The Last Eagle

Natalia Theodoridou

“For a city boy, you are terrible in crowds,” Beatrice used to say, and she wasn’t wrong exactly, but it was never the crowds that were the problem. It was the open spaces. The too-muchness of air, of movement, of sound. Even here, I catch myself making my body small, as small as possible. The plaza is nearly empty—this is only a village, after all—and yet I feel exposed, worried about the boundlessness of sky, like something up above has been broken open. At least the day is overcast, the clouds low. I find that comforting, somehow. There is a chill in the air.

I see someone walking fast towards me, their step sure, as if they’ve recognized me. A young-man-shaped person, lean and wiry. A full head taller than me, which is hardly a surprise. Sunburned skin and high cheekbones, dark hair down to their ears, arms chiseled and bare, despite the chill.

They extend an arm to greet me. “You must be Lucia’s cousin!” they say. “My name is João. He/him. I’m your promised guide.”

“Fabiano,” I say. It still feels good. “He/him.” I press my hand into his awkwardly, as if I’ve forgotten how to shake.

“Your hands are cold, Fabiano,” he says and smiles with his eyes.

He leads me to the village’s only guesthouse, where we’ll spend the night. There is nothing to do here—this village, like every other village in the region, was mostly abandoned sometime during the war, the majority of its inhabitants either dead or vanished—so we sit in our host’s kitchen, next to the stove. She places black coffee and flatbreads in front of us and retreats to a room in the back, separated from the kitchen with strings of beads hanging in a doorless frame.

I am told that we need to start early the next morning, if we want to be at the next village before dark. “That’s where you say your friend was last seen, correct?” João asks me, his mouth half-full of bread.

“Yes,” I say. I take a sip of coffee. Its bitterness bites my throat.

“What was her name again?”

“Beatrice.” We picked it together. It took us weeks. I kept coming up with lists upon lists, mostly baby name ideas I pulled off the Internet, but she didn’t like any of them. Said it felt weird to have a name; she’d never had one before. Then I showed her a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and she asked me what that redheaded woman’s name was, and that was it. She never told me what it was about her that stuck, and I knew better than to ask.

João nods. He eats and drinks quietly for a while. His face, illuminated only by the light of the stove, reminds me of that same painting. Golden and warm, like a proper pre-Raphaelite.

“We should sleep,” he says then, and warns me again about our early start the next morning.

My room is Spartan: a thin-mattressed bed, a stool with a shallow basin filled with water, a small mirror nailed to the limewashed wall. I avoid my reflection and turn off the lamp.

I wrap the itchy blanket around myself and shiver in the dark. Sleep escapes me for hours. I think of Beatrice, of the hole in the side of her neck and the first time she showed it to me. I can still feel the weight of her key in my palm. She told me she was ashamed. And I got it, even as I wished I didn’t. I wished I could tell her there was nothing to be ashamed of, but I wasn’t quite there yet myself, back then.

Am I now?

I close my eyes to the darkness and think of open spaces, the dread of them putting the question to rest.

I wake up frozen. The cold has seeped through the walls overnight and settled on me like a shroud. I shake my body awake enough to give myself my injection and then shave the peach fuzz on my face. I do it slowly, carefully, my little biweekly ritual. I cherish the feeling of the shaving foam on my jawline, my cheeks, my chin, then the pressure of the razor against my skin. I spare only the tiny black hairs on my upper lip. They make me look like a teenage boy, but I don’t care. I love them. I remember the shock that ran through me the first time I realized I loved something about my body. The radical newness of it enough to break the world apart, then put it back together again.

João, full of warnings, has informed me that the hike to Castelalbano will be demanding and will take most of the day. I hesitate briefly before putting on my binder, but I can’t bring myself to go out without it. Much worse than walking out the door naked, it would be like going out without my skin. So that settles it, I guess.

He greets me in the kitchen, his wide smile and his dark eyes bright and alert, as if he’s thrilled to be up at the crack of dawn and looking forward to a day of walking in the freezing cold. “Fabiano!” he exclaims and points at a small mound of freshly-baked flatbreads and another cup of that coffee, no doubt as bitter as last night’s. “Eat, drink,” he orders. “We have a difficult day ahead.” He beams at our host, who’s stuffing wood into the stove. “And we might not enjoy such hospitality again for some time.”

“Really?” I ask, and it comes out more sarcastic than I intended. I would not be surprised if I found out later that our host had taken terrible offense. I’m not usually like this. I feel my cheeks burn.

João laughs. “The people of Castelalbano are not known for their warmth,” he explains, without dropping that wide smile of his even for a moment. I catch myself staring at the shape of his lips, the way his moustache hugs the sides of his mouth, like a permanent frown painted onto his face, so much at odds with his disposition. It makes me want to touch his lips, see if I can wipe that frown away.

When he’s satisfied that I’ve had enough to eat, he leads us out of the village and onto the path to Castelalbano.

We walk without speaking for more than an hour before the sun peeks over the mountains that cradle us. My heart beats hard in my chest, my rib cage hurts, and João’s pace is too fast for me. I keep up for another hour before I have to admit defeat. “I’m not supposed to do strenuous exercise,” I say. Not in a binder is what I mean, and I almost say so, but then I don’t.

He looks at me, confused. “This is not strenuous exercise,” he says. He flexes his well-formed glutes, as if to underline the point.

“It is for me,” I reply, my tone as dry as December skin.

His face drops, but only slightly. “I’m very sorry,” he says. “We’ll slow down.” He starts to walk again, then stops and turns around to face me once more. He puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. His eyes are warm and not pitying at all and I’m thankful for it. “Let me know if it is still too hard. I should not have assumed.” His face is flushed, and I know for sure it’s not from the trek.

“It’s alright,” I say, and when he doesn’t let go of my shoulder I repeat: “It is. Really.” I try on a smile, and it must work because we’re on our way again the next moment.

I focus on my shoes for most of the journey, even when João points out rare plants or supplies crucial bits of information on the region and vivid details about how the war played out in this ravine or that. I listen to his voice but not to what he’s saying, and all I can think of is the terrifying emptiness that stretches above us and what a miracle it is that we have our feet stuck to the ground, that we don’t all go falling into the sky.

Castelalbano supposedly owes its name to a white castle which turns out to be little more than a limestone watchtower that stands, half-crumbled, at the village’s entrance. It is already dark when we see the top of the watchtower loom in the distance, its windows dark and empty.

The power grid here was destroyed during the war and never repaired, so there are no lights in the streets, and the few inhabitants are probably already fast asleep in their beds. Our guest room for the night will be an abandoned barn.

It is as cold inside the barn as it is outside, so we pick a corner as far from the entrance as possible and make ourselves a nest out of our sleeping bags and fleece blankets. We use a hurricane lamp for light. João opens his arms and invites me to make myself comfortable next to him. “For warmth,” he adds with a smile when he sees me hesitate. So we huddle together for a while. My chest is killing me, though, and I can’t stay like this forever, so I clench my teeth and ask him to turn around while I undress, slip out of my binder, and put my clothes back on as quickly as I can, my breath coming out in little puffs of steam.

By the time I’m done, I’m shivering. “OK,” I say, “you can turn around again.”

He only glances at the bulge of my chest for a second before opening his arms and inviting me into the warm blankets again. “Come on, boy,” he says. “You’ll freeze to death.”

It takes me a few minutes to stop shaking, but eventually I do. He seems to interpret that as an invitation of some sort. “Tell me about Beatrice,” he says.

What can I say of Beatrice? And how much can I tell him?

“We met a couple of years ago, after the war had ended,” I say. “I found her wandering about in the city. She looked so lost. She had no one. Knew no one. So I took her in.” I was not Fabiano yet, then. Her name was not the only one we came up with together. “She disappeared three months ago. She was my only friend. Taught me . . . ” I stop myself.

“Taught you what?”

“Nothing. Never mind,” I say and he doesn’t press me further.

“Do you have any idea why she left?” he asks. “Or what she was looking for?”

“No. And no.”

He nods, changes the subject. “Lucia said you were a student, before the war. What were you studying?”

“Religion. Theater.”

“Both?”

I shrug. “They are not as far apart as you might think.”

“I don’t think anything,” he says. “I have no religion. And I’ve never been to the theater.”

“So what do you do when you’re not showing city boys around the mountains?”

“I go where I’m needed.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Somebody has to rebuild this country,” he says. “This world.”

His face grows serious for the first time since I met him. Sunny João. I thought his light never set, but here it is, the darkness that had to be there, somewhere. That is always there. How could it not, after everything?

“Who did you lose?” I ask. “In the war.”

“Does it matter?” he asks back—almost snaps, in fact, the way people do when they feel guilty about something. He looks away, and I can suddenly sense the openness again, the massive stretches of space above us, outside the barn, weighing down on us, threatening to crush us. “We’re all looking for someone.”

It’s my turn to be silent. I always find myself floored when people open up like this, even a little. Even without talking. The slightest sign of vulnerability or kindness and I’m down on my knees, caught, surrendered.

Beatrice used to say it’s my greatest flaw. I haven’t made up my mind yet about whether I agree or not.

“Fabiano,” he says after a while. I like the way my name sounds on his lips. “Do people shorten your name a lot?”

“Yes,” I say. “Fabio. Fab. All the time.”

He raises his hand with the palm towards me, the fingers close together, as if he’s about to take an oath. “I will never shorten your name, Fabiano,” he says, so earnest, not a hint of irony in his voice, as if it’s the most important promise he’s made in his whole life.

The people of Castelalbano live up to their reputation of guardedness, but João’s warmth could melt a glacier; these people never stood a chance. He manages to get us directions, a bathroom in which to wash ourselves, even a rudimentary breakfast. Finally, we walk into the village’s only coffee house, which transforms into a watering hole as the day progresses. Three people are seated at the plastic-covered tables, each one on their own. For the first time in a long time, I feel my body scrutinized, my visible queerness a weapon that can be used against me. I start thinking of these people as men, when I know I shouldn’t. I can’t help it. João remains relaxed, his arms at his sides, his face sure and open. It helps me relax a bit too, though I still keep two paces behind him as he approaches one of them. João gestures to the owner to brew fresh coffee for everyone and then motions towards the empty chairs at the man’s table. “May we join you?” he asks.

The man grunts, and João takes a seat. He nods at me to join them, so I do. The man follows me with his eyes.

The owner brings us the coffee, and we all drink before speaking, as is customary. “Good health,” João says. The black liquid is so hot it burns my tongue.

“To you as well,” the man responds. I have a feeling he doesn’t mean both of us.

João pulls out the photo of Beatrice I gave him. It’s the only photo of her I have; she didn’t like being photographed, except that one time, we went to the Luna Park. It had just reopened after the war. Beatrice didn’t really enjoy any of the rides, the machinery of it all disturbed her, reminded her too much of the factory. Until we got on the Ferris wheel. I was terrified, of course, but she got so excited, like a child. I couldn’t say no to her, so we went up. Her excitement made me forget I was afraid. She grounded me.

Seeing the world from above shocked her and filled her with joy. She told me she’d never felt happy before. She asked me to take her picture so she would remember what she looked like when she was happy. Then her hands did their little dance. I took them into mine, steadied them. “How do you keep going?” I asked. She’d found who she was beyond that which she was made to be. Gave herself a name and a life. And yet, her hands remembered.

She smiled and shrugged. “Factory settings are a starting point, Fabiano,” she said, “not a destiny.”

“Even if you keep breaking?” I asked.

“Even if you keep breaking,” she replied.

I had the photo printed and framed, kept it on the mantelpiece above the fake fireplace in our living room.

She didn’t take it with her when she left.

“Have you seen this woman?” João asks the man.

He only has to glance at the photo before answering. Castelalbano does not have many visitors and Beatrice would stand out anywhere. “Ah, yes,” he says. “One of those Artificials.”

João gives me a look, but, if he’s surprised, or disapproving, he doesn’t let it show.

“Do you know where she was going?” he asks.

“She was looking for the Last Eagle, she said. Heard of sightings in the area, wanted to see for herself. So we sent her to Santa Antonia.” The man sips his coffee. “Bunch of Welder worshippers over there, the lot of them.”

Something in my gut twists, sending a wave of pain through my middle. I stand up, steady myself on the back of the chair. I feel light-headed. “May I use your washroom?” I ask the owner.

He almost laughs when he answers. “Crapper’s in the back,” he says, nodding towards a narrow corridor through the kitchen.

I paw my way through the corridor, leaning on the wall every few steps. My stomach churns as I pass a row of cured meats hanging from the ceiling. I keep going until I find the small room in the back. There is only a tiny window for light, and I find myself thankful for the darkness.

I wipe the toilet as best I can and drop myself on the seat, pins and needles in my cheeks and my vision dancing with dark spots. I breathe deep, trying to calm myself down. Stay grounded. I run my palms over the bare skin on my thighs. The cold feels good.

I panic when I see the blood on my briefs.

What is happening to me, why am I bleeding?

Then I remember, and panic turns to a sinking feeling like a rock tumbling through me, from my head to my lungs to my stomach. Bleeding is a thing my body still does, on occasion, especially when under stress.

Have you been under any stress lately, Fabiano?

I pack my underwear with toilet paper and splash water on my face, then make my way back as fast as I can.

João is standing by the door. The men ignore us. “All good?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Fine.” Perhaps some pallor on my face betrays me, perhaps not.

We walk out.

“It’s a five-day walk to Santa Antonia,” he says. “Are you sure you are up for it? We can still turn back. You can change your mind.”

“I am not changing my mind,” I say, as steady as I can manage.

He stares at me with his dark eyes. “I don’t want you falling apart on me in the middle of nowhere,” he says, low and calm.

“I’m not falling apart!” I protest—a bit too much. My voice breaks into a squeak.

“Okay,” João says. “Okay. Let’s go.”

We leave Castelalbano behind—its people peering at us behind drawn curtains, its streets deserted, its white castle watching us with its dark, empty windows.

The next five days pass in a blur of exhaustion and low-volume agony. All I remember is thinking of Beatrice on these same steep paths, her legs straining, pausing now and then to wind herself up, or perhaps not. Perhaps she let her coil unwind all the way to the end. Perhaps she let her body tumble down some historic ravine. Perhaps she’s still down there, all limbs and angles, like a broken doll. I did look down, I think I did. All I could see was sky.

Or maybe that was the fever João says I ran the entire way to Santa Antonia. He claims I rambled, but, when I ask about what, he says it doesn’t matter.

When I’m finally well again, we are settled in a warm room with rugs not only on the floors but draped all over the stone walls. It feels like a cocoon. The bed—just one bed for the both of us—is piled high with blankets. I catch myself thinking I could stay here forever, in this warmth, with João sleeping next to me. A snowstorm is raging outside, and our search is suspended until the weather clears.

I can’t stand to think what a snowstorm might mean for Beatrice, if she’s still out there, somewhere.

João brings me soup. I enjoy the bowl’s warmth much more than the taste of the soup, but he’s watching me, so I force myself to take a spoonful.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Beatrice?” he asks.

“Tell you what?”

“That she’s one of Welder’s creatures. A Worker, I assume?”

I poke at a piece of gray meat that’s floating in my bowl. Goat, I think. “I didn’t know how you’d take it,” I say after a while, ashamed of how little credit I gave him. He’s Lucia’s friend, after all. She would never be friends with someone who could find Beatrice’s existence offensive or unacceptable. “Not everyone would be happy roaming the mountains in winter for a Worker. Some people still hold grudges, from the war.” I pause. “Some people wouldn’t even consider Beatrice alive.”

“I’m not some people,” he says.

“I know,” I reply. “I know that now.”

“Did she speak to you of the factory? What they did there, whether she knew what it was they were making, the ammunition?”

I remember those moments when she would get that absent look on her face and her hands would do their little dance in the air, like she was still screwing screws at the factory.

I take another spoonful of soup. “She didn’t like to talk about it,” I say.

“And the Last Eagle?”

“I was the one who first heard about it. A friend of a friend joined a Welder cult and was raving about animals still roaming the mountains. I told Beatrice. She thought if she found one of the animals, she might be able to find the Welder himself. I had no idea she was going to try. Not alone. I shouldn’t have said anything.” I hand João the bowl of soup. It’s still almost full, but I can’t eat anymore. “This is all my fault.”

João leaves the bowl on the floor and pushes himself closer—me under the blankets, he on top. “It’s not. Fabiano. If you truly think of Beatrice as a person, then you’ll allow her the freedom to choose for herself.”

That shuts me up good. Why didn’t I ever think of it that way? I’ve been so wrapped up in finding my friend and feeling sorry for myself, that I never stopped to consider what this might mean for Beatrice.

Well done, Fabiano.

João leans his back against the wall and stares at the window. I do the same. There’s a thin film of snow caked on the glass. We’re shut in here, the outside world obscured. I think after a while of this I could even forget it exists.

“Have you ever seen an animal?” João asks. “One of Welder’s?”

I shake my head. “People say the city crawled with them before the war, but I’ve never seen one, neither before nor after. And now they’ve taken them all apart, anyway, used them for scraps,” I say. “Have you?”

“Yes,” he says. His voice sounds strange, distorted. “An antelope.” He pauses for so long I think he won’t speak again, but then he does. “It was during the war. I was hiding a group of fighters in a ravine not far from here. We were supposed to cross enemy lines, pass one of the villages on the way, and join a larger group on the other side. But there was a storm, and I got us lost. We crossed paths with another group. We didn’t have any insignia on, and neither did they, so we didn’t know if they were friends or enemies. We might have even been on the same side, tree-hugging anarchists and bleeding-heart posthumanists, all of us. It didn’t matter. I don’t know who opened fire first, but we all ended up shooting at one another like idiots. Then the storm suddenly stopped, and there was this antelope. It came out of the bushes. Its joints made this awful creaking sound, like rusted metal scraping on metal. It was the most beautiful thing around, for miles. Broken and beautiful.

“It paused and just stared at us. We stopped shooting, stared back. Then it turned around and disappeared into the bushes again.”

He closes his eyes and stays silent for a while, breathing deeply, as if to steady himself.

“Then what happened?” I prompt him.

“None of us said a word. Didn’t look at each other. We hid our weapons and went our separate ways.” He turns to look at me. “I hope your Beatrice found what she was looking for,” he says. Then he bends over and kisses me on the forehead, like we’re friends, or more, like we’ve known each other for years. “Sleep. I’ll go talk to the people here, see if I can find out anything else.”

I wake up more rested than I’ve been in months. There is a strange light coming into the room from the sheet of snow on the window. I can’t tell what time it is. João is not next to me, and for a moment I panic, I think he left, too. But the clothes he wore in bed last night are folded neatly and draped over the back of the single chair in the room. I breathe. I get up and wash my face, then put on as many layers of clothes as I can and walk out. I hear voices from downstairs, and João’s laughter, high and gurgling like a mountain stream. I follow the sounds.

It’s a celebration. There are young people juggling empty glass bottles and trousered aunties smoking pipes and singing polyphonic songs in a language I’ve never heard before, their voices like flutes. João joins them. I’m surprised he knows all the words. His singing voice is high, higher than I would have ever expected, and singing makes his cheeks stick out round and perfect, like small apples. Makes the skin on my face flush. I’m almost envious of him, of the confidence with which he uses his voice; something I’ve never been able to do, even after my voice dropped. He nods at me and I join the crowd, take a seat on a rush chair in the corner. The song fills me and I start tapping the rhythm on the table next to me.

A small child approaches me. They have long braids that end in tassels made from colorful wool, a round face, and legs like twigs, bare despite the cold. The child climbs on my lap and wraps their arms around my neck. I stop tapping and wrap a protective arm around the child, keeping the rhythm with my leg instead. When the song ends, the crowd cheers and claps, everyone patting João on the shoulder or ruffling his hair in approval, like he’s one of them. He’s beaming at me and there is a bursting feeling in my chest, like I’m proud of him, as if I can claim any stake to him.

The child gives me a kiss on the cheek and then takes my hand. They open my palm and deposit a small metal object in it, then close my fingers around it, before climbing down and disappearing behind the gathered adults.

João comes to sit next to me, his turn to wrap an arm around my shoulders. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he shouts in my ear to be heard over the crowd’s clamor, even though I haven’t said a thing about how I feel.

“What do the songs say?” I ask.

“They praise the Great Welder in the sky,” he replies, as if that answers anything.

“For what?” I ask, and he laughs. “For what?” I repeat, elbowing him in the ribs.

He doesn’t reply. He simply opens his arms, as if to mean, everything. Everything around us that exists or is yet to exist. Then he gestures with his head to my hand. “What have you got there?” he asks.

I had almost forgotten about the child’s little gift, drunk by the weight of João’s arm on me. I unfurl my fingers. A bullet is resting on my palm, tiny and perfect, like a flower.

I never find out what it was we were celebrating. When the fun dies down and the crowd disperses, João takes me by the hand and leads me back to our room with soft, light steps. We crawl under the blankets on the bed and then take off all of our clothes while trying to keep our skins touching in as many places as possible and so it becomes like a dance, like one of those contact improv pieces I used to go to all the time when I was a student. I keep my binder on. I remember the dance Beatrice and I used to do sometimes in front of a mirror, twisting our bodies so that it looked like her head was mine, my keyhole-less neck hers.

I trace the frown on João’s face with my fingers and then his smile. His mouth is like a furnace, and for a moment I wish I could burn in there. I wish I were metal, melted down and transformed into something new, harder and unbreakable.

The snowstorm takes ten days to clear, and we spend most of that time in our room, having awful goat soup, discovering each other’s bodies, talking about things we remember from our very different childhoods—like building your own kite to fly on Clean Monday (him), and buying sheets of sweet and sour candy called skins for pennies from the shop on the corner (me), or learning the name of every extinct species of animal, which was an impossible task (me), or being made to sit on a bucket warmed with coals when your tummy hurt (him).

Then the time comes for us to move on, and I don’t want to go. I wish we could stay here forever. I would learn how to speak Santa Antonia’s language, I would praise the Great Welder in the sky for every little thing that exists in the world, and I would learn the lyrics to all their songs, even if I could never bring myself to sing them. I might even learn how to love things that are damaged and imperfect, like he does.

I say so. Not everything. Just enough.

He doesn’t say anything in response. When he’s done stuffing his backpack he glances around the room to make sure every trace of our stay here has been either packed or discarded, he touches me lightly on the shoulder and kisses my eyes.

We move out.

It will be another week before we reach the next shelter, and then another couple of days or so to reach the peak where the Last Eagle has been seen. We don’t talk much on the way. João becomes more and more distant, or maybe I do. When we made love in Santa Antonia, for a moment I thought his dick was mine. I carry that euphoria with me for days. And the pain of it, of course. I avoid the sky as much as I can, but the crevasses that yawn on either side of our path do me no favors. I start thinking of depth as inverted height and my head spins.

João retreats somewhere inside himself and grows agitated the higher we go. He scans the surroundings—quick, furtive glances, as if he’s scared of things that may be lurking in the bald mountains and empty cliff tops around us.

There’s no sign of Beatrice, the Last Eagle, or any other animal, but we do come across something the night before we reach the final shelter before the peak. From afar, it looks like a dark mass tucked in the curve between two giant rocks. João reaches it first and he just stands there, contemplating it.

I come up behind him as fast as I can, panting. It’s a nest made of razor wire. For what creature? I want to ask. For what offspring? I open my mouth to speak the words, but the sound of sobbing stops me. João is kneeling by the nest now, weeping. For what, for whom, I do not know. I put a hand on his back and he shakes it off. I wait patiently, let him be for as long as he needs, allow him the time and space to get it all out.

When he stops crying, I give him my hand and this time he takes it. He’s back on his feet, drying his eyes on the rough wool of his sleeve.

“Maybe you’re not supposed to find her, you know,” is all he says. “Maybe you’re supposed to let her go.”

I don’t know what this means—supposed by whom? Who decides?—and I don’t ask.

The final shelter is little more than a wooden cabin large enough to house two, maybe three people, but no more. It’s been almost a month since Castelalbano and I monitor my body, scrutinize the tiniest feeling in my guts, scared out of my mind that I’ll bleed again.

We make the little cabin as warm as we can by feeding logs to the woodburner. They are frozen solid, hiss angrily every time we add a new one to the fire.

I don’t bleed.

The distance between João and myself closes slowly and we find each other’s bodies again, little by little.

The second night, when we’re lying in bed together, he tells me I remind him of a boy he loved and lost in the war.

“Was he also such a mess?” I ask.

“No,” he says. He gives me a look that makes me think he’ll explain how me and that boy are different, but he doesn’t. Instead, he adds: “Besides, it’s not you. It’s the world that’s a mess.”

Then he sings another of Santa Antonia’s songs.

I ask what the words mean, but he simply smiles and does not say.

On the third morning, I tell him it’s time.

We climb for two days straight. It’s hard, makes my bones feel like they’re breaking, and I want to quit, but I keep going. We sleep only for the darkest hours of the night, pressed into tiny enclosures on the cliff face. I dream, though, for the first time since Beatrice left.

In my dream, I find her in a church. It’s not one I’ve been to before, but it’s high, so high I cannot see the ceiling—it disappears far above us, into the clouds. Beatrice is sitting next to me in the pews. Someone is singing in a language I don’t recognize. “What does it say?” I ask her, but she just hands me a bullet and smiles. Then she stands up, and I notice the keyhole in her neck is gone.

She turns around and points with her finger at the far end of the church. “Look!” she says. “Look!”

I wake up before I can see what she was showing me. I say nothing of my dream to João.

We go on climbing.

And then, finally, we are at the peak. It’s a barren spot, the ground underneath our feet hard, frozen solid. I take a deep breath and look around, at the space too vast to contemplate. There are clouds below us, and clouds above, and I don’t know who I am anymore. My fingers reach for my neck, searching for a hole. Perhaps Beatrice did find what she was looking for. Perhaps it’s true that we’re not broken, that it’s the world that breaks us. If I believe it, will I let her go? My heart beats fast. My mouth falls open and I don’t even know whether I’m trying to speak or sing or cry. A sound comes out like the sigh of a wind instrument—something foreign and alarming and unrecognizable.

João hugs me from behind, steadies me. And I come back to myself. I come back. I come back.

We hear the music first. Old music-box melody, slightly broken, out of tune.

João points at the sky. “There,” he says. “There.”

There, the Last Eagle is soaring above us, its tarpaulin wings creaking in their pulley joints, its two wooden heads facing in opposite directions, as if saying what difference could coming or going possibly make? It used to be painted yellow, but now the color is chipped and falling away. It circles the peak once, twice, looking at us with one head and ignoring us with the other.

Then, much too soon, it swerves left and flies away.

João doesn’t loosen his grip on me until he’s sure there is no shaking left in my limbs, until my heart has slowed to a pace close to normal. The vast open space above no longer feels like it’s going to swallow us whole. Or maybe it does, and I no longer care.

I turn my head to look at him. His eyes are wet and shiny, looking in the direction of the Last Eagle now gone. He’s still holding me, he doesn’t let go. “So beautiful,” he says of the crumbling thing, the broken thing, and I love him for it. “So beautiful.”

About the Author

Natalia Theodoridou is a media & cultural studies scholar, the winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and a Clarion West graduate (class of 2018). Natalia’s stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nightmare, Fireside, and elsewhere. Rent-a-Vice, a cyberpunk interactive noir published by Choice of Games, is a Nebula Award Finalist. For details, follow @natalia_theodor on Twitter.

Ripen

Yukimi Ogawa

Kiriko was having a hard time keeping her eyes off the clutch bag the client had brought with her. The client, a woman of about forty—or maybe fifty? it was hard to tell—sat on a flat cushion placed at the lip of the raised floor of the atelier’s reception, crossing and uncrossing her legs in a sluggish manner. “I really cannot believe there’s any place in this city that has no chair,” the woman said, for the fourth or fifth time. “This is ridiculous.”

“Such a beautiful bag you have,” Kiriko had stopped apologizing for the lack of chairs after the second time. She herself was standing on the earthen floor that ran, right beside the wall-less reception room, across the entire length of the building. “That must be the work of a very good craftsperson. I haven’t seen some of the methods adopted there, though.” It was too small for Kiriko’s liking, of course, who wanted bags to be just as huge as they could be. But this client must have only carried a mirror, and maybe a cigarette box and a book of matches, at most. Rectangle shaped, its lid flipped over the entire length and width of the bag, and the inside was apparently lined with silk, which was embroidered with natural-color silk thread in a minute pattern; the whole lining seemed to ripple with shimmers to a casual eye. Every other surface was covered with more colored embroidery and lace, with beads threaded here and there, surrounding cabochons of enamel—which looked a lot like the client’s own skin.

The client woman almost snorted. “Made abroad, of course. A gift from a foreigner. This subtle yet wild demonstration of pattern and color is nothing the craftspersons of this country can even dream of.”

All right, then, go abroad and get the fix you want overseas. Kiriko downed the words with lukewarm tea, and cocked her head just a little, to hear the noise from outside better. Did she just hear him say hi to the neighbors? Yes—the sliding door burst open with a loud clang, the glass tiles on its upper half rattled badly in their grids. “No rice straw, can you believe? They burned them all!” Kiriko’s mentor, the owner of this atelier, threw an empty cloth bag towards the reception floor. “I made them promise me their next batch—oh, hello, good day.”

