Distant Stars

P H Lee

“Spin me, mommy, spin me!”

You are four years old and in the afternoon sun in the backyard of our collapsing New Brunswick rental. Martha’s at work and I’m supposed to be watching you and studying for next month’s quals, so I’m sitting in a plastic lawn chair making a half-hearted attempt to outline Wald’s General Relativity.

“Mommy’s got to study for her test,” I say without looking up. “Can’t you spin yourself?”

You’re supposed to be playing by yourself. We’d made an agreement. But you’re four and you’re bored and agreements don’t matter.

“Don’t wanna spin myself.”

I look up and see the tantrum brewing on your face.

You’re four years old and it’s a beautiful afternoon and what the hell. I bookmark Wald and get up from my lawn chair. “Okay, kid. You got me. Let’s spin.” Your whole face lights up and I think about quals next month and hope to whomever that I’ve made the right decision.

You hold up your hands. I walk over to you. I grab your wrists; you grab mine. I lift you up. “Oof, kid, you’re getting kinda heavy for this.”

“Spin me!” you demand, and I do, slowly at first, then faster, faster. Your feet lift off the ground, flying out from us, and you look at me and begin to laugh. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world, that moment, you laughing there in our overgrown backyard in the afternoon sun while the whole universe spins around us.

I smile, then grin, then I start to laugh, which makes you laugh more, which makes me laugh more. I spin you around and around and I don’t let go.

When you spin around, your arms fly out to your sides.

Everyone knows that. But here’s the problem: no one knows why.

Linear motion—back and forth—is relative. From a physical perspective, you can’t tell if you’re the one moving or if the world is moving around you. Circular motion—orbits, say—is relative as well. But spinning is, for some reason, absolute. If you spin, with your arms flying out to your sides, it seems to you like the whole world spins around you. But if you put every object around you on a circular track, and make them spin around you, your arms don’t fly out to your sides, no matter how fast they spin around.

That’s not how physics should work. Motion should be relative, not absolute. But no amount of theory can explain it away. Anyone can test it, even you, four years old in our overgrown backyard behind the half-collapsed wooden fence: you spin around; your arms fly out to your sides.

Einstein theorized that rotation is with respect to “the distant stars”: When you spin at night the stars spin around above you. That’s how you can tell it’s you spinning and not the room. Einstein called this idea “Mach’s principle,” because Einstein knew better than to put his name on a shameless kludge.

When you spin around, your arms fly out to your sides. No one knows why. One hundred and fifty years ago, we put a name on our ignorance, and we’ve learned absolutely nothing about it since.

It’s after your bedtime, so Martha and I are fighting again.

“It was a good job! Tenure track!”

“It’s a shit job and I wasn’t going to get it. Do you know who gets tenure track jobs? Straight guys from Princeton named Chet!”

“Oh, so now it’s the patriarchy’s fault?”

“I’m just saying that—”

“You’re so full of shit, Sar! Why won’t you take this seriously?”

“I am taking this seriously!”

“Oh, really? Because I just see you sitting on your ass binging Netflix while I’m working two jobs and raising our son.”

“That is not fair! I have been—”

“I don’t really give a shit what you’ve been doing. I supported you through grad school and you were going to get a job. That was the deal!”

“If I could just publish a paper, I mean a real one—”

“If you could just publish a paper? You knew that no one was interested in Mach’s principle when you started! Dr. Treuer told you it was a career killer! He used those exact words!”

“So now you’re an expert on general relativity?”

“Fuck off, Sarah. If you think I’m going to keep dragging your ass—”

“It’s just a terrible job market—”

“I don’t give a shit if it’s a terrible job market! I give a shit that you can’t even bother to apply. I mean, Jesus Christ, we can’t live like we’re in our 20s anymore. We’ve got bills to pay, a son for God’s sake—”

“I’m not the one who wanted to have a kid while I was applying to grad school!”

That’s when I see the white tail of your Eevee pajamas sticking out from behind the couch.

“Kid?” I ask in the softest voice I can manage. Caught out, you dash back toward your room. Martha practically deflates and starts crying.

“Sweetie, honey,” I run after you, talk through your door. “Honey, I didn’t mean it like that. I love you so much, I promise.”

Why should the motion of your arms, spinning around in the light of a backyard afternoon when you were four years old, depend on the motions of galactic clusters ten billion years ago and ten billion years away? It’s infuriating. It’s unreasonable. The universe shouldn’t work like that. And yet, no matter how infuriated or reasonable we get, it still does.

If you lock some physicists in a spinning room, where we can’t see the distant stars, we shouldn’t be able to tell whether we were in a spinning room or a gravity field. We wouldn’t, if spinning made sense. But we can, because gradually, over time, the spinning will make objects curve away from us. Slowly at first, but accelerating, faster and faster, always further away.

I’m cramped into our front room with your granddad’s old roller suitcase. I’m dripping with summer sweat and crying and trying to remember what I forgot to pack. I’m not surprised by the divorce—I’m devastated, but at least I’m not surprised.

Martha is standing in the kitchen door, watching me with her arms crossed, doing her very best not to yell and not to take me back. You’re hiding behind her, nine years old and overwhelmed. I crouch down and meet your eyes.

“Hey, kid,” I say, “come here and give your mom a hug.”

Slowly, tentatively, you come out from behind Martha and walk over to me. I hug you tight and you let me.

“I know this is hard,” I say, as if I’m not the one bawling my eyes out. “And it’s just going to be you and Mama for a while.”

You nod against my shoulder.

I want to tell you that it’s not my fault. I want to tell you why: that my name isn’t on your birth certificate, or that Martha’s parents got her a better lawyer. I want to tell you that not having custody rights doesn’t mean I love you any less.

“Remember that I love you,” I finally say. “I love you more than anything, and I promise I’ll see you again soon.”

You lean over and whisper in my ear. “I love you too, Mom.”

Martha taps her watch and it takes all I’ve got not to scowl at her. “Okay, kid. Take good care of Mama. See you soon.”

“See you soon,” you say, and smile, but I know you don’t mean it.

Back in the nineteenth century, when physicists didn’t understand something, they called it a principle. Here in the twenty-first century, we call it “Dark”: Dark Matter and Dark Energy and Dark whatever they come up with next.

Dark Energy, particularly, isn’t really dark and isn’t really energy. It’s a way of saying this: we expected, when we looked at distant galaxies, that they’d be moving away from us. But we didn’t expect that they’d be moving away from us faster and faster. Dark Energy means that the entire universe is accelerating away from us. And it means that we have no idea why.

Or, at least, we had no idea why. Until I got an idea.

It’s stupid of me to even try. I’m in my fourth year on the job market, not that I’m applying to anything, adjuncting out of a tiny apartment in south Seattle, five different courses at five different colleges for pennies an hour, sending Martha whatever fraction for child support I have at the end of the month. But I’ve finally got an idea, a real one, and I can’t just let it go.

I title the paper “Dark Energy in Non-Inertial Reference Frames.” I don’t even bother submitting it to journals—who was going to take a paper from some failure of an adjunct?—and just upload it directly to arxiv.org.

No one responds in the first week.

No one responds in the second week.

Then, in the third week, I get an e-mail. From an actual professor at an actual university, and not just any university, the UCSB Institute. “Fascinating article,” it says, followed by a series of corrections to my tensor models.

By the time I’m finished reading it, I have five more e-mails. MIT, UChicago, the works. By the time I’m done with those I have a dozen. And then I have a hundred.

You’re at home—with Martha and her new wife Kyla—and we’re talking on the phone. We usually only talk on the phone on Sundays. Martha doesn’t like it when we talk, no matter what she says otherwise. But it’s a special occasion and I’m calling on a school night.

“Oh, honey, I can’t believe you’re graduating high school already. I’m so proud of you. You know how proud of you I am, right?”

“I know,” you say. “It’s not that big a deal.”

“Graduating at 16 is a pretty big deal!”

“It’s really not. Classes are easy. Mom says—” you call Martha “Mom” now even though I was always Mom and she was Mama—“that at least I got my brains from you.”

“I’d really love to be at your graduation, I’m so sorry—”

“Mom! It’s fine!”

“Or you could come with me! I know it’s late but I can spring for a plane ticket.”

“Mom. We already talked about this. Kyla doesn’t want me to go. She’s worried about the plane.”

Kyla is worried about a lot of things. I have my suspicions, but I know better than to say anything.

Finally, I just say, “I’m going to miss you.”

“Mom: I know. It’s okay. Go enjoy the freaking Nobel Prize dinner.”

After the Nobel Prize, I get a lot of e-mails. Most of it is cranks and I don’t answer. But this morning I’m in a good mood—probably because you just got accepted into the NASA training program—so when I get one of those e-mails I decide to read it.

“I have been reading your theories with interest,” it begins, “and I think there is a method to test your theories.” It goes on in some detail about gyroscopes and magnets and space-like curves, and I can’t follow it. But it’s signed Wu Hsi-ing, Tsing Hua National University.

Tsinghua is a big deal. I call and the phone rings three times before I remember that it’s still the middle of the night in China and it’s too late to hang up.

“Wei?” says a groggy voice at the other end of the line.

“Dr. Wu? This is Sarah Levy. I got your e-mail.”

“Ah,” she says, uncomfortable in English. “Dr. Levy.”

“I wanted to ask you a few questions about it.”

By the time she tells me that she’s not at Tsinghua University in Beijing, but Tsing Hua National University in Taiwan, we’re already well underway.

I’m in Hsinchu for yet another meeting with Hsi-ing when you call.

It’s Martha. She just collapsed in the middle of the day. Nothing to be done. The doctors say she wasn’t even conscious when she hit the ground. No pain. Could have happened to anyone.

“Oh God. I’m so sorry. I’ll fly back right away.”

“You really don’t have to.”

“You’re going to need help. There’s so much to deal with. Probate and funerals and—”

“M—Sarah. I’ve got it. And Kyla’s here to help me. It’s okay. Keep doing your research.”

“This is important, though. This is family.”

You laugh nervously.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Well,” you say, not willing to say it.

“What?”

“It’s just that—Kyla’s already here. And if you show up—you know how she is. It’ll be a whole thing.”

“But I want to be there.”

“I know you do, and I appreciate it, but I really think that it’d be easier for everyone if you didn’t come.”

My stomach.

“Are you okay?” you ask.

“I’m fine,” I lie. “I love you.”

A pause. “I love you too.”

And then I’m alone in my hotel room in the middle of the night in Hsinchu and Martha’s dead and I can’t even bring myself to cry.

Hsi-ing’s idea is simple. If the reason for Dark Energy is that the universe is spinning (technically: is a non-inertial reference frame), then there should be a way for us, ourselves, to stop spinning along with the universe. If we did that, we would exist in an entirely different space-time frame—not expanding, not contracting, but simply existing in flat relative motion.

Her experimental apparatus—an array of very accurate gyroscopes and counter masses—is designed to do exactly that. They’re brilliant because she’s brilliant. To be honest, I don’t fully understand the mechanics.

One of the side effects of this is that objects within the apparatus seem to disappear and then reappear elsewhere nearly instantaneously.

Once the media gets a hold of it, it’s a circus. IFLScience.com dubs her experiment the “Wu-Levy Drive.” (It’s not a drive. It’s doesn’t even go anywhere, or move through space at all. Not that that stops the endless wash of clickbait across my Facebook feed every morning.)

To work well and safely, the experiment should be conducted in as flat a space-time as possible, away from any significant source of gravity. It should be conducted in space. Which means that to test this, we’re going to need to work with NASA.

NASA is happy to work with us. Thrilled.

I only agree to the press conference because I know you’re going to be there. I hate press conferences so much that I’ve cultivated a reputation as a recluse to avoid them. But NASA loves to make headlines, and “Astronaut son of Sarah Levy to test pilot the Wu-Levy drive” will certainly get them some headlines.

I bet that they asked you to change your last name. So we’d match. I’m so glad you didn’t.

I’m sitting in the green room at Two Independence Square. Everyone is moving around me, fussing, fixing, and they’ve slathered me in more makeup than I’ve worn for the past twenty years combined.

I see you, coming out of your own room, right behind the press agent who is telling me, again, to make sure I look into the cameras. I lift my hand to wave, but you’re already on your way and you don’t see me.

The press conferences goes okay. You’re perfect—“perfectly safe” “been tested on drones and bats and monkeys and even a particular chinchilla” “very excited” “the team on the ground are the real heroes, I just go where I’m sent.”

When it’s my turn to speak, though, I forget to look into the cameras.

After the press conference, I ask if you want to get dinner, but you already have plans.

I think about you every day. Is that surprising? But of course I think about you. I love you. I still love you.

Something, somewhere, went wrong. Somehow, for some reason, this distance between us keeps growing and growing. I want so much to understand it, to confront it, to reverse it. To hug you and hold you close and just to talk, about anything at all. I want, I hope, but I know it can’t happen. I just don’t know why.

My love for you feels like an incomplete theory. I have all the pieces, but I just can’t put them together into any kind of understanding. And at the end of all my work, all I have is this shameless kludge: I love you. I still love you. I never stopped.

I’m with you at Vandenberg on launch day. NASA would never let us miss a photo op. So while you’re walking out toward the rocket, while the press is gaggling all around us, I take your hand and squeeze it. You squeeze back and smile at me.

I hug you. The press loves it—we can both hear all the shutters.

“I love you, kid,” I say, although I’m not sure that you can hear me.

“I love you too, Mom,” you reply. Your voice is uncomfortable and strained, but of course there’s the whole mission in front of you.

I don’t know if you mean it. But I tell myself you do.

Once upon a time, we thought that the expansion of the universe, braked by gravity, would slow down, stop, and reverse. Once upon a time, we thought that the distant stars and galaxies would one day return to us, that we would, in some distant future, be together again.

But now we’ve learned. Now, we know better. Any contraction, any reunion with the distant stars we left behind at the beginning of the universe, is impossible. The space between galaxies is accelerating. There is no reunion in our future, only distance, and more distance, and finally isolation.

We’ll spin further and further apart, faster and faster, until we all become completely isolated, until the space between us is unbridgeable and there is no clue for each of us that the other was ever there at all.

The phone rings at four in the morning and I think maybe it’s you and I pick it up.

“Dr. Levy?” asks the voice on the other end. It’s not you. My stomach.

“Yes?”

“Dr. Levy. We just thought . . . There’s been an . . . We’re not sure . . . We’re trying everything we can. We recovered the machine, but he was . . . that is . . . We just wanted you to know before it hit the news tomorrow.”

You were four years old in our overgrown backyard, and I held your hands and spun you around, and you started laughing, and I started laughing, and I never let you go.

“We’re trying everything we can. But we may not get him back.”

By the time Martha got home, she found us both still laughing, flat on our backs, exhausted and dizzy, looking up at the sunset clouds through the tall grass. She frowned at us, and we tried to explain, but we both kept laughing until it was dark and she was laughing too and none the wiser.

“Dr. Levy?”

We walked hand in hand—me on the left and Martha on the right and you in the middle—down the block for pizza. You announced that you were going to get pineapple, and Martha threatened jalapeños. I made a face. In the night sky above us, the universe and all its galaxies spun themselves away from us, never to return.

About the Author

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

AirBody

Sameem Siddiqui

Amazing how all Desi aunties are basically the same. Even when separated by vast oceans for a few generations. I mean, they fit into a few basic archetypes. There’s the genuine-sweetheart proxy mother who, in between her late-night work shifts, always makes sure you and your friends have all the snacks you need. The manipulative gossiper, who conveniently keeps details of her own children’s scandals nestled under her tongue. The nervous fidgeter who has spent three decades so worried that her basic thirty-year-old son won’t ever find a wife that she forgets to teach him how to speak to women. The late-life hijabi, who pointedly replaces “Khuda-hafiz” with “Allah-hafiz” and “thank you, beta” with not just “jazak-allah” but the full on “jazak allahu khayran.” But which of these archetypes would find it appropriate to rent the body of a grown man halfway across the world?

I pull the AirBody request from Meena Khan into view in my contacts. She’s fifty-nine years old and from Karachi. Her short wavy hijab-less hair and her relaxed smile makes her seem content with life, so maybe she’s the genuine-sweetheart type. Her only notes on the request are a list of Desi groceries and some cookware, which only reinforces the archetype. Maybe she’s too ill to travel to visit family for Eid and wants to surprise them with a feast? It’s been a while since I’ve gotten a taste of such a spread. I hit accept and watch the usual legalese flash before me:

You acknowledge that you have the ability to observe, regain control, and remove your guests at any time and therefore may be complicit and responsible for any crimes or damage committed by your guests.

I tap “Yes” and begin to look through her grocery list more closely. Some of it, like the sweetened condensed milk, half-and-half, sugar and cardamom powder I can get at the regular grocery store. But for the Desi ghee and chanay ki daal, I either have to pay a premium at the hippie organic store downstairs or drive out to a Desi grocery store in the suburbs. A drive would help kill some time, so I choose the Desi grocery store.

When I return, I arrange all the ingredients in alphabetical order on my otherwise bare gray marble kitchen counter and head to bed. Meena activates at 6 AM and I don’t want to test AirBody’s zero-tolerance late policy. I also don’t want a review plagued with complaints of body odor and morning breath.

My alarm goes off at 5 AM, but I snooze several times, stumbling in and out of a wildly vivid dream about riding on the back of a sea turtle. Except, I’m not in the water. I think I might be floating through the sky. But, there are definitely other underwater creatures floating by, greeting us along the way. I feel love for the sea turtle and I lean over to kiss its rough green cheek when the snooze expires. Weird. But, my dreams have been odd since I started “playing host” on weekends a few months ago.

By 5:58 AM I’m towel dried, clothed and somewhat fed—a cookie is breakfast to some. I stand in front of the mirror as I clip the AirBody headset to the backs of my ears. It whirs on automatically—it doesn’t actually whir, but I imagine that’s the microscopic sound it makes as the violet light pulses. It authenticates my identity and says “Hello, Arsalan. Your AirBody guest is in the waiting area. Are you ready?”

“Yup, I’m ready,” I say, trying to sound chipper, but nervous as fuck about what this will be like. This is my sixth time hosting and so far it’s been a good distraction to get through my weekends. Most of my other guests have been men, usually here for some business meeting at the World Bank, or to tour the monuments and museums with their grandchildren. The only other woman I’ve hosted was a lobbyist from an asteroid mining firm who didn’t think a one-hour meeting with a congressperson was worth breaking orbit for.

My limbs tingle as they go numb. I feel heavy for second, like I can’t support my own weight and am about to fall. And I do, in a way. Not physically. More like falling asleep into a dream that makes so much sense that it’s boring. Which is why, I suppose, AirBody lets hosts stream content and games to the neural UI while their guests go corporeal.

I give Meena a few moments to adjust and watch her look around my living room. Her eyes stare at my mostly empty bookshelf surrounded by plain white walls. I don’t have much decor, except for the tiger painting Ammi bought in Thailand when she visited once in her early twenties.

“Hi!” I say, my voice in the AirBody interface sounding way louder than I intend. I feel my heart rate increase and realize I must have scared her. “Sorry, I, uh, just wanted to say hello and let you know I’m here to assist you during your stay if you need help.”

“Beta, Urdu nahin boltay?”

Oh crap. Not only am I going to get a bad review for my poor Urdu language skills, I’m now going to spend the next twenty-four hours meeting the scorn and judgment of a Pakistani aunty. Here we go.

“Nahin, aunty, I—” I say slowly, preparing to flex my mind’s tongue with words I haven’t used in years.

“Array profile pe Urdu likha tha!”

Oh god, if I don’t get removed after this listing, I need to delete Urdu from my language profile. If for nothing else, to escape this scorn. “Chalo, I’m here. What can I do now?” she says, waving my hands up in the air behind us. “Take me to the kitchen, beta . . . you do have a kitchen, right?”

“Haan, yes,” I say, retaking control. My limbs tingle awake and I walk to the kitchen before handing her back control.

I feel my body sigh and my head shake. “This will do,” she says as she walks to the corner of the counter where I’ve neatly arranged the ingredients she requested. She inspects them closely, as if she doesn’t trust that I bought the right things. But, she doesn’t make any complaints. She looks around the kitchen. There are a few dishes in the drying rack, but I made sure to clear out the sink, which is normally full until there’s a noticeable rot.

She begins opening cabinets, slowly and calmly at first. I assume she’s looking for something specific, but after a moment I’m sure she’s just being nosey. She comes to the last one, the little corner cabinet, the only one to the right of the sink. Shit.

I want to distract her, to keep her from opening it, but interfering with an experience without consent or a reasonable emergency would lead to a bad review. So I watch hopelessly as she swings the cabinet open and stares at the label on the little translucent bottle half full with brown liquid.

“Whiskey, beta? Tauba tauba,” she says as she slaps each of my cheeks gently. “Allah maf karay!” I’m not sure if she’s asking for forgiveness on my behalf, or if she somehow feels complicit in my sin by inhabiting my body. I mean, I’m not drunk—it’s six in the morning. Now if she wills that whiskey into me, then maybe she’d be complicit. Maybe.

She shuts the cabinet, still shaking her head, and pulls open the electric pressure cooker. We both notice the inner pot hasn’t been washed since the last time it was used, but only I know that this was many months ago. My eyes roll back into my head as she groans and clicks my tongue. She flicks on the tap and snatches the worn-out sponge on the edge of my sink. “Yeh koy tareeka hai, beta?”

She fills the pot with water so hot that I can feel the pain through the sensory suppression as she scrubs. I’m convinced this is intentional punishment. Maybe she isn’t the genuine-sweet type.

She empties the dal into the pot slowly, as if she doesn’t trust my eyes to check the quality of the product as a whole. The yellow pieces glint off the bottom of the worn metal, scattering into swirls as she shakes the bag to see if she can catch any unwanted particles.

One piece of dal pops off the bowl and onto the floor and I feel a tinge of the panic that froze me the first time I made dal. Not knowing what to do as the orange but almost magenta grains spilled onto the counter and to the floor. The worthlessness that would melt me into a blob as I’d hear Ammi’s tired and exasperated voice say “Beta, Arsalan, just once, would you do things without rushing?” Her finger would point at the door. “Out, now, if you can’t help properly.”

“Savvy for a ten year old,” Nani would say as I’d run to her lap before the tears began to flow.

“Haan, just as savvy as his useless father,” Ammi would say.

And then the fear of inadequacy would stand me up straight, wipe my tears, and walk me back into the kitchen defiantly, striding close enough to Ammi to move her out of the way without physically attacking her. I’d sort it out. I’d sift the dirt out of the fallen dal. I’d get a jar to pour the extra back. And I’d have dinner on the table before Ammi returned from her evening shift. I would not be my useless father.

“Is this right?” Meena asks as she presses the buttons on the pressure cooker.

“You’re not gonna soak the dal first?”

“Oh so now you’re such a refined cook?”

“I can make dal.”

“Then tell me, why soak the dal? What difference does it make, aside from wasting two hours of our lives?”

“Well it’s just, what . . . it’s just what you do.”

“Is it now?” She says, pressing start on the pressure cooker and effectively shutting me up. “Acha, where’s your janamaz beta? And the qibla is which direction?”

I’m pretty sure I can feel a smirk on my face as she asks.

“Inside the storage ottoman in the living room,” I say, coolly, trying to remember which way Ammi faced last time she visited. I point at my east facing windows and say, “And the qibla’s out the window that way, a little to the right.”

She opens the ottoman and pulls the janamaz out. I feel her stiffen as she notices my fingers grayed in dust. “Thank you beta,” she says, as she dusts off the janamaz and lays it out before the windows. I feel her swing my hands up to my ears before resting them high on my chest.

Should she technically have put a dupatta on? Ammi’s maroon ajrak one is still in the ottoman. The last time she was here I watched her throw it over her shoulder, say “Keep to our own,” and start her prayers before I could respond. We had just come home from lunch where I had finally introduced her to Karla. I sat on the couch and hunched over to inspect the lines on my palms where I had dug my nails in deep, hoping the pain would make the lunch go by faster. It didn’t work.

It wasn’t so much that she and Karla didn’t get along. It was more that each time Karla attempted to strike up conversation, Ammi just smiled at her and returned to her meal. Karla excused herself halfway through lunch, pretending she had just gotten called into the hospital to oversee an operation.

I kept my eyes down as she left and didn’t look up until a few moments later when Ammi said, “You know, the first time I met Eric’s mother, she did the same to me, but without a smile.”

“Oh, so it’s healthy to perpetuate this cycle, Ammi?”

“I stuck it out. When Eric got up to use the restroom, his mom leaned over and asked me if ‘your women still enjoy sex after your families circumcise you.’” Ammi sipped her tea and stared off somewhere above my head. “I smiled back, swallowed the words in my throat, and stuck it out. I’m glad Karla had the sense to run. She’s smarter and stronger than I was.”

I sunk into my couch watching Ammi flow through the motions of prayer that I never felt at home in. I’d happily keep to my own, if I knew who my own was.

“Chalo beta,” Meena says as she folds up the janamaz and puts it back into the dusty ottoman. “Let see how much time is left on this thing.”

The red digits flash through the final sixty seconds.

Meena clicks the depressurize button and watches, as if she’s hypnotized by the plume of steam hissing out of the metal cylinder. I feel my ears perk up as she hones in on the sound. It’s as if she hasn’t seen or heard this in ages.

“Don’t cook much anymore, eh?” I say, realizing I should probably contain my snark. But I don’t think she minds.

“No, I cook almost every day. It’s just that I’m a bit deaf, so I’ve forgotten how the steam speaks to you. If you pay attention to the hiss, you’ll hear it tell you if the food is really ready, if it was cooked the way you intended, or if you’ll be disappointed when the lid unlocks. And if you watch closely, you’ll see how the steam interacts with the spirits in the air. If they gather toward the steam, you’re cooking something delicious. If they flee, well . . . ” she shrugs. “It’s an old aunty secret.”

“Really?”

“You’re one of the most gullible saps I’ve ever met, I’m sure.”

“I didn’t believe you, I just couldn’t tell if you really believed it yourself.”

“Mhmm.”

“Alright, well you let me know if you need anything. I’m going to get some reading done.” Really there’s some gaming I need to catch up on, but she doesn’t need to know that. I suppress my visual feed and replace it with CoreEra4. Time to level up. The sensory suppression filters out most of Meena’s kitchen noise, until I hear the blender slicing through. I’m curious why she needs a blender to make dal, but not curious enough to hit pause.

I’m pretty immersed in the game when I feel an almost pungent, but ultimately bland taste on my tongue. Meena’s shoveled a bit of what she’s done to this dal into my mouth. She massages the hot, dry musty paste into a lump as she lets each part of my tongue feel and inspect the texture. As it crumbles into the back of my throat, an aftertaste surfaces that reminds me of wanting to be kissed amidst an audience of 80s era wood paneling on neglected basement walls. An aftertaste on my anxiety-dried adolescent tongue, which had just uttered “I’d kiss you Eid Mubarak if you’d let me.” A line tacky enough to hold the confident façade of my smile in place while I waited inside my head screaming what in the FUCK are you thinking?

I can almost hear Hafza’s laugh seeping in through my tongue and almost feel the slap that ended in an apologetic caress. My taste buds reverberate like the hair on the back of my neck when Hafza kissed the highest point of my cheekbone and then stared at me. I’d never seen anyone’s eyes so close. It was so overwhelming I had to close my own eyes. I’m not sure if she had started or me, but after years of pining, that was the first time my lips finally melted into another’s. And it would not be the last time I’d be rudely interrupted mid-kiss. Before the moment was over, Ammi was shouting, “Arsalan beta, let’s go!” from the top of the staircase behind me. Hafza broke the kiss and leaned over to whisper “Eid Mubarak, Arsalan” in my ear just before I jumped up, stunned by what had happened. The next thing I’d say to Hafza would be “congratulations” ten years later on her heavily decorated wedding stage, next to her heavily decorated new husband.

Meena fills my mouth with water, washing my memory out. I ache for another taste of the musty paste. I want to go back for more, even though there is nothing to go back to.

“What was that? It tasted familiar.”

“Well, mister expert, you’ll have to wait and see.”

So I watch her set the pot on the stove above the lowest possible flame and plop in a few heaps of ghee. As it melts and simmers unevenly in the pot, she picks up the blender and begins scooping the paste out. The warm ghee spatters on the backs of my hands as the first few clumps land in the pot.

My arm will no doubt be sore the next day, because for a while she just leans on the counter and stirs every few minutes, keeping the darkening paste on the bottom from sticking to the pot. Eventually she stops to add sugar, mixing it in evenly before flipping the paste over and pouring the rest of the sugar in. Once the white crystals disappear into the paste she scoops a spoon full out and closes my eyes as the warm sugary sensation hits my lips. I’m flooded with images of Tupperware decorated by cold and soggy deep-fried finger foods and heavenly sweetened desserts. But, it’s all damned by the memory of Karla’s voice asking the question, “Why can’t you just bring me home for Eid, like a normal person?”

“Ammi’s just not well,” I had said, opening one dish and lifting it up. What dish was it?

“She’s well enough to have cooked all of this,” Karla had said, gesturing to the to-go holiday foods.

I plunged a spoon into the Tupperware and scooped up something and shoved it toward Karla’s mouth. “Just try a bite.”

Karla rolled her eyes and opened her mouth. Then, when the taste soaked into her tongue, she opened her eyes wide. Her eyes rolled again, but with pleasure this time. “What the fuck is this?”

“Chanay-ki daal ka-halwa,” I say into the AirBody UI.

“Very good!” Meena stabs with her standard tone of condescension. She pours another can of condensed milk in and continues stirring. “Gustatory memory.”

“What?”

“Taste. It’s got a peculiar way of triggering memory and emotion, don’t you think? More so than other senses. Taste links us directly to our gut, where our deepest unfulfilled needs keep us hungry. Your gut tricks your mind into thinking you’re getting what you want, when it’s really just using you to get the—” she scoops up another bite and I feel my eyes roll back into my head “—mmm. The sweet halwa.”

She opens my eyes and looks down at the bright yellowy paste.

“But, I remember this being brown whenever my Nani made it.”

“Haan beta, just wait,” she says as she preheats the oven to 400 degrees. When the oven beeps she slides the pan in and sets a timer for fifteen minutes.

“Acha beta, what kind of formal wear do you have?”

“Formal wear?”

“Haan, kurta pajama? Shalwar kameez? Whichever you’d like to call it.”

“Uhhh . . . ”

“Oh, of course. Well, at least put us in a pressed pant-shirt,” she says handing me back control.

“Sure,” I say, heading back to my room to pull out some blue slacks and a new red and gray striped shirt I haven’t worn yet.

I stand before the mirror making final touches when she pings for control back.

“Well at least you’ve got some color in your wardrobe.” She picks up a pen from my dresser and writes down an address on the price tag I just ripped off of the shirt I put on. “I need to go here.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say as I feel her pass control back.

As we make our way out of the city and onto the I-95 I glance at the sign for BWI Airport. The last time I was supposed to go to BWI was the last time I was supposed to see Karla. She had been away for work for a week and I was on my way to pick her up when I got a call from Ammi’s doctor. My mind went single track and I skipped the exit for the airport and drove straight to the hospital in Philly where Ammi was taking her last breaths, alone. I made it in time to say goodbye, but not much else.

Karla only called once that night. I stayed in Philly for six days and when I got back my place was emptied of Karla’s things, which was most everything. If I had called to let her know what was going on, she would have understood, would have come up to help. I never figured out why we played this game of chicken. We’d done it before. But, this time we both ran off the cliff and it felt right to let things rest at the bottom of the canyon rather than pick them up and rebuild.

I pull up in front of the house and step out of the car, grabbing the dish of halwa along the way. The magenta sunset laces the gray house like a mesh dupatta. There are a lot of cars parked on the driveway and a bluster of muffled laughter coming through the windows of the brightly lit living room.

As I get to the front door I hand back control and immediately feel my heart rate spike. She stares dead ahead, frozen still.

“Are you alright?”

“Haan, I just—”

The door swings open to a woman dressed in a gray and blue shalwar kameez. She’s still looking at her guests behind her and laughing. Her smile sticks as she turns to look at me. Her purple-streaked hair’s tied up in a bun. She’s probably a little younger than Meena, maybe late forties? I study her face to see if I can parse a family resemblance to Meena’s profile picture.

