Mamaborg’s Milk and the Brilliance of Gems

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Luqiong jumps past the fence and she ducks under one of the ferrying carts of the communications warehouse. She taps on the pylo plating of the cart, making sure it’s thick enough. Her database analyzes the sound of the tap and accepts that it is. She sighs a relief. The drones following her can’t track her through the thick pylo plating of the cart. Newer carts, made cheaper, are more penetrative to their gaze, but she laughs to herself—this is one of the old ones.

Outside the cart, the maze of machines before her move cases of the stock, exocoke, the thirst-quenching fizz that supposedly enhances exoskeleton performance. Just her luck that today is soda day. She throws down the blocker blanket over the package in her arms. Her heart races as she reaches out to grab a case. She hears the click-click of the signal of the robot arm assessing an anomaly in the protocol. She swipes the case and pats her chest, which unleashes the UV jamming signals emanating from her arms. The robot arm stops clicking and resumes his transport of the cases.

She opens up a bottle and wishes they were baby formula instead. She takes a gulp, grimaces at the bitter taste, and chugs it down. She tucks the bottle and the pack into the reinforced shelf on her exoskel, which then recedes to pull it close and self-seal. The bumps rattle her, and she pulls down the blocker blanket to check on her loveliest prize yet: the bundle wrapped in her arms. She looks down into the strange violet eyes and the small tuft of black hair. Her babe. She could never get over that. Her babe. 愛瑾. Aijin. “Love” and “the brilliance of gems”—her eyes, so amethyst-like. But it was a coincidence that her babe developed such a gemlike gaze, suited to her name. Luqiong was too weak after pregnancy to think of a name and just used her sister’s name. It was, after all, a bit like her own, 璐琼, lu qiong, a composition of characters that signify forms of beautiful jade. Both her and her babe with names of strength and allure. Strong as rocks and glistening with exceptional luster.

For a week after birth, her babe wouldn’t open her eyes, so Luqiong couldn’t tell if her babe really had brilliant eyes or not to match her given Aijin name. She couldn’t worry, there was no point. Survival: get her into shape and then see what’s next. But when Aijin did finally peel her eyes open, after Luqiong managed to nourish the child and get her to a healthy weight, she felt that love, so overwhelming, so catching her off guard, so devastating, so . . . embedded in her babe’s name. Aijin. She holds her close now, smelling her baby smell, as her teeth rattle, as her whole body trembles, as the machines direct the cart through uneven pavement. Luqiong jumps off, shields her child, throws out a jamming signal from her wrist for good measure, glides past familiar surroundings, behind broken pieces of furniture, past postindustrial waste, through a few dilapidated houses, and climbs with dexterous fingers up a fence and beyond.

Her ears detect no buzz of drones as she waits until it darkens. Aijin sits quietly with her, her eyes closed, her body warm against her waist. As soon as the moon peeps out in the sky, she makes her way through the scrap jungle to her home.

The moon’s light grows piercing, almost too quickly. It illuminates her way, and she makes herself as small as she can, changing her exoskel to a dark camo. The spectral light casts dark shadows that would make the abandoned warehouse she’s approaching look menacing to anyone but Luqiong. To Luqiong, it’s home, or more like a strong house. Home, whatever that means, is protection, not comfort—yet she can’t help but admit a feeling of relief as she skips across shards on the ground and deploys her nimble fingers across an entry pad to deactivate the jerry-rigged alarm system.

She’s careful not to trip over the sinews of this alarm system she put together years ago and pushes against the trigger to drop the locks of the hidden door. She slides in and shuts the door behind her. Her exoskel shifts back to its typical metallic splendor to save energy. Luqiong lowers Aijin into a makeshift changing table made of a stolen warehouse cart, some medical blankets, and padding she had hijacked from a hospital delivery truck. Aijin is as quiet as a spycopter, not making even a peep. She has always been so good like that. Maybe she senses the danger or is used to the lack of conversation. But now that they’re back in the strong house, Luqiong tickles her feet, hoping to get a small squeal out of her. Aijin’s feet are plump and smooth. Luqiong feels a surge of pride for that—plump with tiny wrinkles on their backsides, like a normal little babe. But she knows inside, that it’s not enough. Aijin’s not getting enough of what she needs. She knows it from the somatic readings she’s hustled for, and from her own motherly instincts. And neither is Luqiong.

Aijin looks unfazed at the touch, her violet eyes wide, and Luqiong insists, needing just a small smile, anything to brighten up the bleakness of the landscape that surrounds her. When Luqiong reaches the little knobby mound of Aijin’s knee, drawing out claws and using the tips of her exoskel nails instead, Aijin gives in with a playful curling up of a lip and what could be mistaken as a coo. That’s good enough for Luqiong. She retracts her exoskel nails, changes her, notes the shortage of diapers, and curses to herself. She rocks Aijin until she hears that heavy breathing that signifies her entry into dreamland and drops her into the foam-reinforced crate that serves as her crib. Her arms feel empty without Aijin in them, but she also wastes no time in getting all she needs to get done. With deft fingers, she pulls out the jade hairpin device that lets down a cascade of black hair over her exoskel torso and goes to pump. A mom’s job is never over.

It’s never fun to pump, she thinks, as she settles into a memory-kev seat that molds into her exoskel. She lifts her back out for a moment and thinks a command that opens up the latch unveiling the compartment inside. With the hand not holding the hairpin, she pulls out the pack of exocokes, shimmies back into place, and slams the exoskel compartment closed, leaning back. She places the pack of exocokes beside her.

She breathes out a few relaxing breaths that puff up from her abdomen and sits back up, listening carefully. It’s nice and dark and Aijin is not making a sound. Good, she’s still asleep. Aijin doesn’t cry and scream typically, but sometimes she will coo softly to herself.

Luqiong flicks on a few diodes and a small stream of light shines on her pin. Its jade facade shimmers, cobbled together with some alloys, glass, and a small vial. Luqiong braces herself for impact, grimaces, and punctures. For Luqiong pumping means more than putting a suction cup on the chest. It means getting through the tough exoskel with a needle, rupturing the inner layer, and letting the legs pull out from the pin, pinch her sunken breasts, and draw what little there is to draw. She enhances her natural formula with some synthesizers, which expands the volume, upgrades the nutritional value, and augments the innate sweetness. She knows it will taste not just of mother’s milk but have a tinge of acidic, almost like citrus. She knows this because she’s tasted it. From there, she adds powders for easier suckling.

She lets the pump do its thing, wincing every so often as it does a slow draw. She sees the pull as the vial fills up with one tiny drop at a time. Leaning back again, eyes closed, she feels for the exocoke. The bottle is made of supe-glass, cold in her hands, but gives a bit so it doesn’t shatter when dropped. She squeezes it tight as the little legs of her jade hairpin push against where she’s most sensitive, and a shiver runs down her spine as she feels the liquid being extracted.

She pops the top of the exocoke and takes a swig. She needs to ration them, but she’s already onto her next swig before she sets it aside. The exocoke does as it advertises, eases the ache of the exoskel attached to her and sends in a bit of a numbing coolness so that the prickly grip of the hairpin no longer feels so intense.

She opens her eyes and flicks at her hairpin. The jade ornamental curls release a soft ring. She holds it up to see that the bit of extract is consistent. The meager amount of liquid sloshes about. The elixir of life, she breathes, shaking her head. A small line of blood, hair-thin and no more than a fingernail long, trails in the otherwise cream-colored solution. Fine, not unusual with the pinprick and all. She listens again for Aijin and closes her eyes again, her thoughts wandering to practical matters: food, diapers, and her way out of this bedraggled life.

Before she knows it, she’s slumped back, her chest throbbing, head rolled to the side, and falling into a sleep, with the jade hairpin still attached, making a slight whirring sound at each drop collected.

One day, she thinks, she’ll feed her baby better. No hairpins, no synthetic additives, no puckering powders.

She dreams of the smell of synthesizers giving way to incense, and exoskel grease giving way to jasmine blossoms. In her dream, her mom is short and petite, more petite than she ever was.

She’s scrounging about the dorm she shares with her mother and the two other families, all female members. It’s a one inch bead her mom is looking for that Luqiong was playing with, rolling it about, pretending it’s a self-driving motorcycle. But now it’s missing, and her mom can’t finish the necklace she was making.

“If you’re not going to be helpful, then at least don’t cause me trouble,” her mom says, eyebrows scrunched in gentle fury. Her mom shakes her head and Luqiong can smell the scent of the jasmine detangler spray her mom uses wafting toward her.

She doesn’t want to disappoint her mother, but everything disappoints. Ever since she got a sister, little Aijin, the one Luqiong named her baby after, everything disappoints. The fingers on her mom’s hand giving out from arthritis when she’s crafting makeshift jewelry to sell disappoints. Luqiong’s daily surreptitious collection of odds and ends from the machinery room to use as materials for the jewelry disappoints. They’re not shiny enough or they’re not sanded down enough. There’s never enough, not enough food, not enough formula. Her mom sacrifices herself to buy formula, since her milk has been inconsistent in the detention center. It’s the stress, she says. It’s the stress to keep you alive, to keep baby Aijin alive. Never enough formula, never enough milk.

In the dream, Luqiong suffers hunger pains. She eats her rations, but it’s not enough. She can’t find the bead, but she finds the hairpin, the jade one engraved with jasmine flowers her mom treasures. It’s put into the bin for the auto-grinder, to be trashed. She grabs it, but her sleeve gets stuck close enough to the grinding machine. It starts now, and her heart jumps. Her stomach turns as she’s pulled closer to the chomping maw. In her dream, she’s on the conveyor belt, screaming, but no one hears her, no one sees the shine of jade grasped in her fingers.

When she wakes, her fists are clenched. The diodes’ light is weak and starting to flicker. She turns them off. There’s a repeated dull noise, and she realizes it’s her jade hairpin device beeping, telling her that the vial is full. She pulls out the pin and moans. She forgot to release the legs of the hairpin from her chest. They pinch and grab, like the legs of little recorder spiderbots. She hits the release, but fumbles with her exonails half-retracted and ejects the contents of the vial onto her exoskel. She curses, trying to guide the stream of milk back into the vial.

She salvages as much as she can, then puts the vial, still attached to the pin, aside. It gleams against the sliver of moonlight coming in from an exposed bit of window. It has always reminded her of another jade pin, the one her mother had in her hair. The only relic from her father that her mother hid to keep away from the collectors at the detention center. The one that her mother traded years ago for some extra formula for her dying little baby sister, Aijin.

It was all in vain. Aijin, so small and vulnerable. Aijin so frail and thin. Aijin passed away. Even the money from the jewelry her mother cobbled together from machinery odds and ends dried up as her mother started losing hope and her arthritic hands bested her. She made all kinds of jewelry, but never hairpins. And then she stopped making them altogether.

That was when Luqiong decided to leave on her own. She couldn’t get it together for her mom, she couldn’t convince her mom to leave. So she left. Escaped on one of the intake days, an undertaking that she planned for years. There was no Aijin to be a part of this plan either.

And when it became Luqiong’s turn for her own surprising birth that was never meant to be, she named her Aijin and had asked for no wedding ring, no gifts. Just a straight up hairpin breast pump for her exoskel. They were hard to get, expensive and rare. And it was all hush-hush. Signalers can’t get pregnant, the effects of the UV and their exoskel attachments render them what they call “inert.” But Luqiong found herself being the impossible, doing the impossible, cutting through her torso exoskel to relieve her expanding belly, giving an excruciating birth, running from her job, from being a signaler and electrical engineer, running away again, not from the detention center of the old days gone, but from the combat commissioners that had trained her, with nothing but a state-of-the-art cutting edge hairpin breast pump made from only the most exquisite of jades and alloys and a week’s worth of portafood.

She hustled, begged, cajoled, worked street-smart, got fake IDs, did everything she could to make herself useful in all sorts of underground and black-market ways. But now, she wanted that life over. She wanted a new life, one where she could really feel, physically hold her lifeblood close, and give her baby and her a fresh start.

She gets up and handles the set of test tubes, all sterilized thanks to the bathing sterilizer unit. Everything she owns she owes to her instincts, distracted others, trained skills, and the agility and speed of her pylo exoskel. She starts the distillation, and the tubes wash with a blue liquid. She opens the hairpin vial and pours the contents in, mixing powders and other liquids. As it bubbles, thickening now in the addition process for enhancing the milk, she hears a small coo.

Luqiong walks to the baby crate, checks on her little pride, the package that was never meant to be. She holds Aijin close saying, “Soon, honey, soon. Soon, I will hold you to my skin and I will stare at you as you drink from me.”

It might be a stupid wish, a small wish, but that’s all Luqiong wants. For her own Aijin to be healthy. To not pass away. To not have to drink the substandard concoction she makes from the little she produces and thickens up for the meal. She wants to remove the exoskel in total, rebuild her own body, hold Aijin close to her, and have that skin contact as she nurses her child.

She curses.

She just wants to flippin’ nurse her child, like any other mom.

She picks up the hairpin and raises it in the air. She pulls her elbow back like she’s about to hurl it. She can envision it hitting the wall and shattering, beeping and shrieking as it malfunctions. Her arm trembles. She puts it down. No, she can’t make it shatter, she can’t just destroy this nipple-pricking pump. This extravagant top-of-the-line persecuting device. She needs it. They need it.

For now.

Only for a while longer, she tells herself. We’re leaving. We’re finding the skelcutter. She’s got hints, road maps she’s drawn from stories and hidden away, and some help.

Her hand trembles as she swirls her hair in a bun and affixes it with her jade hairpin. It’s cold to the touch.

Aijin, you and me, she whispers. Tomorrow, we will set off.

And one day, you will feel my skin, under the shell. I will feel you and you will feel me. And you will drink from me like I’m a wishing fountain, making you strong, healthy with all your aspirations coming true.

Luqiong picks up her daughter, holds her to her abdomen, to the exposed part she cut out of her exoskel that has left her scarred and damaged. It’s infected, that part of the exoskel, a virus running up its frayed, tenacious pylo fibers. Aijin coos, her eyes so brilliant and gemlike. She must feel the exposed skin of her mom’s abdomen because she tries to suck on the exoskel that encases her chest. Luqiong locks her elbows holding Aijin’s pursed lips away.

Luqiong blinks her eyes, casts her face toward the rising sun, and straightens her lips. The hairpin pokes into her scalp, itching her. She covers her baby with the shielding blanket and shoots out a UV message, practicing the delivery of that message for when she meets the smuggler when they will cross east to the place where underground skelcutters and other fugitive traders are purported to exist. Where they must exist.

She makes herself strong, to not cry, as she grabs a premade bottle of her concocted milk. She tips it toward her babe, thinking of Aijin the first, her still body, the smell of jasmine, and the cold touch of jade flowers on a fancy hairpin of long ago. And the smooth feel of her mother’s skin long before that when they hugged, or when she consoled her mom, stroking her arm. The sound of the nutritive elements percolating into the solution fills the room. Aijin sucks and swallows, sucks and swallows, her little cheeks puffing in and out. And even though Luqiong’s just holding up a bottle, for a moment she feels a pang in her chest. And she doesn’t know if it’s her heart or her breast, aching under the stiff, unforgiving armor.

About the Author

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

She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter.

Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self

Isabel J. Kim

You are waiting for your instance in the basement of the Shinsegae Department Store. This was as good as an amusement park when you were a kid; it was a wonderland of delicious food stalls and a typical weekend haunt because your grandfather lived two blocks away.

Your grandfather is dead. Your instance gave you the news: a phone call in the dead of night that woke you from a dead sleep.

“Hello?” you said, accented with slumber.

“Is this Soyoung Kang?” your own voice said, accented with Korean.

“Yes,” you said. The only people who still call you Soyoung are family. Everyone else calls you Rose.

“Harabeoji’s dead,” your instance said. You dropped the phone in shock.

You hadn’t heard from Harabeoji in a decade and a half. For a while there were phone calls on your birthday, his voice tinny from the other side of the world. He would say happy birthday, and you would say thank you, and he would ask how’s school, and you would say it’s okay. Then you would ask how is Soyoung in Korea? because you remembered the little girl on the other side of the immigration checkpoint, wearing your clothes and your face and your memories.

Your instance.

Your-her grandfather would say she’s fine! She and her mother came to visit me yesterday. Her mother. Your other mother. The instance of your own mother standing next to you and pretending not to listen to your conversation.

Okay, you would say. Harabeoji never told you anything interesting about the other Soyoung. You eventually stopped asking, because you had homework, field hockey practice, college applications—you were happy living your American adolescence.

This is what you remembered, when your instance told you that harabeoji was dead. His silence about her. As if her existence was anathema to yours.

You picked your phone back up again and listened to your instance. She spoke to you in complete banmal, no formal suffixes for her other self. Grandfather’s dead. He wanted to see you before he died, but he died before we could email you about it. Yes, we saw it coming.

You don’t have to come to the funeral, but he said he wanted you here.

She said nothing about what she wanted, or why she was the one calling instead of an aunt or a cousin. She said nothing about how she felt about Harabeoji’s death, but you could guess her emotions based on the first ten years of being the same person. Maybe her sadness was like a foreign shore, which was how your sadness felt. You couldn’t imagine how she felt about talking to you.

“Okay,” you told your instance, in the dark warmth of your bedroom. “I’ll be there when I can.”

You arranged plane tickets. You arranged time off from work. You arranged a cat-sitter for Doctor Crouton. And now you are in Seoul, in a basement ripped from your memories, waiting for your instance to find you.

An instance is a duplicate self-cleaved mitosis-like from the original—though the duplicate and the original are both referred to as “instances” in modern vocabularies. To become an instance is to instantiate; in the present tense, instancing.

The oldest clear reference to instances is a line in Hammurabi’s Code translated as the foreign brother-self will receive no inheritance.

Different cultures refer to instances with a technicolor diversity: the sibling-self, the changeling, the one-who-does-not-return. The first requirement for instancing is a settled culture, though traditionally instances appear specifically in seafaring cultures. Through most of history, the ocean formed a natural division between the familiar and the foreign.

The second requirement is intent. Sailors throughout history are recorded as sailing from their home ports without instancing for decades, until one morning they boarded their ship and looked back to see their instance standing at the docks. Something must have shifted in their heart, some secret admittance that their leave-taking is permanent, that their families have become foreign to them.

There is a folktale that is repeated in Japan, Korea, and coastal China, of a fisherman who is coaxed into following a water spirit into an undersea court, where he drinks and dances with the beautiful merfolk. But the night grows long, so the fisherman asks the water spirit to take him back to his home. The spirit warns him that time flows differently underwater, but the fisherman repeats that he wants to go home.

The spirit nods and sadly takes the fisherman back to the shore. When the fisherman’s feet touch dry land, he ages thirty years instantly. When he walks into his house, he finds himself already inside, asleep with his wife.

A border is an artificial thing with practical consequences: the severing of the self from the self.

Your catch sight of your instance weaving through the crowds like a ship cutting water. You stare at her as she approaches. Here is your sister-self, your shadow-could-have-been, the woman you are in another country. Here she is, looking you over with your eyes in her face, and the lines in her face are not the lines in your face, but you could have been her: twenty years winds back to when one of you stepped onto the plane and the other stayed.

She stops a careful three feet away. “Did you get here okay?” she asks in Korean.

“Pretty well,” you respond in kind. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“Of course,” she says. “We’re family, after all.”

“Are we?” you ask, and she laughs, and you laugh. It feels something like release.

“Let me get you a coffee or something,” you say. “What do you want?”

“You don’t have to,” she says.

“No, I’m putting you to enough trouble,” you say. She smiles a bit at that, the same way you smile when something is funny but not happy. You can read her thoughts in that instant: it’ll make her feel better to buy me a coffee, I want a coffee and she wants to buy me a coffee, let’s skip the posturing, I know that she knows that I know.

“Vanilla latte, with an extra pump of sugar,” she says. You nod to hide your surprise. You’ve always taken your coffee black.

The distance between you and your instance is manufactured, not inherent. You know this. Your instance knows this. You both share in the creation of the space between the two of you, between yourself and your mother, between yourself and her-your Korean aunts and uncles, between her and her mother, between your mother and her mother. The only thing not your fault is the relationship between your mother and your-her grandfather.

Your instance and her mother get Korea, her-your aunts and uncles, your-her grandfather. They get the physical presence. They get Chuseok. They get your-her grandmother’s grave. They get stationary stores and E-mart and working public transit, they get the ajumma selling ginkgo nuts and roasted chestnuts at the foot of the hiking trails.

You and your mother get America.

You could call this fair trade. You could call this the inherent outcome of your mother’s feud with your-her grandfather, a tender wound not your own, which you never completely probed. You could have researched your instance—you know her name, her birthday, her school history until you left the country. You could have contacted her through your aunts. But you didn’t.

It’s not like you have anything against instances in the abstract. Your best friend from college split into instances nearly a decade ago after transferring to the German branch of her company. She hadn’t expected to instantiate, but Caroline’s heart apparently thought her future lay across the Atlantic.

You love both Carolines. The last time the two of you spoke, German Caroline told you she was planning on returning to America.

“It’s been fun,” she said to you. “But I’m ready to come home. I think I want to dis-instantiate. Don’t tell Caroline, yet.”

“She doesn’t know?” you said, cradling the phone between your shoulder and ear as you rinsed dishes in your sink.

“No,” German Caroline said. “I haven’t told her, it’s not like we’re psychic.”

“That’s kind of a big thing,” you said. “Dis-instancing. I didn’t think people really did that.”

“It’s not a big thing in the States,” she agreed. “That’s why I want to talk to her first.”

“Sure,” you said. “It’ll be nice to see you again.”

“What are you talking about?” Caroline said. “You see me all the time. You guys get brunch like, every Sunday.”

Here is the second half of the sailor’s folktale:

The sailor returns home and finds his instance asleep in bed with his wife. He looks down at their bodies, the slow rise and fall of his instance’s chest. The way his instance’s arm curls sweetly around his wife’s waist. He forgets the endless beautiful night he spent in the underwater court, he remembers only that thirty years of his life have been erased.

A great and terrible anger rises in him. How dare his other self be content. How dare his other self have three decades with his wife.

He picks up his instance’s knife from where it hangs on the wall. He kneels above his other self.

He plunges the knife into his other self’s breast.

His instance wakes in a great gasp. He claws at the air. He screams. His wife, waking, beats at the sailor’s chest. Husband! she shouts. The sailor’s instance grasps at his jacket, at his sleeves. The sailor holds the knife down.

His instance tears the wet fabric. He manages to grab the sailor’s bare wrist.

And then there is a single man lying there, bleeding from his breast wound, his own hand holding the knife in place. The sailor and his instance having merged, falling into a single self like a collapsing waveform.

In some versions of the story, the sailor survives his self-inflicted wounds. In others he does not.

The message remains the same in either version of the story: Intention does not matter in homecoming. There is no requirement of desire to return for de-instancing. What matters is the physical action, the touch of skin against skin.

Your instance weaves the two of you over to the parking garage where her small silver car is parked. She opens the trunk for you, but doesn’t help with your suitcase, which you struggle to lift.

“Sorry,” she says. “I just don’t want to risk—”

“Yeah, I get it,” you tell her, and grunt as you push the suitcase in. You don’t want to touch her either. You get in the car. She turns on the engine.
“Where are we going?” you ask, pretending not to glance around the car. It reminds you of your mother’s old car, not so much in appearance but in the smell of it. There’s a car seat in the back. You didn’t know your instance had a kid.

Your instance sighs. “The plan is for you to stay with me tonight, unless you want to stay with keunimo, but I think she’s busy with arranging everything. You missed the funeral home bits. But he’s being buried tomorrow. So, we’re just going home tonight, unless there’s anything you want to do. Do you want to get dinner?”

You don’t know if there’s anything you want to do. You want to go to the kalguksu place near your old apartment, the restaurant where they would bring out huge pots of simmering clam broth and noodles. You want to go to a 7-11 and get an ice cream bar and a banana milk. You want to go back inside the Shinsegae basement and buy yourself jun, mandu, twigim, and eat all of it at the food court in a feat of decadence your mother never would have allowed.

You wish you were home in your apartment in Fort Lee, heating up a single serving of rice and leftovers, your cat purring by your side. You wish your grandfather wasn’t dead, that you were not here in this country.

“I’m hungry,” you say. “Let’s get dinner.”

The English word nostalgia derives from the Ancient Greek nostos, which refers to a genre of epic literature involving safe homecoming by sea. Nostos can be contrasted against kleos, the glory earned through great deeds. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive—Odysseus’ nostos is his kleos. His return to his wife, meeting his son, and the acceptance of his instance are simultaneously his triumph against Poseidon, his wife’s suitors, and his own self-doubt.

In the narrative, Odysseus dislikes the man his instance became after he left for Troy—weak willed and unable to stand up to his wife’s suitors. Only by leaving, by fighting for ten years at Troy and spending another decade attempting to return to Ithaca, does Odysseus become a man he recognizes as himself. Yet it is the embrace of his own faults that allows him to finally return home, completely and wholly.

Odysseus’ story is an outlier—no other epic focuses so heavily on the relationship between instances, or creates the sort of conflict that Odysseus has between himselves. And in reality, instances don’t tend toward conflict—they know too much about each other, and it’s too easy for them to anticipate each other’s actions. What they want is often too similar to be separated.

Your instance takes you to a local barbecue place, where you meet up with your cousin who you haven’t talked to in two decades, your instance’s husband, and your instance’s daughter. She’s an adorable four year old who stares at you surreptitiously.

“Are we drinking?” your cousin—Jungwon—asks. He’s sitting next to you, and had given you a big hug when he walked into the restaurant. He used to be your favorite cousin. He’d grown up in the time you were gone.

“Please, yes,” you say, and Jungwon orders a few green bottles of soju for the table.

“Really?” your instance’s husband—Taehyung, but call me Tae, haha, yeah, like the band member—says, with amusement in his voice. You’ve been trying not to think about how he’s handsome. How he has nice hands.

“It’s what Harabeoji would have wanted,” Jungwon says. “Just a few toasts. We gotta honor his memory.”

“You’re just saying that, you drunk,” your instance says with a smile on her face that mirrors your own.

Jungwon gasps in mock offense.

“What’s a drunk?” the daughter says, and everyone laughs. “It’s not funny!”

“Just grown-up teasing,” your instance says, giving her kid a kiss on the cheek that the kid squirms away from halfheartedly. You can’t stop staring at the way the kid fits in your instance’s lap like she belongs there.

“Why’d Harabeoji want me to come, do you know?” you say, tamping down the discomfort bubbling in your chest. “We haven’t talked in years.”

“He talked about you a lot,” Jungwon says. “Before he died. You and your mom.”

“Family was important to him,” Tae says. “I learned that when I wanted to marry Soyoung. He was a big ‘duty and loyalty’ sort of guy.”

“War generation,” Jungwon says sagely. “I think not knowing about what happened in the north kind of haunted him.”

“I think he always hoped you’d come back,” your instance says. Your eyes snap up. You want her to explain, but she’s looking away now, busy moving the kid to her own seat.

“What’s living in the States like?” Tae asks.

“Well, everyone speaks English,” you say, and everyone laughs. Then the food begins to arrive, and it’s a scramble to clear the table so that the plates of banchan, meat, lettuce, rice in metal bowls, and kimchi can all fit around the grill. Conversation turns to cooking meat, pouring drinks.

“To the old man,” Jungwon says, and you all clink shot glasses. This at least is easy. Like slotting into a life you had forgotten living.

What’s living in the States like?

America is Costco and Starbucks and freeways; America is H Mart and boba and FOBs and bananas and first gen, second gen, third gen. America means KSA and APSA in college, and it means clicking the box that says “Asian/Pacific-Islander” on the job applications and the census, America means being asked so, where are you from? and nobody meaning New Jersey.

America means not knowing which of your friends are instances.

In 1776, the Constitution granted full rights to white, male, landowning instances—unheard of in Europe at the time—and not much to anyone else, until amendment after amendment chipped away at the assumptions underlying it. There’s still a lot to carve away.

Instancing exploded globally from the eighteenth century onward. Colonization duplicated people across the globe. Immigration through Ellis and Angel Islands created vast swathes of instanced communities across the coasts. This is the legacy of the west: a mitosis-like duplication of the self across lands already peopled.

Instancing is written into America’s blood, into the story it tells itself: Here is where instances immigrate. Give us your tired, your poor, your hungry, give us your copies and let them be fruitful and multiply, let them homestead, let them become titans of industry, let them and their non-instanced children build cities and towns and railroads.

America assumes instances will stay forever.

Here is a free state for those who want to leave, America says, ignoring the fact that the land was already peopled, that the borders were brought to them unwillingly. Ignoring those brought in force in chains. Ignoring the deportations at the border. Ignoring the fact that intention to leave actually just means acceptance of situations beyond your control.

Living in the States means that you’re blank-American. Korean-American. Mexican-American. African-American. Indian-American. Native American. America assumes instances leave their original country permanently and defines them by the self left behind.

Halfway through dinner, Jungwon and you take a smoke break outside. Cold air, warm nicotine. It’s nice. It’s strange to watch Jungwon and your instance together, the familiarity between them, more like sister and brother than cousins. Good strange.

“So, what’s she like? Soyoung, I mean,” you ask Jungwon. You remember him being honest. “She seemed pretty high-strung during dinner.”

Jungwon waves a hand in the air, trailing smoke. “Eh. She’s having a rough time of it. You’re not seeing her at her best,” he says. “You know how it is, Harabeoji’s last words to her was about wanting her to dis-instance, you know, all of that. That was pretty shitty of the old man.”

You stop, cigarette halfway to your lips. “What?”

Jungwon stops. “She didn’t tell you?”

“No, she didn’t tell me! All she told me was that Harabeoji wanted me to come to the funeral. Jesus Christ, did he really ask her that? Dying wish, ask her to dis-instantiate?”

You are abruptly reevaluating how much you knew about your-her grandfather. You know Harabeoji was born before the Korean War. You know your family is from the north. You know your grandmother died when you were very young. You know Harabeoji liked to watch baseball and that he kept sweet jelly cup snacks in his cupboard for you and your cousins.

“Yep,” Jungwon says, looking uncomfortable. “Look, you should talk to her about it, not me. I probably shouldn’t have told you about it if she didn’t tell you?”

“No, you should have told me sooner! That’s so fucked up. Who asks that sort of thing?”

“Well, Harabeoji did.”

You know your grandfather was bitterly opposed to your mother moving to America. You know him and your mother had a blowup fight two nights before you moved, screaming at each other while one of your older cousins hustled you and Jungwon out of the apartment. You know your grandfather drove you and your mother to the airport anyway, but didn’t speak except to tell you to be good for your mom, Soyoung-ah.

You’re pretty sure him and your mother-in-America never spoke again.

The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in 1953, creating the demilitarized zone that splits the peninsula into north and south. The Republic of Korea has the tenth largest nominal GDP in the world, globally consumed entertainment exports, and a remarkably high percentage of plastic surgery among its populace. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has nuclear weapons, a fascist dictatorship built around a cult of personality, and a thriving black market for international media. The two countries never formally ended the war. Both countries post soldiers on their side of the DMZ, blank-faced men with mirrored sunglasses.

Crossing a border creates an instance. Creating a border manifests the capability for instances.