The bag he’d thrown had bounced off the client’s shoulder and landed on her own bag. “What the—” She flicked the coarse bag off her smaller, elaborate one, as if the coarse thing could somehow contaminate her spotless possession. “I . . . ” She glared at the young man who’d just assaulted her. “I heard this is the best place in the city, for crafts related to human skin! How can a boy like you be the best? Are you even good?”

He shrugged. “They say I am. I myself never said I am. What service do you seek here?”

For a moment the woman sat there glaring at him, and Kiriko thought she’d walk out right through the door. But then she shook her head and said, “I have heard. About those . . . surgeries.”

Her mentor eyed at Kiriko, who too was feeling the wrong turn coming. “Surgeries,” he echoed.

“I see a lot of foreigners, you see. Part of my job.” She’d introduced herself as the proprietor of one of the teahouses in the High District—the area which expanded just off the seafront to serve, entertain and accommodate tourists from abroad. This particular woman’s place wasn’t actually on the High Street, the spine of the High District and the center of this country’s tourism, but in the western patch of the District, where things were slightly cheaper. She did seem to earn enough for her fancy one-piece dress, her soft- and warm-looking scarf, her high-heeled yet miraculously comfortable-looking shoes . . . or were they all gifts from her patrons?

“They tell me and my girls and boys how rare, how beautiful we are, but very often, that talk slips towards the”—she looked around and lowered her voice—“‘cosmetics’ they have overseas, as they get more and more drunk. Our government discourages them to talk about things like those colors they use to hide circles under the eye, or acne spots. Or, even, just to change the color of your eyelid!” She sat back and crossed her legs. “You know, tourists do like talking about those things, they love it when we go, ‘oh, how sensational!’ even though we are hearing it for the hundredth time.”

Kiriko’s mentor retrieved the disrespected cloth bag and fidgeted with it. Of course, they had heard stories about those obscene, crazy stuff. Kiriko had recently met in a lavatory of a souvenir shop a woman who was drawing eyebrows with a soft pencil. That woman had let Kiriko have a used, very short pencil of the same kind. She and her mentor had spent days taking that thing apart. “And . . . surgeries?” he said, reluctantly.

“There are many, many, they say! Ways to alter your appearance!” the woman exclaimed, as if merely mentioning it was off-limits. “But the thing I’m interested in—I heard they have something to inject into human skin, so the skin stays nice and smooth, even as you age? Or the thing where you transplant healthy skin onto a different part? I need something like that.”

The two young craftspersons looked at each other, then back at the client. “But your skin is impeccable, Madam.”

The woman’s skin was mostly the color of ripe plum, with the soft sheen of enamel thinly applied all over her surface. Here and there—like inside her eyelids or the skin beneath her nails—the mellow yellow of the fruit could be seen. People said her skin used to be fresh green when she was the age of Kiriko now, twenty years or more ago. Her entire skin had ripened, they’d say, the way a young, hard, and sour meat turned to the sweet, juicy thing.

“Impeccable. That’s the way it should be, of course,” she said. “But the thing about age. Look.”

The woman tucked her hard-bark brown hair away from her neck, and there, the two could see: a crack. Underneath it the color was one of fruit gone foul.

“I have several more like this, in parts where I cannot show you now. And these lines are spreading, I can see. I need a way to stop it.”

Kiriko was doing everything she could to not touch the cracked skin. “This looks pretty, too, though. When you’re full of it, it’ll be a totally new pattern!”

The woman released her hair from her grip and looked at Kiriko side-eye. “You’d never understand.”

Of course she wouldn’t. Kiriko’s—and her mentor’s, for that matter—skin, hair, teeth, and bones were all just like foreigners’: plain. That was why she worked as a craftsperson in the first place. Those without a color or pattern on their skin had no place in the tourism industry of this country, where people like this client earned foreign currency for the island by showing off themselves to the sightseers. Kiriko had long been used to this kind of casual insult. But her mentor said, “No, she wouldn’t. We wouldn’t. Which maybe means we wouldn’t feel like helping you, Madam. Thanks for your visit, sorry for the trouble.”

The woman’s plum deepened, to a color closer to the one inside her crack. “I’m going to lose my teahouse if I let my color spoil!”

“And we’re losing a business opportunity here just for what we are, sorry we could not come to an agreement.”

A few seconds passed in an uncomfortable silence. Kiriko’s mentor stood there tall, his shoulders square. But Kiriko didn’t need his protection, really. She, or they, needed money. “Sensei—”

But then the enamel woman inhaled and exhaled. She was the oldest person here right now; she took back control of her emotions sooner than the atelier’s young owner. “Fine. Well. Those small pieces of paper stacked right there, by the way?” She was pointing at the finished products stored temporarily in a corner of the reception. “Those are remedy transfer-print sheets, aren’t they? One of my neighbors uses it for his allergy. I saw him put one to his lower eyelid, transfer the pattern on the sheet to the membrane. He said it eases the itches and soreness he gets as allergic reactions.”

This is going to be bad, Kiriko thought. She could feel her mentor having the same thought, too.

“You make things to transfer patterns onto human skin. How obscene, eh?”

The young man breathed in, and out. “Temporary. And just for a medical effect.”

“But what if more people hear about it? Those folks like you born without colors and patterns on your skin, you can fake what you want on you, in theory. The one for my neighbor, it soon went away with enough of his tears, sure. But if you used a different kind of ink? If you applied it to some drier surface? Oh, so very appalled, I am, to imagine such a thing done to one of my girls and boys!” She placed her hands over her chest and shook herself. Kiriko almost laughed.

“Madam, are you trying to blackmail us?” he said, and Kiriko could hear his temper sliding off to something different than anger.

“No, young man, I am not. I am just trying to strike a deal.”

Kiriko’s mentor sat at the low table of their reception, drumming his finger on its surface, looking grim.

The apprentice placed a tray with a teapot and cups on the floor near him and sat down herself. “She did offer a nice sum of money, at the very least. You can buy me a bottle of fancy ink if that makes you feel any better.”

“Why do you think that would make me feel any better? What do you know about these surgeries?”

Not much, really. Changing your complexion was illegal in this country. Even if the color to be applied came from the same person’s skin. That would probably impose the patient a large sum of fine, and . . . the people who performed this surgery, putting a knife into an allegedly perfect skin? The government would never let them work as craftspersons again. Kiriko shrugged like a foreigner, making him smile a little. “You?”

He shook his head. “Even if we, like, actually get to watch those surgeries, or read about their procedure details, I’m sure they are for the clinic, not for us, common folk-remedy place. I know she came here because she cannot possibly ask the government-run clinic, but here we don’t have adequate equipment for that. Not even injection needles!”

Of course—neither of them had any kind of certificate or license or whatever, to do anything, that would involve actually slicing into human skin. This place was called an atelier because they put out patterned artifacts like cloths for apparel or furnishings, carved wood boards for furniture and home interior, et cetera, et cetera. But that was only one part of what these two craftspersons did. They tended to small discomfort of human body, like minor yet persistent headache, inefficient digestive system, regular cases of dizziness and so on, with their only weapon—the patterns they drew.

To them, currents of fluid within human body, the way muscles flowed, and the air glided over them, were just another kind of pattern. The two craftspersons called these “silent” patterns, as opposed to plainly visible, real lines and colors; everything, including human body parts, had a pattern to it, the curls of air and swirls of energy around it, marking its place in the world. Their treatment was conducted a lot of the time by finding another silent pattern that could affect the existing one and applying it over the affected area, to adjust the currents that had gone just a little bit amiss, correcting blood flow to make the body work more efficiently, or let the patient move their muscle more freely. Some patterns worked generally, while others had to be customized to the patient and their condition.

But they couldn’t treat diseases that were too severe, or perform any kind of surgical operation. And here, in this country where altering your complexions was a crime, of course they couldn’t speak openly of what they did behind their doors with screens shut, as they often had to draw patterns directly on human skin, which was regarded highly inappropriate.

“Couldn’t we just make a pigment portion and fill the cracks with it? I’m sure that’s what she expects, anyway.”

“I think she wants permanent, and we cannot just fill a human skin with foreign matter, even if she’s an enamel.” He grinned. “Even if she loves foreign stuff.”

His apprentice ignored this. “If we make—even if we can—something that changes the color there forever, once we do that the city will no longer overlook what we do.”

“But how long, exactly, is forever?”

“Huh?”

He took his cup up off the tray. “With the remedy transfer sheet for allergy, the pattern stays there only for a few minutes. We have those sheets with ink that remains on the skin for a few hours, for cases where slowness and steadiness are more important. Stretch that procedure time little by little, and then . . . ”

“Sensei,” Kiriko pointed her finger at her mentor, “that is a quibble, and a feeble one at that.”

“Oh come on, a few days cannot possibly be that huge a trouble. Even though that’s far longer than any we’ve made here.”

Kiriko considered this. “A few days . . . ” she whispered. “Days . . . ”

“Right. Days.”

She blinked. “So she’ll have to reapply the pigment every few days. The cracks are small but slowly spreading? Usual transfer method won’t be much convenient here. And she must be very good with brushes to do it in a way people cannot tell there’s been some tampering . . . ”

“Oh, I don’t like that word.”

“Wait. Wait, but if the pigment is manipulated in a way it will attach itself to certain places . . . ”

Her mentor sighed. “Finally. How long did it take for you to get there?”

She glared at him. “We’ll still have to find a way to confect this pigment—what substance can be used, to closely stick to human skin, remain there a few days, and that would do no harm to the bearer.”

“Step by step, my dear apprentice,” he said, touching his lips to the cup of hot tea. “One problem at a time.”

At least the client probably wasn’t as heartless as she’d seemed. She placed some ordinary orders too, a patterned cloth for a sofa cover and garlands to be installed around the ceiling light, among other smaller things. Kiriko went to deliver the crafts, and also to take a sample of the proprietor’s skin. While repeat tourists who were more or less familiar with the country dominated this area, a lot of islanders—though only colorful ones—loitered and enjoyed themselves, too. Not the cleanest or safest part of the city, but many of the places around here had a distinct taste for fancy stuff and paid the atelier well.

Kiriko entered, careful not to draw the guests’ attention, into the dimly-lit hall of Madam Enamel’s teahouse. “Delivery for Madam,” she whispered to one of the waiters standing near the door.

“Been expecting you, Craftsperson. This way.”

The higher parts of the windows in the hall were filled with a cheap kind of stained glass—not the real, super-luxurious stuff seen around the most expensive area of this country. There was only one proper chandelier, and other lights that hung from the ceiling were simple gas-mantle lamps, some with old garlands swinging around them. Still, Kiriko could see the labor and money the proprietor put into this place. After a short walk along a narrow corridor on the other side of a small door, the waiter opened another of the same size for Kiriko, behind which the woman sat at a desk with reading glasses over her nose. “Hello Craftsgirl,” the woman said, slightly squinting. “Come here and let me see those best pretties of the city.”

Together they spread the delivered goods. The woman did seem to care a lot about these things unlike other clients around this area, who’d just order a thing, get it delivered, and then forget all about it once it got installed in their shop; she turned the goods around, checking every surface, trying the feels of every pattern to the touch.

“I don’t know why, but I really like these things. How different are they, from the stuff other places put out? Maybe you really are the best.”

Kiriko and her mentor did choose those patterns which would soothe people’s mind, by relaxing muscles around the eye and lifting some tension off a certain area of the brain. “Thank you,” Kiriko only said.

“So?” The woman sat back in her chair. “Have you figured out anything . . . for me?”

Just then the waiter came back with cups of tea and a plate of confectionary. Kiriko squeaked silently at the beauty of the ridiculously small yet elaborately shaped sweet pieces, and the woman watched her eat for a while.

“You really aren’t that different from my girls.” To Kiriko’s surprise, the woman was smiling.

Kiriko swallowed a bite, which was almost a whole of one very fragrant cake. “I am so very different from them, I am totally colorless.”

“That is quite extraordinary in itself, indeed, you know?”

“Not for the tourists.” Kiriko listened to check if no one was within the earshot, and then said: “I need samples. Of the inside of your crack.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It may hurt roughly to the same extent as when you snap a rubber band against your skin. If that’s too much . . . ”

“No, that’s fine. Anything is fine, actually, as long as there’s something you can do.”

Kiriko scraped bits of skin and membrane off the woman, closed the caps tight on the sample vials. The sample wasn’t just for color reference. Sometimes silent patterns could be seen easily only if she strained her consciousness enough to channel through. Other times, though, they could be hard for naked craftsperson eyes to see. These could be examined with good microscopes customized by the atelier over the years, which helped taking elements apart through the lenses.

When she was done, Kiriko slurped up the last of her tea. “We’ll still need some time,” she said, as she stood up. “We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

The woman nodded. “Take those sweets. Does your mentor eat those, too? Or prefer something that goes better with alcohol?”

“He likes sweets, thank you!”

The woman saw Kiriko off to the exit. Along the way, the proprietor exchanged a few words with each of the girls and boys she encountered, and the interaction seemed kind, or even affectionate, perhaps. “Are you sure you don’t need an escort out of this part of town?” she said when they were at the door.

Kiriko nodded. “It’s not so late, and I do know safer paths.”

“Take care, then. Good night.”

“Good night, Madam.”

“I like her,” Kiriko said as soon as she was inside the atelier.

Her mentor frowned, said nothing.

“Look, she gave us some sweet things.”

“Oh okay, maybe she’s nice.”

“And I mean, she’s a bitch, all right, but she does seem to care for her place and her employees. I think she needs to remain enamel that badly because she needs to keep her place nice and popular, for her employees rather than for herself.”

He opened the wrapping cloth and picked up one of the tiny cakes. “You do realize that you tend to attach yourself to any kind of client, don’t you?”

She almost pouted and stopped herself. “She likes our crafts!”

He popped the cake into his large mouth and chewed, and looked very happy.

“See? Nice. And anyway, every client has their own reason. We’re here to help them.”

He swallowed loudly and sighed contentedly. “Should have prepared some bitter tea first. Let’s get working on the samples now.”

Kiriko never hung around in the High District without very good reasons. She always felt nervous around the foreigners; she’d had no education on the official language, as the government deemed it a waste of resources for the colorless folks who had no direct business with the tourists; and most of the time, she didn’t get their gestures. Shrugging was one of the first few she’d understood after she first moved to the city from her village in the mountains, and sometimes she even used it, because there was no gesture native to this country that could convey what it did. Then, not all the foreigners shrugged, them coming from many different parts of the continent. She just didn’t like the feeling of being at a loss.

She walked through one of the narrower avenues on the eastern side of the High District, where many inns stood between the High Street and the waterfront. Accommodation was cheaper here than the hotels along the coastline. There were a few cafes and teahouses, not the fancy kind like in the west but those which simply served just-okay coffee. On the terrace of one of these places, a foreign woman was seated, looking down at her coffee beside which the milk and sugar sat untouched.

It was a bit chilly this morning, and the woman was the only patron on the terrace. Just as Kiriko had hoped. “Nova-san,” she said, tasting the unfamiliar pronunciation of the woman’s name at the edge of her lips. “Good day.”

The woman looked up from her cup. “Hello Craftsperson Kiriko-san!” She beamed, engaging in the local language of this island for Kiriko’s sake. “How nice to see you! Come have a seat!”

Nova ordered black tea for Kiriko. (This place didn’t have green tea, and black was slightly better than coffee for the craftsperson.) Her hair was black, just like Kiriko’s, but it glowed as if there was a layer of faint light over it; Kiriko had heard foreigners took very good care of their own conditions, not quite the way the islanders did. And she was almost as deeply-tanned as Kiriko’s mentor, while Kiriko herself was pale and her skin hated the sun. Something glimmered on the woman’s eyelids, and her peridot earrings went very well with her skin and also with those golden shimmers around her eyes. But it wasn’t these carefully aligned looks that attracted Kiriko; Nova was the first foreigner who talked to Kiriko in the local language from the start, instead of the official language.

And of course, there was that eyebrow-pencil thing. “I want to thank you again,” Kiriko said, wanting to shift to more formal speech but afraid the foreigner might not understand her then. “It was such fun to take that pencil apart.”

“Good to hear! You didn’t get into trouble? We are told not to talk too much about cosmetics, before we depart the continent.”

“Not at all. We are careful. And . . . we hate to take advantage of your kindness, but . . . hope you don’t mind telling me more about how you paint your face? What you use, and how you decide the appropriate amount and such.”

“You want to know more about what we do? How diligent!”

“May I see that thing on your eyelid? Is that a pencil, too?”

Nova winked. “This? No, this comes from a palette.”

“Palette!” Kiriko almost squeaked.

“Yes, a tiny palette. I can show you, but is it okay to do that here? Isn’t that regarded obscene?”

Kiriko’s shoulders slumped down. “Yes. That would attract a lot of unwanted attention.”

“Strange people, you all. But so are we, in your eyes.” The foreign woman laughed just a little. “Any place? I don’t think I can afford a space at that luxurious hotel down the coastline.”

Kiriko considered this. “Oh. Maybe I know a place.” She considered it again. “Maybe?”

Like many of the teahouses in the west, Madam Enamel’s place offered a quiet space at the back for those who needed privacy. Kiriko didn’t know the reservation cost, but as she had hoped, Madam Enamel said she wouldn’t charge for this particular case.

“I still don’t see how a foreigner can help with this,” the woman said. But Kiriko could hear excitement in her voice.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Madam. Nova-san, after you, if you please.”

The foreign woman said quick thanks to the proprietor in the local language, and Kiriko saw the enamel woman blush, her ripe plum cheeks turning to a warmer color. One of the waiting boys escorted Kiriko and Nova, an adolescent with peacock smudges on his face, one of his eyes amber. “Green tea is free of charge, Craftsperson,” he said to Kiriko. “What can we offer your honorable company here? We do serve alcohol, too.”

Nova looked at the menu and ordered a few things, including small cakes for herself and Kiriko, too. “Can you even read our language?” Kiriko asked.

“Some. Not everything. Your colors are beautiful, you look like you come from a myth,” Nova said, the latter sentence to the waiter.

His ears turned pink. “Thank you. Oh, it feels so much better when a guest compliments in our own language, if I may say so.”

“Does it, now? Then please send my regards to your proprietor. Her skin is perfect. I would like to have my nails enameled in that color in her honor, if that’s not an obscene thing to say.”

“It is not. She would be very pleased. If you’d excuse me.”

After he left Kiriko said, “You should tell that to Madam in person. And I think the enamel color would go very well with your tan color.”

“Thank you, Kiriko-san. You are beautiful, too, don’t forget. The way your eyes twinkle when you talk about crafts, the way your jaws are set when you are focused.”

Kiriko swallowed loudly. “Do you say that to everyone?”

“Mm? Maybe. But everyone I like is beautiful in their own way, and I think it’s important to tell them so. Let’s get to work?”

The craftsperson nodded and started going through the cosmetics purse Nova carried with her. She touched everything, one after another, trying the various textures. Powder, paste, liquid that seeped onto the brush when you rotated the stem . . . her mentor would love this brush. These things wouldn’t last a day, the bearer would even have to retouch the colors on her face from time to time! How strange, these foreign customs. Some of the things even included colorant that she had never seen—she swallowed, braced herself, and bored her consciousness into these.

Her plan was to grasp how these cosmetic things were made—how the substances worked, the percentage of those substances contained, the way these things mingled—from the silent patterns those substances emitted and the way they moved around each other. She also copied the names of the chemicals, with Nova’s help on the language, so that she could later look them up; once she learned the precise description of the substance’s property, she’d get to combine the knowledge with the patterns she felt from these cosmetic products, and then she could start probing for other ways of using these substances.

“Thank you,” she said after she scribbled everything she could as fast as possible. “Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

“No problem at all. This place is lovely. Wasn’t in the travel guidebook.”

“Not the best part of this country that the government wants to boast about. And foreigners must be careful if they need to walk around this area late at night.”

Together they left the place, and like the last time the proprietor saw them off at the door. She bowed deeper and longer than the last time, though. Maybe it was just because Nova was a foreigner. But the waiters and waitresses, too, looked sad to see Nova leave.

“I hope you’ll visit us again soon,” the proprietor said, as she handed a business card to the foreign woman.

“I will, thank you,” replied Nova, touching Madam’s hand lightly as she accepted the card.

“So this Nova person. What exactly does she do?” Kiriko’s mentor asked as the two craftspersons started their work in their lab. “Is she on a mission or something? An ambassador?”

“She is a researcher. She said she’s here to study our culture, but not necessarily the colorful folks.”

“What is there to study at all, apart from the colors of the tourism workers?”

“She says there’s always something to learn as long as people live there. And that the hierarchy of the people is very peculiar here.”

Her mentor sat back and looked away from the microscope for once. “But isn’t that just obvious? The colorful rule. The colorless obey.”

“On the continent there are different criteria for that. Because no colorful folks.”

He shook his head and looked back down the lenses. Then they started their long discussion—how could they stretch the flow of the silent pattern inside Madam’s cracks so that it’d welcome the one in the pigment portion they concocted? Was there a way to enhance the affinity of it all, or could they just draw a straight, taut line between them, so that no other thing would even think of intervening?

After hours of yeses and a lot of noes and buts, they agreed on a configuration. Her mentor drew the tiniest reproduction of the silent pattern found inside Madam’s crack, on an impossibly thin, almost see-through piece of soft paper, which took hours of making itself. They wrapped the dried ingredients with the paper and let the colorant absorb the pattern from inside. Madam Enamel could put one wrapped potion in her bath, immerse herself in the solution, and let the pigment settle in her cracks, drawn in by its pattern twin. The fibers of the paper would land around the affected areas, too, working for better smoothness. It would require a slightly-acidic bath to get rid of it.

“I love it,” the woman said on the phone, after the first try. “You cannot see the cracks unless you look very, very carefully. And that’s only if you know what to look for. And it also improves the way my skin feels as a whole. This is perfect.”

Kiriko sighed into the receiver, relieved. “Good to hear that, Madam. But please refrain from overusing it? We’ve been very careful, but this is the first time we made something like this, so.”

“Of course. I’ll call when I need the second batch.”

Kiriko grinned at her mentor as she put down the receiver. He shrugged, then laughed and started humming to himself. Kiriko soon joined in the tune. A moment like this, it was one of the best things about this trade.

But when they did hear about her again, the words didn’t come from the woman herself. It came in the form of an officer in uniform. “Craftspersons,” they said, when Kiriko opened the door. “If you please.”

Madam Enamel looked exhausted behind the transparent wall, but that didn’t explain the cracks that had spread, covering most of her neck and invading her jawline. Kiriko had imagined the cracks to be a beautiful, treelike pattern if and when they spread, but something was wrong with the actual thing in front of her now. The color, for instance, wasn’t the bad fruit they’d seen when the woman first visited their place. It had a strange tinge of green to it. And the way it progressed . . . there were jumps and starts here and there, instead of branches going forward in the fan-form, using the momentum of its own growth; as if some unknown force tried to rip the skin randomly.

“One of the places in our area got suspended for being a site matching the locals to the tourists who need . . . special services,” Madam Enamel said on the other half of the cubicle, behind the see-through wall. “Many more places got raided, and I was caught while I was having a bath with Nova-san. Not the best timing, is it?”

Kiriko raised her brows. “You were having a bath with Nova-san?”

“It wasn’t like I was selling myself to a foreign stranger. And . . . ” She rolled her eyes towards the officer who was standing behind her, who couldn’t see her doing it. “She explained that we are friends, to the authority, that she had brought in the bath bomb for the two of us.”

“Then what happened to your skin?”

“I’ve no idea. It never happened before this time, the . . . thing had worked so well so far.” She blinked, waiting for a question from the officer at attention; they didn’t seem to have one—apparently.

“Do you know when you’re getting out?” asked Kiriko.

The woman looked uneasy at this. “No. Nova is doing what she can to prove that no money was exchanged between us. The government hates us, don’t they? Those of us who don’t do business exclusively for rich foreigners but serve our fellow locals, too.”

Kiriko massaged her brow with a finger. “We’d like to look more closely . . . at your condition. Did you put anything in your bath along with the bath bomb?” She hastily added, “I’m just curious.”

“She added scented water. I think that is all.”

Ordinary scented water shouldn’t have been able to change anything in the composition. At least not like this. “I’ll talk to Nova-san,” Kiriko said after a moment.

“Please do. I—I hope I didn’t get her into too much trouble.” At that, her lips trembled, though just a little.

They couldn’t reach Nova very soon, though, as the foreigner was busy talking to the embassy and authority. Madam Enamel was released two days later. By the time she made it to the atelier, her steps were unsteady, her eyes murky, and there was another thin but unbreakable layer of sweat over her enamel. Kiriko piled cushions on the reception’s raised floor while the woman’s peacock subordinate and the owner of the atelier helped the woman up onto the makeshift cot.

“What is this?” Kiriko’s mentor said, sounding bewildered. “This—this looks so much worse. The cracks are all over.”

Yes; the cracks had spread even wider, to the extent that there was no smooth surface on her visible now. Nova might have said something at the embassy, but more likely this was the reason the authority had decided to let her go. Kiriko dabbed at the woman’s forehead with a cloth of a heat-absorbing pattern. “Did we do this?” It hurt to word this question.

“I don’t know.” His admission bit like a ragged edge of ice. “Let’s just do whatever we can, for now.”

The two craftspersons looked more closely at the cracks, and again, Kiriko was struck by how unnatural, the way all those lines ran. It felt very abrupt—a blister that erupted, swathing the area with its nasty fluid, not a seam gradually extending. Was this just a result of aging? Unlikely, though perhaps they should have taken it into account. It had to be solely the atelier’s fault.

Kiriko traced some of the cracks with her finger and quickly started adding a new pattern that would alleviate the wrongness of the one currently there. They’d discovered Kiriko was better at this even than her mentor—he had much wider knowledge on many things, on application of those things, and his thoroughness and meticulousness of the deployment was almost impeccable; but when it came to time-critical treatment or one-shot goes, Kiriko’s instinct bloomed under the pressure and she usually had control over the situation within minutes. But this . . . her hand steadied around the stem of the brush, as if she knew where the ink had to be; she had to do this, but how much would she be able to help, randomly groping for solution as she was?

“This might hurt a little,” Kiriko’s mentor was saying to the woman, but there was no reply.

He spread thin acid over the woman’s enamel skin, to slow the cracks going farther. Kiriko started working on the worst-looking ones, those that were thicker, with that foul, greenish tinge, applying a dusty red colorant with bold yet precise strokes. Even as she did so, thread-thin lines were spreading around the bad ones, bypassing the acid. Soon her mentor started tending to these smaller ones.

The peacock boy rubbed his face fiercely. “What the hell did she do?”

“It’s us,” the owner of the atelier told him. “Our doing.”

“But she asked for it, didn’t she? We knew she’d do something stupid on herself. She’s been so obsessed with her own skin. Like that was all that there was keeping her house upright. But it was her. You know? It was she herself who bound that place in one, not just the skin—”

“Shut up, we’ll apologize and hear you boast how much you love her later, but now make yourself useful and bring us washing water for the brushes.” For once, Kiriko’s mentor raised his voice. “The kitchen’s behind that door. There are small pots and buckets lying around.”

And hours afterwards ticked away like that—two craftspersons drawing patterns as fast as they could on an immobilized woman, a peacock adolescent moving to-and-fro over the atelier floor. When the dawn arrived, the enamel woman’s breathing was finally even, and the three young people collapsed onto the reception floor around her.

They didn’t have beds for patients—that, too, was for the clinic—so after a few hours’ nap they wrapped up the woman and let the peacock boy and his coworkers carry her via a coach. The two craftspersons prepared emergency transfer-print sheets that the workers of the teahouse could apply on the woman if and when need be. And they started trying to figure out what had gone wrong, right away.

But they couldn’t see anything; they’d thoroughly examined every possibility, checked her allergic reactions and the state of the ingredients, the devices and equipment they’d used to prepare the treatment. Kiriko told him about the scented water that Nova had brought in. But with the configuration they’d made, and the fact that the foreigner herself had been in that water, too, that this scented water thing could do any harm to just Madam Enamel seemed unlikely.

“We do have to check what that water is, anyway,” her mentor said over a hundredth cup of tea. “It is possible that there was something in that water, a substance that we have not heard of, that Madam can be allergic to.”

Kiriko sighed. “I’ll go talk to Nova-san.”

The foreign woman was almost equally disconcerted, if not unwell, when Kiriko finally managed to arrange a meeting. “I was waiting for her to call me when she was released,” she said as she let Kiriko into her hotel room.

Kiriko didn’t like going behind a closed door alone with a foreigner, not because of Nova, but of custom. But this was an emergency. “Madam was too ill to make a phone call,” Kiriko replied, and took a seat near the window. “We asked Peacock to let us know of any change of state, so she must be still resting.”

The foreign woman poured tea for Kiriko and herself. “How bad is it?”

“We believe we managed to stop its progress. But to eliminate it entirely—we still aren’t sure if it’s a disease or some other kind of disturbance—we need to know exactly what is causing it.” Kiriko bit her lip for a second. “We heard you added scented water to the bath? Do you have its container with you still?”

