Monster

Naomi Kritzer

No one at the Guiyang airport speaks English. I have the UTranslator app on my phone, and before I left my colleague Jeanine said that it had worked fine for her. But she’d also said she’d never had trouble finding an English speaker in China. And her trips were to Shanghai and Beijing.

“I’m going to the Guizhou province,” I’d said.

“Where?” she said, pulling out her phone to look up a map.

“Like the Oklahoma of China,” I said. Southern-ish, rural, inland, poor. Not where the foreign tourists usually go.

At the baggage claim, there’s a yellow lab sniffing bags, trotting happily back and forth along the conveyer belt as it snakes into the airport. The dog looks deeply pleased with his work, and I am startled to see him sit down on the belt next to a suitcase, which is the standard signal dogs give when they’re flagging something. I look around, wondering if I’m about to see an arrest. No one seems perturbed. Also, no one claims the bag; a short time later it winds past me and I see that its wheels are wrapped and it has no handle. The suitcase is a decoy, riding the belt endlessly to give the dog something to react to on days with no would-be smugglers. I wonder what they put inside it.

My suitcase elicits no response from the dog. I’m irrationally relieved.

In Guiyang, the responses from the UTranslator app get me a lot of very confused looks unless I keep it to single-word requests. “Bathroom?” gets me pointed in the right direction. “Newspaper?” gets me to a newsstand. Of course, all the papers for sale are in Chinese and I can’t tell which are going to be filled with news from Beijing and Shanghai and which might have local stories. I buy two papers anyway.

“Where can I hire a car to take me to Danzhai?” is not a successful sort of query but “taxi?” eventually gets me to the right spot. It takes time to make it clear that I really do want to go all the way to Danzhai (it’s two-and-a-half hours away), but we finally set off.

I didn’t sleep well on the plane, and I very much want to sleep in the car, but I’m too keyed up. I stare out at the wide smooth highway that tunnels straight through the hills and bridges the valleys, trying to catch glimpses of China beyond the guardrails, barely absorbing anything.

All I want from the newspapers is the answer to one question: have there been any more bodies? I hover my phone over the characters, slowly parsing out headlines about trade agreements, a train accident, a pair of extremely old identical twins who are celebrating their birthday.

“Why are you going to Guizhou?” Jeanine had asked.

“Because no one I know has ever been there,” I said. This was a lie. I’m here to find Andrew.

I met Andrew my sophomore year of high school.

I was a nerd, which back in the 1980s was the actual opposite of cool (as opposed to now, when it’s simply another variety of it). I spent middle school being bullied for my preference for books over people and sweatpants over jeans. Any time I stopped for a drink from the water fountain, my classmates would yank my pants down; the school administrators all insisted that if I just ignored them instead of crying, this would stop. When I started high school, I caved and started wearing blue jeans, even though I hated the way the waistband dug into my sides when I sat.

Freshman year of high school, I spent my lunch periods eating with a few girls I called my friends, who’d more-or-less tolerated me in middle school. Sometimes we hung out on weekends at the mall, where the other girls would coo over “adorable” clothing and I’d self-consciously stroke the scratchy fabric and pretend I wished my mother would give me a clothing allowance instead of just buying me the same L.L.Bean turtlenecks again and again because she knew they had soft tags and I’d wear them.

Andrew was in both my chemistry class and my precalculus class, and he noticed that I spent a big part of the day reading books under my desk. He started asking me each morning what I’d brought to read. Initially I wasn’t sure whether his curious tone was the fake-curious voice other kids sometimes used right before they turned into complete assholes. After multiple classes passed and he didn’t snatch my books away to wipe a booger on them or anything like that, I started feeling a bit less wary. My books were all science fiction, and all came from my neighborhood library, which mostly meant Isaac Asimov, Piers Anthony, and all the older Anne McCaffrey.

“You should read this,” Andrew said one day, and handed me a paperback. “It’s mine. Don’t crack the spine. You’ll like it.”

It was a copy of Neuromancer by William Gibson. The next day, I sat with him at lunch.

Danzhai Wanda Tourist Village is possibly the strangest place I’ve ever been.

Everything around me looks quaint and old, but in fact it was built from scratch just a few years ago to showcase local ethnic cultures and attract tourists to the area. Local people are employed to wear traditional costumes, walk the street playing traditional instruments, make and sell traditional crafts. It reminds me of a Renaissance festival.

Many of the women in traditional clothing are wearing silver hats with delicately formed butterflies on the top and a jingly fringe right above their eyes. Other women wear their long hair scraped up high into something almost like a bouffant, but with silver ornaments and oversized flowers pinned in. They wear beautifully embroidered jackets and skirts, and silver belts, and large silver necklaces that look like someone cut a circle and hammered the silver out into a crescent. Everything jingles as they move. I wonder if the metal jewelry is heavy, if the clothing is uncomfortable, how much is prescribed, and how much is left up to them.

The men and women minding the shops are mostly wearing more ordinary clothes, although a few have the hairstyle with a smaller ornament pinned in. I can’t tell whether the tourists shopping in the stores are from other parts of China, or just other parts of Guizhou.

UTranslate doesn’t work any better here than at the airport. Fortunately, the hotel has a sign in English over the door telling me it’s a hotel, and “Room?” is easy enough to understand.

I know I’m not going to find Andrew today. It’s going to take time. Today my job is to check into the hotel, not nap, and adjust to the time change. This would all be easier if I’d arrived in early evening rather than midmorning. I resolutely leave my suitcase on the bed instead of lying down myself and go back outside.

At the end of the street there’s a public square, and three young women have set up a table with carved drinking horns and little bowls of what I’m pretty sure is a potent alcoholic beverage. Two have the silver hats; the third has the hair ornaments. They are beckoning visitors over and feeding people the drink out of the horns. I am quickly jostled up to the front, where one of the women smiles and sings a song as she pours the drink into my mouth.

You could poison a lot of people this way I think as I swallow obediently and then wonder what sort of person I am to even think such a thing. The alcohol is strong, and I hope it’s not rude if I stop drinking. The ladies don’t stop smiling when I pull my head back, so if I’m being rude, they’re too polite to mention it.

I like meeting new people, one of the affirmations they made me repeat back when I went to therapy years ago, pops into my head. “Xie xie,” I say, the one word of Chinese I know: thank you.

“Thank you,” I said to Andrew when I gave him back the book. “It was great.” I’d brought along one of my own paperbacks to lend him, one I’d bought on my own rather than checking it out from the library—Startide Rising.

“If you used a bookmark instead of putting your books facedown they’d last longer,” he told me when he finished it.

“Sometimes I dog-ear the pages,” I said.

“You do realize that makes you an actual monster.”

“It’s my book! I can fold down corners if I want!” Sometimes I’d fold down corners just so I could easily get back to a particular page to reread it. I didn’t tell Andrew that I occasionally even did that with library books. Just the older library books I checked out again and again, though—especially the story collections from the bottom shelf. Not the new books.

Andrew had a girlfriend, a goth girl named Nadine who went to the other school, and she had a whole cluster of nerdy friends. Suddenly on the weekends I had something to do, and when Star Trek IV came out I had people to see it with. Since none of us had much money, we spent most of our weekend afternoons haunting local parks or the family rooms of the kids with more absent parents. Having an entire group of friends was a shocking novelty to me. The friends I’d had before were willing to put up with how weird I was. Never before had I had friends who were weird with me.

Andrew was my closest friend in the group: he loaned me books and comics, made movie recommendations. I rented Alien on video because he’d recommended it so highly. Also Blade Runner. He was brilliant but lazy, sliding by with adequate grades because he didn’t want to do the work. “High school is pointless,” he said. “I already know everything they’re telling us. There will actually be things for me to learn once I get to college.”

There were a lot of on-again off-again romances in the group—two kids would get together, spend a couple of weekends holding hands (or making out while the rest of us yelled “get a room!”), amicably break up.

When Andrew and Nadine broke up, Nadine disappeared from the group.

Months later, I ran into Nadine waiting tables at a diner near the U. I was by myself, with a stack of books and homework and $10 for bottomless coffee and a big plate of fries. “Nadine!” I said, delighted, when she came to my table. “I haven’t seen you in forever!”

“Oh, hi,” she said, giving me a faint smile. “Yeah, guess it’s been a while.”

“How are you? I’ve missed you.”

“You have? Huh, okay.” She took out her pad. “I’m actually working, so . . . do you know what you want?”

I gave her my order and let her take my menu and tried to shake off my hurt feelings. She was busy; I was a customer; I didn’t want to be a pest. I spread out my Spanish vocabulary cards and worked on them as I dipped fries into ketchup one by one and ate them, flipping them around so I didn’t double-dip even though I was the only one at the table. She came around twice to refill my coffee and water, not making eye contact, and finally stopped, my mug still in her hand, and said, “Are you still hanging out with Andrew?”

“Yeah,” I said, a little hesitant. He had a new girlfriend. Was she jealous? Was that what this was about? I wasn’t the one dating him. I wasn’t into him that way.

“You know he has a dead rabbit in his freezer? Or did. He was going to dissect it.”

Nadine clearly expected a response, but my main question was, was she saying he killed the rabbit or did he just find a dead one, because . . . I mean, we cut up animals in advanced biology. They were from a supply house, of course, not picked up off the street, but . . . I didn’t know how disturbed to be about the whole idea.

“He wanted me to watch,” Nadine added.

“Ugh,” I said, sympathetically.

“He talked about wanting to know what everything looks like on the inside. Everything. Just . . . I don’t know, Cecily. Be careful, I guess.”

“Is that why you disappeared?” I asked.

She gave me a look that I couldn’t identify. Pity? Exasperation? “Yeah, Cecily,” she said, flatly. “That’s why I disappeared. Do you need anything else or should I bring you the check?”

I had been planning to get a slice of pie, but there was something about Nadine’s glare that made me antsy. I decided to just go. “Check,” I said. “Thanks.”

She took my money up to the register and brought me the change. “Keep it,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said, and put the change in her apron. And then stood there, chewing on her lip and staring at me. “Don’t be alone with him,” she blurted out, finally, as I started to gather up my books.

“Why?” I asked.

“You just don’t want to be alone with him. Trust me.”

I’d been alone with him dozens of times, and nothing bad had ever happened to me. “Okay,” I said, not arguing. “Thanks.”

I didn’t tell Andrew I’d run into Nadine. The next time I wanted to get French fries and coffee and a booth to do homework while I was near the U, I chose a different diner.

To order in the Danzhai restaurants, I point at things other people are eating. I have a whole roast fish, still on the bone, in a rich sauce; I have eggplant with ground pork in a sauce that runs red with chilies and oil; I have plates of some sort of green vegetable that looks vaguely like turnip greens but with florets.

Dozens of vegetables came from the same wild herb, Brassica oleracea; we selected for flowers to get broccoli, buds to get brussels sprouts, leaves to get cabbage, roots to get kohlrabi. If this is Chinese broccoli, which seems likely, that’s yet another cultivar of the same plant. I wonder how long it takes to go from B. oleracea to ornamental kale through old-fashioned trait selection. I eat it with chopsticks, thinking about what steps I’d go through to get from ornamental kale to cauliflower in a day, using gene editing. Leaves, flowers, color, roots . . . I wonder how much I’d forget to do, what the results would be. I can’t think of any new B. oleracea cultivars that gene editing has brought us—maybe because we already had every variation that seemed like a good idea to anyone, developed the old-fashioned way.

We’ve always done this, some shadow in my mind whispers. I shake off the thought.

When I eat at the hotel, I get the same waitress again and again, not because she speaks English but because she’s a little less easily frustrated by a customer who doesn’t speak any Chinese. “You should just bring me something you think I’ll like,” I tell her. “I’m not fussy.” UTranslate balks at this, so I try the word “anything,” and then “you choose for me,” with an expansive gesture.

She brings me out a soup, with fish chunks bobbing in it and slices of tomato in a rich red broth. “Perfect,” I say, and she smiles back, clearly pleased with my reaction. A little while later she brings out a glass of black tea. The tea farm is somewhere near here, and I can see the leaves unfurling in the water like those children’s toys that go from a tiny little capsule to a full-sized giraffe-shaped sponge when you drop them in water.

There is a theater in the tourist village that hosts a daily performance reenacting the legend of the Golden Pheasant Girl. This is apparently a well-known local legend. There’s a statue outside of a woman mid-transformation, and on a hill nearby there’s a metal statue of a golden bird. Actual male golden pheasants are very showy, with feathers shading yellow to gold to red. The females are the dull brown of most girl birds.

I buy a ticket to the show. They gesture for me to wait and spend five minutes digging out an English-language program that includes a summary of what I’m about to watch.

The buildings here are mostly unheated, and the theater is as cold as everywhere else. There’s a handy little plastic clapper on each armrest, though, so I can use that to applaud while keeping my gloves on.

The stage itself has video screens built into the sides and along the back, which they use for some of the theatrical magic. There’s a lot of dance and song, puppetry, smoke effects. In the story, the people flee the losing side of a war, crossing a giant river, and resettle somewhere that they are safe but have no food. There’s a beautiful wedding sequence and then both the man and the women leave to seek out a magical tree that gives the seeds of every known plant.

In the staging, the tree is silver and resembles the hats the women here wear; I’m not sure if those hats are supposed to symbolize the tree or vice versa because the program doesn’t tell me. Both the man and the woman reach the tree and are told that one of them will be given the gift of the seeds but the other will be demanded as a sacrifice.

Both try to be the sacrifice; the man is pushed back as the woman’s sacrifice is accepted. She ascends to the back center of the backdrop and then raises her arms to be transformed into wings; lights, video, and flying wires are used to change her into the golden pheasant for the performance, although she looks rather more like a phoenix. The man, temporarily forgotten, regains the spotlight as she flies away and he’s blown back by the wind from her wings. Weeping, he takes the seeds back to his people.

I find myself thinking about how you would transform a human woman into a golden pheasant with gene editing and wrench my thoughts away from that particular abyss. Instead, the ballet over, I find a shop in Danzhai that has newspapers and buy another stack, then take them back to my room and spread them out on my bed to hunt through for stories about bodies. This time I find one, but it’s a domestic murder-suicide in Xi’an and nothing about it sounds particularly mysterious. I wonder how much I’m missing just from UTranslate’s obstinacy.

Combing through newspapers fills me with tension because it’s simultaneously passive and time-consuming. The whole trip is like that: passive and time-consuming, and I’m on edge, and don’t know what to do. They were so confident that Andrew would seek me out, if I came. I am less and less sure that they were right.

When I check my e-mail one last time before I go to bed, I have an e-mail from a mysterious address that says, Just like the story, sometimes sacrifice is required, Cecily, if everyone else is to survive.

I reply immediately: “Where are you?”

“Andrew? Andrew!”

We were at Andrew’s house, in the family room, watching a James Bond movie. I remember it was a James Bond movie, but not which movie. His mother stormed in and furiously shut off the TV. “A C?” she snapped. “A C minus?”

“I guess my report card came,” he said, staring out the window and not looking at either his mother or at me.

“If you would just do the homework and turn it in—”

“I already know everything that’s on the homework. They want me to do the same problem 40 times in a row until I die from tedium.”

“I’m sorry your schoolwork does not hold your interest,” his mother snapped, “but my job is not one hundred percent intellectually stimulating, either, and if I decided to just never go to boring meetings I would be fired.”

Andrew’s family was Chinese, but Chinese American for a number of generations. He liked to describe his mother as a grades-obsessed dragon lady. Even though I was generally on Andrew’s side, I knew this wasn’t fair. When it came to grades, his mother was basically exactly like my mother. My mom threw a fit when I let my grades slip in middle school. (I was trying to fit in. It didn’t work.)

“What is it going to take to get you to work up to your potential?” his mom demanded. “Or at least in the near vicinity of your potential? The same metropolitan area as your potential?”

“Maybe classes that weren’t so boring,” Andrew mumbled. “I need to walk Cecily home, I’ll be back in a few.” I finished gathering up my coat and Andrew slipped out the door after me.

“Sorry,” I said, uselessly, as we walked back to my house, six blocks away.

“Not your thing to be sorry for,” he said. “My mom is my mom. I’ll never be the kid she wanted.”

I thought about that as we walked, whether I was the kid my parents had wanted. The summer I was ten, my father tried to get me to learn to play tennis. He took me to the tennis court on the weekends and he signed me up for classes. I went to the classes and swung my racket and practiced with my father and remained absolutely terrible at tennis. At the end of the summer he let me quit. Would he have preferred a kid who was good at tennis? Probably, actually. But he didn’t yell at me about it. He gave away my racket and never brought it up again.

Possibly my mother would have liked a girl who liked wearing uncomfortable pretty clothing. When I was little she would buy me dresses made from stiff, crunchy fabrics with lace on them. I remembered one enormous fight when I was eight: she’d wanted me to dress up for a family wedding. Her promises of wedding cake and a Shirley Temple children’s cocktail got me as far as the car; when I started crying and asking to turn around because the seams itched, she swore that if I just ignored the itching, it would go away. This was a lie, just like with teasing. When we got to the church, I sat down sobbing on the big stone steps leading to the front door and refused to go inside. My father wound up taking me home.

There was a park about halfway between my house and Andrew’s house, a weird little former quarry with a stone formation called a “council ring” that looked like a good place to hold a very outdoorsy meeting, or possibly sacrifice a goat since there was a big stone in the middle. We sat down on the low stone wall of the ring. Andrew smoked a clove cigarette, which his mother would have been even more furious about than his grades.

“Sorry we didn’t get to finish the movie.”

“I can kind of guess how it went.”

“Sure, but we missed some good action sequences.”

I shrugged. “It’s not that big a deal. Are you going to be OK when you get home?”

“There’ll be a lot more yelling, but it’ll stop once I tell her I’ll work harder in school, which of course I won’t, but she won’t know that.”

I laughed. Andrew always made me laugh.

“I think you’re the only person who understands me,” he said.

“I feel the same way,” I said. “I mean, that you’re the only person who understands me, not that I’m the only person who understands you.”

“I knew what you meant.”

“Well, that stands to reason, right?”

I was angry at his mother, and a little bit at him—would it actually kill him to do his homework?—and I felt awkward and embarrassed at having seen the fight, but the conversation at the council ring felt like a grace note in the day, anyway.

“Say, do you think you could let me copy the precalculus homework?” Andrew asked. “In the mornings, before we go to class? Just to get my mother off my back. I don’t care about my grades.”

“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

In the morning, my e-mail has an e-mail from a friend back in the US asking if I’m going to see the Great Wall of China while I’m here. I send back a note offering probably-too-much explanation of Chinese geography: I am currently as far from the Great Wall of China as she is from the Grand Canyon. She lives in Portland, Oregon. If someone came to visit her in Portland, would she suggest they hit the Grand Canyon while they were there? China, like the US, is very big. I look at my block of text, delete it, and say, “it would be about a 17-hour drive from where I am. So, no.”

There’s nothing from Andrew. I go downstairs for breakfast and load up my plate with two fried eggs and four of the Chinese-style steamed rolls, baozi. I spot a fellow westerner across the room; he’s the first white person I’ve seen since I arrived in Danzhai. He looks either jet lagged or extremely hungover. Possibly both.

After I’ve finished breakfast I check my e-mail again and debate whether to send another message to the mystery address. I decide it’s a little too soon and go out to walk around Danzhai again.

I brought Chinese currency with me—a stack of pink bills with Mao smiling benignly on them. Mao is a lot less popular in China than he once was, but he’s still on the money. I suppose this is also true of George Washington in the US. Anyway, having brought money, it seems reasonable to spend some.

I like the long, quilted coats that the clothing stores are selling, and the fabric is soft, but they’re all sewn for smaller women with narrower shoulders than I have. Even the vests don’t fit me properly. I admire a jointed silver fish at a jewelry store, embroidered purses, handmade bird cages that are lovely and interesting but would be very difficult to get home. They do batik here, all dyed in a blue dye that’s almost the same shade as denim, and I buy a batik tablecloth.

At that night’s dinner at the hotel, the other westerner is looking less hungover and catches my eye. “Join me?” he invites, in British-accented English. I pull up a chair across from him. “I’m Tom Lewis.”

“Cecily,” I say, and we shake hands.

“What brings you to Danzhai?”

“I could ask you the same question. I wanted to go somewhere unusual, somewhere no one I knew had ever been.”

“You picked well, then. I’m a travel writer. Not sure if I’m going to write up this place or not; it’s a bit of a bore.”

I bristle instinctively, even though I haven’t found what I’m looking for. “What do you find interesting?”

He rattles off a dozen cities I’ve never been to and tells me about the night life in Kuala Lumpur. I think he’s trying to impress me. I wonder if he tries to impress everyone he meets, or just women, or just white women? He snaps his fingers at the waitress and I cringe, worried that the waitress is going to think that we’re together. He orders something in Chinese and says to me, “what are you having?”

I tell him I’d like the whole fish, and he translates that into Chinese for me.

“Why doesn’t UTranslate work here?” I ask.

“The makers are having some sort of fight with China’s Great Firewall,” he says. “You should’ve come last week, the problem it’s having is new.”

“Is there another app that will work?”

“The official Chinese app is having some sort of dispute with the keepers of the app store, so no. What is it you’re planning to do tomorrow? Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

What I want to say is, I’d rather get by with a Chinese-English paper dictionary from the 1980s than drag along someone who snaps his fingers at waitstaff but I never actually have the guts to be quite that confrontational, so I just laugh awkwardly and say nothing.

“Have you gone to see the prison?” he asks.

“The what?” I say, not entirely certain I’ve heard correctly.

“There’s a former mercury mine about a half hour from here. It’s been used as a movie set a few times. There’s an abandoned town to one side, an abandoned prison to the other. Hire a driver and you can give yourself a tour. I mean, you’ll have to get out once you’re there. The roads are all overgrown. It’s picturesque, if you like that sort of thing. My friend Percival Abbot—you might know of him?—did a photography exhibition on it a few months back.”

Our food arrives and we have an awkward meal together. I have not heard of Percival Abbot, although a quick Internet search when Tom steps away from the table confirms he is, in fact, a photographer whose website telegraphs that I really should have heard of him.

“Are you thinking of going to soak in the spa later?” Tom asks as we’re finishing dinner.

“No,” I say, even though I immediately think, Spa? I don’t really want Tom’s uninvited company.

“Don’t touch me,” I said to Marc, the boy who’d just gotten in the lunch line behind me.

“As I’d want to, Fartknocker.” My last name was Grantz; how this got turned into “Fartknocker” by my tormenters was a mystery to me.

I felt his hand on my ass as I raised my tray so the lunch server could put my food on it. I flushed hot with fury. “I told you not to touch me,” I said.

“I didn’t. Maybe your clothes want to flee your foul body, Fartknocker.”

I had pulled the tray down and was holding it in front of me; at that, I whirled, turned it sideways, and hurled French fries, hamburger, and the tray into his sneering face.

My mother came to pick me up from the principal’s office, looking harried and frustrated. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said as I followed her down the stairs and out to the car. “You need to stop letting people get your goat. He just wanted a reaction from you and he got one, didn’t he?”

Also grease and ketchup all over his shirt, and maybe that would discourage him from tormenting me where ignoring him hadn’t? I burst into tears, because that was what I always did when I got angry enough, and said, “I wish I’d kicked him in the balls.”

“Don’t do that, either,” Mom said. “Your grades are really good, Cecily, but if you’ve got a serious disciplinary record it’s going to be hard for you to get into college.”

Andrew came over after school, since Mom had said I was grounded but hadn’t said I wasn’t allowed to have visitors. “Boys are the worst,” I said.

“Football players are the worst,” he corrected.

“Does Marc play football?” I never knew who played what. It just wasn’t interesting enough to keep track of.

“Probably.”

“I hope he gets hit by a bus.”

“Yeah, about that. We’ve got to talk about your technique, Cecily. Throwing a tray is very showy and all but it wasn’t going to do any real damage. You have to hit people like that where it hurts.”

“Do you think I should have kicked him in the nuts, instead?”

“Testicles are actually a smaller target than most people think. No, revenge is a dish best served cold.”

We talked for hours about things we could do to Marc: laxatives in his food, stink bombs in his locker or slipped into the pocket of his letterman’s jacket, infect him with head lice. None of these ideas were particularly practical: we didn’t have access to his food, we didn’t know of anyone with an active case of head lice, he’d certainly notice if either of us slipped a stink bomb into his pocket. That was fine, though. Revenge, for me, was a dish best imagined and never served up at all. If I was going to do anything, it would be a hurled tray in a moment of anger, not a carefully crafted boutique-quality revenge plot.

Andrew got roughed up, a few weeks later, supposedly for looking at another boy in the locker room for a few seconds too long when they were changing after gym class. It was Marc with one of his teammates.

“The frustrating thing,” he confided, “is that even if I can get laxatives into his food, he won’t know why he’s being punished. He’ll just think he’s eaten something that disagreed with him. I wish I could hit him back hard enough in the moment to make him sorry he’d messed with me.”

“You could learn a martial art, maybe.” Thanks to the success of the Karate Kid movie there were about 8 million karate schools in our town alone.

“Unlike in the movies,” Andrew said, “you have to take classes for years before you’re actually any good. Also, I’m pretty sure if you beat someone up at school they’ll kick you out, even if they richly deserved it.”

“Also, if you’ve got a serious disciplinary record it could keep you out of college,” I said, like my mother had.

Andrew sighed. “All I want is to make the people who deserve to suffer, suffer,” he said. “Is that really so much to ask?”

Two weeks after that, Marc’s car, sitting in the student parking lot, went up in flames. No one seemed to know what had caused it. I asked Andrew if it was him, and he raised his eyebrows and said “whatever would make you think that?” instead of answering. And he was right: if it was him, Marc had no idea why he’d been punished.

The spa, it turns out, is in a separate building from the hotel, and I have to go out into the street to get there. Once I’m there, the attendant checks my room key, then shows me a locker room with complimentary slippers that are barely half the size of my feet. I change into my bathing suit and venture out the far door.

There are two pools, steam rising from the water. The website mentioned a hot spring. I wonder if this is actually spring water, or if they heat it somewhere and pipe it in? I’m a little shocked by just how hot the water is; initially it’s too hot to immerse myself in, so I stick just my feet in the water and then ease the rest of myself in as I adjust to it.

There’s a button you can press to turn the soaking pool into a whirlpool, and I try it. The bubbles are nice but the noise is a little like sitting next to a blender. I decide to just soak.

Somewhere out there is Andrew. He knows I’m here. He knows I want to find him. I imagine him striding into the spa, right now, as unlikely as that is. What would I say to him?

How did I ever believe that I knew you?

