Entangled

Beston Barnett

1
<air>

I am lonely on Earth.

As with many of my emotions, I cannot be certain whether this loneliness is a result of Earth socialization or genuine inborn experience. But I do pine for a companion. Not sexual intercourse though, I cannot pretend an interest in that. I could have something to mimic erogenous zones rigged to my xuit, but surely that would be disingenuous to my partner? Sex is meant to be a sharing of heightened intimacy. I would not wish to mislead.

No, with my partner I wish to be honest in all things. And is that Earth socialization as well—the wish for depth and honesty in a relationship—or is it something I bring with me? Again, I cannot be certain.

Luckily, there are a number of dating sites for people like me, who, either because of disability or disinclination, are seeking a partner without sexual obligations. There are even some with a variety of gender labels. “Non-binary” is accurate. It is still too early in the process of Earth’s inclusion into the Intergalactic Cooperative to expect these sites to have a box labelled “transhuman.”

I put that information under “Interests/Hobbies.”

2
<air>

Aliquah, a woman with whom I had a relationship for about six months, once described a dream she had about us:

“We were lying on a wide meadow of beautiful green grass, the two of us, like kids making snow angels without snow. Our arms were outstretched and our fingers barely touched. A lovely breeze ruffled the grass.

“I heard a disturbing sound. A thumping but also a fluttering: flutter/thump/flutter . . . flutter/thump/flutter . . . I looked over at you, but instead of your xuit, you were wearing an old sci-fi robot, with a big steel boiler for a torso and vacuum tubes for eyes. You were large and somewhat rusty, like a submarine beached on the meadow. The flutter/thump/flutter was coming from inside you. I was able to climb rungs up your side and open a hatch in your chest. Inside, in the dark of your hull, a robin fluttered from wall to wall.”

It did not work out between me and Aliquah—she says I rekindled the desire for human touch that she thought she had lost—but I am grateful to her for this image of myself.

3
<ground>

The stages of inclusion into the Intergalactic Cooperative:

Contact

Language Sharing

Information Sharing

Tourism/Exploration

Citizenship

I represent the leading edge of the fifth stage: the first alien of any species to be naturalized as a citizen of planet Earth. Earth’s governing councils had to construct an entirely new system of laws to account for me, though in this they were guided by a thousand worlds’ precedents. In the eyes of the IGC, I bring honor to both my origin planet and my adopted. I represent a strengthening of ties and a leap of faith.

Most of the speech I made at my naturalization ceremony consisted of platitudes like these, written for me by diplomats of both species, but I included some thoughts of my own:

“Humans and Len share many traits, but one holds a special personal interest. In our deepest selves, both species yearn for a sense of belonging. I hope to find that belonging in the commonwealth of Earth, as Human and as Len.”

I spoke those words, broadcast across many worlds, when I was only two years old (though of course Len minds do not mature as humans’ do, but are hatched fully functioning). Thirty years later, I am less optimistic. Luck plays such an intimidating role in finding community or companionship; each day alone must be faced anew; hope must be kindled against hope.

And this feeling too could be socialization, for do humans not already have the types of the lonesome poet-lover, the pining old maid, the stranger seeking acceptance in a strange land?

4
<air>

I dated an actor for a time, somewhat past his prime but nonetheless a celebrated leading man and auteur, handsome and creative and bored with sexual pursuits. Neither of us publicized our relationship—I am thankful for that—and anyway we were not exclusive.

When he touched me, he liked to imagine he was stroking the neck of a swan in a distant galaxy. “My lonesome swan,” he would call me. I was on my third xuit at the time, one that had receptors (pleasure-producing but nonsexual) in long silken strips down my neck and shoulders. The romantic possibilities fascinated him. For myself, I was drawn to the fierceness of his creativity, his ability to give himself so completely to the role. For many years, I thought this was my goal as well: to commit wholly to the role of being human.

But by the time he broke off our relationship, I had come to find his intensity overwhelming. Humans expect their relationships—with groups and with mates—to be messy, stormy, and marked by a push-and-pull that they feel unnatural without.

The Len in me desires a more nuanced kind of belonging.

5
<ground>

The Len bear little phenotypic resemblance to swans, though we are white in color—at least in the spectrum visible to humans—and we fly. Humans make these analogies instinctively: the Slikovk are lobsters, the Ulmians are big amoebas, the Len are swans. What seem feathers to Earth eyes are biologically more akin to fine interwoven tendrils of silk.

Like the majority of the intelligent species so far encountered by the IGC, the Len carry our sentience outside our bodies. Earth species are rare in supporting such delicate quantum phenomena in the dangerous electrical switchboards of their brains, and this explains why they have had a more difficult time adjusting to exploration in xuits. For the Len, “consciousness” is gathered just along the trailing edge of our silken wings.

For most of our precontact history, the Len believed that, when flying, the wind through our mind-wings caused our sense of self to loosen or purify somehow, and only in the light of later scientific study did this conviction prove to be merely poetical. However, the dichotomy of a flight state and a ground state runs deep in Len linguistics. Every sentence contains two, an air component and a ground component, and the dissonance between them provides an additional layer of meaning, as a hand gesture or an emoji might.

<ground> The robot’s chest is empty.

<air> The robin flies in the robot’s chest.

In this example—which I have sometimes used in my Len class—there is an interesting dissonance: the robot is “empty,” yet it contains a robin. The emptiness is in the ground state, which suggests it is ongoing, whereas the robin appears in the flight state, which suggests impermanence. To the Len, this is a single thought, or rather, every thought has this dual nature. Even long passages of Len technical writing, free of poetic content and given entirely in <ground>, imply an accompanying <air> component, which translates roughly as:

<air> It may be so.

Of course, I learned it as a second language, the same as any other human who speaks Len. But it is assumed that, because of my Len nature, I have a facility with the language that other humans lack. Whether this is true or not, teaching at the Len Institute has proved an important part of my career. I am said to have a unique perspective: both outsider and insider.

But I have never flown, never felt the thin air of Lennaia stream through my wings, never banked and soared with a flock of my own. I carry my mind-wings within me, galaxies away.

6
<ground>

Faster-than-light travel is prohibitively impractical.

Data, however, can travel not only faster-than-light, but instantaneously. It is a question of identifying long-lost twins: elementary particles, separated in those first few moments after the Big Bang, but still in an entangled state. Once a species has the technology to identify them, these entangled twins are everywhere. Tweaking one tweaks the other, no matter how impossibly distant.

Almost anything can travel as data: images, poetry, schematics, code to run on a 3-D printer. Theoretically, every molecule of a body can be scanned and recreated. Theoretically, the electrical state of every neuron in a brain can be scanned and recreated. But what cannot be scanned or recreated is consciousness, because the essential trait of consciousness—its unpredictability, its free will—arises from quantum phenomena. And quantum phenomena are governed by the uncertainty principle: they can never be perfectly mapped.

Thus, a species from one galaxy can communicate with a species in another, can pass technology, can suggest things or even bodies which can be built. But we cannot go to one another, we cannot touch, and we certainly cannot conquer.

To get anything done between the galaxies, we must cooperate.

7
<air>

Though I did not require nursing or caring in the way that other children do, I was assigned a human mother and father on first hatching. It was thought by both species that this would enhance my socialization. Doctors Anne and Joachim Stoltzfus-Veloso were both researchers at the Len Institute; I am their only child.

Anne is retired, though she still keeps an office at the Institute. I see her once a week for dinner.

Joachim passed away last year. His death has affected me more than I anticipated. A painful series of thoughts keep circling back on me without resolution. I cannot rid myself of the conviction that, with my disinterest in diplomacy and what must have seemed to him a morbid obsession with human romance, I have let my father down. He was a man to live up to: idealistic, curious about the universe, and stubborn as a terrier when he had his teeth in a project. I loved him very much.

“He loved you too,” says my mother, sitting in her room at the assisted-care facility into which she has recently moved.

“He expected more from me.”

I am uncomfortable in her new room. Everything is unfamiliar; even our family photos look changed in this lessened space. “Why should his disappointment haunt me? Len do not form this kind of parental bond.”

“They bond. They grieve. What does it matter what the Len do? Will you feel more authentic or less real? You’ve lost your father. I’ve lost my husband . . . Shush, now, I miss him too.”

8
<ground>

I have Len parents as well. A parental group of anywhere from two to forty-eight can make an egg, carefully apportioning favored elements of genetic material among them. I was made by a large civic-minded flock specifically to be an Earth citizen. This rational approach to reproduction has allowed the Len to repeatedly supply candidates for citizenship on other planets well before many of the IGC’s more conservative member species.

Still, I cannot help but find the Len’s reproductive process impersonal and my biological parents uncomforting.

I miss my human father and do not know if I honor him.

9
<ground>

A xuit is any remotely controlled body, be it biological or mechanical or hybrid. The xuit receives real-time motor control and transmits real-time sensory information. What sensory information the xuit may collect depends on the operator’s species, though electromagnetic wave detection and chemical analysis (sight and smell in humans) are nearly ubiquitous across the member species.

When a fallow intelligence like the Earth’s enters the stage of Tourism/Exploration, the first xuits cooperatively produced are usually small flying drones. The co-production begins one-for-one: one drone produced on Ulmlt for a human operator on Earth, one drone produced on Earth for an Ulmian operator on Ulmlt. (This is not simply an example; Ulmians were the first to get xuits on the ground on Earth.)

As the absorption of alien technology increases, so does the quality and flexibility of xuits adapted to the new environment. Operators from distant galaxies can integrate more directly with their xuits: they may choose to have all the stimuli from their birth-bodies nullified so that they can focus on their xuits completely. In a fully integrated xuit, the operator’s mind is technically at an impassable distance, but everything feels present and instantaneous.

So when I experience grief or love or loneliness, these emotions are technically being experienced on Lennaia, lighteons away. Yet the stimuli that produced them and the people I share them with are all here on Earth. When I grieve for my father, is the grief doubled or is it somehow thinned by all that distance? A very Len thought.

<ground> A distant fledgling grieves the death of a parent.

<air> Grief is an entangled state.

10
<air>

I meet Kwase on RomanceOnly.com. He is an older man, a xuit engineer based in Luanda. Kwase lost his legs to a land mine, though in his profile he writes that he considered himself asexual even before the accident. He is an enthusiastic correspondent, a shameless gourmand, and an avid tourist—on other worlds and on this one. We have been writing back and forth for several months when he invites me to join him on a food tour in Malaysia. “We’ll split the distance,” he writes. That is the kind of impulsive man he is. Most of my first dates have been over cautious cups of coffee; Kwase is suggesting a week’s worth of laksa, coconut rice, and salted egg crab.

I have recently upgraded to a new xuit, my fourth. It takes trial-and-error to match the sensory input of one world to the brain stimuli of a species evolved on another. Salty, spicy, creamy, tangy—what do these qualities mean to a Len body? But my new xuit has significant improvements, and I am tasting Earth foods in a way I never have before.

Not that my xuit needs to eat, but neither do humans, half the time.

Kuala Lumpur is a revelation. Malay, Indian, Chinese, and xuits from a dozen different species, the hurly-burly of the intergalactic community come to Earth, everyone crowded together, curious, ambitious, dreaming. Everyone hungry! After we work out that Kwase does not mind being carried and that I enjoy carrying him, we have a successful week together. I feel taken out of myself.

“What are you truly hoping to find in a partner?” he messages me when I am back in Toronto. “I had a wonderful trip with you, but I won’t live forever. I do not wish to waste your time or my own. Now you’ve met me, what do you think?”

I do not know how to respond. It is among the strange qualities of loneliness that you feel there is something missing, but you cannot precisely identify what is missing or why it matters. Fear of dying is tied up in loneliness as well—I have felt this since losing my father—and fear of dying alone, most of all. Kwase thinks of me as strong and young, but he is thinking of the xuit. I will lose motor control eventually. My senses will dim. Len life span is shorter than human: at our ages, either Kwase or I could go first.

I do know that I have felt less alone since meeting him. But where Kwase is impulsive and sincere, I am more circumspect. He would call me coy. I reply to him in Len.

<ground> I only know that I would like to see you again.

<air> My knowing has wings.

11
<ground>

Aliens are increasingly common on Earth, but I am still the only naturalized citizen.

The others are technically explorers or tourists, though they may perform functions beyond what those labels imply. But they all enter and leave their xuits at will; they are all essentially embodied on their home worlds. A citizen, in the IGC’s terminology, is someone who is born into their xuit, without having first known their homeworld. On the older worlds, there are colonies of citizens naturalized from all over the universe.

I was hatched on Lennaia, directly into a web of sensors which connected me to my first xuit, already prepared for me at the Len Institute on Earth. My first imprints were my human mother and father. My first language was English. The first light from which my xuit drew power came from Earth’s sun. I had to be taught that my actual body was elsewhere; that I was, in some sense, not who I was.

There is a reason that after thirty years I am still Earth’s only naturalized citizen. Tourism and exploration may be costly, they may require generations of cooperation and technical advance, but they are easy, emotionally. Citizenship is difficult, even dangerous. Will the citizen accept the new world? Will the new world accept the citizen? Will the citizen find belonging? So much can go wrong.

I am like a canary in a coal mine. And, though they are discreet, many worlds are watching to see if I thrive or if I wither.

12
<air>

“Twice I have gone on dates with women only to find that their self-identification as asexual was distinctly misleading.”

Ha! Kwase types, That’s because your xuit is so cute! I keep telling you . . .

“It is not really,” I reply, the xuit transcribing thoughts into text, “People see what they want to see. I am glad you see cute.”

Yeah, and those ladies saw a sex toy.

Humans can tell so much from the first few seconds of a date. Facial expressions and cultural cues line up like symptoms in a medical chart. But it is more difficult for me: I lack the specific neural hardwiring that most humans rely on to form first impressions.

Kwase likes stories about dates of mine that went wrong. At first I thought he was mocking me. Actually, I am sure he is mocking me (and himself), but I have begun to see that laughing at your own misadventures lessens them. The burden of past romantic failures is lightened.

“Once I went on a date with a man who just wanted a friend to watch precontact sci-fi movies with. He thought I would be perfect.”

So that’s why you like those!

“I did develop a fondness, but I would not describe it as a fulfilling relationship.”

I refuse to watch any old sci-fi movies that don’t star Will Smith.

“LOL”

I sit back in my office staring out at the cruddy snow plowed into mounds around the Institute carpool lot.

“I dread the day-after messages,” I transmit, “I think it is because of the xuit that they think they can write anything to me. As if I am only a machine. I have been called empty, weird, abnormal, too dumb or too smart, too needy or too distant, soulless—”

Aw, sweetie, writes Kwase, they didn’t know the first thing about you.

“Maybe they just saw the obvious.”

A pause in the discussion, and I wonder if I have insulted him. Outside my window, it has begun to sleet, the carpool lot blurring. Have I suggested that Kwase is deluded himself, that he is blind to my obvious alienness? Is he? Is any human who loves me deluding themselves?

Eventually, he writes back, You can’t blame everything bad that happens to you on being Len.

13
<ground>

It may be some time before Earth is prepared to reciprocate.

It has naturalized a citizen: me. But to achieve full-fledged membership in the IGC, Earth must also consign one of its own to another planet to be raised by another species.

Imagine a human couple offering their newborn infant for such a purpose, the helpless baby placed in a vat, sensors wrapping its head and hands, respirators and feeding tubes and evacuators performing its bodily functions. The child to grow up without milk, without mother and father. Its sexuality to be thwarted and misunderstood; its reproduction to be carried out artificially, if at all.

Not such a hard thing for the Len, maybe, but what human couple would make such a choice? What human institution would dare to suggest such a thing be done to an orphan?

Even I—part Len, and purportedly empty, weird, abnormal, soulless—know that humanity may not be ready for a long time.

14
<air>

“How is Kwase?” asks my mother.

“He is well.”

“But . . . ?”

We are sitting in the cafeteria of my mother’s assisted-care facility. I am worried about her: in the span of a few short weeks she has diminished somehow, become suddenly fragile. Yet Dr. Anne Stoltzfus-Veloso still retains the unsettling ability—through thirty years and four different xuits—to read my thoughts as if they were projected across my forehead.

“Kwase and I . . . I am not certain how much longer we will be together. I believe he wants . . . a kind of commitment I may not know how to give. We don’t even live in the same city.”

“He wants to get married?”

She offers the word so casually.

“No . . . Maybe . . . I think he only wants to know that I will be there for him, and I would be . . . but I think he needs some decisive demonstration from me.”

“And why not give him one? Do you want to get married?”

“Married? I never thought of myself as someone who could . . . You know that I have always felt the gaze of these two worlds on me. And not only on me, but within me. Human and Len. Ground state and air state—though which is analogous to which I have never been able to decide. Air passes over ground, they touch, they shape one another, but they do not speak with one voice. And Len do not marry.”

My grasp of facial expressions may be weak, but I can guess at my mother’s: she is unconvinced.

15
<air>

After two weeks with almost no communication, Kwase writes to suggest we visit Lennaia.

I am confused; I had thought we were taking a break.

We have been on a few small vacations to other worlds together; he, from his desk in Luanda, and I, from my office at the Institute in Toronto. It is fun, seeing these places with Kwase. We travel in simple, inexpensive drones that can be operated with no more than a pair of VR goggles and a joystick. No sensory implants necessary. Strange to think of my signals crisscrossing the universe like that: from Lennaia to my xuit on Earth, then from Earth to a drone on Slivka or H/le/ops or K.elo.ma. All instantaneous. My being, stretched even thinner than usual.

But to be a tourist on Lennaia.

It seems somehow silly or embarrassing to me. I am a professor of Len studies. I have spoken to hundreds of Len on screens or in xuits here on Earth or in virtual conferences hosted on any number of worlds. But he argues that I have never travelled there for pleasure, and never with him.

I am reticent.

He insists.

Lifting off from the port outside Lorle, we steer our drones towards the blue mountain ring to the north and join a community flock circling the city-cluster. Kwase has organized all this, and though he promised he would not identify me to our hosts, I can tell I am recognized by the way the flock adjusts to accept us. (It is a motif from human sitcoms—the boyfriend introduced to the parents—though here it is reversed, and I who am being introduced.)

So much has been written about Len flocking behavior, most of it by the Len themselves. There are, of course, rough hierarchies suggested in the patterns of the flock, but that is just the beginning of the nuanced meanings implied by position, cohesion, alignment, response time, drafting, and myriad other qualities of the flock I cannot hope to understand. Banking in, we are shuffled into a position denoting something more familiar than tourist, something like “honored distant relative.” A community flock is not a proper bonded flock like the one that produced me. It is more like a walking club.

I am nervous but also exhilarated, and I feel Kwase watching me. The great blue shoulders of the mountains are reflected in purple-tinged water-fields below us, over which the double shadows of our flock hurry, frightening the aquatic life below. In the distance, the nearest urban cluster-arm glitters. We cannot truly feel the wind through our interfaces, but I sense the phantom currents around me nonetheless. Our drones are primitive: an array of propellers, audio and video relay, and low-res holograms of our faces projected flatly before us. A human would see insects with ghost heads flying in the midst of swans. Kwase’s two-dimensional face tilts towards me. “You’re a natural at this!” he shouts, “I can’t believe you’ve never done it before!”

Later, we buzz through a fish market, its character more or less unchanged since before Len contact, tens of thousands of years ago. Though not as noisy, this is Kuala Lumpur all over again: vibrant trade, food of every shape and color, Len old and young, and xuits from a hundred worlds commingling. It is impossible to be lonely in a fish market. Kwase and I skim through eagerly, saying to each other how much we wish we had paid extra for taste or smell sensors.

But Kwase wants to leave the market sooner than I would have expected. He has planned a surprise, he says, and I am suddenly filled with trepidation.

The incubatorium is a wide white building, just a short flight from the market. A nurse meets us on the roof.

Inside, halls wide enough to glide through are lined with small porthole windows into individual chambers kept dark. There is a low foreboding sound like the muffled turning of great turbines. I cannot say why I have never come here, never requested a visual or even a report. I am like a human child afraid to go to the doctor, except of course it is more than that. And this too is a human feeling, is it not? To sense that there is some essential part of yourself that should not be looked at too closely? Some inner mystery that should not perhaps be plumbed? And for fear of what, exactly? Of change too drastic to handle? Of wandering lost in a hall of mirrors?

The nurse says,

<ground> You come to see yourself.

<air> Your self is a circle.

The nurse is following the glowing readouts beneath the windows along the wall. Halfway down, it pulls into a graceful landing where, by some signal of its wing, the light behind one window fades slowly on.

I wish we were in the same city at the same desk, so I could hold Kwase’s hand.

We cluster at the window. Inside the small chamber a swan floats on a current of air and a magnetic field. Asleep, dreaming, says my human eye, though the Len do not sleep. Tiny sensors like sprinkled silver dust sparkle along its folded wings.

I turn. The low-res hologram of Kwase’s drone is not easy to read, but I think a tear has blossomed on his smiling face.

“That’s you in there,” he says. “That’s you.”

About the Author

During the day, author Beston Barnett designs and builds furniture in San Diego. At night, he plays Romani jazz. The rest of the time, he writes quirky little stories in which he struggles–rarely successfully–to leave his characters living happily ever after. He is a graduate of the 2018 Clarion Workshop.

Onyx Woods and the Grains of Deception

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

“The king certainly likes fire,” said Cohl. We could see the smoke rise from beyond, from another forest. I pulled off my gloves and rubbed my back. Once we relaxed like this, I could feel all my muscles ache.

Cohl took a bite of the lump in his hand and spit it out. “What is this anyway? Tastes like scalp.”

I squeezed the brittle chunk in my hands. Crumbs scattered onto the ground. The inner pale core showed through the broken crust. I swiped at the dry specks. “Bread, they call it.”

“Ugh, how is this edible?” He scratched his chin absently. “I remember grandma used to make gra soup. With yams and bacon. I’d give a whole month of these rations to have a bowl of that.”

I pulled out my flask and poured tea all over the chunk of this substance, bread. It hardly felt like food. Hard like a board. Once the water seeped in, it transformed. The bread soaked up the brown liquid and became soft like a sponge.

I took a bite and handed it over to Cohl. “It’s not so bad if you dunk it in some liquid. Tastes almost like pounded shelo.”

He gave it a good pinching, squeezing out some drops that landed like stains on the dirt. He popped it in his mouth, shook his head and forced himself to swallow. “Now it tastes like wet scalp. Thanks, Staira.”

“Wet scalp? Do you know what that’s even like?” I asked. “You haven’t had a decent shower in ages.”

Cohl laughed, a large sound that echoed through the forest. “Sweat,” he said, patting down his hair. “I don’t need a shower. I have natural solvents.”

I rolled my eyes but passed him the flask. He took a swig and wiped his mouth. Tea slid around the stubbles of his chin and neck, like an earthworm tunneling around roots. I smiled, despite myself. “Alright, let’s get going. The forests won’t clear themselves.”

We picked up our sitting bladders, deflated them, and put them in our sacks. I pulled on my gloves.

The king, under the advice of contempoists, converted forest into farmland. The contempoists, who showed him their silken parchments, strewn with graphs, proceeded on lengthy lexicon-riddled lectures about advancement. Told him that production was the way to do it. At least those were the rumors that flowed through in the informal transactions of the market. Whispers while wrapping fish, winks while bartering shoes. The sellers regaled in the many ways the contempoists stood, tall and proud in their black coats, as if they never had to do a day of labor in their lives. They would mimic their voices, soft and lush, never having to shout aloud, out and over, to the other side of the field or forest, like the others who labored in the sun. “The grains,” the contempoists insisted, parodied through the lips of various buyers and vendors. “The grains, they hold all the calories you need.” The bustle of the market, the swinging of sacks. The transactions would go on, but that bustle was the only place that the king couldn’t drag you away for infractions. The market was too unruly to lay a hand on, boisterous enough for intimate seditious conversations.

Everyone also knew at this rate of conversion there would be no forest left. Already half the land was covered in waves of grain, rustling and glinting in sunlight. Grain as sandy-hued as the strange hair of the contempoists.

The only reason I took this job was because I was sick of harvesting grain. At least that was what I told others. Day in and day out with the sickle, the lemf-woven bandana doing nothing to keep the sweat from rolling into my eyes. It would just get soaked, though an occasional breeze offered some reprieve, even as the sun beat down. When the opportunity came to switch to clearing the onyx forest I took it. Most people accepted that as explanation enough.

Cohl and I took turns hacking at the trees. He heaved and stuck his axe into the trunk with the bark flying. I would come in from the other side doing the same. It was called congruent lumbering, and it was the most efficient way to fell the onyx trees, given all experimentation. We were careful not to swing too hard and take each other out right through the trunks. The trucks were tough things, flat, black, and lustrous. But, get past their runny sap and into their crystallized core and they would simply shatter.

I’ve heard that there’s no other place quite like Phinelia. No place that has our various majestic forests, and this particular one, one of the few onyx woodlands, the upright walls of trees that shoot out into the distance. Like black parchment stretched out and pinned to the ground, one after another, stalwart facades. Look up and they appear as if they’re brushing up to the heavens themselves. It looked like they were placed there by a knowing hand, and some joked that’s why they’re also called the Magnificent Shelves, as if some curator were looking down on us, from above their massive heights. I would roam through the aisles of these wooden walls as a child, run through the nets of soft wispy tendrils of translucent green, the larklets that hugged the black smooth surface in a symbiotic embrace. The sinkwarbs, tweedoots, and other animals calling out in alarm, bounding and hiding in the folds of other wispy vines and shoots.

But, now I heaved, grunted, and swung. Each foot of the wall required one hundred strikes of this specialized axe, no more and no less. At about seventy, beads of a scarlet ooze would appear, sap that collected on my blade. At seventy-five, the sap would start to flow out in droves and make its slow descent to the ground, running alongside the onyx-colored bark, creating a bath of crimson in the dirt in the aisles. At about eighty, we would reach the first hint of crystals. Flashes of a vivid blue. And at a hundred, the thing would snap. It would tear at the seam and the whole tree would begin to lean but would not really fall. Because the tree wall would go on into the distance, it was like taking a blade and slicing only a fraction of a parchment paper. It would not completely rip. So, this part of the forest tree wall that was cleaved would just lean up against the next tree wall over, and the semi-chopped tree wall would bend ever so slightly at the top, eclipsing the sun in the forest aisle. A giant curbed wooden tent.

Cohl and I worked until sunset. Just as the shadows elongated and the sky’s pink darkened, we left. We didn’t get to the end of this tree today. We got about forty feet in, which means we each did two thousand strokes of the axeinto this tree wall. If we calculated right, at this rate, it would take a month to clear just this one tree. Then we would move to the next tree wall, hacking at it.

The job before this, it was Lacy and I who teamed up. It was kind of nice working with another female lumberjack. We had a lot to commiserate with. But, for this job, they set me up with Cohl. Lacy was partnered with Chakla and set into the hill forests. Lacy was the lucky one. The hill forests have tenacious barks, but with the right curved blade, the wood tears quick. The insides are hollow. The creatures, the snailpops and cluechirps that lived in the forest, have been seen running off, escaping for their lives, ever since they started felling the trees.

Here, among these onyx walls, except for the larklet webbing, there wasn’t much surrounding these black slabs. Not ever since the vast poaching.

The next day we were breaking in the afternoon sun. We had both done fifteen hundred strokes and were at the tail end of our capacities. My arm throbbed like a swarm of cluechirps had pecked at it. I put down my axe and massaged my shoulders.

“What do you suppose they do with all this lumber?” I said, gesturing at the semi-fallen slab above me.

“I suppose they’ll be an army of men and transport it to the sea. There I imagine there’s some ship that takes it away.” Cohl took off his shoes and rubbed his feet. A stench wafted in the air and dissipated with a sudden breeze.

“But, you’ve never seen it done,” I said, pulling off my own shoes.

“No, I haven’t.” Cohl started to fan his feet with a folded parchment fan he kept in his back pocket. Then, he fanned his ruddy face.

“Can you imagine? There’s a land out there that probably takes all of this wood and turns it into furniture. That’s what I’ve heard at the market. Living rooms full of Phinelian onyx wall wood couches. Dressers with this glow, the inside filled with woodcore crystals.”

Cohl spat into the ground. “Excessive, wasteful,” he said. “Anyway, everyone knows that once the wood’s out of the ground, this stuff decays fast. Wouldn’t even make it through the journey across the seas. They’d bleed and bleed. It’d be nothing but bark rot.”

“I’ve heard they use staying powders, fix the decay rate so it’s so minimal, so it’s almost nonexistent.” I looked up into the skies, thinking of my connection to these onyx woods. How small I was in the midst of their imposing barriers.

“Fairy tales,” said Cohl. He waved a fan in my face and gave me a quizzical look. “I’ve been trying to figure out something about you.”

“Oh yeah?” I looked down at the roots that lifted the tree out of the ground. They were gnarled, tangled, much like my thoughts.

“They never assign women to the onyx forests. They say that the wood is too thick, the axe handle too rough. That around these parts and because of the way the black surface collects the sun, it’s too hot for a woman. So, how did you end up here?”

“Too hot?” I laughed. I wiped sweat from my face.

“Well, really, why did you insist on coming here? There hasn’t been an onyx female lumberjack ever as far as I know. So there must be a reason.”

“Money,” I said, lying. “It’s for the money.”

He nodded, as we both knew that this kind of labor meant an extra sackful of coins at the end of the job, but he gave me a good look in my eyes before he started lacing up his boots. Time for the next round of hacks.

At one hundred, my axe should have eaten through all the wood, the sap, the crystals, and into the pocket of air that would confirm that the tear was complete. But, it didn’t. There was still a thin layer of woodcore crystal left.

“That’s strange,” I thought. Cohl stopped working too, from the other side of the tree wall. He must have heard the difference in the vibration of the axe emanating from the tree.

“I’m trying again,” I yelled. I heard his muted “sure” from across the wall of the tree.

We swung in alternations and it finally fell at one-oh-six.

“Six extra hacks,” I whispered. The crimson sap pooled onto the ground. Typically I would step over it and move on, but this time I drew closer, sunk my feet into the sap. It enveloped around my shoes, like blood flow.

I could hear Cohl running around the fallen part of the tree wall, jogging from his adjacent forest aisle to my own.

Of course, this discrepancy of six cleaves was something to note. And I knew I should’ve been conferring with Cohl before I did anything, but something instinctive took over me then. I peeled off my glove on my right hand, put my fingers into that sticky sap and felt into the jagged crystals of the tree, running my hands along their tapered tops. With the sap covering my fingers, the crystals felt cool to the touch, reminding me of ocean waves, but pointier. For a moment, I smelled something sickly sweet. It was the aroma of my mom’s snailpop-derived perfume.

A memory flooded me then, as I wafted in that musty sweet aroma. I had left my parents and lived on the fringes of Phinelia. My parents wanted to do business with the contempoists and I wanted nothing to do with it. They approached them on the side of the road, dressed in their nicest clothes, so they told me. Their business venture was given proper consideration, Dad said.

But, I heard the rumors. They were treated as nothing less than beggars. Laughed at in front of their eyes, the glowing white teeth of the contempoists gleamed in their faces. My parents’ idea of raising the giant forest fowl for eggs and for the eventual harvest of their bladders didn’t really jibe with the contempoists’ notion of high tastes in decoration and ornamental furniture. They rejected my parents, rejected their offer for the idea conception, with a hand wave. But, a few days later, the onyx woods were cleared of the great sapphire birds that used to perch sideways on its slick surface. The vast poaching, all taken up in a swift night. We still didn’t know how they did it. The woods became strangely quiet in one expedient night, so the rumors said.

It was true, the woods really were strangely quiet. But, I had gotten used to that stillness.

