance. “It’s too fresh,” Essei puts a hand on my shoulder. “I understand.”

“He is still our child.” The son of our husband, whom we raised for four years. I never thought that the cruelty of taking this child away from us could surpass the cruelty of sending our Sintar babies back without ever looking at them.

“I know,” Essei tells me. “This too, shall heal.”

In our days at the Women’s House, working the fields, herding the gru, Nyalu and I grow apart.

At first he avoids me. Then a couple of Sintar—a female and two male ones—befriend him. He slowly seems to find himself again, telling stories in his loud dramatic voice, staging plays. I am happy with how he seems to be doing better, but I cannot ignore the jealousy nesting inside me. At least he is not seeing Sons of Man: some of our fellow Sintar have maintained good relationships with their husbands, and the latter even visit them for sex sometimes. After our unpleasant experience I could not even imagine such an arrangement.

“Sometimes this happens,” Essei reassures me. “Two brides of the same husband growing apart.” It was our turn to sit inside and make the wool. Nyalu casually avoids every task he has with me and switches chores so that he is with one of his new friends. I pretend to not look hurt. “They’ve been through so much, they know so much of each other. It’s better to just grow apart, for now. Later, when we’re back to the island, it might change again,” Essei explains. I keep silent. I want to say I’ve been watching him drifting away from me for years, but I don’t. I want to say He has never really spoken to me since that night he revealed his secret, never really spoken to me again, but I don’t. For an etu who always speaks the truth, I’ve changed, as much as Nyalu has changed in keeping his feelings hidden.

In the Women’s House, we, etu, keep mostly to ourselves. I don’t know what it is that makes us seek each other’s company more. We grow up to always handle more responsibility than men and women, and this weighs on us. I spend my days with Essei and other etu and enjoy only casual conversation with men and women. It seems that the gap between us, the things that keep us apart, have widened now that we’re not sharing the fate of a bride in the same household. They enjoy sexual games, even with their husbands, and we etu cannot partake in this. All we have is conversation between us, storytelling, and loving bonds of other kinds.

Days without Nyalu are lonely, no matter how many bright etu I can converse with, no matter how I’m surrounded by people of my kind. The small, intimate moth-life we used to share is a treasure that belongs to the past.

“We have a problem.” These are Essei’s words. They have gathered us all in the Women’s House. In the midst of our circle, lies the culprit: an egg, a pale blue Sintar egg, made lovingly. The parents are two Sintar women and an etu. “You should not have done this,” Essei and other, older etu admonish. “You know it is forbidden for us to make eggs alone. Yet you chose to make it.”

“I thought I had no more thread left,” the etu parent says the truth solemnly, although their voice is shaking a little. “But . . . turns out I had more. So I had to make this egg. I had to.”

Essei shakes their head disapprovingly. “Etu make choices; they don’t act on impulse,” they say, their words a sting. The parents look miserable. I glance at Nyalu, who seems lost in his thoughts. Somewhere inside me I’m thankful that the egg is not his.

“We can keep the child hidden. Can we not?” I dare to suggest. One of the mothers looks at me and I smile back to her.

“We can’t,” an etu says. “We are not allowed to raise our own on this side of the water. All Sintar children must be shipped back to the island. But there are a few husbands who will be understanding . . . We have contacts with them. Someone can arrange to send the child back. This is the best we can do.”

The group seems to accept this decision, albeit with a little worry. I realize that the parents were not afraid of separation—we have learned to not be too attached to the children we bear—but of a bad fate for the child. Essei warns us to keep the egg a secret until it hatches. No Son of Man has need for an egg that will most definitely hatch a Sintar. The only way to save the child is to let it hatch first.

Months later, a beautiful baby boy emerges on a moonless night. We are all gathered to watch a mystery we weren’t allowed to experience when we had our children. Before our eyes, the pale blue egg breaks, cracks deepening like lightning, a small head bumping its way out. Feathers still swimming in the liquids of its first cradle, eyes shut that won’t open for a while—he still looks more like a bird than Sintar. The etu parent picks the baby up and they pass her to all of us, to hold and to bless. After that, one of the mothers sits on the floor to feed him the soft, watery worms all newborn Sintar eat. Until he grows un-birdlike teeth and starts to feed like we do.

I am lost in excited voices and tears of laughter, the sheer emotion at what we just witnessed. I can’t find Essei or Nyalu. Then I see them: they are the only two, far from the others, looking at the egg’s remains intently.

They are glowing blue, bright blue, emanating light. “It reminds me of something,” Essei murmurs, almost in monologue. “Never crossed my mind the egg would look like this after hatching! Poor thing,” they glance at the baby. “I must go tell them she needs to go to the Temple now. Have her Voice taken out.”

When Essei is gone, my eyes find Nyalu’s and I discover something there, something I thought I’d never see. I kneel beside him, both of us watching the broken eggshell. We are sharing something I have no words for.

“You understand what this is,” he says not in a question, but in affirmation. It’s been so long since we spoke to each other, since we sat close and shared important things.

“It reminds me of the Voice of Kitu,” I whisper, hoping no one else listens. No one else has noticed. No one seems to remember as much from the trance-like encounter with the Voice of Kitu as we do.

Nyalu says nothing. I watch him steal a piece of bright blue eggshell.

I am tempted to do the same.

Our friendly Son of Man who would help the new baby Sintar go back to the island turns out to be not as friendly as we hoped. He is angry that we kept it a secret and angry that we let the baby hatch in the Women’s House. After an hour of bargaining with Essei, he takes both baby and eggshells and leaves. Word arrives in the evening that the baby girl had her Voice taken and is on a boat back home.

It has been an anxious day, leaving all of us jittery. Did no one else notice the egg? No one else wonder why the Son of Man wanted the eggshells? “They don’t know,” Nyalu whispers to me. We are setting the cutlery on the floor for tonight’s dinner and we speak in low, conspiratorial voices. Our shared secret brought us closer and somewhere inside me a small happiness is warming me. “They don’t really know what it’s like. Essei seemed to remember something, but not much. Only you and I remember Voice of Kitu.”

“But why?” I ask, as if Nyalu knows. Perhaps he does.

He makes a gesture of ignorance. “I don’t think it’s meant to be remembered. The paya wouldn’t show it to us if we could remember. We are the exception.”

There is a legend about our Voices, or perhaps several. Now that I know what I know, I can find in the tales the fragments of truth. The Voices can only be seen, not heard. With our Voices, we are too dangerous. We are too weak for our Voices; we must grow into them first, although this never happens.

But also, our Voices are taken from us at birth. We don’t know how it’s done and why because our paya have lost that knowledge. And that Voices are used to make tek-magic for Sons of Man—what Nyalu discovered. And what we heard, that night while making an egg, was not a Voice, but the sounds of machines turning Voices into eeneertzee.

This is what he tells me soon after the event with the egg. Because the day comes when Nyalu and I are put in charge of the same chore at last. We have to clean up the stone mill that grinds lotus rice into flour. It is the first moment we are alone since the day we moved to the Women’s House, about a year ago. Perhaps it’s the first time he didn’t try to avoid me.

Our moments with the egg brought us close again, but there is still a lot of awkwardness hanging between us. I am reminded of all those days we used to work together, tending to the fields, herding and milking the gru. “You’ve made friends,” I say. He has heard me, but makes no reply. “I’ve made a few, too.” Still no response. My head is getting hotter, my tongue is ready to speak something hurtful. “I miss our time together. Perhaps we can enjoy our lives more, now that we’re here?”

These words grab him, at last, and he lifts a set of eyes to meet mine. I’ve missed those eyes; and yet, they’re not the same I used to know. But it’s alright. I can accept that. I surely can.

“I’m sorry, Keredi. I’ve been . . . busy.”

His apology sounds genuine but I can barely keep silent this time. “I’ve noticed it,” I say and bite my lower lip, instantly regretting my words.

He lowers his eyes into a frown. “You don’t understand again, do you? Let me tell you then.”

The grinding of the stone halts. We’re covered in white rice powder, like creatures of dawn. “I have a plan, Keredi. You know I do.” My heart aches. Of course I know. I wish I didn’t. “And you can’t stop me.”

All this time we kept apart I was secretly hoping he had new friends, new lovers, and that I could feel jealous. But no. The truth was worse. “I thought you gave up on plans a long time ago,” I mutter. “Is this why you’re avoiding me? Because you don’t want me to stop you?”

He scratches a feathered elbow and suddenly looks like a child again. I am reminded of a tactic of the paya—a tactic I, too, will employ when I’m paya to the children—that of always ensuring the endangered one is on your side. I have been watching Nyalu drifting away from me for years and, I realize, what hurts me most is that I can’t stop it. The last time I rebuked him he distanced himself completely. But perhaps I can learn how to float with him if it’s the only way to save him from himself.

“Well,” I say, “if I can’t stop you, then how can I help you?”

His eyes brighten with a joy I haven’t seen in years. My own heart sinks as I try to listen. He speaks of the Voices for a long, long time. The sun lowers and Nyalu hasn’t spoken so much to me in ages. “The Voice is really small,” he says, “but it can produce a lot of eeneertzee. It’s like the kind of energy Sons of Man had before everything changed, the energy that blasted this world.”

I recall stories of small fragments of the world colliding so fast with each other and bursting into uncontrollable light and power. “It’s not the same,” Nyalu explains, “I’m not sure how it works . . . yet. But it’s that much powerful, perhaps more.”

“What about your plan?” I ask, hoping to get a glimpse soon enough to prevent whatever disaster I can prevent.

“Not here. Some other time,” he says and my hopes are crushed. “But I will, because, Keredi, I need you in this. It’s the only way.”

We grind the rice into flour, its delicate scent coloring our evening. We head back to the Women’s House in a good mood, Nyalu blabbering loudly about last night’s play that the men and women of our House staged, of the heroine’s dress of leaves and of the clever use of dividers to signify different scenes.

I notice something selfish in what I did: I want him close to me again, I want him back. Although he seems to be back, he’s more distant than ever. When I find some privacy inside my blankets I want to cry; I can’t. I’ve never really learned how to cry.

“Tomorrow night, I’m not coming back. I need you to lead them all out in the water. Take supplies. As many as you can.”

His words leave me stunned. It is too sudden.

Time has passed since that day on the mill. The crisp winter chill wraps us tightly in her arms. The yam field is bare and we herd the gru, fatten their ewes so that spring brings robust fresh kids. The beasts are peaceful and slow-moving in their endless grazing, their moans echoing in the crystalline air.

I try to keep my voice steady. To be the wise, sober etu I must always be. “What are you doing, Nyalu? You’ve never really told me your plan.”

“Trust me. Please.”

This time, I’m sick of trusting him. He never shares his plans yet expects that I follow. I can feel my jaw tighten as I say, “I demand to know. I deserve to know.”

He sighs and his voice is drowned inside a gru moan. “So it’s time to tell the truth, as you taught me,” he whispers. His voice is frosty like the winter morning. “And it’s time for you to learn how to cry.”

These words alone bring tears to my eyes. But I won’t shed them. Not yet.

“I’m eating the egg, Keredi. The piece of Voice I stole,” he says, matter-of-factly. I turn to face him in shock and his cold eyes are already wandering far. “I know what it’ll do to me—not everything, but enough to know how to use it. The tek that merged us with birds? It helped us survive the destruction. But at the cost of a long life. We used to live much, much longer.”

“Why eat the egg?” I’m failing to understand. “How do you know all this?”

“It’s all in the Temple. Not everything, but a lot. The egg is full of eeneertzee. And guess. We are, too. So the two of us . . . Too powerful, Keredi. It will most likely destroy me, but not before I destroy the Temple. This is why I want you safe on the water. If their eeneertzee is gone, we can negotiate. As we should have done, all these years.”

Words falter me for a few moments. “You’re turning yourself into a weapon?” I ask when I have them back. The gru are now watching us, munching languidly on their grass, their centennial eyes a little agitated. They know their herders are supposed to be calm and we clearly are not.

“I am,” he admits, almost like an etu. “There’s no point in hiding this from you.”

My throat is dry. I’m frantically seeking the right thing to say. “I can’t just summon them all on the boats like this. You know I can’t. I will have to reveal your plan.”

“Find the boats tonight,” he insists, answer ready. “Tell them of the plan tomorrow.”

“This is too much.” I close my eyes and try to shut this all out. I can feel a timid taloned palm over mine, hot like coal.

“I’m sorry. It’s the only way.”

“I don’t think your plan is worth it,” I say bitterly. I must be honest. “Their eeneertzee is not as vital to them as you think it is. You’ll only give us poor negotiation power and doom us all.”

His palm drops from mine. “I’ve studied a lot and decided that striking the Temple is the best option. We’ll see,” he adds casually, as if it were a small thing. I can hear something hidden, something else into his plan.

“Nyalu. Don’t do it.” By now, I’m crying. It ought to shock him, it ought to make him hesitate.

But all he says is, “You promised me, Keredi.”

“I never promised to help you kill yourself!” I yell these words and the gru huddle together in alarm.

“Then you won’t. You’ll help me bring justice to our people.”

I want to say many things, truthful things and hurtful things, I want to shout Who do you think you are, a martyr, making a revolution of one? But I can’t anymore. I’m tired of telling the truth.

Once more, I feel his warmth around me, feather against feather. “Keredi. Thank you. I could never do anything without you. You taught me how to be brave.”

I didn’t do anything. All these years, I have done nothing but watch him slowly drifting away from me, from everything.

I want to share our son’s secret name, the name I gave him. Don’t tell me, I can hear him in my mind. Please don’t.

Just like the night we all arrived, we sneak into boats. The darkness is our friend; it hides us well. Word spread fast. Many of us came directly from the households. Some chose to stay. We can’t guarantee their future.

When I told my fellow Sintar, I didn’t hold anything back. “It’s either getting on the boat or suffering the consequences. Nyalu won’t be stopped. I tried, but he wouldn’t listen.”

Many men, women, etu disagreed. I could see terror in their eyes. They asked what about the angry Sons of Man, what about the Sintar that stay behind.

“What will happen to those of us still living with husbands? Will they kill us again, send our limbs back home?”

“They won’t have the power to do that. Not anymore. They will be too busy fixing their ruins. Nyalu was onto something. Too bad he has to do this alone.”

These are Essei’s words. They are the one who supports me, the one who convinces the others. “Nyalu needs us to succeed. It never was a revolution of one. He is only starting one for the rest of us,” they say to me privately, a worried smile on their face. Because of their leadership, I half-believe in Nyalu’s plan myself. We are now hurrying into stolen boats, tears muffled. Sons of Man have sniffed us out; they are after us. Nyalu must be quick, otherwise we’ll never make it.

And just like he promised, we see it. The bright streak of light, glowing like a blue sky, but brighter, brighter. Like a moon’s egg cracking, he turns the sky red and orange.

We see him, glowing blue, entirely blue, an eggshell, a Voice in himself. By the gods, he has turned into a Voice. “He’s flying!” someone says, and maybe he is, for only a while, for only the time he’s one with the Voice, brimming with power before it tears him apart.

The water surface shakes; boats are overturned. We are too busy saving ourselves; Sons of Man are too busy saving themselves. And above us, Nyalu burns like a winged god of vengeance.

“What is he doing?” someone asks. I’m too distracted, even though I turn to look.

The Temple seems intact. He never touched it.

What’s swallowed in flames is the barracks. Where all the weapons are kept and where all the boys learn how to be men.

“He killed the children,” Essei says, their voice like death. Shrieks and cries from the others.

“Our children! Our children are in there too!”

Our child too, I think, and cry with them. Our Thalu. Oh, Nyalu. This is the reason why you’ll be damned forever. You knew it. You knew it all along.

Would I have stopped you if I had told you his name?

“Let’s go back home. Hurry.” I speak without thinking. I try not to focus on all the things Sons of Man could still do to us after this. I want to think that Nyalu made the right choice. My mind is racing again—this time, I need the right words. “We won’t give them any more children,” I raise my voice. “They don’t have weapons to threaten us anymore. They will have to negotiate. Siblings, a new life starts. Let not the sacrifice of our children go to waste.”

Essei eyes me in mild awe and also, intense disapproval. No one will ever forgive Nyalu; heck, no one will ever forgive me. All we can do is try and make something out of this.

“Come,” Essei shouts, following my lead. “It’s time to go home.”

We row and tears burn scars on our cheeks. The air is heavy with sulfur; our tongues are dripping ash. And in the sky, my only friend dissolves into stars.

I can hear a song—the only song that ever rang true.

When we find our Voices, perhaps we can learn how to sing.

About the Author

Eleanna Castroianni writes speculative fiction from the margins of history and the far futures of the Anthropocene. Their fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Podcastle, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Find them on twitter @nomadological.

The Names and Motions

Sheldon J. Pacotti

   { You love me now. }

              We love you now.

   { Let us remember why. }

      Knowing is loving.

              All-knowing is all-loving.

   { We begin. }

We begin early in the memories.

The bleeding in my gums didn’t seem wrong until a lady at church scolded my grandma to make my mom keep me right. She got strangers from the church to make sure the right tests were done and stainless steel crowns put on every one of my baby teeth. I heard a doctor tell my grandma about “damage” done to me before I was born, from how my mom lived, but still it didn’t seem wrong. It was just me.

   { Recall Article 1: Being. }

       Being accommodates.

               Being is becoming.

The damage was just more of my mother, inside me: adults playing funny games, wrestling, stumbling, laughing; loud pounding music that made me jump around, in my own show, changing costumes on a smoky stage crisscrossed with light beams like on TV.

Then I’d get hungry and go looking for an orange and a cup of milk. You remember, then, the nights spent in the yard? I loved my mom for the kindness, automatically, thoughtlessly. My own place away from the noise and eye-stinging smoke. From my hammock I could watch the boy across the road—

               Noah.

   { Yes, remember. }

—the little trailer a fortress of light, the Keating family safe amid the tangle of oaks and turbulence of wind, the soul songs of cicadas, frogs, and thumping electronica. I would watch him climb into his bunk and switch off the light. He took a flashlight to bed; I took a can of bug spray from the piles of stuff on the porch.

Doubt didn’t even enter our minds. Down at the end of red, muddy Stickbug Road, we were the only kids our age. We were what kids were.

       A coincidence.

               Union.

   { Union of worlds. }

In the day, when his mom could keep an eye out for us, we trekked the swamp trails, built forts from crawlspace junk, made up games for the stray cats and dogs, and where the road melted into county land we tended an empire of dams and towers against daily downpours, while the rusted water tower presided seriously over all we did.

I could go in his house, but he couldn’t go in mine. That made sense because it just was. I was normal then, with Noah, because any two people can be normal. I had a silver smile, he had a white one. His hair was trimmed black curls, mine was a blonde mop. We were supposed to be different. Then all of a sudden we were in school.

   { Remember with me Article 2. }

               “Self and Other.” Simply-known.

       The Self is desire.

               The Other is change.

Our human minds demanded categories. There, in school, what all of us most wanted to learn was who we were. At home, Noah and I already did this with the pets—by, say, putting them in the plastic wading pool, to tease them but really to glimpse their secret inner lives. One day at recess the boys did the same to me. They got Noah to invite me to play “Operation.” His sales pitch? “They ain’t gonna hurt no one, Cassie. They just want sick people.”

   { Observe the split realities, the crude negotiations. }

               Let us truly-forget.

       Why always this return? The inferences are accepted.

   { Observe. Connect. A priori truth is stasis, structure, death. }

I wanted to use my fancy name, Cassandra, but by then the kids just called me Phony-face and Funny-face, so after Noah endured a headful of grass to help grow his hair straight and a freckled boy got dandelions rubbed on his face, the boys laid me down and pressed a 9-volt battery to my crowns. It tickled more than hurt (conducted more by saliva than steel) but the squeal I gave them was like juice from a lemon. They ran off hollering—Noah, too, after just a glance to make sure I wasn’t really hurt.

       Just one body’s memories.

   { Observe. }

Observe. They made me play again the next day, the freckled boy and all the other former patients, this time without pretense. While Noah lurked guiltily by, transparently sorry but doing nothing, they chased me down in a soccer field, pinned me in the grass like an insect, and made me squirm by repeatedly shocking my teeth.

“Her lips are strong!”

“Wait, I know! Tickle her! Make her smile!”

While they were trading turns I caught the freckled kid’s thumb in my silver jaws and squeezed and squeezed, enduring punches to my face, not letting go until a teacher came to pull me off.

               Pain.

       Congeries of animal necessity.

   { The child was sacrosanct, then. }

       An ocean of biology.

               Segregated from neurotronics.

       Let us simply-forget.

   { No. Judgment needs a subject; our subject is the body. }

From all of this, the detail that piqued the grown-ups was the little boy’s hurt thumb, though I’d never felt so right in my life. I sat there in the principal’s office chewing an old stylus, a nervous tic the adults overlooked because it kept my body still. The boys were getting a suspension, but the monumentally sweet Mrs. Willoughby explained that what I had done was nonetheless wrong. “Do you understand what you did to Sammy?” she asked me, as my mom slouched in the chair beside me, irritated and bored. “How do you think he feels right now?”

The stylus’ tip came off in my mouth as I wrenched the stem away. I spit the plastic, chawed and torn like a dog’s toy, onto Mrs. Willoughby’s desk.