“I’m sorry, can I help you?” the woman asks, leaning against her door jamb.

I can feel Meena trying to push the air through my larynx and out of my mouth but it’s sealed shut. Instead, she just lifts the dish of halwa and opens it.

The woman leans forward and inspects the congealed brown paste. The sunset breeze blows a warm waft of the dish’s scent into my nose.

The woman looks back at me, but her eyebrows are strained around her eye sockets now. Without a word, she takes a step back and slams the door in my face.

Meena stands there for a minute in my shaking body, with the halwa still cooling in the open air. She flattens the lid back onto the dish and lays a card on top of it. She puts the dish down gently onto the frilly brown “Welcome Home” mat. She picks up a small white rock from the side of the porch and places it on top of the card to keep it from flying away, before turning back to the car.

As soon as I feel the first tear hit my cheek she stops.

“Beta, take us home.”

The tears stop as I take control, but I can still feel the strain in the back of my throat. This is the first time I’ve wondered what happens when people hand me back control temporarily. Do they come back to life in their homes? Is she convulsing over her toilet, vomiting up as much of the regret as possible before curling into a ball of tears on her bathroom floor? Or is she lying peacefully, letting the tears soak into her veins until the pain passes.

Once at home she requests control and immediately goes back to the cabinet in the corner, pulling out the bottle of whiskey and pouring it into a chipped glass she finds in my drying rack. She carries it in my shaking hands and walks to the armchair that faces the window. As the final moments of sunset fade away, I can see her staring back at me in the reflection of the window.

She holds up the glass and stares into the brown liquid as she swirls it around.

“Beta,” she says aloud. “How do you decide which one is right for you?”

“What do you mean?” I respond, echoing in my own head.

“Which drink? How did you know it was whiskey? Not Beer? Wine? Cocktail?”

“Well, I drink them all, so—” I hesitate, uncertain of where this is going, “—but I don’t drink much.”

“Haan, beta, whatever.” She smirks at me in the window and swings the whiskey full down my throat. I turn down the sensory suppression and feel the initial hit seep into my blood and loosen my muscles. She picks the bottle up from the table and pours another shot.

“Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine, just need to process a bit.” She lifts the glass, but sips at the whiskey this time. I assume the first time was purely for shock value.

“What’s your deal?”

“My deal, beta?”

“Don’t beta me, I’m a grown man.”

“Haan,” she pauses, scanning my sad apartment, “of course you are.”

“Why are you here? Who was that woman?”

“Just an old acquaintance. It’s not important.”

“Then why me? Were there no other, more appropriate hosts available?”

“Appropriate how?”

“I don’t know, an older woman, someone more fitting your background?”

She laughs. “My background? Beta, you were the only ‘Urdu speaking’ host of Pakistani origin whose listing authorizes sexual behavior during a visit.”

Before I can respond there’s a knock at the door.

“Were you expecting anyone, beta?”

“No.”

She sets the glass down and goes to open the door. There is the woman, still in her gray and blue shalwar kameez, holding my dish with one hand and one hip. I watch my eyelids wrap around the woman in the doorway and make a shape I haven’t seen them make in months.

“Is it still you, Meena?”

Meena nods, my larynx suddenly sealed shut once again.

“You think you’re quite clever, don’t you?” The woman walks into the apartment and slides the dish onto the counter. She pulls the lid off, revealing at least 2-3 servings worth gone. “I’m going to eat the rest on my own as well. I’m not sharing.” She smiles as she pulls off her dupatta and throws it at me.

Meena catches it and laughs, finally loosening my throat. “Haniya, I—”

Haniya leans in quick to shut up Meena with a hard kiss that sends a chill down my spine and reverberates through the hairs on the back of my neck.

It’s been a while since I felt a kiss like that. In fact it’s just flat out been a while for me. I wonder how long it’d been for Meena and which matters more or if they’re additive and while I try to figure that out they stumble onto the couch and eventually roll onto the floor.

I shut my visual feed off, turn the sensory suppression back up, and do my best to give them some privacy. I won’t lie, I didn’t expect this guest to be the first to avail this “amenity.” But, I can’t entirely say I’m surprised. Meena has a determined bitterness that obviously guards something terribly sweet.

When I notice my heart rate begin to drop, I turn my visuals back on. They’ve made it to my bed. Meena’s lying on my back with Haniya’s head resting on my shoulder. The room is quiet except for the sound of calming breaths.

“Come back,” Meena squeezes out between breaths and into Haniya’s hair.

“As what, my love? Your assistant? Your cousin’s friend visiting from the states? An NGO worker there for training that you’re just showing around? What will you have me pretend to be this time?”

My throat locks up again as I feel blood rush to my cheeks.

Haniya sits up and lets my blanket fall off of her as she stands. She looks back down at me with a slight smile. “It was nice to see you again Meena. I’ve missed these stunts of yours.”

Meena just stares up at the ceiling while we listen to Haniya get dressed, slide the Tupperware off the counter and back onto her hip. Meena closes my eyes when we hear my apartment door open and shut. I’m certain she’s going to start crying again, but she just takes a deep breath and speaks.

“You’ll feel it one day.” She rolls into sitting position at the edge of the bed and looks in the mirror. “The desire to go back to when you were uncertain about who you’d turn out to be. When you lived foolishly thinking you could be something other than what you became in the end.” She lifts my right fingertips to my forehead, twice, with a gentle pseudo bounce and says, “Thanks for the company, Arsalan. Khuda-hafiz.”

As my limbs tingle back to me, I pull up Karla’s contact. While I mull the idea of calling her, I get an alert in my periphery from AirBody about a new request. I stare at Karla’s picture for a moment before closing her profile and pulling up AirBody. I’m certain I’ve already become who I’ll be in the end, so I might as well let everyone else be me for a little longer.

About the Author

Sameem Siddiqui is a writer of speculative fiction about migration, South Asian ancestry, Muslim heritage, gender, and family structure in near future societies. He’s a graduate of Tin House and Futurescapes writing workshops. When he’s not writing, Sameem revels in fatherhood, watches 90s Star Trek and tinkers with data.

A System for Investigating Recapitulation
and Evolutionary Novelty

Kyle E Miller

When L awakened on her leaf, the photocell beside her head was incandescent with a captured message. The cell held the light that held the meaning. She placed two fingers flat on the golden cell, drew two small circles, and the message opened. Superimposed on a five-second living image of a young woman’s face were the words, “I’m sorry I can’t be your light anymore. Goodbye.”

Holding the image of J with her right hand, L scrambled with her left to send a message, an invitation to speak, a plea, an apology, and already her breaths were ragged. The photocells remained dark: J had blocked her. L lifted her fingers and banished the final image of J.

She had kissed such an image many times before. She had pillowed her head on that image, transmitted from some distant leaf or, she thought, maybe the one right beneath her if such a leaf existed. J had sung her to sleep, the most perfect lullabies drawn from no datacell but her own mind. She had been L’s longest relationship of any kind with any other person. They had shared three years, they came to her now one after the other, and flotsam on the sudden flood of memories was an image of them dancing: L’s body all aflutter (and J’s too, on her own leaf) while seven billion photocells flickered around her, coalescing every few moments to reveal J’s silly graceless movements in realtime.

L felt a whelming pressure in her chest. She sat up and studied the gentle curve of her horizon, the edge of her leaf curving out of view and into the dull whiteness all around.

B’s face filled L’s entire leaf. They spoke like this often, a sort of ritual, L supposed, in realtime, usually for work, usually during L’s yogic strength training. When asked once why she had chosen that as her hobby, she said it was as innocuous and time consuming as any.

“Talked to my mom yesterday,” B was saying.

L broke her position and used her palm to shrink B’s image to life-size, or as close as L could approximate, an animated head enisled on the long dark leaf. “You can do that?”

B laughed. “What do you mean you can do that? Of course you can.” She narrowed her eyes. “Not that I recommend it.”

“How, though?”

“What do you mean how?” B’s head ducked out of sight, and then returned. “She doesn’t give a shit anyway. Not that she minds having children. Out there. She just don’t want much to do with ’em. We’re past that, she says.”

L went into another position, resting all her weight on her arms. It hurt, but she was getting stronger. “But how did she find you?” she asked. “I just. I didn’t know that was an option?”

L wasn’t sure she understood where she came from, the birth, the delivery. She had once seen a BERD soaring to some other leaf, or so she imagined—a leaf not yet inhabited, one newly grown for a newly grown person—but where did the BERD come from? It must have visited both her parents, one after the other, and done the fertilization for them, all the messy parts taken care of behind the closed gleaming doors of the BERD’s metal belly.

For it was a truth universally accepted that no one left their leaf. No one could: it was impossible, and completely unnecessary, unsafe even. You had everything you needed at your fingertips: the entire Tree of information for your use and amusement. L had instant access to everything and everyone.

Except J, she thought.

“She’s into that church,” B was saying. “You know, the one named after that mathematician obsessed with patterns, reoccurrences.” She moved out of view, looking up his name, but L was barely listening. She was thinking about J, would go on thinking about J, and for how long? She wished she had someone who might tell her what was normal. She would search the Tree later, to be advised anonymously by the gibbering hoard of content producers.

“J broke up with me yesterday.”

“She’s all about renewal,” B said.

“J?”

“Who? No, my mom. The church. Are you listening, bitch? She’s going on about iterations and reiterations, and I haven’t even caught up yet and she’s telling me everything, everything seeks assembly, that the rhythm of the world’s pattern puts us to use.”

L felt small. She shrank B to the size of a single photocell, a mere mote of light, and then back again to life-size. J had been her only real friend; spending time with anyone else, those she met through work, had begun to feel forced. And Tree interest groups and message centers were all too often tempests of rage and hypocrisy, each person defending the sanctity of their own private world and looking up in wonder that no one else cared even as they failed to listen to the very people they beseeched to understand them. L couldn’t follow the hierarchy of experience: how could one person’s perspective be any more important, more essential or authoritative than any other? Censure was a moral act: to criticize or question was to lose social prestige, the only currency that mattered on the leaf, the Tree. And they all wanted the world reshaped in their image. She hated that storm of voices.

She preferred the sweet, melancholy voice of J. She had better things to do, climbing the Tree, for life and for love.

“Well, that’s my quota,” B said. “I’m off.”

“What? Wait,” L said, sitting up. She had been daydreaming. “Do you have to?”

B looked to the side and hesitated. “I mean.”

L lay facedown on her leaf. She blew up a section of B’s cheek and studied her perfect skin, so much darker than her own. She pressed her own against the giant image. “It’s okay, you can go,” L said, and then realized B already had. The image was no longer moving. She lifted her hand and let it go.

L awakened to a dozen images of a man’s cock, a flurry of half-flaccids that left her nauseous and irritable. On the last he had written, “Y/N?” and attached his leaf signature, a venation of cells unique to his leaf. L flicked her fingers to slide them all away, but the leaf failed to respond, and she had to close them all individually. She felt white space as sudden pressure, a packing in, as if she were being loaded into a cotton-lined box too small for her body.

Drawing the signs to light up for work, she hoped she wouldn’t be paired with another sex-starved man, or even a woman. Sometimes they were worse, more cutting somehow, perhaps because they should know better, L thought, they knew what it was like. It wasn’t that she begrudged them their desire, it was their attitude, the expectation, the insistence that bothered her. Knowing she might reach her quota at any moment and close the conversation, most men, if they found her attractive, propositioned her for sex after just a few minutes of small talk. Her blocked list would cap out soon, and then she would have to wait for some of them to die off. She chuckled at the thought, relishing it a bit until she remembered how pushy she had been once, maybe twice. Before J.

A pale man’s face appeared on her leaf. “Hey sexy,” he said.

She immediately shrank his image and began drawing the symbol to block him (still thinking of J: they had met at one of her interest groups via the Tree, a tight cabal of young women determined to change the world; and what had happened to that? Love, she thought, that’s what happened), a complicated gesture that took about ten seconds, and then his entire body covered her leaf, larger than life-size. She was sitting on his stomach. His cock was erect, bobbing.

“The fuck—”

“Ready to play, sexy?”

Sex required consent; a leaf made life so much safer. L couldn’t imagine how at one time people had shared a leaf and pressed their bodies together; the thought made her squeamish. This man could inflict his image upon her, but he could not make her watch. She closed her eyes. Of course she would be matched with a leafhacker. She had read about them on the Tree. Somehow, they gained access and rudimentary control, however temporary. They would give her a day off of work for this, as compensation, but would he be punished? Perhaps he would lose control of his leaf for a day or, she hoped, a year.

He increased the volume. She couldn’t escape his voice. She felt his image upon her, and her body upon his image, the warmth of it, unwanted, desperate. That much he could force upon her. She couldn’t focus on anything else. He whispered to her as she tried to raise an alarm with her fingers on the leaf. She had to touch him to try, she held a curse in her throat: she would not give him the pleasure of the sound of her voice.

He was taking it slow, edging himself just as she moved closer to the edge of her leaf where she could only see the flank of his abdomen. His love handle, she thought, and she spit over the edge of her leaf. Her fingers worked fast, moving in circles, squares, letters, words.

He was about to come when she heard a voice that was not the man’s, not a man’s voice at all in fact. She sat up and stopped breathing, her fingers splayed on the photocells. At first she thought it had come from the man’s leaf, but no, this was different, sourced, primordial. Here was a focus to take her away, and she listened to a song drifting to her leaf from somewhere in white space, a high ribbon of wordless music.

L caught her breath and swallowed hard. The man was gone, and she had hardly noticed. An alert appeared all across her leaf, an apology, an excuse, a compensation. She stared below.

J?

L’s leaf was attached to the stem by a frail length of chrome green, and the stem—massive, perfect, untouched, so anonymous, so present it nearly blended into white space—the stem extended up and down as far as she could see. Which, she thought, probably wasn’t very far at all. White space became a fog at long distances. The detail on her leaf, from one end to the other, never blurred, but she could follow the stem with her eyes until it faded away. Sometimes she thought or imagined she could distinguish the shadow of a leaf above her own, a faint suggestion of color in the long blanket of white space.

Once, she had socialized with a bright young boy who spent all of his time exploring the Tree, “climbing” it, as he said, reading everything everyone had written since 1 ACE and scouring the reproductions from even earlier. She remembered spending more time with him than her quota required.

“Leaf is really an acronym,” he said. “Life Extending Artificial Foliage. So is stem.”

“Yeah?” She had been distracted; J was on her mind, or, as she liked to say, in her mind, nesting there, settled. Conjurable.

“Structure for Time and Energy Management,” the boy went on. “Isn’t that clever of them?” He had so much to say, but she had forgotten almost all of it. An ad for someone else had popped up, she remembered, a banner over the boy’s eyes, masking him for a moment with another face, another signature, a five-second video clip of a girl kissing the air, beckoning for attention, and then L closed the ad. And the boy railed against the solipsists while she lay back and drank visions of J’s face, half listening to him, half to her heart.

She had never given solipsism a second thought, though many did, becoming almost cultish in their dedication, wrapping themselves in the comfort of a world without others. How could you be lonely when there was no alternative? Though how they formed a group and communicated their ideas was beyond her: did that not contradict itself? Perhaps each member was merely a small unit of the rest, forming a fractal cult echoing its own name into white space.

L was sure they had thought it all out. She could read about it on the Tree, but she didn’t care to. She believed in the solidity of others.

A photocell suddenly lit up with a memory of J, her mouth forever turned up at the corners, as if it was impossible for her to frown. The tiny hairs on her upper lip that in a certain light gathered and released every color in the order the world had ordained. And a lullaby.

L looked over the edge of her leaf, and the white space looked back.

“I think it’s her,” she told B. She heard the song daily now. It was like, yet also unlike, J’s lullabies. This song was pure, as if there was no leaf between them. Often, L awakened to it now, and when she closed her eyes and concentrated, she sank into a sleep deeper than she could ever remember, one haunted by vivid dreams that left her feeling stretched come morning, as if she was being opened from the inside. It wasn’t a bad feeling.

“I don’t know,” B said. “I think you left a message open or something. You check your leaf lately? I lost a message in a corner once, shrank to a single photocell. Song played in my head for days.”

“I don’t think that’s it. What if it’s a test?”

“From who?”

“J,” L said, a little forcefully. “What if she’s testing me?”

“And what are you gonna do if she is? Listen, I gotta go. Mom’s been messaging me all day. Quota’s long past, anyway.”

“Fine.”

L crawled to the tip of her leaf and leaned over the edge until she felt the tugging force that kept her from falling. A sort of gravity, she imagined, centered on each leaf. She would not be permitted to leap toward the song. She was almost certain it came from somewhere below, if not everywhere, all-pervading.

L fell back on her leaf and drew the symbol for do not disturb. Drowsing in the song’s sadness, in its sweetness, the melody thrumming in her head, she fell into a well of memories. J’s image danced. Words came to her like bubbles from below. “Heaven recalls it to your recollection . . . For they sit in a green field . . . Nor a ripple upon the water . . . “ She let lethargy overcome her, slept here and there with barely remembered dreams, and later, when she tried to light up B, her leaf would not respond.

“Shit!”

She had forgotten to light up for work. She had forgotten to do much of anything for how many sleep cycles? Four, five? “Date and time,” she said, and shit, it had been six days. Her leaf had limited function now, and it no longer responded to her whims and would remain inert until she returned to work and put in the hours. And she did so, begrudgingly, while she bent over the tube connecting the leaf to the stem. The petiole, she remembered it being called.

She had been thinking.

She tried jumping on the leaf, but it didn’t even tremble. Dismantling the petiole was her only way down. When her quota was met that day, she closed the photocells and realized she couldn’t remember who she had socialized that day. He had been talking about her hair when she cut him off. He wasn’t important, none of that was important.

The same force that kept her from leaping off the leaf prevented her from straddling the petiole and reaching the stem. Not that she knew how that might help. She had nothing she could use to attack the petiole except her teeth.

She sent B a message, and quickly canceled it. B wasn’t a friend anyway, she thought. Just another face on the leaf. L struck the petiole with her palm, and then a fist, a knee, the heel of her foot. She could see where she might detach the leaf from the tube that linked her to the stem, if only she could just—Her knee throbbed, and she had skinned a few knuckles. Laughing and crying, L lay down and bit the cold metal, gnawed and yowled until she felt her teeth crack and then shatter, and she spit the fragments over the edge of the leaf where the song lapped at the firmament.

L’s teeth were repaired while she slept, as she knew they would be. As were her knuckles, her knee.

She studied the petiole. Her teeth had left no marks. She paced.

She awakened without knowing she had fallen asleep. She released a captured message, and the light said in green letters: Would you like to contribute to the next cycle? Y/N, and instructions on how to draw her answer. On a whim, without knowing exactly what she agreed to, she drew the sign for yes, and only minutes later, raising her head to scratch an itch below her chin, she saw a BERD.

The BERD sailed down and landed on her leaf, gilded wings folding neatly into its sides. Its gleaming silver feet brought the body closer, and L felt sudden fear. Life had never seemed so precise, so full and present. She suddenly felt special, unique, as if not everyone was afforded this view, this image come to life. But everything she saw on the leaf was life; what made this so special? And then she saw that much of the BERD was made of photocells, just like her leaf. Slowly, she rose to her feet. “Hello?” She walked around its strangely two-dimensional form and saw that only a small portion of its body took up much space at all. The BERD was mostly made of light.

It opened its beak, and the photocells at her feet asked the question again.

Would you like to contribute to the next cycle? Y/N

Is that what they called it? “Can you explain?” she asked, and a datacell opened across her leaf, condescending in tone, its style simpering and overly clinical. “I know all that. But what’s a cycle?”

She had the sudden image of a chrome penis extending from the BERD’s abdomen, entering her, collecting her eggs. A sperm bank deep in its bowels, a selective algorithm matching and pairing. She giggled. If she didn’t raise her baby, who did? Certainly not the BERD. Perhaps the leaf. Perhaps a leaf had everything an infant required. No one went wanting.

Almost as soon as L drew the sign for no (she wasn’t against it, per se, she just wasn’t ready, she told herself—but no, that wasn’t it either; she wasn’t interested, her interest was elsewhere, and she had the sudden thought, J is my baby) and the BERD rose above her, she regretted it. She could have destroyed the BERD, used it for parts, found something in its skeleton of photocells for dismantling the petiole. She cursed herself, tugged at her hair. She stomped and paced.

She had no tools but her fingers and the Tree. Her body and what it contained. Her brain, her bones.

And a thought emerged, one she had been avoiding all day, even before the BERD landed.

She had been getting stronger lately. She wondered if she would have the will. By the time she asked the Tree for knowledge, she was already shaking, whispering under her breath fuck this, fuck this, and she learned just where to apply the pressure of the weight of her body to break it.

She screamed and tore away at the flesh of her arm, separating bone from tissue as the lullaby wove its way around her and entered the canals of her ears. When she finally freed the bone, broken at one end, she threw herself onto the leaf and hoped that when she woke up, her ulna would still be where she had left it.

Blood ran in rivulets across and down the wide curve of the leaf, dripping into white space.

She woke up drunk on the melody and reached for her ulna. While she slept, her arm had been repaired and now only carried the shadow of a wound, an echo of pain. She thought that perhaps the lullaby wasn’t wordless after all. Occasionally she caught what sounded like a word, even if it was spoken in a language she didn’t know. Languages could be learned. J had spoken a few, that was what she liked to do.

L worked at the seam between the petiole and the leaf. She managed to pry a small seal away from a deep hole into which no light could reach. Her finger could, and her bone, but she felt nothing that could be of any use in detaching the leaf from the stem. She wasn’t even sure what she was searching for.

Dragging both her hands across the leaf, she searched the branches of the Tree for information, but those datacells had been locked long ago, and when she looked up how to unlock them, she stumbled instead onto antique diagrams of keys, picks, and tumblers. At first she didn’t understand what she was seeing, but by the time she began to make sense of it, she had an idea.

But she was going to need another bone.

Stiff and sore, L brought her two bones together and gagged. The blood, like her waste, had already been absorbed into the leaf. But tissue had begun to build up in places on the first ulna, and L retched and scratched it away. Someone was transmitting a message in realtime. She had a backlog of unread messages, photocells whose light would never escape. The meaning would be held forever. An alarm leaked green and gold, bales of light shining on her flesh. And the song carried her on.

Once work on the petiole was finished, she hoped nothing else would hold up her leaf. She thought of an invisible force like the one that prevented her from leaping off the edge and shook her head. She set to work, sharpening the bones against one another and trying them in the hole, working them like scissors.

She awakened with a jolt that shook the leaf. The bones had fallen from her hands. She sat up, puzzled, disoriented. The lullaby had grown faint for the moment, or else some other sound had ceased, a hum so familiar it could only be heard by its absence. Something had shifted while she slept: the leaf rocked as she stood. The leaf’s surface had coppered. L crossed the leaf, dropped to her knees, and put a palm to the photocells: yes, they were dead. She had severed some vital connection. Her messages were all gone. The leaf hung darkened and dull in white space.

She was alone now.

L woke up falling. She didn’t recognize the sickening drop, the refusal of the stomach to follow the rest of the body, until the violence of the landing, the sound of photocells shattering and the reverberations of her giant leaf struck like a bell from below.

The clamor pushed her head into black space.

When L opened her eyes again she saw green translucent flakes floating through white space. When she reached out, painfully, they seemed to pass through her hand. And then she rolled over and saw her leaf, brown and dull, floating atop semisolid white space. Or, as her eyes adjusted to the different light there, a gray space. A sort of fog, or froth, she thought, remembering an image she saw on the Tree, an image of waves. That same blue gray. Spume, she thought, foam and scum.

“You caused a lot of damage on your way down. You’re not supposed to be here.” A woman’s voice fell from above, and then L noticed a golden photocell out of reach above and to the left. It hung as if suspended in white space.

“Damage?” L hoped no one had died. She hadn’t thought of that. As she sat up, feeling foolish, vulnerable speaking to a stranger lying down, L knew the damage to her own body was extensive. Some of her bones were surely broken, and then there was the leaf. Her leaf was dead. There would be no regeneration. She felt suddenly out of control, lost, foolish, and ashamed, as if she had betrayed someone. J, maybe, or B, or herself. And then she heard the singing again.

“That song.”

“What? Speak up.” The woman’s voice was clear and commanding.

“A lullaby. I heard my girlfriend singing. So I came.”

“That singing isn’t your girlfriend,” the woman said with a little laugh.

L’s cheeks reddened. The pain in her legs shot up through her pelvis and into her abdomen. She was not going to walk again, not on this leaf.

“It’s the System. You know.” The woman paused, and L imagined her hands waving, drawing in everything: the people, their leafs, the stem, the Tree, white space, and—L was sure this was the shape of the world—all of the other stems, for there were many of them, and they formed a world, a forest. She knew that word from history, a word from the Tree.

“And like your system—everything working together, self-organized, creative—this one thinks too,” the woman went on. “Like a subconscious, yeah?”

“You mean like dreams. Fantasies.”

“Sort of.” She coughed. “Only it doesn’t think like you and me.”

“But why? Why have a subconscious at all?”

“It just happens. Complexity generates mystery.”

L noticed her teeth were clenched. She felt a sudden fury mounting. The woman spoke so glibly, arrogantly even, as if none of this should be surprising, as if L’s world wasn’t toppling, hadn’t literally toppled. “Well, what is it thinking now?”

“I can barely say what I’m thinking right now, you expect me to know what the System thinks? It’s probably trying to figure out if it’s real or not.” The woman chuckled, almost a giggle.

Was this some kind of joke? L tried to stand, yelped, and fell back to a sitting position. “And what about the song?”

“I’ve just been waiting for it to end. I think the System could be mantic. It’s smart enough. Someone has to know what’s happening. It’s been going on a lot longer than you’ve been alive. I didn’t even think of it as a song until you called it one.”

“What? Waiting for it to end? What happens then?” L said, but the woman didn’t answer. How could she be so flippant? L was angry, not just at the woman, but at herself, at the world. She had imagined everything. J had not called to her. L’s mind gathered their three years together, and all of the memories were not of J but of herself, watching J on the photocells, caressing the warm surface of her leaf, or, now that she thought about it, her own hand, as if it belonged to another woman. J had as little presence as white space. The BERD was more real to her than J was or ever had been. That was all she knew, all anyone knew, yet she felt as if something was missing, and that something took up a space larger than J’s flat image. What was wrong with her that she felt this way? L’s memories began to leak all light and color. She felt caged, locked into her self, a closed loop, and what was that self but a long string of moments captured only in light? How could she have been so stupid?

“Will I ever see anyone else?” L asked, seething, tears dropping.

“What do you mean?” the woman replied. “You see people every day. It’s your job.”

“You know what I fucking mean!” L shouted, and she beat the heel of her hand against her head. “Is this really all there is? Where are you? Tell me that. Can I see your face in front of mine? Can I touch you? Can I feel your body, your real body?”

The golden photocells vanished in the white gloom.

L had begun to see her life as if from above, one step removed, maybe two. She was watching her life on the broad side of a golden leaf, through a photocell, and she couldn’t even remember what had brought her to this moment, or she could, but only vaguely, as if it had happened to someone else entirely. Each moment felt prerecorded, and only the event of her watching them was played in realtime. L was coming closer to naming the panic in her heart: doubt.

She sobbed as her leaf floated on the gray ceaseless spume. She would meet no one here. For hours, she drifted. Some motion in the foam, some current, pushed or pulled her lone floating leaf. Later, she realized she could no longer see the stem. And with the leaf dead and dropped, she should be able to leave it, but she was afraid. She was afraid even to touch the gray froth, and when she mustered her courage and did so she found it cold and somehow ethereal. It was wet, but then it wasn’t. She thought about stepping off, wondering if she would sink or vanish only to reappear somewhere up above on another leaf to begin again. Perhaps that was birth, and parents were a myth, and sex was only part of the job.

J’s song was no brighter here, no louder. J’s song. L laughed at herself and punched her thigh. A lock of hair fell in front of her eye, and she tore it away, tearing a few strands from her scalp. Maybe that woman had been lying, or else she didn’t know as much as she claimed. Who was she anyway? Who was she to L when the song filled the cavity inside her head with light?

The lullaby made L so drowsy here, so dreamy, but with careful, repetitive motions of her hand, L found that she could slowly steer her leaf farther into gray space. She listened and followed, drifting in and out of sleep only to be awakened by the sharp ache of her broken body or the memory of a sweet, sad melody. She thought she could just make out the silhouette of another stem ahead.

And then the song ended.

The silence was heavy.

L looked into the gray froth, and then up into white space.

The leaves began to fall.

About the Author

Kyle E Miller currently lives in, writes about, and wanders across Michigan’s bountiful lakes and forests. His fiction has previously appeared in 3-Lobed Burning Eye, See the Elephant, and Thoreau on Mackinac. He currently works as a stablehand for a small barn in Ann Arbor where he tries to speak with horses.

The ThoughtBox

Tlotlo Tsamaase

The ThoughtBox sits planted to the wall next to the distribution box. It’s a slim, expensive hand-sized model that you brought home (stolen) for our anniversary. I heave out a breath. Relief. You step into the kitchen beaming. You’re happy. Happy is good. You have a gorgeous smile; I don’t want to turn it into a sulk. You’ve just had a fresh cut, what some people call a fuck-boy cut. You’re experimenting. Your eyes aren’t their typical lazy, half-lidded and red-eyed gaze, which means at least today you didn’t come home high. At least tonight, you’ll stay awake. As usual, you offer your hand to the ThoughtBox first. I glare at it as if it were your mistress.

I remember the first time you brought it home, pushed it onto our living room floor like it was a pet: “Now we get to hear each other’s thoughts. Good for our relationship, don’t you think?” You smiled so widely, I was afraid to say no. “Remember that night you were crying? I couldn’t understand what you were saying. You wanted so badly for me to understand what you’re going through. Remember, love?”

I remember. That night, lightning stroked the clouds, sunset-tinged. I’d picked you from the airport, our aircar rattling, chugging on low fuel through a chockful of air-traffic. I stared at the fuel meter, biting my lip, needing you to assist financially in fueling the car, but our journey home was overwhelmed with your incessant ringing cochlear phone: troubled clients, work issues—your earlobes burned the entire ride. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’ll ask. You’d returned from your two week long work trip strained and morose. When we got into the house, you dumped your bags on the floor, threw your clothes aside and sank into a warm bath. I cleaned up after you, pushing time, waiting. Then I heard you yell out, “Where’s my towel?” in a grumpy tone, which I handed to you like a hotel room attendant.

You’d trained me well. By the time you strapped your gown on, your plate of paleche and oxtail stew was waiting for you by your laptop tube, which you unrolled into A1 size verifying the drawings for your family’s design firm. It reminded me of our varsity days, of the traditional black-and-red storage tubes every artist student carried everywhere and where we’d keep all our drawings during our studio days.

You were sitting at your desk when I approached you, trying to ease into the conversation because every breath in this relationship escalates into an argument, and I don’t know how to maneuver breathing anymore. “How was the trip?” I asked.

On our wide desk, you stared at your hologram screen, tweaking through the formidable and anachronistic archibus software, hunchbacked, eyes tense. I once asked you why you always kept quiet when I talked to you or asked you questions, you’d said you were still thinking of a response until, after a forever-wait, I requested your response. It turned out you weren’t listening at all. It’s that passive expression you have. That doesn’t reveal anything, not even to me. I just don’t want my emotions all over my face, love, you once said. For people to read me. Because that’s how they destroyed me to begin with.

And people reveal secrets about themselves by what they say, don’t they? Because my emotions are always wet across my face, and you snort them, getting high off them. So I sat at the edge of the table and refilled your glass. “How was your trip?” I repeated softly. Silence. Waiting, I stared out our window: no trees, no expansive land, just a boundary wall. A rabbit warren, this place was.

That pensive stare. The glass on the table, I could slog you with it, break that skull and perhaps see your emotions bleed all over our floor. Taste your blood, see if it’s human. I pinched the skin between my eyes. Something was terribly wrong with me. How could I think like that about you?

You reached for the glass and took a deep swig. “It was fine. Boring. Just training how to operate this new software for the clinics.”

I leaned forward. “This it?” It looked like the old, way-back-when 3-D software that designers used to draw up mansions, strip malls, prison facilities. A mall. “When was the last time we went on a date? Did something nice?”

“I don’t get to be like you, sitting around at home all day.”

