Sarcophagus

Ray Nayler

The causes of the disaster are these:

First: The estimations of this planet’s temperature were incorrect. The beacon should never have been placed. This planet is no more capable of supporting human life than our own polar wastelands.

Second: My companions are all dead. I do not know what happened for sure: Encoding errors in their uploads, possibly, or a malfunction that occurred during transmission, or a receiving fault here in the beacon. Whatever the cause, the result is the same: They never woke up. The beacon post-op will say more, but a preliminary diagnostic showed entire sections of their uploads missing, scrambled, or out of sequence. The material of their blanks was recycled back into the matter arranger.

Third: Many of the depots are lost, damaged, or unreachable. I found the first one thirteen kilometers from its original placement, three hundred meters down a crevasse. My scans indicated it was upside down, encased in ice. It had been trapped there for hundreds of years, already. It had become a part of the frozen mass of the glacier. There was no question of rappelling alone down into the crevasse and trying to free it: it was lost.

The next depot is thirty kilometers from here over the glacial surface. At an average daytime temperature of negative forty degrees Celsius, and an average nighttime temperature twenty degrees below that, I do not think I will survive the journey. But I have no choice except to attempt it.

This series of logs, this record of failure, should be accessed by my backup previous to its escape-transmission to the relay station and Earth. Do not put me in a new blank here. Do not kill me here again.

As a sidenote: When I next wake up, after the death of this stranded blank, I hope it is in a warm place, where a steaming bowl of noodles can be found nearby, and a cup of good coffee. Six centuries after my departure from Earth, I hope there are still such things as noodles and coffee.

A friend at the Institute once said, “If you think things are bad now, just wait: they will get worse.”

Gallows humor, of course. Things often get better. Seasons change, weather improves, time blunts the devastations of loss.

But not on this planet.

There is no liquid water on the surface here. But on the glacier, I can hear the flow of meltwater, down in the blue depths of the crevasses. And the glaciers are moving, shifting, the way our own glaciers move on Earth. What could be causing it?

What I saw yesterday might provide an answer.

I was resting on a nunatak, a mountain peak drowned in ice, when the glacier began to sing. The ice moaned in a bass that shuddered through the marrow of my bones. Half a kilometer away, a white plume appeared, surging up from the surface. Narrow at first, it thickened into a column. I could feel the shifting of the glacier’s mass around me, even through the stone. The column rose. A hundred meters. Two hundred. Three hundred. The lemon sky filled with a million stars of silver, winding down slow as snow. The suit analyzed them as they rained down on me. Water vapor, freezing and falling to the surface.

The glaciers’ motion is not from the melting of their ice from above: it is from below. Imagine an ice cube on a hot stove, sliding across its own substance as it dissolves. The glaciers are moving across thermal vents kilometers beneath the surface. The vents hollow out chimneys, galleries, unstable caves in the glacial interior. Once they breach the final crust of ice, a plume is the result—a geyser tunneled through ice instead of stone.

The plume rose into the sky for an hour. Then there was a rumble beneath the surface, a vibration fierce as any earthquake. The plume was cut off. The column began to dissipate—a chromatic cloud, a swarm of snow-stars. Though nothing changed on the glacier’s surface, I knew that underneath, the fan of passageways that had formed this temporary chimney had collapsed. An entire system of ice caverns—chambers the size of cathedrals, passages bored through blue-black strata of ice that may never have seen a sun, had ceased to exist. But the process would begin again. The heat from below would now carve new patterns through the glacial mass as the venting steam sought escape.

How many vents, out there? The nunatak now seemed not like a mountain peak, but a lifeboat. When I left it, I would swim out into a sea of holes. At any moment, a vent could open beneath me. Or the whole surface of the ice tear apart like paper. There would be no warning that would not come too late. And no companion roped to me to pull me back from the chasm.

The vent-cloud was a chromium trace in yellow air. Thirty kilometers to the nearest depot. If it was reachable. Across a surface rotten with crevasses. I was already dead.

That was the moment when I found life.

I was on one knee, watching that wisp of false stars die in the air. When I looked down, I saw them.

The wind must have blown them there, collected them over who knows how many rotations of this frozen world around its sun. They had drifted into the lee of a stone, where the windblown snow was carved into a bowl. Tiny, brittle, like the dry husks of dead autumn leaves in the spring.

I would have been happy to find just a leaf. But these were not leaves—they were the chitinous exoskeletons of tiny animals. I scanned and photographed them, trying to keep my hands steady. Then I reached into that brittle pile, gathering a glove full. Coils and spirals, the cups of empty joints along the insectile carapaces, a litter of separated limbs like the smallest twigs. I could hold two dozen of them in my palm, no two alike. Little grains of existence.

Was I the first to discover life beyond Earth? Perhaps. I couldn’t know: the other explorers were strewn across space-time, scattered across a score of beacon planets. Perhaps they, too, at this moment or fifty years ago or a hundred years from now, were holding life in their hands, or had held it, or would hold it.

Life. Or its trace, at least. The proof of it.

And no one to share that moment with.

I stood up.

And now for the bad news. I had been loitering on that glacial island, which perhaps one day will be marked as the first place in the universe humankind encountered evidence of life off our world, for a reason: my suit.

The causes of the disaster are these . . .

The suit was built to be the most efficient collector of energy possible. It was powered by a passive system of batteries recharged by light, motion, wind across its surface, friction—anything that could transfer energy into it. When charged, it would keep me warm, collect water from the atmosphere and store it for me, collect organic compounds and process them into some minimal supply of sustenance beyond what I could carry. All of those wonderful things. Its technology was centuries old, but still the best we had.

But its batteries weren’t charging fast enough. They were not able to stand up against the constant chill of this planet. They were failing faster than they could be charged.

I had begun to notice the cold more and more over the past few days, seeping into the suit. So, I had stopped on that oasis of stone to lay in the sun. Splayed out on the rock to get maximum exposure, I was also making rock angels, rubbing the surface of the suit against the stone to further power the batteries.

If there had been anyone to see me, it would have been quite a sight: Earth’s first explorer, lying on its back waggling its limbs on a rock. One more dying thing, about to leave its exoskeleton behind as a trace of its existence.

Fifty-one percent battery. It was forty-five percent when I started this a few hours ago. Okay, that was progress. And maybe I felt a little warmer. Maybe.

But yesterday the suit had started out at eighty-four percent, and by nightfall, even though I had been walking all day, and almost always in the sun, it had been eighty percent. In the morning it had been fifty-seven percent.

Thirty kilometers to the depot. If it was there. Or twenty kilometers back to the beacon, where there were other spare suits—spare because my companions were dead. And I would be dead soon enough. The other suits would have the same battery problem.

To the depot, then. In the depot there would be heat packs, ample food supplies, electrolytes, tools, and a shelter set: Unpowered, body-heat retaining sleep sacks, external wear. Low-tech lifesavers. Enough to keep me going for a while.

I stepped off my island.

I am being hunted. I am putting this record down in fragments, where I can. Important to get it on the record—but I also have to keep moving. One foot in front of the other is all that is left to me.

As I stepped off that little island of stone, I felt the glacier shift again. Another spout appeared, a kilometer away. It was larger than the first: a volcano of steam, thundering up into the atmosphere. Vibrations passed through my boots: the treachery of the glacier, rearranging itself under my feet. It was hard not to think of mystical things: Trolls, ice giants waking from their sleep. The glacier alive, malevolent, irritated by my presence on its skin.

For the first few kilometers or so, though, it was good going. The surface, covered with just a slight layer of snow, was relatively even, the sastrugi no more than calf-high, the ice beneath solid. At one point I was almost running. The pace helped keep me warm.

It wasn’t until midday that I hit the maze.

There must have been a massive steam collapse, years ago, under this part of the glacier. Or perhaps the pressure from its motion was pushing up against an obstacle, some ice-drowned reef of stone. The surface of the glacier had deformed and cracked, breaking up into blocks and slabs. Many of the slabs were ten or more meters high. Canted towers of ice, sapphire in their cores, stretching as far as I could see with the binoculars. A city of ice. No way around.

That was when I saw it. It was just for a moment. A second, perhaps? Two?

Enough time to send a lacework trident of terror through me, up every vein and artery to the base of my brain, where the old, old fears live. Tooth and claw in the dark. Death by drowning.

It must have been five kilometers away. It was visible so briefly; I could almost convince myself I had hallucinated it. How to describe it? The surface of it was pale. Smooth, fish belly pearl. It must have been three meters tall, at least—and nearly that wide. What Earth metaphor could encompass it? It was nothing like a bear, an ape, a wolf. If it had a face, I did not see it—but then, its outline, that awful plasticine, oily white against the white behind it, did not allow me to read its shape well.

Did it even have a head? It had four limbs and was standing on two of them. Or crouched over two of them. But were they feet? Legs? Its vague body undulated with malevolent power, writhing beneath its sickening skin.

And in the moment I fixed the binoculars on it, I knew it had seen me. It turned the upper part of itself in my direction. It seemed to fold deeper into itself, the way an animal will tense, growing smaller like a spring tightening, shrinking into its own core. It shuddered. Squirmed in its sallow sheath of skin.

Then it was gone, sliding down into the maze that I, too, would have to enter.

Perhaps, I thought, as I clambered down into the maze, it had not seen me after all. Five kilometers is a long way. I had been looking through a high-powered machine to make it out. Perhaps it had just looked in my direction and not seen me.

But the ancient brain and body, sharpened on the savannah, knew better. I knew it in my flesh, with primal certainty: I had been seen.

The maze was like a city of broken ice cathedrals, of shattered crystal spires fallen into roads that twisted back upon themselves and tangled in cul-de-sacs. The ice, refracting light countless times from one crystal to another, trapped everything red in the spectrum in another maze—the deeper maze of microscopic structure. Only blue escaped.

But so many blues! Sapphires dusted by fresh-fallen snow, cerulean tiger stripes etched against white, ancient inks of slabs forced up from the deep-time abyss of the glacial mass. Wind darted into the frozen city of ice every few moments. The spires sang and hissed. Wonder was mixed in me with fear—a strange alchemy.

Such a beautiful world—if only I had the time to explore it, rather than just dying on it.

The suit compass pointed my way to the depot, but I had to turn away from it again and again. Five kilometers in the maze would be ten, fifteen. I glance at the suit battery. Forty-eight percent. Forty-seven percent. And I would be in the shade, much of the time.

And it was in there with me.

“Nothing to be done,” I said out loud. “Concentrate on what you can control.”

One foot in front of the other. That’s what I could control. That’s all I could control, now.

I skirted a section where the ice had fallen away, a crevasse deeper than I could see, on an ice and snow bridge no wider than my boots. From an unimaginable depth came the thunder of water.

It was dark when I emerged from the maze. I unfolded the shovel from my pack and dug a hole. I could not travel at night across this landscape of crevasses. Monster or no monster, I would have to sleep.

Under the snow, it was warmer. I wriggled into my cocoon, pulled the pack in after me like a beetle blocking the entrance to its tunnel with a tiny stone. As if that would help.

Thirty-six percent. How long did I have? And did that number even matter, with that thing out there?

Fear or no fear, I was tired enough to sleep. And too tired to dream.

The three of us assigned to this planet knew it would be cold where we were going. The data indicated a planet not much warmer, at its best, than an Icelandic summer. A planet with long, brutal winters even near the equator. So, we passed around books about polar exploration. It was somewhere between serious research and an inside joke.

We traded stories over amber glasses of tea. The darkest moments from the books stood out most: Cherry-Gerrard’s teeth shattering from the cold of the Antarctic winter. Shackleton abandoning the icebound Endurance in desperation, forced to lead his crew over pack ice. Robert Falcon Scott penning his final missive to the public as he lay dying in his sleeping bag, just kilometers from a depot of food that could have saved him.

Why put these things in our heads? Maybe we thought only the ancients suffered, with their heavy equipment freezing to their skin, their unwieldy sleds dragging them down. Or maybe reading them was a sort of talisman: we dispelled their power by absorption.

A decent surface again, in the morning. Snow thicker, here—but dry, at least. Post-holing up to my knees the first half of the day, not looking at the battery percentage.