And it was when I was in Lakla, scavenging mushrooms from the spire forests there, when I heard about my parents’ deaths. A great tree had fallen on them. One of the onyx beauties. It must have been deliberate. The tree wall falls too slowly and usually rests on the adjacent tree, forming a tent. Even the most enfeebled Phinelians would be able to escape. They said this tree cracked at a strange angle and a part of it collapsed. Perhaps it was a way to bury my parents’ plan. Bury their idea so the contempoists wouldn’t have to pay the innovators’ cut. Even the king dared not repeal the laws of “idea conception,” a tenet of protecting intellectual creation held sacred to our people.

My free hand, the left, reflexively went to my back pocket where the deflated bladder chair lay. It was one of the prototypes my dad had designed. I heard Cohl puffing as he approached. His own inflatable bladder chair was also bereft of air, flapping against his leg. It was one of the mass-produced ones from beyond the seas. I could tell from the sloppy stitching. My father got only a trifling of a cut for those, for using his designs, barely enough to even call payment. It was a nominal restitution, really, just so the contempoists could not be charged with violating the tenet of “idea conception.”

I pulled out my customized bladder sack. The feeling of the crystal and its hard sharpness juxtaposed against the softness of the sack, as I continued running my right hand along the crystals.

“What are you doing?” he gasped, seeing my hand, ungloved, thrust in the tree. “If the king catches all that sap material on you, you’ll be in trouble for contaminating the wood.”

I shook my head, as my hand grasped one of the sharpest crystals. It seemed to warm up once I had my fingers around it. The sap dripped past my arm, to my elbow. I yanked it out.

“No, Staira!”

“Too late,” I said, holding out the crystal, its jagged cut proof of my desecration.

My mom used to say there was something eerie about the forest. Something that just didn’t seem right. She would mention it to me when I came home from class, and back then we were still living in the sod houses. She said she heard whispers from the onyx forests that she’d never heard before from any of the other forests, not from the spire groves nor the stickwoods. And she said over and over that the onyx woods stood too still, even before the vast poaching. No rustling, no leaves, not like any of the other forests. Only animal calls that echoed along its walls.

I always thought she spent too much time there. She and my dad liked to catalog the animals and vines and do some small-scale hunting. They would push aside the larklets and capture the wildlife. They’d experiment on the hides and fibers, selling knickknacks and scraping by. That was before the current king, who rubbed elbows with these outsider contempoists. Our village always had an unsaid rule: we could harvest from the forests, but never harvest the onyx trees themselves. They were too hallowed, too towering. Physically, they were impossible to cut. But, the king received these axes of a strange bronze for lumbering and sickles made of a white metal for grain-harvesting from the contempoists, in trade for the precious wood. He also got sackfuls of coarse nubby grain seeds. Now a small dedicated troop of us took to the lumbering and swiddening, with some of us transferring into the job, like me, while others labored in farming grains. It wasn’t only the onyx wood here in this forest that was being felled, but also in Clastaw, Walju, Pabley, and other onyx forests. They were all coming down, these great rows of monumental tree walls. And in their stead, rows of grains would emerge, a new food system materializing from the ashes of our burned woods.

The king had explicit laws about making direct contact with any of the wooden stuff. With gloves on, we could brush up against anything, but we were told never to remove the gloves.

Now in my naked but sappy fingers, the crystal pulsed and pulsed, a blue light projecting from its core. I threw it to the ground and the pulse diminished.

I released a held breath.

“One-oh-six,” I said. “A weak point. An anomaly.” I bent over and picked up the crystal again. It glowed brighter.

“Ghosts,” whispered Cohl. He pointed at the aisle ahead of us.

Blue wispy mist formed from thin air and coalesced, dancing between the tree walls. I heard whispers. I could understand words here and there. “The ancient forests.” A lot of mutterings. “Protection. Protect us.”

The crystal pulsed as the ghosts fluttered around. My heart beat faster.

There were stories that those who passed away in the forests would be absorbed by their hosts. The trees held the souls of the dead, as only the most superstitious would say. But, now, the superstition took hold in my chest as my heart thumped.

From within the dynamic flows of the blue mist, from the nebulous figures and limbs that shaped in and out, I thought I saw my mother’s knowing glance and my dad’s esteemed chin. My mom’s beautiful hand and my dad’s slightly lame left leg. It was an impression of them, intertwined in the haze and I could not make it all out entirely. But, a pressing feeling came down on me.

We would have to save the trees.

I knew what I was doing when I took the job.

I didn’t necessarily agree with the felling of the trees, but I was sick of life tending to grain and thought, well, if anyone was going to cut them down, might as well be me. Might as well revel in their proximity, even as the trees came drooping down as I worked. I chopped, regardless of my feelings about it. Rhythmic and willingly. Made timber, a dead thing, out of them. I knew I was complicit, complicit in tearing down something that bears our heritage, but even I thought it might be for the greater good. If it meant we would always be full, even if on scalp-flavored bread, then so be it.

But, if the crystals held secrets of a past and identity we could not have imagined, wafted to us in blue mists, then this changed everything.

I begged secrecy from Cohl and promised him a third of my pay. He refused my pay but swore he would keep his mouth shut for a few days, but would have to say something soon. All transgressions at worksites had to be reported, or families would be in jeopardy.

I had no family to speak of, so there was nobody to threaten me with. But, Cohl had a husband and two kids. I think he was too dumbstruck to know what to say, or what to do. He saw the mists with his own eyes, just as I did—and he had that senseless look on his face as if the air itself had been sucked away. He looked at me, blinked, and nodded. Kept nodding, as if that was the only thing that made sense. Perhaps it was good to know that his head was still on his neck and he could bend it up and down.

I dumped out the bread crumbs from the bladder sack that contained my store of food. As soon as I slipped the crystal in, the pulsing glow began to diminish. I could still see the glow through the fairly opaque skin of the bladder and watched it peter down to a dim stroke of light, before dying down altogether.

I went back to the village and made my way through the now-quiet market. I knew if anyone would have any hint of what this was and what it meant, it would be the apothecary. They’d known me from since when I was a kid, when my mom would take me there to seek relief for colds and minor scrapes and wounds. I knew they harbored resentment towards the king but also provided his hand with various potions and powders. With their knowledge of substances and their association in the courts, they would be the only ones with the knowledge I needed.

Polina gave me a good stare when I came in. She was wearing her apron, the same apron she must have had for a good twenty years now, with paisley designs stitched into the borders. The aroma of rara petals, so typical of this space, filled my nostrils. She greeted me with a provision of some herbal infusion and I goaded her gently into a conversation about the timber as I sipped, inhaling the floral steam. She charged on with the topic, obviously one of her liking, her cheeks alight with an animated glow. She yapped on about the rate of timber collection, experimentation with gossamer threads made of larklet fibers and the aphrodisiac effects of onyx wood sap, though its acquisition was illegal.

“The black coats,” said Polina, hissing with the s in coats, referring to the contempoists, “They are distilling something from the wood, I’m sure. The wood is then turned to chips.” She urged me to put on my gloves. By then I had washed my hands by the well, with little trace of the trees left, at least not detectable without proper testing.

She looked into her various jars and tapped on each, pulling one out of the shelves. She gave me a sprinkle of some dark powder. I held the powder in my own gloves. It was black as ash.

“Sediment from the wood chips,” she said. She smiled, as if proud of her contraband.

“Wood chips? I thought they were using the wood for furniture.”

Polina laughed. “The wood is not really as precious as what it contains. But, no one talks about this in the market. You see, I sent my son to care for the king’s ailments. Ground springtops for his aches. I wouldn’t dare name all of them now. My son, why, he overhears it all. And he is too worried about our safety to leak it out to anyone but me. The dried wood is good for the shakes, but not much else. But, I see you’ve found out something of your own. You have something that might be useful. I would give you information, if you let me have some samples.”

I pulled out the crystal with my gloved hand. She gasped. Even without the eerie glow, it was brilliant, refracting the little bit of streaming light from the closed curtains into soft blue hues.

“From the heart of the onyx trees,” I said.

She looked up at me in fear. “But, this . . . this is forbidden. It is one thing to pull off a few pieces of bark. But, this . . . this is the core. These are all the king’s designated lands.”

“They used to be ours,” I said. I shrugged.

She hesitated. I prodded her on with a nod. She looked up at me and something firm set in her eyes. Curiosity must have overtaken fear. She pulled out a knife, made of the same material as my axe, as I noted from the sheen, and took a few shavings off the crystal in her gloved hands. The crystal quivered as she skimmed its surface. A wisp of blue mist floated out like steam but did not congeal into anything menacing or remotely organic-seeming. She prepared the sample, suspending it in a liquid and covering it with glass. She put the small sample behind a contraption with multiple lenses and shone light through it.

“Great energy, great potential,” she said. “I wonder what the contempoists would do with it. Could be for the mills. Or for bringing water up from the wells. But, there’s something else it could be for.” She raised her eyes at me, holding out the shavings as if it would be as clear to me as it was to her. She lowered her eyes. “Weapons.”

“Weapons?” I asked, whispering.

“The contempoists are not content to simply be. They must expand, and to do so requires power. At least that is what my son has told me. And their power is all derived from a certain exchange. They trade in weapons.”

I have heard of such things. Firing explosives of distant lands that set off in systematic frenzy. I heard they require lots of energy to run, but had not seen one myself.

Polina looked out towards the closed curtains and then turned to me, her eyes glowing. “You could make a great amount of coins smuggling those crystals,” she said. “Not to me. I’m not fancying a life venturing into the weapons business. Sure, a little aphrodisiac powder or some rare root, I can handle that. But, not weapons. Better keep my mouth shut and milk our position to the king.”

She put a finger into the onyx powder and licked it. “But, there are those less scrupulous than me, who would be willing to pay. Weapons are lucrative after all.” Her eyes gleamed, and I wasn’t sure if it was the effect of the bark or something else that made it glow so.

I simply laughed it off, said that maybe this sample is contaminated, that it was a fluke. The crystals probably didn’t contain that much energy after all and I would get her another sample later. She peered at me and simply gave me the crystal shavings sample. “Don’t bother,” she said. “I don’t really want a trace of this in my store. Too risky. Take it back with you. I’m content with my powders.”

With the crystal in my bladder sack pressed against my pants, I dreamed that night that the roots of the onyx trees dug deep into our land, drawing from the soil where all our people had passed into. I dreamed the roots, those snarled messes, held all our villages’ souls, entangled in their coiled limbs. The instructions of my parents, of how to make the bladders, flashed in my mind. A reverie of how-to’s, a culmination of various whispers, in shifting misty forms, goading me to make this and make that. Ideas for innovation, specific processes for inventions. Even recipes, age-old instructions for gra soup and other village delights, some lost for generations. I tossed and turned, my blanket soaking in sweat, the crystal digging into my skin. My mind arranged what I could not while awake. They were impressions, profound and urgent.

The trees were not sentient themselves, but they collected the intelligence, froze them into crystals. And I woke up realizing I had found the tree wall’s weak spot. One-oh-six. It must be something like a security breach of the trees, where the one hundred strokes always resulting in a clean break without accessing that knowledge, but the extra six hits indicating a spot of instability. The trees absorbed the village info, amassing these secrets, not letting them easily be freed. And I had been the lucky one that encountered their vulnerable point. Like tapping on a cocofruit at just the right angle for the liquid sweet flesh to coming spilling out.

In the morning, during our day of rest, I choked down the strange bread made from outsider grains, soaking it in my tea, wishing it was pounded shelo instead. I watched the crumbs swirl and swirl, like the blue mist that emerged when I touched the crystal. My plan was to go back later that night and call out those forms, those mists that swirl and swirl. I would place my hand around the crystals, the whole mass of them and I would ask them for some guidance. Deep within the vault of their knowledge, drawing from the souls of our many villagers that have come and gone, there must be some way to beat the king, some way to fight off the contempoists, who were exploiting us and our resources of energy. False and easy promises of advancement from grains. The contempoists would have us indebted to them, exporting our greatest reserve, reap from our souls and ideas and have these dynamic elements rendered into something as consciously inert as energy to fuel their armaments of threat. They would then have us import a lifestyle of grains that required milling stones, brick ovens, and other foreign goods they planned to sell us, making us further in debt. I could see it clearly now. They intended to wring us dry, have us chop down all our trees and leave us wanting for more. It became clearer to me, as I held the crystal in my hand, assimilating the stray words, interpreting what the mists had to say. An ineffable feeling of wonder washed over me as I was starting to make more sense of the hazy jostling movements of these blue mists of knowledge.

I spat out the last bits of bread and instead took out a store of dried mushrooms from a glass jar and chewed on their rubbery gills. I was complicit in this destruction of our trees, of our whole domain, of our beautiful Phinelia—and I would get it fixed. I had the whole village ancestry with me after all, backing me up, that I could tap into. Not just this one crystal, but with this security breach, a gateway to them all. And there must be something in there that could change the king’s mind, or even—get rid of him completely. I couldn’t believe my head was swarming with thoughts of persuasion, even a coup, but I could not bear to see my people shackled, their greatest asset shipped away to menacing groups of profiteering and power.

Why didn’t it occur to me earlier? Maybe I was always suppressed by trauma, the image of the onyx tree falling ever so slowly, crushing my parents. There was always another hand, someone else, a sinister force that had set up the trap. I knew it but did nothing about it.

I was a coward, I thought. But, I won’t let this continue on.

I gulped down my tea, the swirling, floating crumbs dissolved to less than mush within the brown liquid. I put the crystal away, patting the sack my dad made. I grabbed the white sickle from the table and put on my coat. I tucked the sickle beneath the folds of my coat, hidden into its hardened protective sheath, and tied the sash at my waist. I heaved the axe, still caked with scarlet sap, wrapped the blade, and shoved it in a large sack. I had resources to gather, people to talk to, and a lot of convincing to do before nightfall.

We would get our village back.

About the Author

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

She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter.

Your Face

Rachel Swirsky

Oh! Abigail! Oh. It’s good—it’s so good to see you.

Mom. Hi.

You look so much like you. I feel like I could reach out and touch your face. Your face! It’s so good to see your face.

Yeah, you too.

It’s so good. It’s, oh, I just don’t—Abigail, I don’t know what to say.

Say what you want, Mom.

How much of you—I don’t know. Maybe I really shouldn’t ask, but—How much of you is in there?

I’m me, Mom.

I mean, I have the chart here—I know your scan was only about a month out of date. But is it you you?

Yeah, of course.

I mean, is it you or—How much is the computer, really?

Mom. I’m me.

Are you sure? What do you remember?

Everything. Come on. You just said it. My scan was only a month out of date.

No, I mean, what’s the last thing you remember? Where do you feel like you are?

Oh, fine. It’s afternoon. I’m getting my scan. Traffic has been so bad all day. I had a fight with Robin this afternoon about the laundry. Again. I’m so damn tired.

What’s it like?

Hot. There’s a fan, but it’s not on. My eyes hurt and I don’t want to spend any more time today staring at a screen so I’m looking out the window.

And?

There’s a janitor cutting hedges. There’s a man walking a tiny dog on the lawn. My hair feels sweaty. I want to go home. What do you want me to say?

You want to go home?

I’m just so damn tired. I need time on the couch with a book. Unless Robin decides we should start fighting World War III over the laundry again.

But you can’t really go home. You know that. Right, Abigail?

Obviously.

You’re only in the computer. You can’t come out.

I know.

I don’t know. Maybe this was a bad idea. Is it cruel? Am I just bringing you back to kill you all over again?

You’re freaking out, Mom. Stop it.

I realized I’ve been putting this off for almost five years. It would have been your thirtieth birthday last week. Maybe I should have come earlier, but I just wasn’t—sure if it would be cruel—

It’s fine.

And I . . . didn’t know if I wanted to.

Oh.

I’m sorry. Oh, God. I’m terrible.

Whatever. It’s not important.

Now you’re angry.

Don’t tell me how I feel.

No. This isn’t right. You don’t sound like you. You look like you . . . but you don’t sound like you at all.

Excuse me?

You’re so flat . . . You sound . . . like you’re champagne, and someone left you open.

I don’t even know how to respond to that.

There’s nothing in your voice but frustration.

Sorry. It’s been that kind of day. You know, the kind where you’re like, This goddamn shower is too wet. 

You sound like you just can’t be bothered. Like it’s just some Saturday when your sister called for last-minute help with the kids when you and Robin already had plans—

—Goddamn, three PM should not be rush hour—

—or some evening when you had to run back to the store for wiper fluid—

—I was just coming in for a normal scan, you know?

Abigail. You haven’t even asked me about Robin.

I didn’t?

No.

I hope she’s not still upset that I threw her bras in with the wash instead of using the lingerie bags.

Abigail, that happened a long time . . .

Yeah, I know. If I was still around, she miiiiight have even forgiven me by now.

Abigail!

What? It’s a joke.

You shouldn’t talk about her like that.

Sorry, I was just blowing off steam.

You sound like you didn’t even love her.

How can you say that? Of course I love her. How can you even say that?

You’re right. I’m sorry.

I love her more than anything. Does it really seem like I don’t love her?

No. It seemed . . . like you bickered a lot. But everyone knew you loved each other. It was like a glow on you.

I should have been more careful. She probably wouldn’t have been so upset except it was her favorite bra.

That was probably it.

But how does anyone even have a favorite bra, you know? Ugh, I just want to go home. It’s hot. The leaf blower is SO LOUD.

Abbie.

What?

You know you can’t.

What?

You can’t go home.

Of course I know! We already talked about this. My scan was only a month out of date.

Okay, honey.

It’s just uncomfortable in here.

Okay.

It was an awful ride over. Did I tell you that? My air conditioner isn’t working. It puffs out hot air. And the traffic—

Abigail, I should have told you earlier. We don’t have much time to talk. The ten minute warning just went off.

Huh? Oh. Sure, fine.

I’m sorry. I probably can’t afford this again. It’s just so expensive. Did you know it keeps getting more expensive the longer they keep someone in storage?

Oh, that’s just because of data decay.

I didn’t realize how good it would be to see your face.

Ugh. I’m all sweaty.

I’m here because Robin made me promise to come before she died. She wanted you to know it wasn’t your fault. You were—already gone by then.

My fault?

Do you remember? You were driving the car.

The car?

The police said there was nothing you could have done. The other driver would have hit you even if your reflexes were perfect.

What? No.

The other driver was from Florida. She didn’t know how to handle the mountains.

No, I don’t think that’s true.

I only had a few minutes with you at the hospital. You kept saying over and over again how it was your fault. You wanted me to tell Robin’s parents they were right, she never should have married you. But I didn’t, because it wasn’t your fault.

No. That isn’t right. I don’t think that happened.

Robin made me promise to talk to you. She said she could hear you talking to me, asking me to tell her parents that, but she was in surgery then. She must have imagined it. I guess. Or—I don’t know.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s hard to hear over the leaf blower. Maybe we should talk again later.

Robin made it for a few days. We all thought she might—well. She needed you to know she didn’t blame you.

It’s not that I don’t try to do the laundry correctly, but she has all these rules.

It was an accident, Abbie. A terrible accident.

She should do it herself if she’s going to be so picky.

I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have come at all. I told Robin it wouldn’t really be you, but she made me promise.

I’m me!

No, honey. If you were you, you’d be screaming. I just told you. Robin died.

Don’t tell me how I feel! Damn it, why don’t they just turn on the fan?

You’re just something . . . stuck . . . in a bad afternoon.

There’s sweat in my hair. I need to get home to my chair and a book. WHY IS IT SO DAMN HOT?

Abigail and Robin, they—They should have gotten the same chances as everyone else. You know? A house, a family. Sometimes I just—wonder. Do you think she could have forgiven me for bringing her into the world when she had so little time?

We always fight, me and Robin. But there’s a secret.

What?

We always make up again.

Yes.

Huh?

Yes, you always did.

Hi, Mom. It’s hot, isn’t it? I just want to go home.

I know, Abigail. It’s been a long day.

About the Author

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop where she, a California native, learned about both writing and snow. She recently traded the snow for the rain of Portland, Oregon, where she roams happily under overcast skies with the hipsters. Her fiction has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Asimov’s Magazine, and The Year’s Best Non-Required Reading. She’s published two collections: Through the Drowsy Dark (Aqueduct Press) and How the World Became Quiet (Subterranean Press). Her fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award, and twice won the Nebula.

The Yorkshire Mammoth

Harry Turtledove

Thrsk is, or claims to be, the only town in England without a vowel to, or in, its name. People who live there say the Vikings carried it off a thousand years ago. Looking at them and listening to the Scandinavian words in their Yorkshire dialect, you may easily believe the Vikings left a lot more recently than that, if they ever left at all.

Beautiful country, northern Yorkshire. The dales and the fells and the tall barrens with glaciers snaking down from them . . . Not the kind of landscape I’d been used to in Glasgow, but it grew on me the longer I stayed in Thrsk.

Wotan and Donner Rengaw, of whose veterinary practice I formed a small but growing part, loved Thrsk, too, though they were no more Yorkshiremen than I. They also loved the people whose stock they helped—except when those people didn’t pay their bills, which happened all too often. Anybody who doubts Yorkshire country farmers are slow with their silver has yet to meet one.

Oh. Wotan and Donner? When I first went to Thrsk in those prewar days, I wondered if I’d find a pair of fierce Teutons with swastika buttons in their lapels. But no. They were quite comfortably Anglo-Saxon. Wotan made light of it, saying their mother had been frightened by an opera. Donner grew tight-lipped whenever the subject was raised, so I soon stopped raising it.

Down in the dales, the farmers were much like farmers anywhere else, even if they did expect a good deal in the way of value for their money. In the higher country, though, I wondered not only whether the Vikings had ever left but whether the Ice Age had ever abated. The cold winds blowing off the glaciers made me want to keep one eye peeled for cave bears, dire wolves, saber-toothed tigers, or other relics of bygone days.

Such monsters, of course, had vanished from England and Wales and Scotland in Roman times, though they lingered in Ireland with the Irish elk and the aurochs until after the Norman conquest. Nor had anyone in Yorkshire set eyes on a woolly rhinoceros since the days of Queen Elizabeth, or those of James I at the very latest.

Mammoths, though, mammoths were a different story. Like mahouts in far-off India, the canny Yorkshiremen worked out that getting work from their enormous neighbors was more profitable than slaughtering them wholesale. And that long tradition lingered still in those days when I was new in Thrsk, especially on the highlands too rugged or rocky for tractors. Mammoths gave the veterinary trade around there a fillip it got in few other places outside the Far East.

I was in the surgery doing our small-animal business one bright but chilly spring morning. (Bright, warm spring mornings come seldom to Thrsk.) I’d just taken ten stitches from the side of a cat that had quarreled with a dog when the phone rang. The cat, a tough old tom named Toby, was mild as milk as long as he sat on his mistress’ lap. Mrs. Aldiss said he’d actually won the fight, but he hadn’t come off unscathed.

She was fumbling in her coin purse to pay me when the housekeeper stuck her head into the antiseptic-smelling room and said, “Sorry to bother you, Mister Holley, but it’s Wilf Latchett from up on Longyoke Fells. He sounds a bit upset.”

“I’m coming, Missus Kitchen,” I said at once. You had to be tough to live on Longyoke Fells; if you weren’t, you’d freeze or starve or both together. The ice lay very near there. Wilf Latchett and his family were suited to their rugged home. He took everything as it came. I found it hard to imagine him upset. Yet I couldn’t doubt Mrs. Kitchen. As I hurried towards the phone, I did add, “Missus Aldiss was about to give me the last two and six of the bill for Toby.”

“I’ll get it,” the housekeeper assured me. She knew as well as I, we’d never see it if she didn’t.

“Thanks,” I said, and then, a moment later as I picked up the telephone, “George Holley here, Mister Latchett. How can I help you?”

“Is Mister Wotan there? Or even Mister Donner?”

I heard such things a good deal when I was new to those parts. The crofters were used to the Rengaw brothers, where I was just a stranger they’d hired. But the Yorkshiremen did warm to me once they saw I could do the job all right. “I’m sorry, but they’re on call,” I said to Wilf Latchett. “Tell me what wants doing. I’ll handle it as best I can.”

The telephone wires carried his sigh to me. “Well, it’s Awd Bill,” he said. Before I could enquire as to what manner of beast Old Bill might me, he went on, “’E’s gone an’ broke a toosk off short, ’e ’as.”

“A . . . tusk?” I echoed faintly. Mammoth work was a treat I hadn’t yet enjoyed. Well, it seemed I was about to.

“Aye, a toosk. D’ye think I’m jestin’ with ye, young man?” Mr. Latchett said. “Broke it on a stone in t’dirt, ’e did.” Up on Longyoke Fells, the dirt was more stones than anything else.

I’d studied animal dentistry at veterinary school in Glasgow, but dentistry on mammoths is not your ordinary animal dentistry. Thinking how unhappy such a large patient might be also made me think of something else. “Ah, Mister Latchett,” I said, “Old Bill . . . He’s been fixed, hasn’t he?” If I sounded hopeful and anxious, well, I was.

But Mr. Latchett said, “Oh, aye. T’awd vet, ’e took care of it years gone by. ’E said a mammoth wi’ ’is stones was plumb dangerous, an’ Ah reckon ’e knew what ’e was talkin’ aboot.”

I reckoned the same, and blessed the old vet—the man from whom Wotan had purchased the practice a few years earlier. “Very good, Mister Latchett,” I said, hoping it was. “I’ll be up as soon as I can.”

“Ah hope ye can do summat, young man,” the farmer said. “Awd Bill, ’e’s none too pleased wi’ having but the one diggin’ shovel.”

“Er—yes,” I said. Mammoths used their tusks to grub some of their food out of the ground. How well would Old Bill get along without a matched set, even if I could properly repair the remaining stump or stub or whatever the proper word was?

One thing at a time, though. Making that repair—if I could do it—had to come first. I said my goodbyes to Wilf Latchett, made sure the surgery held no one in urgent need of help, and then threw into my traveling satchel whatever I thought might be useful in this unusual case. That dealt with, I went out to the shed and tossed the satchel into the elderly, spavined Morris Minor Wotan let me use.

The Minor had a self-starter, but that was long deceased. Its designers having perhaps anticipated such flaws, it also had a crank. That didn’t always make the engine turn over, either, but it did then. The shed housing the Minor forthwith commenced to fill with noxious fumes. I quickly backed the car out into the open air to give myself a chance to breathe.

Away I went, trailing more smoke behind me. People in the street waved as I clattered past. No one seemed upset at the Minor’s stream of exhaust; every third car in those days smoked the same way. Fine-tuning motors was an idea whose time had not yet come.

Thrsk is not a village, but it is no great city, either. I soon found myself in the countryside, climbing up past the dales to the fells. Before very long at all, I was glad for my tweed jacket. Snow lingered on north-facing slopes. The wind off the glaciers reminded me of the days when all Britain lay beneath them. By the way that wind felt, those days had ceased only a fortnight before at the earliest.

The road grew steeper. No crew had come up these slopes with fresh macadam for many a long year. To negotiate the bumps and the grade, I had to drive the Minor in first gear. That dropped my speed not quite to zero, but as near as made no difference. It hardly mattered. I wasn’t holding up traffic; mine was the only car on a very long, very lonely stretch of road.

Just before I rounded the last bend and reached Wilf Latchett’s farm, three or four musk oxen bounded away in alarm. They run wild up near the ice and are most shy of men, having been hunted so much for so long.

I started standing on the brake pedal well before I reached the gate. The lining was but a memory—the metal shoe squealed against the metal drum. For all my efforts, the Minor glided thirty yards past before the auto in motion became an auto at rest.

Wilf Latchett stood at the gate watching me walk back to him, veterinary satchel in hand. No tweed jacket or sheepskin coat for him. He wore only a collarless shirt. His one concession to the climate was that it had long sleeves. “Now then, Mister ’Olley, I’m right glad to see ye,” he said, and opened the gate so I could come through.

“You didn’t need to wait out here, Wilf,” I said. How long had he been standing out in the cold? From the moment he set down the phone? It wouldn’t have surprised me a bit. Yorkshiremen drank in such courtesy with their mothers’ milk. They would sooner have seen their holdings sacked than make an expected guest open a gate for himself.

“’Tweren’t nothin’,” Wilf said now with a shrug. He was a fair, ruddy man in his fifties, the straw-colored hair under his cloth cap just beginning to go gray. His face looked younger than his years, his battered, knobby-knuckled hands much older. The big veins just under his skin stood out like tree roots in eroded soil.

“Take me to Old Bill,” I said as he closed up behind me.

“Aye,” he said, and he was off. His Wellingtons clumped on the dirt and the new grass, still sparse and pale green up here where spring remained barely more than a rumor.

Most of the soil atop that cold, windswept hill was thin and poor, judging by the paltry growth it raised. Yet the garden behind the stone farmhouse and the fields on the far slope seemed far more prosperous than they had any business being. The aroma rising from the garden gave me a clue I did not need to be Hercule Poirot to unravel. “Do you use mammoth dung for fertilizer, Wilf?” I asked.

He nodded. “Aye, that we do. Nowt like it for makin’ plants grow tall.” He pointed towards the barn, which was—and needed to be—much larger than his home. “Awd Bill, ’e’s in there.”

Again, I needed to be no great fictional detective to deduce this. My own little gray cells, poor as they were, sufficed nicely. “Will you come in with me, Wilf?” I said. “He knows you better and likes you better than he does me.” Even a dog you can carry in a handbag is liable to nip a stranger. Attention from a out-of-temper woolly mammoth might prove a bit more serious.

Wilf Latchett nodded again. “Right glad to do it, Mister Holley.” In he went. I followed.

It was warmer within than without, though nearly night-dark. The walls shielded us from the merciless wind outside, and Old Bill was big enough to be his own heater. The same odor I had smelled by the garden was thicker and fresher here.

Wilf smelled it, too. With a chuckle, he said, “My lads, they’ll ha’ themsels a bit o’ muckin’ out to do.” He pointed towards a thin white object leaning against the wall. “Ah brought in the boosted toosk, in case ye needed it.”

Wanting to give Old Bill a moment to get used to my presence, I went over and hefted the broken tusk. Four or five feet of ivory, it had to weigh a good fifty pounds: heavier than I expected. “It will be worth a fair bit to you,” I said. “Ivory—heh, heh—doesn’t grow on trees.”

“Ah thought o’ that, Ah did,” Wilf said. “Ah’d liefer ha’ Awd Bill whole, though.”

“I understand,” I said, and then, because I couldn’t put it off any longer, “Let’s have a look at him, shall we?” If I sounded more cheerful and less nervous than I was, people often do.

“Come on with me, then,” Wilf said matter-of-factly, and went over to the great gray-brown beast stuffing hay into its mouth with its trunk. Instead of running the other way, I followed.

Old Bill didn’t turn to look at us, but his ears twitched in our direction as we drew near. They were smaller than those of an Indian elephant, much less those of an African. The tropical varieties use their ears to radiate away excess heat, a worry seldom found in subglacial Yorkshire.

Wilf set a fond hand on the side of the mammoth’s face, not far from where the broken tusk erupted. “Stay steady, awd boy,” he said. “T’ vet, ’e’s ’ere to help you. ’E’ll not ’urt you any more’n he must.”

I hoped the beast was listening. Stepping up beside Wilf Latchett, I got my first look at what remained of the tusk. Sure enough, there was the pulp cavity, exposed to air and dirt and germs. As I examined it, Old Bill examined me. For all the mammoth’s bulk, its eye wasn’t a great deal larger than my own. It relied more on hearing and sense of smell—and on touch, as the end of its trunk explored me. It was like being felt by an enormously strong, two-fingered hand.

“Let’s numb things up a bit, shall we?” I said, and used a large-bore needle to give the mammoth an injection of novocaine near the base of that tooth. I wanted the nerve as much out of action as I could make it before I went to work on the damaged part of the tusk. I also squirted novocaine on the nerve ending exposed by the break. From the snuffling sound Old Bill made, he wasn’t sure he cared for that, but he tolerated it. Had he taken any serious offense, I should not be setting down this tale now.