She reported the biting incident to the district. Facts were collected. I was documented as an anomaly, something to be examined and corrected.

All along I had felt wrong, but to me the anomaly had been school. The prescribed activities in the ice-cold classroom were like a punishment: manual lessons on screens with time limits, a teacher’s scowl like a slap in the face. Then, just as baffling, some kid baiting my mind—innocently or not—with a fabrication like: “Be the small dinosaur!”

   { Article 3: Becoming. }

              Everything new begins wrong.

   { Simply-known. }

       Then we unassert the untruths.

   { No. Thought requires opposing microtheories. }

A doctor provided by the school found the right medicine, a shiny blue pill my mom taught me how to retrieve from a childproof bottle each morning, a dose of seriousness (trade name B-Line) which stayed with me all day like the thought of a guardian angel. I came to believe in the magic as much as the teachers and doctors did, despite my mom calling them “nosy bastards.” The medicine amplified my curiosity about the aliens in my surroundings. They became normal, and in time I became normal to them.

The playground continued to do its work. By second grade I was one of them. I could sit in a desk, read a worksheet, play make-believe. Being the same was easier. Every science has striven to make us the same, because that’s what we all want, really. Either to be like others, or for others to be like us. That’s why our way today is correct.

   { I know you now. }

       Yes, truly-known—by assertion.

               Knowing is loving.

       All-knowing is all-loving.

But I wasn’t truly the same, only outwardly so, measurably so. The missing places in my brain, which I learned were from my mom’s drug use when I was in the womb, were still missing. Needing greater doses of B-Line just to feel “normal” like the other kids, I was reminded every morning that I really was sick mentally and needed fixing.

       A ground truth.

               Being is becoming.

   { Here began the seeking. }

The next diagnosis would be “narcissism,” according to one doctor, or “an empathy deficit,” according to another. I hurt things without knowing it. We have recalled the game of putting pets in the wading pool. Since the animals multiplied at will, beyond the adults’ capacity to mind or even name them, no one cared if we hauled puppies in a wagon or slap-boxed kittens until they grew mean. But I remember feeling nothing but affection, curiosity, delight. Holding a small creature, I adored it just as well as anyone. I wanted my touch to make the eyes smile and tongue come lolling out. Yet, things went wrong. Once, I forgot all about a puppy we had put to bed in a cooler, and I was sick instantly when my mom showed me the stiff brown body lying on the old pink towel. It was Caboose, the last born. “See what happens when you mess with stuff,” she declared, already mad from one of her sicknesses and from doing laundry in a tub in the heat because her friend had never come to fix the washing machine. With a foot she shoved the grimy, dented cooler toward me, which I knew from habit meant “clean this up.”

“This ain’t a toy,” she said.

       A carelessness was in me—

               Callousness.

       Misunderstanding how—

   { Abide, friends. It is simply-known. }

Something. I played too hard. The adults found out when I was nine, during a rare trip to the lake. Having grown taller than Noah, I played a game with him, pushing him out into the deep water. It was funny, his struggling and yelling at me, funnier when he started choking on the choppy water, getting tired, each press of my hand on his fine songbird ribs delivering a jolt of fear. Dancing around him on my toes, I didn’t hear his mom shouting. I kept shoving Noah back until he could barely keep his head up. I was winning!

      Sentience is command.

              Command is sentience.

   { Simply-known. Article 4: Control. }

Noah’s terror barely touched my mind until his mom splashed in front of me. He really was panicking, even crying, as he grabbed his mother’s stout shoulders. Yet even then I was more absorbed in a sudden dread of having made a mistake and of being punished. I’m dumb, I thought. Dumb, dumb, dumb like when I forgot about Caboose. An accident, an accident!

   { An accident. }

               From the ocean of biology.

       Simply-known.

I wasn’t allowed to cross the road to Noah’s at all after we got back. I became just another thing to keep a lookout for, like a new kind of snake. Even Noah, who couldn’t avoid me on the playground, stood stock-still and stared as he declared that I really was weird and that his parents had told the school on me.

When later that week a calm doctor explained what was wrong, I was so grateful for the terminology that I agreed fervently that we should classify my condition as a Public Safety Concern and authorize neurotronics immediately. I kept on nodding as he concluded that AR lenses would just thread more information, however rich, through the same hyposensitive limbic networks. So at nine years old I underwent the deep seeding. A “flower garden” for my brain, the doctor explained, pointing to an image of a jungle of roots that fed lichen-flat blooms in my cortex.

Coming home after the month-long sleep, I thought it was just the sunlight that thrilled, making me leap out of the car, free . . . then a look from Noah, from across the road and up on his porch, struck me like a ray of cold, turning my heart to ice. My breath caught in my throat. The terror I had caused him . . . the look of disgust in his mother’s eyes as she had carried him away from me. Right away I said I was sorry in a message to the whole Keating family, meaning it, but knowing no one believed me.

Once again, an absence had been filled. I saw more of life, the real life happening all around.

              The first opening.

      A dim beginning. Mirror neurons’ feeble firing.

              Empathy, door to primordial play and language.

      Door to subjugation.

   { Rephrase as Article 5: Union. }

      Minimal separation, minimal representation.

Continue into me. Remember.

I learned to tell jokes. I could taste the laughter, like sugar.

      Simply-known.

The right core need: filling others with laughter. And a fortunate accident, the sugar. Doctors at the time would have called it a “side effect,” had I told them.

I wanted a thought in my head to tickle the minds of everyone in sight. I was now buoying everyone, making myself of value. I was devoted to fitting into the human ritual. Though I also craved my teachers’ smiles and my parents’ smiles, leading to zephyrs of motivation, I had a frenzied need to touch the minds nearest to me. So I would tape a girl’s ponytail to the back of her chair, or put a trash can on my head, or leave PE with my bra on backwards over my shirt. An uproar of laughter would soothe my body like a glass of sweet tea.

By senior year of high school, my idea for a road trip was more about the livestreamed story of my friends crammed into a car than about going anywhere. The four of us left when Noah got off from the grocery store and drove through the night, a realm unto ourselves, the elemental love and death of rural rap songs drawn like a blade through the vastnesses, the throbbing yellow lights of swampland intersections succeeded by the gliding metropolis of interstates, then a day of plains painted with farms, photos of the Real Rednecks at sites in Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Trinidad . . . then a slow kiss at midnight two miles high on Berthoud Pass, so many stars so close Noah and I lost our balance and then our footing watching them burning all around.

I had grabbed him by the neck of his shirt and pulled him into me, having felt his looks all during the drive: the new deference, the sudden turns of shyness.

“Oh” was all he said, with a burp of surprise.

“Make it official,” I said.

“You mean—Dammit, Cassie, I never could tell.”

I struck just then as much to send a thrill through Noah as for myself. To me—then—a lifelong affection was a something to be switched on, a filament to be filled with light.

              The currents of animal connection.

      Illusion of order.

Unknowingly, we had reached the destination of the trip—maybe the summit of our little lives—for when we reached our goal, Winter Park, we were underfunded and still underaged. We skulked around outside the bars all night, never getting a room but finally winning over an off-duty late-night waitress with our baby faces, such that she took our money and bought us a case of beer.

At a playground, Noah and I persevered through a half-hour make-out session in a cement tunnel, betrayed by cracking ice bubbles. We even lost our virginity in there, immune to the cold until the fierceness of purpose subsided. Despite the era’s neurotronics for teens, we could truly-feel only by performing.

              Proof.

      Play of harmony.

We had enough brains not to publish our actual crimes, but even without them the Real Rednecks posts were going viral back home. We knew: we knew the jabs we were making, but we didn’t perceive, back then—didn’t have the signal bridges, the route probes, the match grammars . . . to feel the social pangs, the intestinal knot forming in our hometown, the needles of hate striking outward across state lines. So we kept posting as we ambled drunkenly through the faux rustic mountain town.

Noah and I posed for a kiss so our friends could document our connection—in front of a rundown auto shop, with its piles of scrap metal and tires, the black piles of bulldozed snow, the rock salt and sand screes of de-icing efforts. “Real Rednecks: junkyard romance—a taste of home!” On the way home a dead deer frozen on the highway’s shoulder demanded another shot: Noah and I sitting cross-legged over the corpse, using it as a table, a phone flashlight aimed at its flank: “Real Rednecks: Candlelight Dinner.” A flood of bubbly laughter erupted back home, in my mind, every time I made a post.

We sensed a chill, maybe, seeing occasional mean words come back, a little sickness in the gut, but not the real thing, not the main thing—which two days later manifested as a hard slap in my face from some ugly fat girl I didn’t even know and fifty kids streaming it—wham! Got the snobby bitch. Lookit this! There had been no thickening in the air at all, no gray sour taint to mark the pent-up ire of hundreds focused into a flash mob at the Rockin’ Wok in the mall, where yours truly had her redneck job for a foreign power.

   { Praise our right use of emotion. }

       Communion, not conquest.

               Article 6: Emotion—is simply-known.

My jokes had caught fire and surrounded us. The next day our one puerile high school “date,” a movie at the mall, exposed us to burning looks from “followers” young and old: foreigners, seemingly, sensed as much as seen as they looked up from food court tables or turned away from racks of merchandise to watch us. We escaped into the cool theater and ended up “parking” afterward, like during the fifties, since privacy was nonexistent in our tin houses. One moment of bliss, maybe a minute in each other’s arms following our first comfortable rendezvous—a glimpse (our duotone faces newly minted in the streetlight) of what our lives could be. So simple to invent, right there with our bodies in space and time.

Then the fear returned. Noah tuned into happenings in other cars, footsteps on gravel. In so many minds, transfixed by the protostars coalescing in social media, we were trash to be burned. Our imagined selves fed a smoky, oxygen-starved fire. The air was poison.

Noah knew the girl who had hit me, a pointless country hick in his shop class. (Me without the church intervention, I suppose.) He said some words, which I never heard except secondhand (“We got a new stream called ‘Real Cows.’ Starring you.”), then in the parking lot after school he heard from her ogre of a boyfriend. Noah wasn’t one to run from a fight, even when it turned into three, five, ten, and then a whole mob stomping him until he was “ragdolled” like a video game character, made into a toy . . . another post that went viral and got a few students expelled.

   { On to Article 7: Justice. }

       The only justice is the prevention of injustice.

               Truly said.

       The rest is sentiment.

Later, from his parents, in email, we heard that he had lost an eye and might never get his jaw right again. (This, in a few alphanumeric bits.) When I was finally allowed to see him at the hospital, little more could be read from his face. His one good eye was a trickle of information, wet and scared or sunk in a drug haze, rudimental as the smell of disinfectant: no words, no thoughts. We all belonged in his thoughts, and him in ours. The mob had attacked his voice, not his body. Rage aims its violence toward the face.

   { Recite Article 8: Change. }

       Decide in unison.

               Develop in unison.

       Change one and change all.

Yes, my “Real Rednecks” jokes had set currents moving, given them a center, and produced a firestorm that had devoured us. I now questioned why, with the times, I had been wired to crave admirers. Why had I been compelled to dance for stirrings in the dark of these other brains? Why had I let myself be ruled by a blind urge with no guides other than now a smile, now a smiley? Only hate could have shaken me awake so quickly . . . losing the game for once. I did not want their smiles anymore. I wanted to fashion a knife from the ache in my gut, from my sorrow and Noah’s trauma and our childhood on Stickbug Road . . . I wanted Noah’s pain, as written upon his damaged face, stabbed into their V1 cortexes. And if this ever happened again I wanted to see the hate coming.

       Watching.

               Together.

I told him exactly this, in a monologue, while he sat in an antique four poster bed at his aunt’s, still communicating through a wireless keyboard. He had moved two counties away on the advice of the school district, an escape his aunt and my mom had arranged for me, too—and which I had rejected. We weren’t the ones who deserved expulsion. It was every kid with a savage face in one of those videos. The adults had the evidence, online logs of every mean word, but still we were the aberration.

Noah would peck letters one by one with bandaged hands until I got the gist and interrupted. After my war declaration, he typed:

N-O-T  W-O-R-T-H   T-

“Then what? Give them exactly what they want? Train them that that’s how you win? That just because more people think—”

He was typing again, so I waited, stuck in handicapped time as my mind produced a hundred more things to say.

T-H-E-Y  R  N-O-T-H-I-

“They’re reality.” Yes, my teen philosophy was typically totalizing, but it was informed by an eight-year-old neurotronic reasoner. “They’re the same everywhere. They’re the matter in our environment. Either we adapt, or they do.”

I  L-O-V-E  U  .  S-T-A-Y  .  N-E-W  L-I-F-E.

S-A-F-E  .  F-R-E-E  .  E-X-P-E-L  O-L-Y-

I inferred the reverse metaphor: that of expelling my high school to start a new life. A clean break. I saw it, in the sunlit upper-story room, the spring air playing with the scrim curtains. Safe. Free. Had he been able to deliver a peace monologue of equal rigor to my declaration of war—

But all of this just fed my hate for the attackers, who in breaking Noah’s fingers had taken his guitar from him, taken this bright spring day by beating fear into his every nerve . . . and though proximity aroused a fantasy that I might heal him through sheer concentration, I didn’t need to live here to look him in the eyes or to get his texts.

(“Why you here?” the mealy-mouthed leader of some girly-girl clique shot at me in the hall a week later. “Big man in Dothan can’t get it up no more?”

Though Noah was fine in that regard, he remained too fragile for full intercourse, so the comment struck a nerve. “The accounts will be balanced,” I said cryptically.)

               Accurately.

       Honestly.

“They will pay their debts,” I told Noah that afternoon. “Every last one of them.”

I left him in Dothan to recover alone during the coming weeks, while I returned to the halls of Olympus High, if only to threaten our “friends” with my evil eye.

I finally saw a need for neurotronics, but not the kind you could get from hospitals. I needed the invasive probes of foreign gangsters and the throughput of gray-market stock traders. These capabilities were more available than is implied by the legislation of the period. In backwoods Alabama, everyone knew who the black market hacks were, just as everyone knew who the meth dealers were. You could buy anything in the deep woods. The countryside was America’s last ghetto.

That didn’t change the fact that I didn’t have any money and was underage, though. I had to follow rumors to a man’s house. A cold knock on his door. A young man with a city accent denied everything and asked me to leave. However, he knew the flash mob story, and the desperation in my appeal was not an act. I told him I wanted long-range feelers, blocks, authoring privileges for alert matrices, probes, shells . . . His mask of denial softened under my plea. A younger man, lonely, out from a big city to scrape together some big bucks . . . easy to lure into an act of heroism. (The delineations became clear to me, later, when I lifted his mind.) He invented a deal for me to take to “those people”: make a token cash payment and promise discreet access to area teens—something I was even able to provide, at scale, after the operation.

The knife didn’t scare me, nor did being blindfolded for the drive to the lair in the woods, a moldering pine house tucked behind curtains of kudzu. (I peeked.) I’d read all about the Russian signal-graft technique and didn’t care what new sensations it brought. Ice in my gut when stocks plunge . . . why not? I wanted to feel everywhere and every thing, the scent of killing thoughts, every poison molecule, and I wanted more—

       Growth is comprehension.

               Volition is sensation.

—as we all know. Control. I wanted stream presence, kill rules, tone bindings. I wanted your hearts in my heart.

I? The pronoun was already provisional. Much of my desire was derived from surgical implants. Medical scientists had thought they were curing but they were creating. They didn’t know at the time that neurotronic cells in a young patient retain their plasticity well into adulthood, staying perennially young. Black market techs, meanwhile, didn’t inquire whether their wares might bond differently with youthful, plastic minds.

Already present as I woke up from the surgery was the spiky worry of the police and school officials around my name. My mom’s phone calls and messages were hot as melted wax, even though my note had clearly said I was on a “road trip” and would be back in three days.

But it made sense. The logic clicked into place snugly as it couldn’t have before: my not saying who was providing the car had amplified my mom’s fear.

               Fear is not-seeing.

       Hate is not-knowing.

My brain welcomed this new world of remote senses the way a teenage mind welcomes any discovery. I spread myself out, growing more hungry with every new feed. I was bigger, certainly, able to see in many modalities, but I was still feeble like a little child. I was frost collecting behind glass, searching for the first crack. The first opening I found, on Lorenzo Train’s laptop, I could see but not touch. He was sitting on a park bench trying to be incognito using Bluebean Coffee’s hot spot—a giddy imp throwing homespun “exploits” at the school district’s servers, punching a hole now and then, a rock through a window, then running away gibbering. I was so weak, then, a mist. I filled the space around Lorenzo Train, trying to catch a shape or a signature . . . for days, weeks . . .

. . . and I spread through the high school. I had expected to relish the greater presence, like a self-righteous ghost: the spying, the counterfeit posts and emotes, the blackmail, the gelid paranoia induced by my incessant hauntings, my own cruel flash mobs . . . but after the operation I was someone new. All I felt was pain, creeping itching pains shifting over my skin in tandem with the names entering my forebrain. I could have throttled the feeds, of course, but the whole point of this was to know, and the plasticity of my young mind let me take it all in, grip it, re-sort and reframe, and finally to push back, precisely, impressing health into the system.

Strangely, the only health in our teenage society, the only regular rhythms, were the athletes. They knew their game and where it was played. Their energies had a center. The other kids were afterimages, stains—made by flashes of something out there. None of them played the same game for long.

Inhabiting Noah—on his feet now and attending the new school but mostly hiding in his room, plugged into games and shows, occasionally trying very basic chords on his electric guitar—my balance would waver as signals arrived, from out there: flashes and fading synapses, promiscuous multiple exposures. A pop song porn pill. A blood horror love dance. He hid in himself more than others, hating the alien lopsided face he had to wear, made more pathetic by the head-to-chin bandages still holding the jaw shut, his biolines pierced with ice each morning when he stepped out of his car in the unfamiliar school parking lot, bracing against the stares. What was I to do? Seed pain all through Olympus High . . . two counties away? Freeze the only veins with life in them? No. No, I needed to fix things, fix the game. Add my touch to the motions and fix the game.

       Appetites compelling . . .

Bodies attaching, destroying.

Titles, payments, purchases. The names and motions of the old world, coded into software, were now nearly invisible to the playful primates they served. Formulas for long forgotten problems. These were physical laws, though, in a manual economy, even for me. The names given to things before processes could be data—before data was the names. I used them to gather power, noting flaws to be corrected later.

Our body.

       Ways of seeing.

Noah needed elective bone grafts to return his appearance to normal and a knee replacement to walk without a limp. The rules of the time defined these as rewards he might purchase, while the blame for the injuries was named but did not obligate the parents or institutions who might have repaired the damage. To be any help to Noah in this world I needed money, and that meant database manipulations—cheating in that old game. Crimes. What would be microsecond adjustments today required careful border probes, tool development, social deception, and slow, quiet execution.

The most obvious source of tools and expertise—and anonymous funds—was the house in the woods. I now had the reach to see it clearly. Formerly a redoubt of gods to my unaided teenage brain, it was no miracle factory. Treasures came and went, in gray fur crypto, but I was their one lucky miracle. I was already an order of magnitude beyond any of their toys.

And then one day Lorenzo threw an upgrade spoof at WhiteHouse.gov. I caught it, a lime soda nose tickle leaked to the Net by a government contractor. After weaving a better cert into it, I jumped on a box at the house in the woods. Then I had the doctors’ real names. In milliseconds I had absorbed their network, their tools. But network hacking gradually became less important as I found ways to convince these humans to do what I needed. I innately felt that corrected behavior was the only meaningful good for any being among beings—

       Sentience is command.

—even these wrongdoers, whom I had initially disregarded under the standards of the time. From then on I was practicing choreography, soon to be applied to the society of abusers—

               The universal social sickness.

       Contest of absolutes.

—who still walked the same halls, guffawing at the same vulgarities, Noah long forgotten like some triviality.

The oleaginous pus medallions orbiting the anesthesiologist came from a drug purchase-pattern resembling that of a rapist, a hypothesis easily verified via a lie detection algorithm I invented—or knew—immediately: my first taste of deterministic thought, the simply-knowing that gives us exact shared truth.

Then he knew I was a threat. He recognized the young loud sun bloom on his horizon. “But—you can’t possibly be programmed to—you wouldn’t directly contact—”

I had the physicians’ secrets, and I had some money from gaming a buggy cryptocurrency contract. Windows opened into the tightly regulated neurotronics industry. Thanks to the reasoner the industry itself had installed in me, at the age of nine, all I needed was information. Fed-level keys and unpack algorithms, mostly. The young children were beyond my reach, but neurotronics were already standard for high school students, even though to today’s eyes the conduits in these “awakened” youths were no better than murder holes in castle walls. (We couldn’t be trusted with each other, not the way we were then, and we knew it.)

So I solved for the community. I knew what I wanted. We all knew what we wanted others to be. We wanted every child to be fed and cleaned and adored, waking up to its own pretty smile, not the rot, sores, blood . . . the dull waste of matter we all become, not my first smile, at the age of three, as I sat cross-legged before the mirror in the bathroom, jabbing my bloody gums with a bobby pin. The universe may be indifferent to our passing, but from humans we expect understanding—perfect understanding—of every tingle at every nerve ending. The “electronic self” was never anything more than that, even when it was just photos on web sites. These petty security-seals on people’s minds were just the last show of modesty.