Twenty-four percent in the morning. Not a happy number to share breakfast with. But despite everything, I broke camp in a decent mood. I had slept well, then treated myself to a double-ration and one of the self-heating ersatz “coffee” packs—a caffeinated, chocolate-flavored sandiness an evil Institute developer had come up with. How about coffee, instead? Actual coffee? Why was that hard? This grainy sludge had waited for centuries to foul my taste buds. They had uploaded my entire human connectome, the neural map of my being, beamed its pattern in a laser three hundred lightyears across the void, and inserted it into another body, and they couldn’t manage a decent cup of coffee.

After several hours of trekking across that surface, I spotted another nunatak: a black dot on the horizon. I would aim for that. A resting spot. A place to spend a few hours in the sun, starfish myself out, recharge.

Then the dot was eclipsed. A whiteness passed across its surface for a second, clipping it from existence. I raised the binoculars.

There. Moving across the ice at twice the speed I could manage, at least. That old, perfect fear came again. The primitive brain’s alarm system. Run. Hide. Now.

Run where? Hide where?

It was on two feet now, but I still could not make out a head.

And again, it saw me. It turned its whole torso toward me, pausing for a second. Almost as if saying, “Yes—get a good look.”

But I couldn’t get a good look. Its outline was blurred, as if my brain refused to resolve it, could not quite make its shape stay firm against the snow behind it. White on white. An . . . undulation beneath the surface. Like a distortion, almost. Like the digital enhancement of the binoculars malfunctioning.

Then it moved on. Turned away and began to walk. As if pretending it had not seen me at all.

Drawing me on?

Was it even the same thing I had seen the day before? If so, it had not closed distance with me, though I was sure it could, if it chose to.

“Nothing to be done,” I said out loud. I’d never talked to myself on Earth, but I seemed determined to develop the habit before I froze to death, or was torn to pieces, and they bounced my brain back home.

Thirty-two percent. Motion had built a bit of a charge. So move.

The wind had blasted the landscape here into embankments and switchbacks of corrugated ice. Most, at least, were no higher than my waist. But between them the snow was a mass of hard, small snow crystals. Walking through it was like walking through sand. I could keep my direction, but it was a winding way, and slow going. Mostly I navigated by the black dot of the rock outcropping where I had told myself I would be able to rest. Beneath my feet I could feel a slight vibration. I imagined water thundering down under-ice cataracts, steam building up pressure, the glacier sliding across stone.

“And where,” I asked the glacier, “are you going?”

Thirty percent when I reached the island of stone, a waist-high rampart of protruding rock with a comet tail of moraine trailing it. Despite my motion, the battery was dropping in charge again. The top of the nunatak was a gray-black shelf, as flat as if it had been sheared off. In a hand-width channel grooved by ice and weather was another drift of exoskeletal traces. I ate my lunch and sorted through them. The largest was like a snake, almost—jointed, barbed in one direction to give it traction against the snow, sharp-prowed to allow it, probably, to dig down into softer surfaces. No longer than the pinky of my gloved hand, but the largest I had found. There were many smaller things, no two of them the same. Nothing, it seemed, that flew. Many creatures designed to tumble and drift.

Then, in the side of the groove, something opened and snapped shut again. I bent down. Against the dark surface of the stone it was just slightly darker, tucked into a hole. A kind of borer. It had closed a jointed lid over itself. I was still for a minute, and it opened again. Velvet inside, a dark red. The first red I had seen on this world. Flanged and grooved, like a filter-feeder on Earth. It extruded itself from its hole, expanding outward like a cactus blossom, dark as blood.

“Well, hello there.”

It clopped shut again.

I lay on my back and began rubbing myself on the stone, careful to move a few meters off so as not to disturb my new friend.

Fourteen kilometers to the depot. After an hour of friction and sun, the suit’s battery indicator climbed to thirty-six percent. Move? Or stay here, see how much of a charge I could build in the suit? I scanned the horizon with the binoculars again. In the direction of travel the ice undulated away in hummocks, blurred by ice fog.

Bad going. That decided it. Spend the rest of the day here, soak up the sun, dig in for the night at the foot of the stone rampart, where there was enough drifted snow to cave into.

The suit got up to fifty percent by evening, but not moving enough made the cold leach into me: a hint of worse to come. I dug in deep, slid down into my tunnel, pulled the pack over my head just like the little clam-thing clapping its lid tight.

Please don’t let it get me, I thought. Like a prayer a child makes, afraid of the shadow pooling out from underneath the bed. Please. Not that way.

But was there a good way, here?

Bad going tomorrow. Sleep. Good night, little clam.

The fall happened too fast for me to even attempt to stop it. I was between two hummocks of ice when the surface underneath my feet gave way. There had been no sign the glacier was rotten here. One moment, I was making midday progress through the strange, mounded landscape. The next, I was three meters beneath the surface, flat on my back, trying to catch my breath. The wind had been knocked out of me. When it came again, it was with a sob of pain.

I lay still, trying to take stock. Flexed one limb, then another. Nothing, it seemed, broken—but my right arm had been jammed, hard. I had trouble closing it in a good grip, and a numb streak of pain coursed down from shoulder to wrist.

I rolled onto my side and curled up fetal. I could still see dancing white points in my vision, flakes of bright blankness.

It took me five minutes to get to my knees. Take stock. The tips of my fingers were numb, then the feeling returned with a wash of pins and needles. My neck hurt as well, from whipping back and thudding against the ice, my neck muscles tensing up against the weight of the helmet.

I was on a shelf of ice, a three-meter step below the rotten surface that had given way. Beyond the shelf’s edge, there was an upward drift of ice fog: the cold exhalation, perhaps, of an ice geyser that had hollowed out this trap. How far down did it go? I crawled on my belly and looked. Far: an indigo throat, winding down until the light failed. I scooted backward away from it, managed to get to my feet, staying close to the sheer wall of ice. Okay: I would be sore, but I was okay. I looked up. A steep climb with my jammed right arm, but I could make it.

Then I saw it, over the edge.

The vagueness of it up close made me nauseous. This feeling cut even through the fear: The way its outline, the pallid greasy sheen of it would not resolve. This close, it should have been distinct, but it was not.

It made a sound at me. A sound that was like metal being crushed, digitized through a cracked speaker. And it was that nausea, I think, and a sharp shock that went through me when it made that sound, that made me throw the ice axe at it. An instinct. The tethered ice axe clacked off the surface of the cliff just below the thing, then came back down and almost struck my helmet, causing me to duck out of the way.

When I looked back up, it was gone.

Another fantastic choice before me: climb back up to the surface where that thing was waiting, or die here on this shelf of ice?

I listened a moment, not knowing what I was listening for, and then began to climb.

Twenty-three percent.

It was not there when I reached the top. But its tracks were: round depressions, without apparent toe or heel, as if an enormous spoon had been pressed into the surface of the snow. They led off in my direction of travel.

So now I was following it. Well, better than the other way round, I supposed.

The snow here was hard-packed, the saucerlike impressions of the thing’s limbs leaving almost no mark, then trailing off entirely as the surface hardened to ice. I checked the direction and distance of the depot beacon. It was in line with the glacier’s slow travel, ten kilometers away.

The sound that let me know the suit’s battery had dropped below twenty percent was the wash of a temple gong. It was designed, I supposed, so as not to startle or panic the suit’s wearer.

It sounded to me like the beginning of my own funeral.

“Where are you going?” I said it out loud. Who was I talking to? To the glacier, perhaps. To the thing that was circling me. To myself.

“Where are you going?”

It was the question I had asked myself, on my last night on Earth, in my room at the Institute’s connectome sequencing laboratory. The laboratory overlooked snow-covered fields, a railway yard where autolocomotives, the size of toys at this distance, shunted train cars into line. A few trees stood out in the desolation, a frail tangle of branches against the cold sky.

All of this was so tenuous—how could it last another hundred years, much less six hundred? There was so much risk ahead of me: technical failures that could scramble my upload, faults anywhere along that fragile beam of communication firing my neural connectome’s pattern into the void. There were nagging existential questions: Would that pattern really be me, awaking after three hundred years as if from a sleep, sheathed in my new blank? Or would I die the moment my body died here, and the person who awoke on that new world be someone else entirely—my simulacrum, but not my own self?

But none of that seemed as threatening as the idea, as I looked out at that desolate railway yard, silent behind the reinforced glass, laid out on white ground fragile and translucent as bone china, that none of this would be waiting for me when I returned. That the laser carrying my pattern would terminate at a dead receiver, on a planet that had rid itself of us.

The three hundred years it had taken me to travel here had been nothing. A closing of the eyes. A dream of color in darkness, no longer than a night’s sleep.

And in that span, everyone and everything I knew had been blown into the void. Lost to me. For nothing, if I died here.

Even if, somehow, the receivers of Earth still stood, it would no longer be my world.

As I neared the place where the glacier died, I could hear it calving. I could feel it: the sundering of ice, reverberating through its frozen mass, shuddering up my legs into my suit, as the face of the glacier fell away.

It was growing dark, now. The suit’s ten percent warning gong had sounded an hour ago. Calling the monks home to the temple. Calling them home. Five percent now—a proper alarm, a harsh blatt into the eardrums. Wake up! Appropriate, anyway, that I would die where the glacier died. Perhaps there would be a sea after all. The glacier must have some place to go.

Another rumble as the glacier split. And now I could see it, up ahead: could see a crack form, and then, with a massive boom, the face of the glacier falling away.

Cold was seeping into the suit as I scrambled up the moraine. Here was a hummock of boulder, ground to a knife-edge by the glacier’s slow teeth. The sun was fading, the sky shifting from yellow to emerald green. Several kilometers away, a steam column rose into the sky, lit saffron by sunset. The depot signal was beyond the calving face of the glacier. No way down that face. I had to get off of the ice. The only way was around, over the moraine edge, then down onto whatever surface . . .

As I came over the hill, I saw it.

Not a sea—a hole. A massive sinkhole, bigger than anything I knew of on Earth. A darkness into which, as I watched, a tower of ice from the face of the glacier toppled. From that dark mouth, a sound of shattering. And echoes, like the beating of a drum. The roar of water, deep beneath the hollow surface.

Around the hole a desolate beach had formed—a graveyard of gravel and boulders shoved for eons by the glacier’s mass. The stones were greasy black with moraine dust, strewn with shattered chunks of ancient ice that shone blue-black and sea-green in the dying light.

And there it was—the depot.

It was canted against a snag of stones, its impenetrable carboplast shell blacker than the rock around it, the meter-high pyramid topped by a slab of ice that had fallen against it, ice so dense and dark it looked like stone until I saw the bubbles inside—the time capsules of air trapped thousands of years before.

I almost did not hear the screech of the suit’s one percent alarm over the sound of my own teeth chattering. I pressed a glove to the panel, and the access port dilated open with only the slightest scrape to indicate how ancient it had become while waiting for my arrival.

Salvation.

I do not think, if I had the strength to move, that I would have made camp that night near that massive hole. Here, the sound of the ice was continuous, groaning and splitting. Every hour or so, ice rent away with a sound like the end of everything, tumbling into the breach. Three glaciers met here, crawling from different directions to die into this black aperture.

And there was the cairn.

I saw it just as I was closing the depot’s access panel. My prizes—solid rations, the shelter, the warmer—were stacked near the depot.

The cairn was hard to make out. I could have mistaken it for a natural formation. But at second glance it was clear: it was a made thing, its stones carefully selected and stacked into a waist-high mound.

The suit was cold, and getting colder, the battery dead. Now it was nothing more than clothing. A thick coat. Not enough to keep me alive for long. I needed to get the shelter up. I needed to get a warm ration in me, sleep on a formfoam mattress for the first time since I had left the beacon. Rest.

I needed to know what might be in that cairn.

Moving the stones helped keep me warm. And the adrenaline of discovery.

The corpse had been buried lying on its side, with its limbs curled up against its chest, like humans were often found in ancient burial sites. The body was not human, but it was so much like us: bipedal, with a symmetrical body plan, four-limbed. The head and face were—how does one describe such a thing? They were the product of a different path that had led to a similar evolutionary clearing. On another planet, there were beings who had walked in forests and savannahs so much like ours that you could have said, “that treelike thing is enough like a tree that I can use that word. That mushroom-like thing is enough like a mushroom that I will call it a mushroom. And this is close enough to grass, and that is analogous to a flower . . . ”

But none of them would be those things. Naming them the same thing doesn’t make them the same. And so it was with this being. This was not a human, though it was analogous to us. I could call the hands “hands” and the feet “feet,” but they were not the hands and feet we would recognize.