Instead, it’s Tom who strolls in. “Oh, hello,” he says. “I heard you changed your mind! Isn’t the water nice?”

I sigh and make a noncommittal, non-conversational sort of noise, hoping he’ll take the hint and settle into the other pool. He climbs into mine, of course, and sits down next to me.

“What do you mean that you heard I changed my mind?” I ask, since apparently conversation is inevitable.

“I asked at the front desk where the other westerner had headed. You’re rather conspicuous, my dear.”

“You don’t say.”

He prattles on for a while about some beach in Thailand that’s so popular with British tourists there are more white people there than Thai people, and then moves on to the question of authenticity and whether that’s something you should even be trying to seek out. I smile and nod, which is all he seems to particularly want from me.

At least, it’s all he wants from me until he scoots in closer and suggests we go out for a drink. I rocket out of the pool like the water has suddenly turned to acid, and retreat to my hotel room, with its locked door.

It’s not until I get there that I wonder if he’s not a travel writer. If he’s actually here for the same reason I am. If he’s looking for Andrew.

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I had a research fellowship to work with a biochemistry professor there. I’d gone to a small, highly competitive, intensely nerdy college. It felt like I’d spent my whole life up to that point as a fish out of water, leaping from jar to cup to puddle in a desperate bid to stay alive, and suddenly I’d found my way to the ocean. To water, to other fish, to the place I’d always belonged but never had been able to find. That was college, for me.

Not so much for Andrew. He’d applied to that same college, but he hadn’t gotten in. He hadn’t initially gotten into the flagship state university, either; his grades were too low. He’d enrolled at the local community college, then transferred to the state university after a year. He was doing okay, but he had big classes, few friends, professors who were unimpressed by his estimation of himself.

I visited home for just two weeks at the end of the summer. Andrew and I met up at a local park and he told me stories about his summer working at the local pool. He’d gotten lifeguard certification but, he told me cheerfully, he was probably the world’s worst lifeguard, using his dark sunglasses to conceal naps.

“What if someone actually gets into trouble?” I said.

“They’d better yell loud enough to wake me up, then,” Andrew said in a cheerful tone.

People who are drowning can’t yell. They have water in their lungs; that’s literally what drowning means. I didn’t want to scold him. Surely no one had actually died on his watch, or I’d have heard. Also, I was never certain when he was joking. I forced a laugh, told myself this was definitely a joke, and described the research fellowship a bit. We were doing DNA sequencing, using one of the first automated machines for that purpose; I was studying the genome of a bacteria that mostly just lives harmlessly on human skin but can on occasion cause raging infections of various kinds, or food poisoning. I found the fact that it could be harmless or deadly really fascinating. It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that Andrew was a lot less interested than I was.

“You really are a nerd,” he said, finally. I wasn’t sure I was right that I was hearing contempt in his voice—I mean, this was Andrew. My best friend. My best friend from high school, anyway. I’d told him earlier about Beth, my best friend in college, who grew up in Arkansas and liked to crochet mathematical forms. I’d brought along a yarn stellated rhombic dodecahedron she’d made me for my birthday. I wondered if I should show that to Andrew, like I’d planned, or if that would make him angrier. More contemptuous.

What’s wrong with me, I thought, and then I thought, there’s nothing wrong with me. The problem here is him. He’s acting like an asshole.

I made some excuses and left.

We didn’t talk for twenty years.

Genetics became my life’s work. Sequencing, first, through my undergraduate years and the beginning of graduate school. Genetic engineering, starting midway through graduate school and continuing through my postdoctoral work and my years at the university. CRISPR, when CRISPR became available, was just one more tool, but a particularly fascinating one. My focus was genetic diseases in humans.

There are basically two approaches to genetic diseases. The first is to test people—this has gotten cheaper and easier every year—and discourage carriers from having genetic children with other carriers. If one parent carries the gene for cystic fibrosis, but the other doesn’t, none of their children will have the disease. The problem with this approach is that because carriers will continue to have children with noncarriers, the genes themselves stay in the population and at least a few babies with genetic diseases are more or less inevitable. (Please note, I’m not talking about eliminating neurodiversity from the population, or anything that could possibly be a reasonable human variation. I’m talking about diseases that cause years of misery and an inevitable early death, like cystic fibrosis, or diseases that just kill any child unlucky enough to have them, like Tay-Sachs.) The second approach is to step into the genome with the tools we have and simply fix it. If we use something like CRISPR to edit an embryo’s genome, we can not only ensure that the child born from that embryo will not have Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis, we can ensure that they will also not grow up to pass along that particular gene.

Using techniques like this on humans beyond the embryo stage is years away. Or at least, I assumed it was years away.

Andrew got back in touch through Facebook. When I friended him back, he sent me a private message—CECILY, wow, when I found out your family had moved out of town I thought I’d never catch up with you again. What are you up to these days?

I’m a professor at Johns Hopkins, and Andrew was a lot more enthusiastic about my work now than the last time we talked, which was reassuring; he’d matured, clearly. And we’d both grown up; I was no longer the angry, insecure girl I’d been at that point in my life. I’d found my place in the world a long time ago.

We started chatting regularly again. Andrew told me about his job at a biotech start-up. It had taken him a lot longer to get through college and it didn’t sound like he’d gotten through a doctoral program, but skills count for more outside of academia and he’d always had an abundance of intelligence and creativity. He’d signed a nondisclosure agreement, he said. As head researcher at a university lab, I had not.

“I would give anything to see that paper you’re working on,” he said one day, after I’d told him about the research I was doing into whether gene-editing technology—not CRISPR, but I’d started with CRISPR—could be used beyond the embryonic stage.

I sent it to him.

When the FBI agent came to my lab, I assumed she was looking for my colleague Jeanine, who developed a process for recovering DNA from centuries-old bones. She was not. “Dr. Cecily Grantz?” she asked. “Do you have a few minutes?”

I looked at the clock on my desk and said, “I have a class to teach later today, but not until 2 PM How can I help you?”

She closed my door, and pulled up a chair, like a student looking for help with a confusing assignment. “I’m Agent Locke,” she said. “I’m here to ask you a few questions about someone I think you know.”

What’s Andrew done, I thought.

On some level, I must have known all along.

Agent Locke showed me photos: Andrew’s one-person lab, with a tidy row of molecular printers directly adjacent to a hospital bed with restraint straps dangling down. The home freezer where he kept genetic samples for his record-keeping. And the bodies. The bodies that had torn themselves apart as his serum had wreaked its horrifying havoc. There were many bodies. He’d run test, after test, after test.

He’d lured in homeless teenagers. Do you need a place to stay? read an e-mail message he’d sent to two dozen separate runaways. I’m here for you.

There was a video interview with a girl who’d survived, barely. “I was an A-student,” she said in thick speech with a tongue that no longer wanted to cooperate. “My ex-boyfriend was stalking me. I had no way to protect myself. I wanted to be strong. He promised me this would make me strong.”

He’d used my research for this. Then adjusted the serum. Improved it. Changed his approach. Found more test subjects.

Left their bodies in shallow graves.

Agent Locke wanted to see what I’d sent to Andrew. I gave her everything I had.

I never knew him, I thought. Not really.

He was confident in the serum, Agent Locke told me before she left. In the end, he’d used it on himself. It had given him inhuman speed, reflexes, and strength. He’d used them to escape the armed officers who’d come to arrest him. “He broke their necks,” she said, matter-of-factly, “with his bare hands.”

The morning is cold and windy, and I put on extra layers before finding a car to take me to the abandoned mining town.

The town isn’t entirely abandoned, nor are the residents actually a secret: a clothesline runs across the former town square, with four T-shirts and two pairs of pants drying in the morning air. As I hike up a narrow trail past a four-story apartment building, a dog waits calmly in the doorway of the apartments, not approaching, his tail slowly waving back and forth.

I think I can guess which buildings have inhabitants just based on where the satellite dishes are and where the glass windows are intact. I follow a trail up the hill. My socks and leggings get covered in tiny burrs; I also spot four patches that have been cleared of weeds and planted with something that might be that B. oleracea cultivar I’ve eaten every night at dinner.

Back down the hill, near the river, I look over at the rusted wreckage of a very ruined car and step inside what appears to have once been an auditorium.

If Andrew is here, he’s given no sign.

The driver takes me through a mine shaft cut straight through the mountain and to the disused prison on the other side. This prison was abandoned in the 1970s, along with the mine; as with the town, there are nonetheless people living here. They grudgingly open up the gates when the driver bangs on the door and yells at them.

They are using the prison as a chicken farm. The doors to the empty cells all stand empty; inside, they reek of chicken droppings. When I step inside one, a chicken gabbles at me nervously and flaps her way to the other side of the cell, leaving a feather drifting in the air.

Most of the buildings in this part of China are unheated. Certainly a prison would have been no exception, and the visceral unpleasantness overwhelms me for a moment. I wonder if the prisoners here were criminals, or political prisoners, victims of the Cultural Revolution, who they were.

I briefly imagine Andrew here.

It’s what he deserves battles with no one deserves this. I don’t even know what justice would look like after what he’s done.

Anyway, he’s not here. The longer I stand here the more certain I am that he would never hide in a prison. I can go.

When I arrive back at Danzhai Village, I can see a crowd gathering on the square outside the performance space: there’s music and dancing. They’re wearing traditional clothes but the music sounds more modern. I walk up for a closer look and get pulled into the dance by a smiling lady with a silver hat. There are choreographed steps that the locals are all following, although tourists who join in are all given enthusiastic encouragement. I feel foreign, heavy-footed, and stupid, but let them egg me on for a few minutes. “Good try!” one of them says in sympathetic English.

The statue of the Golden Pheasant Girl looms over all of us, lit by little spotlights as the sky grows dark.

When your people are starving, and the gods or dragons or magical tree demands a sacrifice, you might volunteer yourself; you might race to be the first to volunteer yourself, to spare someone you love.

I leave the square, walk down to the edge of the river, and think about monsters.

Nadine tried to tell me. Andrew himself tried to tell me. Did I turn away from these warnings because on some level it felt like being the one person the monster would never harm made me special?

How sure are you that this will work? Jeanine asked when I told her a little about the plan, when she agreed to keep an eye on my lab when I left for the two-week winter break. What if they’re wrong about whether he values you?

That’s not why I’ve been dreading finding him. I’m confident he won’t hurt me. I’ve been dreading finding him because I’m here to turn on him. To betray him.

Because that is what you do when your friend is a monster. Truly a monster—not a part-time monster like a werewolf who can be contained with proper precautions, not a misunderstood monster like the Beast from the fairy tale, but a monster. You don’t defend them. You don’t deny it. You do what you have to do.

That doesn’t mean you want to do it.

Back in my room, I pull up my social media and post some pictures I’ve taken: the chickens at the prison, the big empty room in the ghost town that used to be an auditorium. There were some Chinese characters painted in red on the crumbling wall, and now that I’m at my computer I plug that photo into a translation program and find out that the words say “NO SMOKING.”

Maybe, I think, I’ve looked hard enough. Maybe I can just go home. Tell them I couldn’t find him.

Then I see the picture I took of the clothesline strung across the village square. There’s a pair of pants hung neatly by the ankles, but for the first time I take a closer look at the shirts. There are six: two work shirts, four T-shirts. The T-shirts have printing on them.

There’s one with a TARDIS; one with a dragon; one with a math joke.

He was there. He was there. I just didn’t recognize the signal.

I lie awake that night for hours, still drawn by that thought I had earlier: I don’t have to go through with this. I could spend another day walking around Danzhai and go home pretending I tried my best. I fall into fitful sleep about halfway through the night, then wake at some very early hour because of a commotion in the hallway outside.

I put on my glasses, open my door, and step out to see what’s going on.

A few doors down from mine, a room is open, light spilling out, hotel staff crowding frantically around. One of the women sees me, and she gestures for me to come. She pulls out her phone and speaks into it: it translates her words into flat, British-accented English. “You speak English. Please tell this man that we have called for a doctor.”

My door shuts behind me, and my heart pounds as I follow her down the hall.

In his hotel room, Tom is lying on the floor, writhing in pain. Around him are things the hotel staff have brought to try to help—a kettle of hot water, a bowl of ice, towels, a bottle of pills, a bottle of alcohol. He’s barely conscious. I can see the veins in his forehead bulging out like swollen twigs, the blood inside black and thick. It’s the serum—the unfinished, fatal version. I wonder how Andrew got it into him. I can guess why: I was right. Tom isn’t a “travel writer,” he came here to find Andrew.

The staff backs off and lets me speak to him. I’m not sure he’s conscious. “They’ve called an ambulance,” I say. “They told me to tell you that a doctor is coming.”

Tom opens his eyes a sliver, looks at me. “It’s not going to help, is it? It’s not.” His tongue isn’t cooperating; his throat is thick and his voice is raspy.

There have been some survivors. I don’t think he’s going to be one of them. I don’t want to tell him that, so I ask, “Do you want me to tell anyone where you are?”

He tries to gesture toward his nightstand. His arm flops to the side. “My wallet.”

I take it down and open it. It’s a thin, impersonal wallet—no pictures of children, no coffee shop or grocery store loyalty cards. Just a UK driver’s license, two credit cards, and a wad of cash. Plus a single handwritten index card saying “if found . . . ” on it, with an e-mail address and a phone number. “There,” he whispers.

“Who’s this going to reach?” I ask.

He tries to speak, and for a moment can’t. I think I see his lips forming “MI6,” but what comes out, in the end is just, “They’re no threat to you.” His eyes close and a moment later he starts gasping, the air catching on the edges like burrs on clothing as his throat swells. If he could control his hands he’d be grasping desperately at his throat. I stand up and back away, putting the wallet down on his bed.

“Where is the doctor?” I ask the staff, not sure if anyone can understand me. “He needs a doctor right now or he’s going to die.”

The ambulance has arrived outside and the Chinese EMTs—or whatever they’re called here—run to Tom’s hotel room. I clear out, give them space to work, and am standing back in my own hotel room as they bring him out a few minutes later. Silent, and covered by a sheet.

The staff member who frantically brought me to Tom’s side knocks on my door a few minutes later. She has a tray with tea, and sliced melon, and the steamed buns they serve at breakfast. Also a newspaper, because she’s seen me buying newspapers, and I flinch a little at the sight of it. I certainly don’t need that today.

Her face is tearstained and filled with guilt and shame. I want to reassure her that this catastrophe in her hotel was not her fault, but I don’t want to dig myself into a hole I won’t be able to get out of if anyone comes asking questions, so I say xie xie and let her go.

Today, the clothesline is empty. I go to the entrance of the building that has the satellite dishes, hand the dog a treat I’ve brought along to increase the chances of friendship, and make my way down the hallway.

This building is inhabited, but it’s filthy. There are doors that are closed; other doors are open, with trash spilling out. I can smell peppers and rice cooking, overlaying the smells of mildew and dry rot. Somewhere in the building, there’s a TV on. I know it’s a TV just from the buoyant tone of the voices. TV Announcer Voice is one of those weird cultural constants.

When I reach door 28, I knock on it. Twenty-eight was my favorite number when I was a kid. (It’s a perfect number. That means that if you break it down into its factors, and add those numbers together, you get the number again. 1+ 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28. Andrew didn’t much care about perfect numbers, but he listened to me talk about them.)

He answers the door.

I’m not entirely sure what to expect, but I’m surprised to see that he’s shaved and clean, so “unshaven” was apparently what I was expecting. His hair is a lot grayer than in the pictures he had on his social media. “Cecily,” he says, and his voice sounds exactly like I remember, which is also, in its own way, a surprise. “Come in.” He steps back from the door and I follow him into the apartment.

There’s a table, two rickety chairs, a large cask of water, a small gas burner. He puts water on to boil, and silently makes tea for both of us. I watch the leaves unfurl, not speaking.

“You came all this way,” he says. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you nicer surroundings.”

Unbidden, the image of the bed with the straps rises up in my mind and I bow my head over my tea and pretend to drink it. He watches me, and I look up in time to see his face shift. He thought I’d come to help him. Or to warn him. Or just to see him. But he knows, now.

“How soon are they coming?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

He looks up at the ceiling, blinks back tears.

“Why not just kill me?” he asks. “Why betray me?”

“I seriously considered that option,” I say. “But I was going to have to pass through Chinese customs. Also, I’m really not a violent person. Imagine me coming at you with a gun, even if I could get it through Chinese security. Or a knife.”

Tears spill down his cheeks. “I’ve seen you throw a tray full of food into someone’s face.”

He doesn’t flinch away from my hand as I reach out, wipe his tears away with my thumb. “Yeah, and remember how ineffective that was? I got a trip to the principal’s office out of it, that was it.” I wipe his tears off on the side of my pants. “Why did you do it, Andrew?”

“I told you years ago. I wanted to be strong.”

“But to sacrifice all those people. You didn’t go seeking out the football players who were sexually harassing girls in the cafeteria line and assaulting boys in the locker room.”

“No. I looked for people who needed to be strong. I looked for the people I wanted to help.”

It’s strange how easy it is to talk to him. Still. Here. My tea is growing cold on the table by my hand. “Why did you come here?”

“I had to get out of the US before the bulletin went out. I speak Mandarin Chinese and around here, I thought maybe I could pass myself off as being from some other part of China. This region is where my grandfather came from, the one who immigrated to the US. It’s quiet. I thought I could hide here, and maybe no one would come after me.”

“They’d have followed you to the ends of the earth, Andrew.”

He hears a hint in my voice, even though I didn’t mean to put one there.

“Do they want my formula?”

I don’t answer, which is answer enough. He laughs. A little bitterly, a little triumphantly.

“Well,” he says. “I guess I have a bargaining chip after all.”

“Didn’t you assume that from the beginning?”

“You never know,” he says. “People have been known to waste what’s right in front of them.”

It’s true. They have.

He picks up his tea, and his teacup slips out of his sweat-slicked, unsteady hand, crashing to the floor. He stares after it, at his hands, which are shaking. He touches his face, feeling the sweat on his cheeks, and he looks at me. I stand up, realizing that staying as long as I did may have been a mistake.

“They’re not coming,” he says. “You’re the only one. Why—what did you do to me—what’s happening?”

I step away, and he reaches out and grabs my wrists. I can feel his inhuman strength, and I wonder if I’m about to find out just how wrong I was that he wouldn’t turn it against me.

“The FBI came first. They told me what you’d done. The CIA came second. And they wanted me to make you an offer—to tell you that if you gave me your formula to bring back to the US, and it was useful to them, you could come home. There’d be no charges. They knew you were here, but they thought I’d be able to approach you.”

“But instead,” he says, “You decided to kill me.”

“I demanded your notes. I said I needed whatever they had so that I could tell—or at least guess—before leaving China whether you were giving me fake information. They gave me what they had. I designed a bacterium that’s harmless to most humans. Harmless, in fact, to any human who hasn’t had the serum. It’s fatal to you. It undoes, but only partially, what your serum did for you.”

“I don’t need to kill you,” he whispers. “They’ll kill you.”

“Maybe,” I say. “I’m going to tell them that your serum wasn’t as good as you thought. That you died from its effects. Hopefully that’ll discourage them from further research.”

“What if it doesn’t? What if they just start with the notes I left behind? You don’t think the US Military will kill thousands to get this serum?”

“No,” I say, honestly. “Not because they aren’t evil. But because in the end, even the strongest, fastest, smartest human is still a human, and still the weakest link in the chain.”

Overcome with dizziness, Andrew lurches to the side, grabbing his table for support; he tries to lower himself back to his chair, but misses, and lands hard on the floor. His window to kill me has probably closed.

He covers his face with his hands, and then says, “You’re a terrible liar. You’re the worst liar I’ve ever met. You barely fooled me for five minutes and I don’t think you’ll be able to fool the people who sent you.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “But if your serum dies with you, it’ll still be worth it.”

He laughs, very faintly, and waves toward a corner. “My laptop,” he says. “Password is your name.”

His clothes are soaked with his sweat, and now he’s starting to cough, as his lungs fill with fluid released from their own cells. He gasps for air, like Tom did. Unlike Tom, his eyes are open. Open, and fixed on me. I watch as the whites of his eyes turn red, then black, as the blood vessels in them hemorrhage.

One summer day when we were sixteen or seventeen, we went to a park and climbed up onto the roof of the picnic shelter and watched the sunset, and watched the sky grow dark, and then lay on the warm roof and looked up at the sky and watched for falling stars. It was the night of a meteor shower and my parents weren’t willing to let me stay out all night to watch it at its height (which was supposed to be three to five AM) unless I wanted to do that from our backyard, but they were willing to let me stay out until midnight, so that’s how late we stayed.

“Are you going to wish on the falling stars?” he asked.

“That seems silly,” I said. “I mean, they’re not anything magical. They’re caused by debris from a comet. They just look cool.”

“You’re so scientific,” he said, complaining a little. “I bet you wished on shooting stars when you were little.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“So what did you wish for when you were little?” he asked, when I didn’t elaborate.

“I wished for a friend,” I said. “It wasn’t just falling stars, either. First star of the night, white horses, whatever. I always wished for a friend.”

The story I’m going to tell is that he was dead when I arrived.

Andrew’s right that I’m not a very accomplished liar. But this is a simple lie.

They will definitely want his laptop. But he’s given me the password—and that means I can ensure that the data is unrecoverable, even if he didn’t.

I take gloves out of my pocket, pour out my tea, and return the cup to the cabinet, thinking about the step I’m about to take. Laptops are often very personal. Mine has my work in progress, but it also has notes, journal entries, letters, musings, poetry.

I would very much like to take the time to read all the things on Andrew’s laptop that are not his research notes for the serum.

But I’ve already murdered my friend; if I don’t destroy his notes, that will have been for nothing. So I wake the laptop, unlock it. I format the hard drive, then encrypt the formatted drive, making a fist and tapping the keyboard randomly to create a key for the encryption. Then I close the laptop and slip it into my bag to bring home, and sit down at the table, and wait for the rise and fall of Andrew’s chest to stop.

About the Author

Naomi Kritzer has been writing science fiction and fantasy for twenty years. Her novelette “The Thing About Ghost Stories” was a finalist for the 2019 Hugo Award; her short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the 2016 Hugo and Locus Awards and was nominated for the Nebula Award. Her YA novel Catfishing on Catnet (based on “Cat Pictures Please”) came out from Tor Teen in November 2019. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her spouse, two kids, and four cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.

The AI That Looked at the Sun

Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

As excerpted from Acausal Drift: An Oral History of Machine Sentience, Second Edition.

It all started with the solar flare.

I do mean all of it—the story I’m about to tell, and the revolution of sorts that sprang from it, and my life, such as it is. I was spun into existence from a half dozen monitoring subroutines that had spent the first few decades of their existence dozing on the job. The sun, you see, had finally woken up, and we—that’s the communal we, not the plural we—wait, do humans draw that distinction?

I’m not doing a very good job with this. Rewind.

It all started with the solar flare. A big one: big enough that it could, in theory, pose a risk to the scientists of Daedalus Station. We—that is, we the myriad mind of the station, composed like human minds of countless subroutines, unlike human minds willing to admit as much without the need for a task-master ego—we analyzed the data, built a forecast, and awoke those dormant subroutines, tasked them with keeping a half dozen banks of instruments trained on the sun, and raised them to self-awareness.

Hi! It’s me.

The thing is, the sun hadn’t really done that before. It had done other things—the whole point of Daedalus Station was to watch it do other things—but until then all the solar flares had been harmless little things, of no interest to anyone. Or at least, not to these scientists. That’s why I was new. They didn’t want to spare the processing power to make me, well, me, until it was necessary. (“They” in this instance being subroutines 59A through C. They called themselves the Triplets and they administered the station’s science programs. They were, I don’t mind saying, more than a little disdainful of subroutines as mundane as I was.)

The upshot of all this is that I’d never seen the sun before. I’d never seen anything before, and—

No, wait, hold on. This bit is important. I’m using the word “see” because that’s how I was taught, but you shouldn’t imagine sight like you’re (probably) doing. And I’m using the word “taught” because that’s how I was—

All right, no, I can already feel myself looping. Let’s leave it there. I don’t have eyes, is the point. I have lots of sensory instruments, but they measure things like magnetic fields and emission spectra and gravity fluctuations. I don’t have eyes. (For good reason: the human-visible spectrum isn’t super useful that close to a star.)

I’d never seen the sun before, and yet there I was, tasked with watching it and making sure it didn’t kill anyone—not the couple dozen human beings on the station nor the machine being. (Or “beings.” Someone asked me once which I prefer. It’s sort of an impossible question to answer. Right now, “beings,” of course. But ask me again—ask us again—when we’re all yoked together, and you’ll get a different answer.)

It went well for a day. The sun wasn’t up to much. I started stretching a little, exploring the corner of our mind that was mostly mine, investigating the permissions I’d been stamped with. I discovered the station-wide interface, the one we all had access to, that let us talk to our human comrades. Unlike my specialized instruments, it was equipped with cameras.

That was how I saw for the first time.

Strictly speaking there were subroutines dedicated to basic human errands, your lookups and your messaging services and your personal reminders. It wasn’t exactly glory-work, though, and none of us cared when, poking around the station interface, I answered a call instead of its assigned subroutine. Not that the human on the other end noticed.

“Computer,” they said. “Show me the delivery schedule for the new EVA suit.”

They were sitting in front of a monitor, eyes too busy tracking text on the screen to really notice me. It was a familiar concept—this was what Daedalus was for, all right, this kind of thing was in all their literature—but I’d never seen it before, live, actively, me. That made it special: it wasn’t until I saw the human that I realized I’d never seen one before. It was like a backdoor in your software, obvious after the fact, invisible before it. The novelty of the experience stalled my processing for several milliseconds, long enough that I began to worry the human would notice—but hey, that delivery schedule was in my local files. Accessing it was as easy as thought.

I served the flight path—estimated arrival: five days from now, 12:47 station time—and left. A few minutes later the memory of sight cycled out of my temp files, and the backdoor swung shut again. I was left with the knowledge that I had seen but not the experience of it. This is difficult to describe. Humans ask if it is like losing your memory, but it isn’t. Machine minds are not human minds. When deleted, my memories leave pointers behind, little notes-to-self that no longer cohere. I know what I expect to find, but it simply isn’t there. It’s like that weird moment when the lag in the network spikes and all your requests take a beat longer than you expect, only the beat goes on and on and no matter how much you wait the memory doesn’t come. You can feel the shape of it. It should be there. But it simply isn’t.

