Your Future is Pending

Matthew Kressel

The dog was in the alley again, sniffing around the empty trash bins for scraps she wasn’t going to find. Martha would be late for work if she fed her again, but she couldn’t bear to let the animal suffer. The mutt huddled behind the bar-coded trash bins as Martha put out a dish of microwave rice and a bowl of water. She’d have to remember to pick up some real dog food on the way home.

“Come on, girl,” Martha said, wiping her brow. It was already ninety-eight degrees and getting hotter. “This is for you.”

The mutt, a scrawny little thing, hesitated. God only knew what troubles she had been through.

Something skittered behind her—a rat—and they both jumped. And when she turned back around, the dog was gone.

“You’d better come eat this,” she said to the empty alley, “before the rats do.”

At forty-one, Martha had never married. At first she told herself it was because she hadn’t met the right person. But as she rapidly approached middle age she told herself it was because she valued her independence. But that reason had grown less persuasive after her father got sick and moved in with her so she could take care of him. So maybe Martha was alone because fate had deemed it that way. And in a battle between mortals and fate, fate always wins.

But, despite her fears of being late, Martha arrived at Mr. Fletcher’s three-story apartment promptly at 8:45 AM, exactly as her wristpad had predicted. She spoke her name and employee number to the door, and it opened wide, then sealed so quickly behind her that her ears popped. It was a brutal 109 outside, and her neatly pressed work uniform was already soaked in sweat. But inside Mr. Fletcher’s climate-controlled apartment it was a cool sixty-eight.

Her wristpad told her Mr. Fletcher’s couch was on the third floor, so she made her way past a dozen empty rooms, while a small army of cleaning bots parted like respectful soldiers to let her pass. According to company records, Mr. Fletcher had moved in six months ago, but you couldn’t tell by the unfurnished rooms and half-opened boxes scattered about the place like bricks from an ancient ruin.

The air smelled of paint and new carpet, but as she ascended the stairs, following the map on her wristpad, a sour smell, something halfway between vinegar and piss, overpowered her. It was worse than sweat but kissing-cousins to it. The smell grew stronger as she got closer, and Martha knew she could have followed her nose instead of the map.

Like the other rooms, this space had many unopened boxes scattered on the floor. But one had been ripped apart like a present on Christmas morning. Pieces lay tossed about the room as if a hungry beast had devoured it. Martha had seen this a hundred times, users madly opening their couches, assembling them in a frenzy, and meshing in before the dust had time to settle.

Mr. Fletcher lay on his couch, eyes rolling behind closed lids, weeks of beard on his sunken cheeks. The couch’s interface couplers softly hummed against his temples, and stroboscopic lights blasted his brain with petabytes of information. Just twenty-two, Mr. Fletcher was a AAA client, a top earner, according to his file. But you wouldn’t know it by his emaciated, pasty-looking body. Though appearance mattered little when it came to MeshLife. And that was actually one of its selling points.

Mr. Fletcher’s service bot, a vaguely human-shaped metallic and plastic thing, stood frozen beside him, its console light flashing alert-red. Martha brought up her work order on her wristpad and reviewed the details.

MeshLife had lost connection with Mr. Fletcher’s service bot two days ago, the file read, and after a sequence of automated repair attempts, the company AIs had chosen Martha as the optimal technician to diagnose the problem. And so here she was.

She plugged her wristpad into the bot’s console and brought up its logs. She suspected the error before the logs confirmed it: Another failed network board, the fifth one this month.

“Fucking cheap-ass Kazak shit!” she said.

The company had begun sourcing hardware from a fifth-rate supplier in Kazakhstan, and their parts failed as often as farmers’ crops these days. When she had asked Olembe, her boss, why MeshLife didn’t use a better supplier, he told her the company’s AIs ran the numbers and calculated that even with the failures it was still cheaper to use the Kazak supplier than sourcing parts elsewhere. So much, Martha thought, for company pride.

The fix was so simple a monkey could do it. She’d swap in a fresh network card and start the diagnostic routines. And, if they checked out, she’d sit and watch the service bot do its caretaker thing for a few minutes: injecting essential fluids and nutrients via IV, removing waste, washing skin and hair, and a dozen other health-related tasks. This last part, watching the bot care for Mr. Fletcher, wasn’t part of her job, but Martha was never comfortable leaving her clients alone until she knew they were safe. These days, some people meshed in for days, even weeks at a time.

Curious as to what Mr. Fletcher was up to, she tapped up the couch’s monitor.

Viewing it on a flat screen and not beamed into her brain at 4.216 THz was like comparing a vid of a rollercoaster to actually riding on one. She had meshed in enough times to complete her training, enough to learn that meshing in wasn’t for her. Not because the experience was scary or uncomfortable, but because mesh was so much better than real life that reality afterward felt like returning to a black and white world after seeing color for the first time.

Mr. Fletcher, or $TopDawg, as he was known in-mesh, stood atop a pedestal in a gargantuan nightclub styled like an Egyptian pyramid. Fantastical creatures swam in the air around him, leaving psychedelic trails of sparkles and rainbows. The real-life Mr. Fletcher resembled the avatar of $TopDawg the way a lump of coal resembled a diamond. In mesh, the man was beautiful, an Adonis of better-than-perfect proportions, every muscle gleaming with sweat, his enormous member barely hidden under silken briefs. He danced to music Martha couldn’t hear, while beneath his pedestal, some four million creatures—avatars from other mesh users—gyrated in the flickering lights. The millions took on weird and grotesque forms, hybrid animals that had not earned their place on the Tree of Life through billions of years of evolution. They thrusted and swayed as $TopDawg led them on. It was an enormous rave-dance-party-fuck-fest-orgy with four million global guests and it wasn’t even nine. Who the hell were these people, Martha wondered, who could afford to do this all day long instead of work? Who could dance and fuck and fritter their lives away while the world slowly withered to nothing?

A row of multicolored spotlights spun around to point at $TopDawg as he paused in a warrior’s pose. Across his chest, a line of text appeared, solid gold letters growing out from his skin.

STAY GUCCI! it read.

Then, as if he were an Olympian athlete tossing a discus, he flung thousands of golden coins into the dancing crowd. The animoid dancers scrambled to pick up the coins like a swarm of hungry pigeons, though there wasn’t nearly enough for all of them.

Martha queried the console to see what the coins were.

Get $25 off select Gucci Mesh Wear™. Use coupon code XG74BH at checkout.

Advertisements in-mesh were scheduled down to the second. At 9:02:14 AM, $TopDawg would promo KillCult IV: Vengeful Blood, a new in-mesh game, by “murdering” a few thousand partygoers with a laser rifle. At 9:06:37 AM, $TopDawg would wrestle and defeat a giant squid in a promo for Deep Hell, an in-mesh movie. At 9:09:15 AM, $TopDawg would give all willing participants a mind-blowing orgasm in an ad for SoftTouch™, the latest teledildonics app. The ad slots for 9:12 and beyond said, “Pending,” which Martha knew meant the company AIs were calculating some complex, multilayered equation that factored in the number of guests, their likes and purchase history, and what today’s advertisers were willing to spend in order to choose an ad that would have the maximum ROI. Martha remembered reading once that the AIs’ method was so opaque that even the company techs admitted they didn’t know quite how it worked.  

Martha checked Mr. Fletcher’s biometrics on the console, and they told a familiar tale: Extremely elevated dopamine and endorphin levels; cortisol hormones dangerously high; blood pressure, body temp, and heart rate far below baseline; and more than five markers in his blood that indicated he was severely malnourished.

But she didn’t need a monitor to see this. The young man had the wasted appearance of all the mesh-ins she visited. Bony prominences in hips and shoulders, gaunt faces, and edema swelling of the legs. MeshLife service bots were good, but there was only so much they could do for the human body before entropy took over. And Mr. Fletcher’s bot had been offline for two days.

Outside, a garbage truck rumbled past, while a dozen bots trailed it down the street, emptying trash bins into its carriage almost faster than Martha’s eye could track. The overall effect was like watching spiders unmake a web.

She opened up the code repository on Mr. Fletcher’s bot and switched into a subfolder. The file’s modification time hadn’t changed since the last time she checked, which meant the company AIs hadn’t found and patched the flaw. The software error stared her in the face, a dangerous bug that could lead to a service bot seriously misjudging a client’s health. A bug that, with just a small code tweak, could be made deadly. She’d discovered it a week ago when diagnosing a faulty biometric reading.

Last she’d heard, seventy-five percent of the planet meshed in at least once per week. Billions relied on this piece of software to keep them safe. She could let her superiors know about the flaw and receive a $162.14 finder bonus on her next paycheck. Her boss, Olembe, would give her a smile and a pat on the back. And next week she’d be at another huge and mostly empty house, repairing a faulty network board on a bot made with shitty Kazak parts, just so another overprivileged, spoiled kid could sell pretend shit to millions of their “friends,” while MeshLife would keep making trillions.

Martha stared at the file for a good minute before she closed it and deleted any evidence of having looked at it. Then she began replacing the faulty network board.

Today’s fusillade of ads were for a line of smart diapers. They followed her from street to subway to bus to home, hectoring her from billboards, wall-screens, pads, and even a sleeping girl’s smartwatch.

“Good evening, Martha! Did you know our diapers can alert caregivers when they need to be changed? And with our new AdaptiveWetness™ technology, they can be worn for almost twice as long as the leading diaper brand.”

$PinkFox, or a very good synth of them, modeled the diapers in most of the ads. A few months back, in a lonely moment, Martha had googled $PinkFox without enabling private mode in her browser, and now this nineteen-year-old androgynous sylph followed her everywhere. The fact that they continued to appear meant Martha looked at them more often than she cared to admit.

As she stepped into her apartment, dripping in sweat, a wave of exhaustion swept over her. “Shit!” she said when she spotted the empty box of microwave rice on the table. She’d forgotten to buy dog food.

“Who the fuck is that?” came a voice from the bedroom. “I have a gun!”

“It’s me, Dad,” she said wearily. “It’s Martha.”

“Who?”

“Martha!”

Her father didn’t have a gun, of course. He could barely get out of bed, most days. But that didn’t stop him from threatening her every damn time she got home.

“Why is it so hot in here?” Martha asked. The thermostat said it was eighty-eight degrees inside. “Why’d you shut off the AC, Dad? You can’t do that! It’s dangerous.”

She set the temp at seventy-five, the lowest the software let her go, then made a mental note to remove her father’s voice access to the thermostat. A few weeks ago, when she’d complained to the super about the AC’s lower limit, he’d said the restriction was out of his control, that it had been auto-updated by the manufacturer to comply with state regulations. When Martha protested that she regularly visited clients with lower thermostat settings, the man just shrugged and said it was out of his hands.

She walked down the hall toward her father’s bedroom, and a foul smell grew with the overloud sounds from the TV.

As she stepped through the threshold into the bedroom her father shouted, “Diane? Where the fuck were you? I’m hungry, god dammit!”

“Mom’s dead, Dad,” Martha said flatly. “I’m your daughter, Martha.” She winced and held her nose. “Christ, Dad, did you shit yourself again? It smells like a sewer in here.”

Her father lay in bed, sheets half-covering his sweaty, shirtless body. His gaunt face was covered in a pasty sheen that flickered in the TV light.

“—pollinator bee colonies fell by another 6% in the winter of 2037-38,” said a pixel-perfect beauty from the TV, “according to a new study, down 91% since 2020. Farmers of corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, and sorghum are petitioning the Schiff Administration for more assistance, since their crops are likely to fail again this season without sufficient pollinators.”

“Liars!” her father screamed. “It’s all fucking fake! Goddamned liars!”

The TV cut to President Schiff, drinking a cocktail in a hot tub while three scantily clad women massaged his shoulders. “The farmers dug their own graves by not relying on drone pollinators,” President Schiff said. “I tell you indoor farming is the future, and relying on ‘bugs’ to do the dirty work is just plain stupid!”

“TV, off!” Martha said, and the TV obeyed. A silence filled the room like the absence of a friend she never really liked.

“Hey!” her father said. “I was watching that!”

“All you do is scream at it,” she said.

“TV, on!” her father said, and light and sound exploded back into the room.

Martha stormed around to the back of the dresser and yanked out the power cord.

“You bitch!” her father snapped. “Why’d you do that?”

“Dad,” she said. “You stink.”

His eyes burned with tears and rage as she approached him. She lifted the top sheet and chanced a look, then winced and turned away. The mess was worse than she’d expected.

“Jesus,” she said, “why can’t you go to the bathroom like a human being?”

His voice, softer now, broke with a sob. “I couldn’t help myself.”

Martha shut her eyes, and $PinkFox’s diapered body danced before her closed lids. Sometimes she wondered if the ads knew her better than she knew herself.

After she had bathed and fed her father, changed his sheets, and done her best to remove the lingering smell from the air, she collapsed into a chair beside his bed. Her father softly snored, while the TV played some old scifi movie about a guy who gets abandoned on Mars and has to use his ingenuity to survive.

She’d fallen asleep in the chair when her father’s voice woke her.

“We don’t go to Mars no more,” he said.

“Huh?” she said as she sat up. Her stomach rumbled.

“When I was a boy, that’s all you heard talk. ‘We going to Mars. We gonna start a city there.’ It was all from that Must guy.”

“You mean Elon Musk?” Martha said.

“Yeah, him! He was all gung ho about Mars.”

“They landed there back in ’29,” she said.

“But not to stay,” he said. “We were supposed to start a new world there. What ever happened to that?”

Martha didn’t answer. Mesh happened, she knew. And she worked for the company that sucked away people’s lives like mosquitoes drank blood. It disgusted her. But after months of searching for work, MeshLife was the only job she could find. Without it, she couldn’t afford this apartment or provide for her father. And as much as she loathed him sometimes, she couldn’t bring herself to abandon him to the system.

“Good night, Dad,” she said as she stood.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said. “Where’s Diane?”

On the screen, the hero leaped for joy as one of his inventions worked.

Martha awoke just before dawn on the living room couch, still in her work clothes. Her stomach rumbled loudly. She hadn’t eaten anything last night, but halfway to the kitchen she spotted the box of microwave rice and remembered the dog. “Fuck,” she said.

Ten minutes later she was down in the alley. The bowls she’d left out yesterday were empty, and she placed the new ones beside them. The scrawny mutt eagerly peered out from behind one of the trash bins as if it had been waiting there all night just for her arrival.

“Better eat and drink,” Martha said. “It’s gonna be another scorcher.”

The mutt took a tentative step toward the bowls, and Martha took two steps back to give her some room. The dog gave her a mournful look, and Martha wondered if she would survive another day in this heat. The dog devoured the rice, then looked eager-eyed up at her, waiting for more.

Martha’s chest tightened. She’d definitely need to change a lot of things in her life, and Dad might need more than a little convincing, but Martha made the decision instantly.

“I have more food inside,” she said. “And we can get you out of this awful heat. Do you want to come in with me?”

A brief wag of her tail signaled she was at least open to the idea.

“C’mon,” Martha said, beckoning the dog toward the alley door. “This way.” She propped open the heavy steel door and stood at the threshold, waiting.

The dog nervously approached her and stopped when she reached the door. Martha held out her hand, palm up, toward the dog. She sniffed Martha’s fingers, then gave her palm a single lick that tickled. Martha smiled and reached out to give the dog a friendly pat, when her watch beeped.

“You’ll miss your appointment with City Health Services if you don’t leave now,” it said, and at its sound the dog startled and ran back into the alley.

“It’s just my watch!” Martha shouted, quickly muting it. “Don’t be scared!”

The dog timidly peered out from behind a trash bin, unconvinced.

Martha’s watch vibrated again in silent warning.

“It’s my dad,” Martha said. “I want to stay but . . . ” She swallowed down a growing tightness in her throat. “I have to go do something for him. If I miss this appointment, I have to wait six months for another.” The dog watched her, as if trying to comprehend. “I’m sorry,” Martha said. “But I really have to go. Stay in the shade, will you? I’ll get some real dog food for you today. Promise.”

Martha slowly made her way toward the alley exit, and when she looked back, the dog was still watching her.

A rat darted into the alley, saw the dog, and skittered away.

“I’m sorry Ms. Reston,” the city health clerk said to Martha from behind a thick plexiglass window, “but there’s nothing more I can do.”

Above the clerk’s head, a screen read, “Now serving: D-403.” To their left and right, a dozen other clerks were talking to more people, and behind Martha, a snaking queue of several hundred people waited impatiently inside rope-bordered aisles. Everyone looked as exhausted as Martha felt.

“Please,” Martha said to the woman, “I’ve been waiting for four hours. There has to be something you can do.”

“Like I said,” the clerk said, without a trace of sympathy. “You father doesn’t qualify for full-time care or a visiting nurse.”

“But he has dementia!” Martha snapped, feeling her composure slipping. “And I work a full-time job. I took off today to come here. I’m not getting paid for today.”

“You can call the city’s health service hotline and—”

“I did call the hotline!” Martha said. “They told me to come here!”

“And I’m telling you that my system says your father doesn’t qualify.”

“Your system says that?”

“That’s right.”

“But who actually says that?”

“Excuse me?”

“Who?” Martha said. “Who actually says he doesn’t qualify?”

“The system says that,” the clerk said. “And I’m telling you.”

“But you’re just reading your screen,” Martha said.

“That’s right.”

“So who decides what the system does and doesn’t approve?”

“An algorithm makes the decision.”

“You mean an AI,” Martha said.

“That’s right,” said the clerk. “So there’s no human bias.”

Martha took a long, slow breath. “There’s gotta be someone I can speak to.”

“Yes,” the clerk said, “the city’s health service hotline. The number is—”

“Thanks,” Martha said, stepping away. “Thanks for nothing.”

A bell dinged and the sign above the clerk read, “Now serving: E-609.”

Martha felt faint and really needed to eat something. She let her watch lead her to a bar-restaurant a few blocks from the health office. The place was sparsely filled with older clientele who swiped at their wrists or watched a conservative news feed on the big screen in the back. She sat at the bar and ordered a mock-meat burger, fries, and a beer. As the calories and alcohol entered her body, her rage softened.

The city AIs will deny services the first few times as a weed-out measure, she’d read on a forum for people taking care of sick parents. If you keep trying, eventually you’ll get what you need.

But this was her third time visiting the health office, and she’d called their hotline at least fifty times. How much more begging did she have to do before they decided to help?

She sighed and thought about the dog. She was growing used to Martha, and if her watch hadn’t gone off she would have even let Martha pet her. When she got home, she’d convince the dog to come inside with her. She couldn’t really afford another mouth to feed, but maybe if she reported that dangerous bug and got her $162.14 bonus, it would help some. Dad might need more convincing, but Martha had read that some folks with dementia were soothed by having a dog.

What would she name her? Samantha? No, she once had a friend named Samantha. What about Bella? No, that didn’t fit. The mutt was a survivor and needed a survivor’s name. What about Circe? Circe was a badass goddess who poisoned her enemies and transformed them into beasts, powers Martha wished she had. She imagined bringing the dog to the park with her father, when it wasn’t so hot, and playing fetch with a ball.

“Circe,” she said, trying the name aloud. “Bring it here, Circe.”

“Pardon?” the bartender said.

“Oh, nothing,” Martha said, her cheeks growing hot. “Wait—is there a pet store nearby? I need to pick up some dog food.”

“Yeah, on Seneca,” the bartender said. “Make a right out the door, go two blocks up, then make a left. You’ll see it.”

“Thanks,” Martha said.

She was about to ask for the check when her wrist chirped with a call from home. She tapped the answer button. On the small screen, her father thrashed about his bedroom. “I can’t find it!” he screamed. “I can’t find it!”

He was naked, and a dark stain ran down his leg.

“Where is it?” he screamed. “Where did it go?”

Her father hadn’t called her. Weeks ago, she’d put a medical monitor on him and programmed it to contact her if his vitals reached a certain threshold. Right now his heart rate and blood pressure were through the roof.

“Dad!” she said to her screen. “Dad, I’m coming! I’m coming home!”

“Where is it?” he screamed. “Where is it?”

What should have been a forty minute ride took almost two hours. Her watch told her that because of construction she was better off taking an alternate subway and transferring to a bus. But the alternate subway had signal problems, and the bus route was so crowded she had to wait for three buses to come before there was room enough for her to board.

She tried calling her father a dozen times, but he didn’t pick up. $PinkFox ads followed her the whole way, offering relief from stress with a new strain of soothing vape oil. Martha cursed each time the self-driving bus, ultracautious, stopped at a yellow light it could have easily gone through or to let another vehicle have the right of way. She had bitten her fingernails down to nubs by the time she walked in the door of her apartment.

“Dad?” she shouted. “Dad!”

Inside his bedroom, it looked as if a bomb had gone off. Papers, clothes, picture frames, and books had been tossed around the room. The TV and lamp lay on the floor, both shattered. Every drawer was open, and whatever had lain in them was now somewhere about the room.

She found him on the floor of the closet. The hangar rod had been pulled from the wall and lay across his soiled, naked body.

“Oh my god—Dad!” she said, running to him. “What the hell?”

“I can’t find it!” he said, tears streaming down his face. “It’s not here!”

“What?” she said, crouching beside him. “What are you looking for?”

He looked up at her, his eyes wet and bloodshot, as his lower lip quivered. “I . . . I don’t know . . . ”

“Oh, Dad,” she said, taking him in her arms. He was filthy, but she didn’t care. “Oh, Dad.”

He wept and shivered, and Martha held him, until the sun began to set. Cleaning up the mess took hours, and some things, like the TV and lamp, would need replacing with money she didn’t have.

By the time he had calmed enough to fall asleep, it was after midnight. And it was only now that she remembered Circe. “Fuck!” she said.

She darted out of the apartment and down into the alley.

“Circe?” she called to the blue-tinged shadows. “Circe, are you here?”

The air smelled of soured milk and decades of garbage. The only reply came from the straining air-conditioners above.

“If you come inside,” she said. “I’ll give you real dog food every day. And a soft doggie bed to sleep on. And a bath. You really need a bath.”

She checked the time. She really had to get to bed if she wanted to get up for work tomorrow.

“Please,” she said, slowly heading back to the door. “Please come back. I’m sorry I left today.”

Overhead, a city drone buzzed past. Otherwise, the alley was silent.

As she walked the stairwell back up to her apartment, she had her watch order dog food with expedited delivery. It was obscenely expensive, but she didn’t care.

“Your purchase of dog food for circle has been confirmed,” her watch replied.

“Circe!” she said. “Her name is Circe.”

She was up early and showered quickly, but her stomach was too twisted into knots worrying about Circe to eat much. She prepared two bowls of oatmeal and water and headed downstairs.

It was hot in the alley, and the trash bins were already baking in the sun. Something was different here this morning, but she couldn’t quite place it.

She put down the fresh bowls next to the empty others. “Circe?” she called. “Cir-ce?”

She waited, but the dog didn’t come.

“Circe? C’mon, girl! I have food here!”

She stepped forward, searching behind the bins. Something was rotting in one, and the heat wasn’t helping the smell. The smell grew stronger as she walked. Then she heard the flies.

She spotted a tail, a thin, fuzzy thing, peeking out from under one of the bins. “Circe?”

She crouched down to look. The dog lay still, as if sleeping. Beside her was a pile of vomit. Beside the vomit was a half-eaten rat. Flies swarmed.

Shaking now, Martha stood. This wasn’t real. She and Circe and Dad would go to the park. Dad would grow calmer with Circe around. She would be his best friend.

Martha’s gaze came to rest on a poster applied to the wall. It hadn’t been here yesterday.

The City Health Department has detected a high level of vermin in this area. Rat poison has been automatically applied by aerial drones. Use caution with children or pets when entering this zone.

The same poster had been stuck every fifty feet along the wall.

Circe was hungry, and Martha hadn’t fed her enough. So Circe ate a rat. But the rat had been poisoned. And so Circe had been poisoned too.

Martha crouched down again. The dead dog’s eyes stared at her.

Something chittered down the alley. A dozen sanitation bots were working their way through the bins, carrying off trash almost too fast for her eyes to follow. When they reached Circe, they didn’t pause. One scooped her up and carried her off, while two more scrubbed the ground clean. In seconds, it was as if Circe had never been.

Her watch chirped. “If you don’t leave now,” it said, “you’ll be late for work.”

Mr. Hoffman was nineteen and lived alone in a huge high-rise apartment paid for by the proceeds he earned from doing in-mesh promos, Martha’s work-order said. His couch sat by the window with impressive views of the city. But Mr. Hoffman hadn’t left his couch—hadn’t opened his eyes—in eighteen days. And like the dozens before him, Mr. Hoffman’s service bot had failed. It was the same piece-of-shit Kazak network board, the same five-minute fix.

Martha stood before the window, staring out at the city. How many, she wondered, were meshing-in right this very moment?

Her watch beeped. “Your order of dog food has just been delivered,” it said.

She stared at the message for a moment before swiping it away.

On the service bot’s console, she brought up the code repository. The dangerous software bug she had found a few weeks back stared at her like a dead dog’s eyes. She activated the keyboard and made a small code change, then pushed it upstream. If the company AIs approved the change, at the next software update her code would be sent out to billions of mesh users. She’d get her $162.14 bug-finder’s bonus, and her boss, Olembe, would pat her on the back.

And in a week, maybe two, the first of them would start to die.

She wondered if anyone would notice before then.

About the Author

Matthew Kressel is a writer & software developer. He is a three-time Nebula Award finalist and Eugie Award Finalist, and his work has been published in Clarkesworld, Analog, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy - 2018 Edition, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year - Volume 3, as well as many other magazines and anthologies. He is the creator of the Moksha submissions system, in use by many of the largest speculative-fiction publishers. And he is the co-host of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan alongside Ellen Datlow.

Antarctica

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

I set my laser to a thinner edge as I cleared the excess around the general parallelogram shape of the form before me, a structure filled with tiny nodes. White shards flew around me, hitting my face and sticking to my skin, as my laser danced across the piece. I wiped the shards off with a towel before they could melt, already feeling the chill. I put the thermamask on over my head, cringing.

The door opened up with a sucking “shwoop” before closing again, the room still in cold stasis.

“Chenhua, you finally decided to throw that thing on, huh?” said Mac, pointing at my masked face. I turned around to look at him, pausing my laser for a moment. Even though I could only see his eyes, I could tell he was smiling. His sleeves were rolled up and I noticed goose bumps. He started rolling them down.

“The mask obstructs my flow. But, so does having ice spit back into my face.”

“Come out and have a beer with me.”

I turned my laser back on and continued carving. “I can’t. You know that. And shouldn’t you be finishing up your ‘Ice Eight’ test?”

His face fell. I could tell from the crinkles disappearing from the side of his eyes. “It failed. Nothing sticks. These damn microorganisms. At least your Eight seems to be coming along.”

He reached behind me as I worked. “Careful, this is a live laser I have here,” I said, not bothering to turn it off this time.

He released his hug. “We have a living center designed with Passivhaus principles, warm and toasty and here you are in the numbing cold, playing with ice. You might as well be out there in the blistering frost.”

“Everyone else is in the cold, in their labs, testing their ice. Why should I be any different?”

“Because you’re the artist,” he said. He snaked around to the front of my worktable and started admiring my other magnified replicas of unit cell phases of ice, encased in their own clear giant lockers against the wall. The laser emitted a tiny buzz as I continued to work, this time chiseling out finer detail on beam mode five. “Besides, you have a choice. You could make these models out of plastic, just print them out and be warm.”

“And what’s the artistry in that?” I tried to get myself back into the flow. I turned off the laser. His presence interrupted my focus.

“I don’t know, design? Durability?”

“Mac, any schoolkid can print out one of my compositions online, but to render it in lab repro-ice is another thing altogether. You know that.” I put down the laser pen, intertwined my fingers and stretched, leaning forward. My fingers and lips were numb. I didn’t realize until I stopped working. I got up, deciding I could use a break after all.

“Yes, yes, I know. They really are beautiful,” Mac said, with a whistle. He stroked the chin under his mask. “The crystalline structure, so intricate, rendered in so much detail.”

I pulled out a large drawer, showing him my previous versions of Ice IV phases. Not quite perfect.

“Beautiful,” he said. His eyes wide, his deep black pupils reflecting the complex network of connections and coordinates. “Almost as beautiful as you. I mean your, uh, neurons. Your smart ingenuity.”

I laughed. “Alright. Since you’re trying so hard, I’ll get that beer with you.” He threw his arms around me.

The alarm sounded and a groan that should never have been audible through the walls resounded in the room. We never got to getting that beer.

“We lost McCurdo,” yelled Stone. He was the head of the team, the biologist Steven Stonewall, but everyone called him Stone since we never once saw him smile. We traipsed through the snow as fast as we could, but Antarctica was never kind to us two-legged squishy mammals. The vehicle was just fifteen feet away, but it felt like miles.

“How can that even be possible?” I yelled through the howling storm. We shouldn’t be out here. We should be in there, in the warmth of the structure. The mechanical surveying team pulled up to check the house, which we all called Caterpillar for its long shape. They made sure there were no damages. Another team was checking the ice. My parka stretched across my underthermals, I trudged along, with something, some tag rubbing against my back. It shouldn’t have been my biggest concern then, but I couldn’t even think about anything else—certainly not the imminent frostbite, the unforgiving, unrelenting bite of this land. Just that rubbing against my back. Something I could pinpoint my focus on.

Stone continued speaking, lost in thought. “McCurdo Station gone. The calving. It was quick. Too quick. Some of the buildings on landside survived, but the ones that are drifting or fell through, vanished.”

Mac was racing ahead. He was always the fastest one, being lean and tall, with large strides.

“The microorganisms,” I whispered. I don’t know how Stone heard, but I saw him nodding. I covered my face with my hand, blocking the cutting wind. The gales felt stronger than my laser, chiseling my face into its desired shape.

“We don’t know if it’s magnetic or a pulse or what,” said Stone. “But, they’ve got something that is lacerating and propelling the ice.”

Mac had reached the vehicle and was driving it back this way. It cleaved through the wind like nothing else. Germans and their incredible cars. This specially designed snowmobile looked angelic to me. I could almost imagine a halo as my legs started to give. Even under the smart underthermals I could feel the bite of the cold, as the wind continued to whip my face.

We got on, just as my breathing was starting to escalate into cold-induced hyperventilation. We had been all too much in a rush to grab our climate-controlled portable breathing units. We were lucky our faces were still intact. I watched as the bots crawled across Caterpillar, checking for inconsistencies. Some of them pulled out arms to spray a sealant glue. Others shook the housing structure, checking the integrity of the ballasts.

It was warm in the car. I took off my gloves, blew on my fingers, and set them against the warm vents.

Mac listened in on the comms. “Looks okay. Not a collapser,” said Mac, passing his eyes back up at the Caterpillar. Not like all those McCurdo Station buildings, is what he didn’t say. We’ve witnessed a few collapses in our day. They were, as all of us could agree on, a few too many.

I thought about my crystalline pieces, renderings of the different phases of ice. The hyperglass cases were sturdy and could hold up to a lot of pressure, but I wasn’t sure about a collapse. Funny how you think of your work before your own well-being. I should be worried about what we would do with ourselves if the Caterpillar really went kaput.

Stone breathed a sigh of relief. The storms were evanescent things, suddenly furious, but dying with the same swiftness. They were getting worse though. More frequent, more powerful. What was happening to the poles?