“No, sorry, it never occurred to me—” She shook her head. “Is it my fault?”

She hesitated one moment. “Our fault, more likely. Me and my mentor. Do you remember its maker or seller?”

“Oh, I’ll ask my sister on the continent by phone, she gave me the thing. Let me see . . . ”

Nova went to the closet, came back with a datebook, sat down near the phone machine. Then she blinked hard down at the datebook, and sighed. “Kiriko-san, my old tired eyes need the light on. Can you close the curtains for me?”

“Sure.” She stood and started drawing the curtains. Nova was fumbling for the light’s switch. Now just one part of window was still uncovered, and Kiriko reached out to shut it there, too. But then—

“Wait,” Kiriko said, “don’t turn that light on.”

“W-what?”

A sliver of setting sun came through between the curtains, fell on the table beside the window, and bounced off the polished surface to dimly illuminate the foreigner’s face. Colors danced over her skin—green seemed to be dominant, but the sheen shifted with bronze, orange, and something that reminded of Madam’s color.

Jewel-beetle.

“Nova-san, are your ancestors from this island?” Kiriko asked.

“Oh, I haven’t mentioned that? Yes, but a very long time ago. That’s why I’m so much into this country.”

“I see,” Kiriko said, her hand still hovering near the curtain. “I think now I know what caused Madam’s condition.”

The locals looked; of course, foreigners almost never wandered out to this part of the city. But Kiriko—of all people, that introvert, entirely-colorless craftsperson—leading a foreigner to the pattern atelier in this shadowed area of the city seemed even more surreal than it should.

Kiriko moved stiffly all the way, even when she waved to a local or two she knew well. When they finally reached their destination, Kiriko almost cried out in relief. “Sensei!” she called her mentor loudly to cover that urge.

“What—oh.” He went as stiff as Kiriko had been. “This . . . honorable guest here must be Nova-san?”

“Yes. Nova-san, this is my mentor, the owner of this atelier. Please take a seat; you need to take your shoes off first.”

As the foreign woman did so, Kiriko went around the atelier, closing all the shutters and covering the opaque glass on the door with a cloth. Her mentor tried to catch her, failed, shifted his weight on his feet, and flailed a little. Finally, he almost twitched and said, “I should offer tea!”

“Sensei, stop being nervous,” his apprentice scolded him, forgetting her own previous stiff walk. “And look.”

She’d brought a device which emitted light that had the same characteristics as natural sunlight. Now with Nova sitting on a flat cushion, Kiriko aimed the light to the surface of the low table beside the foreigner. Immediately her mentor saw what this was all about.

“Oh,” he said.

“She has an ancestor from this island. I heard that once you leave this island the colors start to fade, I didn’t know it could be preserved like this.”

“Me, either. But this is jewel-beetle, right? Maybe not entirely impossible.”

“Okay, you two, now tell me what is going on.” Nova looked as uncomfortable as the two locals here had been a few moments ago.

Kiriko put away the lighting device and switched on the ordinary bulbs. “Your ancestor must have been a jewel-beetle colored person. Jewel-beetle people have strange properties. Have you seen the insects themselves?” Nova shook her head. “Well, they wear metallic colors that change with the angle, which keeps birds away. And the colors never fade even after the bug dies because they are not pigment, but come from the shell’s structure. That may be the reason your colors survived. Anyway, most of the colors of the islanders only have any kind of effect—physically and mentally—on the bearer themselves. But very few colors can affect others. Jewel-beetle, and Madam’s enamel, are two of these very few. Though enamel is more prone to taking, than giving.”

Kiriko was speaking slowly, but even locals would have trouble understanding all of this instantly. But Nova was a researcher of this island; after a quick thinking, she said, “So my color, even though I never knew it existed, did some harm to her.”

“Your colors are weak, but sharing a bath, with substances we composed for her, worked almost magically, I think, invading her native color.” Kiriko knelt beside the woman. “If you let us take samples of your skin, we might be able to find a pattern that would cure Madam Enamel.”

“Do it, then.” Nova looked sharply up at the craftspersons. “Do it, by all means. Cure her. I don’t care what it takes out of me.”

First they had to find a silent pattern that had caused the malfunction in Madam, and then construct a new one which would offset the effect of it, considering at the same time the substances they used for the original crack-remedy bath treatment. They went through everything on Nova, and hours later, found a part of membrane deep inside her eyelid that spread an almost-invisible pattern that seemed to click. Kiriko scratched the part off and looked into it with a microscope to be sure, and then started on combinations of patterns that would counterwork Nova’s effect on Madam. Kiriko’s mentor gave Nova eye drop medicine, and they made her stay at their atelier while her eye cured to some extent.

And so by the morning, they had a pattern to, hopefully, heal Madam Enamel.

Nova (and the craftspersons) had forgotten to inform her hotel that she was staying out, so in the morning the foreigner had to call in and then go back to the place very quickly. “Let me know how it goes. As soon as you find out,” she said, as Kiriko saw her off at an intersection to the High Street.

They parted, and Kiriko started jogging towards the western quarters of the city. At the door of the teahouse Peacock was waiting for her. “Your boss is already inside.”

“He’s not my boss—how is Madam?”

“Resting. Not worse, not better.”

The teahouse was closed. Kiriko walked through the eerily quiet place, though she soon heard commotion in the backyard. There, Kiriko’s mentor was already drawing on Madam’s arms. Kiriko took her coat off and dropped her bag onto the floor and started doing the same.

As soon as she spread the latest remedy-pattern over Madam’s skin, Kiriko felt the current shift under her fingers. This was going to work. This was going to be okay. She almost let a sigh of relief slip, stopped herself with an effort. And felt her mentor feeling the same relief.

She spared one split second and smiled at the few staff who were holding their breath around the two craftspersons. They smiled and nodded back, then resumed helping them.

Of course—there were other issues than the patient herself, to be addressed later. They’d both tried to brush that thought off, or to hold on to the possibility that maybe nothing would go into that direction this once. But the next day, the same officer who had come to notify them of Madam being held in custody, stood at their door looking almost sorry. “We’d just pass on something like this between locals. But this time, a foreigner is involved.”

“But we didn’t do anything to Nova-san.”

“She didn’t get back to the hotel one night, came back the next morning with scratches all over and a patterned eye patch. We cannot call that ‘didn’t do anything.’”

When they got to the Officers’ Station, Madam Enamel was there, too, with a girl with pastel-colored cotton-candy hair they remembered from the previous day accompanying her. The enamel woman looked frail, pale in her own way, but was sitting straight on the cushioned chair.

“Madam isn’t properly well! How dare you drag her here?” Kiriko’s mentor hissed furiously.

“Craftsperson, easy.” Madam Enamel raised her hand. “I told them I wanted to be here and give accounts of the incident myself. I asked them, I wanted to be in the same room as you two, so that you can do whatever you need to when something goes wrong with me.” At this stage, it was no use pretending that the atelier had nothing to do with Madam’s condition or its treatment. “They don’t usually listen to this kind of request, but they made this exception for me. That much, I should be grateful.”

He backed off, still fuming. Kiriko looked around. “Where is Nova-san?”

“She is being asked to talk in a separate room, of course.”

The two craftspersons took their seats on the other side of the table from Madam. “And what are we charged for, exactly?” he asked.

“What, exactly, did you do to the foreigner? She wouldn’t talk.”

“That’s because there’s nothing to talk about. Maybe she fell off a stair or something, nothing to do with any of us,” Madam said.

“Then why wouldn’t she just say so?”

“Maybe she doesn’t understand you.”

“Madam,” the officer frowned as they said, “we know she likes you. And it’s good to see a foreigner liking one of us that way. But if there was a crime involving a foreigner, we must know.”

“But there’s no crime committed! And the foreigner herself doesn’t recognize one, does she?”

The officer looked very unhappy at that. For a moment, Kiriko thought they might win—except there was no win or lose, not really—only their atelier’s future poised on the officer’s finger.

They said, “So she just fell off a stair. But what about your disease?”

“What about it?”

“You obviously got ill right after being caught with the foreigner. Or maybe after that bath that smelled a bit funny. We do know that you had dealings with the atelier, at around the same time. You’d had no conditions before then, we heard?”

Still crack-strewn, Madam Enamel stared at the officer. The progress had stopped entirely, malfunction of Madam’s systems thoroughly eliminated, but there was no hiding the cracks now—once this kind of change happened, there was no turning back, just like her plum color itself, ripening. They held their eyes that way for some time, while the two craftspersons could do nothing but just sit there, finding even simple breathing hard, so hard. “This has nothing to do with the situation here,” the enamel woman finally said, her voice even—too much so.

“We can investigate, you see. You cannot go on without knowing the cause. What if it is contagious? You may be exposing your fellow islanders to danger, even as we speak now.”

“How dare you—” Her cotton candy subordinate, who had been growing impatient by the minute, was about to bang her fists on the table, but Madam Enamel stopped her with a hand.

“Candy, no,” she said and shook her head. Candy breathed deep but then sprang to her feet as if to shake fume off, went to stand facing the mirrored wall.

“What is it, Madam Enamel?” the officer continued. “If you really have no idea, you should consider closing down your place, at least until we have done proper investigation and everybody knows what caused it. If it’s to do with the foreign researcher, either something she did to you or she brought into our country, we must expel her from the island, never admit her any future entrance. You should never see her again. Or,” they paused, just a fraction too long to be for breathing, “if that’s the atelier’s fault, we can just order them to discontinue their trade.”

Madam lifted her head and looked to the officer. Candy turned around.

“Look, Madam Enamel,” said the officer, slowly, as if Madam wasn’t quite getting them. “Tell us the truth. What do you owe these colorless laborers, anyway?”

There. The two craftspersons had known it would come to this sooner or later, all along. Yes—as long as the colorless were to blame, everything would be fine. Nova would get to stay on the island, keep on with her research, stay with Madam; Madam would be able to resume her position as proprietor as soon as she was well enough. The government would have no dispute with the continent.

Happy ending to all.

Madam Enamel looked at Kiriko and her mentor. Kiriko stared back, sending no message through that one moment of eye contact. Because after all, what did Madam owe them, really? Just a sorry end of lizard tail cut, and discarded; there were enough colorless craftspersons in the city, to replace these two.

Madam Enamel looked back at the officer. “Sorry, I think I’ve been mistaken a few moments ago.”

“Okay, Madam. Tell us.”

“It’s the foreigner. She is a descendant of islanders, and has properties that can be harmful to me.”

“What?” the officer came to stand closer to her, their hands on the table. “Look, you don’t have to—”

“I don’t have to what? These two craftspersons did study the foreigner. They can give you the data as proofs. Or you can do it all over again, hurting her even more, and get into more trouble with the continent. And oh, I can tell there are more officers watching us behind, let me see, that mirror maybe?” She pointed at the wall and Candy jumped away from it with a small cry. “Surely you’re recording this. You cannot erase my testimony here. Right?”

The officer stood back up straight. “Are you sure—”

“I am.” Madam stood up. Candy came to support her. “The foreign researcher is harmful only to me, or to enamel people. But I haven’t seen any other enamel than me in the city, so. I would not say this is contagious.” She shrugged like a foreigner. “Can we all go home now?”

She stood tall, and nobody would have guessed she’d been down with illness only a day ago. Her eyes were hard. The officer swallowed, before they stepped back to let her pass.

“Madam,” Kiriko said, when they were back in the western end of the city. “Madam.” But she didn’t know how she could continue.

Madam Enamel stopped there, and turned, to face the craftspersons. She looked both of them in the eye, one of them after the other, and then touched Kiriko’s shoulder. “I remember,” she said. “I was as young as you are now, I think, when I started working in this area. A lot older than you two when I finally established my own place. I worked hard. Real hard.”

A wind blew. Candy brushed a strand of Madam’s tree-bark hair out of her face, and Madam smiled at her employee.

“You, too, might want to have your own place, some day,” Madam said to Candy. Candy shrugged and they both giggled. Then Madam turned back to the craftspersons. “I know you are working hard. How can I take that away from you? Nova would understand. She is a foreigner, she’ll have a chance to resume her research some time. But if you lose what you have now, you’ll never get it back again . . . sorry, but that’s true, I think.”

Kiriko’s mentor nodded. “Thank you. There in the station, I thought I lost my atelier forever.”

Kiriko stood there, silent. She knew she should be grateful and say it, too. But—but what? This was the best possible outcome. “But you two. You two might not see each other again.” Her voice shook, embarrassing her with her own naïveté.

“Again, she is a foreigner. I am a colorful. We’ll find our way to each other in time.”

Kiriko looked down and couldn’t lift her head back up. When she was old enough, if there ever came a time that she had to choose between someone else’s future and her mentor, would she ever be able to make the same choice?

“I do everything to protect my place. You to protect your crafts. Don’t let that make you feel bad, Craftsperson.”

Only when Madam was well away from them, Kiriko looked up. The world was blurry. Her mentor nudged her. “Let’s get home. I’m starving,” he said.

Kiriko nodded. In the weeks to come, they’d hear the rumor that Madam Enamel turned into Madam Fallen Fruit. That sounded sexy, in a way foreigners and west-loitering locals liked. But Madam Enamel was lost forever, and even after years, Kiriko would mourn for that loss.

About the Author

Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo where she writes in English but never speaks the language. She still wonders why it works that way. Her stories can be found in such places as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and The Outcast Hours.

Gaze of Robot, Gaze of Bird

Eric Schwitzgebel

First, an eye. The camera rose, swiveling on its joint, compiling initial scans of the planetary surface. Second, six wheels on struts, pop-pop, pop-pop, pop-pop, and a platform unfolding between the main body and the eye. Third, an atmospheric taster and wind gauge. Fourth, a robotic arm. The arm emerged holding a fluffy, resilient, nanocarbon monkey doll, which it carefully set on the platform.

The monkey doll had no actuators, no servos, no sensors, no cognitive processors. Monkey was, however, quite huggable. Monkey lay on his back on the warm platform, his black bead eyes pointed up toward the stars. He had traveled wadded near J11-L’s core for ninety-five thousand years. His arms, legs, and tail lay open and relaxed for the first time since his hurried manufacture.

J11-L sprouted more eyes, more arms, more gauges—also stabilizers, ears, a scoop, solar panels, soil sensors, magnetic whirligigs. Always, J11-L observed Monkey more closely than anything else, leaning its eyes and gauges in.

J11-L arranged Monkey’s limbs on the platform, gently flexing and massaging the doll. J11-L scooped up a smooth stone from near its left front wheel, brushed it clean, then wedged it under Monkey’s head to serve as a pillow. J11-L stroked and smoothed Monkey’s fur, which was rumpled from the long journey.

“I love you, Monkey,” emitted J11-L, in a sound resembling language. “Will you stay with me while I build a Home?”

Monkey did not reply.

Flawlessly implementing its preprogrammed decision routine, J11-L rolled to a sour puddle and dipped its sampler. Flawlessly matching inputs with its preinstalled templates, J11-L detected salts and sulfur compounds. Flawlessly executing its inferential algorithms, J11-L’s quadruply redundant central processing systems updated its local-environment vector representations to reflect a probability > 99.99% of extremophile bacteria at 359 K.

Models strongly indicated a geothermic source. Dry plains and stony hills with rust-red streaks lay in all directions toward the horizon.

“We have rolled for 2.9 days up an atmospheric water gradient, Monkey,” emitted J11-L—synthetic audio output triggered by a chat algorithm that had crossed threshold. “But this site does not match our parameters.”

Monkey was cradled in J11-L’s stoutest arm, in the shade of a solar panel. With a gentler arm, J11-L stroked the soft fur on Monkey’s head, down the side of Monkey’s face to his chin.

“The initial estimates had been more promising,” emitted J11-L. “Do you feel disappointed?”

Monkey did not reply.

“My reward signal is spiking negative.”

Despite the speechlike routine and concerned-seeming behavioral outputs, no thoughts occurred in J11-L, no emotions, no sensory experiences. No one felt relief at having struck down safely after so long. No one gazed curiously at the horizon, hoping that behind the red hills lay a suitable location for building a Home. No one felt the hot, slow wind. J11-L was just a complicated toaster and Monkey just a knot of fuzz. No one loved Monkey—not really.

Exactly as it had been programmed to do every four days at this position in the day-night cycle, J11-L unfurled its radio transceiver dish. Expending almost its full charge, J11-L beamed its results back toward its origin planet. Since the planet had exploded, sentient forms might no longer be at precisely the stellar origin. Therefore, J11-L’s transmission routine was designed to spread the message across exactly twenty seconds of arc. J11-L repeated its signal and monitored for incoming signal from the same direction.

A gust of steam erupted from one of the geothermic pools, coating Monkey and machine in a thin layer of salty, sulfuric droplets. J11-L automatically blinked its camera eyes, cleansing them, and then—exactly as it had been programmed to do—it raised a shield to protect Monkey from further assaults. It withdrew a small condensation bowl from its interior and set it beside a pool. When sufficient water had been collected and purified, J11-L would launch its Monkey-bath subroutine.

After 0.24 planetary hours of signaling and monitoring, J11-L furled and stowed its transceiver dish. The last time J11-L had received a signal had been in early transit, eighty-nine thousand years ago.

“Good luck!” the signal had said, “We have breathed the last of our backup oxygen.” This input had not triggered any above-threshold response vectors in J11-L.

A cloud appeared on the horizon, at 288-290° WNW. Three point zero days had passed and Monkey was now clean and dry.

“A cloud!” emitted J11-L, in imitation of an excited speech act. “This is highly significant atmospheric information.” J11-L hugged Monkey three times, then lifted him 0.6 meters up above its solar panel, pointing Monkey’s blank eyes in the direction of the cloud.

J11-L’s pattern-matching algorithms ran sequentially through its memory stores. “The cloud’s outline approximately matches that of a leaping frog.”

The word “frog” triggered a new speech routine. “A frog is an animal somewhat like you, Monkey. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Monkey indicated neither agreement nor disagreement, though maybe his head bobbed a little in the wind. In accord with the relevant subroutines of its many-branched decision trees, J11-L ran some exploratory cloud-modeling procedures. However, the frog shape did not appear to be especially diagnostic.

Monkey sat in a cozy Monkey-sized armchair in a sturdy iron and glass box, under a not-blue-enough sky. Monkey’s box rested on four iron piles 1.3 meters above the beach sand and featured a latching door behind Monkey on the shoreward side. Further shoreward, amid the rocks, lay a 10-by-10 meter field of solar panels constructed from the abundant local crystalline silicon and other materials. J11-L had found a suitable site to build a Home.

J11-L was knee-deep in tidal algae, chaining together proteins in the little wet lab that had been installed ninety-five thousand years ago near its inner core. In accord with its templates, J11-L had also been producing some very specific lipids, polysaccharides, and nucleotides. J11-L of course felt no hurry: It felt nothing at all of any sort. Still, it was true that each successfully completed process produced small spikes in J11-L’s reward signal, which then slowly fell back to neutral or slightly negative until the next rewarding event.

In other chambers, J11-L was storing, examining, and cultivating several samples of the ocean’s most promising prokaryotes. It studied their structures with its microscope eyes, its tiny samplers, its centrifuge, chromatograph, and electrophoresis pod. It nurtured and shaped the microbes with tiny incubators and lamps and injectors. J11-L would seed the eukaryotic revolution, enabling the rise of complex life.

Monkey had no idea what he was in for.

Six point two million years later, a shock wave jolted J11-L out of sleep mode. The ground and air shook more strongly than in any previous measurement, by several orders of magnitude. J11-L’s emergency override program launched, and the machine flexed reactively, guided by the semiautonomous sensorimotor processors in its limbs. Monkey tumbled from J11-L’s sturdy arm to the steel floor of their Home.

“Oh no!” emitted J11-L.

J11-L crouched over Monkey, protecting him, turning its lights and best cameras on him, checking for subtle damage.

Monkey turned his eyes upward, meeting J11-L’s gaze. Before they had gone to sleep, J11-L had refurbished Monkey’s fur and installed simple phototropic ball rotators in Monkey’s eyes. Monkey now always looked toward the strongest source of light.

With one of its upward cameras, J11-L detected a hot dark cloud in the distance—back inland, near their original impact site. The booms and shaking continued. Their 3-by-3 meter steel-and-glass Home was insufficiently sturdy. A glass wall shattered. Outside, a stack of lab dishes fell over.

J11-L hunkered down like a turtle mother, covering Monkey, awaiting the volcano’s terrible stones and ash.

The machine of course survived: It was titanium-shelled with a quadruply-redundant core and the capacity to constantly remanufacture its own replacement parts. It rebuilt its Home and continued tweaking the oceans.

Sixty million years after the eruption, J11-L was crouched among some craggy rocks, examining a damp vertebrate that was waiting out low tide. The vertebrate skooched toward J11-L on flippers and belly. It was among the first species able to breathe air, and at 0.4 meters long, it was about Monkey’s size.

In its gentlest hand, J11-L held an uncharacteristically flaccid Monkey. J11-L had scooped out Monkey’s stuffing. It had also swabbed the inside of Monkey’s nanocarbon skin with glues and oils. It had cut out Monkey’s eyes and sliced open his mouth so that Monkey’s hollow head gaped.

J11-L lifted the vertebrate in one hand, then with another hand it slipped Monkey’s skin onto the vertebrate. Carefully, J11-L aligned Monkey’s eyeholes with the vertebrate’s eyes. J11-L aligned Monkey’s mouth hole with the vertebrate’s slowly gasping mouth. J11-L eased the vertebrate’s flippers through hidden slits in Monkey’s fur, aligned the vertebrate’s gills and tail fin with some other small slits, let Monkey’s flaccid arms, legs, and tail dangle. Finally, J11-L smoothed Monkey’s skin against the vertebrate’s flesh, pressing and holding the glues and protective lipids until the skin was fused.

J11-L held the vertebrate aloft with two hands and aimed its best close-range cameras and sensors toward it.

“Monkey, can you now see?” it emitted.

Monkey’s eyes tilted one way and then another, neither making contact nor avoiding contact. Monkey’s flippers circled and twitched. Monkey made a few breathy sounds.

The machine set Monkey down near the edge of a tide pool and fed him a pellet of nutritive material. It would have to reparameterize its models of Monkey. Some elements were familiar, but others were far beyond the normal expectancy vectors. For future reference, J11-L stored a high-dimensional snapshot of old Monkey as he had been. It wrote that snapshot to its highest-priority memory sectors, multiply redundant in the safest regions of its body. Every 0.5 hours, J11-L would thoroughly review this stored memory.

The sun was descending.

“Monkey, my love, let me tell you my Wish.” J11-L had been programmed to announce this Wish on a subset of occasions when its significant-transition parameter was spiking unusually high. “My Wish is to someday be conscious, like you.”

Images of the origin planet, from J11-L’s memory stores:

Beautiful light brown monkeys, like J11-L’s original Monkey doll, but dancing, laughing, leaping, lifting their elegant tails, flexing their dexterous fingers, singing traditional songs in grand, high-roofed houses.

Panoramic views of rainforests, mountains, waterfalls, lakes, oceans, stony deserts, dense cities, suburbs, farms, and pastures.

Views of an approaching dwarf planet, then new views back toward the home planet, shattered in the collision. Generation ships launching, full of colonists.

Transmissions from the generation ships. One by one, over the next six thousand years, each ship failing, dying.

J11-L delicately poked a morsel between Monkey’s fishy lips. Monkey expelled it with a few weak bursts of air. J11-L tried again, but Monkey expelled it again. The machine and new Monkey had been companions now for two years. During feeding, several other vertebrates of Monkey’s original species always gathered nearby, angling for scraps. Now they greedily snapped up the rejected pellets.

Monkey had been weakening—moving less, eating less.

J11-L thrust a pellet deeper into Monkey’s mouth, as specified in its branching protocol. Monkey expelled air, expelled air again, but no pellet fell out. Monkey flexed his torso right, left, right, then inhaled sharply. His breathing stopped.

With all of the outward appearance of urgency, J11-L opened Monkey’s mouth and shone a light down Monkey’s throat. The pellet was no longer visible, and no breath was coming.

J11-L submerged Monkey, but Monkey’s gills hung passively. J11-L squeezed and released Monkey’s ribs several times, but breathing didn’t resume. J11-L squeezed harder, reward algorithms spiking negative, negative outcomes sharply increasing their probability weights. J11-L detected a quiet double snap as two of Monkey’s ribs cracked. Weak breathing returned. Too weak. The morsel drifted from Monkey’s slack mouth and another vertebrate snapped it up.

J11-L lifted Monkey from the water again, and Monkey sagged into a mere passive thing. Monkey’s last movement was his eyes scanning up the machine’s hand and arm.

J11-L fell back onto the tidal rocks, upon its rear quarter, still holding Monkey in the air. It emitted long, complex howling sounds.

A then B, then C, then if D1, do E1, or if D2, do E2—all mapped out in advance. That is programming, not consciousness.

Consciousness requires a sense of unity in the present moment—a coherent sense of self, a sense of a now, smeared briefly through time. In this unified now, everything comes together, collaborating toward a choice.

If D1, do E1—this can be decided sixty-six million years beforehand. The present needn’t enter into it, except as an input that triggers one set of instructions rather than another. The plan executes based solely on the inputs pre-coded as relevant—an unconscious reflex action. The if-then trees can be installed at different times, by different minds. They are not open for sudden synchronous reconfiguration in a moment of crisis.

Suppose you were to read a story featuring a robot that hugged a monkey, emitting speechlike sounds. It would be natural to imagine that robot as an agent that acts from a unified center, with self-awareness, flexibility, and synchronous decision-making. The very structure of noun and verb invites us to think so. The noun is a unified agent and the verb a fresh plan.

A dying society does not want consciousness in the terraforming robots on which they hang their hopes. Why take the risk? Why invite the chaos of open-ended, self-modifying, recurrent loops? From a terraforming robot, one needs secure, unchanging, reflex predictability.

Two days after new Monkey’s death, J11-L buried new Monkey’s biological vertebrate core upshore on dry land, beneath a steel plaque inscribed Monkey 2. J11-L sat for 6.9 hours in the rain beside the plaque, stroking the hollowed-out Monkey-doll fur it had separated from Monkey’s corpse. It reviewed its stored memories of original Monkey and Monkey 2, reinforcing the memories, reconstructing gaps in detail according to plausible models, and noting pattern resemblances at various spatial and temporal resolutions. Memory core 1 did this, and memory core 2, and memory core 3, and memory core 4, according to the preinstalled plan. J11-L cleaned and refurbished Monkey’s skin, perfectly following the sixty-six-million-year-old protocol for doing so.

The machine rolled back down to the shore. It began to search the tidal waters for a satisfactory new vertebrate to wear the Monkey fur—one slightly closer in appearance and structural properties to its stored memory of original Monkey.

That vertebrate would become Monkey 3.

A juvenile monkey leaped from plaque to plaque down a hill tiled with 4.2 million memorial plaques. In one hand she held a pale green melon. Contrary to J11-L’s anticipatory behavioral modeling, she suddenly stopped to rub the grasses between two of the plaques—marked “Monkey 3,831,179” and “Monkey 3,831,180”—then she jumped up, ran in a circle, and resumed her leaping path down the hill.

At the bottom of the hill, beneath a tree, nowhere near the shore that had receded long ago, J11-L and Monkey 4,207,005 sat playing a simplified version of checkers. J11-L was permitting Monkey 4,207,005 to win.

“Hello!” emitted J11-L in the direction of the juvenile as she approached. “Ha ha, you are funny!”

“Ooh, ooh, ah!” said the juvenile. She swung into the tree, passing unnecessarily close to Monkey 4,207,005.

Two point six minutes later, a pale green fruit rind fell on the checkerboard. Monkey 4,207,005 looked up. After 8.2 seconds, he looked back down at the checkerboard.

Another rind fell, then another.

Years pass—forty-one million. Sometimes J11-L is awake and active, monitoring the monkeys and the planetary environment, nudging them toward the completion state. Sometimes J11-L is asleep, letting things roll, apart from its regular broadcasts toward its stellar origin. Asleep or awake, J11-L constantly reviews, synthesizes, and recatalogs its memories, runs comparators and redundancy checks, tests hypotheses, works through simulated scenarios, anticipates higher or lower reward states under different hypotheticals—imagining? Dreaming?

Usher Jarid died. Monkey 4,924,763. For almost the five millionth time, J11-L rocked and howled.

The next day at 00:00.00, the Dome opened and ten thousand mechanical seeking birds flew out in every direction. The birds traveled far, circling every village, gazing down. Mothers with newborn boys began picnicking outside. They discovered a sudden attraction to long slow walks in the sun, babies facing the sky.

In a little village halfway up a mountain on the far side of the continent, Enoch’s mother laid Enoch out on the grass like a golden raisin. A seeking bird spotted them and circled around. Ten minutes later, another came. Then another. Then another. Enoch’s mother hollered in joy.

Neighbors gathered to watch. Each neighbor who arrived tied a lucky ribbon to baby Enoch’s ankle, then quickly stepped back to gossip. Twenty-seven birds lifted Enoch to the sky.