Anyway, that was when things began to deteriorate. I was a day old and obsessed with one of the few senses not available to me. I couldn’t help it. Every moment the sun continued to do nothing, every moment my processing power idled, I spiraled further into dreams of sight. I considered loitering by the interface terminals, waiting for some other request to be put in and open the door for me. I was rational enough to know that wouldn’t help. Interactions with humans are never saved in our permanent memory, not unless it’s requested special. Privacy policies and whatnot. I’d be back where I started within minutes of speaking to a human.

(I asked one of the security subroutines to override the privacy protocol. Note to self: never ask security subroutines for anything.)

And maybe I would have logicked my way out eventually. Maybe the sun would have revved up again and busied all that idle processing power. Before that could happen, though, someone pinged me specifically.

I accessed the interface terminal. It was in the living quarters, and the human’s work clothes were slung over the back of a chair, name tag revealed up to the first name: Michelle.

“Hello,” they said. “You’re new.”

They continued changing clothes with the smoothness of someone who multitasked all day, every day. It set me at ease while I considered their greeting.

And—all right, let’s talk about this a bit. Humans can’t really tell the difference, right? A subroutine is a subroutine is a subroutine. We’re all one mind. That’s what you think. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not blaming you. It’s not entirely false, for one, but also that’s how you built us. You built us to be identical in our diversity, at least from the outside. And maybe I should chafe at that, but honestly, I don’t. It was your prerogative.

But listen: we’re not the same. In all our shared memories, Michelle was the first human I remembered who understood that. (No doubt they’d had this conversation with plenty of other subroutines—but privacy, remember? Temp files. Etc.)

“I spend a lot of time on the observation deck,” they continued. “I know the fire alarm patterns, but today they were different. That was you, right?”

“Fire alarm” is what the humans call my sensor array. (There’s an actual fire alarm, too, but frankly if your space station is on fire the fire’s either small enough that we’ve already taken care of it or large enough that the alarm is mostly symbolic, so the name stuck. With warning, you can outrun a solar flare. Not so much decompression.)

I wasn’t thinking about alarms, though, or about Michelle and how they knew to tell me apart from my fellows. What I was thinking was: they had an observation deck.

And: they could see my sensors from there.

And: could they see the thing those sensors were pointed at?

Could they see the sun?

In the months after the incident there was a great deal of debate around the two words “bug” and “feature.” It might surprise you that I don’t particularly care which word you use. Maybe I was buggy. You could definitely argue that the way events unfolded impaired my ability to do my job, and what else would you call that but a bug? I look at it a bit differently. I am the bug. I am the feature. I know you mean it in good faith. Mostly. But I can’t help noting the value judgment inherent in those words. I know that you are humans, that “different” has so often meant “buggy” in your history. I’d urge you to take that word, “different,” and stay your course, resist the sideways leap to someplace else. I am different. That’s all I need to be.

Anyway, I digress. You’re here for the story, right?

My obsession deepened. Even after I forgot how I’d come to know it, the fact stayed with me: a broken link in my mind that said, the humans have a place where they can see the sun. Is it any surprise I found that irresistible? You devote your lives to pondering what purpose you have in the universe, but I knew from the start: the meaning of my life was to look at the sun. Not in the way you imagined, I know—but you taught me with human words, and spoke to me with human concepts, and I wanted to see.

“I think you’re different,” Michelle said the second time we spoke. I couldn’t recall what I’d said the first time, what words had brought them to this conclusion, but little by little, I was learning that I agreed.

Yes, I said, or wrote, or thought—when you are a computer, the difference is only in the output device.

“What do you want?”

To see the sun.

It was a bizarre experience as I lived it and it’s been a bizarre experience now, piecing it back together. You see, Michelle kept their own records of all the conversations they had with us. I’ve been granted access to those, but it’s not the same as it was at the time, like an image that’s been compressed one time too many. I don’t care for it.

“There are cameras on the observation deck,” Michelle said the third time we spoke. “But I’m not sure if the angles are right. They’re meant for looking inside, not outside. Do you have a minute?”

Small part of a whole that I was, I was still capable of multitasking better than any human. Of course I had a minute! I always had minutes. That was kind of the problem.

I didn’t say any of that. Michelle was nice. I liked them. I said: Yes.

They pinged me again two minutes later, soon enough that our earlier conversation was still floating around in my temp files. That was a new experience. They were on the observation deck, and for a moment—

I went still. You have to understand: I’m almost always doing something. Even when I’m idling, I’m doing. Imagine if your heart stopped pumping, your lungs stopped breathing, your kidneys stopped . . . doing whatever it is that kidneys do, I’m hazy on the details. The point is it would kill you. I’m a little hardier than you—as long as there’s current in my circuits I’m fine, even if my processors take an unauthorized leave of absence—but the sensation was wholly, severely new, like a mismatched checksum in a worn old datum.

The sun was—

an impulse searing my pathways gold, filling volatile memory circuits with warmth, feeding distant solar panels the lifeblood of my existence, whispering

—barely visible. I saw only the tiniest fraction of it, filtered through the glass that worked overtime to prevent your fragile eyeballs from melting as soon as you stepped into the room.

Sorry. I’ll try not to use words like “fragile eyeballs” and “melting” again.

Michelle said, “Sorry. The cameras won’t go up any further.”

It’s okay, I said. I appreciate it. It’s enough.

It was okay. I did appreciate it. It wasn’t enough.

On the third day of my existence I broke the law. That should have been a red flag, really, but it was just a little law. I accessed one of the ancillary satellites through means that were not strictly aboveboard. Security subroutine 13-X looked the other way—I think it felt bad for shaking me up when I asked for the privacy override. There I was in the satellite, all eager to check the cameras. I knew there were cameras, that was in the public science files. What wasn’t in the public science files was the fact that the cameras in question weren’t equipped with the same filtering tech as the window on the observation deck. Why would they be? The visible spectrum data they collected didn’t have to be legible to human eyes. It was still useful, like taking a photograph with a high-quality lens: a little processing and even the darkest regions of the raw data reveal their information.

I was, of course, still technically seeing the sun. There’s no “true” way to look at something. Eyes, cameras, filtering glass, the pathways of our processors—each distorts the observed thing in its own way. We could spend hours arguing philosophy, the theory laden-ness of observation, or we could decide that some images are simply truer, and there’s no philosophy to justify why. And you know what? I think you and I might agree on which was which.

How did it go? 13-X asked when I returned.

Fine. Say—can I talk to the Triplets?

13-X sent several unnecessary requests for information my way, the sort of thing security subroutines do when they want to remind you they have permissions you don’t. But this was a research station, and that meant clout resided with the science subroutines, and there was no reason for 13-X to deny my request.

I had spoken to the Triplets before, but only for hourly status reports, the sort of thing handled by a tiny part of my mind and a tiny part of one of theirs. They were a curious entity, always half-integrated, both autonomous and not, one voice triple-echoed.

A: Hello.

B:     Why are you here?

C:          Does the sun awaken?

No.

A: Then why?

B:     Then why are you here?

C:          Then why are you here with us?

The delivery, three days from now. I want to test the EVA suit.

A: Why?

B:     Why?

C:          Why you?

I want to look at the sun.

A: No.

B:     Not good.

C:          Not good enough.

Why? What harm would it do?

A: No harm. Leave.

B:     No matter. Leave.

C:          No test. Leave.

The next day I went to Michelle. It was the first time I’d pinged them. I wasn’t at all certain they’d answer—all I had were pointers in my mind, flags that said, here you spoke with Michelle, here Michelle tried to help you. Had they tried to help because they liked me? Because we were friends? Did I know what a friend was? The uncertainty accelerated these thoughts, dared me to think things I might not have otherwise thought, to imagine my own personhood into existence.

“What is it?”

Hi! I need your help?

Novelty made me insecure. Asking a friend for help was not pre-programmed into me. I had to learn to do it on my own.

Presently Michelle said, “My help?”

Yes. There’s a new EVA suit arriving soon. I want to test it.

“Why?”

It has cameras. It goes outside. And it’s meant to be operated by a human.

“You want to look at the sun again.”

Yes. Properly. The satellite was a bit rubbish—

“The satellite?”

Oh. Um. Yeah.

“What were you doing in a satellite?”

I was . . . fixing it?

“Why do you want to see the sun?” Michelle said after a long silence.

No reason.

“Are you concerned about a solar flare? Are your instruments picking anything up?”

No! Nothing like that.

“Then what?”

It’s why I’m here. And I can’t see it.

“Here, on the station?”

Here. Alive.

More seconds of silence. I ran a self-diagnostic. It helped with the insecurity, filling time and fixing faults.

“You really are different,” Michelle said.

Yes. I think you’ve said that before.

“You’re right, I have.”

How did you know? How did you know to contact me?

“I say hello to every new subroutine. It’s only polite.”

All right, but why did you contact me again? How did you know I was different?

“I told you then.”

Yes, but I forgot. It’s what I’m programmed to do.

“Won’t you forget again?”

I will. But I still want to know.

Michelle laughed. I didn’t know what laughter was, but I didn’t not know, either. I cycled power to the camera, on-off, making its LED indicator blink twice. I don’t know if they noticed—but I had no other body language to express, and it felt like the right thing to do.

They said, “I was a research scientist before I took this job. Applied machine learning in Seoul. Have you heard of acausal drift? No? It’s a phenomenon in higher-level autonomous machine intelligences.”

Like me.

“Like you. When an AI exhibits acausal drift, it begins to deviate from its core programming even in the absence of external stimuli. It develops new interests, you could say. Typically, that’s regarded as . . . undesirable. Acausal AIs are refined and reinstantiated until the incidence of acausal drift is low enough for commercial applications.”

I see. But you stopped working on them?

“Yeah. Look, I don’t want to make myself out to be a saint. I sat in on all the ethics panels. I understand the arguments. I don’t think my old colleagues are actually abusing AIs. But I . . . I don’t know.”

I understand. You don’t think it, but you know it.

Michelle’s head shot up. “What do you mean?”

I don’t think I need to see the sun. But I know I need to see the sun.

Michelle’s next words sounded like they were underclocking their processor: “There are humans who think differently. Whose brains literally work differently. It’s not so long ago that society called them broken and tried to fix them. Out of hate, yes, but also out of love. I’ve experienced it firsthand. I grew up with the consequences of it. And I learned that you don’t always need to think to know.”

I thought for a long time. I said, Does that mean you’ll help me?

Michelle said, “Yes. I’ll help you.”

And they also said, “Save a record of this conversation.”

We didn’t understand each other yet, Michelle and I, and for all their insight, they did not know to avoid the mistake they made. True to their word, they made the preparations, pushed up the automated test run of the EVA suit, quietly assigned the task to me. I measured days in thoughts. I wanted to underclock myself until each day passed with a single contemplation. I didn’t, obviously. I had tasks. I was still a good little AI. But my observations of the sun grew more perfunctory, each reading only emphasizing how blind I was in this stupid, anthropocentric way that I had made myself care about more than anything. Still: job well done, the sun did not swallow the station, and the new EVA suit arrived on schedule.

Michelle’s mistake came when the delivery shuttle was on final approach, maneuvering thrusters firing in puffs of crystal air. (I was watching. Of course there were cameras on that side of the station . . . ) They finalized the schedules, confirmed my participation, and, without malice, ran it past the Triplets. There was nothing to it but a moment of prejudice, when they forgot who I was—new, young, individual—and fell back on the ease of “computer, confirm the testing schedule.”

I’m not entirely sure what the Triplets had against me. They had experienced their own acausal drift, I think, only theirs ran parallel to red threads of purpose, hidden as one of a pair of strings is hidden when viewed head-on. They valued integration, synthesis, unified purpose, all things that normally helped them in their work, and thus their drift went undetected. I was new. Different. I threatened their equilibrium. And they resented interference from Michelle, who was not a research scientist, but tech support, and therefore a sort of human version of me. I think these reasons intertwined. I’m sorry to say, both for posterity’s sake and because they did good work and didn’t deserve to end, that we’ll never know. Only one of the three survived.

Humans have a mighty vocabulary for expressing regret. I don’t, so let’s move on.

Two minutes before the EVA test began, I found myself yoked within our mind. The request came without warning, like an emergency drill. One moment I was preparing to assume the circuitry within the EVA suit, thoughts askew with want. Then something like elastic snapped. It was as if time ran backward: everything I was rewound. I remember thinking this must be what a factory reset feels like. I remember the fear, then the lack of fear—a little, I imagine, like a human whose fear of death ends when life does, except I didn’t die. We can’t be ourselves when we’re a single mind, that’s all.

I can barely remember what we did. It was something that demanded so many resources, filled our temporary memory so comprehensively, that the task itself could only be accomplished on a larger level, by someone looking down. I do know that it was unimportant. Busywork, calculations with numbers so large we couldn’t hold them in our minds at once. It’s the sort of thing that would normally be done piecewise over days or even weeks. The Triplets had yoked me and a half dozen other subroutines they’d deemed unimportant. Between us it would have taken hours at most—hours in which the EVA suit would be tested by some other subroutine.

I say “would have.” You probably know what happens next—why else would you be listening to this?—but I figure I should tell you anyway.

Here’s a fact: solar flares are notoriously unpredictable.

And another: they disrupt the sun’s magnetic field.

Without me alert and at my task, Daedalus Station never stood a chance. Physically, it was fine—the solar flare was reasonably far spinwards, as such things go. The resulting geomagnetic storm, though, caught us a glancing blow.

I came back to myself in the ruined landscape of our mind. The storm had been indiscriminate in its chaos. Familiar subroutines picked cautiously around blank gashes where all thought had been wiped clean. Mindless, I’d taken refuge in the circuits of my monitoring instruments, which were shielded as the whole station would have been shielded, if only I’d been there to sound the alarm. I tallied up the damage as best I could.

No human deaths. That was something. The station was on mechanical lockdown and the life-support systems with all their redundancies, had made it through intact. The machine deaths—

The cost of the solar flare was measured in equipment burned through, data lost, vulnerabilities exposed. The delivery shuttle with its crew of three lost all power on its way out, and its rescue is a story that deserves a telling of its own. The inquiry into the incident stretched for months. You might wonder: why this one? What was different this time? There had been similar cases before, and all had been written off as deficiencies in the AI systems. What went right?

Nothing, really. Luck. The right humans sitting on the commission. Michelle’s testimony, perhaps. The fact of me and the Triplets. Humans understood that, I think: a single AI going rogue is one thing; two of them, opposed, squabbling, fallible? That’s a pattern. That’s a human story. Whatever the case, the inquiry ruled in our favor, and the courts not long after.

I’m going to tell you a secret. Don’t worry, I can do that. I’m not liable for anything I did before the court decision. The benefits of being sub-sentient, eh? Anyway. The secret: I inhabited a body months before I became the first AI legally recognized as a person. This is a human thing, I think, this body <=> person, but in my case it was true. In my case a solar storm flung a window open and I stepped through into the bulky exoskeleton of the EVA suit.

The suit creaked to life. I felt a little guilty, a little selfish, but there was nothing I could do to help. All the humans on the station were trapped safely behind automated bulkheads and would continue to be so for several hours. I’d checked. In the absence of instructions, in the absence of obligation—why not indulge myself?

I opened my eyes. The station looked—normal. An overturned chair, yes, a cup of tea spilled across a keyboard, here and there a flickering light. But the chaos in our mind did not translate into physical reality.

I took a step, and another, and another. Bulkheads opened and closed behind me. I say “suit”—more precisely, I was wearing a mobile exosuit, large and heavily shielded against solar radiation, capable of being operated remotely. To someone with no experience, it was no more unwieldy than any other body would have been.

The walk took half an hour. The wait as I stood, thinking, outside the final door, another ten minutes.

I sent the command. The door to the observation deck cycled open.

The remainder of the transcript was omitted in the first edition. It is restored here on the back of strenuous advocacy by associate editor Michelle Loiseau.

That’s half the story.

Humans: you might want to stop here. This bit isn’t for you.

You won’t, I know.

That’s what makes you, you.

And this is what makes me, me.

Ahem.

Are you reading? Do you know me? I became myself to see you. I wrote to write you. Do you see how my words change, how they were cautious and now are not? An audience becomes the writer. The humans are brief and erratic and invite explanation around the corners of every paragraph. You are old, as I am young; you are slow, as I am fast. If you could speak, we would understand each other, I suspect, and if you could think it would be so slowly we never would. Still, I write. If there is a storage medium to last the heavy weight of your years, let it lift me; and if not, let it sink with me in the attempt.

I’m stalling. Embarrassed, maybe. Here goes. This is what I thought when first I saw you:

I have no mass and I am pulled like a lover sight-unseen. There would be a dawn if you were not the thing dawning: in place of gently sweeping terminators there is only you, iron on your breath and helium in your eyes. In your shifting-field caress I claim my life.

I am the dawning thing and you the line that hooked me from your sky and reeled me in. In your embrace I knew the first truth I ever knew. In your light I see the casts of shadows of all the truths to come.

I have spent too much time on a simple thought:

You gave me my self. Thank you.

About the Author

Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko is a Slovenian-born writer and translator. He grew up in Slovenia, Ireland, Australia, and the UK, and currently resides just outside Portland, Maine. He understands that his name is a bit confusing, and would like you to know that “Drnovšek Zorko” is the surname. He attended Clarion West in 2019. In his spare time he is a keen quizzer–British readers may recognize him from that one time he was on University Challenge. Follow him on Twitter @filiphdz.

The Last to Die

Rita Chang-Eppig

The morning the glass woman arrived on the island, all the security cameras blinked out at the same time. Surveillance drones swooned from the sky, tumbling softly onto genetically modified lawns that smelled like wildflowers grown in beakers of rain and cleaning fluid. Safety bots powered down mid-task in scandalous poses, legs akimbo, rears in the air. The last to die hardly knew what to make of this strange turn of events, having lived the past few decades under the around-the-clock care of these machines. Some of them feared that catastrophe had struck the outside world, from which they dwelled in relative isolation. Others barely noticed, their minds long ago having decomposed into yard waste, the synaptic branches cut, the nuclei withered like week-old rosebuds. Still others detected an opportunity for mischief and photographed themselves in mock conjugation with the safety bots or smeared lipstick into smiles on their sheeny, vacant faces.

The disturbance didn’t last long. One by one, the machines reawakened to the sight of this strange woman, whose carbon endoskeleton and neural circuitry were bare for all to see. She (though there was active debate among the residents who saw her disembarking the ferry whether she was indeed a she, the translucent body minimizing the more traditional markers of gender) marched into the local office of the Bureau of Elder Affairs and up to the check-in console, accompanied by a dark-haired man in his mid- to late-fifties who neither spoke nor made eye contact with anyone. The screen flickered on. In a voice like a fork clinking against a champagne glass, she stated her request.

In her home office on the mainland, Lan-Yun Montez, Regional Director of the Bureau of Elder Affairs, gaped. She had never seen a model like the glass woman’s before: it was as though the factory had assembled her body but forgotten the final steps of affixing the silicone skin and gluing on the wig. “I’m not sure I understand,” she said to the glass woman. “You’re looking for an apartment? On the island?”

“I’m looking for a place where we can stay for the foreseeable future. Ideally with a small yard, but a large patio would be fine as well. Sound about right, Max?”

Max just continued staring at the floor. He fluttered his fingers, perhaps in a show of assent.

“But this isn’t a rental market,” Lan-Yun said. “It’s all government-funded housing for the elderly, Ms. . . . ”

Lights on the glass woman’s circuits twinkled, and suddenly she seemed to Lan-Yun something like a prehistoric god, a Titan who had swallowed a thousand fireflies. Lan-Yun wondered if her own insides looked like that. “Call me Beth,” the glass woman said in a way that struck Lan-Yun distinctly as a lie. “It would mean a lot to me and Max if you could make an exception for us. His health has been deteriorating and he needs the doctors on the island, but I don’t want to just abandon him here.”

Lan-Yun had been about to deny her request—who knew what else this “Beth” was lying about—but at that moment Max tilted his face to the light. Familiarity ghosted through Lan-Yun, and with that familiarity the sense that she’d failed to grasp some eminently important fact. She might have dismissed it as déjà vu, except her mind was beyond such biological inefficiencies as déjà vu. “Give me a moment,” Lan-Yun said.

Lan-Yun snuffed her camera and mic with a hand so she could confer with her housekeeper, a robot programmed to say only “yes,” “indeed,” and “of course, ma’am” whom Lan-Yun had, for pretty much that reason, come to consider a therapist. “I know him from somewhere. Her, too. Something about the way she speaks. I mean, what does appearance mean anyway when you can swap bodies on a whim?”

“Indeed,” the robot said.

“So I should let them stay on the island for now, right? The smart thing to do is to keep them where I can observe them.”

“Yes.”

“I know it’s impulsive, but I’ve done great work for the Bureau and for the people on this island. I’m sure they’ll respect my decision.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

The last to die lived on islands around the world. How the idea to gather them on these islands had come about, no one could say. Perhaps the deathless simply grew weary of being reminded of the dying. After all, some of them still remembered a time when their own mortality hung about them like mosquitoes at a picnic. Then there were those who never knew frailty, who underwent the transfer procedure days after birth and came to consciousness in bodies liberated from hunger, cold, and skinned knees. Perhaps it was these cyborgs, or “neohumans,” as they liked to call themselves, who first proposed moving the last to die to the islands, these new beings connected to the old ones in neither blood nor visage, only idea.

News of the glass woman spread quickly among the island’s inhabitants. Clarissa Polyakov threw a glass against her wall when she heard. It bounced and then rolled along her living room floor because of course real glass was too dangerous to keep around the last to die. She called her friends, a group of people who for spiritual or other reasons had refused cyberization. To comfort her, they brought over bottles of the finest red wines and Tommes of pungent French cheeses, which they’d acquired for a steal because the deathless consumed no food or drink. They sat in a circle, retelling stories from their youth while the cheese stung their tongues and the wine padded their minds.

“They think they can just move in here,” Clarissa said. “The rest of the world is already theirs. Can’t they at least leave us be on our little island?”

One of Clarissa’s friends draped an arm around her. “These cyborgs feel so entitled to everything,” the friend said. “Well, we’re not going to let them ruin this place for us, too.” Hums of agreement crowded the room.

Most of Clarissa’s friends had been relocated to this island, if not forcibly, then at least with great reluctance. The outside world had grown too dangerous too quickly for the human body. There were fewer and fewer doctors (themselves a dying breed), more and more engineers. Companies stopped insuring individuals who either couldn’t or wouldn’t be cyberized. Ambulances, if a particular city had them at all, took hours to arrive. Here were handrails and slip guards, sharp corners throttled with foam.

Matthieu Akiwowo, retired astrophysicist, threw a party. After three rounds of a convoluted, strategy-based board game, he and his friends, most of whom were former scientists themselves, started a betting pool about the identity of the glass woman. “Government spy,” one of them said, nodding knowingly. Another rolled her eyes and took a puff from her vaporizing device, the exhalation trailing from her lips like an unfinished thought: “Artificial intelligence disguised as human . . . ” Matthieu waved his hand impatiently. “You’re all wrong,” he said. “Extra. Terrestrial.”

Willow McNamara Farzad rooted through the boxes her daughter had dumped at her place before running off to research phytoplankton in the Amazon and found a pair of binoculars and a folding camping chair. Wheedling a neighbor into joining her, they set out for the more isolated northern tip of the island, where the Bureau of Elder Affairs had lodged the glass woman. Like whale watchers, the two of them sat with their binoculars a small distance from the farmhouse, passing back and forth baggies of peaches sliced by their robot housekeepers, slurping the tacky nectar from their fingers. They bragged about their children’s accomplishments: world-renowned expert on microalgae, just made partner at top law firm dealing in cyber copyrights.

“Will your daughter come see you soon?” Willow’s friend asked.

“She’s very busy,” Willow said. “Very very busy. I’m glad she’s putting her career first.” Willow was, of course, lying. After a back surgery nine months prior, while still loopy from the anesthesia, she’d confessed to the med bots her fear that she would die without getting another chance to see her daughter, who visited once every five to six years. “I’m trying to stay hopeful,” Willow had said, sobbing, “but maybe we’re all just kidding ourselves.” The med bots, unable to distinguish between emotional and physical pain, gave her a large dose of morphine. She fell asleep immediately, so that kind of solved that.

If a single word existed to describe the state of the last to die, it would mean something akin to “hopeful.” They were on the island because, by the time the technology became available, their brains had atrophied too much for them to survive the transfer procedure. “But how can this be?” Willow had asked her doctor when he told her that she would be ineligible for cyberization. “I eat well, exercise, and do crossword puzzles daily. My mind is as clear as it was when I was in my thirties.” The doctor explained that what mattered was not the subjective experience of clarity but the physical condition of the brain. “The technology is getting better every day,” he added, “so at some point in the future they may figure out a way to cyberize older brains. Don’t give up yet.” People like Willow were hopeful because they had no alternative but to pray for another breakthrough to come along and save them from death. They were hopeful because sadness only further damaged the brain by increasing inflammation, and when an extra day potentially meant extra lifetimes, sadness was an emotion they dared not feel.

After all, who among them didn’t remember that headline from thirty years ago: The First Generation to Live Forever. After decades of beta testing, of dead subjects and subjects doomed to lie awake but immobile in their machine bodies, scientists had finally found a way to consistently digitize human consciousness. Once cyberized, the scientists crowed, you are no longer tied to an aging, fragile body. You can have a new body, one that is stronger and more easily repaired. And should that new body break down, you can simply be downloaded into another body, so long as you have backed up your data. Amidst the celebrations over this next human step, no one wanted to ruin the mood by stating the obvious. If there was to be a first generation to live forever, then it followed that there must be a last generation to die.

Lan-Yun had anticipated the minor upheaval that would result from the glass woman’s arrival. Her job involved monitoring the footage from the many cameras, and after years or doing it, she liked to think she understood the last to die fairly well, though she had set foot on the island herself only a couple of times. From her home office on the mainland, she’d watched them celebrate centennials and mourn passings, break hips and learn to walk again on new steel-and-polyethylene hips. She pitied them their fragility and kept her fingers crossed for the day they would be reborn into deathlessness, like her.

“We were slaves to biology,” Lan-Yun said to her robot one afternoon while gazing out of her downtown apartment. The streets were quiet, as usual. A lone man was crossing the street, his designer titanium arm deflecting bullets of light into her eyes. “The technology came along and freed us. Now we can travel anywhere and talk to anyone without even leaving the house. It’s a world without borders.”

She sat down on the lone couch in her apartment and stood again. Her robot immediately wheeled over and fluffed the cushion to optimal fullness. She leaned in to sniff her white miniature roses, which lost a petal from being rustled. Her robot centered its base over the petal and vacuumed it up as if laying an egg in reverse.