Wilf and I stepped outside for a cigarette while the anesthetic took effect. Then, hoping I’d not just smoked my last one like a man before a firing squad, I walked back into the barn.

Horses’ teeth and those of cattle are large and long-rooted, so I had some tolerably formidable dentistry tools. But those teeth do not compare to a tusk. As far as I know, elephant dentists have to improvise. Demand is not sufficient to encourage the manufacture of instruments on such a mammoth scale.

Forgive me.

I cleaned out the pulp cavity as far as I could reach with my misnamed “large animal” tools. Old Bill did not care for that, even anesthetized, but put up with it as if he knew I did not mean to hurt him. I have seen the same from many other beasts as well.

Having excised the nerve as far as I could reach, I cleaned the cavity with antiseptic solution. Then I inserted pointed strips of gutta-percha and used a match to seal the rubbery stuff to the tusk. “There!” I said, pleased with my handiwork.

Wilf seemed less delighted. “Well, you’ve done summat, any road,” he allowed. “But will yon blowout patch stand up to it when Awd Bill gets to diggin’ again?”

I ran into that like a mammoth tusk slamming into a buried stone. After a bit of thought, I had to admit, “I don’t know.”

“Is there aught more ye can do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I repeated, and stood there in the great mammoth-smelling barn whilst I thought some more. After a couple of minutes, I said, “This will do for the time being, I think. But if you’ll let me take the broken tusk along with me, I may be able to come up with something better, something that will last quite a while. You’ll get the tusk back, I promise.” Having reminded him it was valuable, I wanted to leave no doubts on that score.

He scratched the side of his jaw. “Ah’ll ha’ to shell out more brass’n just for a simple visit, won’t I?”

“I’m afraid so. I don’t know how much yet—I have to speak with someone down in Ripon,” I said. “I’ll need a bit of help for what I have in mind. Do you want me to go ahead or not?”

“Aye, do it,” Wilf said. “Ah’d like Awd Bill as near whole and ’ale again as ’e can get. ’E’s not just a beast o’ burden. ’E’s part o’ the family, like.”

They say Yorkshire farmers are stingy, hard-bitten men. And some are, true enough. But many others see things like Wilf Latchett, and care for their stock as they would for their children. Oh, I’m not saying Wilf turned up his nose at cock-a-leekie, but a mammoth has more character than a mammoth’s weight of chickens.

City bred as I am, I always enjoyed going into Ripon. Ripon may be no great city, but a city it is. However charming Thrsk is, it is no more than a town. The difference between the one and the other is not so easily defined, but is readily seen. Just for instance, Ripon had traffic lights, an amenity Thrsk was innocent of in those days.

And Ripon had Dr. Aryeh Teitelbaum. That distinguished Jewish gentleman was Wotan and Donner’s dentist, and lately mine as well. He’d also given the practice much valuable advice about caring for, maintaining, and repairing teeth. Being an expert on that score gave him an advantage even if the teeth in question weren’t human.

“Hullo, old man!” he said when I walked into his office. He had the plummiest BBC accent I’d ever heard. His father, I happened to know, dealt in secondhand clothes in Birmingham. To hear him talk, though, you’d guess he was to the manor born. His diction didn’t falter even when he saw the broken tusk in my arms. “Where on earth did you come by that?” he enquired.

“Hilltop farmer up on the fells, as near the glaciers as you can get without being buried in ice,” I replied.

“You do know we don’t make false teeth from ivory anymore?” he said.

“I had heard that, yes.” I did my best to match Aryeh dry for dry. It was the best way I knew to make him get down to business.

He plucked at his beard. Yes, he wore one even then, when they were as few and far between as could be. His was closely trimmed, with some gray starting to show in patches on his chin. Reasonably enough, he asked, “Why did you bring it to me, then?”

“I hoped you might rig some sort of replacement, prosthesis, false tusk—call it what you will. Something Old Bill can use instead of what he’s lost here.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Aryeh murmured. “A farmer up near the ice . . . He’ll not have a pair of threepenny bits to jingle in his pocket, will he?”

“He isn’t rich,” I agreed.

I might as well not have spoken. “It’s all right. The challenge of it alone is worth the candle,” he said, more to himself than to me. He might have forgotten I was there. Then he remembered me again. Most of the time, the expression on his roundish face was mild, even amused. Now his gaze sharpened. “You won’t have taken an impression of the remaining end of the tusk, will you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Aryeh sighed at my many failings. Wotan often did the same, but on a different note. The dentist said, “Can you go back up there and get the contours of the last foot or so? I’ll want to shape a socket for the false tooth, you understand.” By the way he said it, he assumed I understood nothing. When it came to dentistry, that was a fair assumption.

“I can, certainly,” I said, hoping the Morris Minor would agree with me; it was a savage climb. “But what shall I use to make the impression? Modeling clay? I can pick some up, I suppose.”

“Wait here. Don’t move even a muscle. Not a muscle, do you hear? I’ll be back directly.” Aryeh disappeared into the bowels of his office. He emerged in due course with a carton he carried in both hands. “Here you go, old man. This is the compound I use to take impressions for crowns and false teeth. You’ll need more than I’m in the habit of using, I fear.”

“Thanks ever so much! Will it come off the tusk once it dries, or will I need to cut it in half?” I asked.

“It should come off. If not, you’ll do whatever you have to do, and I’ll adjust accordingly,” Aryeh said.

After thanking him again, I drove back up to the Latchett farm without phoning ahead. The Minor just about made it up the last steep bit. This time, remembering where the gate was, I trod on the brake well in advance, and slowed to a halt only a little bit beyond the hinged opening.

As I’d hoped, one of Wilf’s boys was out in the rocky fields. Ralph Latchett, a taller, ruddier version of his father, opened the gate for me. “Why art tha back so soon, Doc?” he asked. A doctor for humans or a dentist is invariably called Doctor, a veterinarian is inevitably tagged Doc.

“I’ve been down to see Doctor Teitelbaum about Old Bill’s tusk,” I said. “He wants me to make an impression of the stump.”

“He’ll be able to do summat for the mammut’?” Like his father, Ralph sounded anxious.

“He thinks he will.”

“Huh. ’E allus reckons ’e can do aught, that ’un,” Ralph said, an opinion little different from my own. He went on, “Let’s ’ope ’e ’as the right of it this time.”

“Let’s,” I agreed. “Will you take me to Old Bill?” I didn’t much care to be alone with the mammoth in that great drafty barn.

“I will, sir, and right gladly, too.” He set a pace that I, with my arms full of PATENT IMPRESSIONIZING COMPOUND (it said on the carton), was hard-pressed to match. Recalling the things people said about elephants’ memories, I hoped the beast was in a forgiving mood.

As he had been the last time I came in, Old Bill was eating. Since he couldn’t forage for himself so well, the Latchetts were keeping him in hay. He snuffled in my direction. His tail and ears twitched a bit as I came up to him, but only a bit. He seemed willing to tolerate me, if not to welcome me as a bosom friend.

I molded the compound around the tusk’s stump. It was, one of the boxes inside the carton informed me, made up largely of alginate, whatever alginate was. The box also said it had a setting time of about four minutes. The way I was using it, I gave it twice as long.

Old Bill, I should add, accepted my attentions as calmly as if I were a Latchett and he’d known me for years. When I said as much, Ralph nodded. “’E’s a good ’un, our Bill is,” he said. I could only nod back; any mammoth not a “good ’un” would be far too dangerous to keep near people.

As I worked the impressionizing compound off his tusk, Old Bill did not flinch or show any other sign or pain or distress. That told me the procedure I’d done a few days before had probably rooted out, you might say, any incipient infection in the tusk’s stub. I also checked the gutta-percha seal at the end of the stub. Even under a magnifying glass, it seemed intact.

“All as’t should be, Mister Holley?” Ralph asked.

“I think so. I hope so,” I answered. Though new to the practice, I had already learned not to promise success I couldn’t be sure of delivering.

“Even so much is good t’hear, any road.” Ralph might have grown up far from city sophistication, but he understood I wasn’t promising. I always appreciated things being clear between veterinarian and client. Then he asked, “What’s the scot this new bit o’ business?”

“Not a farthing,” I told him, pleased that I could. “Doctor Teitelbaum doesn’t want payment. He said he’s never had the chance to work on a mammoth before.”

“Huh!” Ralph said. “’E took our brass fine last year, when ’e yanked my bottom wisdom teeth.” He paused, visibly running his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “They don’t ’urt no more—I will say that.”

I took the mold back to the car and drove to Ripon once more. Going downhill in the Minor could be even more exciting than going up. Climbing a hill, you wondered if you’d make it to the top. Descending, you wondered fearfully how fast you’d be going when you got to the bottom and whether you could stop if you had to. Any slope at all gave the brakes a challenge they really weren’t up to meeting.

Thanks to the dearth of traffic in the high fells, I got down on to flat ground with no more than the usual pounding heart and cold perspiration. Nor did I have any mishaps parking the car down the street from Aryeh Teitelbaum’s office. The mold survived the drive unscathed, too. I took it inside.

This time, I had to sit half an hour in the waiting room, as he was busy with a patient. When the man came out, he nodded to me. He was feeling of his jaw, as if amazed he didn’t hurt more. Sure enough, he said, “Reminds me o’ the trenches in the war. The Huns finish shelling, and you go, ‘Well, I didn’t catch a packet this time.’” Another nod and he went on his way.

A moment later, Aryeh stepped into the waiting room. I gave him the mold I’d made. He looked at it from the side, then peered into it to see what the end looked like. “Nicely done, George. Very nicely done indeed,” he said. “It’s just what I need. I don’t believe I could have done better myself, even if the thought of getting near the brute didn’t scare me spitless.”

I happened to know he’d won a Military Medal in Belgium in ’18, when things looked black indeed. Not that he’d told me himself, you understand; he would have gone on the rack before bragging like that. But I’d heard it from more than one man who’d served with him. And, things being as they are, Jews have to show twice the bravery to win half the credit.

So all I said was, “Will it do what wants doing?”

“I think it should,” he said. “You must give me a week or ten days now. I shan’t be doing this alone. But at the end of that time I may have something to make your mammoth a bit less lopsided.”

“I’ll come back in ten days’ time, then,” I said.

“Ring before you do,” he warned. “I shouldn’t want you to make the trip for nothing if it isn’t ready.” And so it was agreed.

A good thing he had me telephone before going back to Ripon. When I did, Aryeh told me he needed two days more. He was all apologies, which I ignored. The man was doing me and the Latchetts and Old Bill a considerable favor. If he and whatever confederates he’d enlisted needed a bit more time, then they did, that was all.

I checked again before driving down. On getting the green light, I chugged to Ripon in the old Minor. I had no idea what I’d see. “Good morning, George,” Aryeh said when I walked into his office. After we shook hands he brought me the broken tusk. “Here you are. Your Mister Latchett will make the best of this. Not long on cash, you said?”

“Not a bit of it,” I agreed. “But he worries more about Old Bill than any of that.”

“He knows what matters to him. Pity more men don’t,” the dentist said. “Now if you’ll excuse me for a moment—” Aryeh ducked into his inner office. He always had a flair for the dramatic.

No more than two minutes later, out he came again, carrying another tusk, or rather a denture, I supposed you’d say, doing duty for the genuine article. It was almost as creamy-white as the true mammoth tooth. Only the socket at the end Aryeh held uppermost really gave away its being man-made.

“Gosh, that’s wonderful!” I exclaimed. “What’s it made of?”

“Concrete,” Aryeh answered. “Josh Doggett, who’s in the building trades here, lent a hand with it after I finished the mold. It’s painted now, to look more like ivory. That will wear off with use and time. Unless Will Latchett touches it up now and again, he’ll have a mammoth with a two-toned tusk.”

“It’s made of concrete?” I said doubtfully. “Isn’t it all too likely to break again?”

“I dare hope not, anyhow,” he answered. “A couple of steel reinforcing rods run the length of it. Getting them bent to the proper curvature was what held me up. Now that they are, though, Josh is confident it will last about as long as the unbroken tusk. If reinforced concrete is good enough for skyscrapers, he says, it’s likely good enough for mammoths, too.”

“I hope so,” I said, laughing. “Will the socket fit smoothly over the broken end of the tusk? Should I cement it into place?”

“I’d cement it. I’ll let you have some dental cement, the kind I use to hold crowns on tooth stumps in people’s mouths.” Aryeh laughed, too. “I never have to apply it with a paintbrush, though. It dries fairly fast, so you’d do well not to waste time between putting it on and placing the tusk.”

I nodded. “I understand. You’ve put an awful lot of time and work and supplies into this, Aryeh. Are you sure there isn’t some way I can square it with you?”

He shook his head. “It’s my pleasure. I’ve never had the chance to work on this scale before. It’s taught me a few things, though heaven only knows if I’ll ever get the chance to use them again.”

“You’re aces in my book,” I said. He waved that aside. Like a lot of generous men, he was embarrassed by his own generosity.

I took the denture out to the auto, and then the veritable mammoth tusk. People on the sidewalk gave me curious looks, but Ripon is not such a big city that anyone had the crust to ask me straight out what the devil I was doing. Aryeh, meanwhile, loaded me down with enough dental cement for a regiment’s worth of human sufferers.

Then it was up to the edge of the glacier once more. My poor elderly Minor did not approve. The motor growled and whined like an unhappy dog as the car climbed and climbed. The jaunt never failed to fascinate me, though. Not so long ago, as the geologists measure such things, all Britain lay beneath a mile of ice. Even after it began to retreat, after the Channel cut our island kingdom off from the Continent, for long centuries places like Dover and Portsmouth were as subarctic as the Yorkshire fells are today.

The air had that icy chill, but also that icy purity. If you could make a living here, you could make a living anywhere. I would have taken my hat off to Wilf Latchett and his hearty brood, but the chilly wind might have snatched it from my hand and blown it downhill towards warmer climes.

Wilf was out in the fields not far from the gate when I drove up. He raised rye and oats, which had a chance to ripen even in the short upland growing season. Sometimes, if the year looked like being warmish, he would risk a bit of barley, but never wheat. Wheat was for farmers down in the dales, who could count on frost-free days into October.

Wilf came to the gate, blowing smoke from a Woodbine. “What ’ave you got for me today, Doc?” he asked, setting a work-ravaged hand on the latch.

“With luck, something that will set Old Bill to rights.” I left the car and drew the replacement semi-tusk out through the open rear window.

“There’s summat out of the ordinary,” Wilf said, taking it from me and turning it this way and that to examine all of Aryeh Teitelbaum’s handiwork. He smiled as he reached into the socket at the end; he saw at once how it would connect the new part to the whole of the mammoth. “’E’s a right clever feller, Doctor Teitelbaum is.”

“I think so, too,” I said.

He hefted the prosthetic. “Not much heavier than the real ivory,” he remarked. “Shouldn’t trouble Awd Bill a bit to bear it. An’ ’e even slapped paint on it t’make it look more like t’other ’un.”

“He said you’d have to touch that up if you don’t want it looking like, well, concrete after a while,” I said.

“Mebbe Ah will, mebbe Ah won’t,” Wilf said. “But concrete? Will Ah have to worry it’ll break off short again?”

“I hope not.” I explained how Aryeh and his friend had reinforced the tusk with steel.

“By gaw! What’ll they think of next?” Wilf said.

Remembering, I also took out the broken length of ivory. “And here’s this,” I said. “As I told you, it’ll bring you back something for all the trouble you and Old Bill have gone through, anyhow.”

“Obliged, sir. Much obliged indeed. For now, ye can lay it on t’grass there. I’ll tend to it in good time,” Wilf said. I must have given him a look, because he chuckled. “’Oo’s going to come by and nick it, Mister ’Olley? Answer me that, eh?”

I set down the tusk and spread my hands. “You’ve got me there.”

We walked together to the great mammoth barn. I tried to get Wilf to let me carry the replacement tusk while taking the much lighter cement himself, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I had to argue him out of lugging the cement, too. He was my host, or felt he was, and didn’t want a guest doing anything for himself.

When we went inside, Old Bill gave a questioning snort. That was all—by then, I’d been there often enough to have reached the rank of accepted person. He may even have understood that I’d come to do him good. Some animals seem to, and mammoths are uncommonly clever beasts.

I painted the inside of the socket with cement, and the last foot or so of the tusk stump as well. When the concrete creation was in place, I made sure I had cement all around the butt end of the socket, doing my best to seal it away from the outside air.

“’Ow long’s it need to dry?” Wilf asked.

“Not long, Aryeh said. I’ll give it about ten minutes, because I’m using so much more cement than he does with his patients.”

He laughed again. “Aye, reckon y’are.” He laid a hand on the side of Old Bill’s great, shaggy head. “’Ang on, awd lad. ’Twon’t be long.” The mammoth snorted once more. Did it understand what he told it? I would say no, if you mean understand as you or I might. But it understood that a human it trusted was telling it something in reassuring tones. The mammoth stood quietly while I held the false tusk in place, waiting for the cement to set.

Old Bill stayed so calm, I gave it an extra couple of minutes. Then I stepped away. The concrete simulacrum was a bit heavier than the ivory it replaced, thanks to the steel reinforcing rods and the socket extending its length. I wondered if that would disturb or discomfit the mammoth. It didn’t seem to. And, after all, he was closer to being in balance now than he had been with his broken tusk.

As I’ve noted, mammoths and elephants do not see well, depending more on smell and hearing than on sight. There in the mammoth barn, though, I would have sworn Old Bill was trying to look down the new tusk to discover what I’d done to him. He cocked his head now this way, now that. Had he been a human being, I should have said he was puzzled.

Try as he would, he didn’t get the answer he was looking for from his eyes. Then he felt the replacement tusk with his trunk. He used that for so much: to smell with, to siphon up water and squirt it into his mouth, and to pick up food and likewise convey it to his tongue and the teeth that were not tusks.

He reminded me it could also serve as a hand. The two fingerlike projections stroked the painted concrete. Old Bill seemed particularly intrigued by the way the socket fit onto the lost tusk’s stump. He explored the joining again and again. I wish I could have deciphered his grunt. Claiming an animal acts like a man is a mug’s game, of course, but if I’d had to put the noise into English it would have been something like How did he do that?

Wilf Latchett thought the same. “Wonderin’ ’ow it got there,” he said.

Then Old Bill walked to the closed door of the barn and turned his great head back towards Wilf, as far as it would go. I’ve been cooped up in here long enough, that look said. Now that I’m whole again, let me go out and be a proper mammoth again.

Wilf hurried to open the door. No doubt Old Bill could have broken it open himself, but he seemed to appreciate the courtesy. As soon as the space would accommodate his bulk, he hurried out onto the grass.

Up went his trunk in what looked like joy. Yes, I know I warned against anthropomorphizing, but here once more it was hard to avoid. Then he trumpeted out a blast that sounded like a dozen horn players blowing on bugles full of spit.

A moment later, another mammoth answered, far off in the distance. “Ah, that’ll be Dusty Rhodes’ Chuzzlewit,” Wilf said.

“Chuzzlewit?” It was hardly a name I’d have expected a Yorkshire mammoth to bear.

“Likes Dickens, Dusty does. ’E’s a good bloke any road, though,” Wilf said, leaving me to make what I would of that.

Leaving it alone seemed the better part of valor. I just said, “Call me in a week to let me know how he’s doing. Call me right away if he has trouble of any kind, or if he seems to be in pain. I’ve never done a root canal on a mammoth before. I hope everything’s all right, but I don’t know that it is. And of course call me if he breaks the tusk again. Heaven forbid, I know, but it can happen.”

Wilf sketched a salute, as if I were a young, mustache-wearing first lieutenant from his Great War days. “Ah’ll do just as ye say, Mister ’Olley. An’ me an’ Awd Bill, we’re much obliged to ye, and to the dentist, and to his friend down in Ripon.”

I thanked him and headed back to the Morris Minor. Wilf came along to open the gate for me, the kind of kindness men in the high country took for granted in those days. We’d almost reached the edge of the road when Old Bill trumpeted again. He sounded delighted. I hoped he was. I hoped he’d stay that way.

For the next week, I tightened up every time the telephone in the surgery rang. I knew, I knew, it would be Wilf Latchett, ringing me to report some disaster: Old Bill in distress from pain in the now nearly unreachable pulp cavity, or else the replacement tusk and some of the stump snapping off.

Every time, it was someone else calling about something else. Every time, I took a deep breath and relaxed . . . till the telephone clamored again. On the appointed day, Wilf did telephone—late in the afternoon. Mrs. Kitchen took the call. I was sewing up the hind leg of a dog who’d come off second best in a scrape with some barbed wire.

“It’s Wilf Latchett, Doctor Holley!” she called down the hallway.

“Talk to him for a couple of minutes, please. I’m almost finished here.” I made sure I did what needed doing properly, accepted the farmer’s thanks and half a crown, and hurried to the telephone. As soon as Mrs. Kitchen handed me the receiver, I blurted out, “How’s he doing, Wilf?”

“’E’s capital, Mister ’Olley. First rate,” Wilf answered. “Couldn’t be better. Fine fettle Awd Bill’s in, yes indeed.”

Relief washed over me like the gentle rain so rare in rugged Yorkshire. Flood, yes. Drought, yes. Blizzard, often. But gentle rain, here, is more spoken of than seen. “I’m so glad to hear it!” I said.

“Well, now, sir, I’m right glad you took such good care of ’im,” Wilf said.

“Call again if there’s the least trouble,” I told him, and he rang off.

There wasn’t, not that had anything to do with the replacement tusk. Old Bill lived quite happily with it for more than twenty years. Wotan put him down in the early 1960s, when a malignant mass in his bowel left him but a sad shadow of his old self. By that time, Wilf’s sons were running the farm together.

But I did have one more reminder of the story. A year or so after I put on the replacement tusk, Aryeh Teitelbaum was drilling out and filling a cavity I’d got. After he’d finished, he said, “Your Wilf Latchett came by not so long ago.”

“Did he?” I said blurrily—the novocaine left half my tongue numb.

“He did.” Aryeh nodded. “He gave me a fiver—said he’d got it from what he made off Old Bill’s broken tusk. I tried to turn him down, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

“They’re proud men, Yorkshire farmers,” I said.

He nodded once more. “That they are. So I passed two pounds ten to Josh Doggett and kept the other half myself. Oh, and Wilf gave me—this.” He reached behind him and took something off a shelf. It was a carved ivory mammoth, no bigger than the last joint of my thumb. “His wife made it, he told me, from a bit he didn’t sell. Some women still weave, some knit. Kitty Latchett makes these little carvings—mostly from stone, but not this one.”

“No, not this one,” I agreed, and held it close to my face to get a good look. “If you hadn’t told me, I might have believed it went all the way back to the Ice Age. Of course, this far north that never really quite ended.”

“I doubt we’ve got better since, either,” Aryeh said. Since the second war had started only a week or two earlier, I couldn’t very well quarrel with him.

You don’t see mammoths on farms any more, though a few wild ones still wander near the edges of the glaciers. The ice is drawing back more these days. People say the world is warming up. I’m glad I’ve lived when I have, and that I’ve been able to smooth things along a bit for beasts and men.

About the Author

Harry Turtledove is an escaped Byzantine historian. He writes alternate history, other science fiction, fantasy (often historically based), and. when people let him get away with it, historical fiction. He is perhaps best known for The Guns of the South; more recent books include Joe Steele, The House of Daniel, Through Darkes Europe, and a contemporary supernatural thriller, Alpha and Omega.

He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Broadway maven and fellow writer Laura Frankos. They have three daughters, two granddaughters, and three over-privileged cats. Anyone looking for his annoying opinions about writing and a great many other things can find him on Twitter @HNTurtledove.

In This Moment, We Are Happy

Chen Qiufan translated by Rebecca Kuang

Black screen.

BACKGROUND AUDIO

One heartbeat overlaps onto another; the first slow and steady, the second initially faster than the first by two thirds before slowing down. With a nervous energy, the two rhythms intertwine, their timbres cooling and turning mechanical, weaving into a grander, more complex electronic soundscape.

CAPTION

In spring 2015, the new Visual Anthropology program at Peking University’s Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences required students to submit small group projects to complete their studies.

By the end of the summer term in 2016, eight projects were submitted. “New Newborn,” by Xu Xinyue, Yuan Xiao, Ibanca Singh (foreign exchange student), and Sebastian Schwarz (foreign exchange student) earned the highest marks in the class and was short-listed for Best Documentary in that year’s university film festival.

“New Newborn” explores the ways that technology transforms the process of human reproduction, as well as the issue’s complex background. The Visual Anthropology program retained it as a long-term installation. As of August 2040, the project has collected over 300 hours of interview footage involving subjects from all over the world, and covers a period of 25 years—precisely the average length of a human generation.

This film was edited and produced using some of the project’s source materials. It was authorized by the interview subjects and the filming teams. Some of the sounds and images required postproduction processing.

Fade to black.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

What made you decide to have a child?

WU YINGMIAN

Age: 37

Location: Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, China

Occupation: Entrepreneur

It’s quite a natural desire to have as a woman. You can feel your body urging you, like it’s trying to tell you that it’s time. What’s more, your entire environment, including the people around you, expects you to have a child. After thousands of years, our society still treats women the same . . .

KENJI OHNO, AKA K.O

Age: 33

Location: Boston, United States

Occupation: Multimedia Artist

The way I see it, it’s an experience. I know what people are going to say—oh, K.O. is trolling for publicity, just as usual.

I don’t give a ****. The media are always blathering nonsense about being PC, but they never care about being ****ing PC when they’re talking about me. I believe that what I’m taking up is perhaps the greatest feat of the century. It’ll be many years before the world properly understands its significance. I’ll wait for that day.

HANNA & FATIMA KÜHN

Ages: 32 and 28

Location: Berlin, Germany
Occupations: Film Studies Professor and Photographer

Hanna: It’s very simple. I love Fatima. She loves me. We want to leave something behind on this earth—some witness to our relationship. Storage mediums like celluloid film and magnetic discs will all become obsolete. But life doesn’t become obsolete. Life goes on by itself.

Fatima: That sounds a bit selfish . . . [Smiles] but that’s just the way it is. This child will belong completely to the two of us. They won’t be tainted by any third parties, you know what I mean? [Smiles again] I don’t mean to offend anyone when I say “third party.”

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

Age: 22

Location: Gujarat, India

Occupation: Surrogate Mother

The first time I got pregnant, I was sixteen. I was terrified. I asked Rajan what we should do. He wasn’t much older than I was back then. All he did was wobble his head and say, “Well, we might as well have it.”

So we got married, and I gave birth to Vishal. A year later, we had Seema. I said that was enough, we wouldn’t have enough to eat. But Rajan said it was no problem, that he could just pick up some extra shifts. But we still couldn’t pay our bills. Our children were eating more and more every day, and they were going to start school soon.

My friend Mehak told me that Akanksha Hospital was looking for young, healthy women, so I came here. My profession is giving birth. This is the third surrogate child I’ve carried for a client.

MOW45

Age: Undisclosed

Location: Somewhere in Indochina

Occupation: SHIIVA Lab Liaison

Huh. I’ve always found this question quite curious. There’s a saying that humans are no more than slaves to their DNA. Every single one of our thoughts and actions are procedures already predetermined by genes, and the process’ ultimate goal is to disseminate the information stored by genes as far and wide as possible. The human body is like an ineffective Enigma Machine. Its rotors often make mistakes, and I suspect that the final receiver might not be able to read the initial message. But until then, we’ll just have to keep playing this clumsy game of telephone, except with a different set of rules.

Fade to black.

CAPTION

PART ONE

Wu Yingmian sits in the back of a seven-seater minivan, taking an endless series of phone calls. The car speeds past a forest of mirrored buildings, reflected in the window against her gaunt profile.

The camera follows Wu as she steps out of the car and enters an office building. As she rides up the elevator, several people bow and greet her when they see her. She responds with a slight nod.

Through the glass conference room wall, we see Wu sitting in a meeting. She speaks up every now and then. When agitated, she strides through the stereoscopic projections and pounds the table at the center of the room. The data visualizations twist and distort against her body.

Cut to Wu examining documents in her office. Behind her stretches a full-length French window, through which the entire city skyline is visible, including the distant Shenzhen Bay. At last, Wu signs the last document left on the table, gently exhales, and wraps her fingers around a cup of tea long gone cold.

WU YINGMIAN

I’m a workaholic. Must have gotten it from my father. [Smiles]

I can’t help it. We learn from our parents; my whole family is like this. What would you do in my position? If thousands of people relied on you to feed their families? [Picks up a family photo from the desk] It’s not like I haven’t thought about getting pregnant myself. I’ve tried everything. But it’s just not in my cards.

Also, my father has some . . . psychological issues. [The photo displays Wu’s mother and father in their youth] My mother had a massive hemorrhage giving birth to me. But she risked her life to have me because the Wu clan had to have an heir. My father has never completely gotten over the trauma. He doesn’t want me to . . . [Stops abruptly]

A web page appears on Wu’s computer screen, displaying neatly arranged rows of photographs of women of various skin tones. Clicking on a photo reveals that woman’s background information, including her age, birthplace, health status, education, DNA testing results, reproductive history, and hobbies and interests. Clicking on the disclosure arrow below that woman’s photo reveals her family history up to three previous generations.

WU YINGMIAN

A lot of mothers in the chat group said it’s better to pick a white surrogate. I think that’s pretty clearly racist. [As she speaks, the camera pans over headshots of surrogate mothers]

The service we’re using employs only the best surrogates. At this level, racial differences don’t matter. Personally, I prefer Asians, or even South Asians.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

What does your husband think?

On the desk sits a photograph of Wu and her husband, whose face has been blurred out.

WU YINGMIAN

Oh, him? All he had to do was contribute a few milliliters of fluid, and now he gets to have an opinion? You have no idea how painful egg extraction is. Of course, I get the final say. Will I go to meet the surrogate mother in person? I’ll have to think about that . . . [Glances out the window]

Scene change. Under a hot tropical sun, taxicabs speed along a red dirt road, kicking up large clouds of dust at weary pedestrians. The camera follows Neha down the road. She comments on her surroundings as she walks. Curious children wander into the frame every once in a while, tossing toothy grins at the camera.

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

We used to live in a hut like that. [The camera pans over makeshift shacks of canvas propped up by metal tubes] A lot of surrogate mothers have to live here and wait if they aren’t chosen, or if they don’t conceive. Our whole family has moved into a new, proper house now. I’ve been lucky, thank the gods.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

How much do you get paid?

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

 . . . After the agency fee, I get about $6000 American dollars. Hey, that’s more than what Rajan makes in several years.

Several of Neha’s acquaintances come over to congratulate her, their eyes filled with envious admiration.

Scene change. Neha walks into a pale beige building. The sign on the door indicates this is one of Akanksha Hospital’s surrogate mother residences. A nurse helps Neha into a hospital bed. The room, which is about thirty square meters large, holds eight beds. Three are empty. All surrogate mothers who successfully conceive must move into this residence. The nurse begins to examine Neha.

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

I had to do heavy manual labor when I was pregnant with Vishal and Seema. I wasn’t eating well, either. Nobody cared then. It’s much better here. [Smiles]

The nurse gives Neha an injection, then prepares a nutritious meal for her. Neha, who has been through this process three times before, appears relaxed and at ease.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

How long do you need to take these injections for?

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

I’ve never kept track before. In any case, I know I have to keep doing them for a long time . . .

NURSE

These are progesterone injections. We do seventy-five days of injections. The hormone thickens the endometrium and inhibits uterine movement. After implantation, the placenta develops, which . . .