For a short time during the Korean War, it was possible to cross the DMZ with the right papers. The DMZ wasn’t quite a border yet, not coalesced in the hearts and minds of the people as a border. So much had happened to Korea in the past decades. Japanese occupation, name changes, comfort women, the phasing out of the Korean language. The theft of thousands of cultural artifacts. Global war, local war, foreign powers playing toy soldiers with foreigners, ideologies grappling in Korea before they moved to Vietnam.

Soyoung’s grandfather crossed a border-becoming-a-border. He didn’t look back at who he might be leaving behind.

The next morning, your instance drives you to the gravesite. It’s rush hour in Seoul, and you both sit uncomfortably in your black clothing. Your instance’s husband and daughter will be coming later in the day, but you almost wish they were here now. You try not to watch your instance, but her visage reflects off the passenger window.

Seoul crawls past in fits and bursts. Storefronts selling fish cake and twigim and ddukbokki, 7-11s with cardboard K-Pop stars advertising soft drinks and soju.

You have never more desperately wanted to initiate a conversation. A dialogue. An interrogation. You want to ask about Harabeoji’s last request to her, how she feels about it, what she wants to do. You want to ask her your questions without fear of the answers, except you know that the moment you ask is the moment she will refuse to speak. Because you would refuse to speak. It would scare you, to talk. It scares you now.

You know that she knows that you are scared. So, you can’t ask.

You watch the scenery instead. High-rise apartment buildings, signs for after-school tutoring facilities, bus stops and subway stations. Dozens of coffee shops. You don’t remember this route. You hadn’t expected Seoul to change so much—the Seoul in your memories was static, a snow globe of 1998. You feel like a foreigner. Like an American.

Your family has lived in Seoul for two and a half generations. Your grandfather relocated here after the war, and your mother and her sisters were born here, and you were born here, and you could have lived your whole life in this city. Your grandfather died here.

“It was old age, right?” you ask. “Not a heart attack or cancer or anything.”

“He was eighty-seven,” your instance says. “Isn’t everything old age at that point?”

“Sure,” you say. It always surprises you when your instance says things you wouldn’t. It surprises you more when she says things you would.

“We kind of saw it coming,” she says, looking straight at the road. “I mean. Eighty-seven, right?”

“Right,” you say, daring a glance at her. She looks perfectly calm. “Were you close? I remember I used to spend a lot of time at his apartment as a kid.”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. He’s just . . . Harabeoji, right? Mom would park me at his place on weekends. Sometimes he’d call you when I was over. It was like seeing me reminded him that you existed.”

“I didn’t know that,” you say. “He never said anything about you, no matter how much I asked.”

“Well, here’s how you should picture it,” she says, rolling to a stop at a red light. “He’s on the phone, sitting on the sofa, half-watching me and half-watching the baseball game. And I’m sitting at the kitchen table doing some homework I didn’t finish at hagwon. And he’s talking to you, and you’re talking to him, and I’m doing my best to be really quiet with my pencil so I can hear what you’re saying.”

You can picture the apartment with the clarity of a reconstructed childhood memory. The smooth glass tabletop. The creased leather couch. The way it smelled a little like smoke, even though harabeoji only ever smoked outside. You can imagine Harabeoji holding the old landline against his ear. You can imagine yourself sitting at the kitchen table doing homework. Listening.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” you say, after a long pause.

“Well. I didn’t either,” your instance says, and it feels like you’re circling back around the conversation again, taking a derivative and never quite managing to meet the x-axis.

In many ways, it is easy for the man in the folktale. He never had to talk to his other self. And besides, what is three days compared to thirty years? One beautiful, strange night in a foreign country subsumed under thirty years of eating dinner with his wife, raising his children, taking his boat across the glittering shore and casting his nets. Time polishes the memory of the undersea court to a pearl, something carefully tucked away under the rough cloth of his weekday worries.

Or he dies, bleeding out through the self-inflicted wound.

A traditional Korean funeral is held over three days, ending with the burial. Traditional Korean graves are earthen mounds on mountainsides, with nearby stone markers on which Chinese characters are written.

Most people are cremated now. Korea is a very small country, and it has only so many mountains. But your grandfather is traditional, and his burial plot has been purchased for decades—ever since your grandmother’s death.

The gravesite is familiar. A hill on the outskirts of Seoul, a clearing in the middle of the forest underneath the blue sky. This is why you’re wearing black hiking boots instead of heels.

Family and friends and strangers in black, dry eyes, wet eyes, your aunts and cousins exclaiming over you. You must be so tired from the travel! It’s so good to see you again! How’s your mother? You speak Korean and stumble over your syllables.

The burial happens. The coffin. Shovels. Dirt and sod.

Your grandfather’s grave is a large mound of earth, encased in a stone foundation with a shiny black granite marker. Your chest hurts to look at it, the sort of bone-deep dull sadness when a part of you that you thought was already dead dies. You didn’t realize what it would mean to miss your grandfather until this moment.

Your instance walks over to you. You glance up as she approaches. She had been standing near her husband and daughter, while you stood near Jungwon and your other cousins, who had all exclaimed to see you.

“It’s weird being here when it’s not Chuseok,” your instance says. Her eyes are red-rimmed.

“Oh you think it’s weird to be here?” you respond, and she laughs and you laugh and the laughter feels like a thin soap bubble film stretched across your words.

“Don’t laugh,” Jungwon says, without any heat. “The aunts will get mad.”

“Sorry,” you say. “It’s just that, you know. This still doesn’t feel real.”

Jungwon peers at you. “Are you okay?”

Two days ago you were home in Fort Lee. Your biggest emotional hurdles were making sure you did the laundry before you ran out of socks, or deciding whether to get dim sum or American brunch with Caroline over the weekend. You hadn’t thought about your instance, your family in Korea, your grandfather, in months, and even when you thought of them it was in passing, as if they were a dream you only vacantly remembered, something tamped down and buried.

A beat of silence that stretches too long. Your instance laughs. You do not laugh.

“Shit, oppa, of course she’s not okay!” your instance says. “She just learned Harabeoji died two days ago, and now she had to fly all the way here for the fucking funeral, which she missed, what were you expecting?”

“Uh—” Jungwon says. Your instance’s voice spiraled into a shout. Everyone’s staring.

“Are you okay?” you cut in, staring at your instance. Her face has gone all blotchy under her makeup.

“I’m—I’m going to get some air,” she says, and you almost reach for her when she turns on her heel, but Jungwon catches your hand instead.

“Let’s give her a moment to cool off,” he says, but you chase after your other self anyway.

A plethora of related terminology borrows the terminology of instancing. For instance, software development. When Soyoung “Rose” Kang, in her real-true-American-job, downloads a copy of her company’s repository from the cloud, that’s called instancing, the same way the three steps across the immigration gate was instancing. A perfect copy is duplicated in a new location.

When Soyoung “Rose” Kang is done making her changes to the file, she will de-instance it, merging the file with the original on the server. The changes slot into the original, and the new copy becomes the official version on the server. The original copy without the changes is overwritten by the instance. Integration of the other into the self.

You catch up to your other self. She’s come back to where the car is parked, and she’s leaned against the side, pretending not to wipe her eyes.

She looks askance at you. “What do you want.” A statement. Her voice your voice. Her hurt unlike your hurt. You feel like a stranger all of a sudden, so far removed from the way she sounds, unable to understand the way she feels.

“I don’t know,” you say. Plain banmal. “I was tired of talking around things. I’m sorry you’re having a tough time. I’m sorry that Harabeoji asked you to de-instance.”

She smears a finger under her eye, blotting a tear. “Jungwon told you, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah. Last night. He told me to talk to you about it. But I thought you would bring it up if you wanted to talk about it.”

“When have we ever brought anything up?” she says. You laugh. She laughs. Neither of you are happy.

“I could be someone direct,” you say. “America changes people.”

“Does it?” she asks. “Have you changed that much?”

Time, space, the American public school system. You don’t know if change is something that happens to you all at once, or if you could chart your life in millimeters and that maybe years ago you could have understood each other.

“I didn’t know you had a kid,” you say. “I didn’t know you had a husband, or that you drank your coffee sweet. I didn’t know I could be that sort of person. I didn’t know that Harabeoji could be someone to ask so much of you. I don’t think you should do anything you don’t want to do. I don’t want to do anything you don’t want to do.”

She looks at you. And now you finally recognize the expression in her face. Hunger.

“I want to,” she says.

The English word nostalgia is derived from Greek word algea, the plural personification of pain.

Your surprise naked on your face. Her hunger tucked away again behind her blank mask.

“I guess you didn’t expect that,” she says.

“Why didn’t you dis-instantiate me, then?” you ask. She had the opportunities. When you bought her coffee. When you were in the car. When you sat near her in the restaurant. When you slept, defenseless, on her pullout futon. Dis-instancing is about physical contact, not about mutual desire.

“You said it. I don’t want to do anything you don’t want to do,” she says, echoing your American accent, your inflected Korean. It sounds strange through her mouth. That must be how it sounds through your mouth. She smiles at you, a sarcastic twist of the lip. “Could I live with myself, if I did that?”

Maybe you should be glad there is no instance of you that is cruel.

Instances cannot read each other’s minds.

“But I want to,” she says again. “I’ve always wanted to know what it was like, to live somewhere else. To be the one to leave. To be American. I wondered about you. When I had to take suneung. When I would fight with mom. When I was getting married. Did you ever wonder about me?”

You did. You thought about your other self when you picked your college major. When you fought with your mother. When it was Chuseok and you were alone in your dorm room, eating dduk that your mother mailed you.

“I did,” you say. You want to know how she loves her husband. How she loves her daughter. How she talks with her-your cousins and how she goes to work in her silver car and how she orders at restaurants in Korean and how she speaks in Korean and dreams in Korean and how she misses Harabeoji as more than a crumpled memory.

“I guess it’s selfish, to want to know two lives,” she says. “But I can’t help what I want.”

Soyoung’s grandfather always regretted not looking back across the border.

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” your instance says. “And it was cruel of Harabeoji to ask me, and it would be cruel of me to force you. But I’m telling you that I’m happy here, and I love my husband, and I love my daughter, and I don’t know who you love, but you could love who I love. I could love who you love. If that changes your decision, at all.”

Your heart thumping in your chest. Your dry mouth. Your instance standing a scant three feet away, smiling at you.

“So, let me know what you want,” she says.

The three keystrokes it takes to push a de-instancing request to the server.

You want to take your other self’s hand and fold her into your existence. You want to hide in your apartment with the soft warm weight of your cat in your arms. You want to call Caroline in Germany and commiserate. You want to smoke outside barbecue restaurants with Jungwon. You want to go back to your grandfather’s grave and apologize for taking so long to visit.

You want to pick up your instance’s daughter and have her be your own. You want to have grown up in Korea. You want to have grown up in America. You want there to be only one of you. You want your other self to be happy. You want to fulfill your grandfather’s last request. You want to be happy. You want to stop wanting. You want to go home.

Filial piety never rested easy against American exceptionalism.

“It’s not that easy,” you say. Your instance’s face crystallizing in her smile. You can’t look at this, because even if it’s not your feelings, you understand the way that disappointment feels in her heart.

“You’ll remember, if we dis-instantiate. You’ll remember, and I’ll remember, but it’s not going to make you happier. It won’t make Harabeoji and Umma make up retroactively, and it won’t stop me from having left, and maybe it’s selfish, but I have a life. I have a job, and I have a cat, and I have friends, and they could be ours, but then they wouldn’t be mine. And it won’t make Harabeoji happy, because he’s dead, and what he wants can’t be more important than what I want, and I’m sorry about that but it’s true. And I wish there was a way for me to have everything—for you to have everything—but there isn’t. I can’t live my life and live yours at the same time.”

You are suddenly achingly homesick. Home like your grandfather’s apartment, twenty years ago. Home like falling asleep in the back seat of your mom’s car. Home like waking up in your childhood bedroom. You won’t ever get any of that back, and losing that wasn’t your choice, but you can choose how to live with the loss of all the people you used to be.

“If we dis-instantiate, America becomes a memory for you. For me. Just like Korea is a memory for me. You’ll remember, because I’ll remember, and you’ll regret, because I’ve regretted. I know you will. I know about regret. I miss Korea, sometimes. I’d miss America more,” you say.

You don’t know how to explain the way you feel about the States to your instance, who has never had to leave home. How she-you will long for worlds that no longer exist, for countries that only exist in your memories, how you’ve had years to come to terms with the tension that sits in your belly when you think about the homes you’ve left behind, how you have changed enough to miss America, now, and you can bear the loss of one homeland but not two. How to explain she would become a foreigner. How to explain to her how you are Korean-American. How you are American.

“I don’t want that for you,” you say instead. “Or for me.”

Your other self’s smile melts into something less cracked. You smile back in relief.

“If it’s only regret,” she says, and reaches for your hand and you—

The knife in the heart, held by the fisherman’s hand.

About the Author

Isabel J. Kim is a Korean-American science fiction and fantasy writer. When she’s not writing, she’s a law student at the University of Pennsylvania, which is significantly less exciting to talk about. She also co-hosts Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture. Her interactive fiction “Kingmaker” has been published in Sub-Q Magazine (2020). Find her @isabeljkim on twitter.

The Orbiting Guan Erye

Wang Zhenzhen, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan

Setting down my tablet, I turned my head and asked, “Old Liu, what do you say we get a bird to keep here in the station?”

Old Liu’s full name was Liu Zixuan. He was three years older than me, the ranking officer in this humble little space station, commanding exactly one subordinate, one of the top mechanical grapple operators in orbit, Lil’ Zhang—that’s me. Hearing the name Zixuan, you’ll likely picture some fresh-faced pretty-boy with rosy lips and perfect teeth, but no such luck, he was an old-school Beijing Bloke. You couldn’t call him beefy, quite, but he didn’t leave you room for daydreams.

Fortunately, though, Old Liu had a lively mind—you rarely got bored talking to him. He chatted about Beijing with me all the time: the fermented mung bean milk of Tiantankou, the chitterling stew of Ping’anli, the birds of the Summer Palace, the fish of Goldfish Pool. He liked to say that outer space gave him too much of a stuffy feeling, so he needed to air out his memories of his homeland on the regular to do a good job at work. Under his subtle influence, I developed a bit of a hankering for the Beijing life too.

“Keeping a bird? What’s a layabout without any practical know-how like you doing, thinking about that?” he asked.

“See for yourself,” I drawled, and tossed the tablet to him. The tablet screen displayed a short story titled “Feathered Friend,” by Arthur C. Clarke. The story was straightforward—a crew member on a space station was secretly keeping a canary, in a minor breach of regulations. But no one could have guessed that an accident would send the space station’s oxygen levels plummeting, while the alarm system happened to break down at the same time. In this dangerous situation, the canary reacted first and passed out, alerting the crew and ultimately saving all their lives.

I fully trusted the air circulation system in the space station, and I’d never properly tried to care for a pet before. But I wouldn’t mind adding an adorable little backup to the space station, especially when it wouldn’t cost us much of anything.

Old Liu soon finished reading the story. He was quiet for a moment, chin in hand, then said, “Wouldn’t work.”

“How would you know, if you’ve never done it before?”

“Simple. In space, birds can’t eliminate waste. They’re not like humans—they don’t have separate urethrae and anuses, just a cloaca where urine and feces come out together. You wouldn’t want questionable white fluids floating everywhere in the space station, would you?”

“Urk . . . ” My stomach turned when I considered it.

“More importantly, birds can’t voluntarily control their waste elimination. It’s fine on Earth where gravity helps out—makes the waste drop like a bomb from a plane, fwish! But in a zero-gravity environment, the bird can’t eliminate waste. The little thing’s going to clog to death on its own crap and piss.”

I had to admit, he made a vivid analogy. I immediately thought of the aerial bombers newly added to our country’s military. They really did need a rail launcher to properly toss out the missiles.

“Fine, I admit you’ve got a point . . . ” I shrugged. “You really did put all your skill points into this kind of random trivia!”

“Hah. What Beijing Bloke wouldn’t know how to care for flower, fish, and fowl?” he returned.

At that point, a dispatch from the Tiangong main station interrupted our conversation. He waved the tablet, indicating that I should take it.

“Hello? Are you there, Lil’ Zhang? You guys might be getting work to do.”

“Space Station B5-H35 here, message received. Main Station, what’s the situation?” I answered.

“Lidar detected some weird little thingies. No danger of collision with you guys, but they’re not supposed to be there. You guys should take a look.”

“Thingies? Where?”

“They’re probably military satellites launched during the Cold War. Couldn’t find anything on them in the database. I’ll send you the monitoring data. If you look out from the observation dome, toward Tianque, you’ll see it within plus or minus ten degrees.”

I grabbed the telescope and directed my gaze toward Tianque—the wreckage of a large-scale space station. Two years ago, a meteor had struck Tianque while it was still in the process of construction, snapping the main axle into three pieces; not only was repair impossible, the collision had produced a large amount of space junk. As a result, not many people ventured into this region of space even now. It had even proved troublesome for our space station, preventing us from expanding our operations. Part of the daily routine for me and Old Liu in this beat-up little space station was monitoring the movement of this wreck.

But today, something really had changed within the environs of Tianque. In my field of vision, about three degrees southwest of the wreck, a formation of little bright dots had appeared. They were extremely close to us, their relative velocity near zero. Even against the glittering backdrop of the Milky Way, they were clearly visible, like silver chains floating in the void. And obviously, if they were moving along an orbit, they couldn’t be a meteor shower.

“I’ve got visual confirmation. Data received. I’ll try to grab one,” I answered.

“Roger that. Thanks for your work.” The Tiangong main station cut off the transmission.

It might sound hard, operating a cable-controlled grapple with three axes of movement to grab a small satellite, but I’m an old hand. I aimed the microwave radar toward the flashing dots. Soon, the screen indicated that the chains of lights were in fact twelve little CubeSat satellites arrayed in a three by four formation along the same orbital path, advancing in equally spaced ranks as if fastened together by a giant invisible net. At the same time, the computer gave me the time at which they’d be closest to us, approximately one hour later. I sat myself in the operating cabin, made my adjustments, then struck up a conversation with Old Liu.

“I’ve never seen satellites in such a tight formation. Old Liu, you’ve got lots of experience. Have you seen anything like this?” I asked.

“I haven’t. It kind of looks like when you send multiple satellites up on the same rocket, before the payload has had a chance to disperse through orbital maneuvers.” He craned his neck to take a look, then shook his head. “But any launch that’s gotten to this stage should be complete. This looks more like . . . someone created this formation on purpose.”

“But . . . who’d be bored enough to do something like that?” I told him, “We have a tiny window of opportunity this time, only enough for me to fetch one back. How about you take a guess what’ll be in it?”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to keep a bird up here in space? Maybe you’ll pick up a canary,” Old Liu ribbed me, shrugging his shoulders.

“Hah.” With that, I returned my attention to the observation platform.

There’s not much to say about the process of grappling on to a target. You just steer the grappling hook into the target’s orbital path, fire off the RCS thrusters a couple dozen times to cut down on your velocity relative to the target, wait for it to “bump” into the hook, clamp down, and reel the cable back in. Other than the three axes of movement and the zero-gravity environment, it’s not fundamentally different from operating an arcade claw machine. Because whichever satellite I grabbed would be followed by more satellites on the same orbital path, I decided to get the front-most satellite. To avoid a collision, I had to reel the cable in quickly, but it didn’t add too much hassle to the task. Soon, we had the strange CubeSat inside the hold of the space station.

“Is this some kind of joke?” I said. The object in front of me could barely be called a satellite. The cube was a little smaller all around than even a standard 10 x 10 x 10 cm CubeSat, without any visible sensor components on its surface. It was assembled from six sheets of galvanized iron bolted together—some of the screws hadn’t been tightened properly, the nuts gone missing without a trace. Its crudeness put the shoddiest of Soviet manufacturing to shame.

But Old Liu was in high spirits. “Either way, let’s take a look at the payload first.” He unscrewed the top with practiced movements and lifted it away. Unexpectedly, the moment the box was opened, a cloud of icy vapor boiled out of the container, forming a layer of frost over my goggles and skin. Startled, I backed away on instinct, only to lose my balance and start spinning in the middle of the space station. When Old Liu finally grabbed and steadied me, and I’d recovered from my shock, I at last discovered the real face of the payload—some foam, clearly used for shock absorption, and a crystal-clear ecosystem sphere steaming with cold. The water inside it had completely frozen. Through it, I could see a fish frozen inside the ice.

“Old Liu . . . what is this sphere?” My voice shook a little. I turned toward Old Liu, only to find him goggling as well. It took a while before he cleared his throat and came up to put his arm around the sphere.

“Er, scientifically speaking, this ought to be a frozen ecosystem sphere. It looks like there’s a carp and some vegetation embedded in the ice.” He hefted the glass sphere and added, “It feels about five kilos.”

“Sure, but I want to ask . . . why would this thing end up in orbit?”

In this instant, possibilities swam through my mind. What kind of person would take a five-kilogram ecosystem sphere thousands of miles up into outer space, then toss it outside to drift in orbit? What would their purpose be?

Dong!

Old Liu gave a hard rap on my spacesuit, bringing me to reality. “Don’t woolgather, take a close look at this.”

I responded belatedly, picking up the ecosystem sphere and inspecting it closely. Only then did I discover that the ice in the sphere looked a lot clearer than normal ice. There was hardly any distortion; I could even clearly see the patterns on the carp.

“It looks like the kind of crystal structure produced by flash freezing . . . ” Old Liu chipped off a bit of ice and examined it under the microscope. After a while, he suddenly remarked, “Lil’ Zhang, we can’t keep a bird, but do you want to keep a fish?”

“Keep a fish?” I looked at the sphere of ice in Old Liu’s hand, which showed no signs of thawing, and asked, dubiously, “This fish? It’s been frozen into a lump. How are we supposed to keep it?”

“Haha, ye of little knowledge. If my guess is correct, before this ecosystem sphere was tossed into space, it was first flash frozen with liquid nitrogen. With an animal as hardy as a carp, supercooling temperatures will only freeze it on the outside, forming a hard shell, but it won’t damage the circulatory system. The ice shell would even help it survive the g-forces of a rocket launch. In other words, if we toss it into water to defrost, it’ll soon be alive and kicking, guaranteed.”

“But . . . even if it works, we’ll be in trouble if the main station finds out,” I said, shrugging.

He chortled. “So what if they find out? We’re investigating the origins of this mysterious ecosystem sphere, so we have no choice but to keep evidence. If nothing else works, I can always write up an observational report on fish gill function in a zero-gravity environment and hand it to them. They can’t object to scientific research.” Old Liu tossed the glass sphere to me as I spoke.

I caught the sphere and looked at it for a while, at the carp, as pure and glittering as something made of crystal. It felt like I was anticipating the arrival of a new friend. That persuaded me. I set the mystery of this ecosystem sphere’s appearance aside, as my mind already began to consider what name to give this space fish.

The folks in Tiangong main station were all out of ideas regarding the appearance of the ecosystem sphere in near-Earth orbit, so they didn’t stop us from keeping the fish. Meanwhile, our new pal soon proved Old Liu right. In a day’s time, with the melting of the ice, he’d revived from his frozen condition. He hadn’t fully adjusted to the zero gravity, and he looked a little frail, but his life was definitely in no danger. Raising fish in space was already a fairly mature experimental technology; that night, Old Liu designed a custom system, adding a loop to both the water and air circulation systems and running them through a small glove box, allowing for automatic water replacement and manual oxygenation. All we had to do was toss in feed, and the fish would thrive.

Three hours later, the little guy had fully adjusted to the zero-gravity environment of outer space, nimbly tumbling and turning in six degrees of freedom. He’d sometimes even blow out a string of big bubbles, surrounding himself with them, then pop them one by one with slaps of his tail, having a blast all on his own. Based on that behavior, I wanted to name him Bubbles, but Old Liu refused, insisting on calling him “Second Master.” It was a reference to the Peach Garden Brothers from Romance of the Three Kingdoms—he was Old Liu, as in Liu Bei, the fish was Second Master Guan, as in Guan Yu, and I was Lil’ Zhang, as in Zhang Fei—three brothers in outer space who had only one another to depend on. The fish’s status in the space station had really shot up with our getting acquainted, clearly overtaking that of a mostly idle grapple operator like me. Caving to Old Liu’s tyranny, I had no choice but to respectfully address him as “Second Master.”

At first, Second Master gave us a lot of scares. The first time we saw him turn over belly-up and stop moving, we thought he was sick. But when we got closer, Second Master started happily swimming around again. It made sense, after some thought. There was no up, down, left, or right in outer space. In the water, Second Master chose a direction to face purely at random. Every day, when we assumed our positions, Second Master was in a new orientation. The odds of him taking a “normal” orientation were actually pretty small.

You lose track of time in a space station. Amid the daily routine of dry tasks, Second Master became our closest pal. Fish couldn’t speak; sometimes, this made him an even better listener for pouring your heart out to. He had no choice but to be there for you in his primitive way, to receive you, to accept what you entrusted to him.

During this time, Second Master’s origin continued to puzzle us. Old Liu made a thorough search of Earth’s microsatellite databases and research programs, but failed to turn up any records of five-kilogram frozen ecosystem spheres being launched into outer space. Even after analyzing the ecosystem sphere’s structure and construction, we couldn’t make heads nor tails out of its launcher’s motives. Without further leads, we even started to wonder if some supernatural hand lay behind the riddle of Second Master’s origin.

But our lack of clues didn’t last for too long. Soon, news came from the Tiangong main station. Our orbit was once again going to take us by that parade of CubeSats, and this time, the window of opportunity would be long enough for me to grab two of them.

I took a seat at the console. To relieve my anxiety, I asked Old Liu, same as last time, what he thought we’d haul back this time around.

“At most, we’ll end up with another Second Master,” Old Liu guessed unimaginatively.

Since the last time we’d seen these satellites, their formation had grown slightly more scattered and messier, although they were still very close together. Visual observation showed that some of these crude galvanized iron boxes had lost their lids; their small, scattered components could be a serious threat to our space station. For safety, I chose to take the same strategy as my first retrieval attempt, starting with the front-most satellite to minimize disturbance to the formation.

The first retrieval proceeded without a hitch, but something went wrong while I was reeling the second satellite back in. The hold suddenly shook violently.

I cursed. “What happened?” I yelled behind me.

“A micrometeoroid hit the water tank. Don’t worry, auto-repair activated,” Old Liu answered heavily.

I took a deep breath and continued to operate the grapple, carefully towing the satellite into the airtight hold. Despite the shock, the retrieval process went through without any harm done.

The two sheet metal boxes looked identical to the one from before. They were just as crudely constructed, with several screws missing without a trace—the earlier hit to the space station had probably come from one of those screws. Thankfully, there hadn’t been a huge difference in relative velocity, and our space station had taken precautions in a region with relatively high levels of space junk, or the consequences would have been unimaginable.

Old Liu picked up one of the boxes, flipped it over, and discovered that the bottom face had a round hole in it. He deftly removed the sole remaining screw in the lid, lifted it, and, seeing the “payload” that drifted out, once more descended into a state of shock.

This metal box held a huge, extraordinary . . . flashlight.

The flashlight thoroughly exceeded the dimensions of your average household flashlight. It was at least three times the diameter, and more than twice the length. Fortunately, it hadn’t been turned on, or the effect in the hold would be nothing short of a small flash grenade exploding.

“Hey, Old Liu?” I asked.

“Hm?”

“What’s the cheapest rates on a commercial rocket launch?”

“For a heavy launch, seven or eight thousand yuan per kilo. For a small launch, forty or fifty thousand per kilo?”

“Then . . . what kind of crazy rich person would spend that much money to send this random crap into space?”

“Don’t stress about it, the world of rich people is beyond your comprehension.”

“Thanks, that made me feel zero percent better.”

“You’re welcome.” Old Liu turned and picked up the other metal box. “What do you think is in this one?” he asked. “Last time, we picked up a fish Second Master Guan. Maybe this time, we’ve picked up a real Second Master Guan!” he said, giving it a rap.

We’d thought that after two astonishing unboxings, nothing could surprise us anymore. But reality had a knack for finding ways to rock our puny minds.

When we lifted aside the galvanized metal lid, the first thing to emerge was a gold-colored cap, followed by a face. It was a familiar face, a face the color of jujubes, with brows like silkworms, narrow phoenix eyes, and a long, flowing beard. Following it came the body, holding an ingot of gold, drifting slowly out. Only then could we ascertain that this time, the payload wasn’t “Second Master,” but a real, actual icon of Second Master Guan, drifting in orbit two thousand six hundred kilometers from Earth until we managed to pick it up.

“Old Liu . . . this wouldn’t happen to be something you chucked out there just to mess with me, would it?” I said slowly, staring at the statuette as it rotated lazily in midair.

“Why would you think that, at a time like this . . . ” He’d frozen for a moment before turning to look at me. He’d clearly received a considerable shock too.

Once again, I descended into thought. Who would go to that much effort to deliver an ecosystem ball, a flashlight, and a statue of Second Master Guan into orbit? Was this some kind of art project? Or some kind of ritual?

“Don’t sweat it too much, drink some water to cool down.” Old Liu patted me, kicked off the wall, drifted over to the drinking water dispenser, and poured me a cup. Maybe I’d sunk too deep into overthinking; even the water seemed to taste strange today, faintly acidic and displeasing.

As I sipped water and pondered, Old Liu suddenly gave a shout, interrupting my train of thought.

“Stop woolgathering, something’s wrong with Second Master!” He urgently pulled me over to the water tank. To be honest, Second Master didn’t seem any different than usual, idle in the water, gently waving his gills. But normally, once we got near, he’d start swimming merrily around. Today, he didn’t react at all.

“Is he sick?” Old Liu asked. When it came to Second Master, even he couldn’t completely keep his cool.

“Don’t worry, fish are hardy animals. Was he like this earlier?” I felt a pang too, and had to toss the matter of the weird taste in my mouth out of mind.

“No, he was darting around just fine ten minutes ago. I didn’t think he’d suddenly stop moving.” Old Liu had calmed down and was beginning to analyze the situation in front of us. “Is it hypoxia?”

“I don’t think so. If it’s lack of oxygen, we’d be feeling tired too. Maybe there’s a problem with your water aerator.”

Old Liu immediately twisted the valve on the aerator. Bursts of oxygen-rich water pumped in through the pressurization unit. The system looked just fine.

So the aerator wasn’t the problem. I sat cross-legged in midair, considering other possibilities. The weird taste from the water earlier still lingered in my mouth. That strange salty taste in particular was making it hard to focus. All I wanted was to rinse my mouth out.

But even before I went to get water, I suddenly felt like I’d woken from a dream. The most disastrous possibility of all appeared in my mind. I hurriedly told Old Liu, “It’s the water. There might be a problem with the water circulation system.”

Old Liu tensed all over. “Instead of hypoxia, what if it’s nitrate poisoning? I’ll go check.” He suddenly gave me a long look, then silently departed. Five minutes later, the tank’s water replacement system came to life. Ten minutes later, Bubbles flicked his tail, beginning to move again.

Not long after that, Old Liu came back with an awkward expression. He looked at me without speaking.

“Go ahead, I’m mentally prepared for whatever you have to say,” I said heavily.