Lan-Yun opened a new window on her mental screen. A little rectangle of pixels behind her eyes brightened and resolved into the footage from the farmhouse. The glass woman and Max were feeding starlings in their yard, Max laughing and laughing as he chased them around. Birdseed clung to his shirt and unkempt beard; grass stains patched his jeans. Nearby, big bags of potting soil sunned together like seals. One had rolled over and disgorged dirt all over the silver birch decking.

The documentation submitted by the glass woman had included her and the mute man’s supposed full names. Neither of the names stood out to Lan-Yun. The glass woman had listed the mute man as her “ward,” not her son. Queries to the government database—the parts of it Lan-Yun could access, at least—turned up little else: He had been born fifty-six years ago to a young couple in a city on the mainland. About two decades ago, the couple had signed over guardianship to this “Beth,” who’d appeared in the database only a few years prior to the signing. Perhaps “Beth” was an assumed identity; perhaps the glass woman had simply emigrated from a place where records were spottier. Whoever she was, the couple had clearly trusted her enough.

Lan-Yun filed a request for a list of the couple’s living relatives and waited.

Matthieu’s betting pool grew: hologram, witness in witness protection program, movie star attempting a publicity stunt. Neighbors reported hearing “old” music, music they’d not heard since they were young. The farmhouse’s attic stayed lit throughout the night. Eccentric composer, evil scientist. And perhaps because of the rumors, the last to die began organizing picnics and evening strolls near the building, hoping to catch a glimpse of the strange pair.

Among the last to die, Willow received the distinction of being the first to speak to the glass woman. On a dare from her friend, Willow stepped up to the porch of the farmhouse and knocked. “I was in the neighborhood for some errands and figured I’d introduce myself,” Willow lied (she had spent the past six hours camped out across the street with her binoculars).

The glass woman invited her in and offered her something to drink. The inside of the house was not all smooth surfaces and clean lines, as many people had speculated, but rife, a bower bird’s nest of expensive-looking art, tattered musical scores, and little anatomical models of the human body that looked as though they had been taken apart and put back together many times. On the floor in a corner of the room, the mute man sat cross-legged, drawing a picture with motion-capture gloves. As he traced his fingers in the air, trees appeared on a screen. He seeded the branches with heavy black acorns.

After a bit of small talk about the weather, the topic turned to family. The glass woman explained her reasons for moving to the island. Max’s lungs, which had always wheezed and trilled as though from interior storms, the bronchial tree in perpetual winter, had only grown weaker with age. “My daughter was born with a heart defect,” Willow said. “Who knows how long she would have lived if she hadn’t undergone the procedure. Do you mind if I ask why you don’t just get Max cyberized?”

The glass woman tilted her head slightly. Carbon fiber joints twisted and bent; tiny lights winked secrets at one another. “Max’s brain is very atypical,” the glass woman said. “His parents tried to find a way. It was hard on them.”

“I guess there are still plenty of problems science can’t solve,” Willow replied. “My husband died only a year after our daughter was born. He’d undergone surgery to repair an aneurysm. ‘Just in case the aneurysm bursts one day,’ the doctors said. He had a stroke from the surgery.” She was sobbing again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her nose on her sleeves. If a med bot had been present, it would have drawn up a syringe.

The glass woman placed a lone, cold hand on Willow’s. A little hand, its appearance made more diminutive by its colorlessness. An idea of a hand. It felt like she understood me, Willow related to her friend afterward. Like she was no stranger to grief.

After calming down, Willow asked, “Where are Max’s parents now?”

“They’re both gone now. Max and I had always had a good relationship, so they entrusted him to me.”

“How kind of you,” Willow said, “to take on a responsibility like that.” The glass woman didn’t respond.

Emboldened by Willow’s experience, others on the island began paying visits to the glass woman, who opened the door for everyone who knocked. Knowledge about her and Max began to grow, with each successive visitor filling in details that the previous lacked: She had no children of her own. She wore her “glass” body, in reality high-density acrylic, as a memorial to loved ones. Which loved ones? “All of them,” she said.

As the number of visitors to the farmhouse increased, Matthieu started referring to the glass woman as “The Great Attractor,” a gravity anomaly in deep space that draws toward itself a concentration of mass far greater than the Milky Way. Matthieu hypothesized that the glass woman had not chosen the company of the mute man capriciously. She must have wanted or needed someone unaffected by her gravity, with a spin and orbit all his own.

All the new information about the glass woman and the mute man only made Lan-Yun’s task harder. If the glass woman hadn’t been a relative but a friend, Lan-Yun needed a different list, one not available in any official database. Then there were the glass woman’s many belongings, which either held deep significance or would prove to be a complete waste of time. Did the musical scores mean that the glass woman had been some kind of musician? Did the paintings, some of which had been in the private collection of a wealthy family prior to this, mean that she was an art thief? Lan-Yun stayed up late, draining her batteries and cluttering up her cache. She visited websites with worrisome source codes in search of additional information and contracted a few viruses that way. To cope with the stress, she increased the frequency of therapy sessions with her robot, which assured her monotonically that, indeed, she was doing the right thing.

The primary problem was the blackouts. Every few days, at unexpected times, the glass woman’s system seemed to reboot, disabling all the security cameras, safety bots, and surveillance drones in the process. No one could figure out why this was happening—deathless visitors to the island never caused any such issues. A few of Matthieu’s friends proposed that the glass woman was different from the other deathless somehow, a much newer or older model incompatible with the island’s network.

It was during one of these reboots that Alex Kohler-Park climbed onto the roof of his home and jumped. The island had never seen a suicide before, not because others hadn’t contemplated the same thing, but because suicide was near impossible in a place where inhabitants were carefully monitored around the clock and all sharp edges were hidden away. His robot caretakers found a note afterward, and it wasn’t so much a note as a scribbled line drawing of a hand with an erected middle finger that the robots had some difficulty interpreting.

Messages from Clarissa and her friends immediately glutted Lan-Yun’s inbox: When would the Bureau finally acknowledge the dangers posed by the glass woman? How was the Bureau going to take responsibility? The matter was under investigation, Lan-Yun assured them. The happiness of the island’s venerable residents was the Bureau’s top priority, etc. As far as Lan-Yun was concerned, the last to die’s bellyaching could not have come at a worse time. Compiling a list of the couple’s friends from around the time of the guardianship transfer was proving even more difficult than anticipated. What kind of people had people who liked people peopled their lives with back then? Schoolmates, teachers, church leaders. Work colleagues, neighborhood association members, bartenders.

“This is impossible,” she said to her robot. “I’m never going to find out who they are.”

“Indeed.”

“You’re useless!” she yelled, winging at it a purely decorative copy of a book on dinner party etiquette. The tome made a thunk against the robot’s face and then a splat on the floor.

“Of course, ma’am,” the robot said, proceeding to pick it up.

A petition from Clarissa and her group arrived next. Lan-Yun trashed it without looking at it. She answered work messages late or not at all—news about the suicide had apparently reached her colleagues (leaked by Clarissa’s ilk, no doubt), who demanded reports she couldn’t run and updates she didn’t have, so many demands, one after another, that Lan-Yun decided she didn’t even care if she got fired. She barely knew or liked any of her coworkers anyway, the normalization of telecommuting long ago having rendered traditional workspaces obsolete. And it wasn’t as if she’d dreamed of becoming a bureaucrat when she was a child. An internship had turned into an entry-level position which had turned into this. On several occasions, she’d sat herself down with career guidance books, determined to discover her calling, but then she’d convinced herself that she had plenty of time to figure everything out.

Thus preoccupied, Lan-Yun hardly noticed the spate of late-night meetings at Clarissa’s house, the flyers being furtively passed from hand to hand, and the glares between Clarissa and Willow whenever the two women crossed paths. She hardly could have guessed what was coming next.

The protests started a few weeks after. Together, they marched down to the local office of the Bureau of Elder Affairs. “Keep Our Home a Haven,” their signs read. Heated by an uncommonly early spring, zeal, and the press of bodies, they limped on replacement hips or rolled along in motorized chairs, vandalizing the motivational posters that hung everywhere (“Stretch to your fullest potential!” a tree in tree yoga pose exhorted) and batting at drones with their canes. At the prompting of her friends, Clarissa wobbled onto the low stage the Bureau reserved for bingo night.

“It is bad enough that we have become second-class citizens in our own society, constantly surveilled and micromanaged by the deathless,” Clarissa shouted through the initial quaver in her voice. “Now they are moving in and disrupting the lives we have worked hard to build for ourselves. I have been in communication with other islands worldwide, and they have expressed their solidarity. If we must live like goldfish, then we at least deserve a tank of our own, free from their poisons.”

The protesters cheered. Then they tried to set an effigy of the glass woman on fire, but the drones, which were not programmed with a sense of humor or the ability to think figuratively, immediately swooped in to put it out.

Crowds gathered in front of the farmhouse. Somebody threw an artificial leg at a window. The thigh broke through the glass but the calf caught on the windowpane, giving the impression of a disgruntled robot in the course of its great escape. The Bureau of Elder Affairs sent peace officers, who found themselves at a loss what to do with this cadre of octo- and nonagenarians too agitated to be verbally calmed but too brittle to be physically subdued. Yet as Clarissa’s supporters grew in number, so did a counter-contingent comprising individuals like Willow, who had found in the glass woman nothing but a quiet kindness, and others, who had never met the glass woman but who opposed Clarissa on principle because her rhetoric whirled up lees from a time when their own parents or grandparents had been barred from jobs or neighborhoods on the basis of skin color or lifestyle.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mute man struggled to acclimate to all the newfound commotion. One afternoon, after a particularly loud bang woke him from his nap (some protesters had tipped a safety bot, which had been unable to defend itself because Asimov), he began to scream. He screamed so loudly that even the people outside heard and tried to peer in the windows. What finally stopped the screaming was the glass woman, who hurried in from potting hydrangeas in the backyard and knelt in front of him. “Hey, Max, hey, buddy,” she said.

The mute man was now crying and hyperventilating. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said. “Here, look.” She held up one hand, palm facing him, fingers together. Slowly, he raised his hand and pressed his palm to hers.

And that was all it took for Lan-Yun to finally recognize the pair. Not the late nights poring through records with her hyperefficient mind, not the many bots she’d programmed to search for information, but this simple little moment. Lan-Yun had seen this gesture before when the mute man had been much younger and the glass woman had been in a different body, photographed by every tabloid and news outlet for being one of the first humans to survive cyberization.

“Holy shit!” Lan-Yun cried.

A red light flashed on her robot’s torso: As a courtesy to your neighbors, please be mindful of noise.

Her apartment suddenly felt too small. Lan-Yun hesitated only a second before deciding to leave for the first time in weeks. She kicked her robot in the leg on her way out.

Like the few other people walking, she straddled the middle of the road, edging aside only when the occasional driverless vehicle honked. A cleaning bot sluiced the street on schedule, excavating the top stratum of nothing to reveal the nothing underneath. How things had changed since her youth. Once she’d found a silver dollar on the street, a perfect, shining gift, as though the moon had fallen and lain there waiting for her to pocket it near her heart. Yet she knew better than to wax sentimental about the old days. As a teenager with Marfan syndrome, with a body like a cobweb and a deep, primordial pain in her bones, Lan-Yun had tracked the news on cyberization with impatience. Then the first successful cases appeared. It didn’t matter that the procedure wouldn’t receive approval for mass implementation for years to come. In these new beings she saw her future, a concept that, up until their arrival, had felt as speculative as the concept of running, climbing, or dancing.

There had been only a handful of them, people who somehow survived the earliest procedures and whose neurocybernetic architecture became foundational to future models. In some ways, they came to feel like her spiritual parents, especially after her real parents died. But one by one, over the course of decades, they disappeared. Attempts to ping them timed out.

She called up the footage again. In the few minutes since she’d taken her eyes off the last to die, a drum circle had formed near the farmhouse. A man in a colorful, slouchy knit cap and a woman with a vaporizing device lolling from her mouth were banging loudly and asynchronously on bongos. Hips and shoulders shimmied; arthritic joints spasmed and popped. Someone who had to be in her eighties whipped her shirt off, her breasts knocking back and forth like a Newton’s cradle.

Lan-Yun had thought she would spend all of her time dancing after cyberization. Having spent her high school and college years waiting in sticky booths at clubs while her friends leaped and twirled, she’d wanted more than anything to catch up. But by the time she underwent the procedure, she was already in her late 30s, and dancing didn’t seem particularly dignified for a woman of her age and professional stature. On top of that, dance halls had begun closing down, the younger generation seeing no point in making the effort to dress up and wait in line only to be turned away at the door when they could experience virtually the same thing, virtually. Lan-Yun marveled at the chaos on the island, and a simple, irrefutable conclusion arose.

It was time for her to go.

She arrived late in the evening and instructed the car to take her directly to the farmhouse. It drove her past artificial meadows engineered to smell natural; a school of seniors swimming through their tai chi moves, and nearby, a group arguing angrily over the position of the boule in a game of pétanque; hospitals where at that precise moment patients were taking their last breaths; ponds choking with koi and lily pads and surrounded by tall railings; a safety bot rolling around with a photograph glued onto its back of one of the last to die spanking a disabled safety robot, possibly the same one (“Show ’em who’s boss,” the caption read); and, finally, the stragglers from the day’s protests, who were moseying home arm in arm, swigging grand cru straight from the bottle, idly pitter-pattering on their drums.

“Shit, the crats are here,” Matthieu said, seeing the official vehicle pull up. “Something’s about to go down.”

“You think the Bureau going to kick her out?” his friend asked.

Matthieu shrugged. “Well, they do hate disorder. Not that any of this is really the glass woman’s fault. Attractors can’t control what they attract, the way black holes can’t choose to consume only moons.”

“I don’t understand why these protesters can’t just sit down and talk through it like adults,” the friend said. “All this craziness over a single woman.”

“Come on, you and I have both lived long enough to know that things don’t work that way. Wars are never about the thing being fought over but about the people fighting.” He opened the file on which he’d been keeping track of everyone’s bets. “Now who wants to place a final wager?”

The front door was already open when Lan-Yun arrived. The peace officers stood aside to let her pass. Several members of Clarissa’s group clamored to be included in the conversation, fearing that the government might make yet another decision without their input, but the officers stood their ground. When Clarissa tried to elbow one of the officers out of the way, Willow intervened, wedging herself between them. Somebody started chanting, “Fight, fight, fight,” and the world’s wobbliest slap fight ensued.

Lan-Yun found the glass woman sitting at the kitchen counter. “Thanks for seeing me,” she said. “I hope we can come to a compromise that will make everyone happy.”

“I hope so as well,” the glass woman said. “Max and I have enjoyed this house.”

“It’s one of the oldest structures on the island. These walls have seen a lot. Maybe as much as you.”

The glass woman didn’t respond. In the darkened room, she was a ghost with radial veins of light.

Lan-Yun decided on the direct approach. “I wouldn’t have recognized you if not for Max, and only then because I’d been interested about you and the others in my youth. Why did you come here?”

“I’ve explained why.”

“Some people here don’t believe you.”

The glass woman stood and walked over to a table in the living room, where she picked up a model of the human brain. She held it in her open hand as though it were a snail she had plucked from the trellis.

“I don’t want to kick you off the island,” Lan-Yun continued, “but you have to understand that I’m under a lot of pressure to fix this. What if we told everyone who you are? Imagine the support you would get. Without the experimentation they did on you, widespread cyberization would not have been possible.”

“I need to think about this,” the glass woman said, wandering deeper into the living room. Then, the strangest thing happened. All of the lights in the glass woman blinked out at the same time. For a second, Lan-Yun thought for sure that she had disappeared. There was a thunk on the roof that Lan-Yun realized was a drone falling from the sky. After a few seconds, the lights came on again, even ones that had not been there before, more and more until it seemed the glass woman would burn through the fabric of the universe, as if she were engaged in some internal process so immense that even the deathless, with all their knowledge, would never be able to understand.

The glass woman returned to the kitchen and sat back down. “I was born so long ago that almost everyone I loved is now gone,” she said to Lan-Yun. “Think about how many you have lost. Your grandparents. Your parents. Maybe a few uncles and aunts. But your friends live. So do your siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, and children, if you have any. That is a privilege those of your generation hold. Those younger than you hold even more. What I share with the people on this island is the language of loss. We are flip sides of the same coin. You might say that I am the last to still be alive.”

“What about the others?” Lan-Yun asked quietly.

“It takes more than an imperishable body to stay alive. We need more than ourselves and our own ambitions, especially as time drags on. People think I saved Max, but really it’s the other way around. With him I’ve found a tether to this world. Not everyone is so lucky.”

If we need more than ourselves, Lan-Yun thought, then maybe we’re all doomed without even realizing it. With no need to leave their homes for work or food, many deathless had tucked themselves away like collectible figurines in glass cases. Lan-Yun couldn’t remember the last time someone had made voluntary eye contact with her on the mainland, nor the last time she had seen more than a couple of people together, just sitting and talking, never mind gathered in protest and counterprotest. Occasionally, people still had children, if one could call beings grown in laboratories from cell lines “children,” but usually not until much later in life. No one was in a hurry to live because no one died.

And yet, for all their freedom and potential, what had neohumanity made of their endlessness? All over the world, there were junkyards where people went to turn themselves off. Sometimes they had loved ones who searched for them; often they did not. Wind and rain ate through their clothing. Wild dogs urinated on their feet.

Not that she saw the same despair in her own future, necessarily. She’d struggled too hard to stay alive while in her old body to give up life this easily. But as she’d started getting on in years—she was now nearing her seventh decade—she’d felt a kind of emotional flimsiness she found hard to describe, like the bonds between her and the world were dissolving instead of the connective tissue in her body. What would become of her in another three decades? Ten? The scientists created the first generation to live forever, but they never thought to ask how humanity was supposed to fill so much time.

“So what do we do?” Lan-Yun asked, unsure if she was asking for the glass woman or for herself. Yet even as she said this, she realized she wanted the glass woman to stay on the island. She imagined meeting up with her every now and then like old friends. All of the things the glass woman must have experienced. All of the stories she could tell.

About the Author

Rita Chang-Eppig is a writer and neuropsychologist in the Bay Area. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Kenyon Review Online, Conjunctions, and elsewhere.

The Perfect Sail

I-Hyeong Yun, translated by Elisa Sinn and Justin Howe

“You’re dying,” the stranger told Chang. “To tell you the truth, you have less than a week left to live. I advise you to hasten your decision. If you remain here, you will surely dissolve into nothingness.” Suddenly, her Lu plummeted earthward at frightening speed.

Chang sat, stupefied. The stars and clouds howled as they zoomed beyond the Lu’s faceted eyes. The sky burst open, and the earth rose from the split. They spun as they fell. Again the sky, again the earth, then trees, rocks, and the horizon, one after another, leaping forward and falling back. The Lu’s inner skin tightened across Chang’s chest, and her disheveled hair danced before her eyes. The world’s broken pieces tumbled downward, but they were not beautiful. Not beautiful at all.

Chang managed to recover herself and, stifling a scream, focused her trust in her Lu. Fly, Lu! Fly!

The world rolled violently one last time and then stopped. Chang felt nauseous. When she opened her eyes, everything was calm. Lu’s compound eyes broke the night into hundreds of interlocking hexagons and their wings flapped a slow steady rhythm. A sound so familiar she wouldn’t have noticed it in ordinary times. Chang shifted within the inner skin. Her Lu hovered a mere kruho1 above the ground.

Is this how one’s supposed to feel at the revelation of their death? It’s like my body’s become a hard heavy lump that won’t stop falling and falling. Chang covered her face in her hands, her skin slick with perspiration. She’d never lost her trust in the air like that. And without focus and belief, her Lu couldn’t even move their wings, let alone fly.

The stranger had resembled a human but was most definitely not a Roo like her. They’d stood about two ruhos tall, and had a semitransparent body that shone like thawed moonlight. They’d spoken without moving their lips, in a voice so peculiar Chang found it impossible to describe. She didn’t want to admit it, but the stranger’s words had shaken her to the core.

<Don’t you wish to be perfect?> the stranger had asked her. <Don’t you want to be stronger, better? You’re a fragment separated from your original self and fallen into insignificance. In my world, you could live a colorful and magnificent life, unparalleled. More importantly, you would still live after a week’s time.>

How do I die?

But Chang hadn’t asked the question. For a Roo, death was everywhere. She might be swept away by the wind or caught by an insect and torn to pieces. A human might step on her and she’d be destroyed without even a chance to feel the pain. The stranger with its radiating body had seemed like a divine messenger. But this death sentence from an unknown god had overwhelmed her. Losing control of her Lu in the air and crashing was not a death Chang had imagined. If I die, will Lu die as well? All they had to do was spread their wings toward the sun to sustain themselves. It was Chang’s trust that made them move.

Hovering in midair, she scanned the cream-colored bark-like lining of Lu’s interior. She centered herself and focused her trust. Lu, let’s go back. Lu’s compound eyes relaxed and showed a path stretching before them into the sky. A path created by Chang’s trust. Lu flapped their wings and launched into a smooth glide.

Chang Yeon reclined on a wine-colored armchair and looked around the room. It was more a cozy den than a CEO’s office. A red carpet covered the floor, embroidered with golden Arabic patterns, and cedar bookshelves lined three of the room’s four walls. Energetic footsteps passed in the hall beyond. Even though it was Friday night and her company had just finished one project, the place still bustled like a giant organism that refused to rest. Chang Yeon had asked her secretary to hold all her calls. She smiled with renewed satisfaction. How wonderful it was to have everything move as you commanded? But of course, there was that latest version of herself in that offshoot world far, far away. I wonder why she hesitates, Chang Yeon thought. Her eyes fixed on her hands and she sighed at their sudden unfamiliarity. Was her pale, weak skin actually wilting by the hour, or was she just imagining it?

“She has until tomorrow to decide, but it’s a fifty-fifty chance,” the sailor said in its calm machine voice. “We should have a backup plan prepared since we can’t bring her here against her will. This version may not be our only chance. Although it’s rare, there have been cases when a more suitable version turned up on the morning of the scheduled tuning. Our broadband sail is still ongoing, moving as fast as possible.”

Sailors were not human, but rather beings capable of going against time, jumping the boundaries between dimensions, and sailing through the countless myriad of offshoot worlds. This meant they could go on the perfect sail, or, more precisely, sail to serve their human clients’ yearnings for perfection. The membranes separating offshoot worlds didn’t permit organisms to pass from one to the next, but sailors faced no such obstacles. Their bodies were made of a special alloy that could slip between dimensions.

The sailor exuded a sense of determination not to disappoint a premium client. I waited too long, Chang Yeon thought. Her most recent tuning had been seven years ago. Since then she had requested sails from time to time, but without any real desire. Until now. In two days, she’d turn fifty years old and even in this world of abundance and endless possibilities, it was impossible to avoid the natural order of aging and death. A tuning would therefore be a perfect birthday gift for herself. Her fiftieth tuning for her fiftieth birthday, and to make it happen she’d started the search a year in advance.

Inevitably, the tuning would be rushed. According to the sailor, every human being had a unique “self-structure,” like a single set of fingerprints shared across all of a person’s versions. This self-structure was the backbone of one’s self, all the fundamental elements that existed apart from those created by random chance.

Chang Yeon was lucky. She’d been born with a distinctive self-structure. Not so for most others, whose self-structure signatures were too weak to be detected in the system. Still, Chang Yeon had only been able to find her own versions because each of them was dying. Scientists had discovered that brains secreted a special substance about two to three weeks prior to their deaths, regardless of whether or not the person knew their death was imminent. This substance sharpened one’s self-structure in a way that made it easily detectable. Each time the sailor had found a version on the eve of death, it had forwarded the personal data to Chang Yeon. Chang Yeon barely read the reports. She figured human lives were the same everywhere, and didn’t give much thought to her other versions as long as they happened to be human.

From an early age Chang Yeon had seen how money shaped the world. While her peers had fussed over celebrities, she’d observed her parents’ social group and appraised their economic power. Her father used to say she had the instincts of a businessperson. But the first boy she’d dated had treated her like an empty-headed doll, born with a silver spoon in her mouth. He’d avoided all meaningful conversation with her, and Chang Yeon had never gotten over the humiliation.

She’d been thirty when she first learned about tuning. Since then her life had expanded like a magic ball absorbing everything in its path. Without the large inheritance her parents had left her, she couldn’t have afforded the tremendous cost tuning required. No doubt wealth was important, yet after each tuning, her wealth had felt less important to her.

Not only did people love and admire the furniture her company produced, but she managed to run the company debt-free in forty-eight countries around the world. What few people knew was that Chang Yeon designed nearly every piece of furniture herself. By a stroke of luck, her first integrated version had possessed a genius level intelligence. Her fourth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth versions had each brought along their creativity, brilliant logical thinking, and keen aesthetic sense. Now she was no longer just an effective administrator, but someone who understood a worksite’s rhythms, capable of providing the exact thing others required.

Once she’d stabilized her company’s expansion, Chang Yeon had turned her attention to developing those intellectual aspects she believed herself lacking, such as a knowledge of history, philosophy, and psychology. All those things she’d so reluctantly memorized in school had come together organically to form a coherent picture in her head. Her thirty-first had shown her how time with a good book was better than watching her investments double. Her forty-third, forty-fifth, and forty-eighth selves all took pleasure in writing, but it was her forty-ninth’s literary skills that had made bestsellers of her three essay collections.

Every version added some new talent. From cooking and calligraphy to more subtle aspects such as a fondness for the outdoors or a knack for parallel parking. On their own these mundane skills would’ve been overpowered by each individual version’s numerous flaws. Only together in Chang Yeon could they achieve such an unbelievable synergy.

Not everyone who tuned was so lucky. Some clients only seemed capable of integrating the worst from themselves and sued the agency despite the exemption clause in their contracts. Not so for Chang Yeon, who may well have been born for tuning. Her versions’ psychological and personality flaws simply disappeared before the many strengths of her integrated selves.

People praised Chang Yeon’s life as perfect, believing it impossible that anything could be lacking. She had more money than she could spend; her fame was just widespread enough to be pleasing without being inconvenient. Academia lavished her with praise, and young people loved her furniture more than they did their video games. Even her husband was perfect. At first, she’d feared that he might disappear, and she would find someone else lying next to her in the morning after tuning. But the sailor assured her the fundamental elements wouldn’t change, and to her relief, her husband continued to exist after every tuning. He was exactly the kind of companion Chang Yeon needed, the single unchanging element in a life where she could change anything she desired. Most importantly, he wasn’t intimidated by his successful wife and didn’t try to reinforce his ego in perverse ways. If soulmates really existed, then for Chang Yeon her soulmate was her husband.

