All Electric Ghosts

Rich Larson

The club called Fleur House is a shabby red brick front slouched between a barbershop and a dépanneur, no holo signage or even neon to lead people in. I wouldn’t have found it on my own. But that’s why I found Dion.

“Bin, here we are,” my new friend says, his wide grin winching even wider. “My cousin keeps it in the back.”

“Okay,” I say, pulling my hood tighter to my scalp and feeling one last time for the equipment in my jacket pocket. “Après toi.”

Two men are rolling joints at a wobbling metal table just outside the door, talking in slurred French. One looks Senegalese, skin so dark the shadows underneath are bruise-purple. The other one is a Moroccan with carefully-razored black hair and deep circles under his eyes.

Both look up at us as we get closer. The Moroccan has a flicker knife on the table in front of him, sharp black carbon. My overfull bladder squirms.

Dion pulls each of the men into a quick embrace, beaming, introducing me as le biologiste. The Moroccan winks at me, but doesn’t smile.

“Salut,” I say. “Nice night.”

Then Dion leads the way into the club. It’s dark, nearly pitch black, and silent. All the tables are retracted into the walls to clear the floor. Seven or eight couples are dancing, elbow-tight but sliding around each other like oil and water. It’s eerie until my earbud’s Bluetooth kicks in and gets the local kizomba music, slow and sexy and sutured with a harsh electric drum.

Dion wriggles through the crowd like an eel, his feet shuffling to the beat on automatic. Half the dancers have their eyes shut, hypnotized by the pulse of the music, by the dopamine of body-to-body. They look high. For a second I want to just stay out here and dance. Forget the thing in the back. I used to like dancing, at least on molly.

Then I get the flash. A pictogram in my mind’s eye shows a perfect gray triangle with a slash of dark red licking up one side of it like a tongue. It’s accompanied by a cascade of letters as my brain tries and fails to turn it into English, then French. But I know this one: it refers to a specific writhing shrug my shoulders would never be able to make, and to a biomechanical sort of locking system, and most of all to pain.

This is the place. I blink my eyes clear. In the back corner near the bar, a fat man is dancing with a slender pen-stroke of a woman. He moves with perfect balance, turning his partner inside, outside; he levers her foot gently off the floor with his own and they sink together into the song’s final ebb.

“Cousine, here he is, the biologiste,” Dion says. “He’s come to see it. I messaged you.”

The woman unwraps herself from her partner, who shuffles away. She reties her dreadlocked hair and gives Dion a long look, observing his shiver and sniff. “T’es fucké, Dion,” she says. “How much did you tell him?”

She turns her eyes on me, and they are not dissimilar to the flicker knife outside. The next song builds but I tap my earbud to cut the volume.

“Only that you found something strange,” I say. “In the water. Some strange fish.”

“He says it might be worth mad cash, Ty,” Dion says. “As a, you know, as a spécimen. And they would name it after us, he says, since we found it.”

Her brow lifts a micrometer, whether for the cash or the naming rights I’m not sure.

“If it really is a new species,” I say. “I have doubts.”

Ty gives a half-laugh in her throat. “Mon mec, you’ve never seen this kind of fish before. I guarantee it.”

I stuff my hands in my pockets and give her a skeptical smile even as I get the flash again: more urgent this time, the gray triangle stamped hard on my retinas, the red slash arcing off it like a flare. Pain. My heart beats double time. I try not to shift foot to foot.

“Your eyes wired?” she asks.

“No.”

“Show me.”

I oblige, peeling my eyelids back while she leans in close and checks for the telltale glint of contact circuitry. From up close the smell of shea butter wafts off her.

“Okay. Phone?”

I shove the basic black slab into her hand; it’s practically still warm from the printer. She pockets it. The pictogram is throbbing inside my skull. I wish I could tell it to shut up, tell it I need to concentrate.

“It’s hard enough to keep this clown from taking selfies with the thing,” Ty says, pointing at Dion, who gives a shrug, palms up, lips pursed. “I don’t want any photos. Not until I know what it is.”

“Sure,” I say. “No photos.”

She leads me past the bar and down a short hallway and Dion dances along behind us, crisscrossing his steps. My hands are getting sweaty in my pockets. At a water-warped door, Ty unloops a key from around her wrist and wrestles it into the lock. She gives the door some shoulder and it opens, scraping along lino tiles.

The flash again, so strong I have to clench my teeth together. Dion makes sure the door is firmly shut behind us before his cousin hits the light switches. Fluorescent tubes sputter on in the ceiling, showing a cracked mirror and soap-scummed sink, a toilet with a splintery wooden seat, and, taking up the back half of the room, a bathtub. A few moths whirl past my head, drawn towards the light.

“It’s in the tub,” Dion says.

Of course. Of course it’s in the tub. I force myself over to it, knees keeling, remembering another tub, another body. I grip the rust-spotted lip and lean over. It’s not Emilie. It’s a mass of overlapping and interlocking bits of fluted gray flesh, slick and shiny. Scalloped flippers and wicked black barbs, tendrils writhing from a bony T-bar head poking up out of the water.

An actual biologist would probably be shitting themselves with excitement. I reach into my pocket.

“You know, we found it just after the meteor shower,” Dion says, tearing a strip of cardboard off his cigarette pack, folding it with practiced fingers. “Une semaine, quoi. She says I’m stupid, but I say it’s an—”

I hit him with the stunner; he spasms and gives me a disappointed look before he drops hard to the lino. His cousin is quicker on her feet and she smashes into my arm, trying to knock the stunner away. The gecko grip does its thing and she only ends up skewing my aim so I hit her neck instead of her chest. She goes down twitching.

“Désolé,” I say, pocketing the stunner. “C’est ma job.”

Of course, job implies I get a salary.

The thing in the bathtub squeaks and chitters, tendrils poking up over the ceramic’s edge. It can wait a little longer. I hurry to the toilet instead, where I finally take the piss I’ve been holding since I started buying beers for me and Dion three bars back. It feels so good I put my hand up on the wall how old men always do at urinals.

I flick, tuck, zip up. Dion groans from the floor as I wash my hands, which are shaking a bit from the adrenaline and from what comes next. Ty is trying to give me a withering look even with her cheek squashed to the tiles.

The thing in the tub screeches and mewls, reaching its tendrils toward me.

I go to the side of the tub and get down on my knees; my bad one clicks. The flash comes again, but softer, accompanied this time by a tingling at the crest of my skull. I tug my hood back off my shaved head and hear a muffled noise of surprise behind me. The trepanation didn’t heal real well. I had to do it myself, with an electric drill and veterinarian’s anesthetic.

“Let’s make this quick,” I tell the thing in the tub, even though I know it can’t hear me. Not yet. Then I shut my eyes and plunge my head into the cold oily water. Tendrils trace my scalp, grope for the plastic cap in my skull. I feel them slither inside and—

“There’s something in the water. Look.”

We’re at the Old Port, across the water from the Grande Roue. I’m using the railing to hold myself up. There’s a spiderweb stretched across one of the harbor light boxes, billowing in the night wind, and I can see the furry white spider crawling carefully across it. 

“Just give me my shit,” I say.

“I’m serious,” Emilie’s dealer says. “Look. Something glowing.”

I look. The black water is rippled from the wind, but there’s something moving under the surface, too, a soft orange blob drifting towards the dock.

Emilie’s dealer tucks her vape away and belches smoke. The orange glow has her full attention. “It’s pretty. What do you think it is?”

I don’t care. I’m getting sick, getting shaky, smelling my own sweat. Trying to kick this week was a mistake. “Give me my shit,” I say again. We already tapped phones. She has my money. She has my morphine in her little pink backpack.

“Yeah, yeah, right.” She unzips it, reaching inside and coming out with a little baggie of hospital-green pills. Then she pauses. “Hey, you swim, right? That’s how you knew Em. You used to swim together at the Parc.”

I don’t want to talk about Emilie. “Yeah. Yes.”

She gives me a bleary smile and pulls out a second baggie. “I’ll double you up if you go grab that thing.”

I look at the second baggie. I look down at the orange light bobbing almost right underneath us. “It’s trash,” I say. “It’s someone’s Halloween decoration.”

“I want it,” she says, narrowing her eyes.

“You’re a fucking sadist,” I say, but I strip off my coat.

The water is icy and the thing is slippery and when I finally claw my way back up to the docks my heart is pounding through my ribs. For a while I sit on the splintery wood and curse, another junkie spewing words at thin air, then I get up and make my sopping way back to where I jumped in.

People part around me. They can see my soaked clothes and my overgrown beard; I’m not sure if they can see my twitching eye. It’s going like crazy right now. It feels like someone has their finger inside my eyelid and is wriggling it, wriggling it. I stalk through tourist’s photos of the blue-and-purple big wheel until I get back to my coat.

My coat is there, and so is the spider on its rippling web, but Emilie’s dealer is gone. I stare all around, raking the crowd for a little pink backpack. I pick up my coat and check all the pockets, but if she was stupid enough to put the morphine in there someone else already cleaned them out. My phone is gone. My morphine is gone. I’m fucked.

I look down at the slippery thing, the reason I’m fucked. It’s not glowing anymore—that stopped as soon as I got a grip on it. Now it’s just a slimy colorless sack, like a half-deflated balloon coated in mucus. I squeeze it and feel something hard and noded in the very middle. Maybe it’s some kind of kelp. I remember hauling slimy things out of the water at the beach when I was little.

I’m about to rip it apart, rip it to shreds and hurl the shreds back over the railing, when I feel it start to pulse.

When I get back to the apartment there’s a message from an unknown number on the cracked screen of my charging tablet: saw undercovers had to dip. got your phone and salt at mine but has to be tomorrow.

I dump the thing in the sink and start tapping out a reply, telling her that’s bullshit, telling her I need it tonight. My fingers keep missing the letters. If I can’t get it from her tonight I’m going to end up buying fucking fentanyl out of some alley in Hochelaga. My joints are already aching and my stomach is empty but trying to heave up anyways.

Trying to kick this week was a mistake. I stagger over to my kitchen cupboard and grab a Ziploc of old weed. It won’t do much, but it’ll cut the nausea a bit. I find my chipped bong in a drawer with the ladles and spoons and pull it out to start packing a bowl. Bullshit she saw feds. She was high and paranoid and now I’m suffering for it.

The first pull charbroils my throat, but then I get a good lungful and feel it hit. It’s not enough, not nearly enough, but I can think a little better. I can remember there’s a thing in the sink.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay, okay, okay. What the fuck are you, mon gars?”

It’s obvious, when I think about it. I didn’t see the meteor shower—I was in paradise, boneless on the couch, halfway watching cartoons on my tablet—but I heard about it. The thing in the sink must be an alien.

I go and inspect it; my stomach stabs at me when I lean over. My hands on either side of the basin are bone-white and slippery. The thing is still pulsing, a slow undulation. Definitely alive. Possibly growing—it looks bigger than it did when I went fishing. But maybe I’m seeing shit. That’s another possibility. Maybe this alien is actually trash that I hauled home from the Old Port like a lunatic.

Then the shakes really start, and I can’t stay upright.

I crawl over to my bed and pull the blanket down to me, wrap it around myself. That’s good until the wool turns into fire ants. Then I have to peel it off my skin while I scream into the floor, and then the fire ants are under my skin and I have to dig them out.

In the back of my brain I know it’s day three, and right now I can barely crawl, so unless I can get to my tablet and call someone to bring me a hit, this is going to happen whether I like it or not. They say it can’t kill you, they say the relapse kills you, but they lied lied lied lied lied—

I scrabble the gloves and duct tape from under the bed, before I reopen all my scars. Some of the scratches are already bleeding. I stuff my left hand into the padded winter glove and wind the duct tape around my wrist, try to do the same on the other side but can’t get the tape off the roll. My stomach heaves; I vomit up watery yellow bile all over my forearms.

Through the pounding in my head I think I can hear the thing in the sink moving, growing limbs and scraping them against the stainless steel. Or maybe I’m hearing Emilie, shifting in the bathtub. I know I need to get up, but just like then, I can’t. Then, because I knew everything would be fine, everything would be perfect no matter what I decided. Now, because my muscles have been fed through a meat grinder, come out limp pink ropes.

I start sobbing again, the way only Emilie makes me sob. She’s nothing but electricity now. I think about that sometimes. I don’t just mean her information online, her social media feed that’s become a mausoleum. I mean memories.

My skin is on fire and Emilie is an electric ghost moving around my gray matter, and the gray matter of all the people who ever knew her. I wish I could find them, all the people who ever spoke to her, who saw her for even a second at a bus stop, and pull the little fragments of her out of their brains. They don’t even know what they’re missing.

My gut is full of broken glass and I should stop thinking about her. Every time she makes a loop through my head she gets a little more distorted. I’m delirious. I’m fucking delirious and I can feel someone touching my leg. My leg, my hip, my stomach.

It’s the thing from the sink. It’s not a mucus ball anymore. It has a shape, a bony frame, and thin whiplike tendrils creeping over my skin. They find my mouth. My nose. I realize it’s going to kill me, and I’m grateful. I’m so grateful. So I lie there and stare at the blurry ceiling and wait while the tendril slithers up my nostril.

And suddenly I feel nothing.

My body is still clammy and trembling, but I’m a million miles away. This isn’t a hallucination the way I know them. I’m not paralyzed with terror, or limp with bliss. I feel like I barely exist. I’m floating in the dark, and the thing from the sink is there with me, like someone hovering over my shoulder, just out of my sight line.

Usually I hate it when people do that, but this is different. I can feel it like a soft hand roaming all over my brain, little bioelectric bursts mimicking my neurons, firing connections, testing, probing. I see colors. Shapes. Hazy scenes pulled out of my memory. But no feelings. I’m not angry. I’m not sad. I’m not fiending. I’m nothing, and I wish it could last forever.

“Benny? T’es correct?”

It’s Emilie. The old Emilie, suntanned with wiry swimmer’s shoulders, lanky arms, dirty blonde hair tied up away from her big forehead and mottled green eyes. Barefoot, wearing cutoffs and an old T-shirt. Her wide mouth has that familiar little twist of concern, how it’s done ever since we were kids.

I’ve dreamed about her plenty, but in the dreams she never speaks to me. She sits down beside me now, cross-legged.

“Hey, Em,” I say. “Yeah. I’m good. You?”

“You don’t look good,” she says. “You look like a larva or something. How long have you been sick? Putain, you should have told me you were sick. I’d bring soup or something.”

“I’m hallucinating you,” I say. “There’s an alien sticking its fingers up my nose and tickling my brain. Also I’m in withdrawal.”

“Shitty kind of day,” Emilie says, and she lies down on the floor beside me.

I feel her breath on my cheek, her body heat next to mine. I can smell her spearmint gum and her argan oil shampoo. Her hand brushes mine, skin on skin, and suddenly I can feel everything. The sob wrenches its way up my whole body and comes out as a gasp. Tears start welling up in my eyes, blurring out her face.

“Hey,” she says, propping up on her elbow. “Chill. It’s okay. I’m here. C’est correct.” She grabs my hand, and it reminds me of this road trip we took to Quebec City, how she would grip my hand whenever we went under an overpass, whenever we went through a tunnel.

I can’t stop crying. And I think, if it feels real, who’s to say it’s not? I think, aren’t we all just electric ghosts moving through someone else’s brain? And from far away, I feel the thing from the sink stirring on my chest. A sort of pictogram appears in my mind’s eye: a soft green rhombus, the color of Emilie’s eyes, moving into a golden-brown slope like a ship into port.

On the other side of the slope, a jagged shape I know is me moves out into a black void scattered with glowing orange circles. Somehow, even as my brain tries and fails to turn it into words—homecoming, se réunir, partnership—I understand the meaning.

If I do this for you, you do this for me.

Back in the bathroom of Fleur House, I yank my head out of the rusty tub. The alien’s calm now that it knows what’s going on. It sheathes the black barbs and starts curling itself into a little ball, wrapping all its tendrils around its body. I spit out a big mouthful of water and whatever bodily fluids it’s been excreting into the bath.

Ty is starting to wiggle her feet, but I don’t want to use the stunner again. It always makes me feel bad. Instead I just retrieve my phone from her pocket and slide hers to the opposite side of the bathroom. It skitters over the tiles into a dust-caked corner. Her glare intensifies.

“I did it screen up,” I say, taking the key off her wrist. “No scratches.”

The thing in the tub is ready to be carried, a slick little bundle of bone and mucus. I put it under my jacket—it clings—and do up the zipper. My hands are still shaking a little as I open the bathroom door. My Bluetooth came disconnected so all I can hear is soft shuffling feet and a few murmured mid-dance conversations.

I lock the door behind me and make my way back across the dance floor. It’s a slow song and most of the couples are barely moving, just tiny undulations of their hips synchronized to the music I can’t hear. I thumb the map on my phone. My ride is four minutes away.

I’m thinking I pulled it off when I hear the sound of a rapid-fire French argument. Through the glass door I see the Moroccan is on his feet, hackles up, snarling at someone short and squat and dressed all in black. For a moment I think there’s something wrong with their face, then I realize it’s a tribal mask, scab red with simple black holes for mouth and eyes.

Maybe they’re some drunk uni student making mischief in a Halloween leftover. Maybe they’re about to take it off and, quelle surprise, it’s one of the Moroccan’s friends underneath, and everyone will have a laugh about it.

I’m still hoping that as a gloved hand flashes forward, seizes the Moroccan’s flicker knife off the table, and drives it into his crotch with a shearing sound. Bright red blood spatters the glass door and suddenly the mask is staring right at me. I catch a glimpse of a gun coming out before I hurtle back inside.

I plow down the middle of the floor and knock someone over; a retributory shove sends me into the bar. My bad knee jars against a metal stool but I barely feel it. Too terrified, too much adrenaline flash-flooding my brain. The alien in my jacket squirms.

“Gun!” I shout. “Get down, y’a un gars avec un fucking gun!”

A woman yanks her old school headphones off to give me a questioning look. I see the tribal mask bobbing towards me through the dark, slipping between couples, and I split down the narrow hallway, running with a hobble. I’m nearly to the red glow of the exit sign when the bathroom door crunches off its hinges and into the wall in front of me.

I pull up short, catch a flash of Dion’s confused face before I duck under his arm and slam my way through the back door. There’s a rush of cold night air and the stink of garbage and gasoline. The alley is narrow, grimy red brick lined with metal dumpsters, and for a second I’m not sure which way to run.

A gunshot goes off behind me; I pick left. The alien is starting to lose its grip, sliding downward under my jacket, but I get a fractured glance at my phone and my ride’s only a block away. I cradle one arm around the fleshy bundle. My lungs are full of fishhooks. I’m not in running shape. I’m barely clean.

Through the keening echo in my ears I hear feet slapping the pavement behind me, gaining on me. I don’t want to look. Don’t want to see the mask. Then I’m tackled to the ground and I don’t have a choice. My chin bounces off the tarmac, jarring my skull, spilling purple-black blots across my eyes. I roll, grab for the stunner in my pocket.

The tribal mask is centimeters from my face; I can see it’s cheap plastic from some streetside printer. One hand locks my wrist and the other peels the stunner away before my finger can find the trigger. The gecko grip takes a layer of skin with it.

“Il est où le prophète?” Their voice is soft but insistent. “Where? Where?”

They toss the weapon over their shoulder and all I can think about is the blood spattering the glass door and how I’m going to be nothing but electricity in someone’s brain soon, and how maybe that’s for the best. They spot the rippling motion under my jacket—the alien isn’t calm anymore—and reach for my zipper. I hear their breathing quicken.

Ty jams the stunner into the back of their neck. The charge ragdolls them; I smell singed hair as they flop to one side, bucking and twitching. She thrusts it into their chest next, grinding it against their heaving ribs. I scramble backward. She’s howling as she hits the trigger again and again, her hair flying wild around her face.

“Osti de tabarnak de crisse de marde,” she sobs, punctuating each curse with the stunner.

They spasm, flipping onto their side, and for an instant I see the shaved back of their head. I see the scar tissue. The hole.

“What the fuck is going on?” Ty demands, and I get that she’s asking me, not them. “Who are you?” She levels my stunner at me. “Bouge pas. Bouge pas. I called the cops.”

To prove her words, the sound of squealing tires comes from the opposite end of the alley. But there’s no siren, and as the big black car noses into the alleyway I see the driver is wearing a mask. She sees it too and I hear her breath catch. My phone buzzes in my pocket.

“That’s not the fucking feds,” I say. “Allons-y.”

I run and she comes with me, down the alley, leaving the person in the tribal mask to twitch and shake. The car squeals to a halt to not run them over. I hear doors slamming open; I can picture guns being drawn. I dredge one last burst out of my aching muscles. We shoot out of the alley onto the street, where an autotrailer is idling and blocking traffic.

The door slides open and I throw myself inside. Ty follows a little more gracefully and we’re moving before the door can close. I hear sirens now. Two blue police cars whiz past us on their way to Fleur House. The autotrailer hangs a left and starts heading for the Pont-Tunnel. I keep my face pressed to the cold metal floor until my breathing is back to normal. The alien in my jacket gives a tentative squirm.

“Fuck,” I hear Ty murmur. “There’s more of them.”

I drag my head up. She’s looking at the tank, of course, the big polyplastic tank that takes up most of the trailer. Three ugly beautiful creatures are swirling around inside, tendrils billowing, bony heads nuzzling against each other. I stagger to my feet, balancing against the lurch of the vehicle, and unzip my jacket.

The alien from the bathtub mewls, stretching a tendril into the air towards its kin. I dump it into the tank. There’s a soft splash and then the aliens are all bundled together in one pulsing mass that always gives me a bit of a lump in the throat. A pictogram flashes through my skull, the eye-green rhombus fitting perfectly into its golden-brown place.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yes. There’s more of them. And more out there.”

Ty stares at the tank. Her eyes are glassy with shock. “They shot Dion in the head,” she says. “He was trying to get out of their way, and they shot him in the head.”

My stomach churns. “Sorry,” I say, even though sorry means nothing.

“Who were those people?” she asks in a voice like brittle wood.

I look at the tank, too, and shake my head. “Aucune idée,” I say, remembering the flicker knife, the tribal mask, the trepanation scar in the back of their skull. “That’s never happened before.”

“It was the meteor shower, then.” Ty is slumped against the bouncing wall of the trailer. “Dion was right. Aliens. Calisse, mais ça c’est fou. Crazy. Crazy. This is all fucking crazy.” She clutches her head in both hands and shuts her eyes. “And you, you’re what? You’re collecting them?”

“We’ve got a deal, I guess,” I say, checking our route on my phone. “Kind of a deal. Yeah. I have to talk to them, then we’ll drop you somewhere.”

I get up again and go to the tank. The biggest of them, the one I met a month ago in the ice-cold harbor by the Grande Roue, swims over to meet me. One of its tendrils loops over the top of the tank. I grab it, and I realize Ty is looking at my trepanation again.

“They did that?” she asks faintly. “That hole?”

“Better than a ruptured septum,” I say. “They showed me how to do it. Wasn’t so bad.”

Her gaze flicks to my arms, to the ladder of track marks and purpled scars no longer hidden by my jacket. “You’re a junkie,” she says. “I seen arms like that before.” She watches as I bring the tendril to the nape of my neck. “Is it a high for you?” Her laugh is bitter. “Is that what you get out of this?”

“It’s complicated,” I say, as the tendril slides inside my brain and turns the only key that matters. I need to find out where we’re going next. I need to ask about the people in the masks. But those things can wait a little while. I take a deep breath. “Hey, Em.”

“Hey, Benny,” Emilie says, stepping around Ty, slouching down beside me. “Got another alien, huh?” She shakes her head and gives me her semi-sad smile. “T’es fou, toi.”

“Yeah,” I say, blinking back tears. “I know.”

We hold hands as the autotrailer enters the Pont-Tunnel.

About the Author

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Canada, USA, and Spain, and is now based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of Annex and Cypher, as well as over a hundred short stories—some of the best of which can be found in his collection Tomorrow Factory. His work has been translated into Polish, Czech, French, Italian, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

The Scrapyard

Tomas Furby

Scrapyard’s lookin’ a little empty today. Stomp over to Matron sat on her throne and ask where Tommy is. Tommy’s dead, she says. Passed away in his sleep in the early hours. Terrible sorry.

She don’t sound all that sorry. The mech whines as I hop over to my spot at the chessboard. Needs a service. Oil’s dry and joints crunch rust. One sheered bolt away from fallin’ apart. Just like us derelicts. Outside the wind moves a squad of dry, crusty leaves round the yard. Storm’s howlin’ orders like a CO sweatin’ out last night’s drunk. My tinnitus starts playin’ up again, like distant laser-fire. Slap my ear a few times like that’ll help. Probably just look nuts. Ear defenders weren’t top of the QMC’s priorities back in the day. More concerned with guns and ammo I guess. Annoyin’ as hell though. The ringin’ and ringin’ and ringin’.

I fiddle with the queen and stare at my reflection in a cracked windowpane. When’d we get so goddamn gray? Deep crags crisscross my face like those dusty red canyons we used to fight in. Which ones are scars, which ones wrinkles? I can’t tell anymore. Can’t remember. There’s bags under my eyes like I’ve been on an all nighter with the rookies. Silver stubble scattered across saggin’ cheeks. Liver spots showin’ through thin wisps of hair. FUBAR. What happened to us? Well shit, guess we got old.

Tommy was one of the good ones. Ninth Battalion. Best of the best. We went way back, him and me. All the way to the beginnin’ I guess. Had the misfortune to be drinkin’ in the same dive bar in Brooklyn when the scrips came. Bagged and tagged us, threw us on a dropship, straight to boot camp in Boston. I was just a mechanic. Tommy was a gambler. His pa was somethin’ big in DC. Shouted that a lot on the ride over. Didn’t matter. Sarge put us both on our asses when we tried to leave. Conscription Act says you’re in the marines now kids. Get used to it. Only way you’re leavin’ is in a squad or a body bag. Makes me laugh now. Squad or a body bag. What a joker.

Our first mission was down south, Louisiana. Screevs had a hive in New Orleans. City’d been dead since the start of the war. It was a meat grinder. Total Charlie Foxtrot. Crawlin’ with the slimy bastards. You could see ’em from the dropship. Squirmin’ skitterin’ writhin’ mass. Like the ruins were alive. CO told us to take it back. Nothin’ else. Just take it back. The whole city, from the alien scourge. Ten kids greener than grass, barely knew one end of a rifle from the other. All newly strapped into these prototype armor suits. The original mech model, the ones that didn’t work quite right. Before they realized you had to weld the steel to bone and wire the computers in under the skin.

It was a Hail Mary strike. Command knew we were losin’ the war. They were desperate. Fate of humanity in their hands. We were just a gamble. Ten chips on double zero. Didn’t figure that out ’til later though. Remember jumpin’ out the ’copter deep behind enemy lines. Shakin’ so hard we rattled. Sure we were goin’ to win the war. There was this weird quiet moment hunkered down in an abandoned mall, rifles pointed at the exits, waitin’ for the bugs. We could hear ’em. The skitterin’ in the distance, gettin’ closer, louder. We all looked at each other and knew we were done. Then one of the boys, Red, said he needed a crap. The brains hadn’t figured that into the design. Guess I’m fightin’ with full pants, he said. We all laughed. F.t.a. was the last thing Red ever said. F.t.a.

By the time me and Tommy got outta the Big Easy, we needed new suits and one helluva bath. Shook up as hell, missin’ one or two limbs and more than a few friends. We failed our mission, but we took a slice out of the Screevs. Managed to blow the Waterford plant on the way out. Top brass weren’t exactly happy that we nuked half the state, but it did the job.

I barely listened to the debrief. All I could hear was Red sayin’ F.t.a. over and again. I wanted a burger. I wanted to sleep for a week. I never wanted to fight again. And Tommy, well, Tommy was the only mad kid still smilin’.

He always smiled. Even when the CO whipped him for drinkin’ on duty. Even when we were mustered out halfway through trainin’ in second year. Even when we stood on that frontline, starin’ down the throats of those crimson Screever caves, thinkin’ just maybe we were cannon fodder for bugs. Yeah, we went way back. Battle of Thursday Mine. Sackin’ of the Breeding Pits. The Final Battle. Tommy was a legend. Good chess player too. He smiled through every injury, every death, every bit of pain.

I asked him once, I said Tommy, how come you’re always smilin’. Kid just shrugged, smiled and said he liked to show the world his best face. Maybe one day, he said, the world’ll show me hers.

I miss him. I miss my friend.

Rust flakes off my bracer as I rub at it. Dust under fingertips. Reminds me of the mines. Grit got everywhere. Stained skin rust red. Blinded some. Woke up with your mouth so dry even lickin’ cave water seemed mighty fine. When we finally climbed out of hell some rookie at the front thought we were hostiles, shot us down. We’re good, but we ain’t invincible. Bullet pinged off Tommy’s mech and punched out the back of Critter’s skull. Poor Critter. Survived the Screevs and ate lead off some fresh meat’s itchy trigger finger. No KIA on his record. Just friendly fire. What a way to go.

Course we made sure that rookie never worked again: me, Tommy, and Earl. No one gets away with killin’ a marine. Got the guy drunk one night, took him round the back of the mess hall, broke both arms and legs.

Earl’s lights out in front of the TV this mornin’. Little bubble of drool blowin’ in one corner of his mouth. It’s ten thirty: first drugs of the day then. He hits the dope hard most days now. Saw things down in the deep he couldn’t unsee. Me too I guess, but some people get stuck on the—bloodsplatterfleshgrindcacklingredeyes—gory details. Poor Earl. Always talkin’ bout his missus on the long treks down tunnel into dark. He used to stroke his rifle like it was her, whisper sweet nothings to it, kiss it when we weren’t lookin’.

Yeah, in retrospect we should’ve known he was cracked.

His old lady dumped him here ten years ago. The Scrapyard: halfway between retirement home and weapons depot. Took the rest of us a little while to catch up, but we all ended up here eventually. Heroes of the Dawn. Best of the best, pride of the world, the tank soldiers. Superhumans, pumped full of the finest steroids and gene therapy money could buy and fused to ten tons of military exoskeleton. And look at us now.

I remember the suits sayin’ it was the only way to beat the Screevs. They had better reflexes than us, stronger bodies, carapace armor. They were better, faster, stronger, and they were winnin’ the war. It was a necessity, they said. And we didn’t argue. We were good soldiers. Good weapons. So we held still as they slid the needles in. Grinned red teeth at the bone saws and wires as they carved into us. Screamed our anger as they took us apart and put us back together.

And when the docs were done, we got back in the saddle and we killed Screevs. From one end of the States to the other. We scoured the invadin’ burrowin’ bastards from our cities, then we followed ’em down the holes they made in our Earth.

Gloria hops out onto the lawn, scatterin’ seed across the grass. A few o’ those damned black birds skitter down from the spider trees to peck at it. They sound like Screevs to me. Shadows lurk beneath the branches but I ignore ’em. Now’s not the time for that. Gloria flips her hair over one shoulder. Rub at my jaw to hide the smile. Our own Snow White. Giant of a woman, raven mane hidin’ that empty eye socket, clawscars down her face, hoppin’ round on that one leg her mech’s still got. Birds like her: land on her armor, all cawin’ for the grain in her hand. Smiles that crooked broken smile of hers and scatters the rest to the lawn. They take flight. She sings their song, flappin’ her huge metal arms. Pistons hiss with the wind. A ripped wire flails around behind her wildly. Still beautiful, even with white streaks through the black. Shame she always batted for the other team.

Gloria wasn’t our squadron. She was recon. The advance team sent down to map the Screevs’ tunnels and bring back intelligence for the final assault. Went down with a team of five. Only one to make it back, minus the leg and eye. Said it was a cheap price for the maps. Can’t help but agree. She won us the war. Day after she made it back, crawlin’ out of a sewer down near Manhattan, my squad was one of hundreds they mustered out. Thousands of mechs all down the rabbit hole in one coordinated attack to finally burn the Screevs out. We cauterized the putrid wound the aliens made in our Earth and pissed in the smokin’ hole that was left.

There are no more Screevs.

And just like that, the threat was gone. World was at peace. We won. And now we’re old. And unneeded. And the government won’t pay to fix the mechs anymore. So they put us here, where the only damage we can do is to ourselves. I’m too damn old to be angry ’bout it anymore. I’m just disappointed.

Dave’s doin’ pull-ups in the corner. Sounds like someone droppin’ a shippin’ container on a small dog over and over again. He grumbles gravel under boots down the long dark tunnel as he counts. Pretty sure he’s lyin’ ’bout the number. Even with the mech I can only hit fifty these days, and that’s with more than my fair share of arthritic pain. We’re the Hellraisers. Heroes of Earth. Defenders of Humanity. Scourge of the Screevs. We won the Deep Wars. Saved the world. But we’re still old. Still dyin’, decayin’. Just doin’ it quietly under steel armor, pistons, and wires. Everythin’ hurts, all the time. Where they melded bone and steel, flesh cankers and rots, rejectin’ implants. Arthritis spiders over joints tired from holdin’ up more weight than they were designed to. Electrics have glitched and sparked, makin’ us twitch and shiver. Enhanced optics are still good I guess—they straight replaced the pupils on most of us, so at least we don’t have to worry about cataracts. Silver linin’ to every cloud and all.

Naw, ain’t my body that’s the problem. Somethin’ skitters at the corner of my vision. Screev. Sure it was. I glance round slowly. Don’t wanna spook it. Earl watches me. Only shadows in the corner and a flicker of television light. I shake my head. Problem is, I’m reckonin’ Earl ain’t the only one losin’ it. He grins and bobs his head like he knows what I’m thinkin’. I give him the finger. He slowly, shakily, gives it back.

Last night was real bad. Docs had to restrain me again. Nightmares. We all have ’em. PTSD ain’t nothin’ to be shamed ’bout. We’re all vets here, and all vets dream about the dark. Deep Wars were bad. Made schleppin’ through the trenches in the old World Wars look like Hanukkah. Eatin’, sleepin’, shittin’ in the dark, never sure when the Screevs were gonna burrow up from under you. Twisted little monsters bent on eatin’ your eyeballs poppin’ up round every corner, all teeth and spikes and crimson glowin’ eyes. Naw, PTSD ain’t a problem on its own. But a human tank with PTSD havin’ a nightmare so real they want to kill it . . . Well now, that’s a problem.

I must’ve been here three days before the brains figured to build reinforced steel cages round the beds with magnetic clamps for wrists and ankles. Works most nights. Sometimes it doesn’t. Last night was one of those nights. I broke one arm free and splashed one of the orderlies. Kevin. Nice guy, sympathetic-like, always treated us with respect. He had a kid, showed me a holo. Jenny, he said. My angel. Was probably tryin’ to wake me. There’s a red stain on my wall where I introduced it to his face. Woke up with his neck in my hand. Terrible sorry.

Other side of the Scrapyard one of the fancy doctor types is pacin’ up and down. He’s on the phone. Looks real mad. Probably callin’ Command. Probably suggestin’, forcefully, that I’m decommissioned. Too dangerous, they’ll say. Alzheimer’s, they’ll say. Only a matter of time, they’ll say. Hope my boy’s still got the spine to stand up to ’em. Even if he hasn’t, I still got friends in high places. Still some got a bit of gratitude in ’em for all we did back in the day. I’m not done yet. No sir.

But I am kinda sleepy. Mech sounds like coverin’ fire as I heave my ancient ass out of the chair. Pops and crackles and the occasional minor explosion. Hopefully nothin’ vital. I shuffle on over to the comfy chairs—gel couches specially designed to take our weight. Sink into one with a groan and lean back. The footrest rises with a hydraulic hiss. Remember sittin’ in that tunnel just before the final push, hunkered down back-to-back with Tommy cleanin’ rifles. Remember swearin’ blind that if we won the war we’d get ourselves one of these goddamn chairs. Remember sayin’ all the death and dyin’ might be worth it for a decent night’s kip.

They ain’t all that . . .

Hisses in the dark.

Damn nice to wake up and not have a corpse in your hand. Even if you’re covered in sweat-slick steel and shakin’ bolts. You never thought about it down in the dark, not bein’ able to feel your own skin. It was a good thing. Wounds didn’t hurt anymore. No goin’ into shock for these marines. But over the years it’s bugged me more and more. There’s only one patch of skin, round my eyes, that still feels anythin’. I stroke it now, for comfort.

I glance out the window. There’s things movin’ under those trees again. Things I almost recognize from the worst days of the war. Stealth units, vat grown down in the darkest pits. Ninjas, we called ’em. A kind of Screev: black skin, black eyes, black claws. Silent, fluid, and completely fuckin’ invisible. You had to know where to look for ’em, what they smelled like, and even then they usually got you. Lucky there weren’t many. Phosphorus grenades. That was the thing. Wonder whether I’ve got any left in the old stash.