“Okay. Possibly because of the overly high calcium content in the fish feed, the purification process in our water circulation system has been under additional strain this whole time. As of last night, the system had reached its limit—only to receive an additional shock from the space junk that hit the water tank earlier, which caused the system to completely overload. Due to all the calcium-based precipitate clogging up the filtration system and lowering its efficiency, the amines from the urine weren’t fully purified away and absorbed . . . they flowed into the water tank, resulting in nitrate poisoning.” Old Liu described the cause of this malfunction with professionalism and scientific language.

“Great. So, I have another question.”

“Go ahead.”

“This is water from the circulation system?”

“ . . . Yes.”

“Water shouldn’t have a salty taste, right? Can you tell me where this salty taste came from, then? Do you need a drink to cool down too?” I waved the leftover water from earlier in front of him.

At this point, all the water in the tank had been replaced, and Second Master was waving his gills, as if he had woken up. Faced with my soul-piercing question, Old Liu could only laugh painedly, turn away, and start poking at Second Master.

“Hah,” I said coldly. “Second Master really is your lucky carp. I’ll spare you this time.” I threw the water pouch aside and prepared to rinse my mouth.

“Wait!” Old Liu suddenly called out, stopping me. “What did you just say?”

“I said I’d spare you. What, you want to drink it after all?”

“No, the thing about Second Master.”

“Second Master is your lucky carp. What’s wrong?” I asked, not understanding.

“I think, I’ve figured out the riddle of Second Master’s origin.” Old Liu pondered for a while, then suddenly seemed to have realized something. He grabbed the tablet and started looking something up. After a while, an advertisement that could only display on the dark web appeared in front of me, resolving all our confusion. Below is an excerpt from the ad copy—the name of the company is redacted to avoid suspicion of sponsorship:

Still stressing over your horoscope? Anxious about your astrological outlook? With eight internationally renowned space feng shui experts to provide manual calculations and every rocket handmade, XX Spacecraft is here to provide the highest-quality, most reliable destiny alteration services. Whether astrology, I-Ching, horoscopes, or tarot, we’re here to help. Seize your fate by the neck!

[ . . . ]

Service description:

Send a lucky carp: This service gives you the opportunity to send a lucky carp into space, to improve your fortunes on an astronomical scale. To prevent the carp from getting crushed into pulp during flight, we use flash freezing ecosystem sphere technology. This service is only 199,880 yuan. Quantities are limited, so buy now!

Lucky star watching over you: This service provides a feng shui flashlight handmade by a master to brighten your future from near-Earth orbit. This service is only 99,980 yuan. Quantities are limited, so buy now!

Appeal to a higher power: This service provides an icon of your choosing (God of Fortune, Guanyin, Yue Lao, Jesus) to direct your destiny from on high. This service is only 169,980 yuan. Quantities are limited, so buy now!

[ . . . ]

Okay, I’ve got to say, the stars hold very different significance to different people. Fortunately, we never tried to grab one particular satellite—it exploded before the fourth crossing of our orbits. It wasn’t a bomb, just a harmless red flash-bang, but it shone for a full day and night in its orbit. Apparently that one was called “Star of Bethlehem,” for wealthy people who wanted their kid to grow up a prophet.

But at least, the problem was resolved, and all three members of our space station remained alive and well. Unlike the ending of “Feathered Friend,” we didn’t report the whole thing to the higher-ups, just the origin of the weird satellites. That’s why, next time you go vacationing in space, you won’t see a “fishy friend” in every space station. After all, I still want to be able to show my face around these parts, without providing ammo for others to take the piss out of me.

Also . . . when you’re studying the geography of space, if, alongside the “von Karman orbit” and the “Tsiolkovsky orbit” and the “Qian Xuesen orbit,” you see a certain “Second Master Guan orbit,” please don’t wonder at it. Trust the textbook. It’s to commemorate two spacefarers who made celebrated contributions to humanity’s exploration of outer space: Old Liu and Lil’ Zhang.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Wang Zhenzhen, a sci-fi writer and undergraduate at SUSTech, is known for telling realistic stories in a humorous style. His stories “Minesweeper” and “Whose Funeral,” published in Science Fiction World, were respectively selected as The Sci-Fi Stories of the Year for 2018 & 2019. He won the Fifth Morning Star Awards for Best Short Story for “The Orbiting Guan Erye.”

Submergence

Arula Ratnakar

As the people began to die, desperation drove us to the depths of the sea for cures. We mined mineral-rich vents until the tube worms went extinct, stripped polymetallic nodule fields bare, squeezed sludge out of sea sponges to treat the new diseases, these monstrous incurable plagues, born from our new climate, that spread through our air. But the people still died. So we dug even deeper . . .

I look at the corpse lying in the clear preservation chamber next to me. Woman, late thirties, died about four weeks ago. Normally they would have examined her body, signed her death certificate, gotten everything back to her remaining family members (her aunt and her twelve-year-old daughter), and that would have been it. But she had those things in her brain. And she died a strange and sudden death. So here we are, tied up in this investigation. Not that I’m complaining though. No, I live for this shit.

“We’ve all had the procedure done, we’ve all been taking the pills for about a week now. Anything go wrong for either of you? Any side effects?” Marie continues reluctantly. “Nothing wrong on my end.”

Anthony, sitting to my left, looks absolutely elated. “I’ve vomited three times a day since Wednesday! Looks like I can’t do it.”

They both turn to me. Marie bites the side of her thumb. “Nithya?”

Hah. Marie is terrified right now. Is she really afraid that I’ll turn this down? That she’ll be the one to have lights pulsing through her brain every night for the next four months? This is the most interesting thing that has happened in my entire goddamn twenty-seven years of existence. Can’t believe they aren’t fighting me tooth and nail for the chance to do this. Ah well, can’t seem too enthusiastic about it. What if they change their minds?

I try to look downcast. “I’ll do it. I didn’t get any negative side effects. Truthfully I’m feeling better than ever.”

Marie is visibly relieved. “You’re sure about this Nithya?”

Hell fucking yes I’m sure! I nod.

Anthony chuckles nervously. “Well, then get ready to live a dead woman’s life.”

I stare at the reflection of my waist-length dark-brown hair in the bathroom mirror, razor in hand, trying to imagine myself with a shaved head. I think I’d look badass. They’re going to drill little circular tunnels into my skull, intended to be plugged into a set of tubes that will branch out microscopically throughout my brain and shine light pulses into key areas at the cellular level. They don’t want hair getting in the way of the procedure, and I certainly do not want that either.

As the chunks of hair fall to the floor, I think about the last time someone tried out this technology, in a very different context. I remember seeing it on the local news. It’s just optogenetics. An elderly woman got her neurons modified to contain activity-dependent genes for additional kinds of channel proteins, light-gated ion channels. Colorful light pulses could regulate membrane depolarization through these new light-gated ion channels and force the same neurons to fire that were firing during her experiences. She could “record” all her experiences and live them again later, as the wavelengths of light activating the channels would evolve and develop with time, along with the types of light-gated channel proteins being expressed or taken out of the cell membranes. Additional proteins expressed through the inserted gene sequence allowed the tubes to locate and target neurons in the correct firing sequence.

But the old woman’s goal wasn’t to relive the experiences herself. After the woman died, her daughter received a gift. A request to modify her own neurons to include the channel proteins, and permission to access a set of pills and light pulses that would, to the most accurate possible degree, play the elderly woman’s experiences into her daughter’s brain. The final years of that woman’s life, available for someone else to live themself! Eat, sleep, shit, laugh, cry as them . . . become them for a while. It’s the most intense form of memorial I’ve ever heard of.

Why didn’t the woman whose death we’re investigating—Noor—ever play back her experiences herself? Why just have the channel proteins? What was the point of modifying her neurons, if she was just going to live like she’d never gotten the procedure done anyway?

I look at my bald head in the mirror, satisfied with my work.

“Is it conscious?” The disembodied brain in front of me is incredibly disquieting, several infinitesimal, branching tubes running through it, keeping it clean and preventing the natural postmortem process from taking place.

Since Noor didn’t play her experiences back every night for the time she had the new channel proteins, they have to play them back into her brain now, so they can get what they need to play the light pulses into me.

Dr. Irene Young shakes her head. “Certainly not right now. And when fed the light, all Noor’s brain can do at this point is reexperience her last two years over and over again, in a loop, without knowing they’re being relived. The inevitable still happens no matter what, this brain isn’t coming up with anything new anytime soon. And the brain only ‘comes alive’ again, to put it crudely, when fed the light pulses.”

The whole thing still unsettles me. “Isn’t it cruel though, keeping the brain looping like that?”

She’s quiet for some time before speaking. “Think about it like this. Right now, you’re in this room, experiencing this present moment. Earlier this morning, you were experiencing something completely different, and so it goes for every moment of your past. In each of these slices of time, you are completely unable to predict exactly what you will experience next, right? Okay, say you die tomorrow and someone plays your life experiences back into your head. In whatever the equivalent of this particular moment is within the synaptic reconstructions, you will have absolutely no clue what that death will be like. It’ll just be this moment, and you’d be sitting in front of me, staring at that brain. You’re either alive, or you’re in one of those loops, and there’s no real way to distinguish between which of the two you’re in. Even if you can’t stop the death, you don’t even know that it’s going to happen. It would feel essentially the same as living your life as it would play out and then dying, with no way to know whether or not you’ve gotten yourself some amount of extra time. Maybe we should be raging against the impossibility of perfect foresight, or against the fragility of human existence and the ephemerality of a human life. But personally, I don’t think feeding the brain the light pulses is cruel.”

“Hmm,” I’m still not fully convinced, but she seems to have quite a strong opinion on the matter, so I try to redirect the conversation. “Pretty amazing, that I’ll be able to live out a whole two years, every night, for just slightly under four months.”

“Yeah, that’s what happens when you condense the experiences down to high quality immersive experiential versions of whatever she would have remembered naturally, which filters out quite a bit! I mean, there’s no way of knowing whether or not that will cut out something essential, but this will cover the most memorable moments, whatever those are.”

A nurse enters to tell us the operating room is ready. I head out after him and look back to see Dr. Young still gazing at the brain. As soon as she meets my eye, she hurries after me.

It’s time to take my bandages off, a week and a half after the operation. The cannula guides for the tubes that will fire the light into my head have been drilled into my skull and it’s all healed. Dr. Young looks nervous today. Why?

As she unwraps the bandages, she tells me what to expect. “There’s going to be a sensory deprivation chamber set up in your home, with the tubes attached. I know you’ve been taking the pills for some time now, but it is crucial that you continue to remember to take the pills every morning and night, and I’m obligated to give you a refresher on what to expect.”

Dr. Young holds out one box of a set of four. Each box has four rows, each row containing seven orange pills and seven green ones. “The morning pills—orange ones—cause a daily ripple of brain activity, during which you will experience a brief but strong hallucination. Since we’re replacing your REM sleep with Noor’s experiences, and REM is incredibly important for strengthening newly formed synaptic connections, we have to make up for the lost benefits with this ripple. Since you haven’t played anything back into your head yet, there haven’t been any hallucinations. However, as soon as you start, so will the daily hallucination.”

She gives me a quick half smile, but it’s not very convincing. “Don’t worry too much, it will be very brief. This carefully orchestrated daily brain activity will make it easy for us to identify different experiences you have as well. The night pills are what paralyze you and block external sensory signals from reaching you while you’re being fed the light pulses. They’ll also adjust your melatonin cycle to make sure you fall asleep with enough time to play the experiences. Your slow-wave sleep won’t be noticeably affected by any of this.”

Her voice is steady, professional. But the pills are rattling in the box from her shaking hands. She shoves the box into my hands. I have to ask.

I whisper, “Do you know the person who put the light-gated ion channels in Noor’s brain? Was it you? Did you know this woman?”

Dr. Young glances up at the ceiling. A security camera? She clears her throat and begins writing a prescription. She’s ignoring my question. Or maybe she didn’t hear me.

“Here’s a prescription for the pills, in case something happens to the ones I just gave you. Feel free to call me if you have any questions. And good luck with everything.”

Someone knocks on the door. “Irene? Could you come out here for a moment?”

Dr. Young presses the slip of synthesized paper into my palm and looks straight into my eyes. She has these incredibly intense eyes, and her proximity to me makes me nervous. I try to act normal.

She speaks to me in a low voice. “For the record, if it was someone I love who died, and they loved me, I would keep them looping endlessly. Then at least I would know they’ll feel loved forever, and I would be loved by them forever too.”

As I exit the building, I unfold the prescription she gave me. A smaller slip of synthesized paper falls out. It reads in her scrawling handwriting: MEET ME. AFTER YOUR 1ST SESSION. FOR NOOR.

“Rimjhim Gire Sawan,” sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar, plays at a low volume in a beautiful living room. The room is bathed in a pale blue light from massive, glowing screens covering each wall, showing various pictures of deep-sea creatures, ocean views, and Noor with her ten-year-old daughter Sana (currently at a sleepover). Noor and Irene stand together by the door.

“I can’t get them. Nobody can know I’ve gotten this procedure done, and if I show up bald with the cannula guides drilled in, it would be pretty obvious. Please my love, trust me.” Noor gently brushes some hair out of Irene’s face, runs a finger along the slight wrinkles at the corner of her eye. Irene pulls her into a tight embrace.

“Fuck! Can’t you tell me anything? Why are you so afraid of them knowing? I don’t even know where you work, what you’re working on. But why did you get the procedure done if you won’t—are you in danger? If anyone tries to hurt you I swear to fucking hell I will—”

“Shh. I promise I’m not in danger right now. This is just a precaution. In case my research is somehow compromised. I shouldn’t have even told you that I got the procedure done today. But you were bound to see the orange pills eventually, and you literally work in this field, so you’d know what they do.”

“But if you’re not playing anything back, why do you need to take the pills? You won’t be getting the daily hallucination!”

Noor breaks away from the embrace and looks through her handbag for a few seconds before taking out a box of white pills. “REM suppressors. Won’t be getting any dreams for some time now, so the morning pill will definitely give me the hallucination and mark out my different experiences. I’ll be taking these white ones instead of the night pills. Please Irene, just trust that I need to do this. I can’t tell you why yet. In a couple of years, I won’t have to keep this a secret anymore, and I’ll tell you all about my work. And once this isn’t a secret anymore, I’ll tell the world about us. But right now I need to keep a low profile. I cannot let anyone know I’ve . . . met someone here, and I cannot let anyone know about the procedure. Couple of years. That’s all. Hey . . . ”

She takes Irene to the living room couch. Above them is a skylight, showing a dark, almost starless night sky. Noor sits with Irene’s head in her lap, stroking her hair. It feels like they’ve known each other for their whole lives, even if they’ve only been together for four months.

“What do you think we’ll be like in a couple of years? Together, I hope,” Noor laughs and smiles down at Irene.

Irene smiles back, and the wrinkles around her eyes deepen. “Married.”

“Wow, really? You think so?”

“Mhm. Right now, I’m certain of it.” She pulls Noor down for a deep kiss. “Noor, I do trust you. I worry about you, but I trust you.”

“I love you. Thank you.”

“I love you too.”

A massive fruiting body, covered in bulbous sacs, stretches out through the skull of what used to be Dr. Meyers, threatening to burst at any moment and release countless more spores into the air. On a table in the center of the room is a water tank containing a piece of the sea sponge Noor is studying, the one they discovered recently at the bottom of the ocean, that cures the new plagues. Next to the sea sponge are various insect carcasses, arranged neatly in a grid, and all with fruiting bodies from various insect-pathogenizing Ophiocordyceps fungi sticking out of their skulls and bodies. On the floor, an overturned container is surrounded by a swarm of the insects it used to hold. They should have been dead from Ophiocordyceps long ago, but they were cured.

Noor unfolds her touchscreen and checks the security camera footage that she’d saved again. It shows Dr. Meyers, looking like he’d just gotten out of bed, barefoot, disheveled, in a T-shirt and boxers, stumbling around in the middle of the night. Zigzagging through a hallway, he bumps into walls and columns and doors as though he’s possessed, until he reaches the door to the room. He presses his hand against a scanner and falls into the room as soon as the door opens. Dragging himself across the floor in an eerily contorted crawl, he makes his way to the table, lowers his hand into the water tank, and presses his palm against the sea sponge.

The footage then speeds up to show the fruiting body breaking through Dr. Meyers’ skull, developing spore sacs and continuing to grow longer, covered in brain matter, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid. The similarity of this fruiting body to the ones from Ophiocordyceps is impossible to ignore.

Had the sponge somehow caused an insect-pathogenizing fungus to mutate and attack a human being? The whole reason the sponge, of an entirely new genus, Panaceius, is so important is the incredible, unprecedented ability of its unspecialized archaeocyte cells to transform perfectly into a far larger variety of specialized cells than those of other sponges . . .

Someone’s walking down the hallway. Noor quickly shuts down her touchscreen and hurries away. After she exits the building, she opens her touchscreen again, and reconfigures the security camera in the hallway she was just in to stop looping earlier footage of the area when it was empty.

Her job is to study the flask cells of the sponge’s larvae in a different building altogether. She wasn’t supposed to be here, and she’s not supposed to have access to that security footage of Dr. Meyers either. But Noor has this overwhelming feeling that there’s something seriously strange about Panaceius meyeri, and she’s determined to keep digging at it.

Noor walks to the Learning Lab school to pick Sana up. On her way, she passes a group of children leaving the school with completely expressionless faces wearing T-shirts that say “You Won’t Hear Our Voices Until We Hear Yours” and “We Won’t Laugh Until You Save Our Future.” She smiles at them as they pass, and they nod at her.

Noor remembers when Sana first joined this youth movement, almost seven months ago. They had just moved here, into a house given to her by the company she had joined, and were unpacking boxes in the living room. They were taking out the incubating chamber where Sana had grown from a preserved early twenty-first century embryo ten years earlier. Sana wrote her thoughts down for Noor on her touchscreen.

We’re not speaking or showing our emotions on our faces until the adults meet our demands. If they don’t meet these demands, so many of us will die from the pollution and the water flooding and more and more diseases that will show up. And we don’t want to die.

“Won’t it be difficult though? Not showing anything at all?”

It is, at first. But we learn. And I will write it out if I am happy or upset about something. You just won’t see it on my face anymore or hear my voice anymore.

Noor kneeled next to her daughter. “Can I give you a hug?”

Sana nodded and Noor embraced her. “Sana, you’re the bravest person I know. I hope all the demands are met. I want you to have the happiest future imaginable.” She let go of Sana after a while.

After unpacking in silence for some time, Noor spoke again. “By the way, about those diseases. Don’t tell anybody this, but that sea sponge Mommy came here to study might help with them.”

I read about the sea sponge. Why does it leak stuff that pollutes the ocean as badly as microplastics when someone gets pieces of it to study?

Noor sighed. “Well, we don’t know right now. But hopefully the more we study it, the more we’ll be able to benefit from the parts of it that cure diseases and stop the parts that harm the rest of the ocean.”

I hope you do that soon.

“Yeah, so do I.”

Their movement did seem to be working. Or at least, a major demand on their list is being met, whether it’s because of the movement or because of something else. No more cars, and the roads of the state are being replaced with zero-emission magnetic levitation tracks.

P. meyeri, though. Killing deep-sea corals, leaking all sorts of pollutants that integrate themselves into other creatures’ respiratory and digestive tracks . . . only after humans started harvesting it. And Dr. Meyers. Was it simply a coincidence that the person who discovered this sponge died in this way? The specialization used in the way the sponge killed him was astounding.

Where the fungus spore would have contained the enzyme chitinase to break down the chitin in an insect’s exoskeleton, the spores that attacked Dr. Meyers contained keratinase, to get through the human epidermis. Then they manipulated the actin cytoskeletons of the endothelial cells lining his blood vessels, causing the endothelial cells to engulf the spores, creating structures from which they entered the bloodstream. Traveling up until they reached his brain, the spores used the same process to cross the blood-brain barrier. They immediately seized control of his neural activity, activating various types of memories and cues. Dr. Meyers was forced to travel to the room holding the sponge and touch it, in a way analogous to, yet very different from how the nerve toxins in an infected ant tell it to climb to the forest floor and bite down on a leaf. The fruiting body broke through his skull soon afterward.

The specialization in the design of these spores was so intricate . . . how did the sponge know to do all of this? It wasn’t even a spore that was a mutated form of Ophiocordyceps. No, this spore was created from scratch, inspired by the fungus.

If her hunch is right, P. meyeri is demonstrating markers of a lot more than consciousness.

Sana tugs at her sleeve, and the two start walking back home. When there are no other people around, Sana takes out her flute. Six months earlier, Sana told Noor that she’d created a cipher, combining music with the Fibonacci sequence, to communicate with her friends without adults knowing. While it was against the rules her friends had agreed on, she wanted to show her mother what she’d made, under a sworn oath of secrecy that Noor would be the only adult to ever know about it.

With enough practice, one could look at what appears to be really awful-sounding sheet music and translate it into a message. With even more practice, one could hear the music and translate it mentally, which is how Sana communicates to her friends and to Noor these days, using her flute.

At school today we learned about the Indian roofed turtle. I think it is my new favorite extinct animal. I think it is very cute.

“That’s awesome! Is that turtle what you want to write your science class report on?”

I think so. Yes. Sana plays. I want to write mainly about how much I like it and how it went extinct. It is really sad Mommy. Its habitat was mainly in small streams or shallow coastal waters and it fed on aquatic plants. But with ocean acidity levels going up and streams drying out it could not find food or shelter. And too many people started keeping it as a pet, so the wild ones went extinct while the captive ones lived much shorter lives.

Noor shakes her head sadly. “Sometimes humans can just do so much damage, maybe even without realizing it. And so often in this world, those realizations come far too late.”

Sana just nods, and then looks at her mother blankly. Noor feels a brief, sudden pang of anger, sadness, and longing for just a hint of emotion on her daughter’s face. Is supporting this the right thing to do? What if this is causing her harm? She’s trying her best to encourage Sana to do whatever she feels is the right thing to do, and to pursue her interests. And yet, she can’t help but occasionally feel afraid that maybe she’s doing something wrong, maybe this is “harmful and detrimental to child development” as some other parents are saying. But they’re only brief moments of doubt, and most of the time she feels immense pride toward the strength and resilience of her daughter.

It’s a powerful thing, the physical expressions of one’s emotions. And a powerful thing to withhold as well, which is why it’s working so well. Parents would do anything to see or hear or feel their kids speak again, smile again, laugh again, even cry again. Noor herself has spent many nights, after Sana has fallen asleep, watching old videos and weeping at the sound of her daughter’s voice. She feels guilty, selfish for missing those moments so much even with Sana still communicating her feelings clearly through her flute or through typing on her touchscreen. But maybe that’s the whole point. After all, she’s taken far more personal actions to combat the climate catastrophes since her daughter joined the movement . . .

What are you thinking about?

“I was thinking about how humans sometimes do harmful things without realizing it, and how sometimes it’s hard to tell whether something is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do.”

I think about that sometimes too. In my opinion, as long as something will help people eventually . . . it is the right thing to do.

Noor thinks for a long time. “What if it might never help people at all? What if a decision involves taking away something that is helping lots of people? Do you think it can still be doing the right thing?”

Is it helping anything or anybody at all?

“Yes. It would help something very much, save it from being very badly hurt and mistreated. Something just as important as people, maybe.”

Sana is very quiet until they reach their home. Noor places her finger inside a small, clean, airtight cavity next to her front door’s lock. A sterilized needle quickly pricks her finger and collects a drop of her blood to scan. After a moment, the scanner beeps and flashes green, and the door opens.

The flute plays its strange melody as Sana’s expressionless gaze meets her mother’s eyes. Mommy. If it saves something else from being hurt, I think it is still the right thing to do.

I wake up, disconnect the tubes from my head as fast as I can, and sprint to the bathroom, where I retch into the toilet, though no bile enters my mouth. What the hell? I’m getting the nausea side effect now? I’ve never gotten it before! Fuck.

“You should keep an eye on Dr. Young. Meet her, see if you can find anything out about her. It’s a weird coincidence that she’s the one who modified our neurons, and she had such an intimate relationship with Noor without mentioning anything to us.” Marie shoves a handful of spiced, fried crickets into her mouth before passing the bowl over to Anthony, who takes a handful and passes the bowl to me. Switching to insects as a source of protein is becoming increasingly popular these days.

“Yeah. I’m meeting her soon.” I politely take a few from the bowl. They taste okay but need more cayenne powder and salt.

“Are you okay Nithya? You look kind of flushed.” Anthony looks concerned.

My stomach feels so weird. I feel pretty nauseated and stuff is really churning around in there. My period literally just ended . . . and it doesn’t really feel like cramps either, or gas pain. So what the hell?

“I think it’s just indigestion. I’ll be okay.”

Anthony hands me an antacid, and I take it. Pretty soon I’m feeling a bit better. It was probably just an upset stomach.

“Maybe go easy on the spicy snack.” Marie takes the bowl away from me.

“Are you kidding me? That spice is weak as fuck. If anything, my stomach would protest at the lack of cayenne in that bowl.”

They laugh, and then we sit in silence for some time, researching Noor’s place of work. Eventually Anthony closes his touchscreen and looks at me.

“Okay, I have to know. What was it like? You’ve been acting kind of strange today.”

What was it like?

She was alive. I wasn’t myself, I was her, entirely. The world felt so different. It’s so different, in her head. And I can remember everything about her life, in such great detail. It was all so vivid! She was actually alive again. And they were all alive too. Irene, Sana, everyone she interacted with. They were as alive as Marie and Anthony are to me right now. What is the difference really, after all? The neural activity in my brain when I interact with someone is what creates everything I understand about the person I’m interacting with. That’s all the evidence I can ever get from them to prove they’re alive (unless I’m playing light into my head to become them, of course). Recreating those patterns . . . it’s the same as recreating those people, at least what those people were to Noor. The interactions are just as real. They were as alive to me as anybody I walked past today.

Now I’m back in the reality I inhabit. Me, Nithya, not her. But now scents and sights and sounds around me are bringing up old memories that are not mine, of a carpet in a house I’d never been to, of a beach in a country I’ve never visited. Ghostly fragments of thought are invading my reality constantly, of laughter and voices and experiences with strangers and friends and family I have never known. I never realized how many memories I remembered in a single day until I was forced to start separating recollections of my autobiographical timeline from recollections of hers. They’re constant. Every single thing in my surroundings, from Anthony and Marie to the snack bowl to my touchscreen, now has two different emotional states associated with it. Different fragments of memory that are dug up to navigate the experience associated with interacting with any object or person. And I can feel the differences.

I’m here now, everything around me is real. I know it. And it’s especially comforting to inhabit my own reality again because, well, for a while . . . I blinked out of existence. When Noor was alive again, living in my head as my brain activity, I wasn’t there at all anymore. My brain was only a vessel for her to live her life out, with no self-awareness of my role as a vessel, even. I was nothingness for the period of time where she came back to life, and now that I’m awake, she’s nothingness again.

I clear my throat and turn my attention back to Anthony and Marie. “It’s so . . . intimate, this whole thing. Is this right? I mean . . . I remember her life. I have her memories. Is this okay? I feel strange about it.”

“It must feel really weird.” Marie looks at me sympathetically. “But you know the contracts you have to sign when you get the procedure done. You can relive your experiences, or gift them to someone else you choose. And in the case of a sudden and unexpected death, you give your consent to let an investigator live your experiences. Noor knew all these conditions when she got the procedure done. And well, she’s not alive anymore, Nithya. And her family wanted us to do this as well. They want to know what happened to her as well.”

“Yeah, but she didn’t know what it would be like. Nobody knew. She’s alive again, Marie! It’s her, in the past, sure, but she’s as alive as we are right now. She couldn’t have known what I would be experiencing.”

Anthony speaks up. “Hey, this is all for Noor’s sake. We’re going to find out what happened. This will give us the best chance we have at figuring out the whole situation. It’s our job, Nithya. For her family, for her memory. We owe it to them to investigate her death and give them some closure.”

At the end of the day, on my walk home, I pass a father and his three-year-old daughter. I smile, remembering Sana when she was three. She was always running off somewhere, climbing a tree or investigating some bug she found. For a moment, I can almost hear her flute, picture her blank stare . . . I catch myself and quickly work to separate Noor’s memories from mine before continuing home.

I am not prepared for the swell of emotions and deep sense of shared history I experience when I see Irene Young sitting in a booth of a café downtown, sipping her coffee. It’s almost painful, the physical ache in my chest and my gut, of love and lust and nostalgia and camaraderie. It takes a whole lot more effort to separate all of Noor’s emotions toward Irene from mine right now, compared to separating the two emotional states when interacting with something like an apple. And it’s really hard to think properly when I sit down across from this woman Noor loved.

Irene clears her throat. “Do you want anything to eat or drink? The coffee here is from one of the new orbiting gardens. Pretty amazing that what I’m drinking was grown in sealed chambers up in space. Quite the solution to the dwindling arable land problem, isn’t it? And it’s pretty good coffee too.”

As soon as she speaks, the context of the situation hits me.“Can we just cut the bullshit and start talking? Why didn’t we know about you? Why did you take the job of modifying our neurons? What the hell do you know, and why the hell haven’t you told us already? And what was with that note? Why couldn’t you say anything before I started this?”

She sighs. “Look, it’s really complicated. But I want to keep my relationship with her a secret, alright? The place she worked for is not something I want to get too involved with. They know about me already, but they don’t really know about my relationship with her. And I didn’t even learn about her work until . . . ”

“Until what?”

Irene looks down at her coffee. “Well, let me just say that they know I had met Noor. I found out about where she worked a week or so before she died. And I inquired about her afterward. They were really sad about her death . . . but they also told me that they were worried she was planning something really dangerous. They said she was going to do something that would risk a lot of people’s lives. And that maybe she wasn’t in the best state of mind, maybe she was delusional.”

I almost laugh. Delusional? “Trust me, that’s not true. I think I would know, I’m living her life every night.”

She smiles sadly. “And maybe that’s exactly why you wouldn’t see it. Because you’re in her head, you don’t see that her delusions aren’t true. To the person afflicted by them, they actually are real. If you’re living Noor’s reality, experiencing the world around you from her perspective, of course you’re inclined to believe her thoughts.” She gulps down the rest of her coffee. “I never thought she might be experiencing delusions when she was alive either. Everything she said or did always seemed to make perfect sense.” Irene sighs. “But maybe I was wrong.”

I feel a sudden longing to hold her, make her laugh and smile and forget all her troubles. I try to separate Noor’s emotions from mine but . . . this time some of it is coming from me too, at least I think it is. The whole time, she’s been digging the corner of her short-clipped thumbnail into the wooden table, hard, creating an arc indent in the table. I briefly experience the desire to hold her hand but decide against it.

“I’m sorry, Irene. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

“Mhm.” She takes a deep breath and looks up at me, perfectly composed again.

When she speaks again, she chuckles a bit. “You know, I’m pretty jealous of you Nithya. You get to live it. You get to know her in the most intimate possible way.”

“I don’t know. It’s such a new thing, I have no idea whether or not it’s the moral thing to do. I mean, I’m a stranger. It feels a bit . . . wrong. And you, Sana . . . it’s a lot, Irene. It’s intruding on all of your privacy too.”