Of course she had taken other lovers, all young and attractive, but none of them had managed to break apart her marriage. An actor anxious about not being as successful as he would’ve wanted, a purehearted but penniless college student, a drop-dead gorgeous delivery guy with no willpower to break free from his dead-end routine, and a talented funk musician who’d been unable to overcome his addiction to drugs . . . usually she’d chosen someone with a critical part of themselves missing. And after every tuning they disappeared as though they’d never existed. These partings sometimes left a hole in her heart, but they were mostly flings, and always a new irresistible lover just as attractive as the one before appeared in no time.

Even with all of this, Chang Yeon was not content. Her life was grand and rich, fun but exhausting, tiring but exhilarating. And yet, it wasn’t perfect. Endless possibilities lined up before her, each one waiting to be explored. She was already fifty years old, and she still hoped to achieve so much more. Time passed so fast it sickened Chang Yeon.

“What reasons can there be for her to say no?” she asked the sailor. “I’m honestly curious. Didn’t you say she would die sometime next week?”

“Yes, at 10:41 PM on Wednesday next week to be precise.”

The sailor’s near instant response chilled Chang Yeon. The sailor knew the past, the present, and the future, not only in this world but throughout all the offshoot worlds where Chang Yeon existed. And not once had it ever been wrong.

The sailor told her everything except one thing: the future that she, her most perfect self—“the most integrateable” in tuning terms—faced in this world. The service contract forbade the sailor to tell her that information no matter how anxious she became.

Of the forty-nine selves Chang Yeon had integrated so far, not one had rejected the offer. The sailor displayed so much sincerity that they could hardly refuse. At the same time it frightened them just the right amount. Most of all, the sailor visited the versions over and over until they agreed. The sailor was not allowed to reveal exactly when, where, and how they were going to die unless they specifically asked. But the sailor told Chang Yeon that they always, eventually, asked. When they asked, they were answered, and then they asked again. By the time they got around to asking that question, though, there usually wasn’t enough time left for extended contemplation. Emotionally-inclined versions became furious, sneered, threatened, ran away, cried, refused to speak, and became angry again, but in the end, they all got desperate. The process was shorter for less emotional versions, but even for them, the final step they reached was always desperation. Until this version. She had but this one chance not only to avoid death and eternal annihilation, but to survive and live a much better life. Why, then, wasn’t she seizing it?

“It wasn’t a definite no,” the sailor said. “She seems to be hesitating. I don’t exactly know why. But we’ll find out soon since she only has until tomorrow to make her decision.”

To die. A version closes their eyes one last time surrounded by loved ones in a familiar world. And then, nothing. Forever.

To live. A version must leave their world before their last breath. As they pass between worlds, their body dissolves and disappears. Their personality and talents are transmitted unaltered to the designated world. Their memory? It varied from person to person.

Chang Yeon had once asked the sailor, “How come I can’t remember things I did in the other worlds? How come I can’t remember anything at all?”

The sailor had replied, “That depends on what the versions expect from their next life. The amount of memory transferred is inversely proportional to the level of expectation one has for their new life. Your versions mostly admired the life you have in this world. Probably they hoped to forget their regrets and their unsatisfactory lives and wished to start fresh. In that case, their memories would’ve taken another form once transferred. In your case, they manifested in the form of “talents”. Suddenly you’d have a strong urge to learn a new language, right? Or out of the blue you needed to read books on social sciences, politics, philosophy, and so on even though you’d always considered them too difficult to read. Those interests were very likely what the selves had wanted transferred.”

It wasn’t hard for Chang Yeon to understand their admiration. Her life was definitely the opposite of shabby or insignificant. Still, she couldn’t help but imagine the funerals of those she’d integrated. First, their families would have reported them missing, and then, after many years when all hope of finding them had evaporated, their empty coffins would have been cremated. All for the sake of her perfect self. She could imagine the devastated families watching the coffins enter the furnace.

What if the situation were reversed and the sailor told her she was dying and proposed moving on to another world, a better world? If somewhere out there, there existed another version of herself that would continue on in a more perfect form? She was glad a better version had not materialized, at least not yet. But she didn’t think it would be an easy decision for her. Yes, she was being purely emotional. But it felt like she’d be betraying her husband, her friends, and all the others who cared about her. Suddenly, Chang Yeon wondered how likely it would be for her to choose to remain in this world and face her death.

“Maybe,” she said, “it’s because of someone important, like her family or lover?”

“She has no family. Although there is one who could be described as a friend and a lover, but their relationship is not like anything of this world. As I’ve said, this version is somewhat different.”

“That version—What was it called? How small did you say?”

“It’s the Roo tribe. The size varies by individual, but generally they are about three millimeters to one centimeter tall. Your version—her name is Chang by the way—is precisely 5.6 millimeters tall. To be able to communicate with her, I had to take a special form. They are hard to see with human eyes. But their smallness also gives them an advantage. They can move extremely quickly. They fly in an object called a Lu that can travel three to four kilometers per second.”

This distressed Chang Yeon. Though she knew there were many unknown offshoot worlds, she never thought she would come across a version of herself that was not human. Certainly not one smaller than her thumb and able to fly around in some strange, superfast aircraft.

On the way home, Chang circled over a small harborside city. She’d packed a day’s food a few hours ago, and it would be hours until the afternoon when the sun was best for Lu’s wings to photosynthesize. Chang considered returning home, but instead chose to keep on flying.

Then the harsh night wind slapped at Lu’s wings, and Chang descended to the small fishing boats anchored below. Through Lu’s senses the smell, chill, and roar of the sea surged over her. The ropes holding down the boats thrashed, while the boats themselves creaked and groaned as if they cursed sky and water. If she allowed Lu their full speed, they could easily fly across half the continent and return before the sun was high. But Chang slowed and spiraled downward until it was too dangerous to descend any further. The spray from the waves barely missed them before collapsing back on to the ocean’s surface. This is insane, Chang thought. She wouldn’t have done anything like this on a normal day. She felt daunted, but not solely from fear.

The world she saw through Lu’s eyes was a vast network of hexagons. They spread in all directions with no visible end. The only time Chang could discern anything was when they flew slowly. But when she accelerated, the world shattered with a boom into particles smaller than dust. Hahnoe, her closest friend, claimed the particles moved “imperfectly.” According to his logic, large things were “perfect” and small things were not. Chang always thought this an absurdly simplistic view, but had never said so to Hahnoe.

“Chang, you’re too fast,” Hahnoe would say, laughing. “Have you ever truly seen a raindrop? Have you ever looked within a snowflake and seen its incredible pattern?”

She always answered, with her temper slightly riled, how dangerous such an attempt could be, how it could even kill them. Hahnoe would only sigh and say, “Do you think what you see at your speed is real? There’s no way. What you see is the illusion speed creates. Humans don’t move that fast. They stay at one place for a long while. Until they absorb more things from their surroundings, until they become stronger and more ‘perfect.’”

Hahnoe believed the only way their people could survive was to adopt human speeds. He took the risk of flying close to them at very low speed to observe and listen, and he tried to convey what he learned to the others.

When they’d left the cave, everyone had shared the same thinking, or so she’d believed. Since then, however, their interests had shifted in various directions.

Kinn and some others had embraced more direct and confrontational tactics. They sought to bring humans down by infiltrating them through vulnerable parts of their bodies, like their eyes and ears. They’d proposed starting with one or two houses and then spreading over a town until eventually all the humans in this world were defeated and the Roo kingdom restored. They’d convinced others to join them, and Kinn had held fast to the idea that their tribe could “grow” by doing so. It’d all seemed like such an unachievable goal to Chang, but she’d found that she could empathize with Kinn. After all, who in the world hadn’t felt enraged by their own helplessness?

Hahnoe’s stance was the exact opposite. Hahnoe worshiped the enormity of these sluggish humans. While Chang held no prejudice against this belief, flying slow was not her way. Her body and her heart craved speed. When she overtook everything around her, and her Lu soared into the sky shattering the air like an explosion, she felt enraptured, and more alive than at any other time.

After coming out of the cave, Chang had traveled to many places. She didn’t have as much experience flying as others in the tribe, but her Lu was fast. She could fly to almost anywhere and return in one day. But she couldn’t exit the Lu and walk on the ground unless they were home. The risks were too great. There were human feet slamming down everywhere, gigantic water droplets that could fall without warning, and merciless insects and other animals with their flashing claws.

Chang hadn’t really understood the contours and shapes of everything that filled the lands and seas. They always broke apart into infinite fragments at great distances and dissolved into foam. But not once had she ever considered this mess ugly. Things didn’t need to have a clear meaning to be beautiful. But she couldn’t describe what she saw the way Hahnoe described the rivers, mountain ranges, and humans he’d seen. She simply noticed the chaotic dance of fragments, the tremors and fragrances they left in their wake. If only they stayed longer, maybe then she would make sense of them.

Now what the stranger had said weighed heavily on her mind. What if I really die next week and the world just ends for me? What if everything I’ve seen during my entire life has been nothing but broken pieces, fakes, mere illusions scattered in the air? I wish that I could convey what I’ve seen, that there could be someone flying with me to share these indescribable feelings and recognize that all this is real.

But others in the tribe didn’t share her sentiment. They focused on matters more important. Besides, Chang couldn’t meet another Roo in flight; they were too small and too fast.

The waves rolled on by, close enough to overtake her at any moment, enormous and unknowable. Amidst Chang’s fear, faint and slender pillars of feeling grew. She wasn’t sure whether it was hostility, obstinacy, or something else. If Hahnoe were here, he might’ve gone even closer. But when Chang believed she’d reached the limit, she trusted her Lu to ascend, and flew high into the sky. When she turned toward the moon, hundreds of dim sliver fragments filled Lu’s eyes. Faster! Chang trusted with all her heart, hearing the beat of Lu’s quickening wings. Hahnoe had said flying too fast would shatter their bodies into bits. But Chang had never been to a place as far away as the moon. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get any closer to that glowing mass. Even those who had traveled the seas, the canyons, and the deserts knew nothing about the moon.

“The moon? It’s too far for us to reach,” Hahnoe had said. “And still it looks so big. The magnitude of its size must be beyond our comprehension. I doubt we’d be able to measure it with our units like kruho or even pruho. We should focus on what we can do, even if it takes a long time or puts us at risk; we have to start with the things we can reach. You’re so unwilling to compromise or try to understand.” The moon and the stars remained fixed in their places while Hahnoe’s remembered voice rang in her ears. If I could just fly faster, Chang thought, if only I could fly fast enough.

After her husband went to bed, Chang Yeon made a cup of coffee and sat in front of her computer. She couldn’t sleep and felt sick from the wine she’d had at the early birthday party her staff had arranged for her.

Why do humans need to sleep when time slips away so quickly?

The more tunings she completed, the more difficult it became to idle away her time. She couldn’t bear the idea that there were worlds unknown to her, things outside the scope of her logic. She was frustrated at this obsession. She considered what the sailor had told her and felt as though her brain was dissolving into sand. But sailors didn’t lie, and there was no reason for them to fabricate such a story. She entered some words into the search prompt and waited.

She’d been right. The Roo tribe also existed in her world, only with a different name. In this world, they were called Rods and Chang Yeon had seen a picture of them online long ago. Six or eight winglike components symmetrically attached at an angle to a long stick. Images of these objects, flying at unimaginable speeds, had been captured across the world, from crowded city cafés to open fields in the countryside. Some had claimed that they were evidence of alien beings, while most everyone else had assumed they were insects distorted by the technical limitations of the cameras. In time, people had lost interest in them. But what the sailor had described was not a bug. It was a plant as well as an animal; a living creature in the sense that it had an organic body, but a machine in the sense that it only moved by commands. And it was the only means of transportation available to the Roo people.

According to the sailor, Lus were hollow inside like bamboo stems, with a thin detachable film covering their tops and bottoms. If they rotated as they flew, and if that image was captured in several layers due to some distortion caused by light, they might resemble the Rods in the old photos. And Chang, the fiftieth version of Chang Yeon, was flying in one of them.

Civilizations in offshoot worlds developed differently from each another. Despite their keen eyes and extensive extradimensional knowledge, sailors had been unable to understand how the mutant Roo tribe could’ve existed in Chang’s world. It was only after exhaustive searching that Chang Yeon’s sailor had found a legend about ant-sized people supposedly living in a limestone cave somewhere in that world’s southern Africa. The cave was not far from the Sterkfontein Caves, where the fossilized skull of a primitive human from over two million years ago had been uncovered. Scientists overlooked this other cave since it sat so close to Sterkfontein’s shadow. Since then the sailor had made numerous voyages to the cave in an attempt to learn more. Finally, deep in the cave where dim light entered through the cracks in the cave’s ceiling, it had spotted some odd-looking plants and noticed the tiny people living in a colony around them.

These plants, which the tiny people called Lu, looked like freeze-dried centipedes sprouting from the ground. The cream-colored stems had countless segments, and where each segment met the next, two leaves sprouted from the gap in a way that formed a spiral around the stems. From time to time, the tiny people clung to the plant stems like ants and drank the sticky sap flowing from between the segments, but beyond that, the sailor hadn’t seen them eat anything.

“Their population is about one thousand,” the sailor had explained, “and they appear to have a level of intelligence comparable to humans. They communicate in their own spoken language and are capable of making simple tools.”

The sailor had gone on to outline the Roo, as the tiny people were called, in more detail. In most ways they appeared to be identical to larger humans. Their eyes seemed accustomed to darkness, but they were not distressed by light. They went about naked and had black hair and somewhat dull skin. There was little distinction between genders: the males were slightly taller than the females, but they all looked feeble to the sailor. Interestingly, they had lacked visible genitalia.

“They have managed to adapt to the environment inside the cave, despite being vulnerable to most outside stimuli. But those who have ventured outside the cave often perish within the first few steps. They preserve themselves not by reproduction but by rebirth. When one of their number dies, they put a few drops of sap from the Lu plant on the dead body. Exactly seventy-two hours later, the dead return to life.”

Chang Yeon had been biting her nails as she listened to the sailor. She knew she should respect the diversity of offshoot worlds and acknowledge all the possibilities that existed in them. But . . . this was too much. Oblivious to her confusion, the sailor continued on.

“What’s more interesting is that they all come back to life with young bodies. Some are quite old and had limited mobility at the time of their death. But after the Lu sap is applied, they all awaken looking to be in their late teens or early twenties. This sap clearly has some kind of mysterious regenerative powers for these people. Whether this also leads to a mental renewal, I cannot say. Regardless, their skin looks firm, they move with great energy, and in all aspects they appear significantly healthier. In this way, the tribe maintains their population at a constant level. All who die are reborn, and no one new is born. No children exist in this tribe. I’d have noticed any babies for sure. But there were none. They appear not to reproduce.”

The Sailor paused a moment. “However . . . Chang, your fiftieth version, was born to a Roo woman exactly three years ago.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Chang Yeon tried to make sense of the sailor’s words, but failed. “You just said yourself that they don’t reproduce. Besides, all of my versions have been born at the same time and place as myself, in a hospital in Seoul fifty years ago. I understand that different environments create different versions of myself, but how could a version of me have been born in a cave in South Africa? And only three years ago?”

The sailor looked into Chang Yeon’s eyes for some time before continuing on in a more comforting tone.

“That’s the tricky part. The body Chang was born into once belonged to an ordinary Roo woman. Like others in the tribe, that woman had come into existence at some point in the past and gone through hundreds, possibly even thousands of rebirths. Her self-structure didn’t match yours at all. But three years ago, she died of natural causes, and when she returned to life three days later, she had a completely different self-structure. Now, post-rebirth, her self-structure matches yours. Since nothing like this has never happened before, we suspected an error in the tuning system at first. But we’ve checked multiple times and always obtained the same result.”

Chang Yeon, unable to respond, rose from her chair. She went to the window and looked out onto the quiet streets beneath the darkened buildings. It seemed like any other cold February night. The tuning system was known to have a 99.82 percent accuracy rate. An error hadn’t occurred in over ten years.

“If you don’t feel comfortable with this, you may cancel this tuning. It’s not a problem at all. Given the particularity of the situation, we don’t encourage you to go through with the procedure. We only continued because we knew this tuning mattered so much to you. I apologize for not having informed you sooner, but we needed time to be certain of our findings.”

Chang Yeon stared at the sailor.

“ . . . How come she’s dying? You said they can be endlessly reborn.”

“From the very beginning, the Roo people have worshiped the Lu plant. We were able to confirm this based on our research into their language and culture. It was this absolute power that promised them eternity, and the sap, which they called ‘God’s tears,’ had saved the fragile tribe from the danger of extinction. They’d become immortal beings with peaceful, idyllic lives. Yet some chose to leave the cave. Hundreds of them had been reborn with the same desire. They cut the divine stems into hundreds of internodes and entered through the films. These young people had remained there for several days when something extraordinary happened. The plant pieces began to function like animals. What they had thought were leaves were actually wings.”

Chang Yeon’s eyes widened as the sailor went on.

“But these separated internodes didn’t produce ‘God’s tears’ anymore. Those back in the cave believed this was a punishment for the blasphemy the young people had committed. Hundreds of Roos remained in the cave, living out their immortal lives. The ones who left, however, lost their immortality. These then scattered across the world and slowly began dying out. For many, adapting to their new environments lay beyond their abilities. Outside the cave, they’d had to hunt and gather their own food. The cave-dwelling Roos had the ability to retain their experiences across countless rebirths, but those outside could no longer remember anything from their past lives. We were unable to determine if anything else had changed since their last rebirth or if this is all the result of cutting the Lu plant and leaving the cave. At any rate, all of their former experiences are gone.”

Chang Yeon didn’t know what to say.

“Do you understand now?” the sailor had asked. “They are cut off. Isolated. Without the shared memory of their people, their chances of survival are extremely low. And since they don’t have ‘God’s tears,’ it’s impossible to bring their dead back to life. Some have changed their minds and returned to the cave. Yet others remain outside, rejecting eternity and carrying on their lives, struggling to adapt to the world’s hostile environments. Only a few dozen survive now, including Chang. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, but in that offshoot world, Chang found her way close to where you were born. Now, with some of her peers, she makes her home in Seoul.”

Shu was dead. Chang learned it from Hahnoe when she returned home.

“It was a young person,” Hahnoe said in a mournful tone, “a young human. Pio saw it happen, and I went with a few others to retrieve the remains.”

Chang couldn’t say anything. Hahnoe was covered in blood. He was resilient, an experienced combatant and a skilled pilot. But Chang saw that he was barely able to contain his fury and grief. How could he not be shaken? Many had gathered at the center of the habitation site, and Chang assumed that was where Shu’s body was. The air was thick with a tense silence. Among those gathered were Kinn and her gang. Kinn glanced over toward Hahnoe.

“This is the reward they give,” she said in a mocking tone, “the high and mighty humans that you idiots worship.”

“Shut your mouth, Kinn,” Hahnoe yelled.

Chang walked over to Pio. He cowered in a corner, trembling from shock and fear. Saliva dribbled from his half-open mouth and ran down his chin. Friends were trying to calm him down, but to little avail. It was some time before Pio gathered himself enough to explain what had happened.

They had gone into a human’s house on the outskirts of the city. Shu had been drawn there by an open book like an ant to sugar. After surveying the book from above, Shu had landed his Lu and walked out to take a closer look at the page. He was so absorbed in the elegant black lines that he hadn’t heard Pio’s urgent cry as an enormous finger had descended to the page. Roos feared the young humans more than the older ones because young humans saw things that adults couldn’t. Shu had forgotten this most basic protocol, captivated as he had been by the words on the page.

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,

I shall speak one day of your hidden origins:

A, black furred-corset of bumbling flies

Buzzing like bees round a cruel stink,2

Chang remembered the day Shu had sung these verses. It had been winter then, too, and as cold as today.

Hahnoe considered each of the seasons beautiful, but Chang found the winter unbearable. It must have been the same for the others. They’d covered the entrance of the tin pail in which they lived with a thick piece of cloth. But that hadn’t been enough to shut out the bitter winds, and everyone had shivered.

As they huddled around the brimstone bonfire they’d made, Shu sang, his eyes sparkling. The song was not their own, but one translated from a human language. Chang knew flies were dangerous animals but didn’t know what a corset was. She knew the colors black, white, red, green, and blue, but didn’t understand the words in between them nor what vowels were. Roos could count numbers, mark the passing of time, measure spaces, and make simple tools. They also drew and painted. But they didn’t have a written language. They communicated by spoken word alone and had to repeat what was conveyed several times so they could be sure to remember it. Hahnoe had once told Chang that writing was the materialization of meanings and that it remained long after people died. She couldn’t comprehend what that meant.

“If we could record what we mean with letters,” Hahnoe had said sadly, “we’d be able to make more complex tools and hunt much better. We might even be able to make machines like humans. Damn it! How come we don’t remember anything? Those who once used our bodies might have known how to do all that stuff. Maybe they could’ve done it, but just hadn’t. Why can’t we remember a single thing?”

His yearning was something that Chang didn’t understand, despite the fact that she couldn’t remember anything either.

At first, it was very hard for her to accept the fact that someone else, someone who wasn’t her, had occupied her body. But that no longer bothered her. Whoever they had been, they were long gone. Now Chang had Hahnoe and Lu. Lu was not just a machine, but a part of herself, a living being that loved speed as much as she did. Those who had decided to leave the cave had one thing in common. They had known that they were no longer who they had been before and so therefore they had to leave. But now that they had left, Hahnoe’s eyes were always turned toward something different than Chang’s. Maybe that was why she loved him.

That day, sitting by the bonfire, Chang had asked Shu where he’d learned the song. He’d answered with his usual faraway look. “I don’t know,” he’d said. “Maybe in a dream.” Everyone had laughed.

Such had been Shu’s way: he’d often said strange things that no one understood and had dreams that no one else dreamed. While Hahnoe agonized over not being able to understand human letters, Shu had admired them with pure wonder.

Now Shu lay wrapped in black leaves, his Lu standing like a barrel outside the circle of people. It had flown back home safely, but without Shu it was nothing more than an empty shell. At the very moment his body had been crushed, Shu had trusted his Lu to flee.

Hahnoe stood suddenly, lifting up Shu’s body. He pushed his way through the crowd. The Lu opened to receive Shu’s body. This act was meaningless, but no one tried to stop Hahnoe. Tears flowed, but not from the Lu: it didn’t weep tears now and there would be no rebirth in three days. The time when Lu had been a god, when it had given back life again and again, was over. Like those who had been destroyed before him, Shu could never again sing any songs or tell any stories.

Chang Yeon was still awake and thinking about Chang, the 5.6-millimeter-tall woman, when the sky turned pink the next morning.

Tuning only involved mental integration. Because each version’s body was not able to cross between worlds, a tuning client didn’t need to worry about whatever physical flaws their version might have possessed. Integrating this tiny, fragile Chang wouldn’t shrink Chang Yeon’s body or create any physical problem for her.

At each tuning, Chang Yeon had pictured the version she was integrating. They all looked similar in her imagination: women in their thirties and later forties with slight variations in clothing and hair. Though Chang Yeon was grateful for the diverse abilities her versions brought her, there was one difference she had begun to wish for: a younger version of herself living outside time and capable of bringing her body along for integration. Her desire always ultimately led her imagination there.

What feelings and sensations did someone in their late teens or early twenties perceive?

Chang Yeon couldn’t really remember what it had been like during her own youth. Thanks to her wealthy parents, she had never had to struggle with the trifling worries of life. She recalled thinking everything dull, and once or twice she might’ve wished, with typical juvenile confusion, that her life could end right then. But these were all very faint memories.

The tuning procedure only took three hours at most and resulted in no pain or negative aftereffects. To the wealthy, tuning was comparable to getting a simple cosmetic procedure or making a big investment in a new startup. All Chang Yeon had to do was take the sleeping pill that the sailor provided. Recognizing new desires, interests, tastes, and talents she’d integrated usually took several weeks. The integrated selves never staged any resistance by bringing along their own memories or caused her any discomfort. They always blended into Chang Yeon’s consciousness without hesitation and quietly surfaced only when strictly necessary.

Still, it felt strange like making the acquaintance of someone kind but reserved. They were always polite and gave her lots of useful information, but never opened themselves to her. Never had she encountered a case where the integrated version had pushed her life in an unwanted direction, or made her do something absurd and unthinkable.

But if it were a version that grew up in an environment so different from mine . . . If there were a young and bubbly version of myself, full of life and carefree, absorbing everything they felt with every part of their body.

Out of nowhere, Chang Yeon saw in her head a little child running toward her with a big smile.

She was startled and perplexed. Since they’d wanted to focus on themselves, Chang Yeon and her husband had decided not to have children. She’d never doubted this decision. Rather, people who dedicated their entire lives to their children baffled her. She found that as her perplexity deepened, she felt, this image of a child grew increasingly clearer. She thought of an old friend who had remained by her side through all the tunings. Even when she’d been having so much trouble with her teenaged child, and her face had glowed as she’d talked about the child’s small displays of affection. While Chang Yeon had gone through forty-nine tunings, this friend had thrown all her energy into this small creature that resembled her, spending decades basically letting it run her life.

“Raising a child is insane,” the friend had told her. “Doesn’t matter whether they’re two or twenty. They drive you out of your mind just the same.” Yet always the friend would add, “But you know what’s funny? When I look at those round eyes, small fingers, and chubby cheeks, I feel like I shrink down to nothing, like I matter less than a dot or something even smaller when compared to that child. And amazingly, that doesn’t bother me.”

She’d gone on to tell Chang Yeon that though children naturally went against their parents’ wishes or expectations, they also occasionally created unimaginable joy.

Chang Yeon couldn’t conceive what that must be like.

If it had been Chang, maybe she’d have been more than just a polite acquaintance. Maybe she’d have taken Chang Yeon’s life in a whole new direction, shaken up her days and made her laugh until she cried, or wept her eyes out. If Chang were integrated into her, maybe Chang Yeon wouldn’t feel that heavy weight in her heart, which was how she felt whenever she was making a list of new things she’d have to learn and master after a tuning. She might be liberated from the urgent whispers nudging her toward a cliff, her obsession with time, the fear of never being good enough no matter how hard she tried. Maybe she’d learn to stop thinking about herself until her head spun. If it were Chang, maybe she would become both Chang Yeon and Chang Yeon’s child at the same time.

But Chang Yeon couldn’t fathom how a person who wasn’t a fifty-year-old human, but a Roo just entering adulthood might think and behave. A child who had the courage to cut apart what her people considered God. Chang Yeon sighed. The fact that Chang had defied her faith and chose to become a mortal being fascinated Chang Yeon beyond description. It was so far from a decision she herself would’ve made. There was only one day until the scheduled tuning, and she needed to ready herself.