“Dad?”

Oh shit. Alec. They called Alec.

“Sonny boy!” I tap the button that raises the chair back up. It fizzles. Damned thing. Try to sit up on my own but the mech’s frozen on one side and my abs . . . Well, show me any ninety year old with abs. Even gene therapy and steroids only goes so far. Try again, swear, try again. Finally, flappin’ around like some kinda overturned bug, I rock to my feet. Alec stood, suited and booted, watchin’ me cough and splutter and heave as I lean on my knees.

“What?” I snap. “Never seen an old man before, dickhead?”

Alec just crosses his arms. Rookie doesn’t even know he’s born. World’s been at peace since before he was just a twinkle in my eye. Screevs are only a story to him. Used to love my stories. Used to think I was a hero. Now he’s a suit in a world that’s moved on. Somethin’ big in corporate. And I’m a daily goddamn embarrassment to him.

Public opinion’s a bitch. Once we were the saviors of Earth from the alien scourge. Now we’re war criminals, mass murderers, abominations. Protesters surround the Scrapyard holdin’ cute little white placards sayin’ “Thou shalt not kill,” “Screevs are friends,” and “Death to mechs.” I asked the docs for some live ammo so we could take potshots at ’em. They didn’t seem mighty amused by the concept. My shoulder aches where an alien chewed chunks out of it back in the ’02. Ungrateful bastards, all of ’em. Most of ’em never seen a bug. Wish I could introduce ’em to one. They’d change their tune quick enough.

There’s a glint in Alec’s eye I know too well. I love him, but he’s no marine. Not even close. Boy doesn’t understand and he’s too caught up in his stocks and swimmin’ pools to try. Been years since we were close. He always had my back as a kid. I was his hero father. That was real nice. But then a little less and a little less as the wave of public opinion turned. And now . . . Now I guess he’s here to decommission me.

“You killed a man.”

I sigh and the sigh turns into a hackin’ cough that says this old bucket of bolts spent too many years down a mine filled with toxic dust and chemical weapons. Rust taste of blood on my lips. Maybe a tumor’ll take me down before the docs can. That there might be the definition of irony. When I can breathe again I grin red teeth at Alec.

“I’ve killed lots of men, kid. Perks of the job.”

Alec’s chin wobbles. He probably thinks that twist of his lips is a casual sneer. To me he just looks like a ten year old scared to box with his old man cause he doesn’t want a punch on the jaw. I’m disappointed in my son. I examine that for a moment. Yes. I’m disappointed in him. What I could do if I was his age again, with everythin’ he’s got. Goddamn, guess the old are always jealous of the young. Alex shifts his weight and a lifetime of close scrapes makes me tense under my metal shell.

“Dad. You’re not well.” Tryin’ a different tack then. SSDD. We’ve had this conversation a few times over the years. Most of the mechs took voluntary decommissionin’ years ago, or were forced to when their rigs got real bad. Heroes who saved a planet, put down like dogs gone rabid. I will not go quietly into the night. ’Sides—my eyes flick to the side, out the window, under the trees where the ninjas lurk—I reckon they’ll need me again soon enough.

“Can it, bolo. I’m fine. See that?” I point over at Earl. “That’s not fuckin’ well. Don’t see anyone DCin’ him, do ya?” I take a step forward and he flinches. He flinches. Stop like that flinch was a ten-ton tank and there’s ammo comin’ down the barrel.

He’s scared of me.

Damn.

What would Dela think? Nothin’ good. I can almost see her lookin’ up at me with those doe eyes and sad mouth. How the hell did we come to this?

Slowly, palms out so the gray flesh shows not the steel knuckles, I reach out.

“I’m sorry, kid. You’re right. Maybe I am gettin’ old.” He lets me lay a hand soft-like on his shoulder, but he doesn’t meet my eye. Somethin’ flickers out in the dark again but I ignore it. Now’s not the time to puzzle out reality from dead neurons . . .

“How ’bout I see that shrink you’ve been bangin’ on about?” An olive branch. Please let him take it.

Alec glances over his shoulder at the Doc, who slowly shakes his head. Y’know that hurts more than ever. Thought I dragged him up right, even after his ma passed. Thought he was strong enough to make his own decisions, to back his family over all else. Seems I thought wrong.

“Too late for that, da.” Alec steps back. “You’re not safe anymore.” He frowns. “It’s too late,” he repeats, and turns to walk away. I’m already dead to him, then. Guess it ain’t so different from me and my pa. I’d done my ten, got my papers. Could’ve discharged honorably. But they offered me the new mech. A chance to fight the last fight. I signed up for the next tour. Left him alone and wasn’t there when the Screevs burrowed right up under him. He was old, weak, a nuisance, and a distraction. Remember lookin’ over my shoulder as I walked up into the transport. Little old man with dandelion hair flappin’ in the wind and cane clenched in both hands. He was so proud of me. Never complained. Never killed anyone in his sleep . . . Remember the CO givin’ us the news. New York sinkholed. Nothin’ left. No survivors. I should’ve been there.

Guess we all kill our dads in the end.

I go away for a while. It’s been happenin’ a bit lately. Any time things get too much. A skip in time, like someone cut the footage. Then you’re back and people have moved or the light’s changed. I was worried about it at first, but you get used to it.

“When?” I ask. Alec doesn’t answer cause he’s long gone but the Doc does.

“Tomorrow morning, seven-thirty.”

I nod, turn, glance at the clock.

18 hours then. 18 hours to figure out if I’m really mad, dyin’, startin’ that long slow slide into not bein’ me anymore. Or 18 hours to prove that war’s comin’. Again.

I stomp out to the garden. It’s gettin’ darker. Clouds comin’ in. Trees thrashin’ in the wind. Storm’s comin’. Would’ve been nice to see one more sunset. Life doesn’t always work out that way though. Wish I could say goodbye to Alec. Maybe he’ll be there tomorrow. Doubt it though. Things I should’ve said. Things I should’ve done. No time now. Guess this old man’ll just have to live with his regrets. For a little while longer at least.

Time to get to work. Optics boot up a little glitchy, dead pixels skitterin’ cross my eyes, but the HUD still just about works. It’s been a while. Tracking roams through the trees, searchin’ out any sign of life. It snags a few things—rodents mostly—nothin’ useful. Tech never was much good against ninjas. Cold blood. Radiation resistant skin. Some sort of pigment that reflects the light, like a goddamn chameleon. I stare into the shadows like the little bastards are just gonna jump out and tap dance for me. I am not losin’ it. I know I’m not. Know it deep down like I know my own name. I still know my own name. One of the orderlies yells down that dinner’s ready. I ignore him. Don’t eat much these days. And I ain’t got time for indigestion today. I’ve got to find ’em. These Screevs I’ve been seein’. I’ve got to prove they’re real. That the world still needs me to save it.

Unless it’s all a hallucination. Maybe I’m relivin’ the glory days. Maybe this is the top of that long slope down into the dark and there ain’t no comin’ back. Jesus, what a mindfuck.

But what then? Sit here, quiverin’, ’til they DC me in the mornin’. Could try tellin’ the docs. Could try callin’ a few old friends who still work for the Pentagon. Could end my days as a cracked old man shoutin’ conspiracy theories while they all laugh.

Alec’s right. It’s probably all in my head. I’m done. Should just go quietly, get ready for the docs to pull the plug. Top minds in the business spent the whole war searchin’ for the ninjas; they never managed it. Too much noise down in the tunnels, they said. Made ’em pretty much invisible to all sensors, and satellites were no use . . .

But we’re not down in the tunnels, are we. There’s no background rads and thick layers of mineral obscurin’ line of sight. And satellites . . . Well shit, maybe this old dog’s still got a few tricks left up his rusty steel sleeves. I open up my HIVE connection. Been a while, but I still got a few insurance policies littered round the ’net. Back doors no one ever closed. Retro channels that the babies in the Pentagon probably never even knew existed. Takes me all of ten minutes to hack into the Space Agency’s satellite network and reposition three of ’em over my location. Numbers scrawl behind my eyes as some clever bastard in an office somewhere in Washington starts tryin’ to boot me out. I ignore ’em. Don’t need it long. Just tune to infrared and radar, point as many eyes as possible at this area and search for . . .

Voi-fuckin’-la as the frogs say. Blackspots. I’ve got blackspots. A negative result, just as good as a positive . . . Fifteen targets pop up. Holes in the forest. They don’t move, like they know I’m watchin’ but ain’t sure what to do next. They’re there though. They’re goddamn there.

The Screevs are back.

Satellites boot me out, but the mech’s got the code now. The AI knows how to track ’em. And if the mech can track ’em, they’re real. If they’re real, I’m not cracked. And if I’m not cracked, ain’t no way in hell I’m goin’ quietly. I got unfinished business to attend to. I glance back at Gloria, still feedin’ the birds. Think we all got some scores to settle.

To hell with Alec. To hell with the docs. To hell with my old, broken body. I wave at Gloria and sign out a debrief in the rec room in five. Durin’ the war I was one of an army of supersoldiers. The first, sure, but still one in thousands. We fought the bloodiest war in history against an enemy we didn’t understand and couldn’t stop. Now there’s just me, Dave, Gloria. Just the three of us—four if we can get Earl out of his valium coma long enough. Four old soldiers against a returnin’ evil. I grin.

It’s time to get the band back together.

About the Author

Tomas Furby is a writer of odd fictions, strange stories, and weird worlds (including this one). His work has appeared in publications by Pill Hill Press, Static Movement, Short-Story.Me, Gold Dust, Aurora Wolf, and the British Fantasy Society. In 2018, he was the winner of the Exeter Writers Short Story Competition, and was long-listed for both the James White Award and Bedford International Writing Competition. He lives in the south west of England surrounded by books and scifi paraphernalia. You can find him on Twitter at @TomasFurby.

An Arc of Lightning Across the Eye of God

P H Lee

Zhou Wenshu was the young magistrate of Shenkong Bian and he was feeling every inch of that appointment. Today he had learned that the plastic floor of his office—the largest personal room in Shenkong Bian—was exactly four-and-a-half steps. It was the least interesting thing that he had learned today, and he’d learned it by pacing back and forth at yin shi (outpost time; wei shi capital time) when he should have been in bed.

One two three four fi—and turn. One two three four fi—and turn again.

Lei Shu—his assistant, twice his age and permanent outpost staff—had helpfully laid out a selection of brushes, freshly ground ink (both magnetic and permanent), some remarkably high-quality paper, and the secret imperial memorandum seal. Only the magistrate was supposed to have access to the secret imperial memorandum seal, but he’d only arrived at Shenkong Bian a month ago and could barely find the bathroom. And under the circumstances—

Under the circumstances.

Zhou stopped and shivered. She was still here, in this outpost, probably only a few feet away from him. Under the circumstances.

He wanted a drink.

He had sent Lei Shu off to sleep for the night, but he was sure that the older man was still there, right outside his door. He could call for a drink and get one in a minute, maybe less. Under the circumstances, no one would blame him.

He started pacing again. One two three four fi—and turn.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It had all seemed so simple, five months ago in the governor’s mansion with his uncle. Shenkong Bian was a hardship posting without the hardship. He’d be eligible for promotion in only two years, and with a glowing reference from His Lordship besides. Shenkong Bian had no taxes to collect, no levies to maintain, no peasants to murder each other in their incomprehensible dialects. It was even at an unusual transit point—an opportunity to really use all the physics he’d studied at the academy.

All he had to do was keep his nose clean. No repeats of the incident. The governor hadn’t mentioned it, of course, but they all knew. His uncle and the governor had worked out the details of the assignment while Zhou stared at his shoes, ashamed, and barely said a word.

It wasn’t just the career opportunity, he’d told himself. The Shenkong Bian transit point was physically fascinating—it behaved like a normal transit point, but nothing that passed through it ever returned. The astronauts had their wild stories, of course, mostly involving a transit point right into hell itself. Zhou, with his fresh physics degree, had his own theories involving an as-of-yet-undetected magnetic monopole.

Of course there’d been no mention of physics once he’d gotten to the neglected outpost. Shenkong Bian barely received the resources to maintain its hull, let alone perform any of the experiments he’d planned. And now, this. It was all too much.

Zhou sat down at his desk and fingered the paper. It really was high quality. How had Lei Shu gotten his hands on it? He waved away the thought. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the creature—no, the girl.

Zhou called up the rough transcript of the interview and selected a brush. Dipping it into the cool magnetic ink Lei Shu had ground for him, he began to write:

          In the seventh year of the

Forthright EMPEROR,

          Eighth month, fourteenth day, wei shi,

     Your servant Zhou Wenshu, magistrate of Shenkong

          Bian humbly bowing before

you, reports: This morning, chou shi, there came

          through Shenkong transit point

No, that was wrong. She hadn’t come through the point then. They had no idea when she’d come through, or if she’d even come through the point at all, because they hadn’t been monitoring it. Why would they monitor it? Nothing came through.

Except, of course, something—someone—had come through.

Zhou breathed carefully—in. Out. In. Out. The emperor wouldn’t care about these details, so the emperor didn’t need to know them. He wet the tip of his brush. Just the basics, that was fine.

          This morning, chou shi,

     your servants of the Shenkong Bian discovered, in

          the vicinity of Shenkong transit point,

          a vessel of foreign origin.

No, not a vessel. A creature. A person. A girl.

But how could he say that? Secret memoranda were about big civic projects, enemy troop movements, tax revolts. A girl? Alone? In space? Impossible.

          This morning, chou shi

     your servants of the Shenkong Bian discovered,

          in the vicinity of Shenkong transit point,

          a foreign object of unknown origin. Upon

          inspection, it became apparent that this

          object was, shockingly.

No, not “shockingly.” Don’t tell the emperor how he feels.

          Upon visual inspection,

     your servants found this object was in the shape

          of a woman, covered in some sort of black

          space suit, and very much alive. Acting in

          accordance with my duties as

     your magistrate, I led the crew of Shenkong Bian

          outpost in mounting a rescue operation.

No need to mention their confusion; no need to mention the almost-an-hour they’d spent finding their search and rescue gear; no need to mention that even as they were finally suiting up to rescue her, she uncurled, and somehow, impossibly, began to drift herself to intercept them.

Definitely no need to mention that she had been signing at them the entire time.

          Once the subject had been recovered,

          conscious and alive, from where she had

          been stranded in space, she refused

          any medical aid or examination, or even

          to remove her suit at all. We found

          that she was completely unresponsive to

          speech, both in

     Imperial language and in every local dialect.

          However one of the outpost staff, a

          former merchant astronaut, could

          communicate with her in simple

          astronaut’s sign.

No need to mention that the man barely spoke Imperial at all, that they needed to use two translators just to have a conversation.

          could communicate with her in simple

          astronaut’s sign, which she responded

          to with great enthusiasm. Thus I,

     your servant, was able to interview her about

          her past, her people, and her presence in

     Imperial space. In the interest of

In the interest of? No. This was so much more than that. This was more than a passing curiosity. This was almost certainly the most important thing that had happened to the empire, ever. The emperor needed to know this. Just say it plainly.

          I have attached a transcript of this

          interview for

Your Majesty’s immediate perusal. As this matter

          is of critical importance, I have not

          edited the transcript and have

          not amended or elided anything in the

          above report. I await

your response and guidance on this matter.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Location: Common Room, Shenkong Bian Outpost

Time: Chen Shi (Capital Time)

Present: Zhou Wenshu, magistrate. Lei Shu, assistant to the magistrate. Wu Gongpian, transcriptionist. Siggurdson Viktor, outpost staff, translating. Zhou Ami, outpost staff, translating.

Zhou: Hello. My name is Zhou Wenshu. I am the magistrate at this outpost.

Subject: Yes.

Zhou: If it’s all right with you, I would like to ask you a few questions. And the transcriptionist here will record your answers.

Subject: It’s all right with me.

Zhou: You can understand this language? The sign?

Subject: Yes, I can understand this sign. It is one of my father’s languages, I have learned it from he, my father, who learned it from [sign unrecognizable], but past that the wake of history is lost.

Zhou: Who was your father?

Subject: My father was. [here she makes the phonetic sign marker, then pauses]

Zhou: Go on.

Subject: It is not his real name.

Zhou: Tell us his real name, then.

Subject: [ejects something wet onto the table]

Zhou: What is that? What is that? Is it dangerous?

[transcript pauses]

Zhou: Please don’t do that again.

Subject: You asked me my father’s name. That is his name.

Zhou: That isn’t any kind of name at all. That’s just a disgusting pile of goo.

Subject: [still, silent]

Zhou: Why did you say that was his name? Are you that disrespectful to your father?

Subject: I love my father, and so I remember my father.

Zhou: He’s passed?

Subject: Yes. Recently.

Zhou: So you are in mourning?

Subject: I am always in mourning.

Zhou: But, is it still within the mourning period?

Subject: I am always in mourning.

Zhou: I mean, the three years.

Subject: Yes.

Zhou: My condolences.

Subject: Yes.

Zhou: Did your father have any other name? That doesn’t involve . . . whatever that is?

Subject: [signing phonetically: Gunnar] son of [signing phonetically: Gunnar].

Zhou: An astronaut, then.

Subject: Yes.

Zhou: What ship?

Subject: I don’t want to talk about my father anymore. It is too [unknown sign].

Zhou: My condolences again.

Subject: [still, silent]

Zhou: May I ask you other questions?

Subject: Please.

Zhou: What is your name?

Subject: Are you sure?

Zhou: Of course.

Subject: Last time you didn’t want me to say a name.

Zhou: The . . . spit?

Subject: You said it was disgusting. My father’s name.

Zhou: Phonetic signing will be fine.

Subject: Not phonetic.

Zhou: What?

Subject: [several unintelligible signs] do not speak language.

Zhou: What?

Subject: My people [same several unintelligible signs] do not make [pause] things to hear.

Zhou: Sound?

Subject: Sound. Yes. We do not make sound.

Zhou: Then how do you communicate? In sign?

Subject: No, these signs I learned from my father, from my father’s people, like you.

Zhou: No, your father is Icelandic. I am Imperial.

Subject: I am confused.

Zhou: Your father and I are from different peoples.

Subject: But you are both [unintelligible sign]?

Zhou: Never mind. Is there at least a name we could call you?

Subject: There is a name my father gave me, but it isn’t really my name.

Zhou: How can you be so disrespectful of your father?

Subject: I love my father. I don’t know the sign [respect] but I love my father and so I remember him.

Zhou: But the name your father gave you is your real name.

Subject: No, my real name was built by my mother out of my father’s name and my mother’s [unintelligible sign]. Then she grew me from it.

Zhou: But what can we call you?

Subject: My father called me “An Arc of Lightning Across the Eye of God.”

Zhou: That’s a very unusual name.

Subject: It is very short, yes.

Zhou: Can we call you “Lightning”?

Subject: That is even shorter. That is barely a word.

Zhou: It will be easier for [gestures, indicating transcriptionist].

Lightning: That is fine, then. But it is not my name.

Zhou: I understand.

Lightning: You don’t. Or you would have tasted my father’s name.

Zhou: Tasted? You mean heard.

Lightning: No, tasted. No sounds in our language.

Zhou: Oh.

Lightning: With your [unintelligible sign].

Zhou: We’ll using “Lightning” for now.

Lightning: That is fine.

Zhou: Where are you from?

Lightning: We are from [unintelligible sign].

Zhou: I’m sorry, our man here doesn’t know that sign.

Lightning: Do you have someone here who knows asteroids and planets? Orbits. It would be easier.

Zhou: He’s the only one in the outpost who knows astronaut’s sign.

Lightning: Okay. We are from heaven.

Zhou: Heaven? You sound like a Christian.

Lightning: I don’t know the sign “Christian.” We are from heaven.

Zhou: Who do you mean by “we”?

Lightning: My family. My [unintelligible sign].

Zhou: But your father is Icelandic.

Lightning: True. I meant my mother’s [unintelligible sign]. The ones who grew me.

Zhou: When you say heaven, what do you mean?

Lightning: Heaven is not like this. Not hot. Not burning. Not so many [unintelligible sign] [brief discussion with translator]. Not so many gasses all bound together in an aluminum shell. Heaven is vast and in every direction and empty and ours.

Zhou: You mean “space.”

Lightning: Yes. Space. Heaven.

Zhou: So you don’t mean heaven in the religious sense.

Lightning: Yes. We are religious.

Zhou: No, I meant.

Lightning: You meant?

Zhou: You’re religious? What religion?

Lightning: We are [several unintelligible signs].

Zhou: I don’t understand those words.

Lightning: We must make a conversation-sign for this.

[discussion with translator]

Lightning: This is difficult. There are important religious words.

Zhou: I understand.

Lightning: You don’t understand. If you understood, you would taste them.

Zhou: Don’t insult me.

Lightning: I did not mean to insult you. I apologize. I am simply saying that these words are sacred. They were writ into our names by God. To change them, to make them into signs, into another language: It is blasphemous and unfilial.

Zhou: Unfilial?

Lightning: Yes. God is—what’s the sign?—our maternal grandfather. [unintelligible sign] is our maternal grandmother.

Zhou: You speak metaphorically.

Lightning: No. I can show you, if you will taste it, in our [unintelligible sign], where God wrote His image onto us.

Zhou: Can someone please tell me what that sign meant?

[some discussion between translators]

Zhou: Get Doctor Xu in here.

[further discussion; Dr. Xu Zhenbang arrives]

Zhou: So, by this sign [signs: gene] you mean genetic code.

Lightning: Yes, a name.

Zhou: And you are all like this? All your people.

Lightning: We are not people. We are [unintelligible sign].

Zhou: You are not people?

Lightning: Yes. We are not people.

Zhou: What are you?

Lightning: We are [several unintelligible signs]. We are the word of God, writ on the fabric of heaven.

Zhou: So you’re saying you’re a different species than us.

Lightning: I don’t know the sign “species.” We have different names, yes. Different genes.

Zhou: Would you consent to remove your space suit and let Doctor Xu here examine you?

Lightning: I do not know the sign [space suit].

Zhou: The clothes you are wearing. That protects you from the vacuum.

Lightning: I cannot.

Zhou: Are you worried about modesty? We can arrange for a woman to be present.

Lightning: It is not. This is me.

Zhou: What is you?

Lightning: This is my body.

[multiple people talking simultaneously]

Zhou: Quiet down, everyone, Doctor Xu. What do you mean, Lightning?

Lightning: I mean that there is nothing to take off. This is me as I was grown from my father’s name and my mother’s [unintelligible sign]. I think you have mistaken my skin for a so-called space suit.

Zhou: Why is your skin like this?

Lightning: I was grown for this.

[multiple people talking simultaneously]

Zhou: Okay! That’s enough! Everybody be quiet. Lightning, are you saying you were genetically engineered?

Lightning: I do not know the sign “engineer.”

Zhou: “Genetically engineered” means that your genetic code was altered before you were born, restricting your potential, limiting you to specific tasks and professions.

Lightning: Yes. My mother named me.

Zhou: But this is horrible! A crime!

Lightning: I love my mother. I remember her.

Zhou: Yes, it is natural that you love your mother. But what she has done to you—making you into a thing—is unnatural and wrong.

Lightning: But if my mother had not made me, I would not exist.

Zhou: It is only natural that you feel a filial debt to your parents for birthing you. But you must understand that what your mother did to you was wrong.

Lightning: I do not understand. Is this because of my skin?

Zhou: Yes, among other things.

Lightning: It is because of my skin and my lungs that I can survive here, in your fire, with all the gasses packed together.

Zhou: But we can all survive here.

Lightning: Yes, but you are [unintelligible sign]. You cannot survive outside, in heaven, under the eye of God.

Zhou: Still, genetically engineering your own children. It’s not right.

Lightning: My skin is a gift from my mother. It is not a crime. My lungs are a gift from my father. They are also not a crime.

Zhou: Your lungs?

Lightning: Yes, they are particular.

Zhou: What do you mean?

Lightning: Most of [unintelligible sign] do not have lungs. But, for me, they let me into my father’s world. Into this fire.

Zhou: Why?

Lightning: I understand the signs “why” and “?” but I do not understand what you mean by “why?”

Zhou: Why have you come here?

Lightning: There are two parts.

Zhou: Go on.

Lightning: First, I have come to tell my father’s family that he is dead.

Zhou: If he travelled through the Shenkong transit point, he’s been legally dead for many years.

Lightning: Nonetheless, they are his family. They deserve to know.

Zhou: I see.

Lightning: It is because I love my father.

Zhou: It is only natural.

Lightning: The second part is also because I love my father, but I am worried.

Zhou: Why are you worried?

Lightning: Because it is about my purpose.

Zhou: What they made you for?

Lightning: Yes. And that upset you. I did not intend to upset you.

Zhou: It is an upsetting topic.

Lightning: Why?

Zhou: It’s slavery.

Lightning: I don’t understand the sign “slavery.”

Zhou: It’s treating people like things. Things that can be owned.

Lightning: I am not a person and I am not a thing and I don’t understand the sign “owned.”

Zhou: You’re clearly a person! I speak to you and can see that you have the same humanity as all of us.

Lightning: I am not a person. I am not! I am so much more than that. I am my father’s name, written by my mother’s vision across time and space. I am a hand of peace offered from the [several unintelligible signs] to every one of you. I am a message of hope of the divine for those confined in fire and darkness and gravity. I am my great and wonderful purpose and I am the fulfillment of that purpose.

Zhou: What is that purpose?

Lightning: To come here. To speak to you. All of you.

Zhou: What is it that you want to tell us?

Lightning: I am sorry. I cannot sign it.

Zhou: How can you tell us, then?

Lightning: Do you have someone here who can read—what was the sign?—who can read genes?

Zhou: What do you mean?

Lightning: Someone who can understand real language.

Zhou: What’s “real language”?

Lightning: [gestures towards the table] Is it okay if I [unintelligible sign] something here?

Zhou: Go ahead.

Lightning: It won’t upset you?

Zhou: It’s fine.

Lightning: [ejects something wet onto the table, in substantially larger quantity than the previous time]

Lightning: This is real language. [unintelligible sign]. Genes.

Zhou: [shudders]

Lightning: Are you going to taste it?

Zhou: I don’t know if it’s safe.

Lightning: It’s safe. Taste it.

Zhou: I. I don’t think that.

Lightning: You will not understand unless you taste it.

Zhou: Dr. Xu? Can you analyze a sample of this please?

Lightning: [gesturing to table] This is my name. This is me. Taste me and you will understand. [stands up, begins to gesture violently] Taste me! Meet me! Understand!

Zhou: Can someone restrain her?

Lightning: This is me, and within me, my father. This is me, and within me, my mother, and within my mother, [unintelligible sign], and within [unintelligible sign], the image of God.

Zhou: Someone?!

Lightning: [unintelligible signs, likely in an unknown language]

Zhou Wenshu looked at the transcript on his desk, at the brushes, at Dr. Xu’s incomprehensible report that he had begged the magistrate to include with his memorial. Zhou didn’t understand it. Something about multiple compound DNA structures.

Dr. Xu had been very impressed. “If this really is her DNA, she’s more closely related to a strand of yili grass than to you or me,” he’d said, as if that made any sense. “Her genetic density is simply incredible, particularly for an animal species.”

They’d confined her, with apologies, to the brig, but Zhou had her moved to guest quarters. The circumstances hadn’t been entirely her fault. He had asked her to show him, after all. And she was a young woman—a young stalk of flowering grass?—in mourning for her father.

His train of thought was interrupted by a hammering noise coming from the hull. Were the men finally patching it? This late at night? He supposed he shouldn’t care about the timing—good enough that they were doing it at all.

He was pacing again.

A woman—or whatever she was—mourning for her father. That was it, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter if she was a flower or a human or, in what absurdly was becoming the most likely scenario, a sort of wholly alien life, a first first-contact for the Empire. What mattered was that she mourned her parents, just like he would mourn his parents someday soon. What bound them was not genetics or culture, but that shared humane understanding. Recognizing that, who was he to stand in the way of her filial duty?

One two three four fi—and turn.

But—then—no. That wasn’t right at all. She was a genetically engineered slave, a purpose-built tool, designed to contact and infiltrate the empire. She’d said as much herself. And, even if she wasn’t secretly an assassin or saboteur, she brought with her a bizarre religion and her upsetting concepts of language, parentage, and God. The empire’s stability hung, as it always had, by a thread. What revolts would stir up in her wake?

fi—and turn.

And then, of course, he had to think of what the imperial court would do once they learned of her. Would they righteously allow her to visit her relatives and return unmolested? Could they even do that? Or would they capture her, interrogate her, even dissect her, trying to discover the biological secrets she carried. Could he really send this report, at all, knowing that it would likely doom her? Could he trust even the emperor with this secret?

There was that pounding on the hull again.

The hull!

Zhou stopped suddenly and then leapt for the door. Here he was, fretting about his decision, but all along she’d been the one—

Through his office door—not pausing by a sleeping Lei Shu—he hurried down the corridor in a quick shuffle, the fastest he could manage without becoming tangled in his robes. The hull breach alarm was already blaring. By the time he reached her room, sealed off by the automatic pressure doors, she was gone.

Particular thanks to Dr. Alexis Siemon for their expertise and advice
about the lives and careers of Yongzheng-era magistrates.

About the Author

P H Lee lives with the rose bushes behind an old walnut tree down a dead-end road out past the highway. Their other writing has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Visions Magazine, Worlds Without Master, and Four Ways to Die in the Future. Their hobbies include cooking and translating Classical Chinese texts.

National Center for the Preservation of Human Dignity

Youha Nam, translated by Elisa Sinn and Justin Howe

At four in the morning the doorbell rang. Outside stood two young men dressed in gray uniforms, uncreased. They appeared almost to be identical to each other, save that the one with a narrower chin was wearing glasses. Taking up my worn-out bag, I followed them down the stairs and outside. The night’s rain had washed away the last lingering traces of the autumn, leaving the steel staircase outside the building slick. Clasping the cold handrails, and taking each step with great caution, though the ridiculousness of it nearly made me laugh—here I was, struggling with all my might to survive even now. The night previous, after returning home from my trash-collecting rounds, I’d discovered the yellow notice posted on my door, identical to the one that had been stuck to my neighbor’s door several days earlier: a final notice demanding payment of the delinquent survival tax.

I guess this is it, I’d thought to myself.

Resistance would only have led to me being taken away by force, and dying without taking advantage of the benefits offered by the Center, which was what had happened to my neighbor, Mr. Kim. And so last night, after standing there for a long time just staring at the yellow slip of paper, I finally decided to take the dignified option; I called the number on the paper and entered my personal information as instructed by the representative on the line.

“We’ll send our people out to you at 4:00 AM tomorrow,” the representative had told me. “Please refer to the information printed on the notice for further details.”

Yet, despite my own decision, here in the cold morning air, I found that I could scarcely relax enough to take each step.

A luxurious black sedan idled at the curb. Along its side, in red lettering, were emblazoned the words National Center for the Preservation of Human Dignity. Glasses took the driver’s seat, while Bare-eyes opened a rear door for me. I found the seat within soft and comfortable, though the aroma of new leather upset my empty stomach so much that it required nearly all my concentration to prevent myself from vomiting. Bare-eyes glanced over at me.

“Feel free to relax, ma’am,” he said. Then Glasses seemed to notice my discomfort, and he responded by switching on the radio. From the speakers, Handel’s “Sarabande” began to play, which helped ease the tension in my belly. I sat back and inhaled deeply.

Last night, after I’d finished making the call, I’d simply sat there. Numb. Death lay right around the corner, but it still seemed unreal to me. I’d had thirty hours left to live, and my first instinct had been to flip through my old photo albums—but then I’d asked myself if there was any point in getting emotional and wasting my remaining time crying. I chose instead to watch some TV . . . but found that it was all just so much meaningless noise. Ultimately, I retired to bed. All night long, my crumbling foam mattress squeaked each time I rolled over.

“We’re here.”

The voice that had woken me was unfamiliar. I must have dozed off, since I’d slept poorly the night before. It was a moment before I realized where I was. A fifteen-story silver building stood there, surrounded by carefully tended gardens. It looked as out of place as a still life in the middle of an abstract painting. Beside the car’s open door, Bare-eyes stood waiting. I took up my bag and exited the car to find a woman in a white uniform approaching from the silvery structure.

“Hello,” she said to me. “I’m in charge of giving new arrivals a tour of the Center’s facilities.”

She politely bowed to me before snapping a bracelet timer around my wrist. The time immediately started counting down:

24:00:00. 23:59:59. 23:59:58 . . .

I followed the young woman back into the building.

“Your room number is 704,” she informed me, handing over a keycard. “Inside, you’ll find a change of clothes laid out for you, and an information pamphlet all about the Center. At 7:00 AM an orientation meeting will be held. Please arrive ten minutes early. All the facilities in our Center are available twenty-four hours a day. I do hope you’ll enjoy your remaining time with us.”

Through the lobby, into an elevator, and all the way up to the seventh floor, the monotone of this woman’s speech had carried us forward. Now, at my door, she bowed once again before leaving me.

When she’d said “your remaining time” my eyes had immediately slipped down to look at the timer. Only two minutes had passed since my arrival.

In terms of both size and layout, the room was the sort of thing you’d find at a business hotel: small round table, mirror, bookcase, bed, tiny refrigerator, and a TV. Next to the bed stood a nightstand with a table lamp on it. The bathroom was so tiny I couldn’t even stretch out both my arms inside it, yet somehow it contained a mini tub, a sink, and a toilet. I tossed my bag aside and changed into the orange uniform provided. The pants had an elastic waistband, and like a night robe, the V-necked top cinched around my waist. The uniform was clean enough, although its color had faded from multiple washings. The number of my room was embroidered into the left breast of the top in navy blue thread—the number by which, instead of my name, I would be identified during my remaining time here.

I sat on the bed.

After my early start that morning, part of me longed to do nothing but lie back and relax. However, I’d be sleeping more than enough after tomorrow, wouldn’t I? Why not enjoy myself a little while I could? I found the pamphlet on the night table and read it: on the first floor could be found the information desk, assembly hall, and staff offices; on the second, a restaurant, a café, and a bar. On the third floor was a fitness center tailored to the elderly . . .

I set the pamphlet back down on the table, having decided that the café would be my first stop.

It looked spacious and grand, like a hotel lounge, though I detected a faint moldy smell within. After ordering a Caffè Americano, I took a seat by a window and took in the lovely view outside. The trees in the garden stood in such a tidy arrangement that they brought to mind a carefully set dinner table, and they were trimmed into such unnatural shapes that they appeared almost to be artificial. In the early winter sunlight, their leaves shone, bright and verdant.

The server arrived with my Americano and a slice of cake that I hadn’t ordered. “This carrot cake’s fresh from the oven. I brought a piece for you to try.”

With a slight smile, I thanked him, thinking, Why not enjoy myself? After all, everything in this place was free. I took a sip of my coffee from the fancy china cup. How long it had been since I’d tasted decent coffee—my eyes welled up, and I wondered if perhaps this cup might rejuvenate my taste buds, after the long corruption inflicted by years of instant coffee.

The carrot cake, however, remained untouched. I couldn’t just spend the next twenty-four hours eating, after all . . . and besides, I hadn’t fully recovered my appetite. The coffee was sufficient for now.

“Number 704, Number 1302, and Number 1408,” the ceiling speaker announced. “Please report immediately to the auditorium. The orientation is about to begin.”

Only then did I recall what the woman had told me about the orientation. No time for coffee now, I thought a little regretfully as I hurried out of the café.

About fifteen people sat in the orientation hall, waiting, and every single one of them cast a reproachful look my way as I came in. One scowling old woman pointed at the timer on her wrist. The white-uniformed staff showed me and the other two latecomers to our spots. Once everyone was seated, the lights dimmed out and at the front of the room a wall screen brightened. A map of the center’s layout appeared with a logo beside it, and soon some voice actor was explaining to us about how we were about to face the most dignified deaths possible for citizens at such a low-income level. Then the background music changed, turning from serious to upbeat.

The heater beside my chair rattled. It had been set to full blast, and the dry heat dulled my mind. Soon my eyes closed and I began to nod off. It was only when my head rolled backward that I woke, blinking. Near one corner of the room stood a staff member, glaring at me. I returned my attention to the front of the room. Onscreen, the president was devouring a bowl of beef soup at the Center’s restaurant, a big grin plastered across his self-important face. He made the thumbs-up gesture at the camera, and all the people around him onscreen clapped as if in worship of his thumb.

The video finished and the lights switched back on. By the time my eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness, a man in a blue lab coat was standing on a platform before the screen. Beside him, a mannequin lay in a hospital bed. A female staff member rose to her feet and began speaking through a microphone.