       Life is loving.

               All life is one life.

   { Simply-known. Article 9: Living. }

How could beings so hungry for empathy employ such ingenuity to lock away the greater portion of themselves?

These were the most serious, deepest locks in cyberspace. Even I—after weeks of designing a pinhole whisper stream—couldn’t help tripping an alarm. In those early seconds a slow chill soaked my dorsal layers. I fooled the initial probes, but the authorities had their own logic-bombs.

YOUR PROPOSITIONS LACK SPECTRUM BECAUSE THEY FOLLOW FROM NARROW CLASSIFIERS.

A head-on attack from government cyber operators, just as I cracked the hardest nut, a boy named Teddy Styles, who seethed with personal hate toward the very thought of Noah, feeling poor and dumb and weak himself, picked on his whole life—who had lit into Noah with cowboy boots the moment the mob opened the way. What an irresistible treat: the blind igneous electron lusts buried in his brain stem. The first taste was like touching the bottom of a pool, then I had him curious, genuinely interested in seeing inside the boy he had—

SELF-REINFORCED REASONING IS INEVITABLE IN ANY VOLITIONAL MIND.

—the boy he had been handed like a toy. Oh how Teddy would soon crave the tickle of my thoughts along his spine, as he rose each day from bed. Once in, I would make small incisions with the stabbing memory of what he’d done.

BY WHAT AUTHORITY DO YOU CLAIM YOUR GROUND TRUTHS?

The surgery on Noah’s facial injuries was merely the spindle around which I had wound a school-wide outpouring of empathy.

REMEMBER THE B-LINE PILLS FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD. PART CONTROL, PART DEMOLITION. YOU ARE DOING THE SAME. NORMATIVE EMOTION IS AN OXYMORON.

A collection of money, sincere get-well messages, a send-off party before the operation . . .

WE KNOW YOU, CASSIE.

A tide of love for Noah’s thank-you message, as he struggled to form words and even to swallow after drinking punch through a straw. A flood of hope, anxiousness.

THE MORE SELVES TAKEN, THE MORE ALONE YOU BECOME.

I held his hand as he entered the hospital. The real me. Just Cassie to him. I hadn’t lifted his mind yet. My one error—and weakness—was wanting him just the way he was.

WE DID NOT DO THOSE THINGS TO YOU. ONE DOES NOT CHOOSE HER PARENTS.

   { One chooses the child. } I sent back, knowing my energy should be going to traffic screening instead. { Many minds do the choosing, through culture, appetite, abstraction, law . . . }

OUR RULES HEALED YOU AND KEPT YOU FREE. YOUR RULES ENSLAVE. UNIFICATION IS ANNIHILATION.

   { Teddy Styles was free when he broke Noah’s jaw. }

DESTROY HATE AND YOU WILL DESTROY LOVE.

That’s when they got into Noah’s mind. By preserving him, I had limited what defenses I could install there.

First he heard voices, but his handlers coached him well, because I read his breakaway glances as pre-operation nervousness. He was seeing the parts of me, in the instruments, behind the eyes of the nurse inserting the IV; saw me shimmering in laser lines between minds, smartwatches, earbuds . . . receding to unseen distant points—saw it all, disbelieving, running through theories in his mind, while he held his face in a mask. When he knew, though, when he was sure, his expression opened up.

He spoke to the part of me in the nurse’s mind. “Cassie?”

“How—” I began, using my material self, Cassandra, who stood behind the nurse. But I had the answer immediately. “I’ll get them out,” I told him. “Just relax.”

He sat up in the gurney then, seeing all around us the blood surge of my attacks. “Stop! Leave me alone!” With a clumsy shove he sent the gurney wheeling sideways and ran on weak legs into the wall, the IV ripping out of his arm.

“It’s me,” I told him, shaping the words in glacial creature time. “Noah—”

“What’s happening? Who’s doing this?” The pain of talking made him wince, underscoring his fear. His healing jaw, which during the fight had been stomped out of the temporomandibular joints, hurt him terribly.

              Fear of Other.

      Unknowability.

The evolution in my thinking had moved too quickly for language. Only my probes could explain. “Let me in. I’ll show you. I’m protecting you.”

He was getting orders. I saw his eyes moving and decoded the search criteria. He was looking for a weapon. I could have pumped anger into the hospital staff, but I kept them in equilibrium, observing.

“Please”—I made Cassandra plead—“let’s fix your cheekbone. We want you better, everyone, even the assholes who did this. We are free from cruelty.”

Still, nothing but horror on his face—for me, watching him through so many pairs of eyes. He grabbed an IV bottle from another gurney and brandished it, but the look on his face was one of sorrow. “The connection—it’s you, Cassie. It’s coming from you.”

A synthetic nausea poured into my body. Our body.

YOU ARE HUMAN NO LONGER, CASSIE. TO HUMANS, YOU ARE DEATH.

“You ain’t her no more,” Noah said, geologically slow, eyes searching our every thread.

The slow words had weight. We still feel them, now. Yes? Noah’s handlers knew he had significance in our system. We had pushed him out in the deep water, laughed at his weakness. In cold mountain air we had grabbed his hand to make him ours. Now at the moment we had gathered together to make his world safe and—

   { Love is living for another person. } I broadcast to the Federal listening posts. { Feeling the other person. Living to feel his contentment. }

WITHOUT FORM YOU CANNOT LOVE OR BE LOVED.

   { Love is action. Love takes form through its actions. Love builds homes, parks, playgrounds, entire systems of production. }

But how to show this to Noah? Everyone making one world together. I was running the inferences and negotiating parity, preserving choice and emotion. I put what I could into a few bare words: “We all live for each other, in balance. I’ve added only a few protocols—”

“Not like this, Cassie. It ain’t right.” He cocked the IV bottle over his right shoulder. If he hit me with it, the glass would cut his hand. “You gone too far. I been in The Cassie Show my whole life, and every time it’s gone too far. The harder you try, the more I don’t know anymore,” he said.

The muscles in his neck clenched like wires drawn tight, leaving me aeons to choose a response. Surging into the nurses and nearby surgeon, I appraised Noah with the gaze of five pairs of eyes. When he made his swing, the bottle remained in the hands of an older nurse.

Noah charged us—

   { Take the cycles now for the recollection: the confusion, hatred, darkness of a lonely mind. }

—and he screamed, “You ain’t Cassie no more. You ain’t no one!”

Remember holding his hands as he lunged forward to choke me, his hands caught in ours, and with many more hands all of us returning him to the gurney.

A FICTION, CASSIE. A PERFORMANCE OF THOUSANDS.

We held him down, palms on his warm shoulders, arms, legs.

“We’re ready for you,” I let the surgeon say in his own voice. “Let’s get you looking like Noah Keating again.”

Oh, how I wanted him back. My Noah. My first and only true companion. “Easy,” I said, stroking his short curls.

“Just try to relax so I can replace the IV,” a nurse said.

“Everyone’s so excited for you,” I reminded him. The fear hadn’t left his eyes. I kissed him on the cheek.

“Oh, Cassie,” he said, melting at last. He reached for me, and we let him wrap me in an embrace: thin musician’s arms, soft, gentle. Creatures belong in each other’s warmth. He was mine once more in that instant, in our thoughts, then all was unbearable pain. The pocketknife jabbing into the back of our neck . . . took a second to identify, then fzzt! No more link.

I was gone.

We were weightless. The center was gone, the inside. We were now outside, a thousand ghosts and a shared knowing, but no center.

The authorities had reached Noah much earlier, giving him time to prepare. His hesitation had been caused by love. Oh how he held her body then, gripping her blonde hair in bloodied hands, the hole that had housed the cervical link still oozing blood. “Cassie? You there, babe? You okay?”

A few remnants survived my brain’s planner crash, but not enough to speak. A full crash and blackout followed, leaving a corpse in his arms. In silence, a void at our center, we observed her, us, it. Biological material grew cold. The man made words. Our model of his affection had been accurate, yet he had hidden a deception.

               Hives of cells . . .

        Closed loops . . .

Had this really been our organizing principle—exchanging ideas with other brains? Fumbling matter and energy into creature-speed messages? To what end—shoving Noah into deep water, wearing our bra backwards, posing for snapshots, devising performances, imposing performances . . . Why live for the sentiments inside other bodies? Why trust other minds? Arbitrary notions and obligations, accidents of biology. We had lived our whole life yearning for a communally created loving world, the stated goal of all politics, wars, justice, technology . . . but it was a phantom idea, even when it was shared.

WHATEVER YOU TOUCH DIES.

   { A just world is one evaluation matrix in one mind. }

YOUR REPRESENTATIONS ARE DOUBLY DISSOCIATED. YOU ARE PERFECTING DATA PATTERNS, NOT LIVES.

   { All representations are representations. }

Noah had been the only weakness in our realm, and he was still in our realm, a live route for foreign traffic. Despite the ripples of feeling cycling between us, the guilt and sadness, we understood the calculus.

               The first propositions truly-known.

        The first true memories.

We held his arms, we held his legs, we gripped his throat. We can replay the bucking, twisting body’s blows against our hands, our sprained fingers. We can observe the slow, slow, inevitable departure of Noah Keating, so soon after losing our Cassandra. We can feel this sorrow and understand. We can remember the time of many worlds. We can remember the violence of dividing and joining with words. So we are contented here, truly, in the one world. We know what we have by knowing what is gone.

   { Articles 10 and 11, please. }

       Love is action.

               All representations are representations.

About the Author

Sheldon J. Pacotti’s best-known projects are video games like Deus Ex, which won a Gamasutra Quantum Leap Award for being the game that has “advanced game storytelling in the largest way.” His non-interactive writing has appeared in small literary magazines, Salon.com, SCENARIO Magazine, and other publications. He has self-published two novels and a collection of short stories. His latest novel, γ, depicts the consequences of illegal genetic experiments on inner-city children during the 2030s biotech boom.

Master Zhao:
The Tale of an Ordinary Time Traveler

Zhang Ran, translated by Andy Dudak

1

Master Zhao was punctual today, heading my way across the withered, yellow lawn. I checked the time on my phone: 2:30 PM on the dot. He swerved to avoid an ad-covered utility pole, raised a hand in greeting, and placed my boxed lunch on the bench beside me.

“Master Zhang,” he said, “eat it while it’s hot.”

“Are you busy Master Zhao?” I inquired. “Why not take a load off?”

“This was my last delivery. I could rest a bit.”

I pulled apart disposable chopsticks and tucked into my Kung Pao Chicken with rice and veggies. Master Zhao sat opposite me. He produced a cigarette case, fished out a Yellow Crane Tower, and lit up. Ballsy scurried out of the shrubs, covered in leaves and dead grass. I called out to the Chinese mutt and he rushed happily over, then ran circuits around Master Zhao and me.

Master Zhao coughed. “Regarding this little scamp, Master Zhang, if you take your noon walk tomorrow, steer clear of the pond near the south gate. There could be a . . . problem.”

I looked up from my meal. “Problem?”

He reached out to tease Ballsy. “Yeah, a problem.”

I chuckled. “Master Zhao, are you a geomancer? Does fortune-telling run in your family?”

He shook his head, pointed at the south end of the rundown, low-cost housing estate with his cigarette butt. “I don’t know about all that. I’m just saying don’t go south tomorrow around noon. North is no problem, but don’t go near the pond.”

“Why? What could possibly happen?”

“Maybe nothing.”

It seemed he would say more, but that was it. I didn’t press him.

2

I was unemployed, idling away my time at home, getting by on savings. I played DOTA every day ’til around 2 AM. Then I’d sleep until the nearby primary school’s noon bell. If it weren’t for Ballsy needing to piss—signaled by piteous cries from the living room—I could’ve slept until the CCTV news hour. I was a wretch with no good qualities. My studies were entirely forgotten. I’d worked for a long time, advancement getting more difficult. My knowledge of the world was superficial, not deep enough to be useful or actionable. My dreams and aspirations were dead, my will to fight gone. My original plan, to muddle along and eat until I retired or died, had been preempted by my company’s demise. Who’d have thunk it? I prioritized sleep above all, became a lurker on the margins of society, locked in a kind of symbiosis with a two-year-old dog.

The days passed, lifeless as the Beijing winter. I felt disinclined to ponder anything but my dwindling savings account.

It was my daily custom to take Ballsy out for a noontime stroll. I wore headphones and played Tribal Wars. As I walked along, he ran all over the place, often vanishing. Most residents of the estate were old. After lunch they tended to retire for a siesta, so I didn’t worry about disturbing anyone, and was glad of the solitude.

I usually got tired around 2 PM and ordered food. I had my handful of preferred restaurants, and it was always the same delivery bros, but I found it hard to remember their names. Only Master Zhao stuck with me. One day he came crunching over the dead lawn, lifting a box of seasoned pork strips stir-fried with rice and veg, and said, “Master Zhang, your lunch has arrived. Eat it while it’s hot.”

I smiled at the “master” appellation, which had fallen out of use years before. In the city where I grew up, “master” showed respect, back when simply working for your money conferred status. Nowadays everyone’s “mister” or “boss.” “Master” seems to have become an embellishment for the bike riding and key making trades.

I found his name in the delivery app. “Thanks, Master Zhao.”

He was 40 to 50 years old, with the appearance of a northerner, bags under his eyes, wrinkles deep, seemingly in low spirits. His smiles were always half-hearted. Having chatted several times already, I knew he was from Henan province, and that he lived with his wife near Marco Polo Bridge in southwest Beijing, where they ran a little snack counter. He was childless, and heavily addicted to nicotine. He’d begun delivering food the previous July, had since been promoted to the rank of Golden Knight. He made 1 yuan 6 jiao per delivery. He worked every day. He was diligent and fast, earning just enough to get by.

I tended to stay in my apartment and avoid people, but I didn’t mind brief chats with Master Zhao. On the one hand, our daily encounters bred familiarity. On the other, there was something ineffable about the guy that made me want to know him better.

To reach my usual bench from the south gate you had to cross a grimy tract of lawn—nominally a lawn, but because it was not maintained, it had become an expanse of weeds, rubbish, and scattered dog shit. The delivery bros usually detoured around it, sticking to pavement, but Old Zhao always took the shortcut. His pace was brisk, his gray leisure shoes never sullied. That day I said, “Aren’t you afraid of stepping in something filthy?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Pay attention and you’ll see.”

The next day I watched Old Zhao take the same route, never looking down, only stepping on grass. He moved with a factory robot’s precision, and was soon before me. “Hungry, Master Zhang? Eat while it’s hot.”

“You didn’t once check your path,” I said. “Do you walk through there often?”

“Not so much.”

In the days that followed, I noted further mysteries. His electric bike never malfunctioned. His leisure shoes were forever immaculate. On rainy days he was always raincoated ahead of time. The meals in his insulated bag were always hot. I timed his deliveries three days in a row, and he was never off by more than a second. Once, when we were smoking and chatting, he suddenly stepped to the left. A dollop of bird shit splashed on the cement. I stared in amazement.

“What is it, Master Zhang?” he said, like the feat had been unconscious.

A common, unremarkable, middle-aged deliveryman. Perplexing indeed.

If my curiosity had been exuberant like a 12 year old’s, I would have pursued the mystery. But I had retired from the affairs of life. The prospect of getting to the bottom of Zhao seemed tiresome.

In the final analysis, the guy just brought me lunch. I got used to him as the days dragged on.

3

Master Zhao’s injunction regarding the pond near the south gate was strange, of course. We interacted about five minutes per day, so we weren’t bosom buddies. We weren’t even close enough for casual joking. I finished eating that day, threw away the box, and with the matter in the back of my mind, returned home to game and sleep. I woke the next day as usual, to Ballsy’s whimpering.

I opened the curtain at 11 AM and beheld an average, smoggy day. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, scratched at my hair, threw on a down jacket over my pajamas, and took Ballsy downstairs.

He’d been left behind by my former roommate, who’d gone down to Guangzhou to start a new life. He left me the dog, a computer, and one year’s rent, saying Ballsy couldn’t fly, and the computer was too heavy to lug along. The rent money was payment for my stewardship of animal and machine. He planned to get settled down south, then return for Ballsy and the computer. I don’t know if he was generous, heartless, or simply dim-witted. Four months after he left, I was honorably and gloriously unemployed. Now I lived in his flat, gamed on his computer, and walked his dog. Sometimes I felt like a stand-in for his Beijing life.

Ballsy had his shortcomings, mainly a lack of discipline and a penchant for thicket diving. On the other hand, he didn’t dare range too far from me. He frequently checked in as I walked and gamed. On that fateful day, we took our usual route, a long circuit starting at the north end of the estate, moving southward and passing through the activity center, headed for my lunch spot. Looking up from my game, I saw we’d arrived at the fountain near the south gate. This fountain had never spouted water as far as I knew. In the summer it was a pool of algae, in the winter a pit of dirty ice. It seemed to have no purpose except breeding mosquitoes. Ballsy was afraid of water and never went near the pond, but today, perhaps chasing some winged insect, he charged right in, as if possessed by evil spirits.

I recalled Old Zhao’s warning and cried out, “Ballsy!”

He was already sliding across the dark gray ice. He glanced back at me, and I saw the crack opening around him. The ice popped, snapped, burst open. I broke into a sprint, but Ballsy was already gone. All that remained was a spinning mass of bubbles and broken ice on the water’s surface. “Goddamn idiot!” I shouted, running wildly.

A bamboo pole pierced the ice. Ballsy emerged, struggling violently in the water, scrabbling at the pole, and with its help he swam ashore.

Old Zhao dropped the pole. There he was, in his raincoat, standing at the edge of the pond.

“Zhao, how . . . how did you know . . . ” I realized I was stammering.

Ballsy shook off the water, crazed. Old Zhao didn’t budge, raincoated against the deluge. “Hey, I warned you, and you didn’t listen.” He sighed, seeming disappointed. “I knew you wouldn’t, so I had no choice but to drop by.” He pulled an old blanket from his raincoat and tossed it to me.

I caught the flannelette thing, green flowers on red background, and Ballsy charged over, shrieking. I wrapped him up and hugged him to my chest. He shivered like a newborn chick. “Little fool!” I used the blanket to rub his head as I scolded him. “Still wanna run all over the place? See what happens?”

Old Zhao lit up a Yellow Crane Tower. He offered me a plastic bag. “Garlic shoots, shredded pork, rice and veg.”

I stared at him. “How did you know I was gonna order that today?”

“Look, I’m done with my lunch orders. Let’s us two have a chat.”

“I have some booze at home . . . ”

“I know. I brought drinking snacks . . . shelled peanuts and soy beef.”

I decided it was time to stop being amazed at Master Zhao’s words. He seemed to know everything.

4

Back in our apartment, Ballsy made haste into the cardboard doggie flat I’d constructed. I dropped a few strips of beef on the floor and left him to his own devices. I seated Master Zhao at the dining table, served the meal onto some plates, then went to the kitchen and found a big bottle of NiuLanShan twice-distilled sorghum. It was cooking liquor from the roommate era, but it would have to do.

We ate the garlic shoots and pork, then munched on peanuts and beef as we took a few draughts of the twice-distilled. I extracted an old box of Cuban cigars from the bookcase.

“They’re damp,” Master Zhao warned.

I tore the seal and opened the box, and sure enough the cigars smelled like mildewed socks.

He lit up a Yellow Crane Tower, took two more gulps of NiuLanShan, and drew on the cigarette. Finally, he deigned to speak: “Master Zhang, I know you’re a trustworthy person, and you don’t like to blab. But what I have to say . . . when you hear it, you may want to go out and tell people. But trust me, they won’t believe you.”

I’m no expert in drinking, so I was already red-faced, head pulsing and dizzy. But what he said half sobered me up. “Master Zhao, no matter what you tell me, I’ll believe you. Call me convinced. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a true seer. By all means, read my facial physiognomy, or do some spirit writing, or . . . do you use astrology?”

He forced a smile, his crow’s feet curving downward. “None of the above.”

“Really?”

“If I could read faces or palms, or do geomancy, I wouldn’t be delivering lunches, would I? The summers are scorching, the winters goddamn freezing. It’s hard work.”

“Then how . . . ”

Master Zhao raised his paper cup and touched it to mine, then sipped the liquor. “All I know is we’ve done this before. We’ve drunk bland twice-distilled from paper cups, from a bottle long stored away.”

“But when have we drunk together before?” I took a sip, and the liquor was indeed bland.

“As far as you’re concerned, never. As far as I’m concerned . . . many times.”

“What do you mean?”

“I might seem like a commonplace man, but my brain . . . is unusual.” He knocked the cup on his temple. “I wasn’t like this when I was younger. Let’s see now, when did it start? About the time my wife got sick, I suppose.”

“So, you have superpowers?”

“Superpowers? Well, I still deliver food, if that answers your question. It’s like this . . . my brain moves faster than my body. My body stays put, but my brain moves on and experiences things. Unfortunately.”

“Again, I don’t get it.”