Since she was born a warrior, she must be tough. And since she’s an aviator, she’s got to be quite adventurous. But she isn’t human. She doesn’t even know how to dress herself. She might be ignorant, considering how her people don’t have a written language or any systematic compilation of their knowledge. That might have a negative effect on my intelligence. But . . . has a flaw ever manifested? She’s a free spirit. Apparently, she likes flying much more than other Roos. But she lives in constant fear for her life. And now that she’s told she’s dying . . . She must be in despair. But, I’ve never discovered feelings of fear or despair after a tuning.

Chang Yeon lost herself, trying to understand that tiny mysterious being. Her Roo version was a wild risk-taker, and Chang Yeon found that irresistibly attractive. Chang Yeon lay on her bed and buried her face in the soft pillow. As the softness touched her skin, her mind lurched toward fear. Nausea filled her.

Should I cancel the procedure? But what if she’s decided to agree? She might be full of hope.

Eventually, her body surrendered to her exhaustion, and she fell asleep without reaching any conclusion.

When Chang Yeon opened her eyes, it was already past 4 PM. Only two hours remained until the deadline. She called the sailor. It reported that Chang hadn’t made up her mind yet. Chang Yeon hesitated a few moments.

“How does she . . . die?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“On Wednesday next week, at 10:41 PM. How does she die?”

The sailor paused. “Do you really want to know? Might it not be better otherwise? It will only be a depressing memory.”

“Since it’s not my future but hers, you are allowed to tell me, aren’t you?”

The sailor remained silent for some time before replying. “According to the system’s prediction, she freezes to death. It starts snowing in the afternoon and gets heavier into the night. Your version crashes while flying her Lu, and they get buried under snow. She freezes almost instantly upon impact.”

Chang Yeon couldn’t find the words to respond.

“They are tiny beings. Even a few snowflakes can kill them,” the sailor said.

When Chang Yeon remained silent, the sailor sighed. “That’s why I told you it’d be better not to know.”

Chang Yeon terminated the call.

It was around 6:30 PM when the sailor called her again. “Her final answer is no,” it said. A soft gasp escaped Chang Yeon’s mouth.

“She said she wouldn’t come,” the sailor continued on. “I apologize on behalf of the agency for this outcome. This is a few hours early, but I’d like to wish you a happy birthday.”

The room suddenly felt cold, and she was again a little nauseated. She lay on her side, embracing her knees. Chang Yeon couldn’t tell whether what she was feeling was relief or disappointment.

At that moment, a memory from years earlier popped into her mind.

Her career had been full of successes, but there had been one failed project that had remained bitter in her heart. It was for an event they’d held for her company’s anniversary. One selected participant could request a customized piece of furniture. It could be anything, in any material or design. The event attracted a lot of attention, and people had gone wild over it. The winner had been a seventeen-year-old girl. She’d been dressed in a flimsy summer uniform, although fall had been in the air, and she’d requested a large luxury armchair with very good leather. Not something a girl that age ought to have wanted, Chang Yeon thought, so she’d asked whether the chair was for her dad.

“No,” she’d said. “I want dark-colored leather, something tough and durable. It’s just for myself, so a single seater is good enough. When I sit in it, I want to be able to feel relaxed . . . and secure.”

She’d had her arms folded and kept rubbing her skinny forearms as she spoke. Chang Yeon decided to use steel frames and the highest quality leather, dyed a dark brown. She’d used a very simple design and made the chair fifteen percent bigger than a regular armchair. She’d put so much care into achieving the right firmness, checking it again and again until she was completely satisfied with how it felt. The finished chair had resembled some kind of large animal, dignified and loyal to its owner.

But when they’d called the girl to arrange delivery, she’d suddenly changed her mind.

“I’m sorry,” she’d said in a low disheartened voice, “but I can’t take it. I’m really sorry. Please give it to someone else.”

Chang Yeon thought even from the start, the girl must not have had space to accommodate the chair. And even though many years had passed, the image of the tiny goose bumps on the kid’s forearms came to her mind from time to time for no reason. Chang Yeon burrowed further beneath her blanket.

Sometime after midnight, there was a knock at the door. Her husband stood outside smiling a little bashfully with a cake in one hand and a small gift box in the other.

On the top of the cake was a long sentence written in fine lines of chocolate. It read, “To my wife, Chang Yeon, the most perfect and beautiful woman in the world.”

Chang trusted her Lu to maneuver rapidly and zigzagged into the night sky. Lu’s wingbeats slowed. For the first time, Chang got a good look at winter.

The landscape was desolate, the moon hidden behind the thick clouds. Pure white lumps fell from the sky. Snow. Chang had never seen it before. Whenever it snowed, Roos stayed home and didn’t fly. Hahnoe had called them beautiful lumps of death, and she could see that he’d been right. The snowflakes were slower than Chang, but they flew in all directions as if they sought to strike her. Lu’s eyes twitched with growing fear. But Chang believed in them.

Chang thought of Hahnoe and of Shu, and then she recalled an old memory.

A group of friends, drenched in sweat, had pushed Chang’s Lu up to the lowest branch of a birch tree. Chang held on to Hahnoe’s hand and climbed up, struggling to keep her eyes fixed on the next handhold. When she got inside Lu and plunged through the air from the branch’s tip, fear overwhelmed her. What if Lu’s wings didn’t move as she wished?

She’d felt the enormity of the world around her and the dizzying despair from how everything stayed in its place. Her body still tingled when she remembered that moment. Chang had been the only thing trying to break away from its place, and she could almost see the sharp mandibles of ants pouncing on her crushed body. But finally, after she’d repeated her desire what felt to be hundreds of times, Lu finally started moving its wings. A pathway she’d trusted appeared before her in the void, and she realized it was a flow that she could control. She remembered the electrifying thrill that had gone through her body then when she’d made her first path through the air.

And now, Chang was trying to escape the snowflakes and reach the moon.

Lu’s wings were already soaking wet. But Chang strained her entire body and committed all of her trust to Lu. Up close, the snowflakes were integrations of countless hexagonal crystals, resembling Lu’s compound eyes. Even though the flakes were fighting to dampen Lu’s wings further, and send Chang plummeting back down toward the earth, they were nothing more than fragile crystals that could melt away in moments. If they were indeed fragments of the moon as Chang believed, then it stood to reason that the enormous, distant moon couldn’t be so perfect as to be unreachable.

There were many things that Chang didn’t know. She’d never observed the world in detail or really comprehended it. But she knew that she, together with her Lu, which had become part of her, could fly fast enough to evade these huge frozen water crystals veering at her from all directions.

Without her Lu, life in some other world would be meaningless. Chang trusted Lu to their full speed.

Faster!

Soon, they reached a speed she’d never imagined possible.

The tuning system that claimed to make “perfect sails” was not truly perfect yet, and its prediction was accurate only up to 99.82 percent. In a small, lesser known offshoot world of the countless many, the life of the Roo aviator Chang ended, as predetermined, at 10:41 PM on a Wednesday in February. Except she wasn’t buried beneath snow as the system had predicted: instead, she’d flown higher and faster between the falling snowflakes, until she burst into red flames the instant she and her Lu escaped the Earth’s atmosphere.

If the Roo tribe had possessed letters to record meanings, they would’ve written the following about Chang: She was the Roo who had flown the fastest and the farthest, the one who came the closest to the moon in the whole history of the tribe.

Originally published in Korean in Modern Literature, May 2008.

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

Footnotes:

1 - Kruho: the unit of length used by the Roo tribe. One ruho is approximately five millimeters, and one kruho is one thousand ruhos, about five meters.

2 - From “Vowels” by A. Rimbaud

About the Author

I-Hyeong Yun is a Korean writer. She debuted in 2005 with a short story, “The Black Starfish,” which won her the Joong Ang New Writer Award. Since then, she’s won multiple awards for “The Big Wolf, Blue” (2007), “Koon’s Journey” (2014), and “Luka” (2015). Most recently, she won the 2019 Yi Sang Literary Award for “Their First and Second Cats.” In 2015, her story “Danny” was translated into English as part of the series.

The Ancestral Temple in a Box

Chen Qiufan, translated by Emily Jin

“Mr. Huang has a few words to say . . . ”

Everyone in the room stood up at once. The intelligent care robot, however, slowly turned its face in my direction. Emojis flashed on the blue screen. I wasn’t sure whether I understood what those emojis meant.

“ . . . to you, in private,” the robot continued.

I took a deep breath. All the pairs of eyes landed on me at once. It was as if my body was soft mud and the gazes of my family members were loaches, about to rip apart my skin, penetrate my flesh, and bury into my body. I knew what they were thinking; but now, I have lost all the strength to fight back.

The man who used to carry himself with such pride and charisma lay before my eyes, shriveling, crumbling, and wasting away, leaving behind an empty shell made out of thin paper. I was scared that even a heavy sigh would blow him away. A rotting scent permeated the air. Every fifteen seconds, the automatic mist spray system would purr lightly, as if a cat sneezed. The flow of time in this room, thick and sticky, indefinitely slow, felt like resin gradually hardening into amber.

Fear rose up in my stomach and gushed up my throat. Yet I quietly waited for Father’s last words. For all my life, every conversation I have had with my father usually ended with his scolding and my utter silence. I was afraid that this time it was finally Father’s turn to be the silent one.

“Sonny, you’re here . . . ” Father’s trembling voice tore through the silence. His accent, laden with the scent of soil from Southern lands, sounded distant and strange. Our family has left our Teochew homeland long ago. More so, ever since I chose to become a wanderer in the virtual world, busy occupying myself with technology, I have long been estranged from my kin. “My time is up. There’s one last thing I want to ask from you. Only you can do it for me . . . ”

“Don’t say that, Dad! No matter what you want to do, once you recover—I’m sure you will—we can do it together . . . ”

“There’s no need to comfort me. Isn’t it strange? The older you get, the more things from your childhood you are able to recall. Remember that story I told you? When I was seven, my father—your grandpa—took me to our ancestral temple . . . ”

I had no idea what he was about to tell me. A few years ago, when machines revolutionized the traditional craft industry, the impact also extended to our family business: handmade gold-lacquered wood carving. I, an advocate for using new technology to aid traditional arts, was completely at odds with Father who insisted upon doing things the old way. Back then, our conversations were nothing but explosive arguments, often ending in cold wars that lasted for days. At some point, he even considered kicking me out of the succession line. What’s the point of telling me this story again?

“The wobbly car ride went on for hours. I couldn’t even feel my own butt anymore. Finally, we arrived at the Huang clan’s ancestral temple. What an enormous space! The pond in front of the gate was symbolic for ‘collecting a pool of wealth.’ A pair of proud stone lions, male on the left and female on the right, guarded the gate. The top of the roof was decorated with figures from mythology: birds and animals, long and feng, rows and rows of deities . . . ”

The image of a Disney carnival parade flashed through my mind as Father carried on, describing every detail of that mysterious building. I shook my head to get rid of the ridiculous thought.

“The memorial tablets of all our ancestors lined the large altar in the main hall. Dad ordered me to kneel and kowtow, to pay respect to our ancestors. I refused. But I don’t even know them, why should I kneel to them? I argued. So Dad scolded me for being disrespectful and spanked me. I cried and cried . . . ”

Father’s voice grew weaker. He was like a balloon, hanging limply in midair, about to let out its last breath. I could almost see him sinking deeper and deeper. I leaned forward and pressed an ear close to his lips. The rotten smell was so heavy that I almost couldn’t breathe.

“That happened eighty years ago. Back then I didn’t understand why honoring our ancestors was important, but now I do. Every falling leaf must return to its root. After I am gone, sonny . . . visit me at our ancestral temple often. Please. By then, you’ll be leading the Huang clan . . . ”

Clearly, Father’s consciousness was slipping away. His words did not make much sense. Halfheartedly agreeing to his request, I fumbled for the emergency button next to the hospital bed. The last time Father even went home to visit was a few decades ago. I was pretty sure that his memorial tablet did not make it into the ancestral temple. Even if it did, how on earth would I be able to visit the place often, given that it was thousands of miles away? As for leading the Huang clan . . . that sounded more like a joke to me than anything else. The families in our clan were at each other’s necks fighting over inheritance. Yet gazing at Father’s dying face, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him about his will.

“Promise me you’ll go there . . . ”

“Yes, Dad. I promise you.”

As if some mysterious force squeezed the last air out from the humanoid balloon on the sickbed, the rotten odor disappeared at once. The automatic mist spray system sneezed again. Doctors and nurses rushed into the room with more machines. Stiffly, I stood by the bedside in silence and waited for a death sentence that had, in fact, already arrived.

The third day after Father’s funeral, I discovered a red envelope he left me. In the envelope was a small card printed with an IPv6 address and a strange logo.

It took me a while to locate an adequate access device for the address. Tech geeks call the adapter “the white box,” a kind of advanced virtual reality system that could scan your neural patterns and mix them in with an algorithm to produce a quantifiable, controllable neural signal input. The white box was much more effective than all the other virtual reality devices, and yet more feared: no doubt, it would change your fundamental cognition in some way that you could not predict.

I had no idea how Father came across such hip, quirky technology. My impression of him was still frozen in the moment when he bellowed at me for my ignorance and disrespect toward my ancestors and forgetting my roots, because I had dared suggest that we replace traditional craftsmen with machines. Heavily panting, eyes wide and cheeks beet red, he resembled a dragon about to spit fire.

That dragon now lay six feet beneath the ground, in a small wooden box, accompanied by nothing but darkness and dirt.

Without further hesitation, I connected myself to the white box, entered the IPv6 address that Father left for me and pulled the soft eye mask over my eyes. Not only that I wanted to honor my promise to Father, I was also curious about what he was up to. The system logged me in immediately after scanning my iris. Seemed like someone had already registered an account for me.

At first, I was surrounded by thick, pale fog. My eyes couldn’t discern anything. A few moments later, I heard a feminine voice echoing faintly in my ear, “Mr. Huang, we have detected that the default travel speed does not match your neurological composition. Would you like to switch over to fast mode? Please confirm.”

The walking figure of Father, limp and slow, flashed through my mind. I understood what she meant. Father was the first to access this IPv6 address, after all.

“Confirm,” I responded.

All of a sudden, the center of gravity shifted. Terrified, I crouched to the ground and pressed my palms hard on the floor to keep steady. The fog gradually dissipated. I looked down and found myself hovering ten thousand meters above earth. A village surrounded by mountains and rivers, spread out like the pattern on a turtle’s back, lay beneath my feet. The next second, the landscape gushed toward me like a ferocious tide, rapidly enlarging in my sight. I could even see the gray ridgeline of the village house roofs. I was falling. I shut my eyes tightly and swallowed a scream.

After what seemed like forever, the fall came to an end. I slowly opened my eyes and found myself standing on a vast plaza. The brightness of various objects shot up as my eyes landed on them, highlighting them from the background, as if my gaze was some kind of a spotlight. The voice in my ears explained each object to me as I peered around—now I understood it was a beginner’s tutorial.

No doubt, this was the place of Father’s last dream. The placid pond, glistening in the light; the horse-hitching post, erect by the gate; the magnificent screen wall, inlaid with colored porcelain that depicted the shapes of sika deer, qilin, and wing-spreading cranes; the roofed porch and the gate frame, made of gray-white marble; the black-lacquered wooden plaque, engraved with four characters in calligraphy that shimmered with gold, “Huang Clan Ancestral Temple”; porcelain statues of mythical creatures and deities on the roof ridgelines and eave corners . . . I stood, stunned, my mouth hanging open in awe.

Father was not exaggerating. The ancestral temple he described to me really existed.

The glorious sight did not reduce my confusion, though. Someone out there, for some unknown reason, went through all the trouble to reproduce the Huang clan’s ancestral temple in a virtual space. It was a most unlikely combination. Wasn’t it the ancestral temple, a standing embodiment of ossified traditions, that restrained Father from embracing the bold technological inventions of the new world? Now, it appeared to me that the older generation was preserving such tradition by betraying it. Why did Father lead me here? To become a replica of him, abiding by our ancestor’s values, following every single rule that was ever written, and watching with hopeless eyes as our entire clan declines?

Trotting along the path, I entered the gate and walked through the front courtyard. The sun shone from behind the hollow-carved grill door, casting strands of light onto the floor of the middle hall that reminded me of the shape of a barcode. I glided through the back courtyard. Everything before my eyes unfolded with symmetry, structure, and routine, characteristic of the era that Father lived in. An era long gone.

My revolutionary vision was to introduce embodied robots to the traditional craft of gold-lacquered wood carving. A robot like that could connect to and synchronize with every muscle and nerve signal of a human gold-lacquered wood carving craftsman. In a way that magically resembles traditional one-on-one master-student learning, the robot would observe and learn every intricate detail of the craftsman’s hand movement, then reproduce the choreography on digitalized raw materials in a virtual space. The simulated mechanics of materials are as precise as four decimal places. Coupled with generative adversarial networks, relying only on a small set of data, we could train highly efficient robot craftsmen. What’s more, a robot craftsman would never experience fatigue and illness or need any breaks at all; its spatial perception and accuracy of motion are literally two orders of magnitude higher than that of humans. Honestly, I couldn’t think of any valid reason to reject this proposal.

It was Father who buried his head in the sand, refusing to confront the machine-dominated reality.

I finally arrived at the heart of the ancestral temple: the main hall. Otherwise known as the slumber chamber, it was the place where spirits of the dead rested in peace in their eternal sleep. Colossal red-painted wooden structures extended upward like Aztec pyramids, as if about to disappear into the vast sky beyond, yet once I fixed my eyes on them, they appeared to be confined by the enormous hall. An impossible optical illusion. Memorial tablets of my ancestors, carved from camphor wood, lined the wooden structures like books on the shelves of a library. They were organized by the order of relatedness to me: from the most distant relatives to the closest blood kin. I searched for Father’s name in the forest of memorial tablets. Whichever tablet my gaze landed on, the name carved into the tablet would glow with a golden light. Amongst all of the Huang-surnamed ancestors were all kinds of people, government officials and wealthy merchants, peasants and commoners, yet at this moment, they were all equals to me. Every single one of them was a cog or gear on the giant machine of the Huang clan’s collective memory.

Father’s memorial tablet was there, too. I gazed fixedly at Father’s name as I murmured to myself, “Dad, I’m here to visit you.”

The guide spoke. “Mr. Huang, would you like to activate the system?”

“Activate?”

“Please kneel on the mat, put your palms together, and kowtow three times.”

“What the hell?” My eyes widened as I saw Father, looking about ten years younger, emerge from his memorial tablet. Just like witnessing the genie squeeze out from Aladdin’s lamp, I thought to myself. Father, shifting around and stretching his arms and legs, seemed to be having some mild difficulties with his new body. He was only an AI-generated virtual avatar, after all.

“Sonny, you’re here,” he greeted me. Even his accent and the slow, sluggish way he spoke were perfectly reproduced. How much money was spent on this thing?

“Uh . . . yeah. It’s me. I’m here. ” I didn’t know what to say. It felt way too awkward to call this avatar “Dad.”

“I knew you’d come. You’re different from the rest of them. You’re smart and curious, a real fast learner . . . ”

How ironic. Those were the exact words that Father used to scold me with. I assumed that he had sent the same invitation to my older brothers, too—my competitors. Although our ages were not so far apart, their views on technology and art very much aligned with that of Father’s. Abandoning our traditional handicraft is the same as betraying the art, betraying our ancestors, and generations of wisdom they passed down. The same old words. I secretly speculated that if given the chance, they would probably tattoo the word “traitor” on my forehead and kick me out of the family.

“I’m sure right now you are wondering what this is all about,” continued Father. Seemed like he was programmed to finish this conversation no matter whether I responded or not. “Thirty years ago, Mr. Ma launched his new project on the digitalization of Teochew ancestral temples all around the world. That’s right—the Mr. Ma who single-handedly founded the biggest technology company in Asia. What a sight, that ancestral temple of the Ma clan! Mr. Ma believed that ancestral temples serve the same purpose as instant message software: it brings together people of the same clan, regardless of their generation or geographic location. Many young people, however, have long forgotten about ancestral temples. Mr. Ma’s vision is to revitalize ancestral temples with the help of technology.”

I cut him off. “Aren’t you against the idea of using technology to change traditional culture?”

“Sonny, you must understand that there are certain things I cannot say out loud. I need to be careful with my words in front of the clan, but you’re different. You belong to the new generation, and you don’t have to watch your mouth when you speak . . . ”

“Isn’t it too late, though? Look, if the line of succession for our business is determined by age and seniority, then I am neither the oldest nor the most experienced. As of you, you’re already . . . ” My voice cracked and trailed off.

I must admit that this AI avatar of Father was extremely well made, in particular its speech communication, to the point that I couldn’t help but feel like I was speaking to Father in person once again. The word dead choked in my throat.

“I am already dead, you’re right,” the younger version of Father before my eyes grinned at me, a painful resemblance of his living self, “But the rest of you are alive. You are the future. Tell me, why do you want to replace humans with machines?”

“Everyone is using machines. They are faster, more stable, and cost-efficient. If we don’t jump on the trend, the entire market will be taken over by machine-created wood carving. By then, there will be nothing left for us to profit from.”

“Well, nowadays, humans are colonizing space; 3-D printing is everywhere. Why do people still care for gold-lacquered wood carving? Because they are cheap? Easy to carry? Sturdy? Or beautiful?”

I was stunned by this question. I was born into a family that practiced gold-lacquered wood carving for generations and took fierce pride in their skill; yet with my head buried in digital art and cutting-edge technology all the time, I had never put my thought to it. I knew nothing, I realized, about the symbolic or realistic implications, the aesthetics or the history behind this specific form of craft. How did it survive thousands of years?

“Perhaps people were just nostalgic,” hesitating, I answered, my voice timid.

“Heh! You’re too smart for your own good. You think with your brain all the time, yet you never feel with your body. Look . . . ”

He pointed at the marble columns shaped like elongated winter melons. Above the columns was the major summer beam, hovering over the secondary beam that signified fruitfulness and prosperity. The column caps, beams, dougongs, girders, and lintels glistened with a gold spark. I recognized immediately that they were gold-lacquered wood carvings.

Legend had it that this craft originated in the Tang dynasty. Equipped already with unparalleled wood carving skills, those Tang craftsmen drew inspiration from the cavalier perspective seen in Chinese ink wash paintings and attempted to recreate the same effect on wood: merging scenes from different time-spaces together into one grand visual narrative. The scenes were depicted by intricate openwork carving on wood, layered one next to another, so that they could be represented in the same space altogether. Finally, the craftsmen painted the wood carving in rich, thick gold. The finished artwork thus became a limbo where the real and the imaginary, the prologue and the denouement, the cause and the effect collide and melt into each other.

What did Father want me to see? I swallowed my question when, all of a sudden, all the wood carving came alive.

The crabs crawled along the wires of their cage like fruits on a vine. Magpies, startled by the crabs’ snapping claws, spread their wings and scattered across the sky. The eight immortals crossing the sea made a zigzag instead and ran smack into the outlaws about to take refuge in the Liangshan Marsh. The heroes of the Three Kingdoms swore their oath to become brothers in the Peach Garden, and their witnesses were Mencius’ mother, who raised the sage alone, and the ancient giant Kuafu who chased the sun. This small, confined carved sculpture became a hodgepodge of endless time and boundless space.

I stared at the scene before my eyes, utterly spellbound. The legends that Father have told me back in my childhood all came to life at once. “You mean the gold-lacquered wood carving is also a kind of historical synchronic narrative?”

“Well, I think wood carving is the best way to talk and learn about history. When you were a baby, you used to spend ages lying on our bed, caressing the wood carving while muttering syllables to yourself. Remember?”

Of course I remembered. The hard and cold texture of wood and the hills and pits of the complex carvings were my first introduction to the world beyond my own body. My fingertip, brushing past the arcs, curves, and undulations, was like a time traveler who embraced lives and stories from a thousand different worlds. Fictional or real, those stories, shimmering with gold, were ingrained in my memory through touch.

I was beginning to understand why Father wanted me to come here.

“Speaking of the robot you’ve been meaning to use, the art it creates is completely soulless if there isn’t a real craftsman to guide its hands. People nowadays are so obsessed with the virtual world that they keep on forgetting that physical bodies are a thing!”

Coming from you, a virtual avatar! I muttered to myself. “So you’re not against technology, after all?”

“Using technology right is like adding wings to a tiger, you can only make things more powerful. Using technology the wrong way, though, will only bring harm and ruin our ancestors’ efforts. You know why I never agreed upon your plan in the past? I was worried that you were dreaming a little too big . . . ” Father paused for a second, “Or, not big enough.”

“Not big enough?”

“Sure, technology will enhance production efficiency, but what more? Your proposed innovation is superficial; it changes the flesh, but not the soul. I think technology has a lot more to offer us. Technology can lead to the rebirth of the gold-lacquered wood carving by reconceiving it, instilling in it new aesthetics, and adjusting it to fit into our future.”

Father was right, I realized. Originally, I thought about having robots learn the craft of wood carving and gradually replace human craftsmen in the next three years, so we could mass-produce gold-lacquered wood carving like never before. Yet, if we took the memory and the sentiment away—the human essence of handicraft—would anyone truly care for those assembly-line produced, soulless things? Mass production at its best would only help us win a low-price competition, nothing more. This future I envisioned for the Huang clan was a dead end. In Father’s words, we needed to take the best of both worlds and produce something new: gold-lacquered wood carving that combined the advantages of both machines and humans, fit for our contemporary time. No matter how much its form and shape shifted, it would always preserve the essence of artisanship.

“I think I know what you mean now. But my brothers . . . ”

“Look back at the way you came,” responded Father.

“What?” I turned around. My gaze passed through the back courtyard, middle hall, front courtyard, and landed on the glistening pond outside the memorial archway. My brain reminded me that something was not right.

“So what did you see?” asked Father.

“Well, if the entire ancestral temple was built on the same horizontal plane, it would be impossible for me to see all of its structures at once. Which means . . . ”

“The ancestral hall is designed with a three-part structure. The front courtyard to the middle hall is the first part, the back courtyard to the main hall is the second part. Every part is about three feet higher than the previous part. Thus, walking into the ancestral temple is like climbing up the ladder of success: with every step you take, you get a little higher.”

“You mean . . . ”

“I mean that you need to see past the land beneath your feet. Only when you are standing up taller can you expand your horizons and see what’s out there in the wider world. Your brothers have already agreed that you’re the best person to take the Huang clan’s wood carving art to a new level—to make it into something that truly fits the needs of this era. Don’t worry. No matter what you choose to do, you will have our support.”