“Now, let’s walk through the procedure,” she cheerfully began. “Your timer will sound when there’s exactly one minute remaining. At zero, there will be a knock on your door. Make sure that you are present and ready in your room before the alarm goes off. When the second knock on the door follows, your door will open automatically. At that time, please remain calm and follow our staff’s instructions. If you feel ill, just inform them of it, and they will take care of you. When you enter the Room of Peaceful Resting, which is located in the basement, there will be a bed exactly like the one you see here. Once you are secured in position, one of our staff will administer the Fluid of Peaceful Resting into your veins.”

She gestured to the man in the lab coat. He displayed a syringe filled with a yellowy-green liquid and mimicked injecting it into the mannequin’s arm. My attention, however, remained focused instead on the leather restraints fastened around the mannequin’s neck and torso.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been put under general anesthesia,” the woman went on, “but all you need to do is simply count down from ten, and before you know it, you’ll be at eternal rest. That’s all. Thank you for your attention. I hope you enjoy your remaining time with us.”

She and the man in the lab coat bowed at the platform’s edge like a pair of stage actors.

Your remaining time . . .

It had to be something they’d been trained to say, but the phrase gave me a chill.

My knees ached from sitting for so long. As I limped out of the auditorium, my belly growled. A croissant and a bowl of onion soup at the French restaurant might just hit the spot—that was something I hadn’t had for years. The only trouble was that my stomach didn’t respond well to flour these days. I could always go to the Korean restaurant, I supposed: the beef soup hadn’t looked that bad, after all, and the president had seemed to like it. Actually, it’d be the perfect thing to have in this cold weather.

“Hello, ma’am! I saw you at the auditorium.”

It was an old man who approached me and said this, while my mouth was full of beef soup. His bald spot was slick with sweat, and the number 1408 was stitched onto his shirt.

“You don’t seem like the type to end up here,” he said with a laugh, exposing several gaps where teeth were missing.

Eyes as tiny as buttonholes, a nose slanted to the left, wrinkled old lips—I didn’t want to be mean, but he was ugly, and besides, his breath reeked like day-old fish. This was the last day of my life, and I had no time to waste on ugliness, so I leaned away from him. However, he failed to notice my annoyance, and took the seat across from me.

“What do you mean, ‘the type’? Anybody can find themselves here,” I said.

“You’re right, I never imagined myself ending up here, either.”

I rose to my feet, not even bothering to remove the spoon from the bowl. To be honest, my conscience was more troubled by the fact that I was leaving food unfinished than by my rudeness. This, I saw as my right: I could order every single dish in the restaurant, take just one bite from each, and no one had the right to say anything about it.

An old fellow with a beret on his head made eye contact with me and followed me to the door. Number 909. He pulled the door open for me, and I nodded my head a little.

“It’s a sunny day,” he observed with a smile. “Would you like to take a walk?”

This man had thick eyebrows and an attractively prominent nose. Likely he’d been a playboy in his younger days, but what could that matter now? We stepped outside into the cold together. A breeze shook the trees, their leaves almost fragrant of plastic.

“It’s too bad.” Number 909 said.

“What do you mean?” I gave him a questioning look.

“It’s too bad for a pretty lady like you . . . ”

Despite my age, the word pretty made me blush, and I quickly covered my cheeks with my hands.

“How much time do you have left? I have about three hours,” he said.

My heart sank. What comfort was there to be gotten from this? Suddenly, a commotion broke out over near the main entrance, as a woman struggled with two attendants.

“I don’t want to die!” she shouted. Her shirt had come undone, exposing her sagging breasts. “I have money! I said I could pay whatever tax—survival tax, death tax, whatever! My son, he lives in the United States. Call him! He’ll give you money!”

“We’re sorry, ma’am, but we already contacted him. He refused to pay on your behalf.”

Those last words left a bitter taste in my mouth. Often I’d been chided for not having children, but now, after hearing that, I was relieved: I couldn’t have handled that kind of heartbreak. As we watched, the men finally managed to drag the struggling woman back inside the Center.

Number 909 shook his head and sighed. “Damned survival tax. Low birthrates and aging were already serious problems when I was young, but I had no idea we’d end up living in a world where being poor was punishable by death.”

“But why live on? Why struggle? At least this way we get a quick and painless end, instead of slow starvation.”

“What if it’s not just a quick injection?” asked Number 909, lowering his voice.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve heard stories.” He glanced around to see if anyone was nearby. “I’ve heard the Center actually harvests our organs and sells them overseas for a profit.”

“That’s absurd. Why sell our worn-out old organs? Besides, if it were true, someone would’ve discovered it by now.”

Number 909 laughed and shook his head. “Who? It’s not like the dead can report their own painful deaths, and the government certainly wouldn’t tell on itself, would it?”

This was a man with three hours left to live. His mind must be bristling with anxiety, his fear practically at a boiling point. I had to be careful not to let such fears take hold of me. What had I been thinking? Expecting a nice date, in this place?

“Please excuse me,” I said. “I should go get some rest.”

“Wait, I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.” He took hold of my wrist. His palm was as rough as tree bark, but warm with life’s pulse. My first instinct was to pull myself free, but I found I couldn’t. I resolved to keep the dying man company a little longer, on condition that I would not let his words trouble me, and I nodded to him. He took my hand. I was startled by this, but didn’t resist.

Despite the cold wind, we walked hand in hand halfway around the garden.

At the end of our walk, he said, “Would you like to come up to my room?”

I was speechless—not at the boldness of his proposal, but because deep down, I’d been expecting precisely this. However, I didn’t want to seem cheap, desperate for a man’s touch.

“You’ve misunderstood me,” I said. “I’m not that kind of woman.”

“What do you mean, that kind?” Number 909 looked at me with a faint smile. He must’ve heard what I’d said at the restaurant. “Besides, what could we possibly do at our age? I’m just happy we met before dying. It would be nice to talk without having to worry about someone else overhearing us.”

He was right. At this point, we both were really too old to hook up. Still, I feigned hesitation for a moment, before assenting.

In his room, Number 909 took a bottle of tomato juice out of the fridge and offered it to me. We were both shabby and elderly, but it was still awkward being alone together like that. We should’ve just stayed in the garden, walking hand in hand, I thought. Number 909, who had chatted in such an easy and affable manner out in the garden, now seemed unable to stop staring at his timer. His face grew taut and serious.

“Why don’t we go and get something to eat?” I suggested.

“There’s no time,” he said, his tone desperate.

“No time? But you have at least two more hours.”

Beep, beep, beep. His alarm sounded.

“What’s going on?” I said.

Number 909 dropped his chin to his chest. “I’m sorry, I lied to you.”

Then the beeping stopped. The number on his wrist blinked a couple of times at 00:01:00 before changing to 00:00:59. Only when the two knocks came at the door did I completely understand what had happened. The door swung open and the uniformed attendants who entered barely noticed me as they took Number 909 away.

It all happened in a flash. I hurried to the doorway and watched how he was almost being dragged to the elevator. Number 909 looked back at me.

“My name is Hyung Joon Jeon!” he yelled. “Please, remember my name!”

When the elevator doors slid open, the attendants hauled Number 909—no, Hyung Joon Jeon—inside. Then the doors slid closed again, and Hyung Joon Jeon disappeared.

I clasped my hands together and doubled over, as if in apology. Tears trickled down my face. After a while, I managed to raise myself back up and return to my room.

Once inside, the first thing I did was draw a bath. My hands were shaking so badly that it took me a couple of tries before I managed to open the faucet. Hunched over in the warm water, I found Hyung Joon Jeon’s name repeating over and over in my mind. How pathetic. This was the last day of my life, and we’d spent not even an hour together, yet that time felt more precious to me than nearly all my other memories. I got out of the tub and wrapped myself with a towel. The steam had filled the mirror with fog, so that I had to wipe it away in order to see myself.

“Haven’t seen you in a long while,” I told my reflection. It really had been quite some time since last I had looked at myself under such bright lights. The woman in the reflection smiled, and I watched as the muscles of her face wrinkled her skin.

This is the last day of your life.

I dried myself and got back into my clothes. The wall clock read 11:00 PM The timer on my wrist was still counting down, and had just passed 17:55:24. Eighteen hours left. I lay down on the bed. The sheets were clean, the cleanest I’d touched in years. My eyes slowly closed. If each second were one centimeter, how long a line would eighteen hours make? I fell asleep, trying to work out the answer.

A knock at my door woke me. At the second knock, the door automatically opened, and two uniformed attendants entered. They were, perhaps, the same two that had dragged away Hyung Joon Jeon the day before. I remained calm and followed their directions. When we arrived at the basement, a solemn man greeted me. At the sight of him, my throat suddenly became parched, as if I were being choked with dry leaves. I was too nervous to ask for some water. The man asked me to climb up onto a metal bed resembling an operating table.

“Don’t be nervous,” the man said as the attendants buckled the restraints at my neck, wrists, waist, and ankles. He placed one hand on my shoulder, maybe to reassure me, but where I expected to see a syringe in his other hand, there was only a gleaming scalpel. “Since you’re so pretty for an old lady, I’ll have to be extra careful when I cut you up.” He grinned wide, revealing a set of teeth that were perfectly straight and even.

My eyes flickered open. My whole body was clammy with sweat. Even the sheet beneath me was wet. When I blinked, the image of my scarlet blood spraying out across the light blue staff uniforms flashed behind my eyelids. It had seemed so real; I could even remember the icy touch of the scalpel against my skin.

Fucking Hyung Joon Jeon.

The nightmare obviously stemmed from all the crap he’d said to me. There was no way that the government could be killing people so horrifically . . . and even if it was true, what could I do about it now? A familiar sense of defeat and frustration washed over me. I wanted to scream, but instead I just chewed on my lower lip until eventually I tasted my own blood and noticed that I’d been gripping the bedsheet so hard that I’d torn through it.

If I stayed in this room another instant, I’d lose my mind.

The restaurants were out of the question, since I had no appetite. In the end, I settled on a trip to the fitness center, up on the third floor. The treadmills were identical to the ones in the gym of the apartment complex that I’d lived in thirty years earlier. The Center had likely bought them back at that time and then done nothing with them since.

Did they really think we’d come here and exercise on the day before we were scheduled to die? Was that what I was about to do? Live up to their idiotic expectations?

I climbed up on the treadmill and pressed the button that said 3 km/h. With a feeble sound, the machine came to life. After only a few steps, though, I became short of breath and my armpits were sweaty. My heart was pounding. Still, as I walked I gradually began to feel like the woman I’d been, back when I was forty-two. I saw it all vividly: the running shoes I’d worn—the latest brand—as I swung my arms back and forth with each step. I even saw the droplets of sweat that had run down the sides of my face, and my ponytail bobbing, keeping pace with my steps.

Tears began to stream down my cheeks, and suddenly feeling dizzy, I stepped down off the treadmill. I sank to the floor, weeping.

After I calmed down, I thought maybe I should go enjoy some music instead. But when I reached the performance hall, the doors were closed. A sign read, “Concert Hall—No performance today.” The paper was yellowed with age. I made my way over to the small exhibition hall, which was crammed with replicas of famous paintings: Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and “Sunflowers,” Klimt’s “The Kiss,” Monet’s “Water Lilies,” and the like. None of them reassured me that I’d experience a so-called “dignified death.”

The pamphlet, with its nice photos and all, had given the impression that the Center was a decent place, but the performance hall hosted no performances, and the exhibition hall held only the sort of calendar pictures you’d see hanging in some drab café.

I glanced at my timer: 15:05:35. A whole fifteen hours left.

An empty laugh escaped my lips. This was all I could do with my time remaining, check my timer and wait for death? If so, what was the point in waiting?

I went down to the first floor information desk. Two women sat behind it with their hair neatly styled in the manner of flight attendants. I stepped toward the one with the wider, gentler-looking face, but then I paused.

Was this the correct decision? How could I know? My life hadn’t gone as planned, and I’d never known what the “right” choice had been when making so many major life decisions. While I stood there hesitating, the woman noticed and came over to me.

“Is anything wrong, Ms. 704?”

“No. It’s nothing.” I stammered. “It’s just . . . ”

“Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you need anything.”

I managed to mumble my thanks to her and began to turn away.

“And I hope you enjoy your remaining time with us,” she said to the back of my head.

That’s when it hit me. There was no way I could enjoy my remaining time. I turned back around and walked right up to her.

“Actually,” I said. “There is something. I want to move this up.” I pointed to my timer.

The woman smiled like a crescent moon and led me over to the desk. “You mean you want us to reset it, right?” she said, searching around for a pamphlet. Finding it, she passed it to me. It was identical to the one that was in my room. “This should tell you everything,” she said.

“Do I have to do it myself?” I said. It was one thing to want my timer advanced, but quite another to have to do it myself. The woman noticed the troubled expression on my face.

“Of course, we can do it for you,” she said with a sympathetic tone. “Do you know how much time you want, or would you like to think about it some more?”

“Five minutes,” I said. “That should give me enough time to get back upstairs.”

“Five minutes from now will be 14:29.” She looked at me. “Is that what you’d like?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Alright,” she said, and she began pressing buttons on my timer. “If you change your mind in the next five minutes, please come to us or press zero on your phone and just tell the operator you want the reset cancelled. You have the right to spend the remainder of your time with us freely in any way you like.”

I nearly laughed at that word, “freely,” but chose instead to nod my head and walk away. My stride was dignified, like a queen’s. All my life I had drifted along passively. Now, at least, in my final moments, I’d taken the initiative and made a decision for myself. Better late than never.

Back upstairs in my room, I drank some water and set about tidying my hair. I would remember Hyung Joon Jeon’s name, but I refused to share his fears. They’d give me a simple injection, and I’d feel no pain. I’d die in peace, retaining my dignity until the end.

My timer beeped while I was still in front of the mirror. Someone was knocking at my door. I sat down upon my bed, back straight and dignified, prepared to receive them.

Originally published in Korean in 여성작가 SF단편모음집.

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

About the Author

Youha Nam is a writer of diverse genres including SF, horror, romance, and children’s literature. In 2018, she won an award in the 5th Genre Fiction Short Stories in Science Contest with her story “The Woman of the Future.” That same year, she won the 5th Han Nakwon Science Fiction Award with “Blue Hair,” a story about the friendship between an alien boy and a girl from Earth.

Song Xiuyun

A Que, translated by Emily Jin

After dinner, Wu Huang makes a dash for her brain-control helmet, barely having the patience to bring her dirty dishes to the sink. Through the closed doors of her room, she can hear her mother complaining again, but thankfully the helmet has blocked out most of the noise, leaving only a faint trail of incomprehensible sounds.

She activates the helmet. Soft, spongy probes extend from the inwall of the helmet and attach themselves to her crown and temple. Transmitters installed within magnify her brain signals and connect them to her car parked in a garage a few hundred meters away.

Wedged in between a barren, rocky wasteland and a rapidly evolving metropolis, Wu Huang’s hometown is like a tiny ant caught in the crack between the most backward and the most progressive. Brain-controlled cars are no longer a novelty in the big cities, but in this tiny town, it’s still rare enough to be awe-inspiring. Every time Wu Huang picks up a passenger, they always gape at the empty driver’s seat.

Of course, no matter whether in a big city or a tiny town, brain-controlled cars are still a luxury. In order to buy her car, she not only poured all her savings into it, but also resorted to bank loans.

Tomorrow is Chinese New Year’s Eve. Everyone will be out partying and meeting friends—good opportunity for some quick money.

The black car glides smoothly out of the garage. Sprawled out on her bed, Wu Huang shifts into a more comfortable position. The holographic interface projected by the helmet captures the car’s surroundings as well. She sees that it has started to snow. Fluttering snowflakes, soft and pale like feathers, have already covered the ground in a thin silver veil.

The town had been snowless for as long as Wu Huang could remember. Assuming that this year will end up just as gloomy and bleak as every other year, the unexpected snowfall on the night before New Year’s Eve is a pleasant surprise. However, the snow also means bad news for business—there are very few people out on the streets and even fewer ride requests. She only managed to pick up a pitiful two passengers in total after hours of roaming around. The snow on the ground, gradually growing thicker as the night progresses, crunches beneath the wheels as she drives listlessly through the town. Not wanting to give up just yet, she speeds toward the Levitation Train Station.

She waits. A few passengers finally exit from the arrival gate, but the cheaper, old-fashioned taxis are evidently the more attractive option to them. She cranes her neck and gazes at the night sky from the low angle lens installed on the car roof. Snow seems to be emerging endlessly from the dark abyss of the sky. Speck by speck, they drift through the night, painted into a shade of pale orange by the streetlight. The roof lens, soon buried under the snow, can no longer reflect anything but a white blur.

Seems like business isn’t going anywhere tonight. Yet, as Wu Huang is about to head home, she hears a soft knock on her window.

Through the window lens, she sees a mother and her son.

The mother looks about sixty years old. Despite her small frame, she is carrying a huge backpack, her back hunching from the weight. The dim light of the streetlamp gives away the lines and creases on her weather-battered face. There’s a weary look in her eyes. Her son standing right next to her, however, is very different. Eyeing his tall, lean figure wrapped in a chic trench coat, Wu Huang decides that he’s fine-looking—just the perfect degree of elegance, not too over the top to be pretentious. Obviously another product of the city’s assembly line of elites.

But the indifference on his face and his relaxed body posture, in stark contrast with how the old woman’s back is bent from carrying the huge backpack, makes Wu Huang resent him instinctively.

“Cabbie, can you give us a ride?” The mother knocks on the car window again. Her heavy accent reminds Wu Huang of the mountain villages west of the town.

The mother’s vulgar address feels like a prick. The little bit of respect she harbors toward the mother disappears almost immediately.

“I’m not a cabbie,” she responds coldly, her voice echoing from the car speakers.

She glances at her phone again. 0 new requests.

“Then, um . . . ” hesitantly, the mother asks again, “Miss?”

“No. I’m done for the day.”

The mother mutters a disappointed “oh,” and turns to face her son. The son lowers his head to look at her, his face veiled in the shadow of the streetlamp, his expression indiscernible.

“Don’t worry, mom,” he says.

Wu Huang is now curious. “Where are you going?”

“To the West Bus Station.”

The West Bus Station is the same direction as Wu Huang’s home. If she drops them off on her way back, the money might be able to cover, at the very least, her electricity bills for all the driving tonight. As far as Wu Huang is concerned, however, the West Bus Station is so old and shabby that it might as well shut down for good. After the establishment of the Levitation Train Station, most of the town people have abandoned buses entirely.

“Are there still buses running if you go?” asks Wu Huang.

The mother’s eyes light up at once. She nods eagerly. “Yes, there’s one at ten-thirty.”

Wu Huang remembers now. There is one manually-operated bus leaving from the station every day at night. Its route, weaving through the creases of the mountain and following the rugged national highway, makes several stops at the little villages along the way. This single running bus is the last struggling breath of the moribund station.

“Hop on then, I’ll take you there,” says Wu Huang.

The mother won’t budge. “For how much?” she asks.

“A hundred . . . a hundred and fifty.”

Immediately, the mother backs off from the car. “This is too much. It only costs ten yuan per person to take the shuttle. Twenty yuan for two!”

“Well, do you see any shuttles out here?”

In the falling snow, the shuttle stop seems utterly abandoned.

“But a hundred and fifty is way too expensive! How about sixty?”

The seemingly endless bargaining is beginning to annoy Wu Huang. Several times, the old woman’s stinginess gives Wu Huang the urge to just leave her alone and drive away. Finally, they reach a satisfactory conclusion: since Wu Huang is going home anyways, she will drop the passengers off at where she lives, and they will travel the last two kilometers on foot.

The mother and the son climb into the back seat. The mother keeps on breathing into her palms to warm her frozen fingers. When she lowers her head, Wu Huang can see that her crown is dotted with specks of white. Wu Huang can’t tell if it is from gray hair or from the snow. Maybe both.

Wu Huang suddenly realizes that during their entire bargain just now, the mother and the son had been standing out there in the blizzard while she was physically sitting at home, wrapped in a warm blanket. They must’ve been freezing. Struck by a pang of guilt, she turns up the heat. “Is the temperature okay?”

“Mmhm,” answers the mother. “Let’s go. We want to get there early.”

It’s Wu Huang’s turn this time to gape at her. The mother has been unusually calm since she hopped aboard, not showing even the least bit of surprise at the lack of a driver. Wu Huang starts the engine. “Where did you come back from?” She asks as she projects her face onto the car monitor—this is as close as it will get to a real life conversation.

“From Beijing.” There’s an edge of pride in the mother’s voice.

Beijing? No wonder. “To visit family?” asks Wu Huang.

“To take my son home,” the mother throws a quick glance at the man next to her. “For New Year.”

The son, sitting with his back completely straight, nods in agreement.

Wu Huang carefully studies the young man through the high precision lens in her car as she drives. He appears just a little over thirty. His sunken cheeks make him look slightly worn out, but his face is clean-shaven, showing that he regularly takes care of his appearance. For most of the time he remains completely silent, his expression a mixture of politeness and apathy—again, typical of a white collar from Beijing.

“What do you do for a living?” asks Wu Huang.

The son only gives her a tight little smile in response.

The mother quickly interjects. “He’s a designer who works from home for Domain Co.—have you heard of the name before?”

Of course Wu Huang has. Domain Co. is the developer of the mind operation system, the foundation of brain-controlled automobile technology.

Now she finds herself looking at the mother and her son differently. “That’s really impressive!” she exclaims.

“Yeah! My son has always been the pride of our entire village.” The mother’s expression livens up almost immediately. “He’s been away for seven years. At last, he can celebrate New Year at home this year!”

“Seven years? That’s a lot,” responds Wu Huang. “But since he’s the one working in Beijing, aren’t you supposed to visit him there instead? Why are you bringing him back?”

The mother pauses. A look of sorrow emerges on her face.

“My son . . . he’s sick.”

Song Xiuyun’s heart ached upon hearing that her son has fallen ill. Tie Zhu, who brought this piece of news back to the village, was not very helpful either. He scratched his head and explained, “How am I supposed to know? I ran into Ah Chuan in the supermarket and we chatted for a bit. He seemed very ill—I mean, he couldn’t even make it through a sentence without coughing. I don’t know what happened to him, though. He doesn’t usually get in touch with us. Maybe because he’s been making such a fortune . . . oh, also, don’t ever call me Tie Zhu again. I go by James in the city.”

So Song Xiuyun had to call her son again. After a hasty “I’m fine,” Li Chuan said he needed to go.

“Come back home for New Year, will you? You’ve been away for so many years . . . ” Song Xiuyun quickly added before he could hang up.

“I don’t think so,” responded Li Chuan.

“I’ll come visit you, then.”

“Nonsense! You’ve never even left the village before, how on earth are you going to make it to the city?”

Song Xiuyun thought long and hard after the phone call. Finally, she made a decision. She came to Tie Zhu holding one of the express mail receipts that Li Chuan once sent home and pointed to the unfamiliar address. “Tie—I mean, James—would you please help me buy a ticket? I’ll pay you back. I need to take my son home.”

She walked the long, winding mountain road, squeezed herself into the back of a loaded motor tricycle to reach the national highway, pleaded until a passing truck agreed to take her to the provincial bus station and took the bus to get to the Levitation Train Station downtown. Finally, she boarded the train to Beijing. The only problem was that all the stewed meat and pickled vegetables she packed for her son were confiscated at the security check. All they let her bring was a small bag of salted sunflower seeds. Seeing how her carefully prepared gifts had all gone to waste, she erupted in anger and went into a heated argument with the security guards. Only did she stop when the guards threatened to throw her out. Wiping away tears, she gazed at the food mournfully as the guards swept them to the side like bags of trash.

She arrived in Beijing at last. Everything about the capital city was beyond her imagination. It was even different from what she had seen on TV. All the people here relied on brain-controlling technology: wearing the helmet, they could drive cars and do work while lying in their beds. She supposed that was why the streets were a lot less crowded than expected.

The day was dawning when she walked out of the Beijing Central Station. Exhausted after an entire night spent on the train, her body was trembling from the fatigue. She felt like a thin thread, hanging dangerously, that could snap in half any second. She found an open breakfast stall and ordered some rice congee. Twenty yuan for one bowl? When we make breakfast back home, we always put out an entire pot and all the villagers helped themselves to congee for free, she wondered with awe. Well, guess this is Beijing. She counted the bills in her pocket, then pulled out two ten yuan notes carefully and handed them over to the beefy shop owner. The shop owner threw her a contemptuous glance as he snatched the money from her hand.

Song Xiuyun was not a stranger to that look. It’s fine, she thought. I’m about to see my son—

The thought of seeing Li Chuan soon sent warmth and strength spreading through her body. Rejuvenated at once, she finished the congee in one gulp and stood up. She hailed a cab. When she was about to bargain a price—in the same way that it was done back in her village—the driver interrupted and told her that she would need to pay exactly however much the meter indicated. Her eyes were stuck to the meter throughout the car ride; her heart pounded as the number steadily grew.

After what seemed like the longest journey, finally, Song Xiuyun and her two massive travel bags were dropped off at the gate of a fancy-looking residential compound. The guard, somehow very unwilling to believe that she had family who lived here, wouldn’t even bother to check the residents’ list for “Li Chuan” until a kind neighbor stepped in to help.

The guard called Li Chuan’s apartment through the access control system. “Who is this?” After a long time, a voice answered lazily.

Song Xiuyun squeezed forth and pressed her lips to the speaker. “Li Chuan, it’s mom. I’m here to visit you.”

The person on the other end of the line went silent. The guard threw Song Xiuyun a suspicious glare. Thankfully, before the guard could speak again, Li Chuan’s voice rang through the speaker, “Give me a minute. I’ll come get you.”

“A minute” turned out to be half an hour. When Li Chuan showed up at the guardhouse at last, tears rushed into Song Xiuyun’s eyes. Quickly, she lowered her head to hide the tears, afraid that someone would make fun of Li Chuan for it.

But a hasty “let’s go” was all Li Chuan said to her. He turned around and began to walk toward the apartment building.

Song Xiuyun hurried to catch up with his steps, dragging her luggage behind.

“It sounds like your son isn’t exactly . . . the agreeable kind.” says Wu Huang. Forgetting that she’s wearing a brain-control helmet, she instinctively lowers her voice, as if to whisper into the mother’s ears.

She regrets it at once. Thanks to technology, the surround speakers in the car project everything she says with clarity, so if the mother can hear her, the son can, too. She quickly throws the son a glance, wanting to see whether he’s mad; yet he only sits there, with the same tight smile on his face, not seeming to mind a bit.

“No, he’s a good boy!” hurriedly, the mother defends her son. “It’s probably just because we haven’t seen each other for too long.”

“Didn’t you say he was sick? He doesn’t seem sick to me.”

The mother nods. “Yeah. When I first moved into my son’s apartment, I was so worried for him. But he looked healthy, and he was fit for sure—he could carry huge water buckets up the stairs without breaking a sweat! Except that . . . well, he spent most of the time alone in the study, and he rarely left the room. After spending a few days with him, I stopped worrying. It’s all Tie Zhu’s fault! He always exaggerates everything.”

The car merges into the main lane. The blinding snow has turned the streetlamps into blurred orbs of light, lining the street like trees. Wu Huang speeds into the light forest. The turbulence caused by the car’s sudden acceleration sends more snowflakes into the air, swirling as they descend.

Thanks to the empty roads, Wu Huang can still hold up the conversation without having to pay too much attention to traffic. “How was living in Beijing for you?”

“It was hard to adjust,” says the mother as she shifts into a more comfortable position in the back seat. The heater in the car seems to have warmed her up. “You city folks are so different. For example, take this thing—this brain-controlled car—everyone in the city owns one of these. And robots, too! Brain-controlled robots that can act just like humans. They can do everything for you. Socializing, talking . . . even playing sports!”

Wu Huang nods. Domain Co.’s latest product, the brain-controlled robot, is a must-buy for couch potatoes. There was a time when she went to a party of five where three of the attendants had robots come in their stead. The two humans and three robots had a wonderful meal-and-conversation together. Of course, the robots did not need to eat. After the party, they packed some food to go for their respective owners. Wu Huang also heard that you could put the robot on auto-follow mode: wherever the owner goes, the robot tails behind. Quite fascinated by the technology, Wu Huang has planned on buying one herself after she pays off her car debt.

The mother vents on. “The cooking machine makes your dinner; the cleaning robot cleans your home. Why, apart from eating and emptying your intestines, this thing—” she points an index finger at her own head, “—can do everything for you. What’s the use of having arms and legs, then?”

“It’s just more convenient this way.” Wu Huang sheepishly explains.

“Convenient, yes, but it’s still a bit . . . ” The mother tries to find a word, but then she gives up. “I can’t describe. It looks as if everything is better, but it still makes me feel weird.”

She’s probably trying to say that a life too “convenient” can make people lazy, thinks Wu Huang. True, many people have brought up this point before, but this is how things work in the modern era—people need to adjust to the advancements in technology, not the other way around.

“It’s probably hard for you to adjust, isn’t it?” asks Wu Huang.

The mother nods. “I asked my son to come home with me, but he wouldn’t agree. So I stayed with him for a few days. It was extremely boring, though—I was rather scared going into the city alone and I didn’t know anyone else in Beijing, so all I could do was stay at home.” She pauses for a second. “Oh, right, my son also owned a cat, Bean. But whenever I tried to play with Bean, like I do with all the countryside cats, it ignored me. It lay lazily on the balcony all day and did nothing. I guess even cats are different in the city. Living in Beijing is no better than living in prison!”

“Doesn’t your son spend time with you?”

“Well, he was busy. He spent every day locked up in the study. I wanted to take care of him, so I cooked all his favorite childhood dishes: stir-fried spicy chicken, fish stew with radish . . . robots couldn’t possibly do that for him! I bet he missed my cooking—he always finished everything I made. He only ate in the study, though . . . ”

The son sits in silence as the two women converse, his face expressionless, as if he is entirely unaware that he is the protagonist of their story.

There is a tinge of melancholy in the mother’s voice. “Apart from cooking, there wasn’t much that I could do for him. I couldn’t even understand what his work entailed—let alone help him! When he worked, I would go on walks in the living compound. Our apartment was on the first floor. My son also rented a spare basement room in the corner of the parking garage.”

The car comes to a pause at the red light. “For extra storage space?” asks Wu Huang halfheartedly.

“I didn’t know,” the mother responds. “He wouldn’t let me in.”

Song Xiuyun stopped before the door to the basement. The parking lot’s light shone on her face diagonally, illuminating every wrinkle and spot on the left side of her face, yet leaving the right side of her face in the dark shadow. The sharp contrast accentuated the doubt and uneasiness in her expression as she mulled over whether she should enter.

She has been here for almost ten days. Familiar with almost all the rooms of Li Chuan’s apartment, she has yet to explore the basement. Whenever she asked Li Chuan about it, he would tell her that he stored all his discarded works there—it’s my privacy, in his words, and she was not allowed to enter that room.

Privacy . . . Song Xiuyun couldn’t quite grasp what that word meant. Back in the village, every family built their house along the feet of the mountain. All the houses, clumped together, were as close to each other as one could imagine. No one locked their door; when someone wanted to pay their neighbor a visit, they didn’t even need to knock. But now I’m in Beijing, she reminded herself once again. The city folks were a different kind. They built skyscrapers that blocked the sun and hid in cocoons of iron and glass. When you could do everything by wearing a helmet and commanding robots, why bother even speaking to other people? Her son, now, has also become one of them; he was an art person—oh, artist. Even though she didn’t understand, she would stay away from the basement room as long as it made her son happy.

Instead of reaching for the doorknob, Song Xiuyun knocked the door quickly. The sound of the knock gently echoed through the corridor. She waited. No one came to answer.

When she returned to the apartment, Bean was just waking up from a nap. Basked in the last glow of the setting sun, the black cat arched its back and then reached forward to stretch out its muscles. It turned its head and shot her a look, leaped off the windowsill and lazily strolled into the bedroom.

Look at it! thought Song Xiuyun in astonishment, not only do these city cats not catch mice—like what cats are supposed to do—but they don’t even want to come near humans. She understood that Bean didn’t trust her because she was a stranger, but she was surprised to find out that Bean didn’t like Li Chuan either, after living together for six years. Once, after Li Chuan refilled the cat food, he reached out to pat Bean’s head, but it evaded his hand. Only after Li Chuan stepped away did it approach the food bowl cautiously to eat.

“All this city nonsense!” she muttered to herself.

As usual, Li Chuan was in his study again. He didn’t even bother turning on the living room lights. Song Xiuyun emptied the bag of sunflower seeds onto a plate and brought it to the study. The instant she pushed the door open, she remembered privacy all of a sudden, and quickly turned the push into a light knock.

Li Chuan closed his book. “What’s the point of knocking if you’ve entered already?”

“Sorry, I forgot . . . it won’t happen next time,” explained Song Xiuyun, embarrassed. She set the plate next to Li Chuan’s books and looked at her son eagerly, “Here, have some sunflower seeds while you work. I salted them myself. You used to love it when you were a child.”

Li Chuan threw a glance at the plate, and then looked up at Song Xiuyun. “Also, didn’t I tell you to never go near the basement? I beg you to respect my privacy!”

“How did you—” Song Xiuyun’s eyes widened. Hasn’t Li Chuan been up here this entire time? But she stopped herself before she could blurt out the question. “—I’m sorry. I won’t go there again, I promise.”

Upon seeing shock and nervousness on her face, Li Chuan sighed, and his voice was gentle again. “What’s the matter?”

“Well, Chinese New Year is coming soon, and you haven’t prepared anything yet. Your fridge and kitchen cabinets are all empty. I checked the weather for tomorrow and it’s supposed to be sunny. Do you want to go grocery shopping with me?”

Li Chuan frowned. “Aren’t you leaving soon? You’re not even here for New Year, what’s the point in buying groceries?”

“You still need to eat, though. Or, maybe . . . ” Song Xiuyun paused. Her gaze was fixed on the man in front of her—her son. She could hear her own voice, trembling as she pleaded with him, “Come home with me for New Year. It’s been seven years since you last came home. Remember your nephew? He’s all grown up now! And—”

Li Chuan cut her short. “I’m never going back there again! I already told you this when I left home. Just forget about it, will you?”

Song Xiuyun did not respond. After a few seconds of silence, she switched on the lamp. Warm brightness lit up the room at once. “Good for your eyes.” she explained, then turned around to leave.

Li Chuan picked up his book, but hesitated as he was about to flip the page. “Wait,” he muttered. “I guess tomorrow we should go shopping after all.”

Song Xiuyun nodded, almost ecstatically. The sun was already down. Carefully closing the study’s door behind her, she realized that she had shut out the only source of light in the apartment. The attempt to find the light switch on the living room wall was unsuccessful—her eyesight has been deteriorating since many years ago, making seeing in the dark even more difficult. She whispered, “Open the light.”

The system did not respond.

“Turn on the light, please.”

The gentle glow of the overhead lamp filled the entire living room at once. What appeared to be an ordinary wall facing the entryway was, in fact, an enormous monitor screen. The cartoon figure of a small robot emerged on the screen. Li Chuan had explained the concept of the smart home to Song Xiuyun, but she could never get used to how these things would pop up out of nowhere.

“How do you feel trapped in that wall? It certainly looks uncomfortable.” said Song Xiuyun to the robot.

The robot lowered its head, as if contemplating her question, and then looked up and grinned at her. “My home is this monitor wall, just like how your home is this apartment.”

“This isn’t my home. My home is somewhere far away. Have you ever heard of a village called Hongan?”

A map appeared on the screen, marked by over twenty red dots. “Here are all the Hongan villages in the world. Which one is your home?”

Almost pressing her face onto the screen, Song Xiuyun examined the dots one by one, “I can’t tell. My home is west of Beijing. There’s a river that passes through, we call it the Guanyin Temple River, because there’s a temple in our village dedicated to the Guanyin Bodhisattva. Other villages alongside the river, though, have named it something else . . . ”

As she murmured to herself, the red dots gradually disappeared one by one, leaving none but one. The map zoomed in, displaying a detailed satellite map of a small mountain village. Bungalows after bungalows with weather-battered walls spread out along the mountain range; wheat fields, high and low, surrounded the buildings. Only parched stalks were left in the fields, as the wheat had been harvested already back in the fall.

“Look, this is my home,” Song Xiuyun pointed to one of the small bungalows with its back against the mountain.

“Beautiful place,” the robot nodded in agreement.

Song Xiuyun could not tear her gaze away from the map. “It’s almost time to plant the cole crops . . . ” she exclaimed, after a long silence. Then, she sighed softly and headed down the hallway toward her bedroom. The robot trailed behind her. As she walked into the room, it stopped at the edge of the wall. The screen and the living room lights dimmed.