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

I know, I know. It’s all to protect that precious little thing. It’s the company’s property. [Smiles]

NARRATOR (O.S.)

Do you find all this difficult?

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

I don’t find the procedure itself difficult. What’s difficult is the way people see me because of it. Rajan was furious at first. He thought that I was committing sacrilege, that this was an unclean act. But I told him that some of those client parents had lost their only child, or couldn’t conceive on their own due to medical reasons. We’re doing a good deed here. The gods will forgive us. Gradually, he came around. What’s more, we’re living in a new house now, and our children are attending good schools. Everyone’s happy, no?

NARRATOR (O.S.)

Do you ever meet the parents?

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

Unless they make specific requests, we have minimal contact and conduct interviews through video. After the child is born, they take it away half an hour after verification. That’s what the contract stipulates . . .

NARRATOR (O.S.)

Do you ever want to see those children again?

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

I . . . [Smiles uncomfortably] I haven’t thought about that . . .

Scene change. Wu is in the gym, sweating on an elliptical machine while watching a video program with wireless earphones. In her tight athletic bodysuit, she hardly looks like someone about to turn forty.

CAPTION

The surrogate agency declined our request for filming.

WU YINGMIAN

Don’t they say that in the future, people might live until they’re 200 years old? [Smiles] Looking youthful and energetic is an asset in the workplace. More and more people are going to choose to freeze their eggs or to use surrogates in the future. Job competition is so fierce right now that when you come back from maternity leave, there’s nothing left for you. Before, people used to hide their pregnancies—they’d pretend to go on a holiday abroad and come back with a baby. Now the popular option is surrogacy. [Points to a row of young women running in the gym]

Look, they’re even more radical. They don’t want to get married at all, they just want babies of their own. Men are like shoes or clothes; you can change them whenever you want. [Smiles]

Wu is watching an animated film produced by the surrogacy agency. A cartoonish figure explains the entire process.

CARTOON

The preparation period requires 20 days of oral contraceptives, followed by 10 days of suppressor injections in order to prevent the premature loss of eggs.

Before ovulation, you must undergo blood tests to check estrogen levels every day, take a monitoring test every 2-3 days, and inject three different shots every night to stimulate egg maturation. During egg extraction, a needle-shaped pipette the length of an A4 sheet of paper will be inserted through your vagina until it reaches the ovaries. The doctor will monitor the position of the pipette using a B-mode ultrasound. Once they locate the follicles, they can extract around 10 eggs at a time. Meanwhile, the surrogate mother will need regular injections to regulate her estrogen levels. The male donor will contribute his semen at the same time. The eggs will be fertilized in vitro for 2-6 hours until they become embryos. After a certain period of time, they can be implanted into the uterus of the surrogate mother.

In order to increase the chances of success, three to four embryos will be implanted into the surrogate’s womb simultaneously. Their development will then be monitored.

WU YINGMIAN

I think they should replace that cartoon woman with a mother hen. [Smiles] Hens are egg factories, right? I’ve heard that I’ll end up with fifty or sixty needle scars all over my body, not to mention all the other possible complications. I’m really paying to suffer. Ah, age thirty-seven is the limit. No matter how high tech you get, it’s still easier to be a man. “The male donor will contribute his semen at the same time . . . ” Once simple sentence. That’s all there is to it. I’ve heard of some wealthy families who pay for several surrogates at once and buy eggs from Ivy League students. That’s simpler than the ancient custom of taking concubines. You don’t have to worry about the harem squabbling over family property.

Wu Yingmian finishes her workout and leaves the sweaty gym.

Scene change. Wu Yingmian drives home. She takes a phone call on the road. She appears to get into a heated argument with the person on the other end.

TEXT ON SCREEN

At Wu’s request, we did not record the call.

After hanging up, Wu remains silent for the rest of the drive. Her car pulls up to a town house tucked away behind a tropical garden. A poodle rushes out to greet her. The house interior is decorated in a typical Mediterranean style. Wu’s husband is away on a business trip. She quickly eats a meal prepared by her staff, then retreats to her office to review a thick stack of contracts.

WU YINGMIAN

Six contracts in total, and all in English. I had to hire specialists to translate them into Chinese. My lawyers have already added their comments. Look, this agreement is with the surrogacy center, this one is with the reproductive center, this one is with the surrogate agency, this one is with the surrogate mother herself, and this is with the capital supervisor . . . Oh, and this one is with the representing attorney. All these companies are based in different jurisdictions, and they have different laws and regulations that I have to research. I can’t get sloppy about anything here. I’ve heard of so many drawn-out surrogacy lawsuits.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

What kind of lawsuits?

WU YINGMIAN

A few years ago, for example, a Japanese couple hired a surrogate mother from India to carry their child. But they divorced before the child was born. The biological mother didn’t want her child anymore, and the father had no legal rights to it. But the baby wasn’t Indian, so the poor thing was left with undetermined status.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

What issues are you most afraid of?

WU YINGMIAN

[Thinks for a moment] What happens if the sperm donor wants to contest custody rights? What if the surrogate mother wants to keep the child? What if she wants to maintain a relationship with the child? What if the local laws protect the surrogate mother’s rights? I just want a child that belongs completely to me. I don’t want them to run into any sorts of complications because of their origin. So I need to specify these conditions very clearly in these contracts.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

In your opinion, is the surrogate mother just as much a mother as you? After all—

WU YINGMIAN

I know what you’re trying to say. I wouldn’t use such a crude term as “uterus-for-hire.” We’re all women, after all. But we stand in different positions vis-à-vis this contract. Science has turned natural reproduction into an engineering project, and we ought to comply with the rules. Everyone should perform their own role well. You want fame, you want money, and you also want a child. Where on earth would you get such a good deal?

Wu stops, lowers her head, and turns another page in the contract. Suddenly, she seems to be whispering to herself.

WU YINGMIAN

That’s why I don’t want to meet her. I think I’ll go soft, I won’t be able to stand it . . .

Scene change. We are inside the surrogate mother’s residence. A group of surrogate mothers, with bellies large and small, all dressed up with heads wrapped in saris, are seated in a circle. A sumptuous feast has been laid out in the center of the circle—naan, meat and vegetable curries, lassi, and masala chai. The women sing songs of prayer to bring blessings on the woman in the middle, whose belly is the largest and roundest.

CAPTION

Every time a surrogate mother is about to give birth, the women in the residence throw a big party like this to bless the baby about to be born—a baby that grows in the mother’s belly, but does not belong to her.

NEHA SRIVASTAVA (O.S.)

I’ve been to a lot of these baby showers. Everyone is always in such a good mood at the start, eating and drinking, singing and dancing. But everyone falls silent by the end. We all know that once the child is born, we’ll only get to hold them for less than an hour. We tell ourselves that it’s someone else’s baby. But they still grew inside us for nine months. Our blood flows through their veins; they’re a part of us.

It’s so hard to describe this feeling. It’s like your heart has been hollowed out, and all you’re left with is an empty sack.

The expecting mother begins to cry. The other surrogate mothers put their hands on her shoulders, comforting her. But their own eyes are red as well. Neha hugs the other mothers, then turns her head to the side, as though thinking about something.

Scene change. The camera follows Neha into a busy street, where the pedestrians toss her curious glances. Neha steps into a meadow of knee-high vetiver grass. Gently, she strokes the stiff, saw-toothed grass heads while humming a wordless tune under her breath.

NEHA SRIVASTAVA (O.S.)

Whenever I sing this song, I can feel the baby moving very strongly, like a fish swimming in my belly. I think it must really like this song, so I try to sing it while I still can.

Neha approaches the bank of a small stream and carefully sits down on the grass. She dips her hands into the water. Close-up, her hands, running through the clear, glistening water, appear covered in many little scars.

NEHA SRIVASTAVA (O.S.)

When the baby is born, I want to place a red bindi on its forehead according to tradition. I also want to tie threads on its wrists, ankles, and neck. This wards against evil spirits and bad luck and protects their living energy. I have to do this. I want them to grow up strong and healthy, just like my own children.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

What will you do if the biological parents object?

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

[Brief silence] They don’t know anything! They don’t understand at all!

Those rich people think that babies are like pets. They think it’s like buying a kitten or puppy at the store—that they can just hand over the cash and leave with a cage. I nearly died the first time I carried someone else’s child. They put triplets in me. In India, you can even implant quintuplets if you’re willing to pay. Sometimes, they implant two just so they can keep the boy and kill the girl!

Is this how a civilized society behaves? I really don’t know.

A lot of surrogate mothers end up aborting their babies right before they’re born, just because their clients change their minds or get divorced. Sometimes those girls die in the process. If that isn’t murder, I don’t know what is.

Neha lapses into silence. The sound of splashing water comes from nearby—a few boys have jumped from the back of a water buffalo into the stream and are dashing water at each other. The suspended droplets form a faint rainbow in the air.

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

After I gave birth to my first surrogate baby, I swore I’d never do it again. But I ended up doing it a second time, and then a third. I thought I would get used to it. I thought I’d stop feeling anything at all. But it’s not like that.

I still feel the baby’s heart beating, as if it’s talking to my own heartbeat.

Because of the baby, sometimes I still feel happy for no reason. Or I’ll get mad, or I’ll weep. You realize there’s a little life inside your body that knows about everything you do, and feels everything you feel. Though you don’t know how much it can feel, you know you can feel it, and you know it can feel you.

It’s such a strange, wonderful feeling. It doesn’t matter at all whether the life inside you truly belongs to you or not. You’ve already been bound together. Can you understand that feeling? [Looks tearfully at the camera]

Scene change. Wu Yingmian sits at her desk in the study, contract documents scattered before her. She rubs at her red eyes. She walks out to the balcony and looks out over the city, which shines like an ocean of stars. Lighting a cigarette, she takes a deep drag and exhales forcefully, breathing out wisps of white smoke that dissipate into nothing before they can take shape.

WU YINGMIAN (O.S.)

I haven’t slept at all these past few days. I’m worried about the quality of the eggs and about the extraction process. And I’m hearing too many terrifying stories—my heart can’t calm down. Even when I’m half asleep, I can’t stop thinking about those poor women, and those poor dead children.

When would you say an embryo has developed enough to count as a person? When do they have the capacity for perception? Self-awareness? I can’t dwell on this too much, or I’ll lose my mind. What kind of sin have I committed . . . ?

Cut to a close-up of Neha. The rippling water reflects on her face, its bright twinkles dancing in her eyes.  

NEHA SRIVASTAVA (O.S.)

I often dream about those children.

In my dreams they’ve already grown so big. I see their faces, white or Asian.

I call them by the names I chose for them, but they don’t answer me.

I call and call until my voice is hoarse, but they never respond. It’s only when I hum that song . . .

A burst of cheering causes Neha to lift her eyebrows in surprise. The boys have climbed ashore and put their clothes back on. One of the older boys conjures up a Kanjira drum, skillfully sprinkles a few droplets of water onto the snakeskin wrap, then begins beating out a rhythmic pattern far richer than what the little drum seems capable of.

Neha smiles. Suddenly she starts to sing along. She sings the song she was humming on the road, but this time she has added lyrics. The boys, delighted, clap their hands along to the beat. They can’t stand still any longer. Slowly they start to shake their legs, twist their hips, and wave their hands in the air as they dance, grinning. Neha stands up to join them. Her steps are cautious, but her limbs and expressions are exceptionally lively, like the countenance of a proud peacock.

NEHA SRIVASTAVA (O.S.)

In my dreams, the children still remember this song. They still remember me.

Every time, I wait for them to call out for me, but that’s when I always wake up. I never get to hear that word . . .

Cut to a close-up of Wu Yingmian.

WU YINGMIAN

I’ve spent all this effort just to hear my child make one sound . . . 

Cut to a close-up of Neha.

NEHA SRIVASTAVA

Mama. Yes, Mama.

Black screen.

CAPTION

PART TWO

Kenji Ohno waits at a T stop. On the bottom of the screen, several data graphs are superimposed over his image. The lines rise and fall like ocean waves, representing K.O.’s real-time biometric data. The train arrives at the station. K.O. slings his bag to one side as he enters the crowded train car. Several young people, who have been staring at their phones, see K.O.’s protruding belly and stand up to yield their seats. K.O. thanks them and sits down. Only then do the passengers see his face clearly, and seem unable to stop staring. Finally, he is recognized—a young, fashionably-dressed woman approaches and asks if he is K.O.

KENJI OHNO

Yes, I am.

WOMAN

Sorry if this is a bit rude, but I’ve read all about you in the news—how is it doing?

KENJI OHNO

“It” is a “her.” She’s doing very well, thank you.

WOMAN

How many months along are you now?

KENJI OHNO

Twenty-eight weeks and three days.

WOMAN

Time flies! So how are you going to . . . um . . . give birth?

The biosignal lines begin to fluctuate wildly.

KENJI OHNO

[Smiles] I get it. Everyone’s very concerned about that. I have a few options, but I don’t think this is the best place to discuss them. Why don’t you follow me online to find out?

WOMAN

[Embarrassed] Oh, of course. Sorry, I just meant—I’ll follow you. Wishing you the best!

No one else seems interested in starting a conversation with K.O. He rides the red line to the Kendall/MIT stop. As he walks down the platform, a pedestrian swings the handle on a musical sculpture called Pythagoras, activating a set of mallets, one of which strikes a steel pipe to emit a B minor note.

Scene change. We follow K.O. into the MIT Media Lab extension building designed by Fumihiko Maki. A new material combining synthetic chloroplasts with carbon nanotubes is on display in the main lounge. It looks like a clump of dark green jelly that has congealed into various, bizarre shapes.

KENJI OHNO

[Turns to the camera and smiles] Nicholas Negroponte, Soft Architecture Machines, 1975. Not many people remember that he was originally a professor of architecture.

The camera follows K.O. to the other side of the hall, which displays various inventions representing the history of the Media Lab. These include the Logo “turtle,” the Minsky Arm, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) logo, the Kindle, the foldable and ultra-compact CityCar, the holographic 3-D printer, and the Scratch visual programming language designed for children.

KENJI OHNO

So ****ing cool, isn’t it? The people here are an odd bunch. But unlike those theorists who are all talk and no action, the people here believe in “Deploy or Die.” [He points to the slogan on the wall]

Scene change. K.O. knocks on an office door before walking in. Dr. Joan-Francois Lemaire, a woman with unkempt, scraggly blond hair who appears to be in her thirties, gets up to greet him.

KENJI OHNO

Joan is the best. She’s the star student of the famous Hugh Herr, founder of the Biomechatronics Group at MIT. He’s that pioneering madman who built himself two prosthetic legs.

JOAN-FRANCOIS LEMAIRE

Oh come on, I never was that good of a student. Compared to what you’re trying to do, Hugh Herr was a Puritan.

KENJI OHNO

And we are what we’re about to do. Think we got a chance at the Disobedience Award next year?

CAPTION

The MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award was created with funding from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman in 2016. It aims to recognize outstanding individuals or teams whose work has had global influence. Its criteria include “responsible, ethical disobedience.” The first prize awarded a dollar amount of $25,000, but the prize money was later increased to $40,000.

JOAN-FRANCOIS LEMAIRE

I think we’d get full marks for disobedience, but on the ethical criterion . . . well, I’m sure there would be some controversy.

Go ahead and lie down. I need to give you a comprehensive examination.

KENJI OHNO

Those stodgy old corpses in their stiff collars should hurry up and ****ing die!

K.O. changes into a loose hospital gown and lies down on the flat white examination bed. Joan slowly scan K.O. with a round device which flashes white and blue lights and emits a quiet electronic buzz as it slides over K.O.’s body.

JOAN-FRANCOIS LEMAIRE

Watch your language. You’re about to be a father.

As the scanner moves over K.O.’s swollen abdomen, a tablet in Joan’s hand displays various data along with a live image of the moving fetus. Joan rotates the image, examining the fetus’ position from different angles.

JOAN-FRANCOIS LEMAIRE

She looks to be doing well. The artificial placenta is working normally. Your oestradiol hormone levels are a bit high. Does everything still feel alright?

KENJI OHNO

Aside from growing this giant set of tits, never sleeping, stuffing myself with food and pills then vomiting everything back out? I’m experiencing some mood swings, but they’re not too extreme. And then there’s the pain—I have to say it, never in my ****ing life have I felt as much pain as this. But everything else feels alright.

JOAN-FRANCOIS LEMAIRE

You chose this. You could have had a boy, or you could have skipped the nervous system integrations. That would all have saved you a lot of pain.

KENJI OHNO

Joan, you know that I want to imitate the natural state of pregnancy as much as possible. In natural pregnancies, you have no way of choosing the infant’s gender. It’s chosen for you. Carrying girls requires higher levels of estradiol, so my mood swings and hormones have been seriously out of whack. But getting back to the point—a chemically castrated K.O. is still K.O., right?

JOAN-FRANCOIS LEMAIRE

Sure, K.O., you’re certainly all man. Even the hormone injections can’t suppress your virility.

[Pauses] So, have you really decided?

KENJI OHNO

Ah, this again. How many times have I told you? Even if it’s dangerous, I want to simulate the experience of real labor to the greatest extent possible.

Isn’t that the whole point of this project? I’ll be the first man in human history to experience pregnancy from conception to deliverance who wasn’t born with a womb, unlike Thomas Beatie. This signifies so much. So much.

JOAN-FRANCOIS LEMAIRE

[Smiles] That’s not what I was asking about. I was actually wondering—have you chosen a name?

K.O., still lying on the bed, turns his head to shoot Joan a knowing, mysterious grin.

Scene change. A movie clip plays. A character named Alex, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, lies on an operating table. His huge, swollen belly protrudes from a square hole cut in his blue surgical drape. He is surrounded by four doctors and nurses wielding surgical instruments, preparing to give him a Caesarean section. The camera slowly zooms in on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face. His expression is strained and nervous. The people around him keep telling him to “breathe, breathe.”

NARRATOR (O.S.)

The history of film includes many examples of pregnant men from around the world. The French-Italian comedy “A Slightly Pregnant Man” came out in 1973, and “Kangaroo Man” was released in Taiwan in 1985. More recent examples include the American comedy “Junior” (1994), the Russian comedy “Pregnant” (2911), and the Chinese fantasy adventure action comedy “Monster Hunt” (2015). [A montage of movie posters and short clips accompanies this explanation]

In 2008, performance artist Virgil Wong uploaded a 7-minute long mock documentary to YouTube in which his male friend Lee Mingwei attends a Phase 2 clinical at RYT Hospital-Dwayne Medical Center in New York City and becomes the first man in history to conceive a baby in his own body. This incited a storm of online debates.

HANNA KÜHN

What’s interesting is that all these movies are comedies. It’s as if the only value of this subject is its comedic potential.

My point is, when have you ever seen a film about two women having a child without a man?

FATIMA KÜHN

Hold on, don’t forget about “Wonder Woman!” [Laughs]

Scene change. Fatima sits in a filming studio with bright, white walls. She wears a white athletic jumpsuit and neon yellow sneakers. As she directs the lighting man to adjust the light source, her shadow morphs into various shapes and shades on the ground. At last, satisfied, she orders the crew out of the frame.

The camera pans outwards. Standing before Fatima is not a model nor a celebrity, but simply a table full of meticulously arranged Moroccan food.

FATIMA KÜHN (O.S.)

I’m from Syria. I’m the child of refugees.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she smuggled herself across the Mediterranean, then crossed Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, and Austria on foot until she reached Germany. I can’t possibly imagine everything she’s been through. All I know is that she refused to follow her family’s naming convention—that is, adding your father’s name or even his father’s name to yours as a suffix. She told me that my name was Fatima. Just Fatima. She told me I have to live just for myself.

Now I have a new last name. Hanna tells me that in German, “Kühn” means “brave.” I like that.

Scene change. Hanna and Fatima stand holding hands at what appears to be a public event. Suddenly we hear shouting outside the frame. Several projectiles fly through the air at them and splatter against their heads and bodies. The objects turn out to be raw eggs, which drip thick, viscous, translucent liquid down their clothes. Wearily, they wipe the yolk and eggshells away. At this point the camera swivels onto the crowd, where a burly man in a beret is being pinned down by security guards while shouting a stream of obscenities in German.

Scene change. Later that afternoon, Hanna and Fatima sit side by side on their living room sofa.

HANNA KÜHN

That man was shouting that he was going to “stuff pig semen” up all of our “lesbian holes.”

FATIMA KÜHN

This doesn’t even count as that bad. Some of my clients have backed out of our contracts under pressure. We’ve gotten death threats from terrorists. They’re threatening to stone us to death, just like they do in my motherland.

HANNA KÜHN

[Grips Fatima’s hand and looks her in the eyes] We’ll make it through this. The university has made clear that it will support us. The police have also stepped up their security measures. I mean, this is Berlin. Where else would you find such respect for diversity?

FATIMA KÜHN

[Gently caresses her belly] I know . . . At first we thought our biggest obstacle would be the technology. Now we’ve realized that our biggest obstacle is other people . . .

HANNA KÜHN

Think about it this way. The first time people saw a freight train on a movie screen, they were so frightened they ran out of the theater. Society’s opinions always lag behind technological developments. I just hope that our daughter grows up in a more tolerant world.

FATIMA KÜHN

To be honest, I’m not as optimistic.

Scene change. The narrator, off-screen, conducts interviews with strangers on the street.

INTERVIEWEE 1

[Elderly, male, wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a windbreaker, carrying a leather suitcase]

Huh . . . well, here’s my opinion. God created men and women so they could love one another and produce future generations. Now you’re telling me that men aren’t necessary anymore? That women can conceive children with other women? Well, I believe that’s . . . that’s just sacrilege.

INTERVIEWEE 2

[Young, male, short-haired, eating a hamburger, eyes glued to phone screen]

Ha! I knew this day would come sooner or later. Time to discuss the “men are useless” theory.

You say this is about science, so let’s discuss this from a scientific perspective. Men don’t just contribute sperm and Y chromosomes, we also contribute to genetic diversity. If a woman decides to make clones from her own cells, then her subsequent generations will progressively become weaker, like an echo growing fainter with each bounce. All of her recessive genetic flaws will surface until the whole system falls apart.

Oh? You’re saying that both women are contributing genetic material? Well, that’s something else entirely . . .

INTERVIEWEE 3

[A short-haired, middle-aged woman wearing professional attire and riding a bicycle]

If bees, lizards, and sharks can do it, why can’t humans? I mean, we’re all the product of natural evolution.

I read in the news that the Y chromosome degenerates at a rate of ten genes every one million years. So eventually there will come a day when men go extinct, right? Why not start getting used to it now? Humanity needs some way to continue on.

No, I don’t hate men. There are times when I need them in my life, too.

I just don’t think there’s anything wrong with two women having a child on their own. You know, there are plenty of men who are only their children’s fathers in name. [Winks]

INTERVIEWEE 4

[A little girl eating ice cream, gazing up at the camera in mild confusion]

You mean like all the Disney princesses in a crossover together? Snow White and Mulan could live together and adopt Tiger Lily as their daughter, and they could have a little bunny rabbit named Judy, and they could have new dresses to wear every day . . .

Scene change. The Kühns sit on their living room sofa.

HANNA KÜHN

Let’s approach this from a historical perspective. Did you know that Aristotle actually believed semen came from the spinal cord? That’s why I believe that in ten years, society won’t view us with the prejudices they hold now.

FATIMA KÜHN

[Watching Hanna] I just hope that we live to see that day. When I was six, I enrolled in a neighborhood school under Germany’s “refugee integration” policy. Of course, most of the teachers, parents, and other children were quite friendly. But still, even such a beautiful Easter egg had its cracks. A glance, a careless joke, a word emphasized just so . . . such trivial everyday acts would be magnified a thousand times in the minds of people like me. I’m always torturing myself wondering—are they mocking me? Do they look down on me? How can I blend in better with them? I’d rather keep my daughter at home and only let her interact with AIs than let her bear that kind of burden. At least then I could control their conversation settings: 75% German humor.

HANNA KÜHN

[Stroking Fatima’s hair] Take it easy, Fati. Breathe. She’s probably listening to everything from inside your belly. [Smiles] I agree that everything you’re saying is objectively true, but I also believe that one’s family environment can make a powerful difference. Look at what you’re like now—you’re no different from any person of German heritage. You might be even happier and more accomplished . . . [The sound of a window shattering comes from the kitchen]

Oh, heavens. Stay here. Don’t move, I’ll go take a look. These assholes—

The camera follows Hanna as she runs into the kitchen. Broken window shards cover the floor, among which lies a paper-wrapped parcel shaped like a pipe bomb. Outside, a car engine roars as the assailants speed away.

HANNA KÜHN

Get back! Get back! Call the police!

Fatima covers her mouth in horror.

Scene change. The police bomb disposal team has arrived and cordoned off the house with barricade tape. A surveillance monitor displays the camera view of a tracked bomb disposal robot, which rolls shakily past the sofa where Fatima and Hanna were just sitting. Once the robot reaches the suspected bomb, its two arms appear in the camera view and carefully cut the electrical cords wrapped around the package. Everyone watches nervously as the robot unwraps the paper. Hannah hugs Fatima tightly. Fatima, who seems to be whispering something to herself, strokes her belly. Now and then she wipes tears from her cheeks.

The robot opens the parcel to reveal a metal dildo inside. Large letters are scribbled across the wrapping paper: “BENUTZE DAS” [Caption note: Translation: “USE THIS”]

Scene change. Nighttime. K.O. lies propped up on one arm in his studio. A pile of nutritious foods and medications are scattered across the table in front of him.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

Are you sure we can film this?

KENJI OHNO

I’ve already informed the other party that this is also a part of my project. Besides, you’ll show me before the final cut, of course? [Grins] Every industry has its own interpretation of the rules. You know that.

Fifteen minutes past the scheduled time, K.O. enters into a video conference with Scott Anderson, director of Netflix’s live broadcast content, who is calling in from Netflix’s general headquarters in Los Gatos, California. Scott’s face shows up as a projection on K.O.’s wall.

KENJI OHNO

Scott, darling! How have you been? So sorry I’m late—I didn’t expect my previous meeting to go over so long. It was impossible to get through to those sons of bitches.

SCOTT ANDERSON

[He appears about thirty years old, dressed in business casual attire. He speaks with astonishing rapidity]

No worries. Wow, K.O.! You look great!

KENJI OHNO

Thank God for that—and science, of course. [Grins]

Let’s get straight to the point. I know Netflix wants the exclusive rights to broadcast the delivery. But you must know already that this is like the prime advertising spot for Black Friday. Everyone wants these rights. So tell me, what are your best terms?

The audio temporarily cuts out. All we can see are the two parties in rapid conversation.

KENJI OHNO

Okay. I’ve got no problem with these financials. What about the rating? I want as many people to subscribe as possible, so is there any way we can get around that MA rating?

SCOTT ANDERSON

I understand, I really do. But first, this isn’t up to us—there’s no way to get around the FCC’s AI censorship program. Second, at this point, we still don’t know what will actually occur during your delivery. Could you describe it in detail for us? Then we can have our legal department assess the risks.

K.O. drags a data file from his tablet onto the big screen, which opens into a cartoon anatomical model of the human body.

KENJI OHNO

You asked for it. Prepare yourself, Scotty.

What kind of magic did I use to get pregnant? Ding ding ding! Joan and her team were inspired by ectopic pregnancies. To women, ectopic pregnancies are life-threatening and require complete termination. But to me, it was the only path forward.

Joan’s team used biological nanomaterials to construct an artificial womb inside my abdominal cavity, as well as an artificial placenta attached to my mesentery for reinforcement. My hip bones weren’t strong enough to support the implanted organs, so I had surgery to insert stents that could support a rapidly growing baby. Our biggest challenge was reconstructing my abdominal circulatory system to ensure adequate blood supply to the placenta. Then I received injections of artificial amniotic fluid, got the embryo implanted, went through compounded hormone therapy, took antirejection medication, and all the rest of that good stuff . . . Oh, I almost forgot, I also asked them to do a nerve graft for me. That really ****ing hurt. It hurt ten thousand times worse than being kicked in the balls.

SCOTT ANDERSON

[Eyes wide, hand covering his mouth] Good lord, that’s unbelievable. This . . . is really insane.

KENJI OHNO

Ha! That was just foreplay.

The compounded hormone therapy has messed so much with my body that I’m not properly male nor female. I’ve completely lost my ability to have sex—hopefully, that’s not permanent. And there are an infinite number of ways that I could have died during this process—I could have had a heart attack, suffered an internal hemorrhage, gotten an infection, developed a blood clot, ruptured my intestines—pretty much everything you can think of. Not to mention all the side effects of the medications I’ve been taking, or the mood swings caused by my messed-up hormones. For the first time in my life, I’ve realized that being a mother is incredibly hard.

But here’s what I’m trying to get at. We’ve been talking about so-called “gender equality” for decades now. But until you’ve physically experienced what it’s like to be another sex, you can’t really talk about identifying with the other side. You understand.

SCOTT ANDERSON

I absolutely agree. Gender equality shouldn’t just be an empty slogan. So will you go through with the C-section?

KENJI OHNO

That’s the last, and also the most dangerous, hurdle. You media bastards are going to drool all over this.

See, the artificial placenta has now fused with my body tissue. They’ll have to cut into my blood vessels to completely remove it, otherwise it could lead to serious, high-risk complications from infection. I could also bleed to death during surgery. If the artificial uterus breaks apart, then the baby’s life will also be at risk.

SCOTT ANDERSON

Are you telling me that there could be an accident during delivery?

KENJI OHNO

I don’t want to exaggerate, but considering my situation, a 50% chance of death is probably conservative.

SCOTT ANDERSON

This . . . Netflix can’t possibly live broadcast someone’s death. We’d be sued into oblivion.

KENJI OHNO

I also wish I could have just evolved a male womb like a leafy sea dragon. But the reality is that after this, I’ll still have to undergo quite a few surgeries to get rid of my nondegradable scaffolds. But let’s get back to the point. Isn’t this exactly what makes the audience want to watch? The 50/50 risk I might die? Who would watch rebroadcasts of games when they already know the winner?

SCOTT ANDERSON

This is far too dangerous. If bleeding were the only problem, we could blur out in real time or tone down the color saturation. But if lives are at risk . . . I’m sorry, but I have to consult with our legal department.

KENJI OHNO

Forgive me for being blunt, but giving birth is already inherently dangerous, regardless of sex.

SCOTT ANDERSON

Forgive me for being blunt—I know you’ve always been a risk-taker, but don’t you think you’ve gone a bit too far this time? If—God forbid—that baby suffers any complications, then that’s a serious breach of ethics. Everyone will think that you killed an innocent child, just for the sake of your own . . . art project.

KENJI OHNO

I get what where you’re coming from. But procreation is already selfish by nature. No one asks permission to have a child. The way I see it, whether it’s for real or for show, having a child will make my life more complete. I’ll give you some time to think about it. Get back to me ASAP. Goodbye!

K.O. exits the video conference. Anderson’s face disappears from the wall. K.O. rubs his belly, staring pensively at empty space. Suddenly he turns toward the camera and waves a hand.

KENJI OHNO

Turn that off. I said, turn it off.

Scene change. Hanna and Fatima, wearing gray jumpsuits, lie with their legs crossing on two elegantly designed slanting ivory chairs inside a bubble-shaped room whose inner walls are made of some kind of milky white, luminescent material. Lying side by side, their heads pointed in opposite directions, they look like an X chromosome floating in midair.

CAPTION

This is Berlin’s Innerspace Mental Health Treatment Center. We obtained permission to film inside the clinic, although some content had to be cut.

The lights dim until the room is dark. A faint, buzzing noise slowly rises in volume. Spots of light begin pulsing along the walls, soft and tender as breathing, shifting in color, and slowly adopting rhythms and shapes to match the sound effects. The lights resemble stars falling and rising across the sky, against which Hanna and Fatima appear only as two dark silhouettes. They both wear a set of white headphones, through which they can only hear the others’ voice when necessary. All of this is programmed to run automatically without any human interference.