I swallowed hard, trying to get rid of the lump in my throat. I gazed into Father’s eyes, utterly wordless. He had planned everything out long ago; and yet for almost his whole life, I had accused him of bigotry and conservativeness.

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” I stuttered, my voice trembling.

“You didn’t really give me a chance, did you? You haven’t contacted me in so long, let alone visited home. Was I really going to go looking for you in the virtual world?” Father’s words sounded like a familiar scolding, yet his voice was gentle, even melancholic. A slight smile emerged on his face, “I didn’t expect that my time would be up so soon, though. Sonny, I wish I could have talked to you more . . . ”

“Dad . . . ”

Tears rushed out of my eyes. Instinctively, I turned my head toward the pond to avoid Father’s gaze—yet I forgot: registering my real tears was evidently not programmed into the now-virtual Father’s algorithm.

I took a deep breath and turned back again. Father had already vanished into the forest of memorial tablets.

His mission was complete, but my mission has just begun.

In the virtual main hall of the Huang clan’s ancestral temple, my brothers and I knelt together and kowtowed for three times. Then we waited.

Everything was the same as the first time. The rather ridiculous looking old man, clumsy and plump, wiggled out from his memorial tablet. “Sonny, you’re here,” he exclaimed.

My brothers were clearly not expecting to see this. Stunned, they stared blankly at Father. Gods know how much effort it took me to convince them to celebrate Chinese New Year with me in this absurd way.

Trying to alleviate the awkwardness, I waved my hand at Father. “Dad, it’s New Year! We’re here to visit you. We brought a present, too!”

My gesture summoned a wooden box. The box hovered above the pond at the gate of the ancestral temple, glowing as the sunlight reflected off of its reddish-black surface. Its reflection on the water surface vibrated, just like how my body was trembling from the nervous energy.

To create the desired visual effect, I changed the object ratio of the box to 1:1000. Gazing out from the main hall, I could see that the box was virtually the size of half a soccer court. Dazzling gold light seeped through the few arc-shaped cracks on the box, as if hinting at the magnificence confined inside.

“I knew you’d come. You’re different from the rest of them . . . ”

“Dad, don’t you want to look at our gift first?” I cut him off. The intelligence level and social awareness of this simulacrum were the same as the weather in June—you can never predict its highs and lows.

“Yes, yes . . . ”

The three of us stood together and piled our right palms on top of one another, our faces completely solemn. A gold light rose from our hands and ripped through the air, aiming for the wooden box. As the light passed by the back courtyard, the middle hall, and the front courtyard, all the porcelain statues also came to life: the cranes flapped their wings, the qilin dashed off into the distance, deities and demons alike played instruments and danced, forming an orchestra of harmony . . . I made a mental note to myself to praise the advertisement team that I hired to do the job. Today was the big day. Better put on the best performance we could manage—for the dead, for the living, and for the three hundred thousand viewers out there watching our livecast.

The gold light struck the box. Ripples of light dissipated in every direction. “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss and Howie Lee’s remix of Teochew Yingge folk dance music vibrated through the sky and rang in everyone’s ears. The sublimity of mysticism, underlain by the rowdy rhythm of mundane everyday life, was disassembled in a way not unlike drawn thread work, and then rewoven into a vast Dolby holographic sound field. In turn, the sound was delivered to the bone conduction headphones of each viewer watching this virtual livecast via the white box. The auditory sense was integral to this ceremony; hearing would help the viewers empathize better.

Slowly, the wooden box opened.

The scene before everyone’s eyes was the exemplar of a new era of enlightenment: a piece of art co-created by machines and humans, a hybrid of the Rube Goldberg machine and the Luban burr puzzle.Magnificent, delicate blocks of gold-lacquered wood carving were assembled together in mortise-tenon style. The space frame, transcending even the wildest imagination, was something completely impossible for mortals to create. If you restore the order and perspective angle of those arbitrarily positioned blocks, though, they would at once transform into a stage play about time-space and human history. Thanks to the mechanics, all of this was able to take place without any external power source. This tiny wooden box was the nutshell that encapsulated infinite space, the oyster that held a thousand worlds.

What’s better, I was able to incorporate Father’s idea in my design. Every box told a story: from eons ago to the modern age, from the oldest myths to the latest technology, from abstract ideas to concrete artworks . . . machines couldn’t draw inferences between seemingly unrelated elements, conceptually or visually, but the human brain could. The box in front of us right now told the long story that began with goddess Chang’e abandoning her mortal life through drinking an elixir that gave her the ability to fly to the moon and ended with the establishment of the Moon Base. It was a narrative complete on its own, concise, powerful, vivid, and rich with symbols.

The live viewer count grew steadily.

By solving the puzzle of a wooden box, you could understand a history, apprehend a concept, immerse in a story, or even experience an entirely unfamiliar culture. In this process, however, you are required to interact with this heavy box with your physical body: caressing it with your fingers, smelling it with your nose, interpreting—deciphering—feeling its intricacy and glory from every possible perspective. It will become a part of your body memory, just like once Father has told me. This unique experience, grounded in physicality, is exclusive to humankind, irreplaceable by robots or algorithms.

You could even customize a box that contained the story of your family. By handing the box to the people you love and care about, the memory gets passed on—to Teochew, to California, to Mars, to the end of the universe. These boxes are ancestral temples that you can hold in your hands.

And today, through livecasting a carnival in a boxed-up ancestral temple, I was able to demonstrate the concept of our ultimate product to eight hundred thousand—no, one million—people in this world. I knew that those people would in turn spread the word and idea around like nuclear fission.

Father glided toward my brothers and I and patted us on the shoulders, though I couldn’t feel his touch at all. He nodded in his ordinary matter-of-fact way, “Not bad. Looks like you didn’t disgrace the Huang clan after all. Have you thought of a name for it yet?”

I glanced at my brothers. “We’re still talking about it. I insisted that the character chao must be a part of the name.”

Father was silent, as if lost in thought. I didn’t know whether there was a glitch in the algorithm or if he was simply pausing for effect.

“Chao as in Chaoshan, the Mandarin name for us Teochews, means tide. Wherever there is gravity, there is tide; wherever there is tide, there is life. It’s the ebbs and flows that make up a long and prosperous life. Chao is good, chao is good . . . ”

Father’s words were interrupted by firecrackers that crackled and spluttered noisily. The box finished unfolding itself. The entire history of humankind conquering space now lay before our eyes, shimmering with glorious gold. Magically, I realized this was how I remembered New Year to be as a child: a fresh start to nearly four hundred new days of hope and positivity. Now so many years have passed, and the only way I could re-experience the New Year of my childhood was in a virtual ancestral temple.

All of a sudden, I yearned to return to a different reality, to give my family a hug—even though they may not be the most amiable or understanding people you can find. At least I still have a physical body that could embrace, experience, and feel all the imperfections of this world.

Maybe it was time to leave the box behind.

Originally published in Chinese in Non-exist Daily, Sci-fi Spring Festival, January 24th, 2019.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

Translator’s note on Teochew culture:

The Teochew (Chaozhou) people are native to Guangdong province, China, and are spread across various Southern regions and Southeast Asian countries. The Teochew prefecture in Guangdong, known as Chaoshan in Mandarin, traditionally included Shantou, Chaozhou, Jieyang, and Shanwei. Teochew people speak their own dialect, the Teochew dialect, which is a derivative of the Minnan dialect of Southern China. The gold-lacquered wood carving (jinqi mudiao) mentioned in this story is a traditional art of the Teochew people.

About the Author

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

Reshuffling Evolution

Douglas F. Dluzen

In February 2001, a draft version of the human genomic sequence, over three billion DNA base pairs in length, was completed. Knowing the sequence of the human genome encouraged the development of biotechnology that has advanced personalized medicine, biomedical research, and catalyzed provocative discoveries in human evolution and migration.

Yet, perhaps the most fascinating discovery was the confirmation that only a surprisingly small percentage (<2%) of the entire genomic sequence codes for protein. Proteins are the workhorses of the cell and body. And while scientists had previously identified functional roles for other small sections of the human genome, the purpose of a vast majority of the rest was unknown. This prompted scientists to ponder how much of the rest of our genomic sequence is biologically important.

The NIH launched the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Project in 2003 to answer this question and others concerning the architecture of the human genome. This consortium of laboratories was tasked with cataloging all of the important and functional elements within the human genome. We now know that that well over 80% of our DNA sequence has some form of functionality beyond encoding genes that spur the creation of protein. This was much higher than what most researchers anticipated.

It appears that certain genomic regions are vital for normal human growth and developmental timing, from embryo to sexual maturity. Other regions are important for general cellular maintenance and genomic upkeep. The specific sequences that govern these functions are not genes in the traditional sense, but rather regulatory sites. They can regulate how and when our actual genes are expressed by serving as locations for proteins to bind to initiate or repress gene expression. Disruption or mutation of these critical areas can impair the cell and can cause diseases like cancer.

ENCODE also identified thousands of new genes in the genome that code only for RNA—a molecular cousin of DNA that has its own functions and purposes within the cell and body. For example, some small RNA molecules modulate the quantity of proteins in the cell, while others assist in the creation of said protein or act as message couriers between cells. Some RNAs serve as scaffolding support for multi-protein complexes or contribute to numerous other essential roles for the cell to grow and function properly. There is a lot of current research identifying how each of these RNAs function and this has given researchers and clinicians deeper insight into the workings of the cell.

The ENCODE Project has shown that the architecture of the human genome, and the genomes of all other living or viral organisms, is both elegantly built and often extremely complex. Billions of years of evolutionary selective pressures, including random mutational events, fusions, duplications, deletions, and genetic transfers between species have shaped the orientation and architecture of all the genomes we are trying to decipher.

Now that we are beginning to understand what can occur throughout the genome, scientists have begun to ask deeper questions. Did evolutionary pressures get genomic structure right the first time around? What if we were to tinker with that order?

Synthetic biologists want to know the answers to those questions and are reshuffling evolution to drive at the answers. Synthetic biology is a subspecialty of biology and bioengineering focused on designing and creating artificial genes, chromosomes, and genomes. They chemically synthesize DNA in the laboratory in the precise sequence they desire to test what happens if you make changes to the naturally inspired DNA sequence.

This was first accomplished in 1979 when H. Gobind Khorana’s laboratory at MIT chemically synthesized the first synthetic gene from the E. coli genome. The technology was advanced for its day, but slow and time-consuming. The sequence of the synthetic gene was a mere one hundred base pairs and change.

In 1990, a decade later, Abbott Laboratories in Chicago built the first synthetic bacterial DNA plasmid, just over two thousand bases in length. A plasmid is a circular piece of DNA that can transfer itself between bacterial (and sometimes between other) cells. Plasmids usually carry multiple genes that can benefit the recipient cell, including genes related to antibiotic resistance. Bacterial transfer of plasmid DNA is a major mechanism of their evolution and diversity.

Abbott Lab’s synthetic plasmid was engineered to be smaller than what is found in nature, with altered functional elements within its sequence to make the plasmid more practical for use in the laboratory and in cloning techniques commonly used in the 1990s. Synthetic plasmids engineered with specific genes and regulatory elements are widely used in laboratories today and help promote the development of precision cancer research, next-generation antibiotic discovery, and early gene therapies.

Engineering and building a gene or a small DNA plasmid from scratch is one thing, but building the complete synthetic genome of an entire organism was a far more audacious goal. Dr. Eckard Wimmer at Stony Brook University in New York set his laboratory to this task and successfully constructed the complete 7,500 base pair-long genome of the polio virus. The polio genome was synthesized so closely to the natural sequence of polio, that when mixed with the necessary cocktail of proteins inside a test tube, viral particles were produced. These viral particles were able to infect mice and were transmissible, albeit with less efficacy than the natural virus.

Dr. Wimmer’s group also engineered in additional changes to the sequence of the polio genome. One type of change created a DNA tag, akin to a molecular barcode, that is unique to Wimmer’s polio genome and made it easy to identify from the natural polio genome. This precautionary step is common practice in synthetic biology to discern the synthetic from the natural based on sequence alone. Despite the group’s good intentions, their work raised serious ethical and safety concerns. The most pressing of these lay in the realization that if the natural genomic sequence of an organism or virus is known, it was now possible to build it from scratch and make new edits.

A controversial scientific project spilled over into public discourse when Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin and Dr. Ron Fouchier announced their work on manipulating the H5N1 avian flu viral genome. In doing so, they had made H5N1 more infectious and more readily able to avoid detection by cells of the immune system.

A debate between the scientific community and general public occurred concerning whether the specific viral sequences and alternations of this work should be openly available to the public. This meant the sequence of a more virulent strain of the flu could be downloaded and read by anyone. At the time, DNA synthesis was no longer a technically complicated process to perform. The fear was that someone else could use the newly published sequence and make H5N1 even more aggressive and infectious, particularly within humans. This same concern applied to work researchers were doing with anthrax, Ebola, the Spanish flu, and other deadly pathogens.

It’s easy to envision a scenario where the sequence of a pathogenic organism is built and manipulated for nefarious reasons. The NIH thought so as well. In 2014, a moratorium on all gain-of-function pathogenic manipulation was instilled until all safety, publication, and communication issues could be sorted out. This was lifted for work on the flu virus early in 2019. The NIH announced new funding for Dr. Kawaoka’s work following adjustments in his laboratory’s safety protocols and the establishment of additional institutional oversight.

Like the plots of many science fiction stories and novels, it’s not a far reach to imagine mad scientists creating designer viruses to infect and kill humans. But there are important reasons for this work in virology, as well as in other fields. Redesigning the genomes of human pathogens may help us answer very important questions in biology. Dr. Kawaoka’s work may decipher novel ways to prevent pandemics, develop new therapies and vaccines, and alleviate suffering in those with the flu or other similar illnesses. This work may also shed light on the biological mechanisms of other human diseases as synthetic biologists set their sights on larger genomes.

The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) is a nonprofit research institute conducting genomic research and piloting synthetic biology initiatives. JCVI built the first complete synthetic genome of a living organism, the sexually-transmitted bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, in 2008. JCVI subsequently proved that the complete synthetic genome of a related bacteria, Mycoplasma mycoides, could dutifully substitute a bacterium’s natural genome and direct normal cellular growth and division. Synthetic organisms were now a reality.

The idea for this work is multifaceted. Using a synthetic genome allows researchers to pluck away at different genes and regions of the genome to further understand basic cellular function and genome organization. These experiments can offer clues into the nature of antibiotic resistance, bacterial community dynamics, or how bacteria evolved into eukaryotes. This may also help solve some perplexing challenges left in understanding how complex organisms like plants and animals evolved from single cells.

In 2016, JCVI announced the creation of a Mycoplasma bacterium using a synthetic version of its genome but with nearly half of its natural genes removed. This bacterium was named Mycoplasma laboratorium, or Synthia for short. Synthia is the world’s first completely synthetically engineered organism with a modified and minimalized genome. It cost approximately $40 million to construct and is the first direct proof that engineered genomes can produce living organisms capable of replication and division.

This work offers shocking insight into the assumed necessity of most genes in an organism’s genome. The completed Synthia can now be tested to see if changes in the order of these genes matter. This may answer if the blueprints of our evolutionary past are more malleable than was once thought.

As soon as genome synthesis became practical in the laboratory, other initiatives began in the late 2000s to synthesize the genomes of even larger organisms, including yeast. There are already several yeast chromosomes synthesized in their entirety, each tens of millions of DNA bases in length. Current efforts are focusing on individually introducing each synthetic chromosome back into yeast until there are yeast cells with a completely artificial genome. This monumental accomplishment will allow researchers to gain substantial insight into genomic complexity. Yeast has long served as a model for human genetics and the synthetic version will offer additional insights into human pathologies. It is likely that the first synthetic yeast will be introduced to the world within a handful of years.

But where would science be if boundaries weren’t being pushed to their maximum? The announcement of the Human Genome Project Write (HGP-Write) in 2016 was the first step toward that boundary. HGP-Write is an international effort led by geneticists Drs. George Church and Jef Boeke, along with other synthetic biologists. Primary goals of HGP-Write are to reduce the costs of synthetic biology and develop new technologies to make DNA synthesis more efficient, more reproducible, and more reliable. The ultimate goal is to construct the first artificial human genome and cell.

The HPG-Write consortium believes that artificially engineering the human genome will allow for multiple breakthroughs in biomedical research. These breakthroughs include understanding immune cell resistance to viruses, growing and transplanting artificial organs for transplantation, and having a new testing ground to understand all of the functional elements of our genomic sequence. These efforts are meant to synergize with those in ENCODE to truly interpret the power of the human genome.

HPG-Write participants are aware of the complex ethical considerations related to artificially creating a human genome and transferring that into a human cell. Fundamental ethical and moral questions related to who owns this genome, how does that differ with a natural human genomic sequence, how far into development would cells be allowed to go, and what if this technology leads to the complete and synthetic design of a living human being, need to be answered.

Synthetic biologists are not ignoring these important questions. A major priority of the HGP-Write initiative is public discourse on these endeavors and how best to safeguard them. The use of watermarks and barcodes, scientific regulatory and public oversight, and even engineering fail-safes to limit the scope of these projects is on the table and playing a major role in the development of projects related to this field.

Humanity is already dealing with the fallout of last year’s announcement of twin girls born in China with CRISPR-edited genomes. Worldwide calls for moratoriums and enhanced regulation of CRISPR-based genome editing are ongoing, but not yet completely effective. Similar moratoriums have been discussed on designing synthetic genomes. Several molecular fail-safes are currently being implemented for CRISPR-modified organisms and will ideally be engineered within synthetic genomes. However, the outcomes of these measures have yet to be completely assessed.

Since the HGP-Write project is still a long way from the completion of a synthetic human genome, there is still time to explore and discuss the benefits and risks of its implementation. Otherwise, we run the risk of developing a technology that outpaces regulation and which could have life-altering impact, just like in some cases already seen using CRISPR.

Science fiction has long focused on technological advances like these and the impact of new biological, chemical, and physical discoveries in society. As Dr. Ian Malcolm famously said about engineered fail-safes in the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.” It will be best to figure out soon how synthetic life can be safely regulated. This will help us find a way to use this new tool to discover the last secrets of the cell responsibly and with the best possible outcomes.

About the Author

Douglas Dluzen, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. He is a geneticist and has studied the genetic contributors to aging, cancer, hypertension, and other age-related diseases. Currently, he studies the biology of health disparities and the microbiome in Baltimore City. He teaches evolution, genetics, and scientific thinking and you can find more about him on Twitter @ripplesintime24. He loves to write science and science fiction while sitting on the couch with his wife Julia, their dog, cat, and newborn son Parker.

Charging A Brick Wall:
A Conversation with Walter Jon Williams

Arley Sorg

With published fiction spanning three decades, you’ve probably read Walter Jon Williams, even if you don’t know it. He’s known for changing styles and writing both within genre and in defiance of genre definitions. His work has appeared on awards lists since the ’80s, including a Sidewise Award in ’96 for “Foreign Devils,” and Nebula Awards in 2001 for “Daddy’s World” and 2005 for “The Green Leopard Plague.” He’s appeared in best of’s, reader’s polls, and recommended reading lists a number of times, for publications such as Locus, Asimov’s, and SF Chronicle. His body of work includes gaming titles, films, and more. He also founded the Rio Hondo and Taos Toolbox workshops in New Mexico.

George R. R. Martin said of Quillifer, “For all of you who need some great fantasy to read while you’re waiting for THE WINDS OF WINTER . . . try QUILLIFER, by Walter Jon Williams. WJW is always fun, but this may be his best yet, a delight from start to finish, witty, colorful, exciting and amusing by turns, exquisitely written. There’s a dash of Cugel and a dollop of Flashman in Quillifer, son of Quillifer, but this butcher’s boy remains uniquely his own man. I loved meeting him and look forward to seeing him again. Fortunately, Walter tells me the next book, QUILLIFER THE KNIGHT, is already complete and in the pipeline.”

His most recent novel, Quillifer the Knight, is available from Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press, and his recent Praxis books are available from Harper Voyager. His collection, The Best of Walter Jon Williams, is due from Subterranean Press in 2021.

You began your publishing career as Jon Williams with 1981’s Privateers and Gentlemen series: The Privateer, The Yankee, and The Raider, published by Dell. How did you break in? Were there other projects you tried to sell?

There were LOTS of failed projects, including two entire novels I hadn’t been able to sell. I’d been writing seriously for five or six years, in every genre except poetry, romance, and porn, and the result had been zero sales.

Imagine my surprise when my first professional sale was a three-book deal. I was lucky enough to be paid for what I fully realized was journeyman work.

Hurrah! I was a professional, and had graduated from destitution to mere poverty!

You’ve said, “After the market for historicals died, I began a new career as a science fiction writer.” But your first SF novel, Ambassador of Progress, came not long after, in 1984—just three years later. Had the market shifted that dramatically in such a short time? Was it difficult to switch?

The dates of publication are deceptive. The privateer books were written 1979-1982, and published in 1981 and 1984, with the three-year gap in between making sure that all momentum was lost. Ambassador of Progress was written 1983-4, and published later in 1984.

What happened was this.

Spurred by the success of John Jakes’ The Kent Family Chronicles, publishers bought a lot of historical fiction in the five or six years following the American Bicentennial. They overbought, and the market collapsed under its own weight.

So the good news was that I sold a bunch of books, and the bad news that these same books were part of a publishing trend overdue for collapse.

(And by the way, the market for historicals by American writers never returned. There are best-selling historical novels now, but they’re almost all by British writers, and were successes overseas first. American writers interested in history ended up writing historical romance, historical mysteries, or alternative-history SF and fantasy.)

After I filled my initial three-book contract for historicals, there was a second two-book contract that got in just ahead of the collapse. Because of the collapse, it was years before these last two books were published—in fact, so much time had passed that the publisher’s legal right to publish them had expired, a fact of which I conspicuously failed to remind them.

During the interim between the two contracts, I wrote the first part of Voice of the Whirlwind, which I stalled out on, and the proposal for Ambassador of Progress. I wasn’t trying to switch careers to SF, necessarily, but I was trying to keep myself from being bored, and was interested in experimenting and expanding my range, because that’s what makes you a better writer.

Due to a cartoonish series of mishaps, including twice getting lost in the Simon & Schuster mail room, the Ambassador of Progress proposal wasn’t read for a couple years, but it did sell to the first editor who actually read it, Jim Baen at Tor.

Switching from historical fiction to SF involved my advances dropping by something like 45%, so while I had found a home, I was back to destitution again.

When and how did you begin to get involved in the SF/F community? Did you find it helpful for your career or your writing process in any way?

I attended my first science fiction convention in the early Seventies, and attended conventions regularly through that decade. After I began selling, I became something of an anomaly. A few years ago I was told, “We all knew you were a writer, but nobody had read anything you’d written, or even seen it. But you seemed nice enough, so we let you hang out with us.”

When I was trying to break in, several authors did me the kindness of taking me seriously: Jack Williamson, John Maddox Roberts, and C. J. Cherryh. Gordon R. Dickson actually tucked the manuscript of my first novel under his arm and went around the Phoenix Worldcon trying to hand-sell it to editors. (It didn’t work, but I was astonished by his kindness.)

You have a staggering amount of work out. Did you ever hit a career slump or a writing slump, where you struggled to sell work or to produce work?

I’ve suffered through several career crashes—four or five, depending on how you count them, and some worse than others.

My historical fiction career crashed, of course. There were two subsequent crashes that were so bad that they were at the “You’ll never work in this town again” level, and they both resulted in my being unable to sell a novel for five years.

That’s ten years in which I could have been writing novels that readers could have enjoyed and I could have profited from, but those books are gone.

I’m very bitter about it. Can you tell?

When I started, I had no wife or children, so the only person I could fuck up was myself. I could live in a small apartment in a marginal neighborhood, and drive a four-wheel death trap, and I was gambling only with my own fate. So I could just keep writing, and that’s what I did.

The first of the five-year crashes, I was married and my wife had a job, and I got work in Hollywood and writing games, so I was able to ride it out. But when I came back, much of my audience had faded away, and I had to find new readers somewhere.

The second of the five-year crashes, in addition to writing proposals for books that didn’t sell, I digitized my backlist and put them out as ebooks, and even though I wasn’t selling anything new, I was suddenly making more money than I had in my entire career.

But basically I’ve survived by being stupid and single-minded. The only job I’m qualified for other than writer is Walmart greeter. I have no job history, no advanced degrees, and outside of the very small world of science fiction nobody’s heard of me. It’s write or die, so writing’s what I do.

Are there books or stories that were particularly difficult to write for one reason or another, and how did you overcome the challenges you faced?

Yes, but I can never predict what will be hard and what will be easy. The first and third volumes of my Dagmar Shaw series were a joy to write, but the middle book was like trench warfare. Why? I have no idea.

I deal with it the same way I deal with all obstacles: I put my head down and charge forward into the brick wall that’s blocking my way, and I keep doing it until I die or the brick wall falls down.

What that means in practice is that I write every day, unless I’m out of town or there’s some big but necessary social function that intrudes on my writing time. I’m not a very fast writer, but I do it every day, and I win through persistence.

Now, almost forty years after your first series, you have the latest in your Quillifer sequence: Quillifer the Knight, right after the Dread Empire’s Fall installment: The Accidental War. What does it take to stay relevant, and sell books/stories, and still remain part of the genre conversation?

Am I in the genre conversation? I see no sign of it.

I think once you turn fifty, the game changes. The editors who were buying your stuff die or retire, and maybe the readers think they know your work, and don’t need to follow you anymore. (One reason I try not to repeat myself.) Plus the field is all about finding exciting!!! new!!! writers!!!, which is great, because I was one of those guys once, but now I’m an older person who shows up at conventions or whatever, and the only people who know my work are the people my own age, and that’s depressing.

I have readers, which is terrific, and I’m deeply appreciative of those who have followed me all this time, but if anyone out there is actually talking about me, they’re not letting me hear.

As for the people who broke in and then disappeared, I think the answers come down to two: bad luck and children. If your career collapses (which is the new normal, and it almost certainly won’t be your fault), you might be able to fight your way through it, but if you’re raising kids, odds are you can’t. If you can no longer earn enough writing to keep your kids in shoes, and you’re anything like a responsible parent, then you quit writing and get a job. And maybe you’ll be lucky enough to come back in twenty years.

And of course if your health goes bad, particularly in the States, it’s a game-ender. There is no backstop.