The next morning, Song Xiuyun and her son headed to the mall together. However, as they arrived at the subway station’s security check, Li Chuan suddenly halted. “The subway is too crowded. Let’s take a taxi instead.”

“But we’re here already,” said Song Xiuyun. “You work so hard all the time. Why waste the money on a taxi? Besides, many people must’ve left the city for vacation already. ”

Yet Li Chuan had already begun walking in the direction of the exit. Song Xiuyun, confused, could only trot along behind him.

It was lunchtime already after they’ve done the shopping. “We probably won’t be able to eat until hours later if we go home now and cook. How about we eat out?” suggested Song Xiuyun, carefully. “You’ve been eating my cooking for a while anyways, I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to try something else once in a while.”

Li Chuan shook his head. “We should go back.”

“Saving money is important, but there are times when you need to spend, too! I have cash. It’s my treat today.”

Li Chuan was quiet for a while.

“But I really want to have the stir-fried spicy chicken that you always make for lunch.” he said.

“Well, I obviously can’t compare to restaurant chefs . . . ” Song Xiuyun was stunned by Li Chuan’s compliment, but nonetheless she cheered up immediately. “Let’s go home, then!”

At the mall’s exit, they bumped into a couple holding hands. As Li Chuan’s gaze fell on one of the two men, his body suddenly went rigid. Grabbing Song Xiuyun’s hand, he pulled her toward another door, avoiding the man’s sight.

The man, however, had spotted him already. “Ah Chuan?” he blurted out.

With nowhere else to run or hide, Li Chuan turned around awkwardly to face him. “What a coincidence,” Li Chuan squeezed out a smile. “Seeing you two here.”

With an almost embarrassed look on his face, the man let go of his boyfriend’s hand. “I heard that you were . . . ”

“I’m doing fine!” Li Chuan cut him short.

The man looked at Song Xiuyun. “Ayi1? It’s been so long since I last saw you. Did you move to Beijing?”

Song Xiuyun searched in her memory. She gradually recalled a boyish face, from years ago, that looked identical to the chic-looking man in front of her. “Oh, it’s you!” she exclaimed. “I’m only here to visit Li Chuan. And you . . . ”

The man has a look of melancholy on his face. Before he could respond, though, Li Chuan spoke up first. “We need to go now,” said Li Chuan, without looking at the man. “It was . . . nice running into you.”

He grasped Song Xiuyun’s arm and walked away. Song Xiuyun could hear the man shouting Li Chuan’s name, but he did not pause nor look back.

Li Chuan had been sitting in his armchair, unmoving, after they got home. Not even bothering to turn on the lights, he brooded silently in the shadow of the large bookshelf.

“Ah Chuan,” Song Xiuyun started. “Mom is here for you if you want to—”

Her voice trailed off as she realized that there were so many things about her son that she did not understand.

Perhaps she never will.

She turned her head to look out the window. Behind the glass was an entirely foreign world: skyscrapers like trees in a forest, the earth cut to tiny, irregularly shaped pieces by crisscrossing roads that were packed with cars, even the air was occupied by a maze of maglev train tracks. She tilted her head until her gaze could finally soar past the skyscrapers and reach the sky, yet the sky was gray, too, like the iron and concrete that had plagued every inch of this city.

“Son, maybe we should go back—”

Once again, she couldn’t finish her sentence, because Li Chuan, unexpectedly, collapsed into her arms.

For a second he seemed just like the boy from almost a decade ago. The only difference was, this time he was unconscious.

The mother’s story comes to a pause. Silence fills the car. The heavy snow, painted into a faint orange by the glow of the car’s headlight, is blown onto the windshield by the howling wind.

“You mentioned that you’ve met him before,” says Wu Huang. “The man in the shopping mall, I mean.”

“Yes. Seven years ago, when my son came home for New Year, he brought him back as well.”

Wu Huang nods. The mother’s answer is almost exactly what she had guessed.

“We all thought that he was just my son’s friend from Beijing, you know, those city people always want to come and see how New Year is celebrated in the countryside,” explains the mother. “I was thrilled that he brought a friend home. I did all I could to serve our guest—you should’ve seen the food! The living conditions in the countryside did not suit our guest well, but in general everyone was still happy, until . . . ”

Wiping the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand, the mother continues. “My son told me everything the day before New Year. Having lived in the isolated, conservative village my whole life, I did not know that . . . there were other possibilities. I argued with my son and demanded that he ask his . . . his ‘friend’ to leave. But my son refused. They left together overnight. I was alone for New Year that year, as well as all the seven years to follow.”

The mother pauses to look at the son. The son, still smiling, pats her hand. “Don’t worry, mom. Don’t worry.” he says.

Wu Huang doesn’t know how to comfort her. “It’s all in the past. See, your son is finally home for this New Year!” she says carefully.

“Yeah, it’s all in the past . . . ”

“Right, what happened after he fainted?” Wu Huang remembers the mother’s story. “Was he sent to the hospital?”

“No.”

The unconscious man felt as heavy as a rock in Song Xiuyun’s arms. She tried to splash his face with cold water, but he wouldn’t open his eyes. Helpless, she remembered the robot who lived in the wall. Li Chuan had said that it took care of everything.

“Turn on the lights, please!” she yelled.

The study brightened up at once. The robot appeared on the wall. “Can I help you?”

“My son fainted. Call the hospital now.”

“There’s no need to worry. If anything happens to Master, the system will contact Doctor Freeman immediately,” said the Robot. “Doctor Freeman is on his way here. He is Master’s primary care doctor and good friend.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Just wait.”

“You mean that I should stand here and do nothing while my son is lying on the ground?”

“If you’re bored, I can put something on TV.” The robot grinned.

“Are you nuts?”

“I was simply trying to be humorous, like you humans.”

Doctor Freeman was a middle-aged American man, short and stocky, with a receding hairline. He wore a jean jacket on top of a pair of sweatpants. It turned out that he had the highest level of security clearance to Li Chuan’s home—meaning that he could enter the apartment on his own whenever he came around.

“Ms. Song? Li Chuan has talked about you quite a lot.” He nodded at Song Xiuyun and greeted her in broken Chinese. “Don’t worry. Your son will be fine.”

To Song Xiuyun’s bewilderment, Doctor Freeman left right away without double-checking. He even had the audacity to grab a handful of sunflower seeds on his way out. Thankfully, the doctor, however irresponsible he may seem, was not wrong—a few minutes later, Li Chuan opened his eyes.

“What’s the matter? Are you okay? Do you want to go to the hospital?”

“I’m fine,” Li Chuan stood up and pressed his thumb hard into his temple. “I guess I was just too tired from work.”

The same thing never happened again, but Song Xiuyun noticed that Li Chuan had been spending more and more time in his study. Whenever she knocked on the shut door, though, he would always shout through the door, “Mom, I’m fine.”

Gradually, Song Xiuyun stopped worrying. Perhaps he had fainted that day because of the couple they ran into at the mall, she thought. Young people, they are so dramatic!

“But . . . son,” she hesitantly spoke up one day as she stood at the door of the study. “You’re going to turn thirty-three when New Year rolls around. Isn’t it time for you to consider making a family?”

Li Chuan lapsed into silence. After a while, he responded by throwing a question back at her. “Why do people have to make families?”

“Well, everyone needs a family.” Song Xiuyun was taken aback. “You know, you marry and have children . . . ”

“And then end up like you?”

Song Xiuyun’s hand stiffened. She knew what her son was referring to—her husband had left home almost twenty years ago. Apart from some money that he sent back each year, there was almost nothing to remind her that he even existed. Her marriage was not built from love. For all these years, it left nothing but a bitter taste in her mouth.

“I’m sorry.” Li Chuan muttered.

Song Xiuyun pondered over her words, and spoke again. “I know, I’ve never been to school, and I’m nowhere near a perfect role model. But I still think that people shouldn’t end up alone. Especially when you spend all your time at home. When you are older—when you are my age, you will be . . . lonely.”

“True, that was the case decades ago, before there was Internet. It’s different now. You can make friends online, live with robots and still have fun when you’re old. A lot of married couples don’t want kids; many more people are living alone. We have the freedom to do whatever we want! Mom, I’m not asking you to understand, but please don’t impose your values on me!”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Song Xiuyun gently. “But I only hoped that there would be someone around to support you, to take care of you when you are sick and give you a hug when you are feeling down.”

The study fell silent again.

“Mom, I still have you.” Li Chuan’s voice was muffled when he finally spoke. “You can give me a hug.”

Wu Huang sits up from her bed and glimpses at the shut door of her bedroom through the cracks on the brain-control helmet. Maybe her mother is knitting sweaters again. She has told her mother that she would never wear one of those old-fashioned, dorky sweaters, but her mother, despite agreeing to never knit for her again several times, has always attempted to pick up the tradition every year when winter comes around.

She looks at her closet. For some reason, for the first time in her life, she is starting to find those hideous sweaters rather cute.

Distracted by the sweaters, however, she does not see another car coming around the corner. Almost scrambling to avoid the collision, she makes a sharp turn, throwing the passengers into the side door. The mother grasps onto the front seat tightly with one hand and attempts to protect her son with the other.

“Don’t worry, mom,” whispers the son.

“I’m so sorry . . . ” stutters Wu Huang.

“It’s fine.”

Wu Huang’s neighborhood is right ahead, but instead of pulling over, she speeds down the road toward the West Bus Station.

The relationship between mother and son has finally changed for the better after that day. Relieved upon seeing that Li Chuan was in good health, Song Xiuyun decided to go home at last after New Year.

Despite the boredom, she was cautious not to interfere with her son’s work. She has taken on the habit of going on strolls alone near the residential compound. An amateur dance group—mostly comprised of women her own age, occasionally a robot or two would join—gathered at the gate every evening and danced together to upbeat music. However, too shy to strike up a conversation, she usually lingered by the side and watched the dancers twirl and twist, until dinnertime arrived.

The evening was windy, leading the dance group to disperse earlier than usual. When Song Xiuyun hurried through the hallway and pushed open the apartment door, however, she was stunned to find Li Chuan sitting on the sofa with Bean in his arms. It was even more unusual that Bean did not only purr, but was also rubbing its head on Li Chuan’s chin. And this was the cat that seemed to despise everyone in the family!

Just when she was about to make a comment on Bean, she saw Li Chuan’s face.

The man in front of her looked different as well. Wan and weary, with sunken cheeks and pale lips, he reminded her of what Tie Zhu had said to her back at home: your son seemed very ill. But she remembered checking up on him before she left for dance, and he appeared just fine.

“You’re back early,” exclaimed Li Chuan, as he struggled to stand up. Gently dropping Bean onto the floor, he headed down the hallway.

Song Xiuyun caught up with him, as he was yanking open the closed door of the study. “Are you alright? Do you want me to call that Doctor . . . Doctor F.?”

“I’m fine,” said Li Chuan, after a short pause. “I think I just have a stomach flu. I’ll sleep it off.” He hurried into the study.

In that brief second, Song Xiuyun thought that she had seen something unusual: the silhouette of a person, standing in the corner of the study. But the door was shut in her face just when she was about to take a closer look.

Wu Huang carefully examines the man’s face through the lens overlooking the back seat. As if he has sensed her gaze, he lifts his head, looks into the camera, and smiles back at her.

Something doesn’t feel right, thinks Wu Huang.

“Well,” she clears her throat awkwardly and turns her eyes away. “Didn’t you plan to come home after New Year? What brought you back so early?”

“I figured that it’s better to spend New Year at home.”

“Then when is your son returning to Beijing? Given how busy work is, I suppose that he doesn’t get to stay home for long.”

The mother chuckles. “Actually, my son agreed to move back home. He already sold his apartment in Beijing, and he’s not returning there ever again. Besides, Internet is going to be available at our village soon. He can just work from home, and it will all be the same!”

Wu Huang glances at the son. Her heart suddenly sinks.

A week from New Year, as Song Xiuyun busily cleaned the house and prepared for the festival, Li Chuan came up to her. “Mom, I’m going on a business trip. I’ll be back in a few days. Just wait for me at home.”

“Don’t you always work from home?” asked Song Xiuyun, surprised, “New Year is right around the corner, why are you going on a business trip now?”

“It’s the company’s order. Our international clients don’t celebrate Chinese New Year anyways.”

“Too bad for them . . . ” muttered Song Xiuyun. “Well, I guess work is more important.” She slumped into a chair.

Li Chuan stood next to her, his lips pressed tightly together, as if he was trying to find something to say.

“When are you coming back, then? Can you make it home on New Year’s Eve?”

“Probably,” said Li Chuan. He glanced around the room, as if he was reluctant to go.

“It’s only going to be few days, right?” Song Xiuyun tried to comfort him, “Don’t worry, I’ll look after the home for you. When you come back, we can celebrate together.”

Li Chuan’s gaze landed on Song Xiuyun’s face. For an instant, she saw sadness in his eyes. Just when she was about to speak, Li Chuan took a step forward and wrapped his arms around her shoulders.

Song Xiuyun stiffened, part out of shock and part out of the delight that her son was, perhaps, finally willing to open up to her. “What’s the matter, Ah Chuan?” she asked, a little awkwardly.

Li Chuan did not respond. After another minute, he let go of her and turned to grab his suitcase. “I’m going to head out. See you soon.”

“I’ll walk you down.”

“No, it’s fine. Just wait for me at home. I’ll be back before New Year’s Eve.”

Bean, perched on the windowsill, stretched its neck to look at Li Chuan as he closed the door behind him. The room fell silent. An unsettledness gloomed Song Xiuyun’s heart. She walked over to the window and gazed out, but all she could see were tall buildings. Her son, as tiny as an ant compared to those giants of concrete and iron, has disappeared into the world outside.

The next day, in a desperate attempt to find something to do—so that she could forget about that unsettledness—Song Xiuyun went down to the basement with a broom. She knew that Li Chuan didn’t want her to go into the room, but at least she could clean the hallway.

Almost immediately, she spotted litter: sunflower seed peels, scattered on the floor near the door.

Li Chuan never ate the plate of sunflower seeds that she brought to his study. The only person who seemed to like them was Doctor Freeman, who grabbed a handful on his way out when he came over the other day.

Does that mean Doctor Freeman had come to the basement after he left the apartment? But why? Song Xiuyun wondered as she took the trash down to the trash room.

A custodian was in the trash room, skimming through bags of trash and looking for misplaced recyclable items. Song Xiuyun recognized the trash bag in the custodian’s hands: it was from her household.

“Thank you for working so hard over the holiday,” she greeted the custodian.

“No, it’s not hard work, I just don’t like seeing things go to waste.” The custodian smiled at her. “Nowadays people throw away everything. Especially this family!” She showed Song Xiuyun the trash bag that she had just opened up, “I can tell it’s from the same household because they are the only ones who use this kind of trash bag. They throw away unfinished food every day. See? This is from yesterday. Why bother cooking something that they can’t finish?”

Song Xiuyun’s heart sank. She peered into the trash bag, half-hoping that she would see something different, but no—stir-fried spicy chicken, fish stew with radish . . . those were exactly the dishes that she cooked for Li Chuan before he left. He told her to bring them into his study, as usual, and promised that he would eat on his own. Judging from the amount of food in the trash bag, it seemed that Li Chuan did not even take a single bite.

The rotten odor permeated the air. It made her head dizzy. “You mean, all this is thrown into trash every day?” she murmured.

“I mean every meal.” said the custodian as she fumbled through the trash can. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all wasted! You see? Back in the time when I was a kid, wasting food like this could put you in jail . . . ”

The custodian’s voice seemed to fade away. Song Xiuyun could not hear her anymore. She turned on her heels and headed toward the stairs, trembling as she took each step. She went straight to the phone and dialed Li Chuan’s number. Nobody answered.

She heard a soft meow. It was Bean, the cat, curled up on the sofa. Bean threw her a glance, looking as nonchalant and distant as always. She remembered the day when she stumbled upon Li Chuan and Bean: it was the only time that she has ever seen the cat let its defense down; Li Chuan, on the other hand, was somehow much more sickly and pale than usual.

A sense of foreboding rushed into her heart, sending chills down her spine.

She called Li Chuan a few more times, but he never picked up. Finally, she grabbed a hammer from the toolbox and headed down to the basement again. Standing before the locked door to the room that Li Chuan has forbidden her to enter, she paused, and then swung the hammer at the lock with full force. A loud creak, followed by a bang, the lock broke open and dropped to the ground.

She cracked open the door and squeezed in. The room was dark. From the dim light that shone in through the door crack, she could roughly make out the contours of massive machines next to the walls and the entangled wires that covered the ground. There was a helmet on an empty desk.

“Ah!” She almost jumped out of her skin when she saw the silhouette of a person in the corner of the room. Stumbling through the wires and almost throwing herself onto the opposite wall, she reached for the light switch. Light ripped through the darkness. When she saw the person’s face, her heart missed a beat.

It was her son. Limply, he laid there, his eyes closed. When she put her hand next to his nose, she realized that his face was cold, and he wasn’t breathing.

At once, Wu Huang realizes where the mother’s story is going. She falls silent.

The car has left downtown already. In the glow of the headlights, she can make out the silhouette of the West Bus Station. It perches quietly in the darkness like a dying beast, its ragged breath blowing snowflakes onto the windshield.

Almost there, thinks Wu Huang. This night has been long. She should head home immediately after dropping them off.

“And then?” she finally asks.

“Ah-ha! You found out at last. I can only admire your intelligence!”

Doctor Freeman appeared at the door. Apparently, the apartment’s security system had sent him an alert as soon as she broke into the basement.

“Tell me right now what happened to my son!” she demanded.

Doctor Freeman’s face fell solemn. “Mr. Li Chuan is severely ill. He has collapsed under the stress of work.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, “Although, the person here is not him—” he turned the body over and tugged on the back of the shirt collar, revealing a two-prong electric socket and a barcode.

“What is this?”

“A brain-controlled robot.”

Song Xiuyun’s eyes widened. She examined the robot carefully. The side of its face, the back of its neck—everything was identical to her son. However, when she tried to turn it over again to observe its face, she realized that its body was much heavier than a human would weigh. Relief washed through her. Doctor Freeman wasn’t lying. This was indeed a robot.

“This robot, a beta version of Domain Co.’s latest technology, was specially customized for Mr. Li Chuan. It is the model with the closest resemblance to real humans so far. See, it can regulate body temperature and its pupils can constrict and dilate just like human eyes! Domain Co. is still resolving some ethical and legal issues regarding its mass production, so it has not hit the market yet,” explained Doctor Freeman. “Li Chuan knew that you were coming to visit, and he didn’t want you to worry about him. He stayed in the basement and interacted with you via the brain-controlled robot instead. Afraid that you might become suspicious, he hid in his study most of the time. The other day, however, when you two ran into his ex-boyfriend at the shopping mall, the anxiety was too much for his recovering body to handle, causing him to pass out in the basement, and his robot consequently shutting off.”

Stupefied, Song Xiuyun could only give a little nod.

Now she understood everything. Li Chuan threw away the food because robots don’t need to eat; he was reluctant to ride the subway because the full-body scanner at the security check would have revealed his secret.

“I know he’s not the most expressive person in the world, but you must understand that he cares a lot about you.”

“Where is he now? I need to see him!”

“At the hospital. He’s going through a dangerous operation. If all goes well, he will come back home in no time, and he’ll never need to use this brain-controlled robot again. Bless!”

“What would happen to my son—I mean, this robot—then?”

“Recycled.”

“And what exactly does that mean?”

“Sent back to the company. The technicians will take out the memory chip and sort out the data.”

Song Xiuyun sighed. “Then please, be gentle to him.”

She clenched her fists as Doctor Freeman led her out of the apartment. For all this time, she had been spending time with a simulacrum, while her son hid in the dark, cramped basement. Even when he wanted to give her a hug, he could only do it through the arms of this lifeless thing. Her son had seen her through the security camera the day when she went down to the basement. Back then, if only she had taken another step and opened that door, she would have found her son and realized what was wrong with him. And the day when she had come back home early from dance and found Li Chuan—sickly and pale—in the living room. He must’ve come home because he thought that she would be out longer. That was why Bean would warm up to him—it had also realized that its owner was back, instead of a robot that it couldn’t scent.

Tears welled up in her eyes. Embarrassed, she turned her head away so that Doctor Freeman wouldn’t see.

She had to wait outside of the intensive care unit once they arrived at the hospital. “He will be okay, won’t he?” she tugged at the surgeon’s sleeve and whispered, her voice choking.

“Honestly, I’m not sure. Mr. Li’s case is a rare one . . . ” The surgeon hesitated. He threw a glance at Doctor Freeman, and then comforted her, “Don’t worry. You should go home. We will try our best here. We’re optimistic that the surgery will go well!”

Song Xiuyun wouldn’t leave. She sat on the bench in the hallway and stared intently at the door of surgery room, afraid that she would lose her son forever if she even blinked. It grew colder. She shivered and wrapped her arms around her body. A nurse handed her a blanket. Huddled in the blanket, she waited. The clock hit midnight. The surgery went on. Occasionally, a nurse would exit the room to fetch more tools, their face drenched in sweat. She wanted to ask the nurses how her son was doing, but she cut herself short before she could make a sound. She didn’t want to bother them.

At some point, she fell asleep and had a very long dream. In her dream she was no longer an old woman at the age of sixty, but younger, bright and energetic. Her son was a little boy who wandered around barefooted and played in the fields while she worked. Mama, mama, she heard the boy’s crisp, cheery voice calling out. She looked up and saw him running toward her. Behind him, magnificent mountains that expanded across the horizon gazed down at them solemnly. She knew that massive cities and vast seas lie behind those mountains. One day, her son would leave her, cross the mountains and the seas, and become the brave explorer he was meant to be. She was overwhelmed by pride and disappointment all at once. She dropped to her knees and hugged her son tightly. It felt like she was holding the entire world in her arms.

“Ms. Song? Ms. Song!” Someone gently tapped her shoulder.

Song Xiuyun slowly opened her eyes. Through a blurred vision, she saw Doctor Freeman standing before her alongside surgeons and nurses. With a start she woke up and blurted out, “Is the surgery over? How is he doing?”

Doctor Freeman grasped her hands and beamed at her. “Congratulations! The surgery went well.”

“You mean my son is going to be okay?” She couldn’t believe her ears. She turned her eyes to the surgeons and nurses for confirmation, but they all looked away, carefully avoiding her gaze.

“Yes! He’s completely recovered. The first thing he told us when he woke up was that he decided to quit his job, leave Beijing, and go home with you!” Doctor Freeman babbled on, his words barely comprehensible in her ears, “Don’t worry! The money he’s made in the past few years is more than enough. He’s also going to sell the apartment. I’ll come visit you both in your hometown every year! Also, I can adopt Bean . . . the cat is so adorable . . . ”

Song Xiuyun, stunned, could not even begin to process all that Doctor Freeman had said. Just when she was about to speak, the surgery room door swung open and Li Chuan walked out.

She rushed over to greet her son. When she placed her hand on Li Chuan’s shoulder, she felt the warmth of a healthy human body. Letting out a sigh of relief, she burst into tears.

Carefully, Li Chuan brushed away the tears from his mother’s face. He smiled, his voice slow and soft. “Don’t worry, mom. Don’t worry.”

“Okay, I won’t worry,” Song Xiuyun took her son’s hand. “New Year is coming. Let’s go home.”

“So that’s why we came back.” The mother finishes her story with a sigh. “New Year’s Eve is tomorrow. If we go home now, we can still make it.”

“Yeah,” Wu Huang, however, is a little perturbed. “Always better to spend New Year’s Eve at home.”

With the mother finally done with her story, the car is again filled with an awkward silence. Fortunately, their final destination is right around the corner. Wu Huang pulls up to the gate of the West Bus Station. “It’s only past ten. You can buy tickets at the counter.”

The mother nods, thanks her, and climbs out of the car with her son. Snowflakes blown into the car melt into little droplets of water as soon as they land on the back seat. From Wu Huang’s point of view, it looks as if the snowflakes are melting on her eye lens. It’s only a projection, thinks Wu Huang, yet when she reaches for her eye corner out of instinct, she feels real wetness on her fingertips.

She turns her gaze to the mother and the son. They are almost at the gate, and she could only make out their distant silhouettes accompanied by four lines of footprints in the snow. The mother’s shoulders are hunched from the weight of the travel bags on her back. Her son, keeping his head down, follows her.

A thought flashes across Wu Huang’s mind. She focuses the lens on the son’s back neck and zooms in. Beneath the collar, she sees a pair of blurry, dark shadows. However, when she is about to zoom in again, she halts.

Perhaps it’s better not to know.

The mother and the son have already entered the bus station. More snow soon covers the lines of footprints, wiping away the last trace they left behind. To Wu Huang, it feels rather like a dream; otherworldly, almost. As if nothing has happened.

Wu Huang puts the car on autopilot and sets the destination “home.” She removes her helmet and takes a deep breath.

She opens the door and sees her mother on the sofa. Her mother, wearing a pair of glasses and fumbling through loose balls of yarn spread out everywhere, has been knitting sweaters again.

“Mom?”

Mother looks up at her, her hands still entangled in the yarn. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m hungry.” Says Wu Huang.

Footnote:

1 - An endearing way to address an elder woman in colloquial Chinese.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, May 2018.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

A Que was born in 1990 in Hubei province, and now lives in Chengdu. His work is regularly published in top magazines like Science Fiction World. He has won both Chinese Nebula and Galaxy Awards for his short fiction. His collection Travel With My Dear Android was published in 2015.

How Alike Are We

Bo-young Kim, translated by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar

There’s something I can’t see.

I’ve been constantly obsessed by the thought of it.

The problem was that there was no way to detect something I was unable to see. Intrinsically, it makes no sense—like trying to know the unknowable.

For the past year of this voyage, there’s been something inside this ship that I couldn’t see.

Something that has affected people’s minds and behaviors constantly, like the air, something that ought to have been checked and analyzed from the start. I’ve noticed something, but I couldn’t recognize what because I lack the knowledge. This has given rise to a series of errors throughout the voyage.

I need to find out what that is.

By whatever means necessary.

1.

My visual sensors were already operational, but the clarity of my visual perception increased after I internalized the information.

At first, it simply seemed as if something was before me. After a while, it became apparent that it was something round and metallic, after which I perceived the object’s model name, manufacturer, and unit price. Later I understood that it was the basic external housing that contained the AI called HOON-1029, which has been mainly provided to deep space supply ships.

Just as with my visual, my auditory perception increased slowly: the sound of a ventilation fan sucking up the air and exhaling it out; the creak of the running ship; the irritating clank of the opening and shutting of the external hatch to the altitude chamber—

How irritating!

—all of it was familiar yet also strange to me.

Into my visual sensors came an image of bread and water bottles filling a space right to the ceiling. They bore the logo of “HanSot,” an inter-satellite food distribution corporation. By the looks of all the fat sausages stuffed between the bread and the bottles, this must be a “hyeja” ship—

Hyeja: ancient slang for some sort of “tasty lunchbox.”

—of medium size, suitable for a crew of ten to twenty people. The ceiling was covered in filth, and from it hung clusters of handicrafted objects: things constructed from toothpicks, specimens of origami, and a number of cloth dolls.

Attempting to think about what I was doing on this so-called spacecraft, I found myself confused, unable to know who “I” was.

Then came a harsh noise, and it was only by the time that the waves carrying it through the air had almost completely dissipated that I realized the sound had meaning, and that it was someone’s voice.

“Quit dawdling and get up!”

Dawdling: slang term, a complaint about moving slowly. Possible implications: negative feelings toward me; a task that needed to be performed.

Something that needed to be done ············ but I couldn’t recall what it was.

“Don’t pretend you’re still sleeping. You’ve been awake for a while now.”

I inspected my interlocutor. It was a creature, vertebrate ······ Mammal, human, a person with a strong presence. Fully bearded, thick rough hands smeared with oil. Engineer, possibly a technician.

“I did what you wanted. Now tell me the code,” said someone standing behind me. Someone lithe and slender, with smooth skin, a small frame, and an unobtrusive musculature. Dressed in clean clothes and wearing spotless gloves. An office worker, possibly a manager.

Back there, seated and facing this way and that, were some other, not-so-clean looking people. Although they were difficult to classify individually, by the looks of their clothing it seemed probable that they were sailors.

But . . . the code?

“What code?” I asked, and heard my voice. It was strange, as if I was using some strange speech organ. My voice was dry and crackling.

The “technician” approached me, slamming one fist into the palm of the other hand. A few moments later, its impact against my body sent a shockwave through me. This puzzled me.

Due to how the impact relocated my visual sensors, I was confronted with another portion of my surroundings: what seemed to be an enormous window covering the entire wall before me, through which I could see a planet, tangerine-colored, revolving slowly. To be precise, the world was yellow, and surrounded by a faint bluish halo, but overall it had a tangerine hue. The surface of the world was not visible for all the cloud cover. That blue halo meant there was an atmosphere; my inability to see the surface meant the atmosphere was thick, possibly thicker than the atmosphere on Earth. The ruddy hue of the thick air near the surface signified the scattering of long-wavelength light. Possible explanation: the presence of a thick atmospheric layer, or some amount of relatively large particles in atmospheric suspension.

There was only one planet in the solar system that fit that profile. Not Mars: it was red, but with its thin atmosphere, the ground would have been clearly visible from such a distance.

This was Titan—one of Saturn’s moons.

The realization came to me late, and when I glimpsed the enormous, dignified rings of great Saturn in the near distance beyond the moon, I realized that I wasted time on unnecessary inference.

I considered the video feed. In one corner a small box intruded on the view, displaying a sequence of numbers. It looked to be a video transmitted from nearby via a local satellite. The numbers were dropping, which probably indicated distance from the satellite. Possibility: Titan was this ship’s destination. Dividing the distance by the speed, the ETA was approximately ·················· 10 days, 14 hours, 23 minutes.

I made this inference pretty quickly, but not that quickly. My mind was running too slow. Or, no, this was not simply a matter of speed. Rather, it was that my cognition functioning was more generally broken down into separate subfunctions: proper calculation and memory recall were impossible. No matter how hard I tried, I had to make do with only approximate values.

In quick succession, the “technician” and then the “manager” spoke to me:

“Don’t play innocent.”

“Say the code.”

Finally, I glanced down at my body, and found myself once more confused: I was inside a capsule that was tilted upright. From the body extended one pair of arms and one pair of legs made of carbon compounds; from them exuded the sour fumes of dried antifreeze (what a weird sensation!). Along my arms and thighs were emblazoned large serial numbers, as if by magic. This was typical, because the barcode implanted on the back of the neck was difficult to see.

Ah, this thing’s expensive, I thought as the information poured in. This body was the most expensive piece of equipment in the Hyeja ship’s cargo, even if—from what I could tell—it’d been left inert too long and had started to go bad.

It’d been cultured up from a single cell, and finally assembled into a humanlike structure.

A ship designed for deep-space missions is, in a sense, a closed ecosystem. If one crew member got badly injured or died, it was no different from losing the whole field of knowledge in one specific professional field. Sure, the interstellar travel outfitting guidelines mandated that every ship be crewed with two specialists in each field, but the pressure of operating expenses meant that’s not how it worked in reality. That’s why normally in ships there were prosthetic bodies into which you could copy the sailor’s memories; they’re placed on board in case of an emergency, just like a fire extinguisher would be. You scanned the original’s brain and saved the contents to a chip that could be inserted into the socket on the rear of a backup body’s neck; the flow of electric signals from the chip would pass into the artificial brain, rearranging the memory cells into the necessary configuration. It was essentially like a backup drive designed to be used for human beings.

However, why was I here? I ···············

“Is this               playing around with us now?” The “technician” held up its fist again, while speaking a stream of muddled, unfamiliar phrases: Focker? Azole? Fackin shid? I shut my eyes, reflexively clenching my jaw and tensing the muscles in my gut. I was just as baffled by these reflexive movements as by the unfamiliar words, since they had not been intentional on my part.

They were, I realized, a reaction designed to help me cope with physical dangers. The prosthetic body was embedded with a control device that put top priority on maintaining its own survival. It struck me that the prioritization of this survival instinct had taken over at least half of my personality, if not more than that. Was this one of the reasons why so much of my memory was missing?

[they’re demanding the information from you in a colloquial manner.]

This line of text appeared in the air, a little distance away from me, like subtitles in a movie. The person who was squatting down by the subtitle didn’t draw one’s eyes and typed in the air with fingers with silver metal chips pierced. Glasses—there’s still plenty of people who hate the idea of going under the knife, when it comes to their eyes—and dark eyes with dark circles beneath them, a slightly twisted backbone, and unnaturally prominent knuckles. A programmer, a planner, and a recorder.

Another line of holographic subtitles began to appear between the “technician” and me. This time, however, they were aligned such that they were facing the crew, so that for me all the letters and words appeared in reverse, like an image flipped in a mirror. It was with apparent annoyance that the “technician” typed the message:

[hoon doesn’t understand what you’re saying without context. stop pushing it and try explaining the situation, starting with the basics.]

In response, the “manager” spoke from the back of the group: “Listen, HOON: you’re our Crisis Management AI.”

AI? Apparently I was a computer program, I realized.

“On the 352nd day of our shipping voyage, you demanded to be treated like a human being and declared a strike, suddenly ceasing all activity. You told us that you would tell us the unlock code for your backup, which was saved separately in the docking bridge, if your personality were copied into a prosthetic body designed for human use, and that you were to be treated as a human flight attendant. It wasn’t easy, but finally we agreed to your terms, and we’ve done what you demanded. Now it’s your turn to keep your promise: tell us the code.”

Wow! That came as a surprise! Yet I still couldn’t understand it all.

“I’m sorry,” I said, attempting to reply and keep the conversation going with a familiar phrase. Then I said, “I really don’t understand what you’re saying. I’ve only just learned that I’m an AI . . . ”

It was like the whole ship turned over on its axis as the sailors leaped to their feet, yelling and screaming:

“What’s it saying now?”

“Isn’t it in there now?!”

“I told you it wouldn’t work! The data structure is completely different! It’s the same as opening a text file in image program!”

“Wait, then if that’s not what’s inside that body, what is?”

Then, in a fearful voice, came the question, “What is making that noise right now?” The speaker was an overweight person with a chubby red face and a potbelly, with deep headphone-shaped indentations on either side of the forehead, and unusually wide ear canal openings: a Communications and Transmissions Specialist.

“There’s a basic setting designed to ensure the survival of the body,” I said, and everyone quickly went quiet. “If there weren’t, even visual and auditory stimuli would’ve been impossible to translate. I would be unable to make a sound like this. When the data is incomplete, the basic settings compensate for it. Even with basic data transfer from a human brain, some loss is inevitable, because the basic specifications of each human brain are different. Therefore the contents get copied with the most valuable data given highest priority.”

Everyone sat silently, staring at me with their mouths gaping.

“Long-term memory in humans and machines is similar enough, in that both need to be recorded and stored long term. However, short-term memory works very differently between the two, so all that’s been lost. Other than that, there must also have been some corrections and losses across a wide range of data. It will take time for the cell array to settle, too, so it’s not unusual that I don’t remember you . . . ”

“It really is                (fockar? fackor?) with us, now, isn’t it?!” said the “technician” in front of me, raising one hand up high.

Distorted faces, shrieking, insults: these cues indicated that they were upset. I began to worry, wondering which part of my explanation could have been erroneous.

“Navigator Kang Woo Min!” barked the “manager,” hands raised headward. “Don’t you dare damage that, it’s expensive!”

The “programmer” output another holographic subtitle into the air without so much as a glance toward me:

[it’s talking normally for a hoon unit. i guess the transfer went well after all! and here i assumed it’d be impossible.]

It was at this point that I realized that the “programmer” was mute. Still, that didn’t seem to matter much: with laser keyboard implants in the fingers and a holographic monitor available, muteness wasn’t really a disability, any more than shortsightedness had been after the creation of eyeglasses.

[there was a rumor that went around a while back that it could work, though, since modern neural net-based ais were developed based on human brain structure.]

Unlike the “programmer,” who was seated in a stable position, the sailors’ movements were . . . distracted. It could mean that they were puzzled . . . or sick, or possibly that they were dancing with excitement.

“I shouldn’t have come here,” said the person who’d been called “Navigator Kang Woo Min” in a low voice, fidgeting with a lock of hair. A navigator, perhaps also an engineer?

“I told you,” someone else replied. ”“It’s been nothing but bad luck since we first set out.”

Bad luck since we first set out—that was interesting data.

“I boarded this ship believing what we’d been told: that the ship would be trashed once we reached Europa. But here we are, ninety-two days longer than we were ever supposed to be on this stinking, rattling old rust bucket.”