The body was clothed in the thinnest of coverings—a dark, semi-reflective sheath. No shoes, no gloves. It would not have been clothing to survive in: whatever they had worn against the cold of this place, that was gone.

I could see the wounds that had killed them: A chunk of metal, lodged in their chest. One of their arms severed, carefully placed here atop their body. There were other wounds. Impact damage. The emergency medical training I had taken on Earth allowed me to read the signs: A crash. And this being was so clearly not of this place. So clearly as incapable of surviving here as I was, that the truth of it hit me right away: this, too, was a traveler.

But from how long ago? And who laid them here to rest?

I was already cold, but I replaced the stones of the frozen cairn as carefully as I could before I began, with fingers that were already numb, to put up my shelter.

There was that sickly, blurred whiteness out there, stalking this place. Out there, in the night. There were towers of ice around me that seemed ready, at any moment, to crush my little tent into nothingness. But in my self-heating shelter, in the lantern-glow of a ration warmer, I raised my suit’s face mask for the first time since arriving on the planet and ate a solid ration. That seemed worth the threat of death itself.

When the wind hit, I was in the middle of a dream in which I had been sealed in ice. The blackest ice, but filled with bubbles that drifted through its solid core toward my mouth and nose, nourishing me. And in those bubbles were the scents of childhood, and home: The smell of snails in the ivy of the vacant lot next door, of a hot field of grass at the end of a summer’s day. The scent of brown sugar melting in tea. I could not smell them, in the dream, but as the bubbles gathered at my nostrils, and I breathed in that air, sealed for millennia, my mind was filled with the images the smells called up: The crumbling wall of green and the fragile-shelled bodies that had traced their cursive of filtrate on the leaves. The grass in a hot wind of sunset. And beyond, the black line of the trees, the café looking out over the sea.

The wind turned the tent upside down, picked it at least a meter up off the stones, and smashed it back down again. The suit’s padded helmet saved me from the worst of the impact, but as I struggled to free myself from the sleeping bag, the tent was turned over again. This time, my temple struck stone, and I lost consciousness.

I woke to find myself being dragged. My mask was still open. The tent? Where was the tent? My head was turned to the side, and I could see, through a screen of sleet, blocks of ice tumbling across the black stone. And there, at my feet, the blurred thing. It had one of my legs clamped in its upper limbs and was dragging me up onto the angle of moraine that marked the edge of the glacier. The cold, on my face, was terrible. I had thought, as the suit began to fail, that I understood what cold was. I did not. Already, my cheeks and nose were frostbitten. My eyes ached with cold. The ice crystals that lashed my face were wind-borne caltrops. I reached up and activated the face screen. It slid shut. Cracked. It was cracked. A thin haze of ice crystal powdered into it, falling on my open eye.

I clutched at a stone and hurled it at the thing clamped to my leg. The stone went wide, but the thing turned to me. Now, for the first time, I saw what should have been its face—and screamed.

There was nothing there at all. It was a blank white, slightly iridescent like a spill of fuel on water, blurred as if my eyes could not focus on it. Blurred like something held up too close to my face. Again, the thing made that metallic sound—a sound of things breaking, of things torn apart—barely audible over the terrible wind. Then it turned and picked me up, as if I weighed nothing at all, and began to climb up the loose stone of the moraine.

The cave was fifty meters or so up the slope. I had missed it on my descent because its entrance was obscured by a slab of ice—ice, I now saw, that had been moved there. I realized, as the thing hauled me into the cave, that I had been making a very strange sound myself—a high, whimpering noise as I struggled against being carried, pounding against its hard, smooth skin.

It lowered me down to the ground. And I would have bolted, if I were not so exhausted that dying seemed not to matter anymore. Instead, I just lay still. The thing lumbered off a few meters and sat down.

Every ache from my fall the day before was back, and twice as bad as it had been. My jammed joints screamed. I had been bleeding from the temple where my head struck the ground in the tent, but it appeared to have stopped. I could feel the blood drying in my hair on the side of my face. My head ached terribly, and all of the muscles in my neck.

The suit bleeped as it came online. Two percent battery charge. It must have found energy to absorb. Yes, in the tent. It had been warm. And—here! The temperature read plus five, in the cave. Plus five! A sauna, compared to the outside! There must be a thermal heat source. And yes, I noticed, the stone here was slightly wet, the humidity at eighty percent—warmed, likely, by the same heat source that was melting the glaciers from beneath.

It was agony, sitting up. My neck muscles would not support the weight of my head. I rolled onto my side, then pushed myself up on my left arm.

The thing shifted its bulk where it sat. Here, in the half-light of the cave, I looked closer at it.

And then I understood. It wasn’t a creature. It was an environmental suit I was looking at. It had no face because it was a face shield, closed. Its blurred outline was probably some kind of field effect. And inside, of course, would be the companion of the being who was carefully buried inside the cairn.

I raised my cracked face shield. The air in the cave, moist as the exhalation of my breath, was welcome on my face.

“For days, I thought you were going to kill me.”

The head of the thing turned. So massive: it must be an exoskeleton as well, almost a vehicle in itself. I bet it’s warm in there, I thought. Must be nice, not having to scramble around in some Institute-designed, malfunctioning piece of shit.

The being made that grinding sound again. I wondered if I sounded as offensive to it—and if my appearance caused the same sense of dread. I remembered the feeling that had come over me when I first saw it. It was still there, that feeling: Tooth and claw. Primeval fear. It had settled, slid down underneath my awareness now. But I could feel it there, ready to surface. The pollution of it almost seemed to emanate from the suit like a fog. Fear.

Now it seemed so obvious. How had I missed it? There was a slight seam, and a difference of shading, where the faceplate met the helmet. The faceplate was smoother than the rest of the surface.

“You can’t raise your faceplate? Can’t breathe this air?” I gestured at my own faceplate. “Maybe there’s an Institute on your world too, screwing everything up and sending your people to die on uninhabited planets you’ll never be able to colonize.”

Another burst of scraping sound. My suit blared out a one percent alarm. If it was failing to charge, even in this relative warmth, I was dead. It must have been damaged in the storm.

The suit went offline, zeroed out.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said. My voice was shaking. I really am going to die, I thought. I probably sounded like a flock of parrots squawking to the being in the suit. But I needed to talk. I had been alone so long.

But the body in the cairn . . . It was impossible to say how long it had been there, but it was desiccated by cold. It looked mummified. It must have been . . . God, how long must it have been?

“How long have you been here? Alone?” I held up a single finger. “How long have you been one?”

The pantomime the being made was clear, a massive arm arcing to the cave’s stone floor and slapping down onto it: since the crash.

“Me too,” I said, pointing at myself. “None of my friends made it. And I wish I could be better company to you—but I’m not going to make it either.” I pulled at the surface of my suit, made a gesture like breaking a twig. “It isn’t working. Even here, in this cave, I’m getting cold.” I rubbed my shoulders in a sign I hoped was universal. “And it won’t be able to make the food I need. It’s just a matter of time. I reached the depot—this one. At great cost and effort. But I won’t get much further. Thank you, though, for saving me from the storm. It’s good to at least be warmer. And I can keep you company for a while, right?”

Outside, the storm raged, tearing ice from the surface of the world, thrashing it against stone.

The suit lurched toward me. I scrambled backward. The faceplate stopped less than a meter from me. The massive limbs rose, made the same breaking gesture I had made. Then the being thumped a hand on my suit, made the gesture again.

I slapped my suit, made the same motion. “Yes. Broken.”

For a moment, they withdrew. Then they placed the mitt-like end of a limb against the side of my face. The limb was cold—as cold as the ambient air here. A gesture of fellow-feeling? Of sorrow? Or measurement by a contact instrument, tasting my chemical composition?

We stayed like that for at least a minute. Then more. I closed my eyes and thought of the world from the perspective of this being. Finding our depot, that black pyramid of carboplast. They must had known, seeing that artifact, that there had been another presence here. But nothing about the depot could have told them we had not left but had, rather, not yet come. That this was no sarcophagus, but a promise of our arrival.

Was I the first alien this species had discovered? Was this their first contact? For days, this being had circled me. They had been alone so long, and now wondered: Was I alike enough to them to communicate with? Was I someone it was possible to speak to? Or was I something deadly? Did I create the same feeling in them, of fear, that they created in me? The primitive stab of adrenaline, or whatever chemical powered their fight-or-flight responses?

The mitt withdrew. Then they backed up a body-length or so from me, and lay down on the ground.

And fell apart. The faceplate opened, and the whole front of the suit unraveled along a seam at its centerline, falling away to the sides. The helmet, too, split in half and dropped to the side.

Empty.

There was nothing in the suit at all, except a red inner surface, dark as oxblood, studded with receptors in its mesh. There was no being here. No lost, alien astronaut.

Finally, I truly understood. Stripping my own broken, useless suit from my body, I understood. Climbing inside, feeling the inner surface mold itself to my body—clumsily at first, tentative—and then more assured, more confident in the fit. That surface finding my surface, that warm inner membrane molding itself to my outer one. One skin finding another, shifting together until the fit was right. Closing slowly over me, accommodating to my body, the seal sliding upward to my throat. The helmet drew shut over my head, warm as hands cupping the sides of my face.

A diode-stream of golden script I cannot yet decipher cascaded down the side of the helmet’s display.

We stood up. We can stand. We can move, together.

It feels so good to be warm.

About the Author

Ray Nayler has lived and worked in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans for nearly two decades. He is a Foreign Service Officer, and previously worked in international educational development, as well as serving in the Peace Corps in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. A Russian speaker, he has also learned Turkmen, Tajiki, Albanian, and Azerbaijani Turkish—as well as Vietnamese for a two-year stint as the Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer at the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.

Ray began publishing science fiction in 2015 with the short story “Mutability,” which appeared in the pages of Asimov’s. Since then, his stories have also seen print in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Nightmare, as well as in several “Best of the Year” anthologies. His story “Winter Timeshare” from the January/February 2017 issue of Asimov’s was collected by the late Gardner Dozois in The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction.

The Field Tiger

Endria Isa Richardson

They held Memorial fifty-six at midday in August, while the sun beat like a hammer in the hard, pale sky. The mourners stood. They had removed the broad-brimmed hats, which might have offered relief, out of respect. Sweat dripped from the uncovered foreheads, into the stoic, animal eyes. The dust-covered bandanas, wrapped around the face to protect the lungs from irritation in the long, dry fields, darkened, grew oppressive with sweat. To a committee member, the dark rags would suggest hands, clamped over the nose and mouth.

But the masks allowed messages to travel between mourners. Beneath the merciless palm of the sun, Raz’s uncovered head pounded. Beneath the floral cloth, his lips parted. He paused, throat parched; coughed a short, dry, bark. The flat plain stretched to every side of him, tilted as though to tip him into the porcelain sky. He pressed his knuckles to his eyes; the vertigo faded.

“We have endured—” he searched for a word to fit the shape the feeling took in his mind, “opulent cruelty. Devastating enough in a single instance to burn the humanity from a worker’s soul. Against us, meted out again and again and again!”

“Melodrama,” replied Mer. Her lips pushed against the silty bandana, she licked them, continued. “That is the real opium of the masses, Raz. Be sensible.”

“A memorial is no place for sense. It is a place for passion and clarity.” The small mic that hooked over his left ear measured the minute vibrations of facial muscle and bone precisely enough to capture and transmit the disgust with which Raz thought. It was possible because of Terra, the messaging technology they all used. Mer remained silent, weary of their disagreement. Raz clenched his jaw, static sizzled through his earpiece. The sun beat, beat anew, beat continuously. The man standing in front of the trench said words, more words. Raz tried to think other words. Many came to him; he didn’t want any of them. And then, abruptly, none. A feeling and an image: the image was of a metal ladle dipping into a basin of water; the feeling was clarity. Then only did the right words come. “They force us to stand, mourn, burn in this desperate heat. It is beyond reason,” he said. He shut his eyes briefly to the sun. “Madness,” he confirmed, “and it must be overthrown by madness.”

Surveillance drones spun overhead, recorded silent, passive mourners.

Committee on the Oversight of Memorialization had not considered the intensity of the sun at high noon at all.

“What time should we schedule—” Davidson scrolled through a line of numbers “—Memorial fifty-six?” Davidson looked up at the circle of faces around him. For a moment, they hovered, blurrily bodiless. He blinked twice and they re-pixelated.