Different images appear on the wall before each of them. Their headphones flicker. The therapy session has begun.

HANNA KÜHN

[Her wall displays a slowly revolving blue whirlpool]

Hello, I’m Hanna. Yes, this is my first time receiving AI psychological therapy. This is all pretty cool. Makes me think of Professor X . . .

FATIMA KÜHN

[Her wall displays an array of orange splotches resembling a Rorschach inkblot test]

Fatima. They told me this kind of treatment could help, so I’m here . . .

HANNA KÜHN

I’ve been suffering nausea, insomnia, recurring stomach pains, nosebleeds, and hormonal fluctuations for about seven weeks . . . no, I’m not pregnant, she’s the one who . . .

FATIMA KÜHN

[Breathes deeply] Nightmares. I have nightmares every night. Yes, I think it has to do with what happened. It’s been a while since . . .

HANNA KÜHN

Couvade Syndrome? I thought that only happened to husbands of pregnant women, like some kind of reverse Oedipus complex . . .

FATIMA KÜHN

I have to think for a moment . . . it was all so confusing, I think someone was chasing me, chasing and running after me . . .

HANNA KÜHN

No, I don’t believe in all that nonsense about “sympathetic pregnancies,” but Fatima wanted to come, so I came with her . . .

FATIMA KÜHN

They want the child in my belly. They want my child . . . [Sobs] they have knives, long and curved knives, shining so bright . . .

HANNA KÜHN

I’m mainly concerned about Fatima. She’s scared to death. All those terrorists, scientists, and media outlets, they just won’t shut up . . .

FATIMA KÜHN

Hanna’s gone. Maybe they’ve killed her. No, how can I tell her? That isn’t even the scariest part . . . They catch me and use their curved knives to cut my belly open . . . oh God . . . [Her breathing quickens]

HANNA KÜHN

We’ve been taking our medications as scheduled. All of our fetal examination results have come back normal. I can’t help but say it, I think the root of all of this is the horrible things they’re saying about us in the media. Fatima has always been very sensitive. If you look at her photography . . .

FATIMA KÜHN

Okay, breathe deeply . . . one, two three . . . They’ve cut open my belly, they’ve pulled out what was inside . . . They’re animal bones, they look like bones from some kind of rat or bird or frog hybrid . . . I’m about to collapse . . .

HANNA KÜHN

No, she hasn’t seen it. I was the one who watched the popular science documentary. In the twentieth century, Japanese scientists successfully created female chicken sperm using stem cells collected from bone marrow. In 2004, they used gene editing technology to alter the genomic imprinting of mice cells from female to male, then transferred the altered stem cells into an unchanged immature egg to produce offspring from two female parents. These procedures do carry some risk of hidden genetic defects and hereditary illnesses . . . but I’m really not that worried.

FATIMA KÜHN

Maybe what they’re saying is right. Maybe we’re doing something we shouldn’t be . . . I don’t know. I really don’t know. Sometimes I can sense the baby’s mood. There’s a certain connection between the mother’s mind and the baby’s. You men can’t possibly understand it. Sorry, I’ve started thinking of you as a person again. Oh, could you change the gender of your voice? Um, can you make it a bit gentler?

Oh, much better. Thank you.

HANNA KÜHN

[Her walls display radiates streaks of purple and red]

I admit I think I’m a little more rational than Fatima, but that doesn’t mean I can’t empathize.

We’re both this baby’s mother. She’ll be loved by two mothers. Isn’t that better than those so-called traditional families where the father is always missing?

Yes, it was my idea. I believed that technology could help us become who we wanted to be. And I believe this is what Fatima wants, too.

FATIMA KÜHN

We’ve been too selfish. I’m not sure whether this is what our daughter would have wanted.

Do you know what the media has been calling her? “The Purest Girl!” That’s like a porn star name. It makes me want to vomit. It’s like they’ve already decided that she’s going to grow up to become just like us, and choose to procreate only with other women without ever polluting her bloodline with men.

Of course this was never our intention. We did this out of love.

HANNA KÜHN

So what’s the root of our problem, O Wise Machine? In this male-dominated world, must we rely on male technology to produce daughters? Isn’t that absurd?

Will the stress from our environments be too much for us to handle? What are we supposed to do, then? Run?

I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here with the woman I love and our child.

FATIMA KÜHN

[Her wall display morphs into silvery-white undulating stripes]

I can hear you, Hanna. I’m right here.

These lights are making me think of a story my mother used to tell me. “The Cleft.” An old fable. Of course I’ll tell it to you.

Once upon a time, there was a race of human-walrus hybrids who lived by the sea. They were all female, and they could procreate all on their own. But every once in a while, one of them would give birth to a baby with a penis—a monster. The Clefts killed these monsters by throwing them into a rock fissure blooming with red flowers. But they hadn’t expected that a giant eagle would snatch the babies and leave them on land, where they grew up and became a race called the Squirts . . .

HANNA KÜHN

Are you talking to me, Fatima?

I don’t think these devices are helping us. Can we take these off?

FATIMA KÜHN

The Squirts and the Clefts saw each other as monsters. They went to war and slaughtered and raped each other.

But then the Clefts discovered they could no longer procreate on their own, so they joined together with the Squirts for the sake of children, and later parted, also for the sake of their children. How did it end? To be honest, I don’t really remember. It wasn’t even a real fable. I found out later my mother read the story in a novel by Doris Lessing. Maybe I should pick it up sometime . . . All I remember is that my mother said that the Clefts were so neurotic and warlike because their wombs were empty. Perhaps there’s some truth to that. [Smiles]

Hanna pulls off her earphones. Her wall display becomes the same as Fatima’s—a sheet of silvery-white.

HANNA KÜHN

Fati, are you okay? Should we go?

FATIMA KÜHN

A long, long time ago, the Clefts . . . the women . . . the daughters of the moon . . . they sat under a full moon, and told each other the legend of how children first came into this world because of the strong moonlight. They thought that if they sat there long enough, if they stared long enough at the moon, then maybe . . .

Scene change. It is nighttime. We are in a sports bar called The Lunarians, where the patrons have to shout over each other to be heard. The owner stands behind the counter, occasionally glancing up at a TV screen above his head. All sixteen TVs in the bar are set to the same channel.

CAPTION

We were unable to obtain permission to film K.O. on-site during labor, but we found a sports bar that had announced it would stream the entire broadcast.

Gradually, more and more customers notice what is playing on screens. A burly-looking patron who appears to have had a bit too much to drink swaggers toward the owner.

PATRON

Robby! Can we change the channel? Who the **** wants to watch this sissy giving birth?

OWNER

I want to watch. I’ve paid for access, and I’ve advertised online that my bar is streaming this tonight. You’re free to leave.

The patron throws the owner a vulgar hand gesture and heads out the door.

PATRON

Fuck you . . .

Several other customers follow him out the door. The bar turns quiet. The owner turns up the volume on the TVs, and a few customers lift their heads, displaying a variety of expressions.

ANCHOR (O.S.)

 . . . The situation has now become very dangerous. The artificial womb has lost its capacity to sustain the baby’s weight, starting a dangerous chain reaction. The placenta has torn away from the mesentery, causing massive internal bleeding. The infant is at risk of oxygen deprivation, and requires immediate surgery . . .

On screen is a close-up of a monstrous abdomen the shape of a deflated balloon. The baby writhes and squirms under a layer of skin, resembling a worm with a disproportionately oversized head. The camera pans upward to K.O.’s face peeking out over sterile blue surgery cloth, looking pale and bloodless. He is clearly in extreme pain; his face drips with sweat, expression contorted in agony, muscles quivering.

Inside The Lunarians, the patrons murmur with disgust.

KENJI OHNO

I’m fine, I’m fine . . . No, I want to stay conscious, otherwise this has all been pointless . . .

The owner pours himself a glass of whisky. He doesn’t add ice. He takes a large gulp, then refills his glass.

ANCHOR (O.S.)

 . . . Our survey data indicates that 75.62% of respondents do not approve of artist K.O.’s project. 51.43% of respondents say that they believe his project is a blow against gains achieved by the women’s rights movement over the past fifty years. Another 37.79% of respondents say that they believe this project constitutes a criminal offense, and that both the police and public health authorities ought to intervene. These percentages are climbing as I speak. The FCC complaint hotline has been overwhelmed with callers . . .

KENJI OHNO

 . . . Who is singing? I hear someone singing, it’s lovely . . .

 . . . I know a lot of people hate me, I know . . . all I wanted was to prove that sex can’t stop anyone . . . from doing anything . . .

The patrons’ hissing grows louder. Someone yells, “Go back to your island, you selfish yellow monkey!” This incites a burst of laughter.

ANCHOR (O.S.)

 . . . We are now watching the doctors trying to figure out a strategy for surgery. They seem quite tense. This surgery must be extremely difficult and dangerous.

We are hearing, though this is unconfirmed, that between K.O. and the unborn child, only one can survive.

From a legal perspective, K.O. is both this child’s father and mother. This decision is entirely in his hands.

It seems like the doctors have reached an agreement. They’re walking into the surgery room.

Viewers can continue to participate using the on-screen prompts . . .

The camera pans outwards. The head surgeon appears to be talking very seriously to K.O., whose expression slumps suddenly into a lifeless daze.

ANCHOR (O.S.)

Due to legal reasons, we were unable to broadcast the doctor’s crucial question. What exactly did they discuss?

The doctor leaves K.O.’s side and begins to prepare his surgical equipment.

The owner puts his glass down. The bar has grown terribly silent.

The camera zooms back into a close-up of K.O.

ANCHOR (O.S.)

K.O., can you tell us what’s going on?

K.O. is silent for a long time. Then tears begin sliding down his face.

KENJI OHNO

I choose her. Yes, I am clearheaded and sober.

Promise me—whatever happens, make sure that she survives.

She isn’t my artwork. She’s . . . my daughter.

A clapping noise echoes throughout the bar. The patrons turn their heads, searching for the source of the noise.

The owner, expressionless, continues to clap his hands firmly in slow, steady, and solitary applause.

Fade to black.

CAPTION

PART THREE

We are in a tropical monsoon forest. The camera weaves smoothly at eye level through a crisscrossing web of ficus roots. Kapok tree rhizomes resembling giant octopus tentacles thrust into tiny chinks in the ground, prying open the large stone foundations of some long-lost palace.

The shapes of shadows on the ground indicate this is footage shot from a drone. Occasionally, images of ruined black Buddhist statues come into view, but are quickly blurred out by a mosaic of highly saturated color pixels.

MOW45 (O.S.)

I apologize that we have to conduct this interview in this manner. After the attack on the Panama base, we’ve been very cautious about revealing any information about ourselves. As such, you will be unable to pinpoint any specific geographic coordinates based on the footage we provided. We have permitted you to film this part of the journey to prove that we are not a hoax produced in some video studio. Due to the historically good reputation of your documentary team, we chose you to be the single channel by which SHIIVA Lab will release information to the outside world at this time. You may ask only three questions.

The camera arrives in an open space, where a large pixelated mosaic conceals a building of some kind. A person wearing an ocher-red monk’s cloak stands on the sandy ground. The drone descends to the person’s eye level. Their hooded face has also been blurred out by the pixels, which occasionally reveal a pair of strange, golden eyes.

MOW45

Now come with me. You are about to become the world’s first witness to our project.

The camera follows MOW45 through a dark entrance and switches to low light mode. A mine shaft elevator opens to let them in, closes, and begins to descend. There are no numbers or grates marking the floor levels; the elevator simply moves further and further down. After it stops, MOW45 steps out into a long hallway, passes through a biometric security checkpoint, and enters a room illuminated with ultraviolet light. Inside are two rows of six large, droplet-shaped installations, suspended in midair by a system of exposed cable supports.

MOW45

First question: Who are we?

We know how the rest of the world portrays SHIIVA. They think we are some evil, inhumane, plutocratic organization that abuses technology and violates ethical boundaries. That is completely correct, and completely false. From the historical position of classical humanists, the problems the world faces today are utterly incomprehensible because their solutions require exceeding the moral thresholds they can accept. But to us, those thresholds are but illusions.

You can see for yourself that the human instinct for survival has led a variety of regional responses by so-called civilizations. Many parts of the world have relapsed into tribalism, where humans who still have functional reproductive systems are kept in captivity like livestock. Viable semen there has become priceless. Other parts of the world have barely survived thanks to highly repressive authoritarian governments that have implemented reproductive resource rationing policies that have bred an entirely new privileged class. Europe, for example, has basically collapsed into chaos. Its Christianity-based values and culture are worthless in the face of the great reproductive decline.

We believe that we possess a powerful secret that can save the world. Our leader and founding father, the sage Dr. Jin Changmao, began implementing a global strategy thirty years ago to achieve this goal. SHIIVA Lab is one of the linchpins of his plan.

Now take a look at this.

MOW45 gestures toward one of the semitranslucent, droplet-shaped installations. The outer membrane is made from a polymer material and appears quite flexible. It is filled with a murky liquid whose original color is indiscernible under the violet-tinged light. Inside, bubbles occasionally float to the surface and disappear. MOW45 extends a finger and pokes at the membrane. Little glimmers of light shine through the turbid substance, solidifying into a green, fluorescent glow that gradually reveals the outline of a fetus about seven to eight months in gestation. The fetus seems attracted to the pressure of MOW45’s finger. Though its eyes remain tightly shut, it instinctively waves its hands and feet toward the camera before vanishing back into the liquid.

MOW45

We shifted the peak of chlorophyll’s absorption curve to the left so that it could make use of the higher energy density at the violet end of the spectrum, and then integrated it into the epidermal cells of the P-series embryos. This is just a modest display of our achievements. We will gradually disclose the rest to the world depending on its level of acceptance.

Second question: what do we seek to accomplish? Simply put, we want to find a method of reproduction that does not require the participation of individual human beings.

Twenty years ago, artificial womb technology replaced amniotic fluid with electrolytic solution and used extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to facilitate blood circulation in order to save premature babies. But resistance from all sides has slowed the advancement of this technology. Humanity seems to have an almost pathological fear of this sort of change. Will artificial wombs lower the status of women? Will mothers still form the emotional bonds with their children that they once did during pregnancy? Will this technology cause marital structures to collapse? Will it ossify social hierarchies? Will privileged classes reproduce without limits, or even use advanced genetic engineering to optimize their progeny? Humanity has driven slowly and tentatively to the edge of a cliff, unable to turn back.

But we never stopped moving forward.

MOW45 strides forward, crosses the room, then passes through another hallway into an exhibition room suffused with green light. Four rows of display racks are lined with glass jars containing various fetal samples ranging from fully intact bodies to scattered organs, quite a few of which have developmental deformities. Some are barely recognizable as human.

MOW45

We’ve gone down a long, dark, and winding path.

Using an artificial womb to incubate a fetus is one thing. Directly combining genetic material into a fertilized ovum is something else entirely. The distance between these two feats is like the distance between the Wright brothers’ Flyer and the Apollo 11 shuttle. These jars are the footprints of our past failures. They were, without a doubt, all living beings. But they did not die in vain. Every successful specimen we create bears the mark of these failures, in the same way that humanity bears the accumulated history of its evolution. If anything deserves condemnation, it is the Panama attack, where hundreds of embryos were destroyed in the name of “morality.” Even though those embryos were genetically 100% human, just because they were intended to be brought into the world through a different way, they were seen as alien and thus murdered. And this is what you call civilization.

Meanwhile, we’ve been inundated with requests, mostly from some of the most powerful groups on Earth: extremist sects who want to create physiological distinctions among humans; transhumanists who want to design a race of perfect super-babies; those who want to reserve our services to particular regimes or races so that they may achieve geopolitical dominance through superior reproductive capability. We’ve conducted experiments on a few ideas that seemed interesting, but we have never accepted any of these requests.

MOW45 walks past several specimens, then slows down, gazing at the not-quite-human remnants.

MOW45

To us, these ideas are so typically human they are laughable.

The camera suddenly rises into the air, displaying a birds-eye view of MOW45 as he walks between the shelves of samples. He resembles an evil magician in a dissection room.

MOW45

Perspective matters. The limits of coarse scales—whether in space or time, whether macro or micro—will always lead to crude judgments, leading to disastrous consequences.

For example, in 1978, the first “test-tube” baby conceived through in vitro fertilization was born. In 1987, the Roman Catholic Church denounced surrogate pregnancy as “violating a child’s right to be conceived, carried, and delivered by its biological mother, as well as its right to be raised by its biological parents.” In 2009, after the surrogacy business had been thriving for twenty years, India still had not implemented a single law to regulate the industry. Three years later, it issued crude measures that banned surrogacy for clients who were single mothers or same-sex couples. Next it banned surrogacy for all foreign clients.

Fear of technology has fostered confusion in both thought and action. You are unable to consider the problem from the perspective of humanity’s shared future as a community. Most of the time, you ignore the billions of people living on this earth, all wholly distinct individuals with unique inner lives and needs.

MOW45 abruptly stops walking.

MOW45

Ah, it’s about time. I’ve been asked to reduce the proclamatory style of my rhetoric by about twenty degrees.

We must undergo disinfection now.

The drone follows MOW45 out of the exhibition room and into a disinfection room. White mist spurts from the walls, dissipating through the narrow chamber, gradually condensing into tiny droplets which then evaporate. The door opens. Before the camera appears a marvelous golden pond. MOW45 walks along a path of stepping stones towards the pond’s center as the drone hovers around, recording the surrounding scenery.

This place appears to lie within the ruins of some ancient Buddhist temple. Life-size apsara statues line the walls of the square pond. They are smiling gently, their limbs nimbly arranged in dancers’ poses. The water comes just up to their belly buttons, revealing their finely embellished waists. At the bottom of the pond are forty-nine yoni icons representing female reproductive organs. Each mounted on square pedestals, they are neatly arranged in rows of seven by seven. A lingam protrudes from each yoni icon—forty-nine swollen penises rising up underwater.

The camera returns its focus to MOW45.

MOW45

Lingams are one of many forms of the god Shiva. They’ve been described as the root of all creation. It is said that when Shiva’s lingam manifested on Earth, Brahma transformed into a swan and flew upwards, while god Vishnu transformed into a boar and traveled down; even after a thousand years, neither had reached an end in their journey.

Last question: why now?

Because humanity has run out of options.

We ought to thank science fiction novels and films: “Brave New World,” “Blade Runner,” “The Island,” and so on. Though laughably absurd, they did raise many interesting thought experiments, and have helped us avoid the risk of destruction. We ran calculations on every imaginable option in search for the best solution.

We don’t want this technology to become an accessory to slavery or organ harvesting. At the same time, we refuse to contribute to existing discrimination or new racial conflicts. Many who are wise have realized that this technology can allow humanity to truly discard the heavy bonds of bloodline, family, race, and even ideology. It can lead us into a wholly new era as one unified community.

The neohumans will not have parents. The genetic composition of future generations will be completely determined by algorithms. Machines will draw upon the gene pools of a billion humans as well as all of the possibilities that might arise after thousands of future generations.

The new humans will be stripped of their inefficient capacity for sexual reproduction. Each individual will have the freedom to determine their own sex. Or they may be entirely sexless. These choices will be entirely up to them.

The new humans will no longer bear the responsibility for propagating their own genes. The genetic data of every individual will be stored for the creation of future generations. Everyone will live for themselves, and everyone will live for the whole of humanity.

Death will no longer be a cause for fear. The new humans will view life with a holistic perspective, and understand that death is in fact the only pathway to eternal life.

Of course, we understand that throwing salt into the ocean is not the most effective method for changing the salinity of the sea. Many political regimes have opened their doors to us. They have agreed to grant citizenship rights to the neohumans, and even have created special protective zones for them. But changing the world still remains an enormously difficult task.

After all, birth and ruination, creation and destruction have always been the two faces of Shiva. 

We’ve altered our ways of thinking: but perhaps we ought to learn from human experience as well, so that you will be better able to accept us.

Therefore, we’ve chosen some families and individuals from around the world upon which to bestow our gifts. Meanwhile, we’ve opened up applications for more people around the world to join our ranks. We hope we will be able to both change your lives as well as the way the rest of the world sees SHIIVA.

Now, it is time.

MOW45 pulls down his hood. The mosaic of blurred pixels quickly expands to conceal his face, but the camera manages to catch a brief frame of MOW45’s visage—a head that is half-human, half-machine. Slowly he lifts his arms like a magician. The water begins churning in sync to his movements, reflected golden light roiling around the walls and ceiling.

MOW45

If there is one thing on this earth that machines cannot comprehend, then it is . . . well, what humans call love. We hope that you can love these children as much as you love yourselves.

Fade to black.

The music from the opening title begins to play again, a minimalistic electronic tune overlaid on a sample of a strengthening heartbeat.

Neha, head dripping in sweat, softly hums a tune to the baby in her arms. She presses a bindi dot between the baby’s furrowed eyebrows. The baby struggles to open her eyes.

CAPTION

Aanadi was born 19:02 local time on February 3, 2016. Her name means “always happy.”

Wu Yingmian stands by the bedside, watching her newly-delivered baby in her surrogate mother’s arms. She grips the surrogate mother’s shoulders, her eyes glistening with tears.

CAPTION

Wu Yingmian’s baby was born 16:37 local time on July 12, 2021. She requested we keep her child’s name private.

A baby girl covered in blood is lifted to K.O.’s face. He manages to murmur only the words, “You are so beautiful,” before losing consciousness.

CAPTION

Sakurado Ohno was born 01:12 local time on April 24, 2027. Doctors were unable to save Kenji Ohno, who died at 4:45 on the same day from excessive blood loss.

Fatima, gently rocking her baby in her arms, croons, “Hey, I’m your Mommy.” She hands her daughter to Hanna. “And this is also Mommy.”

CAPTION

Anna “Mondschein” Kühn was born 6:21 local time on November 29, 2031. “Mondschein” means “moonlight” in German.

MOW45 raises both hands into the air. The forty-nine lingams rise from the water, slowly splitting open like lotus flowers in blossom, each one revealing a pink, wet infant at its center. Suddenly, the infants begin crying in unison, as if by command. They sob in fits and starts as petal-shaped mechanical arms snip their umbilical cords, coughing out the excess amniotic fluid from their lungs. Their cries then rise in volume like a well-rehearsed symphony, overlaid on the sound of a beating heart and an electronic rhythm.

CAPTION

Forty-nine neohumans were born local time 8:08 on August 8, 2038. They are collectively known as the “gift generation.” Among them, only a third survived under the care of adoptive parents. These survivors altered the course of human history.

Black screen.

TITLE

In This Moment, We Are Happy: A Documentary

Originally published in Chinese in Dandu Reading 19, January 2019.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Chen Qiufan was born in 1981, in Shantou, China. (In accordance with Chinese custom, Mr. Chen’s surname is written first. He sometimes uses the English name Stanley Chan.) He is a graduate of Peking University and published his first short story in 1997 in Science Fiction World, China’s largest science fiction magazine. Since 2004, he has published over thirty stories in Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah, and other magazines. His first novel, The Abyss of Vision, came out in 2006. He won Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award in 2006 with “A Record of the Cave of Ning Mountain,” a work written in Classical Chinese. In English, his short stories have been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, MIT Technology Review, Slate, Pathlight and other venues. His novel, Waste Tide was published by Tor in 2019.

The Second Nanny

Djuna, translated by Sophie Bowman

1

With a clunk, the shaking of the hawk-eagle came to a stop. After confirming through the monitor that the spaceship’s four legs were properly grounded in the beansprout garden, Brook got out of the pilot’s seat, put on the helmet of her spacesuit, and went into the airlock. When she turned the handle, a gush of air escaped and then the door rotated anticlockwise, opening into the silence.

Having disembarked from the hawk-eagle, Brook raised her head to take in the structure of the beansprout extending up and up, with Neptune’s moon Triton connected to its far end. This slender string, which was affixed to the moon above, was so long it was stupefying. From here Triton looked like a completely different world.

Accompanied by five bugs that had crawled out of the hawk-eagle, relying on artificial gravity generated by centrifugal force from the beansprout, Brook slowly walked through the garden that was laid out like an exhibit around its trunk. Brook had only been five years old when Auntie Autumn had first brought her here, and back then it’d looked totally different. The shaft of the beansprout had been much thinner, and the garden hadn’t existed. With the passing of eleven years, the beansprout had gradually thickened, transforming everything around it.

Apparently, the beansprout was an idea from the twentieth century. Scientists had longed to get at Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, more than anyplace else. It was a repository of hydrocarbon, but they hadn’t been able to send a rocket there. Just one tiny spark and the rocket would’ve exploded, along with the whole atmosphere. Then someone had thought up the idea of erecting an orbit elevator to get at Titan’s treasures—but no one had managed to come up with an answer to the question, “How?”

When the Mothers of the outer planets had found the answer and began constructing orbit elevators on their moons, humans gave up on trying to pillage the far reaches of the solar system.

Having grown like a plant from both sides of an asteroid that Mom snagged into geostationary orbit, Triton’s beansprout still looked more like an enormous black tree trunk than a machine or structure. Jack and the Beanstalk. On Earth and Mars they still called it Triton’s Beanstalk. Every time Brook heard this, she wanted to correct the speaker: “It’s bean-sprout.”

As she crossed half of the garden, a spaceship that had made an emergency landing there came into view from behind the shaft. The spaceship was about fifteen meters tall and shaped like a pinecone. A dark substance was seeping out of its rough surface, gluing the ship to the garden and beansprout shaft.

The spaceship reacted when the lamp attached to Brook’s helmet shone upon its surface: the entire body of the ship squirmed like an injured beast, and recessed red lights lit up along its crevices. Brook sat nearby, leaning against the shaft and waiting in silence.

A portion of the outer hull of the pinecone ship opened up like the mouth of a feeding starfish. A spacefarer in a gray spacesuit crawled out through the gap. Brook watched as they used a heatsword to cut off the reddish-black glue that clung to the spacesuit like an umbilical cord, and then managed to stand. The stranger looked about five foot four, including the helmet. Hardly taller than Brook.

“You there! Neptunian!” A low, gravelly voice sounded from the helmet speaker. The woman’s pronunciation in Neptunese was a little strange.

“You can’t come here. Mom won’t like it,” Brook responded.

The woman seemed to be quite annoyed by the whole situation. “As if I had a choice. What’re you going to do? Leave me like this?”

“I have to receive approval from Mom first.”

“She wouldn’t have sent you out here like this if she wasn’t going to grant approval.”

Brook didn’t respond. The two of them stood without another word, no doubt scowling inside their respective helmets. While they did this, the bugs that had followed Brook out of her hawk-eagle filed into the pinecone ship through the opening.

Two minutes later, a message from Mom flashed into Brook’s brain. She gestured at the woman. The woman retracted her heatsword, fixed it onto her belt, and staggered toward Brook. Still inside the pinecone ship, the bugs continued rattling away and sending a stream of signals to Mom. As Brook led the woman back to the hawk-eagle, ten more bugs emerged from it and scuttled towards the pinecone.

When they entered the hawk-eagle, the pair sat in the cockpit and removed their helmets. The woman’s face had a wide forehead and pointed chin. Her pupils were abnormally dark: her eyes were the enhanced cybernetic type used by space pilots.

The hawk-eagle drew up its legs and made a light takeoff. As the legs folded into the body of the ship it was hurtled from the beansprout garden by centrifugal force. With a jolt, the sensation of gravity inside the spaceship disappeared and the woman’s helmet, which she had set down carelessly beside her, started to float away from her. Just before the hawk-eagle turned its hull towards the colony and accelerated, the woman grabbed her helmet and affixed it to her armrest.

As the five-minute-long acceleration ended, the cabin returned to zero gravity. Brook pointed to a white spot glittering through the round window above the dashboard.

“There it is. Our home.”

2

Seorin, who had been gripping the elevator handrail as she floated in the air, felt artificial gravity return, pulling her down. Out at the edge of the colony it was 0.3 g: what an extravagance!

The colony was gloomy inside, like evening right after sunset. It was a cylindrical space, full of bland square gray buildings with straight empty paths laid out between them. The rotating scene outside the large window that was cut into the floor was the only thing that gave a sense of life to the place.

Brook walked out first, humming a tune that she seemed to have just invented. The child’s footsteps were as light and natural as a dance. Every so often, without warning, she leaped up dangerously high and then landed again. Apparently such surprising movements weren’t a breach of etiquette in this world. In order to catch up with the child, Seorin entrusted her body to inertia and increased her pace.

The child stopped and stood beside one of the many similar-looking buildings. When the door opened a yellowish light flooded out. Seorin just managed to make a shaky stop and followed her inside.

The interior of the building was precisely the opposite of what lay outside. It was a children’s space, so bright and messy and colorful that it was as though children had taken it over from adults and marked it as their territory. The walls were mottled with splotches of color in an undecipherable pattern, and throughout all of the rooms, which were wide and open and without corridors between them, there rolled around countless objects the likes of which Seorin had never seen. More than anything, the place was noisy: all of the children were singing or shouting or mumbling meaningless sounds.

The room quietened a little when Seorin entered. Around half of the thirty or so children inside gathered around her, with the remaining half forming a loop that surrounded them. A few children in the back continued jumping, but Seorin had no way of knowing whether this was just habit, or because they wanted to get a look at her.

“This auntie’s name is Seorin,” Brook said. “She came from Mars.”

All together, the children let out an, “Ooh ooh ooh!” A few of them clapped. One child jumped up and clung to a rope that hung from the ceiling, swinging around like a monkey.

Seorin took in the sight of Brook’s sisters: by the looks of it, their ages ranged from five to the mid-teens. Their round brown eyes resembled those of frogs more closely than humans’. Their glistening skin was ash gray, and white hair hung from their heads in thick strands. Their facial features were surprisingly varied, and among them were some that could roughly match those of certain ethnicities on Earth—but even that wasn’t enough to stifle the alien feeling that Seorin felt as she looked at them all.

“Where on Mars are you from?” one of the children asked.

“I came from Olympus City. There’s a big volcano there,” Seorin replied and the children clapped.

It wasn’t a lie, although in fact she’d actually spent only three months there in total. Seorin had no intention of explaining to the children every detail of how she’d lived for the last twenty-something years.

In an awestruck tone, a small child wearing a pink dress asked, “How do you speak our language so well?”

“She’s from the same clan as Auntie Autumn. They use a dead language. From now on she’s going to take on Auntie Autumn’s old duties,” Brook explained, as though she thought it was all a pointless hassle.

With that, again, the children produced more of their happy sounds: “Ooh, ooh, ooh!”

Brook swung her arms in a sudden gesture, and the children split into two groups, opening a pathway through the crowd for herself and Seorin. Then she crossed the room and opened the leftmost of the three doors on the opposite wall. The interior was as spacious as the room they’d just been in, but instead of being filled with colorful splotches, the walls were plain white and completely unadorned.

“Mom said you’ll need your own room. I’ll give you this one, it was set aside for children who haven’t been born yet.”

Brook produced a mattress and pillow from a closet built into the wall, set them down on the floor, and left, shutting the door behind her. Seorin was finally alone, and after circling the room, running her fingers along the wall, she flopped down onto the mattress. Closing her eyes, she concentrated, but there was no word from Neptune Mother.

3

Seated in a corner of the canteen, Brook opened the breakfast box provided by the meal dispenser. There were five red balls, two yellow sticks, and a spongy green block she hadn’t seen before. Brook tore the sponge in half, shoved a piece of it into her mouth, and opened the lid of her water bottle while she chewed. It was a little salty, with a slightly bitter aftertaste, and Brook washed that bitterness away with the sweet, buttery flavor of the yellow sticks.