She looks me in the eyes. “But you’re not going to stop, are you?”

“No, I mean, I owe it to her family and—”

Irene laughs at this. “Oh come on. You and I both know it’s not that. I have never seen someone so enthusiastic about getting that procedure done before I met you. So what is it, really?”

She orders another coffee, and I order one too before speaking. “Okay. Fine. I want to know what it’s like inside someone else’s head. I’ve always wanted to. I want to know how things taste to them, how they think of other people, how their entirely different set of memories influences what the world around them looks like. And now I can. That’s the truth.”

“Fair enough.” She chugs more coffee.

“How do you feel, though? About me . . . knowing so much about your relationship?”

After an almost unbearably long pause, Irene smiles. “It should have been me. Not you. If it had to be anybody, it should have been me. But she never had the time to think about who would get her experiences after her death. And she never requested for anyone to live them out. Nobody even knew about me. She died suddenly, so it’s all being investigated, and so you got them. You don’t appreciate what you’ve been given the way I would have. But I’ve come to terms with it. The light pulses have been encoded to fit your specific synaptic structure, and quantum encrypted to prevent any further access to her memories. So it can’t be me. But it should have been. Am I fine with you knowing so much about my relationship with her? I could be, if you just do something for me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

She grabs my hand. “Tell me about it. Tell me about her thoughts, what it is like in her mind. Tell me everything, all of it, until every last light pulse has run through your head. It’s why I wanted to meet you. You don’t have to tell me anything related to the investigation. I just want to know what it’s like. Starting now. Tell me, please.”

I do.

As I get up to leave, after hours have gone by, with plans to see her again the following week, Irene asks me, “How have you been feeling so far? With the pills and the hallucinations and everything.”

“The hallucinations aren’t that bad, but I’ve actually been feeling a bit nauseated since I started.”

She looks concerned. “You should see someone about that. That’s not normal, especially since you never had the side effect before.”

“I think I’ll be okay, it’s dying down and—”

“Seriously, just to be safe. It wouldn’t hurt to check.”

“Alright, I’ll make an appointment with someone.”

The nurse and doctor at the hospital hand me all the information I need to know, along with the charts and statements laying it all out for me, neatly clipped together on synthesized paper and an electronic copy on my touchscreen.

“Have you started the coughing fits yet?” the doctor asks.

“No, I’m still just getting the nausea.” I look down at my hands.

“Good. So you aren’t contagious yet—too many people wait until they start coughing, without coming in during the noncontagious nausea phase like they’re supposed to . . . that’s the only thing that’s keeping this spreading, these days, honestly. At least it’s very rare to get infected now.”

They hand me packets of liquid. “Here, drink these twice every day to prevent fluid buildup and the bile-inducing coughing fits. They’ll coat your esophagus with a protective layer that will stop you from ever becoming contagious and prevent the mutation-induced signals from leaving the lysogenic squamous cells.” The doctor clears their throat. “Please know, this contagion-prevention mechanism cannot be used prophylactically, and would actually be really harmful to an uninfected person, so please don’t try giving it to anyone else. It only works on an infected person with their viral-DNA-containing squamous cell genome. And please remember that this alone will not cure you—it will be eventually fatal without the cure—so you really need to start ingesting the archaeocytes too. But we’re well out of the horror from a couple years ago, this illness is easily treatable now. The archaeocytes work wonders and have been made highly accessible! So remember to start that sponge treatment soon in addition to drinking this liquid, and you’ll be cured!”

I have it. I’m sick.

“Rajnigandha Phool Tumhare,” sung by Lata Mangeshkar, plays through Noor’s mind. As the sub quickly sinks into the sea, the colors around Noor start to fade away. She watches her red shirt turn to blue-gray as she remembers Irene’s words over and over again.

“I’m sick, Noor. I have it. I was able to get a spot in one of those trials, and they’ve been able to cure every single person in the trials so far. But I wanted to tell you . . . in case something ever goes wrong.”

When only blue light is able to reach the depths, Noor climbs up, out of the spherical observation portion of the sub, and sits across from Matias, her fellow crew member on their two-person sampling mission, at a small folding table.

They’re headed to a newly discovered P. meyeri colony at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Deep-sea remotely operated vehicles have already mapped out the massive, linked caverns inhabited by the colony. According to images from the ROVs, the walls, ceilings, and floors of the spaces are all covered with countless sponges, arranged in an astoundingly intricate fashion. Specialized sponges occupy different chambers, each one shaped to make optimal use of the water currents, avoid danger, protect reproducing sponges, and capture the most food. It’s one of the most complex systems Noor has ever encountered.

This is wrong—she begins to think, but shakes the thought away quickly, remembering Irene’s face as her optimistic facade eventually disappeared to reveal her terror.

“I don’t want to die like that.” Irene spoke through sobs. It was painful to watch, and all Noor could do was hold her close.

“Is this your kid?” Matias points to the screensaver on her touchscreen, flashing family pictures of Noor and Sana.

“Yeah, that’s her. Her name’s Sana, she’s just turned eleven.”

“She’s about my Syd’s age. Such a handful these days, these kids. At least, Syd is. Syd gets into trouble at school every day now, for not responding to questions mainly. But it’s not their fault. It’s those other kids who got them to join that ridiculous movement. I get wanting to prevent and stop the climate catastrophes, but this is just extreme and unhealthy. My kid hasn’t changed the damn expression on their face in over a month, it’s driving me and my husband up the walls!”

Noor is taken aback. “Actually—”

“I hope your kid never gets into that stuff. It’s dangerous, really. And all those experimental public schools cropping up these days, encouraging that crap, aren’t helping at all. Glad I didn’t send Syd to one of those. Where does your Sana go?”

“Sana goes to an experimental public school, Learning Lab, past the wind turbines. And I think the youth movement is incredibly brave.”

“Ah.” Matias sits quietly for some time, his face adopting an expression of deep concern. “Look, it’s for your kid’s sake that I’m telling you this. The movement—”

Noor narrows her eyes. “Look, I’m going through my own shit coming to terms with my daughter’s choices, but I feel guilty enough that I’m going through shit about it at all. I should just respect what she’s doing and admire her strength and bravery. And I certainly don’t need you to butt into any of my personal business. I think, to maximize the productivity of this mission, we should just focus on our research. Why don’t you tell me about that instead?”

This time Matias looks taken aback. “Fine.” He opens his touchscreen and shows Noor a folder full of images of a P. meyeri sponge’s spicules. “These are images taken by the ROVs, showing the portions of the sponges facing the interior of the chamber cavities, toward all the other sponges. The spicules on this side are incredibly complex and specifically designed to bring light deep into the sponge. Their refractive index far surpasses that of our corneas. And there’s a lens too! My question is, why does it need to collect light with such specificity and efficiency? I think there must be some sort of symbiosis with bioluminescent and light-sensing organisms we haven’t found in previous samples, that requires light to reach the interior of the sponge. And if we can control the signaling system they have, if they have one of course, we can possibly increase their productivity.”

Fascinated, Noor studies a document listing potential chemical impurities that could have formed in the spicules to improve their refractive index.

A sharp, high-pitched tone plays in the sub. It’s time to put on their nitrogen regulators and suits. Noor and Matias place needles attached to a system of quarter-inch diameter tubes onto various marked areas on their bodies. Noor winces slightly at this, even though the process is painless. As soon as the needles have been taped in place, they each attach the tubes to thin, flexible, cloth-covered plates that they strap to their backs, and finally press the glowing blue button on each of their plates. Once the buttons are pressed, a microscopically thin system of smaller tubes begins to stretch out from the needles and into their internal tissues, throughout their bodily systems, causing a brief shiver to run through them. One of the most pressing concerns when working in the midnight zone is avoiding any sort of depth-pressure related injury, such as future decompression sickness from pressurized surface-level gases depressurizing upon resurfacing. The nitrogen regulators manage the distribution of surface gases, mainly nitrogen, within the bodies of Noor and Matias, to make sure nothing like that happens.

After putting on the nitrogen regulators, the two of them step into heavy, bulky suits and helmets, and turn on communications with each other. Their suits can collect oxygen from the surrounding water, allowing them to walk around under water for a virtually unlimited amount of time.

“You’re studying the flask cells, right?” Matias struggles to pull gloves over his hands.

“Yeah. Sponge larvae have some form of a rudimentary sensory processing system using their flask cells that allows them to move to a place where they can become sessile, P. meyeri included. But P. meyeri flask cells are different. When the larva becomes sessile, the flask cells continue to develop.”

“How so?”

“That’s the thing. I can track their development up to a certain extent, but for some reason all the larvae I have die before reaching adulthood, even when deep-sea conditions are simulated perfectly. I don’t understand it. In the adults, there is a thin extra layer, lined with mesohyl, that covers almost all of the sponge’s interior surfaces. I think that’s where the fully developed flask cells are. When we collect the specialized sponge archaeocyte cells to make the medication, we have to access them using certain entryways into the sponge body that aren’t covered by this extra layer. If you cut into that layer, the sponge kills itself instantly, producing a dark oily liquid that somehow dissolves any remnants of this extra layer, along with much of the rest of the sponge.”

Matias frowns. “That’s why the sponge colonies used to die out when we got ROVs to remove samples to bring up. Even if the ROVs didn’t cut into the extra layer of the sponge it was harvesting, they had to cut into the surrounding sponges to remove it, and the liquid spread, killing the rest of the colony and hurting other organisms.”

Noor nods. “Yeah. Now we harvest the P. meyeri using those few entryways. You know what’s even weirder though? The sponges kill themselves if you even try to scan them to see into that layer. How are they even able to detect the scan? I don’t understand it.”

Matias frowns. “So how are you going to observe it?”

“My idea relies on the hope that the sponges will protect their next generation at all costs. If the larvae are in the process of escaping the sponge they developed in, maybe the sponge will override the trigger to self-destruct, and maybe I can scan, observe, and take snapshots of the fully developed flask cells inside the adult, if there are any, during that brief window. The sponges aren’t reproducing in the labs, so I’ll try it in the colony itself. Hopefully if I do this, we can find a way to stop the sponges from leaking that corrosive liquid and harming themselves and their surroundings, in the future.”

They finish adjusting their suits in silence. Matias taps Noor on the shoulder and points to a switch that would mute communications with the surface crew. Noor nods, and Matias speaks after muting the communications.

“P. meyeri is pretty special, isn’t it?”

Noor raises an eyebrow. “It is . . . ”

Matias sighs. “You know, if the times were different, I wouldn’t have been doing this. We’re rushing into churning out the treatments since it was such a widespread emergency just a few years ago. But these sponges . . . we’ve barely scratched the surface of understanding them, and they’re unlike any ever known before. Yeah, sponges can’t think. But somehow this one reacts to its surroundings in an incredibly nuanced way. Why, you know? If the times were any different, I would have done things so differently. I would have taken things slowly, and carefully, and with less . . . I don’t know, exploitation.”

Noor gives him a half smile. “I know what you mean. You know, I was almost going to—”

The expression on Matias’ face darkens as he interrupts her. “But times aren’t different. And I want to do this. You know, a few years ago, Syd got sick. It got so bad, their intestines weren’t absorbing anything . . . We had all resigned ourselves to making them as comfortable as possible in their final few months. But then they got into one of the trials, and now we’re able to fret about what they’re doing with their life, not whether they’ll live. After Syd got sick, I knew I had to get myself into this line of research. Frankly, if exploiting P. meyeri means other Syds can live, I’d uproot every last sponge in existence.”

Noor nods. “I understand, Matias. Someone I love, someone I want . . . a future with . . . is getting treated right now. And I want to do everything in my power to protect her, even if it means fighting every instinct I have.”

“Good. I’m glad we understand each other.” He turns communications with the surface crew back on.

When they have reached the colony, Matias and Noor move through an airlock into the exit chamber. Once sealed into the exit chamber, the door in front of them, divided into slats, starts rotating each slat individually as the chamber fills with water. Once horizontal rather than vertical, the slats slide into the walls, leaving an opening through which Matias and Noor leave the sub.

The ROVs had assembled a thin metal grate pathway going through the chambers, just above the sponges on the floors, so that people could walk through without destroying or touching anything along the way. They turn on the bioluminescence sensors on their helmets, which have scanners and filters built in so they can focus on collecting samples and not have to use handheld tools to view or scan the sponges. The helmets track their eye movements and some of their neural activity. They also superimpose faint 3D models of the sponges around them onto the darkness, so that along with any bioluminescence, they’d be able to see the general shapes of their surroundings to know where to go without shining any bright lights.

“Look at this!” Matias calls to Noor. He pumps a bioluminescent dye, packed with glowing plankton, around the base of a massive sponge near the entrance of the chamber. After being absorbed into the pores of the sponge, one would expect the plankton in the water to be consumed, and the remaining plankton-free, non-glowing water pumped back out. Instead, the dye begins to trace a pathway going from one sponge to another, throughout the chambers. “They’re directing the water to one another and sharing the food!”

Noor calls back to him. “Hey, I think it’s time to split up. I’m going to the center chamber, it’s almost time for the larvae to leave the sponges. But keep me updated.” She sets her helmet to show a small viewport in the bottom right corner in which she can see what Matias sees.

Each P. meyeri colony is structured similarly. The sponges near the entrance of the chamber system are the largest, informally named the “sentry” sponges. Almost all the water that flows into these chambers goes through them. The deeper into the chambers one travels, the smaller the sponges get. Only the smallest sponges, in the centermost chamber of the colony, produce larvae. Using the intricate system of directing water, P. meyeri is able to send sperm from all the various shapes and sizes of sponges that are needed in the different chambers to the centermost chamber, ensuring that more of those shapes and sizes will exist in the next generation.

But how do they know which larvae developed from which sperm? And how do the colonies keep growing if there are a limited number of chambers? There are so many questions!

Matias’ voice sounds through Noor’s helmet. “Hey, I want to put on some music, real quietly. Do you want to listen too?”

“That depends on what you’re going to play. If it’s the stuff my daughter listens to, that’s going to be a no from me.”

“Space Oddity,” by David Bowie begins to play in Noor’s helmet.

Noor laughs. “Wow, a song about dying alone, floating away in the abyss of space. Depressing choice.”

“Our current situation just sort of brought that song to my mind.”

“I’m amazed at your optimism. Also, this song is ancient!”

Matias chuckles. “Says the person playing Bollywood songs from god knows what decade for the entire first half of our descent.”

“Hey, Lata Mangeshkar is a legend.”

“Um, so is David Bowie.”

“True. It’s a good song, too.”

They walk down their separate paths for a while, humming or singing along to the song. A dragonfish, swimming in an erratic, jolting manner, convulsing and pulsing blue bioluminescent stripes over its body, moves past Matias. Noor watches it through the small viewport at the bottom of her helmet. Matias decides to follow it before speaking again.

“You know, the nice thing about listening to music is that it kind of puts a filter over reality. Suddenly you can notice your surroundings and what’s moving to the beat of the song. You yourself move differently, blink differently, notice and ignore things differently. For a moment it’s not reality that you’re living in, but a world directed by something else, like you’re starring in a film or something. For the duration of the song it almost feels like nothing bad can happen to you. Everything, whether good or bad, feels like it’s going to either match the music or wait until the song is over to happen. It makes everything seem more predictable and safe. Now, I don’t want to die an agonizing death floating in any abyss, but if I had to, I’d rather have it be while I’m listening to a David Bowie song that’s sort of about what I’m experiencing.”

Noor smiles. “Yeah.” she says quietly.

A cloud of something drifts past Noor. The helmet enhances it, applies a color filter over it to show what color it is, and zooms in to scan. It’s made of larvae. It’s started. She closes the viewport showing Matias’ view so she can get a better look.

Noor watches as the cloud divides itself up and flows through the ostia of the sponges around her. What the hell? They’ll be digested! But then the larvae pass through, out the osculums of the sponges, unharmed. They move from sponge to sponge, until they find their way to separate chambers, where the larvae just swim around in the center. They aren’t old enough to become sessile yet. Noor directs her helmet to scan the interior of a sponge as the larvae pass through it, taking care not to scan through the layer of the sponge that she suspects contains the flask cells.

Tiny, flashing lights shine toward the larvae as they pass through . . . upon closer inspection, it appears as though microscopic bioluminescent shrimp, fused to the inner walls of the sponge, are flashing light from their photophores. This wasn’t in any of the samples . . .

Noor opens the viewport with Matias’ view again. “Matias, you have to see this! Inside the sponges—”

“Noor! I was just about to tell you! Are you seeing what I’m seeing? I found a new chamber! The opening is too small for any ROV to get through, or even notice, really! But I can just barely look through into it.”

Noor expands the viewport. Through a small opening between sponges, she sees a massive chamber, lined with P. meyeri and filled with a large variety of marine life. Snailfish swim laps around the place. Dragonfish swarm the bottom, flashing and . . . mating? This isn’t where or how they normally mate. Transparent squid, packed tightly together, have somehow turned on one another for sustenance, fighting and eating each other, dropping particles of food into the waiting ostia of the sponges. How did these creatures get inside the chamber? They couldn’t have fit through the opening unless they got here when they’d just hatched, or when they were inside eggs.

“I . . . I don’t know what to make of it!” A timer starts flashing on her helmet. It’s time to hurry to the center chamber, the larvae release has almost ended.

What are we doing here? We shouldn’t be here . . . She moves as quickly as she can to the center chamber, full of indecision. There are too many things we don’t know, fuck, we don’t know what we’re doing, we should just leave this place alone, we’ve destroyed so many others . . . she can feel herself panicking and stands still for a moment, closing her eyes and breathing deeply.

As soon as her mind stops racing, Irene shows up in her thoughts again. Irene, the love of her life. Irene, the one she hopes to marry someday. The one who has always worried for her safety . . . the one whose safety Noor worries for now. I need to do this. For her. For our future together. She needs to get well, I cannot risk losing her, ever.

Clenching her teeth, she heads into the centermost chamber. The floor is lined with what look like aggregated gemmules, the result of asexually reproducing sponges. Why are they outside the sponges? And how come P. meyeri gemmules don’t end up developing into sponges themselves, ever? There hasn’t been a single pair of P. meyeri sponges whose DNA matches exactly found so far. Noor carefully takes a sample of the gemmules. And then she looks up.

An intricate, coordinated display of flashing light is taking place throughout the chamber, in a beautiful recursive pattern revolving around one of the sponges, far more complex than any temple carving, any rose window, any generative design she’s seen. The sponge releases its larvae, and then a different beautiful light display centering on another sponge begins as that sponge starts to release its larvae. Using the scanner, Noor finds more of those microscopic shrimp fused to the exteriors of the sponges, somehow being controlled. She steels her churning stomach and holds back her revulsion regarding what she’s about to do.

As the sponge in the center of the swirling, dancing lights releases its larvae, Noor directs her helmet to scan inside the extra layer under its surface. At first, she does not know what she’s looking at. But soon, she begins to understand. The insulating sheaths. The delicate branches. The electrical signals.

Neurons.

The reason it was briefly so difficult to make out what she was looking at was the sheer number of synapses in the thing. Noor asks the helmet to calculate how many synapses would be in the entire sponge if the concentration average held up throughout its body.

One quadrillion. Over ten times more synaptic connections than the ones in a human brain.

Noor backs away, quickly. “Oh, fuck.”

Matias’ voice suddenly rings out, panicked. “Some of the larvae that just arrived at this chamber . . . they’re swimming to me. They—FUCK! NO—”

“Matias, head back to the sub if you can hear me! Please!”

Noor is about to turn around when she sees the lights in the chamber shift, ripple, change their pattern. They aren’t centered around the sponge she was just scanning anymore. They are centered around her.

The larvae that had just been released from the sponge she scanned begin to swim around her, closing in rapidly until they latch on to her suit. As soon as they’re stuck on, their bodies begin to rupture and burst into a dark, oily liquid that quickly spreads. No no no no FUCK!

She moves as fast as she can, back to the entrance of the chamber, back toward the sub, as the liquid begins to cover her helmet and block out her vision. She sees Matias staggering over too. They fall into the chamber, shut the door, crawl through the airlock, and collapse onto the floor of the sub after Matias pushes the button to ascend.

Noor almost thinks “We made it!” when she feels blood dripping out of her nose, her mouth, her ears, and her eyes. Looking over at Matias, she sees he’s going through the same thing. A splitting headache suddenly becomes agonizing, and Noor feels close to passing out. The nitrogen regulators aren’t working. We’re getting decompression sickness. She manages to shed her suit to see the quarter-inch diameter tubes clogged with the dark liquid, creeping closer and closer to the needles that lead into her body. She quickly rips out the tubes, looks over to Matias again, and sees him doing the same, and then Noor falls unconscious, her last thoughts before doing so containing a singular wish of hope that they’d survive.

Noor blinks awake in a hospital bed to see Sana holding her hand, looking at her blankly. In the bed opposite her, she watches Matias begin to stir as well. At his bedside are a weeping man, and a child of about Sana’s age. The weeping man says to the child, “Look Syd, he’s waking up! Don’t you want to greet him with a smile?”

The child types on their touchscreen

No. I have a message typed up for when he wakes up. I worked hard on it. He can read that, and he will know I am happy.

“But it would make him feel happier if he wakes up to—”

Matias reaches over and squeezes the man’s arm, looks up at him with a smile, and shakes his head before turning to Syd.

“Hey, you’re so brave. Thank you for waiting here. I’m just happy to see you, no matter what expression you have on your face. I love you Syd.”

Syd nods at their father and types on their touchscreen

Thank you Dad. I love you too. I’m happy that you are awake.

Noor squeezes Sana’s hand tight and closes her eyes again.

Irene and I sit together on the floor of my apartment, leaning against the sensory deprivation chamber, sharing a bottle of wine. It’s almost empty now, and we’ve been talking for the whole evening. I haven’t told her that I have the illness yet.

I look at her. “What was it like to know her? I’m always telling you what it’s like to be her, but I’ll never know what it was like to know her.”

Irene smiles and closes her eyes. “Knowing her was the most wonderful thing to ever happen in my life. Our relationship was definitely a bit interesting, since we were keeping it a secret from everyone. We only met up a couple times a week, only spent nights together every Friday night when Sana was at a sleepover. But the separation only deepened our love for one another, only made us ache for the other’s company even more. And it made the times we did spend together that much sweeter. Every time I woke up next to her, every time I covered my head with a pillow to block out the sound of her snores, every time I made her smile, or became frustrated with how stubborn she could be, or listened to her give an impassioned speech, or heard her awful singing, or just about a thousand other things, it was all connected by this incredible foundation of just . . . love, you know? The deepest possible amount you can care about someone. I don’t think I’d ever truly loved anyone until I met Noor. The day I knew, I was poring over scans of patients’ brains, and a thought of her just popped into my own brain. I said aloud to the stack of scans: ‘I really care about her.’ And a week later I figured out it was love. I’m sorry, did that make any sense? I think I feel the wine.” She laughs.

“That made perfect sense . . . that was beautiful. I don’t know if I’ve personally ever felt that way about anyone before. But with Noor’s memories . . . I know what you mean, Irene.”

Irene turns to me and looks as though she’s about to speak several times, the expression on her face drifting from an almost-frown to an almost-smile and back again. The intensity of her gaze makes me a bit nervous, and I laugh to shake away the slight discomfort.

“What is it?” I ask.

Irene takes a sip of wine. “Nithya, because of Noor’s memories, of course . . . I really have to wonder, do you feel something for me? I mean, you tell me how much she loved me, and you describe to me what she felt. But it’s you living all of that. And you still remember all of it . . . I have to wonder.”

I sigh. “Honestly? Yeah, Irene. I do. Most of the time I have to work incredibly hard to separate her feelings for you from mine. And it’s almost unbearably tempting to just feel everything, the full extent of her love for you . . . especially because . . . ”

“Because what?”

I take a sip of wine. “Because I feel something for you too. And I don’t completely understand if it’s coming from me, or if it’s some memory leakage coming from Noor’s experiences. But I do know that from the moment I met you, there was definitely something. I mean, how could there not be, you know? You’re brilliant, and powerful, and . . . intense and so beautiful. How could I not feel something?”

Our faces seem to be drawing closer and closer together, but maybe it’s the wine. She half smiles. “What would it even be like, us, together? You, with the lover of the person whose experiences you’re living to investigate her death, your feelings influenced by who-knows-what. And me, with the person who gets to live the life of the woman I loved, a person who has probably been influenced by her in the past few weeks. I’m definitely not sober enough to untangle all the moral and ethical implications of that right now.”

I look at her for a while before speaking. “I don’t really know either. It would be pretty uncharted territory, wouldn’t it?”

Irene smiles at me, and I have no idea what compels me to say what I say next, but I smile back at her a little bitterly, and whisper, “But in its own slightly fucked-up way, isn’t it kind of a perfect match?”

And with that, our lips meet, and there is no turning back.

We laugh and we kiss, scattering clothes around the place as we make our way to the bedroom.

“Is it okay if I don’t play the light pulses tonight?”

“Yeah you can postpone them for one night.”

At the entrance to the bedroom, I pause for a moment and pull away from her, look into her eyes. “Hey, Irene. I completely understand if it wouldn’t be okay but . . . can I feel what Noor felt for you, just for tonight? Please?”

Irene nods. “I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do, but I want that too, Nithya. I need that too.”

I kiss her deeply, run my hands through her hair, and let Noor’s feelings flood into my own, creating a beautiful mix of deep, comfortable, strong love, and new, exciting, passionate lust. I stop separating my memories from hers, and the two worlds blend together. It’s overwhelming, but in a good way, and as it hits me that I’ve loved this woman countless times before, the care and intimacy and ache I suddenly experience for her is the most powerful thing I have ever felt. As we make love, I realize I’m not Nithya anymore in the moment, and I’m not Noor either. I’ve become someone entirely different, memories and emotions from the two lives blending together, but everything focusing and revolving around . . . Irene. I know it’s probably a mistake. But I tell myself just for this one night, I let myself become this new entity, and it feels beautiful, and right, and . . . true.

Afterward, as we lie together, the sweat drying off our bodies under a fresh, cool sheet, I look over at her and decide to tell her.

“I have the illness. And the trials are so accessible now that I got a place in one easily. I’m taking the esophagus-coating liquid twice a day to ensure that I’m not contagious, I won’t get any bile-inducing coughing fits. But . . . I’m not going to do the treatment that would cure me. I can’t tell you why right now, but I cannot bring myself to do it. I think I’ll have around a year. I’m sorry.”

She looks at me for a long time, and I can’t read the expression on her face. But then she turns off the lamplight next to us, and pulls me close to her, wrapping her arms around me. I fall asleep there in her arms, feeling absolutely, comfortably, wonderfully safe.

I wake up to a crashing sound in the bathroom, and someone saying “FUCK!” loudly. I pull on a T-shirt and rush to the bathroom, where I see Irene sobbing. A toothbrush holder had been knocked over into the first of the pillboxes for Noor’s experiences. The box has opened in the process, and pills are scattered everywhere, in the toilet and the sink and on the floor.

I hold Irene close to me, and she starts to say, “I’m sorry Nithya! I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so fucking sorry,” as she buries her head in my shoulder, snot and tears soaking through my shirt.

“It’s okay! Seriously, this is no big deal! I have a prescription, I can get more pills. Don’t worry, seriously!”

But she doesn’t seem to hear me. She just keeps saying it over and over again. “I’m so sorry.”

Noor sits on an uncomfortably textured couch in a small waiting room, her mind going blank as she observes the beige and blue diamond pattern on the carpet at her feet. Someone finally opens a door and calls her inside. “They’re ready to see you now!”

She enters a room full of people way above her pay grade. She’d tried to remember everyone’s names but couldn’t retain any of them.

“Sit down, make yourself comfortable! Do you want any water, coffee, anything?”

Noor shakes her head and sits.

A woman at the head of the table they’re all arranged around leans forward, smiling. “Great stuff you found during your last sampling mission, isn’t it?”

Noor frowns. “We can’t continue doing this. P. meyeri is intelligent! A single sponge contains more synapses than we can even fully comprehend! We have to tell everyone.”

They look at one another, before turning to her. One man sighs.

“Look—Noor—right? We . . . we already know about this. Someone discovered this before you. Actually . . . we’ve known about this almost since we discovered the sponge. In fact, it is a crucial part of how we treat the diseases.”

“What?”

The woman at the head of the table widens her smile. “We have this under control! There is nothing for you to worry about. We’ve known about this for some time, and we’ve taken our research on P. meyeri in some very interesting directions! Some of the techniques used to treat certain mental illnesses these days in humans, physically changing motivation especially, can be mapped to the nervous system of P. meyeri! And the best news is that it does not feel pain, or grief, or any sort of common human emotion at all, really. Quite frankly, it still more or less fits the guidelines listed for which animals are ethically allowed to be experimented on! And with how crucial it is for treating diseases, we have applied for and received an approval to continue working with it too.”

Noor opens her mouth to protest, when another older woman, a kind expression on her face, speaks up. “You cannot deny how important these sponges are to treat those new diseases. You, or someone you know personally, must have been affected in recent years. And I guarantee that P. meyeri can or did save their life. It is an unsettling prospect, sure, to use a possibly intelligent creature in this way. But ultimately, do you not think we should prioritize our own species? Our loved ones? Our family, our friends? Without this treatment, people would die, Noor. Millions of people. Do you really want to see that happen, knowing there is a way to prevent it all?”

Noor feels sick. She doesn’t know how to respond. “Why did you call me here, if you already know what I found? And why don’t other people know?”

The man who spoke earlier replies. “Great questions! Two reasons. We think it’ll be best for you to switch departments and work directly with using the sponges to treat diseases instead of studying its larvae and reproduction. Maybe it’ll make you . . . understand a bit better, why we need to do this. And, we need you to sign some contracts. See, it might lower the morale of some of the people who work here, if what you discovered gets out. Have you told anyone yet? Your crew member on the sampling mission, perhaps?”

Noor shakes her head. “I closed the viewport connection I had with Matias right before I scanned. It was only audio communication with him, and I didn’t say anything out loud about the neurons. You can check the helmets’ histories if you want.”

“Good! Sign these straight away!”

“What happens if I breach the contract? If I do tell someone else?”

The man smiles. “Well, you would agree to get your memory optogenetically wiped clean of these events, if that happens. And we would probably have the person you told sign the contract as well.”

Noor almost laughs. “Sorry, I don’t think I can do that.” She gets up to leave.

The woman at the head of the table calls to her. “Of course, take your time to decide. But I strongly advise you to sign.”

On her way out, the old woman speaks. “Dear, these sponges can be very dangerous things. It’s probably for the best that we control them! Do sign the contracts.”

The man speaks again too. “You know, you remind me of Dr. Meyers. Did you ever get a chance to meet him, before that terrible, unfortunate event? He was such a kind man. It’s a shame, what happened to him, eventually killed by his own discovery. I think it’s best that you sign these.” He holds the contracts out toward her.

And Noor, her heart pounding and her stomach churning, takes them from him before leaving the room.

When Noor gets home that day, she uses Sana’s touchscreen to call Matias.

“Hey, we need to meet up, as quickly as possible. See you soon.”

“I promise, Noor. I’ll take a look at the gemmules. And if anything happens to you . . . I’ll make sure the research is published. I’d want to do that for you.”