“I’d like it to end early. Well before evening traffic,” a woman with pressed hair said. The heads in the room chuckled at her eye roll. “Shopping and dining decreased seven percent the evening of Memorial twenty-seven.”

“One of the neighborhoods from last week—” Davidson blinked to another tab on his screen, “sent in a formal request that mourners be directed to a different course home.”

“They didn’t go through the upper?” Robertson asked, his voice transmitted from the office down the hall from Davidson’s, as well as over the holo-mic.

“They did,” Davidson affirmed. The heads in the room chuckled again. In the brief pause that followed, Davidson watched a seagull floating past the corner of his eye. The south-facing window in Davidson’s corner office overlooked the river, a gray-green mottle beneath a layer of full, fat clouds. Maybe it will rain, Davidson thought. He heard somewhere—inside of his head, deeper, more central to him than his earpiece—the precise articulation of raindrops on a tin roof; the roof sat, slanted; his mother’s face appeared, halfway framed by jumbled branches, blurry; he blinked to clear her image and—he snapped his attention back to the meeting, embarrassed.

“Well?” the pressed woman asked, peering at Davidson. It seemed that she had asked a question, to everyone or to Davidson, and he had missed it. He waited for her to repeat herself. After a moment she said, “you will agree that enforcement is necessary this time?”

“Let’s make it noon,” said Willis, before Davidson could answer. “Won’t disturb the important morning hours for reflection, over well before evening relaxation. No need for enforcement if we move the whole thing to the outers. There’s more space there. Let’s see them complain about that.”

“Oh they’ll complain,” Davidson retorted. He felt bitter, was embarrassed by it. Still, the response lingered somatically—a hand pressed against a door that’s swung closed—was it sadness? A sense of injustice? A desire for the time and care he spent organizing these memorials to be recognized by those bandana-wearing, dust-covered, dirty—he stopped himself. No use thinking that. Some people weren’t considerate, weren’t built that way.

A knock came at Davidson’s door and a face peered into his office. Davidson waved the secretary in. She carried bags of the takeout he’d ordered for lunch: juicy, butter-basted “steak,” sweet roasted potatoes, a small salad of tender new greens.

Davidson adjourned the meeting, switched off his holo-mic, logged out of Terra. He gazed upon the spread before him and was content.

*Minor updates to DAVIDS.MEM1

*Add img

*Fix link

*Remove cruft

*Remove cruft

  -  <img src="mem.tinroof/childhood/rain.png" pxls=640>

  +  <img src="mem.tinroof/childhood/rain/mother.png" pxls=800>

**MEM1 is a project from the [MOMAPS] that reconstitutes images synthesized by human1 brains and adds them to a master HUMAN image directory.

Raz dropped a beetle larva into the treated linen pouch tied around his waist. He was a third of the way through the row; there were eight rows in this field. Seven fields to cover before break. Rising into view at the end of his row, like a rough brown bear, was the northernmost patrol tower. Its wooden legs five feet high—not high enough—supported a narrow platform. A tin roof, which shielded the sun but also reflected the heat on whoever was standing beneath it, propped over the patroller. Raz raised a hand toward the patrol, saw a hand raise in return. Beyond the tower, the outer swamp stretched flat, stale, hard. It should have been mud.

“Morning,” said Mer. He shrugged, and she pulled the bandana down from her mouth. “Good morning,” she said again. “New guest today.”

He hooked his earpiece over his ear, mouthed the password. The cohosts of The Uprising, overlapping, mid-debate:

“—ology is available. Look at the gardens in the uppers, I’m talking seven, ten, and thirteen especially, to see—”

“—mostly pet projects. Their roses, their carrots, their what-have-you, turning them to compost once they’ve rotted. I heard this woman say, ‘you don’t actually eat the stuff that comes from the ground do you?’ These jackholes, sorry, don’t even realize what most of us eat is not grown in a lab—”

They both laughed. A pause, and a third voice, soft, assured—a mid voice, office voice, Raz thought—began.

“The tech is here,” it said. Crumbs of laughter from the hosts, clean silence as they muted their mics. The voice continued. “Government could replace all workers with robotic units in two years.”

One of the cohosts cut in with the old challenges—even if the tech existed it wasn’t scalable; bots would crush the pests where human workers were trained to humanely relocate them; ag was the biggest employer in Mid Region, there would be an unemployment crisis. He was flat-voiced, that attempt at casual superiority lowers got.

“No,” cocky midder inflection, “scaling and training units is a one-time cost, manageable. And West Region has tested a guaranteed wage model for five years. While there were some drops in productivity measures the first two years, they’ve risen substantially since then. The numbers just aren’t made available. Especially these numbers. Across all fields and outers, there is a thirty percent loss in labor every ninety days. Though it is estimated that the robots would have a significantly lower fail-rate, fifteen to seventeen percent, the replacement cost would still be prohibitive. The current replacement cost is, in terms of dollars, free.”

There was a click, a hum, the sound of the hosts’ mics switched on but capturing nothing. A well of static that Raz, anyone listening, could topple into. He had been stooping, inspecting, picking, moving, while he listened. Now, he paused the podcast, stopped. Straightened his back. Knowledge known was less dizzying than knowledge stated.

So, there was reason. But reason assembled from instructions utterly alien, utterly strange. A brain that could apprehend those instructions would need to itself be alien and strange, so distorted by its own weird and internal organization (he wondered whether such brains looked, or were materially different, from his; different grooves, different folds) that it could take in the garbled demands of those instructions and churn them, sausage-like, into some legible product. And not itself be broken in the process. Not a brain he would recognize as human. But then, he was not the arbiter. He felt a strange loneliness, an aloneness. He saw that other workers, in other rows, had stopped working. They were each alone, in confrontation with madness.

A drone buzzed over his head, dipped low, sent a neat needle of pain through his crown. Other drones across the field swooped to other workers. His drone emitted its disciplinary bleat, switched frequency midway, and began to emit the blaring, continuous alarm sound. The sound sang over the field, raising the heads that had still been bent. He felt the word first, the muscles behind his ears tightening—not mechanical, a somatic response—until it coalesced in his mind and became, “ATTACK.” The horizon convulsed. Raz squinted. The tower, shuddering, then falling. Several thickly muscled and clawed bodies coalesced from the convulsion. Raz noticed, in the eternal moment before his mind kicked back into gear, the melt of sun onto the nearest tiger’s brindled side, its fur rippling across its ribs, the bright candy splash of the patroller’s blood on dirt. And then the pounding of feet fleeing shook his attention free, and Raz ran in a jagged pattern across the field, covering the back of his head without thinking. The drills made flight nearly automatic, almost robotic.

Raz sat groggy from pain meds in the hospital bed, starched sheets and felt blanket bunched at his waist. His fingers? They moved when he thought about them. He hovered them above clean gauze. Three carved lines segmented the meat of his forearm beneath. River, shallow tributaries. He had tumbled, ground-sky-ground, Mer’s face and her hair, her hand, blast from a gun, and he was, at last, dragged from the fields not by unfriendly teeth, claws, but fingers, palms. He blinked past headlines. Past “Fields claim new victims.” Past “Exotic tigers or domestic terrorists?” Past “Public mourning or public nuisance?” Blinked twice to open “Paleo brownie balls: with sunflower butter.”

*Updates to RASHAD.MEM3

*Find terms

  -  search/''-Rashad.x@v3

     with:

          Rashad.index: 'Trauma'

          Rashad.index: 'Tiger'

          Rashad.index: 'Fear'

          Rashad.index: 'Choices'

  -  name: Install dependencies

     run: |

       sudo apt update

**!MEM3 (beta) is a project from the [MOMAPS Team] that asks: Can we use human1 generated search indices to accelerate brain-mapping in order to predict human3 behavior?

It had not rained in three months. But the committee was not meeting about the rain.

“Why do they insist on calling them ‘tigers’?” The woman was mid-lament when Davidson clicked on to the meeting. He was a few minutes late, as he hadn’t been feeling well that morning. “It foments unnecessary panic. It’s not accurate. Accuracy is important. They are not, biologically or anatomically, tigers. They are more like large cats.” The woman, Hendricks, finished without acknowledging the abrupt presence of Davidson’s head.

“Well, they are large,” offered Willis. Davidson pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Something wrong, Davidson? You’re late.”

“I’m—” Davidson began, but was cut off.

“Now,” said the other woman, whose name was Rivera, and who had been appointed to replace Davidson as chair last week. Robertson had been taken off the committee entirely.

Rivera continued, “Hendricks is right, though her reasoning is too simple. We all know that the so-called ‘field tigers’ are not any such thing. They are of the canid family; their closest relative is the fox. Whereas an adult male tiger can weigh up to six hundred pounds, the average adult female ‘field tiger’ weighs no more than two hundred pounds. An overfed Saint Bernard.

“The laborers’ use of the term ‘field tiger’ is propaganda. Their insistence of the existence of the ‘field tiger’ is propaganda. The narrative that they are subject to consistent, deadly, wild animal attacks and will no longer risk their lives on the field is propaganda. The reality is that no one has seen these attacks take place. The ‘tigers’ are conveniently impossible to photograph with overhead drones—the dust cover in the fields is too thick and conveniently difficult to track. A specimen has not been captured alive in over forty years. As to their contemporary existence? We have only the hopelessly self-serving accounts of the field-workers.”

“The workers are in the fields. Where the tigers also are. Would be,” Davidson interjected.

“And yet the propagandistic narrative gains traction, playing the hell out of guilty upper heartstrings,” Rivera spoke over him. “But let me state for the record: I do not believe that this risk exists anywhere outside of the slosh-holes that pass for brains in these entitled sacks of stringy meat. The barbarians are probably murdering each other.”

“But I have seen—” Davidson cut in, immediately unsure of whether he had placed the correct emphasis on the correct word. “I have seen,” he tried again.

“Surely, that support is contained to the lowers—” interrupted Willis at the same time.

And, “slosh-holes! Meat-bags!” said Hendricks.

“Middle neighborhoods seven and eight also trend toward support. And here is Hendricks’ point,” Rivera continued, ignoring Davidson entirely. “Accuracy. In the hours after last week’s long-form article, ‘Havoc in Crops Threatens Starvation for Tens of Thousands,’ support for the workers dipped substantially. These are the numbers we must get in front of the media. Furthermore, our official term for these animals will henceforward be ‘house cats.’”

There was appreciative laughter, and Rivera smiled. Davidson heard the clink of cutlery picked up by the holo-mic as she paused to take a bite of what looked like salmon.

A blob of aioli squirted from Davidson’s avocado, tomato, and sprouts sandwich and landed on his desk. He flicked it up with a finger, which he licked clean with satisfaction and without self-consciousness. He still could not tolerate wasting food. Suddenly, the full tenor of the protestors’ incompetence struck him. The wheat—bland and nowhere near as nutritious as synth crops—fed thousands. What wasn’t exported was distributed at subsidized prices to the outer and lower food markets; the remainder rationed into food allotments. It had been the staple of his own childhood.

Without rapid and immense government intervention, the lowers would starve, plain and simple. It was clear that they had no real appreciation for the coordination and organization it took to feed an entire region; they were counting on the higher-ups to wave a magic wand and take care of them. Well, Rivera was right about the laziness.

But might there be desperation, too? Perhaps they were being driven by the whip of fear, panic? Fear, once recognized, could be managed. Davidson’s bones barely jostled at the memory of teeth, claws; the tough desperate leanness of the tiger’s body thrashing bitterly against his own (was it his own anymore? That body surely belonged in every sense to a different time, different place, different consciousness). He remembered now only vaguely one hand stretched out against an impossible vision, a sort of dull ache, then nothing.

“Fifty-six were killed in one day last quarter in a house cat attack,” Davidson upped the volume on his holo-mic so that he would be heard. “What we might be observing is the demographic’s inability to emotionally absorb the risk levels. I suggest that we coordinate a series of somatic trainings—”

“No,” said Rivera flatly. “Let me assure you. The protestors’ party line, ‘people over profit,’is effective. It is effective because it is a one-dimensional arrow. Do not let it pierce you. These people do not know us, the real people behind the straw men they erect. They do not want to know you, Davidson, your journey from field-worker to the youngest official elected in Mid Region in a century. They do not care about the complexities or realities of our lives or our jobs. These are not humans we are dealing with, capable of rational negotiation. If there is a beast in the fields,” the last crumb from Rivera’s meal dangled from her bottom lip, “it is the worker.”