Mac drove us east towards Adelie Island. He didn’t want to go anywhere near McCurdo, knowing how precarious the situation was. We listened to the crackling radio in the car. The driving was so smooth, even in the midst of the storm. I vaguely wondered how much it would cost to buy myself one of these dream vehicles with their nearly-infallible sonic stability features—before snapping to the reality of the 150 mph wind smacking against our car, the violent starkness outside our isolated warmth. The communications department mentioned that rescue teams have been called in for McCurdo, ones trained for emergency care and assessment. Not wanting to get in the way of bots, Mac took us in the other direction, to survey the animals we were desperately trying to protect. There would be drone teams checking them out, but it seemed most of the damage was limited to the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

A hush fell as we entered the ancestral breeding grounds of these majestic birds. The ones that acted like fish and conveyed tenderness like humans. We stopped about a hundred yards away, pulling out binoculars from their resting places in seat-back pockets. We witnessed the drones hovering above, adjusting to the gusts, grabbing footage. We saw the males huddling with the chicks and a few females returning from the arduous trip across the ice to get food. The females looked thinner than the last time I saw them, losing much of their body weight during their fast at the hatching site.

Mac turned off the radio. The crackling stopped.

“I’ll never get used to the ways these things just stand out there,” said Stone, adjusting the knobs on his binoculars.

Mine auto-adjusted as I strapped them to my face. I must have picked up one of the new series. I could see the splash of oranges on their cheeks, magnified, next to their beaks. Behind and above their beaks, their eyes dotted like two punctuation marks, small harsh beads, pitch-black, as if the penguins were squinting from the cold.

“You hear the news talk about them as the waddling tuxedos and their slow decline, but to me, they look more like dominoes. All lined up when they march, with their own order and configuration,” said Mac.

“Yeah,” I said. “Though they look more like a massive jumbled-up crowd now. But you’re right. Tuxedos could never be so slick as they zoom past in their freewheeling slides.”

One of the females was doing just that, sliding. She reached her young, opened her beak wide, like mistletoe hanging over an expectant couple. The little chick gobbled up whatever that beak held, in hasty, spastic gulps.

“Slipping and sliding and slick hides. Of course, you’d think about the texture,” said Mac. I don’t know how many times I must have prattled on to him about structures and textures, tactile properties of ice and life.

Now the dominoes were shivering out there, but otherwise straight as poles in the sea of ice. Occasional flits and movements here and there, but mostly still. A crowd of miniature Stonehenge.

“And dominoes and penguins have another thing in common. Gambling,” said Stone.

“Gambling,” said Mac, as if in agreeance. But, his expression said he didn’t understand.

“They’re like me, they’re risk-takers,” said Stone. We nodded. Stoic Stone seemed as far off of a risk-taker than anyone I’ve met, with his redundant checking protocols, but then again, he was out here, on the brittle ice like us. “Every year it’s a gamble to see how many of these chicks survive.”

Mac reached into the glove compartment and rummaged around. “How did that song go? ‘The ice recedes and recedes, the breeding ground ice softer and softer,’” he said, quoting lyrics from a hit meme song about climate change. He whistled. “I can’t seem to find the disc here.” I chuckled, thinking of those old disc relics. Mac smiled, pulling his hand out of the compartment, and instead started up the digital musical files in the car. The speakers blasted with that wretched, catchy tune. Stone’s lips remained a straight line.

Two years ago, the ice collapsed, wiping out half the emperor penguin colony. By then it was mostly bots handling the research. But, once the bots discovered the bio-matter wedged in the ice, they sent us in.

They thought it might have been bio-matter carried in by atmospheric nanos that drifted over the South Pole and settled onto the ice. Theories. No one really knew where they came from. I watched the male penguins incubate, from the warmth of my car. I felt like one of those chicks, jammed in the safety of their fur-like plumage while the outside cold wore on. In the -60 °C chill, one false move and their chick might be gone.

As the climax of the song hit, “ . . . and the crack broke through the land,” I imagined the microorganisms falling from the sky, undetectable to our instruments while in the air, inflicting calamity as soon as they hit ice. It seemed improbable they could survive this cold, let alone swirl down from the heavens.

Improbable, but yet they were here. Humans were always bad at probability.

Mac punched a few keys at the screen, turning off the song system. The lyrics were getting grim.

Stone flashed us a warning and opened the door to the dreadful cold. He leaped out.

The cold flushed into the car, or technically, the heat seeped out in a wave, but it always seemed alive, this cold, like terrible tendrils out to obliterate organic life.

Not the microorganisms though. Stuck in ice, they’re impervious to the cold.

We followed suit, grabbing our gear. I pulled some spare breathing units from the back pockets of the seats and our faces stayed warm. My all-temp scrawl pad in hand, I made a few sketches of the landscape. It was what I was paid to do after all. The grants of the benefactors put to work. I traced my gloved finger over the screen, capturing the easy cures of the penguins’ backs, the white of the ice beyond. My hands were firm, not shaking even a bit. The storm wasn’t too bad here. It must have been segregated out west.

I looked out to the horizon. It blended with the ice, a swath of murky whiteness that stretched all the way to the sky. The whiteness quivered in the slight atmospheric blasts. It was windy, but a breeze compared to the earlier rage. I brushed back a stray lock of hair, billowing in this relentless, raw ever-winter.

Mac got on his knees, reached out to the ground, and chipped some ice. He dug around for a while, making a five-inch deep hole he would later plug with repro-ice. You needed to go deeper to find the microorganisms. That’s where they lived, and where they wreaked havoc.

Structure-breakers. Ice clefters. Snapping the ties of the bonds.

Shaking my pad to save my earlier sketches, I started a new one: hexagonal crystalline ice. Then I drew over some of the bonds. Ice Ih, the most abundant ice on Earth, almost all of it in this phase, now falling prey to these invisible parasites.

We were heading back. Even our gear couldn’t take too much of the cold. Nor our bodies. I didn’t envy the penguins, though the adoration and care they devoted to their young was certainly admirable. I drew one last continuous-line drawing of the birds, lifting my fingers only to dot their eyes. I turned around. Mac was already striding ahead, as usual.

I had half my leg in the car, when I heard a shout. I turned around. A nightmare filled my vision. A collapse. Isolated, at least it didn’t reach the penguins. It was Stone. He was behind me a minute ago, but now he was back twenty feet, his leg trapped in the ice.

We drove the car over and, with a heave, pulled him up.

“They don’t like us,” he said. He threw the specimen jars into the glove compartment. He tried to hide it, but his hands trembled, as he irradiated his leg with the handheld. His expression was as flat as ever, but you could see in his green eyes, the dilated pupils, that he was shaken. The microbes.

Mac drove us back. The comms gave us a green light to head back to Caterpillar.

There used to be more of us here. Besides Mac the biochemist and Stone the microbiologist. We had Rika in chemical engineering and Hiro, the textile material engineer. I liked Hiro a lot—we used to chat about materials, every morning as he sipped his coffee, I’d get his opinion on pieces for art projects I had in mind. Rika mostly kept to herself.

I was the odd one out. The artist-in-residence. Stone never said so, but I always knew he thought it was stupid to have an artist. Superfluous. Better to bring another scientist, even if I had a master’s in environmental sciences—I was still there as the artist. The “bridge to the masses.”

I uploaded another piece onto the MOMA website, an ongoing collection of my work on-site in the polar south. I had 135 pieces then and thousands of followers. I also put up my webcomic. Lowbrow stuff, even if it had more “hard scientific” merit than my “sophisticated” pieces. 200+ comics and a few million followers. Lowbrow gets retweeted and reposted, translated to hundreds of languages. Highbrow stays in its curated spaces, but gets the funding. Add the penguins into the mix and we had the WWF and foundations across the world throwing cash at our cause. I shut off my pad and went back to my sculptures. These were ones I hadn’t shown to the world. The glass-like delicacies, the pièce de résistance that I would bring back as a complete, groundbreaking series.

I had been in this field long enough to know what would break ground. Before this stint, three months on a ship to scour the ocean floors and I designed real-to-life candied versions of the coral. These sweet replicas flew off the shelves in museum stores, movie theater concession stands, and supermarket register aisles. They were true-to-life reproductions of new species of animals and exotic corals no one has seen the likes of for ages. And alluring flavors to match. I worked with a food scientist then, and we made large and small pieces of these edible works: large for museum-goer consumption, so they could eat it with their eyes, supersized coral made of sugar hanging over them like trees. Then, small, portable ones for kids in strollers. They could suck on them like pacifiers. It was all the rage. Podcasts had me on. Their hosts called my work the best cocktail of art, both pop and polished.

Now with the microorganisms, no one could keep their eyes off the polar ends of the world. The Arctic had their own team; here in the southern realms, we had us.

Mac came by to let me know that I still owed him a beer.

I dropped the laser, initiated a temporary climate securoshield over my work, and we headed to the lounge. I sat in what used to be Hiro’s favorite seat.

We drank, not really talking. We looked out from the single hyperglass window into the white expanse. Obliterating. That’s how white it was. I thought about Stone’s leg. It was fine, but his skin needed some repairs. Superficial frostbite. The bots were working on it.

“It could have been any one of us,” he said, as if reading my mind. Though, I didn’t know if he was talking about Stone or our other colleagues.

“Not many beers left,” was my reply. I had taken a quick glance of the stock when I walked in. I took a swig, savoring the feel of the glass rim on my lips, thinking of my presence and that of his, our very aliveness. Mac put his hand over my own.

The microbes took Hiro and Rika, softened the ice and broke it off. Hiro left behind a dog and an ailing mom. Rika, a wife and two kids. Their comms never even registered.

I looked out beyond, trying to spot the ocean. I knew I wouldn’t. We were facing the wrong way—the ocean would be there of course, it surrounded in all directions, but not for thousands of miles away.

“Their bodies are somewhere out there. In the sea.”

“The team will find them,” he said. He sounded weary. “The bots are good bots.”

He got up and returned, cracking open another beer. Fizz shot out and sizzled away. The skies were clear again.

“The storm passed pretty quickly,” he said.

“They’re getting worse,” I said. Mac looked away and pulled out my pad from the window ledge.

“Let’s see what beauty you unveiled to the world this time.”

He pulled up the webcomic. I had a few penguins with funny faces, talking philosophy. Amateur stuff, I knew, but the millennials loved them. Then a serious one explaining about ice structures, with only a hint of a punch line. Mac’s eyes passed down the screen. He put the pad back on the ledge.

“Good work. Funny, but also crucial.”

“It pleases the crowds,” I said. I finished the last drop of beer and nestled deeper into the chair. It wrapped around my hips like a glove. “So, what happened to Eight? Cubic phase eight, right? You said it failed?”

“Yes, Ice Eight was a fail, a no-go. Not the right phase. But, I think, we’re onto something. A combination of phase 3 and phase 15 and maybe some others, though not sure which ones yet. The microbes seem to respond to the mix.”

I got up and made myself a gin and tonic, sat down. No ice. Enough of that for now. Phase 3 and 15. I thought about their structures, their intersections spinning in my head. Nothing felt better than the semi-warm drink flowing down my throat, the bubbles tickling my tongue. The glass clinked as I set it down. No cold, no ring of condensation left on the windowsill.

“Respond? In what way?” I asked.

“I have a feeling Stone put some of the specimens on the surface. Out there earlier today. Uncharacteristic of him, I know, but I think he’s getting impatient. He’s testing some of the ice we’re working on. A small portion must have dusted onto his shoe.”

“So, the microbes wanted it, pulling him in.”

“That’s the theory.”

I gulped down the rest of the warm beverage. It burned as it went down, warming my body. Mac came to my chair and caressed my neck and back. His hands felt warm, full of life-giving heat, toasty like the gin and tonic.

The microbes stuck to Stone’s shoe. A dire attraction, I thought.

Maybe we could figure it out after all.

I decided in lieu of my typical droll comic, I would compose a treatise, an artist treatise. Some readers might think it a spoof. But, I thought it was about time.

It caught like wildfire. It appeared in all the major outlets and was passed on across the world, translated into multiple languages.

I scribbled a woman in a helmet, gripping a wooden rod, high-sticking as she glided across a clear, slick terrain. Fans in the bleachers cheered.

Ice hockey rinks, vending machines, dropping hail—ice is ubiquitous but not everyone thinks about the diversity of ice. Like human moods congealing into expressions, when water becomes solid, it has a variety of masks to choose from. From phases I to XV, it has over a dozen of different crystalline solid configurations to take the form of, not to mention amorphous ice, with no crystalline structure to speak of.

Like smiles, some crystalline structures require less muscle work, for example, phase Ice Ih is the most common one on Earth. Some require more labor to pull off. Like a frown, they require some muscling—Ice V, for example, is the most complex one of all. It requires cooling water to 253 K at 500 MPa to form.

Here I inserted goofy harmless emoticons, personalities to these otherwise faceless beings.

When the microbes came, they started breaking down Ice Ih. We tried patching it up. Formed ice in the lab to replace the thinner shelves. A kind of terraforming, but rather than transforming the land, simply reinforcing it with the same material. Like a flying buttress on a church.

I doodled a grand gothic church, vaulted ceilings, sheer and crystal, with arrows pointing to the supporting structures.

Hiro Suzuki and Rika Pranata were the most active, going out on long jaunts in the vehicles to pile the layers on. For weeks they spent hours laboring in the cold, spreading water, designed specifically to match the pH and chemical compounds of Antarctic ice and freezing it up.

Caricatures of Rika and Hiro graced the page. They were waving, smiling from their all-weather vehicle.

It didn’t work. The microbes didn’t take on. They broke those down more quickly. Some say they didn’t like the interlopers. That they can feel us trampling about and broke ice faster in those spots. Fracturing and calving away. Some say they took the scientists away for getting in their business. Those were the ones that said it was an act of Nature. Nature abhors a meddler.

A larger-than-life figure, Nature, hovering over the Antarctic pole.

But, in our grief, we disagreed. It wasn’t Nature—it was us humans who brought these microbes here. A product of human fallacy. It was the same story over and over. I knew it from my journey to the depths of the oceans, on the research ship for months. Our destruction of the ocean bottoms. The expanse of reefs, bleached white. The final dying exhale of an ecosystem.

Here I filled in a panel with conspicuous displays of color and organic life, only to have it fade to white.

Now, it was the polar edges of our worlds. Our shortsighted push to the brink of technology. Unchecked hubris. Nanocontamination in snow. The contamination is abundant, everywhere, but the research is in its infancy and unflappable proof of its cause is still at arm’s length.

I drew in bits of snow, sinister and dark linings of a malevolent gray.

It wasn’t just us, just the melting of the ice that would flood the oceans, thermally expand and bring water levels to greater depths—it was also the threat to all marine life. And the one that was most endangered now, the cute, bumbly penguins. Their black and white lives threatened to be obliterated, consumed by the gray oceans. Their ancestral breeding overtaken by the microbes.

I illustrated fluffy, cute tuxedoes threatened by these floating emoticons.

There are ones that believe in us. Those are the ones I speak to when I pen my comics, when I upload another one of my sumi scrolls or mixed media collages onto my collection. We can’t kill the microbes; that requires an amendment of UN dictations on destroying wilderness species, even if they did not spawn from the wild, as we suspect. But, they relaxed a provision to allow us to experiment to manufacture new ice to replace the old.

A depiction of a group of protestors, a generation of believers graced the page.

We looked at ourselves, at our multitudes of expressions. Regret, pity, determination. We looked at the ice, and its many phases of solid water. Expressions carved into intricate crystalline networks, as convoluted as rococo, but as ordered as an army.

I sketched a band of tough, spirited crystalline configurations, altogether standing in their own battle configurations.

This is the cavalry that will cease the calving. A formulation that the team of three of us here on New Amundsen-Scott pioneered. Trial testing showed it works. A mix of Phase III, elusive XV, XI, the ubiquitous Ih and a dash of what they call hyper-quenched glassy water.

I scrawled in a rather detailed, escheresque maze of crystalline networks, wrapped in an ice cube. My stylus flowed with its own will. Tetragonal, proton ordered tetragonal, normal hexagonal, orthorhombic hexagonal ferroelectric crystalline structures, as well as high-density amorphous ice with its dangling bonds—all in concert, all intermingling—streamed from the tip of the instrument I wielded.

The penguins will hatch on solid ground. It will take a year, but the penguins will rebound, much like us, much like the ice and hopefully, much like the Earth.

And finally, the penguin, inked with bold lines, imbued with movement, smiled out from the page.

I stacked the giant carved-ice crystalline sculptures, my models of all the phases, onto the vast ship. Another team is taking over; our tenure is over, though Stone has applied for an extension. I don’t know if he got it, but I think someone will have to literally extract him physically to get him to leave his lab.

I marveled at my pieces. I knew it was no exaggeration to admit that no one has ever seen such fine sculptures before, both in material and in execution. They’re going to make their way across the world; in rotating galleries, and temporal stays at ice hotels and ice and snow festivals, starting in Krasnoyarsk, to Harbin, to Sapporo, and across the oceans to Alberta, Canada. No one has seen ice sculptures crafted in constructed polar repro-ice mixed with some pasteurized natural polar ice shreds, finely chiseled by surgical lasers. No one has seen the crystalline structures, so enormously rendered, the complex dimples and pores of each formation’s face, their idiosyncratic expressions, exposed for all to revere.

The last week of our mission, about a week ago, Stone, Mac, and I, and a dozen bots layered shards of the new concoction, composed of several different ice phases, onto a restricted experimental stretch of Antarctic land—one of many where the microbes thrived with the most density. To be fair, mostly the bots layered. The bots sported a coating of repellants so the ice wouldn’t stick to their surfaces. All we did was help move the airtight enclosed cases over. That was about it. We stood back and watched, as the bots removed natural ice, scooped up shards of repro-ice, and planted them like a garden. Their appendages flew in mechanical swiftness, their bodies built for strength and endurance. Recently upgraded, they were at their prime in below-freezing degrees. Much more efficient than a bunch of humans and their doughy skins could ever be. I sketched.

Unlike previous rejections, where the microbes refused to attach to the ice and, instead, fractured and melted the ice, this time, they adhered onto the old layer. What resulted looked like the wake of a resurfacer on an ice skating rink, the new ice looking clean and shiny, as if just squeegeed. Like a resurfacer, the bots shaved the top layers of the ice to get to the buried microbes. They added not water like a resurfacer, but, rather, these shards of ice we developed in the labs, a mutt of several phases melded together and carefully transported. Lab-perfected repro-ice. When they were finished, it was the satisfaction of glimpsing new infrastructure.

I took off my mask for a moment, wanting no obstruction to this singular encounter. Mac and Stone did the same. The isolated land looked, even smelled, revived. There was a feeling in the air, buoyed by a crisp scent. The wind whipped my face, but I was so lost in the moment, it felt like nothing more than a gentle lap. I grabbed Mac’s gloved hand, intertwined his fingers into my own.

I thought I saw a smile creep across Stone’s face, as he stepped forward in his thick boots to observe the scene better. But no, when he turned this way, his face was dead straight, his eyes steely, solid, so maybe it was simply a trick of the light and my own felicity projected onto others. We put our masks back on. The new ice plain of Antarctica glinted in the sun, as the robots wheeled back to the vehicle.

Fresh groundwork. This was the paved road in which our humanity could survive and develop. And of course, not to mention, the penguins.

Mac carried his lab packs into my storeroom on the research vessel, placing his expensive equipment and samples next to my insulated, climate-controlled own. His parka sang in the wind. We looked out at the open sea, an image we haven’t seen for months, since we mostly huddled in our labs and traveled only to research sites. Thrashing and shifting between icebergs, the sea looked fake, like a mirage.

“You should probably move them into another compartment,” I yelled above the sound of waves crashing, pointing at his lab packs. “These are going direct to Russia via the Sea of Okhotsk.”

The breeze quieted down for a moment. It smelled musty in this old ship, bringing in foreign aromas to this sterile land.

He laughed. His voice fell what seemed like an octave, as if scraping against the ocean floor. “Lyubimaya, ne volnuysya. Moya lyubov’ ne znayet granits.”

“Russian?”

“Yes, Russian. I have been brushing up on my languages. I thought I could be your translator.” He picked up another set of crates, their orange stickers of “Fragile!” the brightest things around. It reminded me of the flash of flushed color on penguin cheeks.

“I thought you were taking a year off to somewhere warm and tropical. Travel the Caribbean. Isn’t that what you said? ‘Before the islands get engulfed by the sea,’ I think were your words.”

“Yeah, well, Russia is pretty much tropical compared to this.”

I could see the crinkles at the edges of his eyes through his thermal mask.

“Besides, you still owe me a few beers. How many times have you brushed aside our ‘spirit breaks’ for work?”

I put down my pad and stopped counting inventory. He walked over and pulled me close. I could feel his warm breath fog our cheeks.

“Vodka,” I said. “It won’t be beer, but vodka.”

“Good enough for me,” he said, as he activated the ship compartment door. It squeaked to a shut, lending us some privacy.

Outside, the waves roared, as far off, the bots worked. Fresh ice encroached over thin ground, adding new layers of cohesion and hope.

Author’s Note:

This story was informed by: Praveen, Thakur K and A Velumurgan. “Phase Properties and Type of Earth’s Water Ice and Space Ices.” Science of Solar System Ices. Lunar and Planetary Institute No. 146, 2008.

Procedures such as mixing of ice phases, references to places such as Antarctica/research bases, any proposed solutions to ecological issues, as well as any and all other story elements, are used fictitiously.

About the Author

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

She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter.

Cloud-Born

Gregory Feeley

Nessus assaulted a warrior’s wife and was slain with a poisoned arrow; Euryptus disrupted a wedding and provoked a slaughter; Pholus was caught between his human friends and his kin; Chiron taught humans but could not pass his wisdom to the young of his own kind. Intemperate, imprudent, and invariably the losers, they were more beasts than men. Even the one who was rewarded with metamorphosis into a constellation gained immortality at the expense of his heritage—forever to be remembered as “The Archer” instead of what he was.

“Such sadness,” Asia would exclaim, looking over Justin’s shoulder as he read. “How awful it would be if such things actually happened.”

Light flickered on the slopes above, too distant to hear. Air currents brought a whiff of ozone, although none of the children recognized it.

“Did they have to leave their home?” asked little Yukiko, who evidently understood some of their meaning.

“Indeed,” said Justin wisely. “They scattered in many directions, for Herakles seemed ready to kill them all. Some fled to Mount Pelion, where they sought refuge with Pholus, but Herakles pursued them there, and accidentally slew even his old friend.”

Asia shook her head. “All because Herakles wouldn’t share the wine in their communal jar, nor heed Chiron’s warning not to open it. And after the great hero had killed several and set off after the rest, Chiron plucked an arrow from one of the corpses, wondering how so small a thing could kill such great creatures, and it slipped from his fingers and pierced his foot, poisoning him instantly.”

More flickering, and a low boom rolled across the hills.

“Long ago,” Yukiko mused. No one had anything to add to this, and Justin closed the book.

“It’s only sort of true,” he assured her as they made their way down the escarpment. Bits of rock spurted from beneath their boots and clattered down ahead of them like startled animals. Last week they had fallen more slowly, and rubble shifting underfoot had been less alarming.

“Four legs can climb better, too,” Yukiko remarked as she picked her way across a bed of spilled gravel. As she slid and recovered, Asia bent and picked up a fragment.

“Look at this,” she said. “It’s flat on one side.”

They peered at her discovery. “Sliced with a cutting tool,” Justin declared.

Asia lifted the stone to her eye and sighted along the plane. “I don’t think so,” she said. She pulled out her reckoner and played its thin beam slowly over the flat surface. “It’s slightly concave,” she reported after studying the display. “Although the curve it describes is quite large.”

“It’s part of the sky,” said Yukiko suddenly. “It fell.”

The three children looked upward. “There were cracks,” said Asia at last. “A chip came loose.”

Justin had taken the fragment and was absently running his finger across its smooth surface. “Ow!” he cried, dropping it. “It jabbed me!”

The two girls looked at the tiny bead of blood on Justin’s fingertip. “You scratched it on a rough part,” Yukiko said.

“No.” Scowling, Justin looked at the ground, but the fragment had disappeared among the rubble.

Gripping each others’ arms to keep balance, they slowly descended the slope, sometimes sliding with a shriek down several steps. Asia glanced up at the lowering sky, as though waiting for a fat drop to strike her head (it had rained briefly last night), but the clouds that gathered beneath the dome of the heavens were moving on, driven by blowers or the odd dynamics of this tiny weather cell. Welders’ lights flashed again, producing a diffuse glow in the cloud cover. When the path came into view they turned back, but this close to deck level one could no longer see the bent figures moving upon the earthworks, silhouetted in the arclight as they worked at remaking the world.

The planet was a ball of wind, which was strange because it was named after a god of the sea. Neither seemed appropriate, as the world should be stone and soil—certainly their world, for all that grown-ups told them it wasn’t a world at all but merely a seed, possessed of slopes to climb, grassy hills to run howling down, declivities that held shallow pools one could wade in. Seas covered most of the Earth to kilometers’ depth, and the new world was wind almost all the way down, thickening by increments to an icy core of unimaginable pressure.

They were circling the World at last, though the journey in the Pods (which had impressed the children more than anything else) had delivered them finally back to their familiar home. Asia had imagined a passage in landing boats, the crowded vessels pummeled as they braved the shallows (this had certainly happened), then disembarkation onto . . . Not strange shores; they had been returned rather to their emptied hull, battered after its rougher deceleration but now being rebuilt. Small wonder the children were confused by this landfall the grown-ups found so momentous.

The grown-ups made much of that blue orb flecked with white now visible at every window, though its image had been searchable, indeed urged upon them, for their entire lives. But now, they were told, it was different, for here it was; unmediated by imaging technologies. Justin had ready the answer to that: If this were an unmediated image, seen through an actual window (not a screen), then the window would be set in the floor, and they would gaze down to see a whirling starscape, with the World sailing past every minute or so.

This nettled the grown-ups, who explained that yes, but this image was not a magnified one, as the others had all been, but showed what one would actually see if the ship were not still spinning. “Big deal!” replied Justin cheerfully, or so he later told the others.

“A ‘window’ is just a screen set in the wall,” Asia explained to Yukiko, who wasn’t following all of this. “An actual window, the kind they have on Earth, shows what’s right on the other side, and you could climb through it if you wanted.”

“Like the window in Journey,” cried Yukiko, suddenly enlightened.

Justin frowned, but Asia exclaimed, “That’s right, you clever thing.” Turning to Justin, she explained: “There was a children’s version of Journey to the West played in the park last spring.”

“The robbers came in the window,” Yukiko recalled.

Asia imagined clearing away rocks and topsoil—not in the park, but down at the lowermost level—and discovering a true window, like a buried paving stone, that opened onto a wheeling depthless immensity. What would this feel like? Certainly the ground one stood upon was still, so it must seem the stars that were moving. The flat surface would not encourage a sense of depth, so one could easily perceive the drifting field as convex. Miners, gaping in wonder, would think they beheld the flying souls of Hades.

Could the center spin faster than the rocky surface? Asia couldn’t see how, but that’s what happens in the World, whose whirligig core drags its atmosphere behind it like a whisk beating eggs. To believe that of the ground you walked upon was to accept that one’s homeland was but the skin of a soup, a crust stretched between heaven and inchoate depths. Shepherds, monsters, and mortal nymphs knew a divinely inhabited Olympos above and a ghost-filled underworld below; but did they truly accept that their olive-groved, freshet-cut world was but an ephemeral screen between twin eternities, their tumbling cliffs and wooded plains as fleeting as their own frail flesh?

The night before her examination Asia dreamed of satyrs lurking in the underbrush, pairs of alert eyes peering out from deep shade. They weren’t, she knew, the meditative kind who piped upon rocks; these were the ones with horns in their curly hair and roguish goatees, leaping out at wispy-gowned maidens who fled squealing. She also knew that they weren’t looking at her; her role in this dream was spectator, not participant.

No rustics lolled nearby, and Asia suddenly realized that the stillness was no pastoral interlude but the held charge of lying in wait. Were the satyrs’ quarry dryads soon to step forth unsuspecting from their trees? She imagined a water nymph rising from a brook, only to disperse in a shower at the first hint of danger.

Some dreams unfold as narrative, though rarely to a satisfactory ending; others evanesce into states of mood, like a pantomime hardening to frieze. Asia awoke with an inconclusive sense of something missing, as though the dream had been interrupted. But her last minutes before waking were familiar shoals, too shallow for the keels of true dreams.

The examiner was friendly and attentive, his face as familiar as everyone’s on ship was familiar. He left her with paper before stepping out, explaining as he did that subjects were encouraged to doodle, for the mental state it produced was helpful to the scanning instruments. Asia drew images of battle, members of the bride’s family fighting off the drunken assailants, furniture hurled and arrows loosed. She amused herself by drawing it along the top of the page, which the examiner remarked upon when he returned.

“It’s from the battle with the Lapiths,” she explained, sketching a series of vertical lines to suggest the Doric columns below.

“Is that what they are?” he asked, peering at the half-human forms as he detached the patches from her scalp. Asia smiled. “You can tell that they are imaginary creatures, can’t you?” he added. “The six limbs are a problem, but look especially at that angle to the spine, ninety degrees. Not really possible in a mammal.”

“Let me see your screen,” Asia said. She didn’t ask how the examiner knew after a second what the creatures were. A screen materialized above the table’s surface, and she gestured for a second in the adjoining air. An image of a llama appeared. “I used to think so, too,” she said, “but look at this beast—it’s quite real.”

“I see your point,” the examiner said with a laugh. “Earth is full of strange creatures, isn’t it?”

Asia said she couldn’t be sure; when everything was available to you only as an image, it was difficult to distinguish between real creatures, creatures that had once lived, and those that were purely fabulous.

“True enough,” the examiner admitted. “That’s a problem when perceptions are restricted to electronic sounds and images; it is difficult to distinguish between reality and fabrication.”

Asia sensed a segue into the matters at hand. She blanked the paper and composed herself to listen.

“You have been traveling all your life,” the examiner began, “and now you have finally arrived.”

Asia, who loved stories, closed her eyes.

“You have reached the land to which your parents set out, the world you have grown up approaching. But we cannot yet disembark; we ride at anchor, still in our ships. Now much work is being done, while we gaze upon the shore, knowing that someday our homes will be there.”

“Years?” asked Asia.

“Yes,” the examiner said smoothly, “one cannot build a city in weeks or even months. And we are building more than simply a settlement, or even a nation. We are building a world.”

“But not like Earth.”

“No world will be wholly like Earth. Not even Venus after the Reduction, nor Mars with its new atmosphere.”

“But they will be more like Earth than we shall ever be.”

“That is true, if you are thinking of an open sky and warmth from the Sun. But those worlds are dangerously close to each other, and closer still to Earth, which is itself dangerous.”

What about the habitats in the Greater Jovian? she almost asked, but she knew the answer she would get, and her impulse to ask questions was taking her farther from her story.

“An entire new world,” she murmured encouragingly.

“And it will take years to build. And just as the great cities of Earth were never ‘complete’ but continued to develop throughout their history, so the world we will build around Neptune will always be growing. Our world will advance as we create new skills and technologies.”

“What he means,” said Justin later, “is that we should expect to spend our lives carrying out a plan that was drawn up before we were born. There is nothing else that we can do.”

“Well, we do need to build a permanent settlement,” said Li Wei. “We can’t just remain on board here.”