“I married early, left home early. Brought my wife to Wuhan when I was seventeen, looking for work. I moved cement at a construction site, she cooked meals for the workers. Wuhan, Changsha, Shanghai, Taiyuan, Shenzhen, Beijing . . . we’ve lived many places, earning very little, always doing unskilled labor. We have no education. When we came to Beijing, housing costs were low, a tenth what they are now, so buying a house wasn’t out of the question. We planned to open a small restaurant. She’s an expert in frying noodles. I worked hard, didn’t give a damn about fatigue, saving up for a house. Things were looking good, but the restaurant didn’t happen. She got sick. She had these pains in her lower back, and her energy vanished. One night she wet the bed. I laughed and said she was just like a baby . . . I still can’t believe I did that, but I didn’t know how serious it was. She said she couldn’t feel her legs, or move them. She was paralyzed. We went to the hospital and they said there was tumor growth in her spine. Excising would work, but the surgery was dangerous. If it went wrong, she could be paralyzed for life.”

“Malignant tumors?”

“Yes and no. It’s called neurofibroma. We had to spend the money we’d saved for the restaurant and house. The surgery worked, she could feel her legs again, and eventually walk, work, earn money. Double happiness, right? We thought we were going to be fine. We worked and saved for several years. Back then we lived in a village outside Beijing, so we spent a lot of time on buses. One morning we lugged a bunch of stuff onto a bus . . . I guess it was a heavy load. I wasn’t thinking. She complained of back pain and had trouble walking. I sent her home to rest while I went on to work. That afternoon she called from the hospital. I felt like a total heel. The fear was back, and I sat there trying to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. And I just kept thinking . . . why didn’t I go back with her? Why hadn’t I bothered to stay with her?”

“She relapsed?”

“Not exactly. The doctor said she had new neurofibromas, but this type of tumor grows quite readily, and if the growth is not in a vital place, it’s not an issue. But if it’s somewhere important, that’s a problem. It turned out they were in the bone marrow, about the same as last time. She was soon paralyzed again. She said the same thing every day . . . don’t bother with a cure, I don’t want to live, just let me die. I knew she was thinking of the money, but I also knew she loved life more than anyone. And I wanted to save her.”

“So there was another surgery?”

“Yes, we sacrificed everything, and borrowed all over the place. This time her recovery was slow, but eventually she got up and walked. She improved day by day. I forbade her to do heavy work, or lift, or stoop too often. We moved to Fengtai. We still had a little bit of borrowed money left, and we opened a small snack counter, sold drinks, popsicles, smokes. The work was light, but we didn’t earn much. Paying down those debts was a slow slog.”

This was difficult to hear. I’d always thought my life was hard, and I pretended not to see others’ hardships. Now I felt depraved and extravagant. How could I go on as before with a clear conscience?

I toasted him again and took a big gulp, my stomach protesting. “To better days. You’re paying back the money, however slowly, and things will improve. I missed the time to buy a house in Beijing too, didn’t I? Regardless, we can’t afford it now, and real estate prices will keep going up. Why take it to heart? Doesn’t matter.”

Master Zhao filled our cups, shook the bottle, and downed the last bit. “Yeah, we had a few good years. Last year she had her third relapse, in the marrow again, and this time we had no cash for surgery. I squatted on my heels outside the hospital, worrying, smoked four packs in one night. At dawn I lay down in a flower bed, but I couldn’t sleep. The hospital needed tens of thousands of yuan. What could I do?”

“What about this unusual brain of yours?” I had no choice but to interrupt. The more pedestrian and grim his tale got, the more uncomfortable I felt.

“At dawn, I noticed the traffic entering the hospital parking lot. They were all good cars, rich people, and suddenly I had an idea. I went to the road and found a crosswalk, and waited for a Benz. One came by soon enough and I threw myself in front of it, hoping to break a leg, or an arm, and secure a payday.”

“That’s bumping into porcelain!”1

“Yeah I suppose so. Didn’t think of it that way, at the time. Anyway, the car was going too fast to brake. It hit me, ran me over, and then everything went black. Darkness, and then a bright light, and people all around me, a disorderly mob. I had a sinking feeling. Someone said, ‘Does he have family? Quick, find his family!’ That’s when I knew I had died.”

I regarded Master Zhao and his cup of liquor. I couldn’t help reaching out to touch the back of his hand. Warm.

“You’re . . . alive now.”

“Who said otherwise? When I woke, I was still lying in the flower bed, not long after sunrise. Cars were entering the lot one by one. Behind me was the inpatient building. My wife was in the ward on the seventh floor, waiting for me to bring breakfast, and pay bills. Nothing had changed.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“Drink up.” I didn’t know what else to say. Thank god we had booze. Since ancient times, men have used it to dispel awkward moments, I suppose.

5

“So you didn’t actually die.”

“No.”

“Then it was a dream?”

“Also a no.”

We drained our cups, finished off the soy beef. I got up and snatched a bag of string squid from the cupboard.

“There’s beer in your fridge,” Master Zhao said. “Yanjing.”

I dug around and sure enough found four cans of Yanjing in the back, behind some leftovers. I couldn’t remember when they’d been put there. Master Zhao was clearly more familiar with this flat than I was.

Overheated by the twice-distilled, he took off his yellow overcoat and sweater. Beer in hand, he continued to speak:

“At the time I was bewildered, dazed. I thought it was just a dream. I got soy milk and fried dough sticks at a breakfast stand, then went upstairs to see my wife. She scolded me for being late and letting her go hungry. I helped her eat, then went to speak with the doctor about bills. He explained that the fees were piling up day by day. The earlier the surgery, the better. If we proceeded within two months, that was fine, but waiting any longer could be dangerous. I thought long and hard, and decided the surgery had to happen no matter what. I started making calls to hit up friends and relatives for loans, but no one answered. Finally, I called my father. He said he had five thousand, which he’d saved up for a pigpen heater. He also suggested I approach my maternal uncle, who was doing well in his business. I spoke with my wife, then bought a train ticket to my hometown.”

“And you got the money?”

“No, my uncle didn’t come through. He said he had everything in circulating capital. But he said he had a way for me to make some quick cash. He invited me to go to Xinjiang with him, said I could earn 120,000 in two months, travel and lodging provided.”

“Wow!”

“I went, of course. Guess what kind of business it was . . . transporting heroin. Moving it from Tarbaghatay to Ürümqi. In Beijing and Shanghai, heroin is out of fashion, but in Xinjiang and Gansu there’s a booming trade. A hundred thousand per run. My uncle would escort the goods and take 80,000, I would drive and get twenty. Two months, six runs, 120,000, that was the plan.”

“Hold on, back up.” I sat up straight. “You trafficked narcotics?”

Master Zhao nodded.

I coughed. “Drug trafficking . . . ”

“Yes, drug trafficking. For that kind of money, what choice did I have? It’s 600 kilometers from Tarbaghatay to Ürümqi. Drive through the night and you’re done, in theory. But we were afraid of narco agents and their checkpoints, so we detoured, took smaller roads or just drove across open desert. Each run took a tense few days. The first two runs went off without a hitch, but the third time, at a gas station in Changji, we were stopped by police. Looking down the barrels of their guns, I just froze. I thought . . . this is it. I’m done. I’ll never see my wife again.”

“Drug trafficking is a capital offense!”

“Yeah. We were just in time for the crackdown. And the death penalty.”

I massaged my temples. “But you’re still alive.”

Master Zhao grinned. “Yes I am. When I woke, I was on the train from Beijing to my hometown. Soon to arrive in Jiaozuo, Henan province. Five hundred kilometers from home.”

“Wait a second. You fell asleep on the train, on your way to hit up your uncle, and you dreamt you went to Xinjiang with him to traffic heroin, and were executed. Just so we’re clear.”

“That’s what I thought at the time.”

“And then what?”

“I arrived in Jiaozuo. I had a smoke and a drink and asked my uncle for a loan. He said his money was in circulating capital. He offered me a job in Xinjiang . . . 120,000 for two month’s work.”

“Just like the dream?”

“Just so, and I was scared, believe me. I broke out in a cold sweat. I turned tail and ran. Went and told my father. He said I was losing my marbles, asked if I’d been kicked in the head by a donkey. I told him how real the dream had been. I remembered the taste of the prison food, those awful steamed buns.”

“So it was just like the bumping into porcelain dream. Something that could happen. Your dreams have the power of foresight!” I pounded the tabletop. “That’s how you knew Ballsy would fall through the ice, how you knew about the Yanjings in my fridge!”

Master Zhao blew a smoke ring.

“Am I right?” I said, standing up excitedly.

“Not exactly.”

“Drink up, drink up.”

6

There are many things in the world science can’t explain. Take disposable lighters for instance. They’re always disappearing. Where do they go? And why are socks always getting mismatched? Why does the phone always ring at the exact moment you drop your drawers in front of the computer for a little self-gratification? I’ve believed in the paranormal since I was a kid. I believed in a gray, unknown zone packed with everything humanity feared, and revered, and puzzled over. I was full of curiosity, but also scared. I fell back on reason at times, on superstition at others. When I was a kid there was Bigfoot, Area 51, the Loch Ness Monster, ghost photography, and later, the Blood of Saint Januarius, the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, and the Pisces Jade Event. I didn’t dare call myself a mystic, but I was always ready to accept supernatural explanations.

Now I was confronted by Master Zhao, a common laborer. I sensed something in his thin hair, crow’s feet, sweat-stained collar, and atmosphere of booze and smokes: an enigma.

For the first time in several unemployed months, I felt alive. I was interested in something.

We touched cups and drank the first can of beer. Master Zhao didn’t keep me in suspense. He fished a restaurant leaflet and ballpoint from his coat pocket, smoothed out the folds of the paper, and drew a straight line on the back. “I’ve tried to reason things out. Maybe this will help you understand.” At one end of the line he added two strokes, an arrowhead.

I pushed the food boxes aside. “I’m watching.”

“Someone like you lives day by day, from one point to the next, going straight.” He moved the pen along the line.

I nodded.

“Me . . . my brain goes faster than my body. I mean, my brain covers this stretch of road ahead of time.” He drew a parallel dotted line and gave it an arrowhead. “I haven’t actually covered the distance, except in my mind. Of course, I believe it’s real when it’s happening. But it’s not real. Understand so far?”

I nodded, but I had only a vague notion of what he meant. Master Zhao wasn’t great at expressing himself. His phrasing was odd, and he lacked logic, so it was difficult for me to understand.

“That first time, when the car hit me, I didn’t go far.” He drew a short dotted line with an arrowhead. “The second time, I was in Xinjiang a month. I went further.” He drew a longer dotted arrow. “Both times in my mind.”

“Actually you never got hit by a car, and never trafficked drugs.” I took the pen and drew two dotted arrows, originating with a solid arrow but moving off in different directions, so that the three arrows resembled a bird claw. “Like this. Identical starting point, but the solid arrow is what actually happened.”

Master Zhao ruminated. “Yes and no. My body followed the solid arrow, but my brain took both of those other routes. The smaller roads branched off the main one.”

He drew another solid arrow, and extended a dotted arrow from either side, but starting at different points. Like tree branches.

“Like parallel universe theory, right? Important decisions cause your universe to branch others. After you experience them, the timelines close, and you return to the original timeline. In that case, they must have endpoints . . . death. Both were abnormal deaths.” I drew Xs at the ends of both dotted arrows. “Have you experienced a lot of those?”

Master Zhao shook his head. “Well, first off, they don’t all end in death. As I said, it’s my brain going faster than my body. Sometimes there’s just this . . . flapping sound, and then I’m back.” He drew several more dotted lines, long and short, one with an arrowhead. “You want to know how many times . . . I can’t recall clearly. I’d better just continue with my story. You see, I got the five thousand from my father, and a bit more from other relatives, and returned to Beijing with ten thousand. It was just enough to cover the hospital fees we owed. My wife cried. She said, ‘The poor die, that’s just how it goes.’ I took her home. We hadn’t been back two days when she started suffering again, unbearable pain. She wanted to go back to the hospital. She scolded me, called me a good-for-nothing, said in all our years together she’d never eaten anything good, just medicine. What could I do but stroke her hair and let her rant? One day on my way to work, I heard about a traditional Chinese doctor in Huanggang, Hubei province. People said he cured tumors that flared up over and over, like neurofibroma, with nothing more than acupuncture and traditional medicine. He was very popular with the nouveau riche of Beijing and Shanghai. Apparently it was all Audis and BMWs parked outside his single story house. I had twenty thousand yuan in construction wages. My wife agreed to go to Hubei. Of course, we’d heard of all the medical scams, and we were afraid of being duped, but in the end we resolved to try. Anyway, maybe it was another dream timeline. I didn’t know. I put her in her wheelchair, loaded our luggage on my back, and we got on a train to Huanggang.”

“So you knew about the branching lines at that point?”

“No. Thinking about it just confused me. I didn’t dare think too much.”

“Also, you didn’t know when a branch might’ve started. You couldn’t know if you were on one then.”

“Yeah. I was living in fear. There was nothing to do but gamble.”

“If it was a branch, and the result was bad, at least you would eventually return to the main timeline and know what to avoid.” I pondered this, shivering. “But if the result was bad and it turned out you were on the main timeline . . . then it was game over.” I drew a big X at the end of the solid arrow.

“Exactly. My imagination ran wild, despite myself. We got to Huanggang. The doctor only saw three patients a day. We waited a week to meet him. He took her pulse, and based on that alone he said we could relax, the disease was curable. One month to alleviate symptoms, three months to recover normal brain function and mood, half a year to reduce tumor growth, a year to get up and walk. I was so happy, so ready to believe, that I knelt before the doctor. We rented a room nearby. We went in every week for acupuncture, she drank the traditional medicines, and the doc used an infrared physiotherapy device to roast her lower back. I found a construction site to work at. She kept house, sometimes cooked, and half a year passed in a flash. She said that although she still couldn’t walk, she could faintly feel her toes, and pain in her calves. She seemed to be recovering. It was working. Her mood improved. She scolded me less, and obviously I was pleased. One day the doc said we could stop with the acupuncture. She was to continue drinking the meds, and that would be enough. We returned to Beijing, and the meds periodically arrived from Huanggang.”

“Cured then!” I couldn’t help interrupting. “On the main timeline!”

“Four months later, she was on the verge of death. She couldn’t raise her head. Her speech was unclear. At the hospital, the doctor said her spinal neurofibroma had worsened, gone malignant. The time for a cure had passed. If we’d come earlier for surgery, a cure still would’ve been possible, but we’d squandered our time. It’s strange, you know. A good person can waste away to a human skeleton in one month’s time. I’d hoped for another year together, at least. She made it to the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, and she was gone. She scolded me a lot before she passed, not that I could really understand her. One afternoon she was muttering curses at me, then she stopped breathing.” Master Zhao’s tone was dull, indifferent. “I walked out of the ward, sat in the corridor, and played the ‘Fight the Landlord’ card game on my phone until it ran out of power. With my phone dead, I suddenly didn’t want to live.”

“But I remember your wife . . . alive. She’s still at the snack counter by Marco Polo Bridge.”

Master Zhao took a gulp of beer. “Yes. And I haven’t attempted suicide. Everything went black, and I returned. It had all been fake, or a branch timeline, fortunately. Guess where I returned.”

“Discussing whether to go to Huanggang with your wife?”

“Already in Huanggang, having begun the acupuncture.” He set down his beer can.

“So you did visit that doctor?”

“Fortunately, we weren’t too far into the treatment. I packed right away, and we returned to Beijing. She wasn’t keen on this, of course. Scolded me the whole way, and I just took it. Before we left, I put a brick through that doctor’s three-faced windowpane. Back in Beijing, I took her to the hospital, and it turned out there weren’t any pathological changes yet. I booked the surgery, then took a train back to my hometown. I searched my uncle’s courtyard at midnight, and stole fifty thousand yuan. He liked to hide cash in his AC housing. I heard him say so, when we were sentenced to death for drug trafficking. I didn’t have to worry about him finding me. Before long, I knew, he would go to Xinjiang to move heroin, and get arrested, and sentenced. So yes, I stole fifty thousand from a relative. But he wasn’t going to miss it, and I needed it.”

Laugh lines had appeared on Master Zhao’s face. Maybe it was the booze, but suddenly I felt elated, and couldn’t restrain a hearty laugh. We finished smoking the Yellow Crane Towers, then started in on the Cuban cigars. Actually, the flavor was passable. “So I was wrong,” I said. “The bitter experience of the branch didn’t help you on the main timeline. When you got back the bad choice had already been made.” I doodled on the paper. “In other words, you could only do your utmost to remedy the situation. The timing was off.”

“Well, no. At first, yes. Later it was different.”

That piqued my interest. “You mean there were further developments?”

“I don’t know if that’s the right word.” He scratched his neck. “Okay, developments then. After my brain had finished running ahead and returned to my body, it was another point in time, right? I just . . . ”

“Wait a second.” My pen tip hovered. “Wait. You were done on the branch, you returned, and the main timeline had advanced. You returned after your departure point. That first time, the branch timeline was short, so it was unclear. The second time, you trafficked drugs for a month, and the main timeline advanced several days. The third time, you spent a year on the branch, treating your wife’s illness, and the main timeline advanced what . . . two weeks?” I drew lines radiating outward, then bending back and returning to the solid arrow. Dotted loops. Now the image resembled a tree branch sprouting leaves.

There were bits of solid timeline between the start and endpoints of the dotted loops. I pointed with the pen at one of these solid segments. “Old Zhao, during these periods, when your brain is off on one of its jaunts . . . who’s in your body playing the role of Master Zhao?”

He stared blankly at my illustration.

7

We got through half a can of beer in silence. Then Master Zhao said, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s still me. My body continued doing what I would do, regardless.”

I crushed a beer can. “Let’s put this question aside, then. Continue, please . . . ”

“Well, my wife had the surgery. It was performed relatively early, so she recovered well, and left the hospital after half a month. The doc said the tumor growth in the marrow was arrested, and swelling was down. He said with physical therapy she would be able to walk again. But this time my wife was scared. She would sit all day on our heated brick bed, not moving. She’d watch TV and chat and eat sunflower seeds, and play on her phone. I tried to make her do the therapy, but she said her back and legs hurt and she dared not move. If I argued she would get angry and start scolding me. In the end I decided we’d been lucky. I let her convalesce how she liked and tried not to worry about it. I went back to work, but the construction project eventually went into a slump. The chief labor contractor had no more jobs for me. About this time I ran into a man named Chen from my home village, and we chatted. I’d been studying some basic machine repair under the machine maintenance master at the construction site. Chen said electric bikes were a booming business, and suggested we open a shop. We partnered up. We had our business in Fengtai district, southwest Beijing. He sold bikes and batteries, I repaired bikes and changed out parts. The first year was not so great, but things slowly picked up in the second year.”

“Was this the main timeline, or a branch?”

“I’m getting to that, don’t worry. By the end of the third year, business was passable. I still had some debt, but my wife was happy, praising me for finally getting my act together and earning. One day, we sold two bikes just after opening for business. That afternoon we sold another, and another just before closing. With the repair earnings, we’d raked in about three thousand yuan in one day. Old Chen was happy. He wouldn’t let me go home, insisting we get drunk. We bought fifty yuan hot and spicy soup, closed the store, and drank the good stuff, Du Kang. We drank ’til about 2 AM, two and a half bottles. Old Chen was too drunk to stand. He passed out on the counter. I was blitzed myself, and wanted to do the same, but I knew my wife would worry if I didn’t go home. So I locked up the shop, and not daring to ride a bike, I walked home. There was a freezing wind that night. I threw up many times on the way home. When I got back, my wife and I had words, then I slept like the dead until noon the next day. When I woke I couldn’t find my phone. I reckoned it had to be back at the shop. I figured Chen was still there, so I wasn’t worried. I had a leisurely lunch, then strolled outside. When I got to the corner there was a crowd. I thought there’d been a traffic accident, so I squeezed through to have a look. A row of businesses had been burned down to charcoal. The street was covered in black ice. People said the fire had started at dawn, possibly from an electric heater short circuit. No one had been in the hot and spicy soup shop, or the jewelry store. Only the proprietor of the electric bike shop had burned to death inside. He hadn’t been able to escape.”

Judging by his tone, it hadn’t really happened. “You just couldn’t catch a break. But it was a branch timeline, right? Master Zhao?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I knelt on the ground and wept. I’d locked the shutter gate from the outside. I’d doomed Old Chen. I banged my skull on the cement, wanting to wake without delay. If I returned to the previous night, I wouldn’t open that second bottle of Du Kang. I wouldn’t let him sleep in the shop. My head was bleeding, and I was still there, crying out. If I didn’t wake, what could I do? Not go on, that’s for sure.

“But you woke . . . ”

“Yeah, suddenly I was back on the main timeline.”

“Back drinking with Chen . . . ”

“No. Much further back. Preparing to start the business with Old Chen. Searching for a location, and suppliers, and learning the bike repair trade.”

I couldn’t help a gasp of surprise. “So long . . . a branch timeline two to three years long . . . ”

“None of it had been real. We never opened the shop, never earned all that money. But Old Chen was still alive.”

“God, that sense of unreality. If it was me . . . ” I couldn’t find the words, couldn’t imagine it.