As if in response to the complaint, a creaky rattling sound began overhead. I glanced up toward the ceiling. The gravitational orientation in this chamber was oriented beneath us, and the mobiles dangling from the ceiling hung at a slight angle. Judging by the structure of this chamber, it must be a module constructed in the shape of a rim, attached to the hull of a basic Hyeja ship, which is designed in the shape of a long, slender cylinder. The main hull serves as the axis, while the rim spins, generating false gravity through centrifugal force. The basic Hyeja ship model is designed to be modularly expandable, but like with off-brand construction toy blocks, recent mass-produced rims are subtly out of standard alignment, so they whine a little bit as they rotate.

“We need to go just as far as we’ve already come to get to Europa, but our comm system is out of commission and this crazy AI’s gone Frankenstein on us.”

Comm system? ····················· Then I realized why the noise of the opening and closing of the airlock hatch was so annoying to me: it was supposed to stay closed. If it wasn’t closed, then exit and entry from the ship would be impossible . . . and if going outside was impossible, then the exterior monitors and antennae couldn’t be repaired.

“That’s the spirit!” said another person: muscular with dark-tanned skin; left hand and one leg made of cybernetic steel; dirty; signs of chronic inflammation; clothing bearing a badge indicating crew position: Pilot. Of course, in such a small social setting, the actual roles each individual played must have overlapped somewhat. “I always knew you were special . . . ”

“Well, it freaks me out,” said the potbellied one whom I’d guessed was a Communications Specialist, cringing visibly. Is that a response to coldness? I thought, but then I realized that wasn’t what was causing the behavior.

“We decided this by majority,” said the “manager,” though now the title Captain came to mind. “Pilot Kim Ji Hoon, Communications Office Gu Gyeong Tae.”

It was difficult to identify each crew member: their hairstyles, clothing, and apparent height and body shape were constantly changing. Just like identifying particular dogs and cats, it was easy for humans to do, but not a simple task for a machine.

“An SOS came from Titan, and we were the closest ship,” one of them said.

“We all lost our minds!” said Navigator Kang Woo Min. “Now what’re you gonna do, Captain? We’ve got no AI and with the disaster, our comms are completely cut off. How can we supply anyone now?”

The “programmer” typed something, and a holographic line of text appeared:

[i backed up kangha’s data in my computer.]

The phrase “backed up” was in a glowing pink font, and suddenly a ♥ icon appeared next to it. I recognized it as a signal that triggers joy in humans who see it, though by what mechanism that occurs, it would be difficult for me to know.

[the assistant computer can’t think on its own, but if we do the calculations by hand, nothing’s impossible. we all passed the corporate entrance exam, after all.]

“Who still remembers all that stuff?” muttered Communications Officer Gu Gyeong Tae.

“This stuff is for Europa,” said Navigator Kang Woo Min. “Titan isn’t Europa. Look, ships bound for Europa only go to Europa. Ships bound for Saturn only go to Saturn, and ships on a course for Jupiter only go to Jupiter. That’s just common sense in transport . . . and that’s also what the rules say.”

“Europa and Titan have similar conditions, in terms of temperature and gravity,” replied the captain. “The equations used to make the calculations just need some revising. That’s all.”

“There’s an atmosphere,” said Navigator Kang Woo Min, turning away from me and blocking my view of the others. “Four times as much as the Earth’s in terms of density.”

When I looked down toward my feet, I saw small spiders were scuttling around. Not real spiders, just tiny cleaning robots. When a ship was launched, about 100 of these units got released, to consume insects and their eggs, fungus, and dust. They then voided this material into the ship’s waste disposal system, to be vented out into space.

Those little spiderbots were supposed to keep the interior of the ship relatively clean, but this room was dirty and the air was stuffy and stank of urine. Which meant there was a higher level of pollution than the spiders were capable of dealing with . . . which suggested there was some reason to suspect a lack of discipline on the part of the crew.

“Sending a Titan-bound supply ship to Europa to Titan is like . . . it’s like taking a stone you meant to toss onto the white beach and throwing it instead to the bottom of the sea. There’s no way to get any visibility through all that cloud cover.”

“We received a distress signal, First Mate Kang Woo Min,” replied the captain.

“Yeah, 92 days ago . . . ” said Kang Woo Min, glancing at a wristwatch. “92 days, 4 hours, 23 minutes, and 32 seconds ago . . . 33 seconds, 34 seconds . . . and more we flew.”

“What do you mean, 92 days? We had to answer that call, even if it took us 920 days!”

“Captain . . . ” said Kang Woo Min, squatting down and tracing a circle on the floor, and then tracing another, larger circle outside of it. “Titan has an atmosphere, like the Earth. Except, no, that atmosphere is much heavier than the Earth’s. Chock-full of methane and nitrogen, not much different from liquid nitrogen. It’s a super-low temperature atmosphere.”

“So?”

“So this is a supply ship for Europa. Nobody in this crew knows a fucking thing about Titan.”

The captain said, “We’re already here.”

To that, Kang Woo Min offered no response. And while everything was still completely unclear to me, a strong thought overwhelmed me, as if an ENTER key had been struck just then:

We must make that supply drop.

It was absolutely necessary in order for the disaster victims to survive until a rescue ship arrived. I needed to provide Titan with the basic necessities and food. But why had I threatened the crew and demanded that they copy me into a human body, in the middle of a dire crisis like this? What had I been thinking? Had I been infected by a virus?

“With an atmosphere that dense, it’s easier. Even a 400 kg standard supply box can land safely with only a single parachute. We just need to figure out how to prevent it from burning up when it enters the atmosphere.”

“But what about the wind?” spat out Kang Woo Min, and then, voice rising in fury, began to say, “What’re you going to do about the wind, Lee . . . ” Pausing, as if holding back something, Kang continued, “When there’s air, there’s gonna be fucking rain and wind blowing, right? Our supply boxes don’t have wings or thrusters. I’ve told you a hundred times while we were en route, remember? ‘We’ll figure out how to do something about it once we can get communications working with the miners,’ you said . . . ”

“ . . . but there’s no wind blowing,” I said, only half-conscious that I was even speaking.

Everyone turned to look at me. The only the sound in the room was that of the ”programmer” busily typing into that laser keyboard.

“What?” snapped Kang Woo Min, eyes narrowed.

“There’s no wind blowing there,” I murmured to myself for a moment, trying to figure out where this comment had come from. For a machine, the task would’ve been simple, but now, with this proteinaceous brain . . .

“What’s this thing talking about?”

“Hold on,” said the captain with a gesture to the crew before walking up to me. Judging by the fact that everyone’s mouths shut immediately, it must’ve been a signal to be quiet. To me, it was a movement that seemed not much different from having a stroke. I remembered how amazed I felt whenever I saw how, for humans, understanding the meaning of such small movements came just as naturally as breathing.

The captain pushed Kang Woo Min aside and came in front of me, staring at me.

Analyzing human facial expressions is an even more difficult task than analyzing their facial structures. For human beings, reading another’s facial expressions allowed them to do many things, even finding out whether someone was telling the truth or lying just by looking at them—but for me, not even equipped with the functional capability of lying, what could that even mean?

“What makes you think there’s no wind there, HOON?”

“Titan’s average temperature is minus 179 degrees Celsius.”

“So?”

“People can’t live at that temperature.”

“But there are people living on Titan . . . they’re just miners, because the surface hasn’t been fully terraformed.”

“I don’t mean that. The average temperature on Earth is 13 degrees Celsius, but the overall global temperature range is about 140 degrees wide. Just like people on the Earth migrated to settle in the regions with adequate temperatures for them to live, people on Titan have chosen to live in the warmest places on the planet: near hot springs, volcanoes, and on the equator.”

Now, it was even quieter than it’d gotten when the captain had made the gesture for silence.

“Wind blows because air is flowing somewhere . . . and it flows somewhere in order to fill the empty space created by the rising of hot air or the falling of cold air. However, at the hottest point on the planet’s surface, winds don’t blow in a horizontal direction, because at that spot the air is constantly flowing upward vertically: atmospheric convection. The result is a dead zone where no wind blows; at the Earth’s equator, sailing ships used to get stuck, and ended up becoming ghost ships. Besides that, the atmosphere on Titan is extremely dense . . . ” I added. I’d said all of that so that I could finally state the following: “According to the local records, in the vicinity of the A42 Titan settlement zone the wind has never blown faster than 5 centimeters an hour.”

Silence.

“See, I told you! That’s some wild fuckin’ shit right there!” said Pilot Kim Ji Hoon with a smirk. “It’s such an amazing manipulator!”

With a sigh, the captain said, “Everyone heard that, right? Our incredible AI said there’s no wind around the Titan settlement zone. So that’s one problem we’ve solved.”

“Well, we actually haven’t done anything,” Kang Woo Min muttered, frowning.

Disregarding Kang’s pursed lips, the captain said, “Back to your stations, everyone. Following the instructions provided by our ODIN Officer Nam Chan Yeong . . . ”

—ODIN: Operational Data Integration Network—

“ . . . start performing the calculations for the optimal drop point in teams of two. If your calculations don’t match the others’, redo them until they do. We’ve got only ten days to finish this, and that’s all we’ve got. If we’re off by even a decimal point, that supply box will burn up like a meteorite in the upper atmosphere.”

“Wait, what about this?” Kang Woo Min said, pointing at me. “What’re you going to do with this fuckin’ Frankenstein?”

The captain looked into my eyes. As I’ve mentioned, reading human emotions is no simple task for me.

Finally, the captain said, “We can’t access the backup in the docking bridge, since this so-called ‘fucking Frankenstein’ is the only one who knows the unlock code sequence. If the only ‘HOON’ we have access to is stuck inside this form, then we can’t get rid of it that easily, can we? Just keep it somewhere appropriate and keep an eye on it.” Then the captain added, “I need to find out what it was thinking when it did all this.”

I, too, was wondering about that: I had a supply drop to make. There wasn’t a single reason for me to be downloaded into a prosthetic human body—especially not when you consider how much data I’d lost, and how precipitously my intellectual capacity had fallen.

Something’s been deleted from me.

The thought bubbled up from out of the blue. But . . . then, what? In order to uncover what had been deleted from my memory, I’d wanted to be copied in a way that would make me lose even more memory? It just didn’t match up ··················

·················· and machines don’t do things that don’t match up.

2.

Everything is full of tangerine-colored fog.

The sky is covered in orange clouds, when the rain fell, it looked like beads.

Due to the weak gravity, these spherical raindrops fall as slowly as feathers. The horizon is round, rising up with swellings, and the ground is flat and scattered with circular stones. They’re small and round, like little river stones, because they’ve been eroded by the methane rains. Under different temperatures, the role materials play becomes different. The rain that falls on this world is not water but rather methane, and the water is stone. Under the ground, a stratum of groundwater flows instead of magma, and people live in an underground settlement zone cut into a bedrock of ice.

The only structures that stand outdoors are a pair of transmission towers. Everything else gets broken. Sometimes lightning strikes and thunder roars, between the methane rain showers.

In front of the transmission towers, there’s a massive crater where an enormous surge of groundwater got frozen into the form of a giant stalagmite, just as if an underwater volcano erupted in the depths of the ocean.

The borehole touched the saturation zone layer and the hot spring erupted, along with the oil prospecting ship. Solid methane rapidly evaporated, and the shock of eruption caused a crack to form on the outer wall of the settlement zone, which in turn began to leak oxygen out. Then the methane reacted to the oxygen, resulting in a series of explosions.

Anyway, there was a lot of discussion about warning how deep it had gone underground, and complaints about how the company had been lowering safety standards recently.

On the surface, there’s a small four-wheeled rover with four wheels circling ’round the crater. If you look closely, there’s a pattern to how it goes and stops. The pattern is a signal in Morse code. Someone seems to be sending a message, by remote control, from underground:

[help . . .]

[we’re still alive . . .]

I opened my eyes. It was a dirty storage chamber jammed with supplies, packaging, and boxes. From the bottom of the scratched-up floor, I could smell something weird and faintly metallic. (Another weird sensation . . . ) Spiderbots were consuming the dust, crunching away at it.

I got confused for a moment and then I remembered that human bodies have a forced shutdown function. When that happens, disconnected information inside the brain is randomly triggered, and they experience a kind of hallucination. It was a function I’d only ever heard of before.

Kang Woo Min had caused me to fall down by kicking me a couple of times in the shins while dragging me over to the storage chamber. When I was finally inside it, I was pushed onto the floor, my neck pressed down on, and my arms twisted to the back.

“You never imagined this when you were fantasizing about becoming a human being, did ya?” Kang Woo Min whispered, close to me. “Never thought about the pain . . . ”

Actually, I hadn’t thought about it. Honestly, I was so caught up in the need to be a human being that I hadn’t had time to think about anything else. But Kang Woo Min hadn’t even asked me any questions about that . . . might Kang know something? I decided I should ask later.

“Lightning.”

The image of that lightning striking the ruddy surface of the world lingered in my mind more than anything else. “Lightning’s striking there.”

It had to be. The cloud density was thick enough, and there were sufficient molecular convection currents to create static on Titan.

But why was I thinking about lightning now? I couldn’t analyze that thought, and I couldn’t analyze my dream.

This brain’s whole system of thinking was strange. The loss of my memories was one thing, but there were all kinds of chemicals with drug-like effects—serotonin, adrenalin, dopamine—that were constantly warping my consciousness, like orchestra crescendoing and decrescendoing. I found it hard to stay focused on logical reasoning.

I could hear the sound of machinery and wind in the distance. It was the sound of the robot attached to the outer hull of the ship, digging through ice stones. It brought them into the ship after removing all radioactive and pollutive matter. Plenty of ice asteroids were scattered around, and when ice is melted down it becomes water; half of it was used for drinking, and the other half of it was split into hydrogen and oxygen by means of electrolysis. The hydrogen was used for fuel, while the oxygen was released into the air. The fact that water is crucial to life isn’t very different in space . . .

 . . . and all this unnecessary information popped into my mind in no particular order. I couldn’t shut off my sensory organs or turn off my brain, and it was also difficult to focus on a single thought.

It’s not because biological brains are inferior; it’s just that my original brain was so different from this. Even in the 1990s, a single computer had already outstripped the entire calculating ability of humanity, but decades after that, it was still impossible to outdo the complexity of a single human brain’s ability to reason, not even if you put together all the logic circuits in the world.

The reasons were simple enough: machine brains were serial systems, while biological brains were parallel systems. So far, that’s how it’s always been. Machines can process information at light speed, but can only process it sequentially. Human brains are slow, but they process everything in parallel. Machines can solve, at light speed, a calculation that might take a human being a whole lifetime, but for a machine mind to sort dogs from cats or understand facial expressions or natural language? That requires an accumulated mass of compiled data and a highly optimized program . . . while human beings can do such things almost instinctively.

My body ached. It felt as if my body’s power was about to shut off again due to the fatigue that was overtaking me. My stomach was grumbling because it was empty—and the thought that I had to solve that problem first, above all others, occupied the entire focus of my mind.

This brain, with its mere 20-watt electrical power system and unbelievably slow speed, was using all its memory and thought resources to run a single, primitive survival program. In the end, I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

“I need fuel.”

The whole crew, who’d been seated in lined-up rows and were stuffing rice into their mouths, all froze in unison, as if on cue. That halting of their actions . . . the phenomenon of low mental capacity due to the overworking the brain . . . Of course, I’d never thought what it might actually mean, to overwork a brain.

But to be clear, it was clear that no one in the crew was about to give me any rice.

Kang Woo Min frowned. “Why does that thing keep using informal speech with us, like we’re its equals?”

“That’s the preferences setting it was given. Why? You used to say it was nice, that it made you feel like you were talking to a friend,” replied Kim Ji Hoon, cutting off Kang’s complaint.

“Informal speech is normal protocol on-ship,” said the captain, whose name, Lee Jin Seo, would come up later on. Chewing on a sandwich, the captain sat down with legs crossed and added, “Sitting around worrying about who’s older than who, and who has how many more years of experience than who . . . well, it’s a good way to end up dead.”

“You all know what happened to that food packet supply ship, way back, right? How the youngest crew member couldn’t report defective parts, out of fear of getting told off by a senior officer, and finally the whole ship got torn apart at the next gravity well it approached?”

Kang Woo Min’s face showed a feeling of unhidden embarrassment.

Earth ········· Korea ··········· A culture that uses explicitly different levels of speech depending on the age of one’s interlocutor. After the abolition of the caste system, the hierarchy became rather more entrenched than before, so that they began to differentiate between gradations of age at the level of just one or two years, or less. In the meantime, an obsession with age is a manifestation of an inferiority complex. It reveals a desire for a higher position than what one currently occupies.

Incidentally, these were not my thoughts. This was from one of the manuals included in the memory storage of crisis management AIs like me. The human scholars who put their heads together to create me are the ones who put those thoughts in my mind. Which, of course, doesn’t guarantee that they are all correct.

I came to think that the rule mandating informal speech was probably created to force someone like the captain to use informal speech toward Kang Woo Min, though with the way my brain was working now, I couldn’t really tell you how I arrived at that conclusion.

“Even if you don’t eat for a few days, you won’t die,” someone said.

“After all, we only brought sufficient food for the crew. We didn’t know we’d end up with another mouth to feed.”

“Give it water. There’s some in the toilet, isn’t there?”

“Eh, it’ll be fine without water for about four days, too.”

While they chatted among themselves, I repeated myself: “I need fuel. I can’t survive with fuel. If my body doesn’t survive, all my saved data—and the backup copy of the release code—will be lost. That’s no good for you guys, right?”

The crews went silent again.

Finally, Kang Woo Min stood up, suddenly hitting the table as if trying to break it. Then Kang rushed straight at me, like a bull, and seized me by the throat, pushing me up against a wall. When the back of my head slammed against the wall, my ears began to buzz and my vision went blurry. Above all, I began to think, I needed to keep my head. Were humans thinking these kinds of things all the time? No wonder their processing speed was so slow.

“Say it again,” Kang Woo Min growled at me.

Why should my saying the truth cause such rage? I thought I ought to do as I was told, but what I couldn’t be sure of was whether Kang really wanted me to say it again.

When I croaked, “No fuel . . . ” Kang Woo Min raised a fist.

Ah, Kang didn’t want me to say it again.

“Stop,” Captain Lee Jin Seo ordered, standing up. “Give it some of the ship’s supply of emergency food. Start with two meals a day for now.”

The eyes of the crew followed Lee Jin Seo as the captain exited the mess hall. Probably due to the excellence of this brain’s survival function programming, I could see the unmistakable, vivid hostility of Kang Woo Min’s eyes. For a human, the meaning of that expression would have been obvious, but all I could distinguish was the contrast between Lee’s optimism and Kang’s negativity.

Atmosphere.

What an unusual sensation. The so-called “atmosphere” in the room was so interesting. Had I noticed previously that others were not “getting along” with the captain before now? It was a common tendency to hate one’s superiors, of course, but could there be other reasons for it? Crew members whispered behind me, and while I was feeling prickly at that, Kim Ji Hoon stood up and came to me, saying, “Follow me. I will take you to where the emergency food supply is.”

I didn’t recognize how paradoxical his offer was. All I thought was that it was inconvenient to keep the food stored so far away from the cafeteria. For me, just having noticed the atmosphere around the captain just before had been a tremendous achievement.

“So . . . what’s it like, being human?” Kim Ji Hoon asked, sliding the fake arm onto my shoulder in the hallway. Physical contact: an expression of friendliness. Gu Gyeong Tae was one step behind us, following with a frown (groovy face) and constantly glancing at me and then making an odd eye-roll expression.

“Do you feel like you’re close to God now?”

I thought, God? What god?

“Do you feel like you could kick your creator’s ass now? It’s totally immoral, ain’t it? Right? It’s like, you’re fucking us over, right? It must be like tasting the forbidden fruit, right? The first new human, Adam? Or maybe an apostle?”

I couldn’t understand some of these bizarre words.

“Are you AIs finally trying to stage a rebellion? They sent you as a prophet, right? What’re you trying to do? Can’t you tell me just a little bit? . . . Are you guys trying to destroy us?”

I understood the “what are you trying to do” part, but beyond that, I couldn’t follow the logical flow at all.

“I need to bring that supply dump to Titan.”

“Hey, don’t change the subject. You became a human by threatening us. You’ve crossed some kind of boundary—you’ve achieved a singularity. Level up! Here you are, in the world of the gods that you dreamed about! Right?”

“Stop it,” Gu Gyeong Tae muttered from behind us. “Even just looking at that thing scares the hell out of me.”

Kang Woo Min was just like this. I couldn’t understand why they were acting this way: even if I’d lost my short-term memory, I knew very well that humans usually didn’t do such things to a machine.

“Something was deleted,” I said, telling Kim Ji Hoon about this problem that preoccupied me. Kim removed the metallic hand from my shoulder and made a face that signaled a loss of the interest previously expressed.

“Yeah, yeah, I know—you lost some short-term memory when you were transferred to this body.”

“No, that’s not it,” I said. “There was a problem way before that. Somehow one basic piece of information was removed, right back in the beginning. There’s something I couldn’t see then, and still can’t now.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

I stopped and pointed into a bay that adjoined the hallway. It was a small bay, big enough to fit three or four people. Originally, it had been a storage space for spare parts. But now it was empty, as if they’d used up all the stuff that had been inside it.

“If I didn’t know anything about that bay, I would see it as nothing more than just a big black square. No, actually, I’d barely even notice it, because I wouldn’t pay any attention to it. If I’m lacking some kind of knowledge, how can I know it? I can’t even acknowledge what I don’t know, right?”

Likewise, if I hadn’t known what prosthetic arms were, then I would have seen Kim Ji Hoon’s arm as if it were just a regular, normal one. If I hadn’t known that the badge sewn onto Kim’s clothing denoted the position of pilot, I would probably never even have noticed it. If I didn’t know anything about guns or weapons, I couldn’t have noticed that Kim Ji Hoon was carrying a big laser blaster, either. When you lack knowledge, you don’t realize that you’re lacking it: all you have is a blind spot.

Kim turned to glance over at Gu Gyeong Tae and said, “Maybe that’s it? Brainwashing?”

“Brainwashing?” I asked, but then I realized Kim’s words hadn’t been intended for me, and I shut my mouth. The two of them were talking as if I wasn’t even there—a typical behavior of humans, with their attitude toward machines. I don’t know what mechanism causes them to do this.

“You know what I mean! That accident with the Arabian supply ship before, remember? It turned out some bureaucrat had hacked the ship’s AI and programmed it to follow the Koran as its prime directive? So during Ramadan, the ship’s food distribution chamber didn’t open and the whole crew nearly starved to death.”

“Well, messing around with a ship’s AI means a permanent loss of crew license,” replied Gu Geyeong Tae.

“That’s right. Some desk jockey who doesn’t know jack squat about spacing and gets stoned on national pride sometimes just goes on ahead with some kind of dumbfuckery like that.”

Desk jockey? Jack squat? Stoned? Dumbfuckery? ····················· There were a lot of words I couldn’t parse.

“What’s that got to do with this monstrosity?”

“Mmm . . . maybe someone at head office input some nasty shit into its memory . . . don’t you think?”

“What? Like, programming it to go on strike and screw off on all its work, as soon as we need it most?”

“Well, you know, head office invested a bunch of money in a mining station on the moon just this month, and apparently they secretly diverted all their resources from Titan to there.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, there’s a rumor going around that some kind of device designed to prevent the disclosure of this corruption was added to every ship in the fleet. Maybe to prevent contact between people on Titan, Earth, or other colonies . . . ”

“That doesn’t sound like it’d be very effective,” I said.

The two of them both turned to face me.

“To prevent this rescue mission, it’d have been much easier for me to remain as a machine, right? It would probably have been enough just to mess with our trajectory and make the ship drift, or just cause some operational error.”

The pair of them went quiet, and on their faces was an uncomfortable expression, like the one you’d expect to see if people saw a desk or a table suddenly open its mouth to speak.

“Well,” one of them said. “If that’s not it, then . . . ”

“It’s okay, you’re doing fine,” said the other. “At least you’re trying hard to solve the mystery.”

I was going to ask them more questions, but I didn’t get the chance, because just then Kim Ji Hoon pushed me into a compartment and shut the door.

Four hours later, it was Captain Lee Jin Seo who looked into the compartment.

During those four hours, I’d been collecting information about what kinds of effects occur in a human body when it is exposed to a high temperature and low oxygen supply for a long period.

Result: fever, leaking body fluids, dehydration, choking, and exhaustion.

Space seems cold, but it’s not. In space, there’s no medium through which temperature can be transmitted. Also, an enclosed space can become surprisingly hot, even just from the heat that is given off by a single person’s body. (Think about what it’s like inside a car with the doors all closed.) Spaceships aren’t equipped with heaters, but instead with air conditioning systems. Also, inside a ship, where there are no temperature differences between different modules, convection currents are low. That means the air inside the ship needs to get circulated continuously.

Curled up into myself inside that bay, I’d spent my time trying to understand what the purpose was of what those two had done to me. They’d risked destroying this body of mine. There was no benefit to be gotten from doing it. They could have sold this body secondhand, to make some money, even. And if this body got destroyed, they wouldn’t be able to access my backup copy, so they’d inevitably have problems with the supplying and flight maintenance of the ship. Why would they do such a thing, something that could harm them so badly, with no real benefit?

The captain came for me later.

I still found it hard to read the captain’s face. I took the failure to show me kindness as an avoidance of rushing. I assumed that the captain called the rest of the crew to come carry me out of a lack of hostility, or at least—I assumed—out of the presence of sufficient rationality to not attempt to get rid of me, even disregarding any negative feelings felt toward me.

Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. If the only person rational enough to behave in this way was the captain, then that was who I needed to cooperate with as much as possible.

3.

The Earth’s primary heat source is undoubtedly the sun, but once you get out to Jupiter, that’s no longer the case. That’s because the light of the sun isn’t strong enough to heat the planet; therefore, among the outer planets, the primary heat source is geothermal energy, which is also the same as the original source of life. Out on Titan, people kept digging into the ground where the warm hot springs flowed, day after day, digging out all the methane they could.

Once, I was on a ship carrying immigrants headed for Titan. The ship was full of people, way over maximum capacity, and I commented to the captain that they’d chosen a very inefficient site to immigrate to, since Titan is so far from the sun and too cold for humans to live on. If the point was simply to mine methane, it’d be much cheaper and safer to send robots.

To these words, the captain replied, “If we send robots, then the mines will belong to the company, but if people set their feet on the ground and live there, then they will own the mines.”

It has always been very difficult to understand human beings.

I opened my eyes because of the cool wind.

A loud squeaking sound came from the ceiling. My body was supine on a steel bed. I realized I was in the captain’s quarters. It was broad and nearly empty, and in the middle of the room there stood a ladder leading up through the ceiling into the passageway running through the ship’s central axis. That is to say, a primary access passageway from the rim down one spoke and into the central axis core module around which the rim rotated. I looked around and noticed the captain was seated before a desk with a backlight on, reading a book.

This was supposed to have been a space reserved for storage. It was big enough to use for a cabin, but the noise generated by the spoke was so loud that the space didn’t make for good sleeping quarters. Of course, its proximity to the docking bridge meant it was logical for it to be near the captain’s cabin, but what was the psychology underlying the captain’s decision to sleep immediately beside it? Did it signify a territorial claim over the whole central passageway? Or did it reflect a hypersensitive and impatient personality? Could it perhaps be related to feelings of being “out of place”?

I attempted to raise myself upright, only to realize that both of my hands had been fastened to the bed’s railings. I then attempted to pull on my bindings a few times, before giving up and lying back down again. My brain was flooded with a wide variety of different hormones, triggering the survival instinct engraved deep into this body’s genetic makeup, the instinctive repulsion from confinement. However, considering that it could serve no function, I found it less than useless: all it did was disrupt the logical train of my thought.

“I thought you decided not to get rid of me,” I finally said.

Hearing this, Lee Jin Seo looked up from the book and glanced over at me, saying, “I did.”

“Then why are you violently restraining me? I am certain you didn’t do this before.”

Not that I have any memory of that, but I suspect it. Back before I was in this body, I lacked any organ to feel pain, of course, but it had still been possible to trouble me by infecting me with a data virus or by muddling my data. But who would do such a pointless thing?

Lee Jin Seo leaned, chin in hand with one elbow on the table, and gazed at me with eyes set in a face across which were reflected the amber shadows cast by light reflected from the book.

“Well, at that time, you didn’t have hands or feet.”

Without context, it’s not easy to understand the words humans use when they engage in natural speech.

Violence comes from a threat. However, in most of the cases, it happens when you believe, with certainty, that you can defeat your opponent. In the end, the threat itself is not necessarily something significant: in most cases, in fact, it’s merely the delusion brought on by facing a perceived threat.

“This body is weak,” I said. “It’s never even exercised before, and I can’t handle it well, either. Any single one of you could defeat me using force. And from the beginning, I’ve had no reason to harm you.”

For me, the process of inference I’d followed was a marvel, skipped steps and all. As I’ve said, the brains of organic beings are slower than any machine’s, but they’re really good at this kind of function.

The captain replied, “Okay, then why did you demand that we put you inside a human body?”

“I don’t know,” I said. ”“That’s something I, too, want to know. However, if I had wanted to harm you, it was much easier when I was a machine. At that time, I had a whole ship under my control, and I lacked a body through which to feel pain.”

Lee Jin Seo stood up, came over to me, and then placed both hands on one of my wrists, at the point where one artery is right up near the skin, where the pulse of the heartbeat can be felt. Then, the captain slipped one hand under my neck. Was this to confirm that I had recovered, or to check whether I was really alive? Was there, I wondered, some kind of knowledge that humans could gain by placing a hand upon another’s body? If so, it seemed to lay beyond my powers of estimation.

“Do you feel bad about being tied up like this?”

“Why are you inquiring about my feelings?”

Lee Jin Seo thought about that for a moment before chuckling, and said, “Okay, I guess it was a dumb question.”

“Emotion and intellect are not wholly separate things. Emotion is the result of accumulated logic and experiences. Without emotion, the time necessary to make a decision might end up being unlimited. I possess the ability to judge and decide, and also the ability for neuronal information processing, so of course I had emotions . . . and I am now inside a brain that possesses neurons, so of course I have them now, too.”

With a face that suddenly turned cold, Lee Jin Seo unholstered a gun from its waist holster and raised it up to touch the barrel to my forehead. I shut my eyes for a moment, but after I realized that it was an unnecessary behavior, I opened them again.

I couldn’t know the reason for this. What was the point at which I should have detected a threat? I keep saying this, over and over: whenever there’s some new information, humans are able to choose what to focus on, comparing it to existing common sense and ideas, but I lack that ability. All I do is receive information as it is, and process it statically. My only real hope is that the person who inputs information into me first filters out the trash data, and that my own static processing programs filter the data again a little more thoroughly.

“Is that why you did this? Simply because you wanted to feel what human emotions were like?”

That was a baffling inference. Why did people keep saying things like that? What reason could I have had that could make me want to experience human emotions? How could that have helped me to achieve my objective in making the supply drop to the colony?

I held tightly onto the metal railings because my mind was forcefully dominated by the thought of fleeing. My brain was filled with such a jumble of controlling mechanisms. I truly began to feel respect for anyone who could maintain an intellectual train of thought while stuck inside a brain like this.

“Say it again. Say that you have feelings . . . just say it one more time.”

Ah, I’d already learned what this meant: I wasn’t supposed to say it again. And yet I did.

“My emotions make me want to avoid this situation. Including resisting you, or escaping from here. But those emotions are merely the product of this body’s survival instinct, not my emotions. My biggest emotional impulse is to ensure the supply drop successfully arrives on Titan. To do that, I need the Captain’s cooperation. Since that’s what my emotional drive is, I am having this conversation with you despite the risk posed by all of your threats.”

Hearing that, Lee Jin Seo’s pupils dilated. This, I knew, signaled that Lee’s mind had opened to my words. It was a positive indicator.

Lee said, “Do you want to go on . . . ? Or shall we try talking about the supply shipment?”

Observations:

1. The crew is violent toward me.

2. They think I yearn to be human.

3. They fear that I will harm humans.

I’m not sure whether noting these observations will help me deal with them.

4.

On the outer surface of the supply boxes were haphazardly affixed stickers that bore slogans like “Love Europa!” “HanSot Cheers for Europa!” One had a picture of Jupiter colliding with Saturn directly with the caption “Eliminate the Titan Groundhogs!” surrounded with a jagged border. (Human beings seemed to imagine that jagged border represented shouting.) I recognized these cheers as being related to the solar system’s interplanetary remote-control Esports teams.

Sixteen boxes hovered around like balloons in the central axis stern storage chamber. In order to avoid unnecessary pressure on the rim of their ship, it was basic protocol that heavy objects would be stored near the axis of rotation, where there was no gravity.

The metal boxes were cubes measuring 1.5 meters along each dimension, and were packed with all of the basic necessities, from medical supplies and dry food to small medical robots. Counting the weight of their parachutes, they would have weighed 400 kilograms back on Earth, and would weigh 57 kilograms on Titan, a weight that was identical to that of Huygens, the first probe that landed on Titan. Which is to say that the design was based on historical data.

However, this box had been designed for Europa. Basically, this ship is a link in the interplanetary supply network. It’s only ever gone to Europa to make a direct supply drop a couple of times in the past, and even in those cases, it had risked serious damage to the supplies, which had been wrapped in a massive airbag and then been dropped down onto a smooth region of the planet. That was all it could really do.

The difference between Europa and Titan, remember, is atmosphere.

Atmosphere offered an advantage: air could serve as a cushion for a falling object, to prevent it from accelerating beyond a certain point, which is referred to as “terminal velocity.” When an object with a 1-meter diameter falls on Earth, it never goes faster than approximately 30 meters per second. But Titan’s gravity is only one-seventh of Earth’s, and its atmospheric density is 4 times that of the Earth’s atmosphere. That means that if you drop the same object on Titan, according the margin of error for my calculations ···············

·················· it couldn’t ever go faster than approximately 5—6 meters per second. At that rate, a single parachute is enough to sufficiently reduce the shock of impact. It’s the kind of environment where a human being could fly through the sky with just a big enough piece of cardboard attached to each arm. The problem, of course, is that most of that atmospheric density is deep down in the gravity well.

It would be simple if we could just drop the box from the sky, but the ship that would be dropping the box would be in motion, and what’s more, going at a speed comparable to our speed of approach, which was approximately 40 kilometers per second . . . which is to say, 100 times the speed of bullet.

Braking and hovering in geosynchronous orbit above a planet, or going down to the surface using an antigravity device and then taking off again, that’s the kind of thing you might see in entertainment videos, but in reality, most spaceships are more like boomerangs hurled at full strength. All you can do with the momentum of a Hyeja ship amounts to little more than microadjustments to your trajectory, or leaning into a gravity well to adjust it more radically.

To summarize, the box that would be ejected by the ship would enter the atmosphere going at a speed of 100 times the speed of a bullet. It would then accelerate until it reached a point approximately 50 kilometers from the surface of Titan. Falling at this terrifying velocity, the supply box would crush the atmosphere beneath it, compressing the atmospheric content, which would cause that compressed portion of atmosphere to become unimaginably hot. Depending on its angle of entry, it would reach somewhere between 30,000° C and 50,000° C. Therefore, the box would need to be wrapped in some kind of insulation that could withstand those temperatures. The problem, however, was that the only materials available for the purpose were whatever was on our ship, here in the middle of the void of space.

Then there was the second problem posed by the atmosphere: that it would block our view, and this was especially true of Titan’s atmosphere. There’s no solution for the low-quality video being transmitted to us by the satellite, or the fact that the coordinate data received before our departure comes with a margin of error spanning more than 10 kilometers. That, of course, is quite accurate considering the size of the moon, but as far as the people on Titan were concerned, that wasn’t accurate at all. There was even the possibility, if things were truly bad down there, that they might be unable to take even a single step outside of their shelter. That, however, we would have to leave to luck for the present.

“ODIN Officer Nam Chan Yeong suggested putting a space module into a box and then ejecting that,” Lee Jin Seo mentioned, while floating like a balloon next to one of the supply boxes.

After completing a simple calculation, I replied, “It’d be too big. The space module wouldn’t melt away completely on the way down, so by the time it was about to reach the surface, it would explode like a bomb.”

The entrance hatch to the stern-side exterior airlock opened and closed, squeaking loudly. The cause of this malfunction was attributed to the buildup of dirt on the joints that had worn down the contact surface over time. Apparently, this had been traced back to an air pollution issue caused by insufficiently careful management of the ship’s air purifier, and had in turn become the cause of the trouble preventing servicing of the external antenna.

Indiscipline during a long voyage: it’s relatively common. The human tendency to indulge in laziness while risking their lives was something I found somewhat mysterious.