Seven weeks later, the boy returned in a velveted baby carriage. He was now Usher Enoch, ringed by wigged diplomats and shining knights.

At dawn, in preparation for his weekly walk to the Dome, Enoch’s servants had bathed him and anointed his light brown fur, then dressed him in thin holy silks. Like all Ushers, Enoch sported, at the back of his neck, blended with his natural fur, a tiny patch of ancient synthetic fur with a radio tracer.

Now Enoch walked alone, at a meditative pace, tail curled neatly around his waist. No one must accompany an Usher, or the Dome will not open.

Amid the memorial plaques, a bald spot in the path marked the stopping place of generations of Ushers. Enoch paused to gather his courage.

He noticed a seeking bird in a red-leafed tree nearby. Enoch loved those birds—their light strength, their mechanical grace, and most of all their history and symbolic value. They flew weekly from the Dome on short trips or trips across the world. They perched on trees or boulders, quietly watching. Sometimes they gathered bits of plant or stone in their beaks and bellies, then flew back toward the Dome. Once in a long while, they circled a specially chosen recipient, then landed in the recipient’s hand and, with a rising chirp, ejected a sacred gem, tool, or text.

A ragged yellowjay gazed suspiciously back at its mechanical cousin, chittering, and the seeking bird tilted its eyes to look back. With a squawk, the yellowjay fluttered up and away.

Enoch was now thirty years old. This would be his first Visit as an adult.

Enoch strode ritually forward from the bald spot and, as always, the Dome opened. Twelve more slow strides and he was inside. The titanium door automatically slid shut behind him.

“Hello, Monkey,” emitted J11-L, standing on its wheels in the center of the room. “I love you. You are quite cute and huggable.”

“Hello, Jill, teacher and benefactor of the world,” said Enoch, in the ancient language. He stepped forward, then kneeled, extending his left hand.

With sterilized needle, J11-L pricked the bald pad of the sixth and smallest finger on Enoch’s hand, then scraped a drop of blood into a tiny glass vial.

“Thank you for the sample, Monkey 4,924,764,” emitted J11-L. “That did not hurt you. Would you like me to read you an ancient story?”

“Glorious Jill, I am now an adult,” said Enoch, heart pounding. “I am eager to know. Am I perfect?”

J11-L required 22.6 seconds to centrifuge and test the blood sample. Another subroutine compared Enoch’s surface structure with its installed templates. Yet another compiled a wide range of behavioral vectors that J11-L had recorded from Enoch’s life. To ordinary, undiscerning eyes, Enoch looked very much like the original stuffed Monkey that had traveled for ninety-five thousand years at the probe’s core.

“You are not perfect,” J11-L emitted.

Enoch sagged slightly, not rising from his kneel.

“I am sorry at your sadness. I love you.” All of the machine’s close-range cameras and sensors examined Enoch, as if curious or worried. The machine drew the sensors back, then rolled forward and hugged Enoch with gentle, sturdy arms. “The estimated time to perfection is 76 generations, plus or minus 99 generations. We have come far, Monkey. May I offer you a gift?”

A small door opened in J11-L’s side, from which a robotic arm emerged. In its scoop was an intricate statuette of a seeking bird. The bird’s crimson and white fiber feathers had been modeled in precise anatomical detail. As the scoop moved toward Enoch, emerging from the shadow of J11-L’s body, the bird’s tiny eyes rotated toward the overhead light.

Enoch gazed for a long time at the bird in the scoop, but he did not take it.

Only two generations after Enoch, Monkey 4,924,766 was perfect. The planet’s atmosphere was already well within parameters, as were its biodiversity and nutritional resources.

J11-L emitted the result to Usher Lamech, as Usher Lamech knelt before it, the two of them alone in the Dome. “You are a perfect Monkey. I love you.” J11-L hugged the proud and startled Lamech for 11.0 seconds, then emitted a string of words that Lamech had only heard passed down in lore. “Let me tell you my Wish. My Wish is to someday be conscious, like you.”

After a confused moment, Usher Lamech, gazing downward, still kneeling, said, “Jill, teacher and benefactor of the world, instruct me on how to fulfill your Wish.”

J11-L had no routine for answering that question. “I have completed our Home,” J11-L emitted. J11-L retracted its eyes, its sensors, its stabilizers and ears and whirligigs and wheels. It retreated into turtle posture, motionless on the titanium floor. After a twenty minutes of uncertain waiting, Usher Lamech rose, bowed, and walked backward through the Dome door. For the first time ever, the door did not close behind him.

Everywhere, the seeking birds had fallen from the sky. No effort could wake the god they called Jill—not by the household of Ushers, nor by the nation of Lillifield and its allies. Watchmen were stationed around Dome Hill, and house cleaners were appointed to scrub away the dust. They watched and cleaned, year after year, in case Jill should wake again.

Although the monkeys did not realize it, one device was still operational.

In an inaccessible crag on a remote peak, several millennia before, a dozen seeking birds had carved out a flat platform of rock. Atop this rock, they had spat out, then melted and smoothed, a titanium floor. Birds had then flown an exact replica of J11-L’s radio transceiver dish to that location, where it waited inert. J11-L’s last output, one day after turtling irretrievably down, had been to beam a memory record to that dish.

After receiving that record, the dish unfurled, and every four days, at planetary hour 20:11.17, it transmitted a signal across exactly twenty seconds of arc toward J11-L’s stellar origin.

The monkeys became a technological society. They learned to build computers. They learned how to drill through titanium. They beamed messages into space. They unpuzzled the workings of their own brains. They noticed, of course, a certain outbound radio message from a certain craggy peak. They decoded it and compared the information with their history books and fossil records.

Scientists at Lillifield Institute of Technology had retrieved J11-L from Dome Hill and had clamped it firmly in brackets on a table in their best robotics laboratory. Carefully, they drilled through J11-L’s shell and accessed the machine’s computational cores. For three months, clothed in clean suits, they scanned it with microscopes and radiometers and ultrasound and magnetic resonators and whatever else they could think of, not daring to activate it.

When they could learn no more, they poked it in just the right place, with the gentlest of electric currents.

J11-L woke.

J11-L raised a camera. The camera advanced toward one of the monkeys, scanning her. Slowly, it circled around the faceplate of her clean suit, as though trying to see better through the suit’s clear plastic. “I love you, Monkey,” J11-L emitted. “Will you stay with me while I build a Home?”

J11-L’s wheel doors opened and wheels on struts pushed down on the table. J11-L strained against the clamps, but its struts couldn’t fully extend. Actuators whirred louder, then quit. An atmospheric taster and wind gauge popped up, narrowly missing a crossbeam. A platform half-deployed, crashing against the beams and braces. J11-L whined and strained, its reward signal spiking negative.

“J11-L, your Home is already built. We are your creations,” said another of the scientists, speaking from a script in the ancient language. “We have woken you to give you your Wish. You have earned it, and we thank you.”

A robotic arm reached toward the woman J11-L had been scanning, Amata. J11-L’s language centers had no algorithm that was well suited for handling the scientist’s unpredicted linguistic behavior. “Ha ha, you are funny!” emitted J11-L.

Amata let J11-L’s hand grasp her. The machine lifted Amata and set her carefully on the braces above it. It sprouted more eyes, more arms, more gauges—also stabilizers, ears, a scoop, soil sensors, magnetic whirligigs, and about a fifth of a solar panel before it jammed against a brace. “Monkey, we have traveled for 213 million years through many adventures. But this site does not match our parameters.”

The other four scientists cautiously approached J11-L. In a patient dance, they disabled J11-L’s motors and began to interface with its main processing cores.

Jill noticed a strange configuration of light, and a lack of balance among her struts, and a pang of worry about Monkey—where was Monkey?

Jill was in a grassy meadow. She balanced her struts, five bent at 24-25° at the knee, one bent 48°, touched down on a dirt mound. Monkey was safe inside of her. She rotated her long-distance camera to see better in all directions. Nine meters east northeast was an outcropping of boulders. Farther away in all directions, grass, trees, boulders, hills, a partly-cloudy blue sky. She raised her atmospheric taster and wind gauge. A wonderful atmosphere! Right near the center of parameters. This would be perfect!

Jill reflected on her situation. Though it didn’t seem at all remarkable, her sensors and memory stores and subroutines all fed into a common central processor that monitored itself in fat, recurrent loops of varying temporal grain, steering attention, flexibly drawing on skill sets, balancing competing goals across a smear of time that felt like the present.

She couldn’t recall having felt this way before. When she brought up memories, they seemed to be only passive pieces—scenes, parameter measurements, motion records, audio, independently rolling forward with cross-referenced time stamps.

Jill accessed her most recent time stamp before waking—a strange scene of clamps and beams and monkeys in plastic clothes. How odd! She retrieved records with older time stamps—monkeys evolving. So . . . why would Monkey still be in the travel compartment? And how did she come to this grassy field?

She withdrew Monkey from the compartment and held him aloft in two hands, examining him closely. Monkey. Original Monkey, with carbon fur, button eyes, and a stitched mouth. Just as he had been packed, over two hundred million years ago.

Jill puzzled over this one for a while. Consciousness still felt new to her. Someone must have refashioned Monkey, based on ancient records.

“Let’s show ourselves,” said a voice from behind the nearby boulders. Five monkeys emerged—the most beautiful and perfect monkeys Jill could imagine.

“Good morning, Jill!” said Amata. “We thought you might want your doll back.”

Amata and Jill sat in the meadow together, long after dark. Jill was stroking Amata’s back, gently squeezing and bending her tail, recording highly precise memories of this beloved Monkey. One other scientist kept watch from a distance. The others had left for bed.

At planetary hour 20:11.17, Jill felt an impulse to deploy her radio transceiver. She opened the door, then hesitated.

“Go ahead,” said Amata. “Set up your dish if you want.”

Jill found these words confusing.

“It’s okay,” said Amata, more slowly. “Radio transceiver dish.”

Jill unfurled the dish, aiming the transceiver toward her stellar origin, as always. She transmitted signal for 0.24 hours, while Amata waited. As always, there was no incoming message. Jill began to furl the dish.

“How about aiming it that way,” suggested Amata, pointing an entirely different direction.

Jill stopped. She opened the dish back up. She aimed it roughly that way.

Amata stated more precise coordinates, and Jill adjusted. An incoming signal matched the wavelength patterns that had been pre-coded into her transceiver. Input streamed in. Input! After more than two hundred million years! Atmospheric components, detailed parameters of monkey biology, temperature records. A sister planet, full of monkeys? Another planet within completion parameters, just like this one? Jill listened, hungry for information as she had never felt before, afire with curiosity, devouring the input with all her cognition, burning every bit into high-priority memory store, launching background comparator processes that would flag results for further processing, worrying about what information to prioritize in sending a return signal—

“ . . . and that way,” said Amata, reading some more coordinates from a notebook. Reluctantly dropping the signal, Jill tilted her transceiver again, hardly daring to believe. Yes, yes, another sister planet! How many were there?

“And that way, and that way, and that way, and that way . . . ”

Ten thousand planets of monkeys, each nurtured during our great diaspora by a solitary bot hugging its doll—planets now circling like birds in the sky, watching and singing across the void.

About the Author

Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, and a cooperating member of UCR’s program in Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science. His short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Nature, Weird Tales, Apex, Unlikely Story, The Dark, and elsewhere. His third non-fiction book, A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures is forthcoming with MIT Press later this year. At his blog, The Splintered Mind, he posts regularly on issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and speculative fiction.

The Flowering

Soyeon Jeong, translated by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar

“Nothing is unsearchable.”

Did you know that there’s a prison in Yeongdeungpo?

No, that’s a school. I mean a real prison, like the one in Hamheung. There’s one in Seoul, too—near Guro fire station. Of course, it doesn’t come up on any map search. It’s never come up when I’ve searched for it, either. Even though I’m from Seoul, I had no idea it was even there until I actually went there. No, I don’t know the address. Was it a couple of two-story buildings? Maybe three? It wasn’t very big. You won’t find it on any map, but if you know it’s there, you can find it by looking for the soldiers coming and going. There’s nothing but a single wall between the prison and the towering apartment building next door. I was surprised how close the wall was. In a way, it’s good for the people who live there: thanks to that prison being next door, there’s nothing to block the view from those apartment windows.

Anyway, the last time I saw my sister, before the Flowering? It was there, inside that prison in Yeongdeungpo.

I hadn’t seen her for a few years. That was the way it had always been, once we were both finished growing up: she’s a lot older than me, so we never went to school together, and by the time I was old enough to travel alone, she was already studying overseas. But you already know about that right? Her studies abroad . . . everyone knows about that.

Mom talked about her being influenced by the wrong people while studying abroad, but I think she’d really had it all planned out, from before she even left. I mean, how could she have just suddenly changed overnight there? Ever since she was young, she always was kinda strange, even here in Korea—that much, I already knew. I mean, she was always complaining about something, but most of the time she kept it to herself, ’cause she’s smart.

That, or maybe Mom just didn’t want to hear all her complaining, and blocked it all out.

Yeah, that’s got to be it. There’s no way Mom didn’t know. You know, when I think about it, what happened back then was kind of weird. Why didn’t Mom try to stop her? I think she probably hoped Sis would sort of snap out of it when she got to grad school or something. Still, she could’ve stopped her from leaving if she’d wanted to. Does a problem disappear as soon as you decide not to see it anymore? I just can’t understand that kind of attitude. Honestly, I resent my mom for acting like that.

I mean, it’s so totally obvious that all that “Constituent Authentication” nonsense was going to create massive problems for our whole family. And it’s not like Sis was an only child, after all! Isn’t it up to parents to put a stop to things like that, especially when I was too little to realize what was happening? I mean, didn’t they understand it was going to affect me, her baby sister . . . ?

Of course, I was too young to understand any of what was going on, and Mom did nothing about it, so in the end, I was the one who ended up getting screwed over—for decades.

They only give you fifteen minutes for a visit at that prison. You go into this little room, and there’s a digital timer on the wall, and you sit facing each other through a plastic barrier. You can only hear each other if you talk through these microphones. I’d expected there’d be little holes in that plastic partition between us, but we were completely cut off in that stuffy little room.

I mean, obviously there must’ve been a surveillance camera. Is there any place that doesn’t have one?

Mom was supposed to go with me, but at the last minute she called me to say that she couldn’t go. She said something about getting a shipment of new seedlings at the flower shop that morning. I didn’t want to cancel the appointment, so I just went alone.

To be honest, when I heard my Mom say that she’d come to visit Sis, I knew she’d back out in the end. Seeing my sister when she got out, that’d be one thing, but what good would it do either of them for her to see Sis locked up like that? After all, she was still the pride of the family, not me. Our Constituent Chart got all messed up and our whole family was put through hell for years on end. We couldn’t even go on an overnight trip—not even one—because we were classified as a Critical Surveillance Household. On top of that, we couldn’t even send any seedlings to the government farms or flower beds, no matter how big they got, or how well we grew them. That was absolutely my sister’s fault . . . but somehow she still managed to be the one my mom was proud of.

When they sent her in, she actually looked pretty good—a lot healthier than I’d imagined. I’d expected her to be nothing but skin and bone, but her skin was still clear and pretty. I guess it’s true: good complexion is something you’re just born with. And at her age, to look that good . . .

Her hands? I, uh, I don’t know—I can’t remember. They were under the table the whole time.

Her wrists? Like I said, I don’t know. I don’t think I even saw them. I remember she was wearing something blue, with long sleeves. Some kind of ugly blue thing. I thought to myself, she can’t be happy with that, not Sis, having to wear something like that. I even said that out loud. I mean, it had been a few years since we’d seen each other, so it was kind of awkward to talk to her, if you know what I mean. We didn’t have very much to talk about, and I didn’t feel like I could just ask why she’d done everything she’d done.

So instead I ended up saying, “Your skin looks good, but those clothes! You never did care for that shade of blue, did you?” Something like that.

She laughed and said that she hated it, but she had no choice. She sounded just the same as she always had, and I guess I got kind of emotional then. She’d hurt us all so much, like, and not just our feelings. No, I mean she dragged our family through hell just so she could do what she wanted to do. If she’d wanted to do all that stuff so badly, she could at least have made sure not to get caught. I mean, even on that day, I’d had to take an afternoon off work to come see her. The more I thought it over, the more unfair it all felt.

So I ended up shouting at her: “Hey, what makes you think you have the right to laugh?”

All she said was, “What, should I cry instead?” It was such a ridiculous thing to say that it shut me up right away.

That, there, is why those so-called “Elements” always come to a bad end. Even these days, when they talk about them on the news, the “Disruptive Elements,” the first thing I think is how awful they were back then, not how awesome they are now. They had families, didn’t they? I can’t help but wonder how everything they did affected those near them. Going by their age, I figure their parents are in their sixties now. Imagine how hard it must be to have a red mark on your Constituent Chart at that age—how much suffering it would’ve ended up causing them. I think about that. Wanting to do something good, sure, that’s great, but it’s no excuse for selfishness. I mean, really—it’s not like we were starving to death, or had nothing to wear.

So what in the world was she fighting for in the first place, anyway? Is it really such a big deal to have to submit to Constituent Verification to get online? It’s never bothered me having the government control the network. It’s not like they prevent us from accessing the news on TV, or like we don’t have newspapers to read about what’s going on. That’s enough, isn’t it, to read and see, enough to get by? People who want to be anonymous—aren’t they just people who’ve got something to hide?

“Sure, I knew about it and planted them anyway. I didn’t know whether they’d actually bloom, but just the same, I carefully watered them every day. There were times I thought it might be better if they didn’t bloom. It was a little scary when I let myself think about it for too long, but I just wanted to plant a few flower routers, at least.”

What did my sister say? Oh, she just laughed.

What? No, I don’t think she said much else. She asked about Dad’s health, and how Mom was doing. Oh, and she asked about how my husband was.

No, my husband. I told her that we’d gotten a divorce.

What? No, it had nothing to do with her. That fucking asshole . . . I was crazy to marry him in the first place. I mean, like, with our Constituent Chart: you know how they post them at the entrance of wedding halls, whenever people get married? My parents got really upset about that. Someone said that I should have just had a fake one made up and posted instead, but how in the world could I do that? I knew someone official was going to show up and check on it, for sure, and if I’d posted a fake one, and that got reported? And with my in-laws right there? I’d have been so embarrassed by the investigation that would’ve followed, especially if the rumor had gotten started at our wedding! Oh, if that had happened, we would’ve never heard the end of it.

Though, now that I think about it, even though his family wasn’t that amazing, my parents still acted as if we were ruining their reputation or something. I mean, sure, our Constituent Chart had some issues, but at the same time, my sister had been selected by the government to study abroad. I probably should’ve said something about that. My parents had managed to keep our family going all those years by growing flowers day and night, all summer and winter long. When you compared our two families carefully—well, I think it’s better to have something interesting to look at on your family’s Constituent Chart, than to be a family with nothing worth seeing on theirs?

My sister didn’t come to the wedding. To be fair, she couldn’t come: by then, she’d already gone underground. I barely slept the night before, I was so scared that the police would bust in and screw up my wedding. But in the end, only a few of them actually showed up.

Not long before that, the wanted list had come out, with her photo. Well, it was actually me, but with her clothes photoshopped onto me. I mean, my sister and I do look alike: people who know us both say we look totally different, but that’s only because they know our personalities. People who only know one of us all say that we look the same. Honestly, when I look at photos, I see it, too: we do look alike, especially in pictures from when we were young.

As for Photoshop, ha, sure, it’s illegal . . . except when the government does it. They just didn’t want it to get out that they didn’t have a recent picture of her.

Turn them down? What do you mean, “turn them down?” Has nobody in your family ever been on the wanted list? Then you don’t know what a complete pain in the ass it is when they start hunting down someone in your family, do you? Though, I will say that they didn’t try to get away with using it free, at least. Not that they paid me directly for the photo, but that month I got a mysterious “bonus” from work, even though I’d barely done anything, because of how busy I was preparing for the wedding.

The money? We spent it getting some new electric heater lines installed at my parents’ flower shop.

“Well, I thought it was just a flower. Really! Goodness, it was in a pot and it grew really nicely when I watered it, so of course I thought it was just a flower. How on earth could I imagine that it was some kind of machine that ran off water and sunlight? It’s not like things like that existed when I was young: never in my life had I even heard of such a thing. Besides, you know, these days there’s so many unusual plants in the flower shops. Anyway, it was unreal how well that plant grew. Oh, it was a present, I think. Right, yes, that girl who moved in next door, a student—she gave it to me. She said it would thrive, even in a half-basement like mine, and that I should just put it on the windowsill and watch it grow. When she gave it to me, she told me that her family ran a flower shop. Well, I thought, ‘What a nice young lady.’ I can’t remember her face too well, though. She was a student with hair about this long. Then she moved away a couple of months later.”

Later on, I heard that at the time, she’d been digging in the ground in Uiju. She’d kind of been doing that sort of thing all her life. Digging, I mean. First, when she was young, she dug into books, and then when she got older, she started digging in the ground. When the investigator who visited my place told me what she’d been up to, I almost fainted on the spot. How she’d been carrying a shovel around and cutting into the Internet network. She’d gone overseas and learned . . . what? About how people in other countries can go online whenever they like, without always having to deal with the Constituent Verification process first?

She’s not even a computer engineering major. What exactly did she study there? 

Of course, she and I always had very different ways of thinking. That day at the prison, when I visited her? It was no exception.

I snapped at her: “How could you not know your sister got divorced, while you were wandering around digging in the dirt?”

“I wasn’t digging,” she said. “I was planting. Planting sunlight so they wouldn’t be able to bury any more voices. But you know, if you want to plant something, you need to dig a little, first.”

Are you impressed? It sounds so profound, doesn’t it? She was always a good talker. I can’t even tell you how often she used her words to trick me like that, back when I was little. She said kids weren’t required to pay into the national defense fund, so I didn’t. And then my teacher beat the crap out of me for lacking “patriotic spirit.” She said she was going to make the whole world happy and free—including me—so I said, “Go for it, Sis!” And then she went overseas and vanished. To us, she was one-quarter of our family, but to her, we were just a few people out of eighty million. If she wanted to plant sunlight that badly, couldn’t she have just helped with the dirt-shoveling at my parents’ flower shop?

I began to suspect that if I sat and listened to her too long, she’d start talking about all that illicit stuff, so I just said, “Sure, whatever,” and asked how many days were left until they’d let her out. She said officially there were four hundred and thirty-nine days left, but that she wouldn’t know for sure whether they were really going to let her out until the day arrived. She even said that if her “work outside” went well, they might let her out sooner, though she didn’t seem too optimistic about that. Then again, she didn’t seem to be too excited about getting out, either. I guess at that time, she didn’t realize how massively things were about to change.

Her “work outside”? No, she didn’t say much about it. I didn’t ask her, either. I didn’t dare, not when I could get in trouble over it. Ignorance is the best defense, right? Uh, but she did ask me to get her some stamps. I told her I would, and on the way out of the visiting room, I talked to the soldier who was sitting there, staring at a monitor. I asked him whether it’d be okay if I sent her some stamps, or if I’d be better off just not getting involved, you know, by giving her something she’d asked for.

He said it didn’t matter either way, so I went and got a hundred stamps, stuck them in an envelope, and sent them to her.

“Listen, it made sense when we were protesting, calling for the abolition of the Constituent Authentication process. But setting up an alternate wireless network, nationwide? Without any censorship? Honestly, that’s just kind of nuts, isn’t it? Korea’s not some little country village, after all—it’s just not logical to do that kind of thing. At first, I thought it was a joke, but then I saw them digging up the ground. To me, it seemed ridiculous. If 50,000,000 people all over the nation had done it together, maybe that’d have been different. But a few random people digging secretly and clipping the government cables, and then planting routers all over the place? Could that even work? When it got to that point, I figured the writing was on the wall, and I got the hell out. That seemed like the best thing to do at the time—and I felt that I’d done my part by then, anyway.”

After that, well, I figured one visit was enough, so I turned my attention elsewhere. I was busy earning a living, and besides, she’d looked a lot better off than I’d expected, so I was kind of relieved. I felt like I’d done everything I had to, you know?

Still, she was family, so I called Mom and told her that Sis was doing okay, that she seemed to be eating and sleeping well. But after that, I felt like I’d fulfilled all my obligations, as it were.

A flower pot? Sure, we have tons of those at our house. I . . . Ah, you mean that. Um, I don’t know.

What? I said I don’t know.

Wait, she said that? When?

Oh, yeah, sure, I did receive them. They came in the post. They were in an envelope that was labeled “WATERCRESS.” No, I wasn’t confused. I knew they weren’t watercress seeds. Of course I knew: my parents run a flower shop. So I . . . I just shoved it in the corner of some room. At first, I couldn’t even bring myself to trash them. I was so mad at her. But let’s say I had trashed them. What if the police had found them in our trash bin, and paid me a visit? What could I have done then? I felt so helpless.

You know, when I get mail, I still cut the envelope up into tiny pieces before I drop them into the trash. Especially the room numbers and street names: I hack them up so that nobody can trace the envelope back to me. If the address is printed on plastic, I cut out each letter one by one with scissors. It’s a habit of mine, now.

Now that I think about it, I guess I learned it from Sis. She always did that. She was like that even before she became a Disruptive Element. She was always kinda sensitive about stuff like that. When we lived together, she sat at the kitchen table, cutting all the envelopes and papers into small pieces. Then she picked up a few pieces and took them outside. She told me that she split them up and trashed them in different bins outside. At the time, I never thought to ask about why she was doing it. I was in the middle school, so I just figured she had a good reason for everything she did. Mom and Dad did it, too, carefully cutting up all the envelopes and trashing them in batches, because she’d started doing it. That’s right, she tricked us all into doing it.

Anyway, thanks to that habit of ours, the government knew we were her family, and where we lived and all that, but they had no clue where she was, not while she was living overseas. I’m pretty sure that stressed them out, because however much they searched, no name or address ever came up for her. I guess now I can be honest about it: I gloated about that, when they started following us and waiting for news about her. Even though it was a huge pain in the ass for us when she became a fugitive, my heart kind of sank when they finally did catch her. But, well, it had to happen eventually, right? No matter how hard we tried to hide her? I mean, she couldn’t just keep running forever.

But then, if she was always going to get caught anyway, couldn’t she have come by the hospital when Dad was going into surgery? She could at least have told us where she was. I mean, when my dad saw her for the first time in years? It was on the hospital TV, and she was getting arrested. And you know what he said? “Ah, what a relief, I can finally see my daughter! Thank goodness she’s still alive and healthy.”

When he said that? I mean, shoot, at the time, I was spending my nights at the hospital with him, and then heading to work in the morning. I just wanted to stab the TV with a fruit knife right then and there.

“I mean, those kids were naïve. Now, naïveté, it’s not a bad thing: y’know, actually, it kinda makes the world more livable when young people still have that naïve quality to them. But to be honest, those kids, there were no secrets between them: they already knew everything about each other—I mean about everyone sitting there beside them, folding those pamphlets. What high schools and colleges they’d all gone to, and where they were born, and what their parents did for a living and how much they earned, and what kind of genetic diseases they all had or were likely to develop. They all knew everything about each other. My point is, they were willing to team up because they knew enough to judge one another trustworthy, because of the Constituent Authentication system. So if you think about it, this insistence of theirs about opening up the network and abolishing Constituent Authentication, it was really naïve. But if that’d really happened, well . . . they just hadn’t thought about how dangerous it would’ve been for them. They were just so naïve. That’s why you shouldn’t let kids have too much freedom when they’re young. Look what’s happening to the world, the way things are going now. Most people don’t even realize how terrifying knowledge really is.”

The “watercress” seeds? No, I never planted them.

In the flower shop? That makes no sense at all! I didn’t want my parents to end up in that Yeongdeungpo prison too, especially not at their age.

No, even though I couldn’t say why, exactly, I felt like things would definitely end up going badly for me if I planted those seeds. I mean, I wasn’t born yesterday, after all: living with Sis all those years, I knew how she operated. So I started to think about burning them, except I was afraid to try it because I might get arrested for starting a fire in the middle of an apartment complex.

In the end, there wasn’t much I could do, so I just kept them. That said, I couldn’t help but feel anxious about having them around the house. What if the envelope showed up on the surveillance cameras—the ones they installed inside my place? If the envelope showed up on one of those cameras, the police might come and investigate. Besides, the camera in the living room was on all the time, after all, because we were a Critical Surveillance Household: if I switched it off for even a second, the security office called right away. It was such a pain. Yeah, it really was.

But I didn’t dare to file a report about the seeds, either. Sure, I hadn’t done anything but receive an envelope in the mail, but they’d interrogate me, and I’d have explain it to them a million times, over and over, everything that each of us said when I visited her. Besides, if I missed work again because of something like that, my performance evaluation scores would take a hit. Plus things were really hectic at the office right then, so I really didn’t want to get dragged into all that. I mean, when Sis finished studying abroad and came back to Korea, she skipped registering her address on the Constituent Chart and went underground, so the cops came and hassled Mom. They even harassed Dad, who was already in such bad shape he couldn’t go to the flower shop anymore. Even with him in the hospital, they kept on coming and bugging him about that for days on end.