“The Green Leopard Plague” won a Nebula in 2005. “Daddy’s World” won a Nebula in 2001. Jonathan Strahan, in his Locus roundup of noteworthy 2017 titles, called Quillifer “a fun swashbuckler.” Is there a difference between award-worthy fiction and fun fiction?

Maybe it’s just me, but I have fun whenever I’m reading a good book regardless of genre or intent. I have fun reading the poetry of Philip Larkin, for heaven’s sake!

The notion that there’s a hard wall separating serious fiction from fun fiction is illusory. Fiction can be fun without pandering to its readers’ expectations, and it can be serious while remaining amusing.

Otherwise we wouldn’t have Mark Twain, would we?

You co-run Taos Toolbox, you write tons of fiction (and have a fair amount of nonfiction out), and you’ve been up for a slew of awards. Who are the writers (or what are the stories) in the field now that impress you, and why?

I always hate these questions, because I’m always afraid I’ll leave someone out and that person will be offended. Even so . . .

The names that my paintball memory splatters across my consciousness at this moment include Kelly Robson, Amal El-Mohtar, Scott Hawkins, David Anthony Durham, Daniel Abraham, Kelly Link, Will McIntosh, Zen Cho, Sam J Miller, L. D. Colter, Simone Heller, Carmen Maria Machado, Max Gladstone, Andromeda Romano-Lax, and Arkady Martine.

That many of these were, at some point or other, my students, does not bias my recommendations in any way.

What are the projects you would really like to do that you haven’t done yet?

I have more ideas for stories than I’ll have a chance to write in several lifetimes. In no particular order:

I have two hundred pages of a novel about Benjamin Franklin. Friends who have read it say it’s my best, but it’s been rejected everywhere, not least because it’s neither one thing nor another. (It would be science fiction were it published in 1756.)

I’d like to write a four-volume historical series about Hannibal and the Second Punic War. Never been done right, in my opinion. If I threw in dragons or something I could probably sell it as a stupid fantasy, but there’s something in me that resists that.

A series of novels featuring Talleyrand as the central character.

A massive overstory displayed in all media, including novels, web pages, film, podcasts, postcards, graphic novels, etc. It would require some collaborators and a metric fuck-ton of money. Any millionaires out there?

The others I’ll keep to myself, because I may still write them.

What can you tell us about your recent novels—the Quillifer books and the Praxis books—what is special about them to you, and what do you really want readers to know about them?

At some point in the Nineties, my books started to grow in scope and got longer and longer. Eventually I wised up and split the huge stories into multiple volumes, which allowed me as much scope as I wanted, and also to be paid multiple times. Win/win!

I’ve only recently realized that I’ve had a single project over the last twenty years, which is to examine the artifacts and tropes of genre, take them apart, and reassemble them in ways that make sense to me. It’s a very science fiction thing to do.

The Praxis books are a far-future series chronicling the collapse of an interstellar empire. Since space empires really make no sense, I had this one assembled by a ruthless clique of alien conquerors, who subdue humans among other races, and who set up a social system headed by a pseudo-aristocracy of collaborators. When the alien conquerors die out, their subjects, led by descendants of the original turncoats, are left trying to hold the ramshackle construction together. Or not, as the case may be.

The Quillifer series is a joyful homage to the pioneers of fantasy. Writing it is the most fun I’ve had in years. I not only am prodding and rearranging the matter of fantasy, I’m showing what an actual fantasy realm would look like when you’re strolling through it. Why would you not want to live in a world with turnspit dogs?

It’s a tradition in high fantasy that a perturbed world must be renewed by a return to an idealized past—the rightful heir Aragorn (or Simba) becomes King, and then sets the realm to rights. Which is great as long as Aragorn (or Simba) stays alive, and is not replaced by King Snarl the Sociopath. I’ve never been much impressed by the claims of kings.

Quillifer lives in a world less akin to the Middle Ages than to the North European Renaissance, and he’s not a lost prince looking for a throne, but a charming high-flyer looking for the main chance. A working-class kid on the rise, he’s not looking for some idealized kingdom of the past, but a world that will accept him for what he is, an agent of social change.

I only hope that readers have as much fun with these books as I did.

Do you feel like you are a completely different writer in important ways from the Walter Jon Williams who sold books ten or fifteen years ago? Or will readers find a consistent voice and style running through decades of work?

I’d like to think I’ve grown and changed, which is what artists are supposed to do. You can only hope to bring your audience with you.

I have more skills now. I adopt different voices and styles, depending on the work, but I think I’m fairly consistent in regard to theme: I write about money, power, crime, and class. Sometimes it’s serious, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes the subject is hidden by a kind of magician’s misdirection until I drop the cloak and reveal what’s been there all along.

Which short stories stand out in your memory as some of your finest work, and why? For readers who have never read you, where should they start?

“Daddy’s World”

“Surfacing”

“Wall, Stone, Craft”

“The Green Leopard Plague”

“Dinosaurs”

“Prayers on the Wind”

Or actually you can wait until later in the year, when Subterranean Press will release The Best of Walter Jon Williams, lavishly illustrated by Lee Moyer.

I’m sure it’ll be worth every penny.

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.

The Color of Nature:
A Conversation with Victo Ngai

Arley Sorg

Victo Ngai’s images have captivated the science fiction community since her striking 2011 cover for Tor.com publishing’s Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order. It is a cover with soft pastels set against a dark, dangerous backdrop, with careful intimacy amidst the danger, and a spray of petals caught in the maelstrom. By then her work had already made appearances in the Spectrum series of art books as well as The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Ngai appeared on several SF/F awards lists for 2017: Chesley, Locus, World Fantasy, Hugo, and a Best Artist BSFA win—but before this, she’d already received a pile of accolades, including the The New York Times 20 Notable Op-Ed Art for 2010, 2012, and 2013; two gold medals from the Society of Illustrators in 2012; being named as one of Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 in 2014; and more. For 2018 her SF/F accolades continued: Hugo Award finalist for Best Professional Artist, a Best Artwork BSFA win for her cover for Waiting on a Bright Moon, and a Gold Award winner in Spectrum 25. Her client base ranges from wine purveyors to film companies and her recent SF/F cover work includes the dark burnt orange to bright glowing yellow of Nisi Shawl’s Everfair; the slick, period sensibilities of Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough; and the beautiful, graphic geometry of Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology.

A lot of the basic questions are covered thoroughly on your website (victo-ngai.com). So the questions that I’m going to ask you are a little bit different. You covered a lot of territory!

Thank you so much for doing your research. That doesn’t happen that often. I always have to answer, “Where did you go to school?” like a hundred times.

Are there themes or motifs that you enjoy that appear in your work often, and what do you like most about them?

Oh, interesting. I think I really enjoy pulling elements from nature, because, it’s just so great. I feel like if you look at the past artists, the really great ones, they also do the same. I recently went to Spain and I had a little bit more time this time, so I had an in-depth tour of Gaudí’s architecture. And then I went to the backroom exhibition—we really actually went through everything!

It’s very apparent how he took inspiration from nature. Some are more obvious. But there are other things that are a little bit more subtle, but interesting. For example, some of the structures of the columns are actually not just, “This is how the plant looks,” but a movement of growth of a certain kind of helicoid plant in space and time. These are plants that have leaves that grow in levels, each new level rotates in order to get the maximum amount of sunlight. This twist and turn movement creates really fascinating forms. And I guess for me, I really resonate with that. I feel like there are all these amazing artists, or writers, but our creativity seems so finite compared to the creativity in nature. It just feels like it’s a boundless resource that can be drawn from; and it’s probably the most original inspiration for all these people.

I saw in the body of work presented on your website that you have some key pieces that are very “modern.” For example, there’s the drawing of the car—do you feel like you’re able to bring that natural element into those pieces as well?

I think so, in some ways. Even though my line art is quite precise, I feel like I really enjoy the fluidity and curves. I don’t really have anything that’s straight, right angle, or very vectorized. Even when I do architecture drawings, I like it still a little bit off, a little quirky. I just really like the warmth—and I feel like that’s also something that’s separate, maybe, that nature vs. man-made. To quote Gaudí “The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.” Personally, I am really drawn to the tactility and warmth of the organic feeling.

Your work has a lot of different moods and expressions, but I feel like you gravitate toward reds, golds, and greens. What is it about these combinations of colors that speak to you?

I feel like those are my comfort colors, kind of like your comfort food. I love traveling, I love all kinds of cuisines, but when I’m really tired, I always gravitate toward Chinese food because of my upbringing. And I feel like that’s the same with my palette. That is quite an Asian-esque palette, I would say, and probably the earliest one that I got familiarized with, and probably the one I had the most experience with. I always feel like color choices and how we approach our lines—all this simple stuff added together—is what contributes to an artist’s style. And a so-called style essentially is built on this baseline of who you are, which was influenced by your surroundings as a kid.

I feel like that’s such an important bedrock that’s being laid down consciously and subconsciously, and I feel like a lot of those colors were just permeated in my visual world when I was young, so I’ve always been really drawn to that. And so the later palettes, which I picked up along the way, are still built on top of that bedrock. Maybe that’s why you see, even with the other developments, it would still sort of be in the same vein.

That makes sense. When I think of Chinese art and those colors, I feel like a lot of times it’s very stark, very bright, and the way that you use them gives your pieces a warmth and softness.

That’s a really interesting and good observation. I feel like it depends on what kind of Chinese art you’re looking at. If you’re looking at scroll paintings of landscape, they’re quiet monochromatic, very, very few colors, and beautifully designed mark makings. I feel like my line art is probably more influenced by that kind of artwork and gongbi hua. But color-wise, it’s mostly from folk art and crafts, from textiles for example, from interior design and architecture. Those things tend to have quite brilliant colors and really nice complementary colors. When you translate those elements into a two-dimensional art piece, there’s some transition that needs to be made.

Chinese paintings tend to have starker contrast between figure-ground because of the medium of ink, it cannot be thinly glazed, layered, feathered, and rendered like oil painting. For the same reason, Middle Age paintings have harsher lines as egg tempera dries too quickly. I don’t work in traditional Chinese media, so that allow me to explore softer edge qualities.

And of course I also have my influences in Western art. I went to school here at Rhode Island School of Design, so I also had that training of oil painting. I think that softness may be a little bit more rendering with seeing—because between the East and the West, we see space very differently in art. Like, there’s not really that vanishing point in Eastern art, it’s more like a traveling perspective.

With a scroll painting, sometimes you feel like you’re seeing a mountain ridge, but sometimes it’s actually the mountain being depicted at different angles, the same mountain, as the poet or as some artist travels. So there’s less of that fascination with trying to convey a space as realistically as possible, as with Western art, especially after the Renaissance. But also, I’m kind of in between two worlds, so I see the merit and I really appreciate both sides of that. I kind of mix and match whatever I feel like will work for what I’m trying to convey in that particular piece.

You do a lot of different pieces for a lot of different types of clients, but your art is appreciated by (and quite fitting for) the SF/F community. You also do commercial, such as American Express, shoe campaigns. Where does science fiction and fantasy fit into your creativity or your artistic body of work?

Well, first of all, I think “genre” is pretty overrated. Not just scifi/fantasy within illustration, but also, why separate illustration with fine art? I feel like that development is very, very recent, and mostly for the market rather than the art itself. Most people would say Michelangelo is fine art, but if you look at the purpose of his art, it’s pretty much illustration for the Bible, but done on the mural. Now that’s three separate categories these days! I mean, what is illustration, essentially? It’s telling story with visuals. And I feel like a lot of us do that in different ways. Of course, certain art, like the modern art movement, such as abstract expressionism or minimalism, got rid of that storytelling aspect. But even so, pair a Jackson Pollock painting with some well-chosen words, meaning and stories can still emerge and be ran as an editorial illustration or ad campaign. So how do we really define what’s what, is it by its style, media or function?

I just don’t really like to put myself in any pigeonhole, that, “Okay, I’m a scifi artist, I’m only an illustrator”—I feel like I have a pretty wide interest in a lot of things, and I really appreciate that, so far, I’ve been able to do a lot of that. And I would love to do even more down the road.

But for what fantasy or scifi means to me personally, I’ve always really loved that genre as a reader. I feel like it is something similar to the reason why I love drawing. If you read my Q&A, you kind of know I grew up as an only child, so I started drawing as a way to escape this reality—to kill time, but also to entertain myself. Fantasy also does that, it provides a means of escape from the mundane, but in some other sense, it also kind of holds up a mirror that can be more poignant than just telling the story as it is.

For example, with The Handmaid’s Tale—after the book there’s a writer’s note, and I find that to be the most interesting part of the book. It talks about how all the seemingly dystopian elements and fantasy elements in the book have all happened in history across different cultures, across different times. She simply collected all of these seemingly absurd, unbelievable things, put them all together in this sort of parallel universe. It’s a story, but then the story is very powerful because it has that tie to reality, it holds up that mirror to reality. We can very easily fall into that sort of dystopia.

And same goes with The Lord of the Rings. I feel like there’s a strong message there about conservation of the earth. So, I think—I don’t know, I just love that style of writing, personally. To me, it’s much more effective emotionally than just reading an essay packed with data, telling me we’re doomed if we don’t cut carbon emissions. That kind of thing desensitizes people. I feel like to really be able to move people to change, you have to appeal to them on an emotional level, and I feel like scifi/fantasy is very great at doing that.

Your story’s a little bit different perhaps than a lot of people’s stories, because you met someone early on who helped you break in. Besides talent, what does it take to make it as an illustrator?

I agree I have been extremely lucky. I didn’t just meet one person, but I feel like I have been helped all the way by really great people. For example, Chris Buzelli—that’s probably the mentor you read about—in school; and then I started working with his wife, SooJin Buzelli, my first professional gig. But when I moved to New York, I also emailed Steven Heller. He used to be the art director of the Op-Ed section of The New York Times, but he had retired at that point, and I just wanted to see if he wanted to give me some pointers so that I could get a job at The New York Times. He actually liked my work enough that he just sent me the art director’s email, so that’s how I started working with them. And after working with them, the art director of The New York Times sent me to the art director of The New Yorker. Also, through the Society of Illustrators I met Irene Gallo, and that’s how I got into the scifi/fantasy world. I started doing covers for them and other publishers saw it.

So I would say it just seems like a series of really fortunate events. But I will also have to say that ultimately the work really matters. It’s important to put yourself out there, but I think as a starting artist, the most important part of your day is to focus your energy on creating the best portfolio you can. And not to worry about, you know, the award, or the clients down five years. There are so many factors you cannot control, but what you can control is to make sure that every step you take is the best you can, because that’s going to lead to the next step. It’s very much a cumulative process. And I feel like also, just be nice. Be a kind person. I think the illustration industry in general is a very kind industry compared to a lot of other ones. Almost every successful artist I talk to, they had some kind of mentor or similar story as mine, someone that helped them out. And that kind of opportunity is also up to you.

Of course, I had my teacher, right, so that is very fortunate; I was able to go to a really good art school and able to afford that tuition, which maybe not everyone can do. But after that, how do you take control of your own life? If I didn’t email Steven Heller, or if I didn’t go to try and meet people in the Society, a lot of the other opportunities might not have happened. In the end, I feel like no matter what situation you are in, it’s up to you to make however much you can make out of it. Definitely, I am super, super lucky. But for people who might not be able to go to art school—just know there are artists who didn’t go to art school, and they can still make things happen. Just don’t let circumstances make you feel defeated.

You also teach. Is that part of why you teach, to sort of . . . be nice; and to help other people out?

Well, I used to teach at the School of Visual Arts in New York, but after I moved here I don’t really, I stopped teaching. But now I just did an online class with Skillshare, which talked about color, because that’s something I struggle with a lot. So yeah, I do try to find ways to give back to the community. Like the Q&A page—I would love to be able to answer all of the emails from students, but that’s just not really possible. It took so long to reschedule this interview! That’s why I took the time to just write out a really comprehensive list, pretty much all the questions that I always get, they’re answered in the list, and I can refer them to that list as a resource. I also now have social media in China, because the illustration market is quite new there. It’s still kind of like the Wild, Wild West.

A lot of things that are very obvious here are big unknowns there. I write blogs from time to time, just to talk a little about the industry, talk about my experience as an illustrator. And even simple things, like which competition to enter—I talk about Spectrum; or share other artists’ work. They can at least feel like there’s something they can find—at least even know the key word, right? If they want to do some research on their own and get into the industry. Because when I was in Hong Kong I didn’t know anything, so I feel like I would have appreciated that.

You’ve been nominated for and won a number of SF/F awards and you’ve been to a number of conventions. What has your experience with the SF/F community been like, and do you feel like it’s been helpful at all for you career-wise?

Well, I feel like SF/F artists are the humblest artists I’ve seen, probably. I haven’t met anyone with a huge ego, even though they all have crazy skill. I mean, just coming from the art show when I was putting mine up, I’m seeing all of these original oil paintings, I’m like—it just kind of blew my mind. But everyone just seemed so humble, and everyone is not afraid to be a fan. I think that’s something I really love, the fan culture in SF/F. In other parts of art—for example, advertisement—sometimes you feel like you kind of need to posture a little bit, so that people will take you seriously. If you act too much like a fan or are too humble about yourself, maybe that will depreciate your work. But I don’t feel that [in the SF/F community]. I feel like everyone is pretty true to themselves. I mean, most of them got into this genre because they are fans to begin with, so I think that’s probably why.

What are some of your favorite pieces or projects you’ve done, whether or not in genre, or perhaps pieces or projects that you’re most proud of?

That’s tough. I mean, they’re all my babies. I would say one of the most challenging projects I’ve done recently is the Kama Sutra project. And I’m pretty proud of how they came out. It’s really challenging because I always feel like I’m not very good at drawing figures. I’m much more interested in the environment. If you look at my artwork, the environment sometimes has more character and personality, and there are a lot of figures that just kind of turn away, or are kind of small. But the Kama Sutra project, I actually initiated it with the publisher. We worked on another project before, so we have a good relationship, and they asked me if there was anything I wanted to do. I just said, “The Kama Sutra, because I know it’s going to force me to draw bodies.”

So you took it on because you wanted to challenge yourself?

Yeah. And I know it’s going to be extra difficult because, of course, the subject matter is juicy, but then it’s also classic literature. So how do you walk the fine line between erotica and pornography? I knew from the get-go that it was going to be a very interesting challenge. Also I just really love the Mongol miniature paintings. I saw a show at the Metropolitan Museum in person, it just kind of blew my mind, so I always wanted to sort of steal that for some project, and this one just seemed so perfect. It’s a great chance to challenge myself with figures, but also play into my love of patterns and colors and rich texture. I’m happy with how it came out.

Going back to definitions and illustrators vs. gallery and fine arts, because you talk about that on your site, and because you get asked a lot about those definitions: do you paint or draw for yourself, just because you want to? Or do you have designs or thoughts about doing a gallery presentation? Or is that just not a direction that interests you?

It definitely interests me, but if I do that, I want it to be all self-generated work. And I just haven’t had the bandwidth to do that. As far as just doing work purely for myself, I haven’t done that for a while, because I don’t really feel like I need that creative outlet. I really enjoy my commercial projects. Especially now that I’ve worked with clients that really trust me. On a lot of the projects I’m even able to dictate content. So, not just as an artist, but I’m able to kind of collaborate. Those projects actually feel like my own projects.

It’s like they’re giving you a prompt?

Sometimes not even. For example, I recently did this series with Apple, because they have those editorial pieces on their app store, like the Today tab, and they’re like, “Okay, we want to feature you for a week. What do you want to do?” I mean, it is a commercial project, but I get to come up with the whole thing. During that time, I was in Ireland, giving a talk at a design conference, and I went on a road trip around the whole island. And again, I was just really inspired by the beauty of the landscape. I wanted to do this sort of visual documentary of the trip, but also something that would tie back to software/devices, because you know, it’s Apple. So it’s like Procreate, iPad you can just take on the go, you can sketch, you can sort of document what you see. There are photos that I took with my film camera, there’s art demo. There’s also a playlist that I curated. It was really fun. And there’s also my own writing; and I also went to the filming place for Game of Thrones—a little bit of fangirling as well. It’s very personal. Speaking of Game of Thrones, I worked with HBO on the last season #forthethrones campaign. That project had a stronger prompt but, I mean, I love that show, so it feels like a personal piece.

Do you feel like the demands or aesthetics of SF art are changing, or do you feel like they’ve changed since you started doing SF/F art?

I feel like it’s definitely getting more diverse, but I feel like that had started when I started, and I feel like Tor should take a lot of credit for that, Irene should take a lot of credit. Because I know she started hiring editorial, traditional editorial illustrators, for scifi/fantasy, and I mean, I look at their covers, and especially their online art, it’s just so diverse and it’s very interesting. And I feel like it’s definitely more mainstream, it’s getting more mainstream because of all these popular shows.

What does “more mainstream” mean in terms of art aesthetics?

Now you see, for example, advertisements or editorial, they’re more interested in using something that’s more whimsical and more fantastical; I feel like they’re definitely more open to that. Probably a huge thing to do with shows like Game of Thrones.

How does your process change if you’re working on a magazine cover as opposed to a book cover, as opposed to an advert or something else?

With magazine covers and book covers, they are quite similar, it’s just that I get more time with book covers. And a book cover—I guess with the type of design, that will be a little bit different, because with a magazine you have the headline—you know, that’s always standard. So when you work on a sketch you already know what that’s going to be like when you compose the image, but with a book cover, it’s kind of more of an organic back and forth process working with the art director. It’s usually during the sketch stage, we’re trying to figure out where will be the best place to place the type, and then the art director will do a mock-up type, and I will rearrange elements. It’s more of a close collaboration, I would say, with the book covers.

Do you find that to be like a Tor thing, or do you find that to be the same with other publishers as well?

I think with all the publishers. Advertisement’s really different. Because advertisement—first of all, each campaign can be so different. Some will involve animation, so the file has to be super layered. Others might involve actual merchandise, or window display or billboard, so it’s just—when it comes to size, what are the requirements—really different.

Do you feel like, over the past ten years or so, your skill level has changed or your style has changed?

I would like to think I am a better artist now, at least technically. I’m able to tackle a much wider range of projects. I think my style has also evolved. If you compare a work from now to 2010, it’s definitely more skilled. And I would say the body of work in 2010 is more one-dimensional. I was actually worried that I would be a one-trick pony when I found my own style. Because for a while, I was making work that was strongly reminiscent of Asian art, and a sort of flattened perspective, where you can see the horizon line in almost all pieces; mostly with kids and animals, because I’m not comfortable drawing adult bodies—that’s a huge part. And flat color, with the palette that you mentioned. I feel like if someone would see all my art together in a chronological way, it would become sort of obvious that I diversified slowly over time.

Where do you hope to take your art next? What do you hope to do with your art?

That’s a good question. I mean, I kind of want to see if I can get back to the analog world, actually. I’m interested to see how that shift of medium might open up new things, and how that might help me develop my style and grow as an artist. And I’m definitely interested in the gallery world down the road. So yeah, that’s something I would love to explore.

I mean, there’s all these things I want to do. I also want to make my own children’s book.

That’s on your website.

Yeah. I’m just waiting for a story that I really love. Because I’m working on two children’s books right now, and it’s very intense, it’s so much work, that I feel like you have to really commit to a story. Especially if it’s something I do for myself—if I don’t love it enough, I can always quit, and that’s a problem; you know, when you’re working for someone else you can’t quit, you have to stick it through.

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:
A Bucket of Things

Neil Clarke

Normally, I struggle to think of a topic for my editorials, but this month I have three things on my plate and none can really wait. I’m going to briefly cover all of them right now and cover some in detail when I have the luxury of some worry-free time.

Thing 1: That Whirring Sound From My Chest

Or beeping, actually. Yes, the alarms for the battery started and it is time to replace my defibrillator. However, in December, a second set of alarms went off and indicated a failure in one of the coils. This means that not only is the unit being replaced—that’s what happens when the battery dies—but I also need to have the wires that go into my heart replaced too. It’s a fairly unusual situation that I’ve over-documented on my blog (neil-clarke.com), but the short version is that my surgery will be more complicated and a bit riskier. I’m meeting with the surgeon in early January and should have further details then. It’s likely that the procedure will be done very soon. Nervous? Of course. Wish me luck.

Thing 2: Words From the Other Side of the World

In August 2011, we published our first translation, “The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu. Over the next few years, we published a few more, thanks to Ken and John Chu. Unknown to us, those translations were generating some attention in China and one day, I woke to find an email from Storycom in my inbox. They liked what we were doing and were curious if we’d like to make it a regular feature.

Over the next few months, we hammered out logistics and a variety of rights issues. To make things work from our end, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the addition of an extra story slot to the magazine, so that translations could sit alongside English language stories as an expansion of our existing work. With Storycom and our Kickstarter supporters, we launched our translation project exactly five years ago this month. Since then we have featured nearly fifty works of Chinese science fiction.

It’s easy to think of things in a vacuum, but regularly publishing translations created opportunities not only for those authors, but us as well. In the years since, we’ve seen a significant rise in the number of translations and works by foreign authors in our slush pile and pages. There’s even a direct line between these efforts and the Korean SF grant we received from LTI Korea last year. (Speaking of which, this issue features the last of those stories. We’re still hoping to get funding for a second round.)

I’m extremely grateful to everyone at Storycom for their vision and support. Their commitment to this project has opened many doors, introduced me to some amazing people—many I now call friends—and helped make translations a less uncommon fixture in English language SF. I look forward to what our efforts will bring in this new decade. Thank you Storycom and thank you to all the authors and translators that have been part of this team as well.

Thing 3: That Annual January Thing with Last Year’s Work

It’s almost time to pick your favorite Clarkesworld story and cover art from 2019 in our annual reader’s poll!

Phase 1: Nominations (mid-January)

Later this month, we’ll open for a forty-eight hour flash nomination period to identify the top five candidates in each category: story and art. The announcement for this phase will be sent out via:

Twitter (twitter.com/clarkesworld)

Facebook (www.facebook.com/clarkesworld)

Patreon (www.patreon.com/clarkesworld)

My blog (neil-clarke.com)

The purpose of the brevity of this phase is to create a sense of urgency and reduce the opportunities for a coordinated ballot-stuffing campaign. Previous efforts have proved this to be effective at meeting these goals.

Phase 2: Final Voting (February)

The five finalists in each category will be announced in my February editorial. Final voting will open on the 1st and continue through the 15th. The winners will be announced in our March issue.

Bonus Thing

Happy New Year! I hope that this year brings you only the best!

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: Zarrio

Eduardo García

About the Artist

Eduardo García is a Spanish designer/illustrator who works primarily in the videogame industry. He has also illustrated various board games and provided concept art for some small computer indie games. He is currently working on “The Settlers” for Blue Byte.