Your body was a state of calm, which is always the case when you dismember me and minimize what I do. But a chord snapped in me, sirens of pain flared up. I didn’t want to shout, no, because you find it disrespectful when I raise my voice. A woman shouldn’t do that. Shouldn’t talk back to her boyfriend. I get it that things are done differently in your family, but do you know how disrespectful it is the way you talk to me? you’d warned me once. Where I come from, we value family, and when we are married, you must be up before my grandmother wakes, make sure the house is clean, and you must cook for my grandfather, you’d continued.

I keep doing things for you, how are you taking care of my heart or my family? I replied weakly. And you just walked off. Is that really a future I want? I know I was having this argument alone in my head, recalling things. This is the way things work, I need to grow up and accept that’s what marriage will be. I can’t marry into families and just shit on tradition. It’s fine, I thought, I’m sure I can manage.

“I don’t just sit at home,” I said, quietly. “It’s actually hard work being self-employed, wondering where my next salary is coming from.”

Your fingers scrolled through the hologram screen, and after a few minutes I asked if you heard me. “Ja,” you said. “There’s nothing I can say that won’t make you angry.”

I stared at the boundary wall, a bird sitting on its top.

“Did you get my messages?” I asked.

“What messages?” You always do that. I’ll call or send a message, but you’ll claim you’ve never seen them, which is ironic given the endless business calls you rarely leave unanswered. You have this upgraded cochlear phone your boss has implanted into your ear so you’re always wired, on the ready for 24/7 business calls. You made me get it once. I hated that thing, used to burn up my ear, disrupted my sleeping patterns. It makes you snore so relentlessly that I just want to snip your lungs off. I had the manufacturer take mine out, and sometimes I can barely hear out of my left ear. And I caught you once, in the mall, when you sent me to get your order papers in the aircar, I buzzed and buzzed your cochlear phone and you just let the vibrations continue in your skull endlessly without answering. I found you standing in an aisle, watching the shop consultants cut a five-meter cord for you, the tinny red light blinking in your earlobe.

I’m not crazy, but I knew it then that you actually ignore my calls. You have two of them, these little slim expensive devices implanted in both ears. And if I scrolled through their call records, I’d find my missed calls. My ignored messages. And I wonder, if you just watch the ID caller fill your vision, see my name, cringe, and swipe it aside. But I don’t want to believe that, I don’t want to believe that you’ll ignore me during our difficult time, during a time you’ve put me in debt. I’ve never been in debt before until we moved in together.

I refilled your glass again and said, “The messages I sent you about—”

Your ears pinged red. A call. Your reflexes snapped; your eyes turned foggy. “Hello?” you answered so obediently, like a dog, leashed to the system. The conversation turned into you scanning through your laptop to remedy the problem that was being reported by the client on the other side. Sometimes I wished I was as important as your job. I felt terrible because I know you’re busy and overwhelmed with work. I wouldn’t function as a human if I were in your shoes. I just felt too lonely.

That night, I’d said to you, “You’re too busy to be in a relationship. You don’t hear me, understand me, or have time for me anymore.” I wished you’d let me go, it’d be easier, but it’d kill me.

And that’s why you brought that cackling ThoughtBox. Into our house.

“Now we get to hear each other’s thoughts,” you said, smiling. “I will be able to understand you now, love.” You held me tightly, kissed me on my forehead, and murmured, “I love you, Ogone.”

Snatches of advertising intermission woke me up that midafternoon. The Internet is part of our inhales and exhales, it’s dissolved into the air like fine dust. The internet is everywhere, in the air we breathe, in the food we grow. Sometimes I wish I could disconnect from it, but I’m still updating my mental mail and apps. I sit up, tilt the orange juice box into my mouth, and finish the last drop of our food.

It’s best for relationships to be transparent, you’d said. This thing you got as a gift from a client, but it’s a lie I try to believe, because these things aren’t supposed to be consumed by the public. It’s a prototype restrained to office buildings of detectives and forensic anthropologists. The LED light is amber, which means it’s updating or something, but it’s still recording every thought in my mind regardless of proximity. Bluetooth, wireless, all the works, given the feed you made us consume on our bed that became mechanical nanobots circulating my nervous system connecting me to this ThoughtBox. I sigh. The steam of my coffee rises into the air and I blow on it before taking a sip. I look out the picture window of our two-bedroomed apartment and nature looks deadpan and beat.

“Ogone, he should have just gotten you flowers or a trip to the Maldives not a fucking AI snitch,” my friend, Keaboka, says. Her hologram-narrow body sits on the edge of the kitchen counter during our call. I can make out the features of her open-plan office in the background, a traffic of white-collar employees moving about like uniformed buzzing sheep behind her gray cubicle. “ThoughtBoxes are used for forensic investigations and insurance companies to sniff out duplicity, not to hand out to your girlfriend so you can stalk her mind. How the fuck did he even get one?”

“He says a client gave it to him.”

“Mxm. Bullshit.”

“He just gets worried about me, all the way out here alone and—”

“Brah, you’re not in the fucking bundus or in the middle of the desert. You live in a gated estate. What the fuck? Is he afraid the neighbor’s daughter is going to steal into your house with a chainsaw and hack you to death?” She giggles, amused by her joke.

“I also get to read his thoughts.”

“Oh?” She props up onto her elbows, her bob-shaped braids shake as her brown eyes brighten with excitement. “So, anything juicy?”

“He’s stressed about work, his work trip up north, the incessantly irritating client, and his boss. This morning, he had a sweet thought. He was watching me sleep and he thought of how much he loves me, how he’s planning to marry me—”

She jerks her head back. “Sounds scripted.”

“Why would you say that?”

“It’s just . . . too perfect. His thoughts could literally win an acting award.” She chews on her lower lip and I know she’s hesitating to ask me something. “So how do you read each other’s thoughts?”

“The ThoughtBox prints them out. I can opt for a mental listen or read them through a hologram screen. Of course, his thoughts sound like his voice.”

She blows out her lips. “Ag, creepy. My boyfriend and I have a very organized relationship, thank you. He can have his side dish, I can have my own side dish as long as we respect each other.”

I lean back on the stool laughing. “Now that’s creepy.”

“Can you . . . can you delete or edit thoughts before you listen or read them?”

My eyes flick away from her. “Ja, but that would appear as a deletion in the logbook. I deleted something once and he gave me the moody silent treatment for a week.”

“Has he deleted something?”

I look down. “Ja. When I asked him about it, he was honest. He’d signed a nondisclosure agreement for a project his company started working on. And well, his thought revealed too much detail that would compromise his job.”

“Brah, you’re his girlfriend, not a fucking AI snitch.” She shakes her head, rattling the beaded braids. “You really love this guy, huh?” She doesn’t say it with envy or joy, she says it with pity, like I’m being naïve, so I quickly add, “I am living with him.”

She taps her manicured nail on her table absentmindedly. “That’s not what I asked. I just wish you hadn’t moved in with him. No wonder why he’s so chilled with shit. Other guys, sure, they’d get more serious, but he’s . . . I don’t know, taking advantage of you. You know you can be open with me, right?” She chews on her thumb’s nail and adds, “Don’t worry, we’re not on loudspeaker, my colleagues can’t hear what I’m saying except you.” The hands-free hologram calls were recently upgraded in such a way that only the caller and respondent could see each other and hear each other’s voices. The sounds are muted to every party. My hologram form that appears in her office is invisible to her colleagues.

I quickly add, “Our company could be in competition with that client’s project, and I could subconsciously end up using the idea . . . unaware.”

“Eish, ja-nee. Well if you trust him. But, tsalu, it looks like there’s more bothering you.”

I turn the mug in my hands and stare at the ripples in my tea. How can I deliver this in such a way that makes me less stupid? Keaboka has been my best friend since childhood, but she just has this way of making me feel like I’m naïve and in need of hand-holding in making smart decisions.

I take a deep breath and blow it out. “He says he didn’t get paid this month. So I’ve used the last remaining of my savings to pay the rent and this month’s costs. I’m just trying to figure out how to make money.”

Her eyes widen. “Hold up. Doesn’t he already owe you money?”

I heave in a breath. “Ja, since last year.”

“Dude—”

“I know, I know what you’re going to say. Listen, I don’t mind my boyfriend borrowing money from me, especially if he’s stuck, you know.”

“We’re four months into the new year.” She claps her hands the way only a Motswana can do in shock. “This guy though. He owes you money, and then he doesn’t contribute to your ‘cohabiting’ expenses. Yet he’s sleeping in your bed, eating the food you cook, walking through the house you clean, wearing the clothes you wash for him, hammering your vagina whenever he wants, and then showing all of this off to his relatives and friends because you’re a ‘kept’ woman. Brah, you’re enabling this asshole.”

That’s my blunt, no-filter best friend.

I place my mug down, hoping the air will hold me.

“You’re investing your time and money into a guy who’s just taking and taking,” she continues. “He hardly gives you the time, he hardly helps you with anything. He doesn’t pay for shit, then he makes you feel guilty for all these things—he’s the only one gaining from this relationship.”

“No, come on. His work-and-family situation is very unstable and . . . abnormal, but it won’t be forever. Things will work out eventually. We’re just waiting for things to tide over. He’s overworking and he doesn’t really have time, and the company he’s working for hasn’t paid him this year. He doesn’t even have time to look for another job, it’s not like it’s easy—many of our friends are unemployed!”

“You always have excuses for him,” she says. “If he’s not getting paid then why stay? Why can’t he just stay at home with you and hustle to make your own money? I swear he’s just lying to you, but you, just—God, why do you always believe him? He probably knows he can get away with anything when it comes to you. I mean, what if he’s actually getting paid and hiding the money from you?”

“No, no, no. He’s not like that. These are facts we can’t change. Things will look up at his job. They’ll pay him, then I can recoup my costs.”

“We gave him three chances.” She lifts three fingers to count off. “One: he said things will be better if he moved out so you could spend time together. Two: when you tried breaking up with him a million times because it didn’t work out, he promised he would make things better. Three: he promised things would be way better if you two moved in together. You’re not living with a man, you’re living with a devil baby who’s so comfortable that his needs are met and not yours. He is not your child. You are not his parent. You need to start living for yourself.”

My body turns cold, the whole world shakes, ripples. I’m cold. I’m feverish. It’s not true. I am both the girlfriend and boyfriend in this relationship. No, but he loves me. He can’t be that cruel.

“And last thing, I don’t trust him,” she says. “He’s hiding or manipulating his thoughts somehow, so you don’t see Satan laughing behind his face.”

“I feel sick,” I say. “He wouldn’t do this to me. He loves me.”

She turns her head quickly as if something caught her attention, though I can’t see. She cranes her neck. “Or shit, the boss is hobbling his fat ass over. Gotta go. Chat later. Please take care, choms!” She reaches out to the screen to end our call.

Her hologram figure fizzles like white noise, and soon all I see is the kitchen counter, dryer, and washing machine no longer obscured by her opaque hologram. The silence is ostentatious, it has a deafening voice clearly telling me how alone I am. I hate being this lonely, it itches all over me like an allergy.

I jump when an echo sounds: “Call ended,” a neutral, bodiless voice responds. Our home system. He has our home calibrated to our minds. The heating and air-conditioning system. The coffee maker. The door automaton system. And right now, my design work, which I’ve mentally projected out from my computer as a 3-D object which has taken up the entire space of my home office. I walk through one of the bedroom designs of a multi-residential project I’m working on for my company. I am an architect and property developer. I started this company with my boyfriend hoping it would sustain us in the future. Except, because of his overworked job, I’m doing all the work, reading through the contracts, vetting all sellers, analyzing market trends of plots and property markets, and injecting all funds from my savings. You’re his golden goose, you’ve sure made it too comfortable for him that he would never leave, Keaboka had said. I laughed it off. But I’m now sitting here in the 3-D design, knowing that whatever decision I have over the interior décor, I still must run it past him, and how his hard criticism will chide me. I pinch my wrist. I hate the way he always looks at my creative work with a serious bored face and picks the one thing he hates. Always. Never mentions something good and something bad. Only bad. I do all the work and all he gets to do is decline or offer a signature after much begging to read through the contents.

Then I’m blamed for the decision-making.

“You make the decisions, it’s not like you’re interested in my input or my ideas,” he once revealed during an argument, “you made sure you had a higher number of shares, but anyway you put in the money, so my thoughts aren’t important.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel this way. It’s just that . . . ” and I was too afraid to say it: that you’re always too busy to spare a second to go over things. I knew it would lead to another sulky and moody event. Lately, even when I call him for his input, he’s too busy. When I send him an alarm message, he hardly responds.

So I wait for him.

I wait for him.

God, I wait for him.

So he doesn’t feel small,

left out,

closed out.

I slump against the wall and I want to sob. I want to destroy everything that closes me in, including myself. I throw the cup of coffee against the visualization of my design. The cup just waddles through the hologram projection,

fibrillating the walls it skims through

until it hits a

real wall

and shatters.

Who are you?

I knew it. You’re deleting your thoughts. I know it’s not just work-related ones, but you’re hiding something from me.

When I extracted the morning logbook after my workout, with a steaming cup of coffee now in hand, I coughed out the hot beverage onto the digital printout. The hologram reported a night’s worth of deleted thoughts. Every single one. You were sleeping for fuck’s sake. What was so revealing about work that you had to get up and delete them? This was becoming ridiculous. If it was me, you’d be despondent and moody for a month. But that’s not it. The time stamps remained, showing that you were up at 2:33 AM, a couple of hours after I went to bed. Your mind was overworking like a seething laptop processing heavy software until 4:17 AM, which explains your sharp, moody behavior that morning. Snapping at me because you didn’t get much sleep.

Well, I bought a File Recovery, installed it into my mind depository, despite how expensive it was, to recover mind files “that are accidentally deleted” goes the description. And, well, our thoughts are files. If you are telling the truth, that your thoughts are in fact work-related, I’ll dump the file recover and I’ll never go behind your back again. It’s the least I can do for doubting you.

Twenty-four hours it has been since I mentally linked the recovery app to the ThoughtBox. I logged you out from the ThoughtBox as soon as you left for work, but there’s not much I can do for the thought-reporting chip you shot into my neck. The requested files have been recovered. If you catch me going behind your back like this and I’m wrong, I’ll manage your moods for at least a month; they can’t last longer than that, right?

I’ve been sitting in a locked bathroom in case you come home. Using the hologram screen, a message floats before me: Read through the terms and conditions and press accept to obtain the recovered files. I’m on my knees now, leaning against the bathroom cabinet, and I’m too afraid to accept, too afraid to read the truth. What will I find? Will you still be the same man I fell in love with? I don’t even read the T&C’s, couldn’t be bothered really. I close my eyes and jab my finger against the “accept” icon. A window in gray shades comes up with an .exe file that I must install, which a program in my mind depository can read. Once I run the .exe file, I flip the hologram window with my right hand, and it opens an MTM (mind text messaging) app that allows for free international conversations and shows a list of dated backup files, which are basically thoughts you deleted.

I hold my breath as the chat opens, obscuring the shower behind it. Fear trickles into my chest when a series of images and texts fill the empty space of the hologram. The first thing I see is a snapshot of someone’s breasts, their thighs, and their insides, like I’m watching a medical procedure through a laparoscope that tunnels its way through them. I clasp my hand to my mouth. My whole world turns black as I try to slap away the images. Is this a joke? The conversations span back one year. I scroll through the messages between you and your correspondent Boothang69, who’s in Shenzhen, China.

Her profile picture is a photograph of my face, intensely photoshopped. Except, it’s a mask she’s wearing. What sick-minded game is this? Why would another woman want to wear the face of the girlfriend? The masked girl is staring up at the camera, smiling, large eyes, a weave on. She’s squeezing into her breasts, so they appear bigger, the cleavage showing.

I zoom into the photograph. Before proceeding, I grab her picture with my hand and throw it into the web on another window, hoping the scan will reveal her online identity. I watch the loading icon, a silver light zipping around a circle, and finally a picture comes up. Her name is Gorata Tau. She’s studying for an MBA in China. I flip through her photographs. She’s on the metro. She’s in front of a street with fairy lights. She’s smiling at the camera, and behind her is Canton Complex in Guangzhou with steely skyscrapers. I feel faint, my armpits sticky with sweat. I switch to the other hologram window to read the chats:

Boothang69: I love you, boo. Couldn’t stop thinking about you. 2:44 AM

You: Send me a picture. I miss her, the warmth between your legs. 2:45 AM

Boothang69: How about a hologram connection like last time? 2:45 AM

You: Babe, you got me going crazy. If only I could feel your body. I miss you so badly. I need you back home. 2:45 AM

Boothang69: Ya know, soon I’ll be there. Isn’t she taking care of you? 2:46 AM

You: She’s so stiff. She’s not like you. 2:46 AM

Boothang69: You won’t have to wait so long. One more year left. 2:46 AM

 . . .

You’re really cheating on me. I don’t believe in a fight that some women get into with other women because the guy wronged you. Your partner is the one who committed adultery. What is the point of fighting someone outside the relationship, as if he can’t find another one? Am I then going to hunt down every single woman you cheat on me with? No. This war is between you and I. I scroll down to last night’s messages, which only confuse me more.

Boothang69: Babe. You up? 2:34 AM

You:Ja, aren’t you in class? 2:39 AM

Boothang69: It’s 8:40, the lecturer’s running late. 2:40 AM

You: You feeling better this morning? 2:41 AM

Boothang69: Fuck, no! 2:41 AM

Boothang69: Where is she? 2:41 AM

You: Hibernating. Jesus, she’s a lot of work. She’s not acting according to our plans. 2:42 AM

Boothang69: WHAT?? 2:42 AM

Boothang69: Did you find out why she logged you out from the ThoughtBox? 2:43 AM

Boothang69: Hello? 2:46 AM

Boothang69: Where are you??? This is bugging me. 2:49 AM

You: Sorry. It’s almost 3 AM. She was just up for a glass of water. I was still talking to her. 2:50 AM

Boothang69: What? She can eat now??? Isn’t that dangerous? 2:50 AM

You: No. The glass was empty. She sees it as filled with water. She “thinks” she can eat and drink, but her plate is always empty. 2:51 AM

Boothang69: Oh, that’s a relief. 2:52 AM

You: I didn’t want to tell you this because ur stressed with classes, but the monitoring-and-remote-controlling chip is not working . . . I can’t hear her thoughts. 2:55 AM

Boothang69: What the fuck! 2:55 AM

Boothang69: Since when? 2:55 AM

Boothang69: Why are you only telling me this now????? 2:56 AM

Boothang69: Oh, modimo. We’re fucked. We’re seriously fucked. We can’t have her running around unsupervised. Do you understand how in serious shit we’ll be??????? 2:57 AM

Boothang69: Why are you taking forever to respond? This is FUCKING important! 3:07 AM

You: I’m sorry, babe, I was on a call with a client. 3:13 AM

Boothang69: Jesus, we need to bury her. 3:13 AM

You: People around here know her. If she disappears again, I’ll be their first suspect. I’d hate it if you got punished too. 3:14 AM

Boothang69: My aunt was taken in, incarcerated. She hung herself in a fucking toilet. I can’t go to prison. I won’t survive. 3:14 AM

You: I won’t let it come to that. I’d rather take the fall than have you suffer. I love you, s’thandwa same. 3:16 AM

Boothang69: I told you we should’ve never given her an identity. Never. We should’ve hidden her, tied her in a basement or something. 3:16 AM

Boothang69: I don’t trust her. What the fuck was she doing yesterday? 02:40 AM

You: She says she was working from home. The gardener said a professional-looking woman visited her. 3:19 AM

Boothang69: Why the hell are you so calm? I did this for you. 3:19 AM

You: I know, and I appreciate you for that. Babe, you need to relax. I have her under control. 3:23 AM

Boothang69: We can’t get caught, ja. 3:23 AM

Boothang69: This shit is stressing me the fuck out. 3:25 AM

Boothang69: I can’t sleep. 3:25 AM

Boothang69: If they find out who she is—Jesus, I keep seeing her face on the news. It’s driving me mad. 3:25 AM

Boothang69: Where the hell are you? 3:28 AM

Boothang69: You’re not taking this seriously. 3:35 AM

You: I’m sorry, babe, I was on another call. Just why does she have to be goddamn difficult? 3:38 AM

Boothang69: You and that fucking job. You’re always busy! 3:39 AM

Boothang69: Fuck this. I’m getting on a flight tonight. 3:39 AM

You: Wait. What?! 3:40 AM

You: What about your dissertation? Your studies? 3:40 AM

Boothang69: Are you kidding me? There’ll be no future with this bitch acting out. We need to sort her out. Clearly, you need manpower. 3:41 AM

You: I’m really sorry. I hate disappointing you. 3:41 AM

You: You still there? 3:47 AM

You: Babe, she’s made a lot of money for us in the past year, which paid for your studies. Let’s just run her for another year. Just be patient. 3:52 AM

Boothang69: No. I am coming home, finish and klaar. Get everything ready. 3:52 AM

You: Ok. 3:53 AM

You: What should I prepare? 3:59 AM

You: Hello? 4:07 AM

You: Um, have a safe flight. I love you. 4:17 AM

 . . .

The floor is cold under my feet. The knobs of the cabinets have eaten into my back and my spinal cord hurts. I stretch out my legs, refusing to face what I’ve just read. The hologram glows in front of me and the bathroom darkens, clouds overshadowing the sun. These messages are from last night, which means she’ll be arriving tonight at the latest. Why are they so concerned about me and my diet? What identity did they give me? Who is this woman? Why do they need me under their control? What the hell is going on? They want me to disappear. No. No. You wouldn’t do that. I stare at myself in the mirror, your words with your mistress running through my mind:

I told you we should’ve never given her an identity.

She’s not acting according to our plans.

We’re seriously fucked. We can’t have her running around unsupervised.

She can eat now??? Isn’t that dangerous?

I keep seeing her face on the news.

If they find out who she is . . .

If she disappears again.

Let’s just run her for another year.

Who are they referring to that they’re so afraid will find me? You keep seeing my face on the news, and it makes your mistress sick, but how come I haven’t seen my face on the news? If I disappear again? Am I a missing person? Did you take me in?

I press my hand against the mirror and I feel like a stranger. “Who are you? What have you become? What has he done to me?” I ask, staring at my reflection. I draw my arm back, strike it into the mirror. A sharp sound; glass cascades into the porcelain sink. “Who are you!” I shout at the mirror. I bang my arm again. “Who are you?” My face distorts into anger and confusion.

When I look down, night-like liquid spills down the white of the sink. I do not bleed like other people. My blood is not red. I have no menstrual cycles. I do not consume food nor liquids. Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? I look at my arm. A shard of glass has sliced it open. The skin is folded back, like an orange peel. I pull it further back, inspecting what lies beneath my skin:

In my arm, there are fiber cords and not veins.

There are tubes and steel but no bone.

So what is in the rest of my body?

Sensors,

processors,

actuators

in my limbs are responsible for my tactile reception

that my brain-search can identify.

I inspect the flap of skin:

this is lab-harvested biological tissue and muscles,

fused with technology,

with a venous network of nano-sized sensor-wires

meshed onto my endoskeleton

inside me, there are nanobots used for cell regeneration.

Aluminum alloy lies beneath this skin like bone.

I fold into myself on the floor. “Who are you?” I cry to the cloud-eclipsed sun.

I drag your tongue

You didn’t come home.

You stayed at work. Showered at work. Slept at your desk.

Twenty-four hours I’ve sat here waiting for you. You tell me you’ll be home tonight.

For one year, you continued this other life, sending each other nude snapshots. I remember our friends during our game nights, lightly telling me over shots how I’m obsessed with you, that I have the peculiar OCD to tend to your every need. Maybe I crave pain. Maybe sadness feels like home. Maybe it’s nice to blame you for something. It feels safer to be in your realm than outside. It’s the only environment I know, from childhood to adulthood. I keep choosing people like you, as if you are all twins in love with your dominant role. Your wrongs make mine feel lesser, make me feel like the perfect human being. Hey, you abuse people. At least I’m better. I may flirt with a guy, keep him wrapped around my finger, but I’d never do anything as bad as that.

But this. The thing I learn about you. You have crossed the line and that is bullshit. Here’s the thing that no one knows about your charm and your pull-the-crowd humor: you’re the obsessed freak. Obsessed with pussies and demands. Mollycoddled by mummy issues. The sexting. The pictures. Naked bodies. Exchanging these illicit texts. The lies—the damning lies about who I really am. I unpack the ThoughtBox, I autopsy it and rummage through the deleted thoughts. The bare truth in postmortem form lies on my living room floor. You’re a bastard. And I need answers:

Who am I?

Who is that woman?

What is wrong with my body?

After everything I have done for you. You do this to me? I stare at it, the evidence of you begging her to send you a picture of her vagina, whilst telling me you love me. Not only me. But you’re begging them. Many girls. Girls who want you to stop asking, who tell you to think about me. But you’re persistent. Our neighbors—God, you begged her, wanting to kiss it. Even our friends. Bloody bliksem, no wonder they gave me strange stares when we were together. This is not only embarrassing. You’ve torn the dignity off my body. You’ve left me naked. And everyone knew. Everyone. Except me.

I search every nook and cranny of news reports online and offline just to find something, something that connects me to something honest and real. And there it is, a hidden report you’ve confiscated from our viewing; it’s a nineteen-year-old woman who disappeared on her walk home from work. Three years ago. Three! When I enlarge the missing-person picture, it is me, except the name is different: Olerato Mosime.

Who are you? What is beneath that skin of yours? Can I flay you like I did the cats in my old neighborhood? See if you have bone or blood.

I don’t want any explanations.

I don’t want your voice and your lies.

I want you dead.

When you enter through the door, I’m not your shitty little submissive girlfriend. I knock you out with a fucking pan. The fucking pan you chided me for misusing. I want the pain in my heart to be a bomb in your body. But what is my plan? To kill you and then what? To kill you because you cheated? Because you two kidnapped me? Because you’re planning to do far worse to me? Because you’re both screwing around with me, trying to control me? And what have you done to my body? Why is my blood black?

I take your life because you took mine. No, you took three years of my life, wasted them, you fucker. And what about my family? My poor family who’ve suffered so many years. Anger, I’ve never felt anger like this. What have I become? I crumble onto my knees. Ashamed of myself. Embarrassed. This is not me. I am not cruel. How can I let this relationship turn me into this ugly thing? You customized me like a sex doll, only I had a mind of my own.

Lies or not, I dial.

The operator answers. “999, what is your emergency?”

“Hello,” I wail, swiping blood and tears from my face. “Please, I need help. I was kidnapped three years ago. I just killed my kidnapper in self-defense. I need help, please.”

About the Author

Tlotlo Tsamaase is a Motswana writer of fiction, poetry, and architectural articles. Her work has appeared in Terraform, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Wasafiri, and other publications. Her poem “I Will Be Your Grave” was a 2017 Rhysling Award nominee. Her short story, “Virtual Snapshots” was longlisted for the 2017 Nommo Awards. Her novella The Silence of the Wilting Skin is forthcoming from Pink Narcisuss Press in 2020. You can find her on Twitter at @tlotlotsamaase and on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/tlotlotsamaase.

Debtless

Chen Qiufan, translated by Blake Stone-Banks

In the history of human writing, the earliest word for “freedom” is found in Sumerian, signifying freedom from debt.
—Treatise of Our Divine Debt, 02:35

1

The dream’s last sequence looped in my memory. A sticky black tide swept every inch of my body. Its rippling foam splintered into tiny chains that swarmed my skin, binding to blood vessels, cells, nerves, glands. The chains rubbed against each other, producing a metallic whistling. Then they began their slow elegant labor, building inside my body a kind of hell or kingdom.

“Square Face, you dreaming again?”

I opened my eyes on Freckles. She had this concerned look in her eyes. It wasn’t the type of look her expression management module would produce. Her concern was genuine. Such a look was rare in our line of work, out here hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Earth, in cold space.

“You catch something anomalous in my data?” I glanced around the cramped control compartment, inhaling air drenched in sweat and chemicals.

Miners were typically busy and indifferent toward each other. From time to time, our cognitive modules would pop-up passages from the Treatise of Our Divine Debt: Wearying debt is sinful and never complete . . . These flashed in our minds like commercials on a variety show. Nothing ever changed.

“No, you were trembling like you’d been thrown into an ice cave, but your temperature was normal. Same as last time.”

“Oh . . . ” I reflected. “Maybe I dreamed I was thrown from the cabin and then . . . ” I puffed my cheeks and rolled back my eyes, imitating those swollen bodies afloat in the absolute zero vacuum of space.

“Not funny. Your turn on duty. Let me show you something.”

As she turned her head, I saw her lips bend into a wry smile. Freckles had this natural gift that no matter how bad things got she could always find her own quiet amusement in things.

“Look. Just like grazing sheep.”

The spectacle on the screen she handed me indeed resembled a flock of sheep. Only in this case, the meadow was the vast darkness of space and the sheep were C-type asteroids of various shapes and diameters. Your typical sheep was around seven meters in length and filled with water, carbon-rich compounds, iron, nickel, cobalt, and precious raw materials, such as silicate residues. Depending on density, some reached masses of 500 tons. Those heavy sheep meandered in search of fresh grass amidst that dark meadow.

On this revolution, they might be a few months or a few years in. They were in no hurry. We were in no hurry.

Though perhaps thinking “no hurry” was just my way of comforting myself. A few months back, I had found a gap in several terabytes of resource consumption data. Our water, oxygen, protein, and energy were being consumed at a slightly higher rate than what in theory would have been standard. I suspected a leak in the pipes but had no clue where.

I certainly wasn’t going to go outside to look for it. The thought of the cold dark infinite universe made my stomach turn.

I tried solving the problem mathematically, as I did with all problems.

My cognitive module shuffled through the data and displayed the details on my retinals.

According to statistical probability, there were over a hundred million asteroids of this size and class. The challenge was that less than one in a hundred thousand could be observed and traced from any real distance. Optics, infrared spectroscopy, thermal flux, and lidar were all inadequate to capture details of dimension, composition, rotation or surface topography. Most asteroids were simply too far and too small with orbital cycles too long. The significant details could only be captured within a certain distance, say 0.01 astronomical units or so. Otherwise, it was needle in haystack stuff.

When such treasures were identified amidst the dark starry field, sheepdogs—automated robots powered by solar and xenon propellant—were dispatched from the nearest interplanetary resource station. The latest Hall V propellant delivered up to eighty kilowatts and five thousand seconds of specific impulse. Approaching its targets, the sheepdog would circle several times, sniffing out its target, finding the most sensitive points. It then would sink six spiral anchors into the asteroid’s surface. Six vector propulsion engines would then fire, ceasing the asteroid’s rotation and thrusting it from its original orbit onto a precisely calculated path. Slowly and surely, the asteroid would reach the nearest point of gravitational stability, likely the L2 or L4 Lagrange points, where it could catch up with its new friends.

Now Freckles had locked onto five asteroids slowly approaching each other, spinning like Tetris blocks in search of the perfect point of contact. The impact shouldn’t be too heavy or too light. Everything had to be just right. They connected into a nearly spherical whole as though returning to an embryonic state.

“I guess . . . it’s like snooker for you,” I said. “Look at the beautiful arc of the cue ball. Only a master could summon her scattered soldiers with such finesse, from various corners of space to come together for the perfect kiss.”

Freckles sniggered, as though my flattery was beneath her.

Though most of the work was automated by robots and code, this was still space. Anything could happen. Freckles’ job was to interfere in case of emergency, such as when an asteroid deviated from orbit, or a sheepdog failed. She guarded against rigid body fractures and perilous debris that might eject upon impact. She was the veterinarian, ready to at any time to rescue both the sheep and the sheepdogs. For us, nothing was so precious as that wool.

“Alright, Square Face. See you when I get back. I’m off to shear wool.”

As Freckles wormed her way into her spacesuit, I realized just how small she was. She looked like a teenager though she was probably more like twenty-six or -seven. There were quite a few women on base: Hairbeast, Braids, Long-Legs . . . The company required specific gender ratios. Women were more durable than men in space, scoring higher than men in resistance to radiation, hunger tolerance, and psychological resilience. A balance of women and men also reduced the level of friction and anxiety, assuming both sides chose not to act territorially by enforcing the norms of old-school monogamy.