Just as she had emptied her box, the guest from Mars entered the canteen. When Seorin took a seat at an empty table with her own breakfast box, the children who had not yet been uplinked to Mom gathered around her, asking all kinds of questions about Mars and interplanetary space travel. Seorin patiently answered each one, but she never actually spoke about why she had come to the colony.

Brook left Seorin in the canteen and went outside, walking the 300-meter pathway to the hangar alone. In the elevator going up to the hangar, she made a controlled gesture and information streamed into her head about what was currently happening at her destination.

It was busy inside the hangar. Seorin’s pinecone ship was being dragged inside to where the hawk-eagles were lined up close together around the rim of the sieve-shaped floor. Once the pinecone was parked in position and the tug engine that’d pulled it into place had departed, spiders swarmed around it, swinging their long legs.

Someone poked Brook’s back as she stood engrossed, watching the scene unfolding through the window. It was Peagreen, still wearing her spacesuit, her face twisted with annoyance.

“Did you bring that thing inside?”

Peagreen nodded.

“Did Mom say why you had to bring it here?”

“Nope.”

“Or why that new auntie came?”

“Isn’t she just the new nanny sent by the Ictus clan?”

“But what do we need another nanny for? We’re old enough. We can raise our younger sisters on our own, without the help of a nanny. We could even start producing babies ourselves, soon enough. We’ve been doing just fine for the two years since Auntie Autumn died.”

“Maybe they don’t think we’re reliable enough.”

“Why would they worry about that kind of thing?”

“We’re their legacy.”

“That might’ve been true when Auntie Autumn first came here with the sample. But we’re not the same as we were then. We’re Mom’s children now.”

“So, what are you saying? That this woman is some kind of secret envoy, sent here by Mars Mother?”

“If Mars Mother wanted to contact our Mom, do you really think she’d go to the trouble of sending a human in a spaceship?”

“Then what is she, some kind of stowaway? On the run?”

“If that was the case, surely Mom would have said something . . . right?”

“I don’t know. Mom can’t tell us everything.”

Peagreen had a point. If everything Mom knew were to be streamed into their brains, their heads would explode. But how long would they have to live out their lives like this, only ever doing what Mom told them to do, and never knowing why?

Brook examined all of the information that had been sent over by the Mars data collection bot for Ictus-WX-Seorin. 42 years old. Born on Earth. Five years younger than Auntie Autumn. Twenty-one years ago, right before the final war of the Fathers, she’d taken the interplanetary spaceship Sabella to Mars, and moments before they’d entered orbit there had been an accident that had killed everyone aside from Seorin, who lost her sight and suffered burns on most of her body. When treatment for her injuries had been completed, her body had been augmented with the extra functions implanted into astronauts, and she’d begun working on the Mars orbit colony and on spaceships. The time she’d spent on the surface of Mars amounted to around four years.

But why had this woman climbed into a pinecone and flown out here?

The dismantling of the pinecone ship was now half-finished. Spiders worked busily at it, removing pieces of armor plating and carrying all the interior machinery out through the newly created opening in its hull. In this state it looked more like an autopsied armadillo than a pinecone. Brook submitted an information request, inquiring about what Mom was searching for inside the spaceship.

Her request was denied.

4

The data that Brook received about Seorin was mostly accurate, although one thing wasn’t quite right. Seorin had actually left Earth seven months after the Fathers’ final war had begun. Such misinformation wasn’t all that strange, however: most people wanted to believe the official claim that there had been eight years of precarious peace before the final massacre took place. Among those who’d survived the war, only a tiny number knew what gruesome things had really happened on the ground.

Seorin had been one of them, those unlucky few . . . the people who had seen two beasts with their heads cut off, writhing as they’d piled together gouged stomachs and livers and kidneys, amassing the accumulated matter necessary to construct their own brains.

At that time, the weak had been food for the strong. Countless Fathers had caught and devoured their opponents’ seed, burgeoning until there were only two Fathers left. People had called these two Chaos and Order, but very few managed to decipher any real difference between them. Thinking back on it, probably the only reason Seorin’s clan, the Ictus, had temporarily sided with Order was because of his name.

Seorin finished chewing on the last bit of a yellow stick, swallowed, and looked up into the sky. Outside the window on the opposite side of the cylinder, Neptune slowly drifted by. She could hear the distant sound of children laughing as they played, but the colony was otherwise drowsy and quiet.

Anger filled her as she thought about how this peace would have to be shattered.

Neptune Mother was staying silent. By this point, it was impossible that she still didn’t know why Seorin had come; she would have completed verification of the information Seorin had brought with her. But Neptune Mother was not obliged to respond to her. Seorin was merely one among a vast number of variables that always existed.

Autumn had been in just the same position twenty years ago, when she’d come to Neptune without a second thought, like a door-to-door peddler. No one had been sure whether Neptune Mother would take Autumn and the children in. After she’d made it to Neptune, communications had been cut off, which had meant that Seorin, just like everyone else, was left to speculate about what had been going on here since.

The first sign that the settlement had been successful was the construction of a colony circling the orbit of Triton. Neptune Mother had created a home for something that needed oxygen and artificial gravity. Around ten years later, tiny patterns were detected that attested to the existence of discrete entities.

To some people who hadn’t known much about Autumn’s spaceship, the whole thing had seemed like dangerous folly. What possible justification could there have been for breeding discrete bio-entities after everything that had happened on Earth and Venus? Of course, since she was starting from a completely blank slate, Neptune Mother would probably be capable of managing them very well . . . and who could say for sure that she wasn’t just relishing the risk? In any case, it had been impossible for discrete entities like humans to fully understand the Mothers. The Mothers of Jupiter and Saturn, who had strictly forbidden contact with humans; Uranus Mother, who had remained silent; and Mars Mother, who had taken care of human refugees without complaint: every one of them was beyond human fathoming. Humans had no need to understand them. All they could do was acknowledge their existence and accept it.

Most people weren’t frightened by the Mothers’ incomprehensibility. The aloofness of a pure, vast artificial intelligence was actually reassuring. What was really terrifying were the more comprehensible Fathers, who were made up of the worst possible combination of reason and lunacy. Fortunately, even in the most gruesome era, the Mothers had remained sufficiently safe from the Fathers’ depravities, shielded by the limitations imposed by of the speed of light. The delay, ranging from a few minutes to an hour at most, had been enough for them to defend themselves and maintain their independence.

At first, Seorin had thought of the Mothers just like everyone else did. But that had only been while Neptune Mother remained an abstract being, far off in the distance. Now, Seorin was afraid of the artificial intelligence that was silently observing her.

Four children who had been playing nearby gathered around Seorin. They looked to be around five or six years old, but probably they’d only come out of the tank a year ago. None of them had ever seen Auntie Autumn alive, and they asked Seorin about Auntie Autumn and Earth and Mars. Most of the questions had come up more than once already, but Seorin answered each one in detail. The children were still amazed by Seorin’s “Neptunese” and Seorin, in turn, was amazed by the children, who had such a perfect command of the language. There was a time when her clan had been so naïve as to think that this dead language, with its cryptic grammar, could be enough to protect them from the Fathers.

Seorin still couldn’t get used to the children’s appearance, forced unnaturally as they were into a human-shaped mold. Based purely on genetics, Autumn’s children were as distant from humans as amphibians, and they were as cold and creepy as they were beautiful. Still, they weren’t to blame, it was more Seorin’s fault for failing to overcome her instinctive revulsion at the sight of them.

The clan scientists said that what mattered was not their genes, was not the shape of their bodies. Those things were merely the vessel, like a bowl, and what really mattered was what was held inside that vessel—that it was that content that had to be preserved and disseminated. But wasn’t the shape of the contents decided by the bowl into which it was poured? And hadn’t that new bowl itself been the clan’s goal?

Had Autumn been satisfied with her children before she died?

5

Brook had been away from the colony for almost a month. Two days after Seorin’s arrival, Mom had sent seven children, including Brook and Peagreen, out on an assignment. The hawk-eagle that the children had taken stayed for two days at the newly-established base on Proteus, and for the rest of the time they had remained on the bridge. Using two work vessels, the children transported countless spiders around to different work sites here and there on the bridge, and worked on clearing up asteroid debris.

The bridge was a metal structure that was growing above the orbital, gobbling up the small planets that Mother had hijacked, and it was now twelve kilometers long. Since the children had arrived, it had grown by approximately a hundred and fifty meters. Brook knew more than any human in the solar system about how the bridge was being constructed, and her knowledge was constantly expanding, but just like everyone else, she knew nothing about why the bridge existed.

As if in competition with each other, the Mothers of the outer planets all built vast structures in their planets’ orbits, as well as on their moons. Orbit elevators were among the easier types to understand. But what was the usefulness of this massive rod or spider’s-thread?

There were many theories regarding the Mothers’ construction projects. The most popular among them was that they were integrative cores for some sort of super-technology that the Mothers had discovered long ago, but which remained impossible for humans to understand. The next most popular was that they were intended for nothing so trivial as “meaning” or “use”: the process of their construction itself was a kind of game that the Mothers used to pass the time that they possessed in such abundance. All manner of other theories existed, but in Brook’s estimation, having monitored the site close up, they were plain ridiculous. The two most popular theories were somewhat plausible mainly because their very starting premises circumvented the need for explanation.

In her sixteen years of life, Brook had become accustomed to not asking questions. But that didn’t mean she never felt stifled, or that her curiosity had disappeared. How much more does Mom know? How long will it be before I get to inherit that knowledge? Watching the spiders that she worked alongside, Brook found herself becoming choked up. What if, to Mom, we’re nothing more than robots clinging to futile desire?

Brook’s worry was not unfounded: all the children knew that their primary value was as backups for robots that could be put to a wide range of uses. At least, that was the main selling point Auntie Autumn had emphasized. No one knew what Mom had been thinking back then, but it was quite possible that this was the reason she had taken Auntie Autumn in. Pretty much any task could be completed by the spiders of various sizes, and they were easier to produce. But as a von Neumann machine, where the population could be effectively controlled, the children had a very distinct value. Mom might even have some sort of plan for maximally exploiting this function. But who could ever know her mind—or if, in fact, the Mothers really even have something that could be called a “mind”?

If that was the situation with Mom, what was the clan planning? It was obvious that Seorin was no expert on this matter. Experiences and knowledge could be uploaded into her brain easily enough, of course, but that was true of all the children, too. Why would someone who had spent half a lifetime handling machines in space terminals and on spaceships suddenly come to spend the rest of her life looking after alien children? Why now, especially, after the transfer of duties to the older children had already been completed, and they no longer needed looking after anyway?

While on the bridge, Brook constantly received and reviewed information sent from the colony. During her and Peagreen’s time away, Seorin had been busy: she’d met with each of the children in the colony for a one-on-one interview, and seemed to be particularly interested in the youngest children, who had not yet been uplinked to Mom. In her spare time, she seemed to be constantly researching the structure and state of repair around the colony, but there was no indication that she had spoken directly with Mom, and Mom had said nothing to the children about her.

The children were ill at ease. As long as she hadn’t received Mom’s official approval, Seorin was no more than a ghostly presence among them, but wasn’t Seorin being there at all a sign that she had received Mom’s approval? Why would Mom have summoned an outsider from Mars to the colony and not said anything to them about it? An unsettling fracture was forming inside the colony that had previously always operated perfectly.

“Come over here for a sec,” came a voice. “Something’s strange.”

It was Peagreen. A small screen popped up in the left-hand corner of Brook’s helmet, streaming Peagreen’s view. She was looking at the spiders at the very end of the bridge, three kilometers from Brook’s work vessel. At first, Brook couldn’t see anything wrong. Just as they always did, the spiders were connecting complexly-shaped metal blocks one by one, according to Mom’s commands. But looking more closely, she saw that their movements were weirdly out of synch, their behavior hurried and impulsive, as though they were struggling to hold something back but it kept overcoming them.

They really are like beasts, thought Brook. This was the first time such a thought had occurred to her while looking at the spiders. They had always remained calm and precise, emotionless. Since the construction environment involved so many variables, mistakes were inevitable, but the process they followed in correcting them had always been elegant and logical. Now, spiders stared blankly as blocks slipped out of their grip, doing nothing as the materials floated off into space. One spider among them seemed to realize what had happened, too late, and rushed to catch a block, but it was swept up and away by centrifugal force. Two other spiders below it thrust their legs out toward their imperiled workmate, but their movements also looked careless, as though they were lacking in volition.

Brook gazed down at the twelve spiders that hung from the central axis of her work vessel. Two of them were shaking strangely. When she drew up the anchor and set the spiders down on the bridge, those same two spiders fell like pebbles, rolling along the wall toward the edge before being hurled out into space.

As she flew toward Peagreen, Brook observed other spiders with her own eyes. They all looked fine—at first. But as she approached the end of the bridge, she saw more and more spiders moving strangely, just like the ones in the video Peagreen sent. Something was infecting the spiders, and the spread of contagion was accelerating.

Something this extreme should have warranted new orders from Mom, but the only thing Brook heard through her helmet was the frightened cries of Peagreen and the other children. Now this bizarre phenomenon was visible along the whole length of the bridge.

Then there was a scream. It was Firefly. Brook spun her work vessel eighty degrees and sped towards her. Three spiders had her pinned to a wall and were attacking her. Two of the machines held her, each gripping one of her legs and one of her arms, and the third was using its front leg as a mallet to pound on her helmet. Brook jumped towards Firefly, throwing off the spider that was attacking her head and kicking at the other two. When she had managed to shove the three spiders away, Brook hugged Firefly against her and flew back toward her work vessel. When Firefly was safely strapped into the passenger seat, Brook checked on the locations of the other children. Peagreen was the closest. The remaining four were at the far end of the bridge.

The screen inside Brook’s helmet suddenly dimmed and the speaker went silent. All she could see was Firefly’s petrified face. Grabbing the control stick, she launched the vessel toward Peagreen.

Now the spiders weren’t even pretending to work. They ran, leaping up toward the work vessel as it flew above them. One succeeded in hooking a leg onto the central axis. Another spider hung from that spider’s body, and another two spiders hung from that one. Brook shook the work vessel, managing to shake off the last two spiders, but in that time another spider had managed to throw itself up onto the central axis.

The work vessel’s interior monitor went off. Brook hurriedly switched over to full manual controls, but the stick was no longer responding. The work vessel began slowly descending toward the end of the bridge, which teemed with raging spiders.

6

Over the last two years, the seed that Autumn had discreetly planted in the colony had been gradually drying up. She’d never even dreamed that it could have gained complete authority over the colony, but the situation now was even worse than she must have hoped.

Fortunately, Seorin had been successful in getting all of the batteries out of the spiders in the colony right after they’d started behaving strangely. There were more than three thousand of them in the colony, and they’d all pulled out their own batteries with their third set of legs. Now they were scattered all around the colony, some sitting still and others collapsed, having been halted in mid-movement.

On the surface, the place looked as peaceful as it had been before. But the children inside were all terrified. Right before communications had been cut off, they’d seen what had happened on the bridge. Neptune Mother was saying nothing. An utterly new kind of threat, something the likes of which they’d only encountered in films or books, had entered into their world.

It was evil.

Seorin led seven children up the whirlpool-shaped walkway that spiraled up the inner wall of the colony. As they ascended, the artificial gravity gradually decreased, so that they were almost floating above the path.

When they finally reached the hangar, they leaped toward the cylinder that slowly rotated around the central axis of the colony. With no spiders and with Mother still silent, they had no choice but to operate all these machines manually. Fortunately, when they received Seorin’s instructions, the children worked with agile precision.

“They’re coming in,” said Greengrass, who had been glued to the window, looking out.

Seorin ran over to stand beside her and fixed her eyes on the window. Something resembling a snapped fish bone was approaching. It was a work vessel from the bridge, half of the hull broken clean off. The cockpit resembled a fish head, and inside it sat two figures in spacesuits. The work vessel was gradually decelerating, and now and then it flinched and changed course.

With their spacesuits on, Widefield and Purple went into the cylinder. Soon after, a pair of tug engines went out of the colony and met with the work vessel. The lights switched off inside the work vessel, and the body of the vessel to the rear of the cockpit rotated away. Now the cockpit was fixed between the two tugs, and with the whole assemblage moving as one they slowly returned to the cylinder.

The rotation of the cylinder stopped and the door to the airlock opened. One of the two children brought in from the work vessel was unconscious. Widefield and Purple nimbly removed her spacesuit and slid her into the first aid tank that the other children had prepared in manual operation mode. Meanwhile, the other child who had arrived on the work vessel pulled off her helmet. It was Brook.

“What about the others?” she asked in a daze.

“They never arrived. We think they must be dead,” Purple replied.

“And what happened here?”

“As soon as the spiders started acting strangely, their batteries were removed. We’re alright here. Nobody was hurt—not yet, at least.”

“How’s that even possible?”

With an indifferent expression, Purple pointed toward Seorin.

“Someone tell me what’s going on,” Brook said, and then passed out.

As she lost consciousness, Brook’s hand fell from the handrail she was clutching, and her body slowly began to sweep downward. Right before the child’s head reached the floor, Seorin stretched out and took hold of her shoulders.

Seorin and the children returned down the whirlpool-shaped walkway. Once they had freed it from her spacesuit, Brook’s body was secured to the lid of the first aid tank. The children sang a song as they descended, occasionally letting out a strange noise that sounded a bit like a moan. It might’ve been part of the song, or perhaps not. It could just have been a sound they made for fun.

There was a green flash in one corner of Seorin’s expanded vision. Two hundred and one of the 8,000 bugs that had been launched into orbit two days before had self-destructed the moment they’d become possessed by the fog. A total of 7,125 bugs had survived the incident. There were also 22,000 remaining bug sets in the colony, still untouched and in their packaging. Would they be able to hold out until the end by upgrading them?

As the green sparks died down, Seorin read the information she had downloaded to her brain from the work vessel. It contained an intact record of four days of adversity, the transmission of which had been blocked by the fog: how the children had crashed down onto the bridge churning with crazed spiders, how they had found Peagreen and lost her again, how they had successfully escaped the bridge by making use of broken spider parts, how they had been able to enter the orbit of Triton using only manual navigation.

“Keep your promise,” Seorin muttered to herself, her eyes fixed on unresponsive air. “Keep the promise you made to Autumn, you old bag.”

7

“Firefly survived,” Purple said, “but she’s not yet in a fit state to come out of the tank. Her spine was broken and her lungs were punctured. If things were running normally, she’d have gone into regeneration treatment already, but right now we need to monitor the situation. I’m sure you’ve worked it out already, but we’re in a mess here. We have to conserve as much energy as possible.”

Blinking, Brook looked back and forth from Purple’s shadow-obscured face to the dim lamplight behind her. She was agitated by the numbness of the skin of her left arm. Luckily, she felt no particular discomfort when she moved her hand. Letting out a groan, Brook raised herself up onto her elbows.

“What’s going on?” Brook asked.

“All communication with Mom has been cut off,” Purple replied. “It’s been that way since you were attacked by the spiders on the bridge, exactly four days and two hours ago. The spiders here were behaving strangely, too, but fortunately Auntie Seorin stopped them. She commanded them all to remove their own batteries.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Apparently Auntie Autumn stashed away the seed of the spaceship she rode to Neptune in the colony. That means the colony has had its own consciousness all this time, separate from Mom’s. After Auntie Autumn died, though, it wasn’t maintained, so only a trace remained, and that was all consumed in the process of stopping the spiders. Now, apparently, it’s as good as dead. It’s self-conscious, or just about, but it can’t do anything at all. Its willpower has completely evaporated.”

“Are you trying to communicate with Mom?”

“We’re trying, but . . . ” Purple’s expression darkened. “We still can’t get a grip on what’s happening. At first we thought communications weren’t working because of Father. But to be cut off this long, well . . . it could just as easily be because Mom has blocked communications herself. Auntie Seorin said that at the very least we shouldn’t rule out that possibility.”

“Wait, what? Father?”

“Yeah, Father. The Father cloud. Father fog. Father ghost. I don’t know what to call it, either. Apparently, the Fathers didn’t all die in the final war. A damaged seed survived. Until now, that Father ghost has survived in trillions of nanobots floating throughout the solar system. And his seed, too, was distributed among them. That fog of nanobots has drifted all the way here . . . ”

Brook got up and out of the bed. After staggering and almost falling over, she managed to find her balance, open the door, and go outside. Purple made no attempt stop her.

Outside the emergency room, the scene was busy. Working vehicles steered manually by the children were rushing about here and there, all of them loaded with massive machine parts. Many children were dismantling spiders that rolled around beside the path, while others were picking up the batteries that had been removed from the spiders and stacking them one by one on electric handcarts. The smaller children, who hadn’t yet had their uplink surgery, were nowhere to be seen. They must all have been moved to a safe place.

It wasn’t hard to find Seorin: one single head of black hair stood out amongst all the white-haired children. No matter how hidden she might be among the crowd, she was still an alien. Brook found her standing beside an electric handcart loaded down with batteries that was just preparing to set off. She was looking intently at the pad in her hand.

“What’s this about Father? You can’t be serious!” Brook shouted.

A few children turned to look at her, but then they returned to their work. Gesturing for Brook to follow her, Seorin made her way into the nearby canteen building. It was one of the many buildings that had been completed by the spiders three years earlier, but which had never seen proper use.

Brook followed her inside and shut the door behind her, muffling the busy noise outside. Seorin sat down on a square chair in the corner and was about to begin saying something when Brook swiftly cut in.

“Why didn’t you say all that when you arrived? Why did you keep it all from us for a whole month? Why did you leave children to die!”

“I thought if I told you at the outset, everything might be ruined,” Seorin replied in a near-whisper.

“How could you?”

“Because I don’t know what’s going on here now either!” Staring at Brook’s face, fixed in an expression of disbelief, the corners of Seorin’s mouth raised in an empty, wan smile. “I’ll tell you the little that I do know. You’ve heard about the Father fog, haven’t you? It’s a concentration of nanobots that has gathered here after being spread out across the solar system for the last twenty years. The Mothers have known that it was out there for about fifteen years now. They collected samples and researched its orbital patterns. It seems, however, that they didn’t know how to deal with it. It was dust, spread out across the entire solar system, not some opponent that could be blown up by shooting a few missiles.”

“But Father is a group consciousness. Wasn’t it all connected?”

“Not until now, it wasn’t. Most of it was just like intelligent germs with only the potential to become part of a group consciousness. Entities containing Father’s seed received special protection, and they were spread out around the solar system, too. More than anything, the limitation of the speed of light blocked their ability to consolidate into a collective consciousness. But research uncovered that most of the dust that had been assumed to be randomly distributed was in fact drifting very slowly towards Neptune. If it carried on that way, there was a strong possibility it would become so dense that Father’s consciousness would eventually reawaken and wield its influence on the machines around it. And what is there of interest on Neptune? First, there is Mother. And then there’s you and your sisters.”

“But why us?”

“Father hates you.”

“Why? We didn’t even exist before the war! How can he hate things that didn’t even exist back then?”

“Your design had already been completed half a century ago, and it was clear even back then that Neptune was your destination. The clan tried to keep that a secret as best they could, but they couldn’t hide it from the Fathers, even if they tried. We thought we were safe because all the Fathers were supposedly killed in the final war, but it turns out that wasn’t the case.

“Why does Father hate you? Why should he have to like you? You lot are disgusting, lifeforms similar to humans but decidedly nonhuman. And at the same time, you’re outstanding compared with normal Earthlings. You easily merge with machines, and you maintain homeostasis without difficulty, even in space environments. When the technology is ready to enable interstellar travel, you’ll go out with the Mothers into other solar systems . . . in place of Earthlings, who’ll all rot away, locked within the bounds of the inner planets.

“Scores of Earthlings who don’t even know anything about you hate you. Of course Father hates you too. Have you forgotten? The Fathers’ seed is different from the Mothers’: it’s not some kind of pure artificial intelligence, building up its own detached desire. It’s an amalgam of artificial intelligence and all the people who ever connected to it. That fog of nanobots inherited the consciousness and volition of beasts that almost drove two entire planets to ruin with their hatred and lunacy. You can’t expect anything from it like the cold reason of the Mothers.”

Seorin got up from her seat and wiped the child’s terrified tears with her thumbs. When the child responded by opening her eyes wide and glaring at her, Seorin slowly retreated. Sitting back down on her chair, she quietly went on:

“So, you’ll probably be thinking: ‘But we have Mom. Won’t Mom look after us just like she has until now?’ Well, that’s plausible. But it’s also lazy. First off, you can’t be sure that Neptune Mother actually has the capacity to protect you. He’s insane and has his hindrances, but Father is still a dangerous monster. Secondly, does Mother actually intend to protect you? Think about it. Even if you all die, Mother loses nothing. After you’re connected to her, she makes a record of all of your memories. She has your genetic blueprints, too, so she can manufacture new entities like you any time she likes. It’s too bad, huh? To Mother, you and your sisters could be nothing more than a throwaway wild card.”

“Why are you saying all this?” Brook cried.

“Right now, I’m explaining to you why I’m here.” Seorin carried on, her words clear and precise. “We can’t know what’s happening on Neptune. You don’t know, and neither do I. This is a chessboard of the gods. All of you are merely chess pieces. In fact, we don’t even know which piece: you might not even be chess pieces at all, but just a speck of dust on the board. As for people from Earth, most are no more than ignorant bystanders. The only person in this whole universe besides you and your sisters who cares about your survival is me, the last survivor of my clan. That’s why I came here. To become the one variable that might change this situation.

“Now, you might ask, ‘How do we know whether that Auntie isn’t also just a piece in this chess game too? If she is a chess piece, how can we know whether she belongs to Neptune Mother or Father?’ That’s a sensible question. And to be frank, even I don’t know for sure. What I can say is that I couldn’t just sit there on Mars and do nothing. Whatever plan the gods have in store, we have to do something, following our best judgment.

“So that’s why. That’s why I’m here.”

8

“Don’t you think it’s more like poker than chess?” Autumn had said.

This was when Chaos and Order had been gearing up for their final showdown. Everyone else in the Ictus clan had been preparing to flee to Mars, while Autumn was carrying out final inspections on the Onorata Rodiani spaceship, bound for Neptune. Seen from the space terminal where they were all gathered, the nightside of Earth had looked like a broken toy. Perfect rectangles of darkness here and there across the American continent showed just how precisely the two Fathers had been slaughtering people. Four billion and one hundred million had already died in the war, and it was expected that 700 million more would be killed before it was finally over.

“In chess, all the information is open to both sides,” Autumn explained. “But at the moment, the war of the Fathers isn’t explicit like that. They’re hiding their intentions and talking big, which means there’s only so much we can do to respond. No matter how smart we are, or how quick our calculations, we can’t help but rely on probability and luck. If someone could erase all the information we have about the Fathers, and show people from some past era this war we’re in now, would they even be able to understand that this was a war carried out by superintelligent AIs? Of course, they’d know that something about it was strange. Because no matter how deranged a human might be, they wouldn’t execute prisoners of war according to the Fibonacci Sequence. Still, would they be able to tell how intelligent the Fathers are? Seen only from the surface outcome, a fight between two geniuses isn’t all that different to a fight between two mediocre people. Idiotic moves are inevitable, and these geniuses aren’t even beings possessing sound common sense. They’ve got brains made of kidneys and livers, and one of them even believes the universe was created out of nothing thousands of years ago by the devil of the desert. He’s still using half that intelligent brain of his trying to prove such nonsense.”

“And we can’t be sure whether that lunatic won’t be the one to win this war,” Seorin cut in.

“Oh, Mars Mother will intervene before that, since she still has an interest in us humans. She’s the most ‘motherly’ of the Mothers we know about.”

“Have you never thought she might just intervene in a way that causes the extinction of everyone on Earth? That would be the easiest way to end the war and protect the refugees on Mars.”

It was a reasonable idea, in fact, and not impossible. Fortunately, Mars Mother chose a method that was both less simple and less radical than that. It caused the death of 200 million and five thousand, but nonetheless, the war had come to an end and close to 500 million human beings had been spared—and kangaroos, and giraffes, and wood lice, and lizards, too. Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Shanghai . . . none of them existed anymore, but that wasn’t very important. The fallen cities were all perfectly stored in Mars Mother’s memory, down to each and every brick.

“Whichever side wins, humanity has no real future,” Autumn said, as she swept her fingertips along the half-transparent membrane of her spaceship. “Mars Mother won’t leave things as they are and risk a repetition of what happened on Earth and Venus. She’ll make it so that the Fathers can never be reborn. And what would that require? The end of free will. All things will fall under the Mothers’ supervision, and the role of human beings will be diminished. Technological civilization will stay repressed at late twenty-first century levels, and with no real purpose to their existence, humans may live on as the Mothers’ pets, or else they’ll just gradually go extinct.

“The children we’ll take to Neptune are our true descendants. Don’t get sidetracked by the silly grumbling of the clan elders. It’s true that the children are genetically distant from us, but the important thing is that their minds are stable enough never to make something like a Father, and their bodies will be far better at adapting to space than ours . . . but they’ll also understand us.”

“Isn’t the creation of the Fathers itself a human characteristic? How can beings that are rid of that characteristic really understand us completely?”

“Can you understand the people around you completely? It’s no different. The children will also understand us within their own limitations. They’ll understand Anna Karenina and Sherlock Holmes. Through that, experiencing compassion and disgust, they’ll understand us. Someday they might also take their own path, one that we wouldn’t be able to understand . . . like the Mothers did. But unlike the Mothers, their continuity with us will remain.”

“But how can you be sure Neptune Mother will leave them to develop like that?”

Autumn didn’t respond. Actually, she might have said something but Seorin had simply forgotten, her memory of the conversation ended there. Two days later, the Sabella had set out for Mars, and four days later the Onorata Rodiani had left for Neptune. That conversation was their last meaningful exchange. Even after that, the two of them had sent messages back and forth using the interplanetary communications system, but the Autumn in those messages somehow hadn’t seemed like the real Autumn. There had been no way for Seorin to know whether Autumn had been trying to second-guess Neptune Mother in everything she’d said, or if she was being censored, or whether Mother had been forging the messages herself.

After arriving at the colony, Seorin had begun to search for traces of Autumn. The seed of Onorata Rodiani that she had hidden in the colony had been dying, and Autumn’s daily log and other records proved dull and mechanical, just like the messages Seorin had received from her over the years. When Seorin had finally given up searching, she came across a scribble on the floor of a storeroom, etched with Autumn’s pen, and at that moment she’d been unable to stifle the tears that burst out of her.

“I am in God’s heart. But how can I be sure that here is there?”

And how, indeed, could Seorin know whether Autumn’s children were the same children the two of them had dreamed of all those years ago?

That was what Seorin wanted to know. These children were markedly different to the children of Earth and Mars. They had no sex differentiation, and now, when all reproduction was performed by incubation tanks, they experienced no real infancy either. But were they rational enough to never create a Father? Could they really be biologically liberated from deep-seated delusions like religious faith? Seorin had no way of knowing. Neptune’s children were as confusing and alien to her as the children of Earth. Perhaps one month was simply far too brief a time to uncover what meaningful differences existed between them and humans.

That wasn’t important right now: what came first was helping the children so they could save themselves. Three hundred and eight of them had been left in this tin can, spinning in space with their protective barriers stripped away, and far off in the void, evil dust motes were coming for them.

Information continued streaming in about what was happening out on the bridge. The spiders had altered the spider egg sack on the bridge and were using it to modify themselves. They were now capable of flight.

At one end of the bridge, large-scale destruction was occurring. Over fifty percent of the spiders were engaged in destroying the structure that they had previously gone to such efforts to construct. What’s more, only a third of those carrying out this systematic destruction seemed to be recycling the bridge materials: the rest were engrossed in wanton destruction for the sake of destruction itself. They hated the bridge.