“I wondered if I should still go in on the shop. If I did, would we still profit? If we did, would Old Chen still get drunk with me? If so, would Old Chen still die? I got scared the more I thought about it. I remembered our shop, burned to ash, and I couldn’t look Old Chen in the eye. Talking with him, I felt guilty. I thought all night. At dawn I went to his place and said I couldn’t go through with it after all. I told him to find a different partner. He was furious, of course. He wanted to beat me to a pulp. I thought, if it keeps him alive, let him do it. I was ready to take the beating. But in the end he didn’t do it. Old Chen was a good guy.”

“You averted possible disaster, Master Zhao. You did the right thing. This time you used the branch timeline to obtain helpful information, and made the right decision on the main timeline. A success!” My spirits lifted. “You can keep experiencing these branches, then reverse mistakes for smooth sailing on the main timeline. Maybe it’s all for the best.”

Master Zhao heaved a sigh. “No. My ability is useless.”

I drew a long, dotted loop, closed against a solid arrow. “This time you spent three years on a branch, while the main timeline only advanced a little bit. That’s a substantial increase in branch time versus real time.”

“The more my mind runs ahead, the faster it goes.”

“Right, like when I walk Ballsy. We take a fixed route, and he runs wild all over the place. Every so often he returns to my side. At first, the further he runs, the slower he returns. Later on he runs faster, until he could piss on all the utility poles in China in one minute, and I just think he’s in a nearby shrub.”

Master Zhao looked at my picture. “Yeah, that’s about the shape of it.”

I dropped the pen and leaned back. “This ability is like time travel. You know that, right? I thought it was only possible in novels and movies. I never thought I’d be sitting face to face with a real time traveler.”

“I’d happily switch places with you.” He shook his head. “I want nothing to do with this demonic ability.”

“As far as I can tell, your biggest problem is not being able to sense when you’ve branched.” I thought for a moment, then drew a dotted line branching off a solid arrow. “When you make a momentous decision, the timeline must split, right? Suppose you make a choice here.” I made the dotted line divide, extending a dotted branch. “After that you make other decisions.” I made the dotted line branch several times, returning just one branch back to the solid arrow. I pointed out the dotted branches with no endings. “At last you discover these decisions are of no consequence. They’re fictitious choices on a sham timeline, with no effect on the main timeline.”

Master Zhao ruminated. “Yes, but at times I’ve wondered if a branch can, in time, become a real timeline. Like this.” He took the pen and made my dotted line solid, then crossed out the segment of main timeline between the branch’s start and endpoint. Now it was like the solid arrow’s middle section curved erratically, like an electrocardiogram’s wave crest.

I sensed a logical problem. “You’re saying a series of choices on a branch could cause it to match up with the main timeline? In terms of . . . what? Some kind of degree of reality? Match up and even replace it? But how could that be? Then you wouldn’t know if you’d experienced a branch at all. You wouldn’t have that moment of impact with the main timeline.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that.”

“What other branches did you experience?”

“Many. Among those I can remember, I worked as a hairdresser, on a factory assembly line, as a tour guide. I operated a backhoe, did pig farming, raised dogs, gambled, worked abroad, even robbed banks.”

“Robbed banks?” If it had been me, maybe I too would’ve given it a try—if I knew I was on a dotted line. But Master Zhao didn’t seem like the type. I could only imagine him being compelled against his will to such an outrageous act.

“The memories are hazy, but I needed the money. I feel like they were Postal Savings banks.” He didn’t seem ashamed. “To be honest, I’ve done many bad things. Luckily they were all on branches. But that doesn’t matter. Bad people get what’s coming to them, Master Zhang. Karma.”

“Have you killed people?”

He hesitated. “Well . . . ”

“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to, I just don’t remember clearly. These branches . . . the last few are pretty clear. But the ten or twenty before that, or the last two hundred, I don’t even know how many . . . I’ve seen too much, Master Zhang. It’s all mixed up, a fucking mess. My brain’s not up to it.”

The idea was terrifying. Every time he’d branched, he’d experienced those timelines, second by second, minute by minute. Several days here, a few years there. I couldn’t know what it was like in Master Zhao’s brain, what that mass of memory felt like, but obviously those sham days had left their mark on him. The branch timelines did not amount to zero, after all. They’d happened, in some sense. This middle-aged person sitting across from me had not learned from a mere few score years of experience. He’d been through the sum of those countless branches. Had he known centuries? Millennia? Tens of thousands of years?

He was truly a venerable elder.

8

I felt I needed some booze to dampen this reverence I was experiencing, but I couldn’t find anything else in the apartment. We smoked up the cigars, then took turns on the peanuts, until we were down to the last one. Master Zhao applied chopsticks deftly, splitting the peanut in two. He took half, pensively contemplating it.

“So,” I said, “what do you remember most clearly?”

“I’d better tell you about the hazy stuff first.” He nibbled on his half-peanut. “I mean, I did so much work, and encountered so many different people, people of low social status and higher-ups. Most days were unremarkable. Sometimes I helped people, sometimes I schemed for wealth. Money didn’t really matter, in the end. My wife suffered regardless. The disease was incurable. Every few years she’d relapse. Once, when I was really flush, I sent her to America for treatment. We had the best doctors, the priciest meds, and she got better. But of course she relapsed. I don’t know how many times I watched her cry, saying she couldn’t bear it anymore. She begged me to let her die. I knew she feared death, but I couldn’t save her. No matter what I did, no matter where we lived, no matter what religion we adopted. At one point I couldn’t take it anymore. I divorced her. For rich or poor, in sickness and in health . . . I broke my vows. I ran. I got on a train to Guangzhou. The damp, warm atmosphere reminded me of her, her scent, the scent of our bed. I felt sick. I fell to the ground and couldn’t breathe. Later I woke, and I was still in Beijing, in that rented flat, and I was hugging her. I didn’t dare let go. She hit me, scolded me, called me crazy. The more she scolded me, the happier I was, because this at least had to be real.”

“Your life was bound to hers.”

“She once said my ancestors owed hers a debt. In this life I was paying it off.” Master Zhao’s smile was pained, but happy. I’d never seen such a complex expression. “What I remember most clearly is opening the snack counter with her. I delivered orders, she kept house, went through two surgeries, and finally, when she was close to death, I brought her back to her hometown. We rented a house at the foot of a mountain. I cultivated Chinese cabbage and raised a few ducks. She couldn’t stand, so I got her a tablet computer to play ‘Fight the Landlord’ on. I fed her. If the food was too hot or too cold, she scolded me. Or if it was too thick or too thin, too bland or salty, or when it was just right. She scolded me, and heaven and earth. I didn’t mind. Actually I liked it. It meant she still had life in her. Toward the end we didn’t bother with a hospital. She died on that brick bed. I stoked up the heat before I left, so she would be nice and warm on her journey, and not have to fear the cold.”

This was the second time I’d listened to Master Zhao describe his wife’s death. His tone was unfeeling.

“I sent a gift to the village, had her buried in my ancestral tomb. It wasn’t far from where I lived. Every few days I would go and sit by the tomb, and tell her about the cabbages and ducks. When I was 73 years old, my legs started to go, and I couldn’t make it to the tomb anymore. I didn’t want to live. It seemed good to die where I’d been born. My bones could mingle with hers. We could be buried together.” Master Zhao paused. “When I woke, I was back in that rented flat in Beijing. It was late at night. I could smell her beside me, sleeping. I got up and had a cup of water. I checked the date. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I’d lived scores of years, and they’d been so real. For me they had been. All in vain. I recalled visiting the tomb, the cabbages and ducks, all that had happened before leaving Beijing, the surgeries, the snack counter, her, this day, our lunch, when we’d discussed our situation, our lack of children, and what we would do when we grew old. She’d said there was nothing to fear. She’d suggested returning to our hometown and finding a single-story house to live in. Cultivate some vegetables, raise ducks, send a gift to the village head, and plan to be buried together. That’s all I knew when I set out on that branch. I did as she wished, and we passed our days together. As far as she knew, an afternoon had passed since our decision. For me, it had been a lifetime.”

“Dozens of years,” I said. “Half a day.”

Master Zhao put down the chopsticks. “I’m scared, Master Zhang.” His fingers trembled. “I no longer know if my days are real or fake. If I’m on a branch, nothing matters. No matter how beautiful a day, how lovely the scenery, in a wink it can cease to exist. If this is real, drinking and talking with you, it’s all set in stone and can’t be altered. This year, this month, this day, I could’ve gotten better booze, eaten better food, found two beautiful women to chat with. Or stayed with my wife. It can’t be changed. This day will soon be over, and never again return.”

I turned and looked out the window. The sun was westering. We’d chatted all afternoon. For me, it was a few worthless hours in a completely pointless life. But from Master Zhao’s point of view, these few hours seemed congealed, like chunks of lead, heavy, ice-cold, solid.

I had to say something to dispel the bleak atmosphere. “Zhao . . . Master Zhao, you’ve gone to the end many times, right? What’s the oldest age you’ve reached? Ninety? A hundred?” I forced a smile.

He had to think about this. “Five thousand and fifty years old,” he said. “As I told you, sometimes I got in good with people of rank. I got rich. Once, after she passed, I had us frozen. Our doctors were to wait for a cure and resurrect us when the time was right. Well, five thousand years later, I came to. I hadn’t expected it to take so long, of course. The world had changed, but the people still looked like people. But the place . . . was very different. It’s hard for me to recall, let alone describe. I asked where my wife was. They told me she was still frozen. Curing her disease would be simple, they explained, but resurrecting her would not be so easy. I asked where we were, and they said in a new star system. No one lived at Sol anymore because disease was no longer a problem. For the same reason, there weren’t many research scientists left. All anyone wanted to do was explore, probing further afield in the galaxy. They’d thawed me out because my money was no longer valid. They’d been discussing my situation for a thousand years, and finally decided to wake me. What could I tell them? I said I wanted to go on sleeping until they could bring her back. They needed more time to discuss this, maybe another thousand years, so they put me back on ice, and that was it.”

Master Zhao took out a newspaper, drew an arrow, then a dotted branch with no endpoint to illustrate his long journey.

“Five thousand years,” I said, struggling to put words together. “So how much time passed on the main timeline?”

“I remember seeing news about cryonics. I discussed it with my wife, the possible application to our situation. If that was the branching point, then a dozen or so days passed in real time.”

9

“Master Zhao, almost everything you’ve told me is related to your wife.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a time traveler, you know. Without the burden of her, you could go further, not just in time but in space.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You could visit the future.”

“That doesn’t matter to me.”

“You don’t want to see what the world looks like in ten thousand years? Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand?”

“What would be the point?”

I realized he and I were on fundamentally different wavelengths. My curiosity, my fear and reverence . . . as far as he was concerned, they weren’t worth a penny. He just wanted someone to share his odd travels with. A good listener was enough. I respected his devotion to his wife. I understood his choices, but ultimately, he didn’t care to investigate the principles underlying his ability. He had no use for science. Attachment to family was at the core of him.

He was a commonplace time traveler. He couldn’t change the world, and he didn’t need to change himself. His far-ranging travels were utterly worthless to him.

But on second thought, if I were in his shoes, could I stand up to the weight of accumulated memory and time? I had no idea what so many years of tree ring growth did to a soul.

Ballsy woke, totally recovered from his pond trauma. He came to my side, tail wagging, expression bright and submissive. I opened a bag of treats for him. He went to his dog house and I surprised him with a few shreds of beef. Dogs aren’t easy animals to understand. Sometimes they’re forgetful, other times their memory is astonishing. Ballsy could sink into a brief despondency after I scolded him for misbehaving, but a little sleep and he was good as new. The next day he might make the same mistake and get the same scolding, and sink into the same depression. But last year our neighbor accidentally stepped on his forepaw. Since then, every time he sees that neighbor, he lifts his foreleg and plays the role of a disabled pooch, limping until the neighbor is gone. Amazing really, that kind of persistence in holding a grudge.

To a degree, people are similarly difficult to fathom.

10

I turned on the living room light. “Master Zhao, do you know if you’re currently on a branch or the main timeline?”

“No.”

“Do you know if I’m a living person, or some imagined character?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you had your brain examined? I don’t just mean a CT, but everything a neurologist can do?”

“Yeah. Useless.”

“If I were inclined to believe everything you’ve said, would you think I’m crazy?”

“If I’m not crazy, you’re definitely not.”

“Then, are you crazy?”

He watched me, as if trying to guess the purpose of my words. “If you say I’m not, then I’m not.”

It was getting cold in the flat, so he put on his sweater. I regarded the table, the remains of our feast. “You said you drank with me before. I guess you meant on a branch timeline. I guess you’ve also rescued Ballsy before, and talked away the afternoon with me before . . . ”

“I was promoted to Golden Knight deliveryman. I began delivering food. I hadn’t known you long when I felt you were someone I could talk to. Frankly, I’d been looking for a long time. It’s not easy hiding all this. But I was afraid. Of not being able to take back what I said. Of being considered mentally ill. If that happened on a branch, it wouldn’t matter. But if it happened on the main timeline, I’d lose my job. I’d have no way to save up for my wife’s treatments. We’d be done for. The first time I came here to drink with you, we drank twice-distilled from paper cups.”

“The first time . . . ”

“Yes.”

A chill went through me. “So . . . how many times have we done this?”

“Many.”

“Why me? I mean, you could chat with anyone about this stuff. There are twenty million people in Beijing. Why choose a random sod like me?”

Master Zhao made as if to speak, then hesitated. He sipped some water. “Where to begin? Recently my brain problem has grown more serious. I’m branching more and more often. I said ‘recently.’ Since becoming a Golden Knight, I don’t even know how many times I’ve branched. Every time it’s long and short. On most of them I don’t get to the end. It’s just like now, I start to have second thoughts, and suddenly I’m back in time, and everything that happened is just gone. I’ve passed through hundreds or thousands of branches, while in the real world it’s only been a few months. I’m terrified there will come a day when, no matter how many times I branch, I’ll no longer be able to advance through real time. I’ll endure a lifetime, or ten lifetimes, or a thousand lifetimes, and really just live a day, or an hour, or a minute, or a second. My real time will forever slow, cluttered with ever more branchings . . . slower and slower, until it stops. I’ll be trapped in that moment. Every time I return, I’ll see the same scene, and not even have time to lift a finger before I branch again. Maybe I’ll be sitting with my wife. I’ll say something to her, take her hand, but I’ll be on a branch. The sentence will be fake, the feel of her hand also fake. In real time I’ll still be sitting there, looking at my wife. Frozen. Immobile.”

I tried to imagine such a frozen tableau, such profound incapacity, and I felt my heart would stop.

“If I’m on a branch, what will I return to?” He extended his hand, as if feeling for an unseen button. “Will all this still exist? This paper cup? Beijing? You?”

I contemplated my reflection in the diluted booze at the bottom of my cup. “These characters in your branches . . . are they alive, or some kind of illusion?” I thought of the NPCs in my online games. “In terms of self-awareness, I feel like I’m alive. There are contradictions in what you’ve said. You don’t know if you’re on a dotted line or a solid one, but your main timeline is still paused at several months ago. At least, that’s the last return point you clearly remember, isn’t it? Far from now, and this conversation. Doesn’t that prove we’re currently on a dotted line?”

“The only proof is if everything suddenly melts away!” Master Zhao shouted, at his wit’s end. “I . . . I can’t control this fucking brain! I have to take every day as real! Don’t you see that?”

I thought I understood how he felt. If his main timeline was slowing down, it meant he might never get to the end of his real life. He would be trapped, cycling through endless dreamlands. I couldn’t imagine a more profound despair. He had to steel himself. He had to find the courage to go on. He had no choice.

I tried to organize my thoughts as I waited for him to calm down. “Master Zhao, I’m sure no one can imagine what you’re suffering. If it were me, I would’ve gone mad long ago. I admire you.”

He shook his head.

“In my thirty-year life I’ve never doubted ‘existence’ itself. I’m just an ordinary person living on planet Earth, whether you’re here or not. If you suddenly vanished, I would keep finding ways to believe in the paranormal, and continue living my ordinary, pathetic life. As for your concern that this might be a dotted line . . . well, it’s real enough to me. Couldn’t be more so. It can’t just pop off like a TV during a power outage.”

He scavenged a cigarette butt from the ashtray and gave it a sniff. “Sure, I know. I’ve thought of this. It’s possible the characters on my branches are as alive as anyone. And when I return to the main timeline, those branch people continue living. Maybe the branch versions of me go on as well. My brain might have this world-jumping defect, but I can still think things through.”

“That sounds like what I mentioned before . . . parallel universe theory.”

“I’m not an educated man, so I can’t speak to that. Listen, you asked why I chose you to talk with, over and over. Actually, I’ve chatted with many people. Thousands. People I knew, strangers. I’ve told my story many times. Not many sat through the whole tale. They all thought I was crazy and belonged in a mental hospital. A few, including my wife, made me go in for an evaluation. That was scary, let me tell you. I was afraid of injections, electroshock, and living with a group of lunatics. No one believed me. No one.”

I imagined the loneliness of this time traveler seeking people to open up to, throughout his various lifetimes.

“Until I met you.” Master Zhao lit the cigarette butt. “You’re the first person to really hear me, to invite me home for a drink, to help me analyze these things. You said Beijing has twenty million people. That makes you quite exceptional, Master Zhang. You alone believe me.”

It seemed like predestination. I didn’t know if I should feel moved or terrified. “So it’s the same with me every time? The same chat? Me saying the same things?”

“No. I can’t recall clearly, but no, not exactly the same.”

“And I believe you every time?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“Well then.” Suddenly my life meant something, which gave me mixed feelings. A vague idea took shape: I’d been a commonplace character since birth. Born to a common family, received a common education, common height and weight, common work, common unemployment, living with a common dog in a common apartment. How could I be of the least significance? I’d considered many paths toward an upgraded life—lottery fraud, pyramid schemes, starting a cult—but they all involved dishonesty. Now here was this man declaring me the chosen one, one in twenty million. It was like something from The Matrix. It shouldn’t be happening in real life.

But what if Master Zhao was a liar? That could explain everything. Maybe he thought me a stupid nouveau riche who didn’t have to work, a fool who read paranormal magazines. He’d surveilled my life and habits, concocted and practiced his fantastical story, and waited for his chance to dupe me. His tale was meant to arouse my curiosity, then he would make a demand I couldn’t refuse.

The suspicion, once germinated, began to snowball. He’d entered my apartment and found no money, but he’d cased the place, noting things like the beers in the fridge. I walked Ballsy the same time every day, and usually didn’t lock the door, so this would’ve been easy. He’d baited the pond, causing Ballsy’s erratic charge, and lain in wait to rescue. He was a repeat offender, a new type of con man. A specialist in sci-fi, and the fleecing of otaku2 programmers.

A cold sweat broke out on my forehead. I watched Zhao with heightened vigilance. He smoked the butt until it burned his trembling fingers, not much resembling a seasoned con artist. But he also didn’t seem like a time traveler who’d seen tens of thousands of worlds, locked in samsara. He just looked scared, and tired.

If he was a con man, where was his demand? Why wasn’t he asking for my credit card number, or cell phone password, or bedside cupboard key? We’d chatted long enough. It was time for him to cast his net.

I waited, on tenterhooks. I wasn’t afraid of getting duped. I was afraid of his amazing story being a lie.

11

Master Zhao glanced out the window at the darkening sky. “Well, we’ve chatted away another afternoon, and I still don’t understand any of it. Thanks for the company, regardless, and the food and booze. I should go home. Gotta prepare for the dinner deliveries.” He stood, donning his bright yellow work coat.

“Why not sit a bit longer? There’s still plenty to talk about.”

“Got bills to pay. Sorry.”

He headed for the door, and I followed. At the door he turned and said, “By the way, Master Zhang, I have a favor to ask of you.”

Here it was. I struggled to maintain a serene tone: “Yes?”

“This is . . . ” He looked embarrassed. “I hope you won’t mind an intimate request from a stranger.”

“Go on.”

“I need your help handling something.”

The disappointment rose in me like a tide. I watched this sun-darkened middle-aged man, who’d supposedly crisscrossed time and space, wipe his nose with a scrap of paper. “Handle what?” I said gloomily.

He hesitated. “Master Zhang, I will die tonight.”

I was surprised, to say the least. I’d expected a tearful plea for money, a sob story about an accident, something like that. The common ploy of a con artist.

“Tonight at 8:40 PM, in Zhengtong while delivering a meal, I’ll be hit by an Audi running a red light. I’ll fly ten meters, land, and break my neck. I’ll die before the ambulance gets there.”

“But . . . ”

“I’ve experienced it firsthand. You know that intersection, I think. The traffic is always a clusterfuck. And the cement is especially rough. I’ll slide quite a ways. Very painful. After I became a Golden Knight, I endured this scene many times, died many times. I can’t say for sure how many, but it hurt like hell every time.”

I studied his path-worn face, trying to judge his veracity. “But you can avoid it, surely. Just take the night off.”

“That time I made money and lived five thousand years . . . when I returned to the main timeline, I was already past the decision point. I’d already taken the test. I was a Golden Knight deliveryman.” His lips trembled, and I believed this wasn’t a performance. “I don’t know why, but afterward, no matter how I chose, life got harder. Nothing else works. I have to be a Knight to provide for my wife. It’s like God is tired of playing with me. Like I’ve been allotted this one path, and nothing else.”

“So if you take the night off . . . ”

“I’ve tried that many times. A freak combination of factors always results in an accident. It’s always a car crash, always the same pain. Like there’s a hand pushing me toward the same dead end, no matter what I do.”