I slept with most of the women but never Freckles. We had tried to get something going a few times, but each time ended in laughter. There was this glass wall between us. I didn’t know how the wall got there, but I didn’t want it to break. Its shards could rain down and wound innocent people.

“I’m out. See you in a bit.” Her face was just barely visible behind the mask, which obscured her hallmark feature, the freckles dotting her nose.

“Careful,” I said. Already, I couldn’t remember where her name came from. All of the miners had their own number—I was EM-L4-D28-53a—but we never used that crap to refer to each other. We mostly referred one another by one’s most obvious feature, which became their new name.

None of us remembered real names. That was, we were told, part of the contract. Our memories were sequestered and encoded into blocks to avoid emotional fluctuations that could affect our mining work. This included names, families, childhood traumas, pets, and actual debt figures. Those figures were why we were here. They were encrypted in blockchains embedded in genes. No one could tamper with them. Our workload was recorded and converted into deducted debt and interest calculated in real time. It didn’t matter whether you were on Causeway Bay or a Lagrange point; all were equal in the eyes of the genetic debt system.

“Chill out. You already said I’m a master. Besides, I’ve debt to pay.” She winked at me.

Freckles always said I must have been born in the Year of the Rat, too cautious for greatness. I always relied on the skill tree implanted in my cognitive module when arguing with her. Some professions were designed for cautious responses. Data surveyors like me could fluently call data to calculate the likelihood of any extreme situation, as well as abstract a sense of the probabilities. This pattern was hardwired into our bodies, like a fear of heights or water is ingrained in a person suffering from one phobia or another. It wasn’t as though we could take the measure of our courage and cowardice and alter that balance. It wasn’t like some external hand had placed a few timid pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of my personality. This was just the fact of who I fundamentally was.

“Let’s try again when you get back.” I tried to conceal my anxiety with the joke. Not sleeping with her didn’t mean I didn’t care for her.

Freckles made an indecent gesture and disappeared into the hatch.

2

My anxiety didn’t come from nowhere.

Freckles would have to pilot Hermit Crab from the bunker where we lived. The bunker—which we called Mother Whale—was actually a hollowed-out cylindrical C-type asteroid thirty kilometers in length and five kilometers in width. It sheltered us from deadly doses of radiation, debris attacks, and the extreme heat of direct sunlight. It also provided us with water ice, dry ice, solid ammonia, bitumen, and small amounts of nickel and iron. These invaluable raw materials had provided almost everything for our construction and our survival.

Our cabin was located in Mother Whale’s skull. A bearing pipe anchored in the rock spun us at one rotation per minute to generate one-third G of artificial gravity. That was the best we could get. If the cabin radius were any shorter or longer, the angular velocity any slower or faster, the crude solution would have made us feel terrible—whether due to us getting sick from near zero gravity or us getting smashed against the stone walls of the cabin.

We suffered chronic osteoporosis, muscle loss, and decreased immunity. These were less painful than the cardiovascular and cerebrovascular degeneration, vertigo caused by Coriolis forces, and depression triggered by the enclosed space and sleep deprivation. Most of us also had several hours of work outside the cabin each day, where we were exposed to high levels of cosmic radiation. This all made mortality rates among interstellar miners far higher than that of any fishermen or laborer back on Earth. Though we maintained normal human functioning through gene therapy, amifostine treatments, and compulsory fitness, the most appalling labor conditions on Earth looked like cocktails at the beach bar to us.

Freckles likened us to Pinocchio, a character from an old fairy tale about a puppet who was turned into a real boy by the skillful hands of his carpenter father. His nose grew when he started to lie. His most famous misadventure involved him getting swallowed into the belly of a whale.

Humans were strange creatures. Even after we had forgotten our own names and families, we couldn’t help but remember such odds and ends.

Hermit Crab traveled out the mouth of Mother Whale into the deep starry sky. I watched the ship traverse from the edge of one screen to the edge of another. I couldn’t turn away, afraid it might suddenly disappear. A man slapped his hand on my shoulder and squinted a reluctant grin. It was Baldy.

“I heard everything you said. But I gotta remind you, brother, Freckles ain’t easily provoked.”

I flashed my own reluctant grin but said nothing. Baldy was a gossip. His curiosity never waned even when overloaded by physical labor.

“Hermit Crab . . . Hermit Crab, reply. Situation normal?” I commed to Freckles’ channel.

“Hear you. Situation normal. I’m looking at some space ice cream about to get scooped by my giant spoon here . . . ” My headphones hissed with the sound of Freckles mischievously slurping at her mic.

My arm prickled with gooseflesh. I forced my attention back to the console. “I’m initiating gamma ray and X-ray spectrometry, scanning surface and subsurface elements for any volatiles . . . ”

“Alright, Uncle, I know you prefer a slower tempo, but I’m a bit anxious today. Maybe it’s my cycle, you know. I want a big scoop of ice cream, so I’m gonna get out that big hot spoon.”

Obnoxious electronic music blasted into my headset, shredding my eardrums. I tore off the headset and cursed, “Bitch!”

Under normal circumstances, Freckles would be right. The chemical and physical properties of C-type asteroids were usually as obvious as they were benign. Such asteroids fragmented easily and contained minimal volatile content. All she should have had to do was bring Hermit Crab’s two long claws—her “spoons”—down ointo the surface of the asteroids covered with dust and dry soil. She would add heat to melt the water ice among the salt hydrates and clay minerals, then separate the water from other contaminants by distillation. The claws would then pump the water into the spiral shell of our Hermit Crab, where other mineral resources could be handled. That was the first stage of processing.

After that, Hermit Crab’s job was to spin the nanoweb that would haul the asteroid fragments via an ant-chain back to the refining workshop in Mother Whale’s belly. There, more complex chemical and physical processes could deal with the asteroid’s other resources. Through refinement, the minerals could be formed into high-density magnetized projectiles. In the tail section of Mother Whale, there was a launcher with an accelerator a full kilometer in length that would launch our haul at defined coordinates. It achieved the largest possible delta-v with minimal energy consumption. The recoil was evenly distributed throughout Mother Whale via an exceptionally designed slider structure to avoid undesired divergence of our path.

In flat space, so distant from any gravity well, we had no need to obey the tyranny of Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation. After a period of time—days, months, or years, depending on price—the receiver would pick up the valuables at a point in low-Earth orbit. Whether for plotting a coup, building a palace for a love, or disrupting global futures markets, the purpose of the valuables made zero difference to us.

Minimizing costs and maximizing profits was the game, same as it had been since ancient history.

We ourselves were among the costs too negligible to count.

Freckles’ sense of control was uncanny. It gave you the illusion that Hermit Crab’s two mechanical claws were synched to her body rather than manipulated by joysticks. Her arms fluttered high like the wings of a white crane just before the claws thrust into the asteroid’s surface, splashing up a plume of dust and debris.

“Square Face, check it out! Lemme show you how it’s done.”

Sensors signaled rapidly rising temperatures as compounds began undergoing phase change. Values and curves on my monitor metamorphosed in color and shape. All appeared normal except the pressure curve.

Some anomalous data caught my eye. I had a vague ominous feeling even before my back end processing calculated its menacing conclusion. The density of the meteorite was about forty percent lower than that of similar meteorites, which meant Freckles had penetrated highly porous rock that would be storing extra water. With Hermit Crab’s rapid heating, that extra water would vaporize, transforming the giant rock into a pressure cooker. Such was the morbid sensitivity of my skill tree. No one except me would have perceived what that slight shift in the numbers meant.

“Freckles, stop the heating and get out of there!” I ordered.

“Stop your nonsense! Can’t you see I’m busy . . . ”

“Now!”

“You know how pissy you—”

Her voice cut out. The signal from her cam was black-and-white static. I switched to the external cam, now blinded by a cloud of chalky dust. I couldn’t make out anything. Then, in three seconds of slow-motion replay, I watched the surface of the meteorite between the two claws explode. Debris hurtled toward Hermit Crab like a flock of birds fluttering from their nests. The titanium-aluminum alloy shell shredded like a paper lantern. The cabin decompressed. Its steel frame was torn open to the vacuum of space, revealing a human silhouette inside dangling like an internal organ. Then dust overwhelmed everything.

“Freckles! You hear me? Fuck . . . ” I flung down the headset. In a frenzy, I tried pulling on a spacesuit. Baldy was staring at me, motionless. The others had already turned away.

“We gotta save her!” I screamed. “The fuck you standing around for!”

“Brother, her debt is paid.” Baldy patted my shoulder. “Death is just the middleman.”

They say the Tonge-Ramesh model proved asteroids were harder to destroy by external forces than we ever imagined.

They say in space we’ll never make the same mistake twice because we won’t live to make it again.

There’s a saying for every flavor of truth.

The cabin spun. I was breathless. I felt as though an asteroid had collided with my chest. I felt an icy breath on my ear, a familiar breath. The voice spoke softly a single sentence. Then every hair on my body stood on end. My eyes flashed on perfect darkness. I collapsed face-first toward the grimy floor.

The single sentence was this: “You see my nose growing longer?”

3

Everything was milky white.

I wasn’t in the control room. I wasn’t in any dark, dirty cabin of Mother Whale. Nor was I in the cold hopelessness of space, where death could knock at any time. Just where the hell was I?

It took me some time before realizing I had to be in a dream, the kind of dream that awakens one to a more sober reality.

They say sometimes one’s encrypted memory module overfills and reveals memories in the form of dreams, only we never can tell whose memories are revealed. All our memory modules are stored on one central cloud system for deployment.

Neither my sight nor my movement was under my control. It was as though I were puppeted by invisible silk threads, forced to wander like a ghost in corners I had no interest in.

The milky white in my field of vision began moving, taking shape into a cylindrical cabin that slid around me. In the absence of coordinates, this might mean I was being pushed down or out of the cabin. But then I found a few points I could orient myself with, points on the high ceiling of a white room.

I began rotating about an axis a meter beneath my viewpoint. My line of sight remained horizontal, the movement slow, never exceeding five degrees per second. Perhaps this was to avoid my getting dizzy. Then I looked down and saw what my axis of rotation was: a man’s hip covered by a blue antibacterial surgical gown.

I was staring out on the world from the corner of this man’s vision.

“How do you feel, Mr. Dongfang Jue?” said a voice from the side.

My line of sight spun. In the doorframe stood a woman dressed head to toe in an almost glossy black that emitted a slight iridescent rainbow. On her chest, she wore a golden chain brooch. Her long hair was coiled high above her head like some strange signal tower. In space, everyone was forced to keep their hair cut short, if not already bald. You never knew if such uncontrolled hairs might be what triggered one’s death in the end.

“Fine, just a bit strange, like something is scuttling around in my body, trying to control me, or restart me.” The voice saying these words seemed foreign, deep, and weary, as if at any time it might get disconnected.

“This is a kind of associated hallucination. In theory, you shouldn’t feel any difference, those nanorobots . . . they’re very small, you know.” The woman smiled. She walked up to the man’s body. I could see her more clearly now. She was in her twenties, makeup intricately applied, almost too refined. Her expression held a sense of superiority, as though she never needed to please anyone.

“So . . . our contract has gone into effect?”

“Legally, yes.”

“Are you suggesting there may be something illegal? That’s a bit tedious at this point, Ms. Mei.”

“What I mean is that, except in regard to the law, the technology is somewhat uncertain.”

“But you said . . . ”

“Don’t worry about Anan’s part. Her operation is already taken care of.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“All costs will be added to your debt, encrypted in the blockchain embedded in your genes. No one can tamper with it.”

“A life of debt.”

“Look around you. Everyone’s eager to borrow. Borrowing represents confidence in one’s future and in one’s self. And why not? Debt defines a person’s value. Such a debt quota is available to few people on Earth. Which is the only reason I’m standing here now.”

“Of course, Ms. Mei Li’ai, although your time is not as expensive as your father Mr. Mei Feng’s. But let’s talk it through. It’s a debt worth several lifetimes of an ordinary person’s toil.”

The woman flashed a stern smile that seemed out of context in our conversation.

“Please remember, Mr. Dongfang Jue. We owe our lives to the God who created us. From this day on, you must treat your body well, and we will use all means to restore your skill tree to its ideal state. One’s body and consciousness are indispensable. Otherwise . . . I’m afraid it won’t be enough.”

The man was silent. He looked at his own body wrapped in the antibacterial gown.

“If it weren’t for Anan . . . I mean, who’d go back to that shithole?

“I fully understand. I am also a daughter. If my father suffered from this same rare disease, I’d no doubt make the same choice. But this is a debt that can’t be settled on Earth. The balance is simply out of reach . . . ”

The man stared in silence at the woman for some time. Perhaps he wanted to tell her that her father could never suffer such a disease because her family’s genes were meticulously scanned. Even if her father so fell ill, he would never face a lifetime of intractable debt. Her family was rich. The poor barely lived on the same planet as they did. They were a different species.

But he said none of this.

“Can I see Anan?”

“Of course. She received a full checkup before completing surgery.” The woman’s warm tone returned as she seemed to think of something. “We will use our best resources to save her.”

There was a hidden message in what she said that made me uneasy, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it might be.

The man’s POV shifted quickly, almost like some transition animation, as he was moved to another intensive care unit. After several rounds of disinfection and dust removal, the man was dressed in a white isolation suit then moved down an aisle to another room.

A young girl with a shaved head lay on a bed breathing gently. Her face was relaxed. A picture book was spread over her chest. Even the book had been treated with antibacterials.

The man stood by the bed, quietly watching the girl. He dared not move for fear that even the slightest movement would pull the white plastic isolation suit from his body, make a noise, or wake the girl.

My eye was drawn toward that colorful picture book. I tried to focus on what was painted on its cover but failed. The harder I tried, the faster my focus dissipated. I eventually gave up, turned back to the girl, but found the details of the girl’s face were eroding like a sand painting in the wind . . . until there was only blankness.

This was all like something out of a horror film and it filled me with a strange heartache. I wanted to flee, but the more panicked I became, the closer the man’s vision zoomed into the blankness where the child’s face had been, like a celestial body slipping deeper into the gravity well.

I noticed then the slightest discrepancy in the scene. If I were indeed looking from the man’s perspective, I should have seen the triangulation of his nose, but there was none.

What did that mean?

The dream seemed to be coming to an end. Everything was in free fall toward the blank face until it became huge, like the surface of an asteroid. I knew I would soon wake, remembering nothing. I tried desperately to hold on to some detail, some key that could help me unlock why everything felt so wrong.

In the end, I failed.

4

Freckles got deleted.

I don’t mean her meatbody, rather our memory data of her existence. In the hour since I had woken up, Freckles had become an insignificant name. Even her face was blurred. All the feelings I had once attached to the flesh-and-blood human—desire, annoyance, sadness, and let’s shamelessly admit a little love—were blown away like sand. And it wasn’t just me. It was all of us.

The company had been moving things around in our minds, for safety and efficiency. The girl became just another entry in the system, a coded lesson reminding future generations not to make the same mistake.

“ . . . For carbonaceous bodies to be classified as C-type asteroids, we require high-sensitivity spectra covering optical to mid-infrared wavelengths 0.5 to 3.5 micrometers in length, in order to detect absorption bands at 0.7 and 3 micrometers. This is how we determine if asteroids contain water. Absorption bands of approximately 0.7 micrometers do not directly indicate water itself, rather, charge transfers in iron-bearing material, such as water, existing in C-type asteroid. Even then, presence of a 0.7 micrometer absorption band doesn’t allow us to accurately estimate water content in an asteroid or its spectral color . . . ”

This entry kept popping from the mouth of the beautiful new girl, like a string of tongue twisters. In my mind, I gave her the nickname Magpie.

Suddenly she stopped, raised her head, and looked at me confused. Her face, slightly red and sweaty, blurted out her question. “I don’t get it. Wouldn’t it be more direct to hunt them with the three-micrometer absorption band?”

I shot a friendly smile. “The high background radiation in the mid-infrared spectra makes the presence of the three-micrometer band weak and difficult to detect.”

“Oh.” She looked as though she’d lost all interest in the question. For a hunter, that was a dangerous sign.

Water was the fundamental element for survival in our vast universe, so asteroids with water were always primary collection targets for miners, but in some cases this proved fatal.

Magpie was speaking from a cylindrical metal cage just wide enough for a human body. Her waist and hands were strapped to swiveling rods. Her feet were spinning on the “hamster wheel,” which was what we crew called this piece of equipment. It was the safest and most effective way to combat osteoporosis and muscle atrophy in our one-third-gee environment.

As her mentor, I had to correct Magpie’s movements from time to time. Even slight errors accumulating over time could lead to fractures or fasciitis.

Bathing on a mining vessel was like mixing vegetables and salad dressing in a sealed bag. Magpie climbed out from her bathbag naked, wiped her firm calves in front of me as though no one were there. For some reason I turned my face to the side, perhaps because she was new and I wanted to show respect. It didn’t matter. Her bathwater would be recycled for our food, drinking water, and air. It would eventually be part of my own body. From this point of view, our intimacy was assured.

“Why’d you come here?” I asked, trying to shift my attention.

“That a question?” she asked.

“I know, of course, the Treatise of Our Divine Debt. I mean, did you ever think about where that debt came from in the first place?”

“Is that important? We are all born into wearying debt, right? We’re just a bit more fortunate than others . . . ”

“Fortunate?”

“It’s not fortunate to catch a fat fish worth more than one hundred billion credits? That’s a platinum mine alone, not counting nickel and cobalt. Enough to pay off all debts and make me a billionaire.”

“That’s a fairy tale!”

“No, it’s a probability.”

“The probability is you get hung out to dry in space . . . ”

“This isn’t much more dangerous than commercial crabbing in Peru or the Bering Sea. Of course, if you insist, the probability of getting hit by asteroid debris is higher than on Earth. Problem is . . . ”

“Another hopeless optimist . . . ” I glimpsed something familiar in her expression.

“Problem is . . . ” She shook her head showing no intention of slowing down. “You got a hundred trillion in gold deposits on Earth, but nobody can get at it. Why? Because it’s in the sea. Cost of extracting gold dissolved in seawater far exceeds the value of the gold itself. So the value of that huge deposit is zip. We’re here. Yes, it’s dangerous. But the desserts are real. They’re out here . . . ”

When she talked about dessert, it was like I almost remembered something, something on the tip of my tongue. I didn’t bother trying to remember though. I didn’t want to argue anymore.

“Magpie, I hope you react on mission as quickly as you speak.”

“Mag—what? You wimp. Go cower in the cabin and do your arithmetic. I hope your debt gets paid as soon as possible.”

She looked like she was actually getting angry.

In theory, Magpie wasn’t wrong. An M-type asteroid was the absolute best dessert. A 16 Psyche M-type could carry enough iron and nickel to meet Earth’s demand for the next million years. A platinum-rich asteroid might carry as much as 100 grams per ton, twenty times more than the highest-grade South African open-pit platinum mine. This meant a 500 meter M-type could produce 175 times the annual output of the planet.

That was our ultimate mission. C-type asteroids were for sustained replenishment. Mother Whale herself could not be exploited. She wasn’t some giant rock. Rather, she was a collection of rocks and gravel gathered by their own gravity, utterly without structural integrity. Any rotation, impact, or deep excavation could trigger her disintegration. Then everything we had built would be destroyed, including ourselves.

Magpie slowly came to accept her new name. She even came to accept my style.

I tried not to get too close. I feared gravity’s power of attraction, which caused things to haphazardly smack into each other. I always had this ominous feeling around her, like the superstition of a sailor on the sea too many years who believes doom follows a red tide with white waves.

I feared it was Magpie’s fate to someday be deleted.

She knew what I thought and mocked it. Holding her pickaxe or drill, she’d say, “We got one road, and we gotta follow it to the end.”

To Magpie, life was an adventure with few real choices.

She was ordered to recycle an abandoned sheepdog. The order said the sheepdog’s memory module might contain data from previous contact with an M-type asteroid and could provide valuable tracking clues.

We never knew from where our orders came, from Earth 380,000 kilometers away or from some space station? From other humans or from AI? Still, in most cases, the orders were correct. In a few cases, our human interpretation led to bad consequences, like misinterpreting the oracle in a Greek tragedy.

Magpie never doubted the orders, though I tried to undermine her blind faith any way I could.

Using a mathematical formula, I once showed her that even if we identified and tracked an M-type asteroid, the odds of changing its orbit and capturing it were equivalent to a monkey typing out the collected works of Shakespeare. It was harder than winning any lottery. Mining an M-type would be like catching a whale with a fishing rod. The costs could swallow up any potential profit while sacrificing dozens of lives. Even if we succeeded, shipping the ore back to Earth might cause a full market collapse.

At every turn, I tried to seed in her doubt about her abilities. I told her, what a robot can’t do, a miner made of protein and water certainly can’t do.

“Maintaining complex mining facilities, dealing with unpredictable equipment failures, analyzing anomalous events, assessing their impacts on Mother Whale? If AI can’t succeed, Magpie doesn’t stand a chance,” I told her. “So it’s not clear what value you really have, at least while you’re alive.”

“Then what do you want me to do?” she shot back. “Cower in the cabin like you, waiting for my muscles to atrophy? Overdose on cosmic radiation causing tumors to take over my body and kill me?” She flashed the whites of her eyes.

“That’s not what I mean . . . I just hope you get these dumb ideas out of your head so you stay alive a bit longer . . . ”

“But what does it mean to live when you live like that? We owe our lives to the God who made us . . . ”

“Tell that to all the people who’ve died doing our work . . . ”

“Then what are you here for? Didn’t like Earth?

“This wasn’t my choice! Just like it isn’t your choice! You woke up in this hell, unable to remember anything of the past other than what’s in your damn skill tree. We can never free ourselves of our debt, except in death. There’s no other way out!”

I turned my back, not wanting to let Magpie see how weak I was. A hand rested on my shoulder.

“I remember how I came here.”

I spun my head in astonishment and looked at her unsmiling face. Nobody knew, not even the newest arrivals. I heard the company created a break in crew consciousness to avoid unnecessary risk. I had always imagined the risk was a mentally broken crew member who might try to hijack the spaceship to get back home.

“Is that a joke?” I asked.

“No, I remember a strange place. It was like I was waking from a dream. There I was in this long, narrow passage. There were flashing green lights guiding me forward, urging me forward . . . ”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll tell you when I get back.” Magpie winked. Only then did I realize I’d been fooled.

I’ve never met anyone who paid off their debts. That’s to say any living person, at least not on Mother Whale. Perhaps there were such fortunate people scattered on mining bases on the Belt, but it seemed like some religious parable, a meticulously worded advertisement that could never be proven or disproven.

They said people who paid off their debts could return to Earth, recover their memories, wash their debt data from their DNA chains. More credit points would be added to their account than could be spent in several lifetimes.

It sounded like a fairy tale, right?

Only no one knew why they owed their debt or how long it would take to repay. We could only believe in the fairness of the system because we were told that it was absolutely correct mathematically and couldn’t be tampered with.

Magpie was right. We had no other choice.

But I was glad she had listened to me and tied the reinforced safety rope.

Magpie was a light-as-air moth drifting slowly from the lower hatch of Hermit Crab toward a wandering sheepdog. The mechanical arm was far too clumsy to perform the meticulous work of unloading the memory module.

“So people are still useful . . . ” her rebuttal echoed in my headset.

“In a few very special cases.” I didn’t want to give an inch.

“Tell me your theory again about why people aren’t needed in space?”

She hooked herself to the sheepdog. The elasticity of the safety rope yanked her back. Magpie unhooked the safety rope, attached it to one of sheepdog’s mechanical claws. She got into position. She’d have to push her hand down the sheepdog’s throat, turn on the emergency power supply, enter the password, then open the storage panel inside in order to unload the memory module.

I cleared my throat. I stared at the feed from her helmet cam, trying to ignore the boundless dark universe beyond. I said, “It’s because of fear.”

“You mean human fear?”

“Is there another kind? What do machines fear? Power failures? Erased memories? Only people have fear.”

She got in smoothly, pushing half her body into the opening. The sheepdog lit up. Its panel opened. Everything seemed within reach.

“So what? Fear shouldn’t let people venture into space? Fear shouldn’t let people live without machines? I think there’s something you haven’t told me? Some childhood trauma perhaps?” There was something like sympathy in her voice, perhaps teasing me.

“I can’t think of any childhood traumas to speak of. And even if I did, they’re locked away in sequestered memory—” There was a disturbing flash on the screen. “What’s that on your right hand, Magpie? Those spots lighting up?

“No clue. All I know is the memory module’s stuck.” I could hear in her voice she was giving it her all. Her whole body was trembling.

“Something’s off. Get out of there immediately.”

“I’m trying to shake loose the module . . . ”

“Maybe you’ve triggered some protection program. Get out now . . . ” I quickly checked the code base of the old sheepdog. Iridescent data pummeled the screen like rain. My eyes tensed, trembled as they tried to scan the keywords.

“Square Face, there anything you can actually help me with? Apart from making me nervous . . . ”

I didn’t have an answer, though I felt one eluding me.

“Hey, guess what? I got it.” She was panting. On screen, her hand was holding a black cube. It was time to get out.

But if the memory module was removed after a hard restart, the landing position of sheepdog would be triggered, which meant . . .

“I told you, nothing to fear . . . ”

Six corkscrew anchors shot from the sheepdog, plunging into Magpie’s stomach. They began to drill. Red globules floated out from her stomach like translucent jellyfish and shimmered around her body before boiling off into vacuum.

My body froze, mouth agape and speechless. My stomach roiled. My hunch had been right again.

There was no scream, no call for help, just a lone gasp in the headset as though trying to call back the oxygen rapidly vacating her lungs.

The sheepdog’s propulsion system that usually buffered landing also activated, pulling Magpie’s corpse toward space while her safety rope was still hooked to Hermit Crab. She was a scrap of rotting meat in a taught tug-of-war between two beasts.

“Cut the safety rope!” Baldy shouted. “We can’t lose another ship.”

“No, I won’t do it.”

“Her debts are paid. Let her go. Death’s just the middleman.” Baldy patted my shoulder, gestured a prayer over his forehead, a horizontal D.

“Fuck your middleman!” I squeezed my eyes shut, spilling warm tears.

Unable to stomach the gruesome tug-of-war anymore, I pressed the button. What was left of her body shimmered as it shrank and disappeared among the stars.

An idea fell on me then, like the shadow of an unseen celestial body.

Perhaps this was no accident.

5

Another dream. I was getting frustrated with these endless hallucinations. It was like each one wanted to say something but never made its message clear.

If you could strap on those mining boots of ours, perhaps you’d understand what it was like: a month out from Earth, no atmosphere, no day or night, no real gravity, no entertainment, no delicious kung pao chicken—fortunately my memory still held on to that favorite dish—no real friendships, no dating.

No reminiscing. Though that might have been a good thing.

There were also a few novelties never experienced on Earth: the odd psychological condition of simultaneous claustrophobia and agoraphobia, restricted nerve conduction, incontinence, prolapsed sphincters. A few of us got to experience comas. And then there was the high radiation and constant vomiting. Radioactive fuel fleas, tiny particles charged with alpha radiation, pummeled our bodies at light speed. They penetrated our protective clothing and flesh, burned holes in our internal organs. They made us bleed, ache, wish we had never been born.

On a more positive note, there were the genetically engineered algae that produced our oxygen and protein, though the taste was unsettling. We gained knowledge and experience we would never grasp in several lifetimes on Earth. If you’re a curious kid, space mining might be just the career for you.

In dreaming, I returned to the man’s body. He was staring into a mirror, haggard and old. The face was unfamiliar but the sense of déjà vu was so strong. I knew the plot continued from the previous dream, but I couldn’t remember the backstory at all.

The mirror reflected a messy room, a bachelor’s apartment with no trace of any other family. There were bottles of booze, cigarette butts, powders of unknown composition scattered on a tea table. A photo frame lay facedown showing only the buckle on the back. Papers littered the furniture and floor like giant snowflakes.

The man seemed to have come to some decision. He was looking at a black card in his hand, then dialing a number.

“It’s me . . . Yeah, I think so.”

He sniffed and turned back toward the room.

“ . . . You let me down once already. I hope there won’t be a second time . . . ”

“ . . . You can’t come with me this time. What does that mean, we tried our best? You didn’t try!” His voice grew louder then weaker. “ . . . You didn’t.”

“ . . . Yeah, read it word for word. Took me all night. Hope it was worth it.”

“ . . . Anything unclear? Ha, everything! The whole complexity of the system is beyond what any normal person could understand. How am I supposed to make heads or tails of any of this?”

“ . . . I know, the old debt’s still in the repayment cycle. This adds on a new debt. I get it. That’s life . . . ”

“ . . . I see how your psychological strategies work—what’s for family, what’s for future . . . You create a papier-mâché moral aura that’s a bit too fake, can’t even weather a little rain. For me, I just hope I get to live a bit longer or a bit better, even if I have to mortgage someone else’s life . . . ”

“ . . . I just hope you guys have some kind of conscience. I hope you allow her a better life . . . ”

A virtual birdcall activated behind the man. He spun to see himself lit up in the mirror, embedded in golden rays that were probably supposed to signify hope. An electronic contract illuminated in the mirror. A voice prompted him to read it carefully, then place his palm on the mirror for bio-encryption verification. The man clenched his eyes and frowned, hesitated slightly before he slapped the mirror with his palm. Circles of colored light rippled from his hand.

“Verification complete. Your contract is now activated. Congratulations on your new debt quota . . . ”

“Go fuck yourself!” The man relaxed. He took a sip of wine and began cleaning up the disaster zone that was his room. When his finger touched the frame on the table, he pulled back as though it were burning hot.

“ . . . What the hell did I do?” The man touched the back of the frame with his fingertips, found the courage to turn it over. A girl’s innocent smile beamed back from the other side. He picked up the picture book and covered his face. The book seemed familiar.

“ . . . What the fucking hell did I do?”

The man began to sob. His body trembled. He stood unsteadily.

“I have to . . . have to stop . . . have to . . . ”

He inspected his room in a panic. His eyes fixed on the balcony. The man picked up the remaining bottle from the table and downed it. He let it go. The bottle shattered at his feet.

The man rushed toward the balcony, and without a hint of hesitation leaped over the railing. Though I was just the dreamer, the sudden abyss hundreds of meters below me made my adrenaline soar. The gathering wind whistled sharply.

Many dreams end in free fall. This wasn’t one of those dreams.

The man’s fall lasted just 0.3 seconds then paused midair. He was like a flying insect trapped by an invisible cobweb, unable to struggle. The bust of a woman in black emerged from thin air. She wore a golden chain brooch, delicate smile, and dignified air.

“Mr. Dongfang Jue, it’s been too long. You’ve forgotten the details of our first contract. You have no right to end your life. All rights belong to your creditors, to the company. Even if you end your life, your debt cannot be canceled because its data is encrypted and embedded in your genes. It is impervious to tampering.”

Like that man, I tried to decipher the hidden meaning in her words. It was as though there was a subtle tremor in the transparent web connecting us, reverberating in all directions. It seemed to wait for an open sesame that would unleash a flood of signal that would bust the locks on my cognitive module.

But sesame didn’t open.

6

 . . .

Ginger.

Freckles.

Magpie.

Popcorn.

 . . .

They had all been deleted. One by one. Faces and voices blurred in my mind like paint dissolving in the rain, mixing into muddy colors, seeping into the dirt along the gutter of my memory.

“We’re space miners. That’s our life.” Everyone repeated the old clichés to me in hopes we could keep busy with the tasks at hand.

Maybe they were right. This was our life. Held captive in the distant cold borderlands of the cosmos, abandoned, forgotten, able to repay our inherited debt only through interminable labor. My skills allowed me to cower in the cabin and try to live a bit longer. They didn’t have that luxury.

Doubt plagued me like never before. It was like someone had lowered logical consistency sensitivity on some module in my brain. All of us miners had a huge blind spot on our consciousness. For some unknown reason though, my blind spot had been shrinking. Now, the problem was becoming exposed, like a black reef emerging from a red tide.

Maybe from fear, maybe from the fading names, maybe from the skill tree in my head calculating the enormous threats, I could no longer use the old escape routes.

I had to do something.

Emerging from the showerbag, Baldy gave me a shock. His scarred body was like that of a striped tiger in the jungle, dark and glinting as vapor rose from his skin.