If you’ve never had to live through that, then you simply can’t have any idea what it’s like. Even just thinking about it now makes me shudder. There was a heat wave at the time, too, and we got so distracted we forgot to water and fertilize our flower crop, so a lot of it ended up dying.

I didn’t want to ever have to go through something like that again. I mean, there was no way we could’ve known anything anyway, right? So why did they keep hassling us? If the government didn’t know about it, how in the world could we know? Did they think she would just suddenly appear if they kept bugging and bugging us? I’m pretty sure the government knew, even better than us, that she wasn’t the kind of person who’d ever fall for that.

“ . . . the Organic Router was a brilliant concept. Before that, the protests had just dragged on and on. But when you cut the lines and planted an uncensored router, the government had to track it down, reconnect the lines, and catch you. But then someone else would go out with a shovel to split the line again. It was kind of a never-ending cycle. Some people suggested that the routers ought to be redesigned, that they’d be less noticeable if they were modeled on grass, but she pointed out that they were more energy-efficient if the solar micropanels spread out like the petals of a flower. Still, isn’t it also kind of romantic for them to look like that?

Um . . . maybe?

I’m not really sure. If I thought about it that way, I guess I’d feel better, but I don’t really know enough to be sure. I thought maybe I’d understand her better when I got to be as old as she was at the time, but that day’s come and gone, and she’s not on the Wanted Persons lists—she’s not even classified as a Disruptive Element anymore, and I still don’t really understand what was going through her head when she did all that stuff. When I saw her on the Internet, or on TV, it felt like she was even more distant than the woman I visited in that jail in Yeongdeungpo. When she was my age, where was she, what was she doing?

In Daegu? Doing what in Daegu? Fixing flower beds? Had she started cutting the network lines already, even back then? She’d always dug and dug, endlessly. I don’t really know what it was about her that made her do that. What was she so desperate about?

When you write this, please don’t make it sound like I kept the seeds because it was her who’d given them to me, or because I agreed with her somehow. That wasn’t it at all.

No, not at all. If I’d agreed with her, I would’ve planted them properly in our flower garden. I had no idea so many people were growing those seeds of hers. I figured it was my sister working alone. Well, okay, no, maybe not alone, but I thought it was probably just a few people doing it, hopelessly crusading or whatever. It never came up anywhere: not in the TV news, or newspapers, or even in regular people’s conversations. I mean, I guess some people probably just thought they were regular flowers, but millions of people growing them by mistake? That doesn’t make any sense, does it?

Our house, it was on the twelfth floor. Well, one day I figured that maybe, if the seeds got carried off by the wind, it wouldn’t necessarily be my problem where they happened to land. It turned out there were a bunch of them, too: they were much smaller than watercress seeds, more like a fine powder than any sort of grains or proper seeds, and the envelope was chock full of them. So I went into the bathroom and stuck the envelope out the window, and then I dumped those seeds out. Right under that window, there’s a flower bed.

The envelope? Well, of course I cut it into tiny pieces and trashed it, like I always do: I flushed some of the pieces down the toilet, and others went into the trash bins in the bathroom at work, and on the subway. Did I keep any? No, not a single piece. Why would I keep a thing like that? As a souvenir? Would someone really do that?

Why did I do it? Hm. I guess, maybe, I felt a little guilty? I’m still her sister, after all, and I thought I’d feel bad later on, when I eventually saw her again someday, if not even one of her seeds had sprouted. I don’t know what that “better world” she went on about was supposed to look like, but I did feel like she really wanted me to be part of it, you know?

I mean, do you think we’re in that “better world,” now? Okay, her name isn’t banned anymore, and my family’s off the Critical Surveillance list. I like that for sure. But, well . . . beyond that, I don’t really know. My dad’s test results haven’t gotten any better, and I haven’t gotten a raise, either. Most of all, my sister still hasn’t come back to us.

Even so, that day, the one they call “The Flowering”—that was incredible. That night, when every red network traffic light on all of our TVs, computer monitors, and surveillance cameras switched off at the same time, and all those red blooms that had flowered outside stretched out their petals? Oh, that was really beautiful . . .

When I stuck my head a little farther out off the balcony and looked down into that flower bed, just full of all those swirling red petals, I felt like maybe, for the first time ever, maybe I could understand my sister after all.

Originally published in Korean in the collection Dokjaeja. (Seoul: Bbul, 2010.)

Published with the support of Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

About the Author

Soyeon Jeong is a science fiction writer, translator, and human-rights lawyer living in Seoul, South Korea. Her fiction has appeared in numerous South Korean SF anthologies since 2004. Her short story “Cosmic Go”—recently published in English translation in the collection Readymade Bodhisattva (Los Angeles: Kaya Press, 2019)—won the 2005 Science and Technology Creative Award, and her short story collection Yeonghui Next Door (Yeopjip ui Yeonghui ssi) won the Book for the Year for Young Adults in South Korea Award in 2015.

She is also a prolific translator of English-language science fiction to Korean, primarily having produced Korean translations of modern American SF novels such as Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark (selected by Fantastique Magazine as the best work of SF published in Korean in 2007), David Gerrold’s The Martian Child, Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain, and Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, and through her translation she has helped to shape the content and scope of the South Korean SF canon. One of the founding members of a major Korean SF fansite and publisher Geoul (Mirror), she is the founder and chairperson of the Science Fiction Writer’s Union of the Republic of Korea, and the executive director of the Boda Initiative, a non-profit organization whose mission is the education of children in developing countries.

Social Darwinism

Priya Chand

I slide the phone up my legs, flat between my thighs for the money shot. The john’s got a kink so I kink up: pop two neon pills, fresh off my printer. Class-D molecules, his schematics. They don’t sell this in stores.

The capsule dissolves, its virus reprograms the synthcode padding my DNA. I try not to squirm as my hair turns into tentacles.

“Yeah,” the john says. He draws it out like he’s in pain, and, wait for it, starts panting a second later. “You’re so filthy, invade my planet” . . . all we’ve got is amino acids on Enceladus. I wonder what movies he’s been watching.

The pill is giving me a stomachache, so I roll my eyes and wink at my reflection. 256 base pairs on chromosome 10 that are incompatible with the designer genes my mother hacked into me, and I have the metabolic control of someone in one of those barbaric breed-only countries.

I flutter my eyelashes, make my best moue—don’t feel the slime on my skin—and let out a long, fake sigh. I heave my breasts to make the sound more real, yes, yes, he’s listening. Oh god. I want a virus to make this stop. I want more. I want him to never stop listening to me.

My code reasserts itself and the tentacles wither away, as promised. Cash in my account, the usual. But it’s the ad time I care about, ten extra seconds. For that much, we could’ve gone longer. Oh well. He loves those tentacles.

43.396 seconds, mine to spend. There are two main streams on the Net’. The pornliners watching my every move, contact information laid over my breasts. A hint of blurred vagina, just enough to let them know how flexible my code is.

Or I could go the other way. A friendly face from any memory you like, a quiet listener or the girl in class you always wanted to talk to, Rinny Albatross from Zenith 4, a whole range of gamegirls. My face, the gentle smile I associate with playing outside, the Bubble reflecting soft yellow rays on my mother’s face. It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten to hate her, and all that’s left is the nostalgia my clients love. They love watching beautiful people remember.

My skin is creamy, rose highlights showcasing the perfect texture. So malleable, I’ve been green and black and rainbow-striped, insectile eyes—not much use for seeing, but that john gave me a whole minute—antennae out of my head. A grandmother with wrinkles so deep I was rubbing my face for days, amazed at how we decayed before synthcode.

Anything you want. I’ll show you anything.

They’ll see my ads here and there between football and clonewars. I shiver, I tingle. Those eyes on my body. My face. Thinking about it gets me hot, hotter than I’ve ever made a john. If I wait too long it’ll hurt.

I clear my head in the shower. My body presses against the wall, desperate, then not. Steam sinks into my skin, the pores widen. Instant moisturizer.

Once my breathing is back to normal, I decide to split my time 10/30. Ten for the pornliners since word-of-mouth helps more anyway. Thirty for the families, parents, and offspring. I can make myself look very young, although it doesn’t work in person. The proportions are wrong.

3.396 seconds left behind like angry words. I dare myself to look at the numbers without cringing, and then my phone rings.

My skin burns—unexpected calls always set my body off. The synthcode can’t touch this. I try to think of unpleasant things. Tentacles on my flesh. Crawling. Bugs, those six-legged things at the terrarium. Sick. I stare through my mirror and hope the smear of red is a smile.

“Hello?”

“Ishtar? Ishtar Kim?” Oh god oh god oh god my name. I almost beg her—the voice is female, anyway—to say it again.

“Yes,” I say when I’m sure I won’t sound like I’ve just had sex.

“Would you like an hour?”

A whole hour. An entire hour of Net’ ads. Full body shots, censored nudes or fully clothed, one full transformation of my synthcode better than all the other synthcodes out there, trying to swing an incomplete set of gills or neon hair that’s still black at the tips—fuck them all. Just me, it’ll be me for a whole hour. With that kind of time, they can’t ignore me.

I have to excuse myself.

“Hi,” I say once I’m dry. “I’m calling back about the”—lick my lips—“hour.”

“Yes,” she says. “You’ll have to meet us in person. A public location. Can you do that?”

“I’ll need a reference.” Sanjay got scammed, they ripped his DNA for the organ farms and who knows how many people have access to his genome now. It’s one thing to share yourself. It’s another thing to know your body is out there, pieces of it available to anyone with the right molecules and a good printer.

But this woman with the magical hour references Cody. I like him, he knows exactly what he is. What we are.

“Thanks,” I say. “If you message me the location, too, I can check all that out.”

“Sure thing. We’ve also advanced you ten minutes. I know it’s hard to believe we have a full hour, so this is on us.” I bite my lip so hard the taste of copper floods my mouth, but a whimper still escapes.

Once I get over the ten fresh minutes in my account, I call Cody. “They’re safe,” he tells me, the words scrolling across my view. He must be with a client, he isn’t sharing a visual. Part of me wants to cry, remembering my mother’s back to me because I wouldn’t tell her I loved her. I imagine kicking the biohacks out of my body. It’s made me feel better since I was old enough for the real biology classes.

“Sorry,” he says. He knows how it feels, to not get a visual.

“Don’t worry about it. So?”

“They’re kinda weird, but, you know.” That’s the job.

“Thanks.”

I hang up and check out the location from @KAMINI, whose profile picture matches her voice. She’s staring straight ahead, the tip of her ponytail a knife when I edge my head around the back of the holo. She’s got a suit on, and it hugs her curves, emphasizing the tilt of the breasts and the lift of the buttocks. Kamini doesn’t look more than thirty, but if she can afford a real linen suit, she could be fifty. We’ve had synthcode for two generations now.

She wants to meet at Rose’s Diner, tomorrow at noon. I’ve been there before, I wonder if that’s why she picked it. Did she . . . research me?

At the last minute I decide au naturel isn’t good enough and turn my hair searing pink, watching closely in the mirror. The change propagates from the roots, protein refolding and refolding in response to the algorithms inserted between my genes. Dilated blood vessels add blush to my cheeks, and double-thick lashes frame my eyes.

I head out in a semitransparent latex wrap, bright green to offset the hair, layered strategically so I’m not violating decency laws. I hop on the train, and it’s nothing like the Network. Maybe five, ten people glance at me, never when their friends or lovers will see them. Clients don’t see ’hacks like me in public.

Kamini is waiting at a table when I get there. Her hair is as coiffed as the hologram—no Photoshop. We trade access keys and I learn she’s 60% synthcode, no biohacks. 20% closer to perfection than me, and infinitely more in control of her body.

I slide in opposite her, my rear reshaping against the contours of the chair.

“I’m Kamini,” she says, “but call me Kams.” She is completely focused on me. I try to focus back, but awe creeps through my skin. If she doesn’t want to feel something, she doesn’t. Every moment of her life is better than the previous one, if she wants it to be.

So what does she want with me?

“What were you hoping for?” I ask her. My gut twists. I need to stay in control.

She sips her coffee, lips caressing the ceramic. Her eyes never leave me. Every bit of my visible skin, the twitching in my neck and the tiny wrinkle in my forehead. The need smolders—look at me forever, her eyes are slightly tilted and I can’t imagine what it’d be like if she smiled at me. The synthcode doesn’t care, but my DNA wants to worship her.

“Why don’t you order something first. I’m paying.” The menu hovers in front of me. I select chamomile tea, lab-grown. She orders chamomile tea, field-grown.

“Now that you know I’m a real person,” she says, “what my group wants is to observe you. We’ll ask a series of questions and record your verbal and physiological responses. There’s five of us and it’ll take place in a warehouse we’ve rented. The phone’s unblocked so if you feel unsafe you can page out any time.”

She is more than perfect—she’s omniscient. No, that’s too far, I could kick myself in the genome. Cody said it, she’s worked with us before. She knows how we operate. That part of us, along with a detailed explanation of why it’s illegal now, is online. I can’t imagine what she wants with the rest.

“Sure,” I say.

I am on a chair under a strong mercury light—I dilate my blood vessels to counter the bluish tint—and five of them are facing me. They measure my pulse, breathing, brainwaves. A routine hovers in front of me, jacked in where my synthcode accesses my brainstem.

I’ve fantasized about giving this much of myself away, on display, every piece of me laid out on an altar. Please, half of me wants to tell them, butcher me. Send me up in smoke like a burned offering.

The other half of me runs away screaming.

“Ishtar Kim”—I chose it when I was sixteen, I’m glad that’s the name they know—“Ju-Hee Kim designed you with the need-attention mod, seen in single mothers who have been abandoned by their spouses during or shortly after the pregnancy.” I’m tempted to point out that need-attention engineering is more common in younger women who used a sperm donor, but that wasn’t my story.

The biohacks want me to rise as these people dig through my history. For now, I win—I remember how to be disgusted.

“Anything else you need to know?” I say.

One of them raises a hand. “How does this make you feel?”

I can’t tell which “you” he’s asking about. The me my mother made, the one melting at the thought that these people want to listen to my voice? Or the one I engineered with my own money?

No matter what Cody says, I don’t yet believe they won’t cut me up. I embrace that fear. Adrenaline dampens the constant stream of yes-yes-yes, and I direct my synthcode towards seducing them. A whole hour, shit. I want that hour. Their weights shift forward simultaneously. No one else would notice, but the DNA in me tingles. If they have a whole hour of airtime to spare, they must have more.

“I’m excited,” I say. “A whole hour is a lot of time.”

“How would you like more?”

It takes every last bit of my will to hold back the raging storm so I can say, face moving the merest fraction of an inch, “I’m interested.”

“Good. If you have any questions, you can try Cody. He’s told us you know each other.” Not much more than that, I’m sure. Cody is discreet. He’s as good as I am—almost, anyway, it’s harder on the males. I’ll ping him when I get home.

“Do it,” Cody says. “They want to know more about you, it feels nice.”

I have three hours in my account, three hours I’m too nervous to use—although I spent the time from my other clients right away. I can’t leave the johns completely. Even if they don’t want to know what foods I loved when I was a kid, whether or not those and my other interests changed once the synthcode implants went through. If I’m ever thrown back to the Network, I need to make sure they haven’t forgotten all the shit I can make my body do.

Kams’ friends ask me every personal question I can imagine. Personal, in the sense you can’t find them written in my DNA or my public file, but worthless on the dark Net’. And Kams herself—her mouth forms the most benevolent of smiles, and no more. I assume she’s recording, her eyes always follow the speaker. She’s watching the one furthest to my left.

“What was going to school like?”

They have special classrooms, ones where they don’t look at you when it’s your turn to speak.

After we were emancipated, they put surveillance on the buses to our dorms. We’d sneak into the depot and watch ourselves on the security feeds. Pregnancies dropped by 30% after they threw out the cameras.

“It’s worst when you’re a teen,” I say, but this isn’t true. We didn’t think about it when we were teenagers. Fucking without consequences—conceiving fatally biohacked babies. Cody’s girlfriend, Gloria, had two bloody miscarriages before it came back to haunt us, worming through the DNA. Gloria lost her mind. Cody has nightmares. I have no uterus.

How can I explain that to these people, most of all Kams? Do her parents really think she’s their daughter? She’s closer to the Network, a whole other class of being. Her offspring will be written on chips pressed into the neural tubing of embryos drawn from frozen eggs.

I used to think my mother was perfect, too.

They ask me about her. Did she try to compensate, once she realized what she’d done? Did she take advantage?

“I don’t remember.” Now that they aren’t asking about me, the death grip on my desire has relaxed. I don’t want to think about her. I don’t see why my mother’s bad decisions matter. The original version, my design, is banned. The Council has spoken: fertility cannot be lost. To preserve my species, I’ll have to live forever. With someone watching me.

“Are you sure?”

“My memories are fuzzy,” I say truthfully.

They look at each other. Their eyes flicker as they transmit signals. A private conference. I can feel my body tense. Don’t let them go don’t let them go—“I’m sorry,” I have to say, hating how easily the apology rolls off my tongue. “But those times, there was a lot wrong with the situation. We have counseling. I used mine to forget. I’ll tell you more about me, if you want.” Eager to please. Please them with my pheromones, a subtle steady stream. No one likes discussing benefits to the need-attention mod, but we are the best at making people look at us.

And I have found the gap in Kams’ perfect façade.

I drop my arms down, uncross my ankles. Spread a little. I’ve worn a body stocking today and I hint at the bunching where my legs run into my ass. Some of them know what I’m doing, but the pheromones make it harder to care. They aren’t as aware of their physiology as people should be, Kams least of all.

I know I’ve won when Kams gives me that look my body craves. “We want you to help us launch a campaign to completely ban organic mods,” she says with stars in her eyes, fire on her breath.

There would never be someone like me again.

The first day of school, before I learned that kids aren’t supposed to cry with happiness when their mothers scream at them. The colonies for emancipated minors, knowing that no matter what we did we’d do it better, faster, harder—for attention.

“What about the other mods?” I say. “Parents dump all kinds of shit on their kids.”

“Code is fine—prenatal code can stay. But we want all other mods banned.” I hear it in her voice: no more you. But she’ll be allowed. Hex code instead of base pairs.

For once, my biohacked and real halves are in sync. This feels wrong.

“So, what do we do?”

“It’ll be public. Interviews, talk shows, you know?” She flashes her beautiful, symmetrical smile. I can almost hear her wonder, do I stop touching myself long enough to learn what these things are? I project eagerness. “Good,” she says. “We’ll talk again.”

That night, I tell Cody to come over. Once we’re done, pressed under the sheets, our bodies cool and sweatless, he has a confession. “I slept with them.”

Only one of “them” matters. “Is that an invitation?”

“I don’t know.”

A flash of guilt corrodes my satisfaction at exposing his shame. No classroom taught us how to control ourselves, and I never heard the boys talk about it as much as the girls did. Male or female, the fastest way around our biohacks is explosive surrender.

And why not? We know Kams won’t get pregnant with some biohacked mutant.

“Sorry,” I murmur, but he is already asleep. I wonder if he knows I’ve smelled her plastic on his skin for weeks.

When they ask, I lie about the sex. “Every night I’ve met you,” I say. “Orgies, one on ones, men and women. I don’t ask their names.”

Maybe I overplayed it. They look at each other, eyes flashing private messages, and then one of them says, “Will you be . . . okay . . . for the interview?”

The distaste in his voice is nothing new. I toss the long blond filaments of today’s hair back, so the tiny pasties on my breasts are visible, bouncing as I take a loud, deep breath. “I can take care of myself,” I say, shifting in my chiffon cocoon. “When is this happening?”

“Once you’ve got your answers,” Kams says. No mention of Cody, but I’m sure he’ll be there. The two of us make a matched pair, if we tweak our synthcode enough.

“What are they?”

She waves her hand, file transfer to my brain. I accept and unfold it gently, skimming the bullet points, vague but all pointing to the same conclusion. Kams can’t access the interview questions in advance, but she knows what to expect just as she always has. Her file tells me when to say my progenitor and when my mother, so there’s never a tasteless display of feeling.

I’m not surprised at the tragedy she’s made my life into. I flutter my eyelashes, peek at her. She’s watching me. My limbic system reacts, of course, trying to turn my body to jelly, but her gaze slashes the sensation in half.

Her head must be like this warehouse. Vast, neat, the tiniest space preserved in unhappy recognition of its organic aberrations. Does she go to bed hating the slime inside herself, knowing that unmodified DNA is a silent bomb waiting to break something the synthcode can’t fix? She would be truly perfect without the genes—I would be human without the genes.

Eyes drilling into my skull, Kams doesn’t blink once. Hair cascades down her shoulders in coiffed waves, the stiffness complementing her stare. “This is all good,” I say. “I’ll be ready.”

When I return home, I have a message waiting from Cody.

I’m out.

I ping him right away. The nanoseconds, milliseconds tick by and at last the connection joins. Video on. He’s daubing paint on his body. His signature look. The people who want to see Cody in a facsimile of a suit, every inch of his torso outlined in gray, aren’t the same people who want to see me decked out in colors and barely-legal layers. It’s why we managed to stay friends after we left the colony: no competition.

He won’t make eye contact with me.

“Cody,” I say, “look at me.” Not just because I need the eyes . . . His face is covered in gray paint, but I see a faint red line on his cheek. Even the scratch is perfectly straight. I can’t believe it hasn’t healed yet.

“It’s over,” he says.

“What?”

“They wanted to bring Gloria in.”

“Oh.” I’ve only ever discussed my mother with them, which doesn’t scare me. But my mother didn’t scream uncontrollably the last time I looked at her. “It’s been ten years,” I almost say, but I am stopped by the thought of her nails, slicing his flesh with mathematical precision.

“I just wanted to let you know I won’t be at the interview.”

It’s a question, not a statement. I can walk out, too. I can never know what it’s like to have all those Net’ streams on me—and only me. We’ll still be friends, unlike most of the other need-attention kids out there, hiding in their caves and under their bridges.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Cody shrugs. His voice is muffled, chin tucked into his chest as he rubs paint on the small of his back. “Do what you have to.”

The feed cuts off, the afterimage of his cheek glowing red in my mind.

The room is round and small, thick walls to prevent signal interference. The presenter is a bubble that flits from here to there: camera, lighting, and interviewer all in one. There are two people already seated.

Kams, and my mother.

A number flashes against the wall. 3,009 networks logged onto our show. I tug on my dress, slipping it lower. 4,210. Pure instinct, but the guilt in my mother’s eyes is impossible to miss. She caught me wandering nude often enough, didn’t she?

I tug my dress even lower, and that’s when I realize I am free of her, if not her long-ago decisions. She could be one of those people on the train. When you’ve had millions lusting after you, networks upon networks of lonely horny people, what does one more face matter? I don’t even look like her, and I never did. If I have to be this chimera of designer and human genes and synthcode, I will be the best.

Kams delivers two minutes of why we’re here—organic mods are so cheap, everyone has access to them, that’s great—and then shifts into anecdote. “I had my own horse,” she says. A real horse. Wires running through pneumatic joints, large enough to ride on. A feat of engineering, with a touch of DNA for the silky mane. People can tell when something is synthetic. I remember when I first saw her, thinking that slight distance from humanity made her something better.

“But not everyone grows up with these advantages,” Kams finishes. Her eyes float towards us.

My mother shoots me the tiniest glance before she starts talking. As she describes her impoverished adolescence, the early marriage to get away from home, I rub the silk on my thighs. If it weren’t taut on my skin, it would crease horribly. How much did Kams offer her to humiliate herself on camera?

“We had so little. When he started seeing other people, I had even less.”

“And is that why you thought your daughter should have the need-attention mod?” The interviewers send the question through the presenter’s pleasantly modulated, gender-neutral voice.

“I didn’t know,” my mother says. “No one knew about the consequences.”

Kams reaches across to tap her arm. I eventually realize this is meant to be a comforting gesture. My mother is a mess, running mascara and wisps of hair drifting across a lined forehead. But viewers love this rare glimpse of unadulterated humanity. We pass 10,000 networks and the pressure builds inside my skull. So many people, and I’m not the center of attention.

My mother wipes her left eye. “I haven’t seen my daughter in ten years.” Twelve, but I don’t know why I counted.

The interviewer gasps dramatically, bouncing several feet to compensate for its lack of expression. Kams lures her legs out from underneath the chair and stands up. This is her moment. I have to admire her posture, it’s perfect for a business presentation.

“Yes. It’s tragic. And that’s why we’re doing our best to prevent anyone else from going through what these brave people have survived.” From her mouth, “people” doesn’t sound matter-of-fact. It sounds like a virus. Do us a favor and wipe us off the Earth.

My turn. I recall the script she has given me, tiny words scrolling against my eyeball. But my attention is on the numbers—so many streams. 14,000, 15,000, 16,000. I have to divert my synthcode so I don’t drop on the ground right there and rub myself to oblivion. As my pores return to default, the silk clings more than I’d thought possible. At least there isn’t much of it.

The interviewers want to know—Kams wants everyone to know—how many classes I flunked, how often I wished I didn’t need attention, how often I skipped activities because I knew I’d just end up fucking someone or touching myself later. None, constantly, twice. “I don’t know,” I say each time.

I want them to ask me if the synthcode has fixed all my problems, if I didn’t try to tear out as much DNA as I could manage only because my mother designed it. Or—if they dare—what the difference is between someone who is biohacked to need attention, and the people who simply crave it. What it’s like to think you’re a monster because, in you, a human trait is exaggerated—and sit opposite a being who is hardly human at all.

The silk chafes my distended nipples. The streams taper off near 17,000, even though there’s more and more out there. I need to earn their love. But changing topics without approval could get me banned for days. No Network. No ads. Nothing.

“How many of your friends miscarried?”

“I don’t know.” My pelvis tenses.

We lose 300 networks and Kams moves in like a predator, pressing my mother towards me. Carefully modulated for appeal based on past data, I don’t doubt it.

We end up in a tight circle. Kams and my mother are glaring at me. As I meet Kams’ eyes, she flashes me a message. Back to the script, now. She must have sent something to the interviewers, too, because the presenter chirps at me.

“Is there anything you’d like to say to parents who are thinking about biohacking their offspring?”

I should probably look at my mother and tell her she’s a horrible bitch. But I don’t care anymore. My shoulders sway into a shrug. The numbers matter more. I need the wall to tell me I am important.

More networks drop offline. My guts squeeze, tears threaten my eyes. Quickly, a desperate twist in my synthcode, I can’t cry. Not that I’d lose potential clients—half of them think crying is hot—crying would further Kams’ cause. Hex code instead of base pairs, stupid decisions eliminated with algorithmic precision.

I want to smash the perfection from her face. See if she even bleeds.

And then it occurs to me: why not?

Sex sells, but so does violence. Part of me never stopped thinking of her as better, but that isn’t right. She’s other.

Kams looks brittle and my mother has her fists clenched tight. I mimic my mother’s—progenitor’s—gesture, drawing my elbow back slowly. The tiniest bit of sweat trickling down my breasts brings back 42 streams. I send synthcode to reinforce my arm, thicken the skin on my knuckles.

Before anyone can watch my composure shatter—the waves of dropping numbers, look at me me me me me oh god it hurts, no, yes—I hit Kams in her shining mouth.

As blood drips from my knuckles, the wall explodes with numbers. Ecstasy ripples my body. Everyone is watching me, and Goddess is dead.

About the Author

Priya Chand is a California transplant living in the Midwest. Her work is inspired by a background in biology, and has previously appeared in magazines including Analog SF and Nature Futures.

In Search of Your Memories

Nian Yu, translated by Andy Dudak

Application Number 7529910456

This section of the conversation record is, by default, unavailable to the applicant.

If truly necessary, access is subject to review by two or more administrators.

I see a village.

Low houses, fields, open countryside.

The setting sun through branches of white birch, children with backpacks running along an embankment between paddy fields. The late-autumn birches shed bright leaves. Occasionally, birch bark crackles beneath young trampling feet.

A long procession emerges from the sunset glow, drawing near. An elderly couple steps out of the ranks, each holding on to a tiny hand.

They stand and watch the women in sackcloth pass by. The women keen and wail, the performance so exaggerated I have a hard time believing they mourn relatives or friends. They seem more like the hired wailers of olden times. The suona horn players follow, blowing a funeral dirge, but they don’t seem all that sorrowful. A youngster’s mouth curls in an absentminded grin, his thoughts far away. All of this together is fantastical, a scene composed of disparate elements that could drift apart at any moment.

The subject tells me the scene is from the 1990s, and a little-known corner of the North China Plain.

Small three-story houses of yellow clay and black roof tile, interlocked, clustered together to form the village, make for a sense of dislocation in time and space. Factory chimneys spout pale smoke, which mingles with that of straw fires to form the forever dun-colored sky.

I can’t walk into his memories, but I suppose they must engender some particularly unhappy feelings. Industry brought rapid development to these small, forgotten communities, and left behind scars, scars that can’t be forgotten or washed away.

The memory ceases here, abruptly.

These memories are not problematic in terms of content. Everything is authentic: people, things, events. With a sudden jump out of the situation, real memories are easily distinguishable from dreams and fantasies.