“You take digits zero to nine and assign each one to a music note, starting from middle C and going up into the first few notes of the next octave. Then, you rewrite the first twenty-six terms of the Fibonacci sequence using the music notes, zero as middle C, thirteen as DF, one hundred and forty-four as DGG, like that. For the repeated one, sharped D is used. Is that right?” Irene looks at Sana, and Sana nods at her.

Irene and Sana sit together on the bottom stair of Noor’s home. Sana is wearing a small synthesized paper party hat with “12” written on it. It’s Sana’s birthday party, and Noor has decided to invite Irene over, just for this one day. She wants her daughter to meet the woman she hopes to marry someday, even if Sana doesn’t know who Irene really is quite yet. She will . . . if all goes well with what Noor’s planning.

Irene continues, “And within a measure, one-digit Fibonacci terms would be quarter notes, two-digit terms eighth notes, three-digit terms triplets, and so on, ensuring that each ‘letter’ would take up one ‘beat’ in each measure of the cipher, with each measure holding a word. Looking at the time signature of each measure, whatever number is above four is the number of letters in the word the measure holds! I love it, Sana! That’s an awesome cipher you’ve created.”

Thanks, Sana plays.

“Could you play that one more time, but a lot slower? I want to figure it out.”

Sana nods and plays it again much slower.

“That’s a T . . . then H . . . A . . . that’s N . . . Oh! You’re playing ‘Thanks!’ You’re very welcome.”

Noor chooses to walk over at this moment. “Sana, you showed Irene your cipher?”

I like her, Mommy. She told me that she volunteered and helped assemble the zero-emission machines used to keep the conditions around the last coral reef from deteriorating for another decade. It’s going to keep a lot of critically endangered species alive for a little more time.

Noor smiles at Irene. “You never told me that you helped save the last coral reef!”

Irene shrugs.

Sana types on her touchscreen and shows it to Irene. It says I like you on it.

Irene grins from ear to ear, and it makes Noor’s heart sing. It’s these moments that make her really question what she’s doing. She thinks to herself. If the research doesn’t work out . . . would Irene understand? Would I be able to go through with it? Noor wishes for the millionth time that she could trade places with Irene. And she wishes for the millionth time that she had the strength to tell Irene what she’s doing.

One of Sana’s friends motions something to Sana, and the child leaves Noor and Irene to go into another room. Noor sits down on the bottom stair.

“How’s the treatment going?”

“My small intestine is around one-fifth sea sponge now! Can you believe it? Well, not really a sea sponge, but made of these almost stem cell-like things inside a sea sponge, that replace everything they need to replace all by themselves! Apparently, they learn to replicate my body’s HLA variants in the process, release antagonists for pattern recognition receptors, NK-cell activating receptors, and T-cell receptors, and have a high surface concentration of sialic acid, so there is no immune response! It’s an amazing treatment. Still a long way to go, but I’m feeling good about it.”

Noor looks away. “That’s nice, Irene. I’m glad it’s going well.”

Irene laughs. “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. You obviously don’t have to tell me if I’m right or wrong, but I’m fairly sure this is what your top secret line of work is. I mean, you get weird every time I or anyone else mentions P. meyeri. Besides, I like to think you’re working on the stuff that’s saving my life. Noor, my beautiful knight in shining armor.”

Noor feels herself begin to tear up. She pulls Irene into a tight embrace.

“I love you so much, Irene. You know I’d want you to live forever, if that was possible, right?”

Irene gently returns the embrace, and caresses Noor’s back lightly. “Of course, my love. Of course I know. I promise you, I’ll be okay. I’ll get better, and I’ll live.”

“Hum Aap Ki Ankhon Mein,” by Geeta Dutt and Mohammad Rafi plays softly in my kitchen as I pour the fragrant filter coffee, made from rice milk and Irene’s favorite blend from the orbiting gardens, which I spiced with cardamom and cloves, into a cup. Irene is looking out a window. She seems lost in thought, but she’s smiling, which makes me smile a bit too. She shakes off whatever she was thinking about and takes the coffee from me.

“Do you want a sip?”

I shake my head. There’s no way I can drink coffee anymore, it would leave me doubled over in pain for hours. Over the past two months, twenty pounds have just dropped off my body, regardless of the amounts I eat, and I feel cold a lot these days. My reflection in the mirror sometimes doesn’t register to me as what I look like these days, lips devoid of color, sunken eyes, the whites sometimes taking on a yellowish tinge, and massive dark semicircles beneath them. Truthfully, my appearance was always a bit of a point of pride for me, and the bold lipsticks I used to wear not looking quite the same on my face anymore stings more than I’d like to admit. I forget all of that when I’m with Irene, though. She makes me feel absolutely beautiful, always.

Irene takes a sip of the coffee. “It’s delicious! I didn’t know you could . . . is making coffee still in the realm of ‘cooking’?”

I sit down across from her. “Honestly, I have Noor to thank for this one too. You know, she and I have a similar cultural background. When I was younger, I was a lot more religious. Still don’t know quite why it happened that way, my mother was pretty religious, but my father was an atheist, and there was never any pressure to believe in anything. But I think I was looking for a way for the world to make sense. Not in an ‘everything is going to be okay’ way, but more of a ‘there is a reason for everything, and a meaning to everything’ way . . . I don’t know. Anyway, I stopped believing in any sort of higher power eventually, and when I did . . . a part of me felt like I wasn’t really, truly, allowed to take part in celebrating various aspects of my culture anymore. I know, it was kind of silly, but I cut myself off after that, from the clothes and the cuisines and the songs and the events and . . . the community, I guess. Noor wasn’t religious either, but she very much participated in celebrating her culture anyway, and I think seeing that made me feel like it was okay. So . . . enjoy my family’s recipe for filter coffee, it’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

Irene holds my hand. “I see you’ve been influenced by her love of old Bollywood songs too.”

“I think that’s definitely new for me, but I really like them. I have no idea why she enjoyed listening to such old songs though, she never thought much about it herself.”

Irene puts the coffee down. “I think, for her, it was all about the idea of connecting to past generations. Think about all of the people, who haven’t been alive for a century or more now, watching those movies, or listening to those songs. It makes them seem more human, doesn’t it? You’re kind of hit with that realization that these people lived and died, they were just like us. And it’s an interesting thing to feel. Once, she and I went to a redwood forest, saw a fourteen hundred-year-old redwood tree. She just stood there, for almost half an hour! She was thinking about how many people had stood where she was standing, how many people over the centuries saw that tree. I think it’s the same reason she listened to those songs.” Irene sighs.

“I remember that day! It was so nice, walking around with you, in the fog-covered forest. We had such a wonderful time, didn’t we?” I catch myself too late. “I mean, you both had such a wonderful time, didn’t you?”

Irene looks at me and frowns. She doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“What is it?” I ask her.

“What kind of a person am I, for doing this?”

“What do you mean?”

She takes a while to respond. “I don’t know exactly why I’m with you, Nithya. I don’t know if it’s because of you, or because the more time I spend with you, and the longer you live Noor’s experiences, the more you remind me of her, and the more I can almost pretend she still exists. It’s unfair to you, you’re an entirely different person.”

“Well, if we’re going there, what kind of a person am I for being with you? Instead of letting you grieve, I kept meeting you, even if I knew Noor was influencing me, even if I didn’t know entirely whether it was me that was falling for you or her, even if when I’m with you sometimes I forget to keep track of where I end, and she begins.”

“Maybe we’re both being selfish.”

I sigh. “Do you want to stop seeing me? Because even if it’s selfish, or wrong, or unethical, I don’t think I want to stop seeing you. Maybe that makes me a bad person, or a weak person . . . but the truth is that I’m in love with you. And frankly, I don’t care where it’s coming from. It’s the same set of neurotransmitters and it’s the same physical process, and like it or not, this is still my lived experience, even if it now includes someone else’s too. And my lived experience is telling me I love you.”

Irene starts to tear up. “I don’t want to stop seeing you! And I love you too! But you shouldn’t love me. And I know for a fact that you’re not going to love me for much longer, too.”

“What, because I’m sick? I can’t believe you just said that to me!”

She shakes her head, speaking through tears. “No, it’s not that at all, it’s something else. Lots of other things, actually. You’ll find out soon, and then you’re going to hate me! And you’ll agree that I am a terrible person for seeing you, for letting you fall for me . . . I just liked you too much! And you reminded me of her . . . and in a way you brought her back to life for me. But I did something terrible, Nithya! And soon you’re not going to love me anymore, I know it.”

I try to touch her shoulder, but she shrugs me away. “What could you possibly have done?”

She takes a deep breath and wipes her tears away. “If it wasn’t for something I did, something terrible, Noor would have been alive right now. I think I killed her, I think it was all my fault. I didn’t know what would happen! And now she’s gone, forever, and all I can do is grasp at the occasional, flickering ghost of her that I see in you.”

Irene turns away from me and leaves my apartment. I let her.

Who are you? Are you me, in my current, lived experience? Are you my disembodied brain, lying miles away from my corpse, looping through my memories to prepare a set of light pulses? Or are you someone else entirely, a stranger, maybe, living out some of my most memorable moments? I’ve been searching for something to show me which one it is, a sign, a glitch, a flash in my surroundings? But it’s an impossible quest. I can only wonder who you are.

This is the one Irene has. The phage has two capsid heads, each containing a packet of viral DNA, and two protein sheaths, each ending in spider-leg-like fibers. Instead of attacking bacteria, this phage goes after cells in a person’s small intestine and esophagus.

Spread through the air, as soon as phages enter a person’s mouth, they will make their way down the esophagus, either binding to squamous cells on the esophagus and injecting the cells with one vDNA packet or continuing down the esophagus until they reach the small intestine, where they then are able to bind to enterocytes and inject them with the other vDNA packet. After being infected, the cell enters a lysogenic phase. The vDNA packets are tied to a protein mimicking a nuclear localization signal. They trick importin receptors into bringing the vDNA into the nucleus of their host cell. Here, the vDNA is incorporated into its genomic DNA, and as soon as this occurs, the infected cell’s function is altered for the rest of its life.

In the small intestine, lysogenic enterocytes become immensely oversized to make room for as much eventual phage production as possible, in the process, disrupting nutrient absorption. Severe internal growths, agonizing stomach pains, diarrhea, vomiting, and eventually fatal malabsorption result from this. Eventually, close to natural cell death, the vDNA tells it to enter the lytic stage, and it creates as much phage as it can carry before bursting and releasing it. The phages that were just released either infect other enterocytes or travel with bile, as the lysogens around the recently burst cell send signals to the lysogens in the esophagus. When a lysogenic enterocyte in the small intestine bursts, the lysogenic squamous cells in the esophagus receive signals to trigger gastroesophageal reflux, and it induces a coughing fit, bringing the virus-carrying bile up into the person’s mouth and then spreading into the air to infect other people.

For a while, there was no way to stop the lysogenic enterocytes from eventually proving fatal without stripping the entire lining of the small intestine and replacing it using stem cells, an expensive and invasive procedure that runs the risk of reinfection, since the proteins on the surface of the enterocytes wouldn’t change. Then came the discovery of P. meyeri.

With P. meyeri, all an infected person has to do is take a pill every day over a period of time that contains pre-specialized archaeocyte cells from the sponge. The highly specific cells target lysogenic enterocytes and simultaneously work to destroy them and perform normal enterocyte functions themselves. P. meyeri archaeocytes end up entirely replacing the lysogenic enterocytes, and the infected person is cured. Since most of the proteins on the new cell surface are very different, there is no risk of reinfection as well.

The woman from Noor’s earlier meeting leads Noor to a window looking into a room with a single P. meyeri sponge in the center and turns off the light in the hallway around them. “I’m glad you signed the contracts, Noor.”

There’s some sort of a light system set up inside, with tiny blue LEDs everywhere. The main lights in the room go off as well, and the LEDs turn on. A dancing blue light display begins, in a similar yet also quite different recursive pattern to the ones Noor saw in the cavern during the larvae release.

The woman turns to her. “What we’re doing is tricking the sponge into believing the lysogenic enterocyte cells we fused to the inner linings of the channels that run through it actually belong to it, and that the infection will eventually kill it. The way P. meyeri responds is amazing. It synthesizes its own, new, modified enterocyte-esque cells, using the many archaeocyte cells it has, and has them slowly but surely destroy and replace the lysogenic enterocytes, ending up fused to the inner linings of its channels instead of the infected cells.”

They move to a window looking into another room full of sponges. The woman continues “This is where we take the sponges next.” After Noor realizes what’s happening, she feels nauseated. They’re stripping the inner linings of the sponges’ channels. Autonomous machines take cylindrical tubes with sharp edges, and, entering the few pathways without cutting into the nervous system, essentially shave off the new layers of the sponge.

After the archaeocytes have been stripped away, a small trickle of what looks like the dark corrosive liquid drips out of the sponge. Noor turns to the woman next to her. “Is that . . . ”

The woman nods. “It’s a diluted form, so it doesn’t do as much damage to the sponge, but yes, for some reason it secretes that same substance after we strip it of the newly specialized archaeocyte cells . . . Is something wrong?”

Noor frowns. “There must be a way we can use what we already know to come up with a different treatment, without harming or harvesting any more P. meyeri spon—”

The woman smiles and puts her hand on Noor’s shoulder in what looks like an amiable gesture, but she grips the shoulder slightly too tight. “We’ve been doing some research in that realm, but we’re not going to stop using P. meyeri. What happened to Dr. Meyers was sad and terrible, of course, but think about the big picture here, Noor. Once we fine-tune our control of this thing, we can use it for a lot more than just treating a disease.”

On her way out, Noor stops by the building where Matias works and checks in with him. “How is it going, with the you-know-whats?”

“I’m sorry Noor. I don’t know if it’s going to work out. Are you still going to go through with your paper?”

Noor sighs, but eventually nods. “I don’t feel like I have a choice. This is just what I have to do . . . it’s the ethical thing to do. Are you still going to support me, even if your part doesn’t work out?”

Matias looks down. “My promise was that if you were right about what you think happened to Dr. Meyers, and if something terrible happens to you too before you publish it, I’ll make sure it’s published, because that’s what I think the ethical thing to do would be. But . . . if my part of this doesn’t work out . . . if there’s no alternative . . . I don’t think I can support you besides that one situation. I’m sorry.”

Noor wakes up to Irene shaking her, forcefully, with tears streaming down her face. “How could you?!” Irene speaks through sobs. She’s holding a stack of synthesized—Oh. No . . . the paper . . .

Noor sits up. Irene speaks again. “Answer me! Tell me there’s been a mistake. Tell me you haven’t written up something that will, if approved, get me killed.”

Noor gets out of the bed and whispers. “I’m sorry.”

“Is there any other cure?”

Noor shakes her head. “No . . . but there’s always hope, maybe—”

Irene starts laughing, bitterly. “This whole time, I thought you were working on the thing that’s been saving my life. But actually, it’s quite the opposite, isn’t it!”

“It’s an intelligent creature, Irene! It cannot be okay to exploit it like this!”

“In any other situation, I would agree with you. But this was an emergency! An actual, serious threat to our existence. And if this treatment goes away, what’s going to happen to everyone currently infected?”

“You haven’t seen P. meyeri like I have, Irene! If you could just try to understand where I’m coming from, maybe you’d see that—”

Irene scoffs. “I do understand where you’re coming from. I read every page of this thing. But have you, ever, once, truly considered what this is like from my perspective? I mean . . . and . . . why did it have to be you, Noor? Why you?”

Noor doesn’t know what to say. How did it escalate so quickly? Why is this happening so fast?

Irene begins putting on her jacket and collecting her belongings.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving. I can’t do this.”

“What are you doing with my paper?”

Irene stops, grimaces, turns to Noor. “I can’t let you do this.”

No, no no no. Noor follows Irene as she walks to the door.“Irene, think about it, please. Sit down, we can talk about this. You . . . don’t know what the place I work for is like. Something really bad might happen. Please, just think about this! Plea—”

Irene opens the door, turns around, and says, “I don’t want to die,” before leaving and slamming the door shut behind her.

I wake up to one of the foulest scents I have ever encountered. Looking down, I see that I’m lying in a pool of green liquid. I shit myself. “Ew, ew ew,” I repeat to myself over and over again as I unplug the tubes in the sensory deprivation chamber and rush to the bathroom to clean myself up. After thoroughly cleaning and disinfecting the sensory deprivation chamber, I take my morning pill to trigger the hallucination, like I do every day, and sit on the floor to wait.

Something’s different this time. Until now, every hallucination has been about my own life, nothing from Noor’s ever entering them. But suddenly I’m sitting at a beach I’ve never been to before, and that is entirely different from what my own imagination normally invents. I try to move, but I can’t move at all. I look out to see . . . Sana is in the distance . . . half buried in the sand? The tide begins to come in, but she doesn’t react. Water rises and rises until it’s covering everything, and I try to move to her, to my daughter, but I can’t move, and now she’s under water, and now I’m under water, and I can’t scream because it’ll fill my lungs, but soon it’s unbearable and I gasp, inhaling saltwater, and then my vision goes black.

The darkness soon dissipates, and I find myself shaking, with tears running down my face, curled into a fetal position on the floor.

There are three people named “Matias Rodriguez” living in the nearby area. I try calling the first two from my touchscreen, but I don’t recognize their voices. I recognize the third voice instantly.

“Hello?” he says.

“Hi, I’m investigating Noor’s death, and I wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know if I can help you. I don’t know anybody named Noor.”

“Excuse me? You went on a sampling mission with her . . . do you remember that?”

“Ah, I see. I was scheduled to take part in a sampling mission some time ago, but I got a pretty bad head injury and was unfortunately unable to do the mission. My memories are very poor quality or nonexistent for a while after that, but I’m back to normal now.”

Oh, fuck.

His memories . . . I think I know what happened. Fuck. I sigh, but then I remember something and my heart sinks even more.

“How’s Syd doing?”

Matias groans. “They’ve stopped communicating with me entirely now! Not even through their touchscreen . . . it was bad enough when they wouldn’t change their damn expression, but now . . . Wait. How do you know about Syd? Who are you? Have we met?”

Damn it, poor Syd. “I’m sorry to tell you this, sir, but I’m afraid you might have had some of your memories wiped.”

Matias’ tone changes abruptly. “Did Syd put you up to this? Did my husband? Endless paranoia in my family these days, I swear. I’m going to end this call now. Good day.”

I meet Irene at the same café we met at months ago, spot her sitting in the same booth, drinking the same coffee. I feel like if we meet here, not only will our conversation go unheard in the hum of all the other conversations taking place around us . . . we will be more inclined to be civil. I will be more inclined to be civil. It’s not just my anger driving me right now, it’s Noor’s too.

I sit down across from her. She smiles at me, weakly.

“Irene . . . what did you do? And . . . why did you keep this from me?” I feel tired, all of a sudden.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t risk telling you earlier. I didn’t want you to hate me. I wanted to have just a little bit of time with you, even if I knew it would end up like this eventually.”

I shake my head. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. This whole time, I was just . . . blinded by my feelings for you. Damn it, for months! What did you do with her paper? And what else have you been keeping from me?”

Irene looks down.

“ . . . Is there something else you’re keeping from me?”

She flinches.

I sigh. “Look, at this point, I would appreciate you just coming clean with me, okay? Just tell me what you know, please, for her.”

Something seems to click into place for Irene. She looks very determined, all of a sudden. After a long stretch of silence, she nods, and says “Fine. Okay, fine. You’re right. I should do this, for her . . . she deserves justice. Those assholes need to be taken down. Screw it, I’ll tell you everything.”

“Thank you. Fill me in, from what you did with the paper to whatever else you haven’t told me. Tell me everything. Starting now.”

She does.

She tells me that she took the paper and asked around the place where she was getting treated until she found the contact information of Noor’s workplace. She met with three of their representatives, a young woman, an older woman, and a middle-aged man. They thanked her for the information, told her they would “take care of it,” and that they would be in touch with her soon.

Irene looks back up at me, shaking her head sadly. “I didn’t know what they meant by ‘taking care of it,’ Nithya! Just slightly over a week later, she died!”

“Why did you keep this from me? Self-preservation, again?”

Irene winces. “Maybe a little bit, yeah . . . but I like to think I would have reported all of this to you, immediately, if they hadn’t made me . . . ”

“Made you do what?!”

“Please try to understand! They threatened me, they threatened to hurt Sana! I had to, Nithya!”

“ . . . What?”

“ . . . I made you sick. It was in the first box of the set of pills I gave you. I put the phage in, too.”

You did what?! I stand up to leave.

“Nithya, wait! You don’t understand! I’ve been protecting you, this whole time! I’ve been telling them you’re doing the treatment! They thought if you had it, you wouldn’t side with Noor. They think you’re on their side!”

“You’ve been spying on me too? What the actual fuck? All of that stuff, about wanting to know what it’s like in her head, was a lie?”

“No, that came out all wrong! I haven’t told them much, I promise! Your investigation is safe! I swear, I’ve been protecting you! I’m on your side Nithya! And it wasn’t a lie. I wanted to know what her thoughts were like, desperately. That wasn’t a lie at all!”

I can’t look at her anymore. I walk out the door. She was threatened, though. Hear her out. A little voice pops into my thoughts as I leave the café, and I can’t tell if it’s coming from myself or from the Noor part of me. I can barely distinguish the two anymore now, and I’m tired of trying to.

Sana, my daughter, I am so sorry I left you. I love you, so much. Maybe someday, I will see you again. Would you recognize me? Would it still be okay? I miss you Sana. I love you. I’m so sorry.

Mommy I want to tell you about something. Sana plays her flute to Noor, standing in the doorway to the living room.

Noor sits at the coffee table, typing into her touchscreen. She stops, closes her touchscreen, and smiles at Sana. “What is it?”

Sana begins an uncanny melody. I have been thinking. I started communicating like this to incite action to stop the climate catastrophes. And I still care about that so much. But I think along the way I figured out that I prefer communicating like this to communicating any other way. I like the control I have over my flute and I like how it sounds and I like that it is a language I invented. I think even if the demands were all met I would still type in my touchscreen and play my flute to communicate. Is that okay?

Noor nods. “You know, I have to admit that I struggled sometimes to accept your method of communication. I tried to hide that from you, and I’m really sorry if any of that came through. But over the past couple years, Sana, I’ve realized that communicating like this makes you happy. And I’d never want to get in the way of that. I’m happy for you, and I love you so much. Of course it’s okay. Is it okay if I give you a hug?”

Yes. I want to hug you too. Sana moves to her mother and embraces her. Noor holds her daughter close for a while.

Noor recognizes the knock, and she opens the door to see Irene.

“I’m so sorry Noor! I told them. I told the people you work for. I just don’t want to die. I really don’t want to die.”

“Hey . . . come in, it’s okay. I knew you did this, it wasn’t hard to guess. Come inside, we left things on a weird note last time.”

“Is Sana here?”

“No, she’s at school.”

“You’re not at work? I mean, I should have thought that through before showing up, but I’m realizing it now.”

“ . . . No.”

They move to the living room couch and sit next to one another. Diffuse light comes down through the skylight above them. Noor turns to Irene, and half smiles.

“You don’t have to be sorry Irene. You were acting out of fear for your own life . . . and in a way, I did betray you. But I wish you could have seen what I’ve seen before making that decision. Especially because the research company I work for . . . I think they’re capable of some pretty awful things. But I prepared for this, just in case. It’s why I got the light-gated-ion channels two years ago.”

Irene frowns. “What do you mean? Is . . . is something going to happen to you?”

Noor sighs. “I was trying to tell you this earlier. But . . . don’t worry about it right now, okay? I forgive you for what you did, can you forgive me? I just . . . for a little bit . . . want it to go back to how it was. I love you, Irene. And that hasn’t changed. Can we go back to how things were? Please? I really need that right now.”

Irene thinks for a long time, but then pulls Noor close to her. They hold each other for a while, and then Noor kisses Irene. Irene kisses her back. “I love you too. I want it to go back to how it was before, too.”

I wander aimlessly around the town, trying to collect my thoughts. With every session of Noor’s experiences, I lose my sense of self more and more. I don’t quite know who I am anymore, and I keep asking myself, would Nithya do this? Would Noor? Is this Nithya? Is this Noor? But it’s exhausting now, trying to keep track of my memories and my thoughts, and trying to remember which are hers and which are mine. Mine. But who am I?

With those two years of Noor’s experiences came a lifetime of memory as well, something I was not anticipating at all. But I should have known. After all, what are our thoughts, our experiences, our reality, without our memories? Of course I remember things now that weren’t necessarily events taking place in Noor’s experiences. Her every recollection of some other past event was encoded in her brain activity too, her memories within a memory. And subconsciously as well, memories were coloring her every thought, and those not-so-obvious rememberings were transferred to me too, running underneath my thoughts now too. It’s impossible to live a snapshot of someone’s experience without inheriting everything that came before that snapshot too, whether it’s immediately obvious or somewhere under the surface. Frankly, it’s futile to try and separate myself from her at this point. I can’t even remember how I used to think before I lived that piece of her life.

Maybe I should stop separating them. All those times, making love to Irene, when I released my hold on these two identities, and allowed them to blend into each other, it felt so right! Irene. Noor forgave her. Would Nithya? Would I, whoever I am now?

Maybe I’m exhausting myself, thinking that I’m separating the two identities, when I’m really deluding myself trying to categorize my thoughts into what I believe Noor would think and what I believe Nithya would think, when in reality there is no way to know where those thoughts are truly coming from.

I should let them blend.

I put on Noor’s favorite song, “Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya,” sung by Lata Mangeshkar, and decide to stop trying to control my own mind. I let the music wash over me, I let the two identities come together, mixing into one another, memories and thoughts and experiences and reality.

I’m not quite either of them, any longer.

I smile. I think I know what to do next.

I call Irene from my touchscreen. As soon as she picks up, I say, “Listen, if you’re really on my side, you’ll help me finish what Noor’s started. And you can begin by working with my partners Marie and Anthony, to restore the memories of a man named Matias Rodriguez.”

After a long pause, she responds. “ . . . I will. I promise I will.”

I arrive at Noor’s aunt’s house, where Sana lives now, and I take a deep breath before knocking on the door. Noor didn’t know her aunt super well, but she seemed nice, and didn’t live too far away.

I’ve just started to consider knocking on the door again when it opens, and she’s standing right in front of me, flute in hand. Sana. It takes all my strength to prevent tears from filling my eyes. I’m immediately flooded with joy. My daughter. It’s been so long . . . But she’s not my daughter . . .

The girl takes out her touchscreen and types Who are you on it.

I clear my throat. “I’m Nithya . . . we met once, several months ago. I’m investigating your mother’s death. Can I come in?”

Sana stares at me for a moment before nodding and letting me into the house. She types on her touchscreen I did not recognize you at first. You look different now.

“Yes, I’ve become sick. Hey, can I talk to your great-aunt? I need to ask her a few questions.”

Sana leads me to the living room of the house, where an old woman sits on a doughy blue armchair, facing out the window. Next to her is a beautiful upright piano, with several pages of sheet music on display above the keys. Sana, in the adjacent room, has begun to play something on her flute.

I turn to the old woman. “Hi Ms. Bakshi. My name is Nithya, and I’m investigating your niece’s death. Noor was working on something, a paper, before she passed away. Do you know if any copies of her work still remain? On her touchscreen, or any physical copies, or anything related at all? It’s crucial for our investigation.”

Ms. Bakshi sighs. “I’m afraid you’re months too late. I had brought everything Noor had worked on to this house, but it’s all gone now. There was another group of people who asked me the same question several months ago, very soon after Noor’s death, with a warrant to search the house. They took all of Noor’s research, all the physical copies, and all the electronic ones too. I’m sorry.”

My heart sinks. It’s all gone. I don’t think I can pull the entirety of Noor’s paper out of her memories. There’s no hope now, unless Matias knows something, maybe? Maybe he has a copy!

“Thank you, Ms. Bakshi. Don’t worry about it. I should probably get going now.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. I wish—Hey, Sana? Could you keep it down, just a little bit? The grown-ups are talking here!” She turns back to me. “I don’t know what it is with that girl and that strange song. She plays it all day, every day, several times in a row. I can’t say I like it too much, but if it makes her happy, I don’t have the heart to ask her to stop. Do you want something before you leave? Chai, coffee? I have some freshly made rice-milk peda in the kitchen! You must try some.”

I shake my head. “I’m sorry, there’s not much I can consume properly anymore. But thank you for the offer.”

As I take my leave, I pass by the piano, and something catches my eye as my gaze drifts over the sheet music. Wait a minute . . .

And then, I actually start to hear what Sana has been playing on her flute this whole time.

 . . . The choanocytes lining the innermost channels of a Panaceius meyeri sponge differ from choanocytes in many . . .

It’s the paper! My eyes fill up with tears. I go to Sana. “What you’re playing right now . . . it’s your mother’s research, isn’t it?”

Sana stops playing her flute, looks up at me, and nods. After some time, she plays You understand my language?

I smile. “Yeah, I do.”

You really have lived a part of my Mommy’s life.

I kneel next to her and tears start flowing down my face. “Yes, Sana. I have. And because I have, I know she loved you so much. I’m . . . I’m so sorry you’ve lost her. I’m so, so sorry.”

Nithya. I would like a hug. Could I give you a hug?

I nod. Sana hugs me, and I can’t stop myself from crying into her shoulder.

When she lets go, she takes the stack of sheet music from the piano and hands it to me. I sit and look through it, remembering Noor painstakingly documenting all of it . . . But there’s a new section now, at the end, with an annotated name in the margins, still written in the Fibonacci-sheet music language. Matias Rodriguez? I look at the title of the new section, and I can’t believe my eyes.

It’s titled, “The Cure.”

It turns out that there is a way to grow sponges out of the P. meyeri gemmules, and sponges that grow from them are not conscious in any way, they do not have the extra layer, or the corrosive liquid! What Matias did was take certain genes from the pre-specialized archaeocytes from a conscious P. meyeri sponge and introduce them to the gemmules. The sponge that grew from the gemmule ended up having inner channels lined with the specialized archaeocytes. And this sponge had no qualms about reproducing in the simulated settings within a research lab. When the sponge from the gemmule reproduced, it did not create larvae, but only gemmules of its own. And when the next generation of gemmules became sponges, they also contained the specialized archaeocytes. Matias had found a way to create a population of sponges that were as ethically alright to experiment on as other sponges discovered before P. meyeri, that contained the cells necessary for the treatment and could reproduce! I’m fucking stunned. This could save my life.

I thank Sana and her great-aunt for their time over and over again, filled with happiness. As I’m about to leave the house, Sana tugs on my sleeve and then plays something on her flute again, looking right at me.

Nithya. About what you said earlier. I do not know if I believe Mommy is entirely lost. Will you visit again? I want to have more conversations with you. And I want to meet you again.

I grin at her, and nod. “Sana, I can come here as many times as you want me to, for the rest of my life. Thank you for making your cipher. I think it’s a lovely way to communicate, and it truly saved the day. I’ll see you again soon, I promise.”

After I leave the house, I begin to walk away, when a small synthesized-paper envelope falls out of the pages of sheet music. There’s a single word written on it, still in the Fibonacci language. A single measure, time signature five-four. Eighth notes E, D. Sixteenth notes D, A, high E, high C. Quarter note F. Triplet notes E, F, F. And finally, quarter note F, again.