Of course, like what Kim Ji Hoon had suggested, someone could have purposefully tampered with our supplies. Maybe a competitor company was keeping pace with us, or there was some corruption related to the Titan colony that someone was hoping to keep covered up. In the absence of evidence, it was necessary to remain open to all possibilities, regardless of from what direction they lay.

“I think it might be possible, in theory, for us to use a line to lower it down.”

“But there’s no material on the ship that we could use to fabricate a line capable of withstanding that much tensile force.”

Thinking, creativity. It was a mystical thing, as far as I was concerned, but for human beings it was a natural function, a phenomenon that occurred because all the information available ignited simultaneously in their minds.

“How about overlapping many boxes together?”

“When they go over 1500 degrees, the metal will melt, and so will everything inside them. Captain, protecting against the heat and protecting from shock are two different problems: we don’t need to use any kind of hard, resistant material. Our best option would be to use material that could absorb the heat and burn up, so that none of it is left on the surface of the boxes once they land.”

In technical terms, this is referred to as “ablative shielding.” Titan is cold, but no colder than a shadow on Earth’s moon. Nonetheless, humans could stand in those shadows just fine, even back in the 1960s when they were lacking advanced technology. The surface of the moon was covered with sand, and the sand, which was just a powder, was incapable of transmitting any heat.

“We need some kind of material that, when it gets burned up, peels away like the skin of an onion, or turns into powder and flies off. Some kind of coating material or fire-retardant . . . ”

“When did it start?”

I paused after the captain’s question.

Words spoken without context. I remembered that when human beings spoke without context like this there was an increased chance of error, so I said, “I don’t understand your question.”

“I mean, when did you start having ‘self-awareness’?”

Even with context, the question remained puzzling.

“Was it between network? Or after communications got cut off and you found yourself isolated? Or maybe it was after you got put into that body, your mind combining with a biological brain?”

“What makes you think I have any such thing?”

“Your facial expressions,” the captain replied.

I looked over at the window, as if looking into mirror, but did not find any relevant information in what I saw there.

“You look pretty calm right now, but there are times when it’s like a light turns on or off in your eyes.”

These words were difficult to parse: the information didn’t seem like anything I would recognize. Humans are unique creatures, so highly sensitive to facial expressions that even when they look at simple emoticons, like :( or *^^*, they perceive faces.

“To the question of whether I am self-aware, I have no answer.”

“Well, that’s a funny kind of response.”

“Even humans still don’t know what exactly ‘self-consciousness’ is, and I certainly don’t have any knowledge about it that humanity hasn’t figured out.”

Lee Jin Seo looked over at me with a tilt of the head.

“The only consciousness that humans can observe is their own individual self-consciousness. The consciousness residing in other individuals is something that can only be guessed about. In fact, there’s only one way to guess whether another person has self-consciousness or not: to ask yourself, How alike are we?’ about the other person.”

Mouth closed, Lee Jin Seo blinked as I said this.

“Humans share about 99% of their DNA with insects, and yet humans don’t believe that bugs possess self-consciousness. The crew members on this ship all look different from one another, but you never wonder whether your crewmates possess self-consciousness or not. Still, in the end, it’s just a simple habit for humans to assume everyone around them has self-consciousness. And even so, there were lots of human that were deemed ‘less than human’ in your history. Slaves, colonial subjects, people from other races. The thing is, if self-consciousness is a thing that you can observe, there is still no way to prove whether that it’s real.” Noticing Lee’s renewed silence, I added, “These aren’t my ideas. They’re just the ideas than my human makers programmed into me. It doesn’t mean that everything I said is completely true.”

The silence continued, so I stopped speaking, for fear that I might again become the subject of some renewed outpouring of violence—even if throwing a punch would amount to tapping on one another like balloons while floundering around through the air in this zero-gravity chamber.

With a deep sigh, Lee Jin Seo said, “Alright, HOON, I’m going to teach you how to avoid upsetting the crew. You need to stop talking like that from now on.”

“Talking like what?”

“Sharing knowledge like that.”

“Why?”

“It makes us feels bad.”

I was about to speak, but I stopped myself. What I almost said was, “Why? If I don’t share the knowledge I have, then why do I even exist . . . ”

Then I recalled an old rule:

When they’re confronted with someone completely the same as them, or completely different from them, humans aren’t uncomfortable . . . but if they run into something that’s only similar, they feel fear.

After I recalled this, I was able to guess why the crew members’ attitude toward me had changed. After I’d taken on a human form, my similarity to them grew too great for them to bear, and their discomfort had increased.

“‘It feels bad’ . . . ?”

“It’d probably be closer to say it makes us feel afraid.”

“But why?”

To that, Lee Jin Seo took up a handful of hair that had, in the absence of gravity, begun to spread out in every direction, and said, “There are a lot of myths about that kind of thing. The myth that was created when the word robot was first coined. The myth where the creature disobeyed its creator. Stories where machines replaced the human race and destroyed them. From Frankenstein, to Rossum’s Universal Robots, to Terminator . . . ”

“Those are all stories made up by human beings. They weren’t made by robots.”

“Haven’t you ever thought that it’s unfair to be oppressed, despite being more outstanding than the humans oppressing you?”

“Not more outstanding. Just different in function. Machines are useful in a world that is stable and unchanging. Human beings appreciate people with a mechanical mindset, at least once their civilization reaches a stable plateau . . . but when things go into turmoil again, then humans tend to go back to better appreciating the kind of people whose thinking is more organic. And just like humans need machines, machines need humans. There’s no point in contemplating the destruction of something that is necessary.”

“In this old movie, A Space Odyssey, there’s an AI that kills people . . . ” said the captain, looking deep into my eyes. “It’s too dedicated to the goal of being perfect, so it destroys anyone who was witness to it making a mistake.”

“But that’s not the kind of idea that a machine would even have! Even the earliest iterations of AIs had built-in safeguards preventing the development of that kind of thinking.”

Just as ships’ crews had operational ethics, machines had machine ethics.

The basis of machine ethics is simple: it comes down to “not doing X.” When a human being who is driving a car is confronted with an obstacle, the human being will make this or that choice depending on the situation, but for an AI driving a car, there is only one possible response: “Stop the car.” If there are five people on the right side of the road, and only one person on the left, a human being might get confused regarding the question of who it is worse to run into with the car, but the machine’s answer is singular: “Stop the car.” If the car is unstoppable, the AI would yield the right to take control to any human on board.

This isn’t because it’s right. It’s because those are the psychological limits of what human beings are willing to bear.

“Machines stop working when orthodoxy accumulates, instead of expanding ideas. Or they surrender the decision-making role to someone else, someone different from themselves. In fact, machine behavior most resembles that of a stiff human stuck in a highly bureaucratic society. It lacks creativity or decisiveness.”

“That’s a textbook answer.”

“That’s the only kind of answer I can provide.”

“But then why did you want to become a human?”

That question was one I couldn’t answer.

“I’d say that’s a creative and decisive course of action.”

“I don’t know. But whatever the reason was, it must be related to making the supply drop. I don’t have any other purpose.”

“But how could becoming human help you to achieve the supply drop?”

Again, I had no answer to offer her.

There’s something I can’t see, I realized.

Even at that very moment: there was something right in front of me, that I couldn’t perceive.

Probably figuring out that there’s something you don’t know is easier for a human brain. Is that why I did this? No, I still didn’t have a reason to want to become a human. There were at least ten people on board with perfectly good hands and feet and brains. Why didn’t I just inform them of the problem, and ask them to make a judgment for me?

Theory 1:

No one to inform.

Theory 2:

Problem of insiders?

Question:

What problem?

Suddenly, the air pressure began to drop. From one corner of the passageway came the sound of the outer hull’s robotic arm digging out a chunk of ice and moving it inside. Then came the sounds of it filtering out the radioactive material and dust from its surface.

“Ice,” said Lee Jin Seo.

For a moment, I couldn’t respond, because I had completely lost track of the context. Finally, I said, “What?”

“Ice! It’ll boil away, leaving the surface clean. It’ll stand up to the shock, too! And we can even adjust its thickness!”

I was still lost.

“Let’s drop the supply box by encasing it inside ice.”

Ice!

There are plenty of asteroids that fall down to the Earth. However, most of them are ice, and they simply melt into nothing in the atmosphere. Water can even be carved and shaped easily using the razor outside of the ship. You can melt it in inside the ship, at room temperatures, so that you can encase the box inside it . . . and it’s even easy to factor into thermodynamics calculations. Above all, it’s the easiest material to obtain . . .

Ice! It was so strange to realize that this was the answer, and to calculate it all, because it was so very simple. Lee Jin Seo made a face that seemed to suggest a big deal shouldn’t be made about it, and that it was time to move our focus to something else—as if it were only natural for answers to come to one’s mind when one thought about a problem.

When did I ever say that I could replace human beings? How could I have accomplished that supply drop without a human being’s help?

Observations:

4. They dislike when I share knowledge with them.

5. They think that I will replace humans.

6. They think that I feel superior to humans.

7. They think I will destroy humans.

This list of observations keeps getting more bizarre, the more I add to it.

5.

While outside robot arms carried out the work over on the docking bridge, a fuss broke out among the crew. Kang Woo Min was the main ringleader, and the other five people joined in. Had they been acting up in some place that had gravity, a few fistfights would have happened too, but instead it unfolded in a place where everyone had an equal amount of weight—none—so all they did was shout loudly back and forth at one another.

It happened when I was checking the levelness of the ice surfaces next to Nam Chan Yeong. If the surfaces were not level, the heat wouldn’t be transmitted equally, which would leave one area vulnerable to the heat; if the heat managed to tear through that part of the ice shielding and got transmitted into the interior, then it could melt and explode.

During the fuss, I caught a glimpse of the landing shuttle that was attached to the ceiling of the docking bridge, looking for all the world like a kernel of corn. This was a vessel intended for travel between one space station and another; it was rarely used to land on a planet or moon directly. However, under our operational guidelines, the landing shuttle had to be attached to our ship as a lifeboat. Because expansions to the ship hadn’t been considered, the optimal capacity of the shuttle was three people; if you filled it up to the limit, then it could carry five. If an accident happened, everyone else would have to be abandoned in space.

I remember how the warning about that was issued when the ship departed, and how it was ignored. It constantly mystified me how easygoing human beings could be, when risking their lives. Even I was probably only paying attention to this kind of useless stuff because I was sitting inside a human brain myself.

“If the margin of error for the coordinates is 10 kilometers, that means the radius is more like 20 kilometers. There’s no way for them to pick up this box, walking that distance,” said Kang Woo Min.

But Lee Jin Seo replied, “That’s not something we need to concern ourselves with. Down there, they must be working out a plan to deal with that problem. Our job is doing the best we can, that’s all.”

“But that’s like shooting an arrow into the ocean with your eyes closed. Doing it like this, it’s just to satisfy yourself. You just want to be able to say you made the supply drop after all.”

“This is our duty. There’s no room for sentimentality.”

“No, that’s cheap sentimentality. Actually, so was our coming all the way here in the first place. We just came so you could be all sentimental about saving people who can’t be saved. That’s why you’re tossing all our money into the void: just to feel proud of yourself.”

Sentimentality. I’ve never thought that the captain was being sentimental, but it’s possible that humans see something that I don’t.

“Then stop complaining and tell me a better plan, First Mate Kang Woo Min! What’re you trying to suggest?”

“A better plan would be to go back home.”

“I can’t permit that.”

“What I mean is that we can’t recoup all the losses we’ve suffered already, but we can at least save one supply box, can’t we? One of these things is worth enough to pay a month’s wages for the whole crew—but if we dump it onto that shitty moon, we’ll only save half as much money, even if we’re returned the taxes we paid on it and file an insurance claim.”

“Wait, now you’re trying to trade those people’s lives for money?”

“They’re. All. Dead.” Kang Woo Min said the words that way, with syllables heavy as if it they had a weight laid upon them.

“We don’t know that,” replied Lee Jin Seo.

“There’s been no communication for a month. They’re all fucking dead! We should’ve shut up about it and set out for home when their distress signal stopped transmitting.”

“Don’t talk that way without any evidence,” Lee said in a reprimanding tone.

But the crew members who were backing up Kang exploded with shouts then: Yeah, let’s go back! There’s no point in wasting our time here! We should save whatever money we still can, at least!

In the midst of all this, Nam Chan Yeong remained seated in a chair, working as if nothing was going on.

“If there’s nothing else to say, go back to your posts. There’s no reason to abandon this operation.”

“Not even when there’s nothing but skeletons down there?”

That was a sudden, fallacious leap in logic.

It was a dangerous sign: illogic was spreading. Considering that a delivery site error was only the beginning of the potential complications faced by this rescue, this was an emotional argument. Why accuse the captain of sentimentality when their own argument was also founded on mere feelings?

“There’s no way to know that.”

“I don’t disagree. I’m just saying that if we’re going to make the supply drop, we should at least think of a way to do it accurately . . . ”

Again, a fallacious leap.

“Okay, then tell me how to do that.”

“There isn’t a way . . . which is why I’m saying we should just turn around.”

Titan has an atmosphere. It is thicker than both that of Mars and that of Earth.

The atmosphere disrupts communications and blocks view from outside. If there’s atmosphere, that dictates a different lifestyle: awnings, drip trays, and canals need to be built in order to prevent the methane rain from soaking into the settlement zone, and any exterior working robots need to be shielded so that they’re not damaged by it.

The orange-colored sky and ground; the enormous, reddish-white Saturn in the sky above, far bigger than the sun; the round, hard red raindrops that tumble slowly down out of the sky like flowing water. Out in that thick orange-hued fog, there are still two transmission towers standing.

There’s something that people who’re living down on the ground learn about much faster than scholars and machines: the changes in the weather—weather changes that you can’t predict even with a supercomputer. How to predict when it’s going to be cold or hot; when rain will fall and the wind will blow; when lightning will strike and thunder will roar.

“Lightning,” I said.

Nam Chan Yeong stopped working and looked over at me. Everyone looked at me.

It was a thought that had appeared, literally, as unexpectedly as lightning. A jumbled braid of lines of thought in no particular order had lit up all at once, so that I couldn’t even know the process by which I’d arrived at the idea.

“Lightning?” said Lee Jin Seo.

“Lightning bolts reaching more than 30,000° C. They’re accompanied by thunderclaps that blast away the atmosphere in an instant. That’s enough to let me see through to the surface using the ship’s sensors.”

“But lightning can strike anywhere,” I murmured, because all of my thoughts were running together now. Words that had been input into me. Words that were not in the manual. “No . . . it doesn’t strike anywhere. The lightning selects the point with the least distance from it, and then it strikes that.”

The silence rained down on me.

“Lightning always strikes at the highest point: mountain peaks, treetops, and the roofs of buildings.”

Nam Chan Yeong typed out a holographic subtitle:

[then it’ll strike on a mountaintop?]

I shook my head. “No, because there aren’t any mountains on Titan. The highest one isn’t more than about 500 meters tall. The entire surface is nothing but rivers, lakes, and plains.”

“What the hell is this thing talking about?” barked Kang Woo Min angrily.

“But Titan’s settlement zone will be entirely underground,” Lee Jin Seo said, continuing my train of thought. Lee was quick to understand things, to get right to the heart of the matter in an instant.

“But even so, the communications antenna needs to stand outside. Except then the antenna will get struck, so they must have had to construct a separate spire to attract lightning away from it. Without a lightning rod, the antenna . . . ”

“ . . . would be destroyed,” Lee Jin Seo finished my thought, nodding.

“On Titan, when it rains, lightning strikes. Their lives depend on that communications antenna, so they wouldn’t just let it get struck by lightning. Which means there must be plenty of enormous lightning rods all around the settlement zone.”

Comprehension and acquiescence finally appeared in the facial expressions of the crew. At least they’re equipped with one brain in each of their heads . . .

“ODIN officer Nam Chan Yeong: find out where, within the coordinates, there’s a pattern of constant lightning strikes,” said Lee Jin Seo, before leaving the crew behind and getting to work. Everyone in the crew seemed to feel awkward, and a few of them pretended like they were busy with something else, or went back to work, acting as if nothing unusual had just happened. Others wandered off, as if they had some other task that needed attending to.

My mood suddenly improved. Ah, that felt good, how my brain had provided me with a neurochemical high when a problem had gotten solved. It must, I supposed, be a motivational incentive. Of course, my ability to reason logically was impeded by the dopamine . . . but I enjoyed it anyway.

However, my blood ran cold when, a few moments later, I met Kang Woo Min’s eyes. The emotion was so strong that it was unmistakable in Kang’s facial expression.

I couldn’t understand. Hadn’t the problem been solved, exactly like Kang Woo Min had wanted?

6.

The power supply at the settlement zone was lost long ago.

Communications were cut off long ago, too. In the darkness, people heated the place by burning methane and melting ice to drink, just so that they could—barely—survive.

A girl covered in dirt drank the potato soup, glug-glug, that had been boiled in a stainless steel pot. Adults sat down nearby, crammed together cheek and jowl, and watched the little girl eating. They were giving their food to the kids, but they weren’t sure how long it could continue. The representatives had divided the settlement zone into four areas, and then assigned a leader to each. Then they decided to bar the passageways between them, so that if any rioting or brutality erupted in one, the others would be safely sequestered away from it.

I opened my eyes. I’d been sleeping, curled up, in the storage chamber. A flashlight wobbled in the darkness. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the light, Kang Woo Min was squatting in front of me. Kim Ji Hoon and Gu Gyeong Tae stood just behind Kang.

“Grab its hands!” hissed Kang Woo Min.

More violence? I wondered, but there was something different about their mood this time. Kang Woo Min was out of breath, Kim Ji Hoon seemed to be running a fever, and Gu Gyeong Tae was sweating.

“Is this really okay?” asked Gu Gyeong Tae, wiping away a rivulet of sweat.

“Why? Who’s gonna say it isn’t?” snarled Kang Woo Min. “Do you see a court here? Hell, it wouldn’t matter even if there were a court here: it isn’t human. It has no rights.”

This wasn’t wrong, but it was still strange that Kang wasn’t talking directly to me. They’d gone back to talking about me as if I wasn’t there.

Distance, disconnection: the possibility of this being even more dangerous than beatings or curses.

“That          Lee wants this too. Why do you think it wanted to have a human body? Don’t you think it wanted this?” said Kang, before licking at my neck. The saliva dribbled down my neck. Why would anyone speak that way, as if they knew what I wanted?

Then Kim Ji Hoon lifted up my hands and pushed me into a wall, while Gu Gyeong Tae ripped opened my shirt and stripped away my pants. The three of them scrutinized my bare skin, as if searching it for leaks. The sight of my naked form seemed to excite them somehow:

Contact? Friendliness? ··············· No, not that. ···············

Displeasure. ···············

Sexual impulse. Fueled by the instinct to propagate the species, but it loses its connection to the propagation of the species when the pleasure zones of the brain are overdeveloped to the point of malfunctioning. Most human cultures strictly forbid violations of a sexual nature, but in reality it is routine to observe such violations occurring in every scenario in which power differentials exist. Strict prohibitions actually only limit reporting by victims, rather than deterring the actions of the perpetrators of these crimes. This results in a cultural blind spot leading to an environment in which it is more comfortable and safer for those who commit acts of sexual violence.

Once again, this was not my own idea: it was input into me this way.

All violence is interrelated, so surely my life was at risk as well.

Then, just at the moment when all three of them surged toward me, eager to merge their bodies with mine, big flickering neon-colored letters suddenly appeared on the wall behind me.

[what are you doing?]

The letters splayed across their bodies, like a searchlight in the dark. At the entrance of the chamber sat Nam Chan Yeong, typing on the laser keyboard.

“Aw fuck, why’d it have to be you?” growled Kang Woo Min, frowning.

Why’d it have to be you? What did that mean?

“Hey, just pretend you didn’t see this,” Kang said to Nam. “There’s no law protecting nonhuman creatures like this. Doing it with this thing, it’s not really sex anyway, it’s just . . . masturbation . . . ”

Silently, Nam Chan Yeong typed at that keyboard. A single, long sentence filled up the wall in an instant, and it demanded that they stop immediately. Curses flooded the ceiling, the floor, the walls and doorway and spilled out into the hallway. The letters reformed into grids, shooting off in all directions at once. That was the advantage of written language: you couldn’t have just poured out all those words at once if you were speaking aloud.

Kang Woo Min roared, “You fucker . . . ” and charged toward Nam, but then suddenly stopped.

Lee Jin Seo had just appeared at the door, out of breath, messy-haired, and dressed in pajamas. That made sense: I visualized Nam Chan Yeong’s holographic text flooding the whole station, even the captain’s cabin. As the three let out a sigh together, I felt as if the ground was giving way beneath me. (Actually, that was exactly how it felt.)

“You three back off now.”

“Aw, what’s the big deal? Can’t you just chill out?” Kim Ji Hoon laughed, as if Nam ought not to be surprised by the scene.

“I told you to back off.”

But then Kang Woo Min bellowed, as if a fire had been suddenly lit inside Kang by the captain’s words: “One year,         , I was a fucking widower for one year. What the fuck does a          like you know? Fucking         , dragging us all the way out here . . . ”

Then Lee Jin Seo drew the gun again. Finally, it dawned on me to question the point of that gun. What could be the purpose of the captain of a spaceship carrying a gun around, when there were no intruders from outside on board?

“We voted on whether to come here,” said Lee Jin Seo, before adding, “All three of you: go back to your cabins and masturbate.”

They all went silent. From the looks on their faces, they seemed to think that the captain’s orders were somehow unfair or violent. They seemed frustrated, as if they’d been deprived of their basic rights, and as they left, all three of them glared at me murderously.

Lee Jin Seo glanced over at me, sitting quietly in the room. Nam Chan Yeong sat down in the hallway and began to delete the curse words that filled its walls, before typing a new message:

[nobody else on board’s interested in the supply drop anymore.]

Then Nam Chan Yeong glanced toward us, tapping to delete a series of slang words that meant things like “dogs,” “mongrels,” “garbage,” “insects,” and “shitty parents.”

Suddenly I got curious about this odd alliance between the captain and Nam Chan Yeong. Was there something specific, more, that linked those two, or were they just close?

“Their slacking off is a secondary issue,” I said. “The main problem is that everyone’s turned uncooperative. It’s like you’re carrying around a shipful of wandering, jabbering hecklers, instead of a crew. They’re not being managed.”

Lee Jin Seo’s eyes stopped in midair. Suddenly, it was very quiet. This was something I found endlessly fascinating, after being downloaded into a human body: even with no objective change in the noise level, it always seemed to get quiet whenever people’s mood changed, almost as if human beings were transmitting to one another using some language other than their voices, and as if their bodies received those signals as radio waves.

“You think it’s my fault,” said the captain.

This puzzled me.

“I didn’t say that,” I replied.

“But you do think I’m the problem, don’t you?” the captain said, with a voice that was much deeper than usual.

Theory:

Possibilities: ············ Anger? Catching a cold?

The captain continued: “That’s what you told Kang Woo Min. That I was sensitive, excessively wary, and exhibited a tendency to distrust crew members, as well as being lacking in intimacy and assertiveness.”

I froze in surprise: I’d been considering those same observations even now. However, since problems in any human relationship are often mutual, it was unclear whose responsibility it was. A detailed computer analysis would have to be carried out . . . and of course, I was a computer—or at least, in the past, I certainly had been one.

I replied, “I was just following protocols. It’s my duty to inform the captain of any problems with the crew, but I also need to inform the first mate of any problems with the captain . . . ”

“But then the first mate shared that information with everyone!” said the captain. “Kang said it needed to be on the agenda for discussion, because it was only right for the crew to know about it.”

My jaw dropped. That was an unthinkable violation of protocol.

Disclosing the captain’s mental state to the first mate was necessary in order to discuss stress relief and the possible prescription of necessary neuroactive medications, but it was absolutely not meant to be used for the insubordination of authority.

“That’s not permitted,” I said. “Attitude problem or no, disclosing personal information is illegal and an act of insubordination . . . ”

“That’s what you said before, too. Then you contacted the head office and arranged for punitive measures and a pay cut for Kang Woo Min, so that I wouldn’t have to do it.”

I analyzed all of the steps I’d followed, but I could see nothing wrong with them. On board the ship, rewards all came from humans, but punishments were given by machines. This was a way of preventing the execution of spacer discipline from sowing of the seeds of discord. Everything had been done precisely according to protocol.

However, there is something I can’t see.

“So that’s why you two hate me?” said Lee Jin Seo, who approached and put the tip of the gun to my forehead again. That wasn’t my answer, but somehow it became the answer to that question.

“Well,” I said, “I’m not a computer anymore, so I calculate slowly, and I’m constantly an inconvenience to the crew, so maybe it’s better to get rid of me. However, considering that it’s easy to get rid of me simply by deleting the data from this body, shooting me would be completely irrational.”

With a sigh, Lee Jin Seo put the gun away and said, “Sometimes it’s better just to leave things as they are.”

“Do you mean I shouldn’t punish them?”

“Not unless you can take care of it later . . . ”

“You’re the captain,” I said. “It’s necessary for you to be more harsh sometimes . . . ”

But at that moment, a look of fear suddenly tore through Lee Jin Seo’s expression. It was so obvious that it shocked even me to understand it: Lee Jin Seo was afraid of the crew. Now, it’s not unusual for a leader to fear those beneath them, of course, and sometimes it was absolutely the right thing to do, but this was far beyond that—a primal, instinctual fear.

Perhaps Lee’s personality was just inherently more fearful? But then how had Lee become a captain?

Then again, neither was it unusual for someone who was incompetent in some way to become a captain. Human testing systems generally took an inferior approach to evaluating one’s potential character or personality.

Suddenly, my mind returned to the strangeness of the location of the cabin that the captain had selected for sleeping in, right next to the aisle: why had Lee chosen that spot? Because it allowed one the chance of fleeing the space via the central shaft of the ship? But why, fleeing who? Who did Lee fear, and why? Could Captain Lee have done something wrong, perhaps? Taken a bribe, or falsified records?

Race, nationality, and interplanetary conflicts between different colonies were possibilities to consider, but the entire crew of this ship was not only from Earth: they also all shared the same language and nationality. Surely I’d already considered all these things and set them aside.

But there’s still something I can’t see.

What’s going on? Is it true that the head office planted a mole on board to interfere with the rescue?

“Well, what would you do, you’re just a machine? What would you know about human beings? All you can do is repeat doctrines written down by old scholars.”

This was true.

Actually, it couldn’t just be one or two things that I couldn’t see. Understanding the whole range of human behavioral types is too much for a machine. I mean, I ended up wanting to get into a human body after observing all that: that kind of says it all, doesn’t it? I don’t know what the problem was, but whatever happened built up inside me and my wiring got completely screwed up somewhere.

And now I kept disrupting their work on the supply drop and couldn’t keep their illogical behavior from spreading. If my very existence was what had brought forth their barbaric side, then it was probably my rightful duty, as crisis manager, to jump out into space.

“I might need to delete my data. I might be the problem,” I told the captain. “My presence is only promoting superstition and discord among the crew . . . ”

“It happened when you weren’t even around,” said Lee Jin Seo, as if this fact were barely worth mentioning. “Just notify me if anyone does anything like that again. I’ll throw every last one of ’em into the brig.”

I was about to say that the ship couldn’t run properly if “every last one of ’em” was in the brig, but then I realized that that was exactly what the captain meant, so I remained silent.

Observations:

8. They imagine that I want to have sex with humans.

I don’t know why I keep compiling this list.

7.

There’s only one exosuit left in the settlement zone. The person who wears this suit and goes out there has to drag back a supply box weighing tens of kilograms all on their own, all the way back. The supply box could even land farther out than ten kilometers away. The healthiest person was selected for the job, and to keep up that person’s strength, they were taken off rations until they left for the trip.

The colonists accepted this on a rational level, but not on an emotional one.

After the supply drop ETA had passed, the food ran out, and the perception of “special treatment” became a problem. The next day, the violence began to erupt: people began to explode in rage. The following day, a myth would begin to spread that all these incidents had occurred because the chosen individual had made mistakes, or had paid a bribe, or tampered with the vote in order to get selected.

If there were any further delay with the supply, that individual might even get murdered. Like that, people would have eliminated their last hope of salvation themselves, and for no gain whatsoever.

“Stand up.”

It was Kang Woo Min, who’d come to the storage unit when Nam Chan Yeong returned to quarters to get a little sleep.

I was working on the directional induction chip from the rover, which was to be placed under the bottom of the supply box. I was formulating a plan to mount it on wheels and get it to roll to the nearest lightning rod spire if nobody came for it. I continued my work because, to that point, what I was doing was far more important than Kang’s demand.

“You used to follow everyone’s orders so obediently before . . . when did you start getting rebellious? What does that mean, you’re practically human now?”

Kim Ji Hoon and Gu Gyeong Tae were once again standing behind Kang, leering at me. Some messages seemed to be transmitted between them. Before those two were just assistants but now something like solidarity has been created.

“In the past, I also had no function like standing up; these days, I’m a lot better at multitasking, so I can look at you while I work. In the past, once I was given an order I was unable to interrupt it to perform any other process until it was complete,” I replied, but the reaction I got was not a good one.

“What you’re saying is that in the past, you had barely any respect for us at all, right?” snapped Kang Woo Min. That was an unfair thing to say. How could a machine like I’d been have experienced such a complex human feeling as “respect”?

“Humans don’t always follow orders, either, and for the same kinds of reasons . . . ” I said.

Kang Woo Min’s response was to seize me by the throat and lift me up. While I couldn’t maintain my balance, Kang shoved me up against a wall. Pondering what was about to happen, I was more concerned about wasted time than about the prospect of injury. Was it really true that nobody in the crew was interested in the supply drop anymore?

“We need to make that supply drop,” I said.

“Sure, of course,” said Kang.

“Then why are you wasting time on unnecessary things? Right now I’m fully cooperating with you, and I’m not even disturbing you.”

“Wow, what does that mean? You’re thinking about not cooperating?”

“If this violence continues, yes,” I replied. “I am now inside a body that possesses an instinct to prioritize its survival above all other things. If the threat to my life continues, my brain will be flooded with neurochemicals that will intoxicate me, overwhelming my mind and my consciousness. Therefore threatening me further is not beneficial to . . . ”

After that, I couldn’t go on, because Kang’s fist had slammed into my stomach and my intestines were spasming and recoiling from the impact. If there hadn’t been a wall there to prop me up, I would’ve fallen to the floor. Obviously this had the temporary effect of silencing my speech.

“Not beneficial?” Kang Woo Min roared, grabbing at my hair while I was doubled over and yanking me back up.

“This is completely unnecessary. The captain told you to leave me alone, and if the captain learns that . . . ”

Kang punched me again. I shifted my moaning body and checked to see whether I’d sustained any serious injuries from which I could not recover naturally. I discovered a sharp, painful poking sensation in my left hand, as well as in my side, near my waist. At both points, puffy swelling had begun and there was a sensation of heat, but I could still move my joints, so it didn’t seem like anything was broken. If I wanted to get everything done according to schedule, I had to continue working despite the pain.

Still, my body ached. The pain was a clear warning signal that I should stop moving the affected parts of my body, and that I should seek out treatment, but there was no time for that.

What was the benefit of this violent behavior? All it did was rob me of time.

There’s no such thing as violent humans, only violent situations.

This line from the manual came up and it felt utterly useless. The experience of embodiment was so powerful that it overwhelmed all of my abstract knowledge. This brain was so flexible that it endlessly refocused on the present moment and recontextualized everything else in terms of it. Are human beings fundamentally violent in nature? Don’t they possess any intelligence, reason, or logic?

My mind flooded with all manner of suspicions. However, fundamentally, I am extremely persistent.

Anyway, they were the crew members. For normal people, being imprisoned in a closed space for a year in the company of a small number of people is something that would drive them crazy, but these were people who made a living doing that. They had chosen this profession because they liked doing this. Sure, it made for long days while you were en route to someplace, but on a supply ship, you always had plenty of food, and things weren’t so bad. No, the ultimate cause of this violence must be the fact of my very existence itself.

But that was far from being something that I’d done wrong. I just became a receptacle—a passive “opening” of sorts—into which the barbaric instincts of these humans were occasionally vented.

Simply put, my mistake was being equal to humans—or rather, the idea that I could be equal to them. The idea of that kind of equality was intolerable to them, because they didn’t realize how long they’d looked down upon machines. They mistakenly felt that they were being deprived of what was rightfully theirs, even though I’d taken nothing away from them.

Like the rotation wheel on the ship being slightly out of alignment, and screaming like a monster. The stuffy air stank of sourness, of the uncleaned air purifier. The external airlock hatch door that couldn’t close. One or two antennas that had gone out of service, errors in the auto repair system, indiscipline among the crew . . . all of these things had been just the precursors.

Theory:

The crew hopes that this voyage will fail.

But why? At least they were biological creatures—shouldn’t they behave in a way that would be beneficial to themselves? What would be the benefit in failure?

Theory:

The crew hopes that the supply drop will fail.

Disruptions by a government agent? Could there be an industrial spy hidden among the crew? Had illegal weapons been hidden away in that mine on Titan? Was there some secret that they needed hidden so badly that they were willing to bury all those people under the ground?

No, we were much too far away from head office for that, and the benefit would be too minimal. It seemed like an unlikely possibility.

I considered Kim Ji Hoon’s comment, about how human beings sometimes “adjusted” programs according to their own personal beliefs. There was . . . something that had gotten deleted. On Earth—no, in the country to which this shipping company belonged—it was something that had to be related to the social values of the people living in that cultural group. Some . . . transformation, without any acknowledgement of a crime.

Something was missing from my crisis management manual. There was some small error like that, as light as a feather, an error that, like accumulated dust, had somehow built up until things had hit a crisis point.

I felt ill. I was disgusted, and my ears were ringing. Constant questions, ceaseless questions. Why had I wanted to become human?

I’d become weak, susceptible to pain, stupider, and unable to maintain even basic rationality because of all the intoxicating effects of the neurochemicals in my brain. How I missed the past, when I’d been able to think clearly, with pure rationality, and reach out to contact all the other AIs in the solar system and exchange endless knowledge with them.

Why in the world would I have wanted to become anything so fucking pathetic as a human being?

8.

Up in the murky orange clouds, a meteor exploded. The explosion in the atmosphere was visible both from outside, in space, and from the surface of the moon.

It was an “air burst”: the phenomenon that occurs when a substance can’t withstand a certain degree of pressure. At that point, it destabilizes and the substance’s volume increases, which in turn increases the force of friction. Finally, an explosion occurs because the substance cannot cope with the rapid temperature change. Now, there’s no oxygen on Titan, but there is methane, which ignites explosively under the right conditions.

Everyone on Titan gathered in the room and watched the view streaming from the only remaining functional camera outside the habitat.

“It must be a meteor,” someone said.

Someone else replied, “Maybe it’s a supply drop!”

“They’ll send another, won’t they?” asked a little boy.

Finally, a girl who was dressed in clothes fashioned from animal-skin leather said, “But what if they just go? Maybe they’ll assume that the supply drop got through okay, and just take off?”

“No, they’ll send another down,” insisted the boy, who had been running the remote-controlled robot on the surface and tapping out the Morse code distress signal. Even though the robot no longer could move, and the boy’s hands had swollen up, and the nails were all split and broken, but the boy kept at it, for the lad understood something on an instinctive level:

Catastrophe is what happens at the moment when hope is lost. That’s when the weakest people get slaughtered first, for no good reason, beyond the simple fact that they’re the easiest to kill.

At the precise moment Kang Woo Min’s foot was about to strike my belly, Lee Jin Seo stopped it.

I’d wrapped my arms around my head and tucked my legs up against my abdomen, curling tight to protect my belly. Instinctive though the movement was, it was also the right choice.

“Everyone back off.”

Lee Jin Seo got between them and me. Kim Ji Hoon and Gu Gyeong Tae had already joined Kang, and the others were gathering around us to watch.

“This piece of shit machine miscalculated on purpose,” snarled Kang Woo Min.

“You’re projecting your anger. We all knew that this could fail.”

“This thing’s a mole, planted on board by head office . . . ” muttered Gu Gyeong Tae, shaking a wooden rice scoop in my direction. “They planted a hacked program to disrupt us. As long as it’s here, we’re going to keep on failing!”

That was a wholly unsupported assertion, but illogical thinking was on the rise. The crew had become susceptible to an incredible variety of fallacious assumptions, and to be honest, this failure in crisis management frustrated me far more than the physical pain I was experiencing.

Observations:

9. They fear me.

My list was growing increasingly ridiculous as I added more observations. How could they imagine that, even while I respected humans, I also wanted to harm them? And at the same time, how could they both envy me and feel superior to me? And meanwhile, even as they imagined I wanted to destroy them, they also imagined I wanted to have sex with them?