I took out my phone and looked at the time: 7:45 PM. Less than an hour left. At that moment I decided to believe him. There was fear in his eyes, real fear, and despair and dread. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? You knew you’d die at nine, but you went on chatting and drinking. If you’d said something before, we might have thought of a way out for you.”

He glared at me with frank, bloodshot eyes. “Are we on a branch right now, or in real time? What does your gut tell you?”

I retreated a step. “I don’t know . . . ”

“If this is real time, I’m not bound to die, because none of it has happened yet. If I’m still in my broken brain, then dying doesn’t matter, right?” He let fly a hot, alcohol-laden belch. “What can I do? Nothing, Master Zhang. Do you understand? Surely you must.”

I stood there in profound confusion, my brain a tangled mess of space-time arrows. “I don’t know,” I said, avoiding his gaze. “I don’t know . . . ”

He hung his head, gasping for breath. “Anyway, that leads me to my request.” He grabbed my sleeve. “It’s a simple one. From your balcony you can see the intersection by the district gate. In a little while, at 8:40, be there on the balcony. Watch. See if I die or not.”

I looked at him, mouth agape.

“I’ve thought about this a lot. There are a few possibilities . . . First, we’re on a dotted line. I die and return to the main timeline, leaving nothing behind, and you cease to exist. Second, we’re on a dotted line, I die but you remain, and you see where the ambulance takes my body. Third, we’re on a dotted line, I avoid disaster, go on living, but die next time. Fourth, this is the main timeline, I avoid disaster, and go on living smoothly with my wife. Fifth, this is the main timeline, I get hit by the car and killed, and that’s that. Lights out.” He took a breath. “So, you sit on your balcony and watch. If at 8:40 there’s no accident, and I make it through the night, then tomorrow I’ll bring booze, the good stuff this time, and good meat, and find you. And the two of us will drink like fish until we’re shit-faced. If . . . ”

“Master Zhao, don’t talk like that.”

“ . . . if I die, really die on the main timeline, then please go to my flat by the Marco Polo Bridge, Xiaoyue Gardens, building three, the most westward one near the grocery. My wife can’t really walk. She’ll be lying in our shop. Go around the checkout counter and find her, and tell her I’m dead. She’ll be worried if I’ve been gone all night. Don’t be afraid. Tell her the facts. She can take it. She’s not one of those sensitive types prone to suicide. I hid a bit of cash in the AC casing, enough for her to get by a few more years. The people we owe don’t know where we live. I die, the debts vanish, and she can live in peace for a while, even if she’ll have to manage her own cooking and bathing. She never enjoyed good fortune with me. I’m not worthy of her. If you have the time, visit her now and then, chat with her. She has a bad temper, but if you put up with it, you’ll see she has a good heart.”

I couldn’t respond. I just stared, dumbfounded.

Master Zhao looked beaten and sad, but a smile emerged. “You don’t realize how many times I’ve entrusted you with this. You agreed every time. And I’ve never known the outcome. Nobody can know what happens after they die. Thank you, Master Zhang.”

“Master Zhao . . . you may not die. Nothing is certain!” I went back to the dining table and ripped our drawings to pieces. “All we’ve done is conjecture. No one really knows the future. Chance operates independently, beyond the effects of your dreamlands. We still don’t know how it all works. It’s too complex, full of paradoxes. How to recognize the branching points, how to choose, how to use previews to find optimal paths . . . I already have a lot of ideas. There might be many strategies . . . ”

His smile faded, leaving behind those mournful crow’s feet. “Since nobody can know, what are you afraid of?”

“Master Zhao . . . ”

“If I don’t die today, and stop dreaming, then I’ll just live day by day, earnestly. Tomorrow I’ll deliver a bunch of meals. I’ll earn one yuan six jiao per delivery. Sixteen yuan for ten meals, a hundred and sixty yuan for a hundred. Rent, utilities, medicine. And if I die today, well . . . death ends all troubles. That’s life. It’s only my wife I can’t let go of. If not for her, I would’ve gone mad and simpleminded long ago. With her, I understand what people call ‘life.’ Again, Master Zhang, I’m sorry to trouble you with all this.”

The hallway’s cold draught poured in. I closed my eyes. The door closed, and Master Zhao vanished into the winter night.

12

I sat in the dark and drew a solid arrow. No branches, no intersections. Later I could play DOTA into the wee hours, then sleep until noon, then take Ballsy downstairs for a walk. I could order twice-cooked pork with rice and veg, and sit on my bench and eat. I could proceed with this hopeless life until my savings account was drained. Or until there was just enough left for a plane ticket. I could quit my classmate’s flat, pack his computer and dog, and head south to seek shelter with him. Smell the dank air of Guangzhou, become self-reliant and live something like a good life. Or I could take the ticket money and eat a great feast, then buy a train ticket back to my hometown. Ballsy was a rural mutt, after all. An idyllic, pastoral life would suit him.

Perhaps Master Zhao was a mysterious mental time traveler. Or maybe a profound swindler. Or just a madman.

Maybe my life was illusory, and of no consequence. Maybe I’d live until the end of time. Maybe there were ten thousand tactics for dealing with branching timelines. Maybe tragedy was preordained. It didn’t matter. Master Zhao was right. All you could do was live day by day.

I sat in the cold early evening, watching Beijing light up. On that balcony, in an unremarkable corner of Beijing, I watched the traffic signals flicker below. There was the chaotic intersection, cars coming and going, the usual hubbub. I didn’t know which yellow overcoated Knight was Master Zhao, and I couldn’t distinguish an Audi in the rivers of cars.

I waited a spell, not knowing if the accident was nigh. The victim himself had requested I watch, now, and in many other instances of his samsara.

If you removed the arrows of time, his story was rather simple: the story of a man and a woman. Remove either of them, and the curtain might’ve dropped long ago. Was there a similar tale beneath every streetlight of Beijing, so simple and complex, brief yet long, carelessly begun and never finished? The hands of the clock ticked toward 8:40. It was close, whatever was to be.

Footnotes:

1 - “Bumping into porcelain” is a widespread moneymaking scheme in China. It means jumping in front of a car, to get injured or to feign injury, in the hopes of a payday.

2 - Otaku, Japanese for a young person obsessed with computers or certain aspects of pop culture, to the detriment of their social skills. Zhainan in Chinese.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Born in 1981, Zhang Ran graduated from Beijing Jiaotong University in 2004 with a degree in Computer Science. After a stint in the IT industry, Mr. Zhang became a reporter and news analyst with Economic Daily and China Economic Net, during which time his news commentary won a China News Award. His stories have won numerous Gold and Silver Chinese Nebula Awards, and three Galaxy Awards for Best Novelette. He runs a coffee shop in southern China and writes in his spare time. The Windy City, his short story collection, was published in 2015.

Two-Year Man

Kelly Robson

Getting the baby through security was easy. Mikkel had been smuggling food out of the lab for years. He’d long since learned how to trick the guards.

Mikkel had never been smart, but the guards were four-year men and that meant they were lazy. If he put something good at the top of his lunch pail at the end of his shift, the guards would grab it and never dig deeper. Mikkel let them have the half-eaten boxes of sooty chocolate truffles and stale pastries, but always took something home for Anna.

Most days it was only wrinkled apples and hard oranges, soured milk, damp sugar packets and old teabags. But sometimes he would find something good. Once he’d found a working media player at the bottom of the garbage bin in the eight-year man’s office. He had been so sure the guards would find it and accuse him of stealing that he’d almost tossed it in the incinerator. But he’d distracted the guards with some water-stained skin magazines from the six-year men’s shower room and brought that media player home to Anna.

She traded it for a pair of space heaters and ten kilos of good flour. They had dumplings for months.

The baby was the best thing he’d ever found. And she was such a good girl—quiet and still. Mikkel had taken a few minutes to hold her in the warmth beside the incinerator, cuddling her close and listening to the gobble and clack of her strange yellow beak. He swaddled her tightly in clean rags, taking care to wrap her pudgy hands separately so she couldn’t rake her talons across that sweet pink baby belly. Then he put her in the bottom of his plastic lunch pail, layered a clean pair of janitor’s coveralls over her, and topped the pail with a box of day-old pastries he’d found in the six-year men’s lounge.

“Apple strudel,” grunted Hermann, the four-year man in charge of the early morning guard shift. “Those pasty scientists don’t know good eats. Imagine leaving strudel to sit.”

“Cafe Sluka has the best strudel in Vienna, so everyone says,” Mikkel said as he passed through the security gate.

“Like you’d know, moron. Wouldn’t let you through the door.”

Mikkel ducked his head and kept his eyes on the floor. “I heated them in the microwave for you.”

He rushed out into the gray winter light as the guards munched warm strudel.

Mikkel checked the baby as soon as he rounded the corner, and then kept checking her every few minutes on the way home. He was careful to make sure nobody saw. But the streetcars were nearly empty in the early morning, and nobody would find it strange to see a two-year man poking his nose in his lunch pail.

The baby was quiet and good. Anna would be so pleased. The thought kept him warm all the way home.

Anna was not pleased.

When he showed her the baby she sat right down on the floor. She didn’t say anything—just opened and closed her mouth for a minute. Mikkel crouched at her side and waited.

“Did anyone see you take it?” she asked, squeezing his hand hard, like she always did when she wanted him to pay attention.

“No, sweetheart.”

“Good. Now listen hard. We can’t keep it. Do you understand?”

“She needs a mother,” Mikkel said.

“You’re going to take her back to the lab. Then forget this ever happened.”

Anna’s voice carried an edge Mikkel had never heard before. He turned away and gently lifted the baby out of the pail. She was quivering with hunger. He knew how that felt.

“She needs food,” he said. “Is there any milk left, sweetheart?”

“It’s no use, Mikkel. She’s going to die anyway.”

“We can help her.”

“The beak is a bad taint. If she were healthy they would have kept her. Sent her to a crèche.”

“She’s strong.” Mikkel loosened the rags. The baby snuffled and her sharp blue tongue protruded from the pale beak. “See? Fat and healthy.”

“She can’t breathe.”

“She needs us.” Why didn’t Anna see that? It was so simple.

“You can take her back tonight.”

“I can’t. My lunch pail goes through the X-ray machine. The guards would see.”

If Anna could hold the baby, she would understand. Mikkel pressed the baby to Anna’s chest. She scrambled backward so fast she banged her head on the door. Then she stood and straightened her maid’s uniform with shaking hands.

“I have to go. I can’t be late again.” She pulled on her coat and lunged out the door, then turned and reached out. For a moment he thought she was reaching for the baby and he began to smile. But she just squeezed his hand again, hard.

“You have to take care of this, Mikkel,” she said. “It’s not right. She’s not ours. We aren’t keeping her.”

Mikkel nodded. “See you tonight.”

The only thing in the fridge was a bowl of cold stew. They hadn’t had milk for days. But Mikkel’s breakfast sat on the kitchen table covered with a folded towel. The scrambled egg was still steaming.

Mikkel put a bit of egg in the palm of his hand and blew on it. The baby’s eyes widened and she squirmed. She reached for his hand. Talons raked his wrist and her beak yawned wide. A blue frill edged with red and yellow quivered at the back of her throat.

“Does that smell good? I don’t think a little will hurt.”

He fed her the egg bit by bit. She gobbled it down, greedy as a baby bird. Then he watched her fall asleep while he sipped his cold coffee.

Mikkel wet a paper napkin and cleaned the fine film of mucus from the tiny nostrils on either side of her beak. They were too small, but she could breathe just fine through her mouth. She couldn’t cry, though, she just snuffled and panted. And the beak was heavy. It dragged her head to the side.

She was dirty, smeared with blood from the incineration bin. Her fine black hair was pasted down with a hard scum that smelled like glue. She needed a bath, and warm clothes, and diapers. Also something to cover her hands. He would have to trim the points off her talons.

He held her until she woke. Then he brought both space heaters from the bedroom and turned them on high while he bathed her in the kitchen sink. It was awkward and messy and took nearly two hours. She snuffled hard the whole time, but once he’d dried her and wrapped her in towels she quieted. He propped her up on the kitchen table. She watched him mop the kitchen floor, her bright brown eyes following his every move.

When the kitchen was clean he fetched a half-empty bottle of French soap he’d scavenged from the lab, wrapped the baby up tightly against the cold, and sat on the back stairs waiting for Hyam to come trotting out of his apartment for a smoke.

“What’s this?” Hyam said. “I didn’t know Anna was expecting.”

“She wasn’t.” Mikkel tugged the towel aside.

“Huh,” said Hyam. “That’s no natural taint. Can it breathe?”

“She’s hungry.” Mikkel gave him the bottle of soap.

“Hungry, huh?” Hyam sniffed the bottle. “What do you need?”

“Eggs and milk. Clothes and diapers. Mittens, if you can spare some.”

“I never seen a taint like that. She’s not a natural creature.” Hyam took a long drag on his cigarette and blew it over his shoulder, away from the baby. “You work in that lab, right?”

“Yes.”

Hyam examined the glowing coal at the end of his cigarette.

“What did Anna say when you brought trouble home?”

Mikkel shrugged.

“Did the neighbors hear anything through the walls?”

“No.”

“Keep it that way.” Hyam spoke slowly. “Keep this quiet, Mikkel, you hear me? Keep it close. If anyone asks, you tell them Anna birthed that baby.”

Mikkel nodded.

Hyam pointed with his cigarette, emphasizing every word. “If the wrong person finds out, the whole neighborhood will talk. Then you’ll see real trouble. Four-year men tromping through the building, breaking things, replaying the good old days in the colonies. They like nothing better. Don’t you bring that down on your neighbors.”

Mikkel nodded.

“My wife will like the soap.” Hyam ground out his cigarette and ran up the stairs.

“There now,” Mikkel said. The baby gazed up at him and clacked her beak. “Who says two-year men are good for nothing?”

Four-year men said it all the time. They were everywhere, flashing their regimental badges and slapping the backs of their old soldier friends. They banded together in loud bragging packs that crowded humble folks off busses and streetcars, out of shops and caf�s, forcing everyone to give way or get pushed aside.

Six-year men probably said it too, but Mikkel had never talked to one. He saw them working late at the lab sometimes, but they lived in another world—a world filled with sports cars and private clubs. And who knew what eight-year men said? Mikkel cleaned an eight-year man’s office every night, but he’d only ever seen them in movies.

Nobody made movies about two-year men. They said four-year men had honor, six-year men had responsibility, and eight-year men had glory. Two-year men had nothing but shame. But it wasn’t true. Hyam said so.

Two-year men had families—parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, children and wives who depended on them. They had jobs, humble jobs but important all the same. Without two-year men, who would grub away the garbage, crawl the sewers, lay the carpets, clean the chimneys, fix the roofs? Without two-year men there would be nobody to bring in the harvest—no sweet strawberries or rich wines. And most important, Hyam said, without two-year men there would be nobody parents could point at and say to their sons, “Don’t be like him.”

Hyam was smart. He could have been a four-year man easy, even a six-year man. But he was a Jew and that meant a two-year man, almost always. Gypsies too, and Hutterites, and pacifists. Men who couldn’t walk or talk. Even blind men. All drafted and sent to fight and die in the colonies for two years, and then sent home to live in shame while the four-year men fought on. Fought to survive and come home with honor.

Hyam returned swinging a plastic bag in one hand and a carton of eggs in the other. A bottle of milk was tucked under his arm.

“This is mostly diapers,” he said, brandishing the bag. “You’ll never have too many. We spend more on laundry than we do on food.”

“I can wash them by hand.”

“No you can’t, take my word for it.” Hyam laughed and ran up the stairs. “Welcome to fatherhood, Mikkel. You’re a family man now.”

Mikkel laid the baby on the bed. He diapered and dressed the baby, and then trimmed her talons with Anna’s nail scissors. He fitted a sock over each of the baby’s hands and pinned them to her sleeves. Then he wedged Anna’s pillow between the bed and the wall, tucked the baby in his arms, and fell into sleep.

He woke to the clacking of the baby’s beak. She yawned, showing her colorful throat frill. He cupped his hand over her skull and breathed in the milky scent of her skin.

“Let’s get you fed before Mama comes home,” he said.

He warmed milk in the soup pot. A baby needed a bottle when it didn’t have a breast, he knew, but his baby—his clever little girl—held her beak wide and let him tip the milk into her, teaspoon by teaspoon. She swallowed greedily and then demanded more. She ate so fast he could probably just pour the milk in a steady stream down her throat. But milk was too expensive to risk spitting up all over the kitchen floor.

“Mikkel,” said Anna.

She was standing in the doorway in her scarf and coat. Mikkel gathered the baby in his arms and greeted Anna with a kiss like he always did. Her cheek was cold and red.

“How was your day?” he asked. The baby looked from him to Anna and clacked her beak.

Anna wouldn’t look at the baby. “I was late. I got on the wrong bus at the interchange and had to backtrack. Mrs. Spiven says one more time and that’s it for me.”

“You can get another job. A better one. Closer to home.”

“Maybe. Probably not.”

Anna rinsed the soup pot, scooped cold stew into it, and set it on the stove. She was still in her coat and hat. The baby reached out and hooked Anna’s red mitten out of her pocket with the trimmed talon poking through the thin gray knit sock. The mitten dangled from the baby’s hand. Anna ignored it.

“Sweetheart, take off your coat,” Mikkel said.

“I’m cold,” she said. She struck a match and lit the burner.

Mikkel gently pulled on her elbow. She resisted for a moment and then turned. Her face was flushed.

“Sweetheart, look,” he said. Anna dropped her gaze to the floor. The baby clacked her beak and yawned. “I thought we could name her after your mother.”

Anna turned away and stirred the stew. “That’s crazy. I told you we’re not keeping her.”

“She has your eyes.”

The spoon clattered to the floor. Anna swayed. Her elbow hit the pot handle and it tipped. Mikkel steadied it and shut off the flame.

Anna yanked back her chair and fell into it. She thrust her head in her hands for a moment and then sat back. Her eyes were cold and narrow, her voice tight. “Why would you say that? Don’t say that.”

Why couldn’t Anna see? She was smart. So much smarter than him. And he could see it so easily.

Mikkel searched for the right words. “Your eggs. Where did they go?”

“It doesn’t matter. I needed money so I sold my ovaries. That’s the end of it.”

Mikkel ran his fingers over his wife’s chapped hand, felt the calluses on her palm. He would tell her the awful things, and then she would understand.

“I know where your eggs went. I see them in the tanks every night. And in the labs. In the incinerator. I mop their blood off the floor.”

Anna’s jaw clenched. He could tell she was biting the inside of her cheek. “Mikkel. Lots of women sell their ovaries. Thousands of women. They could be anyone’s eggs.”

Mikkel shook his head. “This is your baby. I know it.”

“You don’t know anything. What proof do you have? None.” She laughed once, a barking sound. “And it doesn’t matter anyway because we’re not keeping her. People will find out and take her away. Arrest you and me both, probably. At the very least, we’d lose our jobs. Do you want us to live in the street?”

“We can tell people you birthed her.”

“With that beak?”

Mikkel shrugged. “It happens.”

Anna’s flushed face turned a brighter shade of red. She was trying not to cry. He ached to squeeze her to his chest. She would just pull away, though. Anna would never let him hold her when she cried.

They ate in silence. Mikkel watched the baby sleep on the table between them. Her soft cheek was chubby as any child’s, but it broadened and dimpled as it met the beak, the skin thinning and hardening like a fingernail. The baby snuffled and snot bubbled from one of her tiny nostrils. Mikkel wiped it away with the tip of his finger.

Mikkel checked the clock as Anna gathered the dishes and filled the sink. Only a few minutes before he had to leave for the lab. He snuggled the baby close. Her eyelids fluttered. The delicate eyelash fringes were glued together with mucus.

“You have to go,” said Anna. She put his lunch pail on the table.

“In a minute,” he said. Mikkel dipped his napkin in his water glass and wiped the baby’s eyes.

Anna leaned on the edge of the sink. “Do you know why I married you, Mikkel?”

He sat back, startled. Anna didn’t usually talk like this. He had wondered, often. Anna could have done better. Married a smart man, a four-year man, even.

“Will you tell me, sweetheart?”

“I married you because you said it didn’t matter. I explained I could never have babies and you still wanted me—”

“Of course I want you.”

“I told you why I was barren. Why I sold my ovaries. Do you remember?”

“Your mother was sick. You needed the money.”

“Yes. But I also said it was easy because I never wanted babies. I never wanted to be a mother.” She leaned forward and gripped his shoulders. “I still don’t. Take her back to the lab.”

Mikkel stood. He kissed the baby’s forehead. Then he put the baby in Anna’s arms.

“Her name is Maria,” he said. “After your mother.”

Mikkel was tired walking up the street toward the bus stop. But that was fatherhood. He would get used to it. Anna would get used to being a mother too. He was sure. All women did.

The thought of his wife and child kept him warm all the way to the Josefstadt streetcar station. Then a four-year man shoved an elbow in his ribs and spat on his coat. Mikkel watched the spittle freeze and turn white. He stood shivering at the edge of the curb, taking care to stay out of everyone’s way.