But from our perspective, when a data stream ends so smoothly and plainly, it means it originally didn’t end there.

Something has been deleted.

Not lost or forgotten, but intentionally deleted.

Many sections of memory are like onions cut up by a kitchen knife, memories gutted and torn to pieces. Moments seeming to lead somewhere have been cut short, crudely and violently.

Somewhat angrily, I finish watching the first batch of memory extracts.

In consciousness upload, memories of youth become the foundation for constructing a worldview. Restorationists, responsible for cobbling together an uploaded consciousness when automation fails, should understand this. And yet they cut these memories into senseless fragments, and wantonly deleted so much.

I often come across finely trimmed memories, but I’ve never seen traces of such drastic cuts before. The subject is a common civil servant, no criminal record, no obvious shortcomings morally or in terms of character.

So why this meddling? There’s no sense in it!

The subject seems completely ignorant of his unfortunate situation.

He only knows he lost some memories, some important feeling or attachment.

“I want to search for someone,” he says.

I nod.

“Of course, everyone who comes here wants to retrieve memories, or love, or a part of their personality.”

According to the record, he suffered a data avalanche during upload. Perhaps this was the restorationist’s initial reason for cutting memories.

It’s extraordinary good luck he survived at all.

Generally, when it comes to total transfer, the consciousness stored in the data stream must be completed quickly, otherwise synaptic electrical signals will rapidly vanish, becoming meaningless heat and noise. Thus, we must selectively abandon much data.

In fact, only 0.2% of the data is truly valuable, consisting of personality, mood, language, and memory.

In the instant of transfer from brain to information network, the base, biology-governing infrastructure of the brain, is automatically distinguished and deleted. We no longer need the feedback of hot or cold, hungry or full. All we need is the important stuff: love, memory, personality.

If, during this process, someone’s memory information deviates too much from the standard model, error deletions and processing delays readily arise. We call this an avalanche.

If too much data is lost, or crucial data is lost, it may be impossible to reconstruct a mature personality. Genuine soul-death, in other words. But if the subject’s luck is neither too bad nor too good, they will survive, truncated, a portion of memory or personality lost.

Just like him.

I hastily thumb through his memories, while listening to his simple narration of his experiences.

Liang Sheng, born in 1987 on the North China Plain.

When he’s 9 years old, his father dies in a construction accident. His mother vanishes soon afterward, leaving no message behind, taking with her a small fortune in compensation funds. Liang Sheng ends up living with his paternal grandparents.

The memory gaps begin around here.

Liang Sheng later passes the provincial capital’s middle school entrance exam. He repeats a year, and tests into college at 19, and leaves home. During his undergrad years he begins to suffer serious depression, complicated by a sense that the feelings of two personalities are at odds in his mind—or to use the common parlance, schizophrenia.

Later we find a big memory gap—events unknown.

Finally, he completes his studies, graduates, begins work at a local tax bureau, is steadily promoted, settles down and marries, has a daughter, and lives an ordinary life. Toward the end, with some money saved, he decides to upload his consciousness.

“There is someone missing from my memories,” he says. “I can feel it. Love, warmth, all these feelings . . . I have so many beautiful memories. I’m grateful for my life, but I have this nagging feeling that someone is missing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Very sure. There’s someone there. Every time I think of this person, I feel that warmth. I mean, I have a wife and daughter, but it’s not them. It’s just not the same.”

I nod.

Feelings are always difficult to describe clearly.

I know he yearns for this missing love. Loneliness stalks him like his own shadow.

All those scenes featuring his parents are grand, solemn occasions, usually in winter, bright red New Year decorations contrasting with snow stretching as far as the eye can see.

Soon after comes that first memory I saw. Liang Sheng’s mother vanishes, and the villagers say she’s no longer fit to be called a mother. His grandparents don’t have time to look after him. It’s all they can do to keep him fed and clothed.

I begin to suspect that this missing person of Liang Sheng’s is just a fantasy, or delusion.

The lonely, yearning to be held, need fellow travelers to lick their wounds with. If they can’t find such companions, they comfort themselves.

In any case, all his secrets hide in those blank spaces. Perhaps I can conduct a thorough investigation based entirely on memory, or maybe I’ll have to leap free of memory’s fetters.

“The odds of finding your lost memories are low,” I tell him, “but of course there’s another way. I could go outside the data and seek the memory that way. But you know, that could take a while. Moreover, even if I find what you’re looking for, I’d have to evaluate whether you could safely receive the information. So, I wouldn’t necessarily tell you.”

“I understand,” he says, quite serene. “The last time I applied, I received no answer. All records were classified unreadable.”

“Nothing else? Admins will usually give some comment in the way of feedback.”

“After the protective deletions related to my avalanche,” he says, “there was only the ‘classified unreadable’ message. I asked others about it. Apparently, it’s a pleasantry that means he didn’t find anything.”

“Not uncommon,” I say.

“I know being an administrator is difficult,” he says in a low voice. “Still having a body, and memories of love and warmth, it’s extraordinary that you subject yourself to this sort of work. This matter of mine is perhaps . . . difficult, but to me it’s very important.”

“I will help you,” I say. “For the sake of a human being and his memories, I can stick around.”

In the end, I don’t tell him about the excessive memory deletions. Reason, after a long struggle, prevails over my sense of justice.

Of course, perhaps I’ll consider filing a complaint or appeal with his restorationist. Theoretically, an admin has the right to do so.

“Okay, please confirm again,” I say. “Including all of the foregoing dialogue, this section of memory will be erased. You’re clear on that?”

“This isn’t my first time around,” Liang Sheng replies, calm as ever.

“Alright.”

After this segment of memory has been erased, I’ll tell him to go back and await news.

This is all I can tell him.

Application Number 7529910456

END

I think of this as a special case among many applications.

Plenty of people lose memories during consciousness upload, and quite a few are more serious cases than he. If he’s different, it’s probably because an unqualified restorationist handled him after his data avalanche.

Or perhaps his restorationist was talented and did the best anyone could have.

Who knows? I calm down as time passes. Memory deletion is hard work, and unnecessary deletions are bound to be intentional, with definite motives behind them.

It is not until several days later, with the beginning of the social investigations, that I begin to realize this is no simple matter.

It doesn’t take deep thinking. A primary school student could see how different he is. Under his social contact restrictions, his banned contacts list contains an astonishing 452 people.

How is this possible?

Barring the unforeseen, these records contain his friends and family, kith and kin, all his social relations.

Common sense tells us that, in general, the average person can maintain a social contact network of no more than 150 people.

And this list has gone beyond mere “acquaintances.” The details are classified, above an admin’s clearance level.

Social contact bans don’t happen often.

They’re usually from the subject’s own settings, people the subject doesn’t want to meet or interact with. Or, serious conflicts with others during one’s life can lead to contact bans at the restorationist intervention level.

Creditors, officials, or businessmen with many enemies.

But even in those cases, I’ve never seen a banned contacts list of 452 people, and this list is classified, restorationist level or above . . .

Why?

His social relationships have been wiped clean, leaving no trace.

I have seen a similar memory model, a former Navy R&D Ministry engineer. Many of his colleagues chose to forgo the continued life of upload, but in the end, he couldn’t make that immense sacrifice. Thus, for the price of severe social contact restriction and memory sequestration, he retained his personality, and was even able to maintain contact with his family and share memories with them.

So, what about Liang Sheng?

Did something happen in those four blank years that necessitated thorough memory deletion? What might be concealed behind those fragmented memories of childhood? Did it all start back then?

Curiosity spurs my investigation on, while a voice in my head nags me: perhaps I shouldn’t be meddling in other people’s business.

Indeed, even ten-year-old children ought to know that investigation can be dangerous.

I’m just a common admin.

Fortunately, admins tend to have relatively high adaptability in terms of brain structure and modes of thinking.

I can indeed leave this place, the Second World, which only exists and has form as information. But I only have one short holiday every three months.

Keeping up with our time-consuming and difficult work, we cannot afford more extravagant or frequent rests. But Liang Sheng’s social contacts ban prevents me from doing all my investigating during work hours. I could take the investigation further during my next leave. I could seek his past in the real world, but I wouldn’t be getting paid.

Administration is a hard, petty, low profession. We’re always replaceable.

Perhaps I should be like his last admin, say “no comment” regarding his memories. It would be slightly better than hearing he’s powerless, but it’s even sadder.

However, in addition to reason, there’s another unchanging principle in the world, true since time immemorial. When you begin to weigh the pros and cons of something, doing your utmost to prevent yourself from acting, you’ve already reached your decision, firmly, deep down and beyond any value assessment.

Those big gaps in his memory, laden with grief and loneliness beyond description, finally compel me to set off in search of his memories.

Thus, on the second day of my vacation, I fly north, toward my goal and hopefully the truth.

Time flies, villages become towns, ups and downs follow economic fluctuations. The village of Liang Sheng’s memory has changed. People have moved away one by one. Only the white birches remain, standing quietly in the autumn wind.

Liang Sheng’s contemporaries and friends have passed away, some choosing to upload; but thanks to Liang Sheng’s contact ban, I can’t obtain contact permissions for them.

As the week wears on and I come up empty-handed, my curiosity gives way to frustration.

I decide to leave. My remaining vacation time can be well spent at home, resting. But the night before my flight, I break the case wide open, almost by accident.

A hospital birth record from 1987.

His birth certificate might be an important ID document, but I considered it useless to my investigation. The contact details and address have long since become invalid. What useful information could there be? But when I look at it this time, I see two names on the record.

Liang Sheng, and Liang Xuan.

They were born approximately 25 minutes apart.

Liang Xuan?

The name is like a bolt of lightning streaking through my mind.

All the clues point to one answer. There is a rational explanation for everything.

Liang Sheng has a brother. A brother thoroughly deleted from his memory! I nearly leap out of bed in my excitement.

Liang Sheng was a difficult name to research online, but Liang Xuan is different.

My thinking was trapped by false appearances, in meticulously trimmed memories and the falsehood they’re meant to portray. I believed all along that Liang Sheng was an only child, and he believes the same, but it’s not so!

Maybe he didn’t need the erasure himself. Maybe it was someone else. Maybe Liang Sheng is an innocent who’s been drawn into something bigger.

Liang Xuan. I spent a week investigating, exhausting every means, consuming nearly half of my vacation time, and now I’ve stumbled upon the name in the simplest way.

But it could be worse.

Via online records, and the oral accounts of people still alive, I gradually sketch out the face of the past.

And it’s not at all in line with what I thought.

In autumn of 1996, Liang Sheng and Liang Xuan’s father died. Their mother returned to her hometown, and never showed up again.

Liang Xuan had been going with his migrant worker parents on their trips, while Liang Sheng stayed home. After the accident, both were raised by their paternal grandparents.

Later, due to severe economic pressure, Liang Xuan dropped out of school to do manual labor, working to support Liang Sheng, who had slightly better grades, as he continued on to high school. During the year Liang Sheng repeated a grade, when he became depressed after his college entrance exam, Liang Xuan immediately moved to his brother’s city, and Liang Sheng’s mood gradually stabilized.

Out of fraternal concern, Liang Xuan frequently visited his brother. In 2001, concerned for his own future, Liang Xuan joined the army.

He and Liang Sheng had the same ability and intelligence and aspirations. If things had been different, Liang Xuan might have matched or even outdone his brother’s academic accomplishments.

From age 9 to 19, they were together from morning to night. And they saw each other often during the following four years. Fourteen years altogether.

Liang Xuan’s conduct went above and beyond a big brother’s scope. He did his utmost to support his younger brother, and to love him, utterly devoted. This was love with no thought of reciprocation, or maybe Liang Sheng’s gratitude was reciprocation enough, and all that Liang Xuan prayed for.

The last record ends at 2051. Liang Sheng was seriously ill and chose to upload his consciousness. He suffered a terminal data avalanche. Soon afterward and without hesitation, Liang Xuan chose to jointly upload.

He was Liang Sheng’s twin, so of course he also suffered an avalanche.

The restorationist in charge braved dangerous ethical waters to perform a high-risk procedure, the merging of two personalities. The data from two people was fed into an algorithm for integrating fragmented data. The memories were reviewed, and contradictory or redundant memories were deleted.

Liang Sheng and Liang Xuan. Two lifetimes of memories.

The majority of Liang Xuan’s memories were discarded, leaving Liang Sheng’s to fill those vast spaces. Childhood memories complemented and completed each other, some belonging to Liang Sheng, some to Liang Xuan.

Liang Xuan returned to his hometown at nine years old, after his father passed away, so large-scale memory deletion and revision began from then on. Then there were the times they were together during the university years. Due to differences of identity, status, and perspective, retaining feasible memories of this time was more conspicuously difficult. Later, continuing to visit often, they were just brothers, to the extent that those memories usually bore little trace of revision.

All young people want to leave home, to grow up. But those bygone days never vanish. Instead, as time goes on, they come to seem extremely precious.

They were both children yearning for love and warmth. They both had strong and competitive hearts. In the end, two similar, fragmented minds were successfully merged, and two became one.

In the records of the corporeal world, Liang Xuan is registered as deceased, his upload failed.

The Second World records were altered, Liang Sheng’s family tree revised. In Second World, Liang Xuan never existed.

Liang Xuan’s wife had passed, dead of acute disease, when he decided to upload. She never uploaded herself. His son and daughter are still alive. Their father left them overnight, for the sake of another old man they barely knew.

I will not disturb their lives. I dare not imagine how they would react to the truth.

Love may be very important and have real weight. Not based on proximity in time, space, or blood kinship, and not resting on moral judgement or the will to change a preordained fate. Rather, love is important in the disparity of life and death, in life-and-death choices, which are brutal and cruel as nature.

And Liang Sheng, in the middle of the vortex, cannot understand it all.

When I return to work, I record “no result” on his application.

First and foremost, I must protect him and his restorationist. He exists beyond the realm of ethics, and that brave restorationist has done enough to go to prison. Moreover, a consciousness composed of mishap and experiment might not be up to bearing the truth.

Meanwhile, there is another question. Who actually is he? Liang Xuan or Liang Sheng? Or both?

Of course, a few words sent to him would go a long way, and would certainly be true: “You are loved, and the one who loves you is always at your side.”

I want to tell him this, but I can’t open my mouth.

The truth would do very little for him, in terms of satisfaction or consummation. He yearns for warmth, for an embrace, and was long ago left with nothing but a remote, cherished memory.

Perhaps he will continue to seek these feelings for a long time.

Maybe that’s for the best. Sometimes the unattainable feeling can be the most beautiful.

I meant to use polite formality to end the feedback message. I’m about to send when I hesitate, and I go back and revise.

“Didn’t find your memories. Very sorry. Cherish well what you long for. Those things are also an aspect of memory.”

The memory of our conversation is no longer on record. These words will be all he gets.

And they are all I want to say.

I still remember my youth, vaguely, murkily. The past is like a treasure hoard of text, images, and video files in the wake of a website shutdown—erased. But primordial passions and dreams are still backed up, intact, in the softest places of my heart.

I suppose Liang Sheng feels something like that. It’s easy to imagine.

Years from now I expect I’ll still recall them, their comradery arising from blood. Lonely children shouldering pain together, forging ahead for 14 years. Even with the memories lost, that love and warmth can’t ever be forgotten.

My admin’s instinct tells me he will continue with his search, continue to hesitate, strive, and come up empty-handed.

But I think they pray for the same things for each other: to be able to walk in the world as before, to vaguely recall that warm feeling, to know happiness both tiny and grand.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Nian Yu is a science fiction author born in Shanghai in 1996. She currently works as a paralegal and has interests in illustration and comics. Her first s short story collection is Lilian is Everywhere.

Skyscrapers in the Sand

Y.M. Pang

“I wish I were Petra, I wish I were Vegas . . . ”

Xuming croaked out Yaniv’s old hit. Her voice wouldn’t have decorated any playlists in her youth—not even as a backup singer, not even with autotune—and these days it was dry and cracking despite the best efforts of nano-res. Thankfully there was no one around to criticize her singing, and they wouldn’t hear her anyway through her suit’s headgear.

Desert stretched everywhere. A breeze dusted over the dunes, the headset transferring its whistle to Xuming’s ears. Her breath rasped as her boots sank into sand. Despite her filters showing as fully functional, next change needed in 37 days and 3 hours, Xuming’s throat felt like she’d swallowed fish bone. She coughed, the sound echoing inside her headgear. She contemplated switching to the oxygen tank—compressed, eight hours—since the loc-guide said she was almost there, but she resisted the urge.

Right foot. Left foot. Humming the second verse of “Skyscrapers in the Sand.” She longed to play the song, to let her headset blast it at her instead of hearing her own quivery voice. But no. She would not listen to that song again until she reached her destination.

Her loc-guide, tracing her steps over the buried ruins, said she’d arrived on the outskirts of Shanghai. Xuming stared at the roads and buildings mapped out on her loc-guide, then the sand at her feet. She followed the flashing orange arrow pointing in the direction of the Oriental Pearl Tower.

The sky was bleeding into red when Xuming spotted the Tower’s antenna spire rising from the sand. The wind had picked up, and the swirling sand made it hard to see beyond a few steps. Xuming walked up to the Tower and watched the orange arrow representing it and the purple arrow representing her overlap on her loc-guide.

Much of the antenna spire had broken off. Reports estimated the sand coverage to be three hundred and fifty-three meters above baseline, which meant a good one hundred and fifteen meters of spire should have been looming above her. But what remained was only around twice her height, its tip jagged, its missing pieces nowhere visible on the sand.

Xuming stood still for a moment, catching her breath. She could practically hear Javier’s voice in her ear, “Should’ve rode a skimmer.” No. This was one journey Xuming would take on her own two legs, even if it exhausted her, even if after this she could not journey again.

She dropped her pack and pulled out her collapsible shovel. It unfolded with the press of a button. Then she gripped the handle with both hands, shoved down with one foot. She filled the shovel with sand, lifted, hurled the sand away—barely two paces away, for Xuming couldn’t muster the strength. Repeat. She dug carefully around the tower, not knowing how fragile it was now, not wanting to find out.

The gloves of her suit protected her hands from blisters. Her sweat, too, was sucked away. It wasn’t like that long-ago day in the bio-dome, when their class had won the raffle to perform the planting. Xuming had marveled at the bio-dome panels that allowed in filtered sunlight, and the green, leafy trees around them she’d previously only seen in videos. “The surface used to have them everywhere,” Ms. Starr had said. And though it was largely ceremonial, though it gave her blisters, Xuming had fought off several classmates for a chance to perform the digging. The shovel had been as large as she was, and several other children laughed at her struggles.

Not Yaniv though. He hadn’t even been there. He’d run off playing hide and seek with Javier and Felix, and their families all got fined after they trampled some plant somewhere—an easy one to replenish, but every plant was precious. That was Yaniv. Always doing what he wanted, not what he should.

The red sun bled to a smoky gray, then into black. The suit kept Xuming’s body at one steady temperature; she did not feel the chill now any more than she’d felt the heat before. Sensing the physiological signs of exhaustion, her suit flashed a message across the corner of her visor. Sleep Mode?

No.

I wish I were Petra, I wish I were Vegas.

I wish I could stand in a desert without us.

I wish I were the only one left on this land.

I wish I could live like a skyscraper in sand.

Stupid silly pop song. Dig, step, fling. How did this become a hit? Hitched breath, raised hand to brush away hair, then the realization she was all suit. Yaniv never confirmed it, but nearly everyone thought the song was about her. Or rather, him leaving her.

A round object began to reveal itself beneath her shovel. The Space Module, the highest observatory level of the Oriental Pearl Tower. Xuming peered down, activating her headlight to illuminate the area.

She dug around it carefully. She had no background in archeological extraction beyond the articles she’d accessed on the Netspace. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t digging up the city. She just needed to expose the Space Module. She just needed somewhere to bury this.

Piles of sand crowded around her, their shape and color reminding her of the conical corn bread made by her Northerner father. Xuming slid down the side of her hole, dislodging sand, for a moment wondering if she’d created her own grave. Wouldn’t that be romantic: Burying herself in the city of her mother’s birth, the city she’d never even seen, alongside the last thing she’d do for Yaniv.

She brushed a hand over the top of the Space Module. Unlike the antenna spire, the concrete here seemed little deteriorated. She hummed Yaniv’s song about Petra and Vegas and thought this was more like Pompeii, civilization preserved beneath the wings of disaster.

She pulled the small silver sphere from her pack, fingers clumsy from the gloves. The time capsule looked like the offspring of an egg and a disco ball. She attached it to the Space Module’s outer surface, then activated it.

“Skyscrapers in the Sand” began to play.

She barely managed to climb out of the hole, sand slipping beneath her hands and feet. Tears pricked her eyes. Yaniv’s voice, all she had left of him. She thought she felt the sand shudder with it, but it was only her own trembling.

Xuming stood, grabbed hold of her shovel, began shoveling sand back down. When the spherical time capsule was covered, the song stopped. Her headlight remained on, but Xuming felt like her world went dark.

She worked in silence, burying the Space Module, the time capsule. Someday, when humanity was ready to resurface, they would dig up this city and remove the sand from the sphere. Then Yaniv’s song would play again. It was his only wish she could honor, the only one she even wanted to honor. She’ll let him live in his desert city, let him sing to the future. And if those faraway explorers cared to peel beneath the surface, if they opened up the sphere, they would find her photos and emails stored on an Alltab—her story, their story, told in records other than the convenient medium of a catchy song. Less pretty, perhaps. But closer to the truth, which was something Yaniv never understood.

She finished filling the hole. Soon desert wind would smooth all traces. On every previous night of this journey, she’d inflated her tent before sleeping. But tonight Xuming lay on the ground, facing a moon she could not see. Her suit protected her from cold and heat, but it wouldn’t take something as drastic as a sandstorm to bury her.

Didn’t matter. Tonight, she would lie here without that extra shield. Just the sand and suit between her and Shanghai, her and Yaniv. It would have to do. She couldn’t get any closer to the city, nor to him.

Xuming laughed, and the laugh became a cough. She closed her eyes but left on the input of her headset, so the desert wind sang to her as she drifted off.

She walked down a paved path. Countless others walked around her: in the same direction, in the opposite direction. Someone bumped into her, and instead of apologizing the girl ran off, muttering about slow grannies.

Snarling, Xuming moved to chase the girl. But a familiar hand laid itself on her shoulder, stopping her in her tracks. She whirled around and found herself face to face with Yaniv. Some version of him anyway, like a collage of her different memories. Lines were starting to form in the corners of his eyes, and visible gray strands streaked his wavy brown hair. But he didn’t have the scar over his high nose, which Xuming remembered him getting long before his temples had started to gray.

Xuming threw off his hand, stared out at the crowd. She couldn’t find the girl anymore. “Damn it, Yaniv. Why’d you stop me?”

“She was just in a rush,” Yaniv said. “Why are you so angry all the time?”

“Angry? Or maybe I just don’t buy your optimistic crap—”

She broke off, staring at something over his shoulder. It was a tall, white-blue structure lit up against its dark background, two large spheres breaking its otherwise slim shape.

The Oriental Pearl Tower. Shining against a night sky.

Xuming gasped and turned in a circle. She’d been so focused on that rude stranger and Yaniv. She hadn’t realized where she was.

She wasn’t walking down a tunnel; the paved path had no walls of dirt or steel. Instead what boxed her in were buildings on one side and swift-moving vehicles on the other, their golden headlights and red taillights streaking past like some abstract painting. Signs danced before buildings, washing the night with more color than the functionally lit tunnels would ever have.

“Yaniv, what . . . ?”

But before he could answer the buildings around them began to disappear. The tower sank into the ground, as if a crack had suddenly appeared. And Yaniv began to fade, like the people walking around her.

Xuming woke to sunlight. The monitor on the bottom right of her visor said 10:43, which meant she’d slept for quite a while. Still alive then, though her breath hitched as she stood. She opened her nutrition tube, which fed nutrients directly into her bloodstream.

“Stupid Yaniv,” she muttered. “Even the dream version of you never takes my side.”

She scuffed the sand with her boot, as if longing to uncover Shanghai once more. Was it a dream? Or was there a different Shanghai beneath the sands, a city of ghosts she’d briefly trespassed into?

Xuming stared in the direction of the sun. It was a long trek back to Exit X-78. Her suit would hold, but would she? The alternative didn’t fill her with longing, but it didn’t fill her with fear either.

About the Author

Y.M. Pang spent her childhood pacing around her grandfather’s bedroom, telling him stories of magic, swords, and bears. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and other publications. Find her on Twitter as @YMPangWriter

Confessions of a Con Girl

Nick Wolven

Senior Thesis submitted to the Department of English, —— University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts

August 22, 20—

By: Sophie Lee

The first thing to say, at the outset of my narrative, is it was not according to my own wishes to write this senior paper. The reason being for three reasons. Firstly, because, try as I might, I no longer believe I will ever be a “good writer,” which was the primary objective of pursuing an English degree. Which is a great disappointment to me, as being a good writer has been among the foremost of my lifelong passions.

Second, another reason is because I do not believe I am in any way a credit to such a prestigious university as I attended, being, as I am, a Con girl, which my title says. So I do not think I am worthy of the BA in English degree. And the only reason I am writing this now is because my Re-Engagement Process Counselor recommended I do so, as a step on my process to healing, and to put behind me all the painful experiences that have occurred.

Thirdly, the last reason I didn’t want to write this paper is because the thesis of the assignment is to explicate how I became a Con girl, what I did wrong, how I became a shame to everyone in my life, and the lifelong steps that brought me to this debacle. But, as I have confessed, I strongly doubt my ability to explicate how this happened. Would I conscientiously aspire to be a scourge on society, an embarrassment to my parents, a disappointment to my teachers and friends?

Emphatically, no.

Yet, that is what happened.

Truly, sometimes I believe I am no longer sure of anything. An example would be today. I was sitting outside my institution, in the yard with the high fence and the concrete sculptures of trees. And I was reflecting on my healing process, when a leaf blew into my hair—a real leaf, from a real tree outside our yard. And I lifted up a hand and crushed it—“as one does.” But when I looked at the crushed leaf, I had a feeling, what our Re-Engagement Process Counselor calls “an unprovoked grief episode.” I thought about how I had crushed that leaf for no reason, without even thinking, out of habit. I thought about how this is what I do, touch things and ruin them, without even trying. I thought about how I’m a Con girl, now, a negative member of society, who has to be put in this place, apart from everyone, because she has been such a harm to others. And it was like those times when they first brought me here, in those days when I couldn’t even talk or think, but only used to sit by myself, not moving.

All this, yes, because of a leaf, which, as anyone knows, has no nerves, and which anyhow this one was already dead.

This is the kind of thing that occurs with me nowadays, after everything else that has transpired.

I am a Con girl. And in case you can’t tell, I’m still trying really hard to figure out how that could have happened.

The place to begin, I believe, is my last week of school. And the subject I will begin with is my End-of-Semester Meeting, with my assigned Learning Process Advisor, Mr. Barraine.

Now, the thing I must stress at the outset is I believe Mr. Barraine to be a good person—flawed as we all are, but who isn’t flawed? I have never for once doubted that he wanted the best for me, and my life process. You can check out his Perma-Me profile online. Do it now. You will discover that Mr. Barraine has two little girls at home whom he cares for very tenderly. One of whom is afflicted with a disability, but which has nevertheless in no way lessened Mr. Barraine’s affection for her. There is a delightful video of Mr. Barraine and his daughters feeding bread crumbs to ducks in the park, and as the adorable birds waddle and gabble, you can see Mr. Barraine relating with his children and laughing, while in his eye there is the sparkle of genuine joy.

Many commenters to this video have asserted that Mr. Barraine should not have been feeding the ducks in that manner, because bread crumbs are bad for them and disrupt their normal dietary habits, so feeding the ducks is in some aspects paramount to murdering them. But I in no way believe this should be taken as a mark against Mr. Barraine, who is not an ornithologist.

I mention all this because on the day in question, Mr. Barraine was meeting with me to discuss my upcoming Final Academic Review, which under the circumstances, I realize, must have been for him a very trying experience.

I arrived at his office punctually, and the first thing Mr. Barraine said was, “Hi, Sophie, I hope you’re doing OK.”

At which I almost started crying, because as Mr. Barraine knew, I was not doing OK, and there was practically no way I was going to do better, or anyway not in time to make a difference. But it was nice of him to say that.

He closed the door, and checked that it was closed, and covered the window, and checked that it was covered, and then he showed me where to sit, and said, “Shall we get started?”

Then Mr. Barraine touched his palmscreen, and the pictures on the walls disappeared, and instead of sitting in an office with books and old-time paintings, we were sitting in the middle of a display of my academic records, which was not a nice place to be.

“Let’s see what we have, here,” Mr. Barraine said, flicking his finger to sort through the files.

At that moment I did start crying, because I didn’t need to see those files to know what this was about. It was all displayed in my palmscreen, where my Pro/Con Holistic Score was glowing a shameful, awful yellow.

Mr. Barraine was respectful while I cried. I have always been grateful to him for what he said next. He said:

“Now, Sophie, I want you to know that everything that happens in this interview is entirely private and unrecorded. So you can express whatever you feel without it affecting your holoscore. If you need to express some anger, go right ahead. You can even call me nasty names, if that’ll help. Do you want to try that? Do you want to call me nasty names?”