I can’t help but smile. I recognize the name immediately.

Noor sits at a desk, writing out sheet music on synthesized paper. An envelope sits next to what she’s writing, with “Irene” written on it in the Fibonacci-music language.

Dear Irene,

My love. I do not know if you understand exactly what you did. But you might soon. If that happens, I would want you to know I forgive you. And that I still love you. And . . . I understand what you did. But I also want you to know what it is like from my perspective. I want you to see P. meyeri for yourself. Feel what I felt for yourself. That is why if this is ever found . . . I would want you to be the one to live out my experiences. I do not know if it is going to happen like that. But I would want you to.

There’s good news too. Matias found a cure! I have just finished adding it to the paper. You will live my love. No matter what. And hopefully we can get this released soon and nothing will happen to me and we can both live together for decades more . . . happy and in love. I would like that very much. I love you Irene . . . this probably will never reach you, but I wanted to write it anyway.

Love,

Noor

Irene and I sit together, drinking coffee next to the sensory deprivation chamber in my living room. Oh man, I missed the taste of coffee so much. It’s been a month on the new treatment plan, and I’m already feeling so much better.

Matias’ memories have been restored. What happened was that he thought he would try to convince the research company to stop exploiting P. meyeri, since there was an alternative. But it didn’t work, and they hinted to him of the other, non-medication-related purposes that they could use P. meyeri for. They threatened him and made him sign the contracts, but he went to Noor with his research anyway, not knowing that Irene had told the research company about her work already. After Noor died, representatives from the company found Noor’s completed paper, after searching her aunt’s house, and discovered that Matias had breached the contract. He had his memory forcibly wiped.

With Irene’s help, Matias got his memories back, and working with me, we translated Noor’s paper back. As promised, he made sure it was published, and especially with the world knowing about the cure he discovered. The corrupt leadership of the research company was quickly removed and faced serious consequences. Numerous protections were put into place regarding disruption of the P. meyeri colonies and work is being done now to try and figure out a way to communicate with the sponges. For now, only unintrusive ROVs are allowed down there.

I look at Irene, drinking her coffee next to me. I wonder, if there hadn’t been a different cure, if I was still sick . . . would I have forgiven her? I shake the thought away. What’s the point of speculating, distressing myself with “what if”s? She had more than proven she supported me . . . and she was making sure the research company didn’t suspect anything about me the whole time. And, the truth is, ultimately, despite everything, I do still love her. Every part of me tells me I still love her. And she still loves me. So, if we love each other, and we make each other happy in spite of everything, why shouldn’t we just . . . be together?

I move closer to her, and she puts her arm around me. I rest my head on her shoulder. “You know, Irene, I don’t know if I’ll ever be Noor.”

She smiles, and she kisses me. “I don’t care. I love you.”

“And I don’t know if I’m entirely Nithya anymore, either. I think I’ve become someone else, entirely, the result of Noor’s memories and Nithya’s memories blending together, which gave rise to someone new.”

She kisses me again. “I still love you.”

This makes me smile. But then I remember something, and I sigh. “There’s just one set of light pulses left, Irene. It’s her death. I don’t know if I can do it. I’ve been putting it off. Especially because, while I know she doesn’t understand that she’s in a loop, I know she is, and I don’t want her to experience that again. I just don’t know if I can do it.”

Irene holds me closer. “Then just don’t do it. You don’t have to force yourself to do that, both for your sake and for her’s. The people responsible have been punished, chemical analyses months ago figured out what literally caused her death . . . there’s no need for you to play the light pulses.”

“You really think it’ll be okay if I don’t?”

“Of course, Nithya! You are under no obligation to play that awful experience into your head. I promise you.”

“Alright, I don’t think I will, in that case.” I settle my head back onto her shoulder. After a while, I continue. “You know, I’ve been thinking. Noor wanted you to be the one to live out her experiences, right?”

“Yes, but look. I’ve been thinking about this too. I’m actually really happy it was you. If you hadn’t done this . . . I would never have met you. I would have had her with me, always, but I wouldn’t have had you. I’m actually really glad it happened this way, Nithya. Besides . . . we’ve talked about this before, her patterns of neural activity are tailored to fit yours, and there’s no way to get those light pulses again.”

I look at her. “No, I’ve been looking into this, and I think there is a way, Irene. I think there is a way you can live some of her most memorable moments, too.”

So, who are you? Are you my current, lived experience, as I wait for the sedatives to put me into a temporary unconscious state? Are you my brain in the next few hours, almost done looping through my memories of the past several months, to put together a set of light pulses? Or is it you, Irene, my love?

Is it you, living my memories of the past months, which would certainly include some of Noor’s memories too? I wonder which of Nithya’s memories will make it through, and which of Noor’s will. I hope you’ll tell me all about it soon. And who knows how long the entire set of experiences will be? If they could condense two years of Noor’s life that much, how long will it take for you to live this tiny fraction of mine? Hours? Days? You’re in a waiting room outside right now, and we’re going to have a lovely day together after this procedure is over. I hope we will have a lovely life, together, too.

But no matter what, right now, I love you deeply, and Noor loved you deeply. And if you wanted to, my love, in your mind, you could keep us looping endlessly.

About the Author

Arula Ratnakar is a twenty-two-year-old scientist, artist and science fiction writer who is currently studying biology (concentration in neuroscience, minor in architecture) at Carnegie Mellon University. Her writing can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine and her artwork can be found in the first issue of Dark Matter Magazine. She is autistic and bisexual.

Themes of identity and reality have always interested Arula, particularly as someone who is the daughter of two immigrants from India and has grown up in the U.S with many different cultural influences. Arula is interested in studying brain simulation science in the future, plans to continue writing science fiction stories, and hopes to work on science fiction movies someday. Her Twitter handle is @ArulaRatnakar

55 Plaque

Isabel Lee

There aren’t actually fifty-five plaques. I’ve found this to be a pretty common misconception in children, especially when parents neglect to talk about it at home. That’s why it’s one of the first points I go over when we begin our unit on the Didacts. There are only nine plaques that have arrived on Earth so far; 55 comes from the number of years between the ninth plaque and this coming tenth one, a number that follows a very special pattern called the Fibonacci sequence.

Fibonacci, I say again slowly, spelling it out in big letters on the whiteboard. The first numbers in the sequence are 1 1 2 3 5. Can someone tell me the next number?

I pass out sheets of graph paper and together, we draw the spiral. I show them how to draw each box in pencil so that they nestle together perfectly, and then everyone uses their black marker to trace the quarter-circles that connect to form the conch-shell curve. In each box, we write the Plaque number and the year in which it arrived. I start the math from the beginning: The Alpha Plaque arrived in 1879. One year later, the Beta Plaque arrived in 1880. The 2 Plaque arrived in 1882, then the 3 Plaque in 1885, then the 5 Plaque in 1890. By the time we get to 34 Plaque, the box already creeps off the sheet, and barely any of the last box fits in the sliver of paper that is left. Still, I tell them to fit a big 55: 2021 in the edges of the sheet.

2021. This year seemed so far away when I first started teaching, nearly six years ago. But now, the future is here, and the government predictions are putting the Arrival sometime next month. Isn’t that amazing, folks? How lucky are we to be alive right now?

Then the kids get to color the spirals however they want, and by the time that’s over, we’ve usually hit recess. The spirals are collected, cut out, and laminated, then hung from the ceiling of my classroom until our Dinosaur unit in December. Today, though, the universe throws a wrench into my lesson plan. I can sense it—someone is about to cry. I turn from the whiteboard and scan the room, and sure enough, Alya is sniffling at her desk. Connor’s right next to her, of course. I make a mental note about the seating chart as I walk over. “Alya, honey, what’s wrong?”

Alya wipes pearls from her eyes, her dainty features contorted with anguish. “C-Connor said the sky’s gonna become pink,” she whimpers. “And then it’s gonna get really bright and loud, like the world’s ending. But that’s not true, right, Ms. Ore?”

I crouch down, assembling my answer. The 34 Plaque video isn’t shown until later in the unit, when we think we’ve prepared the kids enough. Connor’s undoubtedly seen it, though: rivulets of light streaking the rose-tinted sky over a trembling Earth, all in that grainy sixties film glory. The most watched video in human history, probably. Pink Sky has been recorded with every wave, but only for the last was color film possible. “The world’s not going to end,” I say gently. I give Connor a stern look and he squirms in his seat. “It might feel scary at first, but that’s why we’re learning about it in school. So when 55 Plaque comes, you’ll know how important and amazing it is.”

Alya shakes her head. “But none of it is real,” she mumbles. “The Didacts, Pink Sky, 55 Plaque, all of it. My dad told me so.”

Her words siphon all the pre-rehearsed Didactology responses from my head and leave me speechless. Even Connor gives her a stunned, bug-eyed look. I purse my lips. “I think he might be a little confused about that,” I manage, and then touch her spiral lightly. “I like the checkerboard pattern you’re drawing, Alya. Keep it up.”

The situation seems adequately diffused, and I straighten up. Other kids call for my attention, and Alya’s words fall to the background of marker disputes, Joey’s paper ripping down the middle. In the silence that follows recess dismissal, though, I sit in my empty classroom and stare at the blank space hovering on top of my inbox, unsure of how to start. In between cursor blinks, I realize I’ve been wondering when I’d have to write this email for a long time.

After school ends, I take the train all the way to the Bronx. As we rumble out of Harlem, I put in my earbuds and stare out at the usual murals. The imagery is obvious, if you know what you’re looking for. The most famous one depicts a little girl iconically holding a sunflower, the center engorged with meticulously staggered seeds. Other commonalities are the nautiluses, pine cones, and spiral galaxies that dot the brick edifices all the way home.

I’m reminded of a manga Mom showed me in middle school, where an entire town becomes supernaturally obsessed with spirals. People drive themselves to insanity as they begin to see spirals in their hair, the sky, creeping into the walls of their homes. It makes me wonder if I’m doing something like that, too, every September when I teach this unit. Because once you understand the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio it manifests in, you can never unsee how often it appears around you. It’s as if the world has committed it to memory, etched it into its bones. We’re listening, it wants to say. We’ve understood.

I get off the train and walk the two blocks to my apartment. I’ve had my own place for years now, but I remember when Mom would come up for the week and take the spare bedroom, to meet friends or run special errands. It’s been nearly two years since she passed, but sometimes when I open the door, I still think she’ll be in the kitchen waiting for me, dinner already warm on the stove top. As always, though, all I arrive to today is darkness and an unstocked fridge. I root around the pantry and decide to make curry, one of my staples nowadays. It reminds me of better times, when I wasn’t really living alone. It’s also stupidly easy.

My phone buzzes as I start to dice onions and carrots, and I pick up after I see it’s Dad. “Hello?”

“Hello, Sam? It’s Dad.” His voice is tinny and muffled, and I can imagine him hunched over the kitchen table in his apartment, speaking to the cell phone I gave him five years ago.

I turn on speaker and prop my phone on the counter. “I know, I have Caller ID.”

“Hey, how’ya doing? You said you were coming up this weekend, right?”

I stop cutting and rack my brain, wondering when I told him I was heading upstate at all. “Sure, I can come Saturday, if that works,” I tell him all the same. All we have is each other, as Mom would say. She said that a lot near the end.

Dad says good, see you then, and then I hang up. I start to peel a potato, already dreading the drive up. Lately, there’s been massive construction projects on major highways, to ensure our infrastructure is intact in the unlikely scenario that 55 Plaque bequeaths itself upon New York. Thanks to some feat of Didact engineering, Plaques have never landed in urban areas, but shards of its protective capsule have been known to break apart in the atmosphere and disperse across continents. Practically, this means that traffic is just always terrible. Then I remind myself that I don’t see Dad nearly as often anymore. My parents used to live much closer to the Bronx, but after Mom passed, we sold my childhood home and I helped Dad move into a smaller apartment. Since then, my visits have grown much more infrequent.

As I wait for the water to boil, I try to not think about the drive or my aging, lonely father. Instead I run through the lessons I’ll give later this week. Tomorrow I’ll describe the Didacts themselves, the bread crumb messages they’ve left for us to follow with each new Plaque.

Someone always asks: What’s on the Plaques? They’re all different, I’d reply, but each teaches us something new about science or mathematics. 21 Plaque taught us universal laws of physics, and 34 Plaque gave us major breakthroughs in chemistry and medicine. The knowledge they’ve given us has saved millions of lives. But why are the Didacts telling us these things? We don’t know for sure. But scientists think that the Didacts want our help. Right now they’re giving us the information we need to develop as a civilization. One day in the future, they’ll leave their planet and come to Earth, and we’ll save them. There are plenty of other theories, of course, ones that are much scarier and arguably more plausible. But those aren’t in the curriculum.

And then the hard one: When exactly are they coming? To this I have to take a deep breath and say, we still don’t know, but most likely far in the future. Some scientists believe the Didacts plan to send 13 Plaques in total. If that’s true, then we have hundreds of years left to wait. That’s a bummer to a lot of kids: No Didact meet-and-greets at birthday parties anytime soon. No, we will spend our entire lives in the in-between.

When I tell people I teach first grade, they like to bemoan how challenging these conversations must be, how hard it is to get kids to understand the entirety of the Didacts and their plan. Honestly, I don’t think it’s that bad. Kids’ brains are so malleable; they can wrap around almost anything. Besides, my job is just to simplify things we’ve known for decades. Later on in the unit, I’ll tell my kids to imagine themselves as Ngô Chí Thiện, the Vietnamese farmer whose rice paddy was the landing site of the Alpha Plaque in 1879. Imagine witnessing Pink Sky for the first time and thinking that the world is ending. Imagine being on the first team of scientists to excavate the Alpha Plaque, to decipher their etchings and realize the artifact’s implications. These things are harder than any lesson I could ever teach.

The water is boiling, and I slide in my vegetables, lost in thought. In 55 Plaque’s advent, who knows how the world will change? The knowledge it brings will surely alter our understanding of reality, though scientists won’t come to an official consensus for years. I drop blocks of curry roux into the water and use a wooden spoon to crumble them into pieces. Caramel color seeps into the stock, filling the apartment with warm, rich fragrance, and I sigh. I almost envy my kids in this way. They’ll take 55 Plaque in stride, come of age within the new world order it brings. I doubt the rest of us will fare as well.

Alya’s parents tell me they’re available Thursday after school, and so at 3:30 p.m. they sit across from me in the empty classroom while she’s in ballet. Alya’s father, large and stoic, wears a thick vintage bomber jacket that’s sizes too big for him. Alya’s mother, tiny like her child, fidgets with her fingers, her face creased with concern. “I’m sorry, but didn’t the other child make Alya cry? So why . . . ?”

I nod. “That’s correct, Mrs. Fahri. But we worked out the situation, and it’s actually something Alya said after that caught my attention.” I look to Mr. Fahri, who glowers back. “Alya mentioned that you had . . . expressed your disbelief in Didactology, and it was causing a little confusion.”

The Fahris exchange glances. Mr. Fahri leans toward me, matte fabric bunching around his shoulders. “Look, ma’am, all I’m doing is raising my child to accurately assess the world around her. And I think it’s my own right to do so.” He rests his elbow on the desk, his palm open to the sky. “In all honesty, I think I should be the one questioning you. Do these unproven theories really belong in schools? Aren’t you twisting the narrative for our kids?”

On his hand, I see what he unmistakably wants me to see: a thick brass ring, striped by a powder-blue line. A quick glance at Mrs. Fahri’s hands reveal she’s playing with an identical item, and my stomach twists. Of course they’re Humanists. I could have told you as much from Alya’s words alone, but something about how brazenly the Fahris display their rings deeply unsettles me. Growing up, this organization was considered fringe, extremists in tinfoil hats at the outskirts of society. But like a Fibonacci spiral itself, the Humanist movement has exploded in size within the last few years. Nowadays they clog up news cycles and infiltrate school boards across the country, demanding Didactology be removed from the curriculum and replaced with human-centric explanations for the Plaques. Their rings, traditionally used in ceremony, signal both their level and their most important tenets—blue like the seas for followers, verdant greens for evangelists, sunny gold for their leaders. They refuse to believe that anything could be more important than Earth, than us.

I force myself to maintain eye contact and muster a placid grin. “Mr. Fahri, this is what every child in America must learn by law. Rest assured that we only teach the most supported theories and give students plenty of evidence—”

Mr. Fahri scoffs. “Evidence that was forged by our government, come on!”

Mrs. Fahri looks between me and her husband nervously. “Albi, let’s not—”

“No, I think I’ve heard enough.” Mr. Fahri gets up and stands over me, smug. “I see the crap Alya has to deal with at school. At this rate, we might as well take her out.” With those words, he walks out of the classroom. Mrs. Farhi hovers in her seat for a second, then mumbles something apologetic and runs off after him.

The door swings shut, and I sit there for a while, tense. Finally, I exhale and cradle my head in my hands. Parent-teacher conferences are often taxing, but this one leaves me especially disturbed. For years, I’ve watched Humanist discourse bloom into a movement and tried to shield my kids from the worst of it. But how can I stop the seeds budding in their own houses? There’s no way I can protect them from everything, nor tell them that the life they know and the people they love are wrong. What keeps me up at night is that I don’t know who will.

It’s Saturday, and I stand outside my father’s apartment complex, lingering a little longer than usual. The air is cooler and clearer in Poughkeepsie, and flame-tinged foliage crowns the sky above my head, filtering in light in layers.

Dad opens the door on my second knock and lets me in. His apartment is always a little mustier than I remember. I hand him a bag of low-sodium cashew clusters as I enter, my usual offering. The doctor says his diet needs more Omega-3, and these are the only things I know he’ll eat. “Traffic real bad today?” he asks, ripping open the bag and popping one in his mouth.

“Awful,” I say, cracking my back and glancing around. “Could I have some coffee, Dad?”

While the coffee machine is brewing, I sit at the kitchen table and sort through the teetering pile of junk mail, giving him the usual mundane updates. Dad bumbles around the apartment, stacking dirty dishes and closing drawers, things I’m sure he meant to do before I arrived. When Mom died two years ago, it wasn’t like Dad’s life had just fallen apart. He kept on top of bills and ran miles each morning, too prideful of his own agency to allow himself to slip. But it’s the small things, like Mom having fresh-cut fruit ready every time I visit, that he can’t account for, and that I miss the most.

“How are the kiddos?” Dad asks as the coffee machine chimes. He pulls a mug from the drying rack and starts to pour.

“They’re good. I swear they get rowdier every year.” I roll my eyes. “Don’t get me started on the parents, though. Some of them are genuinely crazy.”

“Well, I’m sure they’re just trying to do what’s best for their child,” Dad says mildly, setting the mug down. I make a face and say nothing, studying all the paper on his table. On second glance, I notice the vast majority are branded with the same emblem, a sun surrounded by small inky letters that read Hallowed Sky Ministries.

I pick up a flyer and read it, feeling the thick, glossy paper between my fingers. “You guys are doing potlucks now?” It comes out sounding more derisive than intended, and I wince. I know in my heart Hallowed Sky is good for him. He found the community shortly after he moved to Poughkeepsie, and it gave him something to do, a fresh start in a new place. But we never went to church when I was a kid, never as much as dressed up for Christmas. I still can’t fathom the thought of my father bowed in prayer.

Dad nods good-naturedly. “Yep, they’re a new thing, but turnout has been really good so far. You should come to the one this Wednesday, Sammy—we always do these things in Glenn Park.” He points to the address printed on the bottom.

I put the flyer down and sip my coffee, stalling. He invites me offhand to church events every once in a while, though lately they feel more and more frequent. “Um. Maybe not on a work night.”

“There’s always the Hallowed Sky branch in the city, too. I’ve heard they have a great local pastor,” Dad adds enthusiastically. I shrug, and he falls silent, his eyes shifting to the table. “I know this is unfamiliar,” he says, his voice soft. “Believe me, I know. But . . . I think you’d be really surprised if you tried it.” He picks up the flyer again and pushes it into my hands. “We all need assurance, don’t we? Now more than ever.”

The flyer wavers, outstretched in front of me. A memory rushes to mind: my father handing me a pair of batteries in our garage, when I was no older than six. He had modified one of my dolls, a fairy, and sewn tiny lights in her delicate wings. I clunked the batteries into place, and she had started to shimmer instantly, the lights tracing intricate swirls. I had gasped at the magic I thought I created, but really, it was all him. An electrical engineer for forty years, Dad would wire up my toys whenever I got bored with them. He was eight in 1966 and witnessed 34 Plaque from his backyard in Jersey. When it streaked across his sky, on its way to a remote field in Zimbabwe that’s now considered sacred, he wasn’t inspired to pursue Didactology or astrophysics like other kids who witnessed the same event. No, my father saw Pink Sky and never got over the lights.

I take the flyer and slip it into my purse wordlessly, and he smiles. Neither of us mention the topic for the rest of the visit, and soon I find myself hugging him at the door, assuring him I’ll come up again soon. On the way back to the car, I pass a trash can and feel the paper crease in my purse, briefly consider what would be too easy. I can’t bring myself to do it.

Some things, I tell my kids, we have to trust are really there even if we can’t see them. I say this to Juliet during indoor recess on Friday, when she asks why we talk so much about the Didacts when they live so far away. This answer doesn’t seem to satisfy her, but she shrugs anyway and goes back to coloring her Rainbow Fish. She’s filling in the scales with circles, from the inside out.

We’ve been having indoor recess a lot these days, which is a real bummer. The start of October is when brilliant golden foliage shrouds our blacktop, when the air is sweet and cool and not yet prickly with ice. But like every day for the past two weeks, the Humanists are holding a rally in the park next to school, so like every day for the past two weeks, we’ve been ordered to stay inside. The kids basically do whatever they want in the classroom for twenty minutes, while I miss half my lunch break. It’s a deal none of us want.

I spot Alya and Connor sitting together at the Moon Sand table and immediately start to gravitate toward them. To my surprise, they seem to be getting along, each absorbed in their creation. Alya perks up when she spots me nearing. Her dad’s threats to take her out of school have proven to be empty so far, thankfully. “Ms. Ore, look! I made a doggy,” she says, showing me the lumpy mound in front of her. I smile and nod. Moon Sand is the bane of my existence, but the kids love it so much I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.

Connor crushes his own malformed lump with his fist. “Ms. Ore, I’m bored,” he sighs. “When can we play tetherball ousside again?”

I’m not sure what to tell him. The government has set the Arrival period to start next Monday, after which every day is fair game. The Humanists will surely be rallying until then; they’ve already moved mountains to land the permits they need to stay in the park, somehow slithering out of any noise complaint or city appeal the school has thrown at them. “A little while longer, bud,” I say. “These people won’t leave until after 55 Plaque comes.”

Connor groans. “I hate the people yelling in the park,” he tells me. “My mom says they’re dumber than dirt.”

In the edges of my vision Alya stares at her sand dog silently. “We don’t hate others,” I tell Connor sternly. “You know better than that.”

I smile faintly at Alya, but she shows no reaction to Connor’s comment. Instead, she’s fixated on the sand, tracing lines surrounding her dog that spiral out to the edges. She hums as she works, until she notices me watching.

“Do you like it?” she asks, and I nod tightly. The alarm erupts from my desk, and I get up and call five minutes to the class.

At the end of the school day, I remind people about permission slips for next week’s museum field trip as everyone’s packing up. “They were due today, so if you didn’t bring it in, make sure to remind your adults first thing when you get home,” I stress over the chatter and backpack-zipping. My expectations are not high. First graders are notoriously bad at this.

The room clears out and I sit at my desk, debating whether or not to try to catch the earlier train. I realize I’d have to run, which decides things. I check my phone instead. Dad has sent me a long email that looks suspiciously like spam, and then I double-check the subject line. This Week at Hallowed Sky, it reads, and my finger hovers for a second before marking it as read.

I lean back in my chair as an eruption of voices tremble through my window. The Humanists’ protests usually disappear underneath the classroom noise, but in the silence I can make out their chants from across the blacktop. No Didacts! No Lies! The People Need To Open Their Eyes!

This chant in particular is one of their favorites, though they’re all pretty nonsensical, just like the beliefs they stand for. Any normal person would tell you Humanist rhetoric is ungrounded and inconsistent, with countless factions all claiming their own insane things. The main message is the same, though: that the Didacts aren’t real, that the Plaques were made by the government in order to sell a narrative and control of the public, that humans are in fact the dominant (and only!) species of the universe. Depending on your flavor, you also might believe that people who believe in the Didacts are devil-worshippers, or that Abraham Lincoln masterminded this plot back during the Civil War, or that the Plaques are manufactured below Disney World. Regardless, it’s all obnoxious. Outside, I can hear chants crescendo and bubble over into loud cheering, and I wonder how they can stand to protest for so long. Maybe they work in shifts.

Soon, though, the protests become buried underneath familiar rambunctious noise. I crane my neck toward the blacktop, where lines of kids squeal and dart around each other as they head toward the buses in the parking lot, blissfully unaware of the brewing storm just a few yards away from them. They’re chaperoned by aides, a new safety precaution since the protests started. The aide who leads my class passes into view and I recognize the forms of my kids: Jacob in his puffy camouflage coat, Natalie and her hot pink boots. I make out Alya near the back of the line, skipping to keep up with her peers. Before they all disappear behind the trees, I swear I see her gaze out toward the park, hover for a moment, and then wave.

Dad calls when I’m frying gyoza and watching the Monday night news. It’s already a precarious setup; my hand is stinging from hot oil splashes, and I’ve accidentally flipped one off the pan while my eyes were glued to the screen. But I pick up. “Hello?”

“Hi Sam, it’s Dad.”

“Hi, Dad,” I say, nearly sending another gyoza overboard. I grab the remote and turn down the volume, then turn on the CC’s. The breaking story tonight focuses on statements released by Humanist groups about their plans upon the Arrival. The news anchors talk with experts, who try to dissect the phrases buried in their vague threats: Revoke society. Secede. Start anew. No one is sure what they actually mean, it seems.

“Did you end up going to Hallowed Sky in the city yesterday?” Dad asks. I freeze. I spent yesterday eating Oreos and looking at dogs up for adoption on my laptop, before concluding I have neither the time nor the money nor the facilities to own one.

“Uh—” I say, switching my phone from one side to the other, “—yea, actually, I did.”

“Really?” His voice brightens and I feel guilt punch me in the chest. “How did you like the guest speaker? Wasn’t he something?”

“Yea,” I agree, grimacing. “His message was . . . really convincing.”

There’s a pause from Dad’s side, and for a moment I’m sure he knows I’m lying. “So you truly believe what he says, Sam?” he asks softly.

I suck in my breath. “Oh. Uh, I mean, it’s all so new, and . . . ”

“Right, right,” Dad says hurriedly. “Well, it’s good that you went, that you heard his teachings.” A silence seeps in between us, and I imagine him on the other end of the line, grasping for words about life and truth and God. What can’t he say to his daughter?

Finally, I change the subject. “The Arrival is coming so soon,” I state. In the classroom, I usually effuse this sentiment with excitement and hope, but to Dad I can only feel their weight. I think about the economy crashing in ’32, about the food shortages my parents lived through in ’66. I think about what they’re saying this time, that it may be worse. “Make sure you’re locking your doors, okay? Who knows what’s going to happen.”

Dad chuckles. “You don’t have to worry about me, honey.” He pauses. “You’ll be coming, right?”

“Hm?” I catch a whiff of something burning, and I look down at the stove top. “Oh, shit—yea, Dad, I’ll come up soon. I gotta go.” I hang up and drop the gyoza on a plate, and then smother the smoking pan in the faucet sink. Steam billows into my face and I hold my breath, praying that my apartment’s temperamental smoke alarm keeps its chill today. A few moments of silence pass, and I exhale slowly. Then the blaring starts.

It’s everyone’s favorite day—field trip day. We’re gathered in the rotunda with what feels like every other class in the city. A giant clock looms above us, chimes reverberating as it hits 9 a.m. My kids swarm around, practically vibrating with excitement, and I lose head count twice before our tour guide finds us and herds the group into a long, empty hallway. The kids hush immediately in the sudden darkness, enraptured by the array of eerie nature dioramas. The guide begins a spiel on beavers, and from the back I tally twenty-four and breathe a sigh of relief.

We visit exhibit after exhibit throughout the morning, the kids gasping in delight with each new hall we step into. We go to the Museum of Natural History every year, so by now I know what will be hits; the dinosaur hall is always a crowd-pleaser, as well as the room with enormous prehistoric bugs they can mount like horses. This year, the mummy chamber spooks the hell out of Louis, and I spend twenty minutes calming him down outside the bathrooms.

The best exhibit is always saved for last, though. After lunch, the guide leads us through the solar system hall, where planets and asteroids shine like ghosts. At the end of the hallway, we turn a corner into a large, open foyer, sunlight streaming through glass panels on the peaked ceiling. This room is always busy, but it’s especially packed this time, and my kids advance eagerly through the crowds. In the middle of the room stands a wide stone slab, and mounted on the surface is a small, golden disk. It’s only a few feet in diameter, barely taller than my kids. Above the disk, letters have been etched into stone: THE ALPHA PLAQUE (1879).

As I approach, waves of light ripple across the surface, grooves glinting and revealing the intricate patterns. I’ve shown this image before in class, projected it onto the whiteboard and explained the meanings of each cluster of symbols. But it’s so different when it’s really in front of you; it never gets old. I find myself brushing against the velvet ropes, drinking in every detail.

A trio of circles convene in the Plaque’s midpoint, around which smaller ones trace dizzying epicycles. This is their solar system of origin. From there, large swooping curves draw your eyes from the center to the outer edges; on the top, the Didacts have etched lines like soldiers, establishing scale and units of distance. Strange ellipsoids filled with hatched characters fill the bottom edge, representing the Didact’s atomic models, hydrogen and helium and carbon. Other symbols fill in the rest of the space, communicating their number system, their written words for Didact, Earth, Star, Human. The fifth word was something we didn’t figure out until 13 Plaque. Wait.

These are the fundamentals, simple concepts that unfold into grander ideas in later Plaques. Everything’s placed here for a purpose. When the Didacts eventually try to teach us how to achieve light speed travel, or harness energy for the sun, or whatever it is they truly want us to know, I wonder if we’ll be able to put all the pieces together. I wonder how different we’ll be.

I look over at my kids, who have wormed their way to the front of the crowds and lean against the ropes. I catch sight of Alya’s face, lit up in wonder, and I feel something in my chest ache. They soak all of this up so effortlessly, never believing for a second that we’d ever lie to them. Here, in this big, bright room, in the presence of a truth much larger than any of us, I want so badly to believe that we don’t.

When we step out of the museum, the world rushes to greet us as it always has. The kids who bought souvenirs flash them off to their friends, the chatter subdued after a day’s worth of exhaustion. As we descend the stairs and head toward the bus, I look across the open street, toward the city’s skyline. It’s still midafternoon, but the sky seems duller than normal, like the back of an old spoon. Then I notice the color.

I stop, basking in the slight hue, like red watercolor under the tap. Other people around me have noticed, too; some take pictures, while others speak on the phone with faces creased like paper. “Oh my god,” I whisper.