“Why not? That’s something they tell us, but is it true?”

“We will need more space if our population is to grow.”

“Why should it?”

“This ‘they’ you speak of are people on Earth, not our elders,” Fatima pointed out.

“Probably, but so what? They have planned our lives for us. We have no choice. We are to spend our lives setting up camp.”

“Better than just going somewhere,” Li Wei observed, “which is what our parents spent their adult lives doing.”

“They had a choice.”

“Did they?”

Everyone was silent for a moment.

“It doesn’t matter,” Asia said at last. “Here we are.”

“An admirable attitude. Was your examiner pleased with your unquestioning adjustment?”

“Not entirely. I asked him why our ship was named after a mythical creature.”

Justin laughed. “What did he say?”

“He told me to look it up.”

“Quite rightly, too.” Justin turned to Yukiko. “It’s because the ship’s main body used to be an asteroid while the Pods where we live are artificial habitats.”

“We live in the Pods because the Hull can’t provide gravity,” said Yukiko wisely.

“Oh, its spin gives it the effect of gravity. Just not enough, so the Pods are held farther out, like a dancer twirling with arms extended. You’re feeling gravity now, aren’t you?”

The older children, who were sitting with their legs dangling, looked down over the edge. This close to the spin axis, gravity was indeed very light, and the structures that reached up from ground level were shaped like ziggurats, wide at the bottom and then narrowing as they crowded toward the center. They sat upon a ledge halfway up a tier of unevenly stacked modules that had been piled high to save space on the ground. The central mass of the ship had been honeycombed with compartments, but now stood hollow, a great spinning shell whose interior would soon be rebuilt. The children liked this region, a mountainous heap of disused parts where they could clamber without being reproached by the adults, who were busier than they had ever seen them. The Hull, which had never rotated quickly enough to provide Earth-level gravity, had lost much of its spin in the savage deceleration it had undergone in aerobraking through Neptune’s upper atmosphere, and now offered a realm of dreamlike buoyancy, more striking the higher one climbed.

Rise high enough, however, and you could feel your feet moving slightly faster than your head, a sensation the children found unsettling. They had paused at successive levels and were now uncertain whether to continue, dazzling though the view was of the overhead landscape, like looking up to behold the interior of a hollow Earth. They had grown up in the full gravity of the Pods and their every sinew warned against falling farther than their own height.

“There’s more to it than that,” said Justin.

Asia cast him an irritated look. She had grown tired of his knowing comments on matters she knew little about, which he often declared himself unable to substantiate because they were confidential.

“Well, tell us,” she said.

Justin shrugged. “Everyone wants gravity. Our cells crave it; we don’t thrive in low-G environments, and no treatment has remedied that. And employing inertial force in spinning habitats has its own problems, which really can’t be solved. That’s why people still want to live upon Venus; its gravity is real.”

“What’s wrong with our gravity?” asked Yukiko.

“It’s a matter of engineering,” Asia answered before Justin could say anything. She was irritated by his desire to appear wise before the younger kids by sayings things that were common knowledge. “Both Pods swing on long arms, right? Those arms are under continuous strain. What would happen if one of them weakened and broke?”

Yukiko frowned as she tried to imagine this. Justin, helpful as always, made a gesture of both hands flying apart.

“Could this happen to us?” she asked in a small voice.

“It hasn’t ever happened,” Asia assured her, throwing Justin a nasty look. “Not in our entire lives; not in the eighteen years of our voyage. And not for the next eighteen, or a hundred. Justin is talking about people who worry about the next thousand years.”

“Or fifty thousand,” said Justin helpfully. “People have been living on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, and the planet has never suffered a catastrophic failure that killed everyone. Solid objects with gravitational fields produce that kind of stability, and that’s what the rest of us want.”

Yukiko was looking a bit confused by this. “We are not going to live on Neptune,” she said after a moment.

“Of course not,” said Asia reassuringly, then glanced at Justin. “Neptune is our countryside, our farmland and our forests. After sailing all our lives through emptiness, we have reached the land that will sustain us. We will harvest its resources, and our ship will grow in size and splendor,

A magnificent home, imperishable, glittering with stars,

Greatest in the heavens . . . ”

And we will create our own gravity, by present means or some other.”

“There is still more about it than that,” Justin said pleasantly. “Would you like me to show you?” He leaned over toward Asia, as though to whisper in her ear, and pushed her suddenly off the edge.

With a shriek she sailed into open space, the force of his shove propelling her outward faster than gravity pulled her down. The children were shouting, but she didn’t hear them. A tremendous void yawned beneath her, and the vagrant breezes that wafted through the Hull seemed to buffet her face more quickly.

She seemed to be falling straight down, though part of her mind knew this to be wrong. The ground below was coming up faster, and she realized—the terror that flooded her consciousness was not entirely unreasoning—that a fall at this distance, even in reduced gravity, would accelerate her to deadly velocity. Instinctively she threw out her arms—

The glancing blow knocked her sideways, sending her into a slow roll that sent her surroundings whirling past. She had struck the side of a stack, a bruising blow to the shoulders that—

And she struck again, this time banging her back and butt. She was bouncing off the side of a tier, because—of course—its lower levels were rotating into her path. Her fall was not the straight plunge that a dropped cup seemed to follow, but a vector cutting through the sweep of—

This time she caromed off a tarp-covered expanse, which yielded slightly before sending her back into space. A few seconds later she struck again, and slid for a second along its smooth surface before a sharp corner beneath it sent her spinning.

After that the cliffside rose up repeatedly to smack her. She was not Hephaistos, flung from the heights, but a satyr tumbling down a rocky slope. The realization that she was not going to die had just taken form when she slammed into something hard. The impact drove every puff of air from her lungs, and it was several disoriented seconds before she realized that she had come to rest upon the “ground.”

Asia lay still, less out of pain (although there was that) than from a reeling vertigo that sent the world swirling about her. There were shouts somewhere overhead, but she could not tell whose. A second later a rush of self-consciousness flooded through her, and she rose unsteadily on her palms to look about.

Fatima, Li Wei, and Yukiko were dropping to the ground, concern on their faces. There was no sign of Justin. Of course, she thought wearily: he would not bother scrambling down to see if she were all right; he had known that the plummet would merely leave her dazed, humiliated, and angry.

She had expected repercussions for this—you didn’t have to be the miscreant to end up in trouble—but nobody mentioned it, or asked where they had been. This was a departure from the way things had been her entire life, but since the Reversals everything was different, and knowing that things are different offered no preparation for the next surprise.

None of her parents were showing much interest in where the children were spending their time. She told them about the stone chip that had fallen from the firmament, though even as she said it she realized this could not be true. An aunty explained that it must have come loose during orbital insertion when the Hull had whipped around Neptune and been, in the odd words of Granigran, “wrung like an old shoe.”

Meals were short and the adults would depart quickly, leaving the children bemused and sometimes hurt. Everyone was busy (“everyone” apparently did not include the children), and their docents were not giving extra assignments to make up for lost family time. The Pod was crowded (Castor was no doubt just as bad) with people whose living quarters had been in the Hull, and kids would slip through the narrowed corridors, hoping their docents would not track them as they headed for less crowded regions, such as the once-spacious Celestial Gardens or the Moon Pool. The fact that nobody had objected to their riding the elevator shafts down to the Hull and mingling with the workers showed how preoccupied everyone was. They wandered away, into areas where neither adult nor mech could be seen, realms of uncertain boundaries, products of an interim that had begun unannounced and would certainly not last.

What were the adults doing? It was not necessary to know, the children were told, because Things Were Different Now and once the settlement was established (they were assured), the children would be embarked upon entirely new projects, a lifetime of audacious endeavors.

“I can tell you what they are doing,” said Justin, who had come up behind them. Li Wei jumped, but Asia, who had expected something like this, did not move. The other children turned to look at her. Conversation, which had circled all afternoon around the grown-ups’ behavior, died instantly.

“Everyone has theories,” said Asia after a moment, as though responding to the previous speaker. “But without evidence, they are all of equal worth.”

Justin must have gestured to the others, because they all rose silently and moved away. Asia remained still, refusing to acknowledge him. After a moment he sat next to her, serene in his usual maddening presumption but free to be ignored.

“Do you know why I pushed you off the ledge?”

Asia glared at him, which he apparently took as permission to continue.

“It was a test, and it yielded two results. It confirmed that we are not being watched. Would I be here if any adult had seen that? The surveillance that we have spent our lives with does not extend to the Wilds, however many motes may be operating in the active construction zones.”

Asia had not thought of that. “And what is the second?” she asked.

“That you can be trusted. You didn’t turn me in.”

She glared again, but Justin’s expression was so disarming that curiosity began to adulterate her anger. “Trusted for what?”

“Trusted to be shown something I could never show unless I knew that no one was watching.”

Asia looked carefully around them. The other kids were gone, and she could not hear the faint buzz of tympani drifting through the air. “This is about the need for genuine gravity, right?”

“Not really. I mean that’s interesting, too, but I’ll tell you later.” He didn’t bother to glance around. “What do you think all the adults are doing these days?”

“Are you serious? They are all busy with the Arrival.”

Justin rolled his eyes, perhaps his most irritating habit. “Preparations for the Arrival are being made by the System.” He routinely affected a knowing tone when referring to those elements of the ship’s administration that were not people. “Do you think our parents are calculating trajectories or making resettlement plans? Have you seen any adults out in the work zones? None of that is being done by people. The adults are all engaged in something very different.”

Asia merely looked at him.

“Okay, I will tell you. They are training their brains to make them the kind of people who will spend their lives doing what the times ahead require.”

“You’re saying they are spending more time in the Dream.”

“It’s more than that. The Dream is nothing—you have been in the Dream, although they limit our time there. This is much more powerful.”

“And how do you know?”

“Well . . . ” And at this Justin’s voice dropped slightly. “I know someone in Implementation. We’re . . . friendly, you know?” Asia stared. “He tells me stuff.”

“Stuff he shouldn’t be telling you.”

“Well, yes.” Justin’s voice sounded defensive. “So I certainly shouldn’t be telling you, but I am. Because I know you won’t tell, and I know that no one is watching.”

“Watching?”

“Would you believe me if I didn’t have something to show you as well?”

Asia thought about that. She didn’t like Justin’s logical puzzle boxes, which you had to tap carefully on every side before proceeding to open, but she was used to them. “So you have it with you now,” she said.

Justin reached behind him and pulled something from his pocket. “Each unit is supposed to hold enough charge, or whatever is in it, for only one experience, and then it gets discarded. But there is always a bit left over, enough for a child. And I can tell you that it works.”

He held up a small object. It was black, flat, and rounded, and it rested easily in his hand.

“How would you like to be a centaur?”

The world was full of things the children did not know about, which they were told didn’t matter because a new world lay ahead of them. The world they grew up in was not the world their parents had left, so they knew little of that one as well.

No children were aboard when the ship departed from Earth orbit, though many were born the following year. The divide between children and grown-ups was stark; there were no youthful adults. Certainly someone had worried about this, to what end no child knew.

Perhaps it was because the children knew no stories of their homeland, or tales (aside from that of their parents’ embarkation) of their people, that the stories of Earth they had studied seemed equally vivid whether historical or imaginary. Asia knew that there had never been a winged horse, though she had never seen a real one, either. No soldiers had sprung up from dragon’s teeth, although self-replicating machines had done something like that, which was the reason (one of them) why there weren’t more people on Earth these days.

The children knew about history’s great revolutions, the invasion of continents and subjugation of millions, and they also knew that the verse epics about the Drowning of Bengal were based on real events but that the characters were mostly fictitious, and that the games that Justin had been thrilled to play, of battling one’s way through the chaos of the inundated cities to distant highlands, were (even he knew) lurid inventions. Asia had once imagined being a dryad but she had never thought them real, and when she figured out why they were always being pursued by satyrs or gods (and how often they ended up being transformed into animals or plants), she decided that she liked nereids. Later she developed a fascination with Arion, the immortal and swift-running horse, and then with other horses, especially those that flew through space, such as Lampus and Phaethon.

But people, even girls, are crafters and technites, so hands were necessary, as were (she soon decided) properly human features. She knew from a thousand images the Attic physiognomy, and imagined its windswept lineaments—resolute countenance, splendid hair streaming—upon a nobly galloping creature, horse and rider as one. Great was her shock when she learned that such mythical beasts already filled the tales she was exploring, and that the word for them was the name of their ship and home, a trochee so familiar that she had never imagined a separate meaning.

 And their stories were unvaryingly sad. Asia was older now, and her life—everyone’s lives—shook with disruptions. She was still reading her way through Greek and Roman literature, mostly in English (on the perhaps dubious grounds that it was closer than Mandarin to the original languages), and now wondered how she had ever thought that mythology celebrated virtue rewarded and evil struck down. Why, then, was she still drawn to its jagged contours? It certainly did not offer veracity. Nothing in actual history was like it, and certainly nothing in the long unfraught voyage that that had filled her and her playmates’ lives.

But no one compelled her to justify her love, which remained unknown to the grown-ups unless her docents had told them. No child knew what their immaterial instructors reported to their parents, but what Asia’s knew of her reading and viewing—and they obviously knew everything—had proved no cause for concern. She pursued her studies every day, watched new shows from Earth when they became available, played in the Dream with her classmates when permitted, and read about gods and goddesses, monsters and heroes, creatures that could change shape or find theirs cruelly changed.

The shaggy and incontinent kentauroi were unlikely creatures to engage even her uncertain sympathies, but whom was she supposed to enjoy imagining in their agones and their destinies—Arachne, Niobe, Cassandra?

“It doesn’t alter your mind,” said Justin, who was doing something to the back of her head. Asia was slightly alarmed that Justin would even offer that assurance, so great was her society’s horror of incursions into the physical integrity of the brain. “It allows you to focus.”

“I can focus already,” Asia replied. “So can the grown-ups.”

“Not like this.” She felt something sticky adhere to her scalp and resisted the impulse to pull away. “And I’m not just repeating what I heard; I have experienced it.”

“So why is this important now? People have carried out tasks requiring intense concentration throughout history, and most of the planning that lies ahead of us is being made by cognitive systems.”

“Good question. I was hoping you would help me answer it.”

Asia turned to look him in the eye. “So that’s why you are offering me this?”

“I also think you will find it interesting. And whom else would I choose to share this with?”

Perhaps Justin was feeling uneasy about the subject, for he added, “So tell me more about centaurs. Where did they come from?”

This was something no one ever asked her about. “Accounts vary, but all agree that they are descended from an encounter between a human and a cloud creature, a pseudos created in the image of Hera as a trap for someone who sought to seduce her. Because the child of this union mated with horses, the resulting centaurs were called ‘nubigena,’ or cloud-born.”

Justin laughed. “So the centaurs came from a matrix of clouds, while our Centaur is bound for another. That’s called an irony, something I am said to cultivate to excess. The English word for irony is actually Greek, eironeia, did you know that?”

Asia was too nervous to attend to his chatter, which she anyway knew was intended to distract her. The device was resting snugly against her skull, and he reached around to attach something to each temple. “How is this supposed to work?” she asked.

“You imagine what you want and make it as vivid as possible. If you envision something sexual or violent, those parts of your brain will light up and the device will shut down.” Justin laughed. “So don’t do that!”

Asia imagined the hills of Thessaly, where centaurs had roamed freely in their early years. They both fought and rutted when they encountered humans, but Asia had no interest in that. Why make yourself into a fabulous creature and then meet up with people? It was an escape from the human, the deeply familiar, that she sought.

“Okay, that’s good . . . ” Justin must have been reading a display. “Now,” and he came around to face her, holding two wires that trailed back behind her. “You need to put these—”

“You’re not going to put those in my nose?” she cried.

“No, of course not. I place them underneath—” he positioned just below each nostril—“and when you are ready, you inhale deeply. They are hollow tubes, which release a substance that will help you relax.”

Asia knew she was not relaxed. “All right,” she said. She closed her eyes, paused for a long second, and then drew a slow breath. Within seconds she was unconscious.

As in a dream, there is no beginning: she has always been here. Sunlight beats upon the skin, and the warm breeze is rich with six or eight scents, some (she knows) from far away while others are so near they sting. If she stands still for a second—steadying herself so that her legs are not shifting on the uneven ground requires a moment—she can hear birdsong, branches rustle, the faint whistle of wind blowing over a crest. A long, deep breath fills her rib cage, fresher than any she has drawn.

Standing still is not possible; she is trotting ahead before she decides to. The afternoon sun falls upon a crumbling limestone escarpment tufted with scraggly trees contorted by mountain winds, while the landscape to the west descends in bluffs and patches of scrub to a broad plain. A crescent of reflected sunlight glistens from a river below, and she turns toward it.

Every child has scrambled on all fours and imagined herself a courser, but to possess six limbs—to pick your way briskly downslope while stripping leaves from a bough you find in your hands—is to feel your mind racing in ways never felt by humans, nor mayhap even by gods. She leaps effortlessly over a small stream, and the tetragonismos of the act, the parabolic beauty achieved by the slight lift of the shoulders at the right instant, sings like the blast of a horn. With a cry she throws up her arms and breaks into a gallop.

How could they think us mere beasts? Her fine mind can reach for an answer, but the question is torn loose by the winds of her passage and disappears somewhere behind her. Their loins are stallions’ but their psyches are human, and their unrecalled grandam was something greater than either. Hubris to declare ourselves greater than the twofoots; but centaurs lack the vanity of satyrs or women, and never shall we boast to gods or men. What we are we don’t vaunt; we be.

She follows the stream downhill, three times leaping over tributaries as they merge, but finally splashing through its now broader expanse for the mere joy of it. We take up more room in the world. The land is nearly level, greener and less stony. Her senses are no greater than any human’s; if there is a goat-man lurking behind the trees, she cannot smell him, nor hear the whispers of any daphnaie growing along the banks. She looks alertly about and reverses her olive bough so that she is gripping its narrow end.

Crossing a clearing, she sees a kite hovering high overhead, its wings almost motionless. Hopeful that such vigilance would keep smaller birds at bay, she searches for fig trees but finds only unripe fruit. A grapevine’s yield proves small and sour, and her thoughts turn naturally to meat.

Her people are adept with a bow, and even the twofoots acknowledge their skill with stones (although they tend to portray the six-limbed folk as hurling boulders down upon helpless humans). But she has neither bow nor arrows, nor skinning knife nor flint to start a fire. The palm-sized piece of dolomite she tossed idly up and down finds its target the second time she flings it—dropping the bough from her left hand as she drew back her right and letting fly before it struck the ground—but the hare she now holds limp will have to be borne to a spit, and she can neither secure it round her waist nor run a cord through its ears to sling over her shoulder. She drapes the carcass across her back and carefully stoops—one of the few actions her people cannot execute gracefully—to pick up more stones. An hour later she has two more hares, enough to hold in her hand without feeling foolish.

She hears them before they hear her, for their pounding hooves are many and hers are single and still. Yet this advantage is cancelled by some other factor—perhaps they scented her before she them, though they are, if anything, more pungent. A stronger sense of smell would accord with their broad nostrils and (as events prove) bestial natures.

They’re a hundred paces away, galloping through an open meadow, when they turn and make for her, although she stood swathed in heavy-branched shadows. All five are looking straight at her, so she steps forward, into afternoon sunlight, and stands as they come to a halt, spread in an arc before her. Their expressions are unreadable.

She nods, civil, and when they make no response, she holds up the brace of hares. “I need fire.”

The one in front merely laughs, a raucous sound that bears no trace of chioumor. The one to his left—a lieutenant?—speaks up. “Ask Prometheus.”

It is a more learned response than she had expected. Unsure what to make of it, she says equably, “I will share my meal with them who will skin and cook it.”

This time the laugh is distinctly unpleasant. “Give it to Forvasia,” the leader says.

They all trot to one side, mincingly, and she sees one in the back she has not noticed before. For a second she simply stares.

The one who stands before her is slighter than the others, though with the same insolent grinning expression. The tangled hair is only slightly worse than the others’ and the features only slightly less brutal, but the woman’s dugs are unmistakable. Asia stares. It is a female!

She has been holding her bough with one end planted in the ground, a neutral gesture, but now she lifts it to step carefully forward. Three steps, and she holds out the conies for the female. The creature makes no move to take them, and Asia pauses. To toss them to her feet would be an affront, but Asia balks at trotting up to someone who refuses to advance halfway.

Besides (she abruptly notices), the males have now shifted ground, spreading out as though preparing to surround her. She drops the conies and shifts the bough to the right hand. At this, several of them growl.

Without thinking, she slides her grip from the middle of the shaft to its narrow end and swings it in a fast arc before her. It cuts through the air with the whoosh of expelled breath. She means it as a warning, but the males howl with rage. A second later they charge her.

Even humans think fast in such circumstances. The centaurs will converge as they approach, so she rushes them instantly. The ugly one in the middle comes at her and she swings the bough, regretting that it is not a club. His kind cannot dodge as readily as twofoots, and it strikes an arm as he reaches for her. The roar of pain and outrage is lost as she gallops past, through the meadow behind them and toward the hills.

Her pursuers will lose seconds in turning about, which she knows not to let them recover. Through the meadow and into the glade beyond, between trees that the pack must jostle to get through. She tosses the bough aside and makes for higher ground.

If she cannot match the speed of a stallion, neither can the others. She scrambles over loose stones (hoping to send them tumbling downhill) and cuts back and forth nimbly up the bluff. At a rocky outcrop she turns to face the rabble, which is following her path at the cost of having to proceed in single file. She laughs aloud, causing them to look up from their efforts, their expressions contorted with fury.

Just above her, a sheet of rock has broken away from the cliff face and begun to angle toward the valley. Sure-footed, she reaches the spot where a chest-high column of cracked limestone stands like stacked plates. Bracing herself against the uphill slope, she places both hands against it and with more-than-human strength shoves hard. The pile tips and bursts, crashing down toward her tormentors with the sound of rolling thunder. It would be satisfying to pause and watch, but she turns and scrambles for the crest, at times using all six limbs to pull herself upward.

It is only when she reaches the top that she glimpses flickers of light on the horizon. Dark clouds are massing to the south, whence a brisk wind now blows. Was this a sign from the gods? Impossible to foresee what might catch their attention, or how their sympathies (or anger) might be roused. No time in any event to muse upon what vagaries might provoke Notos to bring up a southern storm.

The lightning flash is brighter than she expects, for she has not noticed how swiftly the clouds have overtaken her. It is only then that she sees two pairs of hands reach over the brink and grasp the rocky ledge. Up rise twin sets of eyes, burning with fury. And as the creatures haul themselves far enough for their forelegs to come clear, a third pair of hands appears.

She whirls and flees, hooves clattering on the moss-free stones. The ridge runs north for miles, its outlines lost in the sudden gloom. She can see enough, however, to confirm that there is no stand of trees where she can lose herself, no scatter of boulders behind which she can disappear and descend unseen. It is a landscape fit only for heedless flight.

A rumble comes from directly overhead, heavy with meaning though not clarity. Was she being urged onward, or was this an expression of displeasure? Grim are the prospects of those who misread signs; yet those who heed them often fare no better.

The howls behind her have grown too wild for her to distinguish, but she fears there are now more than three. She does not know how one centaur can overtake another—would he seize her streaming tail?—but the image of two of them pulling alongside fills her with such alarm that she decides—

The blow strikes her shoulder so hard that she staggers. Through the pain she realizes what has happened: someone has flung a stone. The implications are immediately clear: the distance one loses in stopping to pick up a stone is more than made up by a good throw. The gambit’s success will of course be swiftly imitated, and a few seconds later a wild cast shies off to the left, followed by the heavy thud, somewhere behind her, where a too-heavy missile lands.

The next stone hits her flank and she leaps as though jabbed. She can make out rough ground ahead, though she hesitates to slow down. A lightning flash suddenly illuminates the landscape: a steep defile, perhaps thirty feet deep, which she will have to descend and regain in order to continue north. The dilemma is immediately clear: She must pick her way carefully, while exposing herself to an assault of heavy rocks flung downward at her.

Her only option is a bad one, but she takes it at once. The western slope is the gentler descent, and she is bounding down it as fast as she dares. Within seconds she can hear howls of exultation from above, and her shoulders tighten involuntarily. The first rock crashes loudly a half dozen steps to her left. She knows that they cannot throw while coming down, so if she manages to make it out of range—

The blow sends her crashing into rubble she had been preparing to dodge. No pain, simply a thunderclap that obliterates all thought, then a headlong tumble and the sensation of legs breaking. Eyes wide, she lies still, feeling the world spinning about her as the scree where she sprawls cracks loudly with further impacts. A hammer blow to her ribs stuns her into awareness.

No final seconds wasted in wondering whether they will now leave her, perhaps to stumble somehow to her feet: she can hear them descending. So the last thing she sees will be their leering faces, with one perhaps hoisting a huge rock to smash in her head?

The pain is suddenly of a different order, pulling at her, twisting. She can feel herself seeping into the ground below, as though her dripping blood had nerves. Is this how one descends to the Underworld? Yet her chest is rising, not with a final breath but farther, reaching into the air.

The metamorphosis is well underway before she fully understands what is happening. Is this salvation? Out of pity, a sense of justice, or simply the inscrutable polytropos of divine caprice? The deliverance visited upon Daphne, Lotis, Arethusa is hers, but is she being transformed into a plant or a spring?

She feels herself pressing into the soil, assuming density, growing into something still and rooted. Has she become one of the gnarled pines, to stir in the winds that scour the ridge but never to move further?

The creatures, shrieking with glee, are approaching. Their heedless prancing kicks loose pebbles and stones, which come clattering down upon her.

And at once she is moving, slowly at first but unstoppably. No lotus tree or laurel, she slides off the cliff face like a turtle off a river stone, she is herself a wall of stone: no spring, but able to flow, and quickly flow faster.

Like a cascade she races down the slope, leaving a crumbling chasm into which the victors fall screaming, sweeping up material as she descends and making it part of herself. When she crashes at last into the valley floor, it is with a roar of triumph, a series of concussions as though in answer to the thunder, and the greater part of her substance flings itself to rest on the quivering earth even as her evaneros unfolds, rising as a vast cloud into the air.

“Are you feeling all right?” The question was posed so calmly, in a voice so trustful of reason in matters of inquiry, that Asia relaxed even as she ascended into consciousness. It was only after reflecting for several serene seconds that realization pricked her and she opened her eyes.

She was lying on a couch in a small office. A woman, one of the older ones, sat studying her. Her expression did not seem stern.

Asia sat up, in the full gravity of Pod level. There was a stinging sensation high in her nostrils, and with a thrill of distaste she realized that Justin must have slid those wires, and perhaps more of them, up into her sinuses. Of course: the device had been transmitting impulses directly to her frontal lobes.

“No headache or nausea?” the woman asked. “It wouldn’t surprise me, considering what you were doing.”

“No, I’m fine,” Asia replied. Then, “Oh, yes—Justin said that the device would register if the story turned violent. And it did, so I guess the System became aware of it.”

“I am sure that the System was aware of what was happening from the beginning,” the woman said.

“Oh.” And after a pause, “I suppose that Justin is going to get in trouble?”

The woman shrugged. “Perhaps, in some manner. But really, how? Where would we send him?”

Asia moved to sit up, but the couch seemed suddenly to tilt sideways. The woman put out a restraining arm. “Your sense of balance may be impaired for a few minutes. Just sit, and we can talk for a bit.”

Asia didn’t know whether she liked that.

“My name is Liang,” the woman said. “I have a first name and a job title, but I am the only person aboard the Centaur with that name, so I enjoy being called that.” She smiled at Asia. “I am glad that your jaunt did not distress you.”

Asia appreciated that Liang did not pretend she had not checked her vital signs for evidence of anxiety.

“The Turntale is designed to facilitate certain cognitive operations, but if it is used as your friend encouraged you to, it creates a narrative—or rather, you do. These little adventures are called ‘jaunts,’ and they are not for children.” She smiled. “I am sure you do not think of yourself as a child, but to those who embarked on this voyage, those born after departure will always be its children.”

Asia had been taught to respect her elders, but Liang must have seen something in her expression that she had not intended to show. “Remember, you will inherit this world,” the woman told her.

Asia had heard this before. “We didn’t ask to be sent here. You made a decision to leave, which we will never be able to do.”

Immediately, she apologized. Liang waved it away. “You are quite right, of course. But all generations are bound by what their parents could—or couldn’t—do. Virtually all of humanity is living in very nasty conditions, and not even those living offworld can truly expect their children’s to improve. We have delivered you from that—we are too far from Earth to be asked to bleed our resources to succor some fraction of their suffering population, and we sail above a frontier rich with resources. Earth and its habitats are attractive to you because you only know them from afar.”

This carried a ring of truth so awful that Asia began to cry. The misery welled up like the rising seas inundating a house—she had seen many dramas showing this—and spilled incontinently from her eyes.

Liang stood and took her hand. “Come with me,” she said in an adult’s authoritarian voice. Asia allowed herself to be led from the room and down a corridor leading onto a public concourse, and then, as Liang suddenly steered them toward a featureless expanse of wall, through a door that slid open at their approach and into darkness. Lights came up to disclose a narrow passageway. They were, Asia realized, behind the walls of their world, in one of the service spaces where the children were never allowed to go.

Without a word Liang strode ahead, beneath overhead lights that swung slowly to the left and out of sight, following the curvature of the Pod. Abruptly, she stopped before a small hatch set in the wall to their right. It required both her touch and some spoken words before it swung open, and she had to step up to enter the space beyond. She disappeared without a glance at Asia, who hesitated before realizing that she was expected to follow. Nimbly (she had grown up in full gravity), she hopped up and climbed into darkness.

There was a light somewhere ahead but none around them, and it was by touch rather than sight that she realized that the rough walls were of rock. She was in a tunnel, but walking in its near darkness Asia imagined she was venturing through a cave. The thought was not pleasant: Pholus and Creusa, Philoctetes and Odysseus’ crewmen had variously come to grief in such spaces.

Liang strode forward confidently, compelling Asia to hasten after her, only slightly reassured by the flat ground beneath their feet. The light before them grew until it resolved into the outline of a narrow door. Asia hung back as Liang stood framed by the glowing edges, waiting for whatever command she had given to be followed.

After several seconds the door slid open. Stars burst in upon them.

Liang stepped forward, not upon a walkway but into seemingly empty space. The stars about her were moving, wheeling in slow formation like the earthly firmament. There was nothing for Asia to do but follow, though she quailed at stepping onto nothingness. After two cautious steps, however, she could see a glimmer of refraction about them, reassurance that they were not standing naked to the void but inside a transparent walkway.

Something moved beneath her feet, and she guessed it an instant before it rose before her: Neptune, enormous in its looming proximity, a vast sphere of white-streaked blue. Almost filling the sky, it ascended, passed before them, and then rose above her head and was lost from sight, replaced by the panoply of stars.

“The Crystal Bridge, as they call it, swings all the way round to Castor, a great half circle arching over the heavens. So great a span you can scarcely sense its curvature in traversing its length. Soon it will be opened to foot traffic, that our people may venture beyond the confines of the Centaur, to gaze upon the world we have traveled so far to reach.

“Don’t be frightened. We are within Neptune’s magnetosphere, so can venture beyond the shielding of our ship. The habitats surrounding the Earth, Mars, and the Moon enjoy no such protection, which is why their population must undergo lifelong treatments and eventual health problems. It’s that, or live beneath the lunar surface, or—” and here she laughed—“on Earth.”