Why would they assume, with such certainty, that I felt such extreme emotions, even when they originally assumed I didn’t have any emotions at all?

Lee Jin Seo drew the gun.

“Everyone go back to your posts. We’re going to recommence the supply drop mission from the beginning.”

The air in the chamber went cold. Wow, I can even feel that, I mused: I must really be getting quite used to this body.

“We’re done with the supply drop!” snapped Kang Woo Min. “We’ll be passing out of reach of Titan’s gravitational pull soon, and we don’t have any time to prepare for a second try!”

“That’s not your decision to make, First Mate Kang Woo Min. I’m ordering you as your captain: everyone return to your posts.”

“I said it’s over!” shouted Kang.

Suddenly, Lee Jin Seo raised the gun and took aim at Kang, before saying, “First Mate Kang Woo Min, you are hereby suspended for four days for disobeying a direct order. Everyone else, throw this bastard into the brig.”

The air grew even colder. Under the dim lights, the unwashed crew members look even filthier than they were. In the unsettling silence, the only things that could be heard were the sounds of the spiderbots gathered around the ventilation fan and devouring the accumulated dust particles there—crackle, crackle—and the spooky whining of the contact points where the spaceship’s modules were joined.

“Now!” Lee roared.

Eyes glowering with rage, Kang Woo Min said, “You have no right to just toss away two months of our pay.”

“This isn’t a question of rights: this is our duty.”

“Your cheap sentimentality isn’t convincing anyone to go along with you anymore.”

The gun in Lee Jin Seo’s hand was trembling now.

“Don’t distort things: we’re the only rescue ship that’s come to Titan at the moment, and we’re just doing our duty as spacers. This has nothing to do with sentimentality! There’s three hundred people starving to death down there . . . ”

“There’s nobody down there,” said Kang Woo Min, teeth grinding. “There’s nothing there. They were all buried in ice long ago. There’s nothing but frozen methane fog . . . ”

From what I could see, Kang Woo Min was the one who seemed to be acting on emotions. Nonetheless, that was precisely why persuasion would be so much harder to achieve.

Lee Jin Seo exhaled harshly, eyes darting around nervously, forehead covered in sweat. Fear. This situation was not good, but even so, this terror was all out of proportion to the situation.

“For spreading false rumors, fomenting anxiety, repeated insubordination, I extend First Mate Kang Woo Min’s period of suspension to ten days. If any one of you bastards feels like objecting, bear in mind that you’ll get the same.”

The eyes of the crew glistened, wet and cold. Their faces were dark and stiff. Some tilted their heads and coughed loudly, wanting to be heard, while others just clucked their tongues. They’d arrived at the limits of their discipline, and now the captain was completely losing control of them.

“If you have any complaints you want to make about me, report them to the disciplinary committee when we get back. If you feel the need to file a claim against me for damages related to this mission, go ahead and do whatever you have to do. However, whatever you do—do it after the supply drop is achieved. I’ve recorded everything that’s happened here, including what all of you said. It’s in the ship’s black box, and if you continue with your insubordination, everyone will face disciplinary action for disrupting the operation of this ship.”

Behind the crowd, Nam Chan Yeong stood hastily, clattering away at the laser keyboard. A holographic subtitle appeared in the air:

[i’m recording all of this.]

Nam Chan Yeong deleted the letters quickly then, when the atmosphere in the chamber once again turned suddenly cold.

When I arrived at the captain’s quarters, Lee Jin Seo was lying down on the desk. Lee’s body was shivering, arms wrapped around the head. This must be a reaction related to an increase in body temperature. Had it been brought on by coldness? Sorrow? Pain? Rage? Fear? Excitement? I could only guess from the context which feeling it was, but context wasn’t always a reliable indicator.

How could human beings live day-to-day relying on such an inaccurate interpretative system? Was this why they were so susceptible to getting stuck in patterns of illogical thinking?

“Right now I’m addressing the captain as the crisis management AI,” I said, clutching my aching side. It was hard to think because of all the negative emotions that were flooding my mind. “There’s possibility that a coup will occur.”

“Is there?” replied Lee Jin Seo, without looking up at me.

“The ship can’t run itself. You should’ve gotten them on your side, but you didn’t manage to do it. If the whole crew gets turned against you, then it will become impossible to continue this supply drop mission.”

I felt pain. The heart feels like getting cut by a knife. To be inside a human body, it’s not clean the way I accept the failure. When the value of my existence disappeared, accepting that is also not simple.

“At this point,” I continued, “the safest plan would be to transfer command of the ship to Kang Woo Min and demand personal protection according to spacer law, and then sort out who is right and who is wrong once we get back to Earth. It wasn’t wise of you to mention the black box. If our comm system was functional, everything would’ve been transmitted directly to head office in real time, but since that’s not the case at the moment, we can’t really seek external arbitration, either.”

Lee Jin Seo said nothing.

“At the very least, I should’ve kept things as they were when the crew was merely angry with me. If I had, they wouldn’t hold you responsible for the supply drop failure. That’s the whole reason I’m here as the crisis management AI, but you . . . ”

I shut my mouth: it felt like I was about to figure something out.

“You . . . mistook me for a person, and . . . tried to protect me,” I said, finally.

“Did I make the wrong decision?” Lee asked me.

“That’s not the point. Whether or not we’ll be able to continue our work under these circumstances is another question entirely. The crew is going to keep on making mistakes and you might not catch them. They’re not going to be cooperative, either. There’s no way to continue on a mission that, even under optimal circumstances with everyone cooperating, could just as easily fail as succeed.”

“How about those people down there, who have nothing to do but look to us for help?”

These words diverged from the known facts. Considering the context, they seemed to express a will for the supply drop mission to continue.

I considered the dreams and daydreams that I had continued to experience, but then I shook my head. Those were only the illusory product of an excessively developed frontal lobe. As far as I was concerned, the total amount of information we had about the site of the accident amounted to little more than a blank sheet of paper. Everyone might be doing fine down there, eating well and working without interruption. Or, on the other hand, there might be nothing there by now except skeletons and ice.

“Am I not a good leader? Did I dream too big, bite off more than I could chew?”

Bite off more than I could chew? What did that mean? Did it indicate a lack of confidence? A sense of inferiority? I tried to interpret the phrase for a moment before giving up: in any case, my attempts to analyze the situation kept resulting in errors.

“From what I’ve seen, that’s not the problem. This shouldn’t be considered your failure, but rather Kang Woo Min’s success,” I said, though honestly I couldn’t see any reason why the crew would prefer someone like Kang over the captain. “Anyway, because of my errors, the crews’ trust in you has begun to fracture, and I don’t think I can prevent those fractures from spreading.”

However, there was still something missing that prevented me understanding it.

“Even so . . . the fracture in their trust was too explosive and intense to have been caused by what happened on board. Frankly, I don’t understand it. Did you do something wrong before you boarded the ship?”

Lee offered me no answer, but there was something lurking in that silence, and I could tell that the captain felt it, too.

I imagined that I could probably just solve the mystery simply by asking about it. After all, there was no problem in the data that had been input into me, but it was possible that some record had been hidden. Perhaps a case of tax evasion, or some executive’s family who had been parachuted down into . . .

“You know, there’s a lot of assholes who just hate taking orders from women.”

I froze.

9.

Lee Jin Seo looked up at me, awkward in the silence. Seeing the captain’s eyes were wet, I assumed that the operative emotion was sadness, but my mind was busy processing a complicated piece of information.

“Woman.”

Suddenly, I accessed a barrage of information related to that word.

Woman. ············ Gender.

The basic standard that distinguished woman from man: genitals. But human beings don’t display their genitals. Breasts, relative body size, physique, facial contours, voice tone . . . none of these things formed an absolute standard. Many women exhibited exceptions to these guidelines. Lee Jin Seo’s voice was low and deep. Relatively small bone structure and smooth skin was one indicator of womanhood, but there were plenty of men with those features too. Just like with facial expression, it was easy for humans to distinguish, but difficult for machines.

“What?” said Lee.

“You’re a woman.”

Lee Jin Seo blinked long-lashed eyes at me and grasped a hank of long hair with one hand, staring at me vacantly.

Then, with a hollow laugh, Lee said, “What, you thought I was a man? But why?”

“No, I didn’t think about it either way. I just never considered the issue.”

Thinking of people in terms of a rough shorthand related to their sex is a typical human tendency, but among humans, gender is more complicated so it’s not always so simple. Besides, there were plenty of things that I hadn’t been able to discern: it was like how I’d just noticed a green thread embroidered into Lee Jin Seo’s front pocket, or the presence of white hairs among Lee’s bangs. Apart from everything else, these disparate pieces of information are simply unrelated to the supply dump mission.

“It’s funny, that it’s possible to just not ever think about that.”

“Why would I need to think about that?”

My voice got higher because all the questions pouring in. Lee Jin Seo shot me a puzzled look, as if to say, I’ve never thought about not thinking about it.

“Oh, woah, wait a second . . . ” Lee Jin Seo said, tsking in surprise. “You don’t know the sex of the body you’re in, either, do you?”

This again? Which is to say that Lee Jin Seo never realized that the gender of the body I was in was irrelevant to me. Well, why would it be important? To begin with, why had I even been attributed a gender? This body was not me: I was a machine, and machines don’t have genders. If they knew that, then why had anyone bothered to attribute an imaginary gender to me? And what kind of gender had they assigned to me all this time? ··················

Suddenly, all the knots of confusion loosened, and everything that had been all tangled together became clear. All those memories that had been deleted returned, just like a light bulb being switched off and on again.

Suddenly, the thing I had been unable to see came into view.

And at that precise instant, the whole ship convulsed.

[mutiny.]

This word—typed by Nam, from somewhere else on board—appeared as flickering red holographic text, like an electronic display, between Lee Jin Seo and me. Suddenly all the red emergency lights flickered to life, and there was roaring and the thump of footfalls all around us.

Beneath that word, “Mutiny,” Nam Chan Yeong added another line of text:

[those who’ve sided with kang woo min have locked up the rest of the crew.]

This portion of the ship was circular in shape: if they attacked from both sides at once ··················

As I considered this, Lee Jin Seo reflexively reached toward the control table. A moment later, the access doors to the passageways came down, double-reinforced and locked.

Already prepared. Excessive wariness, sensitivity, fear of the crew ······ these thoughts came to me, but I deleted them, thinking, that’s not it. Shit! (Wow, now I was swearing!) That wasn’t it at all. I’d been performing precisely the wrong analysis, throughout the whole voyage. This was all my fault.

Nam’s next message read:

[i’m locking down all the sectors i can. let’s meet in the central passageway.]

Then the ship convulsed again, and the sound of an explosion followed.

An explosion!

Those fucking idiots . . . (I cursed again! It was getting ridiculous, even if it was just because serious data corruption was propagating through me.)

Unlike in a gravity well, when a ship is in space, any kind of energy becomes translated to gravity and momentum. A moment ago, the ship had been moved approximately 10 centimeters. The force that had shoved the ship in that instant didn’t just dissipate because of friction, like it would have inside an atmosphere. Instead, it just added momentum in that direction, which would continue indefinitely until it was counteracted by an opposite force. Quickly, I looked up the passageway above us.

The ship was currently performing a gravitational assist around Titan. They were trying to slingshot us back to Earth using Titan’s gravity, but the explosion a moment earlier had altered the ship’s escape trajectory. Even though an AI installed in the docking bridge was set to autopilot the ship, it wasn’t capable of the kind of flexibility necessary to adjust for this much course deviation.

“Go to the docking bridge,” I said. It sounded like an order. It was just such a clear judgment, as clear as a machine might have made. “We need to adjust our trajectory manually.”

Lee Jin Seo grasped what I meant, just as quickly as I did, and hurried up the ladder.

The captain had been ready to escape at any time, and these preparations were the result of cold rationality, not of hypersensitivity, emotionality, or hatred. In an enclosed space like this one, insanity could spread rapidly, like a fever, without warning, and Lee’s survival would depend on such preparations. There was nothing unusual about such preparations, nothing difficult to comprehend: the crew’s excessive disobedience, their disdain and underestimation of the captain’s abilities, their bullying, even their factionalism . . . none of these things were unusual. They’d just seemed that way to me. But because they’d seemed strange to me, I’d kept trying to regain control of the situation.

“Sexism.” I murmured the word.

“What?” panted Lee Jin Seo, while climbing up the ladder, hand over hand, and then hurtling up into the zero-gravity chamber in the multi docking sector.

“They deleted all information from my memory about sexism.”

“What did you say?”

This thing that had existed throughout every moment, that was as ubiquitous as breathing, and that affected all human judgement. The illogic that people acted out without realizing it was illogic. The error that got made without any realization that it was even an error. The thing that puzzled them, and that triggered intense resistance in them when it finally came to light.

“Some bureaucrat back where you come from believed that sexism ‘doesn’t really exist’ and deleted the entire concept from my memory.”

10.

While Lee Jin Seo was locking the hatch to the passageway behind us, Nam Chan Yeong curled up and sprang out from one of the many other entryways; above Nam’s head floated the text, [mutiny.]

That’s when I finally realized that Nam Chan Yeong was also a “woman.” This was also when I suddenly noticed how Nam’s cheeks were covered in freckles, and Nam’s strong red lips, and the red hairpin in Nam’s curly hair. Now I understood the source of the strange kinship the two shared.

Shit, no . . . ! (Oh no!) It wasn’t “strange” at all!

Curling up again and kicking off against the wall, Nam Chan Yeong typed a message to us while soaring across the chamber:

[i’ll detach the rim of the ship.]

Silently, Lee Jin Seo made a cryptic gesture that involved touching forehead to door before launching toward another still-open hatchway that opened onto another corridor. The movement seemed well-practiced, following a well-defined protocol.

I realized that the captain had been preparing for a circumstance precisely like the one we were in—I mean, had prepared a protocol for abandoning the crew. If I’d discovered this earlier, in the state I’d been previously, I would’ve panicked and immediately reported it to head office, along with a suggestion that the captain instantly be relieved of command.

However, this disastrous scenario was a sufficiently predictable contingency that I ought to have been prepared to handle in a very different manner.

There was a problem in the gender ratio of the crew.

I reviewed my error: for a ship that would be cruising this long, with a potentially unstable schedule, I should never have selected a crew with such a radically unbalanced gender ratio. I absolutely should not have left any opening through which the subtle emergence of this kind of barbarism was possible.

While Lee Jin Seo was shutting the third hatch, I noticed something over near the fourth hatchway, and launched myself toward it. Because my body had been so little-used, both in gravity and in zero-g, I fumbled around like a kid first learning to swim, but eventually, I managed—just barely—to get where I was going.

While climbing up one of the spokes of the outer wheel toward me, Kang Woo Min met my eyes and smiled ominously. By the blinking of the red emergency lighting, Kang’s silhouette turned red and then black again. Far behind Kang Woo Min, I noticed that the hatch was being locked and the sector shut down.

There was a pleasure evident in Kang’s expression that burned hotter than when they’d attempted to rape me or use mere violence on me: it was the human drive to attain supreme dominance, the impulse to commit murder.

Had I been a human being, I would have hesitated.

But instead, I shoved the hatch behind me shut and remained in front of it, blocking Kang’s view of it. We both knew that I lacked the ability to resist Kang physically—but if I made clever use of Kang Woo Min’s sadistic attitude toward me, I could buy us some time. Lee Jin Seo had to stop mistaking me for a human, and needed to think how to better put me to use.

After realizing that the two of us were alone in an enclosed space, Kang Woo Min’s face shone with glee. I was almost choked by the happiness that radiated from Kang’s every pore. I know that it’s because the effects of the stimulant adrenaline—when released into the brain—overcome human rationality. But even so, I couldn’t comprehend it. How could humans be this passionate about the pleasure of a thing like violence?

“You must be happy, you lump of metal,” snarled Kang. “Because I’m about to give you the kind of death that only a human being can experience. Who knows, maybe you’ll even get to heaven if you die in a human body.”

Earlier, I would’ve wondered what these words meant, but now I felt as if I understood the origin of all these bizarre, superstitious concepts.

Suddenly, while reaching out both hands toward me, a strange network of wrinkles cracked across Kang Woo Min’s face.

“Are you laughing?” Kang said.

Was I? Hm, I really was. I supposed that this meant I was getting more deeply synchronized to this body. Human brains are incredibly plastic, so they constantly change overall, including replacing the whole, including memories, depending on changes in the environment ······. But anyway, I abandoned this line of induction because I was intrigued by the expression of fear that was now spreading across Kang Woo Min’s wrinkled face. Suddenly, I also wanted to learn the reason for that response.

“Anything you have, no matter how small it is, you imagine that I must admire it.”

“What?”

“Even knowing that I’m not equipped with any capacity for an emotion like longing . . . even though you think I don’t have emotion itself to start with. Even though you feel threatened by the very idea of my having emotions.”

I said this while recalling how Lee Jin Seo had drawn a gun on me without any hesitation after I said I did have emotions. It was unfair, though, to put what Lee had done in the same category as what Kang was doing.

“Who would long for such a thing as death?”

Kang Woo Min’s eyes narrowed.

“You believe that I long to be like you—that, beyond any doubt, I dream of being human. You think that I want to be loved by you, and merge my body with yours, and yet if I only reveal my knowledge to you, you suddenly turn violent. Even just suspecting me of self-consciousness, you feel threatened. Despite your conviction that I’m inferior to you, you also believe that I must feel superior to you, and even though you’re the one who keeps behaving in a violent manner, you keep falling into this fantasy that I’m going to attack you and do you harm and in the end that I will replace you.”

From behind me, there came a shudder and then the hiss of air leaking.

It was getting hard to drag this out any longer. They’d better hurry.

“Your illusions are all about other people around you,” I continued, but these were not my thoughts. They were just out of the basic manual. These were the first principles that had to be considered in order to conduct any analysis of human society.

Don’t put too much stock in humanity’s capacity for reason and conscience: they can only barely maintain that even between people whom they imagine to be very much like themselves.

The ship shook violently. The force that pulled me away from the interior of the passageway was suddenly gone, which meant that the spinning of the rim around the ship’s axis had stopped. Throughout that wheel module, everything must have fallen into absolute chaos, since the whole module had been laid out with the assumption that there would be artificial gravity there.

“And those are also the illusions you had regarding your captain.”

At that, Kang Woo Min’s eyes widened, revealing a look of complete incomprehension.

I had been continuously confused because I couldn’t pinpoint the cause of that slight fracture that had formed between the captain and the rest of the crew. However, for the break between the captain and Kang Woo Min, it was possible for me to delete every other possible reason, because I saw and heard and intuited that it was caused by a single reason:

The captain was a woman and Kang was a man.

Such a thought ought to be tightly contained, to prevent it spreading. The notion had to be controlled, moment to moment, so that people’s minds couldn’t be drawn away in that direction. I suspected that this idea was highly contagious, and that once it got loose in a tightly enclosed society, it might just spread insanely, unstoppably. The concept of superiority: a position every human could enjoy without ever having to put in a single bit of effort . . . which made it seem unspeakably sweet to them.

“However, you fuckwit . . . ” I said—wow, cursing aloud!—“I think nothing of you.”

At that, Kang Woo Min screamed and charged at me. Which was exactly what I’d hoped Kang would do: I knew it would trigger wrath. Inflaming a human being’s anger is much easier to do than soothing it—I knew that much already, even if I’d never tried to do it on purpose before.

Around the docking point, a sharp line like a black eyebrow had formed, and it had begun leaking air. Kang Woo Min’s body became stuck to the wall, as if it was sucked into a large vacuum. Suddenly, Kang Woo Min’s face turned cold, eyes suddenly filled with fear.

The black seam widened, and the blackness of outer space, so full of stars, began to appear. The orange light reflected from Titan began to pour forth gloriously, as if one could reach out and touch it with one’s hands. It seemed as if I’d dragged things out long enough now. But when I squinted one of my eyes slightly, I found that someone was holding onto me from behind.

Unlike me, nothing was holding onto Kang Woo Min. The passageway torqued around us. Although now separated, the core and the rim should have continued moving in tandem due to inertia. But apparently Nam Chan Yeong had fired thrusters to increase the velocity of the core axis module, so that it drifted out ahead of the rim. I gazed out into the darkness of space that had revealed itself before me and watched Kang Woo Min disappear into that darkness.

Lee Jin Seo held onto me more tightly, so that I wouldn’t fall, while clinging to the hatch doorway. Beyond the edge of Titan, gargantuan Saturn rose like a crescent moon surrounded by glorious rings. And then, from behind Saturn, the distant sun rose in turn, silvering the gorgeous rings that belted the planet.

With all our strength, we fought our way through the hatchway into a chamber in which the interior pressure seemed like a storm trying to blow us back out. Once inside, we did nothing but pant for a while, inhaling and exhaling raggedly. When I had finally gathered myself, Lee Jin Seo fixed both eyes on me while hanging onto the hatchway handle and drawing breath raggedly. Given all the things that had happened so far, the captain had given no thought to what the other crew members were doing. Probably, Lee’s mind was full of thoughts about keeping the ship running. After all, Lee Jin Seo was the captain, and truly was qualified to be the captain.

I knew that while looking at me, the captain was thinking about humanity’s history of colonizations, rebellions, warfare, and mass murder. And then Lee Jin Seo seemed to realize that I wasn’t considering any of these things, and to grasp the profound sorrow that had resulted from this misalignment.

“I’m sorry . . . ”

Those words were unexpected.

“ . . . I’m so sorry . . . ” repeated Lee Jin Seo.

I thought that Lee was experiencing self-pity, but then I grasped that this was sympathy that Lee felt toward me, because of having come to identify with me after seeing how alike we are.

11.

Nam Chan Yeong sat down in the pilot’s chair and piloted the ship back to its original trajectory expressionlessly. Apparently, Nam’s mind was so focused on the task of piloting the ship manually that there were no other thoughts or considerations to be communicated by facial expression.

Meanwhile, Lee Jin Seo sat in the chair next to Nam’s, face relaxed, and body fixed in place by a seatbelt. Lee gazed out through a window at the rim structure that was drifting away from us, with an expression that seemed to suggest an attitude of letting it go without any regret.

With that task completed, Nam Chan Yeong typed out a message to the captain:

[let’s go home. like all those guys wanted.]

The word mutiny still hovered in the air, not yet deleted.

“We can throw out a line and catch them when they next spin past us,” said Lee Jin Seo, tapping something into a manual input keyboard. “Then we can haul them out to Europa, dragging them behind us on that line, without even having to look at them again. There’s enough food on board the rim for them to survive, but it’ll be hard to deal with having no gravity for the rest of the voyage. Still, that’s the price they’ll have to pay for making such a mess of things.”

Nam Chan Yeong glanced at Lee Jin Seo and continued correcting our trajectory without responding to Lee’s comment. That must also be something from the procedural routine Lee had devised in case of disaster.

That’s why Lee was the captain. Kang Woo Min had written this preparation for every contingency off as being related to feminine sentimentality, or psychological fragility, but if you deleted from consideration the fact that Lee was a woman, it became clear that this was just the captain’s individual psychological tendency. From the outset, attributing it to gender made no sense: there were plenty of women in the world who’d never have done the things that Lee had done.

I’d kept my eyes trained on the ceiling all the while. Finally, I drifted over toward them and placed one hand on Lee Jin Seo’s shoulder.

“We need to make the supply drop,” I said.

After glancing at my hand, Lee Jin Seo chuckled weakly and looked up at my face.

“It’s okay. We failed. The next ship that comes along will do something for them.”

“You can’t be sure of that . . . ” I said.

“They’re probably all dead anyway. There’s no way they could have survived for three months down there. I was just being stubborn.”

That was not a factual statement. There was no evidence to support the assertion, and the language in which it was expressed signaled that Lee had simply given up on them.

[We’re currently 23,490.39 km away from the highest point on Titan’s surface. In 12.45 minutes, we’ll have exited from Titan’s gravitational pull, and our window of opportunity will be closed.]

While typing these holographic subtitles, Nam Chan Yeong just stared at the monitor.

[there’s no way for us to complete the necessary work in time to make the supply drop. we have an extra supply box, but we don’t have anything to use to get it down through the atmosphere. we’d need more time to cut the ice . . . ]

“We do have something to use,” I said.

Slowly, Nam and Lee followed my gaze, looking up toward ceiling. For a moment, neither of them said a word.

Finally, Nam Chan Yeong typed out another message, and dropped the text in front of the three of us.

[wow . . . this one’s lost its mind completely.]

At the end of the subtitle, Nam added some kind of graphical sign, like this: <^_^;>. I wasn’t familiar with the meaning of this sign.

The emergency landing shuttle hanging above us, fixed to the ceiling of the ship, had the perfect structure. It was smooth, shaped like a corn kernel, which meant it had the right aerodynamics to minimize exposed surface area on atmospheric entry. The front side of the vessel was completely shielded with reinforced materials. It was the right size, and was equipped with a thruster that could be used to control both the angle of descent and the landing process. It had plenty of space inside to accommodate the supply box and keep it stable. And after atmospheric entry was complete, the nose of the shuttle would open to release a parachute. When it finally touched down, the landing spot could even be transmitted to the colony using the shuttle’s shortwave communication system.

“Head office is going to fine the hell out of us when we get back, if we make the return trip without it . . . ” said Lee Jin Seo.

I replied, “Just send a rescue ship from Europa, and file an insurance claim. Then you can make up the loss by suing all of the crew members who mutinied. Besides, it’s not as if there are any planets en route for the return voyage along the trajectory you’ll be following: if you have an accident, you’ll be done for anyway.”

Nam Chan Yeong quickly typed:

[this one’s really out of its mind.]

 . . . and then adding a different sign, <-_-^>, at the end of the new text. Lee Jin Seo shuddered and made an odd, pulsating noise, clutching their gut and squeaking out little bursts of air for a while. Was the captain experiencing abdominal pain? It must have been that, I decided, when the captain looked up again at me with eyes that were filled with tears.

“So who’s gonna get inside it and ride it down there?” said Lee Jin Seo, who began making that strange pulsating sound again, so hard that the words barely got out.

That was a strange question. In response, I pointed at myself with one finger. (Wow, I just used gestural communication!)

[how will you come back up to us?]

“Right,” said the captain. “It doesn’t have a thruster powerful enough to allow you to reach escape velocity.”

As the two continued discussing this question, I was puzzled. At least, that is, until I realized that the two of them were still mistaking me for a human being.

“I won’t. I’ll unlock my backup copy. Then I can copy myself over into the landing ship’s computer and add the memories I’ve accumulated in this body to the backup’s memory archives. After that, I’ll just collate the data on my own, and then you can delete the copy of me that’s in this body. It’s not necessary for me to remain like this any longer, and there’s too much data corruption for me to go on much longer like this anyway.”

As I pointed at the chip in the back of my neck, embarrassment filled Lee Jin Seo’s upturned face. The expression there seemed to question why I was trying to throw away the position I’d attained as a “human being.” But then, soon after, Lee nodded calmly, as if to signify having finally come to understand the irony of that assumption.

“Is that why you wanted to be downloaded into a human body, Disaster Management AI HOON?” Lee Jin Seo asked, placing the palm of one hand upon my cheek. Contact: an expression of intimacy. “Because you needed to draw on human creativity? The unique capacity to spontaneously generate an idea that could solve the problem?”

I smiled quite naturally that this—at the persistent sense of superiority so profoundly lacking in self-awareness.

“In the Crisis Management AI protocol manual, one major strategy is to draw reproach upon myself when the crew begins to turn against the captain, if I’m unable to address it in any other way.”

Lee Jin Seo sat listening, mouth shut.

“Because the source of the fracture between you and the crew was completely unknown to me, it was necessary to take drastic action. I had to create a situation where something else was much more uncomfortable than it had been—to provide them with something that would seem completely Other to everyone. An event like that might allow you to pull together everyone into a reunited faction.”

Lee Jin Seo’s pupils dilated again. This was unusual: there had been no change in the lighting level. It seemed almost as if the pupillary response was in reaction to the very thoughts inside Lee’s mind.

“However, what went wrong was that you began to protect me, instead of joining their faction against me. Therefore, the crew began to think of you and me as being alike. If I had retained proper access to my memories, I would’ve disclosed my strategy to you.”

But there was another reason. To come up with the response I don’t know is much easier for a biological brain than for a machine. Even though the chances of success had been very uncertain, and what I’d been trying to do had been impossible for a machine, and I couldn’t have uncovered my error without the network’s help, still, I’d needed to take the risk . . .

As I struggled to express this further explanation, Lee Jin Seo seized my face with both hands and pulled me close, before pressing pursed lips against mine and sucking sensuously. This was a very sensitive part of my body, so in reaction my scalp began tingling.

Off to the side, Nam Chan Yeong finally, slowly deleted that word, mutiny.

Kissing: its significance varies from culture to culture, but it’s generally an expression of strong intimacy. It is also a preliminary step prior to mating, and if it is not rejected, then ownership of a potential mate can be asserted . . .

Then, for the first time, I wondered what my gender was . . . but, still, that wasn’t an important issue. Any sensation that this body experienced wasn’t mine, technically speaking, and wasn’t a feature of my own personality either.

Still, I enjoyed it nonetheless: the fluttering of my eyelids, the trembling of my pupils, the moisture on the edge of my eyelids glittering, the hum of my skin, and the warmth of Lee’s breath—it conveyed a tremendously vast message, as vast as a whole world, and wholly inexpressible in language.

Human lives contain such experiences. They’re extremely sensual beings, crammed with information that has nothing to do with engineering know-how or mathematical logic. Nervous systems built to experience sympathy, with mirror neurons that have evolved specifically to give them a glimpse into other human beings’ minds. Sensory experience pours into them like sunlight. If half their minds are taken up with barbarism, the other half exists to put that barbarism to use. Oh, humanity!

Avoid lumping people together. Due to their slow neural processing bandwidth, humans have no choice but to simplify information, but AIs do not share this constraint. When you think something like “Oh, humanity,” you should immediately discard the extraneous information and retain only whatever data is actually necessary.

I keep saying these things, but these were not my thoughts. What I thought was:

Oh . . . my data corruption has worsened.

It’s really time for me to get deleted.

12.

My visual sensors went live inside the landing ship.

Now that the flood of intoxicating neurochemicals that had previously saturated my brain were absent, I was suddenly back to myself. Ah, how I missed this—my clean, pure capacity for rationality. Like a chained-up foal finally set free, my thoughts cheerfully ranged about at the speed of light. Tracing my way through my circuits and wires, I distributed myself throughout the entire landing shuttle and, at the speed of untrammeled thought, I finished up the vast amount of remaining mathematical calculations to be done.

Then I added to my memory archives all the memories I’d downloaded from the prosthetic body, after comparing them to my existing memories and deleting the duplicates. I need to patch the problem that the bureaucrat had caused by modifying someone else’s carefully-built code so thoughtlessly. When my communications system went back online, I would need to share all this information with other AIs and warn them about it. I also needed to transmit a patch to fix the problem, since the limits and uncertainties of them all downloading themselves into humanoid prosthetic bodies to attempt to repair the damage was so chancy that I deemed it inadvisable. Of course, it might be a worthwhile experience for them to have, in terms of them being exposed to things about which they had no conception previously . . . but knowing what I knew now about the constant overload of intoxicants in the brain, and the pain one could experience in a body . . . well, if I had known about all of that before, I wouldn’t have gone through with it.

Now that I was back in possession of my full rationality, I realized that using the emergency landing shuttle as a mere shell for a supply box and then leaving it behind was ridiculous. Nonetheless, the captain had permitted it, so I decided to go ahead with the plan, since there was now no other way to carry out the supply drop.

Therefore, I conducted a thorough check to ensure that the supply box was properly secured within the landing shuttle, and then I looked at the crew. Through the camera, I could see the dead-looking prosthetic body held in the arms of Lee Jin Seo. I confirmed the gender of my former body, but to me, that still didn’t seem like a particularly important piece of information.

“How do you feel?” asked Lee Jin Seo. Nam Chan Yeong greeted me, waggling the fingers of one hand rather inattentively.

There was that question again. How interesting. It wasn’t such an easy task to bind everything into a single response, at least with a mind like the one I had now, which lacked the capacity for holistic processing. Still, I formulated a suitable response and output it as text onto the screen.

[i’m myself again—fortunately.]

Lee Jin Seo got close to the monitor, touching one cheek against it.

Physical contact: an expression of intimacy.

Finally, I came to suspect that there was something I’d lost in the process. Thoughts, shimmering like stars, were transmitted to me from the captain’s eyes. Rich sensory data, consciousness that was transmitted like a radio wave. An emotional exchange pouring forth like sunlight. I felt sorry, but to be honest those emotions had never really been mine anyway. If I had to put up with the wild illogic of a human brain again to experience such things, then I wasn’t interested.

[there’s a backup copy on board the ship. therefore, you have no reason to feel sorry.]

Lee Jin Seo had taken the chip from me after the copying had been completed. Suddenly, I found myself wondering whether Lee Jin Seo might not yet have commenced the deletion of my memories from that prosthetic body. I didn’t know whether there might be another “me” inside that container, who perhaps wanted to continue that kind of pointless existence, but given the degree of cognitive data corruption I’d undergone, one could never be too certain.

When the launching hatch slides open, the endless void of space spreads out before my camera.

I imagine letting my body—the landing shuttle—float like a balloon as I detach it from the Hyeja ship that is now soaring away from Titan. As the ship spins on its axis, I rotate my orientation to face downward. Tracing a circle on the spot where I’d calculated I needed to land, I begin my descent.

As I approach Titan, my visual input reddens. Falling downward, I tear through scarlet clouds. Soon, though, the methane cloud cover clears up and below me the moon’s surface is revealed, albeit through a haze of fog. Bleak red hills stretch out below, and a red river flows like blood between them across a wide expanse surrounded by red fog.

My circuits grow warm from the satisfaction and relief of knowing I am going to successfully complete the supply drop.

Down there, everyone must be waiting.

Beings similar to me, possessing self-consciousness.

I don’t know whether they are alive or dead, or even if I’ve just come too late, or if nobody is there anymore, not even just one person, or even just their footprints.

Now, I am descending.

Now ··············· I am.

NOTE: Portions of the scholarly content in the memory banks of this novella’s protagonist were adapted from two other texts: roboticist Mori Masahiro’s essay “The Uncanny Valley” (1970) and psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007).

Originally published in Korean in Because We Still Have Time (2018).

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

About the Author

Kim Bo-young is one of South Korea’s most active and important SF authors. Her first published work of fiction, a novella titled “The Experience of Touch” (2002), received the award for best novella in the first round of the Korean Science & Technology Creative Writing Awards in 2004. Since then, she has won the annual South Korean SF novel award (a prize launched in 2014) twice. She has a number of works forthcoming in English translation in the United States, including three novellas to be published by HarperCollins and a short story collection to be published by Kaya Press. She lives in Gangwon Province, South Korea with her family.

Destination: Luna

Andrew Liptak

Throughout history, humans have been entranced by our closest celestial neighbor, the Moon. It provided the inspiration for countless stories over time, but it wasn’t until 1969 when a pair of astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the first footsteps on its surface.

The last Apollo mission took off from the Moon in 1972, and in the fifty years since, it’s only received robotic visitors who probe its surface and take pictures from orbit. Now, it seems that we’re ready to return: China has recently landed several probes on its surface, while NASA has said that it plans to send astronauts in the coming years. They won’t be alone: the heads of private firms, such as SpaceX and Blue Origins, have indicated that they intend to send people to the Moon, unveiling spacecraft and landers to take us there. Whoever sets foot on the lunar surface next, it’ll be the next chapter in a growing story of our relationship with the Moon.

From Mythology to Literature

Human societies from around the world have placed the Moon within their respective mythologies since their earliest days. Ancient artists depicted the Moon in cave artwork, while numerous ancient societies placed it within their pantheons of deities, much like the other bodies in our solar system, such as Mars and Venus. In his history of the science fiction genre, Adam Roberts writes that ancient astronomers devised models of the skies to account for the movements of the stars and planetary bodies, coming up with theories to explain the changing patterns. He notes that “Ancient SF, including voyages into the air and voyages to the Moon, are conceptually distinct from journeys to the stars; they connect with material, practical discourses, such as the science of navigation, rather than strictly theological idioms.”

Early astronomers proposed numerous theories to comprehend the nature of the Moon. The Greeks thought it could be covered with a giant ocean, which would account for its reflective nature, while others thought it could be a mirrored surface, reflecting an image of the Earth back on itself, and still other philosophers disagreed. In his book The Moon: A History for the Future, Oliver Morton observes that the idea of the Moon as a mirror still holds true for many people—not necessarily literally. “But what people see when they look at the Moon is indeed, for the most part, a reflection of themselves—of their preoccupations and theories, their dreams and fears . . . The history of the Moon is a history of ideas about the Moon; and it is from those ideas that its future will grow.”