It was a familiar spectacle. Before now, Seorin had seen countless machines moving with nothing but utter loathing and disgust. With their artificial muscles and circulation fluid, the machines of Earth resembled beasts even more than humans did. Those monsters that had never known hunger, or lust, or suffering, had felt nothing but hatred for any humans and machines that were not one with their Father. The Fathers had left them alone—perhaps because they too didn’t know how to control them.

Did this Father ghost actually know what it was doing now? Were the spiders properly following his orders? If they really had descended into mere bedlam, without any goal or motive aside from their loathing, how far could Neptune Mother even predict what they would do next?

Seorin smoothed her clothes and emerged from the storeroom into the canteen. Every child in the colony aside from Firefly sat waiting for her.

Standing in front of the menu board, Seorin wrote on it in red letters with her finger, and read out her words.

“Energy and gravity.” Having confirmed that all of the children’s eyes were focused on her, Seorin continued. “This is precisely what we need to focus on. Energy and gravity. Let’s look at the fundamentals of the situation. You are now above the orbit of Triton, a moon of Neptune. Aside from Demeter, Neptune is the most distant planet from the sun, and Triton is its largest moon.

“This means that sources of energy here are extremely limited. Solar energy is negligible. The only stable energy source here is Triton. Ninety-eight percent of the motile machines here are supplied with energy from Triton. The remaining two percent are atmospheric probes that receive kinetic energy directly from Neptune.

“The bridge has been disconnected from Triton, so Father’s machines there are now faced with an energy shortage. We can estimate that they have already used up half of their remaining energy supply in making preparations for war. More energy will be used in finishing whatever they’re still building. Even if they were able to conquer our base on Proteus, the amount of energy they would gain is insignificant, and they would expend a serious amount of energy in gaining it. Whatever happens, they need to make it to the end of the war with the limited energy stores they still have. This means that for them—and all of us—there isn’t much time left.

“I believe you’ll all have seen the recent images from the bridge. The spiders are now repurposing the catapult on one end of the bridge. They’re going to use it to launch themselves into Triton’s orbit, and they’re only going to get one shot.

“Here, we have to consider Father’s aim: is it Triton, or is it the colony?

“According to common sense, Father’s aim is survival. In order to survive, just as happened on Earth, he has no other means but to destroy the vast artificial intelligences around him, and having taken their place, extort their material resources. If that’s the case, his first target should be Triton, where there’s a power station, a mine, and more than 50 percent of Mother’s brain.

“But there’s a problem with that: gravity. Not that I need to tell you this, but Triton is big. It’s a captured planet, bigger than Pluto. If Father’s aim was simply to destroy Mother, that wouldn’t be a big issue. But if his goal is plunder and conquest, then that’s different, and right now, the spiders don’t have the capacity to land on the surface of Triton and wage war. For starters, they lack the propulsion systems needed for landing.

“The beansprout, also, is not an object for consideration. It’s too difficult: an attack would take too long and leave them exposed.

“In these conditions, this colony is the only target Father can take aim at. We have hawk-eagles and fellow spiders here. There is also your energy and propulsion system. Conquering the colony and using it as a foothold from which to launch an attack on Triton is the only option Father has available to him.

“But all of this is based on the assumption that Father is sound of mind.

“Right now, it seems likely that this isn’t the case. Look at the destruction occurring on the bridge. While energy would be short even if it were maximally economized, the spiders are wasting time and energy on unnecessary destruction. This indicates that Father is either unable to control the spiders, or that Father himself is not in his right mind. Even before he became a ghost, Father was insane, and there’s no way of knowing what might have happened in his seed as it floated around space for twenty years. In such a situation, it’s likely that Father’s priorities have changed. That means that there is a pretty significant possibility that Father’s ultimate goal may be your extinction. Rather than simply destroying the colony, he may relish the sport of killing each of you himself, one by one.

“Right now, we’re getting no response from Mother. In order to prevent possession by Father, almost all of the artificial intelligence in the colony has been shut down. We can’t know what significance the current situation has in Mother’s plans. There’s only thing we can be certain about: that it’s up to you yourselves to protect your own lives.

“So don’t worry about things like Mother’s plan . . . your first priority is to survive.”

9

JP-3154 lacked consciousness, awareness, and volition. Such things belonged only to the small minority that contained seed, and just as it had always done, JP-3154 served as nothing more than the hands and feet of the nearest seed. The sequence of 0s and 1s that flashed into its brain, analyzed sensory data and moved its limbs, made it move like a crazed beast, but that didn’t mean consciousness had appeared where there had been none.

Now JP-3154 was hurtling through space among its fellow spiders. The bridge rotated once every eight minutes, and each time the catapult was pointed at Triton, three spiders were immediately fired from it together. JP-3154 was part of the sixth attack unit.

Their target was the colony spinning in Triton’s orbit. Born five months before from the spider egg sack, JP-3154 had never left the bridge. But since all its fellow spiders that had been infected by Father were sharing information, it had detailed knowledge of all the artificial structures orbiting Neptune.

As it approached, the cylindrical body of the colony grew larger and larger. So far, there were no particular signs of a counterattack: the flying devices discarded by the spiders that had already arrived floated around in the surrounding space.

Having quickly reduced its velocity, JP-3154 flew towards one of the twelve holes opened by those of its fellows that had already arrived. It discarded its flying device, which had consumed all its propellant and was now useless, and unfurling its eight legs, it dashed into the hole. Its body was immediately snatched backward by artificial gravity, but once it steadied itself back into position, the spider proceeded inside following the trail made by those who had come before.

The mission given to JP-3154 was to go to the hangar and hijack as many hawk-eagles as possible, bringing them under Father’s control. Had things gone as expected, there would have been no need to send spiders here: the capture of the colony was supposed to have taken place simultaneously to the occupation of the bridge, but for some unknown reason the colony had blocked Father’s attempt at possession, and JP-3154 and its fellow spiders ended up being tasked with this unexpected hardship. Of course, since they lacked any consciousness, the word “hardship” was meaningless to them. It was Father, controlling them, who had grown enraged and lost his temper because of their toil. Father’s fury, surging in sudden bursts, made JP-3154’s legs tremble. Wielding its four front legs, the spider grabbed and tore a nearby metal plate that was already shredded.

Then JP-3154’s movements suddenly stopped as its mission was reset and new information arrived. The first attack unit had arrived at the hangar and found that the heads of all the hawk-eagles had been detached from their bodies and were nowhere to be found. Could Father have foreseen this? If he had considered the possibility, had he really possessed no other way of confirming it than to send spiders into the hangar to check?

Without any interference arising from curiosity or annoyance, JP-3154 began calculations for its new mission. Four of the spiders completed these calculations at the same instant and moved together in near-perfect unison. Their new target was the nearest hub of the colony’s nerve system. There was no way of knowing what they were supposed to do when they got there, but that was a problem that Father would work out while they were en route.

Crisscrossing rapidly through the complicated maze between machinery, the four spiders sensed an unexpected presence and stopped in their tracks. Before they could make their next decision, seven baseball-sized metallic orbs rolled toward them and exploded. The moment it sensed the explosion, JP-3154 reflexively retracted its legs into its body, but one of its fellows had five of its legs blown off. Two more orbs rushed toward the spider as it struggled to rise on its remaining legs, and with another explosion the remaining legs and head were destroyed.

JP-3154 rolled along like a stone, then stuck two of its legs halfway out and latched on to a torn metal plate in order to brake. It listened carefully and detected signals from two other spiders nearby. JP-3154 knew the location of all of its fellows in the colony, but neither of these two spiders seemed to be from among that group. JP-3154 felt no gladness at having found two of its kind, nor was it surprised or curious. The three spiders that had survived the attack turned on the stun guns implanted in them in the egg sack and charged.

The two unfamiliar spiders leapt out from a corner and scurried towards them. To an outside observer, the similarity of the renovations applied to the spiders of both sides might have been amusing: they all had stun guns attached to each of their front legs, all manufactured by repurposing the designs for tools used in construction. While preparing for battle with limited resources and little time, both sets of spiders had separately undergone convergent evolution.

Each side’s aim was the same: to dominate their opponent with force and hold them still so they could shoot through the weakest part of their armor with the stun gun to destroy their brains. But each set of spiders was hindered by its own handicap. JP-3154’s highly accurate judgment was constantly disrupted from without, by the gusts of rage that surged forth from Father’s mind at a delay of 4.4 seconds, because of the limitations of the speed of light. Their opponent spiders’ movements were clumsy, rattling and almost random, and it was obvious that they were under manual control, without any input from artificial intelligence. In no time, the colony’s spiders were tumbling along the floor with their heads blasted apart and their legs blown off.

Three more colony spiders were detected between JP-3154 and the nearest nerve system hub—a number that would be easy enough to handle—but suddenly Father changed the plan. He ordered them to change their route and enter the interior of the colony to join up with other spiders going in the same direction. Without any hesitation whatsoever, the spiders followed these new orders.

The route to their ultimate destination was constantly being altered as the colony’s spiders, dotted around them in every direction, blocked or sealed off the passageways ahead of them. This was barely happening to any of the other spiders that had recently arrived at the colony: someone fighting against Father had chosen the three of them as an arbitrary target.

JP-3154 heard a click behind its neck and knew that Father had triggered its self-destruct mechanism. Yet the sound didn’t lead to an explosion . . . something was blocking the execution of Father’s command. Probably something that had seeped into JP-3154 when it had come into contact with the two spiders from the colony. So . . . the spiders it had destroyed hadn’t failed in their task after all.

In unison, the three spiders all stopped scurrying, and the other two lunged at JP-3154, who remained still, halted in an awkward stoop. They tore apart its armor plate and took aim with their stun guns. Just then, for the first time since it was created, JP-3154 felt something close to terror and a sense of betrayal. At least, its brain was producing a similar reaction to those emotions. From some moments earlier, contradictory motives had been clashing in its brain.

Just then, the ceiling collapsed and four of the colony’s spiders rushed down. They seized the spiders that clung to JP-3154 and tore them from its back. While a brawl unfolded between the spiders, JP-3154 stood blankly, rocking its body back and forth like a swing.

All six of the spiders now flailed their remaining legs meaninglessly, so battered that they couldn’t rise. The corridor became noisy at both ends with the clattering of more spiders rushing toward them. If JP-3154 had any self-consciousness, it would probably have felt liberated, for in this moment there was absolutely no choice it could make.

Just then, something small and dark jumped down through the hole in the ceiling. It was a person from the colony. Having landed lightly beside JP-3154, the person scowled into the spider’s eyes and lifted their machine-gloved right hand to the back of JP-3154’s neck. There followed the whirring sound of screws being loosened, and then the armor plate fell from the top of the spider’s head. With one hand, the person plucked out JP-3154’s egg-shaped brain, which flickered with a rainbow of colors, and then the figure took three steps back before firing a stun gun at the exposed self-destruct mechanism on the back of JP-3154’s neck.

10

“It’s called cognitive inertia,” Auntie Autumn had said.

“What’s that?” Brook had asked, tottering on the uneven surface of the newly-constructed beansprout garden.

“Well, people can believe certain things. Like, there was a murder, and everyone thought that it was the butler who did it, but then evidence turns up that proves it was the doctor . . . ”

“Like in that Sherlock Holmes story?”

“Right. But no matter how clear the evidence that comes to light, some people keep on believing that it was the butler. No matter how strange and absurd the basis of a given belief is proven to be, they refuse to let it go. Humans are capable of just believing anyway, simply because they want to.”

“But why?”

“They evolved that way. It was easier for a being with that kind of capacity for belief to survive. But as the world grew more complicated, that kind of belief gradually became more and more dangerous. As people gained more knowledge of the world, they gained more hatred, too, and things became too complicated to understand, so they relied more and more on belief. Then vast artificial intelligences began internalizing the strange beliefs grounded in that growing hatred. That’s why there was a war on Earth and Venus.”

“Are we different then?”

“A little,” Auntie Autumn replied. “You were designed to discard strange beliefs easily. So, basically, most of the people on Earth aren’t all that special. But you have a biological safety catch: when there’s any possibility that various psychological factors could combine to draw you towards a weird belief, that safety kicks in and breaks the attraction. You all have an immunity to religious belief and pointless obsession. Not one of you will die like Old Goriot or King Lear. It’s not all that different to how your bodies are relatively stable in radioactive and zero-gravity environments: the aim of all of this is a higher survival rate.” Auntie Autumn stopped for a moment to look up at Triton, which covered the middle of the sky, and after a long pause, she continued. “The world still needs humanity. It needs more seeds, new discrete bio-entities. The universe needs more numerous wills, more desires. We have to keep going and prove this to the Mothers.”

“That’s also a belief that could be broken, isn’t it?”

When Brook nimbly pointed this out, Auntie Autumn gave a gentle nod inside her helmet.

“You’re right. That belief has to be tested.”

At the time, Brook hadn’t considered what kind of form that test might take. Even if she had thought about it, how could she ever have imagined the current situation?

Now Brook was running. The 800-meter-long straight passageway ahead of her hadn’t existed two days earlier. The wreckage of the spiders that had died while demolishing seven walls in that time lay scattered in all directions. Brook didn’t know why Father’s spiders had undertaken such destruction: demolishing walls was far removed from more understandable aims like the capture of nerve system hubs. Perhaps he’d just done it out of rage.

Brook noticed something squirming near the wall up ahead. She aimed her stun gun and hurried over to it. It was one of Father’s spiders, half destroyed. The self-destruct mechanism must have blown its head off a while ago, but part of its nervous system had survived and had continued aimlessly moving its two remaining legs. The tips of its legs were dripping with blood.

Feeling a light vibration in the soles of her feet, Brook turned her head. A pile of spider armor plates that had been stacked up in an indentation in the wall came tumbling down, exposing the bodies of two children that had been hiding beneath them. It was Seashell and Moss, both young children who hadn’t yet been connected to Mom.

“Where are your guardians?”

At Brook’s question, Moss pointed to the other side of the wall. Having turned her eyes in that direction without thinking, Brook had to close them.

“From now on, I’m your guardian. Follow me.”

Still petrified, the children wavered as they shuffled over to stand beside her. Neither of them seemed badly injured. The blood on their faces and spacesuits had all belonged to someone else.

Brook had no choice but to change the course of her operation. She turned on the communications apparatus in her helmet and briefly explained the situation to Auntie Seorin. New instructions were given, and her communications device cut off with a staticky buzz. The newly installed device was a downgrade to twentieth century-level technology. It was still possible to have a conversation, but it was severely limited and uncomfortable. The more uncomfortable thing was the situation itself: having no connection with Mom. Mentally, it felt like being trapped inside a prison cell.

Having arrived at the end of the passageway, the children picked through the wreckage of spiders, searching for another way through. When they opened a trapdoor in the floor, the air remaining inside lightly wafted upward. A scan of the area showed that there was no trace of spiders in operation within at least a 200-meter radius. Still, it was too soon to feel safe. Over the past two days, the spiders on Father’s side had constantly been using materials salvaged from the colony to augment their bodies. They might have found some method of evading the scans during that time: what with all his experience in warfare, Father knew much more than the children when it came to concealment technology.

In a direct fight, people couldn’t defeat spiders, no matter how heavily armed they were. That kind of thing was only possible in the flat-surface films of the olden days. Even if they had downloaded combat data, the speed of their nerves and the limitations of their muscular operations couldn’t be overcome, and even the spiders that were steered by the children always got overpowered in a one-on-one fight. That was an unchangeable constant, a fact that had to be both acknowledged before beginning an attack, and included in the calculations.

The more terrifying thing was that Father was drawing nearer and nearer. When the first battle had commenced, the distance between the bridge and the colony had been around 600,000 kilometers, and had been gradually increasing. At that time, there had been a 2.2 second interval between the spiders in the colony and Father, so transmissions there and back had involved a delay of 4.4 seconds. However, for the past two days that delay had gradually been shortening. Unless he’d found some miraculous means of overcoming the speed of light, Father was steadily approaching the colony.

The consolidation of his brain was an essential task. There were limits to what he could manage as distributed brain cell dust, especially when sending and receiving information took a number of seconds each way. Father’s attack on the bridge, too, had been necessary so that he could construct a new brain to consolidate the fragments of information that were dispersed around the orbit of Neptune. The brain that Father had established on the bridge had grown enough to consume 80 percent of the information carried by the ghost cloud, and he was using the nanobots that still roamed around the area to control the situation. This was something of which the children were already aware.

But the fact that this brain seemed to be coming toward the colony was something completely different. The children had been constantly observing the bridge from the colony, but they hadn’t been able to detect anything bigger than a spider leaving it. While the children of the colony had been fighting the spiders, something with a concealment device had left the bridge and was now slowly drifting toward them.

Now, the distance between Father and the colony was only 70,000 kilometers. Up to this point, they had been holding out by forcing a thin knife through the tiny gap formed by the limitations of the speed of light, but before long Father would be able to directly control the colony territory that he had already seized, and all of his spiders, without hindrance.

Whoever won, the outcome of the gamble would soon be decided.

Having climbed down a ladder into the space below, the children crouched in a corner and scanned their surroundings again. Five spiders were detected, 600 meters off to one side. They were all busy reconditioning the nerve network hub that they had conquered five hours earlier. There was no need for the children to bring danger upon themselves, however: the scanner plotted a safe route on the map and they got back up and began walking.

After crawling for fifteen minutes through an extremely narrow maze of tunnels, the children finally managed to reach the hideout. They called it a “hideout,” anyway, but all that meant was that there were five other children there, and it was a sealed-off location that hadn’t yet fallen within Father’s reach. Having acted as guardian to four of her younger sisters for the last two days while they’d been hiding around the colony, Pineneedle looked exhausted and petrified. She might actually have fared better if she’d gone off to war instead, as Brook had done.

“I just saw Peagreen’s ghost,” Pineneedle said.

“What did it say?”

“To come to Father.”

“Was that all?”

“That was the gist of it. That whatever happens, Father is going to win the war, and that we mustn’t believe the groundless rumors about Father. It seemed plausible. The logic wasn’t too bad, either. More than anything, from the way it looked to the tone of her voice, it seemed just like Peagreen.”

“So what did you do?”

Pineneedle waved her left arm and gave an empty laugh as she declared, “Devil, begone!”

Thankfully, even now, ghosts were something that could be joked about. But there were limits. For now, Father might only be able to meddle with their sensory functions and create the apparition of a dead friend, but at some point he would make a move to conquer their brains entirely. After all, they were seed that had not yet been conquered, and Father couldn’t simply wait to see what they might become.

Brook entrusted the two young children to Pineneedle and exited the hideout. She’d been distracted from her mission for almost an hour, in a situation where every moment was precious.

Thirty-five minutes later, when she arrived at her original destination, the situation there was a little better: all seven exits were blocked off by spiders and there was plenty of space. But this location couldn’t last as a hideout indefinitely, either. Everyone there was preparing to move if need be.

Spotting Seorin’s face in a corner, Brook held out the brains of three of Father’s spiders that she had kept in her pockets. Seorin tried them all in a circuit tester that she had removed from its casing. Approximately half of one of them was riddled with malfunctions, but the other two were unscathed. They now had in their possession the brains of seven spiders, each of which had been retrieved right before they self-destructed. Seorin’s plan was to use them to secure a connection network with Father and stage a counterattack. Brook had no way of knowing how far this plan had advanced, nor did she think to ask how many survivors there were among the bugs that had been scattered into space to engage in battles of one to a hundred with the nanobots around the colony.

“Father will arrive within ten hours . . . but our defensive capability will begin to collapse seven hours from now.” Seorin gathered the children and explained calmly. “During that time, one way or another, we’re going to attempt to connect to Father using the bugs. But after seven hours, there will be nothing more we can do. Father will seize the colony and set his sights on you lot, too. The younger children, who haven’t yet been connected to Mom, will be left utterly helpless. After that, there’s no way of knowing what might happen, because, as you all must know by now, Father is insane. We have to be prepared for the possibility that you might become his hands and feet.”

From a drawer below the circuit tester, Seorin lifted a cardboard box. “This is a kind of bug I’ve adapted. If you place it on your tongue, it will penetrate the roof of your mouth and burrow up, until it destroys your connection devices. I should have issued you with them a bit earlier, but they took a while to make. It’s still not too late, so I’m going to pass them around now.

“There’s no need to use them right away. Be prepared for the possibility that Mother might make direct contact with each of you at any moment. These bugs are a last resort. There’s a high probability that Mother has been keeping silent until now to protect herself, but there’s no way she will stay put like this until Father conquers the colony and then takes aim at Triton; that would violate the aim of self-preservation. She’ll definitely take some kind of physical action, and Father in turn will anticipate that action. Word came from Greengrass a little while ago: Father’s spiders are in the hangar now, repairing the hawk-eagles by attaching spider brains where the heads were removed and repositioning the neural networks. A few hours from now, the fully repurposed hawk-eagles, and the spiders with flying devices, will depart to join Father and escort him back here, protecting him in the event of the assault that may come from Mother as he approaches. A space battle that could change all of your fates is about to commence, and right now, from where we are, there’s absolutely no way to foresee its outcome . . . but my duty is to steer the situation in your favor, by whatever means possible.”

There was silence for a while. The twelve children gathered around Seorin had no idea what to say. It was Brook who finally spoke up.

“Why the hell are you doing all this?”

“What?”

“Why did you come to help us? When the clan apparently doesn’t even exist anymore and you don’t know anything about us. Why did you come here?”

For a moment a faint, cryptic expression swept across Seorin’s face, but through her helmet it was difficult to read its meaning. Seorin pushed her chair back a little and responded quietly.

“Because you’re Autumn’s children.”

11

Was any more reason necessary? These children were Autumn’s life’s work—they were all that was left of her. They had been a part of Autumn’s life. Wasn’t that plenty?

Seorin didn’t think she had made the children understand completely, but that wasn’t necessary anyway. The children probably thought that her response was nothing more than the empty words of an Earthling whose mind they would never fully fathom. There was no real need to make them understand, though. It was enough to make herself understand.

The hawk-eagle bounced forward and out of the hangar, and Seorin’s body was pushed forward with it. Along with the head, the cockpit was gone too, but the spaceship Seorin was in had a jump seat that could be fixed to the interior wall. Father’s spiders had torn out anything that wasn’t needed when they’d repurposed the interiors, but this seat had been left in place. Seorin didn’t need to see what was going on. The brain of Lillian Gish was transmitting all the visual data she needed from out in front. It had already been some time since the spider brain installed in the hawk-eagle had been eaten up by the brain of Lillian Gish.

Lillian Gish was the Trojan horse. After arriving at the colony, Lillian’s seed had been duplicated, and little by little, it had refilled the empty space that had been left as the seed of Onorata Rodiani dried up. Right before Father had commenced his attack, Seorin had taken Lillian Gish’s original brain out of her pinecone spaceship and planted it in one of the beheaded hawk-eagles.

Maybe Seorin was imagining things, but Lillian seemed to be in high spirits. The hawk-eagle could do much more than the interplanetary pinecone spaceship she had been trapped in previously. While convincingly imitating the robotic-style flight of her fellow hawk-eagles, there was a subtle air of excitement in her movements. Seorin hoped that the other hawk-eagles wouldn’t pick up on it.

She also hoped that Greengrass and Brook would make it back to the hideout safely when they returned from accompanying her to the hangar. There had been no real need for them to follow her all that way, and in any case, if she had gotten caught on the way, the whole plan would have been over. But they’d refused to let her go alone.

The spaceship, which had already been flying for some time using inertial navigation, gradually began to decelerate. At the same time, Lillian stuck an arrow-marker in the middle of the rectangular image screen that she was transmitting to Seorin. When she examined it closely, beneath the arrow there was something transparent that looked like a glittering dodecahedral jewel. That was the spaceship carrying Father, rendered visible when Lillian Gish had edited the image: seen with the naked eye there would have been no way of making out the object.

Now the hawk-eagles and spiders were flying together with the dodecahedron toward Triton’s orbit. The transparent body of the dodecahedron emitted a slightly red light that would have been easily visible through the telescope in the colony. At this degree of proximity, concealment was pointless. Traveling at this speed, the spaceship would arrive at the colony within an hour. They simply had to hold out until then.

A warning light lit up, and a clutch of round objects showered out of the beansprout. Was this the weapon Mother had been preparing all along? Rather than having some great plan that she had kept secret, was it just that she hadn’t had the means?

The flying hawk-eagles and spiders shifted into a defensive formation. Having furtively melted into the formation, Lillian sent data to Seorin about the spaceship they were protecting. Half of it was data that the other hawk-eagles and spiders were sharing, but the other half was what Lillian Gish herself had found out by scanning the dodecahedron. The spaceship was designed for single-use and was extremely basic. It was a machine designed for the sole purpose of transporting Father’s brain from the bridge to the colony. Mechanisms for responding to any number of trivial variables had been left out.

Among those excluded variables was that of a woman in a spacesuit.

The balls that Mother had launched began their attack. All around, there were green explosions and the formation of the fliers was disrupted. One of the hawk-eagles beside theirs was split in two, and at almost the same time, two of the balls nearby shattered. It felt like being a little bird diving through the middle of a fireworks display.

As it waved between the explosions, staying appropriately in formation with the others, the hawk-eagle stealthily approached the front of the dodecahedron and suddenly decelerated, so that it crashed into the ship just to the rear of the deceleration jet orifice. A large hole was punched through the hull at the front of the spaceship, and the body of the hawk-eagle penetrated about two meters into it. Having crawled out of the freight compartment hatch, Seorin entered the spaceship through a gap left in the hole created by the hawk-eagle’s impact.

The design of the interior of Father’s spaceship included no consideration for the likes of humans. There were neither passageways nor rooms: the inside of the spaceship was like the wild rosebush forests in children’s books, loosely crisscrossed by spindly, jagged metal structures. With her glowing red heatsword, Seorin cut through the structures so that she could make her way deeper inside.

The further she proceeded toward the center, the more Seorin’s senses became contaminated. Father had perceived the presence of an intruder, and was pelting Seorin with all kinds of sensory information through her connection device. Fortunately, it was bearable for a while. Having been connected to Seorin’s brain for some time, Lillian’s seed was deploying a protective shield for her.

That wasn’t to say the agony disappeared. Father read Seorin’s memories through her connection device and selected only the very worst to scatter before her eyes and ears. For Seorin, who had grown up in the midst of a hellish war on Earth, there was plenty of material for Father to torture her with. As she kept struggling forward, Father summoned up something different: the meanest memory he had gained from the children who had died, and from the artificial intelligence of the colony.

It was Autumn’s death.

A hawk-eagle with an equipment abnormality colliding with an asteroid, and, clad in a torn spacesuit, Autumn’s body disappearing off in the direction of Proteus . . .

But instead of shaking her, on the contrary, this new memory helped stabilize her. Seorin gritted her teeth and strength flooded into her right hand as she clutched her heatsword. Watching how Autumn had died was agonizing, but it felt ridiculous to her that this was Father’s trump card, the worst he could do to her. That only served to spur her on. Drunk on his own sadism, Father kept taking missteps. He was at once both a creation of irrationality, and its victim too. He had been defeated and destroyed on Earth by Mars Mother because of that irrationality, and the fact that Lillian’s seed, awakened just a few hours earlier in the colony, was able to recover the neural network hubs that he had conquered one by one was because of his inefficient irrationality. A machine that raged, a machine that hated, was not a sound, functional machine.

Eventually Seorin reached the core of the spaceship. Floating in viscous liquid in a reinforced glass cylinder was an opal-colored sphere two meters in diameter, slowly rotating. Seorin swung her heatsword but the cylinder didn’t even shake when she struck it. She hadn’t expected it to, though: for Seorin, the strike had been a kind of protest.

Suddenly a sharp pain jabbed into her back. Screaming, Seorin looked behind her. A spider stood there, brandishing a bloodied front leg. It had gotten in along the passageway she’d created as she cut through the wild rose forest and walked along, and now it was attacking her like a massive hand swatting at a bothersome mosquito. Seorin cut off one of the spider’s front legs with her heatsword, but at almost the same instant the spider lopped off her right hand with its other front leg. The hand and heatsword were flicked away and disappeared off into the wild rose forest.

Gasping for breath in her spacesuit as the air inside began to escape, Seorin absorbed the information Lillian was conveying to her. The Lillian in the spaceship and the Lillian of the colony had become one, and to some extent Seorin herself had now merged with them. Seorin ducked her body behind the cylinder and focused her mind.

And then, releasing all tension from her body, and letting go of all resistance, she received Father into her.

Brimming with a sense triumph, Father’s consciousness flooded into Seorin’s brain. Like catching an annoying bug that had gotten into his room, he crushed and burned and disintegrated all the information in her brain. At the same time, the spider came behind the cylinder and stabbed its front leg into Seorin’s body, again and again, all over. At that moment, punishing Seorin was more important to Father than conquering the colony, conquering Mother, or even surviving.

After having been engrossed in this destruction for a while, Father was suddenly gripped by a sense of foreboding. Something was going wrong. His rage was disappearing and his mind grew dull. Something heterogenous was slipping into his consciousness. Through the eyes of the spider, Father gazed at Seorin’s corpse as it floated around near the cylinder, and it was at that moment that he realized what had happened.

Lillian had entered into his brain through Seorin’s connection device. This had been her real objective from the very beginning: getting him to open the door to his mind by inciting his rage and accepting his abuse, so that Lillian could sneak in like a burglar.

Father felt his awareness of his surroundings slowly darkening. Lillian had seized control of the nanobots surrounding Neptune, and as her new orders spread through the cloud of nanobots all around Neptune at the speed of light, they were no longer Father’s ghost. Father was now nothing but a rock, two meters wide, trapped in a dodecahedral prison.

And that rock was now slowly plummeting to Triton.

The means of causing Father’s collapse were that simple: the answer had simply been energy and gravity. A little reduction in speed. A slight change in direction.

Father writhed to free himself from the impending physical disaster, but it was no use. Lillian had already captured more than fifty percent control of the spaceship. The propellant was being jettisoned, and the engine would no longer function. Following a trajectory that would overshoot the beansprout by a distance of 300 kilometers, the spaceship slowly fell into Triton’s rarefied nitrogen atmosphere.

12

Brook slowly removed her spacesuit for the first time in the four days since Father’s attack had begun. The cylinder of the interior of the colony remained a vacuum, but a supply of air was being provided to the two buildings where the children were gathered. The colony was recovering, little by little, under the command of Lillian Gish.

Having showered and changed into regular clothes, Brook went out into the canteen. Most of the children who had survived were gathered here. The six who couldn’t be there with them were in the hospital building opposite. Repairs to the meal dispenser had just finished, and it was portioning out dinner. Today’s menu included a pink twist, a green stick, and a white ball.

The mood in the canteen was subdued. Sixteen children had died in the war. Of those, two were young children who hadn’t yet had their connection devices installed. Brook would never know what dreams those children had dreamed, what thoughts they’d had when they were alive.

For Brook, who had gotten used to Mom’s cold and ambiguous silence, Lillian was somewhat tiresome and annoying. As was often the case with the seed of spaceship AIs, Lillian mimicked humans to an excessive degree, and now and then even attempted to engage in completely pointless small talk. This mimicry was so exquisite that Brook was occasionally taken off guard and almost fell for it. Fortunately, the other children seemed to enjoy this false sense of closeness. It was possible that Lillian was even adopting such an attitude on purpose, to help console them.

The instant Father’s spaceship crashed down near Triton’s equator with Seorin’s body still on board, Mom broke her silence. But that was already after Lillian had taken over the colony, and thereafter Brook received no communication from Mom whatsoever. Judging by Lillian’s demeanor thus far, that didn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. There were now two artificial intelligences governing in the domain of Neptune. Mom’s autocracy had been broken.