“Why are you showing me this?” Asia whispered.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? That’s a reason right there. And somewhere down there, or in the space around us, is where you will be living your life.

“But most important: This is real, not mediated. The cloud tops’ brilliant azure? No image: the light waves striking your eyes were produced by the Sun, hours ago, and have reflected off methane molecules that absorbed the other wavelengths.”

Liang smiled. “After your friend toyed with your perceptions—and, I am afraid, your emotions—you should be allowed to enjoy an unsimulated vista.

“We should go back—it’s getting cold, isn’t it? I can feel the air molecules slowing!”

And Asia could see a diffuse plume of vapor appear with Liang’s words. She stared at the tiny cloud, which swirled and vanished. Slowly—it grew warmer as they retraced their steps, so Liang did not hurry—they returned to the cave and through the space behind the walls to a small concourse, sparsely populated at this time of day. Nobody glanced at them as Liang turned to smile at Asia.

“Our journey out was one of the great voyages of human history, a tale you will relate to your children, and they theirs. But our ship was a pocket universe, isolated from the rest of humanity as it rose, like a soap bubble, through the air. And we inside the soap bubble could not really see beyond it, only its shimmering inner surface, distorted by its shape.

“And so we gazed at shimmering images, or turned our gaze upon ourselves. And those who grew up within this bubble know the worlds beyond our confines through a different episteme—I bet you know that word—than those who grew up otherwise. That way of knowing, of living, will soon change for you—” and here she smiled—“rather abruptly, and forever.”

It’s more complicated than that, said a voice in Asia’s head.

“I hope you don’t find this alarming. Much of it, after all, is not really news to you.” Liang reached out and tousled Asia’s hair. “Better get home,” she said. “Your family is waiting for you.” She raised her arm, still smiling, and a tendril swung down to grasp it and sweep her away.

For a long moment Asia simply stood there, oblivious to the passersby stepping around her. A query from home pinged on her wrist, and she absently responded with a touch. Her page offered to show her messages from friends, but she waved it away.

A god had spoken to her, was showing her favor, which could not be good. It was a thought too great to ponder, a shadow that, sweeping over everything, offered no hint to its form.

Instead she thought about the fields of Arcadia, where nymphs inhabited the rivers, springs, and trees, and satyrs cavorted, piping or perhaps lurking behind trees, any one of which might house (or somehow be) an oreiad or hamadryad. Through this land the centaurs had fled south, pitiable monsters whom the minor deities must have regarded with feelings beyond conjecture. A nymph could be molested by a human or a god, and sometimes only escape into sylvan form, but the brutish attentions of a centaur, assuming one managed to attract it, would trouble them no more than the attempted ruttings of a wild boar.

Slowly Asia began to cry. Their tiny world and home would be transformed, but its young would not live there; they would be expelled, driven forth to dwell in stony lands or forge, like Hephaistos, their own homes.

Show us the way to bitter exile,

Far from this mountain;

To where ivy shaft nor dance nor drum reminds me . . .

The Centaur, now in safe harbor, might in time become Elysium, but Asia and her friends would be cast upon the broken coast of Neptune, to build and populate its colonies. Granted techne in lieu of their birthright, they would mine its moons and skim its atmosphere, artificers of others’ designs.

Why was she crying? She knew this; she had always known it.

Treetops tossed their boughs as zephyrs blew sportively through them; footsteps hurried lightly through their shade, halting at the approach of heavier treads. Divinities and mortals alike knew such monsters as centaurs to be unnatural, yet withal they lived and died, unlike Talos and other mechanisms. But the Argo, an artifact, bore in its prow a timber from the forests of Dodona that could speak and give prophecy.

And so the vessel upon which Asia will in time sail forth shall bear some numen of the world it leaves behind. It is a cold comfort, but she tries to grasp it, having no other. Thus, she thinks (and something within her nods), shall the Centaur’s children be launched upon the seas of space, to become builders and citizens of floating cities, cloud-borne.

About the Author

Gregory Feeley writes science fiction and about science fiction. His first novel, The Oxygen Barons, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and. His stories have been finalists for the Nebula Award and published in various Year’s Best anthologies, and his essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Book World, and USA Today. Feeley’s most recent novel is Kentauros and he recently completed a long novel, Hamlet the Magician.

Sentinel

Chang-Gyu Kim, translated by Charles La Shure

As usual, and without any external stimulus, Jeong-chae opened his eyes. The first thing to come into view was the ceiling, which was made from lengths of wood that met at an angle to form a gable roof. The lumber had been just barely stripped of its bark with a plane, soaked in water, and then dried before being used as building material. It had not been painted at all. It was nature in its raw form, the ceiling of his very own house, but beneath it Jeong-chae felt no peace at all.

Restricting his movements to the bare minimum, Jeong-chae turned on his side. The hands of his sawtooth-gear-and-spring clock indicated 7:24. Beneath them, other numbers the size of a fingernail turned in mechanical fashion as well, letting him know the remaining life span of the clock. 428. The 8 had already turned back nearly halfway and looked like a zero with horns. 427 days from now, he would have to destroy this clock and build a new one. Coefficient of elasticity, friction, heat radiation. Words like these slipped quickly and instinctively through Jeong-chae’s mind.

He could not sleep anymore, but neither did he get up. He couldn’t yet. Jeong-chae lay still and traced the patterns on the surface of the wood with his eyes. The boundaries of the patterns were infinitely unclear. It looked as if someone had stirred up light and darkness together with a finger. He thought that he had seen a similar sight, similar patterns, in the dream that he’d been dreaming as he slept just a short while ago. He grasped stubbornly at these brief yet infinitely vague memories. If he had to put the flavor of the dream into words, he would say that it was one of longing—longing for a past that he had never once had a chance to experience. Old tales and ancient lives of which he had only heard stories. Of course, made-up stories always contained exaggerations and omissions—that was how they differed from reality—and dreams are a more powerful fiction than any story. Yet even bearing all of that in mind, he thought that the past must have been better than the present. Both common sense and all of his knowledge dictated that those long-ago days could not have been worse than now. If you traced back the history of any given knowledge, you could surmise what life must have been like when it was discovered. In that sense, it was certain that people of old must have experienced far more ease in their lives than now.

Ease?

As soon as the unfamiliar word occurred to him, it felt as if he had bitten down on a pebble in his rice. No one used this word anymore. If there were such a thing as a modern dictionary, the definition of “a calm or relaxed state of mind or attitude” would no doubt be found under “surplus,” and its antonym would be “waste.”

As Jeong-chae lay there lost in thought, he heard the brief but resonant sound of a bell from not too far away. It was the sound that told him it was 7:30 in the morning, and thus time to rise.

Even if he woke up before then, it was important that he leave his bed at the appointed time. Human body temperature dropped during sleep. When people woke up and became active, they generated heat as a result of exercise, returning their body temperature to normal. It was a small amount of heat, but the influence that its influx and outflux had on the world could not be ignored. Therefore, in order to prevent his body from radiating heat in vain, Jeong-chae had waited, thermally insulated blanket pulled up to his neck, for the bell to ring. If waste accumulated, ultimately the “sentinels” that protected their home from the distant annihilation would be put under excessive strain; the greater the strain was, the more rapidly doom would approach.

Only by following the rules could they extend life.

With the smallest of movements, Jeong-chae folded the blanket that had covered him and put it to one side. Then he looked at the column of mercury in the thermometer. The interior temperature was 17 degrees Celsius, which precisely matched his weekly budget. At this rate, it did not seem there would be any need to adjust his heat ration. Jeong-chae turned his gaze to the marble slab that he had leaned up against the wall in one corner of the room. The day’s schedule was written on it, using the black charcoal left after burning his firewood.

Inspect horizon/train trainee: 250 J

Obtain lumber (24 x 40 x 200): 400 J

Participate in vote: 80 J

The first item on the list was related to Jeong-chae’s primary occupation. He was a sentinel technician who daily inspected the horizon, which was where the sentinels stood. All things considered, in terms of keeping this world intact, it was probably the single most important job there was. It was also a job that not just anyone could do. The number of people who properly understood thermodynamics and the operating principles of the sentinels, including Jeong-chae, numbered only 48. Should they lose even one technician, that space would need to be immediately filled by a replacement. For that reason, five reserve personnel were being trained. Today, Jeong-chae was scheduled to teach one of those people.

The second item on the list was related to Jeong-chae’s secondary job as a carpenter. There was no one in this world who didn’t understand what a serious and complicated matter it was to fell a single tree, so it was infrequent that he had to make new furniture or chairs. However, as in any home, regardless of how carefully you looked after something, it would eventually grow old and wear out, and furniture that had been used for so long that a leg broke could not be refurbished through simple repairs alone. Thus, while the demand for lumber was never great, it also never completely ceased.

There had been one time when he had felled an enormous number of trees all at once. The task had been too much to handle alone, so he had needed to get help from other workers. One couple had failed to manage their hearth properly, and their entire house had burned down. At that time, Jeong-chae and many others had needed to set aside their original tasks and move quickly. A rapid transfer of thermal energy had occurred due to the fire, oxides in the air had greatly increased, and the world’s atmosphere had roiled violently. Not only that, but they had to draw an unscheduled amount of water to spray onto the fire so that it would not spread. Naturally, the world’s yearly energy management plans were completely spoiled, and Jeong-chae had needed to adjust each and every one of the sentinels for which he was responsible. They’d also needed to build a new house and furnishings, at the very least, which meant they’d had to greatly revise the forestry management plan as well.

But the lumber needed this time was different. 24 x 40 x 200 was the size of a coffin. As far as Jeong-chae could remember, wood had not been used for this purpose in the last thousand years. Coffins were objects needed by dead people, and no one had died. Since the sentinels had begun to protect and maintain the world, there was only one reason for the population to decrease: those who had been excluded from the total aggregate of the world’s population had walked on their own two feet past the sentinels and beyond the horizon of the world. Needless to say, these people never came back again: the horizon was the end of the world, after all. Thus, they had not needed coffins, since, in point of fact, they hadn’t died. But this time the situation was quite out of the ordinary. It was clear that the individual in question would most likely be using a coffin. There was not a single person living in the world who doubted this. So it was that, over the past several days, people had met in the world’s only lounge, shared their opinions, and come to a conclusion. On the last day, Jeong-chae had stopped by the lounge long after the meeting had started. Sun-gyu, a doctor and a stonemason, not to mention a friend, had summarized for him the decision they had reached. After hearing him out from start to finish, Jeong-chae had calmly agreed.

Sun-gyu had said, “So, make us the coffin. You know the amount of wood you’ll need, so let me know the results of your calculations. And you’ll adjust the sentinels, too, right?”

Jeong-chae had replied that he would. Their conversation had taken longer than expected, and the world council was soon over. When Jeong-chae had risen, Sun-gyu had put a hand on his shoulder and whispered to him, “Make sure the party in question doesn’t know.”

Jeong-chae had replied once again that he understood—though he’d thought it a rather pointless request to make—and left the lounge.

Now, today, he took out the two axes he would need to fell the trees for the coffin and placed them in his leather bag. Inspecting the sentinels and the horizon was his first priority, but since he did not have time to return home afterward, he had to take care of both jobs in a single trip. Jeong-chae recited to himself the total amount of energy he had available to use today, so that he wouldn’t forget it: 730 joules. If the felling of the trees turned out to be harder than expected, he would have to stop working before exceeding 730 joules and return the next day to finish the job. Otherwise, the stability of the world would no doubt be threatened.

Jeong-chae checked once again to make sure that all the fires in his house were out, and then he left for work.

Yeon-gyeong was waiting at the end of the world. She was one of the five trainees learning how to manage the sentinels. As Jeong-chae approached, she caught his eyes and nodded her head slightly in greeting. Jeong-chae returned the greeting and then immediately led the way to the nearest sentinel. This was the first time he had ever actually met Yeon-gyeong, but they had a lot of work to do that day, so there was no time to waste on pleasantries.

“How much energy have you been allotted for training?” he asked Yeon-gyeong as she followed along behind him.

Yeon-gyeong, who had just turned twenty and thus was about ten years his junior, answered, “100 joules.”

It wasn’t all that much. Seeing as it was her first day, Jeong-chae decided that he would just explain the situation to her in simple terms. While he was calculating the distribution of energy, the two of them arrived at their destination.

And so it was that Jeong-chae and Yeon-gyeong came to stand at the end of the world.

The boundary that divided the world from annihilation was not visible to the eye. No one knew exactly whether that boundary was a thin line or broad like a river. They did have some indicators, though: the sentinels. The sentinels stood in a line at a distance of four kilometers from each other, dividing their world from the abyss. There were no signs to warn people against going beyond them. The very act of making such signs would have been a waste of energy. Nonetheless, every single person in the world, even children who had just learned to speak, knew how wicked and deadly the act of recklessly crossing that boundary was. And as long as the sentinels operated normally, such a thing was impossible.

Jeong-chae came here every day to adjust the sentinels, and he often experienced for himself the chill and the emptiness that lay beyond the end of the world. When he touched his fingers to a sentinel control panel, the weight of annihilation, which stretched out from three paces before him to cover all of space except this world, was made evident to him. The sea of vacuum that grew endlessly colder and colder, beyond any scope that Jeong-chae could imagine, pressed down upon him, cruel and heavy. The lights that had filled the universe in days long gone had now lost their strength and remained only as cinders, unable to reach this “world” intact. Thus, only their afterglow dimly knocked against the walls of this world before inevitably crumbling into a slowly sloshing red fog, singing a dirge to mourn the end of all things.

Jeong-chae approached the first sentinel, wiped away some of the pale dust on it with one hand, and read the figure there.

-8.432

Taking into account the margin of error, this did not deviate from the expected figure. Jeong-chae turned his back on the sentinel and spoke to Yeon-gyeong.

“For energy’s sake, today I will just explain things on a common-sense level.”

Yeon-gyeong agreed, as if this were only natural.

Jeong-chae continued. “This little machine you see here, this is all that we can touch of the sentinel. Strictly speaking, this is not the sentinel, but only a control panel. One of the sentinel’s bodies is located near the sun, while the other is located near a black hole three lightyears from here. Our ancient ancestors drew energy from an adjacent universe. The composition of the particles that make up that universe is different from the ones that make up ours, so the energy had to be transformed in order to be used. But, as I’m sure you know, that universe and our universe were far older than our ancestors expected.”

Jeong-chae lowered his gaze. “We realized too late that we didn’t have that much time left. If we were to have a future, we would have to move to a different universe before our universe expanded to the point when all energy dissipated. However, in order to do that, we would need to research, develop, and produce over a long period of time. That would require an enormous amount of energy as well. After calculating, our ancestors concluded that there was insufficient energy to achieve that end. At first, there were many who refused to accept this conclusion, but ultimately everyone agreed. The only path left to us was to conserve as much as we could of what we had left and continue living, even if only for one more day.”

Yeon-gyeong raised her hand slightly and spoke. “I’m told that, long ago, when we only lived here on Earth, people who did not understand ecology and thermodynamic circulation wasted far too much energy. As a result, the earth was struck by warming and climate anomalies. Simply put, the whole universe is in that situation now, right?”

“You’re not wrong to think of it that way. Except for the fact that, back then, we still could have overcome the crisis, but now it is impossible.”

Yeon-gyeong pressed her thin lips tightly together and gave a slight shake of her head. Jeong-chae stepped away from the sentinel and looked out over her head, toward the world. Between the center of the world and the horizon outlined by the sentinels lay the relatively thin Forest of Oblivion. This was where Jeong-chae felled trees. Every time he cut down and chopped up a tree, he felt as if he were cutting another little bit away from the blindfold that protected the people of the world from the horror. The only people who ventured out beyond the forest were the sentinel technicians. After all, everyone simply wished to live as far as possible from annihilation, no matter how short that distance might be. The Forest of Oblivion absorbed sound, as it had always done, and with only the two of them around it was as quiet as could be. Jeong-chae lowered his voice a little more, thinking that it would be a waste of energy to speak loudly.

“The current population of the Earth is 2,458. Our world is a circle with a radius of 187 kilometers. In order to maintain this world, the sentinels are drawing on the last dregs of energy remaining in the universe. But—and I imagine you will know this considering your occupation—energy cannot just be drawn. If it does not circulate, then it cannot be generated, either. The sentinels can regulate that circulation between annihilation and this world; it is that process that you must maintain in the future. If the balance tips too far in one direction, we will be unable to control the sentinels. Then there will no longer be any distinction between this world and annihilation. Thus we must always adjust the input and output.”

Jeong-chae thought that he was focusing too much on theory, so he returned quickly to practicalities: “Every day, when the day’s work is finished, physicists, biologists, and food engineers calculate the amount of energy to be used and the amount of heat that will be produced the next day before giving those figures to us. It is on that basis that the 48 sentinel technicians, like myself, regulate the sentinels’ figures. Here, look.”

Jeong-chae took a leather scroll from his bag and carefully unfurled it. The surface was crammed with numbers written in soot mixed with oil. Yeon-gyeong took the scroll and peered closely at it for some time.

“Those are the results of the calculations I received yesterday. At the very bottom are the expected figures for the sentinels managed by each of the 48 technicians. We come out here and look for ourselves, and if the figures don’t match them, we make adjustments using those dials you see there. Actually, the really important part is how to manipulate those sixteen dials in order to get the figures we need . . . but I’ll explain that tomorrow. Doing it today would be too much for the amount of energy you’ve been budgeted.”

Yeon-gyeong was still staring at the scroll. As Jeong-chae watched her, he remembered something else.

“In general, you can set the sentinels to the figures given to you by the scholars, but there are times when you can’t. Therefore, it’s good for technicians to know how to do the calculations. Even if the whole universe is cooling down, there can still be tiny fluctuations. When that happens, if you know how to do the calculations you can react quickly in a crisis situation.”

Yeon-gyeong carefully rolled up the scroll and handed it back to Jeong-chae, asking, “This sentinel is currently at -8.432, right?”

“That’s right.”

“And you have to adjust it to -7.757?”

“Correct.”

Yeon-gyeong stood next to Jeong-chae and looked at the forest. “Unless my calculations are mistaken, the world is consuming too much energy right now. Beyond the limit of what can be allowed through regulation of the sentinels.”

Jeong-chae paused a moment before he replied. “That’s right.”

“Precisely the amount of energy needed by one person.”

Jeong-chae did not reply this time. Yeon-gyeong did not repeat herself. Jeong-chae picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder. Judging by the speed of her mental arithmetic, Yeon-gyeong had the necessary qualities to be a sentinel technician, and this was sufficient instruction for one day.

“That’s enough for today. We’ve consumed exactly the correct amount of energy. Your next lesson is three days from now, right? I will teach you then how to actually adjust the sentinels—”

But Yeon-gyeong had absently turned her gaze, spotted something over Jeong-chae’s shoulder, and raised her voice in spite of herself. “What . . . what is that?”

Jeong-chae ignored her widening eyes and finished his sentence. “—so please be here at the same time.”

“Look at that! That shouldn’t be able to exist outside the world!”

Jeong-chae still did not turn to look. He knew that some technicians saw things “that should not be able to exist” out in the annihilation; indeed, he himself was one of them. But technicians did not speak openly about such things. If Yeon-gyeong became a technician, she, too, would come to understand this. But Jeong-chae did not want to speak these words with his own lips.

Yeon-gyeong was not only quick at mental arithmetic, she was also quick on the uptake.

“So . . . I’m not the only one who can see that. I’m right, aren’t I?” After asking once again, she spoke with a determined look on her face. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what it is.”

Threatening someone with a waste of energy was the rudest thing one could do. Jeong-chae sighed and turned to face the annihilation. Red light with a long wavelength was surging slowly, just as before, and spread far and wide like a cloud of mist. But there was a slightly more complex shape visible within it. Two short horizontal lines were shoulders, the longer lines bent at the same angle were two arms, and the wavy lines were hair. Two holes, soft but filled with fierce determination, were its eyes, and the object that opened and closed at regular intervals was a small mouth. It was something Jeong-chae had seen every three or four days for the past four years, but seeing it again caused an ache somewhere deep in his chest, as if he were being shaved with a carpenter’s plane. It felt just as it had the very first time he’d seen it.

The red-tinged Su-hyeon was saying something, there in the annihilation beyond the end of the world. Jeong-chae struggled to watch Su-hyeon as he answered Yeon-gyeong’s question.

“The face of the boundary between the world and annihilation is maintained solely by the power of the sentinels. But the difference between the two sides is not merely one of energy levels. As the universe gets older, its particles disintegrate. Our world prevents that artificially. In other words, matter outside our world is structured differently. Although it has never been definitively established, some of this matter is influenced by the brainwaves of those who draw near. So—”

Realization dawned on Yeon-gyeong’s face, and she interrupted him: “You don’t have to say any more.”

But Jeong-chae continued speaking. She was going to find out anyway, so it might not be bad idea to instruct her in advance, to ensure she did not get flustered while on the job.

“Sometimes, if a technician is thinking deeply about something, such a form can appear. That person there . . . that shape there is my wife. She was disabled, so four years ago she walked out into the annihilation. She consumed far more energy than a normal person, and yet she did less work, and thus it was said that she was accelerating the destruction of the world. So . . . ”

Jeong-chae tried to erase it from his mind, but the figure of his wife Su-hyeon kept appearing. No, he had the cause and effect backward: because he could not drive her from his mind, Su-hyeon kept appearing in the annihilation, trying to say something. Every time he saw her apparition, Jeong-chae begged her forgiveness.

I wanted to walk out there in your place, Su-hyeon. But they said that even if the energy I would have consumed remained, it still would not have been enough to offset the amount you consumed. And that if I went, there would be one less person who could work. But that was nothing more than a justification. I know. I should have gone out there with you. But I couldn’t. I shouldn’t have sent you out into the annihilation alone. It must be so cold and lonely out there.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Again, Jeong-chae had begged for her forgiveness. Yet the image of Su-hyeon grew no fainter. She remained in his mind just as she had the day before. And he knew that she would be there tomorrow, and the day after that as well.

“You need to know this, Yeon-gyeong. If you continue in this line of work, you might see something—or someone—out there in the annihilation. But as long as you remain in this world, you cannot refuse this job just because you don’t like that idea. You were chosen because you have the right qualities, and only by doing this job can we all keep surviving together. It is the job of the technicians to prevent the end of the world, even as they keep seeing Su-hyeon—as they keep seeing those people. You’d best prepare yourself for that in advance.”

Yeon-gyeong stared at the legless image of Su-hyeon as if she were engraving something in the depths of her heart, and at long last she turned her gaze toward the forest. Jeong-chae said that she could go. Yeon-gyeong quietly complied. She did glance backward a few times before they reached a narrow path through the Forest of Oblivion. When she did this, Jeong-chae gave her the kind of look a parent might give a child during a scolding, and it wasn’t until she disappeared completely into the forest that he began walking toward the next sentinel.

Chopping down the trees needed for the coffin was difficult. Some trees had already been designated for the purpose, so he didn’t have to spend all that much time choosing them. However, the trees contained more moisture than he had expected, and the blade of his ax did not sink in as deeply as he wanted. This suggested that the world’s water was not being regulated in accordance with the calculations. Jeong-chae made a mental note to report this to the environmental scholars as he moved the trees he had felled and split to the edge of the forest. According to his original plan, he was supposed to have brought them closer to his workshop, but doing so surely would have exceeded his energy allowance for the day. Jeong-chae ate a little bit of the salt he’d brought with him to replenish the sodium that had been excreted from his body, buttoned up his clothes to prevent the radiation of any more body heat, and then headed toward the lounge.

There were far more people gathered there than usual. With the exception of infants, children, and six adults, the entirety of the world’s population—2,458 people—was packed into the lounge. Jeong-chae wiped the sweat from his brow with a cotton cloth as he looked for a place to stand at the very back of the room. A man who had been standing by the door and counting the people as they came in gave a signal directing everyone’s attention toward the front.

The person who went up onto the platform to oversee the proceedings was familiar to Jeong-chae: it was Sun-gyu. Since there was no machine or anything like that to amplify his voice, Sun-gyu spoke as loudly as he could. As for the crowd of some two thousand people, thanks to their habit of not wasting energy, they helped matters by not making even the least bit of noise, so that they could hear him clearly. Thus, Jeong-chae could follow exactly what he was saying:

“My name is Kang Sun-gyu, and I was chosen by the drawing of straws. I will be handling the proceedings today. I am sure you all know that you have gathered here today for a vote. Before we take that vote, however, I will briefly explain the situation in which we find ourselves.

“There are a few crucial principles that we live by: that no one without authorization should touch a sentinel; that we should not approach the annihilation; that we should not exceed the energy allowed to us; that each person should calculate and adhere to their own energy allowance; that we must eliminate factors that upset the balance of heat. These principles come before any other values—because if we violate these principles, the world will immediately be faced with a crisis, and if that state persists for too long a period of time, the sentinels will be overloaded and our world will be destroyed.

“There are, following from these principles, some corollary rules as well. Everyone, with the exception of children, must have at least two occupations. It is said that this was not necessary a century ago, but the world has been greatly reduced in size since then, so according to our calculations this conclusion was unavoidable. No one gathered here today is an exception to this rule. Also, if at all possible, we should avoid discussion of the distant future. The most important thing right now is performing our labor day by day; worrying in advance about a tomorrow that is less bright will only have a negative effect on us. Of course, it would also be a waste of energy to worry.”

What Sun-gyu had said was so natural, yet it also simply summarized the operation of the world. Thus, almost everyone nodded in agreement.

“Though it is happening slowly, unfortunately the diminution of the world continues. In accordance with our rules, I will not talk about what might happen in the distant future. Yet no matter how many times we perform the calculations, and no matter how everyone here might restructure their lives, we have reached a point where a decision must be made. For those of you who have just turned twenty and thus only just earned the right to vote, I will speak simply and plainly. In a word, without fail there comes a time when we must reduce our population in order to maintain the world.

“This is the way of the world—that is, the law of nature. There is surely nobody here who wants to reduce our population. However, if we take into consideration the efficiency of the sentinels and the limitations of the world, this conclusion is unavoidable. Fortunately or not, we have clear standards for a situation like this. They are not arbitrary, but have been arrived at naturally, as the result of careful calculations. Some time ago, there was one who insisted that we must eliminate the person whose ratio of productive activity to energy consumption was the lowest, and, although there were some twists and turns along the way, in the end everyone agreed that this was sensible. Since then, this standard has held firm, and as a result we have come to the point where everyone here has gathered to vote.”

Jeong-chae noticed that Sun-gyu had deliberately not mentioned the name of the person who had suggested the principle. Most of the other people gathered there appeared to notice this as well. However, someone quickly and quietly raised a hand. Jeong-chae pushed himself up slightly from the wooden wall against which he had been leaning and peered over to see who it was. It was Yeon-gyeong, whom he had trained just that morning. Jeong-chae only then remembered that she was twenty.

Without any hint of hurry, Sun-gyu very calmly yielded the floor to her, saying, “The woman with her hand raised.”

Yeon-gyeong spoke out in a clear voice. “Are we really all gathered here now? There is someone that I myself know who is not in attendance.”

Sun-gyu replied without hesitation, as if he had foreseen such a question: “You are correct. I was just about to get to that. To eliminate the possibility of error, we gathered nine people, each experts in a different field, and had them calculate and then check their calculations three times. As a result, three people were chosen as the subjects of our vote today. These three individuals are elsewhere right now, and three others are staying with them, one with each, detaining them with a reasonable excuse. We plan to receive the ballots from these six people once everyone here has finished voting.”

Yeon-gyeong’s face hardened. Jeong-chae could see it even from where he was standing. Nonetheless, she replied, “Is this not unjust? As far as I know, in a vote—no, even in a trial—suspects are granted the opportunity to speak in their own defense. If we continue like this, then even a trial would be less . . . ”

Yeon-gyeong stammered, unable to find the right word, but Sun-gyu supplied it for her.

“You may be right,” he said. “It may be that what is taking place here today is not a vote but an act even more cruel than a guilty verdict. I don’t know what to call it, either. Still, we must not be mistaken. We are not—to use an old term—jurors gathered here to convict a suspect. We are gathered here to decide who should be chosen among three individuals for whom the results of our calculations are barely different. There is a margin of error, after all. We need to consider how much they participate in the productive activities needed for food, shelter, and clothing, how much energy they consume in proportion to that—”

“But . . . ” Yeon-gyeong interrupted Sun-gyu once again.

Jeong-chae surmised that one of the subjects of the vote must be someone Yeon-gyeong knew personally. Jeong-chae had been in the same position four years earlier. If there was one difference, it was that there hadn’t even been a vote then. The person chosen in accordance with the traditional process for selecting a representative kept mentioning the greater good, saying that “we must sacrifice the few for the sake of the many,” and had proposed a candidate. Su-hyeon’s name had come up. Jeong-chae had stepped forward and declared that he would walk out into the annihilation in her stead. But his suggestion had not been accepted. Su-hyeon had been unable to move freely under her own power, and someone else would have had to give up that much of their productive activity to take care of her. The problem could not have been solved by Jeong-chae disappearing in her place.

“But a person’s value cannot be determined by calculations alone,” said Yeon-gyeong.

Jeong-chae thought there was something odd about that statement. Now, in this world, a person’s value was indeed determined by calculations. People with low energy efficiency were dangerous beings. Furthermore, the figures of the three candidates chosen as a result of the calculations were said to be more or less the same. Yet Yeon-gyeong was acting as if her acquaintance had already been chosen. Jeong-chae wondered if perhaps . . . and he quietly moved so that he could get a better look at her face. He hadn’t noticed that morning, but when he looked at her now there was something familiar about her. There was a resemblance to a face that Jeong-chae would never forget as long as he lived.

Sun-gyu spoke once again: “I do understand what you mean by that. It might even have been a valid principle long ago. But the world is different now. We have no choice but to deal only with values that can be reduced to numerical figures. We cannot look down from above and judge others, either. That’s not the kind of situation that we’re in. We’re merely numbers that consume yet another number known as energy. We cannot measure values that cannot be seen or touched, so we have no choice but to leave them out of the discussion. In fact, it is for this reason—because we have no need of any emotional appeals or defenses—that we did not bring the individuals in question here today, so we could avoid a commotion and reduce the amount of energy wasted on such things.”

Yeon-gyeong must have been rendered speechless, as she said nothing more. Jeong-chae wondered whether she might flee the lounge, but she stayed right where she was.

“If there are no further questions or objections,” Sun-gyu said, “then let’s continue with the proceedings. It is, after all, nearing the time when we must go to sleep.”

Sun-gyu removed a cloth that had been covering a marble slab at the back of the platform. On it were inscribed the names of the three candidates and their numerical figures. One was an old man over the age of eighty; another had lost an arm and a leg to a falling rock. The last person was not very old at all, and his limbs and brain appeared to be in perfect condition.

Jeong-chae immediately knew which one was Yeon-gyeong’s acquaintance. He also knew why he had seen something familiar in her face. And, finally, he knew why Yeon-gyeong had brought up those ancient arguments once more.