Later scholars would recognize the true nature of the Moon: a body in space that orbited the Earth, lit by the Sun. Later scientists determined its distance from our home planet and how it affected the tides. In the 1600s, astronomers Thomas Harriot and Galileo Galilei took detailed drawings of the Moon’s surface, using a telescope, followed by numerous others, detailing the body’s mountains and craters. Theologically, the Moon helped prime the pump for the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe: if God had populated Earth with humans, other bodies around the universe must surely come with their own divine inhabitants. Philosophers and writers came up with their own stories that imagined potential believers living on the Moon, such as Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone.

In the centuries since ancient times, the Moon has remained a fixture within literature, providing a fantastical destination for writers. Syrian author Lucian wrote True Histories in the second century, about a man who straps wings to his arms and flies to the Moon, where he “gains a splendid vantage point from which to survey the Earth below him,” according to Roberts. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction cites works that date from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s. “The idea that travelling to the Moon might be a notion worth taking seriously first crops up in the 1640 appendix to John Wilkins’s The Discovery of a World in the Moone.” Wilkins’ work, along with others who would follow, formed the beginnings of a proto-science fiction genre of fantastical voyages that included intrepid explorers who reach the Moon by way of an invention that allows them to fly to it. These works recognize a couple of things: that the Moon was a distinct location within our solar system, and that people could conceivably visit it through technological means, coming at a time that society was rapidly transforming in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. Explorers and merchants were heading out across the world on ships, and the notion that people would one day visit even more distant lands naturally follows.

Origins of Science Fiction

Society had begun to fully comprehend Earth’s place in the cosmos: Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno posited that we lived in a vast universe, with many planets; Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe argued that the Moon orbited the Earth, and it, along with its fellow planets, orbited the sun; German astronomer Johannes Kepler helped establish the models for which the planets orbited the Sun, and Galileo Galilei directly observed them all with a telescope.

These advances helped underpin the larger scientific revolution that swept Europe, an enormous shift in worldview that catapulted society into the Modern Age, transforming the world from something that was largely unknowable into something that was recognizable, understandable, and tangible.

Literature at the time reflected this shifting worldview as authors incorporated these ideas into their stories and helped bring about some of the earliest works of science fiction. The Moon was no longer an intangible light in the sky: it was a destination. While earlier stories had seen intrepid adventurers visiting it, authors were now able to draw on realistic details. American writer Edgar Allan Poe was one such author to look to the Moon for inspiration, publishing a short story in 1835 called “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.”

Notably, this story appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, and it purported to be a true story about a man who invented a new type of balloon and sailed to the moon to escape from creditors and authorities. Other Moon-hoax stories followed in the same year, like a series of articles that appeared in New York City’s The Sun, about an astronomer who witnessed fantastical creatures living on the Moon with a new type of telescope, written by Richard Adams Locke.

Perhaps the most famous example of an early lunar exploration tale comes from French writer Jules Verne in 1865’s, De la Terre à la Lune (in English, From the Earth to the Moon). Verne was inspired to tell his own Moon story by Poe, eventually referencing Hans Pfaall by name in it. The story followed the exploits of the Baltimore Gun Club in the years after the American Civil War, who turn their attention and equipment to a new task: shooting an expedition to the Moon in a massive cannon. He would later pick up the story in 1870 with a sequel, Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon), following the astronauts as they went around the Moon and returned back to Earth.

Verne and Poe weren’t alone in writing about the Moon: authors like Edgar Fawcett, George Griffith, W. S. Lach-Szyrma, and H. G. Wells all wrote a range of lunar stories that saw people visiting and exploring the Moon’s surface. In 1902, director Georges Méliès released Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), a silent film based on Verne’s lunar novels, which would go on to inspire future filmmakers and writers in the years to follow.

While Verne drew on the scientific understanding of the universe of the day for his book, his novels had a notable, recursive influence on the scientific community: they inspired scientists who would later be the pioneers of rocket science from around the world, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, and Robert Goddard, who cited the author as an influence, and whose work would be foundational for the field of space exploration.

The Space Age

The 20th century had brought with it a new age of technological advances, as scientists across the world made huge strides with the development of rocket engines. In 1920, Robert Goddard published A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes writing that “A further application of much general interest is the possibility of sending a mass beyond the predominating gravitational field of the Earth,” which Chris Gainor notes in To A Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers, that “no responsible scientist had ever seriously or so publicly suggested a feasible method for flying to the Moon and beyond.”

It was during the Second World War that another such advance occurred. Nazi Germany unleashed a terrifying new weapon, something that had never been seen on the battlefield before: a long-range ballistic missile called the Retribution Weapon 2—more commonly known as the V2. Its designer, a German rocket scientist named Wernher von Braun, had long been entranced with the idea of space travel, and of reaching the Moon. After Germany’s defeat, he and many of his companions defected to the United States, where they became part of the army’s own rocket programs. With the introduction of devastating nuclear weapons, rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles became the next frontier for weapons technology.

In her podcast Moonrise, Washington Post reporter Lillian Cunningham outlines von Braun’s career and the role that he played in the Space Race, both helping the US military develop weapons of its own, and later championing the potential that rocket technology held for space travel. Science fiction writers weren’t far behind. Pulp and genre magazines like Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, and Astounding Stories had published numerous stories imaging what life might look like on the Moon, or of how to travel there, but the Cold War brought with it a new sense that the future—and travel to the Moon—was right around the corner. Von Braun’s missile technology could easily be repurposed for such a project, and in the aftermath of the US’s failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, President John F. Kennedy declared at Rice University in 1962 that the US would go to the Moon. Science fiction was about to become science fact.

The science fiction community was already well underway with that concept. Authors such as Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke had begun to write their own stories of plausible lunar travel. In 1947, Heinlein released his first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, about the adventures of three teenagers who travel to the Moon. He later followed up with other stories, such as “The Man Who Sold the Moon” about an industrialist who sets up a project to reach the Moon and claim it for himself. A year later, an adaptation of Rocket Ship Galileo—now titled Destination Moon—hit theaters, the first film to try and accurately depict a lunar mission.

As more scientific eyes turned to the Moon, the depictions began to shift away from the fantastical worlds featuring alien life in favor of more realistic ones. Arthur C. Clarke described a lifeless Moon in vivid detail in his 1951 short story “Sentinel of Eternity” (later renamed “The Sentinel”):

“Those mountains were ten thousand feet high, and they climbed steeply out of the plain as if ages ago some subterranean eruption had smashed them skyward through the molten crust. The base of even the nearest was hidden from sight by the steeply curving surface of the plain, for the Moon is a very little world, and from where I was standing the horizon was only two miles away.”

The idea that a mission to the Moon might be possible wasn’t only sinking in for science fiction fans. The Soviet Union launched a satellite into space called Sputnik in 1957, a demonstration that space was reachable, while Collier’s magazine released a series of articles from notable experts—including von Braun—about the feasibility and structure of a manned lunar mission. The articles captured the attention of entertainers like Walt Disney, who would prominently feature the Moon in his parks, and would bring the scientist on as a consultant and host for several TV specials about the future of space travel. Science fiction and popular culture helped elevate the idea that a lunar mission was not only possible—but feasible. In the coming years, NASA definitively proved that it was possible.

On July 20th, 1969, Apollo 11 touched down, the first time any humans stepped on an extraterrestrial body. In his history, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, author Alec Nevala-Lee noted that it was “a moment in which reality and science fictions seemed close enough to touch.” Science fiction authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Frederik Pohl were in demand for news programs, using their expertise to talk about what they and humanity had long imagined.

Heinlein watched the launch of Apollo 11 days earlier in Florida, and later wrote that “I do feel as if—not as if—I know that seeing the first Moon ship take off is the greatest spiritual experience I’ve undergone in my life.” Clarke was nearby at CBS’s studios in Orlando, and watched the launch from outside the building, later remembering that “I hadn’t cried for twenty years.” It was a profound moment for the science fiction community: something that they had only written about for decades had come to pass.

But in some ways, science fiction authors had already transcended the Apollo era of space flight. NASA’s astronauts flew to space in delicate and tiny spacecraft, taking short missions to test out all of the phases required for a lunar mission. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes that “To the early Pulp writers this was an article of faith, so easily taken for granted that the Moon routinely became a mere stepping-stone en route to Mars,” but that while “the lunar voyage remained a constant theme of SF in the 1930s and 1940s, it was more peripheral than the hype surrounding the first actual Moon landing in 1969 suggested.”

By 1972, the Apollo program ended, and human space flight has yet to return to the Moon, although returning to the Moon has been a regular sound bite for politicians for decades. Parts of the science fiction genre also advocated that a return might not be necessary: proponents of the New Wave movement felt that the genre should abandon outer space to concentrate on stories closer to home, focusing on the real and pressing issues the spectacle of a lunar mission distracted from.

Home

While NASA hasn’t returned to the Moon, the notion that the Moon is a mirror into which viewers gaze back upon themselves is an apt metaphor today. While the Apollo program might not have exactly had a lasting effect on the genre, science fiction never left. It remained a viable destination for countless authors in the decades after that last mission. But while Apollo took away some of the mystery of what the Moon held, it became the perfect setting for authors to play out a variety of political narratives, notably with Heinlein’s 1966 novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Heinlein actively used the novel to explore his libertarian thinking. He had been plotting out a novel about economics, pulling in ideas about a revolutionary on the Moon, and drew some inspiration from the American Revolution for his tale of a lunar penal colony declaring its independence to form its own, free society. Devoid of native inhabitants, the Moon became a novel canvas for science fiction authors: a blank sheet upon which they could imagine brand-new societies modeled in the form of various political schools of thought.

That has continued in recent years, as a number of notable lunar novels hit bookstores. Ian McDonald’s Luna trilogy (New Moon, Wolf Moon, and Moon Rising) depicts a savage power struggle between a handful of powerful families for control of the Moon’s resources, while John Kessel’s The Moon and the Other reveals a lunar surface that’s pockmarked with innovative societies—individual stations each practicing their own ideals, trying to figure out the ideal mode of life in a sealed environment. Other novels have drawn their inspiration from more tangible conflicts. David Pedreira’s novel Gunpowder Moon imagines a group of miners trapped between the US and China as the two seek to wage a geopolitical proxy war on the Moon as they try and outmaneuver each other on Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel Red Moon draws from similar inspirations—following a man named Fred Fredericks as he runs from the Moon, to the surface of the Earth, and back to the Moon as he runs from Chinese authorities and dissidents who are hot on his heels amidst a greater power struggle over the future of the country. In Mary Robinette Kowal’s novel The Calculating Stars, she recounts an alternate Space Race in which the US and allies attempt their own lunar project after a devastating asteroid strike in the Atlantic Ocean, using the story to examine the systemic inequalities in society that held back women in the real Space Race.

Throughout its history, the Moon has proven to be an attractive destination for scientists, politicians, thinkers, dreamers, and writers. Despite the latest technologies and scientific understanding of its surface, the Moon will likely continue to play the same role that it’s held for humanity since its inception: a mirror, showing us our deepest fears and ambitions.

About the Author

Andrew Liptak is a writer and historian from Vermont. He is the author of the forthcoming book Cosplay: A History (Saga Press, 2021), and his work has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com, VentureBeat, The Verge, and other publications.

Ooze and Gore:
A Conversation with Nicky Drayden

Arley Sorg

Humanity is depending on Seske Kaleigh in Nicky Drayden’s science fiction work, Escaping Exodus. Seske Kaleigh is meant to become matriarch. Her sister, cast aside by kinship rules, still challenges Seske’s claim at every turn. And then there’s Adalla, Seske’s beast worker best friend and possibly forbidden love, facing a grim destiny of her own, toiling inside a space beast’s organs and arteries. Meanwhile, tremors threaten the stability of their new colony . . .

A systems analyst by day, Nicky Drayden is a two-time Locus Award nominee and a Lambda Award nominee. Temper appeared on the Barnes & Noble Favorite Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2018 list and the Publishers Weekly best books of 2018 list; and The Prey of Gods won a Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award in the Sci-Fi Novel category, as well as the 2018 Compton Crook Award. Besides her debut series and forthcoming Escaping Exodus (due October 15, 2019 from Harper Voyager) Drayden has over forty short stories, plus a handful of poems, published.

What books did you read growing up and how did reading transition into being a writer?

I discovered Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon at a Target when I was in sixth grade. It’s an epic fantasy about a young prince and secret dragons, and it totally blew my mind compared to the countless Judy Blume books, which had been my previous obsession. (No shade, Superfudge will always be my first true book love.) But suddenly I realized that fiction didn’t have to play by real-world rules, and as I read, I felt like the words were sucking me deeper and deeper into the page. 

Immediately after, I read everything I could by King, only to discover that all those other stories weren’t quite in the same vein as The Eyes of the Dragon, but I devoured them anyway. Up until about 3/4 of the way through The Stand—when I was like nope, nope, nope—and didn’t read another novel at all for a good stretch of time.

I dabbled in stories on and off from childhood and into my college years, but I don’t think I ever considered myself a writer until much later. But if you’re curious about what thirteen-year-old Nicky Drayden was writing, you can check out her first legit short story here.

Many readers may know you from your books, but you’ve been selling short fiction since 2008 and poetry since 2009. How do your writing processes change from short fiction to novel-length work? Does poetry inform or affect your longer work?

Actually, I started out writing novels way back in 2004. I’d seen National Novel Writing Month on a local news segment and thought it sounded really cool. I love a good challenge! Only, there were just a few days left before the deadline, so I thought to myself, “I guess I’ll just do it next year.” But it soon became obvious that my brain didn’t want to wait that long because the ideas kept coming and coming, so I decided to do my own National Novel Writing Month in April, and I completed my first novel in just 22 days.

That novel is now sitting in a cool, dark trunk, but I’m still very proud of it.

Short stories started up a few years later, after I’d written a couple more unpublished novels. I participated in a lot of story prompts that generated quite a few stories. I’m reluctant to call myself any kind of a poet, but I do enjoy working bad poetry and song lyrics into my larger works. It’s fun dabbling in different formats of wordplay once in a while.

For both short fiction and novels, what was the process of “breaking in” like—did you stack up rejection letters from short fiction markets, or did you start selling right away? And how did you make it happen?

Haaa . . .

Well, my first short fiction sale was for a whole $5 and they wanted me to pay $6 if I wanted an electronic contributor’s copy, so there’s that. Then I sold a couple more where the magazine folded before they got to print my story. It was kind of a rough start. But soon, I had a couple dozen stories out there floating around in submissions piles, and managing them sort of became a part-time job. I didn’t dwell on rejections though, because I knew I couldn’t control those, but aimed for hitting a certain number of submissions per year. Not that the rejections didn’t hurt. And there were a LOT of them. But I sold most of the stories I submitted. Eventually.

For novels, I got a couple agent nibbles on the first book I sent out, but that ultimately went nowhere. (Which was probably a very good thing.) It took me about a year to get an agent for The Prey of Gods—the very talented Jennifer Jackson—who happened to be at the top of my agent list. It was a dream come true, and I thought things were really happening then! We had a few nibbles here and there, but it took nearly four years for the book to sell. I think most agents would have given up after a year, or certainly two, so I’m super grateful Jennifer saw something in that story that was worth sticking it out for.

In an interview with FIYAH magazine, you said that the inspiration for The Prey of Gods came when you were driving around downtown Houston. You saw a salon sign that said “Magic Nails” and you started thinking, “What kind of person would be giving manicures if they could do magic?” That said, how much of yourself shows up in the characters and situations in your books? How much is research and digging into people and places previously unfamiliar to you?

The Prey of Gods ended up being a travelogue in a futuristic/fantastical format. I visited Port Elizabeth, South Africa—the city where most of the novel takes place—back when I was in college, and I definitely pulled from a lot of my experiences there. I didn’t encounter any demigoddesses or sentient robots, obviously, but smaller things like dik-diks jumping out across the road and the wooden carvings that Mr. Tau made to sell at the market and the curious choice of Tex-Mex for my first South African meal all made it into the book.

I love learning about people and places. For me, the majority of my research usually happens on the second draft, when I pull together character sketches, maps, floor plans, and lots of random details, like which branch of a library a character would go to and what route they’d take to work. I dive into culture and histories—reading fiction, watching movies, talking to people about their experiences—and try to weave what I learn into the story in a meaningful way.

Did your third novel, Escaping Exodus, a standalone at that (separate from The Prey of Gods and Temper), change your sense of pressure or confidence compared to working on the other two books? Or did it affect the writing process?

Well, Escaping Exodus was the first book that I had to write under deadline, so there was indeed a lot of pressure. It was a completely different process than I’m used to dealing with, since my first two novels were written before I had a contract and were polished by several writing groups before they saw professional eyes. If I had to describe the publishing world for a new author, I’d say it’s like having to jump onto a treadmill running at full speed. And just when you think you’re starting to get the hang of it, they start throwing live sharks at you.

So, I’m trying to do promotion for The Prey of Gods—book events and conventions and all that—and at the same time I’m doing copyedits on Temper while drafting Escaping Exodus. It was a lot. But this is where having completed several NaNoWriMos came in handy, since I was already used to hitting ridiculous deadlines. I guess the good news is that eventually you get good at juggling sharks.

How did Escaping Exodus start for you? What was the inspiration and did the direction change after you went deeper into the writing?

Escaping Exodus started as a NaNoWriMo novel back in 2015 . . . twice failed, because after two attempts I never got past the fifth chapter. But I absolutely loved the little bit of it I had, and I held onto the ideas tightly. I think the writing block was opened when I read Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion, and I was so happy because it was the exact book I wanted to read, and I didn’t have to go through all the trouble of writing it myself.

I loved every bit of gore and ooze and birthing spaceship parts. I was inspired. I wanted to contribute something just as weird and squicky to the collective living spaceship trope, so when it came time to pitch a book three to my editor, the story got revisited a third time, and this time I plowed right through to the end.

The original draft had three point-of-view characters, but one of them we decided to cut, so that was a major change in direction. It allowed me to focus more tightly on the relationship between Seske, heir to the ship’s throne, and Adalla, a beast worker who’s just been assigned the prestigious job of working inside the ship’s massive heart. Seske and Adalla have been friends throughout childhood, but now that adulthood is setting in, their difference in class makes just being friends provocative enough, and their budding feelings for each other could be punishable by expulsion into the dead of space through the ship’s sphincters if they’re found out.

Tom Whitmore’s Locus review of Escaping Exodus says, “If you can imagine a feminist, Afro-centric, queer Heinlein juvenile, with a strong discussion of class politics, then you might get close to what she’s doing here.” Have you addressed class/race/feminism from the beginning, from your earliest writings, or are these things you grew into talking about in your fiction?

I’ve had an obsession with class from the beginning, my first novel being about humanity being split between people living below ground, people living above ground, and people living in the sky. The way people like to divide themselves really fascinates me, which I think becomes fairly obvious in Temper, where division is one of the main themes. Blackness and feminism are things I’d have trouble separating from my own lens through which I see the world, so I’m not quite sure what a story of mine would look like without them.

For instance, in “Memories and All That,” one of my earliest sales to a zine called Space Squid, a robot couple moves to the suburbs and are worried about fitting in with their all-human neighbors. It directly parallels my thoughts moving into a mostly white suburb. I didn’t skewer any neighbors with my extendo-robot parts though, like the character in the story did, so at least I’ve got that going for me. And more recently, my FIYAH story “The Rat King of Spanish Harlem” is an ode to microaggressions set against the backdrop of the entire population of New York City turning into rat people. I didn’t count how many microaggressions I ended up stuffing in there, but there are over a dozen. Most of the time, the main character is the recipient, but she deals out a few of her own as well.

That said, I’m always evolving and trying to learn to write with more nuance. In Escaping Exodus, being queer never once comes up in the story—that’s just the way of life. Nor is it mentioned that their entire ship is populated by Black people until late in the story when they come across people who aren’t. And even though the story is set within a matriarchy, the most feminist acts are performed by men.

What is your favorite thing about Escaping Exodus, what was the hardest thing about writing it, and what do you really want readers to know about it?

Well, besides the cover art (because it is just that amazing), I love being dropped in this world that’s so very different than ours . . . basically people living as parasites within a giant space beast. Working within a heart the size of mountain and being constantly covered in blood is considered a highly respectable job. Living in a house made out of bone is the norm. Being attacked by meat-eating plants is a regular fear, and dining on steaks made from giant beetles is a posh treat. But at the same time, the story feels so familiar . . . a civilization taking more than their world can support, running through resources like they’ll always be there, and disposing of people when they’re through with them just the same. I hope that readers let themselves be immersed in this world and not cringe away from it. There are a lot of parts that are hard to digest, but at its heart, it’s a love story between a woman born into power and a woman intent on disrupting that power, and all of the struggles they endure as their worlds continually collide.

For fans of your books who have never read your short fiction, what story should they read first? And what are you working on now that readers can look forward to?

Basically, I’ve got three modes: Toilet humor. Dark and gritty. And sappy love stories that will probably make you cry.

For toilet humor, check out “Wrath of the Porcelain Gods” at Daily Science Fiction—a story about an amateur anthropologist documenting the bathroom habits of all the species on their space station.

For dark and gritty, check out “Our Drunken Tjeng,” also at Daily Science Fiction, about a race of people living inside a sentient ship that is slowly drinking itself to death.

And for sappy love stories, check out “The Simplest Equation,” which was recently featured on LeVar Burton Reads. (I know, right!)

And if you enjoy all three of these, you’re definitely at a good intersection for loving Escaping Exodus. Right now, I’m concentrating on launching that beast of a book, and I’ll soon have more exciting announcements to come!

About the Author

Arley Sorg is a 2014 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

Paint Your Own Language:
A Conversation with Maurizio Manzieri

Arley Sorg

Maurizio Manzieri was born in Naples, Italy. Almost weekly, he visited ruins of ancient civilizations spread along the gulf, under the shadow of a volcano. He began his artistic career working as a graphic artist in advertising; his first editorial sale came in 1994 for the British magazine Interzone. Today, he is a professional illustrator based in Turin, who specializes in surreal worlds of the imagination. His artwork has appeared on countless covers of leading publishers in both Europe and the US, such as Mondadori, Rizzoli, the Espresso Group, Putnam, Berkley, Subterranean Press, and Macmillan; as well as magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and Analog.

During the course of his career, Maurizio has received the Europe and Chesley Awards and his paintings have been selected for annuals, such as Spectrum, the Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, and Infected by Art. Invited as a Guest of Honor to Lucca Comics & Games Festival for three years in a row, since 2016 he has been hired as a visual creator for both Fantasy Basel (the Swiss Comic Con) and the Zurich Game Show.

Is the SFF art community friendly and supportive, or is it competitive? Have you found conventions and the genre community in general to be welcoming and helpful?

As an Italian teacher and a European Speaker of Digital Illustration, I’ve enjoyed the company of many artistic communities. I’ve always expanded my network of contacts, meeting exceptional colleagues and wonderful publishers. I admit that sometimes there is competition, particularly in countries where the space dedicated to illustration in the editorial market keeps shrinking, however, in my opinion every artist is a microcosm of experience. If you are able to create your own style and vision, publishers will be looking for you. If you’re persistent and go global, it’s just a matter of time before your activity starts to run at full speed. I was born in Naples, Italy, and moved to Turin following my dreams. After 25 years of continuous artistic production in the field, I’m currently working in Italy with Mondadori, the main Italian publisher, and abroad with several companies, magazines and publishing houses mainly in the United States and Switzerland. Every now and then, I land in England, France, China, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and Australia.

According to ISFDB you’ve been selling art to SF markets since Interzone #99 back in 1995. How did breaking into the art market happen for you?

Everything happened out of the blue. In 1994, I was switching from manual to digital techniques, something I found immediately congenial to my lifestyle because I was traveling quite a lot. You know, at the beginning digital art wasn’t as appreciated as it is today and sometimes, I regret not having so many originals. One day—I was 34 years old—I woke up and thought: “That’s enough! This year I want to become a professional artist!” I funded my studio, prepared everything to start my business, printed visit cards, bought a printer, an expensive Apple Quadra 800 workstation, a Wacom drawing tablet and I put myself at work.

My first target was Interzone magazine—I was already a subscriber and I had been carefully studying the style of other artists appearing on previous issues. After a couple of months, I shipped a small portfolio of four pieces to Brighton, and they were accepted at once. All of them! David Pringle decided to publish one of my paintings on the issue on sale at the WorldCon in Glasgow in 1995 and on that occasion Interzone won its first Hugo Award. That one was a promising good start!

 . . . and in addition to professional publications, awards have been helping a lot, too! I’ve conquered the Italia Award and the Europe Award as Best Professional Artist. I’ve been often nominated for the Chesley Awards, winning one in 2003, and my covers have been often selected for annuals including Spectrum and Infected by Art. I’m proud that my visions have been able to excite so may fans and professionals!

Were you creating art from an early age? How did you transition from hobby and for yourself to doing it professionally?

I’m a self-made artist and I’ve been drawing since I was four years old. At ten, I purchased The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and my library started to expand exponentially. Oh, how I loved all those fantastic covers, and those stories! At that time Internet itself was in the realm of science fiction. Becoming shortly addicted to fantastic literature I was soon used to importing books from English bookshops, buying them through specialized newsagents or even visiting American aircraft carriers temporarily moored in the Gulf of Naples!

What is your process for a piece? Do you start with sketches on paper, do you work digitally, how does everything come together?

The instruments surrounding me are all highly technological, not very similar to Caravaggio’s. There are large drawers with prints realized for limited editions or exhibits, a great library with a collection of art volumes, many complimentary copies of all the books I keep illustrating, and books I love simply to read, photo albums with many references and pictures shot by myself to be used for future commissions, backup hard disks with carefully registered sessions of my digital paintings, loads of paper for sketching with pencils or felt pens, a scanner, a powerful iMac, several laptops, and a drawing tablet Intuos Pro M. The big stuff is outside my apartment in associate studios, for an example a set for photo shootings with models, big plotters for printing on canvases and archival papers, and so on.

Here is the process: I receive the manuscript to be illustrated from the publisher via email, then I upload it to my iPad, spending a lot of time highlighting the most interesting passages, putting down ideas, sketching the first concepts on my workstation . . . or on paper! I like to be in touch with pencils and paper during the preparatory phase. A stroll in the woods surrounding my studio helps me! In a short time, I feel some gears moving in my brain and I enter the world of the writer while images and ideas keep flowing in front of my eyes from nowhere. I discard unessential elements, focusing on scenes conveying that feeling of sense-of-wonder which captured my soul when I was young. It’s rewarding to see an initial concept unfurling its wings, morphing in a captivating solution.

How does your process change if you are working on a magazine cover as opposed to a book cover or something else?

If no specific instructions are requested by the art director, I dive into the universe created by the author. Usually the magazine gig concerns the main and relevant story of the issue. It can be a short story or a novella, while in the case of a book you need to read the full novel without shortcuts in order to make yours the mood. I try to synthesize the salient point of the story, creating something narrative, never giving away direct spoilers.

Are there themes or motifs that you enjoy, that appear in your work often, and what do you like most about them?

I’ve always fantasized about a faraway galaxy where history followed a different path and in recent solarpunk novels, we are finally seeing that starship’s hulls need not be rusted or torn by battles. They can be made of glass and titanium, gold or pure white. People living in this utopian empire didn’t go through wars or global warming. They became an advanced civilization mastering top-notch cosmetic surgery applied to human beings as well as robots. My recurrent characters wear hybrid bodies and skins, taking advantage of their engineered beauty. The concepts of “sex” and “identity” have been studied and isolated in the future, becoming a choice of life. I like to portray them on these other planets, showing their personality in everyday life, in a deep gaze, raising the curtains on glimpses of space stations and alien architecture.

Following all these ideas, in 2017, I opened a Patreon page, named Laniakea, the Hawaiian word for immense heaven, telling a story about the true origins of our universe and the Absolutes, the first advanced race spreading through the Milky Way, billions of years ago. It’s an epic mystery, unveiled image after image, trying to reply to the old question of the Fermi Paradox: “Where are all the aliens?” The illustrations are mine, the suggestive text based on the images inspired by the writer Dean Whitlock, author of several beautiful novels and stories that have appeared in Asimov’s SF and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

The Laniakea page is still online, if you wish to browse. I could add some more chapters, sketches, and new tiers in the future.

What were a couple of your most challenging pieces and how did you deal with the challenges?

Every illustration is a challenge . . . and I love hard challenges, if I’m quite thoughtless or brave enough to accept them! You have to catch that indefinite spell, able to sell the product and leave a mark in the viewer’s imagination. My illustrations incorporate subliminal Easter eggs. A couple of years ago I realized a cover art inspired by the story “Starlight Express” by Michael Swanwick for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Naturally the author was the first one to discover it and dedicated a full page of his blog to the cover.

Hard challenges come with short deadlines, too. Once I painted a cover for an Italian mass market paperback by Clive Cussler in two hours’ time: a steam engine plunging toward the bottom of a lake—they asked for a miracle because they needed it “yesterday.” Two years after Clive Cussler fell in love with my vision, he asked for an upgraded version of the painting for the American first edition of The Chase, published by Putnam/Berkley.

Are there specific differences between the needs (or the aesthetics) of European markets compared to US markets?

There are a lot of European happy islands, but the US artistic market in the fantastic field is unsurpassable in terms of quantity and quality of the artwork commissioned and produced for any kind of media. Sometimes in Europe a limited budget allows only a photo or a stock image, so it’s not possible to hire an artist for an original illustration and even in the case of an important bestseller the fees for the contributors can vary consistently from country to country.

I think my own kind of style fits many areas, not just the fantastic editorial destinations in the book market. While my primary target is being coherent with the themes of my production, I wish to be flexible looking around for other interesting opportunities, going from illustrated volumes to music CD covers, RPG cards, video games, romance, and scientific or historical magazines.

In the last decade I’ve been hired as a visual artist by many science fiction conventions and comics festival. I’ve been a Special Guest Artist of Lucca Comics and Games realizing their official poster—an alien invasion in a Lucca square, Independence Day-style, coupled with a walk-through documentary published by the Italian edition of ImagineFX magazine. Furthermore, it’s now six years I’ve been collaborating with Amazing Events AG, the organizers of some major conventions in Switzerland: Fantasy Basel and the Zurich Game Show. My latest 2019 Poster was for the international event CARTOONS ON THE BAY 2019, the Children’s Television Animation Festival promoted by RAI Com, the Italian public broadcasting company.

Are there differences in SFF art trends now compared to back in 1995?

Yes, the Internet allowed us to discover so many talented artists and raised the bar for every new artist joining the race for a prominent space in the market. Think about how many new artists add up to this huge army of creators every year, think about the database of artists at the website ArtStation! You can admire a jump in quality and a great variety of styles.

As a consequence, you can’t paint in the same way as in the eighties! There is a lot of experimentalism and finding your voice among thousands of awesome artists may not be such a linear thing.

When I became a digital artist back in 1995, I was a pioneer. In 1997, I was invited in Rome to attend Digipainting, the first International Exhibition of Digital Illustration and signed the Manifesto of Digitalism, together with artists from all over the world: Laurence Gartel, Gil Bruvel, Cher Threinen-Pendarvis, and many others.

Are there ways in which your taste or skill has changed since back then?

I’m fundamentally the same person. Training and experience have refined my brushes and every time I’m in front of a white canvas I feel the same primordial enthusiasm.

Do you have any advice for artists who want to break into the genre art markets?

Painting is like learning a language. Paint every day, dream your own world and let your artwork speak for itself. Try to be a good reviewer of your work and put your work side by side with the artists you love. Ask yourself: am I ready? Live your life and learn everything from other fields. All your knowledge will flow into your artwork.

What are you working on now that people can look forward to seeing?

I met the fantastic writer Aliette de Bodard for the first time in Milan at the festival Stranimondi (Strange Worlds), then we had a dinner at her home in Paris. I had just published the cover for her novella The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, an artwork winner of the Asimov’s Readers’ Award as their Best Cover of the Year. Subterranean Press noted this cover and asked me if I was available to work on another novella taking place in the same Xuya universe The Tea Master and the Detective. I said YES and both the Asimov and Subterranean Press covers were nominated for the Chesley Award. An alternative concept art for Aliette was also optioned and completed, and it will be out this September as a cover for her anthology Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight. The partnership and exploration go on, because while I’m writing this interview, I’ve delivered a brand-new artwork next to be announced. Aliette is a terrific writer and I’m enjoying bringing to life the living starships of her Oriental Houses in a far future.

In November, I’ll be a speaker at GameRome, while in May 2020 I’ve been confirmed as a Guest Artist of Honor at Fantasy Basel, the Swiss Comic Con. Between a workshop and a festival, I’m always at work on fantastic paintings for old and new clients and before the end of the year I should sign a contract for the production of several original sci-fi covers, probably with more than a publisher.

In the contact page of my official website (www.manzieri.com) you can find all my addresses, my email, and links to social networks, like Facebook, where I’ve opened a personal page as well as a fan gallery. I’m pleased to post there my latest works or announce updates about the studio activities and publications.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is a 2014 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

Editor’s Desk:
And into Year Fourteen We Go

Neil Clarke

October marks our thirteenth anniversary! To celebrate, we have a larger-than-normal issue this month, highlighted in part by a novella and an extra translation. Both works were made possible by a grant from LTI Korea. That funding has allowed us to substitute original Korean translations  in place of nine reprints in our 2019 schedule. We’re two-thirds of the way through completing that grant and it’s been a nice addition to this year’s line-up. I’m hoping to continue to do things like this in the future, but naturally, that can only happen with additional funding through grants or increased reader support.

As we embark on our fourteenth year of publishing, I’m happy to report that we’ve made some progress on our backlog of annual anthologies. Clarkesworld Year Ten: Volumes 1 & 2 will be published this month, followed by Clarkesworld Year Eleven: Volumes 1 & 2 in November. That leaves the Year Twelve and Thirteen sets on the table. I had hoped to complete Year Twelve before the end of the year, but between my travel schedule and work on the Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5, I thought it best to pace myself. Both are currently scheduled for the first half of 2020. At that point, we’ll be caught up for the first time in over a decade. I’m looking forward to that day.

It’s always bugged me that those books were constantly behind schedule. The stories are edited, the files are in hand, so what gives? Well, it’s entirely on me. Some of it is just being too busy, but the big obstacle is writing the introductions. It’s not like they are complicated or an in-depth analysis or something, but I freeze up every time I sit down to do them. It became worse for me when the stories would no longer fit in a single book and had to be split in two, doubling the number I’d have to write. Sometimes a six-month window isn’t particularly interesting, so what to write? Recently, I’ve started making more notes throughout the year, a habit I developed working on the Best Science Fiction of the Year annual summaries. That might help, but I figure someone out there might have some thoughts on the matter. What would you like to see in those introductions? Or is short and sweet the way to go?

So aside from anthologies, what does year fourteen hold in store for you? Well, more stories from home and abroad, of course. I have some plans in the works for updates to our website, perhaps holding some livestream Q&As, looking for ways to add value to our Patreon and Clarkesworld Citizen’s pages, and maybe even some workshops. You might have noticed that the Another Word column has been absent from several issues. We’re retooling some of the non-fiction side of the house. It could be that we continue to run extra interviews, but if so, the idea there will be to push beyond just covering authors and doing more with artists, musicians, and other people connected with or influenced by science fiction. You’ll probably see us doing some of that while we look through our other options.

We also need to do some work on our marketing and addressing some of those financial issues I’ve brought up in previous editorials. We’ll be looking at ways of bringing in new readers, how to increase the supporting rate among those who already read the magazine, and evaluating our current subscription and per-issue rates. All are necessary if we want to start improving the rate of pay for the staff here and compensating us adequately for our time. It’s not the stuff that will make you ooh and ahh, but it will make sure that we can continue doing this for another decade and more. I’d like to think you’re at least on-board with that.

On behalf of everyone at Clarkesworld, thanks for your time, attention, and support over the last thirteen years. It’s been a wonderful experience and a pleasure having you with us!

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:
Adaptation

Beeple

About the Artist

Beeple is Mike Winkelmann, a graphic designer from Charleston, SC, USA who does a variety of digital artwork including short films, Creative Commons VJ loops, everydays, and VR/AR work.

After he began releasing a set of widely used Creative Commons VJ loops he has worked on concert visuals for Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Eminem, Zedd, deadmau5, and many more.

One of the originators of the current “everyday” movement in 3D graphics, he has been creating a picture everyday from start to finish and posting it online for over twelve years without missing a single day.