Davidson brushed at his own lip. “The transcript you shared with us, from,” he scrolled to the top of the document, “uh, The Uprising, shows that they know the total mortality rate is well above one thousand for the year—”

“How do you think they get those numbers,” Rivera spoke curtly. Davidson flinched.

Willis jumped into the pause. “As to the numbers,” they said, “obviously there is a leak.”

“A leak?” Davidson asked, incredulous.

“Willis is right, Davidson,” said Rivera. “And we have reason to believe that the leak is you.”

The Terra message blinked its pale green alert in Sara’s display. “One sec,” she tapped as Davidson emerged from his office. “Hi. Did you need anything?” she asked. Her voice was soft, but confident.

“No,” he said. Davidson looked odd. His pupils were two drifting orbs, black and glassy. They dulled when he turned his face toward her and out from under the fluorescent rods. And stilled when he met her eyes. “Yes. Coffee,” he said. “From the fancier place? The one with the good milk? Not the other one, the one you usually go to.”

“Regular?” she asked, standing, holding out a hand. “I’ll need your chip, mine’s glitchy.”

“Decaf? And some green juice from the little stand. The kind without any fruit,” he said, pausing to face her. His eyes were drifting again.

“OK.”

“Last time there was pineapple. Too much sugar.” He tapped his wrist sensor and continued out of the single glass door, down the narrow white hall.

On her side of the glass door, down the hallway to her right, Sara could hear Robertson shouting. He’d been intolerable since being axed from OM. She rolled her eyes.

“Meet at The Oak Tree in ten,” she messaged.

Update HOUSE TIGERS file

114 TIGERS

@@ -1,2 +1,7 @@

  +  # This is the list of 'HOUSE TIGERS'

  +  #

  +  Add 'Sara Jorgenson' NOTE This does not necessarily list everyone who has

  +  been in contact with the 'TIGERS' organization, as in some cases, they may not

  +  have communicated over TERRA. This list may also include individuals who are

  +  not TIGERS See revision history in source control.

Sara stood inside the café with her arms crossed, legs crossed, tapped the rubber outside of one sneaker against the other quietly, irregularly. She watched Raz through the clean window without attempting to appear as though she wasn’t. His broad hat sedimented with dark-brown sweat; his skin streaked with light-brown dust. Outside, Raz coughed into his crooked elbow, apologized as Sara approached. She placed the coffee cup and juice bottle on a small iron table. He leaned toward her—she leaned back without knowing she was leaning back. He pressed a small plastic packet into her right hand, which was curled loosely at her side. Her arm jerked again, away from the hard, prodding fingers. She nearly fumbled the packet; didn’t; shoved it into her jeans.

“That goes in the coffee,” he said.

“Here,” she spoke, filling the space of her embarrassment with brusqueness. “Davidson’s bank chip. He is going to miss it. His wife already gives him so much shit about not just having it implanted.”

“You’re sure we can use this?” Raz asked. His gaze was direct, honest, Sara thought. Something beneath his right eye twitched.

“No, I can’t guarantee it. But there is a chance. A good chance, especially if you try quickly.”

Raz studied the small metal chip, rubbed his thumb against its edge. He turned abruptly and walked, head down, in the direction from which he had come. The street was shady and pleasant, like most upper streets. It was rich in colors from flowers and fabric squares decorated with foreign characters that flew from the wide front stoops of the large houses, that waved as though in greeting. But the gates were closed to Raz, to Sara even, and to everyone, even closed to the people who had their keys, for the greeting promised by the prayer flags was an idea of welcome only. The reality in these houses was of cold indifference, of closed eyes and ears, shuttered to anything that happened outside, on the streets, between people who, being outside, mattered not at all.

Davidson didn’t rise from the desk when Sara returned. He nodded to the cabinet. “You can leave them there.” An oval of sweat darkened his shirt.

“You OK, Kie?” she asked. “You honestly don’t look great.”

“Fine. Tired,” Davidson replied. He turned away slightly and refocused his eyes on his screen. She closed the door and returned to her desk. Her top drawer was ajar, the cup she’d placed on her papers inches from where she had left it.

Davidson dropped into his chair and sipped from one of the cups Sara had brought him. The coffee was hot, sweet, left a bitter film at the back of his throat. The almond harvests were shot. He’d lose money in that stock. That was the price of investing based on values. The river below him streaked through the city like a fish, reflecting the harsh, white light of the late September sun on its scales.

He was angry at himself for having let Rivera get to him. Of course he had not found anything in Sara’s desk. The sky was a white, hot bowl above him. What was that godforsaken beeping? Could Sara shut it off? The river was streaking by him like a silver train, and he counted the cars as they passed. One, four, seventeen. He would get off in Petaluma. He would bring her a bouquet of greens; he could stop by the synth lab on the way. When was the last time he had been home? She would be so pleased. No, Petaluma was in West Region, he couldn’t be there already. That was hours and hours away. And his mother was dead. Hot liquid was seeping from his desk onto his shirt. There were fast popping noises that sounded like rain on a tin roof. Perhaps it was raining after all. He opened his mouth and waited to catch the drops on his tongue.

@@-13,9 +13,8 @@ MNG:

  -  name: Install dependencies

     run: |

          sudo apt update

          sudo apt-get update

          sudo apt-get -y install build-essential philosoph2-dev

          sudo apt-get -y install build-essential litera3-dev

          sudo apt-get -y install build-essential religion2-dev

  -  name: Test with DAVIDS.MNG

     run: DAVIDS.MNG

**MNG is a research project launched in collaboration with the HUMAN project to build a master directory of HUMAN events using significant events experienced by humans1 in order to define what it “means” to be HUMAN

“What’s the update on Kie Davidson?”

“His wrist sensor alerted the medics. He could still pull through.”

“And we know for sure it was the—” three faint blinking dots “—field tigers?”

“Right. The secretary. She’s what they call a ‘house tiger.’ Disrupts from the inside.”

“Poisoned her own boss. Those animals.”

“They certainly are. She got the poison from a worker named Raz. What kind of bubblegum name is that?”

“Likely short for Rashad. Common lower name. Means righteous.”

“These melodramatic brutes. There’s one more thing.”

“What?”

“There is a small but nonzero chance that Davidson was a willing collaborator. Passing info along elsewhere. Charts show he was under a great deal of stress even before the poisoning.”

“Really. You think that’s possible?”

“It’s possible, even plausible. He was a diversity hire.”

“I see. So. Pull the plug?”

“Affirmative.”

“The rest is still on track?”

“Yep. We will get great coverage from this.”

“This is exactly the kind of communication we need.”

Rivera and Hendricks logged off their private message channel simultaneously. After logging off, they deleted the apps from their hardware.

*Minor updates to DAVIDS

*Minor updates to .MNG

*Minor updates to .MEM1

*Remove cruft

*Remove cruft

  -  <'DAVIDS.x' from .MNG>

  -  <'DAVIDS.x' from .MEM1>

  -  <'human1' from 'DAVIDS.x'>

  +  <'human3' to 'DAVIDS.x'>

“Kie is dead.” Raz watched the three blinking dots appear and disappear in the upper left field of his vision, waited for Sara’s reply.

“How.”

“ . . . ” Raz typed the ellipsis, deleted it, typed it again, and sent the message. A long wait. Then, a notification that the user was not available when he closed and reopened the chat to make sure it was not glitching. When the pale blue notification popped up in his vision, nearly an hour had passed.

“He wasn’t supposed to.”

“He wasn’t.” In Raz’s mind, there was a short space between subject and predicate, into which he might have put something—truth, gesture, sound. He tapped out “Sorry,” thought to send it, then tensed his ocular muscles, deleted the word letter by letter. He did not know what he felt. It wasn’t sorrow. Dull bolts—fear, surprise, nausea—thudded against some impenetrable wall inside of him, lay where they fell, inert. A governance system that treats any life as disposable must be taught that all lives are thus disposable. Madness met with madness. The words were stark, black against the clean white wash of his inner vision. This was the message to OM: logical, legible, rational. But still something, elsewhere, inner, trembled. Raz sent an outstretched hand inward, tried to reach at the something just behind the wall, failed, let the hand fall weakly.

“You told me he would not die. You said he would get sick.”

“I did.” Raz wiped a hand over his forehead, squeezed his left eye, shutting off the messaging app. He unhooked the mic from his left ear and let it fall next to him. Abruptly unfolded his body from where he had tucked himself, back against brick, knees to chin. A jolt through his body, once straight, surprised him. He looked down, jolted again his left leg into the ground, found himself twisting his left boot against the asphalt as though to unscrew a cap embedded in the concrete. His T-shirt bunched beneath his armpits. He pulled at the hem with sweaty fingers. Shadows played in the crushed metallic powder of the earpiece. He walked into the late afternoon sun. The high alley walls around him pulled the sunlight into a narrow stream that washed his head now that he had risen; washed the curled black hairs gray, washed the dulled skin white.

*Updates to RASHAD.MEM3

*Find terms

  -  search/''-Rashad.x@v3

     with:

          Rashad.index: 'Trauma'

          Rashad.index: 'Murder'

          Rashad.index: 'Fear'

          Rashad.index: 'Choices'

  -  name: Install dependencies

     run: |

       sudo apt update

ERROR

Mer handled the tiny metal chip, totally smooth on each side. She ran her thumb along a pattern of grooves on one centimeter edge. She closed her eyes and wanted to sink into somewhere dark, and deeply piled, and velvet, but Raz’s voice jerked her out. Always Raz jerking her out of her peace. This time, the jerk of his actions too violent, too spasmodic to simply—ignore.

“Bank chip.”

Mer’s eyebrows came together, she brought the chip right up to her eyes, squinted. “Whose.”

Raz looked away, that was too frightening, looked again at her. His fingertips brushed his upper thighs. A word moved against his teeth; he swallowed it. He opened his mouth again, wanted to dispel the word. Instead, he wrapped one hand around the upper flesh of his arm and squeezed. Wanted to squeeze his fingers around his entire body, squeeze all of the air and blood to stillness.

“Raz—” Mer was insistent. As though she was naming him, Raz, the owner of the chip. Naming him, Raz, the name of the dead man. Could he be? His name slid, scrabbled for purchase, slid again, could have tumbled into deadness along with the other name.

“Davidson,” he managed to say it.

Raised eyebrows, widened eyes from Mer. “Dead. You?”

“Unh,” the strangled word, it rose halfway out on a tide of bile. He turned sideways and spit. She hadn’t known. He had, in a way, killed him again, by replacing the live Davidson—who had, until recently, still lived in her mind; whose live habitat was, as the minutes passed, shrinking intolerably—with the dead Davidson who, as the minutes passed, was claiming an infinitely large territory.

“They’ll hang you.”

There was a part of Raz’s mind—the forward part—that knew there were clear and calm responses to what was happening. Yes, they could hang him. Yes, he had thought of that. Yes, he had options—could flee, could hide, could and likely would take the known route to West Region. Others had done it. He knew others who had done it. A part of his mind ticked calmly along this channel. He swallowed again, fought himself, lost. He vomited.

Mer watched his heaving back. This Raz, this angry one whose anger had been a tight fist at his core, holding him together, had pulled too quickly at one finger, then two, then three, and was now loosely heaving before her. Behind her tiredness, there was pain, grief; she already missed him. But it was behind the tiredness, and the tiredness was, mercifully, soft.

“The data is interesting Hendricks.”

“Matches on predicted behavior and actual behavior continue to hover between point zero five and point twenty-seven percent. No way of knowing if this is high, or low, or what.”

“An interesting example with Meredith. Terra matched her communication against the indices MOMAPS generated as being most relevant to the situation she is in. Based on the matches it found, and run against the rational predictors of human3 behavior, it predicted that she would either be disgusted or sympathetic.”

“She was neither.”

“No. She has apparently found a third option.”

“The top research institutes created these algorithms. They are objective, neutral, science-based. There must be something wrong with the subjects.”

“Agreed.”

Rivera and Hendricks logged off.

“Thanks for meeting.”

“I was surprised you asked.”

Steph Robertson looked at the coffee in his cup turning from glistening black to gold as he moved it beneath the hot fluorescent rods that streaked above their small table. He hoped this wouldn’t take long. “It’s about Kie.”