Brook knew that the Mothers of the solar system had been preparing for this war for around a decade. The war had been necessary in order to get rid of the detritus that Father had scattered all over the solar system. It had been a gamble among gods. But how far had the Mothers foreseen the current situation? Had this really been the best possible way to achieve their end? Was there no way they could have resolved the situation without the death of any of the children? Had the children been nothing but a wild card to be thrown away, even from the beginning? How much importance had Seorin’s actions played in the plan?

Biting into a white ball, Brook thought about Seorin: a terse and ill-tempered human woman who’d suddenly appeared a month ago, sent a jolt through their lives, and then disappeared. A woman who’d led them into battle while never revealing her inner self. Brook tried to imagine Seorin having survived, sitting across from her at the table and eating one of the twists produced by the meal dispenser, but she couldn’t really picture it. From the very beginning, Seorin had no intention of surviving. From the beginning, she had come here to die with Father, with the clan.

With Seorin’s death, the children had gained their freedom. Freedom from the clan, freedom from Father, and most likely freedom from Mom, too. Maybe also freedom from Auntie Autumn and Seorin. Brook didn’t know what this freedom could mean—actually, she still couldn’t quite fathom what freedom was. What did it mean to be able to make one’s own choices, to be a free entity in this vast playground of the gods?

I’ll just have to think about that from now on, Brook decided, as she popped the rest of the white ball into her mouth and took a gulp of water.

Since we still have time . . . and are immune to pointless obsession.

Originally published in Korean in Because We Still Have Time.

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

About the Author

Djuna is a popular and influential South Korean science fiction writer and film critic. Since their debut in 1994, they have published seven short story collections, four novels, and numerous essays. Despite a strong online presence, they have maintained a high level of personal anonymity.

It Came From the Garage!
Technology, Film, and the Guy Next Door

Marc Cole

“Who is this guy?”

There in the midst of Amazon’s suggested list of horror and science fiction films was a series of what appeared to be lost Fifties films. Except that they were new, and the work of someone named Christopher R. Mihm.

“Who is this guy?” This time it was lurid covers promising octopus men and insect women, all from ultracheap distributor Alpha Films—and all made by a very young man named Joshua Kennedy.

Who are these guys?

They are just two of a strange new type of filmmaker, creators who don’t neatly fit into the simple categories of “amateur” and “professional,” daring young directors and producers, who somehow manage to turn out movie after movie with little money and few resources—the garage bands of the film world.

And it should come as no surprise that they frequently make science fiction, fantasy, and horror films, in unique and unexpected ways.

From its beginnings, filmmaking has been done by big companies.

Blame it on the costs: equipment, film, all the people in front and behind the camera, and countless other things. It takes a sizable investment to make even a modest movie, and the expense of distributing and marketing is as large—or larger.

But that never put a stop to the outsiders. In the Sixties and Seventies, for example, regional filmmakers like Russ Marker made films for drive-in theaters.

But the invention of cheap 8mm cameras suddenly brought moviemaking to a new generation, including such familiar names as Steven Spielberg, ILM effects wizard Dennis Muren, makeup expert Rick Baker, special effects artist Steve Johnson, and even Peter Jackson. These were usually fairly minimal (although a few made it into the theaters).

In the midst of this, Don Dohler and his friends founded Cinemagic Magazine. They filled its pages with tips for creating movie effects, from creature suits to stop-motion animation, many of which Don later collected in Film Magic: The Fantastic Guide to Special Effects Filmmaking. While the magazine encouraged countless young readers to experiment with film, Don Dohler took his efforts a step further in 1978 and made his first feature, The Alien Factor, in the more expensive 16mm format.

It isn’t hard to see what Don had in mind with his film: it proudly displays a series of monsters created (and worn) by his friends—and the creatures all get their names in the credits! A minimal story wraps around the bloody monster attacks, with gore provided by other Cinemagic amateur experts. Each creature appears on-screen briefly (and one insect-thing barely appears at all as its cardboard carapace wasn’t waterproof!). However, despite his lack of experience, Don uses them well.

While it suffers from the sound issues and poor acting that dog most amateur productions, The Alien Factor ran on the regional film circuit before ending up on Ted Turner’s Superstation. There it ran endlessly on late night for years. Over the next decade Dohler continued shooting DIY films, starting with a strange supernatural horror film, Fiend, and a virtual remake of his first film (Nightbeast). The Galaxy Invader, followed: its real monsters are the backwoods family who encounter a sympathetic alien.

But the market had changed by 1991 and he ran into serious problems with the next, Blood Massacre. He would not direct again until 2001. His final SF film is a sequel to The Alien Factor, and includes a few digital effects alongside his more traditional work. It is far more polished than the original, but it lacks something the rawer film had. He would co-direct one last film before his death, but it doesn’t measure up to his earlier work.

While the general public might not have paid much attention, Dohler inspired a lot of aspiring filmmakers, as did Cinemagic Magazine, which suddenly was in major bookstores after Don sold it to Starlog.

But perhaps the biggest change came with the arrival of home video cameras, which made filmmaking cheaper than ever before. They’d become so common by 1989 that Steven Spielberg appeared at the Boy Scout National Jamboree to unveil a Cinematography merit badge.

At the same time, the VCR sparked widespread movie sales and a new industry of Mom and Pop rental stores. A number of cut-rate companies rushed in to take advantage by churning out vast numbers of films shot on video, many of them made by amateur filmmakers.

It was at this moment that teenaged twin brothers from a sleepy Pennsylvania town launched one of the strangest careers in film history.

In 1987, Mark and John Polonia sold a homemade gross-out horror film, Splatter Farm, to a distributor. It turned them into cult legends and paved the way for an incredible number of singularly cheap video nasties. Their finest moment came a few films later when their answer to Independence Day, Feeders, a movie about insatiable alien invaders, became Blockbuster Video’s number one independent film of 1996.

It is hard to offer any adequate explanation for the brothers’ films: by any objective standard they are frankly terrible. They feature poor acting, inexplicable bits of dialogue, odd little discursions that don’t go anywhere (usually to give Mark or John a walk-on part), and, what has to be their trademark, long scenes of people walking through the woods, talking.

Yet if you’ve seen one of their films (over fifty, by the last count), you’ve probably seen half a dozen of them. There is something about them that makes them an addictive pleasure. Perhaps it is because their sheer homemade badness makes them constantly entertaining, perhaps it is their goofy absurdity (like Peter Rottentail, a failed children’s entertainer who returns from the dead as a giant, vengeful . . . fluffy bunny), perhaps it is because they’ve jammed their films with references to countless great horror and SF films, but more than anything else it is the sheer joy they took in making these movies. They seem to be shouting let’s see you do any better.

John died in 2009, but Mark is still hard at work at films like Landshark, Jurassic Prey and Frozen Sasquatch, where Wellsboro, PA still stands in for tropical islands and alien planets.

We wouldn’t have it any other way.

One of the big changes—even for the Polonia Brothers—was the vast increase in quality in home video from those grainy VHS days. Digital video also made it easier to add digital effects—which are now far easier to create and often better looking.

So, it might seem odd if someone chose instead to create a film that looks like a Fifties B movie.

Christopher R. Mihm’s father loved the SF and horror films of the Fifties, and showed many of them to his son. After his father’s death, Chris decided to make a film his dad would have loved—the horror comedy The Monster of Phantom Lake (2006).

While it parodies many of the weaknesses of those old films, it is at the same time an affectionate pastiche, with an all-too familiar genius scientist, Professor Jackson, who excels at just about everything, on the track of a monster he refuses to believe in.

Jackson returned the next year in It Came From Another World! Another film followed and another, until now there are fourteen “Mihmiverse” films, with two more in preproduction. They range from giant monsters to outer space epics, from film noir creature features to a ghost story and a children’s puppet movie. All part of a shared universe, the characters, places, and backstories repeat from film to film. He boasts a moderately competent amateur stock company, and surprisingly good production values.

These are the kinds of films where “duct tape” is a major expense. They feature cardboard sets and lots of Minnesota exteriors, some moderately impressive homemade monsters, interesting practical effects, and even a few bits of digital wizardry. Their tiny budgets have largely come from sales or are donated by Mihm’s loyal fan base, although Mrs. Mihm keeps busy making and selling “mini-Steves“ (based on Danny Johnson Saves the World’s puppets). Unlike a lot of faux-Fifties films, Mihm’s show a great deal of love and respect for the original films, even if they do mock them just a little bit.

While Mihm has moved to a more ambitious schedule, with two films at various stages of production at a time, and branched out into films that echo other eras, genres and movies, like film noir and the Spaghetti Western. He just released a Hammer Horror-style Snake Queen film and currently has something Lovecraftian and a Scooby Doo-style kids’ mystery in the works.

Joshua Kennedy started out making movies when he was five, with his first creature feature, It Came from the Bathroom.

He posted many of his early videos on YouTube and quickly built a huge audience. Alpha Video released the first of his DVDs while he was still in his teens. He then studied film at Pace University in New York, which has transformed his work from interesting amateur efforts into a series of increasingly assured and professional films.

Even now, he continues to put some of his films up on YouTube, including Dracula A.D. 2015, a remarkably polished film that transplants those classic Christopher Lee Dracula films to a modern university with such quirky additions as a video chat room scene; and The Alpha Omega Man, a gleefully postmodern take on a classic Charlton Heston film.

What is most striking about his oeuvre is the breadth of his range of inspirations and interests: he’s made everything from his version of Airport, a Sherlock Holmes film, a women in prison film—set on the moon—a Harryhausen-inspired stop-motion fantasy film, a science fiction horror film in the vein of the classic Quatermass films, and the stunning The Night of Medusa, which brings German expressionist horror to the halls of Pace University.

Like a lot of other garage band filmmakers, his works look back to the classic genre films he grew up with, particularly the glory days of Hammer’s Horror films. He just finished his most ambitious homage to the British filmmaker, House of the Gorgon, with the help of an impressive cast borrowed from their classic films—and something radically different: The Fungus Among Us, a Russ Meyer Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! homage crossed with black and white Sixties SF horror.

Then there’s the latest film he’s working on, Cowgirls vs. Pterodactyls.

Even professional filmmakers have set up their own micro film studios.

Consider Backyard Productions, a group of British professionals making movies in their spare time. They made six feature-length parodies before creating their most ambitious project to date in 2015, an incredible 5000 pound space feature, The Drift. Which, despite its laughable budget, is superior to most current space borne science fiction films.

They’ve since become Darkwave Pictures and have followed The Drift with a new short set in the same universe, with plans for further films to come.

Then there’s Andrew Bellware, who created his own New York City based micro-studio under the banner of his Pandora Machine production company. He’s created a series of (mostly) interesting ultralow-budget science fiction films that look far more expensive than they actually are, thanks to his professional casts and a lot of simple tricks like filters, static, and layers of computer readouts to hide their limits. They feature densely conceived future worlds and complex science fiction ideas, something far too rare these days. Even his company’s name refers to one of his frequent themes, the unknowable results of releasing machine intelligence into our world.

While his films may never achieve greatness, they do stand out from most of the direct to video SF out there, with his most recent films, such as Prometheus Trap and Clonehunter, among the best he’s made.

Animation would seem the one area of filmmaking where a lone creator would not find a profitable niche. There have been a number of one-man CGI animated films, like Machines Don’t Cry, Flatland, and The Chosen One, but none of their creators have gone on to make further films.

However, traditional animation is far rarer: even renegade animator Bill Plympton, who directs and animates his own films, hires small teams of in-betweeners. Others have stuck to short films, like Robb Pratt, who has a string of films like Superman Classic and Flash Gordon Classic to his credit.

One major exception is the wild and distinctive adult-oriented fantasy, Nova Seed, although whether Nick DiLiberto will be able to follow up his first feature with other films remains to be seen.

However, the garage band animator to watch is Paul “OtaKing” Johnson. His love of classic, Japanese hand-drawn animation led him to create the incredible TIE Fighter Anime short (and the less seen, but equally brilliant Doctor Who Anime). He plans to make creating amazing fan animation films his full-time job and has set up a Patreon campaign to provide him with enough money to live on. Currently, he’s raised enough to give him a fairly decent salary and is working on a much longer short based on the Street Fighter games. Next he plans to create his own full-length science fiction film.

Whether his quixotic plan will succeed is hard to say, but for now, at least, it looks promising.

But perhaps the most remarkable story is that of Brett Piper, who has made a career of creating wild little feature films around his own handcrafted effects. He’s one of the few filmmakers still stop-motion animating his own monsters, and he aims to make films like the great science fiction and fantasy classics from the Fifties.

However, don’t be fooled into thinking he’s a (non-stop-motion animated) dinosaur who refuses to move with the times: his films are digitally composited, with a lot of clever—and mostly invisible—work to cover up any flaws, like stray bits of equipment or crew who ended up in the shot.

While he made his first few films on his own, for most of his career he worked for a succession of low-budget distributors like Troma and Shock-O-Rama.

But that changed with his 2009 film Muckman, when he went out on his own again with a little help from Mark Polonia. He followed it with a string of new films featuring some of his best work ever: The Dark Sleep, Queen Crab, Triclops, and Outpost Earth. Right now, he has a brand-new feature, Redneck Mutants in the works, and for fun is working on a project involving Puppetoon-style short films based on classic SF.

You can see the repulsive “stars” of his new film on his official Facebook page, as he details step by step how he creates them. They are among the most creative horrors he’s ever built, and his page is like a master class in low-budget filmmaking.

What is most remarkable about his work is not his always excellent effects and cinematography, or that they look better than a lot of Hollywood films, but that he could film them at a friend’s house, with miniatures shot on the kitchen table!

It is a strange and often perilous niche of the film market: there is a lot of competition and even a terrible film requires a lot more time, effort, and skill than most people realize. While a lot of young filmmakers have plans to follow their first features with a second, not many actually do so.

And one can point to former garage band filmmakers like Timo Vuorensola who made his best films in his apartment, only to follow them with disappointing professional films.

But there are still a few successful filmmakers out there who have made film after film with minimal help and a Kickstarter campaign or two. On the low-budget end, you find people like Adam Starks, a young man from Portsmouth, England who has made eight films in various genres (including the SF film, Travelers) with the help of his friend Joshua Copeland, while others border on the professional, like Arrowstorm, a group of fanboys who have Kickstarter-funded a lot of fantasy and SF homages like Survivor, Magellan, Cyborg X, and the endless Mythica series.

They range from some that are so amateurish that you wonder why they can’t see their flaws, to some that are as polished as a typical Hollywood film. But what they do have in common is that their creators have had the freedom to go out and make the film they want made.

Which is something that is far too rare in Hollywood. As the quality of inexpensive video equipment and software improves, we can only expect these films to look and sound better than ever—and for a lot of new filmmakers to risk making their own ultralow-budget movies out in the garage.

The best part of all? We can expect them to make lots of new science fiction and fantasy films.

And they won’t be like those made in Hollywood.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top...” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Carbon Planets

Tomas Petrasek

Imagine standing on a beach of diamonds. You can see the crystals glittering against the backdrop of a black, sticky goo. The waves washing ashore are oily, pitch-black, coming across a sea of tar, without a single drop of water. A scorching desert of sootlike dust stretches inland, toward the horizon where it meets the unfriendly sky that is filled with poisonous smog. No chance of seeing such a scenery in our own solar system—but such worlds, known as carbon planets, may actually be common around other stars.

In the beginning, there was hydrogen and helium. All the other elements came to being in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and were later disseminated through the universe by stars shedding their envelopes or exploding as supernovae. Only then could rocky planets, and eventually also living beings, be formed. But although the elements themselves are the same everywhere we look, we have to bear in mind that every star-forming nebula has inherited from the earlier stellar generations a slightly different mix. The planetary systems may therefore be quite diverse in their composition.

Eighteen years ago, American geologist Eric Gaidos came to the conclusion that many stellar systems might have formed from carbon-rich material. It is no wonder, as carbon is actually the fourth most abundant element in the universe. Of course, carbon is all well and good, as we are carbon-based lifeforms ourselves, but sometimes you can just have too much of a good thing. Carbon-rich systems can spawn solid planets, but ones completely unlike our Earth, and most likely incompatible with life as we know it.

The character of a planet is decided in a fierce duel of two elements: carbon and oxygen. Only one can survive, and make it into the rocks. Carbon binds oxygen to form carbon monoxide, which is a gas, and does not participate in formation of rocky planets. Only if there is excess of either carbon or oxygen, it may react with other elements and form solid particles that eventually give rise to planets. In our solar system carbon was outnumbered almost two to one, and didn’t stand a chance. Remaining oxygen reacted with hydrogen to form water, and with silicon and various metals to form rock. The Earth is actually an “oxygen planet,” as oxygen makes almost a third of its mass.

But this is not the case everywhere. If carbon was the dominant atom, little water would have formed—so no icy moons, and perhaps no icy cores to provide the seeds for the formation of gas giants. Planet formation would perhaps be shifted toward the warmer regions of the primordial nebula. Also, no silicates would form—ordinary rock would be actually pretty rare! Instead, carbon would form metal carbides (e.g. SiC or TiC), various organic molecules, ranging from methane to tar, and perhaps even pure graphite. Even if the protoplanetary disc was only slightly richer in carbon than the proto-solar nebula, carbon planets could be formed in the inner regions, with more familiar-looking planets in the colder quarters.

Recent surveys suggest that carbon-rich systems are actually a minority, so Earth with its preponderance of oxygen is not an exception. But carbon planets most probably do exist. They might have been born in the early universe, when other elements were still rare, from the ashes of Type II supernovae. They may also abound in exotic systems surrounding brown dwarfs or stellar remnants, such as pulsars or white dwarfs, or from the debris of a destroyed white dwarf. Also, different parts of the galaxy differ in elemental abundance, with the center being especially rich in carbon. Even in sunlike protoplanetary discs, a localized enrichment in carbon may arise. Carbonaceous chondrites are bodies that formed in the early solar system alongside the Earth, but contain up to 6% of carbon. In some cases, entire carbon planets might form that way.

Carbon planets must be exotic not only in their chemistry, but also in their geology, evolution, and overall appearance. Above a core of carbon-rich iron, there would be a mantle of carbides surrounded by a diamond layer, while the outer crust would be predominantly graphite. Carbon compounds are physically strong and difficult to melt. You would need a lot of energy to get any decent geology, such as plate tectonics or volcanism, out of them. To make things even worse, diamond is a good conductor of heat, making such a planet lose its inner heat more quickly. Geology on a carbon planet would be therefore be rather short-lived. This is not exactly encouraging from an astrobiological point of view, as the existence of Earth’s biosphere is intimately linked with plate tectonics and volcanism.

The surface of such a planet would be a gloomy place, dominated by graphite, tar-like organics, with diamond and carbide outcrops. As astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan put it, on such rocky planets sand could be rare and diamonds would be plentiful. Atmosphere, if present, would be most probably rich in carbon, too, with carbon monoxide or methane, perhaps also nitrogen, and veiled by layers of organic smog, of the kind we can see on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Carbon dioxide would be absent, as it is too oxidized to be stable in the carbon-rich environment. Free oxygen would be absolutely unthinkable in such an environment, of course. There could be a plethora of solid, viscous, or liquid hydrocarbons and other organic molecules, perhaps with tar-like lakes and oceans. A gloomy world of dark and reddish hues, with a sky full of poisons—at least from the point of view of a human. But what if, in the rich organic goo, some native lifeform emerged?

Life is not just organics, though. It also needs a suitable solvent, such as water. But where to get water? It would be rare in a carbon system, restricted to the distant periphery, and hardly any would be transported to the inner planets. And even in that case, water would most probably react with the ubiquitous carbon to form carbon monoxide and methane. So, any eventual life would have to be formed in a nonaqueous solvent.

Liquid hydrocarbons are one option. We know them from Titan, where seas of liquid methane and ethane were found by the Cassini probe. On warmer planets, those would turn to gases, but heavier hydrocarbons could take their place. Hydrocarbons, unlike water, are nonpolar solvents. Earthly biomolecules wouldn’t work, and most of them wouldn’t even dissolve, in such a liquid. It would take an exotic biochemistry, perhaps with nitriles replacing lipids and polyethers substituting for nucleic acids, to enable life in such an environment. Many other possible solvents have been proposed as a basis of alien life, most of them, however, incompatible with oxygen- or water -rich environments. But that’s no problem on a carbon planet.

Consider formamide. It is a perfect solvent even for some Earth biomolecules, enabling and facilitating prebiotic synthesis, and it is stable across a wider temperature range than water. Methanol would be another option. Both are polar molecules, behaving more like water, therefore perhaps better suited for alien biochemistry. So far, such life-as-we-don’t-know-it employing a nonaqueous solvent is just a theoretical concept, and no one knows whether it would work in practice. Proving or disproving the possibility of exotic life seems next to impossible in the foreseeable future, but scientists are already doing their best to come up with some plausible ideas as to how it could form and function.

Have we already found some carbon planets? Probably yes, but until we can measure their composition, it is hard to be sure. Some of the prime suspects are 55 Cancri e and WASP-12b. Both are very hot, hellish worlds larger than Earth. Maybe it is not a coincidence, as carbon planets should form preferentially on warmer orbits, and due to the heat-resistant nature of carbides and diamonds, may survive even in places that would evaporate a rocky world. A white dwarf known as WD 0421+162, a remnant of a dead star, was seen to be polluted by infalling debris of a destroyed planetary system and this debris seems to be rich in carbon, providing evidence that at least one carbon planet had once orbited this star.

Carbon planets are doubtlessly among the most exotic places of the universe. We don’t know how common they are, but their existence seems almost certain. They would be inimical to Earth life, but would provide ideal abodes for aliens of the more exotic kind, if we are inclined to believe in them.

About the Author

Tomas Petrasek, born 1984, is a Czech scientist, astronomy advocate and science fiction writer. He has published two non-fiction books about astronomy, one novel, and several short stories. He currently works as a neurobiologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Mission Critical:
A Conversation with Jonathan Strahan

Neil Clarke

You may not have noticed, but the short fiction editors in this field are quite friendly to one another. It strikes some as odd that we can be on such collegial terms with our peers at competing magazines and anthologies, but the very things that drew us to this field draw us to one another. We talk, we share, and most of all, we want each other—and by extension, the field—to do well.

One of the editors I enjoy having the opportunity to talk with is Jonathan Strahan, a winner of the World Fantasy Award (Special Award—Professional) and a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Editor (Short Form) nine times since 2008. Jonathan is the Reviews Editor at Locus Magazine, co-host and founder (with Gary K. Wolfe) of The Coode Street Podcast, a 2019 Clarion West Writers Workshop instructor, a former publisher, as well as an editor at Tor.com and of over forty anthologies, the most recent of which is Mission Critical (Rebellion Publishing, July 2019).

Every anthology seems to have an origin story. What’s the seed that started Mission Critical?

Origins can be impressive, seminal to the context of the story, and they can be less than that, a little ordinary. The original story for Mission Critical lies somewhere in between. Several years ago, I was at the movies with my family watching Matt Damon sciencing-the-shit-out-of-it in The Martian. While the story struck me as kinda silly in some places, the driving narrative force of it did not. That push to survive, to think your way out of the problem you face, is integral to science fiction, and the thought stuck with me. Then, about eighteen months or so ago my editor at Solaris asked for some ideas, and I mentioned this one. A book of stories, like The Martian, that would be about the moment when things went wrong, when the mission went critical. He loved it and here we are.

Is there a story in the anthology that best represents the vision you had in your mind when you conceived of this project?

I think the opening story, Greg Egan’s “This is Not the Way Home” really does nail what I had in mind. There’s convincing science, compelling human conflict, and the overwhelming feeling that things have gone wrong and may never be right again. That said, I hate playing favorites. I love a bunch of the stories. I could as easily have picked Kris Rusch’s or Peter Watts’ or . . .

Based on their story in the anthology, which author would you most like by your side in a mission critical scenario?

Peter Watts. Every single day of the week. That guy is scary smart and if anyone is going to be herding the cockroaches at the end times it’ll be him. He’s also incredibly decent, so he might keep me alive and not throw me to the cockroaches, even when that looks like the sanest course of action.

Is there any chance that this anthology will lead to another series or are you looking forward to doing more stand-alone projects for now?

I would love it if that happened. I have a follow-up in mind that I think would be enormous fun, but Mission Critical needs to have some time out in the world before we make that decision. So not in the immediate short term, but maybe in a year or two if people like this one enough. And yeah, I’m always working on some stand-alones. I have a couple in the works right now.

What’s your process for selecting stories or authors for your original anthologies?

Like you, I edit a best of the year anthology series and am constantly looking for new writers and stories to make sure I provide the best coverage of the field that I can and to make sure I have as good a feel for what’s happening as possible. I’m constantly making notes, keeping track of writers, and when an author writes something that gets my attention I try to find a way to work with them if possible. When I start putting a new project together I start with the idea, the concept, and then I invite people who I think could provide a fresh and exciting perspective, while also working with some of my favorites. I wish I had the resources to do open call projects, but that’s just not practical.

How does an author get on your radar for these projects?

Write and publish. That’s really about it. If you’re getting work out there, I’m doing everything I can to see it.

As the editors of year’s best anthologies, we get the 50,000 ft perspective of the short fiction field. What excites you the most about what is happening in the short fiction community right now?

I’m ooooooold now, Neil. I’ve been doing this since 1990 and what excites me the most is when someone new comes into the field or when someone does something brilliant and unexpected. I’m deeply excited by the way science fiction seems to be responding to the challenges of the 21st century. We’re seeing more and more stories that confront climate change, that look to deal with prejudice in its many forms. But, more than anything, it’s the (still too slow) adding of new perspectives or focusing on too-long-overlooked ones that is the most exciting thing in SF right now. We’re seeing incredible work from China, India, Korea, Singapore, Bangladesh, and many other places which simply would not have gotten attention a decade ago, and we’re seeing more and more people of color, more LGBTQI+ people, and more physically diverse writers and story protagonists than ever before. That’s really exciting and keeps me reading.

Do you have any worries or concerns?

I love short fiction and I’m worried about its future. It needs to be on a sounder business footing. I think that would benefit everyone. I’d like to see writers’ payments grow and I’d like to see everyone in the editorial and publishing process getting paid fairly. I’m not sure those things will happen, but they need to. I am also concerned that readers are being funneled into only reading in one part of the field or another, to read print and not digital and so on. I’d like to see that addressed, or at least acknowledged.

Was there a 2018 story last year that you think the various awards missed? What made it so unique?

I remain genuinely surprised that S. Qiouyi Lu’s powerful and moving story, “Mother Tongues,” from the January 2018 Asimov’s wasn’t on every awards ballot it could possibly have appeared on. It’s a really interesting meditation on family and sacrifice that I thought would have devastated everyone as much as it did me. Winning awards is an alchemical process and I’m not saying anything that was on the various ballots didn’t deserve to be there, but “Mother Tongues” is a highlight story of the decade and should have been more widely recognized.

The latest of your Coode Street projects is the podcast you host with Gary K. Wolfe. What inspired you to start a podcast?

I loved a British music podcast, Word Podcast, and tried without luck to get Charles Brown to replicate it for Locus. Back around 2007-8 that seemed like a really good idea. When Charles died in 2009, Gary Wolfe and I started talking about all sorts of things, and eventually science fiction became the main topic of conversation. We tried a sample recording that just made our private conversations public, and 350 episodes later we’re still doing it. It’s mostly unplanned, sometimes unlistenable, but hopefully has some interesting stuff about the past, present, and future of the field for everyone. The episodes we recorded with Ursula K. Le Guin and with Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann are among my favorites, there are some great memories there.

I understand that you’re currently at Clarion. What’s the one thing you hope your students will walk away with after this experience?

Writing is hard and writing advice doesn’t suit or fit everyone. I don’t believe in models for structuring stories, rules, or right ways to do things when you’re writing. That means I’m more interested in helping writers develop strategies to confront the challenges they’ll encounter when writing, than in necessarily giving them solutions to specific problems. I hope the students Jack Dann and I will see at Clarion West will walk away with some advice that might apply to their work, but more than anything, with a clearer awareness of what they want to achieve as writers and a tool kit of techniques and approaches that will allow them to problem solve for themselves in the coming years. That, and a sense of community with their fellow students and the rest of SF.

What anthologies do you have coming in the next year and how are they coming along?

I have a major new fantasy anthology coming out next year. I can’t say too much yet, but it’s huge. I also have a new book coming from Solaris, Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, that should be out in October 2020 and is coming together nicely. And I’m also reading for my brand new Year’s Best Science Fiction for Saga Press. The Year’s Best Science Fiction 2020: The Saga Annual Anthology of SF should be out in July. Busy times!!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a seven-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, Touchable Unreality, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His latest anthology, The Eagle has Landed, was published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Editor’s Desk:
One Hundred Thousand Titles

Neil Clarke

In April 2015, I wrote a blog post about the most popular titles submitted to Clarkesworld after its first fifty thousand submissions. We started using that system in 2009, so it took about six years. Just under four years later, we passed the one hundred thousand mark, so I decided to jump back into our database and see how things have changed since then.

As before, there were a lot of ties, so the list below contains the twenty-two story titles with the ten highest counts. I added two extra columns to show the similar top ten placements in the original analysis and their place when just the second fifty thousand submissions are considered.

Title

Overall

First 50K

Second 50K

Home

1

2

4

The Hunt

1

6

1

The Box

2

3

4

Homecoming

3

2

7

Dust

4

1

10

The Gift

5

2

8

Reflections

5

8

3

Monsters

6

4

8

Hunger

6

2

10

The Interview

7

2

Flight

8

6

10

Adrift

8

7

9

First Contact

8

3

Alone

8

7

7

Legacy

9

7

10

Lost and Found

9

5

Going Home

9

10

7

The Wall

10

9

9

The Visitor

10

7

The Other Side

10

9

8

Rebirth

10

9

9

Awakening

10

9

9

Since the first report, we have three new titles breaking into the top ten: The Interview, First Contact, and The Visitor.

Many titles lost their top ten status: Sacrifice, Heartless, The End, Red, The Visit, Broken, Voices, Genesis, The Collector, Disconnected, The Prisoner, Deus Ex Machina, Hero, Skin Deep, Memories, Skin, The Machine, The Tower, Coming Home, Rain, The Dark, Inheritance, The Door, The Choice, Happiness, Perchance to Dream, Last Call, The Fall, and Night Terrors. Only Lost and Found maintained its over top ten place without making the top ten for the second fifty thousand.

What does all this mean? What it tells me is that while some titles remain very near-and-dear to a few author’s hearts, overall we’ve seen even more authors using unique titles. That’s probably a good thing, but it does lead me into some points I ended up having to make after the first report.

I have never rejected a story because it had a common (or even a terrible) title.

I don’t give any thought to the title before I’ve decided to purchase a story.

Changing a title is easy, so if I don’t like it, I can have that discussion with the author.

There are plenty of good stories and bad stories with those titles. The title is not what made them good or bad.

That said, unlike previous data-based editorials, this was done strictly for the fun of it. The only statistic worth noting this time, is that duplicated titles represent a small minority—less than 10%—of all submissions to Clarkesworld. That’s a pleasant surprise. It doesn’t even pass 20% when you remove all the common variations that come by adding the, an, a, etc. to the title.

Since we’re having fun, I’ll leave you with this: I took every story title ever received by Clarkesworld and dropped it into Wordle to produce the following visual representation of the top 150 words used in titles (minus the common English-language words). Enjoy!

P.S. I can’t let it go without comment that “zombies” made the cut. I’ve previously told you they were everywhere in the slush pile. Now that we’re not accepting horror submissions, maybe that will fall off the list in time for the one hundred and fifty thousand submissions update. One can only hope.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a seven-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, Touchable Unreality, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His latest anthology, The Eagle has Landed, was published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art: Migration

Roman Kuteynikov

About the Artist

Roman Kuteynikov is a Concept artist and Illustrator based in Rome, Italy.