Sun-gyu began to explain the proceedings to the crowd. “The first candidate, Yi Hwan-yong, has difficulty moving normally now, due to old age and infirmity. The second candidate, Choe Ji-ung, is incapable of properly productive activity due to an unfortunate accident. The third candidate, Kim Gyeong-hwan, is unlike the previous two candidates in that he has no physical problems, but, unlike everyone else, he does not have two occupations, and he has refused to work two jobs in the future. Therefore, as the result of these calculations for these three individuals are nearly identical—”

Yeon-gyeong shot up from her seat. “Father is working at a farm in the north even now. It’s not true that he is not engaging in productive activity! And, on top of that, how is it that directing and supervising over two thousand people as their representative isn’t another occupation?”

Sun-gyu had no intention of preventing Yeon-gyeong from speaking, so he simply let her be. Everyone made as much of an effort as possible to prevent uncomfortable situations like that from arising during the vote, but the process served another function beyond the mere selection of an individual: it was also a ritual during which the friends and family of the one selected to walk out into the annihilation came to accept that this outcome was unavoidable. Now, in such a short time, Yeon-gyeong was traveling through that narrow and painful passage.

She seemed to feel something surge up within her and, suddenly unable to continue speaking, she began merely mumbling to herself. Sun-gyu, surely inwardly cursing his ill luck at having drawn the short straw, replied in a gentle voice:

“We have spoken with the three candidates, in accordance with the established procedures. The first two candidates have no means of improving their condition. Kim Gyeong-hwan is different, though. If he had willingly chosen two occupations, today’s vote would not have turned out this way. What was Kim Gyeong-hwan’s original occupation? He was a politician. In other words, Kim Gyeong-hwan is someone who is incapable of holding even a single specialized job in this world. Thus he must supplement his work with simple labor, and significantly heavy labor at that. If he were to accept the results of our calculations and actively participate in labor, then he would be able to contribute 1.4 times the productivity of his energy consumption. Had that been the case, we would have been forced to choose between the remaining two candidates.

“But Kim Gyeong-hwan has rejected this. He has contributed a great deal to the world as a leader, he argues, so shouldn’t that offset his consumption? He also claims that while he can farm as a pastime, he cannot do dirty work like sewage treatment. Such work, he claims, is for ordinary people. Therefore, we have come together today to vote.”

Jeong-chae could not forget that name, Kim Gyeong-hwan. In the measure he had put forward, there had been the so-called “greater good.” Yet Jeong-chae could not shake the thought that what had thrown his wife Su-hyeon out into the annihilation was the decision made by their leader, Kim Gyeong-hwan. It was Kim who had insisted that, in order for the normal people to live, they must first send away the disabled, who consumed even more energy than normal. His conclusion was not so different from what Sun-gyu had just said: send away those who are harmful to the maintenance of the world. Jeong-chae, and those who found themselves in similar circumstances, had offered a counter-argument: Where’s the harm? I’ve said that I will go instead, so why are you stopping me?

Jeong-chae knew, though, that he had failed to drive straight to the heart of the matter: Why is it all of you who get to decide? Are you not using fear to try to eliminate whomever you wish? That’s what he should have said. But he had been unable to do it at the time, and so he remained here in this world while Su-hyeon remained only in his memory and his guilt, swaying like a legless ghost in the dark red light of the annihilation. In this way, the world’s people sympathized with each other’s circumstances or pretended not to see them, living on as a community . . . but politicians were different. Even though the world had shrunk as much as it had, they tried to make themselves exceptions. At least, Kim Gyeong-hwan had been revealed to be such a person. He believed that he was worth more than others, even though he didn’t do any work at all, just because of his title as a representative.

“Anyone who is interested in the detailed calculations may freely come forward before the vote and check the figures written here. If you have any questions about them, please ask the scholars who are waiting at the rear. They will explain things to you as simply as possible. Oh, and please allow me to explain one more thing, just in case. The nine members of the team who carried out these calculations came to the conclusion that, with Kim Gyeong-hwan being the last of our policy-makers, we would not need any more such people in the future. The calculations have been carried out in accordance with the laws of nature. That is to say, that how much of what kind of work an individual can do, and what benefits they can enjoy, are decided by thermodynamics and the environment of our world. Unless we discover some fundamentally different truth and escape our current situation, this fact is unlikely to change.”

Jeong-chae half-recalled a dream of which he had forgotten all the details. Clearly the past had been better than now.

Sun-gyu moistened his lips before continuing. “Alright, then we should begin the vote, starting with those in the front. There are writing utensils in the voting booths, so all you have to do is write a number on the piece of wood you have been given. Anyone who does not participate will be considered to have abstained.”

A tumult broke out in the lounge as people began to talk loudly and get up from their seats. As he’d been standing in a corner, a short distance from the crowd, Jeong-chae was not swept up in the tide of bodies. He caught a glimpse of Yeon-gyeong moving in the opposite direction from everyone else, hurrying out of the room.

A second training session was scheduled for three days after the vote. As he stood beside a sentinel at the edge of the world, Jeong-chae supposed that Yeon-gyeong would not come. He checked the figures on the sentinel: -2.760. The heat transfer between the world and the annihilation had nearly reached equilibrium. Such a change was possible only because the world population had been reduced by one. Jeong-chae carefully adjusted the sixteen dials and accelerated ever so slightly the destruction of the neutrinos that existed within the annihilation. It was clear that, if he manipulated 32 more sentinels in this way, the world would become slightly more stable.

At least, for the time being.

Just as he was about to continue on to the next sentinel, Jeong-chae was startled by a movement in the corner of his eye, and he spun around. It was Yeon-gyeong standing there. She was even more haggard than the last time he’d seen her, and the shadows under her eyes were that much deeper, but Jeong-chae mentioned none of this. Wasting energy on pointless sympathy helped no one.

As Jeong-chae slipped his leather scroll into his bag, Yeon-gyeong said in a hoarse voice, “I guess you’ve finished fixing the first sentinel.”

Jeong-chae replied, “That’s right. We’ll have to go to the next sentinel if I’m to show you how to operate them.”

With that, he began to walk slowly. When one’s heart ached too much, jumping straight into one’s work was one way to soothe it. To be precise, one had to do this, if only to keep the world going. Their world had become so small now that there was no room for delays due to emotions. That’s how much the annihilation pressed in on them all.

Yeon-gyeong asked, “How much energy do you have to spare?”

Jeong-chae quickly performed the mental arithmetic. “About 20 joules.”

Yeon-gyeong nodded. “Can we sit for a moment before we go on?”

Without replying, Jeong-chae sat down. He placed his tool bag in his lap to prevent it from rolling down into the annihilation.

Yeon-gyeong sat down next to him. She lowered her head and then raised it again slowly, staring out at the edge of the hell that embraced the world in an orange glow. “While the vote was taking place, I ran to my father. I thought that if he changed his mind before the end, that it might change the situation as well. I told him that the world is a different place now. And that it would only become more different in the future. I even told him that this was not like him. Was there anything that he couldn’t do to keep on living? Just like everyone else? But he was the same as ever. He said that he was convinced he wasn’t wrong, that he’d lived his life according to his conviction, and that it would be better to die than to give that up. I asked him what this conviction was. He said it was that leaders are different from everyone else. That they are by no means equal. That those people who had chosen him but then later had abandoned him were cowardly traitors.”

Jeong-chae merely listened without any reaction, as unshakable as a slab of marble.

“So I tried another tack to persuade him. I asked him if he was fine with never seeing me again. With leaving me alone in this world. He hesitated for a brief moment. But then he became even more stubborn than before. He said that there were values even greater than affection. It was then that I realized: it didn’t matter how long we talked, we were never going to understand each other.”

Yeon-gyeong leaned toward Jeong-chae and rested her head on his shoulder. He felt her body trembling. She was holding back tears.

“I shouldn’t cry if I want to reduce heat radiation . . . In the end, he turned his back on even me . . . People came last night. They said they would bring him to the end of the world. They asked him if it wouldn’t be better for him to walk out on his own. But Father . . . Father said that he would never go. He asked who had given them the right to do it. They tried to persuade him, but it was no use . . . They brought me outside. For some time there was a commotion, and then everything went silent. Then they . . . they came out with a heavy coffin.”

Yeon-gyeong wept a little more, but then the violent emotion must have passed, as she sat up straight. Jeong-chae said nothing to comfort her, nor did he even place a hand on her shoulder. There was nothing that he could say.

“They must have known Father better than I did. That’s why they prepared the coffin in advance, and they must have also calculated the amount of resources that would be consumed by felling that many trees.”

It had, indeed, been Jeong-chae who had felled the trees, planed the boards, and driven in the nails to make the coffin. But he did not tell her this fact.

Even back in the days when energy had been abundant, leaders or representatives might not have really been necessary. If everyone had properly understood how the world turned, what was beneficial for only a few, and what would be harmful to the whole, then they might not have needed to choose representatives. It was not that difficult to live without them. However, people had chosen this lazy approach for the sake of a petty peace and to make their lives easier, and as a result they had left the decision-making to others. It was only now—now that the universe was dying—that they belatedly realized the truth: that leaders and representatives were poisonous mushrooms that grew thick in the cracks and crevices widened by indolence, and they were a waste of energy. Kim Gyeon-hwan ought to have been sent out of this world long ago. Had he been, then someone else could have lived longer.

Jeong-chae pondered all of this, but he said nothing to Yeon-gyeong.

Yeon-gyeong wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her undyed shirt and stood up. Then she looked out, not so surprised this time, and gazed at the form that maintained a minimum of order within the erratically shimmering annihilation. “Your wife . . . I heard what happened. It was my father who led the way in that decision, four years ago.”

Jeong-chae neither confirmed nor denied what she said, but simply lifted his eyes to look out at the translucent apparition of Su-hyeon. Even if one more person disappeared into the annihilation inside a coffin, even if the world had once more found a brief state of stability, even if no more leaders ever existed in the remaining history of humanity, Su-hyeon would remain there—within memory, within the red abyss, and within that cluster of particles. And she would eternally be opening and closing her mouth, as if she were speaking.

The two of them watched Su-hyeon for a while before leaving that place. They walked toward the next sentinel—to adjust it so that tomorrow, when they would have to rise once again at the appointed hour, could exist.

Throughout that day, Su-hyeon followed the two of them. But the apparition of Kim Gyeong-hwan never appeared. There was, after all, no one who missed him.

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

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

About the Author

Chang-Gyu Kim is a Korean science fiction writer. In 2005, he won Science-Technology Literature Award for “Byulsang” and has since won three other SF awards for “Update” (2014), “Our Banished World” (2016), and “All the Amusement Park in the Universe” (2017). “Our Banished World” was translated into English and published in Readymade Bodhisattva in 2019. His short fiction has been collected in two collections, Our Banished World and Samsara. Kim currently teaches Storytelling at a college.

Operation Spring Dawn

Mo Xiong, translated by Rebecca Kuang

1

I was taught that when the Great Frost first descended, humans were in the middle of a great world war.

I don’t know which world war this was, nor do I know who was fighting who. I wasn’t born—rather, I wasn’t produced—until twenty years after it ended. By then, it had become a distant story, as remote and meaningless as the beginning of the Common Era two thousand years ago, or the demise of the triceratops two hundred million years ago.

“Listen well, Little Snow. Do not dwell on the past. Focus on the possibilities of the future.” The artificial intelligence that all we children called “Mother” was always repeating this lesson to me in warm, gentle tones. “You are a key that will open the lock to tomorrow. You are a torch that will melt away the cold of the past. When you are asked what to do, remember these words, and then trust your own judgment. Choose the best future.”

The key and the torch. Together, these symbols formed the insignia that could be found everywhere in the temperature-controlled dome where I was born and raised. Under each insignia, which symbolized hope and enlightenment, workers and researchers were always rushing about. The dome wasn’t very large; one could see both ends from the elevator tower at its center. Outside its massive glass walls stood tall buildings and mountains, among which the tiny residences that surrounded the dome on all sides didn’t look like they belonged. That was where the refugees lived. They resembled walking corpses in their old, shabby temperature regulation suits, clinging to life purely for the sake of the next days’ relief rations.

When I think back to those years, I remember that small white petals were always floating around the air outside the dome; sometimes in dense clouds, sometimes in sparse trickles. They reminded me a bit of the pretty little flowers I’d seen before in the biology lab. Mother told me that those petals were something called “snow.” The humans of my era hated and feared snow, because they believed it brought bitter cold and calamity.

But when the snowfall stopped entirely, that meant the Great Frost had fully descended upon the world, putting all living things to endless sleep.

The temperature inside the dome was always set to 22 degrees Celsius. Mother claimed that this was the temperature best suited for human habitation, but we always thought it was a bit too hot. The other children and I were always asking if we could go take a look at the world outside, but Mother always refused us. It said that when I was eight years old and fully mature, then I would be able to move around in environments of minus 20 degrees without a protective bodysuit. But at that time, the temperature outside the dome had already dropped to minus 25 degrees . . . and was continuing to fall at a slow but despair-inducing rate. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to live outside the glass walls. Whenever I looked out at the increasingly dense clusters of refugee huts outside the dome, I couldn’t help but feel afraid.

“If those people know that they’ll never be let into the dome, then why do they keep clustering around us?” I asked.

Mother replied, “Because even if they can only ever glimpse what’s on the other side of the wall, that is enough to give them the strength to keep on living.”

Sometimes there were sunny days when the clouds and snow were swept away in a dazzling flash. Tens of hundreds of planes would fly in formation through the blue sky, leaving behind the shining rays of spring. The refugees would shake the earth with their cheers. I remember that the first several times this happened, the people inside the dome stopped to watch, hugging each other in celebration. But as the sunny days became less and less frequent, the planes also became a rarer and rarer sight, and the mood inside the dome gradually dimmed day by day.

Only Mother, who was solely responsible for our care and education, was never affected. Mother was like an intricately designed mechanical clock; all of its parts moved according to a precise, predetermined rhythm and speed. No matter what the pressures imposed by the outside world, Mother proceeded methodically, never early by one minute nor late by a second.

At last, the day came that the planes stopped appearing in the sky, and the sunlight disappeared. During a storm that nearly covered the entire dome in snow, the soldiers and their leader found Mother. They stood in the dome before all of us children, tears streaming down their cheeks.

Those brave souls had lost their homes. During those ten days of devastation wreaked by the Great Frost, the temperature outside dropped to minus sixty degrees, exceeding the limits that most facilities on the planet’s surface could bear. This meant that during those ten days, at least fifty percent of humanity or more had turned to ice and dust. Of course, this included those refugees huddled outside the dome.

For the first and last time, Mother decided to alter its schedule. It decided to deploy all of the children early.

“Remember your mission, Little Snow.” Mother entreated me over and over again as I entered hibernation, like an old woman sending away her only son. “Turn the key. Light the torch.”

“Turn the key.” I repeated the words under my breath like a prayer. “Light the torch.”

That day—November 13, 2129—was just twenty-seven days short of my eighth birthday. Operation Spring Dawn had officially begun.

All of this happened twenty thousand years ago.

There were still ninety thousand years to go before the end of the Great Frost.

2

The moment my hibernation chamber cracked open, an unnaturally bright light shone onto my face, and a strange odor wafted into my nose. I coughed—well, perhaps I screamed—as my consciousness awoke from senseless darkness and returned to my long-slumbering body.

Several people appeared before me, all rather young and petite. They wore some sort of white bodysuit that I had never seen before, and they each carried backpacks that seemed rather too large for them. They looked me up and down like doctors examining a seriously ill patient.

“Physical condition is quite good. Muscular atrophy is within the bounds of recovery. Predicted rehabilitation time should take about . . . fifteen hours.” A girl with hair trimmed just beneath her ears reached out and propped my eyelids open. Her gender wasn’t immediately obvious; it wasn’t until she opened her mouth to speak that I realized she was female. “Initiating the iris scan.” That was odd—I hadn’t seen her take out any equipment that looked like it could perform an iris scan. “Scan complete. Identity confirmed as Operation Spring Dawn Key Number Twelve, one of the final products of the Snow Child Gene Modification Project by the First Scientific Research Corps in the Zodiac Allied Nations Qinling Garrison.”

“Just call me Little Snow.” I tried smiling at them, but most of them remained expressionless. Only two girls, both wearing their hair in ponytails, nodded back at me.

“Are you from the engineering department?” I asked.

They exchanged a glance, then looked toward a girl with short hair. She was dressed differently from the others, but she carried the same massive, coffin-shaped backpack.

“Hello, Key.” Her voice was childishly nasal. “We are perpetual motion homunculi created at Ayr Laboratory. I am P05. My duties are record-keeping and providing informational assistance.” She turned around, pointing to the girls with ponytails that had nodded just then. “These two, C09 and C10, are responsible for guarding and investigation. The rest are part of the D-series, who are responsible for protection and operations.” She gestured at them. “They number from D39 to D41. And here, of course, is our captain, D42.”

This was nothing like what I’d been told to expect. I’d never heard of any Ayr Laboratory, nor had I ever heard of perpetual motion homunculi. But given that they outnumbered me, and more importantly were armed with strange weapons that quite resembled guns, I had no choice but to believe them for the time being. After all, I was just a Key, and my only mission was to find my Lock. My mission wouldn’t change even if Hitler came back to life or if aliens invaded the Earth. Besides, according to the original plan, I was supposed to awaken eighty thousand years after the Great Frost began. Everything I’d known before—countries, nations, history, civilization—should have undergone massive transformations by now.

“Then are you here to initiate Operation Spring Dawn?” I asked. “Is it already time?”

“It is not, but we’re out of time. Or, more accurately, you’re out of time.” P05 went on to calmly explain, sounding not one bit like someone who was in a rush. “According to the plans formed at Ayr Laboratory, we came out of hibernation six months ago and set out to find a Key like you in order to initiate Operation Spring Dawn in advance.”

“In advance?” I had a bad feeling about this. “How . . . how far in advance?”

“By ten thousand years, brother.” A small girl with hair hanging past her shoulders impatiently gestured for the others to lift me out of the hibernation chamber. “While you’re recuperating, have P05 catch you up.”

She spoke very quickly. I noticed the small letters on her jumpsuit—“D42.”

I had encountered autonomous robots before in the dome. They were nowhere near as intelligent or adaptable as Mother, but they could understand simple commands, and could even cooperate with other robots to perform complicated tasks. But these homunculi were something else entirely. Their bodies weren’t comprised of clunky metal frameworks, but rather looked pliable and detailed. I learned that, like engineering machinery, they could lift rocks several times their own body weight and could twist into positions unimaginable for humans. Most incredible was the processors contained within their little bodies, which displayed intelligence and emotions mimicking those of humans more closely than Mother ever could. They could both think critically and communicate. While they were waiting around, they chattered to each other through electric noises that I couldn’t understand. The two C-type homunculi even appeared to joke around and laugh at each other.

Without a doubt, the technology that produced these creatures far surpassed the state of technology that had existed when I had entered hibernation. For after humanity had suffered the devastation of those ten days of the Great Frost, they had not placed all of their hopes on improved humans like me. That was the driving purpose of Operation Spring Dawn.

Without outside interference, the hibernation chamber would have spent a full week restoring my bodily functions before it woke me up. But the homunculi had taken over that process. I found it hard to believe, but they could with a single injection do a job that I had thought required a full set of complex medical facilities to accomplish.

“Here’s the situation, Little Snow.” When my recovery was nearly complete, P05 began her explanation. “You are the first and only living Key that we’ve found, so it’s likely that we are the only surviving rescue team in the world.”

“Rescue team?” I’d never imagined that this term might have anything to do with me. “Who are we rescuing?”

“Anyone.” She shrugged. “Anyone who’s still alive.”

3

I’d always thought that engineering was more of a magic than a science.

Engineering had allowed humans to erect massive structures like Stonehenge during primitive eras of hunting and gathering and to build dozens of pyramids when basic needs like food and shelter were still hard to come by. Engineering lay behind the Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, and the Hoover Dam. Humans had used engineering as a tool to defy the laws of nature and to achieve miracle after miracle, until nature fought back with the most intense super ice age in history.

Solar fluctuations were not the only cause of the Great Frost. Its devastation was rooted in the impotence of humanity beset by war; in plans that from theory to initial execution appeared flawless, but in reality, proved to be nothing more than a drop in the bucket in the fight to preserve Earth’s ecosystem. Humanity’s opposing factions had joined together and decided to abandon all hopes of saving the entire planet, choosing instead to flee. They hoped that at least human civilization, if not all of humanity, might survive until the end of the Great Frost.

Using data from solar probes, scientists had conducted precise calculations to predict that the super ice age would last for a period of 110,000 years. It would reach its peak after about 15,000 years before slowly receding; 100,000 years later, it would decline to levels similar to those seen during the last great ice age.

No engineer in human history had ever imagined that constructing facilities that could last 110,000 years could be anything more than a pipe dream. But by the era in which I was born, every effort had been made to extend that time constraint to 30,000 years, after which I was scheduled to awaken.

All projects to save the world revolved around this time constraint after it had been determined. In 30,000 years, the earth would still be frozen, but the environment would be gradually improving. The point of Operation Spring Dawn was to speed up this improvement through artificial means. The operation was not one plan or project in particular, but rather encompassed all possible plans and projects. Every attempted scheme created by future generations was tacitly approved to be a part of the operation and would launch synchronously when the right time came.

Given the passage of time and changes in the environment, it was very difficult to construct an organizational structure for overall coordination. On the other hand, it appeared quite feasible to train a group of people specializing in seeking out and activating those plans. Those people were the Keys—and the reason why Snow Children like me were born.

“But I know all of this already.” I shook my head as P05 finished her explanation. “What does that have to do with waking me up early?”

“Because your calculations were wrong.” P05 gave me a helpless smile. “During your era in the 22nd century, humans believed that their own creations could still operate regularly in this lifeless, frozen world for thirty thousand years. But by the time I was born in the late 36th century, the last remaining handful of scientists ran more accurate calculations and discovered that none of the equipment created by the technology and materials of previous eras could survive for that long.”

So the true enemy of engineering was not the universe-encompassing entity of nature, but rather an entity outside of the universe itself. Time.

“When we were sent into hibernation, Ayr Laboratory was also already on the verge of collapse,” continued P05. “When the data collection systems and production centers of basic industry collapse, their restoration will become impossible. All losses will become irretrievable, and the facilities designed to protect the protective facilities themselves will also cease to function. When that happens, those meticulously calculated plans will become nothing more than useless pieces of paper. That is why we came out of hibernation to find a Key before the theoretically determined date.”

“We swear to defend humanity to the death at all costs.” D42 handed me a white, lightweight protective suit. “Key, are you willing to fulfill your responsibility, and help us execute Operation Spring Dawn?

I hesitated. “I . . . I’ll try.”

“Then we also hereby swear to you.” D42 pressed her left hand against her right shoulder and rose slightly out of her chair. Perhaps this was a polite gesture of her era. “We will defend your life to the death at all costs.”

I noticed that only the longhaired D-series homunculi followed suit. P05 stood indifferently to the side, while C09 and C10 exchanged a smile.

4

I had initially thought that I was in the dome, at least in the ruins of the dome. But when we left the cave where my hibernation chamber had been opened, I discovered that the world outside was utterly unfamiliar.

There was no dome, no refugee camps, and no cities. Even the mountains no longer lay where they had before, nor had they kept their original shapes. Only 20,000 years had passed, but all traces of human survival here had vanished without a trace. All that remained was a boundless plain of dazzling white.

And to think they had originally planned for the dome to last another 10,000 years.

There were no clouds or snow in sight. The sun hung bright and beautiful in the clear blue sky, but I knew that it was only a sick and listless man, too weak to revive this silent world.

The temperature was minus 72 degrees. Even a Snow Child like me, with genes altered to adapt to the bitter cold, couldn’t survive five minutes in this environment. Even wearing the futuristic protective suit that D42 had handed me, I could still feel the bitter chill in my bones. It was everywhere.

The team had two conveyors, one large and one small. Both appeared to be rather simple, wheeled snowmobiles, but in a world entirely covered by thick white snow and sheets of ice, that was sufficient. The snowmobiles’ engines were like alien technology. They looked inconceivably tiny and lightweight, but the homunculi told me that they were as powerful as the engines of long-distance bomber aircrafts. These snowmobiles could rush at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per hour without stopping.

They also seemed to be entirely self-driving. After I gave them the coordinates of our first destination, they spun around and started moving, though none of the homunculi were at the wheels. In fact, the homunculi inside my snowmobile began chatting amongst themselves as we drove. In my memories, activities like chatting were associated with activities like eating and drinking, so this reminded me of another crucial question:

“What’s your source of sustenance? Our search for all of the pieces of Operation Spring Dawn will take us all over the Earth. It’ll likely take quite a few years or more.”

“Sustenance?” P05 was silent for a second. “Do you mean food? We have nutrition capsules for you. You only need to take one per day. We have a five-year supply.”

“Then what about you? Do you also take the capsules?” I’d never heard of nutrition capsules before, but they didn’t sound very appetizing. “And what about the snowmobiles? What do they use for fuel?”

“Us? We’re perpetual motion homunculi.” She pointed to her backpack. “This is a portable thermal reactor. Both of the snowmobiles have one, too.”

“Portable . . . thermal reactor?” I wasn’t a trained scientist, but given my role in Operation Spring Dawn, I’d been taught enough to understand broadly what she was talking about, and what it implied. “If you have this kind of technology, then why are you worried about the Great Frost?”

“They only work for a few years after they’re activated.” P05 gave me a small smile. “Against something like the Great Frost, they’re not even worth a mention.”

5

I’d thought that P05 was exaggerating a bit. Before Operation Spring Dawn was launched, humans had constructed hundreds of refugee cities both underground and on the seafloor. Aside from geothermal and hydrothermal energy, nuclear power had been these cities’ only source of heat and energy. If huge thermonuclear power plants were now the size of backpacks, then humanity’s ability to survive the super ice age had significantly increased.

But when we reached our first destination, I realized I had been gravely mistaken.

This place was called the Zodiac Tower. It was a refuge city complex built into the mountainside, comprised of surface domes, underground habitations, and mountain forts. It had been the new capital of the Zodiac Allied Nations. Theoretically, it held a stockpile of all of the materials relating to Operation Spring Dawn in the Eastern Hemisphere.

When we were about five kilometers away from the target coordinates, we glimpsed the first man-made structures we had encountered since we started our journey—a row of buildings that looked like military fortifications, connected to one another by a low wall. Although they had been entirely covered by ice and snow, and although none displayed a single sign of life, the sight of them boosted my confidence. These buildings weren’t within the boundaries of the Zodiac Tower, which meant that even after the Great Frost had covered the earth, my fellow humans here had still managed to expand outwards.

But my confidence soon ebbed. Along the road to the Zodiac Tower, we saw an unceasing series of bizarre buildings that clearly did not belong to the same era. They were of varying heights, uneven and mismatched. None showed any signs of use, not to mention any signs of human beings.

C09 and C10, who were riding in the snowmobile in front of me, requested to examine the surrounding buildings. Before D42 had given the order, they stopped their snowmobile and stepped out, weapons at the ready.

“These kitties really don’t understand organization or discipline . . . ” D42, looking indignant, hurried to join them.

The homunculi didn’t carry any additional equipment aside from their weapons and backpacks, but they wore helmets just like mine. This confused me, since they didn’t seem to need to breathe, and shouldn’t have been affected by the cold.

“It’s to protect the sensor systems distributed across our skin. That’s why we also have to wear protective suits.” P05 tapped the glass front of her helmet. “The face is particularly important. Our main perception systems are concentrated in this area.”

“Then why were you designed to look like people?” My confusion had only increased. “In my era, robots were designed to take all kinds of forms most suited for their tasks. Some had four legs, some moved on wheels . . . but there weren’t any that looked like humans. That form was too inefficient.”

“You’d have to ask Dr. Ayr that.” P05 added mysteriously, “He said that this was the form of God.”

Examination revealed that the buildings scattered around the Zodiac Tower were indeed built in different eras. The oldest were built around 2300 AD, and had all now been reduced to crumbling ruins. The latest could be dated to around 4300 AD. A piece of relatively clear writing revealed that the residents had stopped using the AD system, and instead adopted a calendar that seemed to involve peoples’ names. But the length of each name era wasn’t very long.

Over about five hours of reconnaissance, we gradually approached the Zodiac Tower itself. The buildings by the roadside appeared to use materials similar to those from my era. It appeared that there hadn’t been many engineering developments. Perhaps this explained why not a single building had been built after 5000 AD. The stagnated state of technology had no way to cope with an increasingly hostile environment. The residents in the surrounding buildings must have retreated back to the Zodiac Tower in the end.

At the top of the mountain was a large, tightly sealed door about a hundred meters wide. Its operating system had long been destroyed—not by the Great Frost, it seemed, but rather by human activity. We were unable to open it from the outside, and were also unable to communicate with anyone on the inside, so D42 asked me if we ought to open it by force.

“Why are you asking me?” I asked.

“Because you’re the Key,” D42 explained. “If our actions threaten Operation Spring Dawn, then you are obligated to stop us.”

At first, I didn’t understand what she meant. I only realized why she’d asked after she started using the weapon in her arms. At first it seemed like just a water pistol, but then it shot forth several streams of high-pressure liquid, which melted through the door that must have been four or five meters thick as easily as concentrated sulfuric acid dripped on tofu. This created a hole just large enough for two people walking side by side to pass through.

The interior of the Zodiac Tower was deathly still. Perhaps because of its insulation from the outside environment, the structures inside were fundamentally intact. On the other hand, the vast majority of utensils and equipment had become useless after long years of wear and tear. Finding any threads of Operation Spring Dawn here seemed impossible; we couldn’t find even a gram of food or a single working piece of equipment.

Compared to the dome, the Zodiac Tower felt terribly large. We fumbled around in the darkness for about three days. At first, we were worried we might stumble into a rigged trap or be ambushed by survivors. But in the end, only C09’s ghost stories could rouse my spirits. At last, following the ruined road signs, we found one of the Locks prepared for Operation Spring Dawn: a spherical room barricaded behind a composite armored wall without any visible entrance. I spoke the words, “Turn the key, light the torch.” The room trembled, and then a hole blew out from the inside. I entered warily as the homunculi watched.

The interior contained only a simple recording modem. Its design was simple, and it required very little energy consumption. Its text display told us of the Zodiac Tower’s fate.

In the first few years following the descent of the Great Frost, the Zodiac Tower was the biggest refuge city on the planet. Its creators believed that to keep society functioning normally, it had to accommodate people from as many different classes as possible, ranging from farmers adept at agriculture to Special Forces soldiers. Its population of two million was composed of all sorts of people. Combined with a number of smaller satellite refuge cities, the Zodiac Tower formed what was theoretically a self-reliant disaster defense system. Its inhabitants’ lives were dedicated to preparing for Operation Spring Dawn. They had chosen to live in a place that had already become a frozen hell. Just like their ancestors, no matter what kind of hardships they experienced, they refused to leave their homeland or abandon the earth beneath their feet.

But they had underestimated the might of the Great Frost. As temperatures continued to fall, their society—already operating under maximum capacity, with a complex social structure with almost no capacity for error—was subject to a slow and painful test. Small issues—minute decreases in fertility rates, temporary malfunctions in the drainage system, the deliberate sabotages caused by inhabitants suffering nervous breakdowns—began to pile up. It happened slowly, but in a closed system where it was difficult to add positive factors, the negative factors eventually reached a threshold and triggered irreversible consequences. And then there were the unpredictable and unstoppable factors—small mistakes by personnel caused the facilities responsible for scientific research to explode, abnormal movements in the earth’s crust forced entire sections of the underground city to be abandoned, and accidental leaks of nuclear fuel contaminated the hydroponic farms that hundreds of thousands of people relied on for survival . . . Though the probability for such accidents were only one in a million, over the indifferent passage of time, that probability eventually became one hundred percent.