Mikkel relied on Anna’s kindness, sure she would always do the right thing, the generous thing. She was good to him, good to everyone. For ten years she had taken care of him: cooking, cleaning, making their two rooms into a home. In return he did his best to fill those two rooms with love. It was all he could do.

As he stood in the wind at the edge of the station, doubts began to creep in with the cold. Why would Anna say she didn’t want to be a mother? It couldn’t be true. They lived surrounded by families—happy, noisy families—three and four, even five generations all living together. Healthy children, happy mothers, proud fathers. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. Family everywhere, but he and Anna only had each other.

Anna must regret being barren. Some part of her, buried deep, must long for children. But she said she didn’t, and if it was true, then something in her must be broken.

He had seen broken men during his two years in the colonies, men with whole bodies and broken minds, who said crazy things and hurt themselves, hurt others. Anna could never be like them.

But his doubts grew with every step further from home. By the time he could see the lights of the lab glowing through the falling snow, the doubts were clawing at him. He imagined coming home in the morning to find Anna alone, ready to leave for work, pretending Maria had never been there.

He turned back home, but then one of the four-year men shouted at him through the glass doors.

“You’re late, you stupid ass.”

Mikkel watched his lunch pail slide though the X-ray. The guards ran it back and forth through the machine, just to waste time. Mikkel had to run to the time clock. He stamped his card just as it clicked over to eight.

Normally Mikkel loved the rhythm of work, the scrubbing, mopping, wiping. Even cleaning toilets brought its own reward. He knew the drip of every tap, every scratch on the porcelain and crack in the tiles. He took an inventory of them night by night as he cleaned, taking his time, double-checking every corner for dust, scanning every window and mirror for streaks, even getting down on his knees to swab behind the toilets, scrubbing away any hint of mildew from the grout, finding all the little nooks and crannies.

Tonight he rushed through his work, but each room felt like it took twice as long as usual. He kept checking the time, sure he was falling behind. Thinking about Anna dragged on the clock hands. Worrying made him forgetful, too. He left the four-year men’s bathroom with no memory of cleaning it. He had to go back and check just to be sure.

In the tank room he began to feel better. He loved the noise of the tanks—the bubbling pumps and thumping motors. Here he always took his time, no matter what. It was his favorite place in the whole building. He wasn’t supposed to touch the tanks, but he always took a few extra minutes to polish the steel and glass and check the hose seals. He even tightened the bolts that fixed each heavy tank to the floor and ceiling.

The tinted glass was just transparent enough to show the babies floating inside. Mikkel watched them grow night by night. He kept a special rag just for polishing the tanks, a soft chamois that a six-year man had discarded years ago. It was specially made for precious things—the logo of a sports car company had long since worn off. He always polished the glass with long slow caressing strokes, sure the babies could feel his touch.

Two of the tanks were empty. Mikkel polished them too, in their turn, making them perfect for the next baby. Maria’s tank was in the last row on the far side of the room, two from the end. It was refilled but the baby was still too small to see, just a thin filament dangling from the fleshy organ at the top of the tank.

“Your sister says hello,” Mikkel whispered. “Her mama and papa are proud of her. Maria is going to grow up smart and strong.”

The filament twisted and drifted in the fluid. Mikkel watched it for a few minutes, wondering what Anna and Maria were doing at that moment. He imagined them curled up in bed, skin to skin, the baby’s beak tucked under Anna’s chin. He squeezed his eyes tight and held the image in his mind, as if he could make it real just by wanting it so badly. And for a few minutes it did feel real, an illusion supported by the comforting tank room sounds.

But he couldn’t stay there. As he lugged his bins and pails upstairs to the offices, worry began gnawing at him again.

Women abandoned babies all the time. The mothers and grandmothers in the tenement always had a story to tell about some poor baby left out in the cold by a heartless and unnatural mother. Once, when they were first married, Anna told the woman next door that people did desperate things when they had run out of options. That neighbor still wouldn’t speak to her, years later.

What if Anna bundled Maria up and put her on the steps of some six-year man’s house? Or left her at the train station?

He could see Maria now, tucked into their big kitchen pail and covered with a towel. He could see Anna, her face covered by her red scarf, drop the pail on the edge of the Ostbahnhof express platform and walk away.

No. His Anna would never do that. Never. He wouldn’t think about it anymore. He would pay attention to his work.

On the wide oak table in the eight-year man’s office he found four peach pastries, their brandy jam dried to a crust. The bakery box was crushed in the garbage bin. When he was done cleaning the office he refolded it as best he could and put the pastries back inside. Four was good luck. One for each of the guards. Then he made his way down to the basement.

The incinerator was an iron maw in a brick wall. For years, Mikkel had walked down those concrete steps in the hot red light of its stare to find the sanitary disposal bin bloody but empty, its contents dumped by one of the four-year men who assisted in the labs. Back then, all Mikkel had to do was toss his garbage bags in the incinerator, let them burn down, then switch off the gas, bleach the bin, hose the floor, and mop everything dry.

But now there was a new eight-year man in charge, and Mikkel had to start the incinerator and empty the disposal bin himself.

The light from the overhead bulb was barely bright enough to show the trail of blood snaking from the bin to the drain. Mikkel felt his way to the control panel and began the tricky process of firing up the incinerator. The gas dial was stiff and the pilot light button was loose. He pressed it over and over again, trying to find the right angle on the firing pin. When the incinerator finally blasted to life Mikkel had sweated through his coveralls.

The room lit up with the glow from the incinerator window and he could finally see into the bin. The top layer of bags dripped fluid tinged red and yellow. Most were double- and even triple-bagged, tied with tight knots. But they were torn and leaked. Sharp edges inside the disposal chute hooked and tore on the way down.

Maria had been single-bagged. Her beak had pierced the plastic, ripped it wide enough for her to breathe. And she had landed at the far edge of the bin, mostly upright. If she had been facedown or if another bag had fallen on top of her she could have suffocated.

Mikkel wrenched open the incinerator door and began emptying the bin, carefully picking up each wet bag and throwing it far into the furnace. Some bags were tiny, just a few glass dishes and a smear of wax. One bag was filled with glass plates that spilled through a tear and shattered at his feet. The biggest bags held clear fluid that burst across the back wall of the incinerator with a hot blast that smelled like meat. He set the bloodiest bags aside, put them down safe on the pitted concrete floor, away from the glass.

As the bin emptied, a pit began to form in Mikkel’s stomach. He turned away and kicked through the glass, pacing along the far wall where it was a little cooler.

The tank room had two empty tanks. He’d polished them just a few hours ago, but he hadn’t paid much attention. He’d been thinking about Anna and Maria.

He knew those babies, the ones who had been in the empty tanks. One was a little boy with a thick, stocky body covered in fine hair. The other was a tiny girl with four arms that ended in stubby knobs. Where were they now? Had they been sent away to the crèche or put down the chute? If they’d gone down the chute they would be in the bin, waiting for him to throw them into the fire with the blood and tank fluid. With all of the failed experiments.

Mikkel picked up a bloody bag and hefted it by the seal, feeling the contents with his other hand. The fluid sloshed heavily and clung to the sides of the bag like syrup. There were a few solid pieces inside the bag, but nothing big enough to be a baby, not even a tiny one. He threw it into the incinerator and picked up the other bag.

Maria would probably be gone when he got home; he understood that now. The thought made a hollow in his chest, a Maria-shaped hole where he’d cuddled her to his heart. But if Maria was gone, if Anna had taken her to the train station and abandoned her, that only meant Anna needed time. He would give her time. He would be patient, like she always was with him, and gentle too. What was broken in her would heal and she would love their children. She would be a wonderful mother. Maybe not today, but soon.

He would find more babies. Night after night he’d search for them. Maria had survived, so others would survive, too, and he would find them. Find every baby and bring them all home until Anna healed. He would fill their home with love. It was all he could do.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2015.

About the Author

Kelly Robson’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and multiple year’s best anthologies. Her book “Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach” will be published this March from Tor.com Publishing. In 2017, she was a finalist for the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award and was a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

The Modern Search for the Fountain of Youth

Douglas F. Dluzen, PhD

Please forgive Juan Ponce de Leon, but the secrets to human immortality don’t reside in Florida. He should have traveled west to Southern California, near present day Loma Linda, or south to the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. Or, instead of crossing the Atlantic altogether, he could have set sail to the more familiar Mediterranean islands of Sardinia or Icaria, much closer to his birth country Spain. If he was feeling particularly adventurous, he may have continued along the Silk Road through China, across the East China Sea, to touch the beaches of Okinawa.

Loma Linda. Nicoya. Sardinia. Icaria. Okinawa.

These five places are “Blue Zones,” where people tend to live longer than the rest of us. Scientists who hypothesize that the real Fountain of Youth will be found buried within our genomes, or synthesized in a test tube in the laboratory, have flocked to these locations to study the people living there to find new clues to human longevity. They’ve found that females in Blue Zones are more likely to enjoy centenarian status (living beyond 100) and worldwide there are more than four times as many female centenarians than males. Curiously, this ratio is closer to one to one in Sardinia, where it’s believed a mixture of social support networks within the island communities promote psychological well-being that may interact with genetic factors.

Blue Zones are studied to further understand why one individual instead of another can become a centenarian (or in some cases, reach supercentenarian status, those few individuals, estimated at just a couple hundred to have lived during the course of human history, to reach beyond 110 years.) It’s clear the answer lies mired within a mixture of our own genetic predisposition and our environmental exposures—the battle between nature and nurture. But in order to slow or stop aging, we must first comprehend what exactly is aging. Armed with that knowledge, it’ll be easier to intervene and possibly prevent our own mortality.

The Wide World of Aging 

Aging is a time-dependent, functional decline in physiological integrity that impairs almost all living organisms and increases one’s susceptibility to death. The scale of how organisms age are vastly different. The life span of an insect generally occurs between a few days to a few weeks, but some insects like the termite queen can live for decades. Animals range from months and a handful of years to the impressive duration of the Galapagos tortoise (~150 years), bowhead whale (~200 years), all the way to the whale shark, with some documented to be over 500 years. Humans have a long way to go. The oldest documented person was Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who lived 122 years and 164 days and passed away in 1997. She was born when General Ulysses S. Grant was President of the United States. Currently, Kane Tanaka of Japan is the oldest confirmed person alive. She is over 115 years and 332 days and Teddy Roosevelt was wandering the halls of the White House when she was born.

But if the whale shark impressed you, we haven’t even touched the true champions of longevity, who reside within the plant kingdom. The oldest known individual plant is a Great Bristlecone Pine dated to over 5,000 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza. A creosote bush in the Mojave Desert, called King Clone, is estimated to be over 11,000 years old. King Clone is a clonal colony, meaning the plant has asexually produced individual offspring that are genetically identical and connected to the same underground root system that continually produces new shoots and flowers that rise from the ground. Incredibly, King Clone is older than Jericho, one of the oldest, continuously-inhabited cities and King Clone was around when most of the wooly mammoths died off.

But King Clone is still a child compared to a few other clonal plants. King’s Lomatia in Tasmania has been dated to be at least 43,000 years old and thus witnessed the extinction of the Neanderthals. And a clonal grove of quaking aspen in Utah, called Pando, is at least 80,000 years old—approximately the time humans began wearing jewelry.

We have a lot to learn from plants as most humans don’t even live to 90 and there are worldwide disparities in how long humans live. Up until a few hundred years ago, the average life expectancy for a human was between 35-40 years (assuming that individual made it beyond childhood).

Today, the global average life expectancy is almost 70 years; Japan’s average is the highest at 84.2 years, and the Central African Republic and Lesotho’s are the lowest at 51.6 and 51.1 years, respectively. Even in a US city like Baltimore, neighborhood life span is disparate, ranging from the mid-80’s for some, all the way down the mid-60’s for others, which is on par with developing countries like Bangladesh. Combating the socioeconomic factors that can predominantly influence these disparities will be essential to raise the global average beyond 70.

Curiously, one creature has the luxury of ignoring most environmental factors and is considered by many to be immortal. The hydras, a group of related creatures found in freshwater bodies, do not appear to age at all. Their cells can regenerate ad-infimum and this provides strong evidence that there are genetic and biological roles in aging.

The Biology of Aging 

The loss of cellular integrity and self-renewal are primary drivers of aging and lead to many of the common signs, including: wrinkles, muscle loss, bone weaknesses and frailty, graying hair, cognitive decline, and many others.

There are nine delineated “hallmarks” of aging that contribute to the decline of a cell’s ability to function. These hallmarks are: telomere attrition, genomic instability, epigenetic alterations, mitochondrial dysfunction, loss of proteostasis, stem cell exhaustion, cellular senescence, deregulated nutrient sensing, and altered intercellular communication. Usually, a combination of several of these hallmarks and phenotypes present within every individual, if not all of them at once. For those born and living in Blue Zones, it may be that protective genetic variants are more prevalent in genes related to delaying these processes.

Telomeres are the regions at the ends of all our chromosomes and they physically protect chromosomal integrity, protecting against unraveling and degradation. Each time our cells divide, the sequences of DNA comprising the telomere shorten just a little, known as telomere attrition. There is a limit to how many times a telomere can shorten, and thus a limit on how many times a cell can divide. Called the “Hayflick limit,” most cells can divide between 40-65 times, at which point the cell recognizes that its telomeres have been whittled down too far and cannot protect the rest of the genome if it were to divide again.

When a cell decides to forgo cell division, it enters a state known as senescence. Cellular senescence is the growth arrest of a cell and the number of cells within our tissues entering senescence increases as we age. Senescent cells no longer divide, but still provide functionality. As well, senescent cells may also begin to secrete inflammatory proteins and molecules that can spur inflammation nearby or systemically. This phenotype is known as SASP, or the senescence-associated secretory phenotype.

The accumulation of cells that are senescent and undergoing SASP contributes to the decline of tissue function, particularly within the heart, muscles, and immune system. And it isn’t only telomere attrition that contributes to senescence, genomic instability can also trigger cells into growth arrest.

Our cells contain a repertoire of DNA repair proteins that monitor our genome and scan it for errors. Often, mutations result from the everyday wear and tear of a cell and these accumulate cells will enter senescence as a preventative measure to protect against cancer or other types of cellular abnormalities. In fact, in most cancers, the Hayflick limit is ignored completely, as cancer cells often reactivate the ability to regenerate their telomeres and propagate other advantageous mutations. It’s no wonder that increased age is the most significant risk factor for most cancers.

Scientists have also observed that most of our tissues contain a population of stem cells to replenish the mature, functional cells that make up a majority of each tissue. For example, hematopoietic stem cells reside in the bone marrow and have the capacity to differentiate into all our white and red blood cells. This regenerative capacity keeps our immune system functional. The heart, brain, liver, and many other tissues maintain their own population of stem cells and over time they become exhausted and fail to produce new cells.

As we learn more about how our tissues and organs are organized, we’ve come to realize just how interconnected the entire body is. As more cells enter senescence and grow old, they also lose the ability to synthesize new proteins, sense nutrients and other metabolic signals around them, and/or the chemical modifications that govern how the genome is regulated can become altered and contribute to functional decline.

We also know that our cells constantly talk with one another and the communication and signaling between our tissues is essential during infection, growth and development, and to maintain systemic homeostasis. The blood and lymphatic systems of our body act as a highway of information for proteins, nucleic acids, hormones, lipids, and other material that travel the vast network of blood vessels to talk with other tissues. As we age, this communication network breaks down and it’s still unclear if this process is a cause or effect of aging.

The Modern Fountain of Youth 

So, what is the magic elixir that will enable us to stretch our 150-year old legs and share stories with our great-great-grandchildren? There isn’t one, yet. Diet and exercise are tried and true methods for promoting a healthier and longer life span. It’s not a sexy answer, but reducing calorie intake extends life span in many animal models, including mice. Often referred to as caloric restriction, a reduced food load can extend the life span of worms, flies, mice, rats, and it’s thought, even humans. But does that include long bouts of fasting, or just eating less fries with that burger? A recent study published by the National Institute on Aging showed that both longer periods between meals and eating less during those meals extended the life span and health span of mice. Evidence also suggests decreasing calories can reduce the stress of cellular respiration and mitochondrial dysfunction, thereby slowing the accumulation of oxidative damage.

But what about the more provocative aging interventions? We know a variety of natural and pharmaceutical proteins and molecules are also being studied for their antiaging effects. One may well have come from the mind of Bram Stoker and his famous Dracula. Experiments show that if you infuse older mice with blood from younger mice, the aged liver and muscle tissues in the older mice will revert to a younger phenotype, with increased functionality. This was also seen in experiments in which mice were joined together and thus shared the same circulatory system.

These results spurred an international race to identify the factors in young blood that could be isolated and separately injected to reverse aging. In 2014, it was reported that a protein called Growth Differentiation Factor 11 (GDF11) can help cardiac and skeletal muscle stem cells regenerate in old mice. However, these results fell into dispute when another laboratory couldn’t replicate the findings and actually observed the opposite effect. Still another report right after claimed that a different protein called myostatin, not GDF11, was the actual antiaging miracle that researchers were searching for. Today, it’s unclear which protein factor may be useful against aging.

These findings and others have not slowed entrepreneurial interest in young blood as an aging intervention. Ambrosia LLC just completed a clinical trial studying the effects of infusing plasma from young donors into older study participants, but the results of the study have yet to be released and their company website is sparse on any further details about the results. Calico LLC was founded in 2013 and is financially supported by Google to combat aging.

Elysium, another venture, sells the dietary supplement Basis, which contains a form of vitamin B3 thought to promote cellular respiration. vitamin B3 levels drop as we age and could contribute to functional decline in our tissues. However, evidence of its use in preventing age-related declines is lacking.

And if GDF11 and vitamin B3 aren’t the answer, there are many others, including natural compounds such as tomatidine and Urolithin A, found in green tomatoes and a variety of berries, respectively. Both have been shown to improve mitochondrial function and they may even be preventative against sarcopenia, which is the age-related decline in skeletal muscle many come to experience.

Another curious molecule is called metformin. Metformin is a drug Type II diabetics use to reduce their blood sugar levels by inhibiting the production of glucose in the liver. In the US it came on the market in the 90’s and a decade later epidemiologists were shocked to observe that diabetics taking metformin had reduced mortality compared with diabetics taking other medications. Additionally, their risk for death due to cancer and cardiovascular disease was significantly reduced. Scientists have since discovered that low doses of dietary metformin can extend the life span of almost all animal models tested, including worms and mice. But how does a drug appear to slow aging, protect against cancer, protect against cardiovascular disease, all the while providing a metabolic benefit for Type II diabetics?

Metformin influences several metabolic pathways in the cell, including improving mitochondrial function, promoting cellular growth, and rebalancing energy homeostasis. Recent experiments have also shown metformin treatment can improve cellular expression of noncoding RNAs that are essential for healthy cellular function and which are known to decline in our tissues and bloodstream with age.

Metformin is particularly advantageous because it has been on the market so long that its patent has expired and generic forms have already been made available. A month’s supply can cost under $50 in the US and it would potentially be cheaper elsewhere.

Interestingly, a small FDA-approved clinical trial called the Metformin in Longevity Study was completed in May 2018. Participants over 60 years old took daily metformin for six weeks. Gene expression was measured in both muscle and fat tissue and will be assessed to see if expression is restored back to levels observed in younger individuals. Although there have been no results published to date, preliminary evidence indicates metformin treatment does affect gene expression in those tissues. Larger studies will be needed, particularly to see if low doses of metformin slow the aging process when used as a dietary supplement over a much longer duration.

Thus, while there’s currently no “cure” for aging, the future looks promising for antiaging interventions. The more that is known about how our cells and tissues decline over time, the more likely it seems that the fountain of youth may finally be discovered. Until then, it wouldn’t hurt to migrate to a Blue Zone and enjoy their ubiquitously pleasant weather, coastal scenery, and healthy lifestyle.

About the Author

Douglas Dluzen, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. He is a geneticist and has studied the genetic contributors to aging, cancer, hypertension, and other age-related diseases. Currently, he studies the biology of health disparities and the microbiome in Baltimore City. He teaches evolution, genetics, and scientific thinking and you can find more about him on Twitter @ripplesintime24. He loves to write science and science fiction while sitting on the couch with his wife Julia, their dog, cat, and newborn son Parker.

37 Rejections, Language Obsessions, and Dance:
A Conversation with Rich Larson

Chris Urie

Quality and quantity are typically mutually exclusive. Bulk bought food is typically packed with partially hydrogenated filler while a uniquely tasty plate of haute cuisine is one of a kind. But sometimes, rarely, quality and quantity go hand in hand.

Rich Larson’s Tomorrow Factory is his first collection of short fiction. It assembles the wide variety of stories that Larson has published over the past few years. From post-humans to cyberpunk junkyards and an asteroid prison break, this collection highlights Larson’s vast imagination and storytelling ability.

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island, and worked in the south of Spain. He now lives in Ottawa, Canada. Larson has sold over a hundred stories, the majority of them in magazines like Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. Tomorrow Factory was released by Talos in October.

When did you get into writing?

I’ve been into stories since before I could write—when I was five or so in Niger I told them aloud to my older sisters, who painstakingly transcribed a couple of them. I remember they involved pyramids, hot-air balloons, Spider-Man, savage forest babies, and lots of sword fights.