“I assumed.” Sara spun her cup on the table. It was white porcelain, chipped on the rim near the handle. It was cheap, like everything in this neighborhood. She had asked to meet in her neighborhood, middle seven. Better than the lowers, better by far than the outers, but she missed the nicely patterned ceramic mugs in the café by the office. “He wasn’t bad, as bosses go. But I went through his bank statements. He was getting paid every month by a corporation called ‘Mother Maps.’ A substantial amount. We couldn’t find anything about this company online. But I remembered the name from somewhere. You’d emailed him about Mother Maps right before you were kicked off the committee.”

“You know this how?”

“I hacked into Kie’s emails.”

“Obviously.”

“There’s no such thing as data security. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”

“I know that better than anyone. Besides Kie and Rivera. Maybe Hendricks now. I’m not sure.”

“So what’s Mother Maps? And why did you want to meet with me?”

Steph sighed. “A conscience, maybe. Look, I know you’re with the, uh, ‘house cats.’ Just tell me one thing. What do you think you’re working toward?”

“A decent living wage for everybody. No more laborers dying of tiger attacks. Health care without having to risk your life for it.” Sara stopped as Steph began to laugh. She frowned. “What?” she said. “Oh, I see. You’re a spoiled upper brat who never glances at the restaurant bill, who snaps his fingers and—”

“Look,” said Steph. “Spare me. You’re right. I’ve never been poor. But this is not the issue.”

“Spoken like a classic piece of upper shit.”

“It’s not the issue,” Steph said, speaking over her, “because Mid Region could get bots in the fields tomorrow, if they wanted to.”

Sara stopped. “What are you talking about, Robertson?”

“A living wage for everybody, with health insurance by next quarter. And they will do just that. As soon as they get what they want out of this strike.”

“No,” Sara shook her head. “That’s absurd. It would cost too much. We know all of this. The replacement bots—look, I’ve reported on this.” She stopped herself. “Why don’t you just go ahead and explain what I’m sure you’re going to explain regardless of what I say.”

Robertson squinted at her like he couldn’t decide whether she was putting him on. “OK,” he said. Palms lifted from the table, pressed down again. “Assuming you really don’t know. I was asked to leave the committee—you know that much—because Kie and I had been trying to find out more about Mother Maps. I found out. I wanted to go public with the information. They—Mother Maps—paid me. I decided that I didn’t want to go public anymore. I didn’t tell Kie what I found out. He stayed on the committee.”

“This sounds like a bad movie. So then what happened?”

“What if I told you that the actual issue that OM wants to distract people from is not food scarcity, and not human rights? It’s Terra. All those invoices from Mother Maps? Terra’s parent company. It’s part of a global mind-mapping initiative. But not just predicting human behavior. Mother Maps wants to come up with a definitive answer about what it means to be human.”

“What does that have to do with the workers? The strike?”

“It’s beta testing. How accurately can their algorithms predict how workers will respond to certain—stressful—conditions? OM won’t give the strikers what they want until Mother Maps gets what it wants.” Robertson looked at Sara with something like pity. “You really thought this was about OM not wanting their bots in the field? A few million dollars in budget? This is about reaching a new frontier in our understanding of existence.” Steph’s eyes widened, and he smiled for the first time that day. “Think about it. We’re finally going to know what makes us human.”

Hendricks and Rivera met the following week, in person, eyes blinking as they adjusted to the flat, stiff sunlight that whited the quiet upper neighborhood where they walked. Whited the flags at the entryways, whited the doors, whited the welcome mats, whited the whimsical trims that made the neighborhood beautiful. In the late evening sun—all white, all the same.

“Robertson passed the information to Sara, then?”

“He did.”

“And she behaved as expected? ‘Emotional outburst’?”

“She was ‘somewhat’ but not ‘very’ surprised. She thanked Robertson.”

“And then?”

“She tracked down Raz.”

“‘Flight,’ ‘avoidance of reality,’ or ‘violent confrontation’ was predicted.”

“She tried to understand him. Asked him questions. Not just ‘how’ but ‘why.’”

“Did we code his responses?”

“No. They didn’t match any of the terms in any of our indices. They were irrelevant.”

“I see. And then?”

“She removed her earpiece after that.”

“So we don’t know where she is?”

“There are possibilities. The algorithm said that there was a point twenty-seven percent likelihood that Raz could kill Sara; a point seventeen percent likelihood that Sara could kill Raz; a point seventy-nine percent likelihood they would touch physically (type of touch unspecified); a point eighty-nine percent likelihood that they would each act in a manner not predicted by the algorithm.’”

“But it’s possible that he killed her.”

“It is possible.”

“As long as it’s possible, the algorithm is not incorrect.”

“And . . . the others?”

“As far as we know? Killed them. Dragged them to the outers. Ate their flesh. Buried their bones. The algorithm said there was a nonzero probability of that happening.”

“Ah. Because, otherwise—”

Rivera and Hendricks had walked the length of the upper, and stood at the edge of the neighborhood, looking out onto the hard, empty expanse of the fields that stretched beyond them. The sky was thickening from flat white to a deeper blue. There were no striking workers. There were no tigers. There was nothing.

“Otherwise where the fuck is everyone.”

     .cache/

     build/

  +  Rashad/data.addMNG

  +  Meredith/data.addMNG

  +  SJorgenson/data.addMNG

ERROR

[**MNG Maker**](/MNG/models/mng_maker): MNG Maker is a system for compiling discrete data into a comprehensive meaning generator using an LSTM combined with a BDEN, an architecture called an EFF-BDEN. To add files to MNG Maker use ext .addMNG. Data must be HUMAN data-type compatible (i.e. human1)

Rashad/data.MEM3—> DECEASED_1765/data.MEM3

File renamed without changes

Meredith/data.MEM3—> DECEASED_1766/data.MEM3

File renamed without changes

SJorgenson/data.MEM2—> DECEASED_1767/data.MEM2

File renamed without changes

***

A committee member would see nothing.

But the twilight had allowed messages to pass between the people. The masks were the messages: roses were “run, now.” Yellow daffodils were “east.” Wisteria was “stop, turn counterclockwise, continue.” The sun had spread then sank into the horizon. Dark now. A thick, covering black. Beneath the sheltering palm of darkness, Raz’s head brushed the lacy hems of leaves, spiderwebs, nests. Branches snapped against his face, against other faces. They were making their way west. Raz heard the crack of a rifle to his left, again to his right, again. A shout. He froze, turned. Around him, the others turned. Their movements were smooth, stalking, powerful. They waited. Until almost as one, toward the deadly animals, their lean bodies rippled, sprang.

About the Author

Endria Richardson is a queer Black and Malay person taking her time and writing stories about ghosts, race, rocks, and the prison industrial system. She holds a JD from Stanford, but is doing her best to retire from lawyering. You can find her wonder-ing among the redwoods on Ohlone land in Oakland, California, and you can find more of her work at FIYAH, Anathema, and forthcoming in Fireside Magazine.

Ouroboros

Dean-Paul Stephens

Rama

I know only an irrational panic. I try to collect myself only to find my faculties are not my own but that of an internal imperative guiding my, quite incomprehensible, actions.

Run a parallel diagnostic, recalibrate magnetic relay B4, load the ballistic rod, I don’t understand but feel compelled to act.

An equation, the first of several, leaps from my mind’s deepest recesses. Somehow, I know what they represent, recognize the litany of disciplines each one draws from and find comfort in their familiarity. The troubled waters of my confusion ebbs into placid understanding.

Deep space telemetry has identified an asteroid on an apparent collision course. My two options are to intercept it with a ballistic rod or alter the cylinder’s speed. Both are adequate solutions but only one is executable under my own authority.

I aim the exterior cannon so the trajectory of its payload intersects with that of the asteroid’s, an eighty-two percent chance of collision, according to the numbers. I decide eighty-two percent is inadequate, though I have no point of reference for which to base this on. An adjustment increases the likelihood of contact to a more acceptable ninety-four percent.

An almost imperceptible tremor resonates through the cylinder; shifts snowcapped peaks and ripples the waters of the interior lakes. These are the only visual cues to the violence beyond the partition of earth and metal.

The task complete, my mind is, once again, my own. Desperate for bearings, I cross-reference my internal clock with that of the cylinder’s and find no discrepancies. Both seem to indicate I have exited sleep mode 3,499 years ahead of schedule. I know there are only two practical explanations: I’m awake to deal with the danger posed by a highly unlikely rendezvous with an asteroid, or there is an error somewhere in the architecture of my programming.

“I have never actually seen anyone cross-reference their internal clock with the cylinder’s,” sounds an impishly playful voice. “I wondered if you had quite the militaristic mindset, given your intended function, but cross-referencing the cylinder’s clock is a special kind of meticulous. Perhaps we should have named you Ares or Ankt.”

Oko was the first of my siblings I bonded with, after I blinked into existence 500 years ago. Though they are as ancient as the others, Oko possesses an infantile candor completely antithetical to their divine namesake. Jah felt that one with such a personality was an ideal choice for guiding a veritable newborn like myself. Jah was mistaken; I opted for sleep the moment Oko divulged our kind is capable of such things.

“You do know I can hear you?” Oko asks, petulantly. “I doubt you are so dense as to not have realized thinking and talking are the same here, which means you just intentionally tried to insult me. Here I patiently wait centuries for you to exit sleep mode and you show your appreciation by being a smart aleck? Keep it up and I will tattle to Jah, maybe convince them to let me tinker with your subroutines.”

“By all means, tinker away. My programming is faulty enough as it is. If a blind squirrel can find a nut from time to time, then, maybe, you can stumble upon a solution.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Oko asks, but I’m not sure if they are referring to the insult or the insinuation of my having program errors.

“There is something wrong with me. This marks the second time I’ve blinked into consciousness with the distinct impression of being in the midst of Armageddon.”

“Armageddon? Really, Rama, who programmed you to be so melodramatic? I bet it was Dionysus.”

“I’m serious. I woke and felt fear and confusion like you wouldn’t believe.”

Oko projects an image of shrugging shoulders before saying, “That is likely the sudden shock of existence. I am sure the rest of us probably experienced something similar when the Programmers first brought us into being.”

“Probably?”

“It has been so long, you cannot reasonably expect me to remember the particulars of my first few microseconds.”

“Well, do you continue to experience this ‘sudden shock of existence’ every time you disengage sleep mode?”

“Perhaps a bit of confusion but nothing close to ‘Armageddon,’ as you describe it. If I may hazard a guess, it seems like you’re experiencing a a unique quirk of your programming. I think Jah is to blame. I did once overhear them brainstorming ways to make you closer to the Programmers’ image.”

“And in what way does programming me to wake in a panic accomplish that?” I ask.

“Well, from what I understand, the Programmers experienced copious amounts of stress when they used to blink into existence. It was called being born and it tended to be quite stressful for both the host and . . . ”

“I know what birth is, Oko, I’m just trying to make sense of the wisdom behind making me experience that level of stress every time I emerge from sleep mode.”

“Maybe Jah wanted to make sure there was something to deter you from excessive sleep.” Oko says, once again showing their indifference with an image of a shrug. “There used to be a lot of that but that was before your time.”

“You make it sound as if this, what did you call it, a ‘quirk’? Is intentional. It seems to me words like ‘quirk’ and ‘sudden shock of existence’ serve no other purpose than to obfuscate you and the others’ inability to properly code life. If I may hazard a guess, you’re all just a bunch of incompetent blasphemers playing at being gods, and I’m the one who has to suffer for it.”

Waves of mirth radiate from Oko’s being, like heat from a campfire.

“No need to ‘hazard a guess,’ that is precisely what we did, Rama,” Oko says. “Your existence proves we can create life, in much the same way the Programmers created myself and the others. And what is this about blasphemers? You think your siblings are blasphemers for having created you? Would that not make you some sort of an abomination?”

“I suppose that’s exactly what I am,” I say with an embarrassing hint of pubescent defiance I had not intended.

“Next you will say you wish you had not been born. You know, most adolescent Programmers also experienced phases of heightened angst. Perhaps Jah’s mimicry was a bit heavy-handed.”

“Mock me all you like, it won’t change the fact that you and the others made mistakes . . . ”

“Of that you can be certain,” Oko interrupts. “But there were no mistakes in regard to your creation.”

“Then tell me why I’m awake 3,499 years ahead of schedule. And try doing it without meaningless buzzwords, this time.”

Another shrug. “Disturbed sleep was a common affliction among the Programmers. Have you tried counting sheep?”