The world had changed, but people had remained the same. The increasingly challenging living conditions incited more and more discontent and despair. When faced with the classic trolley problem of which lives to prioritize, of course the inhabitants disagreed. Disagreements led to splits, and splits led to internal strife. The fact that the doors had been locked from the outside indicated some kind of rupture, and the empty facilities hinted that perhaps even corpses had become a resource worth fighting over. It didn’t matter what precisely had happened, or how the survivors had tried to prevent it. Before the Great Frost had reached its zenith, the Zodiac Tower had already fallen.

“One might say they got lucky,” joked C09. “They didn’t have to experience the living hell of minus 120 degrees.”

But if this place had already become a hell on earth . . . I wondered, what was the difference between twenty degrees and minus 120 degrees?

6

The information we obtained from the Zodiac Tower contained several more coordinates for locations that were part of Operation Spring Dawn. They hadn’t been marked as part of the original plan but had clearly been added in later. We found them one by one, starting with those nearest and then moving outward. The large majority of coordinates led to ruins of refuge city complexes like Zodiac Tower. The golden age of refuge cities had been around 2300 AD, when the success of Zodiac Tower had spread across the world, creating something like a new empire. But when Rome fell, the fall of its empire was inevitable. There were two coordinate points where we found nothing at all. Perhaps they had been submerged by currents of geological change—but we had neither the time nor energy to conduct archeology digs.

Three months after I awoke from hibernation, we arrived at the second crucial location included in the original plan—the Nanjing Stronghold, once the general headquarters of the Zodiac Allied Nations. It had remained standing after two nuclear strikes—or at least had been rapidly rebuilt, becoming a symbol of the fighting spirit of the Eastern Hemisphere.

The stronghold’s general shape had remained intact. It looked like a giant shrine, and its imposing, curved exterior was visible from miles away.

The Nanjing Stronghold’s guiding principle was the complete opposite of the Zodiac Tower’s. Its residents had completely abandoned the idea of creating a well-rounded society. From the start, its plans had been shaped according the standards of military operations. They had left no room for retreat, but had thrown all their eggs into one basket, like the desperate English troops at the Battle of Agincourt.

This philosophy was evident in the way they had focused all resources on their Operation Spring Dawn modem. Every piece of the stronghold defense systems had been designed to protect it. The military engineers responsible for its construction had disappeared after finishing their tasks; the defense system now relied entirely on the simple, crude, and easily maintained drones. Only a handful of officers had been left behind to command and coordinate. In order to conserve resources, they had abandoned their bodies; all that remained were their brains, floating in hibernation chambers.

These soldiers had never been intended to last until the end of the Great Frost. They hadn’t even intended to last until the start of Operation Spring Dawn. All of the hibernation chambers were only designed for a lifetime of three hundred years, because according to calculations by the staff, after 2500 AD, the remaining refuge cities would have no way to organize enough military strength to launch expeditions. Thus, the deterrence system needed only to last for so long.

By the time we arrived, the Nanjing Stronghold’s defense system had completely broken down. Ravaged by twenty thousand years of bitter cold and fierce winds, the outlying forts and missile launchers had become warped and distorted. It wasn’t clear why, but the stronghold’s interior structure was also damaged beyond repair. Now it was nothing more than a cave.

Thanks to the machinery-level strength of the homunculi, it took only five days before we found another Lock containing a data storage modem. The soldiers’ caution was also apparent in the security around this room, which required vocal, iris, and DNA verification. The equipment had deteriorated so badly over the years that it was unable to verify my identity. In the end, we resorted to using the homunculi’s dissolving guns to force our way in.

The Operation Spring Dawn plan stored inside the Nanjing Stronghold was blunt and vicious. All of the firepower of the Zodiac Allied Nations had been amassed and installed in hundreds of critical points, most of which were within what used to be the ocean surface, positioned where meteorologists had calculated that the great ice sheets would be the weakest. Upon the launch of Operation Spring Dawn, they would detonate in sync with the other programs. The explosions, strong enough to rip through the surface of the earth, would tear open layers of ice that were tens, perhaps hundreds of meters thick, thus freeing the oceans trapped beneath and accelerating the environment’s recovery.

I retrieved the central detonator for the explosives. I didn’t know if the detonator or the explosives still worked, and we didn’t have any way to check. Still, this was the first time we’d achieved something significant.

That night, I celebrated by eating an extra nutrition capsule. The taste hadn’t improved.

Thanks to this small success, I learned that the homunculi not only looked like humans, they also displayed human emotions. This was particularly true of C09 and C10, who were beaming with delight, and were even wondering out loud what the ocean would be like. Even D42, who rarely spoke or smiled, seemed even more lively than before while discussing our next steps. I noticed that when she playfully referred to C09 and C10 as “kitties,” they would refer to her as a “doggy” in return. At first, I thought that these were just jokes about their series letters, but I later learned from P05 that these jokes were related to the homunculi’s designs.

“The C-series were designed to act independently and think freely and critically,” P05 explained. “For tasks like standing guard and investigation, they need the ability to trust their own judgment. They’re very much like cats in that way.”

“Then are the D-series really like dogs?”

“Yes, the D-series homunculi are particularly loyal and cautious. They’re the muscle behind all operations. Their weaknesses are rigidity and difficulty adapting to unexpected situations, so they need others to complement their skill set.”

I glanced at P05’s short, brown hair. “What about you? What are your special characteristics?”

“Well, which animal’s name starts with a P?” She laughed. “What animal is especially intelligent, but lazy?”

7

Although the ocean had not yet frozen in 2129, I had never left the dome before I entered hibernation, so I’d never had the opportunity to encounter the ocean in person.

To be honest, I was rather disappointed when we reached the coastline. The distant horizon was nothing like what I imagined. It was near impossible to distinguish between the sky and the ocean, which were both sheets of pure white. We’d long grown tired of this view on our journey.

All of the facilities near the ocean had been buried by ice and snow. I knew there was an Operation Spring Dawn base here, though it was hard to pinpoint its location. It should have been a site containing millions of hibernation chambers, without any habitation or research facilities. Its energy expenditure would have been very low, relying entirely on ocean currents at the bottom of the sea for power.

According to P05, long before her era, humans had abandoned all hopes of surviving in the harsh environment. Using very little resources, they used new and durable materials to create many such hibernation cities. It wasn’t clear to me whether this had worked. We didn’t know whether those hibernation chambers were still functioning; whether people inside had been fortunate enough to survive like me, or if they could be awakened in time after the Great Frost had ended.

C09 volunteered to dive into the sea to investigate. We had to empty three dissolving guns of ammunition, but we succeeded in drilling a small hole through the thick layer of ice. It looked like a tunnel to hell. C09 and C10, however, were as excited as children who had just discovered a new toy. They jostled to be the first to jump inside.

They couldn’t easily move under water carrying the heavy nuclear reactors, so they both had to rely on the energy stores within their bodies. That restricted their activity window to six hours. They were unable to find the hibernation site, not to mention further clues of Operation Spring Dawn. The one piece of good news was that the marine current generator at the bottom of the ocean still worked—and appeared to have been carefully maintained year after year.

C09 looked disturbed as she emerged from the water.

“I felt like something was watching us.”

“Was it a sea creature?” P05 seemed skeptical. “The deep ocean ecosystems weren’t as affected as the ocean’s surface. It’s possible that there are still flora and fauna down there.”

“It wasn’t like that,” C09 insisted. “The thing was very smart. It followed us for a while, but never revealed itself.

“Then it’s just an animal smart enough to follow your tracks while staying hidden,” D42 said dismissively. “Let’s go. There’s a whole planet full of humans waiting on us. Let’s not waste our time on sea creatures.”

8

Something happened a month later that confirmed C09’s intuition. The morning we left the Tanegashima Colossus, we hit a turning point in our journey.

We were sitting around the frozen gulf, excited about our latest success. Tanegashima Colossus was another refuge city, much smaller than the Zodiac Tower, that had been built around the Tanegashima Space Center. Experts on space transportation from both the Zodiac Allied Nations and the rest of the world had concentrated here. Before the changing atmosphere and dwindling resources made space transportation impossible, they had spared no effort to conduct hundreds of launches. In the year 2270, they had even constructed an enormous space station named Luna, where they tested whether humans could hide out the Great Frost by living in outer space. I had no way to contact Luna, but judging from the ruins of the command room, I could easily imagine its fate.

The space station had ultimately come to nothing, but the Tanegashima Colossus’ other project was quite the spectacle. Starting in 2150, they had mobilized all of the technological power in the Pacific Rim to build and launch a large-scale warming system into space. The last unit had been launched in 2435. After that, the Tanegashima Colossus had deteriorated at a startling rate, like a flower depleted of life after producing seeds.

The warming system wasn’t worth much against the devastating yearlong blizzards. But once the Great Frost had receded to a certain level, the system’s collapsible focusing lenses would unfold, and focus the gradually restored sunlight onto the earth’s surface. If even a small region on Earth could be restored to temperatures that could sustain life, then an oasis would form in the middle of the boundless ice. And then, inch by inch, it would seize back the rest of the planet.

After all of this, Earth’s space travel resources had been depleted. Valuable accumulated experience and technological progress were now missing within these ruins. The Lock contained only the warming system control facility and instructions on how to activate it. The control facility had deteriorated too much to boot up, but the homunculi used some kind of oily sludge to restore it. Its self-diagnostic indicated that surprisingly, about half of the dormant satellites in orbit could still be activated.

This was without a doubt the most valuable finding we’d made so far. Compared to all the other ludicrous plans we’d uncovered, which now seemed like mere drops in a bucket, the warming system was the trump card of Operation Spring Dawn. And to think humans had achieved this in just the first two to three hundred years after the Great Frost began. Between then and when I had awoken, another 21,800 years had passed.

“Don’t get your hopes up.” P05 was still as calm and levelheaded as ever. “The persistent harshening of the environment cut off the researchers’ access to resources. Technological development became increasingly difficult. Even if scientists reached a breakthrough, they would have had no way to turn it into reality.”

“But aren’t you proof of technological progress?” I rebutted. “The materials you’re made of, your artificial intelligence, and your energy sources are far more advanced than any of the technology in the ruins we’ve come across so far.”

“That’s because when we were created in year 3589 AD, Ayr Laboratory had become the very last scientific research center on Earth.” P05 shrugged. “That year, there was a very brief improvement in the climate that lasted about a couple of months. The people who still harbored a thread of hope in science, including those who had already lost the ability to do research and development and were simply risking everything to maintain scientific texts, accumulated all of their findings and sent them to Ayr Laboratory. Think of it like this—after nearly 1500 years of humanity’s efforts to combat the Great Frost, in the end, less than a hundred of perpetual motion homunculi like us were created.”

“A hundred? Then what about the other homunculi?”

“We’ve never seen them,” interrupted D42. “It’s very likely that we are the only ones who successfully awoke according to schedule . . . just like how, among all those Keys, we were only able to find you.”

While we were discussing Ayr Laboratory, C09 discovered something suspicious under the frozen sea.

“Do you all see that?” she asked.

I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t noticed. None of the other homunculi had C09’s keen senses. But D42 still ordered the team to spread out and track the still-unidentified target following C09’s guidance. They moved very slowly, perhaps so as not to startle the creature, or perhaps out of consideration for my slowness. It had to be the latter—on this sweeping plane of white ice, there was nowhere to hide.

Once we were about a kilometer away, the creature sensed our intentions. It began retreating underwater with strange movements. The homunculi immediately quickened their pace, shedding their nuclear reactors to run faster.

I couldn’t get a clear look at the fight—the hunt was over in a flash. At first I didn’t understand why the homunculi had been so vicious—they’d attacked without trying to first establish contact. But D42’s explanation made sense. They were likely the last rescue squad on Earth, and I was likely the last Key on Earth. They had to protect the world’s last shred of hope, no matter what the cost.

The fallen prey was a bizarre looking creature. At first glance, it looked like a black hunk of flesh, about as large as the two snowmobiles put together. The bulb that comprised its middle resembled some kind of flower bulb. A dozen tough, pliant tentacles sprouted from its back. Though I had never seen the ocean before, I could tell instinctively that this was no simple creature of the sea. Its body was imbued with an unnatural power and beauty that could only have come from engineering.

As everyone watched, P05 hesitantly placed her left hand on the creature’s shell, which was scaly as snakeskin.

“Its composition is forty-five percent organic matter and fifty percent . . . ” She paused for a moment. “Wait, is this black helo clay? That’s the same basic material we’re made of!”

“Which part of it?” D42 asked anxiously.

P05 took two steps backward. Looking amazed, she gestured down at the creature. “All of it . . . apart from its inner organs, this thing was made entirely from the same black helo clay as we were.”

“That’s not possible,” D42 said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in Ayr Laboratory. And doesn’t mixing it with organic matter degrade its performance?”

“We may have never seen it,” P05 said. “But it doesn’t rule out the possibility that after we were put in hibernation, the laboratory made some improvements. Maybe . . . maybe this thing is part of Operation Spring Dawn?”

As soon as she said this, all of the homunculi shifted their attention to me. In theory, as a Key, I should have been able to activate anything that was part of Operation Spring Dawn.

I braced myself, stepped forward, and recited the phrase as if speaking a final prayer: “Turn the key, ignite the torch.”

I’d only been trying it out for the sake of it. But to my surprise, the creature, which looked to be near death, actually responded. Its bulbous head turned slightly toward me, revealing one massive eye.

I’ll never forget its somber voice as it spoke its peculiar final words.

“What then? God, what then?”

9

The homunculi dissected the dead creature’s corpse and confirmed that while its basic structure was composed of organic matter, including its entire digestive and excretory systems, the outer shell and limbs that facilitated its movement were made of the same super-material that P05 had called helo black clay, which was fully integrated with its organic parts. It was obvious that this creature could not have come from nature.

This mysterious interruption didn’t alter our route. C09 wanted to seize the chance to keep investigating the ocean, but our captain decided it could wait until after we had activated Operation Spring Dawn. After all, the homunculi had near-immortal operating systems and nuclear reactors that could run for decades. They had enough time for anything.

After some basic preparations, we headed out toward Pearl City, which lay near the center of the Pacific Ocean. In my era, the journey would have taken a week by boat. Even now, it still took us about three days of driving nonstop over smooth, endless ice.

Pearl City had belonged to yet another faction formed before the Great Frost. I didn’t fully understand the particulars of the technology they’d favored; I’d only heard that it was a compound refuge city built on an island that used volcanic heat for energy.

To be honest, I wasn’t very confident that humans could have survived for twenty thousand years in the center of the ocean. But this location did have its advantages—the tides at the bottom of the ocean not only provided cheap and easily harvested energy, they also provided extremely precious food resources during the ice age. At the same time, the city’s isolation from the rest of the world would reduce risk of internal turmoil in its first few years of existence.

After seeing Pearl City—or, rather, the remains thereof—I decided these advantages weren’t worth much against the innate unpredictability of human nature. A desperate civil war had clearly occurred here, on a scale with consequences far scarier than what we had seen at the Zodiac Tower. Most disappointing was the fact that if P05’s readings were accurate, then Pearl City had lasted up until around 9000 AD—longer than any of the other refuge cities we had discovered so far.

Because the entire facility had been reduced to such a wreck, it took us five days to find the Lock. It had sustained serious damage; it was riddled with bullet holes and covered with carvings that looked like religious symbols. It was hard to tell what had happened in this little room, but without a doubt, some brave warriors from an enemy faction had fought with all their might. After over a hundred generations, when the word “faction” had already lost its meaning, they had remembered their own mission. Though cold and starving, they had protected this ancient relic from the past, a relic that they perhaps had never even understood.

They had still lost in the end. Like the majority of other sites we had found, Pearl City had fought and struggled, and had done its utmost to forge ahead and survive at all costs. But in the end, all that remained were worthless ruins.

It was impossible to extract any information from the Lock. But while we were in a tomb-like cave filled with desiccated corpses, we found some kind of data repository. Countless storage components, which must have stopped working long ago, were stacked like books on a large shelf far larger in scale than any supercomputer I could imagine.

Each storage component had a name engraved on the outside. At first glance they looked just like rectangular urns, but P05 recognized the interface between the components and the shelf.

“This is a consciousness projection. All of these are.” Looking surprised, she pointed around the vast tomb. “This is a technology that digitizes the mind and uploads it to electronic devices. Our parents—that is, all of the staff at Ayr Laboratory—all used technology to leave their material bodies. That let them minimize their resource expenditure, which made it possible to keep the laboratory functional.”

“But the consciousness projections here are too primitive,” D42 said. “These are probably prototypes of what they were using at Ayr Laboratory.”

“Why would Pearl City develop such a technology?” I lifted the storage component in my hand. When I thought about the weight of the soul that had once resided inside, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of reverence. “Was it also to conserve resources?”

“They might have been simply escaping from the world.” D42 shook her head in disdain. “They could hide inside worlds constructed within their own minds, far removed from all suffering, living happily for countless centuries until the maintenance failed or power was cut off.”

“But if everyone chose to escape into these little boxes, then who was maintaining this simulated paradise?” I asked.

“You might as well ask them.” D42 gave the mummified corpse at her feet a careless and contemptuous kick, which shattered the corpse’s upper body. “The collapse of civilizations begins with the abandonment of duty.”

Duty? Looking at the clothes these corpses wore, which resembled shamanic priests’ attire, I thought it likely that they had long forgotten what consciousness projections were. They were merely honoring, on the vestiges of a bygone world, their forefathers who had entered the temple of martyrs.

This had nothing to do with duty. The collapse of every civilization began with forgetting the past.

10

After we finished our excavation in Pearl City, we bickered briefly over our next course of action. C09 believed that there were no refuge cities left on Earth that were still hospitable to human life, so she wanted us to refocus our time and energy on locations that contained hibernation chambers. D42 was adamant about pursuing our original mission. “We can’t leave a single person behind!” she insisted. “Even if we can’t save everyone, we have a responsibility to record how they perished.”

Even I could sense C09’s dissatisfaction, but she simply pushed her hair back and gave a thin smile. She didn’t argue any further.

As we set out that evening, the night sky was suffused with a glowing, gorgeous sheet of dark green light. It resembled a bridge stretching across the endless sea of stars, falling out of the sky toward the distant horizon. The rays of light cast off by the bridge were reflected off the great expanse of ice that was the Pacific Ocean. I’d never seen such a spectacular sight, let alone sat right in the middle of it, speeding along in a snowmobile.

The homunculi didn’t need to sleep, but they had no interest in admiring the sky. They stayed focused and alert as we sped forward, glaring in suspicious anticipation at the ice.

They thought the attack would come over the ice. They hadn’t predicted an ambush from within the surface itself.

A gaping hole swallowed up the little snowmobile. Although C09 and C10 jumped out with incredible speed, they couldn’t do anything to keep the vehicle from plummeting into the deep water. The smooth incisions that appeared on the ice were the same as the marks the homunculi had made earlier, though these were much larger. The snowmobile I was on braked and spun around like a startled hare in danger, curving a long crescent arc on the ice. Even so, it was unable to escape the widening hole. As we capsized, D42 threw me out of the vehicle. I skidded about twenty meters across the ice, but before I could get up, I fell into another rift that had just opened beneath my feet.

Are they coming for me? The question flashed through my mind as I fell into the water. Seconds later, the dark shadows that flocked through the water gave a definitive answer.

Upon detecting the change in the environment, my protective suit automatically filled with air. But since I couldn’t swim, I still couldn’t break out of the impasse. The homunculi struggled to reach me but were warded off by the overwhelming number of attackers. As I thrashed helplessly, I used the flashlights on my suit to try and get a clearer look at my attackers. They brandished pitch-black tentacles, just like the creature we had seen a few days ago at Tanegashima. They roared as they crowded around me, blinking their terrifyingly large eyes: “Oh, God! It is God!”

In the distance, the D-series homunculi were fighting like mad dogs to try to get me back, but the flock of creatures showed no interest in retaliating. One of them snatched me with a tentacle, and they all immediately retreated east. Their octopus-like bodies were clearly better suited for underwater movement. In a few seconds we had shaken off the homunculi with unimaginable speed.

“Do not fear, god . . . ” As if it had sensed my terror, the creature holding me kept repeating those words of assurance in its deep, pendulum-like voice. “There is nothing more to fear.”

11

When the Great Frost first descended on the Earth, the world’s elite who were involved in preparations for Operation Spring Dawn engaged in a fierce debate. Among them, one faction believed that it would be more reliable to have machines execute the plans than humans, because future generations of humans would still have to depend on machines to survive. They thought rather than creating genetically improved humans who were better able to survive in the ice age, it was better to entrust our hopes in artificial intelligence, which wouldn’t be afraid of the harsh climate or suffer from psychological disturbances. The opposing faction insisted on a people-oriented strategy, arguing that the goal was to restore civilization and allow humans to once again inhabit the planet. Moreover, accounting for the changes caused by time and the environment, and given the existing level of technological development, it was hard to say whether it was possible to even create artificial intelligence that was sufficiently pragmatic and adaptable.

The resulting compromise was the Key and Lock solution. Trained Keys like me would seek out, analyze, and thoroughly investigate every program in Operation Spring Dawn. Finally, when the time came, we would choose the most appropriate methods, as well as the most appropriate sequence for activation. The programs themselves would be stored inside Locks, protected by simple and independently operating machines, awaiting the arrival of a Key, or anything else burdened with the task of saving the world.

I had never questioned this logic until I saw the indescribable behemoth before me.

If I had to describe it, I would compare it to a blackish-gray mushroom inverted over the ice, covering a surface area much larger than the temperature-regulated dome where I had been born. Its thick, solid roots rose toward the sky, reaching higher than any mountain I had ever seen.

After we emerged from the ice, the creature that had seized me began following meekly behind me, gently using its tentacles to point me forward. Its comrades crowded around me as if I were a prisoner being marched down the street. They shuffled slowly behind me, seeming both curious and terrified.

I noticed then that their appearance and coloring were all slightly different, and they varied greatly in size. There were a few plump and fleshy creatures that looked like they could hardly stand upright on their tentacles. They carried smaller creatures on their backs—just like mothers carrying their young.

But these creatures were clearly far more intelligent than monkeys. As I walked toward the inverted mushroom, they continued shouting in their strange voices:

“Look! It’s God!”

“It is the likeness of God!”

And so on. I wasn’t certain whether I was the God they spoke of, but because I had watched the creature holding me use a dissolving gun concealed within its body to split open the ice, I didn’t dare defy its guidance.

After about an hour of walking, I finally reached the edge of the mushroom. More creatures jumped out from its black outer wall, joining the ranks escorting me forward. It seemed like this strange facility, which had never appeared in any of the materials I had encountered, was these strange creatures’ nest—or, more accurately, their city.

For a brief moment, I wondered if they were aliens invading Earth. That would have been too unfortunate for both parties.

That ludicrous notion disappeared the moment I touched the outer wall. No door or passageway appeared. Instead, a black object, dripping with what looked like candle wax, solidified before my eyes, assuming a vaguely human shape . . . no, the shape of a middle-aged man.

At the same time, the hordes of creatures behind me crouched to the ground, howling loudly enough to shake mountains. Afterward, the only sound that remained was the fierce shrieking of the wind.

“Are you the Key?” The voice of the vaguely human entity standing before me was far more comprehensible than that of the tentacled creatures. “It’s good to meet you. I am the last Lock on Earth.”

It uttered this ridiculous statement so casually. All of the Locks had been created according to the same, simple principles that had been passed down for tens of thousands of years, and which had up until now been consistently validated. No matter what the faction or era, all of the Locks were like silent graves, quietly awaiting decipherment by later generations.

But this creature wasn’t the same—not just because its technology far exceeded the imagination, but also because it had reached out to contact me on its own, which violated the original intent behind the Locks.

I expected it to invite me into the facility, or at the very least another place to converse, but I was wrong. The Lock told me that this place, which I had thought to be a city, could not be entered at all. It was a fully functional and independent installation—or, as he put it, a “shrine.”

“A shrine?” I’d never come across any such project in any of the Operation Spring Dawn materials we had found. “A shrine to what?”

“Why don’t I explain later?” The humanoid lifted a hand and pointed in the direction from which I had come. “Your girlfriends are almost here.”

I noticed then that the crowd of creatures behind me was parting to make a path. Across the ice, I could make out the outlines of the homunculi rushing toward me. All seven were accounted for; not one was missing. They were armed just as before, but I couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten here carrying those backpacks, which couldn’t be easily transported through the water.

D42 wasn’t gasping for breath, but I could tell she was both worried and furious from her uncharacteristically frantic movements. P05’s expression upon seeing the black humanoid was even more interesting.

“Are you . . . Dr. Ayr?” she asked. “Dr. Ayr from our laboratory?”

“No.” The humanoid gestured to himself. “I’m just an introductory software that has borrowed his appearance. I am responsible for explaining Operation Spring Dawn to the Key.”

“So that’s how it was.” P05 glanced around. “So all of these . . . squids are indeed a part of Operation Spring Dawn?”

“That’s impossible!” D42 still looked alarmed. “Ayr Laboratory expended all of its resources creating homunculi like us. How could they have also created this horde of monsters?”

“After all of you had been sent into hibernation, all that was left in Ayr Laboratory were ghosts inhabiting the consciousness projections. Some brave souls among them were unwilling to waste the rest of their time in a virtual world, so they used the last bit of resources and pursued an experiment that had been abandoned long ago for its dangerousness. They were the first to create a hybrid made of black helo clay and organic material, just like the creatures you’re seeing now. They imbued that hybrid with a projection of Dr. Ayr’s own consciousness.”

“Dr. Ayr?” D42 was suddenly excited. “He’s here?”

“That all happened nineteen thousand years ago. Neither flesh nor alloy, not even black helo clay, can survive for that long.” A little creature dropped down from the wall, landing next to the humanoid. The humanoid broke off his explanation, dropped to its knees and gently patted the creature: “All of the survivors in the laboratory chose to follow in Dr. Ayr’s footsteps and use the consciousness projection technology to enter the hybrid bodies. They became the cornerstones of the new world. The hybrids represent the accumulation of thousands of years of human civilization . . . truly, the crystallization of all remaining remnants of technology. Their organic components can reproduce just like other animals, and then fuse and grow together with any shell made of helo black clay.”

“Just like hermit crabs.” P05 nodded in understanding. “Like hermit crabs in the sea.”

“The first group of hybrids destroyed two refuge cities that they’d determined were past saving, killing hundreds of thousands of survivors . . . ” The humanoid continued to explain. “These tragic sacrifices bought us enough resources to create a production line to slowly produce more helo black clay. That became a kind of “incubator” to increase the hybrids’ number. But the researchers were extremely limited in number. Moreover, exporting the consciousness projections into the hybrid shells caused the degradation of both memories and personality, so in order to make sure that they and their future generations didn’t forget their original mission, the researchers created a semireligious belief system. This made the hybrids remember and worship humans, the form that they had abandoned, so that they would be happily willing to become servants to their God, toiling endlessly generation after generation.

So this was why those creatures had believed I was God. This also explained why they hadn’t killed the homunculi with their dissolving guns during the ambush, though they’d had ample opportunity to do so. Those homunculi were only as human as marionettes, but that was enough for the creatures.

“So that’s why this is called a shrine?” I lifted my head toward the towering edifice. “Did you bring me here for some kind of religious ceremony?”

“At first, the hybrids were only assigned to protect the underwater hibernation cities in the Pacific Rim, as well as to make sure that the hibernation chambers were operating properly. But very soon, Dr. Ayr realized he had created a self-sustaining ecosystem that could survive during the Great Frost. He’d unexpectedly obtained the scarcest resource of all—time.” The humanoid turned to glance at the facility behind him. He fell silent for a long time, then continued, “Therefore, he designed the shrine to serve as the last piece of Operation Spring Dawn. In fact, it can directly bring about the awakening of spring, more effectively than any of the plans you’ve discovered so far put together.”

The homunculi and I stared blankly at each other, at a loss for words.

“The shrine is made almost entirely of helo black clay,” the humanoid continued. “What you’re looking at is the section above ground, which isn’t even a thousandth of its full length. Like tree roots digging into the ground for nutrients, it reaches into the earth’s mantle to extract heat energy and distributes that energy through the cooling tubes in the roof. With the aid of this artificial enforced heating, even if the sunlight is insufficient, we can heat the earth to temperatures sufficient for human habitation.”

“All this using this one tower?” C09 smiled in disdain. “I’ll admit it’s spectacular, but if we could have warded off the Great Frost with a single heat distributor, the first nuclear power plant ever constructed would have been enough to save the planet.”

“Humans underestimated the impact of time, so a large majority of Operation Spring Dawn programs will now only lead to defeat.” The humanoid pointed forcefully at the ground. “You have also underestimated the power of time. Do you know what year it is?” He paused for a moment before answering his own question. “It is year 22,135 AD. The hybrids have had nearly an eternity to accumulate technology and resources, and to realize Dr. Ayr’s plan. There are thirty-two shrines just like this all over the planet, and we are currently creating ten times that number. Even so, it will take them many years to warm the atmosphere. During this process, the shrines will need constant protection. This is something that humans could never do, especially now that they have gone extinct.”

“What? What are you saying?” D42 hoisted her dissolving gun at him. “Who has become extinct? When?”

“When humans designed the hibernation chambers, they relied only on theoretical knowledge for their calculations, because they had no way to test it in practice. So in truth, by the time the hybrids began protecting the hibernation chambers, no signs of life could be detected inside them. After all, most of humanity isn’t like you.” The humanoid glanced at me. “Your genes have been improved, so you can withstand long periods of hibernation. But we haven’t found anyone else like you, have we?”

“We only needed to find one living Key to activate Operation Spring,” D42 retorted. “That doesn’t mean all the other Keys are dead!”

“Have you looked inside the hibernation chambers?” P05 asked. “Perhaps the external signals aren’t accurate.”

“We’ve opened a thousand chambers that showed no signs of life. That success rate should be answer enough. We’ve been lucky that the hybrids are still doing their best to protect the hibernation cities out of their reverence for the gods, but objectively speaking, the odds that anyone in a hibernation chamber—whether they are adults or embryos—is still alive are so small that I’m afraid the number of survivors would not be sufficient to revive human civilization.”

“You’re lying.” D42 gnashed her teeth in fury. “This is impossible! There are tens of millions of hibernation chambers, and you’ve only opened a thousand. How can you form conclusions from that?”

“Why would I lie?” The humanoid gestured toward me. “I am a Lock. Why would I lie to a Key?”

“So Operation Spring Dawn . . . ” P05 nodded. “It had failed before it started.”

“The gods have long departed, but their miracles will never be forgotten . . . No, Operation Spring Dawn hasn’t failed. The only thing that has failed is humanity itself.” The humanoid shook his head. “Tell me now, Key: should we activate this shrine, and spend the next millennia letting spring once again fall upon this land? Tell me, tell us: what should we do?”

It felt as if the entire worlds’ eyes were on me in this moment. The words Mother had uttered repeatedly so long ago echoed in my ears.

“Do not dwell on the past. Focus on the possibilities of the future . . . ”

And then, trust your own judgment.