It’s not long until some of my kids catch on. They gape with me, at the sky that is barely smidgened pink, at the siren screams that have begun to quietly emanate from the ground. I look around, suddenly panicked, and imagine the worst. How long until crowds gather here on the stairs, yelling and fighting? How long until our bus can no longer pass through the packed roads?

I usher kids toward the waiting bus, gently pushing backpacks and holding hands as we descend, murmuring let’s go home let’s go home let’s go home guys all the way down.

We get back before the worst, and I pull out a sign-out sheet printed on pink paper from my desk and hand it to the aide. She’ll follow a special protocol for release today, making sure every parent signs their kid out in person or calls her directly. Once my kids leave, I sprint to catch my own train. The other passengers are restless. They flick upward at their phones, in an endless state of refresh. We are three days early to the Arrival Period, the official government prediction, and we’re all waiting to hear them confirm what we already know. I try calling Dad, but his phone goes straight to voicemail. The train passes under a tunnel, orange shadows leaking into our cars. It’s just bad service, I try to assure myself.

We shoot out of the darkness, and my leg bounces as I look out the window. The train bisects avenues and exposes them for an instant, each a blast of noise and light. I catch glimpses of people who have spilled onto the street, climbed out of their apartment windows, and craned their necks to the sky with the same stunned expression. We’ve all been told of this event our entire lives, but now that it’s here, it’s like none of us know what to do.

I hustle back to the apartment, and then try to call Dad again. It still goes to voicemail, and I feel my chest twist with anxiety; he should be home. I leave him a message and drum my fingers against the table. Against my better judgment, I turn on the TV and flip to the news. The anchors sweat and speak loudly, their eyes darting around the teleprompter, charting the world’s reactions in real time. A coup in Laos was apparently timed to start during the Arrival, and the camera pans to ragtag armies in the street, swarming the capitol. They brandish flags with the Didact word for Humans painted in drippy black strokes. My phone buzzes and I jump, but it’s not Dad. I look at the name of the school principal—my boss—and pick up in a daze.

She gets straight to the point. This is about Alya, the principal says. Her parents were calling earlier and were reportedly very angry. They want to know why Alya was taken somewhere against her will and taught information that is not true.

I dig my nails into my palm and tell her, as calmly as I can, that they signed the permission slip. I can show them.

Alya’s parents were not aware the trip would focus so heavily on the Didacts, she says.

Melissa, for the love of God help me out here, I say.

There’s a long pause on the other end. Then the principal informs me that Alya was never signed out according to the special protocol today, that she left when the aide was with another family and that no one can get in touch with her parents anymore. She doesn’t know anything concrete yet, but she wanted to know if Alya had said anything during the trip.

I think back to our trip and say no, I can’t think of anything.

Thanks, Samantha, the principal says. You really should have told me about Alya’s parents earlier. I stew in her silence, and then she hangs up.

Dad still hasn’t returned my calls. I sit at the table with my phone upturned while the TV flashes images of the faint pink sky, broken windows and ransacked stores, cars streaming out of the city on packed bridges. Then the anchor interrupts with a breaking story—all over the East Coast, large groups of people are reported to be migrating to upstate New York, fleeing when the sky had just started to turn. The reasons for doing so are still unknown, though the anchor notes these people all seem to be connected to various Humanist organizations. A block of innocuous-sounding names fill the screen, and he rattles some off. Sacred Planet Community, PeopleForPeople, Our Children’s Earth. Then I stop listening—my eyes fixate on a name in the bottom right and my stomach drops to the ground. Hallowed Sky Ministries.

With trembling hands, I pick up my phone again. I open the web browser and start typing. Suggested terms populate immediately: Hallowed Sky Humanists, Hallowed Sky legit, Hallowed Sky cult. I shut my phone off.

I rack my brain, wondering how I could have missed this. Our last phone call plays in my head and I feel dread creeping up my limbs like frostbite. I shake it off, forcing myself into action. I reach for my purse and dig out the flyer I hadn’t bothered to throw out. A quick Google Map tells me the park address printed near the bottom is near Dad’s apartment—barely a ten minute drive, if someone had wanted to swing by and pick him up.

I pause and look out the window. The sky is now unmistakably pink, and though the world isn’t trembling yet, I know to expect it. I reach for my car keys, stuff the flyer into my purse, and locate my coat. I check my phone again; no new calls. I head out the door.

The roads are absolutely packed, and what’s usually a forty-five minute drive with construction takes me nearly two hours. The evening darkens, but not into a familiar indigo; instead, the sky burns like a potent, eternal sunset, suffocated with smoke. When I finally pull up to the address that was scribbled onto the flyer, it’s almost eight. I stare at the small, derelict building I’ve been brought to in confusion. Then I notice the open field behind it, where fuzzy black masses move in the surreal twilight. A crowd. I know I’ve arrived.

I park my car in the lot and stumble into the field. There’s a musical hum that comes from the crowd, a sort of harmonic resonance. As I reach the edges, I notice the long, flat stage in front, where several figures stand slightly elevated. They all wear long, red robes, with golden stripes accenting their sleeves and collars. A shiver runs down my spine. I’ve only seen the full Humanist getup in documentaries and photos.

These figures press their mouths onto the microphone and speak in reverential tones. “ . . . So many faithful here, such a wonderful sight . . . He has given us all this great blessing,” I catch. The sound booms from speakers on the ground and comes out a little muddled. Around me, plain-clothed men, women, and children murmur and clutch their blue-striped rings.

Peering through the darkness, I spot my father’s face near the front of the crowd. I weave toward him, grasping his arm as soon as I can reach. “Dad!”

He turns. “Samantha!” he exclaims. His face is a mosaic of shadows, unrecognizable as he smiles. “You made it. I knew you’d come.”

“Dad, what are you doing here? We need to leave,” I say, tugging on him. His shirt is silken, and it’s only then that I glance down and see his robes, the color of blood.

“Sam, honey, it’s okay,” he says. “Calm down.” It’s the same tone of voice he used when I was five, when I had woken him up in the middle of the night because of a bad dream, crying in his arms while he comforted me. His voice makes me want to cry, now, too.

“Dad,” I plead, but then don’t know how to finish my sentence. Too much should have been said before, and now it’s too late. Finally, I ask in a small voice, “What is this?”

“They didn’t tell you the specifics at service?” he asks, frowning. “We’re leaving, Sam. Renouncing this world.”

I meet his gaze and it’s like a spell is broken, and for the first time we can see through each other’s facades. His eyes harden, his expression closing. “I’m sorry,” I say, hearing my own voice tremble, “but Dad, this is real.”

He looks away, saying nothing. His eyes seem to be staring past the stage, toward the darkness in the distance. “How can we ever be sure?” he murmurs.

I look around frantically, searching for any way to get us out of this. My gaze lands on a familiar-looking bomber jacket. I look up to its wearer. Mr. Fahri stands hardly twenty feet behind me, fervently nodding and bouncing on his heels, a ring-clad fist thrust high in the air. Mrs. Fahri stands next to him, her expression set ablaze. Nestled into her parent’s legs like a baby penguin and shivering, Alya catches my gaze. She looks at me with wide, wet eyes. I stare back, unable to breathe.

Dad’s sleeve slips out of my grasp, snapping my attention back. He steps onto the stage, and I grasp for his fingers, but they slide out of reach. I’m left holding the ring I’ve pulled from his hand. The stripe, I observe in the lantern-light, isn’t blue but instead golden, like the accents on his robe. His eyes flicker back to mine for an instant, filled with something I can’t catch—regret? disgust?—and then he joins the others on stage. He takes the mic. “What a great turnout we have tonight, folks,” he says, as if he’s just hosting a weekly bingo night and it’s time to draw the first numbers. “How blessed we are to gather here. We have been called to such holy, righteous action.”

I stand there, dumbstruck, as the crowd starts to advance forward, drawn by some invisible magnetism. Someone jostles my shoulder hard—I see Mr. Fahri emerge from behind on my left, his eyes glued to the stage. Mrs. Fahri follows him, and they walk like insects to light.

I look behind me. Alya stumbles a few feet behind her parents, unable to keep up with the rush. She sees me and I shoulder my way to her. “Ms. Ore!” she cries.

I crouch down and grasp her shoulders tightly. “We need to go now,” I tell her.

Alya hesitates for only a moment, and then I watch her mouth harden into a line, her head barely dipping in a nod. It’s all I need. I gather her into my arms and spring up, sprinting through the darkness toward the fluorescent-lit parking lot. She’s surprisingly light, and as I cradle her into my chest, I think I can hear her heartbeat, or mine, or both. I reach the parking lot, panting. Behind me the microphone booms: “Alright, folks, let’s take a moment to look around us . . . we’re getting word of some folks who have become separated from their kid . . . ”

I rip open the back seat door and place Alya in the car, then get into the driver’s seat. As I’m pulling out, my phone lights up with Dad’s contact photo, and my ringtone starts to blare. With shaking hands, I silence the call. The map resurfaces on the screen, lighting a path to civilization. I attach my phone to my dashboard and follow it out, accelerating down long, unlit roads, praying that we reach the highway.

Behind us, the roaring undulates and trembles, and in the rearview mirror I think I see small lights, blurry dark figures. I speed ahead, trying to gain as much distance as possible. The stoplight a hundred feet ahead of us turns yellow, and I try to floor it before realizing there’s no chance we can make it. I slam on the brakes. Alya lets out a whimper from the back seat as we screech to a stop. I stare out the windshield, stricken by the blazing sky. Rivulets of light streak across our view now, white-hot like stars.

“It’s so pretty,” Alya says.

“I know,” I breathe. No video or written account could have prepared me for this; in its final stage of transformation, the sky is not just pink, but orange and white, mixed like melted glass. It shines incandescently, terrifyingly beautiful. The Earth is black below it. I imagine my father underneath a sky like this fifty-five years ago, deciding to dedicate his life to creating light. I think I understand.

“Ms. Ore?” Alya asks, breaking me out of my trance.

I look behind me and see it all shimmering in her eyes. “Yes, Alya?”

“The light’s green,” she says.

I turn around; it is. “Oh, yea,” I say. I hit the gas, and then we’re going.

About the Author

Isabel Lee is a writer, artist, and creative technologist from Chicago, Illinois. Her interests include exploring the intersections between code, art, and fiction, and you can find her work online at isabellee.me. She also enjoys painting and watching Korean thriller movies. Isabel is currently a senior at Yale University. This is her second publication; her first story can be found in the September 2020 issue of Clarkesworld.

Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core

Wole Talabi

From: Emeka Nwobi

Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2034 4:29 PM

To: Chukwudi Nwobi <CNwobi@uh.edu>

Subject: Emeka Nwobi has shared the file “Provisional Patent Application For An Eternal Spirit Core Final Draft” with you.

Sender’s Note: Please Review

The link below only works for direct recipients of this message.

PROVISIONAL PATENT APPLICATION FOR AN ETERNAL SPIRIT CORE

[Open File]

PATENT MEMORANDUM COVER SHEET

INVENTOR(S) INFORMATION

First Inventor’s Name:

Engr. Emeka Nwobi, MNSE

Second Inventor’s Name:

Prof. Chukwudi Nwobi

Commented [CNwobi]: Why am I credited as coinventor here? I don’t know what this is exactly.

Home Address:

51 Akewi Road, Onitsha, Nigeria.

Home Address:

9324 Olivia Broek Lane, Katy, TX 91404, USA

Citizenship:

Nigerian

Citizenship:

Nigerian

INVENTION INFORMATION

Title of Invention:

Methodology and System for Generating, Installing, and Running A Persistent Memrionic Emulator of Recorded Neural Patterns, Also Known As An “Eternal Spirit” Core (ESC) In A Human Personal Nanomachine Network Environment Node.

Commented [CNwobi]: “Eternal spirit”? Is this a joke?

Conception Date:

25 September 2032

Commented [CNwobi]: You were really thinking about this during the funeral?

First Disclosure to Whom/Where/When:

My brother, Prof. Chukwudi Nwobi and his wife, Dr. Mrs. Anwuli Nwobi, at their residence in Port Harcourt on 14 November 2033.

Commented [CNwobi]: I had no idea you were taking this seriously. I thought we were just speculating about the possibilities to prepare for the meeting with LegbaTech.

Is There a Sponsored Research or Engineering Project Related to This Disclosure?

No

Commented [CNwobi]: So you’ve been using the money they left us to develop this thing? How much has all this cost?

To Your Knowledge, Has This Invention Been Used for Any Commercial Purpose?

No

To Your Knowledge, Has Any Specific Technical Information Relating to This Invention Been Disclosed to a Third Party?

No

Do You Plan to Publish/Disclose Information Relating to This Invention within the Next Year?

Yes.

I will deliver a presentation on the fundamental theoretical framework I have developed, discuss the methodology with which this can be achieved, and illustrate the primary proposed application at the International Conference on Computing Frontiers (ICCF) in Denmark, between 14 and 17 December 2034.

Commented [CNwobi]: Please withdraw the paper until we have a chance to talk properly. I can’t believe the committee accepted an abstract based on this. They will laugh you out of the conference. Memrionic processing schemes cannot be downscaled to run on nanomachine units, the processes run at quantum level and still require large supercooled units just to emulate one human memrionic. Research into this is preliminary at best. Or did you find something new in the files I sent you last year before the Legbatech meeting? Emeka, is this seriously what you’ve been doing for the last year? Why you didn’t come to Anwuli’s 35th? Why you haven’t been answering my calls? I can see you’re online, editing the document right now so answer the phone please.

Prior Art

While independent memrionic copies have been generated and stored as part of established computing systems, no actual technologies and methods exist to embed such copies into a human personal nanomachine network environment with on-demand live responses.

Commented [CNwobi]: There is a reason for that. It’s impossible.

Related Products/References:

Google’s Biocompatible Nanomachine Network Computing Environment - GLink© (commercially available)

LegbaTech’s Mem-One© Memrionic Neural Systems Scanner (commercially available)

XiaXia Inc’s Yige-Danao© Nanomachine Process Integration Software (commercially available)

3QPI Memrionic Mining Network Drivers (modified from opensource)

Commented [CNwobi]: OK fine. How did you get 3QPI memrionic network drivers to run on GLink? How is the nanomachine network not overheating? Does any of this even work? We really need to discuss this. I have tried to call you five times already. I will finish putting my comments on this document and call you again at your 10 a.m. sharp today before I go to bed. Just pick up the phone this time. Please. Anwuli has been worried sick about you since the funeral.

Summary of the Invention

A methodology and system for generating and installing a persistent memrionic emulator (the “eternal spirit” core) of any deceased individual whose neural patterns have been recorded (the “deceased”) in the personal nanomachine network environment node of a living client (the “user”) is described:

The methodology allows quantum processes to be emulated on a nanomachine network by external modulation of the strong force between particles.

The system can read in a full neural scan of the “deceased” as memrionic files and store this information optimally in a nanomachine network embedded in the “user” brain as modified 3QPI format files.

The system can be configured to receive all neural information processed by the personal nanomachine network of the “user” and integrate them as direct streams of input.

The system will generate a hypercubical memrionic matrix of response probabilities based on the recorded neural patterns of the “deceased.” The system is configured to identify the response with the maximum confidence value based on feedforward simulation and relay this via auditory nerve stimulation to the “user.” This sensation is expected to provide an optimal user experience that may be described as the “user” hearing a voice of the “deceased” in their head. The form of sensory stimulation can be modified.

This invention will allow the generation of what may be described as an “eternal spirit” for those who are deceased or about to pass on. This “eternal spirit” has been designed to reside in the place it matters most—the minds of those who love them. It will also allow businesses to offer a unique and compelling solution to anyone who has lost loved ones and misses their counsel, their encouragement, and their love, by installing the live, context-optimized probabilistic memrionic models in their personal nanomachine networks. This will be particularly useful for those who wish to maintain a sense of constant contact with those who have passed on. Use cases include people who would want to know what their parents would think of significant life choices, how they would have reacted to the sight of their grandchildren playing, what words of encouragement and advice they would give in moments of crisis, etc.

Commented [CNwobi]: Ah. Emeka, Mama and Papa are gone. Even if you get this to work it won’t bring them back. It won’t be them. Not really. Memrionic scans aren’t people. Just echoes. Please stop this Emeka. They’re gone.

If Field/Human Testing Is Planned for This Invention, When Is It Currently Scheduled to Begin?

An alpha version of the prototype system will be tested using previously acquired memrionic scans of my mother, Mrs. Shiela Nwobi on 4 January 2035.

Commented [CNwobi]: Oh No. No. No. Emeka. Seriously, I know you’re reading this. Please, please, pick up my call.

About the Author

Wole Talabi is a full-time engineer, part-time writer and some-time editor from Nigeria. His stories have appeared in F&SF, Lightspeed, Omenana, and several other places. He has edited three anthologies and co-written a play. His fiction has been nominated for several awards including the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Nommo Award which he won in 2018 and 2020. His debut collection of stories, Incomplete Solutions, is published by Luna Press. He likes scuba diving, elegant equations and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Malaysia. Find him online at wtalabi.wordpress.com and @wtalabi on twitter.

To Study the Old Masters in the Prado at the End of the World

Sarah Pauling

You kissed her while Mom’s broken-down dishwasher roared from the next room over. Lucia had said it would be romantic: You, her, and a pitcher of tinto de verano whipped up from your brother’s old wine stash and a flat Sprite from the back of the fridge. Like it was still springtime. Like you were still at the fair in Sevilla, sketching each other dancing.

What would be really romantic, you told her, would be making out on a sofa that didn’t have a dubious history re: cat vomit. A sofa you could call your own, down Avenida Manolete, where the apartments were spaced farther apart and the mall theater didn’t play ads before American movies.

“Your immigrant dream,” she teased, winding fingers through your hair.

A spaceship landed on the Mosque-Cathedral two kilometers away, dead city-center in Córdoba, but you didn’t hear it. The wash cycle was so clamorous you had to pretend it was waves on a shore just to relax into her again.

Pictured: Virgin and Christ Child, Alonso de Herrera. Oil on wood. 1508. 92 x 79 cm.

Depicts a holy conversation (sacra conversazione, in the tradition of Renaissance painting) centering the Virgin Mary—a human woman—and her child. The setting bears a striking resemblance to the pre-renovation Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, itself a unique architectural blending of Islamic and Catholic art.

The Virgin’s regal features hint a likeness to Isabella I of Castile, whose marriage to Ferdinand II of Aragon united the kingdoms of Spain. Together, spurred by faith in the Virgin’s cult, the two monarchs drove the last remaining Islamic caliphate from the Iberian Peninsula.

Above, the spaceship hung massive as a nightmare: gleaming hot glass, blocking out the sun, icicle appendages trailing down to caress the Mosque-Cathedral like a squid eating something big enough to choke on it.

Lucia pulled you through old-town back roads. She was born to this country, unlike your family of Argentines, and she knew the city—like a birthmark, like a birthright.

People moved helter-skelter, water disquieted by stones. The army hadn’t come yet, though the news and your emergency text alerts said they would, and all anyone could think to do was find each other.

Lucia wanted to find her mother. You left yours in the apartment, her soft hands trembling as she called Dad’s cell phone again and again.

Orange trees in the cathedral courtyard reflected, distorted, on the spaceship’s mirror-liquid surface. You wondered if the oranges were there before the cathedral was. Before it was a mosque—maybe even before it was a temple to an old Roman god.

Your own reflection was a distant dot of color, distorting along the spaceship’s edge until you lost yourself completely.

Pictured: Portrait of Ferdinand II of Aragon, Robert Matsys. Oil on wood. Early 1500s. 35 x 28.5 cm.

Robert Matsys, a prominent Flemish painter of the Renaissance period, worked as a portrait artist for powerful families, including Spanish royalty: first for Isabella I of Castile and then, after her death, for her husband Ferdinand II.

Ferdinand and Isabella launched military campaigns against the Emirate of Granada between 1482 and 1491. Their annexation of the city marked the end of the Reconquista. In the same year, they commissioned Christopher Columbus’ voyage to their planet’s western hemisphere, thus taming the New World alongside the old.

You pulled Lucia down a claustrophobic street in the Casco Antiguo, toward the bar you discovered your second week in Spain—when your dickhead brother still lived at home and Dad’s visa wouldn’t come through and you needed to get away from Mom for a while.

You led her into the empty building when her breath started heaving; when her gasps turned from exertion to tears.

“Her phone’s off,” she said. “Mama—”

“Shh. You remember this place?”

The bar once served orange wine outdoors, in glasses small enough to count as shots. Locals and tourists had congregated on cobbled streets. Back then, your Spanish had had the wrong accent: An Argentinian shhh where it should be yyy, and vos instead of tu. You caught eyes in the dark whenever you spoke.

One girl had worn heels higher than your hopes, but you talked to her anyway. She asked your opinion on El Greco and Bermejo; you said you liked Latin American muralism. She laughed at you, but without cruelty.

It hadn’t been long before you spoke like a Spaniard instead of a porteño. Like a citizen of the motherland instead of the place you were born.

Outside, the spaceship began to hum. You remembered the cathedral tower was once a minaret.

“I was so pretentious.” Lucia choked on a laugh, rubbing a hand over her eyes.

You pulled out her barstool and tried to smile. “Come on, cielo, you’re still pretentious. You always did prefer the old masters.”

Pictured: King Boabdil Mourns Granada, Hans Durer. Oil on canvas. Circa 1869. 275 x 377 cm.

Abu Abdallah Muhammad XII, known to contemporary Spaniards as Boabdil, was the final Nasrid ruler to control Granada before its surrender to Ferdinand II and Isabella I. In 1492, Muhammad XII yielded the besieged city and left for exile in Fez. His descendants lived in poverty, as was typical for human commoners of the time.

Various Islamic caliphates had controlled portions of the Iberian Peninsula since the eighth-century destruction of the Visigothic Kingdom—who had, in their time, conquered various Germanic tribes in an attempt to restore Roman rule.

Night fell brokenly. The army didn’t come. You huddled with your mother—and Lucia, and Lucia’s mother, thank god—on the pullout sofa. You watched the news until the power went out. The damn dishwasher finally fell silent.

Lucia ran her hands, rough with brush calluses, over your skin. Her thesis painting from Madrid Complutense hung from your bedroom wall, orange and indigo genius cornered by a staid frame. She had always been better than you—knew how to tame herself, and when.

You hated yourself for thinking: maybe art will come from this.

“They’re everywhere,” your brother told you in his last call before your phone lost signal. “In Córdoba and Granada and everywhere else. They’re building something over the cathedral.”

For a while you heard fighting in the streets: rallying cries and football chants. Then nothing. Quickly and painlessly, there was nothing.

That night, the power came back on. The news resumed service, and the smiling RTVE anchors explained what would happen next.

Pictured: The High Ask in her Earth-Bound Majesty, Lucia Esquibel. Oil on canvas. 2043. 150 x 245 cm.

The work of Lucia Esquibel defined Earth’s early Cosmopolitan period. Rising from humble beginnings, her innovations earned her the patronage of the High Ask and the tutelage of prominent Ganymede artists. Esquibel drew influence both from Earth folk traditions, such as Renaissance portraiture, and Ganymede high art.

This work, in Esquibel’s signature orange and indigo, depicts The High Ask’s coronation in the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba. According to legend, the Ask was to be crowned in the cathedral nave. However, when she saw preserved floor tiles from the Roman temple that had first occupied the site, she chose instead to hold the ceremony while standing on the protective display glass.

(“Are there any questions?” you ask the museum’s distinguished visitors. “I knew Esquibel myself. I was with her when the cathedral was rechristened. At the start of the New World.”)

The Ganymede shrine rests on top of the cathedral, rests on top of the mosque, rests on top of the Visigoth church, rests on top of the Roman temple, rests on top of dirt and rock and bone.

Standing in the Court of Oranges, you watched the cathedral’s rechristening. Everyone you know in this strange and battered country stood with you.

The new architecture was slick and silver, like you wouldn’t be able to touch it without a finger sliding off again. Like crystal; like wineglass rim-music repurposed and made physical. It hurt your eyes, eating up your field of vision and slurping up holy stone.

Shining, sick with oxygen, the High Ask commanded you to call her Grandmother. Grandmother, birther of the gods who birthed the universe. (In this way, she claimed your god.)

Your gut clenched. Your tongue pressed to the roof of your mouth. You stiffened your spine—

And Lucia pulled you into a bow.

She took your hand, but your fingers were limp with the vision of crystal: sleek, sweating, slipping, sweet.

About the Author

Sarah Pauling sends other people to distant places for a living as a study abroad advisor in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was shortlisted for the James White Award for new writers and is a graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop. Her work is published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Cast of Wonders, and Escape Pod. If approached without sudden movement, she can be found at @_paulings on Twitter, where she natters on about writing, tabletop gaming, comics, and books.

“We’ll Know It When We See It”:
The Trouble with Finding (Alien) Life

Julie Nováková

Last month, NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars to investigate current and past conditions on the Red Planet and search for life. With it, an old but still burning question inevitably arises: when—if—we find alien life somewhere, are we going to recognize it?

The question is far less trivial than it sounds. The odds are we won’t encounter a technological civilization or travel beyond our solar system anytime soon. There are tantalizing environments in our own backyard: Mars, which had liquid water long ago and still has large amounts of water ice with potential lakes underneath its polar ice caps, and possibly hydrothermal systems under ground; Venus, whose past remains mysterious to us and which may have possessed water oceans once, too; moons such as Europa or Enceladus, with vast amounts of liquid water hidden underneath their icy shells; Titan’s exotic methane-ethane seas . . .

But we can hardly expect any of them to teem with macroscopic life we could notice at first sight. The first alien life we encounter might take the form of a microbial plaque, an extremophile living in conditions that we’d never have guessed before, or tiny, long-dead fossilized remains. Are we going to spot it—even if we’re as lucky as to find it, not just an uncertain chemical sign of its presence?

To answer this question, we need to take a journey to Earth’s deep prehistory, earlier attempts to discover alien lifeforms, and finally to current space exploration.

Digging the Red Planet

Mars has always drawn our attention and imagination. From early observations of (actually nonexistent) vast crisscrossing channels that spurred the fantastical visions of H. G. Wells, to today’s images of fossilized riverbeds, a probable coastline of a long-gone ocean, and chemical evidence of water-altered rock, the Red Planet remains one of the promising targets of search for alien life. However, should it have ever arisen there and survived up to this day, it must almost certainly be surviving in a handful of nearly isolated clement environments.

Mars is likely still geologically active to some extent, and if there are places warmed by its inner heat not far beneath the surface, they may contain liquid water, energy, and chemistry needed for life. The surface itself, however, doesn’t look promising. Mars likely had a much thicker atmosphere once, but lost it to the solar wind due to the planet’s small size and cessation of its protective magnetic field. Nowadays the atmosphere is so thin that liquid water couldn’t exist on the surface (perhaps save for a few lowest-lying places, such as the bottom of the large impact site Hellas Basin), unless saturated by salts—which wouldn’t make it very appealing for life—and even then, not for very long, until it inevitably evaporated. All life as we know it—though not necessarily all life in the universe—requires liquid water, so we’ll have to dig deeper.

Unfortunately, that’s what Perseverance can’t do. Its drill is a few inches long, so it can only probe the surface layers where water can’t be expected to stably exist and which are penetrated by radiation from space—remember, we’re not protected by a magnetic field and a thick atmosphere there—and subject to great temperature swings. Radiation and erosion would also destroy any complex chemistry rather quickly, so chances of finding either direct or indirect evidence of extant life so near the surface are rather sparse. But fear not—while the rover is not perfectly equipped to search for current life (a quite demanding task), it could discover traces of extinct aliens.

Don’t imagine fossilized bones, though. Almost certainly, the life in question would have been microbial, and to grasp the undertaking of detecting it, we must return to our home planet.

The earliest Earth wouldn’t have been a very temperate place to live in, but gradually, the young planet cooled, and plate tectonics, continents, and oceans might have already been here before four billion years ago (Ga). It remained a wild place, though, with frequent impacts in the still unsettled system, and the Late Heavy Bombardment (whether a unique event or a tail of a longer bombardment period) wreaked havoc as late as 3.8 Ga. When could life have appeared, then?

It is generally agreed that at approx. 3.5 Ga, life existed and flourished on our planet. However, the earliest suspected signs of life date back to nearly 4 Ga. Some of the oldest rocks on our rapidly changing planet contain what appears to be fossilized stromatolites—layered microbial mats typical for warm shallow seawater. There’s a problem, though: physical and chemical processes independent of life can produce structures that are trickingly similar to suspected microbial fossils. We need more to be reasonably sure.

We can turn to carbon and other elements needed by life and their isotopes—forms that differ by the number of neutrons in their core, and thus their atomic weight. Carbon has two widely present, stable isotopes: lighter 12C and heavier 13C. Life is known to “prefer” the lighter isotope—our enzymes, the molecular machinery of the cell, can be picky as to the structure and weight of the compounds they’re working with. Isotopes of sulfur, iron, and nitrogen are indicative of potential presence of life as well. However, the ratios can be skewed by some abiotic mechanisms as well. Microfossils together with isotopic shifts toward what life prefers and signs of physical and chemical conditions clement for life present the best evidence to claim “Life!” but even then, we cannot be absolutely certain.

What about Mars, then? Perseverance is equipped with instruments to find traces of even long-gone life and conditions for it: Cameras to determine local mineralogy and find potential microfossils, environmental sensors, radar for exploring the subsurface geology, and spectrometers able to analyze the local chemistry in fine detail. We need all this, since remnants of life’s products and building blocks such as nucleic acids, proteins, sugars, or lipids are not untouched by the passage of time, and some perish on scales shorter than human lifetimes. In old or altered samples, we can find “complex organics,” mixtures of long and complex carbon chains and cycles that might, or might not, have been of biological origin. To assess that, we must understand the complete environment they’re found in.

Is that a good way of searching for life, you’re asking? Shouldn’t we take a more direct approach?

We had, in fact.

The Viking legacy

Perseverance is not the first mission to search for life on the Red Planet, and not the last either. The Viking landers in the 1970s had been the first, and up until now the last, primarily astrobiological space mission. On board, they contained several ingenious experiments aimed at detecting signs of alien metabolism and life-sustaining chemical reactions.

The landers scooped regolith from the surface and just underneath. In the first experiment, the samples were heated and ran through a gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer, instruments designed to separate molecules by their weight and measure them to assess their size, and potentially, complexity and composition. The results didn’t yield any substantial amounts of organic matter.

In gas exchange, inert atmosphere was pumped to the sample, and nutrients and water added. The goal was to measure whether or not any gases produced by life processing the nutrients would be released. Some gases evolved, but they did so in the negative controls with sterilized soil, consistent with abiotic chemistry.

Pyrolitic release added an atmosphere of radioactively tagged carbon dioxide and monoxide, liquid water, and light. If photosynthesis occurred, the radioactive carbon isotope 14C should have been incorporated into more complex compounds, like when plants on Earth produce sugars in photosynthesis. After a few days, the samples were heated and measured: no such complex organics were found.

Finally, labeled release (LR) introduced nutrients, also radioactively tagged with 14C and inert atmosphere. Would carbon dioxide containing 14C be released as a waste product of metabolizing the nutrients?

It was. On both landers.

In addition, both negative controls containing sterilized samples from Earth came out negative, as they should.