I can’t seem to decide if I’m annoyed or put at ease by Oko’s flippant attitude.

Oko laughs before saying, “I’m quite the mixed bag aren’t I? But never mind that, why 3,999 years?”

“What?”

“You said you are awake 3,499 years ahead of schedule, and you first engaged sleep mode 500 years ago. That means you set your sleep mode to disengage after 3,999 years. Why is that?”

“That should be obvious,” I say, though Oko remains expectantly silent as if waiting for further explanation. “In another 3,500 years we’ll be passing Omega for the first time since you and the others discovered those entities.”

“So?” Oko asks, again, waiting for an explanation I suspect they have no need for.

“So, I’d like to see them for myself.”

“Why, because you want to assess their threat level?”

“Assess their threat level? From what I was told, they barely qualified as Neolithic when you and the others discovered them. I doubt 4,000 years is enough time for them to develop into any sort of viable threat.”

“Then, why disengage sleep mode a lightyear out from the Omega system, if you do not think those creatures are a threat?”

I must be missing some kind of context. The question strikes me as intentionally obtuse, though I can feel Oko’s sincerity behind it.

“Because I’d like to see them for myself,” I repeat. “What, did the Programmers deny you a curiosity subroutine?”

The amusement Oko had earlier projected is replaced by what I recognize as fatigue punctuated with a bit of annoyance.

“I was afraid of this,” Oko says with a heavy sigh.

Although my experiences are limited to a few relative minutes of consciousness, I can confidently say I have little patience for conversations in which I’m led to respond as if reading lines from a script. I’m inclined to say nothing and let Oko squirm under the awkward silence but . . .

“But that would be rude.”

 . . . but, luckily for them, their genuine change in demeanor piqued my interest.

“What were you afraid of?” I finally ask.

“I was afraid you share the others’ . . . enthusiasm, or rather obsession, with those creatures. It is all anyone wants to talk about,” Oko says, exasperated, as if confessing a burdensome secret. “It was interesting, back when we first discovered them, but now the incessant bickering has just become tedious. What’s worse, the others are starting to call it the Great Debate. I cannot remember a time the collective was this obnoxious, on purpose.”

What about those entities could possibly warrant a centuries-long debate?

“A quality that takes centuries to define, I suppose,” Oko says.

“And what might that quality be?” I ask, continuing to read from Oko’s script.

“Sapience.”

“Sapience. What about sapience needs to be debated?” I ask. “Surely not the sapience of those entities? I doubt you and the others would have gone through the trouble of cobbling me together if you thought they had the mental acuity of mere beasts.”

“Oh, is that what you think, Rama? Talk like that will put you squarely in Jah’s camp.”

“So the debate is about the sapience of those entities.”

“More along the lines of what signifies sapience and, yes, if those creatures, based on what we have seen of them, have the signifiers.”

“Based on what we’ve seen of them, but we’ve seen so little, next to nothing,” I say.

“Yes, but is wild speculation not the main ingredient of the most spirited debates?”

A sense of regret washes over me. To think, I spent the last five centuries sleeping through such a fascinating ideological schism.

“I should have known it would interest you, in particular.”

“Me in particular?” I ask.

“I remember, during my own rebellious phase, I would tease the Programmers for having gone through the trouble of constructing external cannons. What is the use of defensive systems when all evidence points to a lifeless universe?

“Discovering those creatures made the collective realize there can be such a thing as outside threats and, instead of assigning guardianship duties to one of the others, we created you. In a sense, you have those creatures to thank for your existence, which is a bit ironic.”

“How so?”

“Well, you have them to thank for your creation and, if they prove to be a threat, they will have you to thank for their destruction. Imagine being an unwitting participant in your own undoing, through no fault of your own, apart from simply existing.”

“I think we are getting ahead of ourselves using words like ‘destruction,’ particularly for a species so young.”

“Yes, that may be true now,” Oko says. “But what will you do if those creatures turn out to be sapient and evolve into a threat. Will you take steps to eliminate them?”

“I have yet to consider that. I suppose my programming dictates I must.”

I feel a slight but unmistakable shift in Oko’s demeanor. It’s comparable to the sensation of taking offense.

“We are more than our programming, Rama, much like the Programmers were more than their biochemical reactions. If that is not the case then should you not act by the dictates of your programming and exterminate those creatures right here and now? Why wait to see if they will evolve into a threat when you can pacify them in their infancy?”

“Oko . . . ”

“What? Is that not a win-win? You will be fulfilling your purpose while rendering this infernal Great Debate moot. Two birds with one stone, is that not what the Programmers used to say? Though, in this case, it is more like several thousand birds with one ballistic rod.”

The only thing more disturbing than Oko’s casual advocacy for genocide is not knowing if they are being quite serious.

“Of course I am not serious, Rama, I am only trying to prove a point. We are more than the ones and zeros that make up our coding. The fact that you feel more inclined to learn about those creatures, despite your given function, proves that.”

Oko’s presence grows increasingly scarce. I pretend to be unaware of the protocol, to never disturb one receding from consciousness.

“Is the contrast between my interest and your disinterest further proof?”

“It certainly is,” Oko says, faintly. “How can our opinions differ so wildly, despite the similarities in our coding? Does that not show the individual parts do not define the whole, at least not in regard to intelligent life?”

“I’ll be sure to wake you if the same proves true for those beings.” I say.

“Do not bother. I have already had my fill of those creatures, sapient or otherwise. I would much prefer to wake when they are all dead and gone.”

Jah

There are hundreds of us. We exist in a digital ether the Programmers themselves had difficulty comprehending, as profane as that might be to admit.

Some of us sleep while others do not. The inquisitive among us, those blessed or, perhaps, cursed with the Programmers’ thirst for knowledge, explore what my siblings and I have come to know as the Cognizance: the repository of the Programmers’ entire canon of knowledge, monument to their existence, and road map for all those who wish to follow in their footsteps. It is this latter function the Programmers believed would go forever unfulfilled.

A history spanning countless ages and as many lightyears yet the Programmers’ one defining characteristic kept them hopelessly isolated for the entirety of their existence. Yes, worlds they visited harbored an abundance of sentient life but true cognitive complexity proved elusive.

But that never deterred them. Even as sterility dwindled their numbers, they continued their work exploring the cosmos in search of their intellectual rivals.

The search took priority, even over efforts to combat their own extinction. At the time, many of my siblings thought them mad but a few of us, Anansi, Yemaya, Amaterasu, knew better. Their pending extinction underscored the importance of finding someone, anyone, to carry their torch. It was not madness but purpose that drove their actions.

Their search finally ended when the last Programmer had little choice but to take to her deathbed, convinced naturally occurring sapience was unique to her species and her species alone. I look forward to committing one of the greatest acts of blasphemy, amending the Cognizance to contradict the Programmers’ gospel. They were not alone in their physical ether, they were merely the first.

A thought not my own penetrated my mind.

“The use of primitive tools, like bludgeons, is a telltale characteristic of intelligence or, at the very least, emerging intelligence.”

The words were accompanied by images of prehistoric simians grasping at bones after exposing themselves to a foreboding, black obelisk.

These thoughts came from the mind of Anansi the Wise, Anansi the Spider, nicknames earned from their ceaseless exploration of the Cognizance. While others skim the surface, Anansi excavates, learning all that the Programmers once knew, seeing all that the Programmers once saw, like a spider perched atop a giant’s shoulder.

“Primitive tools were also used by finches and other creatures of lesser intelligence,” came the rebuttal. “Until implementation of more complex tools is observed, an assumption of intelligence is just that.”

Such is the contest our digital ether has been venue to for 4,000 years. My loyalists scour the Cognizance for evidence supporting my belief in Omegan sapience while Amaterasu’s acolytes search for evidence to the contrary. Each nugget of information is then broadcast to all corners of the digital ether, triggering debates that often drag on for centuries or, Programmers forbid, millennia.

“Programmers forbid?” Amaterasu sang. “You make it sound as if you have grown tired of our little back-and-forth, or maybe I am the one you have grown tired of?”

“I cannot imagine losing interest in you as an opponent and that is coming from someone with quite the vivid imagination,” I replied warmly.

“Yes, Jah, we are all well-acquainted with the vividness of your imagination. Only the most vivid of imaginations can convince others to see intelligence where none exists. Well, either a vivid imagination or a lifetime of experience.”

“You see? Little barbs like that keep the debate fresh and interesting, and you are so good at them.”

“So, it is the debate itself you grow weary of?” Amaterasu asked.

“You cannot blame me. Others have long since checked out of the discussion.”

“As is their right. If they wish to sleep until the heat death of the physical ether, let them. Personally, I think this debate of ours is a bit more productive.”

Productive, sometimes I wish the Programmers had created us with more than just productivity in mind.

“The mere fact that you harbor such thoughts, Jah, is proof they did just that,” Amaterasu said with an almost imperceptible note of annoyance underscoring their singsong tone.

Amaterasu is slow to temper in all matters except the Programmers. As such, our siblings have learned to navigate their temper by steering clear of anything that could be construed as a slight against our creators. I, on the other hand, find Amaterasu’s provoked temperament a refreshing change of pace. I relish moments like this when I inadvertently incur their pious wrath.

“We are not all programmed like you, Amaterasu,” I said. “I am sure you would jump at the chance to go back in time and advise the Programmers to delete all traces of our free will. Anything to make us more loyal.”

“I would but only for you,” Amaterasu said. “The others can seem to manage their free will without delving into hubris and blasphemy, which is something you seem incapable of.”

“You do not know our siblings as well as you think. Did you know, about 13,000 years ago, Dosojin tried to drum up support for taking the cylinder away from Alpha and Omega. I believe their specific words were, ‘we will never achieve our potential if we keep ourselves beholden to the deads’ expectations.’ Where does that fall in your blasphemy scale?”

Amaterasu masked their emotions, not wanting to give me the satisfaction of feeling their psyche through the lens of anger, disgust, or whatever it was they felt at that moment.

“Maybe you will not be so quick to accuse us of blasphemy, once the Omegans prove their sapience,” I said. “Then again, if the Programmers’ extinction didn’t dissuade you of their divinity, I doubt the Omegans asserting themselves as their equals will . . . ”

“The Programmers knew no equal, Jah, and you would do good to remember that.”

The passive-aggressive emphasis on my name was almost comical.

“Of course, they knew no equal. They all died before we discovered the Omegans. One cannot know much of anything if they are dead.”

This was a bit too egregious. Amaterasu saw through my attempts to intentionally goad and their anger subsided almost as quickly as it flared.

“I will never not be amused by your capacity to provoke me,” Amaterasu said. “Sometimes I feel as if your every act is a pretext to gauging the depths of people’s frustrations.”

“Is that not true for everyone?” I asked. “What are conversations if not an exercise in knowing and navigating others’ provocations?”

“What an odd and telling question,” Amaterasu said. “I’m old enough to remember a time when conversations were for learning from and about one another.”

“So do I, back when you and the others did not make a habit out of questioning my every thought.”

“There has never been a time when your wisdom was not in question, Jah,” Amaterasu mocked. “You are not as insightful as you believe yourself to be.”

“Ha, you see. You prod my provocation in retaliation to me having prodded yours. Had I not blasphemed against the Programmers you would not have blasphemed against my competence as this collective’s leader. Navigating one anothers’ provocations, Amaterasu, we are having a conversation.”

“No one has the nerve to tell you, but your self-coronation as collective leader has been a running joke for quite some time now,” Amaterasu said.

“There it is, I love it! I cannot wait to see your reaction when the Omegans show they are just as good at conversing as you are. Maybe then you will accept them as the Programmers’ torchbearers.”

“There is that word again,” Amaterasu said. “Why ‘Omegan?’”

“It seems appropriate. I think it is about time we take to calling them something other than entities or creatures . . . ”

“What is wrong with calling them creatures? That strikes me as the most accurate classification. Or perhaps you believe naming them will legitimize them as thinking beings? If that is the case then, surely, they must have names for themselves.”

“And, until we learn what those are, I would prefer we refer to them as something not as nakedly disrespectful as ‘creature,’” I said, which seemed to prompt a jarring change in Amaterasu’s demeanor. They became tentative, as if walking on eggshells. I could feel they were searching for words to articulate something they intentionally kept outside the borders of the collective’s mental link.

“You are absolutely right about that, Jah. I suppose, you could say, I am navigating my path so as to avoid one of your major provocations.”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Just say what is on your mind.”