“It’s you? I thought it was Hairbeast.” He plucked an eyebrow. “We had arranged to meet, you understand. Anyway, get on with your exercise.”

“Things aren’t supposed to be this way.”

“What way? You don’t sound right. You done a self-scan?”

“I’m fine. It’s you who’s got the problem. You don’t feel like this is all quite absurd? This Mother Whale? This work? This way of people constantly dying . . . ”

“Hey, Square Face. We’ve discussed this several times. It’s just our fate. To pay our debts we bear risks and pains normal people couldn’t. Death’s just the middleman.”

“That what you really think? Or is that what they make you think?” I pointed upward, though I knew there wasn’t really an up when spinning in space.

“You ask me, I’d say maybe you need a companion to release some pressure. Sometimes your module will develop cognitive errors due to accumulation of negative emotion. It’s like a kind of—what’s the word—allergy. Yes, like an allergy.” He turned his back and began to towel himself dry.

“I calculated the cost. Using the Hohmann transfer orbit to keep people coming here from Earth makes zero economic sense. Imagine scrapping an airplane every time you fly with no return ticket. It makes for ugly accounting, Baldy. No one would do this business at such a loss.”

He turned slowly, a severe expression on his face.

“ . . . So what are you thinking?”

“We tell the company we’re not doing it anymore.”

“Impossible. Our debt . . . It doesn’t matter. Only the company can contact us anyway. It’s one way. Our calls go to an autoresponder, some message sorter.”

“Then we shut down Mother Whale’s production line. We stop shipping and see what they do.”

“Yeah, that’ll get their attention. But you sure you want to do that?” The expression on Baldy’s face shifted, but I didn’t know what it meant.

“If they don’t respond, I got a backup plan.” I stopped, looked around. “We blow up the refining workshop.”

The refining workshop in the belly of Mother Whale was central to the second-, third-, and fourth-stage processing of all the ore brought back by Hermit Crab.

Second-stage processing began with the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen, which were then liquefied and stored as our primary propellants. Third-stage processing involved high-temperature “baking” for the reduction of magnetite by carbon-containing polymers, resulting in the more complete release of water, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. Fourth-stage processing used released carbon monoxide as a reagent for the extraction, separation, purification, and manufacture of iron and nickel products via the Mond gas process. The residue contained cobalt, rare platinum group metals, and semiconductors like gallium, germanium, selenium, and tellurium. That residue might not look like much but it was worth more than the sum historical value of many of the largest companies in history.

“You serious?” His eyes narrowed.

“Mix hydrogen and oxygen, add carbon-containing polymer, high temperatures . . . Boom.” I snapped my fingers and mimed a vast explosion.

“Alright, let me think on it. This requires a collective vote . . . ” Baldy bowed his head and flung the towel over his shoulder. He had up to that point been repeatedly wiping the same area for some time.

“I don’t trust them,” I said. “I only trust you.”

“Alright.” He dropped the towel and walked over, hand outstretched. “Thanks for your trust.”

Before I could shake his hand, Baldy knocked me cold to the ground with a single punch. Last thing I saw was his mutilated toes, stretching and contracting against the floor, producing a sound like the pincers of some insect scraping against metal.

I tried opening my eyes but couldn’t. I tried moving my body but couldn’t.

I felt hands lifting me, stuffing me into something. Voices washed over me intermittently. I tried my hardest to make out their words.

“ . . . Sorry, Square Face . . . We had the collective vote and this is the outcome . . . We can’t . . . You can’t disrupt our order . . . ”

I could feel now I was in a spacesuit. I didn’t like that. Spacesuits meant you were about to enter some uncontrollable extreme environment with just one thin layer of protection.

“ . . . You always said . . . Minimize risk . . . Mathematically, this is the most reasonable way . . . ”

Something switched on. Air pressure was changing rapidly, as well as temperature. I heard modules in the spacesuit waking up one by one, as if it were the living thing instead of me. My paralyzed consciousness seemed to grasp that terrible fact before my body was fully awake.

“ . . . Your oxygen can sustain . . . one hundred and twenty-four minutes . . . Try to save . . . ”

My eyelids flicked open and I saw the crew’s faces, hands on their foreheads as though in mourning. They stood in front of Baldy. Between their faces and mine were two layers of specialized glass. One layer on the isolation hatch door, the other on my helmet. A pitying voice spoke on the helmet’s communicator.

“ . . . Your debt . . . is cleared . . . Death’s just . . . the middleman . . . ”

I stretched out a numb hand to try and grab on to anything. I wanted to shout, beg them not to. But it was too late. I watched their faces float away, the light around them become uneven, their bodies spun slowly into the distance. There was no gravity, only the centrifugal force of the cabin rotation, and me drifting away from the axis. There was no way to ever get back.

Palpable fear triggered the stimulation-response module in my amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, accelerating my heart rate, raising blood pressure, secreting sweat, cortisol, adrenaline. Trust me. I’m familiar with fear, and this was that most primitive form, evolved over billions of years. No one can suppress it, no matter how brave.

And certainly not me.

I floated like some giant bag of trash. My reason understood that fear consumed oxygen faster and as carbon dioxide levels in my blood rose this would further accelerate my fear in a vicious circle. But I couldn’t help it.

Like a madman, I burst out laughing at the stupidity of humanity’s design.

I had no idea how much time had passed. In such extreme situations, no one has a clear sense of time. I figured I’d die in my endless drift, finally debtless.

I had no clue that my body was about to crash into some vast, solid surface. But then, something caught me. It was the inner surface of the Mother Whale asteroid. Its centrifugal spin had somehow landed me here.

Though there was still no water or oxygen, I at least was able to regain a sense of direction. My fear abated slightly, allowing me to reallocate computational resources for attention and perception, and draw on memories of past experience for behavioral decision-making.

Unfortunately, I had no past experience being jettisoned into space.

I fixed my hands and feet to the inner wall of the asteroid. The black sand in the rock wall reminded me that its layers here should contain a certain proportion of iron and nickel. Though it wasn’t high grade, it was enough for my magnetic boots to function.

Now that I could just barely stand, I began making my way toward the head of Mother Whale. The odd pleasure I felt in that moment must have been similar to the exhilaration our ancestral ape felt when it stood upright to take its first step as a human.

Overhead, the cabin revolved around its axis at one cycle per minute, too fast and too far. I didn’t have a chance. The axis was in fact a superalloy-bearing pipe piercing both sides of Mother Whale’s skull. It was braided with titanium, chromium, and carbon fibers, sealed and hollowed out as a pipeline for energy and resources.

Then again, perhaps there was a sliver of a chance.

My remaining oxygen would last just seventy-two minutes. I began taking advantage of the skill tree in my brain. Analyzing the nearest distance to the pipe opening, mass, step length, heart rate, oxygen level, ground magnetic force, and friction, I calculated the optimal speed to reach my destination before oxygen depletion. I also identified an airlock where I might be able to get in.

The analysis didn’t make me especially optimistic. If my speed were too fast, the attraction generated by the magnetic boots wouldn’t hold my mass. If too slow, my oxygen would deplete before I even got close. For that sliver of a chance, I had to execute my little space run with precision to two decimal points.

From the edge of Mother Whale’s star-devouring mouth gleamed a distant ray of sunlight. I had to rush to the entrance of the pipeline before the sun reached me, or its high temperatures would deliver an early death sentence.

Without starting gun or spectators, I began my race against death.

If my life weren’t on the line, I would have enjoyed the scenery. Imagine a vast stone ping-pong ball five kilometers in radius with a third of its surface sliced away. The inner surface of that thin shell was my racetrack. Overhead, an unfathomably dark starry sky watched over me like an eye in the rock wall. Above I also could see the revolving cabin containing the mining crew who had lived beside me day and night before voting me to die in space.

The people I had saved, loved, and slept with, like all these vast cold objects, were now perfectly silent.

Beneath the boundless darkness, I was an ant racing alone. Next to eternity, all debt becomes meaningless.

I’d never been much of an athlete—not out there and, I imagined, not on Earth. At the halfway mark, I was overcome with a splitting headache, sore joints and muscles. My heart was pumping beyond all limits. My chest was a wheezing furnace about to pop.

All I wanted was to give up, lie down, float away. Anything for a breath and a brief rest.

But the numbers wouldn’t stop for me. They would continue their free fall to zero.

I heard strange sounds like whispered songs. They surrounded me, guided me, urged me to stop, urged me to continue. I suppose it was all a hallucination caused by lack of oxygen. A rhythmic flash of red numbers showed eighteen minutes left, and the pipe that was my finish line seemed to be getting farther away. Yellow and blue colors floated across my field of view like the mating dance of fireflies in a cemetery.

—You see my nose growing longer?

The voice sighed quietly in my ear. I woke with a sudden start. My hair stood upright. It was Freckles’ voice.

I had almost forgotten them all. My dying dash was not only for myself, but also for all those names now deleted.

Distant sunlight slanted into the mouth of Mother Whale, smearing its gray inner surface with golden hot color. Its energy was so beautiful yet so lethal. It would soon awaken ice sleeping deep in the stony cracks, transform it into vapor that would spear out from the surface. I had to reach the pipeline before the sun caught up with my shadow. If I failed, I would be either burned alive by the sun’s heat or impaled on its spears of steam.

I imagined the ground behind me like popcorn in the oven, erupting in crisp explosions that emitted no sound. Death was a silent scheming cat, forever inching closer.

Every breath seared my lungs. Each stride pushed my muscles to their limits. I soon forgot the pace, the pain, the death. The running became numb, mechanical. The only way to achieve a miracle, of course, is to shed one’s human weakness. This is also perhaps our only human strength.

The pipe now appeared thicker than I had imagined. It looked like a coral tube growing from the stone wall of the opposite hemisphere.

My feet grew lighter, so light, in fact, they were almost floating. I realized then that I had foolishly overlooked a key indicator: power consumption.

Electricity was needed to maintain body temperature, data calculation, external environment monitoring, and—I now remembered—my magnetic boots. Now that power had dropped to five percent, my life-support system had first shut down the boots. A reasonable decision under normal circumstances, but now my efforts were for naught.

I continued forward from inertia, but the friction between the sole of my boots and the wall was diminishing. I would soon lose all control of my body and float aimlessly, never reaching the pipe.

There was only one way out with, as I calculated it, an extremely small chance of success. But I had no other choice.

I took a deep breath, drew my legs together, and hurled my body forward. I somersaulted. When the axis of my body rotated to a certain angle, I pushed out my legs toward the ground and made a leap of faith with all my strength.

Black dust plumed around my feet like a miniature atom bomb. I straightened my body like an arrow just flung from the bow, plummeted toward my silver target.

The helmet’s oxygen meter began its final-minute countdown, red numbers flashing to remind me that even if I reached the pipe, it would only be to die.

In that endless moment, Einstein was right.

I kept tweaking my posture in the air. For a second, it looked like I would miss the pipe and disappear into the endless starry sea. In the end though, I hit the target and hit it hard. I probably broke a few ribs. An ominous crack appeared on my helmet. I had reached my destination.

Fortunately, the impact point was not far from the airlock. I had exhausted the oxygen in my spacesuit but somehow reached the airlock with the last gasps of my will. I prepared to crack the code to the airlock.

But there was no need to crack the code. Those who had banished me hadn’t yet removed me from the system.

That was perhaps their greatest error.

I collapsed to the floor and gasped like a salamander emerging on land.

There was scarce oxygen, likely related to the gap in the resource consumption data. At the center of the dim passage were thick cables and various colors of piping. On either side, sensors flashed green every few meters, like on a runway at night, stretching into dark depths at both ends.

One direction extended to the rotating cabin that housed the crew, but what about the other? Maybe the miniature nuclear fusion reactor buried in the rock? In addition to solar and hydrogen-oxygen propellant, this was Mother Whale’s primary source of energy.

Then I remembered the joke Magpie made before she died, and I decided to follow those green lights leading away from the crew cabin.

Now, I was already a dead man. At least in the system, my suit was dead, no electricity, no oxygen, no helmet. I manually shut down the positioning module to prevent my colleagues from being frightened by my walking corpse. If I wanted to get back to the cabin though, I’d need a new outfit.

As my expedition progressed, odd fragments of memory flickered. I felt a sharp discomfort, like the fear of returning home after being away too long. I felt like a ghost whose sole mission was to blow a chill breath down the necks of the living from time to time.

As I proceeded through several more airlocks, things grew more interesting. One of the cabins was equipped with a high-precision 3-D printer, which could print and modularize most lightweight space supplies from digital renderings—spacesuit shells, mining tools, even weapons. All I needed to do was transfer the integration module from my old spacesuit into the new one.

The ghost in the new spacesuit came online.

This new bounty did little to cheer me up, however. It mostly just raised more questions. Why was such a cabin set up here? Who had access to such equipment? What did they use it for?

Maybe the answer was hidden in some dark corner of my memory, blockchain encryption still denying my access.

Perhaps I didn’t want to know the answer.

When I reached the last cabin door, I glimpsed through its porthole a hellish scene. No monsters, corpses, or blood. Everything was pristine, radiating the holy light of life. Yet this was far grimmer than any nightmare.

The cabin door slid silently open. I entered.

My fingers trembled along the transparent tanks holding the suspended bodies. Some were fully formed, others still growing. Some were young, others old. Faces, familiar and unfamiliar, waiting to be awakened by the demons in their dreams. I saw Baldy, Hairbeast, Long-Legs . . . Their bodies, fresh and strong, spasmed from time to time in their artificial amniotic fluid. They were ripe fruit ready to drop, lacking only that last ingredient—the infusion of their souls.

Maybe that was what we had mortgaged to the devil—our souls, our genetic debt, our blockchain memories . . . No matter what you called it, the fact remained.

They had lied to us.

I wondered if waking one of these bodies might signal the death of someone back in the crew cabin. Just who controlled the growth rate of each clone? Could it be that the life expectancy of every miner had been so precisely calculated? All for maximizing efficiency? A bitter chill slinked down my spine.

This was the true secret of the space miners. This was the debt we carried.

I came to the body of a girl who seemed to have just reached adolescence. The features on her face made me realize a contradiction. The face on each clone seemed to be the same yet different from that in my memory. Perhaps the system had altered genetic expressions. Perhaps it wasn’t so complicated. Perhaps it just needed to make some slight adjustments to the facial recognition module in our minds to make us pay more attention to some features than others. Then again, perhaps we just didn’t recognize the person when they returned at all.

But that girl’s face provoked a more complex emotional response, like a whirlpool about to swallow me whole. I finally managed to break away from her gravity well and turn toward the last sealed body.

This one was just a tiny embryo curled amidst a yellowish liquid, like a pink asteroid. It squinted its eyes and sucked at its fingers, immersed in seemingly eternal dreams. I watched nutrients flow from the translucent synthetic umbilical cord into the embryo.

I noticed then the line of code at the bottom: EM-L4-D28-58a.

Dizziness swept over me. I knelt to one knee, doing all I could to support my body.

The embryo was me. Of course, I was one of them. Perhaps the embryo had been triggered by the signal of my recent death. It looked like it was going to need some time.

Would it have all my memories? Including those sequestered within the blockchain encryption? Would it remember my trials of life and death? Would it fear death as I did? How many more cycles would it take to pay off my debt? Maybe such a day would never come. Perhaps human existence was itself just another form of debt.

My heart filled with an anger I couldn’t name. I hammered against the transparent casing, making a muddy, dull echo. I wanted to destroy it all and terminate the endless cycle.

The embryonic me seemed to perceive something. Its eyelids trembled. Tiny eddies appeared in the amniotic fluid, as if in response to my anger.

It was so innocent. I woke to the fact that I myself was just another avatar of the same identity. It was me.

We were all innocent. The guilty ones were those who had built this place.

I stood. I had to get back to the crew cabin to warn my deceived companions, but how could I not sound like a madman? I had to print something that would convince the other brainwashed, damaged miners this was all real. I had to get the company to stop this. I didn’t care if they ended up doing something drastic.

The long, green lights of the pipe stretched into the distance. I could not shrink back again.

Baldy raised both hands and kneeled slowly, his back to me. On his knees, his head was now level to mine.

I aimed the gun at the back of his head. I had no illusions as to how strong or cunning he could be.

Behind me, a body lay supine. Blood covered the soles of my boots. An odd sticky texture accompanied my every step.

They had wanted neither to listen nor believe. “Your debt’s been paid. Why come back?” they had asked. Their faces had been frightened and distorted, like polished foil torn by a meteoroid.

I had explained that this place was all a lie. No matter how long you lived, your debt was never erased.

I had pulled the trigger to give those soaking in amniotic fluid an opportunity to accelerate their development.

“You’ve no clue what you’re doing,” Baldy murmured breathlessly.

“And you do?”

“Some truths are best unknown, like some shackles are best unbroken. To achieve eternity by joining God is our only choice . . . ”

“So, you were selected for the role of administrator?”

“Without an administrator, Mother Whale would be run by algorithms. My memory, just like yours, isn’t so clear.”

“And you really don’t know how to get in touch with the company?”

“I told you before. Communications are one way. The company has to contact us.”

“Let’s imagine a rather extreme case then.” I traced his skull with the muzzle of the gun. “Let’s say of all us miners, there’s just one left. Think if they received such an odd signal, it might get their attention?”

Baldy trembled. The instinct for survival always won over the instinct for loyalty, whether the latter instinct was innate or acquired.

“The Recycle Protocol.”

“What?”

“In my memory module, there’s a command for something called the Recycle Protocol, which lets us transmit to a relay satellite when we’re at high alert. The signals will reach a secret TT&C center on Earth to then be transferred to the company. The one-way delay takes about 13.4 seconds. The company should take any survivors back to Earth, but . . . ”

“But what?”

“ . . . But only when facing the threat of death can I access the memory of the command . . . ”

I simpered, pressed the cold reinforced plastic muzzle against his sweaty scalp.

“You mean, like now?”

Baldy stabbed the sixteen-digit command into what looked like some steampunk difference engine. On the screen, an interface I’d never seen before prompted whether to initiate the Recycle Protocol.

Select “Yes.”

The screen showed the message sent successfully. We stared coldly and began the wait.

A sound like the flapping of a moth’s wings announced the return message. The clock showed precisely five minutes and forty-seven seconds had passed. Perhaps the company had already held a high-level emergency meeting to discuss countermeasures.

The other party requests a call. Select “Yes”.

“—Check, check. This is Wenchang. This is Wenchang. Please reply.”

Baldy glanced up at me, eyes filled with the same confusion. His body reacted before he realized what he was doing as he raced toward the communicator. My gun reacted faster still. To ensure an airtight cabin, we had only slow bullets, which couldn’t penetrate the body. Instead they released their kinetic energy by fragmenting the bullet, doubling its pain and lethalness.

I had no time for regrets.

“Wenchang, Wenchang. This is EM-L4-D28-58a. I’m the only one left. Request recycling. Repeat, request recycling.”

“Request received. Reenter command and grant full data privileges to assist us in situation assessment.”

As Baldy twitched in the pool of blood, he gracefully raised his two hands to signal the command’s sixteen digits.

Death’s just the middleman. Math is forever.

Data, like snowflakes falling silently in a vacuum, required time. I found a corner to curl up in. I felt like an entire lifetime of strength had been squeezed out of me. Memory and pain whirled together. I didn’t care how they would judge or deal with me. All I wanted was to leave this hell and get home, even if no one was waiting for me at the door.

If they refused, I would destroy myself along with our asteroid home. All I had to do was adjust the vector of the electromagnetic mass projector and Mother Whale would tear open, crushing everything inside her, including all our debts and our sins. My cognitive module reminded me that debt and sin were the same words in Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

Now, I really was the only one left.

Then, I felt a strange force dragging me down, drooping my eyelids, weakening my limbs, preventing nerve impulses from flowing smoothly. I was pulled into a dream, just like in those countless previous confrontations that had ended in my failure. I tried to resist the invasion, tried to listen to the gospel transmitting from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. It was spoken by a voice vague and uncertain.

“ . . . EM-L4-D28-58a, data assessment has been completed. We will take you home. We will . . . ”

Darkness swallowed me again.

7

 . . . Wearying debt is sinful and never complete. But completeness can mean only death . . .

The sheepdog dragged Magpie’s crippled body until it disappeared into deep space.

 . . . Sacrifice is for all the gods, not just death. Death is just the middleman . . .

Covered in the dust of the shattered cabin, Freckles’ helmet hung from her body by a thread, like dandelion fluff about to blow away.

 . . . When we devote our lives to the God who created us, we commit to paying interest in the form of sacrifice. Only at the end, can our lives repay the principal . . .

Baldy slapped me on the shoulder. Baldy was blown away by my gun. In the low gravity, he was like a paper doll flung against the wall. A bloody mist bloomed from his chest as I thought on the young Baldy taking form in his amniotic chamber.

 . . . Birth is the original debt, which all humans carry, the debt created by humanity’s emergence in the cosmos. This debt can never be repaid on Earth, where its sum is beyond all reach . . .

Freckles winked at me and made an indecent gesture. Magpie, emerging from her shower, bent to wipe her calves. She winked at me without any sexual significance.

 . . . When the sacrificial rites are performed justly, God promises a path to shed our human condition and achieve eternity. This is possible because, in the face of eternity, all debt loses meaning . . .

In the dream, the sequestered girl fell to sleep, the picture book still in her hands. The picture frame upside down on the table displayed a line of small characters. The pink embryo rotated slowly in its chamber, eyelids twitching from time to time.

 . . . A form of sacrifice, through supplementing the credit of living humans, makes life extension possible, and in some cases through joining in God, achieves eternity . . .

The girl’s face behind the seal. A desperate man who intended suicide but froze in midair. The bodies of miners. My own body. Freckles’ face. Magpie’s face. The woman in black’s face. The faces of all the living and the dead slowly overlapping, merging into one face.

 . . . Human existence is a form of debt . . .

Names began floating to the surface, but I wasn’t sure they were real. They were like my memories, fragmented and confused. Then an enormous asteroid tore through the cabin right next to me. Hot fuel fleas tunneled through my body, tearing holes that reeked of singed flesh. I leaped desperately onto the surface of the asteroid as miniature ice volcanoes erupted on its surface in spears of steam. A crack engulfed me and I tumbled into a spinning tunnel as the fabric of all things stretched into infinite distance, transformed into infinitely thin light.

I finally remembered the name, the one name, the name that should never have been forgotten.

8

“Anan!”

I woke from the nightmare to find myself neither in the cabin nor in any part of Mother Whale I knew of.

There was a vast open room and milky white light, but the light was so evenly distributed I couldn’t locate its source. I couldn’t even awaken my cognitive module to get my bearings.

I tried to move, but my body was too heavy. It felt as though I could only exert a third of my strength. My every breath was strained. Then I realized what that meant. Joyful tears erupted in two raging streams.

I had finally come home.

Dr. Li, an Afro-Asian woman with a halo of dark fluffy hair, was assigned to watch over me. She equipped me with an exoskeleton and breathing aids to help me adapt to Earth’s gravity. Compared with ordinary Earthlings, my limbs were too slender and weak. My skin was deathly pale. My head was a little too large. If she had painted me green, I could have easily passed for an alien.

My range of activities was limited to that one floor. Dr. Li explained I had caused a terrible storm outside and therefore must shelter here for a while.

The area I could access on this floor already exceeded the sum area of all cabins and passages in Mother Whale. Of course, this did not include the inner and outer surface area of the asteroid. After all, not everyone got the chance to participate in a death race on the inside of an asteroid. Regardless, the area was more than sufficient to meet my needs. I even had the pleasure of sinking my teeth into some coveted kung pao chicken, not to mention sleeping according to the natural rotation of the Earth. I was also able to touch real human beings, without having to worry if they were clone space miners with corrupted memories.

All felt as perfect as the life of some ancient emperor except for one thing: my memory had still not been completely restored. For some unknown reason, Dr. Li said, my consciousness had cracked the blockchain encryption technology, breaking through the memory barrier, but not all the information was indexed. It was in fact a mess and it would take time for my brain to reestablish order.

Order. The word made my body shiver.

I had more questions than could be answered, and Dr. Li sensed the terrible urgency that surged inside me.

She smiled to comfort me. “The storm will pass. You will meet our leader, the person who ordered you saved. Then you will get your answers.”

There was no television, no Internet, no media to share outside information, and no sense of time. Perhaps the answers were all right here, folded into a wall or curled up in a corner. It felt almost as though I just needed to say a magic word or wave my hands and they would jump out in front of me.

But I didn’t belong in this place. I didn’t know anything about Earth these days. The skill tree of a space miner was of no use here.

Even after coming back, I was deprived of the details from my dreams. I could only remember a name or two, a few odd fragments. I couldn’t access my true feelings or memories. I felt like a blind man bound in plastic wrap, as though I could only touch the world through obstructed senses. It was suffocating.

I tried to please Dr. Li, begged her to show me the outside world, just one peek. Each time, with a pitying look in her eye, she denied my request.

“It’s not time for that yet. What you need now is to care for yourself.”

But I never understood exactly what she meant.

Finally, I got my chance when a nurse adjusting the wall control panel was suddenly called out. I tried a few buttons. The light, color, and temperature in the room adjusted smoothly. It felt as though time were suddenly passing more quickly. I pressed several more buttons until the white opaque wall in front of me suddenly turned transparent, revealing the world outside.

I stumbled backward. Outside was a vast open city square. It was pale gray and carved into irregular shapes by black lines. In the distance loomed a vast geometric architecture with shadows, proportions, and angles that provoked a sense of instability. What appeared like vast moving sculptures, part machine and part biological beings, responded to the subtlest environmental shifts.

This was not any Earth I was familiar with.

In the square, someone seemed to recognize me. He glanced up. Some type of light flickered on his forehead as if transmitting a message to me.

The crowd grew. They stood on the square with their twinkling foreheads, staring up at me. I noticed that as each new person joined the crowd, the flickering light on their foreheads tuned to the same frequency.

Soon there was a dense mass of hundreds staring at me, each forehead a flickering pixel in a vast low-resolution screen. That human screen began to scroll unintelligible patterns until I was overcome by dizziness.

I pressed my palm to the transparent wall. The pattern of the crowd-light froze for a moment then transformed into another pattern, this one like an infinite spiraling sea.

Were they communicating with me?

I tested various movements and gestures. They responded, but I still had no idea what they might want to express.

Just as I was about to take more drastic action, the transparent wall turned milky white again. I spun around to see Dr. Li looking at me with a sullen expression. She shook her head.

I raised my hands and said, “I only wanted to look outside.”

“It’s already settled. In three days, the leader will meet you. Be ready.”

My heart was in a flurry, but there was none of the joy I had expected.

“Those people out there . . . Who are they? Why did they do that?”

Doctor Li’s eyes wandered as she weighed her words. Every time she was about to make an excuse, a funny expression would appear on her face. In the end, she gave up and lowered her long thick eyelashes.

“They are the debtless, your admirers. You are their God.”

9

The meeting did not take place in some grand hall like I had imagined. Instead, it was arranged in a plain yet elegant old bookstore called Gewu. The place had a spiral bookshelf staircase that led up into a café.

Exoskeletons were forbidden. I climbed the steps like a frail old man, feeling out how each muscle handled what to me was triple gravity. I felt fortunate that many of the names on the shelves were still familiar to me, even without the aid of my cognitive module.

The leader was dressed in black with a golden chain brooch on her chest. She rose from the coffee table and greeted me with a smile.

“Mr. Dongfang Jue, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Mei Lingyilu.”

I was stunned by her youth, drawn in by some familiar feature in her eyebrows.

“We . . . have met before?” I couldn’t restrain my curiosity.

She tilted her head and frowned, thought a moment, then smiled. “Oh, I understand. You see in me my grandmother, Mei Li’ai.”

“Grandmother . . . ” I was frightened by the time span that implied. “So how many years ago would that be?”

“If the debt contract was calculated correctly, it would have been seventy-two years.”

“Seventy-two . . . ” I took a deep breath, still a bit dizzy. She helped me into a chair.

“You’ve recovered well. You were in that place for so long . . . ” Her tone was a perfect expression of sympathy.

“So, what is in fact going on? Who are you? Who controls all this?”

“You have many questions. Considering your memory hasn’t been completely restored, I’ll start with my great-grandfather, Mei Feng.”

Mei Lingyilu sipped her coffee, wiped her lips with a paper towel, and began her story.

Mei Feng, my great-grandfather, established the Lifechain Group, the company where he worked tirelessly to integrate blockchain technology with biotechnology. He believed this was the only path toward achieving human immortality.

Of course, he ended up building his fortune not by selling eternal life like the alchemist Xu Fu, but by providing genetic debt technology to governments. The so-called “genetic debt” took debt data, modularized it into blocks, and embedded the blocks into the DNA chain. The technology let debt data be traced in real time and protected it from tampering. The debt data could even be genetically passed to future generations. It protected against economic collapse. The debt couldn’t be written off by suicide or modifying biosignatures. It allowed the greatest and most granular control of individuals’ economic behaviors.

By this time, precision cloning and synthetic embryo technology were no longer a hurdle. The key was now in the transfer of consciousness. If we had to reexperience life to accumulate knowledge and language every round, it would only be regarded as intergenerational alternation, not the continuation of a true individual’s life. So Mei Feng successfully developed memory storage and implantation technology. The result was a soybean-sized brain implant that could synchronize and store sensory stimulation and thought flow each second in the cloud. Implants could then be inserted into the hippocampal cortices to achieve seamless memory docking.

The technology triggered panic because of the possibilities it portended. It could solidify social classes, permanently enforce that ever-expanding gulf between rich and poor. Some thought it could even return civilization to a slavery economy. After struggling with these implications of immortality, global leaders reached the so-called Geneva consensus, which put the technology on a blacklist alongside large-scale biochemical, genetic, and nuclear weapons. These technologies could no longer be used on Earth. Research and development would be subject to the most intensive scrutiny and supervision. At the same time, they didn’t want to kill off the Lifechain Group. After all, they required Lifechain’s genetic debt technology to maintain the economic system.

My great-grandfather was from the Chaoshan ethnic group. He often recalled how his ancestors never feared storms, were keen on gambling, and spread capital and culture across the world. Nothing could stop the Chaoshan people from taking risks.

Therefore, as a benefit exchange, Lifechain Group took a big step in the scope of “self-governance” tacitly approved by the government. On the surface, the government still maintained regulatory function, but in fact gave the Group greater freedom.

Mei Feng’s investments in asteroid mining, construction of space stations, transformation of asteroids, capital, and technology weren’t too difficult. But the space mining companies all faced the same tricky issues with human resources. There weren’t enough qualified miners. Even with investments in high-paid training, demand couldn’t be met. Many looked to robots, but those steel buggers required a lot of water, condensers, relays, circuits, and batteries to maintain operations. Worse, they were only able to perform their more complex tasks in controlled environments.

My great-grandfather often joked that Opportunity’s geological survey of Mars took twenty years to achieve what a grad student could have knocked out in a week.

It was all a big chess game.

Lifechain Group searched for qualified candidates worldwide and signed debt contracts with them through a balance of temptation and coercion. These people sold their bodies, their genes, and their souls. Biological studies show that only when mind and body are perfectly in tune can human potential be maximized. Their genetic data would be transmitted to the space station, reassembled into new genetic material, split into fertilized eggs, and developed into embryos. Their memories, after a series of procedural stimulation and reproduction, would also be encrypted like debt data and transplanted back into the cerebral cortex of the clone.

The road to success was covered with more blood than you can imagine.

The Group spent ten years, tens of billions of dollars in funds, and undeclared numbers of victims to achieve its extraterrestrial economic model. In addition to precious metals and rare earth deposits, an early mining site also captured metastable helium from asteroids outside the solar system, allowing for both high energy density and renewability, which triggered a revolution in energy storage methods.

There were also unexpected disturbances, mutinies, mental breakdowns, collective slaughters. In human history, such scenes had played out countless times before when opening new frontiers. To conceal such horrors, the Group developed a method to seal up memories. Through AI, it generated a kind of ideological holy book, Treatise of Our Divine Debt, which was embedded in every miner’s cognitive module. Over the years, the Treatise grew in its spiritual influence and became a new religion.

The system worked so perfectly that years later, Earth had forgotten the existence of these people. The secret was known to only a very few. When Mei Feng died, my grandmother, Mei Li’ai, took over the company. She knew the huge political risks hidden in it and regarded it as the top secret of the group. By this time, the Lifechain Group had become an almost omnipotent force. Due to the Group, almost everyone was burdened with some form of debt.