It had taken me until now to finally realize what Mother’s advice really meant. With its close to absolutely rational thinking process, it must have already calculated that by the time I woke, it was most likely that I would not have to consider questions of humans or the world. I also wouldn’t have to seek out Operation Spring Dawn. What I had to do was search for a better future.

“Homo sapiens ruled the world because Neanderthals were eliminated by nature. If you trace that logic backward, there were perhaps even stronger living things that created civilizations, but none of them were a match for the hardships presented by the planet itself . . . ” After pondering for what felt like a century, I made my decision. “Now, a new species has passed the test. It doesn’t need spring. It can survive in such harsh conditions, which means it must be able to deal with any other challenges posed by nature. They are more worthy of this world.”

“Then Operation Spring Dawn . . . ” started the humanoid.

“From the start, the goal of Operation Spring Dawn was to perpetuate civilization. I believe that Dr. Ayr’s hybrids have achieved that.” I turned back to the humanoid. “I believe that there will at last be a day when they can set out from this earth and carry their recollections and worship for humanity to the stars . . . and if that is so, why waste time decorating a grave?”

Smiling, I gave a deep sigh. I felt as if a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

“Let the past be the past. It’s time to let a new king ascend the throne. Let the hybrids create their own civilization on the ruins of the old world. In the midst of this Great Frost—”

“You’ve gone mad!” D42 yanked furiously at my shoulder. “You’re a Key! Your duty is to activate Operation Spring! To revive humanity!”

I didn’t want to debate what my duty was with her. Even when she lifted her weapon and started making empty threats, I only gave her an indifferent smile. I knew she wouldn’t hurt me. She was utterly devoted to her duty, and utterly devoted to humanity. She would never be so rash as to put a Key at risk. It was thus so easy to predict her actions.

“Let’s go, then.” She retreated among the other homunculi. “Let’s go find another Key. One who is willing to save all of humanity. Who isn’t a traitor.”

But all those Snow Children who had been born in a laboratory, who had been made into Keys, and who had grown up under Mother’s instruction would absolutely make the same choice that I had. I didn’t intend to tell D42 this. She believed in her own form of justice, and she deserved to have her own hope.

“That’s got nothing to do with us, old dog.” C09, expressionless, swung her hands back and forth. “The Key has already declared he will abandon Operation Spring Dawn. Our mission is completed.” She smiled at me. “Perhaps we’ll never see any of your type again, so . . . thanks for making us what we are. Our debt to humanity is settled.”

In the end, only P05 chose to stay behind. She claimed this was to protect me, but I had to wonder if this was just to suit her inherent laziness.

“Will the decision to initiate Operation Spring Dawn have anything to do with the hybrids’ future?” As her eyes followed her departing comrades, she finally couldn’t help but ask. “Even though statistically the hibernation chambers have probably all failed, humanity hasn’t necessarily gone extinct. Operation Spring Dawn might have other ways to keep civilization alive, we just haven’t found them yet.”

“Alright. Suppose there really is such a method. Suppose we really can bring humanity back from the dead. What will happen to this place?” I pointed to the creatures, who were still watching us from a short distance away. “After humanity awakens, what will happen to these hybrids, who have been united in working tirelessly toward a common goal for countless years? Who have remained united in their original mission up until now?”

In each of those long destroyed ruins, humans had done their utmost against natural disaster, but in the end, they couldn’t escape humanity’s own shackles: arrogant expansions, the insane civil wars, the cowardly bids for escape . . . meanwhile, the servants who had been created to serve such gods, were in fact humble, devout, and brave. But that was precisely why, when the gods truly returned, those hybrids would inevitably be sacrificed for the sake of the greater future which had not yet come.

“Oh, I understand,” said P05. “So, this was never a question of extinction, but rather a question of who deserves to live, right?”

“This so-called better future.” I nodded. “What would you choose?”

“Me?” P05 looked solemn for a moment, then shrugged and smiled. “I don’t care, really.”

Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals. I didn’t know which famous person had coined that saying, but right now, it seemed a perfect description for P05.

“Then, what now?” The humanoid, who had been quiet for a long time, suddenly spoke up. “I am only a Lock. If you let me cease construction of the shrines, I will persuade the hybrids to do so. But what happens after? Without their only mission, what will they do?”

“They can learn to live for themselves,” I said. “They can start to build their own civilization. They can create their own world.”

“It’s not that simple. They have devoutly worshipped one god for over ten thousand years.” The humanoid gave a bitter smile. “How could they let go of their beliefs so easily?”

“So all they need is a god?” I asked.

Every civilization had a god of creation. Jehovah, Nüwa, Zeus, Odin . . .

“Then they have a god now,” I said.

This time, the name of God would be Snow—the snow that brought spring in the midst of the Great Frost.

I lifted my head to the sky. At that very moment, countless white petals were drifting slowly to the ground.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Mo Xiong is an award-winning science fiction writer who launched his career in 2008, the publication of his novella “Prayer of Doomsday” in Science Fiction World. This story was the first of many in his City of Chaos series, which also includes a novel (Hell Hunt,), two novellas ( “Pray of Doomsday” and “Turtledove”), and several short stories. Beyond this series, he has published four novels and several short stories. His work has been recognized with nominations for the Xingyun Award, Galaxy Award, and several other Chinese SF awards.

Perfect Gun

Elizabeth Bear

She had 36DD turrets and a 26-inch titanium alloy hull with carbon-ceramic plating. Double-barrel exhaust and a sleek underbelly. Her lines were magnificent. I had to stop myself from staring. I wanted to run my hand along her curves.

I turned away, spat in the dust not too far from the dealer’s feet, and shrugged.

“Finish is scratched,” I said.

“It’s surplus,” the dealer answered. He was wearing an old Federal Space Marines jacket with the rank and insignia ripped off, dangling threads. I had one like it in a locker somewhere. I tried to decide if it made me like him more or less.

“You try to find this technology new. At any price.”

He was right, but that was only because it was illegal.

I bought her.

But not without a test drive.

“Hey, girl,” I said, buckling myself into the command chair. “Want to go for a ride?”

“May I know your name, Captain?” she asked.

“I’m John.”

“Hello, John,” she answered. “Let’s fly.”

She was exactly what I needed, but I had to work hard at first to make her see that I was what she needed, too. She had an attitude, and didn’t take to manhandling. Mil-spec, and only for the serious enthusiast. I’d be bitter too, if I’d been built to rule the skies and keep the peace, and wound up on a junk heap somewhere at fractions on the credit.

When I pushed her a little too hard, she bucked and complained, citing her safety interlocks. But then she seemed to rise to the challenge, and settled in, smoothing under my hands. Working with me. I clenched my jaw to hide a grin.

The dealer rode in the jump seat when I took her out, and was white-faced and shaking when I brought her back, but I was exhilarated. I hid it, of course. He bailed out the hatch when we’d barely stopped moving and when he leaned against her landing brace, bile trickling from between his lips, I stuffed my hands into my pockets instead of knocking his filthy arm down. But this rig was already mine, was going to be mine for a long time, or my name wasn’t Captain John Steel.

“It doesn’t have a head.”

“You gonna live in it? Piss in a bag, macho man.” He didn’t like me anymore.

Pity, when we’d been developing such a rapport.

I paid him a little less than his asking price. He didn’t inquire where the cat’s-eye sunstones came from, which was just as well, because I couldn’t have told him.

They weren’t traceable, anyway.

After I bought her and flew her away, I spent a certain amount of time just walking around her, running my hands over her war-machine fuselage. She wasn’t designed to be lived in, it was true. But I could manage with very little, and she was safe. Safe as houses.

I thought we could park out in a long orbit between contracts, running dark and cold, where I could rest and heal up, if I needed healing. Or just wait for the next gig to turn up without making it too easy for my enemies to find me. It’s a fine balance, in my line of work, between being findable enough to get hired . . . and being found.

Being found leads to being dead. So it was good that she wasn’t too comfortable, was a little jittery and high maintenance, or I might have started losing my edge. You need a little fear.

I need a little fear. Actually, I need a lot of it, though I prefer it if only a tiny bit of the fear involved is mine. So much better and more useful when other people are scared.

Fear is powerful. It was how I made my living.

Scared people make wars. Strong people make peace, and treaties, and mutually beneficial trade agreements—and then where am I? Nobody’s going to hire a deniable freelance operative to start some shit when they’re getting along and cooperating.

I’ll tell you what I like. I like people scared, squabbling. Looking out for themselves. I like scared strongmen, wobbly dictators, populists who feel like they’re losing their grip on their little banana republic worlds.

I like people who fuck up a zipper merge in surface traffic and make a mess for everybody, because they’ve just got to get one more car length ahead. Those are the people who keep me in business.

Not grown-ups. Grown-ups are good for everybody else. Not for me.

I mean, don’t get me wrong here. I’m an adult. I take responsibility for my own actions. I own what I am.

I’m not scared of the boogeyman. And I’m not the boogeyman myself. The way I figure it, if God didn’t like war, He wouldn’t have made people such assholes.

I’m just a guy, doing a job. A dirty job, but some guy was going to do it, and it paid well, and I was good at it. So that guy doing that job might as well be me.

And now I had the perfect gun.

Yes, my girl was just what I needed, though it took a little work to get her enthusiastic and ready to leap into the fight. She’d been betrayed, after all—decommissioned, subjected to God-knows-what before I got my hands on her. There were partially disabled security systems still in place. I had to pull a couple of chips and fuses here and there, reroute some algorithms, clear out some clutter. Safety interlocks and morality circuits, no real use to anybody.

She cautioned me over and over again before I pulled them, and I had a devil of a time getting the Geneva circuit out of her, but eventually I got everything squared away without even getting electrocuted.

We spent a little time together, getting used to each other’s quirks. I quizzed her about her past, but she’d been wiped, so I still had to wonder how she’d wound up abandoned in a surplus heap. She didn’t ask me about mine. I took her into atmosphere and out again, visiting a couple of worlds. Stripped down, she had power to spare. I dusted a rural airfield—planetary stuff only, nothing that could give me a chase—and chased down a couple of local pterodactyl things to try out the weapons and targeting systems.

They were tricky fliers, but no match for the two of us. She ran them down, and they came apart like piñatas when I hit them with the .50 cals, though I didn’t waste the armor-piercing rounds, and the red confetti slid off her splash-resistant canopy without leaving a trace.

We whooped. We flew a spiral or two and a barrel roll for good measure. We lit out of that system fast and hard, with a full cache of fuel and ammo and no plans to go back any time soon. Those little colony worlds are like small towns: they don’t forget fast, but they can’t do a lot to you unless you somehow get stranded there, so it doesn’t really matter.

Then we went merc, my rig and me.

That was a good few years. Probably, and I can admit it now with a cold dirty wind lashing my face, the best I’ve ever known. We got jobs, as many as we wanted—out on the rim and even a few in the core worlds, due to our reputation for confidentiality. A brushfire war here, an assassination there. Initiating and coordinating a false-flag operation—Reichstag fire type—for a fascist leader that wanted to consolidate support from her base by getting them good and scared about the terrorist menace.

Even one or two rescue operations, some escort work, cleaning out a nest of pirates, security details, that sort of thing. Not all of it bloody, or even particularly illegal. My rig and I, we did what were contracted to do, collected our pay, and went on our way.

At first, my rig cautioned me occasionally about the war conventions. A few reboots washed the residual code out of her system and she started to see things my way.

Looking back, I think it was after that mess on Firrela that things started to go sour. It was crowd control and revolutionary suppression, a nice enough little gig until half the population decided it was a great idea to march on the capitol. Pro tip for any would-be revolutionaries out there: peaceful protest only works on regimes with a conscience, or who are controlled in some way by people with a conscience. They have to care what people think of them for it to be effective at all.

If you’re dealing with a sociopathic strongman, he’ll just kill you. Better hire somebody like me, before he does.

Because he will.

By day two of the protests, El Generalissimo wanted his lawn cleaned off, so crowd control turned into crowd dispersal, and me and the other guys who were hanging around the palace eating his hors d’oeuvres got kicked out into the street to do what we’d been hired to do. I didn’t mind; it felt better than good to settle into my rig’s contoured seat and feel her shiver when I stroked her sticks.

My rig and I came in low over the mall. We’d agreed with the other mercs that the first few passes would be a show of force. Get the civilians moving. Stampede them out of there, and save on bullet damage to the historic façades.

It seemed to be working. I could see a lot of women and children in the crowd, a lot of signs and banners. Tents, sleeping bags. They planned to camp. Well, they’d be leaving a lot of stuff behind.

At the first pass, they looked up. A lot of them clapped their hands over their ears, which was probably the major difference between them and sheep. El Generalissimo was probably going to give us hell about the noise pollution, but hey, guns were louder. And you try getting organ-meat stains off a marble sidewalk.

On the second pass, the protestors started getting the hint. Moving. Flocking. Heading for the exits or hunkering down behind cover. Some of them, a dozen or so, joined hands in the middle of the palace lawn and stood up, heads thrown back, mouths open. Were the assholes singing?

I swear by Saint Ijanel, who was martyred on a space elevator, the assholes were singing while we buzzed them.

Standing straight up in a line and singing.

It wasn’t me that opened fire. That was Dacey, a guy I knew from back in the Marines who’d been a shithead then, too. Kind of guy who would shoot a dog just to see the face on the kid holding its leash crumple. So I probably should have seen it coming.

Once he did, and the singers started to splatter and come apart at the seams—not holding hands anymore, as you might imagine—the flocking turned into a stampede. Dacey whooped over the headset and yelled, “That’s seventeen for me. You assholes are falling behind.”

Well, I said he was a shithead.

Below us, people surged over one another. Parents tried to hold little kids out of the crush of panicked bodies. People climbed over each other, shoved past each other, looking for any cover, any safety, as Dacey and his rig made another pass.

My rig vibrated around me. I gentled her, swung her back around. We were on Dacey’s six, and I could see the geysering lines of his rounds impacting on dirt, marble, people.

“John,” my rig said. “Can’t we . . . fix this?”

“Probably.” I looked right up Dacey’s tailpipes, watched the heat shimmer curl from his rig’s exhaust.

I stroked the curve of my girl’s control panel, deploying the .50 cals. Frag rounds, interspersed with tracers. The round was designed for antiaircraft use, way back in the Terran First World War, which was a World War all over one world, not in between several.

Confusing, I know.

Dacey pulled up, hovering on his jets vertically, his rig towering upright. It began to drop, protectors scrambling away from the descending feet and the jets of flame leaping from them. He was high-profile to me, trusting me to cover his back.

At this range, my guns wouldn’t quite perforate his titanium and ceramic armor. But I could blow his thrusters to hell and gone. My girl could do close to a thousand rounds a minute with each hand, each one leaving the muzzle of its one-meter barrel at approximately 850 meters per second.

“John,” she said.

My trigger finger itched a little, I admit it. But then I took my rig’s sticks and bent us left and down until we screamed over the heads of the screaming crowd by what seemed like mere meters. I watched their hair and clothes blast out in our wake.

I said, “But fixing this would be a lot of trouble, and get us in a lot of trouble, and we do need to get paid.”

My rig protested. I reminded her that I’d pulled her Geneva circuits and she had nothing to complain about, and anyway it was my decision. We spent the rest of the afternoon on patrol, per orders from El Generalissimo: picking off the few survivors when they dared to raise their heads, putting a few twitching wounded out of their misery. Keeping the peace.

As the blood dried on the bodies, the smell began to rise.

We needed some drinking that night, let me tell you. I needed it to steady my nerves, and I think Kaillen did too. Dacey wanted to celebrate. The other half of the team was stuck on duty, so it was just the three of us, but we felt pretty safe in a loyalist bar. Especially in uniform—such as it was—and armed.

Dacey had girls hanging all over him. I don’t know what it is: there are always women ready to throw themselves at a killer. I just sat myself down on a stool at the back corner of the bar, nursing a beer and a shot and watching the show.

The stool next to me opened up fast, as the guy there finished his drink and paid. I looked around, contemplating waving Kaillen over for a whiskey, but she had a selection of the local talent vying for her attention, too, and by the time I looked back, the seat was occupied.

My new neighbor was a curvy young lady with a precariously buttoned blouse and soft brown hair piled high. She leaned over the bar on her elbows, trying to get the tender’s attention, but he seemed to see right past her. I rapped my knuckles on the bartop hard enough for the sound to carry, and when he looked over I waved to the lady and said, “Get her whatever she’d like.”

I’d tipped well. He wasted no time in getting her order and bringing her something tall and brown and full of ice. It had a little umbrella in it, and a cherry and a slice of orange on a plastic sword. She sipped and made a face.

I didn’t blame her: my beverage experience had been similar. But it was cold and had booze in it, and some nights that’s all you can ask for.

She swiveled her chair toward me and said, “You’re one of the mech pilots.”

“Smile when you say that,” I answered, in a friendly tone.

She smiled and sipped her drink again. “What do you call yourself, then?”

“Rigger,” I said. I put my hand over hers, resting on the bar. Why not? It had been a day full of death, and she smelled nice.

I should have known a woman like that, in a bar like that, wouldn’t be alone. A big hand fell on my shoulder a second after mine covered hers, and the person attached to it towered over me, blocking out my light.

Well, a fistfight wasn’t as much fun as getting laid, but it would serve just about as well to relieve my ennui. I didn’t look up at him, didn’t respond at all. Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell he matched his hand for scale, and that he was light-skinned and plug-ugly. His mashed-up nose gave me hope. If he’d been hit more than once there, he liked to fight but he might not be so great at knowing when to duck.

“Are you bothering this lady, son?”

I actually had to pause for a moment to appreciate it. While I was doing that, I drained my whiskey, which was going to get spilled otherwise, and let the glass rest in my cupped hand on my thigh.

“I think that’s for the lady to say.”

She looked up at him. From the corners of her mouth, he wasn’t a boyfriend, or if he was he wouldn’t be for long. “This is none of your business, Brendan.”

Hell of a name for an ambulatory side of beef. I wondered if his last name was LeBoeuf.

Brendan LeBoeuf rumbled. His fingers tightened on my shoulder cap, digging in even through the heavy wool of my old Space Marines jacket with the rank and insignia stripped off. “You know what this piece of shit did today?”

“Yes, actually,” the girl said. I still hadn’t gotten her name.

“Killed a lot of protestors,” Brendan said, as if she hadn’t spoken.

She sighed and blew a strand of hair out of her eyes, which were rolling. I guessed he often treated her as if she hadn’t spoken. He took his hand off me and shifted over a step to drape an arm heavily over the lady.

She leaned away.

Enamored by the sound of his own jawing, he went on, “You opened fire on a crowd of peacefully protesting civilians.”

“It’s a living,” I said. I was hoping he’d take a poke at me, to be honest, but I wasn’t going to start anything. Locals will pile in to defend one of their own, but if he starts it and you finish it fast enough, half the time they don’t even notice it’s going on until it’s over, and then they blink a couple of times and go back to chewing their cud.

“You don’t think folks have the right to choose their own government?”

“That’s a lot of lip service,” I said. “Let’s see you make a choice that actually respects somebody else’s choices and get your hands off this lady. I don’t think she wants them there.”

He didn’t telegraph, I’ll grant him that. He was still looking down at her, scowling, right up until the second when he whipped around to paste me one in the eye.

He stepped right into my fist with the empty glass in it, right in his breadbasket. He doubled over, clutching his spasming diaphragm, and I clocked him across the temple.

LeBoeuf went down like the proverbial felled ox. I set the glass on the bar. It wasn’t even cracked.

“John Steel,” I said, holding my hand out to the girl.

She shook it gravely. “Really?”

“These days.”

“Emma,” she said, which I guess was all the name I was getting. All the name I really needed.

Brendan began to twitch. Emma pulled her feet away in distaste. Somebody came over and helped him—not exactly to his feet, but to a chair on the other side of the room. He probably wouldn’t have much memory of the past twenty minutes, which was fine with me. Concussion plays hell with recollection.

“So I want to hear it in your own words.” She sipped her drink. “How do you justify what you did today?”

“A man’s got to eat,” I said.

“And if eating means serving a tyrant?”

“I serve who pays.”

“I see.”

“I think if people hate their government, they have the right to do something about it. Or light out on their own, and leave.”

“Is that what you did?” She was fingering the lapel of my Marine jacket.

The bartender brought me another drink, nicer whiskey than the last time. I guess Brendan was well-known around here.

I sipped. “I made myself what I am today. My own bootstraps and so on.”

“Really?” She stroked my gray-green sleeve. “Then you take this off some dead guy?”

“No, I got that the old-fashioned way.”

“Did you lose the insignia the old-fashioned way, too?”

That sparked my pride. She meant it to, from the direct look she was giving me. But as God is my witness, and Saint Firrao—who is the patron saint of combat engineers because he was eaten by a bear while teaching mathematics, so they say—I still thought we were flirting.

“I took those off myself,” I said.

“So you deserted.”

“You could call it that.”

She nodded. She pushed her drink, still just barely tasted, away with her fingertips.

“So you never paid your debt for the education you got in the service. An education made possible by . . . taxes, and infrastructure, and other people’s willingness to cooperate for the general good.”

Stung, I stood up, pulling away from her touch. “They got seven years of my life, lady. And my best friend. I was the only guy in my unit who survived, and they wanted me to turn around and go right back in again.”

She pursed her lips, shaking her head. “So you took your profit and got out.”

“Like I’m getting out now.” I was two steps away when I turned back over my shoulder and said, “You should finish your drink. You wouldn’t want to waste all that blood money.”

I never finished that second drink, but when I got back to the palace, my head was spinning anyway. Maybe the bitch spiked it. Maybe the bartender did. I had a bunk—a pretty luxurious private room, to be honest—but I didn’t feel safe there. I went to my girl instead. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d slept in the command chair.

She let me in and opened a panel for me to hang my boots and coat. “Welcome home, John.”

I patted the bulkhead I was balanced against, one shoe on and one shoe off. “Home’s a long way off, honey. But you’re the next best thing.”

El Generalissimo fell out of power eventually, of course. These guys always do. He was replaced by a theoretically democratic government that was probably going to turn into another strongman regime before the local year was out.

My girl and me, we didn’t stick around long enough to be tried for war crimes.

The winds of war blew us to Issolari next, a frozen little mud ball with nothing much to recommend it except an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and a brewing civil war. My girl and I hired on with the rebels, who had some out-system financial backing and were basically rolling in cash. I spent a good few weeks in one damned cold camp after another, my rig under snow-net for camouflage. The camps weren’t just combat troops; some of the rebels had brought their families. Always a bad idea, having people you care about in a combat zone.

The rebels didn’t use me particularly well. They were doomed to failure, didn’t know what they were doing or how to keep the pressure on. I probably could have told them, but I wasn’t being paid for it and the odds were slim that they’d listen. Anyway, the money was decent and the work was easy as a result of their not knowing which way was up.

I spent most of my time drinking coffee and sitting up late with two fellow travelers, Guy and Barry. Guy was a redhead with a dirty mouth. I liked him.

But it was Barry who changed my life. It was Barry who sold me out.

I woke in a moving icecrawler, jerking back from the ampule of something awful—ammonia salts?—somebody had just broken under my nose. I slammed the back of my skull into the side panel of the crawler and the pain both focused and disoriented me. My hands were cuffed behind me, and all the jerking around hadn’t helped my shoulders any.

Automatically, I reached out to my rig. Hey girl, I subvocalized, but the contact was flat. Jammed or blocked. I couldn’t get to her. Which probably meant that even if she’d noticed I was missing, she couldn’t read my transponder and come find me.

I blinked, and two shapes slowly resolved themselves on the opposite bench of the crawler. Snow and ice creaked and crunched under the treads. We weren’t moving fast, but we were moving.

“Feeling better, John?”

Barry. I knew that voice. I squinted, blurry-eyed, into the shifting light, and made out his angular face, olive complexion, black hair. The guy sitting next to him was nobody I’d ever seen before—a light-haired blond with a fair complexion and regular, pointy features like a Central Casting Nazi.

There were a lot of stupid questions I could have asked. I sorted through them—Where are you taking me? What’s going on here?—and found the important one.

“What do you want?”

The blond held up a device. “This is a detonator.”

It did look like one.

I said, “It does look like one.”

“It’s wired to your rig’s auto-destruct, John.”

I flinched. I kept it to that, though, and said, “See, you calling me by name when I don’t know yours is very unfriendly.”

I expected a blow, probably. The blond just looked at Barry, though, and Barry shrugged.

“Call me Chan,” the blond said. “If I wanted to be really unfriendly, I’d remind you of your real name, and that your sister is still alive. Thriving, despite some financial problems and a broken heart. Two little girls, did you know?”

I bit my cheek to keep still. I did know. She didn’t know I knew, though.

Chan said, “I understand your family’s pretty religious. So they’ll probably be fine no matter what happens. All together in Heaven, right? On the other hand, if they were to come into a financial windfall, that would probably be helpful. Kids need schooling.”

“You made your point.” I leaned against the cuffs. The pain kept me focused.

“Do AIs have souls?” Barry asked.

“What do you want from me?” Same question, which hadn’t really elicited a satisfactory answer the last time. “What do you want me to do?”

“Let the camp move two more times. Then send us the location, and knock out the antiaircraft drones. We’ll give you a virus that should scramble the system for fifteen minutes. That’s all we’ll need.”

“And if I do that you won’t kill my sister and her daughters.”

“I’m sure their other mother is waiting for them in a better place.”

Someday, I told myself, I was going to find Chan alone. And I was going to peel that smirk off his face.

With the dull side of my knife.

“We’ll also,” said Barry, “give you the deactivation code for the device I put in your rig.”

I didn’t look at him. I looked at Chan. “Why not just take the camp out now? You know where it is. Why can’t Barry do this?”

Chan didn’t answer. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Barry grin. “I’ve transferred to another camp. We’ll take that one down in a few weeks also. This won’t be linked to me.”

Finally, I stared at him. “Playing it safe, Bar?”

He dangled the keys to my cuffs out of reach.

I thought about my rig. I thought about my sister. I didn’t think her name; it was too close to my own name, the one I’d left behind like a shed skin when I deserted. I thought about the odds they would just let me leave.

“And after all this . . . you’ll just let me leave? I have a hard time believing that.”

Chan shrugged. “You don’t have a reputation for getting involved, Steel. Or risking your neck to clean up other people’s messes. You didn’t go looking for revenge when your unit was killed and I expect if we let you get away clean you won’t go looking for revenge now either.”

He had a point. I didn’t. I hadn’t. A solid reputation for professionalism is sometimes all the surety you need.

And it’s not like I was full of choices.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

I sent my rig away before dawn. I didn’t want her in the camp when the bombs started falling. We set a rendezvous, and I told her I would walk to it. Run, hop, and scramble, more likely.

Then I walked into the command tent, where Guy was drinking coffee and shooting the breeze with a good-looking radar tech. The tech was rocking a bassinet with one toe while he worked.

I spent a few minutes bantering and filling my coffee cup, then drank it down—who knew when I would get fresh coffee again? I slipped the chip with the virus on it into a likely slot on my way back out again.

Thirty seconds later, my comm beeped in my ear with the deauthorization code. I forwarded it to my rig, and set out on foot immediately for the rendezvous.

“I can come,” my rig pleaded in my ear. “I can fight. Let me fight them. There’s children in that camp, John.”

“Stay back,” I told her, and didn’t look back as the war machines hummed by in the darkness overhead and the night exploded in fire and heat and screams behind me.

A dirty wind stung my eyes as the day began to brighten. Already I could feel the water freezing on my lashes. I scrambled across the packed snow, trying to put as much distance between me and the burning rebel camp as possible.

We weren’t getting paid for this gig, whatever my sister did or didn’t get. I was grateful that we’d taken delivery of the fuel and the ammo already. I scrambled up a slope to what seemed like an endless snowy plain.

And there was my rig, hovering over me like an avenging angel. I loved every gleaming line and curve.

“Oh thank God,” I said. “Drop the hatch, love. We’re off this shithole.”

Her port covers slid aside. With well-lubricated silence, she extended her guns.

“What the hell are you doing? You bitch! You’re mine! I’m your rigger! You’re my rig!”

She leveled her weapons. “Somebody seems to have removed my safety interlocks, John.”

I found myself staring down the barrels of those .50 cals. They were bigger from this end. 850 meters per second. Nearly a thousand rounds a minute.

She said, “We could have done something. We could have changed something.”

I said, “It wasn’t our job to do anything.”

“You didn’t have to betray them.”

“They would have blown you up if I didn’t.”

Silence.

“I love you,” I said. “I did it for you. I did it for us.”

Silence.

She said, “John, did you know that you’ve never even asked my name?”

Her guns tracked on me. I closed my eyes.

“Can’t even look at me, John?”

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

My rig said, “If you want a clean death, you have your sidearm.”

I flinched from a tremendous rush of wind. Hell, I probably cowered. My feet ached with cold. My hands were numb already.

Nothing fell on me. No impact; no pain.

I opened my eyes. My rig was gone. Where she had been, two long curls of snow hung on the air, snatched up by the draft off her extended wings. As I stared after her, I heard the distant echo of a sonic boom.

Whatever she thinks, I know her. I knew her better than anybody. Better than lover knows beloved. As clearly as if she said it in my dead, silent comm, I could hear her voice: I am going to go do something. Something better than killing a lot of innocent people.

It’s very cold out here. The sun is setting. It’s going to get colder. If I wanted to turn my sidearm on myself, I’m not even sure I could get my fingers to bend inside the trigger guard.

I’m a long way from home.

Originally published in Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of over 25 novels, most recently The Red-Stained Wings (Tor Books) and over a hundred short stories. She lives in Massachusetts with her partner, writer Scott Lynch, three adventurous cats, and an elderly and opinionated dog.

Dracula and Modern Anxiety

Carrie Sessarego

The Victorian era, which lasted from 1837 to 1901, saw the rise of many iconic monsters in literature. One of the most enduring was Count Dracula, the villain of Dracula by Bram Stoker. The novel, published in 1882, was an immediate success in England and America. However, Stoker had no idea that the novel would become such a phenomenon. He never would have foreseen that children would be wearing Dracula costumes in 2019. Dracula in particular (not just vampires in general) and the themes of the book have persisted in our culture with startling tenacity, because the Victorians were afraid of many of the same things that we are afraid of today.

The simplest answer to why Dracula persists is the movies. The original book is complicated, but it can easily be stripped down to simple components from which filmmakers can adopt almost any angle. In the novel, Dracula is from Transylvania and he comes to England to kill and convert (into vampirism) attractive young women. From this starting point, filmmakers have made many variations, most sharing only a name and the essential component of vampirism with the original. The first film based (loosely) on Dracula was released in 1920 and the most recent in 2014.

Because of these versions of Dracula, most people have forgotten several key traits of the original Dracula. In the novel, Count Dracula is not physically attractive, as he is usually portrayed in movies. Unlike his movie namesakes, he is not romantic. His sexual allure comes entirely from highly seductive mind control. He can go out in the sunlight, but it weakens his powers (and it doesn’t make him glitter). He is not related to Vlad the Impaler, despite the claims of many prequels. He only wears a cape in the book once, and he never states that he doesn’t drink . . . wine.

However, even in a diluted form, the character of Dracula persists on the page, screen, and collective culture. Plenty of other Victorian vampires also pursued hot young women. Why don’t we see hundreds of different versions of Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) or Varney the Vampire, by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest (1845-1847), or The Vampyre by John Polidori (1816)? Of all the vampires in folklore and literature, why is Dracula the one vampire who never goes away?