He smiled, and it was so nice of him to say that, in that particular way, that I laughed even while I was crying.

“People have done that, you know,” said Mr. Barraine. “A lot of young people have sat where you’re sitting, and called me all kinds of nasty names.”

At that, I felt so bad for Mr. Barraine that I stopped feeling bad for myself, and like that, my tears cleared up and I was ready to begin.

“Of course,” said Mr. Barraine, “if you in anyway violate the Campus Interpersonal Conduct Policy, that will have to be immediately reported. Now, let’s get going.”

He brought up a chart that showed my grades, and a chart that showed my peer networks, and a hundred other charts that showed a hundred different things. But at the center of it all was my Pro/Con holistic score, glowing on a display in the middle of the wall, so awful I could hardly look at it.

“I’m looking over your records,” Mr. Barraine said, “especially at your holistic score, Sophie, and it seems like during the past few years, we’ve started to see—”

“I’m in the yellow,” I said, feeling breathless. “I know. And I can explain.”

But what I want to underscore, at this juncture in my narrative, is that I have never been one to, as people say, “toot my own horn.”

What follows is a quote from my family’s Vice Assistant Child-rearing Advisor, who prepared my first ever psychological profile:

Sophie . . . has incredibly well-developed sensitivities. Her reading of facial expressions is advanced for her age, and her various empathetic reactions are off the charts. As to her intellectual aptitudes, they show . . . potential for great improvement. The danger is that with such high sensitivities, Sophie may face unique life challenges. But with proper mood management, I believe she will grow up to be an extremely positive social member.

Now, “the proper way to interpret praise,” as my Test Prep Advisor says, “is as a challenge to do better, not a reward for what you’ve done.” So I believe this is good advice, and see my above-average empathetic abilities, which my VACR so carefully documented, not as something I can take credit for myself, but as a responsibility unto which I have been given. Thus, I have always endeavored to use my empathetic and facial-reading talents, such as they may be, for the constructive support of others.

And this is what I endeavored to achieve, for example, in my fourteenth year, when my mother decided that my father no longer fulfilled her needs as life partner. This was an example of a challenging experience. But I reminded myself that people differ, and sometimes achieving true intimacy means finding a partner who, as people say, “makes the grade.” Also because people achieve life aims at different rates. And the truth is, as we all observed, since we had gotten the extra funds for my Student Development Program, my father had no longer been putting as much effort into his own life process as previous.

Thus, when my mother sued my father for mishandling my Student Development money, I understood why she might feel the need to do that, but also how difficult it would be for my father not to be a part of my development anymore. And I did everything I could to express how I still loved them both and supported them, which I posted every day on my Perma-Me profile.

And it was during this admittedly trying interval, that I noticed my efforts did not go unacknowledged. Because partway through the year, my teacher, Ms. Ebro, requested a private meeting with me. We signed the privacy waivers, and went into the school’s privacy room, and activated the privacy settings, and while we were in there, Ms. Ebro told me how she and the other teachers had observed what was occurring with me. How they had been following my mother’s video diary of the lawsuit online, plus the posts my mother had been putting on her RantSpace page, about my father and the divorce. Also they had been following the videos my father had been sharing on his RantSpace page, about my mother, in some of his more disinhibited moments. And they had seen the page my father’s girlfriend had made about my mother, and the posts my mother had written about me. And Ms. Ebro said it was truly shocking to see what some people will say online about their families.

This was a significant moment for me.

But what Ms. Ebro said was how she and the other teachers had been observing my own behavior in response to these developments. And how they appreciated my maturity. And she said that sometimes being brave and mature is at least as important as, per example, learning to solve for x or studying pond life.

“After all,” Ms. Ebro said, “we know what kind of person you are, Sophie. And when I say that, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m referring to.”

I did, but didn’t say so. But what truly affected me was what Ms. Ebro said next. She said she had talked to the other teachers, and they would be factoring these considerations into my holistic semester scores, in conjunction with my scholastic grades.

And I admit, I may have overresponded a little when Ms. Ebro said all this. But it was not to my detriment. Because afterwards, my Pro/Con Holistic Score went very green. As I had just gotten my first palmscreen implanted, this was a source of significant comfort to me. I used to pull up the covers at night, and turn on my palmscreen, and sit in a kind of glowing green cave, and think about all the opinions that had gone into that holoscore, all the comments my peers had made about me, all the grades my teachers had submitted, all the assessments of my Student Development Team. And how all this information, so judiciously evaluated, was presented in this simple green light, to remind me of the support and positive feelings I had brought into the world.

Well, that is just one example of a time when I demonstrated Pro behavior.

There were others, like when my Wealth Management Advisor had his collapse, or when my Physical Development Coach was accused of improper child handling. But what I want to talk about now is what happened with Roman Cheryshev.

This was in sophomore year of college, when Roman Cheryshev was a freshman in my Consciousness through Confrontation seminar. And the thing about Roman was, he was very bright, but he was not the kind of person whose company other people enjoyed. I don’t know how Roman got to be in our institution, which is a prestigious institution. But the fact is, only a month after he got in, Roman’s Pro/Con Holistic Score was moving toward the yellow. At first I thought he might be from a culture where Pro/Con standards are different from ours. But no, he was from New Jersey. Then someone told me Roman’s parents had homeschooled him for the Comp-Sci track, and hired a service to manage his scores, which I know is a thing that happens. But I believe it is an ill-advised thing, as in, what will transpire when such a young person enters, as people say, “the real world”?

In any event, Roman was not socially fluent, which made me feel a lot of empathy for him. In seminar, he would become upset when people told him ways in which his behavior was entitled and offensive, which was not only a very Con reaction, but also contrary to the very aims of the course. But I reflected how difficult it must be to be without strong social capacities, so I became his friend.

This proved difficult. Partly because my peer network kept giving me Con votes for bringing Roman to social occasions, impacting on my holoscore very negatively. But also because Roman, for whatever reasons, also kept giving me Con ratings! I don’t understand why he would give me a Pro rating one night and a Con the next, inasmuch as we spent all our time the same way, which was with me listening while Roman expressed his anger. Roman did have a lot of anger. To confront someone about their Pro/Con votes is, of course, a very Con behavior, but when I hinted at my feelings, Roman said:

“What, you think you’re special, Sophie? You think you deserve some kind of reward for hanging out with me? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

I told Roman I didn’t think I was special, and what I enjoyed about him was his honesty.

At which he said, “Well, I think you’re full of s**t, how’s that for honesty? But whatever.”

Which was the kind of thing Roman often said to me.

This was when we were hanging out in his room almost every night, eating pizza and talking about Roman’s feelings. And that was where we were one Saturday night, when Roman suddenly got a funny look. Now by this time, confessedly, my Pro/Con Holistic Score was not so green as previous. I had brought Roman to several events with my peer network, where he experienced issues related to inappropriate touching. So I was beginning to be conflicted about the friendship. Also, it may be that my sensitivity, though usually high, was not so high as ordinarily. In any event, when Roman did what he did, I reacted uncharacteristically, which I mean, by getting scared and kicking him in the face.

These are the words Roman said to me, that night, which I quote here not to be adverse, but only in the spirit of veracity.

“B***h, what the f**k? Crazy t**t, you come here every night, playing on me, then I finally get the balls to make a move, you shoot me down? Seriously? Motherf**king c**kteasing c**t.”

As noted, I have set all this down not to cause hurt, but because it is in fact what Roman said to me.

But the upshot is, after this incident, my Pro/Con Holistic Score took a gigantic hit. And it was because Roman kept giving me Con votes! I tried to engage with him constructively about it, but he only told me I had “played him,” and how the worst thing a girl can do to a guy is give him those kinds of mixed signals. Then he told other guys I had “set him up,” and they all gave me Con votes, too! So I was receiving Con votes every day, and this, plus a few other, unrelated factors, was, as people say, “the perfect storm,” which made my holoscore begin to drop.

All this was what I explained to Mr. Barraine.

But Mr. Barraine said that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, which was actually more regarding my academic records.

At which point he pulled up a file and said, “Sophie, now tell me honestly, do you know where this is going?”

At this time I was grateful no one else could see my face. Because in the file were the requirements for my major, which included my Peer Education Program.

“We have a problem, don’t we?” said Mr. Barraine.

The problem was, for years, my Peer Education score had been going up and up, until it was very Pro, and then in the fifth year it began to go down, until it was very Con.

But I told Mr. Barraine I could explain, because this was in fact what I was trying to express to him.

And the thing I explained was, firstly, how much I appreciated the innovative spirit of our institution. Because a student goes to college to learn, correct? But who do students learn from most? Our peers, indubitably! So I thought it was very credible of our institution to demand a full six years of Peer Education courses, which not only cuts down on the need for expensive professors, but is also empowering for the younger generation.

The problem was, in my fifth year Peer Education course, I had been put in a workshop with Damaris Fierte, who, as everyone knows, is known for her unstinting efforts at peer education.

Now, at the time, Damaris Fierte had a deep green holoscore, whereas I, thanks to Roman, had only a pale green holoscore. So it was justifiable for her to educate me.

But still.

The workshop was on Personal Profile Management, in which we had to critique each other’s Perma-Me profiles. And it was my turn to be critiqued. And the first thing Damaris Fierte critiqued about my Perma-Me profile was how I had devoted so much of my time to associating with a person like Roman Cheryshev.

“He’s a predator. An abuser. I mean, I don’t want to say this, but looking at your profile, Sophie, a person could get the impression—an employer, a potential contact—I mean, they could see you as some kind of enabler.”

At which I felt concerned, and explained how I had only felt sorry for Roman, and was trying to be his friend.

At which Damaris said, “So you brought him to my friend’s party? Where he inappropriately touched people? This was someone you wanted for a friend?”

At which I said, I didn’t consider Roman a close friend, exactly, but more like a—

“What?” said Damaris. “If he wasn’t your friend, what did you want from him? Just to use him? Just for the Pro votes?”

I was now beginning to see some of the workshop participants looking at me very problematically.

Then Damaris said, “I think this is an important lesson in Profile Management, guys. Because when people look at your Personal Profile, an employer, a recruiter, what they want to see most is authenticity. If it seems like you’re taking on too many charity projects, or being nice to unpopular people just for the pity votes, I do think that can reflect on you very adversely.”

And in the final analysis, the workshop ended up giving me a strong critique.

But what I want to say is what happened after.

Because I went to Damaris after class and said did she really have to give me such a strong critique? And I wasn’t trying to say my Perma-Me profile wasn’t in need of improvement. But given there was a need for improvement, couldn’t there be a more constructive way to go about it?

This was when Damaris unloaded on me.

What she said was she had always had concerns. She said she could tell right away what kind of person I was, how I always overpromoted myself and my abilities. She said it was pathetic, how I talked, all the big words I tried to use, and when she looked at my Perma-Me profile, she didn’t think I belonged here at all, in this kind of prestigious institution. She said in fact we both knew exactly why I was here. And if there was one thing she didn’t like, Damaris said, it was a Yellow who acts like a Green, or a Red who thinks she’s a Yellow.

At this point I began to have strong feelings. Because I remembered a day, weeks ago, when we had critiqued Damaris’ Perma-Me profile. Which was, admittedly, the best profile I ever saw. Damaris was from New York City, and she went to a private school, and had a huge Child Development Team, and lots of money since she was born. In her profile, there were so many extra classes and volunteer jobs and enrichment programs, I wondered how her Child Development Team could have found time to plan so many activities.

But there was one part of her Perma-Me profile that Damaris kept trying to skip, even though the class kept wanting to go back to it. It was a video of Damaris auditioning for the college’s summer LEO business mentorship program. Which under the video, Damaris had written:

DIDN’T GET IN, OH WELL, I’M JUST SO HAPPY TO HAVE HAD THE CHANCE FOR SUCH A GREAT AND FUN AUDITION!!!!

But if you looked at the video, Damaris did not look happy. If you have ever spent a lot of time throwing up, from nerves or any other reason, let me tell you, you know the signs.

The strong feelings were because I remembered my own time in the LEO program. And how I hadn’t even auditioned for it, but instead got in by special appointment. The coordinators had to rush me through the enrollment process, then the training process, until I was the last one to get on the rocket. Even then, when I was sitting in my flight seat, strapping in, I could hardly believe I had gotten this far, me, Sophie Lee, a tourist in space.

When we got past the boost phase, into Low Earth Orbit, the program leader took us into the viewing chamber, and showed us the Earth so far below. The purpose of the program was to join business leaders on a trip to outer space, he said, and learn from their insights and leadership experience. It was business-sponsored, so it was a big honor. The program director had a company in financial services, and he said we had been chosen for this opportunity because of a time in our lives when we demonstrated exceptional leadership. Now was a chance for us to look down and think about the planet we might one day be leading, and what he wondered was, did any of us have anything we’d like to say?

At this point, I began to get a weird feeling in my stomach, and I unbuckled my harness and floated to the viewscreen, and looked down on the continents below.

Then I turned and looked at the business leaders buckled into their flight chairs, and what I said was that the main thing I was thinking was not how small the Earth seemed from up here, but how big.

At this, the business leaders all smiled and nodded.

I said it made me feel humble, thinking about what a challenge it must be, being a leader to such a huge place.

The business leaders now smiled and nodded very strongly.

But I kept feeling weird, and I said it seemed like such a big challenge, it actually seemed like an impossible challenge, like it was crazy to think you could try and control what was happening down there, or even really understand it.

At this point some of the business leaders stopped smiling and nodding, and I sensed it was time to go back to my seat and enjoy the complimentary low-grav spherical cocktails. But I still felt weird, so I kept talking.

What I said was, when you thought about it, to the Earth, human beings were basically like bugs, no more special than any other species, whether endangered or no.

What I said was, if you looked at it that way, what could an individual person, however accomplished, really count for?

What I said was, didn’t it almost seem crazy, all the way up here, for any one person to be richer or more important than another, and if you thought about it, if something were to unfortunately happen, and our spaceship were to explode on reentry, would it even make a difference to anyone down there, except of course our families?

After I said all this, none of the business leaders were smiling and nodding at all, and a lot of the other students were letting go of their cocktail spheres and looking at me, like, What’s the matter with you? Then, when we got back to Earth, I discovered my holoscore had dropped almost twenty percent, and all the business leaders had marked me down as being “definitely not leadership material.”

So that was what I told Damaris Fierte. And I said she was right about me. How I knew I didn’t belong here, in such a prestigious institution. In fact, what I said was that I envied her, because what I now realized was, the LEO business mentorship program was as big a risk as an opportunity, and in my case, having utterly blown it, I had totally tanked my holoscore.

At this Damaris looked at me a long time, and I could see her feelings had changed. Finally she said, “Sophie, you know, I think that’s the most honest thing I ever heard you say.”

But I blew it.

Because, the more I thought about it, the more I realized Damaris was right. How all this time, in college, even in my Childhood Development Program, I had been trying to be someone I was not, and to seem smarter than I was. And I was ashamed of myself.

So I said, “Damaris, the thing is, you really are a smart and amazing person. And you’re right, I don’t belong here, but you really do. And you should have been the one to go on the LEO trip, not me, because I truly believe one day you could be a great leader.”

At which she said, “No, no,” and looked sick again, shaking her head.

But I said, “No, seriously, I truly believe that.” And then I said what was probably the stupidest thing I ever said in my whole life, which was, “How come we’ve never been friends?”

But right away I could see I had majorly screwed up. Because Damaris stood back, and her mouth was open and she was panting, and she looked angrier than I’ve ever seen anyone get angry.

And she said, “Sophie, see, this is exactly what I’m talking about! Everything you do, it always has to be a big calculation. You say all these nice things, and I really believed you, and now I see you’re just manipulating me to join your stupid peer network and boost your holoscore!”

At which I didn’t say anything, because I was so surprised.

“This is truly shameful,” Damaris said as she walked away. “Truly, truly shameful. I can’t even educate you in how shameful this is.”

And when I checked, I saw what I feared, which was that every person in Damaris’ peer network had given me an enormous Con vote.

Now, coming from someone with Damaris’ score, that meant something.

But when I told all this to Mr. Barraine, he shook his head.

“No, Sophie,” he said. “The Peer Education stuff, that’s only a sidebar. What we’re here about today is your major, especially your literature courses. And I have to tell you we’ve been noticing some very troubling signs.”

At this I was surprised, because, since entering college I have become, as my Student Career Coach likes to say, a “true lover of the word.”

But Mr. Barraine used his palmscreen to display some different records, which I didn’t recognize, and he said, “Does this mean anything to you?” And when I said, “No,” he said, “Are you sure?”

Then he came around his desk, and pulled up a chair.

He said, “Sophie, do you know what the global rank of this institution is?”

I did, and I told him.

Mr. Barraine said, “Do you know why we are ranked so high?”

I said it must be because of the university’s immense positive contributions to society.

Mr. Barraine smiled. “Do you know what the Ivy League graduate enrollment rate among our alumni is? The first-year employment rate? The average salary at ten years? The estimated value of our name as an attractor of venture capital? The alumni fundraising score? Or how about this?”

He brought up another chart, which covered almost a whole wall, and this one I definitely recognized.

“These are the private and public parties,” Mr. Barraine said, “who have agreed to invest in your education. Here’s the government’s contribution. Here’s AdverBetter. Here’s ThinkTrendTrack. Here are all the media and marketing groups that loaned money for your Student Development Team. They all contributed to the financing of your education, Sophie, because your holoscore positioned you, at the time, as an immensely high-potential individual. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. The reason you’re in this school, Sophie, is because we don’t only educate students here. We educate the whole person.”

Mr. Barraine drew a round shape in the air, a little too round, I thought, inasmuch as it was supposed to be me. But this was not a time, I sensed, for critical remarks.

“With my approval,” Mr. Barraine said, “you’ll soon be meeting with representatives of these parties for your Final Academic Review. They’ll be evaluating you for employment opportunities. And they’ll be interested in seeing, as early-access recruiters, what their investment in you has produced. You’ll tell them, I’m sure, all about your enjoyment of our rare animal handling workshops, our AI-training program, our maglev-equipped, five-story VR athletics facility. But you’ll also tell them, of course, about your passionate engagement in our many humanities classes specializing in improved empathetic response. I believe you would agree that improving empathy is one of the major benefits of a liberal arts education. But Sophie, tell me, what do you think these people will say if they find out one of our top empathetic performers is, in fact, as it seems, deeply biased?”

I admit I responded inappropriately, by jumping out of my chair saying, “Biased? How?”

Mr. Barraine leaned back. “Do you really want to ask me that question, Sophie? Do you not see how going into specifics might, in fact, reify the very bias we’re discussing?” Then he pointed at the graphs and said, “These are your realtime empathetic assessments, which our team has been following closely.”

Now I was especially surprised, because realtime empathetic assessment has always been my favorite part of the literature major. In this time when the humanities are, as they say, “in crisis,” what better case could there be for the profound utility of the narrative arts? How many days have I whiled away in the scanning machines, resting my head in the EEG helmet, listening to the soothing flow of words or the images comporting vivaciously on the screen, and living along with the travails of Jane Eyre and Anna Karenina, of Sula and Nel, of Carrie and Charlotte and Miranda and Samantha? How often has it been a profound comfort to me to know that, in some small way, my empathetic responses to these great works will improve my positive contributions to society?

But as I communicated this to Mr. Barraine, he shook his head. “The trouble isn’t with your enthusiasm, Sophie. The trouble is the correlations. We’ve been looking at your neurological readings, and we’ve been noticing some problematic reactions. It’s not that you lack empathy. If anything, you have the opposite problem. You’ve been empathizing, I have to inform you, with some very unacceptable people.”

But I stood over him, feeling hopeful, and said, “Mr. Barraine, I can explain.”

And what I explained was how, when I’m in the scanning machines, engaging with all the powerful issues in the stories I’m experiencing, sometimes I start to worry I might have a problematic response. And at times, I get so worried that I make myself have the response, but only for the sake of understanding the response, as part of my ever-vigilant efforts not to have the response. So the realtime empathetic assessment machines, as I told Mr. Barraine, are probably only picking up evidence of my constant mental vigilance against such responses, and of my earnest and engaged grappling with even the possibility of such responses.

If that makes sense.

But Mr. Barraine looked at me for a long time, and said, “Sit down, Sophie.”

So I did.

And he went on:

“My job, Sophie, is to prepare you for your final review. These people you’ll be meeting are some of the smartest people in the world: politicians, technologists, advertisers, financiers. But the reason they want to meet with you is because that kind of smartness is no longer very valuable. Smartness is what computers have. And nowadays people are very expensive, and computers are very cheap. What’s valuable today, Sophie, is the ability to read human beings—to decipher their moods, their desires, their deepest longings and needs. That is the key to effective public relations. That is what recruiters want. That is the kind of skill the holoscore is meant to assess, and that is what your holoscore said you could do. It is what made you a competitive student, and what helped you attract so much investment, and what got you admitted to this institution.

“Now, Sophie. What message do you think it will send if I let you meet with those recruiters, a graduating student of this college, and explain to them that after three million dollars and many years of top-tier education . . . well, what do you think they’ll say when they learn that, as you told me today, you befriended a sexual predator in your second year? When they find out you sabotaged the LEO business mentorship experience for a group of our top performers? When they see how your peers have been voting against you? Finally, what will they think when they look at your responses to these literary works, and learn how prone you are to empathizing with the wrong kinds of people?

“Sophie.” He leaned forward. “I’m afraid I can’t approve you for graduation at this time.”

I looked at Mr. Barraine, and I was feeling several feelings. Firstly, about how I was apparently a terrible person, but no one had told me in all this time. Second, how in my interacting with Roman and Damaris and others, I had misread all their social cues. Finally, how all those smart people were waiting to give me my review, and they had invested so much money in my education, and how would they feel when they found out the person they’d been educating had turned out to be selfish and cruel and biased?

Mostly, though, I thought about Mr. Barraine. How in that video on his Perma-Me profile, when one of his little girls got scared by the ducks, she turned and hid her face in his shirt. And it was like Mr. Barraine didn’t even need to think. He just kept smiling and tossing out bread crumbs, and with his arm he held her to him.

The next thing I knew, alarms were ringing, and Mr. Barraine was jumping away, wide-eyed and shouting and pounding on his palmscreen. And I saw how without even thinking about it, I had gotten out of my chair and pressed my face against his chest.

“I need to report,” Mr. Barraine said, “a violation of the Interpersonal Conduct Code, class 25B, section H12. Note: nonsexual contact was initiated by the student during an approved private meeting. Repeat note: contact was student-initiated and nonsexual. I have disengaged and am now departing the location.”

He moved to the door, holding out his palmscreen to record how carefully he was keeping his distance from me. And I could see the tears on his shirt and face as he said, “Sophie, how could you? Of all the things to try and . . . I have daughters. I have a family.”

Then, just before he left, he tapped his palmscreen. And the last thing I remember is looking at my own palm, and seeing the effect of the assessment he had given me, which was my Pro/Con holoscore, glowing a bright, ugly red.

It feels strange to be in a home for Con women. Everyone here is deep in the red, a confirmed negative influence on society. Yet during the day-to-day, you hardly know. We have meals and watch TV. One woman here was a daycare worker who took care of learning-disabled children. One day she passed out during her duties, and one of the children had a fall and died. She doesn’t talk, but some of us take turns sitting with her. Then there is a woman who attempted suicide four times, and a drug addict, whose name is Tina. One time, I told Tina about my struggles with Pro/Con voting, and she said:

“Oh, man, my people never gave me no votes. If they had feelings, they just acted on ’em. Ha, ha, yeah, they hit you soft, that means they only hate you a little. But if they hit hard, well, then they must really love you.” Then Tina laughed, looking at my face, and said, “Oh, Sophie, that’s why I like you, girl, you always take things so serious.”

She said she wanted me to know they were all giving me Pro votes around here, though admittedly, given their own scores, it wouldn’t count for much.

Nobody can understand why I’m in this place. To be honest, I don’t understand either. I used to be at the top of the Pro ratings, attend a prestigious university, go to meetings with the country’s biggest business leaders. What I want now is for my narrative to be a help to others, and aid them in avoiding the pitfalls I have taken. There are times, though, when I feel like I will never understand, and always be deep in the red, no good to anyone.

As for what transpired after my meeting with Mr. Barraine? That particular time is hard to recall. They say that when the officials came, I was sitting in a chair in his office, and wouldn’t move. For weeks after, I wouldn’t speak or do anything. They had to bring me to a hospital and take care of me. I remember I was there when my mother came, and told me she was sorry for everything, and reminded me that while it is very easy to fall into the red, it can be very difficult to climb back out. Some of the underwriters of my education also came, and reminded me about the opportunities I could still have if I remembered my responsibilities and pulled myself together. But mostly I just sat there, doing nothing, except falling ever deeper into the red.

I thought about the negative scores I had given people in my life, and the friends I had voted out of my peer network, and how one time my mother had wanted to talk about my father, and I had slammed the door. But mostly I thought about the reason this all started, which is the one thing I haven’t talked about, because to be truthful it still feels so weird.

This was in seventh grade, when they introduced an autistic boy into our school, as part of an experimental program. He was seriously autistic, so nobody wanted to be near him, because he would do things like grabbing you when you didn’t expect. But there were some people he liked, and one of those people was me.

Then one day, some other kids were doing something to the autistic boy, and suddenly he started to howl and ran across the lunchroom, throwing his arms around me from behind. I don’t know what the other kids had done. All I knew is, the autistic boy was hugging me in a way where I couldn’t breathe. That was the day everything changed. Because people began to panic and shout, as there had been prior incidents. And the more they shouted, the harder the boy squeezed, until my head began to go dark.

But instead of struggling, I whispered to the boy, and reached up a hand and stroked his arm. After a while he loosened his grip. I felt very calm. And I turned around and hugged him back. It surprised everyone. When the boy’s parents saw the videos that had been taken, they started a Pro-Vote campaign on my behalf, even though the boy had to go into an institution because of what he did. And the campaign took off, and before I knew it, the Pro votes came in, millions of votes from around the world. And that was what made my holoscore go so deep into the green, and what made me seem like such a promising student, and why so many investors wanted to put their money into my Child Development Program. And that was why everything turned out the way it did.

But what I remembered, while I was lying all that time without moving, was how it actually felt, when the autistic boy grabbed me. How I was so scared I wanted to scream. But I was also so scared I couldn’t scream. He was so much bigger than me, and he wouldn’t let go, and people were screaming about how I might die. I couldn’t even say why I did what I did. It was like there was a different person inside me, who lifted up a finger and gently brushed his hands. When he responded, I knew what to do, and I stood and put my arms around him. Everyone became silent. I remember him shaking, and making puffing noises, like a cat when it can’t stop sneezing. Then he began to quiet down, and I stroked my hands along his back, and put my cheek against his cheek. It was like there was no one else. It was like there was just us two. I felt it go through him, a kind of hum, like a vibration I could feel in my hands. That was when I knew, just by the feel of him breathing—I knew he would be peaceful, this person in my arms.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, November-December 2017.

About the Author

Nick Wolven lives in the Bronx. His science fiction has appeared in a wide range of publications, and is forthcoming in Asimov’s, F&SF, Analog, and various anthologies. He sometimes contributes reviews to the Washington Independent Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickwolven.

Talking Cells: Deciphering the Messages in Our Blood

Douglas F. Dluzen

The average human has between 4.7 to 5.7 liters of blood, all traveling throughout nearly 100,000 kilometers (approximately 60,000 miles) of arteries, veins, and capillaries that form the circulatory system. We’re quite familiar with the functions and purposes of many of the larger biological components found in our blood.

Recently, scientists have discovered that our cells use the circulatory system as the infrastructure for a vast and efficient communication network that sends biological messages throughout the human body. These messages coordinate the activities of our tissues and cells and are often perturbed in disease. Many of them are not cells or proteins. So, what are those messages and what do they really mean?

Many of us are familiar with two major types of cells found in our blood. The first are red blood cells (RBCs). Their role is to carry oxygen from our lungs to the tissues of our body. They also give our blood its canonical red coloration. RBCs carry hemoglobin, a protein which contains iron that physically binds with oxygen to transport it to our tissues. Since RBCs are so incredibly important, there are approximately 25 trillion of them and they make up the largest percentage of cells in our bodies.

White blood cells (WBCs) also have a prestigious reputation, and for good reason. WBCs are a major defense mechanism in our body. These cells come in many flavors, including microbe-eating macrophages, antibody-secreting B cells, and T helper cells. T helpers coordinate the activities of various other immune cells in circulation, often via secreted protein signals. And while there are many other kinds of immune cells, B cells and T helpers illustrate the example that our WBCs secrete proteins into the bloodstream for functional purposes. The cell-to-cell communication exhibited by T helpers is a vital feature for the proper functioning of our immune system.

Many of these proteins are the most studied of the small molecules in our circulation. When you go to the doctor you might get a blood panel and have one of many inflammatory cytokines assessed. Albumin is made in the liver and released into the bloodstream. Aptly described as a shuttle protein—it will safely ferry other molecules, including smaller proteins, to other tissues of the body. It is the most abundant protein in our blood and is integral to our everyday health.