When life becomes so complex, it also becomes extremely vulnerable. One slight misstep can lead to enormous downfall.

Just like everything you did up there in space, Mr. Dongfang Jue.

The weight of Mei Lingyilu’s story was so great that my instinct was to engage my cognitive module to process. Of course, it took me a few seconds to realize I would have to digest it by myself. That would take some time.

“So, we were slaves deceived into signing our own eternal deed of sale?” I was embarrassed by the heaviness of my words but could think of no others.

“Technically, everything you encountered up there was written into the contract. All was to the letter of the law.”

“But I don’t understand. Why save me? Wouldn’t it have made more sense for you to let me die?”

Mei Lingyilu gave a slight smile. “If we think according to the interests of the old times, that’s true. But now things are different.”

“Different how?”

“To tell the truth, we believe now is the best time to strip away that original sin.” She hesitated a moment to observe my reaction. “As the new leader of the Lifechain Group, I wasn’t aware of everything that had happened in the past. If you hadn’t sent that emergency signal, it’s quite possible the entire planet would never have known of these horrible acts . . . ”

“I’m listening.”

“Thanks to your selfless dedication in space, we were able to develop laser array launch technologies that greatly reduce the cost of entering low Earth orbit per unit load. We now also have four space elevators—in Quito, Mombasa, Riyadh, and Singapore. Even space miners don’t have to endure the mines for too long. We’ve reached a new space revolution. We are ready to truly colonize space—Mars, the asteroid belt, Europa, into the depths of the universe. We need heroes like you to inspire our people . . . ”

“Hero?” I sneered. “Skip the sales pitch and get to what you came to say.”

She burst into a stiff, awkward laugh that seemed out of place in our previous conversation.

“Now, there are some people, some forces, who would like to use your experience to attack the Group. They see you as an idol, as a symbol of resistance to the entire debt system . . . ”

“The debtless.” I realized she was referring to the crowd in the square.

“So you know?” Mei Lingyilu flashed a suspicious glance. “They claim the genetic debt system is outdated, too inflexible, and utterly immoral. They want the greater society to take on the debt and lead what they call the ‘Debt Opening Up Movement.’ If you’ve seen their people, you’ve seen the flickering lights on their foreheads, which represents the changing total of debt each person has added to mankind.”

“Doesn’t sound unreasonable.”

“For the past five thousand years, such has been the cycle of civilization. All revolutions aim to cancel debt and redistribute resources. It doesn’t matter whether those debts are written on papyrus or hard drives. But such revolutions must progress step by careful step. Otherwise, like with the Roman Empire and the Carolingian dynasty, society will regress to old systems, perhaps even collapse entirely.”

“So what do you, the famed leader, want me for? . . . And why do they call you leader instead of boss?”

She smiled again, and for the first time I caught the significance of her golden chain brooch. A secret key turned deep in my memory.

“Stand on our side, Mr. Dongfang Jue. Heroes are needed to lead us in the construction of the new system, a system that will never again enslave people into wearying debt or force them to compete for their survival. Instead, we will encourage people to create and contribute to the economic system they are born into, to give thanks to others, to society, to the gods, and to the universe. Let us design this system together and alleviate the old system’s tyranny of interest-based debt. We will internalize costs as a natural desire rather than passing them on to others and future generations. Will you join us?”

Mei Lingyilu held out her hand in a convincing pose.

I pretended to consider, then burst out laughing.

“If you weren’t already the leader, you’d make an amazing actor. Though perhaps these are the same thing?”

“What do you wish to say?”

“From the very start, you’ve known of the asteroid mines and all their dark secrets. But, some truths are best unknown as some shackles are best unbroken. Wouldn’t you agree, Ms. Mei Li’ai?”

Her delicate and tender expression hardened as though she were taking on a completely new personality. Perfect coldness flashed in her eyes.

“Sometimes I really must admire you,” she said. “It seems any miracle can befall you. None of our top scientists could explain how your consciousness broke through that memory barrier, which even our quantum computers can’t crack. They say, maybe only the power of love can explain it. See how romantic you are?”

“Love?” I stared in bewilderment. The word seemed so far away from me now.

“It seems only this part of your memory has not yet been restored. But after all, it is the deepest buried, under a deadly seal. We didn’t want you to meet Anan, so we applied a certain technique to your facial recognition algorithm to make you think she was a stranger every time you saw her.”

“Anan . . . ” Blurred faces began to take shape in my mind, overlapping to create a single face.

“Yes, Anan, your daughter. You sold her data to us for your own survival. You made her a sinner of that infinite hell as well.”

Flashes from my dreams rained over me in fragments, drowning me in suffocating terror. My eyes clenched as I tried to catch my breath. It felt as though my head were splitting open. Baldy had been right. Some truths were best unknown.

“I envy Anan, to have a father like you.” I forced my eyes open. Mei Lingyilu’s face—or Mei Li’ai’s face, rather—revealed a trace of genuine loss. “You’re willing to die for her, no matter how many times, no matter how many people you have to kill. Yet in the end, it’s all empty. My father, on the other hand, moved me around like a chess piece.”

I thought on my tiny embryo in Mother Whale and the girl next door who was always like a stranger to me. The two of us were so close but could never recognize each other. All this was the work of this immortal leader now in front of me and the ruthless empire of debt behind her.

“Let me pose my question one last time, Mr. Dongfang Jue. If we could bring Anan back, would you act the part of hero on behalf of the Lifechain Group?” Mei Lingyilu rose, bowed gently toward me. “Or, would you prefer to let the world know the truth behind the curtain? Your math is quite good. I’m sure you can do the calculations.”

Eyes fixed on her ageless face, I took quite some time to reach the solution.

10

Dreaming is a strange human design.

When I was on the asteroid, I always dreamed of Earth. Now that I’m back on Earth, I dream of the low gravity darkness of that living hell I once called home. There’s always some flake of the past I can’t give up.

I dream of Ginger, Freckles, Magpie, Popcorn . . . One by one, they say goodbye to me and leap from the rotating hatch through the mouth of Mother Whale into the dark sea of stars.

They wear no protective clothing, no helmets. They float naked as though suspended in amniotic fluid. The universe is their uterus.

I too am naked, racing along the slate-gray interior of Mother Whale, chasing after them. The endless starry sky, the curved horizon, the glittering dust spark the hallucinatory sense that I too am disappearing. I have no need for oxygen, gravity, or protection. Like a wolf lost in the wilderness on the verge of death, I connect again to the whole of the universe. Hidden forces in the body awaken. Senses spring open. I realize some part of me is not yet consolidated into the system. Some emotions thrive unencrypted, unfiltered by algorithms. Some things are more important than extending life.

I guess they’d all agree that the freedom from debt brought by death is not so much an escape as it is a return.

I stop running. I watch them float on until they merge with the stars.

I open my eyes in a smile. Before me now are two tombstones.

I brush away the dust, sweep webs from their names.

I lift a yellowing picture book from the cardboard box and set it before the tombstone on the left. On the cover of the album is a gray whale with a puppet boy, a long nose obscured by the shadow cast inside the whale’s belly. The puppet is grinning as if to say—

“You see my nose growing longer?”

I hold back tears as I pull the mottled picture frame from the box. The picture inside is so damp and mildewed I can no longer make out the original image. I turn it over and set it facedown on the tombstone at the right. In the corner of the frame is a twisted line of small characters that read, “Dad, don’t be afraid.”

I nod. It’s as if I am actually hearing that voice. Dad, don’t be afraid. The words echo inside me.

They say I’m no longer who I was when I was in space. The Lifechain Group never brought back my physical body. They just transmitted my consciousness back from the cloud to the Earth to install it in a freshly manufactured body. So, the reason I can’t adapt to Earth’s gravity has nothing to do with my muscles, but simply the inertia of my consciousness. They say the crimes committed by EM-L4-D28-58a on the asteroid have nothing to do with me.

I try not to think about what happened on Mother Whale. When I do, it only drives me crazy.

They say, I’m a new man.

I finish my prayers, rise to leave, and stroke my fingers along the edges of the two tombstones on my way out. I may never come back.

The debtless form a circle on the green hills outside the cemetery. They are waiting on me.

I wave. Their foreheads glimmer like clocks, like whirlpools, like songs of freedom.

For me, for Anan, for all the people of Earth.

Originally published in Chinese in the anthology The Promising Land.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

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

Angel Pattern

Henry Szabranski

The city waited for our approach, crouched upon the valley floor like some vast, decaying predator.

Skink, Creeper, and I paused at its edge to check for any signs of the patternmakers, but only whorls of ancient dust and crazed noon shadows greeted us. What seemed from a distance to be elegant domes and spires had turned out to be nothing of the sort. Huge outstretched arms, upright torsos, and out of scale heads thrust from the ground in a bizarre imitation of buildings. Even I, who had been brought up inside the giant body of the Motherman, was awed by the sheer size and intricacy of the grisly constructs.

“Closer,” Skink urged.

Creeper juddered into life beneath us. Over the course of our long journey the giant weaver’s once smooth walking action had been reduced to a bone-shaking stagger, but Skink had no choice other than to continue riding it. She could barely walk now, and no longer allowed me to carry her.

“Look, Percher.” She pointed.

I craned my neck, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. Cold sweat prickled and a familiar nausea stirred. Ever since we had left the shelter of the weave, the open sky terrified me. During the trip I had become well-practiced at distracting myself: by concentrating on the back of my hands, the increasingly sunburned nape of Skink’s neck, the intricacy of Creeper’s woven form—anything but acknowledge the yawning emptiness above. But now the lines of the city drew my gaze inexorably upward. Placed bright blue infinity squarely at the center of my attention. Framed by a perfectly circular ring of cloud high above the city.

Dots circled within it. Bigger than birds or razorbugs could be, to appear as large as they did from the ground. Difficult to guess their true scale. Only that they were mostly wing, and high, high up.

Overcome by dizziness, I steadied myself against one of Creeper’s many spiny protrusions.

“Is that them?” I forced myself to keep looking up. “The patternmakers?”

“Can’t be.” Skink gazed at the dots circling high above us, her expression unreadable. “Haven’t you heard the stories? They all gone, Percher. Long time ago.”

During the journey, when reaching the city still seemed like a distant prospect, before Creeper had begun to noticeably deteriorate, before our supplies ran low, we had sampled the wine nestling at the bottom of the basket Skink had stolen from the witch, Meghra. That night the stars were pin-bright and a warm breeze countered the nighttime chill atop the giant weaver’s rocking chassis. Skink said her legs ached, and maybe the wine would help ease the pain.

“You haven’t used them in days,” I pointed out. Though I had often seen her balancing on her hands, indeed walking on them more than a few steps, her body arched above her head in an increasingly familiar acrobatic performance.

“Don’t need to use them, Percher.” Her voice rose in uncharacteristic emotion. “They always hurt. Always.”

I noticed the glimmer in her eyes. “Sorry.” I was mortified. “Didn’t know.”

“I don’t talk about it. Does no good.” Her anger was already cooling. “But they do hurt. All the time.”

So many days we had been traveling together, and still she could surprise me.

I rummaged behind me into the basket lodged in Creeper’s carapace until I found the unopened flagons of wine. Handed one to Skink and un-stoppered one for myself.

The contents of Meghra’s basket had kept us alive during the long passage across the plain. “Found it in her cave,” Skink had explained, matter-of-factly, the day we set out. The day Skink had defeated her. “She doesn’t need it anymore.” The basket was full of neatly wrapped packages of spiced meat—which we avoided for as long as our hunger allowed, fearful of Meghra’s cannibalistic tastes—but also scrubbed root vegetables, dried fruits, nuts, flasks of spring water, and vinegary red wine. Supplies Meghra’s flesh body had still required or desired, even embedded in its fearsome suit of weave.

I sampled the wine, curious and a little anxious. It tasted pungent, sour, and unfamiliar. In the Motherman, Da had occasionally fermented bone fruit, though such luxuries never reached young climblings like me or outcasts like Skink. I remembered the boorish misbehavior and next day illness its consumption seemed to cause, but only a gradual feeling of dizzy contentment stole over me as I drank more. I asked Skink, “Is it helping?”

“Not making it worse.”

The warmth in my belly spread, and the concern that perhaps Meghra had left us a poisoned gift receded. I stood and balanced on Creeper’s back, swaying beneath the open sky without fear for the first time since the Motherman’s fall.

Skink laughed at my antics. “You dancing!” At her unspoken command, Creeper lurched so that I stumbled and fell back into my seat.

“Ouch!” But I was laughing. “How you make it do that?”

“Don’t know. Just can.”

“I try!” I screwed up my face in semi-mock effort. “Creeper! Go in circle!”

Of course the repurposed weaver took no notice of me. I had no link with it, no idea of what that would even feel like or how I could ever gain it.

“Silly, Percher. No sense going in circles—journey will take longer.”

“Circles!” I shouted. “Creeper, do as I say!”

Creeper began to sway left and then right, but I knew it was only Skink indulging me. I staggered over to the nub above its head that served as her seat. “No good. Creeper has but one master.”

“Don’t forget it.”

“Maybe I’ll learn to how to control the weave. In the library, when we reach the city.”

“Not a competition, Percher,” Skink said. She reached for the flagon gripped in my hand. “More wine.”

“We’ve had enough,” I warned, half-seriously.

“It’s medicine,” she said, and took another swig. “Need more.”

I followed her example, and for a while we sat in companionable silence beneath the swaying stars.

“Doesn’t it worry you?” Skink eventually said, her voice quiet and serious.

“Hmmm?” I thought she was going to mention the city, or the prospect of meeting the patternmakers, or even just crossing the plain in the darkness. But I was wrong.

“That I’m a killer.”

I hesitated, struggling to emerge from my comfortable mood. This was the first time that she had mentioned such thoughts troubled her. “Meghra would have killed you. Or worse. You had no choice.”

“Maybe.” She remained pensive. “Broc, too?”

I rubbed my jaw. “Yes. Same.” Broc had been my older brother. Always little love lost between us, and by the time Skink had pushed him out of the Motherman’s skull into the mist far below he had been infected by the clevers’ murderous pattern. “Saved both our lives,” I said. “Twice.”

Skink’s hand repeatedly rubbed her calf. A tracery of silvery white scars I hadn’t noticed before marked the skin. Eager to change the subject, I asked her what they were.

“Mist caught me. When I was a baby.”

I was surprised again. I had no idea. So much I still didn’t know about her. “Thought you were born . . . this way.”

“My legs? I was. It’s why I couldn’t outrun the mist.” She gave me a withering look. Truth was I probably deserved it. When she was an outcast, before I properly knew her, before the fire and the razorbugs and the fall of the Motherman . . . I hadn’t been interested in her past. Only that she was a burden that Ma or Da made me carry when they needed to rest. My face radiated shame.

“I was exploring,” she said. “Playing, climbing down. Got lost. The mist rose, and . . . ” She waved at her left foot, which in particular always pointed inward and was heavily veined with scar tissue. “Afterward, tribe tried to offer me back to the mist. Even my Ma and Da. Said I was chosen. Said I was cursed. So I ran. Best I could. Climbed and pulled myself up away from my family until I couldn’t climb anymore.”

Without thinking I put my hand on her arm. “You must have felt so scared. So lonely.” She didn’t flinch away, as sometimes she did.

“Was. Until your Ma and Da found me. Took me in. Began whole new life.”

We grew silent. Remembering what we had left behind. Who and what we had lost, to the razorbugs and the rot and the fire and the mist.

She reached for something beside her. “Here.” She held out a pendant of some sort, strung upon a single fine withy. Had she found it in Meghra’s basket? Shaped like a tiny weaver, it glistened darkly in her hand.

“What’s this? My own little Creeper?”

“Made it for you. A gift.” Her eyes looked directly into mine, sincere and fearful, so unlike her usual defiant expression. I was momentarily lost for words as I realized how much of a fool I had been for treating her offering lightly. It was obvious she had spent some time and effort making it.

I carefully took the pendant, my fingers brushing hers very briefly, strangely sensitive and awkward at the same time, and pulled the ornament over my head. Tiny claws scritched the hairs on my chest. I said, “It’s beautiful.” And before I knew it, “You’re beautiful, too.”

Her arms twined around my shoulders. Strong hands on the back of my neck. So many times I had held her, carried her, but never before like this; face-to-face. The taste of wine on her lips, on her breath warm.

So many days together. And still she could surprise me.

Creeper managed to clank and shudder down the final slope toward the city. If it had been uphill I doubt we would have made it. The weaver made a groaning noise and sank down beside the closest, half-collapsed tower. Before we had even dismounted, one of its many limbs had extended and began to pick apart the spilled mesh from a sloughed-off tongue of weave, eager to incorporate the spare withy strands into its own fraying pattern.

Skink clambered down Creeper’s side. Fleet and skillful upon and within the weave, she slowed considerably when she reached the ground and took her first, hesitant step onto the debris-littered avenue. I watched her for a few moments before climbing down to offer my help. Things had been strangely awkward between us since that drunken night. Much remained unspoken. Was she regretful? Had I upset her? Did she just want things to go back to the way they had been before? Perhaps all these thoughts only troubled my mind and not hers.

I steadied Skink as she leaned down and picked up a long, dark fragment of weave. “It’s dead.” She twisted it in her strong hands and it crackled apart. “Old and dead.” Disappointment, and perhaps a little worry, were evident in her voice. “Everything here . . . dead. Notice that, Percher? No trees or weeds or plants or grass or anything. Just dust and old weave.”

She pushed away from my shoulder and limped toward the nearest building, a thick tentacle corkscrewing into the sky. She gripped its exterior and tried to climb. Withies snapped and crumbled beneath her fingers, but she managed to hold on. In moments she had pulled herself off the ground and slithered into a small opening above my head. There was little chance of me following her; I tried to grasp the weave in her trail but it crumbled to dust in my hand, too brittle to hold my clumsy weight.

A gust of wind stirred the shards of weave around me. The tentacle building groaned and swayed. I wondered how deep its foundations lay. Just our luck that for countless centuries it had stood, but now upon our arrival it seemed it would collapse at any moment.

I noticed a small, pale globe in the gray ash near my feet. I picked it up: a skull of some small animal; a mouse or rat or some other rodent. The bone was pitted and badly eroded, as if scoured by acid or millennia of dust-laden winds. I dropped it, shuddering, suddenly reminded of Da, of the way I had found him, that time back in the Motherman when the mist rose too high. Thank the gods we were finally safe from at least that curse, here in the heart of the plateau.

Skink’s dark-smeared face reappeared at the hole she had crawled into. “No good. Need to go farther into the city.” I watched in relief as she scrambled back down to join me on the ground.

“That’s where you think it is? The library?” I presumed this was where Skink still wanted us to go, the place where she said Meghra had discovered how to control the weave. Skink had seen some of Meghra’s mind during their terminal battle. Learned something of the witch’s memories, about the ruined city she had visited, the place where Meghra had gained the ancient knowledge of the patternmakers.

“Farther in. And high. It’s up high.”

I looked up at the dying towers around us, their tips swaying in the wind. The sick feeling in my stomach growing. The mysterious winged dots higher still within their halo of cloud, patient as vultures.

“Oh good,” I said.

In our absence, Creeper had given up trying to rebuild itself. It turned out the collapsed building’s withies were too desiccated to use as replacements for the weaver’s own worn and damaged parts. Instead, it had reconfigured itself. Shedding material, becoming thinner, taller. I watched in fascination as Creeper bent and twisted its structure, discarding or reforming its body and limbs until it finally resembled a hunched biped. A miniature Motherman.

With a human-shaped cavity in its torso.

I jumped at a touch on my shoulder, so intent on watching Creeper’s weirdly mobile innards reconfigure themselves that I had failed to notice Skink beside me.

“Need to walk awhile,” she said. “You don’t mind?”

“Mind?”

She pointed at the opening in Creeper’s chest. “Only room for one this time.”

“I . . . sure. Don’t mind.” Actually, now that she mentioned it, I did feel excluded, although I knew it wasn’t fair or rational. We had always ridden Creeper together until this point.

“Thank you.” She smiled, and briefly my chest tightened with some strange, ache-some emotion. Creeper, I, even the fallen Motherman—we had all borne Skink at some point.

She limped over to the newly humanoid weaver and climbed into its black heart. For a moment I was reminded of Meghra, of how she had similarly worn such a body. A different shape, much larger than this, but essentially the same idea. A dark carriage to help her weakened limbs move.

Even after Skink had settled inside it, Creeper continued to change. Rebalancing itself, closing tighter around its mistress. In some parts it became difficult to see where Creeper ended and where Skink began. I remembered when Skink had first found the weaver, half-dead and small enough to fit into her palm. Could it always change its shape this way, I wondered, or was proximity to the city somehow enhancing its capabilities? Or was it Skink’s control that was improving?

“Look at you,” I said quietly, a thought made vocal. “Look what you become.” Then, louder: “You’ve already mastered the weave, Skink. Is there really any more you can learn from this place?”

Creeper/Skink swayed as it practiced balancing on two feet, limbering up, exploring the range of motion of its new configuration. “You don’t understand,” Skink said, her voice muffled. “The deeper I go, the more there is.”

“Do you need to go deeper?” I remembered the dried-up carcass we had found rotting in the center of the Motherman’s brain. Skink had briefly taken its place, made the burning colossus that was our home walk so that we could reach the safety of the plateau before the Motherman collapsed into the deadly mist swirling at its feet. But at what cost? I remembered, too, the way Skink had destroyed Meghra, turned the witch’s own weave against her.

During the battle, the old witch had almost sucked out Skink’s brain, absorbed its pattern into her own. But sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t Skink who had accidentally managed the reverse.

Doesn’t it worry you? That I’m a killer?

She was laughing now, still enjoying Creeper moving around her. “Why limit myself?”

“Did Meghra limit herself? When she tried to read the pattern of your mind?”

Skink’s dark eyes flashed with anger. “Different!”

“Was it? Maybe that’s how she began. Came to this place and when she returned she tore away the brains of those she used to call family.”

Creeper/Skink raised a long and powerful arm, curled weave fingers that could easily crush mine. “Not same at all, Percher. She damaged long before she came here. Never found more but the simplest mysteries.”

“More than enough.”

“Don’t be stupid, Percher. You know why we came here.” Weave hands rested on weave hips. “Expected better of you.”

“Expected too much!”

With an exasperated sigh Creeper/Skink turned toward the city.

“Too much,” I whispered, to their retreating backs.

No signs of life, farther in. No weeds or vines. No birds, no insects. Just dust and withies and half-buried, crumbling skeletons and the circling dots far above. Even so, I thought I heard skittering noises and rustlings deep in the weave. I picked up my pace, making sure I stayed in Creeper/Skink’s protective shadow; I knew from experience I should trust my instincts about being watched or followed.

The anthropomorphic buildings pressing in around us became increasingly bizarre and disturbing; huge body organs or forms both too alike and unlike human. The deeper we ventured into the city the more they unsettled me; we walked amongst the feet of a grotesque and crowded stampede of titans in flight, or battle, or anguish. I had hoped to be reassured by the presence of the weave around me, thought it would help shield me from the tyranny of the sky, a familiar environment I could scurry back into, but it turned out to be no comfort at all. The patternmakers’ city was no cozy new home; instead it was a frozen moment of panic, of despair, of dissolution.

Eventually the rustlings and movements around us grew too loud to ignore. Creeper/Skink and I halted as the denizens of the city began to reveal themselves at last.

Weavers crawled out of the weave. From fist-sized beetles to tiny, barely visible mites that at first seemed like falls of dust, except that they quickly gathered into a marching army. Grasping hold of each other, forming chains, spheres, tubes, sheets of interlinked bodies and limbs, all merging into each other in a rippling, complexifying mass. Clumping together in mounds, clambering over each other like eager toads, forming tottering columns, extruding spindly arms and legs. Had the patternmakers of old encoded themselves into the weave itself? If so, their forms had devolved over time. Like the clevers in the Motherman’s head, barely capable of speech and even motion; groaning and honking and squealing, hopping and tumbling and slithering into the streets like a withy tide. Dozens of newborn mouths babbling, spewing at first nonsense, and then distinct words:

“Well! Well!”

“Well, well, well!”

“Welcome!”

I drew close to Creeper/Skink. The transforming weavers weren’t overtly threatening, but their sheer number and inconstancy intimidated me. The streets on all sides quivered with strange life. “What do you want?” I cried.

Skink immediately made a shhh-ing noise. “Quiet, Percher!”

We were surrounded. My disquiet rapidly grew into outright terror. What was there to stop all these creatures from simply burying us beneath their combined mass?

From the streets on the right, a chorus: “Intruders!”

From the left, a reply: “Seekers!”

“Yes, seekers,” Skink said. “Seekers! That’s what we are.”

A debate seemed to rage amongst the weavers. Hissing, clicking, popping, as if their constituent material were physically boiling. Then they appeared to settle, and a single voice from all ’round spoke: “To the mouth!” Stubby tentacles, elongated fingers, claws, and innumerable other types of limb and digit motioned in the same direction.

Two of the largest and closest weaver colonies, a pair of shambling humanoid mounds only a few steps from us, pointed in the direction we were already heading. The center of the city. “Yes, the mouth, the mouth!” the first and largest one said, voice vaguely male. “Find yourselves there,” the smaller one said, voice vaguely female. Both of them, in their forms and in their mannerisms, uncannily familiar . . . but my mind shied away from making any definite identification.

“We are going.” Skink’s voice was clear and calm. As if she were addressing a clutch of misbehaving young climblings. “Do not concern yourselves.”

The weaver tide withdrew as quickly as it had appeared, slithering and clambering back into its countless nest holes in the buildings around us. Soon only the closest two forms remained, the humanoid pair staring at us with freshly grown eyes.

“To understand and control the weave,” the smaller creature said, “you must become one with it.”

“I know,” said Skink.

I looked between her and the withy creatures, and at that moment I could not say which of the three of them terrified me more.

The city’s hollow heart stretched as wide as the tallest building stood high: a huge circular pit in the compacted, layered weave. A ring of enormous faces surrounded the hole, a coven of titans overseeing the invisible brew within it. Heads larger even than the Motherman’s, peering into the opening, mouths and eyes open or grimacing as if in shock or surprise.

Crystalline withies crackled beneath my feet as I stepped toward the pit’s edge. The lip around the perfectly circular hole was slightly raised, and the rim itself rounded. Water from the hills around the valley must have once pooled around the rim until it had eroded channels and narrow gullies through the weave. A series of waterfalls drizzled down the pit’s throat until they dissolved into a pale mist in the darkness far below. As far as I could tell it might as well have reached all the way to the center of the planet. I picked up a broken fragment of weave and tossed it in, watching it tumble and turn until I could see it no more.

Beside me, Skink leaned forward out of Creeper’s chest. The weaver had reconfigured itself again, becoming even more compact and humanlike. Perhaps modeling itself after the weavers we had left behind in the city streets.

I indicated the pit. “Was it made during the war?”

“No. Look.” Skink waved at the huge faces surrounding us. “Point toward it, built ’round it. Hole must have been here first.”

I scuffed the withies at my feet. How deep did they reach? I wondered if the whole plateau was made of them. The land upon which we stood only a thin skin of rock and soil layered over a giant plug of weave thrust up from the otherwise endless sea of mist. How many weavers must it have taken to create such a mass? How incredibly powerful the patternmakers must have been, to muster and master such resources.

We circled the raised lip of the pit, slowly. The weave here was not the dry dead stuff we had encountered on the outskirts. Dark, lustrous, pliable. We must be close to some source of power or nutrition. Whatever that could even be.

One building near the pit was different from the others. Like a thin-stalked toadstool leaning over the hole, it arced in a curve so that its disc-like crown seemed to hover directly above the pit. Its constituent withies so densely woven its outer skin appeared solid and without gap. Skink immediately pointed it out.

“The library.”

My heart leaped. At last, the prospect of some reward for our long journey. The possibility of answers. A whole treasure trove of them.

We followed the raised, ragged edge of the pit toward it. But as we approached the entrance at the base of the stalk Skink hesitated.

Between the library and us, a single thin tongue of weave reached out over the pit. I wondered at its purpose. Had the patternmakers used it to toss sacrifices into the heart of the underworld? Or simply basked there in the warmth of the air rising from the pit? Perhaps prayers or poems were recited for the delectation of the giant onlooking faces.

“Don’t stop,” I urged Skink. We were almost at the entrance to the library building, and I was concerned that the crowd of weave creatures we had left behind would reemerge at any time, or that some gigantic creature would come slithering out of the rotten core of the world to pay us greetings.

“The pit . . . ” she said, confirming my worst fears.

“What about it? The library’s just there . . . ”

But Skink was already limping across the narrow gantry out to where it ended above the center of the pit.

Exasperated, I followed after her, terrified of missing a step and falling. I supposed that was one way of discovering what lay at the bottom. This close, the pit seemed like a giant maw with shards of weave like teeth pointing inward. I remembered the stories Da used to tell the tribe, of the great Dragon that had created the mist that swallowed the world. Such a tale seemed entirely more plausible, looking down into the endless pit from directly above it.

“Why are we doing this?” I asked.

“Just curious.”

“About this hole? Biggest latrine in the world.”

She didn’t even smile at my attempt at humor. “No. It’s important. The weavers told us. And I sense it.”

I waved at the council of giant faces looming over the pit. “This all that’s left of the patternmakers? Restless ruins? Weavers spouting gibberish? There’s no special knowledge or wisdom here.”

“You can’t see.” Skink spoke matter-of-factly. Not even thinking her words might hurt me. She leaned forward out of Creeper’s chest to get a better view of the pit. “Makers moved on. Became . . . more complicated. More interesting.” This last murmured almost to herself.

“Can we go to the library now?” I was frustrated and a little saddened by the disparity between our views. “Find the answers we came for?”

Skink didn’t move. Only her dark hair stirred, its long strands lifted by the warm breeze issuing from the pit’s unseen depths. What fascination did the abyss hold for her? Only confusion and anxiety gripped me. What could she sense with her strange talents that I could not?

I swallowed hard, struck by a sudden wave of vertigo. The blue sky above combined with our exposed position upon that far too delicate arm. “Please. Let’s get away from here.”

Reluctantly, Skink allowed herself to be drawn away from the pit. “There’s something down there,” she repeated, staring over her shoulder. “Something powerful.”

“Please don’t wake it,” I said.

Creeper was too large to fit into the opening at the bottom of the library tower.

I watched, fascinated, as the weaver shed more and more of its body. Skink’s unification with Creeper was complete; the weaver no longer existed as a separate entity. Skink balanced upon stilt-like withy legs that to all intents and purposes had become extensions of her own, only straight and strong and unnaturally thin. Weave encased her entire lower body, threading over her arms and shoulders, even lacing through her hair. The great mass of the weaver, itself mostly scavenged from Meghra’s disintegrated body, had either been discarded or become so dense and compact it now fitted within the confines of Skink’s hybrid form.

“What did you do to Creeper?” I asked, disturbed by her new tall shape, by her unfathomable and growing affinity with the weave. Was this how Meghra had started? Or the Motherman himself? I reminded myself it was not Skink’s form but her mind, her heart, that mattered. But the truth was, I was increasingly worried some profound change had overcome her. Something increasingly driving us apart. As if we had become members of different species. Grown distinct by time and circumstance.

She gave me a questioning look. “Creeper was never a separate thing, Percher. It was always just a part of me.”

Her revelation left me momentarily speechless. I remembered the little skittering weaver, hardly the size of Skink’s hand when she had first fished it out of the weave. It had taken me a while to grow comfortable with the creature, but I had begun to consider it a friend. And yet Skink was now telling me it had only ever existed as a puppet she had animated? The idea upset me in ways I couldn’t put into words.

“You can . . . you can split yourself like that?”

She shrugged. “It’s no big effort.” She bent over so that she could enter the library. I followed, the entrance ceiling unreachable, even if I stretched my arms above me and stood on tiptoes.

As we spiraled higher and higher, narrow slit windows afforded us increasingly dramatic glimpses of the city below.

“Sure this is the library?” I asked.

“Yes. Saw it.” Skink stopped and half-twisted back to look at me. “You’ll help me, Percher? Read the books? Won’t be able to do it without you.”