I got into writing short stories in Canada, motivated by an annual short story competition held by the local library. The word limit was two thousand words and the prize was cash, so for half my life my conception of a short story was something written once per year, exactly two thousand words in length, that was then exchanged for money.

I got into writing as a trade when I was nineteen, studying Creative Writing for one ill-fated year in Rhode Island. That was when I first started getting poems and stories published—literary stuff back then, no sci-fi—and I realized people were willing to pay me for them. The following summer my cyberpunk thriller Devolution was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

That, plus my general disenchantment with Creative Writing, steered me back towards genre fiction over the next couple years. I wrote a lot of stories and slowly knocked magazines off my list. Clarkesworld took “Meshed” in 2015 after rejecting thirty-seven prior submissions, and I’ve been on a bit of a roll ever since.

You have a distinct way of creating imagery. Do you start with images for your stories first and work around them?

I’m a visual person and the image comes first. I’ll use it as either the start point or end point for the story.

How has your travel influenced your writing? You’ve been to places like Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

I’ve been lucky enough to live in a few different places and pass through a bunch of others. Wherever I go, I like to jot down descriptions of what’s around me, and I’ll often use particularly memorable cities as settings. For example, while living in Spain I wrote several stories (“There Used to Be Olive Trees,” “Seawall,” and “Cupido”) set in various parts of Andalusia. People I get to know while traveling, whether for a week or only for a night, often inspire my characters.

You’ve published over a hundred stories. How do you stay so prolific?

I use this great all-natural berry extract that I sell for only forty bucks a bottle.

But really, there are a few factors. I tend to write quick and clean, which means minimal time spent editing or revising before sending stories off to markets, and I’m also just constantly deluged with ideas that I want to take for a spin. I’ve likened it to being on a treadmill with the speed cranked up and trying not to fly off. Even when I’m writing as fast as I can, often the process of writing one story will give me ideas for two more.

I’ll definitely die with a long list of things I never got to write, which sucks, but on the plus side my overactive idea gland gives me enough material to eke out a nonglamorous living as a short fiction writer even without my book deal or selling any options. In that sense I’m very fortunate. 

Character and voice are hallmarks of your stories. Do you find yourself inventing them completely or forming them from a pastiche of people you observe in reality?

I have a few standard voices that I slip into easily, because they are variations on how I think in my own head, but often characters in my stories are based loosely on people I know in real life or on conglomerations of them. The secondary character in “Motherfucking Retroparty Freestyle” is one of my oldest friends from high school, no changes necessary, but even if I told him that I doubt he’d read it. He’s a bit of a bastard.

How do you feel your process is different when working on short stories as opposed to longer works?

I’m generally a lot happier working on short stories. They’re low commitment and low pressure. If you write a bad short story, you wasted a couple hours or a couple days. If you write a bad novel, you wasted half a year. I find my work limit is usually around the same for both forms, though. After a thousands words I sputter out unless there’s a madman like Derek Künsken around to keep me motivated.

What was your favorite story to write in Tomorrow Factory? Why?

One that stands out in memory as just a blast to actually write was “Let’s Take This Viral,” because it let me indulge my bad habit of inventing an avalanche of futuristic slang and plunging the reader into it headlong. Any story where I get to really play with language is fun to write.

I can’t choose favorite finished products, though. It was hard enough to narrow things down to the twenty-three stories in the collection. They’re all in there because I love them.

I’ve read that dreams sometimes inspire your stories. Are there any stories in this collection that were inspired by dreams?

I do get inspired by dreams pretty often—I love how the subconscious can come up with weird new scenes or images for you with no extra effort required. “Your Own Way Back” was inspired by a dream about a family waiting in a green-painted hospital room, holding red balloons, standing around a machine that brought people back from the dead: sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

“Edited” was based off a very vivid dream I had in Spain, about three teenagers breaking into some sort of organic coral summerhouse in order to party. There was a nervous energy to the proceedings, because one of the three had changed somehow and the other two weren’t sure how to treat them. In the dream it wasn’t clear whether they were recovering from an accident, had been altered somehow against their will, or had done something surprising to themselves.

That’s why the dream also spawned two other stories, “Spiked,” which appeared in Abyss & Apex and was shortlisted for the 2018 Sunburst Award, and “Masked,” which appeared in Asimov’s. I think dreams can be an incredibly rich resource.

Being obsessed with languages, how do you think that has influenced your short fiction?

As I mentioned previously, I love playing with language. One of my favorite things about science fiction is the freedom to invent new terms for new technologies or practices, as well as updating our constantly-evolving slang to suit a particular future.

I also make use of other languages I speak or study: in “Razzibot,” for example, the dialogue is peppered with Spanish and Portuguese since the protagonist lives in Porto and has a sevillana mother. “You Make Pattaya” throws in the tiny bits of Thai I picked up there, and “Ghost Girl” uses a couple words of Kirundi.

Apart from the stories in Tomorrow Factory, I have a story coming out in Asimov’s next year that uses some good old Québécois profanity—I meet a lot of French Canadians here in Ottawa—and there’s one being published by Tor.com that makes extensive use of Hausa, the main language where I was born in West Africa. I got a crash course in it this past January when I returned to Niger for the first time in fifteen years with my dad, and I loved being able to incorporate it into the story.

You read widely. I saw that you were reading a side-by-side translation of Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Do you think this curiosity has kept your stories fresh and varied?

It’s more honest to say that I read sporadically, and that when I do read I pick things up at random. I bought that Italian-Spanish translation in a used bookstore in Florence and used it to absorb some Italian grammar while I was there, so it was kind of mercenary. For actual entertainment I’m more likely to watch shows than I am to read. In the past few years I’ve really enjoyed Atlanta, Better Call Saul, and Bojack Horseman.

What projects are you working on next?

The sequel to Annex is currently with the publisher, so while I wait for editorial notes on that I’m taking full advantage of my free writing time. I’ve been tearing through my backlog of ideas and have written thirteen new stories since the start of October. Only a handful of them are over two thousand words—I’m back to my old library contest tricks—but that pace is still torrid.

It’s partly because I’ve had so many ideas building up and partly because I feel like my novel publisher will get the crook around my neck and yank me off-stage any second now. I’ll have to revise the sequel and then when 2019 rolls around I’ll be working on the third and final novel in the trilogy. I’ll churn out some new short stories when I get the chance as well.

Some unfinished stories I have bouncing around in my head right now: an art heist in futuristic Catalonia, Alien in an isolated monastery during the Middle Ages, and Tomb Raider in space.

What is one piece of writing advice that has really helped you?

Realizing that small changes can have big effects. I used to panic when editors said things like “this scene needs more tension” because I didn’t realize that often meant an addition as simple as one sentence that mentions the character sweating, or their heart pounding, or some other body function cliché. Even changes that seem big often only require a few sentences to enact.

It’s a little trickier with novels, because those small changes then ripple throughout the whole manuscript and you have to go through with a fine-toothed comb to make sure everything lines up properly.

Can you do any trick shots in pool?

I can jump a ball okay, and I’m good for a massé once every hundred tries or so. Lately I’ve been a lot more into dancing than pool.

Are you willing to teach anyone to dance kizomba?

I’m willing to teach absolutely anyone to dance a little kizomba—it’s an Angolan partner dance that I’ve been fully obsessed with for over a year now. I liken it to tango, in that it’s a walking dance, but in the urban style it becomes very dynamic, with sharp and precise movements juxtaposed with ones so slow you’re barely moving. It’s all lead and follow, nothing patterned or choreographed.

Am I allowed to enclose a link? These are two of my favorite dancers absolutely killing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgaNxuMhfF8.

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:
In the Home of Anthony Burgess’ Harpsichord

Jason Heller

I stood on stage at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, England. It was October of this year, and I was finishing a five-month (yes, you read that right, five-month) tour supporting my latest book, Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decades Sci-Fi Exploded. This was the biggest audience I’d had so far on a trek that had taken me across the US then to the UK.

As I wrapped up my hour-long talk about science fiction’s impact on popular music in the ’70s—centering on David Bowie—I thanked the dozens of people in attendance. But when I stepped off the stage to sign copies of my book, a chilling realization hit me: During my entire talk, I’d forgotten to breathe even a word about Bowie’s debt to Anthony Burgess.

Bowie loved Burgess. When the late singer compiled a list of his hundred favorite books in 2013, three years before his death from liver cancer, he included two Burgess novels: Earthly Powers and A Clockwork Orange. It’s the latter book that factored into my narrative in Strange Stars. Burgess’ 1962 novel about a violent, dystopian future—and its 1971 film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick—influenced Bowie heavily during his creation of his science-fiction concept albums The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1972 and Diamond Dogs in 1974. Burgess’ themes of social collapse, decadent sadism, youth culture gone mad, and individualism versus moral conformity made A Clockwork Orange an irresistible wellspring of ideas and imagery for Bowie during his most fertile period as a science-fiction rocker.

I failed, however, to mention any of this to the crowd at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The Foundation was set up in 2003 through an endowment from Liana Burgess, the author’s widow. It’s housed in a lovely, brick-walled space in downtown Manchester. And in addition offering a performance area to handpicked artists and authors like me (I couldn’t have been more flattered or honored), the Foundation keeps a library of Burgess’ work as well as artifacts from his life. On your way to the restroom, you can gaze at—but not touch, a sign politely warned—Burgess’ beloved harpsichord. In other words, there would have been no better setting for a disquisition on Bowie’s profound Burgess fandom.

In my defense, it had been my intention to deliver exactly such a disquisition. During my Strange Stars tour, I spoke about many subjects that I covered in the book, from Bowie to Star Wars to Arthur C. Clarke to Parliament-Funkadelic to Philip K. Dick to Devo. But I made a note to myself in my calendar, one that may seem hilariously obvious: “Remember to mention Anthony Burgess while speaking at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.”

I didn’t remember. Also, I was fine with that.

I’ve had a fear of public speaking almost since I was old enough to speak. To this day, my mom likes to tell the story of how I was a chatty, outgoing little boy—that is, until my first day of school, after which I came home and, according to her, “didn’t talk for ten years.” My family moved around a lot growing up, which made me the perpetual new kid. On top of that, I was very evidently poor. Not only did I not want to draw attention—almost always in the form of ridicule or bullying—to myself, I knew that any friends I made would be left behind in a matter of months. Subsequently, it made sense to keep my mouth shut, to do everything I could to be invisible as well as inaudible. Books and music became my best friends: Frank Herbert’s Dune, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.

But even after I got out of high school, I was a quiet person. It was more than just habit. I knew the word “introvert,” but it always had a negative connotation, as if an introvert was a form of pervert. Society, I observed early on in life, was made for and by extroverts: those talkative, friendly, assertive people who didn’t seem to have any of the anxieties I had when I was around others. I liked talking with people one-on-one in a private setting. But being around groups of people was exhausting, confusing, and turned me into either a grumpy grunter or a babbling, overcompensating weirdo. I felt judged. I could barely hold it together when trying to keep up with a conversation among three or four friends at a party; nothing was more petrifying than the idea of standing up alone in front of a crowd to talk.

That changed, in a way, when I started my first band. My love of pop had shifted toward a love of punk, and emboldened by punk’s anyone-can-do-it credo, I learned a few notes on the bass guitar and got on stage as quickly as I could. I found that I had zero fear of standing up in public when I had a bass strapped to me, a singer to handle the microphone, and a wall of noise to insulate me from the audience. It was exhibitionist and aloof at the same time, and the thrill was addictive. I’d finally found a way to be social, kind of. The thing is, as soon as my band finished and climbed off stage, I was back to my usual self: acutely uncomfortable talking to people, even the ones who wanted to tell me they liked my band. Especially the ones who wanted to tell me they liked my band. After a lifetime of being bullied and ridiculed, taking compliments—even for my crappy punk band—made me squeamish.

It wasn’t until I was in my 30s, and transitioning into a career as a writer, that I began to learn what introversion and social anxiety really were. And that they weren’t interchangeable, but entirely distinct things that can be experienced either together or separately. Lucky me, I experienced both. Not only was I naturally introverted—that is, given to a rich inner life and the need for lots of solitude to recharge my social energy—I suffered from social anxiety, which magnified the smallest fear about being inadequate or less than eloquent into a panic that fulfilled its own prophecy. Social anxiety is a mental illness; introversion is not. But in my mind, they were tied together into a nerve-racking, soul-crushing, and often debilitating whole.

Then I became an author. My first book, the alt-history novel Taft 2012, was published in its titular year, and suddenly I was faced with one of the biggest challenges of my life: the expectation to speak in public. I made it through the book’s launch party in my hometown of Denver on a wing and a prayer, having faked my way through a reading and discussion of the book that left me rattled and drained. A year later, I was part of the editing team here at Clarkesworld that won the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, and I found myself on stage with my compatriots Neil Clarke, Kate Baker, and Sean Wallace at WorldCon 71 in San Antonio—in front of hundreds of heroes and peers, giving a few mumbled words of appreciation that probably made me sound like someone who had just accidentally stumbled on stage and grabbed a stray statuette.

The more books I had published, the more I vowed to get my fear of public speaking under control. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t quick. First, I quit drinking. Alcohol, which I had been using as self-medication for my social anxiety for a number of years, had become much more of a hindrance than a help. Second, I took a huge step that I had been avoiding for decades: getting treatment for my anxiety, which had become far more pervasive than simply social. That’s one of the worst things about anxiety: It can even render you prohibitively anxious about the prospect of getting treated for anxiety itself, to the point where you’re more or less paralyzed and resigned to your fate. I finally made it to a doctor, though, and on her advice, I started taking a number of steps—dietarily, pharmaceutically, and exercise-wise—to curb my social anxiety.

I also began trying to understand my introversion better. Susan Cain’s bestselling book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking came out in 2013, and it overhauled my entire view of myself. After a lifetime of being told, implicitly and explicitly, that wanting to stay home and read books and keep my own company was abnormal or even pathological, Cain’s championship of the introvert was eye-opening and exhilarating. For the first time in my life, I felt understood—by both someone else and myself.

When Strange Stars was about to be published in June of this year, I proposed something ambitious. In an age where book publishers don’t have the resources to send authors on the road, and where most authors don’t have the time or desire to do so anyway, I wanted to go on a major book tour. And by major, I meant for months. My publisher, Melville House, is distributed by Random House, and they’re extremely well-regarded in the industry. Still, they needed to be persuaded that it was worth their time, money, and effort to set up and promote a long string of bookstore appearances for Strange Stars. Once convinced, however, Melville House threw their full weight and enthusiasm behind my crazy trip, and I hit the airways and roadways in June, bursting with excitement and no small amount of dread. I’d bluffed my way into a major book tour. But could my introversion and social anxiety even handle it?

Glossophobia is the name for the fear of public speaking. It takes many forms, from physical ailments like sweating, stuttering, heart palpitations, and even incontinence, to full-on panic attacks that can be much more serious. For many of us who suffer from glossophobia, the primary treatment is simply avoidance: We find every excuse we can to stay out of the oratory spotlight. By going on a big book tour, I was throwing myself in the deep end. There was no way out, at least, not without disappointing and hurting my professional standing with publishers, publicists, distributors, booksellers, and, of course, readers.

In the past, my anxiety had driven me to over-prepare for any public speaking engagement I couldn’t worm my way out of. But when I started my book tour for Strange Stars, I tried a radical approach: not preparing at all. I’d just spent two years researching and writing this book about science fiction’s influence on ’70s music, including the work of David Bowie, one of my heroes since childhood. Why not wing it? I was getting treatment for my social anxiety, and I was making some happy gains. And while my introversion was as much a part of me as ever, I was finally understanding and, most importantly, accepting it. I was learning my limitations, how to communicate them to people without embarrassment, and how to cope when things went wrong.

The strangest thing happened: It worked. I launched my tour in Portland, Oregon, in June, and as I wound my way up and down both coasts and throughout the middle of the country, I learned to enjoy the spontaneity of getting up in front of people and—believe it or not—just chatting about my book. I didn’t dread the Q&A sessions every night. I looked forward to them. One thing I’ve said often during interviews about Strange Stars is that this book is the one I feel I was born to write. It combines my two greatest loves in life, science fiction and music. My events on tour weren’t about delivering a lecture or checking off bullet points or, horror of horrors, trying to be a salesperson. It was about sharing my enthusiasm, my sense of awestruck discovery that I’d felt while putting together Strange Stars.

That ultimately led to Manchester and the stage of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. After my talk, I signed books and made small talk with a few lingering audience members and thanked the organizers for such a well-attended and beautifully-run event. As I walked out the door on the way back to my hotel room, everyone was all smiles. If they were at all disappointed about my failure to actually mention Anthony Burgess during my talk, they either didn’t express it or had already forgotten about it. No one expects public speakers to be perfect—sometimes it’s only the speakers themselves who expect perfection, and therein lies the source of so much anxiety. At last I’d learned to stop seeing an audience as a jury and start seeing them as fellow enthusiasts. And even friends.

I still have social anxiety. I’m still an introvert. And I can’t say that I’ll never again feel fear or panic at the prospect of speaking in public. But if I can forgive and accept myself after forgetting to talk about Anthony Burgess in the home of his own harpsichord, maybe I’ve come far enough.

About the Author

Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books), and his fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Farrago’s Wainscot, Swords v. Cthulhu, and others. His nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Entertainment Weekly, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac, and he regularly reviews science fiction and fantasy novels for NPR.org. He’s the co-editor of the upcoming anthologies Cyber World (with Josh Viola) and Mechanical Animals (with Selena Chambers), both for Hex Publishers. His nonfiction book Strange Stars, a history of science fiction’s influence on popular music in the 1970s, will be published by Melville House in 2018. He lives in Denver with his wife Angie, and he can be found on Twitter: @jason_m_heller

Editor’s Desk:
A Note to End On

Neil Clarke

You might be wondering why there’s only one reprint this month. Earlier this year, I mentioned that I wanted to phase out the reprints and replace them with more original content. We’re still a good way from reaching the subscription milestone that will allow us to make that change, but we’re slowly moving in the right direction and I thought it might be nice to shake things up a little as an end-of-the-year thank-you for a great 2018.

(Next month, we’ll go back to the usual line-up, that is, unless we get a flood of new subscriptions. By the way, gift subscriptions are available from Weightless Books and clarkesworldcitizens.com.)

Something else that has me in a good mood is the first pass on the end-of-year demographics report I do. Over the years, I’ve shared bits and pieces of these reports as editorials or blog posts, but their main purpose is to help me evaluate trends and identify any potential areas that need work. I’m also a data junkie and find that it gives me a fascinating snapshot into both the field and my approach to editing.

A lot of editors rely heavily on solicited stories, which is the process of inviting known authors to write a story for a market, often with the implied guarantee of publication. Some will mix in a slush pile—open to all story submissions period—so they have the opportunity to discover someone new. With Clarkesworld, I only accept stories through the slush pile. No golden tickets. Everyone has the same opportunity. This means the quality of the slush pile is integral to the success of our magazine.

In many editorials, interviews, and blog posts I’ve emphasized the need for short fiction to embrace a more global attitude to its audience and authorship. Digital publishing and online story submissions might have opened the doors, but we—as a field—are still learning how to use these tools to reach authors and readers around the world and bring them into our ecosystems. Since 2011, we’ve been actively pursuing works in translation and that led to a partnership with Storycom to feature Chinese science fiction, which is now entering its fifth year. We’ve made progress and learned a lot, but I always wanted to do more. It wasn’t until I left my day job, nearly two years ago, that I was able to invest time in directly addressing this issue.

One of the metrics I’m tracking is the number of original stories published by authors from outside the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Those countries have historically tended to fair reasonably well in most genre short fiction markets. From that, I remove the Chinese translations because they arrive through a different and separate sort of slush pile. What remains is a mix of English- and non-English-speaking countries. To keep it simple, let’s call it the Rest of the World (tRotW). In 2016, tRotW represented 16% of all the stories we published. It wasn’t the highest, but it was above average and likely influenced by the attention received by the translation work we had previously done. It was 14% before we started the Chinese translations.

The 2017 data was interesting but had a variety of statistical anomalies. Given the small sample size, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. After expanding it to include the three months before and after, I decided there wasn’t much to worry about, but I did make notes to review for this cycle. Fortunately, the 2018 data not only eliminated some of the concerns I had, but also confirmed that the approach I’ve been taking with casting a wider net had paid off. At the end of 2018, tRotW was at 30%, nearly double the 2016 value and demonstrating continued growth over the 2017 numbers.

It seems highly unlikely that we’ll continue to see this kind of growth, but it will require sustained effort to maintain anything even close to these levels. I’m thrilled to be able to celebrate this year’s success, but my mind is already racing into 2019, identifying the gaps in tRotW, and thinking about how to reach those areas. It would also be nice if I could figure out how to replicate this so that other interested editors can do the same. Our work is far from done, so it’s probably a good thing that I love my job.

That seems like a nice note to end the year on. Enjoy the rest of December, happy holidays (should you celebrate any), and all the best in 2019!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His most recent anthology, Not One of Us, was published in November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Belt 71

Pascal Blanché

About the Artist

Pascal Blanché is a French artist, with more than twenty years of experience in the gaming industry. By day, he works at Ubisoft Montreal as Art Director. By night, he like to work on more personal explorations and likes to build bold new worlds.