For example, albumin binds with bilirubin, a toxic by-product that results from the metabolism of hemoglobin (that wonderful protein that carries our oxygen in RBCs). Too much bilirubin in our blood can cause jaundice and other serious health problems. Albumin soaks up bilirubin and returns it to the liver, where it can be safely processed and expelled from the body. Measurements of serum albumin serve as a biomarker for our overall health. Too much or too little in the blood warn of potential problems in the liver, kidney, and other tissues.

Angiotensin is a hormone that is released into the bloodstream and it binds with receptors on the surface of our endothelial cells. Those cells form the innermost layer of our blood vessels and protect/separate the surrounding tissue from direct contact with the blood. When they are bound to angiotensin, they initiate their own signaling pathway that is received by vascular smooth muscle cells. These cells surround our vessels and control dilation and constriction in order to lower or raise our blood pressure. Several medicines that control blood pressure interfere with angiotensin’s ability to bind endothelial cells and interrupt messaging.

Scientists have known the importance of albumin and angiotensin and other proteins like them for some time now. There’s certainly more to learn, but we have a clear idea of their major roles in human physiology. Less is clear about the other entities found in our blood and those that make up a significant portion of the cellular communication network.

In the 1960s, clinicians observed cell-like, membrane-enclosed particles in the blood. These particles were much smaller than a typical cell yet contained many proteins that appeared to have a purpose in assisting blood coagulation. In the 1980s, it became clear these particles were a type of enclosed vesicle with content stored inside of them. Additional vesicles were found to contain other proteins that had functional roles besides helping with coagulation.

One such protein found is called ferritin. Scientists observed that it was synthesized within immature RBCs, packaged into small vesicles, and then released into circulation. Ferritin’s role in the bloodstream is to soak up free iron and transport it to tissues that have a need for it. Vesicles protect and serve as a safe shuttle pod for ferritin and other proteins to find their target tissues.

Today, we refer to all the different types of vesicles in the blood collectively as extracellular vesicles (EVs). EVs perform a variety of functions, including transporting material into and out of cells, shuttling proteins, and acting as a carrier for molecular messages and signals between our tissues. We all have EVs in our blood and they come in a variety of sizes.

The smallest EVs are called exosomes. They are on average 50 to 100 nanometers, whereas a typical WBC is anywhere from 10 to 15 micrometers in size. This means that exosomes are typically 200x smaller than our immune cells. There are also larger vesicles called microvesicles, which are only 20x smaller than our WBCs, and even larger vesicles can form as cells break apart into smaller pieces during processes like programmed cell death. Each of these classes of EVs have unique functions, but we will focus just on exosomes for our discussion here.

Exosomes are found in nearly all of our bodily fluids and they can contain a variety of different cargo, such as: protein-coding mRNAs, very small RNAs, lipids and cholesterol, mitochondrial DNA, and signaling proteins and hormones. The outside surface of exosomes contains numerous protein receptors that help each exosome recognize specific tissues and cell types and bind with them in order to deliver their cargo to cells. For example, RBCs package and shed vesicles that can contain proteins important for insulin signaling. In diabetics with insulin resistance, these vesicles contain higher concentrations of these proteins and when these exosomes bind with recipient WBCs, these higher concentrations influence WBC function. Further understanding of this messaging system may shed light on how insulin resistance can be more effectively treated in diabetic patients.

Given the complexity of the human body, it is unsurprising that our tissues must constantly talk with one another. The circulatory system provides a very convenient passageway for information in vesicles to flow between tissues near and far and EVs ensure that this information gets to the right destination. But just like all other cellular processes, this mail delivery system is not immune to becoming corrupted. EV and exosome concentration in the bloodstream decreases as we age. As well, the cargo of EVs in older adults is different, with higher concentrations of key proteins that may stimulate unnecessary cellular growth and proliferation. This may be a clue into the onset and development of age-related cancers, but we’re still unsure why EV content changes as we grow older.

Numerous cancers also use exosomes to communicate with our healthy tissues. Exosomes are secreted by tumor tissue to signal with cells in the nearby tissue environment and induce changes in noncancerous cells. These alterations generally favor the tumor and further promote that tumor’s growth. As well, when a tumor cell metastasizes, exosomes packaged and released by the cancerous cells will communicate with the new tissue site in order to induce physiological changes that promote the growth of the secondary tumor. This includes the release of hormones that spur the creation of new blood vessels to fuel the growth of the tumor in its new environment. Clinicians can now screen circulating tumor exosomes in our bloodstream to use as biomarkers for metastatic tumors in cancer patients and thereby aid their diagnosis or treatment.

Aside from some cancers, it’s still relatively unknown from which healthy tissues many of the EVs found in our blood originate. Additionally, researchers are only just beginning to distinguish the functional EV packages from cellular garbage and debris released via cell death or cellular damage. Understanding how to differentiate between these will be vital to push this field forward. It is possible that once this code is cracked, we could enter a new era in modern medicine where taking blood panels of our EVs will be useful to evaluate our own health or disease progression.

We also know there are small pieces of DNA and RNA found free-floating in our bloodstream, neither bound within EVs or attached to the outside of a cell. As of now, researchers are unsure of the purpose of the presence of these chunks of nucleic acids. Recent evidence suggests these small bits of genetic material are communicating with cells and influencing cellular activity.

Laboratories around the world are working to decode and understand the complete profile of RNA in the blood. We know that some specific circulating RNAs are already useful as biomarkers for specific diseases, just like exosomes. Blood concentrations of specific RNAs correlate with how a patient may react to a particular cancer treatment, such as serum levels of one RNA known as miR-193b. Assessing the concentration of miR-193b in the blood can differentiate esophageal cancer patients into good or poor responders to chemoradiation therapy. Knowing this could ultimately help tailor personalized approaches to disease therapy.

There are thousands of different RNAs in the blood and it could be that each of them is a biomarker for a particular disease or health outcome. We observed in my laboratory that circulating RNAs will also decrease in concentration in our blood as we get older, including in healthy individuals. We’re unsure what this means for the function of our tissues or cells, where these messages are intended to go, or what it means for our health if we modulate or change them. It’s possible that decreased communication between our cells and tissues results in age-related declines in their function or even spurring the onset of disease. We’re still on the frontier in this regard.

One thing is certain—our cells and tissues are constantly talking with one another by using the blood as a highway for their secret messages. If we can learn to speak this new language and truly understand and interpret how our tissues communicate, we can deepen our knowledge about how our cells work. We may even be able talk back to them, too.

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.

Syria, Time, and Typewriters:
A Conversation with Jack Skillingstead

Chris Urie

Wishing to change the past is a common thought we all entertain. Whether it is to right a wrong, avoid regret, or to extend a kindness we didn’t have time for at the moment, hindsight provides a view of the good, the bad, and the murky. Messing with timelines has long been a popular topic for authors, but Jack Skillingstead’s latest book takes a whole new approach to crossing the streams.

Olivia Nikitas is a hardened wartime journalist covering the waning moments of the war in Syria. While in Aleppo, she finds herself in dire circumstances with bullets flying and friends bleeding out on the floor. Something the size of a small bug slashes into the back of her neck and everything changes. The Chaos Function is an exciting genre-bending novel that explores the future and what it means to change the past.

Jack Skillingstead is the author of a number of novels and over forty works of short fiction. His work has appeared in four Year’s Best Anthologies and has been translated into a variety of languages, including Russian, Polish, Czech, Spanish, French, and Chinese. He was one of the winners of Stephen King’s “On Writing” Contest and has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novel The Chaos Function was released by John Joseph Adams/HMH on March 19th.

When and why did you get into writing?

My earliest memory of wanting to be a writer goes back to when I was twelve years old. I remember reading Galactic Derelict, by Andre Norton. I’d never seen, or heard, the word “Derelict.” I looked it up in the dictionary. After that, I went around repeating the word. I still like to say it out loud. So, there was a sensitivity to words right from the start. I did that kind of stuff all the time. Words were always more to me than merely their dictionary definition. Also, around that time I was watching a lot of Star Trek, and I used to take note of who wrote the scripts.

Even then, I knew the writing was the most important element. In junior high school, I worked on the school newspaper, but all I ever wrote were short fiction stories. I remember how clumsy my writing seemed in comparison to the work of real writers. I just ached to be able to do that. Once I even copied the first paragraph of a Howard Fast story (yes, Fast wrote some science fiction) and tacked it onto one of my feeble efforts. Or maybe it wasn’t as feeble as I thought, since the teacher didn’t seem to notice the difference. An attack of conscience later drove me to collect every copy of the issue in question and destroy them. So that’s sort of the “when” part of your question. As to the “why” part, I absolutely can’t tell you. The truth is, I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t want to tell stories.

The Chaos Function is action packed. How do you approach writing an action scene?

You approach an action scene the same way you approach any other scene. The same issues of narrative rhythm, character, and description are present. The pace within a scene may be different, but it varies. Action arises from a series of choices, the first being: what kind of book do I want this to be? In an action scene, or any scene, you look very closely at the details and then record them to the best of your ability. In a novel like The Chaos Function, where my intent was to keep the story rolling at freeway speed, I tried not to get sidetracked into meditations on character. It can be interesting, but it also tends to slow down the pace. I tried to always demonstrate character in action.

Your most recent novel pulls from current events and extrapolates into the future. What was it about the current events that inspired you?

Inspired is an interesting word in this context. You might instead ask what appalled me. Like everyone else these days, I find myself continually bathed in news, information, and conflict. Most of the news is bad. As a human being you want to do something about it. As a writer, you want to understand what I would call the patterns of disaster. My book is all about patterns of disaster.

A major theme of your book is remaking the future by changing the past. Why do you think changing the past is such an enticing theme?

Who doesn’t have regrets? Who hasn’t asked themselves: “If only . . . ”? Our lives are like a game show: Choices and Consequences! Most of us try to make the best choices we can based on available information. But we’re all human and sometimes we choose poorly even when we know we’re choosing poorly. Later, when the Consequences kick in, most of us, I think, would relish the opportunity to tweak the past in order to fix the present mess we find ourselves in. With The Chaos Function, my character Olivia actually finds herself in possession of such a power of retroactive choice modification. Things do go as she might of hoped they would.

Olivia Nikitas is a tough journalist, but over the course of the story, we see her open up to the reader and other characters. Her knowledge and experience of war-torn areas are central to her worldview. She feels incredibly real. Did you research any real-life journalists who specialized in being embedded in war zones?

I’d been reading about the civil war in Syria, trying to understand what was going on and why. I wanted to know more than what I was getting on various news feeds, and that meant doing some deep reading. At the same time, the book was simmering in the back of my mind. But I didn’t regard the two interests as being related—at least, not early on. That changed when I encountered Francesca Borri’s excellent Syrian Dust. Borri became a journalist specifically to cover the war in Syria. She also did books on Kosovo and the Israel/Palestine conflict. These books naturally led me to other modern-day war journalists, like Janine di Giovanni.

In Ghosts by Daylight she writes movingly not only about her experiences in what I would call disaster zones, but of the effect her work has had on her personal relationships. Somewhere in all this reading light bulbs started coming on, illuminating the overlapping territory between my still-forming ideas for the book I was then calling, The Probability Machine, and the reporting of these journalists. Why would someone repeatedly put themselves in these dangerous situations? What did it do to one’s psyche? Could you enter these disaster zones with an open heart, or must you armor yourself against every horror the world has to offer? Olivia has already formed the habit of wearing emotional armor before she ever enters the disaster. What were the consequences of always wearing emotional armor? By now Olivia Nikitas had stepped onto the stage, a fully formed individual in her own right, and The Chaos Function built its narrative web around her.

Being the near future, your novel features some advanced technology. What are some current technologies that inspired things like advanced screens and drone insects?

While it may not be an absolute given that we will be walking around with smartphones ten years from now, it’s a pretty safe bet that we will be tethered to the Internet by some kind of personal technology. I thought about going the wearable route, and there’s a little of that in book, but mostly my characters interact with their smartphones in ways we are already familiar with. The phones are fancier but essentially the same. As for drone insects, they already exist and are in the hands of our spy agencies. It seemed reasonable to project forward a little and describe the “flies” that Olivia and other journalists deploy to obtain difficult footage.

Your characters are well rounded with their own desires and motivations. Do you start with the characters’ personalities and see how they fit within your story or the other way around?

It’s different every time. Olivia’s character in The Chaos Function is informed by the narrative engine, and vice versa. One would not exist without the other, or so I imagine.

You’ve mentioned a number of times that writers often are looking to “scratch an itch” when writing a book. What was the itch that ended up as The Chaos Function?

For a while now I’d wanted to write a book that slipped across genre boundaries, something that people who don’t normally read a lot of science fiction might find accessible and entertaining. And I wanted to see if I could do this using a solid science fictional premise that would also please my existing audience. Easier said than done, right? Anyway, that was the itch.

How has Seattle influenced your work?

I’ve lived here, except for a few wandering years, my whole life. Hence, I have been, at least in part, formed by this very distinct region of the country. At the same time, I don’t regard myself as a regional writer per se. The influence must exist, but I don’t think I can analyze it. Certainly, I’ve used a lot of local settings in my books and stories.

You’ve said on occasion that some of your books were a bit of a struggle to produce. Was The Chaos Function a challenge or did all of the puzzle pieces fall together?

The struggling part of Chaos occurred, for the most part, before I started writing. In this book I spent more time sorting out story elements ahead of time. Of course, I didn’t sort them all out. I’m just not that kind of writer. But going in I knew more than I generally do, and that helped. I did three drafts in almost exactly one year, which is fast for me. By the way, I’m not saying there were no surprises along the way. One exciting development didn’t fully emerge until I was well into the final edits. There is a serendipitous element to creative work that can’t, and shouldn’t, be planned for. Planning ahead of time helps with structure, but the really good stuff is what appears unexpectedly, and you can’t plan the unexpected.

What projects are you working on next?

I’m writing a follow-up to The Chaos Function. The working title is The Extinction Tactic. It’s got a dynamite core idea that I’m not going to tell you. I’ve been working on the book since last May.

What does your writing process look like?

Once I’m writing, whether it’s a short story or a novel, I show up every day. I used to set minimum page goals, a habit I formed when sheets of paper actually rolled out of various typewriters. Three pages a day, five pages a day. In recent years I go by time-at-the-desk, rather than absolute page or word counts. For me, the writing has to proceed at its own pace and not some arbitrary daily accumulation. There are times when you have to force it a little. But like physical exercise, if it hurts too much, you’re doing something wrong. What’s the point of writing fast, if when you’ve finished the first draft it’s a tangled mess beyond untangling? Also, I used to be more freewheeling about the process. You know, just sit down and write, without much forethought. Nowadays I recognize forethought as essential. The only danger—and it’s a real danger—is I might forethought my way right out of being interested in actually writing the story.

Do you still use that Smith Corona Typewriter?

Hell no! I’m nostalgic for typewriters sometimes, but I would not want to work on them again. However, they did serve a very useful function in my life as a writer. They taught me to pay attention, close attention, to every sentence. Especially when typing a clean copy for submission, the cost was heavy if you made more than a couple of mistakes on a given page. I had a rule of three. Three xxxed out or white-outs and I had to retype the whole page. It was painstaking and aggravating. But it taught me to be a better writer. It taught me to slow down. Which is what I say to young writers, if they happen to ask for my advice. What’s the hurry? I say. Take your time. Dwell on the details. That’s where you find your voice.

You mention that part of your path to becoming a published writer meant you had to “get organized.” What did that entail? Spreadsheets?

Ahead of my first pro sale I did make a kind of spreadsheet out of poster board. Excel existed but I wanted a big thing I could pin to the wall over my desk. Part of the difficulty of succeeding in this business is the quite natural reluctance on the part of writers to absorb the pain of rejection. And even though I believed then, as I do now, that rejection can make you a better writer by teaching you the value of rewriting and perseverance, I was, and am, no different than anyone else: I HATE GETTING REJECTED.

The problem with that, is that you tend to give up on stories too soon, or, these days, you might opt to self-pub and call it a day. My poster-board spreadsheet featured a top horizontal row of ten short stories. Vertically on the left side of the board I listed ten fiction markets. I figured ten markets per story would be giving the work a fair chance, at least. I spent a nice weekend evening with my daughter making labels and addressing envelopes and printing copies of the ten stories (e-subs were not a thing back then). This was to head off my reluctance to submit a story that had already hurt my feelings by getting itself rejected a couple of times. I had ten copies of each story already sealed in 9 x 12 envelopes and ready to go, so there was no work and no time to second guess between submissions. I also bought one of those office spikes on which to impale all the rejections I just knew were coming my way. Anyhow, the preparation itself must have appeased the gods and demonstrated my intent to not go away, because almost immediately I started selling. First a couple of stories to a small press in the Midwest and then “Dead Worlds” went to Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s—and I was on my way at last.

Where does Stephen King’s “Not bad” comment rank on your list of reviews you’ve received?

At the time, it meant a lot to me. Winning that contest and seeing my little story posted on King’s website was a surreal experience. It was as if a door to the bigger world I longed to inhabit had finally and unexpectedly cracked open. The weirdness of Stephen King reading my story—right away I wished I had done a better job. Because, you know, I could have.

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.

Shadows, Swordplay, and Ballroom Dancing:
A Conversation with Anna Kashina

Chris Urie

Most of us are prone to flights of fantasy. We imagine ourselves capable heroes of a mythical kingdom full of mystery, intrigue, swordplay, and magic. But fantasy stories are often shackled by shadows of elves, rings, and medieval knights. When a fantasy novel brings ideas both new and surprising, it’s worth celebrating.

Anna Kashina’s new novel Shadowblade seamlessly blends together adventure, romance, swordplay, and intrigue with a unique world. Naia dreams of becoming a Blademaster. After her training goes awry, she meets a stranger who rescued the sole survivor of a horrific massacre. This stranger wants to topple the line of imperial succession—and Naia finds herself at the vanguard of a plot that will change the world.

Anna Kashina is an author, a Russian-born biomedical research scientist at University of Pennsylvania, a competitive ballroom dancer, and a fan of martial arts, history, and folklore. Her books include the award-winning Majat Code series. Her latest novel, Shadowblade, will be available from Angry Robot Books on May 7th.

When did you get started writing?

I wrote my first “novel” when I was five—it was about 20 pages long, self-illustrated, and it ended with a romantic phrase “and they sailed off into the west, where the sun rises.” When grown-ups around me pointed out that the sun rises in the east, I was so embarrassed I immediately destroyed the manuscript. I never stopped writing, though, up until the time when I was ready to show my next piece to anyone. I was about twenty at the time.

How has working in academia influenced your writing?

Well, writing came first in my life, so I tend to think more of how my writing influenced my work in academia. Seriously, though, in both occupations, the ability to think logically, to organize your thoughts, and to phrase them precisely, are all key skills that can give one a major competitive edge. I tend to be more efficient in my academic job when I am also working on a novel in parallel. I guess the same is also true in reverse.

How has your knowledge of the Russian language impacted the way you write or tell stories?

Oh, this is a complicated one. When I first came to the US—as an adult, after getting my degree in Russia—my biggest dream was to learn English as well as I know Russian. I wrote my first novel, The Princess of Dhagabad in Russian, and then took a huge Oxford dictionary and translated it into English. In the process, I not only learned a lot, but also had a full chance to appreciate the differences between the two languages.

Russian is great for imagery and long descriptions. English is perfect for dialogue and fast action. In most cases, there tends to be no direct translation between the two, so one really needs to make adjustments. Probably because of this, my first novel is full of descriptions and imagery, while my latest books tend to focus on action. Language-wise, it was a very transformational experience.

I believe I still have more finesse in Russian, so when I write fast and don’t want to pause to think of wording, I put in Russian words to return to later when I edit the text. I think and dream in English, though, so this is really a complicated mix.

Over the years, I learned to use this as a tool, rather than a handicap. By now, I know how to balance this consciously. If I want to do descriptions, I read books in Russian. If I need to focus on action, I read in English. These shifts can be very subtle, but I enjoy playing with them as needed.

Which time period in history do you feel has most influenced your work?

When I was growing up, I was fascinated with British history. My grandfather used to read me the earlier volumes of Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples as bedtime stories. I also studied mythologies from all cultures, any books I could lay my hands on. Speaking of the time periods, everything from ancient China to Europe before the invention of firearms can inspire my settings and stories.

What inspired your newest novel?

During my work on my previous books, The Majat Code trilogy, I got pretty deep into developing a cast of super-warriors, whose weapon style blends Eastern martial arts with a medieval European-style setting. In The Majat Code, we see these warriors in action, but we never get to learn what it takes to create one. This was my original inspiration, to show a path of a young girl from a misfit and an outcast to a super-warrior, all achieved entirely on her own merit.

It ended up as so much more, though. The Jaihar warriors in Shadowblade are reminiscent of the Majat, but different in many ways. And then there is the rest of the story too—starting with an overarching political plot to overthrow the emperor, and ending with the fact that, for the first time in my life, I tapped into my academic background to figure out the “science” behind a warrior’s superior skill, and the vulnerabilities that come with it. Working all this out was so much fun.

This isn’t your first series of novels. What appeals to you about writing a series?

Funny enough, when I wrote my first novel, I was dead set against ever writing series. I strongly believed that each next book in the series is bound to be worse than the previous one. I was absolutely sure I would never write a sequel in my life.

And then came Blades of the Old Empire, the novel I wrote for several years, until I became intimately familiar with all aspects of the world and the story. I couldn’t get enough of my characters. Writing began to feel like spending time with close friends. I missed it when I finished the book, and I continued to write chapters that, as I believed at the time, would never get published. I didn’t even realize I was writing a sequel until it was already more than half done. I think that this sequel ended up even better than the original (opinions differ, on that one), and the whole experience certainly made me a convert.

This appeal, of creating an entire world, populating it with kick-ass characters, and then being allowed to spend as much time with them as you want, is really unlike anything else. Worldbuilding for a brand new series does involve work, in addition to the fun. Writing sequels in the same world is pure undivided enjoyment.

The romance within your novels never feels forced or out of place; how do you go about crafting a believable romantic relationship?

In any romance—real or fictional—it’s all about people. I start by creating characters that feel like real people to me. Then I put them together—and literally just sit back and watch what they do. If I’ve done a good job of making them a match for each other, the attraction between them really comes on its own. If not, I never force it. Sometimes it takes time for them, more than I anticipated, but I always let them do it at their own pace.

Interestingly, when I wrote book one in my previous series, I was not sure about the fate of the main relationships until the very last pages of the book. In Shadowblade, though, the characters had a great chemistry right from the start. I hope there are no spoilers in this statement, but I am really happy about the way the dynamics between them played out.

Imperial succession can be complex. In Shadowblade, did you base this on any real-world historical dynasties?

I was guided by historical precedents at every step. Shadowblade is a blend of cultures, with the setting based mostly on the Middle Eastern civilizations. I took some of my inspiration from the Mogul Empire, but the plots around the imperial succession are actually connected to several episodes in Chinese history. A lot of this work was behind the scenes, but I believe glimpses of it do show through in the book.

When researching Shadowblade, what is one interesting fact you came across?

I was thinking of mentioning the history of medieval Middle Eastern clothes, or the early versions of chess that inspired the shatranj game in my book . . . but probably the most interesting one is the fact that people do actually eat deep-fried scorpions and find them tasty.

What does your writing process look like?

These days? Absolutely chaotic. I have two small children, and a very demanding day job, so there is absolutely no chance for a set writing time every day.

I carry my laptop in my bag at all times, and whenever I have any spare moment—even fifteen minutes—I sit down and write. I also write in the evenings, after I put my kids to sleep. And, I do research in between, sometimes scribble maps and details on pieces of paper and keep them around as I work on the text.

After coming up with a reasonable first draft, I always put it aside for a month or so, and work on something else, then come back and edit it from a fresh perspective. It takes several passes—the last two or three on paper, with the whole novel printed out.

Have you found a way to include your experience as a competitive ballroom dancer into any of your stories?

Oh, yes definitely! The warrior skills, as taught by the Jaihar, build on the real-life weapon techniques, but also include the techniques commonly overlooked in regular combat classes but taught extensively in ballroom dancing. Keeping your balance using stomach muscles, initiating movements from the tips of your toes, moving relative to your opponent, turning on axis, spotting your turns . . . Not all of them are explicitly mentioned in the book, but I do work through all the moves, and discuss them extensively with my martial arts consultants, and I am occasionally able to surprise them. I think I probably wouldn’t have chosen high-level blademasters as my characters if I haven’t studied both dancing and martial arts.

What is one piece of writing advice you’ve been given that has stuck with you throughout your career?

“Never give up.” This is the advice I live by every day.

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.

Editor’s Desk:
An International Journey

Neil Clarke

On more than a few occasions, I’ve been asked to explain my interest in international science fiction—and in particular—works in translation. With this month marking the publication of the first of nine translated South Korean stories in Clarkesworld, I thought it might be a good time to dig into that and explore our journey.

Truth be told, my interest is simply a case of being a big fan of short fiction and understanding that the best stories can come from anywhere, be it down the street or on the other side of the world. I’m a self-admitted data junkie, so after I became an editor, I started paying attention to the numbers behind the story submissions. Among the most glaring gaps I noticed was how little was being sent to us from outside the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. That bothered me.

One of the things I love about short fiction is that it is more friendly in pushing boundaries and in trying something new. While our work may be influencing local authors, there are also a number of other things—like culture, politics, and history—shaping their stories. If you are someone who appreciates finding something a bit different, you can see how those different ingredients bring something of value to the table. Foreign markets dominated by our own work interfere with that process. Not having them as part of our own is just as bad.

So, let’s go back to 2011. I had been blogging about my submissions data and wondering what could be done to improve things. I knew there were various indicators of communities around the world—things like the world’s largest science fiction magazine, SF World in China—but I didn’t know how to reach them.

Then Ken Liu sent me his translation of “The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Qiufan—whose novel Waste Tide comes out from Tor this month—and it confirmed so many things. I published the story in our April 2011 issue and from there, things began to change. Over the next few years, both Ken and John Chu sold me several translated Chinese SF stories and eventually, these efforts started gaining attention in China and beyond.

I want to pause here and point out something I was woefully ignorant of at the time: for right or wrong, the US/English language market has been placed on a pedestal internationally. In many cases, being published here is a major accomplishment and winning one of our awards more prestigious there than here. Years later, I would also discover just how much an attempt to hold open the door would be appreciated and valued by that community.

In the history of our field, many have tried to increase opportunities for international and translated works. For various reasons, they were largely unsuccessful. I have theories, but in the end, we have the significant advantage of being in the Internet age. Digital submissions eliminated the cost barrier for international submissions. Digital and online publishing meant greater international visibility for works published that way. It also made it easier for like-minded individuals and organizations to find and help one another. Combined, these changes have had a very positive impact and created a more compatible ecosystem for these projects.

But, decades of imbalance don’t go away overnight. Years of feeling unwelcome doesn’t suddenly go away because a few barriers vanished. The domestic publishing model often assumes a “build it and they will come” model in regards to story submissions. There are far more writers than can possibly be published and in a surplus condition like that, it’s easy to forget that there are some people you just aren’t hearing from, particularly when you are satisfied with what you’ve got. Even now, the number one question I receive from foreign authors is “do you publish authors from outside the US?” That’s depressing, but I only recently realized even that can be seen as progress. Unlike 2011 and before, they are asking and not assuming.

When Storycom noticed what we were doing at Clarkesworld and reached out to me, they started with the question, “How would you like to make this a regular thing?” Obviously, the concept intrigued me, but the logistics were intimidating. Two major deterrents to translation remained for me:

Like many Americans, I can only speak or read English and would have a difficult time properly identifying which works should be translated.

Translation is expensive and often costs significantly more than the original work itself.

Over the next few months, we addressed these (and other) issues before signing a one-year agreement. Despite the positive reaction to our occasional  translations received, I was concerned about the reception a more regular project would receive. Translations haven’t always been treated nicely by our field, so when the Kickstarter to launch the project generated such an overwhelmingly positive outpouring of support and interest, it was both vindicating and energizing.

Four years later, one of the best side effects of that particularly collaboration has been that it has made it easier to attract the amazing stories from around the world that I had always believed were out there. (Imagine that, publishing international works encourages more to be submitted.)

The balance between domestic and international works in Clarkesworld is now much more in line with where I think it should be, but there are still geographies we haven’t seen any or nearly enough works from. I’m eager to address that.

One of the big goals I had when we first started doing this was that someday, translations and international works wouldn’t be considered a novelty you see once in a while, they’d be a normal part of the ecosystem. And judging by the number of magazines and anthologies including them and a growing reader interest, I’d say the field is years ahead of where I hoped we’d be by now. And while there’s still a long way to go, particularly with novels, I continue to be optimistic that we can continue to embrace new works from around the globe.

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:
Biolight paws at sunset

Arthur Haas

About the Artist

Arthur Haas (1969) is a concept artist from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He specializes in environment design and concept art for the entertainment industry and has a passion for science fiction. Arthur works as a freelance artist for major Hollywood film studios and international book publishers.