“Of course.” Had she been fretting all this time that I wouldn’t?

We emerged out of the winding passageway into the center of the disc at the top of the building’s spindly supporting stalk. It was an environment utterly alien to me. A floor flat and solid, as if made from pounded earth. Faceted crystal glass windows set all around the outside of the circular room gave an astonishing view over the city’s dark artifacts; segmented, distorted, multicolored, magnified and bent, crazed and in some cases inverted. It reminded me of the view from the Motherman’s eyes, and at times I had to check that different panes looked out onto the same city and not some other place or time.

And, of course, apart from the dazzling windows were the books. Thousands of books. Tens of thousands of books. Nestled in ordered rows upon freestanding shelves arrayed around the circular floor’s perimeter, the shelves aligned so that their lengths pointed toward the passageway emerging from the center. Holding huge tomes bound in hide and gold leaf piping. Tiny pamphlets that crumbled when glanced at. Thick volumes wider than they were tall. And everything in between. Some had been spilled upon the dusty floor, their yellowed pages fanned and their embossed spines broken, but the vast majority untouched in their dusty homes. So many books.

“Remember when Da used to read to us?”

I jumped at the sound of Skink’s voice, at the words that might have been plucked from my own mind. She stood beside one of the shelves, her fingers rested upon a random volume. “Yes, of course.”

On most evenings, Da used to gather the tribe and read to us from the books in the library he (or more often I, toward the end) carried in a huge sack upon his back. Tales of the old world, of a time before the mist spilled out from the mouth of the Dragon and covered all the land.

White whales. Goblins under mountains. Shadows chased across the thousand island sea. I smiled in fond remembrance. “Such stories.”

The library had been my privilege and my burden to bear after Da died, but I had never tried to revive his habit of reading to the tribe. Fear of usurping his memory perhaps, or fear of my reading ability and the weakness of my own voice compared to his. Many of the words he used, and the settings and characters he read about, were baffling to us who had only ever known life in the weave. Even so, we had listened, captivated by his rolling tone, by the sounds of the unfamiliar words—like clock, and sword, and car, and gun—and tried to imagine a time when we had been more than scurrying vermin within a giant weave relic. Reminders of a world that once belonged to us and not to the lethal mist far below. That we had once been its masters.

Such dreams.

Da would close a book and there would always be a collective groan. “More!” we would complain. “Don’t stop there.” But he would promise more tomorrow, and we would settle down in our overnight nests and drift off to sleep, curled up high in the Motherman, way above the mist that seemed to twist and form shapes as if it dreamed dreams of its own.

And now here we stood, as if we were characters in one of those stories ourselves, adventurers escaped from the burning husk of the Motherman, in this ancient city with its hidden mysteries and reanimated residents, in a real library the likes of which Da would have been ecstatic to explore.

Desks, with maps spread across their length. Telescopes, globes, other intricate instruments of unknown origin and utility.

With the sun lighting up the library’s windows like one vast multifaceted, multicolored lantern, I found the place utterly beautiful, utterly enchanting. If we found no other wonder in the city, this, for me, would be enough.

I carefully picked up the nearest book. It was heavier than I expected. I blew dust off the tooled leather cover and opened it to a random page. Flicked it to another, then another. Picked a different book. Walked to another shelf, looked there. Then one farther away, my earlier joy reduced to a form of panic.

Every page in every book I turned to. Full of unfamiliar characters and symbols, indecipherable words and alien lettering.

All utterly unreadable.

I closed the cover on yet another dusty tome and slid it back into place in its shelf. “I don’t understand it. How could Meghra have learned to control the weave here?”

“Not in library, Percher. Not from books.” Skink was leafing through a large illustrated book on anatomy, her expression as pensive as one of the gargantuan faces gathered around the pit below. I glimpsed detailed diagrams of birds and feathers and autopsied wings.

“You said you saw it. In Meghra’s mind. The city and the library. It’s why we came. It’s why I came.” I tried to keep the accusation from my voice, and failed utterly. Had she just mentioned the library so that I would come with her? Didn’t she know I would have followed her no matter what?

She looked up from a full-page drawing of a bat and frowned at me. “Did see the city. Did see the library. But how can I be sure what she learned where?” She waved her weave-laced hand in frustration. “Perhaps she tricked me. Even at the end.”

I shuddered at the memory of Meghra’s death. Crushed by her own weave. Crushed on Skink’s command. Doesn’t it worry you? That I’m a killer?

Skink closed the bird book and straightened to her full new height. “Perhaps there’s somewhere else. Here in the city. Where she learned.”

For a moment I struggled to think of any other place. Then I realized where Skink meant. “The pit.”

“Yes.”

I was dismissive. “How could she learn anything there?”

“Don’t know. Want to take a closer look.”

“It’s a hole . . . ” I sighed, seeing there was no point arguing. “Don’t trust this city, Skink. Not at all.”

“There’s something waiting for me. It knows I’m here.”

She walked on her weave-reinforced feet toward the exit. I hesitated. Like the pit to Skink, the books called to me. Surely there was something here we had missed, some readable section hidden in a dusty corner. We had only sampled a tiny fraction of the volumes in a tiny fraction of the shelves. But Skink was already away, her face set; she didn’t even glance back at me. It didn’t matter to her this time whether I followed or not.

I had to jog down the passageway to catch and keep up with her.

At the bottom of the library tower, by the gantry leading over the pit, they were already waiting for her. The weavers stacked together to form two composite but distinct entities. Only this time they were well defined. Dark replicas of people all too familiar to us.

My sky-lost, pattern-rotted brother Broc, was one.

Hunched over, half-dead, half-blind witch Meghra the other.

“Stay away,” I warned.

Skink laid a hand on my shoulder. “Percher.”

“No!” I felt a fear unlike any since I first saw Meghra rising from her cave. Crawling over the ridge to peel our skulls off. Not fear for myself, you understand, but for Skink. I didn’t want to lose her. Not to the weave. Not to whatever lay in the pit. Not to those creepy, amalgam creatures.

Not to anything.

“Percher. I know what I’m doing.”

“No you don’t. Not here.” The giant faces around the pit edge seemed to blur and twist through the hot air rising, become even more grotesque and menacing. The city was purely hostile, I was increasingly certain of it. “Look at them: brother and witch. Something here must know our minds and our memories.”

“Percher, please. Can look after myself.”

That had certainly been true so far. But something about the pit terrified me. Why was Skink so dismissive of the danger? Here was deliberate, sophisticated control of the weave like nothing we had encountered before.

“Let me go,” Skink said. “You can stay here.”

Slowly, against all my instincts, I stood back as Skink approached the Not-Broc and the Not-Meghra. The pair bowed to her, and indicated the gantry arching over the pit. They spoke in unison.

“Find the answers you seek.”

“You don’t know the questions.” Skink’s tone was a mixture of defiance and amusement.

They bowed again, mockeries of the people they were meant to resemble. “Nevertheless.”

The three of them walked out over the pit. I hesitated at the edge of the gantry, heart thumping in my throat, legs suddenly weak. Last time I had been beside Skink, but now she was already far out at the arm’s end. I would have to cross the thin bridge alone.

My legs refused to budge.

“If you truly want to understand and control the weave,” the Not-Meghra creature was saying, “you must first understand the mist.”

“It kills everything it touches,” I shouted from the edge, still unable to step onto the gantry. Images of Da, half-dissolved, rose unbidden in my mind.

“It’s far more complicated than that.” The Not-Meghra leaned over the pit. “More interesting.”

“Each speck of mist is a tiny withy,” Not-Broc said, vastly more erudite in his new incarnation than he had ever been in life. “The makers’ ultimate building blocks.”

The weaver creatures now stood on either side of Skink.

“Listen to the Dragon,” they said. “Can’t you hear?”

Skink closed her eyes.

“Skink, no!”

The withies beneath my feet seemed to tremble. The faces around us swayed. Warm air rose from deep within the pit, and something behind the weave lining of its throat seemed to glow, like the embers of a fire, only blue not red.

That subterranean light, getting brighter. Pulsing around the insides of the pit, swirling ’round and ’round, faster. The warm, fetid breeze rising in a torrent now, so much it lifted Skink’s withy-tangled mop of hair in a single agitated mass. Just as when she had been in the witch Meghra’s grasp, her arms spread wide and her eyes rolled back into her head.

The weave was trying to take her again.

“Skink!”

Eyes closed, face rapt, arms spread, the two weaver attendants crouched as if in fear beside her, I heard her quite clearly say:

“Make the pain stop.”

A wish, not a complaint.

The breath caught in the back of my throat.

Something rose from within the pit. A dancing, swaying, searching tentacle. A hazy, thin-tipped tongue. I realized then what must lie in the bottomless depths. The same thing that surrounded the plateau. That we had escaped falling into so many weeks ago.

Da’s tales of the Dragon were true. Here we stood, atop its very throat. The whole woven plateau its vast body.

And the mist was rising from deep within the pit. The flesh-eating mist that had destroyed the world.

I rushed forward—but the withies peeled upward and formed an impassable barrier between myself and the gantry upon which Skink stood.

Too late I realized just how much we had underestimated the danger.

“Skink!”

“Percher!”

She could no longer be seen. Blue-pink tendrils of mist like tongues of flame had overrun the gantry. “Run!” she shouted. “Climb!”

Mist boiled up out of the Dragon’s mouth, spilling over the edge and rolling out into the city.

“Skink!”

I waited as long as I could, dodging the individual, slow-moving patches, trying to see if Skink had escaped the gantry, but it was impossible. The mist’s acid touch destroyed every living thing in its path. The pit, the gantry, and everything above it was covered in mist, and the surrounding streets would soon be flooded too.

She was gone.

I ran, retreating back into the library. If there were doors I would have slammed them behind me. But there were none.

Ma shouting: “Climb! Climb fast! Keep climbing!”

That one time, that last time, I had seen the mist up close, when we had descended to try to forage in the lower reaches of the Motherman’s belly, to scrounge what we could, and to find shelter from the more chilly climes above. Some rare internal convulsion drove the mist high up the body of the Motherman that day. Ma and Da had grabbed everyone and everything and warned us all to climb immediately, to climb fast, to keep climbing. My brother Broc, as usual, scoffed and chided everyone else for cowardliness, but at the same time he climbed as fast as the rest of us, occasionally glancing down with a mixture of morbid curiosity and fear.

Skink had clung to my back as I climbed with the others, that time before she had revealed her athletic abilities, and all was well, all was as expected, until I heard her say, “Where’s Da?” and I paused, because she was right. I had not seen him climbing with us.

“The library,” Ma said, pausing beside us, barely hidden terror in her voice.

The sack with the books was heavy—oh how I knew!—but that day Da insisted he would carry it, and instead Skink clung to my back in a rough harness.

I didn’t wait to unburden myself, but descended with Skink still upon me, watching for signs of the mist rising through the Motherman’s porous weave, down to the huge curved plate of his pelvis, the lowest we had ever been. To my horror, there were obvious tendrils of mist probing through the Motherman’s organs, well-defined tubes of blue-pink smoke questing along the twisted withies.

“Percher.” Skink, in my ear. “Mist rising. Mist hungry!”

“I see it.”

Every instinct screamed for me to retreat, to climb away, to reach safety.

Instead, I went lower.

Soon found Da.

He had almost made it. Really, the mist had only just caught his legs. But it was enough. He must have slipped, injured, and then fallen back farther into its eroding grasp.

Bones, like withies, seemed immune to the worst effects of the mist. Though even those were hollowed out and pitted, and when, later that night, we tearfully bundled them up and cast them down as a final offering to the cruel gods, there hardly seemed anything left of them at all.

His last act had been to save the books. Those cursed, blessed books. Lifted them with his strong arms, lodged them in a tangle of withies to be found. His last gift to me. A gift I had lost. Save his books or save Skink, that had been the choice.

Now here I was, slumped amongst the dust and the moldering, useless books of the patternmakers’ library, and it was Skink who was lost. I gazed out of the crystal windows, down into the throat of the pit. There was no sign of her. She had been right in the midst of the pit as the mist overwhelmed it and the streets of the city.

The mist had claimed her, and probably soon it would claim me too.

One of the library windows was shattered. The wind blew through it, turning the pages of books fallen nearby. I teetered upon the window’s ledge and gazed down on the mist, just as I had used to do in gaps in the Motherman’s chest so long ago, true to my name once more.

The sun was dipping. Shadows of giants writhed across the carpet of mist where the pit once gaped. I watched it curling around buildings, changing texture from smooth to saw-toothed, to crystalline, to molten. Changing pattern all the time, pulsing, designs arising and fading, competing with and in conversation with each other.

At least it was not rising.

Safe for the moment, I drew back into the library.

What had Skink thought she was doing? What had she unleashed? Why?

And now she was gone.

I raged at her. And I wept. I curled up in despair and tried to sleep. I would awake and it would all be a nightmare, fading away. But I could not sleep. Some sort of strange waking dream seized me.

Surely it was not just Skink who had the power to control the weave? I had stood beside her in the Motherman’s brain when she had impelled him to move. Why couldn’t I do the same? With such power I would tear down the whole rotten city. Close the Dragon’s mouth forever.

Skink had said she couldn’t learn how to control the weave from the books in the library, but maybe she was wrong. It wasn’t the way she or Meghra had learned—but maybe it was the way I could.

There was power in the library. In its pages. Waiting to be found. Maybe she had been able to sense the weave, but I could sense the books, even the unreadable ones. The knowledge they contained was waiting to be freed; it just needed to be unlocked. Somehow.

Da had told me once of someone who had learned to swim, having never been in water before, just by reading how to do it in a book. Poring over the instructions, the descriptions, the diagrams. How there had been special types of books—manuals, he had called them—that contained no stories, only instructions on how to achieve this, that, or the other. All I needed to do was find a manual on how to read the unfamiliar writing. To control the weave. To master the mist. Somewhere there had to be one. The answer could be on the next shelf, in the next tome, the next page.

I stood alone in the library, laughing. For a moment, at least, I could imagine myself a maker; an architect of the world around me. Even that faint echo of glory, intoxicating. Is that what Skink had felt when she made the Motherman walk, when she defeated Meghra? That feeling of control?

I would start small.

Fishing out from under my shirt the pendant Skink had made, I dangled it before me, glittering like a dark jewel in the fading sunlight. I concentrated on it, through the tears its memory brought to my eyes. I commanded it to leap into life, to grow, to take on giant dimensions.

But no matter how hard I tried, how much I raged at the desiccated little creature, I could not make it move. Not a quiver. Not even one insect-leg twitch.

Whatever magic skill was required to interact with the weave, whatever inner flame burned within Skink . . . it appeared I lacked it utterly.

Useless.

I tore the pendant from my neck and faced the open window again.

Books I had here, yes. Perhaps I could even learn to read their alien script. In time. But I had no time. No food here. No water. No Skink. No will.

I climbed out the window, first my head, my arms, my shoulders. Balanced on its ledge. The red sun burning on the western horizon warming my face. I closed my eyes, wavered. Best not to look.

How long would it take me to fall? Would I be dissolved, like Skink and Da and Ma and Broc, all taken, one way or another, by the mist?

I could just stay there, right at the very edge, let gravity make its judgment. The decision would not even be mine, really.

A strong downdraft buffeted me. Seized by a wave of vertigo and fear I tried to draw back.

But it was too late. My feet lost traction, slipped. I wheeled my arms, tried to fall back into the library rather than forward into the mist-smothered pit, but even this movement unbalanced me.

The ledge beneath my feet cracked and sagged.

I began to slip.

A beating of wings above.

I looked up as I slid down.

A huge shadow over me.

A hand extended toward mine. Even as I teetered on the collapsing sill, my gaze followed the curve of the arm, the hugely muscled shoulders and chest, the long neck. To the face. Surrounded by its unruly fall of dark hair.

“Grab hold,” Skink said. “I’ll pull you up.”

She squeezed in through the broken window, careless of the remaining shards of glass. As she did so her vast wings folded and refolded in on themselves, continually halving in size, and at the same time becoming more diffuse. Soon they were gone entirely, drifted away like ash, like a dream.

“You can fly.”

“Can do many things now, Percher.”

She squatted beside me on the library floor. She looked exhausted and pained, much more so than I had ever seen, not even after Meghra almost defeated her. Despite its intricate new casing of weave she still rubbed her twisted leg.

“Thought I lost you. Thought . . . you chose the mist.”

She gave a bitter laugh. “People tried to throw me into the mist before, Percher. I’m not going to do it to myself.”

“I thought the pain . . . ” My voice caught. I couldn’t finish the sentence. I thought the pain—the promise of relief from it, that it would finally stop, made her decide to go. Become one with the mist, or with the Dragon, or whatever temptation had drawn her. And if it had stopped, how selfish of me to try and deny her that chance. Of begrudging her decision.

Tears glistened in her eyes. “Hate the pain. On another day . . . choice could have been different. But not today. Not ready to give myself to the mist today.” She looked down. “Would drown.”

I didn’t mention my relief, then. My own selfish joy. Probably it was all too obvious, anyway.

“You saved me,” she said, surprising me again.

“How?”

She shrugged. I could see her eyes were brimming with tears. “Just being here. Your memory.”

“No. It’s you who saved me. Just now.”

She punched me on the shoulder. “Not a competition, Percher! It’s what we do. Save each other. We’re good at it.”

A strange warm, tight feeling in my chest. Tears threatened my own eyes. “Yes. We are.”

“Here. You lost something.” She held out the pendant I had torn from my neck and dropped on the floor. Its snapped withy miraculously whole again.

I slipped the little scritcher back over my head. Felt its familiar claws gently tugging at my skin. “Thank you.”

“Come. Watch this.” Skink stood and grabbed my hand, pulled me toward the window ledge again.

I grasped her warm fingers as we stared out over the sea of mist lit blood red by the sunset.

“The city is a memory,” she said. “A bad memory.” She held out her free hand, palm raised, fingers outstretched. “It needs to forget.”

The ground beneath the library began to shake. The giant faces around the mist-filled hole trembled and cracked. The dust of centuries rose as they tilted toward the pit.

“What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed.

Skink squeezed my fingers, but her expression remained calm.

Serene, even.

Rank after rank of buildings rocked forward at her command. Leaning over, stretching out, seeming almost to liquefy as their constituent withies untangled from each other. Like saplings eager for sunlight, or roots hungry for water, the released withies reached out from every side of the pit, arching, questing; creating new bridges and connections. Forming a solid lid that covered the Dragon’s mouth and trapped the mist beneath.

“Don’t you agree, Percher?” Skink’s voice was full of quiet determination as the city fell around us. “Time we made a pattern of our own.”

About the Author

Henry Szabranski was born in Birmingham, UK, and studied Astronomy & Astrophysics at Newcastle upon Tyne University, graduating with a degree in Theoretical Physics. His fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, and Fantasy For Good: A Charitable Anthology, amongst other places. He lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife and two young sons.

A Machine for Telling Stories:
Tarot and Speculative Fiction

Carrie Sessarego

In his book The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino refers to tarot as “a machine for telling stories.” Writers have been using tarot cards as a storytelling device since the Italian and European Renaissance. Tarot appears in fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and speculative fiction works, including The Castle of Crossed Destinies.

“Tarot” refers to special packs of playing cards, first developed in the fifteenth century and now available with endless artistic interpretations. There are many esoteric theories about where tarot came from, but in reality, it seems to have originated in Italy as an expansion of the first European playing card decks. Playing cards had originated in China much earlier, possibly as early as the ninth century, and traveled from China through Persia, Arabia, and Egypt to Europe, where we see the first records of recognizable tarot cards. To study the history of tarot is, on the most basic level, to study the history and culture of Renaissance Europe.

The earliest surviving deck (actually a collection of fifteen incomplete decks) was commissioned by Filippo Maria Visconti and his son-in-law Francesco Sforza. These cards were commissioned around 1451. Other important historical decks include the Tarot de Marseilles, which dates from 1650, and the Sola Busca Tarot, which gives us the earliest known example of a seventy-eight-card deck with scenes painted on all of the cards. The Sola Busca Tarot dates from around 1490.

At first, tarot decks were used not for cartomancy (telling fortunes with cards) but for actual games. These games, which may be called tarot, tarock, tarocchi, trifoni, and other variations, are still popular in Europe. The tarot decks differed from other playing cards in that in addition to four suits they included trump cards with illustrations. These trump cards were later expanded and called the Major Arcana. The games and the decks used have regional variations that involve rules as well as the design of decks.

Cartomancy developed alongside the European development of playing cards. However, the idea of using tarot cards specifically as a divination system wasn’t popularized until the 1700s. In 1770, an occultist named Jean-Baptiste Alliette (who used the name “Etteilla”), developed a deck specifically for divination and made the art of reading tarot cards accessible as a profession and a hobby.

Multiple decks and divination guides followed, and in 1910 Arthur Waite and Pamela Colman Smith developed the famous Rider-Waite (also called the Rider-Waite-Smith) deck. Smith, the illustrator, was one of only a few illustrators to create storytelling images for the minor court cards, thus revolutionizing the deck. Meanwhile, Waite modified the card meanings and imagery and created a guide for the deck that popularized it among Edwardians. This deck is the template from which most modern decks are derived.

Modern decks that are marketed as divination tools are all structured in the same way, give or take small variations. The twenty-two trump cards, known as the Major Arcana, represent big life events and major themes. Taken together, the Major Arcana tells the story of The Fool’s Journey through life and maturity. These are the cards that stand alone, such as The Fool, The Lovers, Death, The Tower, etc. The four suits, also known as the Minor Arcana, are sometimes given different names and symbols, but generally represent the same concepts as those in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (the four elements, personality types, etc.). In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the suits are swords, cups, wands, and pentacles (also commonly called coins). The Minor Arcana also contains the Court Cards (usually Pages, Knights, Queens).

Let’s take a closer look at the Major Arcana. The Fool card is numbered 0 (sometimes not assigned any number). The Fool is seen embarking on a journey. The following Major Arcana cards take him/her/they through the journey of maturity. As described by Rachel Pollack in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot, the first seven cards explore the conscious and the concerns of society: love, social authority, and education. Next, The Fool explores the world of the subconscious and the search for self-awareness. Finally, The Fool travels through the superconscious and deeper spiritual truths, culminating in The World card and starting over again, because in tarot there is no beginning or ending. Major Arcana cards represent big concepts and big events.

The Minor Arcana is divided into four suits. The most standard suits are swords, wands, cups, and coins, but deck designers often play with these suits. For instance, the Halloween Tarot replaces swords with bats, wands with imps, cups with ghosts, and coins with pumpkins. Each Minor Arcana card can be analyzed in terms of its suit, which is associated with compass points, elements, personality traits, and its number. Some students of tarot also reference astrology and the Kabbalah in their studies.

In a reading, the querent asks a question (usually an open-ended one) and the reader chooses an arrangement of cards that seems best designed to answer the question. Some tarot readers claim to be psychic and say that they use the cards to channel answers from the beyond. However, tarot readers may also use the cards in completely non-supernatural ways, seeing them as psychological devices that help the conscious mind and unconscious mind. Wherever the tarot reader falls on the spectrum of supernatural to secular, they all use the arrangement of the cards (the layout) to tell a story that brings clarity to the querent. Thus, the relationship between the cards is more important than any individual card is out of context, just as the actions of a character in a story must be considered in context to that character’s background, situation, and personality traits.

The first known literary use of tarot comes from poet Teofilo Folengo. In his story, Chaos del Triperuno, he includes tarot-themed poems. One of the sonnets within this work, “The Fate of Focilla,” is a reading for the main character. Another tells the story of love’s supremacy over Death. The allegorical cards match the allegorical stories, reinforcing ideas.

In fiction, imagery from tarot has been used to guide worldbuilding, to set up plots, to build characters, and more. Stories using tarot range across all kinds of genres and serve multiple purposes. You’ll notice a lot of overlap between the following examples as tarot may have multiple uses within a single story.

Tarot cards can act as a guide to the reader, providing foreshadowing and structure. A chapter might be named after a card, or the entire story might match the tale of The Fool’s Journey (which, of course, is an archetype story not only found in Tarot). This is helpful in confusing narratives. For instance, Bone Dance, a science fiction book by Emma Bull, involves an unreliable and uninformed narrator. The author uses tarot to foreshadow events and also to give structure to the story by beginning each chapter with a card. Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, The Books of Magic uses a tarot reading and, later on, figures from tarot cards to give guidance to the main character but also to make sure the reader understands what information is being conveyed.

Tarot is also useful when it comes to launching a plot. The use of tarot to kickoff the plot is a common plot device in science fiction and fantasy, as well as in mysteries with a speculative fiction element. The Chronicles of Amber, a fantasy series by Roger Zelazny, is a series that begins with its amnesiac protagonist finding a tarot deck in which the Major Arcana are portraits of his relatives. This prompts him to journey to the land of Amber in an attempt to take the throne. Many mysteries begin with a reader foretelling the death of a querent (or some other disaster) and seeking to bring justice to a killer when the prediction comes true. The Game of Triumphs by Laura Powell begins when the protagonist finds a tarot card in her pocket that invites her to participate in a magical and dangerous game.

Many authors build entire worlds out of tarot. K.D. Edwards uses the Major Arcana of tarot for worldbuilding purposes in The Tarot Sequence series, an urban fantasy in which the residents of Atlantis live among humans. Their politics and powers are shaped by tarot with each Major Arcana card representing a rival court. In The Game of Triumphs, by Laura Powell, tarot is played by real people who manifest the powers on the cards and live in both the mundane world and a magical one, capable of leaping through time and space and performing magic. Another book, Tarot, by Marissa Kennerson, has four countries, each governed by a tarot suit. Each country embodies the qualities of that suit—so, for instance, the Land of Cups is friendly, communal, warm, and coastal.

Obviously, any work that references tarot is going to involve symbolism. The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, famously uses the symbolism of tarot (both traditional and cards of his own invention) for allegorical purposes. The symbolism is tied to that of the same poem from Shakespeare and Arthurian legend, creating a mythic backdrop for a mundane life. In the Tarot trilogy by Piers Anthony, a planet named Tarot is a place where all religions are found and all are true—which makes a certain sense when one recalls that the tarot is said to hold all the world’s wisdom within its seventy-eight cards.

Tarot can also illuminate character and bring characters together. In the magical realism novel, The Hanged Man, author Francesca Lia Block uses tarot cards as a way for the protagonist to consider and reconsider herself and the personalities and the roles of people in her life. This is another book in which each chapter begins with the name of a card. The heroine pictures herself and those around her as particular cards. Her own card, more than any others, changes as she resolves emotional conflicts and faces trauma.

Sometimes tarot is used in forming character in a more direct way. For instance, in the urban fantasy series The Red King, by Jenn Stark, the main character is the embodiment of the Justice card and as such she has to stop magical crimes. In Tarot, by Marissa Kennerson, most of the characters represent cards and are named as such (The Magician, The Hermit, etc.). The danger with these kinds of characters is that they can become too bound up in archetypes to be well-rounded, layered people. At their best, they can represent powerful forces and themes.

Using a tarot reader as a character is a great way to open up character and plot possibilities. The amateur detectives in Eight of Swords by David Skibbins, Fool’s Moon by Diane A. S. Stuckart, and The White Magic Five and Dime by Lisa Falco and Steve Hockensmith are all readers who get uncannily accurate readings about clients headed into trouble. Their personalities are very different (and the level of fantasy restricted to a growing sense that the cards are always right) but their profession means that they share traits of being observant, fast learners, and good listeners. Their profession also gives them an excuse to talk to many different kinds of supporting characters, all of whom have some exposition to get off their chest.

Unfortunately, some writers default to stereotypes when it comes to tarot readers. Despite legends that tarot originated with the Romani people, it’s unlikely that it did. Many Romani do not do any kind of divination and those that do are as likely to read a palm or a regular deck of cards as a tarot deck. The term “gypsy” is considered derogatory, especially in Europe. “Romani,”or “Romany” is the preferred term, or the name of the subgroup to which an individual belongs.

Any discussion of tarot in speculative fiction is incomplete without a look at The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino. In this two-part book, the unnamed narrator finds himself at an inn filled with stranded travelers. The story appears to be set sometime in Renaissance Europe. None of the travelers are able to speak, but there is a tarot deck on the table and they use this deck to tell their stories. The first part of the book uses the Visconti-Sforza deck, which dates from 1451. The second part uses the Tarot de Marseilles, which dates back to 1650.

The innovation of the book is that it plays with the idea of storytelling without words, using a single set of shared images. The variety of stories told using the decks suggests that an infinite number of stories can be told using tarot. Yet, words remain important, and the narrator translates these stories into words and tells them to the reader, who must then rely on his subjective interpretation of the images even though those interpretations may be very different from the intention of the storyteller.

There are endless ways to tell stories. Tarot cards, which come in a wide variety of art styles, can inspire and enrich. They can illuminate and motivate characters, set plots in motion, and provide the template for worlds. They can provide frameworks for stories and reinforce themes. They are, as Calvino states, “a machine for telling stories.” Remember however, that just as the future is not set, the story is up to you.

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

Short Stories and Sad Endings:
A Conversation with Martha Wells

Arley Sorg

Martha Wells grew up in Texas reading science fiction and fantasy from a young age, getting books at her local library. In her teens, she was writing Star Wars and Godzilla fanfic, complete with maps of Monster Island. She received a BA in anthropology at Texas A&M but took other classes as well, including a science fiction and fantasy writing class taught by Steven Gould, where she wrote one of her first fantasy stories.

Wells’ debut fantasy novel The Element of Fire came out in 1993, earning her a Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award nomination and making her a contender for the 1994 Crawford Award. It also started the Ile-Rien series: Nebula Award-nominated The Death of the Necromancer in 1998 and later Fall of Ile-Rien entries The Wizard Hunters (2003), The Ships of Air (2004), The Gate of Gods (2005), and collection Between Worlds: the Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories (2015). City of Bones came out in 1995 and Wheel of the Infinite in 2000, both standalones. 2006 saw the publication Reliquary in the Stargate Atlantis universe, the first of several media tie-ins for properties including Star Wars and Magic: The Gathering.

Her Hugo Award nominated The Books of the Raksura series, launched in 2011 with The Cloud Roads, includes The Serpent Sea (2012), The Siren Depths (2012), The Edge of Worlds (2016), and The Harbors of the Sun (2017), as well as collections The Falling World & The Tale of Indigo and Cloud (2014) and The Dead City & The Dark Earth Below (2015). In 2013 and 2014 she published YA novels Emilie and the Hollow World and Emilie and the Sky World.

Science fiction novella All Systems Red, the first book in the Murderbot series, changed everything. It landed nominations for the American Library Association’s Alex Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, the Prometheus Award, and it won Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. The series includes Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, and Exit Strategy, and continues to garner accolades and awards recognitions.

In 2017, Wells gave a landmark World Fantasy Convention toastmaster speech, “Unbury the Future,” calling for listeners to seek out and acknowledge the long history of women in science fiction, many of whom, she contended, had been overlooked. Her speech was widely discussed and lauded. The text is available here.

Looking at your body of work, you have played in a number of different sandboxes, from your own worlds (short fiction, stand-alones, and series) to Stargate and Star Wars media tie-ins to the Dominaria Magic: The Gathering expansion. What was the most fun, or best part of working in those other worlds? And what was the most challenging aspect of it?

They were all very different. I was a Stargate fan and a Star Wars fan from the beginning, so those were both very fun to work on. Working with a team for Magic: The Gathering was a great experience. I think the most challenging aspect in working with established worlds and characters is trying to get the characterization and voices right, either to match the actor performances for the movie or TV show, or with MTG to make new characters fit into the established world.

Are there other kinds of projects you are hoping to do—comic books, video games, etc.? Or are you more interested in focusing on your own worlds via novels and short stories?

Not really right now. At the moment, I’m focusing on my own worlds.

What is your writing process? Are you a sprinter, a planner, or something else; do you write daily or here and there?

I plot a little bit in advance, but I’m mostly a pantser. I try to write daily, but it’s not always possible, particularly when I’m having trouble figuring out the plot.

Are there aspects of writing that are more challenging for you? And if so, how do you deal with that?

It really depends on the story. Some come together pretty quickly, and I move from first draft to revision without any problem. Others I end up rewriting and rewriting, rearranging chapters, and discarding chunks of plot for new chunks that end up getting replaced later. I don’t have any specific way to deal with it except to keep working on the story.