The LR results puzzled scientists. They indicated life, while the rest of the experiments spoke against it. Only decades later, when the Phoenix probe landed on Mars and analyzed its regolith chemistry in more detail, was the mystery likely resolved. Phoenix found perchlorates: Chemically aggressive, reactive salts that quickly destroy any complex organics when heated. They could have caused a false positive in LR, decomposing the nutrients and releasing carbon dioxide. They could also have caused a false negative in the chromatograph/spectrometer readings in the basic experiment and pyrolitic release. In short, we don’t know whether the Viking samples contained life. More likely they didn’t, but we cannot say that with anything near certainty.

The experiments would have been great, had the Martian environment been more Earthlike. Unfortunately, when they were launched, we knew too little about the surface of Mars.

Another important drawback is that, while they were ingeniously designed to detect several types of metabolisms we are familiar with, they likely wouldn’t be able to find anything more exotic. Imagine life using a mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide as a solvent. That has been considered for Mars; while hydrogen peroxide is chemically aggressive under “normal” temperatures, it wouldn’t destroy life-bearing chemicals in the Martian cold very fast, and its great advantages are that it’s hygroscopic (“attracts” water) and acts as an antifreeze. Seemingly ideal for life in a very dry and cold environment. But once you heat such life in an experiment, you destroy it.

We could also consider more exotic lifeforms, using completely different solvents or building blocks. While unlikely on the quite Earthlike Mars, the argument stands: With Vikings and similar probes, despite certain advantages of their direct approach, we almost certainly wouldn’t be able to spot it. The more generalist approach of current rovers has greater chances of discovering something we don’t know we should be looking for at all.

European Space Agency’s rover Rosalind Franklin is a part of an ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars mission, slated to launch in late September next year and land on Mars in spring 2023. Its instrument payload is similar to Perseverance, but it has one great advantage: an ingeniously designed foldable drill that can reach depths up to two meters beneath the surface, already protected from most radiation, temperature swings, erosion . . . If we were extremely lucky and it found, for instance, a hydrothermal system, it would have a good chance of finding present life on Mars, if it exists there.

What is life?

Whether we’ll keep searching for life in Martian regolith, Venusian clouds, or subsurface oceans of icy moons and dwarf planets, we’ll need to define what we’re trying to find.

At first, it might seem like a ridiculous question to ask what is life. We just know it when we see it, right? But at the second glance, it’s more complicated. Consider viruses. Are they alive? On their own, they are incapable of metabolic exchange and reproduction, which are considered to be key features of life. Without metabolism, how can anything actively live in its environment? Without reproduction, how could we have biological evolution? On the other hand, once they enter a cell that can “lend” them its molecular machinery, they can metabolize and reproduce through it. Most biologists, myself included, would argue that viruses are alive and definitely have their (very important) place on the “tree of life.”

Some lifeforms can enter an inactive state in which they can survive environmental stress—bacterial spores or tardigrades in anabiosis can withstand extreme radiation, temperatures both very high and low, desiccation, many chemical extremes . . . They don’t seem alive, yet when we place them in a clement environment with liquid water, they can “come alive.” Would we notice alien life in such inactive forms? It certainly wouldn’t come up in metabolism-centered experiments, unless we provided exactly the right conditions to “revive” it. Detecting its complex chemistry and life-resemblant shape in microscopic images may be our only chance to notice it—provided that they are similar enough to what we’d expect to find.

Complete inactivity is not even necessary to make life detection harder. Extremely slow life would be difficult enough to spot. Deep in Earth’s crust, there are communities of microbes that reproduce once in tens of thousands of years. They live on tiny droplets of water in rock and poor chemical gradients. They are deep enough and scarce enough that on another planet, where we are not at home, we most likely wouldn’t even get near them.

Of course, there is the notorious question of whether life on an entire planet could be isolated in a few balmy spots, or whether it would inevitably leave its traces on the whole world. Some biologists and chemists, such as author of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock, thought that a biosphere must necessarily transform its whole world, and argued that Mars has no life, since we can’t see any interesting chemical disequilibria in its atmosphere. On the other hand, methane has been detected on Mars independently several times, and it seems that its amount varies by season—but it can be tied to life-devoid processes.

That brings us to phosphine on Venus. If it is really present there—several studies cast doubt on that since the original study came out—it could be explained by life, but also by our lack of sufficiently deep knowledge of processes in Venusian mantle, crust, and atmosphere. On Venus, at least, it’s not hard to go and test directly whether phosphine really exists there in the claimed concentration, and what probably makes it. For planets orbiting other suns, looking at the spectra of light passing through their atmospheres will long remain the principal or only method of finding out whether they host life. That, too, is looking for signs of metabolism in a way: photosynthesizing life on Earth releases oxygen, which is in disequilibrium with other atmospheric components (many of them also produced mostly by life, such as methane).

Life can be defined by many traits, each with its own drawbacks: metabolism; the ability to undergo biological evolution; being in temporary thermodynamic disequilibrium; high complexity and organization at the same time . . . We already got to the pros and cons of looking for metabolism. Biological evolution is trickier—many non-living systems undergo changes that are often “heritable” to their “offspring” (such as crystals and faults within them), and many are sorted based on their stability (unstable configurations simply don’t persist), which resembles natural selection at a brief glance. For biological evolution to occur, we need relatively, but not perfectly, reliable information storage mediums (DNA or for some viruses RNA, in case of Earth), change, and heredity. We can well-conduct experiments with fast-reproducing microbes in Petri dishes and see how populations cultivated in different conditions begin to grow apart. But for looking for life, it doesn’t seem most fortunate—it rests upon too many assumptions, such as the speed of the process. We could look for the building blocks that support it—and with them, we move toward complexity and organization, to finding complex molecules and patterns. Finally, thermodynamics is favored, especially by physicists, as a way to understand life’s origin, but probably wouldn’t be easily utilized in search for life.

There is no single absolute definition of life, and no single surefire way of looking for it. We cannot be certain that if we go somewhere, we’ll recognize it. In places where we can expect life relatively similar to Earth’s, such as Mars, the chances are good enough, though things like spores, “slow life,” or slightly altered life’s chemistry can complicate it. But is carbon-based life in watery environments the only way? If we stumbled upon extremely slow and fragile silicon-based life in pressurized lakes of liquid nitrogen, would we be able to spot it at all?

While life may seem like something “we’ll tell if we see it,” it’s not as trivial as that. And, in the far future, we might be asking ourselves a different but equally pressing question: Would we recognize intelligence and sentience if we saw it? There, we cannot rely on chemistry and planetary science, and perhaps that’s why—apart from the want of “finding ourselves out there”—it is a rich domain of science fiction, with books such as Peter Watts’ Blindsight or David Brin’s Existence (and many others) offering potential answers to this question.

Finding life is not so easy, and nor is learning more about it. But we are fortunate to live in a time when we are well and truly embarking on this exciting journey of discovery.

For more about looking for life as we don’t know it, the deep biosphere, paths toward complexity, or exploring the subsurface of Mars and Europa, you can watch online seminars of the European Astrobiology Institute. (www.youtube.com/channel/UCZjpLapCNVXNs1DNqJMhPJQ)

About the Author

Julie Novakova is a Czech author and translator of science fiction, fantasy and detective stories. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and other magazines and anthologies, and her translations of other authors’ work appeared in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and F&SF. Her work in Czech includes seven novels, one anthology (Terra Nullius), and over thirty short stories and novelettes. Some of her works have been also translated into Chinese, Romanian, Estonian, German and Filipino. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013, the Aeronautilus award for the best Czech short story of 2014 and 2015, and for the best novel of 2015. Julie is an evolutionary biologist by study and also takes a keen interest in planetary science.

Falling in Love and the Collective Consciousness:
An Interview with Elly Bangs

Arley Sorg

Elly Bangs was born in Seattle and lived there nearly her whole life. She earned a BA in creative writing from The Evergreen State College, roughly sixty miles away. She’s primarily worked in small nonprofit organizations, “usually in a role that combines doing all their paperwork with building their websites and databases. Right now I’m half the IT department at a local museum.”

Bangs has been writing stories since childhood. Her first publication, “This Must Be the Place,” came out in Strange Horizons in 2009. She became involved in the genre community via the monthly Two Hour Transport open mic reading series, where she learned about Clarion West, and finally attended in 2017. Afterward, she went to her first convention, ConFusion, with her Clarion West classmates.

In 2018 Bangs’ fiction gained traction, with “The Cool Kids” in Daily Science Fiction and “Dandelion” in Clarkesworld, among a number of other publications. “Dandelion” landed in the top six for the year in Clarkesworld’s reader poll and popped up in a host of respected short fiction review venues, effectively putting Bangs on the map. Her work continued to appear in venues such as Escape Pod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside Quarterly, and more. Recently, her story “Deep Music” was published in the January 2021 Clarkesworld.

Elly once rode her bicycle alone from Seattle to the Panama Canal. She enjoys “bicycling, tinkering with circuitry, and baking pies.” She lives in Seattle with her partner and two cats: brother and sister, Alpha and Omega (respectively). “Alpha is intense and regularly rides on my shoulder while purring like a motorcycle; Omega is far more laid back, but she’s also the one in charge.”

Unity is her debut novel, an “apocalyptic cyberpunk” book centering on collective consciousness, due from Tachyon Publications in April 2021.

What were some of the most important genre works for you when you were younger, what did you get from them, and has your view of those books changed over time?

What stands out now is how much Philip K. Dick I read as a kid. It would be hard to name all the ways his novels, stories, and ideas have influenced mine, and I pay some homage to that in Unity. It’s not an uncomplicated love, given the amount of misogyny baked into nearly his entire body of work—which somewhat edited itself out of my memories as I grew up, and is a bit jarring to rediscover every time I reread his stuff—but his meditations on empathy and humanity, and the search for transcendent meaning in a troubled universe, will live in my head forever.

You attended writers’ workshop Clarion West in 2017. What were the most important things you got out of it and what was the most challenging aspect of the program for you?

Realizing that writing didn’t need to be a solitary thing—that it really couldn’t be—changed my life. There are a lot of different ways to find that kind of community, with or without any kind of workshop or convention or structured thing, but Clarion West was that for me. My classmates are still some of my closest friends. Their wisdom and perspectives are invaluable. Just having people around to encourage each other and share in the joy of success and the bite of rejection makes writing a whole different kind of thing.

The hardest part was going full-steam on short stories instead of novels, and to some extent learning how to write short stories at all. About half the short stories I wrote at CW were just radically abridged novels, it turned out.

Even before attending Clarion West, you had a story in Strange Horizons in 2009, and another a few years later in a Bikes in Space anthology. But your short fiction career really took off in 2018. Did Clarion West have a significant impact on your career?

Clarion West gave me a really good push, but around that time I also reconfigured my whole life to make a writing career possible. I moved into a small windowless room in the basement of a five-person house, where the math worked out for me to survive on a half-time job and put several hours a day into creative endeavors. I’ve been living on canned soup and writing as hard as I possibly can ever since, knowing that any day my luck could change and I could lose the time and energy I’ve been able to spend on this. So, yes—plenty of determination and a bit of sacrifice, but also plenty of luck, and the privilege of working in a field that pays well enough to do this.

What are a few of the most important things you’ve learned about writing or the industry through the process of getting your short fiction and your novel published?

When I started sending stories out in a big way, in late 2017, it was easy to feel like I was never going to get accepted, and it was pretty hard to know if I was making any progress. Publishing takes a lot of rejection, and a lot of persistence and experimentation, and in my case it took writing forty or fifty trunk stories. I knew all that going in, rationally, but I had to learn in the guts as well. That was the most important lesson. Then, once I had a handful of publications, I started to get a much better feel for what kinds of ideas most connect with people, and how to put my heart into things—and it was easier to trust the work would eventually pay off.

The most important thing I’ve learned about novel publishing is that it has several steps, of which writing the book is only one, and each step can take a year or two. It’s definitely worth it, but it’s also tough. Starting a new novel and having to trust the world to still be here in five years when it hopefully reaches readers is a tall order, some days.

To date you have over a dozen short stories out. Are there themes that you tend to be drawn toward in your short fiction?

Sooner or later I always come back to weird love stories. Water-monster-wranglers heartbroken over their exes; postapocalyptic cage fighters who fall in love with each other; million-year-old blob creatures who fall in love with toxic wastewater ponds at fracking sites. Love is a very weird thing, and its weirdness is something I could never remotely finish exploring.

That, and resisting fascism—but I’m really hoping I live to see that theme become less timely.

Of your short fiction out to date, which are the stories that you are most proud of, or that are most important to you, and why?

“Dandelion” (Clarkesworld, September 2018) felt like my breakout story, and I don’t know if I’ve really topped it yet. It’s the hardest science fiction I’ve ever written, and it gave voice to a lot of ideas and feelings I’d carried around for a very long time—and I think it pretty well achieved the kind of balance between hope and sorrow that I’m always aiming for.

“A Handful of Sky” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, June 2019) is also up there for me, because it taught me how to revise. Scott is a brilliant editor, and we worked on it for roughly a year. The draft that ended up being published was probably the seventh or eighth at least—but every time I took it apart and put it back together, it came back twice as strong. I’ve been a lot less squeamish with my revisions since then.

Unity opens with these very damaged characters in a fairly bleak setting. What do you enjoy most about writing characters such as these, and why do readers love following damaged characters?

Personally, I feel like a damaged character in a bleak setting pretty much every day. I figure most people do at least some of the time. So, I find a kind of healing magic in stories about profoundly damaged people who are nonetheless loved deeply by people around them, who survive their bleak settings, and who grow and adapt through that—in ways that make them into people who aren’t exactly the people they would have chosen to be from the outset, but who are nonetheless extremely worth being. Stories like that have gotten me through a lot.

The characters in Unity are cut in quick, strong strokes: Within a few lines the reader gets a good sense of who an individual is. What is the key to strong characterization?

If I’ve accomplished that, it’s all a matter of ample revision. At some point I figured out it takes me longer to properly get to know a character than it does to write one draft of a novel. Once I really know them, though—like they’re family, and I can hear their voices in my head—they find ways to come through vividly in very small details. That’s when everything becomes fun, too.

There’s a lot of worldbuilding both on the page and behind the scenes, or between the lines, in this book. Are any of the major world elements drawing on or inspired by specific things?

There’s a lot I could name. Certainly a lot of contemporary climate anxiety comes through in all the underwater cities and desolate wastelands. Plenty of timely political dread went into imagining a future United States that collapsed under the weight of its imperial adventures, then splintered into a bunch of differently-dysfunctional nations (from the Free Republic of South Cascadia to the Holy Western Confederacy), each one trying to embody a different memory of what they think the USA had been.

The use of ubiquitous fusion power mainly to charge handheld electromagnetic weapons is meant as a reply to this idea I catch floating around sometimes—that limitless free energy, or any technological advance for that matter, would bring about world peace. We already have everything we need to address human problems like war, and until we do, it’s going to bend any technological solution we throw at it to its own whims.

There’s this concept at play in Unity of collective consciousness, but there’s also this aspect of fragmentation, and separation, even isolation; and the desire to reconnect. It’s very conceptual and even allegorical, but is it also personal metaphor? Or is it more about examining the human condition through a science fictional lens?

Both, I hope. On the personal side—I mean, I’m from Seattle, so it probably goes without saying that I’ve experienced a great deal of absolutely crushing, soul-deadening loneliness. I’m doing better now, but my twenties, when I laid down the bones of this story, were really hard years for connecting with people and feeling like part of the human race. When you have an experience like that—and when, at long last, you do manage to form good and strong bonds with other human beings—it turns up the contrast on everything and makes you realize what an oddity and a miracle it is that we’re able to communicate with each other at all. You realize language is telepathy-lite. If I’ve told this story properly, the metaphor is both personal and human-conditional, and the science fiction is a lens for examining one through the other and vice versa.

There are a number of interesting world details, such as automated distribution of antidepressants to manage widespread depression and agoraphobia. Are some of these elements cautionary, or perhaps even commentary? Or are they simply creative embellishments, without message or intended meaning?

For me, that particular detail was exactly half cautionary and half aspirational. Lots of people need pharmacological help to balance their neurochemistries, and would even in the most utopian setting. I want there to be a drug like the one Alexei takes to treat his suicidal ideation at the start of the novel, I want it to be that accessible, and I think these are reasonable things to expect to happen by the year Unity is set.

At the same time, I think American society is fairly hostile to our brains (chemically, sensorily, emotionally, socially, what-have-you), and getting more so—and the worse it gets, the more we’ll all need to modify our neurochemistries to keep up. If humans end up living permanently under water (or under ground, in microgravity, in ecologically devastated wastelands, etc.), I imagine the broad need for highly advanced antidepressants could become almost a kind of synthetic evolution. Which, in some ways, might actually be kind of cool. But I think the extremely brutal settings in Unity also speak to the need to protect and cultivate environments and societies that our minds can mostly withstand.

In your Civilian Reader interview, you talked about collective consciousness, saying that it hadn’t been explored to your satisfaction. Many describe science fiction as an ongoing conversation. Do you see a relationship or conversation between Unity and specific titles or stories?

I think of Unity as being in conversation with the whole trope of collective consciousness, more than with any one thing. That said, the Borg have to be the most widely recognizable example, they were my first introduction to the concept, and I remember how disappointed I was as a kid in the nineties when Trek mostly boiled them down to zombie horror; the collective seems a lot less like a single mind than an authoritarian regime made up of caged individuals.

So many of the collective consciousnesses in SF are like that, but I think we’re missing out on some far more interesting thoughts when we use “hive mind” as a shortcut to “scary and totally alien.” I would argue that a beehive is not fifty thousand lowly conformists, but a gestalt organism with a combined memory and algorithmic intelligence. I think human societies already have inextricable elements of collective consciousness too. We’re not just social creatures; we’re each basically incomprehensible without our connections to each other and our shared ideas. I see pop culture as our collective dream, and the Borg as a nightmare about communism (or corporate office jobs, or assembly-line work).

What is important or special about this book for you, what do you really want readers to know about it beyond the blurbs and reviews?

We are all living through an extremely heavy piece of history. I, for one, have survived this much of it because I had excellent stories and characters to lend me some strength, to remind me I’m not alone, and to tell me that a better and more just world is possible. I see it as my job as a writer to pay that forward, and that’s exactly what Unity has been about for me since the start. If it ends up being that for even one person, it will have been worth the truly embarrassing number of years it took me to write.

What else are you working on, what else do you have coming up that new fans can look forward to?

I spent most of 2020 working on novels—I’m now very foolishly attempting to write all three books of a fantasy trilogy more or less at once—but I’m making time this year to write stories again. I don’t have anything to announce yet, but I really hope to see readers among the ever-excellent pages of Clarkesworld and other short fiction publications in the near future.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, is senior editor at Locus magazine, and associate editor at Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines.

Important Strangers:
A Conversation with Becky Chambers

Arley Sorg

Becky Chambers grew up outside Los Angeles “in a family heavily involved in space science”—her father worked in aerospace engineering, her mother worked as an astrobiology educator. Her mother loved genre fiction, so Chambers was reading and watching SFF shows before she’d started school. Despite the prevalence of the sciences in her family, she moved to the SF Bay Area to study theater at the University of San Francisco.

After years working in theater, she became a freelance writer. She crowdfunded debut novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet via Kickstarter in 2012, and in 2015 the book was republished by Hodder & Stoughton and Harper Voyager. The genre community immediately took notice: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet received critical acclaim for its fresh take on space opera, worldbuilding, characters, and positive leanings; moreover, it was a Kitschies, Arthur C. Clarke, and British Fantasy Award finalist. Beyond the genre community, the first Wayfarers book landed on the Women’s Prize long list. Chambers continued the Wayfarers books with A Closed and Common Orbit in 2016 and Record of a Spaceborn Few in 2018. Both books garnered nods and nominations, and collectively all three books won the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Series.

In 2019, her publishers released To Be Taught, if Fortunate, a harder SF standalone novella, unrelated to the Wayfarers universe. True to form, the novella was short listed for Locus, BSFA, and Hugo awards. The final installment in the Wayfarers books, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, is due in April 2021. A new solarpunk series with Tordotcom Publishing is also due to begin in July, starting with A Psalm for the Wild-Built.

Becky Chambers lives in California with her wife. During the pandemic, she’s spent much of her time “on my couch like everybody else, and have spent the winter screaming toward a deadline (I made it), playing Hades as if it were my second job, and going absolutely ham with a years-long TTRPG campaign.”

You originally crowdfunded your debut novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, on Kickstarter back in 2012. With book four coming out, as well as a few other projects, do you feel like your writing has changed in important ways since that first novel?

I’m always trying to grow and change in my writing. I never want to find myself treading water. The joy for me is in choosing something specific to tinker with or improve upon. It’s hard for me to critique my own work, but I would say that overall, I’ve gotten more precise with my words, and less afraid of failed experiments. I also don’t wander into the weeds as much as I did at the start. At first, the question was just “can I write a book?” Turns out, I can! Now, the never-ending task is, “do that again, but better.” I wouldn’t want it any other way.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet came out with Harper Voyager and Hodder & Stoughton in 2015 and landed a number of awards nominations. Your work has continued to receive nominations and nods every year since then. Does the recognition drive you? Or does it have a different kind of impact on your process?

This might sound ungrateful, but I can’t say it affects my day-to-day process that much. I’m incredibly humbled by the recognition my work has received, and in the moments when I get that news, it means a great deal. But in terms of my every day, I am my own worst critic at all times. It’s helpful when I remember that I have proof that I’m not a hack sitting on my mantlepiece, but nine times out of ten, I’m too busy cussing at whatever project I’m working on.

Are there important ways in which the series changed from your original vision of the work? Did The Galaxy, and the Ground Within change much from conception to final copy?

The biggest change in the series has been me. I was twenty years old when I first started building the Wayfarers universe; I’ll be thirty-six this year. I think differently, I write differently. My creative interests have evolved. When I wrote The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (finished when I was twenty-eight, for those keeping score), I was rooted in this idea of wanting to make a classic space opera setting in which I could flip the script on whose stories mattered.

Nowadays, I’m hungry to push the foundational boundaries harder, and to keep challenging my own assumptions about what’s essential to the genre. There are things I would have done differently with the Wayfarers universe if I’d created it today, and that was one of the big feelings I anchored myself to while writing The Galaxy, and the Ground Within. I felt like I was having the last word in a conversation with my twenty-something self. The Long Way was me then; Galaxy is me now.

As for the conception of the book itself, I don’t outline, so I haven’t had a manuscript yet that hasn’t changed a ton from beginning to end. I think this one may have shifted the most out of all four of them, though. I was going through my original brainstorming notes for it the other day, and the end product is completely unrecognizable next to them. I really had to feel this one out as I went along.

I feel like the heart of The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is in thrusting individuals together who are very different and forcing them to negotiate those differences. What are the advantages of telling this story in space, with a cast of aliens trapped on an isolated world, as opposed to a set of humans on an island at sea, or at an oasis in the desert?

With Wayfarers, I never want the reader to forget that these small stories are happening against the backdrop of a very big universe. I try to make that juxtaposition feel as ever-present as I can. I want to tap into that quintessential Carl Sagan concept of people being insignificant and wonderful simultaneously. Telling an intimate story like this with wormholes and galactic parliaments just over your shoulder makes that job all the easier.

This is a less fancy answer, but I also just really, really love writing aliens. There’s nothing I have more fun with than mixing up a bunch of cultural and biological differences, and then blending them all together.

Like other books in the series, this is a character-focused book. What are the keys to drawing compelling characters?

For me, it’s all about the little details. Everyday habits tell you everything you need to know about a character. What do they eat for breakfast? What kinds of entertainment do they like? Do they swear, and if so, under what circumstances? Once you’ve got a general feel for what their deal is, then you can start exploring how they get along with everybody else. That’s when you properly understand who they are. I also think it’s important to let characters be messy. I do not necessarily like or agree with everything every POV character does on the page. I think it’d be boring if I did.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing The Galaxy, and the Ground Within?

Doing so in 2020. At first, I didn’t think lockdown would be difficult in a practical sense, because I already work at home and have been doing so for years. I’m well-equipped to stay inside at my desk all day. But it quickly hit me just how much of my work comes from what I draw from other people. I’m mostly an introvert, but I do have a social side, and so much of my fuel for this series in particular has come from being a sponge around others—listening to ambient conversations, people-watching, traveling, having mundane adventures with friends. The lack of that specific type of input, combined with the prolonged panic attack we are all still going through, made this one very hard to write.

What is the heart of this book for you, what is important about it to you, beyond the notes on the back cover?

Aside from the conversation with my younger self that I mentioned before, the crux of this book is the idea that someone you only knew for a few days can still be a person you have a profound connection to. I’ve spent a lot of time in the other books on unraveling many, many forms of families and friendships. Meaningful exchanges between strangers is the concept I wanted to stick with here—the people you barely know but will never forget.

Your new Monk & Robot series is coming up, beginning with A Psalm for the Wild-Built. What was the inspiration for this book, and how did the story develop?

I’ve had an itch for years to do something solarpunk, and Monk & Robot is me scratching it. I can’t say that there was one big “aha” moment with this one. It’s this jumbled mix of things I like (monks and robots, for a start) and little ideas that have been bugging me for a while. The theme I wanted to play with most is the relationship between technology and nature. These concepts are often presented as diametrically opposed, or mutually exclusive. I wanted to paint a little portrait of a world in which they coexist harmoniously, and I figured the best way to do that was to make two characters go for a walk through it.

Will fans who’ve loved your other works find the narrative and themes familiar? Or are there important differences between the new series and the work you’ve done before?

The setting is very different than others I’ve worked in; there are no spaceships in this one, for a start. It’s also worth mentioning that Monk & Robot falls squarely under the science fantasy umbrella. It’s the polar opposite of what I did in To Be Taught, if Fortunate, where building off of real science was the whole point. In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, there’s no magic or anything, but robots think, gods are real, and people live on a made-up moon called Panga, where they have always lived. My entire approach to how this world works can be summed up as “because I said so.” But as far as the themes and the flavors go, I think people who know my other work will find themselves in familiar territory.

There’s this passage from the beginning of the book, which starts, “All we have ever known is a life of human design . . . ” Is this a metaphor about resisting the control of mainstream culture and seeking individuality and freedom? Or is it just a cool paragraph without any intended meaning?

I love your take on it, but I was coming at it more from a perspective of the constructed world versus the natural world. I was born and raised in the unending suburbs of Los Angeles County, and though I’m well-versed in biology, it took me a long time to flip my brain around and truly grasp the understanding that our default world does not have roads or plumbing or buildings. Robots are, by definition, built to facilitate human needs. They work in factories, they follow schedules based on a clock, they build stuff that we invented. So, I decided to bust them out of that environment. The robots on Panga basically woke up and said, “We want to understand what the world looks like when there isn’t any trace of you in it.”

Narratives about robot or AI consciousness inevitably evoke thoughts of other stories that take on similar topics. Is this book (or the series as a whole) in conversation with or in response to any other works?

I can’t say that I had any specific works in mind as I wrote this one. I’ve always had an affinity for robots and AI, but I am not sure where that root comes from. I’m just fascinated by the idea of consciousness arising from technology, plain and simple. I can tell you that I didn’t want the robot in this book to go through the paces of having to learn what emotions are, or to be overly childlike. I have loved a lot of stories in which “robot learns feelings” is a central concept, but personally, I dislike the subtext there that emotion taints logic, or that logic restricts emotion. We can handle both, so why can’t a different kind of mind? See, now I’m on a tangent. This is what always happens when I start talking about robots. I just like them so much.

When Dex meets Mosscap, there’s this conversation that is light and humorous, but which also performs worldbuilding and character development duties. What is the key to pulling off this moment?

Very glad to hear that it works! Personally, I find it useful to read dialogue-heavy scenes aloud several times and tweak them word by word. If something feels awkward to say, or if an expository line sounds clunky, I poke at it until it comes across more naturally. Ultimately, I want my characters to talk the way people talk, and actually hearing what I’m writing down is my favorite tool for figuring out if I’m on the right track.

The other key part of writing scenes like this is asking myself what work the scene is performing for the story as a whole. Do we need to know everything that’s in here? Do new concepts come across clearly to someone who isn’t living in my head, or do I need to shore them up more? It’s just a matter of constantly taking the temperature of a scene as you go.

What are your favorite things about the main characters in A Psalm for the Wild-Built, and do you feel closer to any of them; that is, is there a character you relate to more than others?

Dex and Mosscap are both pieces of myself that I’ve run through multiple layers of filtering. I relate more to Dex, but I would like to be more like Mosscap on most days. Mosscap is better company, I think. In terms of the traits I gave them that make them their own people, I’m fond of Dex’s slightly weary attitude of “well, I guess this is happening now,” and I love writing Mosscap in an existential spin.

What is the heart of this book for you, what do you really want readers to know about it?

The heart of this book is comfort. I intended it as an escape, and hopefully that’s what it will provide. There is nothing in it that can hurt yo u. The POV character in this book makes tea as part of their profession, and that is exactly the vibe I wanted the story to have: something gentle and momentary and soothing that might make the rest of the day a touch easier to tackle.

What else do you have coming up that fans can look forward to?

I just handed in the sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built a few days ago. I don’t have a release date for it yet, but that’s on its way. I’m taking a few months now to lie fallow and focus on book launch stuff and chip away at my enormous to-be-read list, and then I’ll be diving into a brand-new novel set in a brand-new place.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, is senior editor at Locus magazine, and associate editor at Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines.

Editor’s Desk:
The Best from 2020

Neil Clarke

Over the last two months, Clarkesworld readers have been helping to determine the best story and cover art that we published in 2020. While there’s almost always someone (or a group of someones) who tries to sway the process, the voting went rather smoothly this year. Participation was up slightly over 2019 with the majority of the final voting happening in the opening and closing days. We’d like to thank everyone who participated this year and hope you’ll continue your involvement next year.

Best Cover of 2020

The race for this year’s best cover art was interesting. Our winner maintained a clear lead from the start, but the remaining places were very close and frequently shifting. In the end, our readers selected:

3rd Place: “Alien Scout” by Arjun Amky (November)

2nd Place: “Home Planet” by Beeple (April)

And this year’s winner is:

“Ancient Stones” by Francesca Resta (October)

Best Story of 2020

As the final round of voting was taking place, the rankings were constantly shifting right down to the closing hours. At the bell, our winner squeaked into the top spot. A total of twelve points separated the top five. While each had a strong showing, this is the first year that the story with the most first place votes did not place in the top three. (It finished fourth, missing first place by six points.) It was the second and third place votes that ultimately made the day and to reinforce that every vote matters, the participation of one more voter could have easily changed everything.

3rd Place: “To Sail the Black” by A.C. Wise (Novelette, November)

2nd Place: “The Translator, at Low Tide” by Vajra Chandrasekera (Short Story, May)

And this year’s winner is:

“AirBody” by Sameem Siddiqui (Short Story, April)

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners and finalists! The close races and strong support shown for each story and cover are something that this community can be proud of and we look forward to providing readers with much more to be excited about in the year ahead.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a eight-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, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His most recent anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5, was published in October by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art:
Sunrise

Alex Ries

About the Artist

A nature enthusiast and science-fiction fan, Alex Ries is an Australian based concept artist and illustrator with over a decades’ experience across the film, videogame and print industries.