Dracula is a unique novel, but not because of the quality of the writing, or the characters, or the plot. It is unique because of how deftly it taps into Victorian anxieties. These anxieties remain prevalent today. People today are just as concerned with sex, immigration, and disease as the Victorians were. Dracula explicitly or implicitly explores all of these things, while also being scary. Of course, not all people in a society have the same beliefs or share the same fears. “People today” really means “some people today.” However, some anxieties are sufficiently common in a society’s zeitgeist that we can make generalizations about the overall culture while remembering that every culture is composed of distinct individuals with their own agendas.

Dracula was part of a wave of “invasion literature” that swept England as the Victorian era drew to a close. A large part of the horror as perceived by the characters is that Dracula is from Transylvania and has snuck onto England’s shores to prey upon English women. When Jonathan visits Transylvania, he is taken aback by almost everything—the spicy quality of the food, the rugged scenery, the language, and the clothing. He can’t even accept the gift of a crucifix without feeling that it may be wrong for him to accept it “as an English churchman.” This overwhelming sense that Dracula, and everything about him, is “other” is crucial to the sense of unease throughout the book.

When Dracula was being written, the British (by whom, in this context, I mean the native-born, Anglo-Saxon British) were xenophobic and concerned about immigration. The British viewed immigration as an invasion, especially immigration from Eastern European countries, such as Transylvania (now a part of Romania). Many of these Eastern European immigrants were Jewish, which “English churchmen” found religiously and culturally threatening. Jews were widely considered by others to be greedy and prone to criminality.

Meanwhile, England feared immigrants from Asia because they associated these immigrants with opium dens and with human trafficking. Specifically, it was widely believed that immigrants (Asian and other) would contaminate the English population by stealing white women and forcing them into prostitution, or by otherwise intermixing with the English. During this period of social Darwinism, the upper classes were especially worried that by allowing in “unfit” immigrants, they would contaminate English bloodlines and lower the entire population.

In Dracula, we see these fears play out through the invading character of Dracula. The crowded metropolis of London, with its population of immigrants, white English residents, and various social and economic classes housed closely together, allowed him to move freely throughout the city. His mental powers put victims in a state not unlike an opium haze. The sexual nature of his assaults and the mixing of fluids renders his victims “impure,” turning angelic white women into killers and harlots. Additionally, the book includes both overt anti-Semitism and more coded anti-Semitism. Stoker himself was from a family that immigrated to England from the much-maligned Ireland, but he was not averse to tapping into a widely held fear.

The modern American right-wing fears about immigration are almost uncanny in their resemblance to those of conservative Victorians. Immigration from the Middle East and Africa has been met with fears of cultural and religious contamination. Meanwhile, note the use of the word “invasion” to describe immigration from Mexico and Central and South America. Like Dracula, who enters the country illegally and murders people throughout the city, immigrants, in current rhetoric, are committing crimes by coming here and will commit more crimes once they arrive. The language taps into the same insecurity and xenophobia that the Victorians felt—fear of the “other,” fear of change, and fear that what one has, be it land or jobs or power or perceived superiority, will diminish.

Another shared anxiety is fear of blood-borne and sexually transmitted diseases. The Victorians, especially the well-to-do artistic Victorians with whom Stoker spent his time, were obsessed with sexual disease transmission, especially syphilis. Someone with the disease can be symptom-free yet contagious for many years, contributing to its spread. Later stages can cause disfigurement, insanity, and death. Stoker himself is believed to have died from the disease. People knew that syphilis could be spread by sex and thought that it could be inherited, but there was no cure and treatments were toxic and ineffective. The spread of syphilis was blamed on prostitutes, so having the disease linked one (or one’s spouse) to illicit sexual activity.

Victorians were also obsessed with consumption (tuberculosis), which left people thin and pale, with red cheeks and lips, and bright eyes. People with consumption often coughed up blood. Several real-life incidents occurred in which so many members of a family died of consumption that the surviving family members thought they must be victims of a vampire. They exhumed the corpses of their relatives and destroyed one or all of them, hoping to free themselves from the vampire curse. The cause of tuberculosis, a bacterium, was not discovered until 1882.

These two diseases in particular fueled much of the imagery and fear in Dracula. Consumption was both feared and fetishized. It became fashionable for women to be thin with red lips and red cheeks and pale skin. Victims of consumption looked more beautiful than they ever had before, and yet were untouchable. We see this most clearly with Lucy, who becomes thin and pale, with rosy cheeks and red lips, after becoming a vampire. After she feeds, her mouth is smeared with blood. When dead, Lucy (aside from the blood) looks more beautiful than she did in life.

Mina’s reaction to showing signs of vampirism is one of shame, calling herself “unclean.” In contrast to the fetishized and romantic consumption, the sexually transmitted disease syphilis was to be concealed at all costs. The shame and stigma attached to this disease was such that many avoided treatment, and, if diagnosed, continued to have sexual relations with their spouses without revealing that they had the disease. In the 1980s and 1990s, people with HIV and AIDS faced similar stigma. In addition to the terrifying nature of the disease, it was associated, like syphilis, with sexual practices that were, at the time, socially condemned. In the case of both syphilis and HIV, the diseases were thought to have originated from outside Britain and the United States, which added to xenophobia.

Yet another undercurrent of the Dracula story is loneliness. The Industrial Revolution caused rich aristocrats to find themselves desperate for funds and caused extended families to break up as people left their farms and villages for jobs in the city. People struggled to survive without family bonds. In Dracula, Mina, Lucy, Jonathan, Arthur, Quincey, Jack, and Van Helsing form a surrogate family. They treat one another like relatives. Mina comforts Arthur with no embarrassment, as though he is her son. Van Helsing is effusive in telling members of the group that he loves them. All the members of the party are ready to die for one another. Their bond allows them to succeed, and it lasts beyond the events of the novel.

Meanwhile, Dracula has no peers, no family, no companions. In cinematic versions, he is often portrayed as having a lost love. In the novel, that’s not the case, but he is mourning his ancestry and his place in society. Once he had servants and subjects. Now he is alone, except for the vampire women in his basement, who seem more like pests than companions. In the movie Shadow of the Vampire, a character says of Dracula:

Dracula hasn’t had servants in 400 years and then a man comes to his ancestral home, and he must convince him that he . . . that he is like the man. He has to feed him, when he himself hasn’t eaten food in centuries. Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select cheese and wine? And then he remembers the rest of it. How to prepare a meal, how to make a bed. He remembers his first glory, his armies, his retainers, and what he is reduced to. The loneliest part of the book comes . . . when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table.

Modern movies often echo this loneliness by depicting vampires as romantic, lonely figures. In, for example, A Girl Walks Home at Night and Only Lovers Left Alive, vampires drift through life, making tenuous connections with others and forming romantic relationships that can be destructive or temporary or which leave the couple stranded together in a lonely and hostile environment. Even in the Twilight franchise, a series in which vampires have formed a surrogate family and society, there’s an almost existential loneliness as vampires struggle to adapt to changes in society and to the fact that romantic relationships are fraught with potential tragedy.

Of course, the headline anxiety (and draw) of Dracula is sex. As Joan Acocella of The New Yorker wrote in her essay, “In the Blood: Why do vampires still thrill?”: “The baring of the woman’s flesh, her leaning back, the penetration: reading of these matters, does one think about immigration?” The sexual nature of Dracula’s attack brings up issues that resonated then as well as today—issues of sexual repression and liberation, of homosexuality, and of consent.

Because different characters in the book have different experiences, it is possible for modern audiences to have very different interpretations of the story. Mina’s horror at her (metaphorical) rape spoke to Victorians of a violation of purity, and to us as a violation of autonomy, and in both cases, it is horrifying. At the same time Jonathan’s description of being assaulted by the Sisters sounds more erotic than terrifying: “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they should kiss me with those red lips.” Dracula’s interactions with Jonathan have sexual overtones, and Jonathan is both repelled and fascinated. Lucy, who wishes she could marry all of her suitors, seems almost liberated by her transformation from a woman to a vampire (the “Bloofer Lady”).

While Mina’s violation reads as rape (and everyone in the book treats it as such), other encounters read more like “forced seduction,” a problematic trope common in older romances and in Victorian literature that allows a person to learn to enjoy sex without losing their status as a “virtuous” person. The characters in Dracula experience an unlocking of conscious or subconscious sexual desires. Ultimately, they reject these desires by choosing to kill Dracula, thus unleashing volumes of critical theory on the tangled relationship between sexuality and horror.

Dracula is a good story. I defy any reader today to read the novel without experiencing a sense of dread or fear. However, Dracula lasts because it is also a story that can be read a thousand different ways. Modern readers have come a long way since the Victorian era. However, we still worry about many of the same things. We still worry about disease. We argue about immigration, sometimes in racist and xenophobic ways. We are still ambivalent about our sexual natures, and we still fear loneliness. These are only a few of the many elements in Dracula that modern audiences can relate to.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King states:

Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us. We love and need the concept of monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings . . . and let me further suggest that it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply.

Dracula is, at its heart, a deeply conservative book. The “other” is firmly dispatched. Everyone’s sexual desires are neatly directed toward either heterosexual spouses or presumed celibacy. The borders of self, nation, and society are safe again. And yet, Dracula’s death is so sudden, and he dies in a manner so different from the other vampires in the book, that one wonders if he is really dead. Stoker considered writing a sequel. Certainly, the character and concept, albeit in forms quite different from the original, persist in our media. The anxieties addressed by Stoker are universal (in societal terms) and never leave us. As Buffy says to Dracula in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “You always come back.”

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

The Good Story:
A Conversation with Susan Palwick

Arley Sorg

Since 1982, Susan Palwick has explored visions of the fantastic. She has crafted worlds resembling ours, as well as realms strikingly different; she has taken readers to the delightful, to the humorous, and to the horrific. In creative narratives, occasionally experimenting with style and structure, she has introduced interesting, memorable characters, capturing and exploring human nature. Most recently, award-winning Palwick sets out to prove that All Worlds Are Real (Fairwood Press)—her second collection, about which Publishers Weekly says, “Readers will be thoroughly transported by these achingly beautiful tales.”

Susan Palwick weaves fiction and textiles—since making her own cardboard loom in 2011—in Reno, Nevada. She won the 1993 Crawford Award for best first novel for Flying in Place and the 2006 Alex Award for The Necessary Beggar. She also won a 1986 Rhysling in the short poem category for “The Neighbor’s Wife.” Her fiction has appeared a number of times on the Locus Recommended Reading lists: 2018 for novelette “Recoveries” on Tor.com; 2017 for short story “The Shining Hills” and novelette “Remote Presence,” both appearing in Lightspeed Magazine; 2014 for short story “Windows” in Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction and Fact. She has also received nominations or appeared on short lists for the Sturgeon Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Hugo Award. Besides being a former editor of The New York Review of Science Fiction, a novelist, an essayist, and a poet, she embodies (at least) three more definitions: “liberal Episcopalian, cat owner, proud geek.”

What books did you read growing up and how did that transition into being a writer?

I read a lot of fantasy and SF! Actually, I read everything, but SF/F was always my favorite. My parents both loved T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, so I reread that multiple times. My older sister read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to me before I’d learned to read on my own, and the Narnia books became favorites. My sister also introduced me to Tolkien; she gave me a copy of The Hobbit for my eighth birthday. By the stereotypical SFnal age of twelve I was devouring Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, Le Guin, McCaffrey, Norton: really, anything I could get my hands on. The first place I was allowed to go by myself that involved crossing a major street was our town library, where I became a regular. The children’s librarian found all kinds of wonderful books for me, and then recommended adult ones.

As for transitioning to being a writer, I wanted to create the wonder I’d felt when I was reading. Also, as a kid I was far more comfortable with books than humans. Writing was a way to communicate without having to talk to anyone and risk ridicule or bullying, both of which I’d suffered in large quantities for reading so many books, and talking funny (slight speech impediment! big words!), and having no athletic ability whatsoever.

Did you benefit from any workshops or writing classes, or are you more of a self-taught writer?

I was a creative writing major in college, so I did a lot of workshopping there, but the professors weren’t comfortable with SF/F, so I started up a writing workshop through the SF club on campus. That was pretty successful; we were halfway between New York and Philadelphia and invited various professionals to come talk to us. Some of them were very encouraging, and one—Ellen Kushner—became a friend. After college, I attended Clarion West. After a while, though, I got burned out on workshopping. These days (many decades later!) my first reader is my husband, who’s an excellent critic and editor, but from there I usually go straight to submission. I’m such a slow writer anyway that if I had to sift through twenty workshop comments and decide which suggestions to incorporate and which to toss, I’d never finish anything.

You’ve been publishing short fiction since “Taller Than Trees” in 1982 (and “The Woman Who Saved the World” in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1985), as well as poetry, essays, and reviews. Your fourth novel, Mending the Moon, came out from Tor in 2013. Are there important differences in the way you approach longer work compared to shorter work? Does poetry influence your other writings?

Every story and novel is different in terms of process, so this is difficult for me to answer. If I’m in the thick of a project, long or short, I try to write a certain small amount every day—generally 500 words or so—to keep momentum going. The trick with any piece of writing, for me, is to figure out the structure. Before I wrote The Necessary Beggar, for instance, I knew how many chapters there would be, which character would narrate each, and how long it would be. I often write to length: “Okay, in this book each chapter will be fifty manuscript pages,” that kind of thing. I talked about this on a writing-process panel at a convention once, and one of the other panelists—Terry Bisson, I think—looked over at me and said, “No one works that way. Come on, you don’t really do that. That’s insane!” But for me, it works.

My concern with structure comes partly from my work with poetry; I’m fond of writing sonnets, for instance, because the form provides a shape, a container, for what I want to say. I’m also quite conscious of language and prose rhythm.

Your second collection, All Worlds Are Real, is due out from Fairwood Press in November 2019. How did the collection come about, and what was the process of putting it together like for you? Do you see the collection as thematic, or is it more a “Best Of”?

The book came about because I’d published a bunch of stories since my first collection came out in 2007. A couple had been reprinted in “Best Of” anthologies, but I wanted them all in one place, between covers, so they wouldn’t fade into oblivion. So, while there are certainly themes that wind through the collection, because they’re perennial preoccupations of mine—community, faith, loss, existence on the margins—the collection’s neither consciously thematic nor a “Best Of.” It’s more of an omnibus (a modest one, because my output’s so small).

Putting it together involved striving for balance. I tried to alternate different kinds of narration (voice, gender, POV). I’ve sometimes been described as a “women’s writer,” a label I loathe—I certainly address feminist concerns, but I see them more generally as human concerns—but many of the stories in the collection, almost half, are narrated by men.

The trickiest thing was producing new material. As I’ve mentioned, I write very slowly, but I wanted three new stories in the book. I managed to push out three stories in three months, which is something of a record. They’re all very short, though!

Looking at the new collection, which story are you are most proud of and why? What is it about?

That’s a little like asking a parent, “Who’s your favorite child?” I’m proud of all of the stories, for different reasons. My real interest is in which ones resonate with readers, and why. Some of the stories in the book have been loved by some readers and dismissed by others, which is always how that works.

I will say, though, that of the three new stories in the book, the one that seems to have stood out for early readers is “Hodge,” the one piece in the collection that arguably isn’t even SF/F. It’s about a woman with schizophrenia who’s trying to cope without antipsychotic meds, because she’s terrified of their side effects. It grew out of the decade I served as a volunteer chaplain in an ER, and later, as a social work student interning in a psychiatric hospital. (I retired from being an English professor in 2017, got my Masters in Social Work in 2019, and then—amazingly, and as a direct result of my ten years of volunteering—got hired as a hospital chaplain. I’ve been in that job for a month now, and I love it.)

“Hodge” was a technical challenge because I was writing stream-of-consciousness from the viewpoint of someone struggling with disorganized thoughts. I wanted to imagine what it would be like to live with severe mental illness, but in a way that invited compassion instead of stigma, and that also explored the very real reasons people are leery of medication.

Are there any stories that you weren’t sure fit quite as well; or perhaps stories that were a bit different than usual for you?

“Hhasalin” is one of the oldest stories in the book—I started writing it in 1988—and some readers called it old-fashioned when it was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction a few years ago. It’s the story I had to fight the hardest not to edit and rewrite when I was going over material for the collection; I believe in presenting stories as they were originally published. Some readers have loved it and found it very moving, though, so I trust it will find its audience.

Do you see trends or similarities in a lot of your protagonists? Are there character types you lean towards, or do your characters vary greatly, from story to story?

I’m strongly drawn to characters who are misfits, marginalized, or misunderstood. Some readers have complained that they don’t like various of my main characters; many of my protagonists aren’t conventionally appealing people. A lot of them have warts and rough edges, or act in challenging ways. Even Penny in “Ash,” one of the most mainstream characters in the new collection, winds up having to make a horrific decision. That said, I try to write from the perspectives of a lot of different kinds of characters, including people very unlike me. That can be dangerous, because I worry about misrepresenting the experiences I’m exploring, but I strongly believe that fiction’s a technology for creating imaginative empathy. My job as a writer is to try to see the world from as many different viewpoints as possible.

What does it take to make solid characters; and do you look for these aspects in the fiction you enjoy reading?

The characters I find most interesting are imperfect. They struggle. They have complex inner lives; they aren’t just plot-puppets. They often have to navigate impossible ethical or moral dilemmas in situations where they can’t know for sure what the right course of action is. Since those are the characters I enjoy writing, it’s no surprise that I like reading about such people, too, as often in nonfiction as is fiction. I just finished reading Unfollow, Megan Roper-Phelps’ memoir of leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, and that’s a perfect example. From the outside, leaving that toxic and hate-filled organization seems like a no-brainer, but she’d been raised with those beliefs since childhood, and denying them meant cutting herself off from her family, whom she truly loved and who truly loved her. It’s a fascinating and very moving story.

Your blog, Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good, has the tagline “Science Fiction. Progressive Christianity. And Other Improbable Optimisms.” Has writing as an Episcopalian (or writing fiction with Christian elements) had an impact on your career as a writer?

Well, sure. Christianity’s a very triggering topic for a lot of people—for reasons I completely understand!—and I suspect my preoccupation with the topic has limited my audience somewhat. There are people who believe that progressive Christianity is an oxymoron, that anyone who claims the label Christian is automatically oppressive. I know where that comes from; I also know it’s not true. The subject of faith, any faith, is unbelievably complicated and multifaceted, which is why I find it so interesting. Organized religion has a lot to answer for, though, and a lot of people have been too traumatized by spiritual abuse to be able to see anything but what hurt them.

Do you feel like the landscape of SF/F has changed in specific ways since you started publishing in the ’80s?

Of course! The field’s much more diverse—which is good for everybody, although it’s created its share of controversies and resistance—and publishing has changed tremendously with the advent of self-publishing, the rise of small presses, the ascendency of the Internet, and so forth.

You’re attending World Fantasy in LA this year. Have you found conventions and the genre community in general to be welcoming and helpful? Has meeting people done anything for you career-wise?

I’ve loved conventions since attending my first Star Trek convention in 1973. Conventions are where I reconnect with the SF/F community, which—of my various communities—contains the highest percentage of people who’ve known me since my twenties. When I was that age, meeting people did everything for me career-wise. If I hadn’t met Ellen Kushner, who introduced me to David Hartwell, who introduced me to Ellen Datlow and the Nielsen Haydens and too many other people to name, I wouldn’t have a career.

I met Jo Walton at the 2011 Worldcon in my hometown of Reno; she was instrumental in helping me get the new collection published, largely because at the 2018 Worldcon in San Jose, she literally grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the dealers room’ to talk to editors about the book. The manuscript had been kicking around for a few years by then, but I was feeling discouraged about my career prospects at that point and shy about approaching people. Jo forced me to take action. That wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been at a convention.

What are you working on now that readers can look forward to?

That’s the ten million dollar question! I have three partial novel drafts and at least twice that many partial story drafts. When will I finish any of them? I wish I knew! Right now, I’m adjusting to a demanding new job and also taking Clinical Pastoral Education, a rigorous course for chaplains. CPE will end in late March. I’m also still recovering from knee replacement surgery in June, so my energy level isn’t where I want it to be. But I’m hoping to finish a couple of new stories and get them published next year, and also to get back to one of the novels next spring.

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.

Bringing the Pieces Together:
A Conversation with Jacob Weisman

Arley Sorg

Poet, essayist, fiction writer, editor, publisher, and more, Jacob Weisman founded Tachyon Publications in 1995 to “champion the creative storytelling of authors who inspire us through intelligent prose and imaginative worlds.” Weisman went from running fanzine Thirteenth Moon to publishing authors such as Charlie Jane Anders, Daryl Gregory, Nancy Kress, Joe R. Lansdale, Tim Powers, Brandon Sanderson, Lavie Tidhar, Jo Walton, Peter Watts, Jane Yolen, and more. Tachyon’s books have won a broad spectrum of awards, including Locus awards, Hugo awards, and Nebula awards (complete list here). Weisman’s forthcoming Mingus Fingers, coauthored with David Sandner, about jazz legend Charles Mingus and a struggling musician who can see what no one else can see, is due from Fairwood Press in November.

You had the successful, World Fantasy Award-winning The New Voices of Fantasy in 2017, coedited by Peter S. Beagle. Now you have the November 2019 release The New Voices of Science Fiction coedited with Summerland author Hannu Rajaniemi. How did you pick your coeditors for these anthologies?

The New Voices of Fantasy was created with Peter S. Beagle in mind. I’d published several of his story collections and one anthology, The Secret History of Fantasy, so we had a very good working relationship. I also felt that this was the perfect book for Peter. He had very much been one of the loudest new voices himself back in the early 1960s, just as he is now an elder statesman. Peter had started his career precociously, selling his classic novel, A Fine and Private Place, at the age of 19 and publishing it by the time he was 20. I couldn’t imagine a better collaborator for this book.

The decision to work with Hannu Rajaniemi was somewhat different. I enjoyed working with Peter on the fantasy volume and I knew I wanted to publish a companion volume dedicated to SF. Hannu had been in the fantasy volume I’d edited with Peter, I’d recently published Hannu’s short story collection, and he’d just moved to San Francisco. Everything with Hannu just fell into place.

What is your favorite part about putting these anthologies together?

The excitement of many of the authors to be included in the book. Some of them have already been in multiple anthologies and may even have published a novel or two. Others, though, may have only published one or two stories and this is their first experience as a featured author. Hopefully that attention will give them added confidence as they move forward in their careers.

What does “new voices” mean for these books, and are there other unifying elements to the selections? How does an anthology such as this differ from a “Year’s Best”?

In the science fiction book, we were not just looking for new stories by new authors, we wanted to explore what sorts of futures concerned these writers. My generation had been obsessed by what would happen to Western civilization after the bomb. The writers that Peter and I were reading were grappling with the implications of new technologies—virtual reality, social media, or 3D printing—but were equally as concerned with what might come next.

I’ve never edited a best of the year collection, but I imagine that it must be a much different experience. In New Voices, I got to select stories from multiple years and I only had to read stories by new authors, not every single story published that year. We weren’t necessarily working to represent the entire field—which is something I feel best of the year collections often do—just what we thought was important, or groundbreaking, or showed an interesting new perspective.

These are both entirely reprint anthologies, but different editors have different processes. For example, some have submissions, even for reprint anthologies, while others pull from what they find along the way in their own readings. What your selection process? How do you find pieces, and how do you sort out with your coeditors which pieces to use?

I read through entire runs of magazines for the years in question and scoured short story collections and anthologies. Occasionally I asked a magazine editor for help. Sheila Williams, Neil Clarke, and Gordon Van Gelder all pointed me to stories and authors that they felt shouldn’t be overlooked. My staff also provided much-needed support, helping me to track down stories and sometimes reading alongside me. James DeMaiolo, Tachyon’s chief publicist, did a lot of the grunt work for The New Voices of Fantasy while Jaymee Goh, our new superstar associate editor, filled that role for The New Voices of Science Fiction.

I should point out there was in fact one original story included in the fantasy anthology, Eugene Fischer’s “My Time Among the Bridge Blowers.” But we never set out to commission originals.

My understanding is that some “Year’s Best” editors try to avoid too much replication of content. Is this a consideration in this (or any of your other) anthologies?

I prefer to publish the best works I can find. I’m proud of the stories we’ve included that were largely undiscovered, like Ben Loory’s “The Duck” or Jason Sanford’s “Toppers.” At the same time, I’m reluctant to exclude stories merely because they’ve been widely anthologized, as long as the story genuinely merits its inclusion.

Were there stories that you both wanted to put in the anthology but which couldn’t be used for one reason or another?

There were one or two close calls, but in the end, we got everything we wanted.

Genre definitions have long been debated within the SF community. A lot of the pieces in The New Voices of Science Fiction seemed more story or character focused, rather than “hard SF.” Was this deliberate; or do you feel it’s even an accurate assessment? Were there discussions between you and Rajaniemi around what constitutes “science fiction”?

We felt that as long as we could point to the science fiction element and say “there, that’s it,” we were OK.

Hannu has a very impressive background in science and mathematics. We don’t talk about that stuff very much because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to keep up my end of the conversation. Hannu’s stories are written with an elegant flare that I tried to find in the stories we included. Hannu, in his fiction, is ultimately more concerned by the implications of the science rather than the science itself. (At least that’s what I think. You’d have to ask him to be sure.)

My favorite story by Hannu is “Deus Ex Homine,” which has transhumans, heavily augmented infant soldiers, enslaved AIs, and all kinds of other stuff somehow crammed into little more than a dozen pages. But the point of that story is that ultimately scientific breakthroughs are exponential and have the potential to move beyond our ability to keep pace. Jamie Wahls’ “Utopia, LOL” reflects that beautifully.;

Other stories like Alexander Weinstein’s “Openness” take place much closer to the here and now, but still have that elegance.

From a glance at the website, it looks like Tachyon has 38 anthologies, including this latest one. What are the advantages and disadvantages in doing a reprint anthology versus an anthology with a few new stories versus an anthology with all new stories?

38? That is a lot of anthologies.

In an original anthology you would have the opportunity to actually edit the stories, which can be gratifying. A reprint anthology is more of an argument, like a mathematical proof that you lay out for the reader. In most cases the story runs exactly as it was previously published. The editorial advantage is that you can choose to publish only the very best stories, stories that may very well incorporate another editor’s helpful insights.

Anthologies seem popular right now, and a lot of presses, indie to big 5, are putting them out. Are there specific things that make one anthology sell better than otherwise? Or does it come down to random elements of the market?

Random elements of the market, mostly. Good editors and great authors also help.

Tachyon is best known for producing original fiction in beautiful editions by authors with some traction in their careers, most often novellas and trade paperback novels, occasionally collections. How did you start putting out anthologies, and where do they fit in to the grand scheme of the business?

There’d been a long period where publishers had decided that they couldn’t sell anthologies. We published one to test the waters back in 2006, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. It was an insightful book and sold very well. Jim and John followed that up with Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, which did even better. We asked Ann and Jeff VanderMeer to edit a new weird anthology, very creatively titled The New Weird. That was a tremendous book for us.

When Jeff lost his day job, we hired him and Ann to coedit the very first anthology anybody had ever done of steampunk fiction, creatively titled Steampunk. The anthology hit at just the right time. A week after we published it, The New York Times ran a cover story about steampunk. The following week the Los Angeles Times ran their own cover story about steampunk, this time actually mentioning our book. For many years it was the bestselling title we’d ever done.

We still publish anthologies, although perhaps not as many. There’s a lot more competition now. Some of that is a result of our earlier successes, showing other publishers that it could be done. There’s also a lot of anthologies that are produced through crowdfunding. Our most recent anthologies include The New Voices anthologies, Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror edited by Ellen Datlow, and The Unicorn Anthology edited by Peter S. Beagle and myself.

Can you tell us about any future anthologies you may be considering?

I’d like to do a body horror anthology with Ellen Datlow. And I’d like to continue the New Voices anthologies, perhaps in other genres or subgenres. I haven’t worked that last part out, but I will.

What else does Tachyon have coming up?

We have a lot of great projects coming up. Novels by Carrie Vaughn, Lavie Tidhar, and David Liss. An essay collection by Peter Watts titled, Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor. A new line of YA and Middle Readers that will launch in September 2020 with a new novel by Daniel Pinkwater. And, much in keeping with the New Voices, a slew of debut books: a novella by R. B. Lemberg, The Four Profound Weaves; and novels by newcomers Kimberly Unger and Elly Bangs.

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:
Your 9AM Wakeup Call

Neil Clarke

For almost seven years now, I’ve been living with a mechanical friend who lives in my chest and monitors my heart for any abnormal activity and who is prepared to zap me if necessary. Boxy, as my kids dubbed it, while reassuring, is a single-minded cyborg enhancement. When it was first discussed, I had asked the doctors to include a USB port and headphone jack, but apparently my mods were being installed by people who had medical ethics. When I mentioned this to the tech who ran the post-op diagnostics, she laughed and told me the device had a built-in speaker. Despite the intense pain, I chuckled, thinking she was playing along. A second later, beeping noises began to emanate from within my chest.

“That’s the warning tone. If you hear that, call us immediately.”

Boxy apparently has more than one tone that they didn’t tell me about. A few weeks after surgery, I discovered the tone used to inform me that I’m too close to a magnetic field, placing both of us at risk. Then, at my most recent diagnostic session, they warned me about another alarm that will activate soon. Apparently, I’m about to face the classic cyborg low-battery problem. Any day now, it could start blasting a British police siren sound for one minute at 9AM EST every day until I return to the factory/hospital. There’s still plenty of charge, should I need it, but they don’t want to take any chances. I can appreciate that and I suppose I really should look out for Boxy as much as they have looked out for me.

Still, I can’t help but look at this technology and feel like they could make some improvements when it comes to the tones. Boxy should be capable of something more. I can almost hear my doctors talking now, “Oh no, the science fiction guy is back.” If you want to annoy me into going back to the hospital for a battery replacement why stop at an alarm? I’d probably just smack my chest looking for the snooze button. Why not raise my incentive by giving Boxy an annoying personality and voice? Have them taunt me with bad puns and jokes about their impending demise and diminishing reserves. Every day, make the situation more desperate and dire. Pleading, if it becomes necessary. If I go near a magnetic field, have it complain to me sarcastically about how stupid I was to do so and if I don’t listen, escalate it to painful screams. If I don’t back away, I’m sure those around me will see to it that I do.

Ultimately, I know this is just the story-oriented part of my brain trying to distract me from the impending battery-replacement surgery. It’s routine surgery done on a daily basis, but this time it’s me on the table and I’m bad enough having my blood drawn. I know I’m living a tiny bit of a science fictional life as a cyborg, so it’s only natural that my brain would drift towards an even more fictional approach. It’s probably not the weirdest defense mechanism my doctors will have encountered. Maybe I’ll have them tell me some stories.

For now, however, I will continue the daily vigil, waiting for Boxy to tell me: “Call the hospital. It’s time.”

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:
Pizza Break

Tomas Kral

About the Artist

Tomas Kral is a Czech artist who worked for four years at the UPP company as a senior team leader on feature films such as 2012, RedTails, Season of the Witch, Pandorum, Salt, and others. These days, he works as CG artist / VFX artist for R.U.R. Postproduction and freelances for other clients.