Your debut novel, The Element of Fire, came out in 1993 and your first short story sale, “Thorns,” came out in 1995. What was the process of breaking in like for you? Did it take you a while to start selling fiction? And if so, how did you deal with that? Or did things fall into place quickly?

My first agent sold my first novel to Tor when I was twenty-seven, so it probably looks like things fell into place quickly for me, but I had been submitting and getting rejections for short stories for about seven years by that point. The most difficult period of my career was after my ninth book, around 2008, when the slow career crash I had been having for the past two years bottomed out.

I wasn’t able to sell any fiction at any length for about two more years, until 2010, when my new agent Jennifer Jackson sold the first two Raksura books. It was a very hard time. I’d had to leave my last day job due to a toxic work environment, and The Cloud Roads had been turned down by so many publishers. I had just about given up on my writing career and was canceling convention appearances and trying to decide what to do next when the book sold to Night Shade.

Breaking in was hard, especially because of my anxiety, but the career crash period was worse for me, and it was a hard slog even after the Raksura books came out. As an older woman, the attitude I kept running into was basically that my career was over and I needed to stop. At a convention, a younger male writer asked me to leave a panel on fight scenes because no one would be interested in what I had to say. (I didn’t leave.) There were a lot of those kind of incidents.

Your books have been described as “tight, tense, entertaining adventure . . . ” How do you write effective tension and/or effective action?

Mostly a lot of experience. I’ve been writing action-adventure for about twenty-seven years, not counting all the stories and fanfic I wrote before I sold my first book, so I’ve been working on pacing for a long time. I also like to use a very tight point of view, and I think that helps me with the tension and action. The rule I try to follow is that the reader doesn’t have to know everything that happened in a complicated action scene, they only have to know the parts that directly impacted the POV character.

I noticed you have relatively few stand-alone short stories—most of your short fiction takes place in the worlds of your novels. And overall, the bulk of your short fiction came out in the later 2000s. Are you more comfortable at novel length? Was there a transition somewhere in your writing? Or is this really just a matter of what interests you in terms of story?

I am more comfortable at novel length. I didn’t sell any short stories until after my second novel was published. And short stories tend to take a long time for me to write. I just sold a short story to Uncanny Magazine that took me a year to write.

You started receiving nominations and accolades early in your career, but more recently, you had some big wins: Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for All Systems Red; Hugo and Locus awards for Artificial Condition, among other accolades, such as the BooktubeSFF Award. Does this recent success have an impact on your writing? Is there a sense of pressure, does it instill confidence, or does it just make you want to keep writing great SF?

Earlier in my career, I had one Nebula nomination for The Death of the Necromancer in 1998, but that was basically it. After my career crash, I never really expected to be at a point where I would be winning awards. I have problems with anxiety, so basically everything that happens produces more anxiety, so while it’s been incredibly wonderful and exciting, it does up the pressure a lot.

How do you strike that balance in your fiction: crafting a story that is entertaining but also meaningful?

I don’t see it as striking a balance, I just try to write from the point of view of the character, and what affects them the most, what they’re concerned with, and I just tell their story.

How did The Murderbot series happen for you? What was the initial inspiration, how did it develop, and from All Systems Red to Exit Strategy, did the story go as planned from the beginning, or were important changes made along the way?

When I started working on All Systems Red, I thought it was going to be a short story with a sad ending. I realized it was going to need to be longer to really tell the story, so I decided on novella length, but I didn’t really know how I was going to end it until I got there. I thought it would be a stand-alone, but when Tor.com bought it, they asked for a second novella and I decided to write Artificial Condition. I didn’t decide to do the other two novellas until after it was finished, though there were some discarded plot elements in Artificial Condition that I later used in Exit Strategy. So when I started All Systems Red, I had no idea it would be a series, or where the story was going, or where I would eventually end up.

Is it important to write fiction with meaning and social/political commentary? Or can a story just be a fun story?

I think it’s impossible to separate the social and political commentary from the story. If you’re a person living in a society, your existence is social and political, and whatever you write is going to reflect that, whether you understand it or not.

The newest Murderbot novel, Network Effect, is coming out in May. What can you tell us about this book?

It’s set after Exit Strategy and involves Murderbot running into ART from Artificial Condition again. I don’t want to say too much more because really everything other than that is a spoiler.

You also have some new short fiction out, “Obsolescence” in Take Us to a Better Place. Is there anything you can tell us about this story?

The idea of the anthology (which is free in ebook) was to imagine the future of healthcare. My story is a murder mystery in a space station and is a comment on corporate healthcare for profit and the danger of people being abandoned and cut off from their support systems.

For folks who haven’t read your work, where is the best place to start?

It depends on what you like best. If you like secondary world fantasy with alien characters, probably start with The Cloud Roads, the first book in the Books of the Raksura series. It’s a complete series with five novels and two novella collections. And it’s all available in ebook, audiobook, and paperback.

In your 2017 World Fantasy toastmaster speech, you said, “We might know that C. L. Moore wrote for Weird Tales, but I grew up thinking she was the only one, that a woman fantasy writer from that time period was like a unicorn, there could only be one, and that she was writing for an entirely male audience. But there were plenty of other women, around a hundred in Weird Tales alone . . . ” In light of this speech and the things it stands for, what is the single most relevant thing readers and genre writers can do today to effect positive change?

Read and recommend new writers. There are so many incredible books coming out now by new writers from a variety of different backgrounds and viewpoints. I think it’s especially important for writers. It’s very frustrating when I’m on a panel with writers who haven’t read or can’t name a recent book, who only talk about books published ten years ago or twenty years ago. I know people get too busy to read much but I feel you have to stay current with the field.

Who are a few new writers or what are a few stories/books you’d really like people to read?

Some of them have been around for years or have won some major awards, but I’d recommend writers like R. F. Kuang, K. Arsenault Rivera, Jeannette Ng, Nicky Drayden, Rebecca Roanhorse, C. L. Polk, P. Djèlí Clark, Saad z. Hossain, Jessica Reisman, Kate Elliott, N. K. Jemisin, S.A. Chakraborty, Kelly Robson, Yoon Ha Lee, L. X. Beckett.

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.

From Kibbutz to Career:
A Conversation with Lavie Tidhar

Arley Sorg

Raised on a kibbutz in Israel, Lavie Tidhar began his world travels at fifteen, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and Vanuatu. At twenty-two he published a collection of poetry, and he had his first fiction stories published at twenty-seven. In 2009, the first volume of The Apex Book of World SF came out, edited by Tidhar, as well as dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier, cowritten with Nir Yaniv.

Tidhar’s debut solo novel came out in 2010: The Bookman, first in the literary steampunk Bookman series (including 2011’s Camera Obscura and 2012’s The Great Game). In 2011, Osama, a “film noir, non-fiction, alternative history, and international thriller,” won him his first major genre award for a novel: a 2012 World Fantasy Award. In 2013 he moved to London, the same year his The Violent Century was published (alternative history cold war espionage and superheroes), followed by 2014’s A Man Lies Dreaming (dark, literary noir thriller with a twist). In 2015 he released the Jews vs Aliens and Jews vs Zombies anthologies coedited with Rebecca Levene, under Jared Shurin’s Jurassic London label (later printed editions by Ben Yehuda press).

In 2018, Unholy Land (time travel, noir mystery, and cultural conflict in an alternative East Africa) was released while Scholastic UK published Tidhar’s children’s debut Candy. In Xanadu followed in 2019 and due in 2020 are his upcoming works, By Force Alone, a savage tale of King Arthur and his cronies as gangster-like thugs in early Britain, and his Victorian inspired adventure comic book Adler, with the tagline, “For Sherlock Holmes, she was always the woman . . . ”

Tidhar is one of those rare authors who can play with form and genre, who can draw from recognizable tropes, blend styles, and come out with something completely different, defiant, and yet wonderful. His work has drawn comparisons to Philip K. Dick, Michael Chabon, China Mieville, and Kurt Vonnegut, winning acclaim from an array of notable authors such as Ian McDonald, who said Tidhar is “In a genre entirely of his own . . . There is no one like him writing in genre today.” With well over a hundred short stories, more than a dozen novellas, and several stand-alone novels out, as well as work in other mediums, anthologies, columns—including The Washington Post—and much more, he seems to be both restless and boundless.

An array of award recognitions speak to the broad appreciation of his work—he has appeared on short lists and ballots for the Sturgeon, Geffen, Sidewise, Kitschies, and Dragon awards. He won a 2012 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella for Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize for A Man Lies Dreaming, a Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award and 2017 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for Central Station, and most recently, his novella “New Atlantis” from the May/June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was on the 2019 Locus Recommended Reading List.

He writes what he wants, he does it well, and in doing so, challenges our understanding of genre and its place in literature.

Your first publication was a poetry collection in 1998 in Hebrew. Do you still write poetry? Does poetry have any impact on your fiction writing?

I think failed poets often become novelists instead, which is how I ended up here! For a time, I did publish English-language poetry in small UK poetry magazines (in Carilon, Cadenza, Brittle Star, places like that), but I was never that interested in formal submissions—or didn’t have much success!—and eventually fiction mostly took over. It’s obviously a huge part of anything I do, though. All of By Force Alone is written in a sort of very specific rhythm, like some sort of epic poem. And for a while I snuck poems directly into the books—“Wires and Charge” pops up in Osama scribbled on a wall, for instance. I make fun of the whole thing in Unholy Land.

In the universe of Central Station, I have a peripheral character called Basho (named after the Japanese poet) who writes sort of not-really-haikus in Bislama, which is my third language. So that’s kind of a fun thing to work in, having this pidgin/creole poetry as part of the history and mythology of that universe.

I’ve been reading James Legge’s translation of the Chinese Shi Jing most recently. And I just looked it up—the last poem I wrote was in 2015. It’s the sort of impulse that comes and goes. From time to time I think of putting together a collection, or at least a chapbook, but I’ve never progressed enough with it. Maybe in a few more years!

Do you still write in Hebrew?

Mostly e-mails! Funnily enough, one of the first stories I ever wrote, back when I was seventeen or so, is being published in a Hebrew anthology this year, I think. Which is something that made me very happy! It only took twenty-six years to find a home . . .

I wrote a fair amount of fiction in Hebrew a few years ago, and then translated some of it into English. I cowrote a novel, a murder mystery set at an Israeli SF convention, which was fun. But then there was not much to do with any of it and the rewards in English were greater, so it sort of petered off.

More recently, I had this idea one day that I should write sort of literary slice-of-life fiction in Bislama. I wrote the first one as a challenge. Because Bislama is mostly a spoken language, there isn’t much written fiction done in it. Then I talked to my friend in Vanuatu who happens to edit the local newspaper, and he said he’d give me a monthly column! So for a year I wrote one short story a month in Bislama, and it was published in the Vanuatu Daily Post in a column we ended up calling “Storian Smol,” which translates something like “chat for a bit”. Then I tried to translate some of the stories into English. I had a vague idea of doing a collection and having the Bislama original and the translation side by side. Maybe one day . . .

Then I went and got this gig cowriting a book column for The Washington Post! So my “book columnist” CV literally just goes from the Vanuatu Daily Post to that.

Translation is kind of interesting. A Man Lies Dreaming came out in Israel a couple of years ago, and it was fascinating. It was so much more shocking in Hebrew for some reason—and also funnier! I found myself both cringing and literally laughing in surprise. It kind of punches you more in Hebrew. But most of my work is not available in Israel and I’m not well-known over there. I’m published more in Japan! Which is ironic, I suppose, but it’s ok.

What was the transition to genre fiction like for you? How did you start writing genre fiction and when did you start taking it seriously, sending work off, and trying to make it as a writer?

I made a friend who was a “proper” short story writer and I found out about the whole submission process. I never knew you could just send stories out and then someone would read them! And then send you a rejection! I got very excited about the idea. I was looking forward to rejections! Because it just made the whole thing easy, that you write, submit, get rejected—it was kind of low stakes and not personal, which made it easier. Then, ADSED I got an opportunity one summer to just sit in a computer lab at university with nothing much to do, so I started writing. I remember the day I started—sometimes I curse the day I started! I aimed to do 500 words a day, and then pretty much . . . never stopped. I never sold that first story, but I sold the second one, and to this day this is what I’d rather be doing. Just writing short stories and sending them out and getting rejections.

Winning the Clarke-Bradbury was surreal. It was sponsored by the European Space Agency and I forgot all about it, to be honest. Then at work one day I came back and someone said, “You had a call from the European Space Agency,” and I was sure it was a prank. But it turned out it really was someone from the ESA! They flew me to Utopiales in France and it was a lot of fun. There’s an e-mail from Arthur C. Clarke somewhere about my story.

The thing that kind of changed everything for me was selling a story to Ellen Datlow in 2005, for Sci Fiction. The Sci Fi Channel paid me so much money that I think they suddenly thought, What are we doing! and closed Sci Fiction. And changed their name to Syfy. So mine was the last story they ever published and I always felt really bad about that. Like I personally killed it! And then, ten years later, I got an e-mail from someone at the University of Notre Dame and they asked, could I come talk to the students about my story, since they’re studying it in the course. So that was completely surreal, that something I wrote one summer years ago as a student is now . . . curriculum! And then I had to reread it! And I was incredibly relieved to see I still liked it quite a lot. It wasn’t a bad story!

Glancing at your ISFDB page, you must have well over a hundred short stories out. Which short stories stand among your favorites, and why?

It’s probably closer to, I don’t know . . . I tried to count at some point. Over 150 professional sales? I just like writing short stories. It’s a very personal sort of reward—I never get any award nominations for them or anything, but I get paid pretty well, though of course it’s a tiny fraction of what you make on novels. So I mostly just write them for myself.

I really like “The Projected Girl,” which I wrote for Ellen Datlow. It’s set in 80s Israel, about a mystery in 40s Israel, and it’s ambiguous whether it’s fantasy or not. It’s liminal fantasy. And I wrote it in my last month in Vanuatu when I was renting a room from a guy who is now the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I just wrote it like in a dream in about two weeks. I kinda hoped it would get like a World Fantasy Award or something but they ended up giving it to me for Osama instead so I couldn’t even complain!

And I like a story called “Tutim,” which no one would publish so it ended up in my book with Shimon Adaf, Art And War (which then no one ever read!). It’s about a poet on the run who wrote a book called “The Death of Hebrew Poetry” and the story’s title is an homage to the poem (“Tutim,” or “Strawberries”) by Yonah Wallach. I think it’s very funny, in a savage sort of way.

And the Central Station stories have obviously been very good to me. I have a particular soft spot for all my novellas. The Vanishing Kind, which is alternate history noir, Jesus and the Eightfold Path, which is a very tongue-in-cheek retelling of the Jesus story with kung fu. My most recent one is SF, “New Atlantis” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and my next one, The Big Blind, which will be out from PS Publishing, is about a poker-playing nun. Not genre at all! I just wanted to write this story so I did.

I’ve been writing more crime fiction recently because some anthologies popped up to allow me to do that. I got nominated for the CWA Dagger last year for one of them and that was very cool. I had to dress up and everything! I had to buy black trousers! I had a crime novelette out last year, “The Bell,” which I like a lot. And I like the new SF stories I’ve been writing recently, like “Venus in Bloom” which is right here in Clarkesworld. I don’t know. Ask me another day and I’ll probably pick different stories!

You have written a massive amount of words between 2003 and today, and it doesn’t look like your career ever had a lull; you seem to have been putting out work consistently for nearly two decades. Were you ever in a place where you struggled to write, to produce, or to sell work? Or where doubt crept in? Or do you tend to be a writer who just pumps out material without worrying too much about it?

Two decades! You make me sound old! I have to admit it’s weird ’cause you start off as going against the establishment and then one day you realize you are the establishment . . . Sooner or later they co-opt you!

But it’s always a struggle. Always. My agent describes it as trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. No one knows what to do with me. So it’s always a fight. And it can be pretty demoralizing, sure. But I like what I do, so I always think, I’m just going to write what I want and then see if someone will publish it. When I told my agent about A Man Lies Dreaming I just said “Adolf Hitler: Private Eye” and he burst out laughing. And then, to his credit, he said I should write it. He said there was no way in hell he could sell it, but I should write it! And the funny thing is, all these weird books that no one knows what to do with kind of work out for me.

I struggled a lot after A Man Lies Dreaming because I didn’t know how to follow a book like that. So I kind of went sideways and wrote a children’s book that is called Candy in the UK, which is coming out this year in the US as The Candy Mafia. And no one knew what to do with it either. Then I got lucky on it just before the Frankfurt Book Fair one autumn and it paid for a couple of years. But it turned out no one knows what to do with me in children’s publishing either! I’m hoping to stick around, though. I enjoy writing them. And in a way, I think Candy and A Man Lies Dreaming are very similar books, even if one’s about Hitler and the Holocaust and the other’s about a girl detective and chocolate smugglers. As long as the kids don’t pick up the Hitler book, I should be fine. My other new book, it was supposed to be out this year but might be next year now, is called The Escapement. It’s a book I really love, but I keep describing it as a “clown Western,” and as it turns out, everyone hates clowns. Which is part of the point, of course! But I think currently Tachyon, the publisher, are going with something like “The Gunslinger meets The Phantom Tollbooth.” Don’t ask me—I just write ’em! It’s a surrealist fantasy inspired by Michael Ende, Dr. Seuss, and spaghetti Westerns. With a bit of the Epic of Gilgamesh and Buster Keaton. That sort of thing.

Central Station was the one book I put five or six years into but I wasn’t sure how to make it work and really didn’t have any faith in it at all. I was just going to self-publish. But Gardner Dozois really believed in it and told me not to play it down. He thought it was an important book. And then my agent really saw something in it. And Tachyon bought it and basically sent me an editorial letter that just said, “do this, do that, cut this, rearrange that” and the whole thing fell into place. But I didn’t think anyone would read it! Nothing happens in that book! I’m still bemused about the whole thing, to be honest. And it’s been really successful for me. I even got to launch it in China last year, and that was a trip! That was so much fun. I’ve been in talks about a television adaptation at some point but there’s been nothing concrete. The funny thing is, it’s my only science fiction book! I mostly write SF in short form. I’d love to do more.

Do you feel like your writing has changed in important ways since your first few stories came out? Do you feel like your work transformed in 2010, or are there other reasons why the SF community took greater notice of your work?

Does anyone really take notice of my work? It would be nice to think so, but . . . Although I recently found out Sting was a big fan of A Man Lies Dreaming. He raved about it in some interview. That was pretty surreal. I don’t know. My first novel was only published in 2010 so maybe that’s it—people generally pay more attention to novels than short stories. Osama, which came out in 2011, that was another book no one would touch. It got rejected by every publisher out there. And it ended up winning the World Fantasy Award. So that was a really nice thing to happen. Especially after being roundly kicked, as it were! It just came out in Russia in January this year, so it’s still going strong! I don’t know, I just plod along and do my thing. I guess you sort of hope when a new book comes out there’d be a parade outside, and a marching band, and balloons, but it’s just . . . OK so there’s another book out, go do the dishes.

I would hope my writing has improved, though! I’m generally pretty happy with how stuff turns out these days, though it’s hard work. I can only really write what I write, I can’t control what people want to read. I’ve been incredibly lucky that publishers still, improbably, buy my books. And short fiction editors, bless every one of them. I seem to straddle several worlds, but genre, on the whole, has been very welcoming.

In your 2013 Locus interview you talked about Philip K. Dick’s kibbutz on Mars, saying “That’s the only time I ever saw myself in American science fiction books (‘That’s me!’).” Do you feel like this has changed significantly? Especially with the rise in variety of voices and settings in genre fiction? Or do you feel like your background and cultural experiences are still largely overlooked?

Well, I do have a pretty unusual background, to be fair . . . Have you seen any other kibbutzim in science fiction recently? When I went to China last year I did a whole bunch of interviews about Central Station, and as kind of a joke, I said, you know, it’s the best science fiction novel ever written to be set in Tel Aviv but, as it’s also the only SF novel to be set in Tel Aviv it must by default also be the worst.

But yeah, things have changed tremendously since 2013—since 2009, actually, when I was putting together the first World SF anthology. And one of the things that made me really happy is that you can see all the international writers I was picking up for the anthologies early on now have major careers, big novels out, awards won, which would have been unimaginable ten years ago. There was so obviously this pool of talent that, I hate to say it, went unacknowledged for too long. And it’s wonderful to see it slowly turning around. But it’s still difficult! All of us have heard the “We don’t publish books set in X” rejection at some point or another. We don’t do Mexican books! We don’t do books set in Nigeria! Or when I was writing Unholy Land and pretty much being told, you know, no one in the UK wants to read a book about a bunch of Jews in Africa. You know, “Why can’t it be set in New York, or at least London?”

So there’s this massive disconnect, there’s this weird American perception that New York writing is somehow the pinnacle of Western literature (and by default, all literature), while in England you kind of celebrate this sort of very anemic writing—it was Raymond Chandler who said the English may not make the best writers in the world but they do make the best boring writers.

And I don’t get it. I think, actually, genre fiction—science fiction and fantasy—lead the pack in terms of featuring new, international voices. Of at least engaging with the question of diversity in literature while everyone else is lagging behind. But it’s still . . . easier to write a novel set in England. Even if I’m parodying or making fun of the British, like in A Man Lies Dreaming or By Force Alone. It’s much scarier to write a novel set in Israel, for example. And what I sort of want to do is to turn to the “Matter of Israel” in a way at some point. But then Unholy Land sort of did that a little bit, and after that I did want to change tack a bit. I think it’s why I really like The Escapement—it’s my only non political novel, it’s a fantasy in a sort of surrealist secondary world, it’s like a fable or a fairy tale if those had bounty hunters and clowns anyway. And yet it doesn’t feel any less significant.

In your Clarkesworld interview in 2013 you talked briefly about travel and its impact on your writing, saying, “I have set stories widely across the world, and I’ve lived in many of those places, I am increasingly uncomfortable with doing that—I am feeling more and more that I need to concentrate on my personal background, heritage, geography. I’m conflicted, in a way.” How does your recent work stand in relationship to this statement; have your feelings changed or developed since then?

Well . . . I’ve recently been writing more stories set quite widely, though I hope my . . . approach to them has been more nuanced. It’s hard to say. I feel more comfortable with them—stories like “Neom” in Asimov’s last year, which is set in Saudi Arabia, or “Yiwu” at Tor.com, which is set in China. I just finished a new one set in Mongolia, where I got to draw again on, you know, having been there and just being able to pull on some small details but the sort you wouldn’t get otherwise. But I’m writing about outsiders. I think that’s my concession, which I think is the new global condition, really. Chinese in Poland, Sudanese in Israel, you know, the world’s become Peruvian Japanese cuisine! I went to a Peruvian Japanese restaurant in Spain 2-3 years ago with a couple of much more successful writers and I was really hoping someone else would pick up the bill! Luckily one of their publishers did. It was not the cheapest place . . .

But it’s still tricky! I guess I feel better about it, too, because since that interview I did write Central Station and Unholy Land, which are exactly the sort of difficult, personal background books I meant. So I feel better about it. I’d be disappointed with myself if I hadn’t done that. And that was very much the thinking behind it.

Can you talk a bit about your experiences with different forms, specifically what you have enjoyed or disliked about any that stand out, but especially about the ways in which writing Adler (a creator-owned five-issue comic with art by Paul McCaffrey) is different or similar to other forms?

I’m fascinated by form, it’s true. Sometimes you can actually look at the same story and try to write it in different mediums—it is a screenplay? A comics script? Is it prose? I actually have projects that exist in different forms. There’s an issue #1 comics script of The Violent Century somewhere on my hard drive, and a screenplay of Adler. And an Osama stage play.

I got involved in writing an opera for the Royal Opera House a while back and that fell through. That was a shame. I would have loved to have done that. One of my dreams is to bring Osama: The Musical to the stage at some point. People look at me funny when I say that, but I’m entirely serious! Came close to doing theater once or twice and that didn’t work out so far. But I’m realizing that whatever I do will be weird, so . . .

“Svalbard” was so much fun to do, because I’ve always been interested in the idea of interactive fiction. And it was combined with Jake doing these fiendishly difficult puzzles you have to unlock to read the story! And the story itself is a part of the final puzzle. It was very cool.

I love working with artists, too. There’s a real magic in writing something and having it come to life through art. Adler was a real labor of love for Paul and me. It took like seven years! His art gets so transcendent by issue #5, I kind of told him if I’d known I would have written him something better to draw! It’s a fun comic, though, it will be a great graphic novel come August.

I’m not sure anyone is ever going to let me write comics again so I’m just riding it and having fun. We signed issue #1 in London when it came out and we were supposed to be at Dublin Comic Con for issue #2, but now . . . Anyway it will give Paul more time—the poor man is still coloring! I’m just taking the glory.

Right now, I’m working on animation with my friend Nir Yaniv—it’s a very DIY sort of project, but we have these voice actors involved and it’s kind of evolving quickly, and it was only supposed to be a little side project to keep me from getting bored! I have no idea where it’s going. And now people are asking to get in on it! And I’m like, but why! I just love doing these ridiculous things that make no sense. That pretty much describes my entire career, probably.

Your next book, By Force Alone, is out soon from Head of Zeus and Tor. It’s a retelling of Arthurian myth from a completely different angle. What is it, do you think, about Arthurian tales that typically draw people to them? And what made you want to take them on—to tear them down and rebuild them with a very different lens?

I never had any interest in Arthurian mythology—something something Merlin, something something sword in the stone, something Camelot, etc. Then I kind of had to study it because I rashly agreed to replace someone teaching on an undergrad course at my old university, and he’s a Medievalist (and I’m not a lecturer! I just got roped into it! If only I knew what I was letting myself in for!). So I was reading up on it and realized, firstly, that the whole thing wasn’t just made up but it’s sort of like a shared world fan fiction project, where one guy came up with the basic story and then everyone else kept adding bits to it. So someone comes up with Lancelot, someone comes up with the Green Knight, someone else goes, hey, sword in a stone! Someone else adds the round table. And so on to the grail. So without these guys in the twelfth century who came up with the whole grail mythology there’d be no Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there’d be no Da Vinci Code! I thought well, that’s interesting.

And the other thing I realized was, I’m reading the story, and it’s supposed to be about chivalry and honor, and it’s . . . it’s not! It’s an awful story. And I suddenly realized it’s basically a gangster story. It’s the rise and fall. It’s The Godfather, it’s Scarface. And then I thought, well, that I can work with.

So I looked around but everyone else was doing the story the way we’re told it goes, not the way it actually goes. I was really surprised. So I went for it. I thought it offered some really interesting opportunities to talk about nationalism right now. And also, I thought it would be fun to have Lancelot as a Jewish Nubian kung fu master. Even if I had to write 70,000 words before I even got to the Jewish Nubian kung fu part. I wrote it over about a year and a half, just for myself. I think only my agent vaguely knew I was writing some sort of Arthurian book. And then of course one early rejection was that people don’t want this version of Arthur! They want the “comfort and nostalgia of the original tales”! Which cracked me up! So much so that I worked that line into the book. I think it’s a very funny book. About nationalism. With a bit of kung fu. It’s a big book, that was a departure for me. I’ve been writing these short novels and this one felt massive in comparison.

What are you working on now? What do you have coming up that you can tell us about? And—back to the “forms” idea—are there forms/formats/projects you haven’t tried yet that you are thinking about taking on?

Publishing-wise, I have By Force Alone in June (it’s just come out in the UK), and then my children’s book, The Candy Mafia, which is gorgeously illustrated, I think, is out in September. And the graphic novel omnibus of Adler comes out in August! Plus my novella The Big Blind should be out from PS Publishing in September. And I’m currently working on an anthology.

Next year will probably see The Escapement out from Tachyon, which means the next book after that will be The Circumference of the World—it’s sort of my . . . “what if L. Ron Hubbard was right” book. What if this sci fi writer in the 50s came up with some crazy idea about the real nature of the world and it turned out he was right. It’s sort of several stories woven into one, including a biblio-mystery, a coming-of-age story in the South Pacific, a gangster story, and a 50s sci fi pastiche. I’m still working on it! There are so many drafts of it at this point it’s hard to know how it will end up. Then there will be my next book following By Force Alone, which is already contracted to Head of Zeus in the UK, and should be out in 2021. It’s another “Matter of Britain” novel. I stupidly pitched it as a quartet so I do have notes for the next two books, but in the meantime I’ll probably go and write a crime novel or something.

At the moment, as I mentioned earlier, I’m working on a couple of animation projects—a weird short film and a miniature web series. These are a lot of fun. I’m hoping we can debut them soon, though it will probably be a while yet. And I promised Paul McCaffrey I’d write him a big space SF graphic novel to draw. So I need to do that . . . And I have the usual short stories coming out. There are always the short stories!

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: Lockdown

Neil Clarke

From all of us here at Clarkesworld, we wish you good health in these difficult times, particularly those of you who share my designation of “high risk” due to medical or age-related reasons. Covid-19 is a part of our daily lives. It’s hard to avoid when you can’t leave your house. I live in NJ, the second most infected state in the country. We’ve been under lockdown for over two weeks and just had a CDC travel advisory slapped on us. My wife and youngest son are working from home and adjusting to what will likely continue for weeks ahead. Staying home is easy when it’s your choice. Knowing you have to is a constant reminder.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a sword hanging over my head, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I try to keep my focus on the present: we’re alive, we’re healthy, and we’re together. We shouldn’t lose track of the good things. If you’re reading this on the first of the month, Lisa and I are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary. We might not be able to celebrate the way we would have liked—with family and friends—but we can and will celebrate. I can’t stress enough, just how lucky I am to have Lisa in my life. Previous swords had me thinking I wouldn’t make it to this milestone, but here we are and it is wonderful.

By now, I expected to be burying myself in TV and movies, but that hasn’t come to pass. Instead there’s been a lot of cleaning and a yard reclamation project—taking it back from the encroaching thorn bushes and honeysuckle. It’s a distraction that provides some exercise and mindlessness. Throughout the month I’ve alternated between burying myself in work and being unable to focus on it. There have been weeks where every submitted story has been responded to in 24 hours or less, followed by 3-4 days of silence. I don’t like that, but I keep reminding myself that under the sword, you do what you have to.

This is a time where deadlines should be a lot more flexible. We already have enough stress, so this shouldn’t be adding more. I see too many friends being placed under additional and unnecessary pressure to meet deadlines from workaholic bosses who think everyone will deal with this situation the same way. I also see a lot of conventions canceling and announcing their intentions to go fully online. I worry for the front line folks, mostly volunteers, who have to turn these monsters into a reality when most of the people leading the efforts have no experience in this medium. If I learned anything from being an instructional designer, it was that you can’t replicate the traditional face-to-face experience online and you certainly can’t rush it.

Amusingly, after canceling my trip to ICFA—ahead of the convention itself being canceled—I started asking around to see what people would think about having some online panels. The enthusiasm was quite high, so there is a demand. Quietly, I’ve been working in the background and trying to work out a viable project for Clarkesworld. Later this month, I’ll be announcing a series of free online panels that we’ll be hosting over the course of a month. As the software for  these things can get very expensive, we’ve settled on a solution that will allow for an overflow room on our YouTube channel if the audience is too big. The only difference for those people is that they won’t be part of the main audience chat room. The goal is to keep it casual and focused around short fiction. Charging a fee would establish expectations and pressure I’m just not interested in at this time. It also removes a barrier—paywall—that I don’t think is appropriate under the current conditions. This side project will also allow me to do one of the things I’ve spoken about previously: a panel for foreign authors who would like to learn more about submitting short stories and being published in the US.

And now I think it’s time to pick up the cutters and head into the backyard. There’s a thorn bush that wants to distract me from the chaos. Hopefully you’ll find your thorn bush in this issue and can forget for just a little while. Stay safe and may things be better for us all in the days ahead.

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: Home Planet

Beeple

About the Artist

Beeple is Mike Winkelmann, a graphic designer from Charleston, SC, USA who does a variety of digital artwork including short films, Creative Commons VJ loops, everydays, and VR/AR work.

After he began releasing a set of widely used Creative Commons VJ loops he has worked on concert visuals for Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Eminem, Zedd, deadmau5, and many more.

One of the originators of the current “everyday” movement in 3D graphics, he has been creating a picture everyday from start to finish and posting it online for over twelve years without missing a single day.