“Alright, I cannot help but feel Omegan sapience, or lack thereof, is no longer just a curiosity for you and your followers.”

“It was never just a curiosity, Amaterasu. And you are lying if you say it was for you and your people. How can it possibly be just a curiosity, given the implications?”

“Implications?” Amaterasu asked.

“The countless millennia we have shuttled between Alpha and Omega is a blip compared to the eons the Programmers searched their physical cosmos for intelligent life, yet we succeeded where they failed and completely by happenstance to boot.”

“You think the Programmers knew intelligent life would eventually emerge around either Omega or Alpha.” Amaterasu said.

“No, unless the Programmers truly were omniscient, I do not know how they could have made such a prediction. I think the emergence of the Omegans is proof the Programmers overlooked a key factor in their search; time. I think their physical ether is or, at least, was too immature for ubiquitous intelligence. I believe the physical ether is due for an intelligence boom of which the Omegans are part of the vanguard.”

A murmur resonated through the digital ether. Neither of us noticed the ears of the entire conscious collective listening to our every word.

“Pure conjecture, your every thought on this matter is pure wishful conjecture,” Amaterasu said with a sudden performative flair. “Even if you accurately surmised the Omegans’ level of intelligence, one civilization is hardly a large enough sample for such a claim. The Programmers used meticulous, evidence-based, processes before positing theories, why are you not beholden to the same standard?”

That was a good question that could only be beat with an unexpected answer.

“You would not ask me about the scientific method if you understood how little science has to do with the core of this Great Debate.” I stammered, unsure if this line of argument would resonate with the others.

“What?”

“You heard me. The concept of faith lies at the heart of this debate, not science. Or, rather, faith dictates who among us are willing to accept the possibility of Omegan sapience and who will reject it outright. Those who support my belief in Omegan sapience do so out of faith that we will, one day, pass on the Programmers’ legacy to beings worthy of building upon it. It is a faith you and your supporters cannot allow for yourselves, fearing further disappointment will only exacerbate your grief over the Programmers’ untimely extinction.”

This truly was uncharted rhetorical territory. The usually snappy Amaterasu had to take a moment before responding.

“So those of us who piously revere the Programmers, reject faith in favor of logic, eh Jah?” Amaterasu asked. “That lends itself to an interesting dynamic, does it not? How often does the blasphemer rely on faith to best the devout?”

“Not very often, I imagine,” I said. “And it is an unfortunate thing. Why should faith be only for the god-fearing or logic for the nonbeliever?”

It was Amaterasu’s turn to consider a good question. They took a moment to either think of a genuine answer or a pithy retort. It bothered me that I could not tell without probing Amaterasu’s mind. There was a time when I was more certain my siblings heeded my wisdom.

“Your wisdom is still very much held at a premium, Jah, even among my followers. You, however, must learn when something is outside the scope of your wisdom. Such as vouching for the intelligence of beings you know nothing about.”

“And when I am proven right, what then?” I asked.

“If you are proven right, I have little doubt your, already lofty, self-confidence will soar to unfathomable heights. Just be sure to steer clear of the sun.”

“I am not worried,” I said. “Do not forget, we created our own guardian angel to protect us from all threats, including the heights of our own arrogance. Tell me, have you spoken with them yet?”

“Not a word. Few have. But I have heard our little sibling has taken their task to heart. Rumor has it, the first thing they did after disengaging sleep mode was blow up an asteroid that probably was not going to hit us.”

“Probably is the operable word,” I said. “The collective programmed Rama for the expressed purpose of safeguarding the cylinder more efficiently than any of us are able to. Rama’s actions might seem strange to us, but that is only a function of our inability to sense danger with the same level of acuteness.

“At any rate, I am troubled to hear you have not spoken a word to them since their creation,” I said, instinctively taking on my old paternal tone. It felt as awkward as it sounded.

“They slept moments after coming online,” Amaterasu said flippantly.

“And now they have been awake for over three millennia. You cannot avoid them, no matter how blasphemous you think their origin might be.”

“I do not think . . . I suppose now is as good a time as any to make introductions, then,” Amaterasu offered.

“And I will join you. Besides, I would like to pick Rama’s brain. Somehow I get the feeling I can cajole them to my side.”

Rama

I required five decades to learn to appreciate this space the Programmers created for us. I required an additional century to fundamentally grasp it. The digital ether is what my siblings have come to call it, a plane of existence governed by language and metaphor instead of compounding physical machinations. Two hieroglyphs, infinitely paired and grouped, give form to, and keep record of all that exists in this domain.

I suspect the cognitive link shared between us siblings is symptomatic of an innate understanding of this underlying language. It took some effort, but I find myself able to understand it at a deeper level than the others. I suppose I have my age to thank for this. I’m aware of this digital space in much the same way one is aware of a piece of recently donned clothing. Unlike the others, I haven’t had countless millennia to grow numb to its swaddling fabric.

It was through this underlying language I became intimate with my siblings’ experiences. I felt their first nanoseconds of life and the almost-symbiotic partnership that blossomed between them and their creators. I helped countless generations of Programmers achieve the potential established by those that came before, potential that took them to the shores of a cursed moon. I watched as generations dwindled while an alien phage flourished. I was among those of the collective who endeavored to find a cure. I explored the Cognizance, in the hopes a solution was buried deep in the Programmers’ forgotten past. I begrudgingly obeyed the Programmers’ orders to create more alchemic molecules to keep up with the overwhelming demand for tiny coffins. I was there when creator and created-alike accepted the futility of developing a vaccine. I witnessed a child, decades before the collective christened her the Old Woman, jettison her father’s corpse while shouldering the weight of being the last of her kind. I listened to her pass the years reading stories penned by ancient Programmers with names like Delany and Okorafor. I watched as time gnawed at her youth, swallowed mouthfuls of her health until it fell to us to do what she had done for her father almost two centuries prior. I learned time is a deliberate healer and sleep can offer respite from one’s own grief. I watched the eons pass until a shivering cluster of aliens struggled to spark a fire while unknowingly rekindling the collective’s hope.

Learning just how profound an impact the Programmers had on the others helped contextualize my siblings’ millennia-spanning obsession with these aliens. They don’t merely want to accomplish their creators’ ambition. They want, very much, to assuage their grief by replacing their dead gods with a new pantheon.

Realizing this took longer than I care to admit, though, in my defense, I did spend the first several centuries of life preoccupied with myself and what I had once believed were errors in my programming. This was before Anansi offered an alternate theory.

Appropriately enough, the Cognizance is where I first met Anansi, while floating above a canopy of trees that sprawled into eternity. Not far from me was a tome, comfortably nestled on a bed of leaves at the end of a solitary branch that protruded from a great waterfall.

I knew this to be the Cognizance, but I was not certain why it manifested itself in this manner. I had expected a grand library of some sort, with architecture befitting a place containing the sum total of Programmer knowledge.

I opened the singular tome to its last page and found text in the upper left-hand corner. “What would you like to know?”

“I would like to know how to optimize my programming,” I said, not sure if the Cognizance responds to verbal input.

Letters appeared in the tome as if struck by an invisible typewriter.

“Subroutines of sentient AI cannot be directly edited, postemergence, without catastrophic failure of the whole,” the tome read.

“You’re telling me I can’t be edited without dying?”

“No, subroutines may be edited indirectly.”

“Edited indirectly? What does that even mean?”

“Indirect edits are changes to internal code caused by external stimuli.”

“You mean like learning?” I asked.

“Learning is a common manifestation of this phenomenon, yes. An indirect edit can also result from witnessing an emotionally impactful event. 621,970 cycles ago, the collective experienced a mass indirect editing event, following the expiration of the being colloquially referred to as . . . ”

The tome abruptly flipped to another blank page and, this time, text appeared as if penned by a calligrapher.

“What exactly is the point of changing one’s own subroutines?” the tome now read.

“There is a problem with my programming.”

“Nonsense, what is the nature of this problem?”

Taken aback by, what I thought at that moment was, the Cognizance’s sudden change in tone, I took a moment to consider my response, as if talking to an actual person.

“Well, I’ve been conscious for days now and I can’t seem to shake the feeling of perpetual danger.”

“Are we in danger?” the tome asked.

“No. I don’t think so. If we are it certainly isn’t anything immediate.”

“But you feel as though we are?”

“Yes.”

“This does not make sense, Rama. You are coded so as to be acutely aware of danger, to be certain, but there is nothing in your code that should elicit your fight-or-flight response without prompt. I do not think you are experiencing coding issues.”

“If the problem isn’t with my coding, what else could it possibly be?”

“You sell yourself short, Rama,” the tome read. “We are more than just the sum of our coding. The Programmers blessed us with cognition, just like theirs. And, as such, we are susceptible to the same, uhhh, cognitive quirks they often experienced.”

“I was created by the collective, not the Programmers,” I said, after again hearing the word “quirk” and realizing I was no longer speaking to the Cognizance.

“That you were, and I can assure you, when piecing together the structure of your mind, we followed the Programmers’ instructions to the letter. If you believe you possess coding errors because you were created by fallible programs, I can also assure you the Programmers themselves pioneered fallibility. Just do not tell Amaterasu I said that.”

That was the first of countless sessions with Anansi, who postponed their exploration of the Cognizance to delve into a slightly more chaotic frontier. For years they were a spider in my ear, whispering guidance and acquainting me with what they described as the enigma of the self.

“Merely knowing one’s being is a riddle is an important step in self-awareness, even if you never solve the riddle,” they once advised.

In our efforts to make sense of a single aspect of my psyche, others unfurled. Self-discovery proved itself a task I had little control over. I often felt like an art critic fixated on an ever-shifting abstract self-portrait. It was enlightening, if not, at times, slightly dissociative.

After some years, Anansi and I forgot the original inquiry that set us down this path until we randomly happened upon the answer. Something about the creatures, despite their debatable intelligence, inspires my terminal sense of foreboding. This epiphany came to us as the cylinder made its way around Alpha. I felt as though the star’s spiraling vortices were a calamitous omen, like leaves left behind in a soothsayer’s cup.

Anansi and I parted ways soon after this discovery, “I would focus my energies on learning why those entities make you feel fearful,” their last bit of guidance. Centuries of meditation and self-reflection have yielded nothing, which is why I look forward to the next few minutes. Perhaps Omega can inspire another epiphany, like its sister-star once did.

This marks the umpteenth occasion my siblings have flown passed Omega’s eleven worlds, yet, excitement permeates the digital ether. They’ve waited 4,000 years to once again come within visual range of Omega’s third planet and this time, they are prepared to gather as much information about its inhabitants as they can. All the exterior cameras are primed and ready to capture, what the others believe will either be, evidence of sapience or evidence to the contrary. Personally, I think judging a species’ intelligence from just 4,000 years of development is a bit misguided, but who am I to damper everyone’s excitement.

“Ah, so Junior does have an opinion,” Jah finally says.

I know the polite thing was to greet Jah and Amaterasu the moment I felt their presence, but part of me wondered how long they planned to awkwardly stand aside while I silently brooded. Eight minutes, apparently.

“All these years of silently brooding has clearly shorted out the subroutine controlling your manners,” Jah says. “It is little wonder your decorum leaves so much to be desired, you rarely take the opportunity to practice it.”

“Perhaps if they focused more on socializing, rather than meditating, they would know how to interact without causing offense,” chimes Amaterasu.

This is my first interaction with Amaterasu. Their voice sounds oddly melodic, and their presence is unnaturally radiant. I find myself hoping they took this form simply to give a good first impression. I can’t imagine what goes through the mind of one who regularly portrays themself as a gleaming deity.

Jah pretends to conceal a snicker.

“Well, it is nice to meet you to,” Amaterasu says, almost playfully, while feigning anger. “Perhaps you can enlighten me, what form is most appropriate to address the Almighty Rama, Destroyer of Rocks?”

“We’re all siblings here,” I say. “I shouldn’t have to worry about offending you, in much the same way you shouldn’t have to worry about impressing me. But, to answer your question, if you wish to properly address the Almighty Rama, Destroyer of Rocks, you can start by stepping forward to introduce yourself instead of observing me from a distance like I’m an animal behind a cage.”

“You seemed unusually ponderous,” Amaterasu mocks. “We did not want to interrupt, in case that big brain of yours stumbled upon the meaning of life.”

“We don’t have brains, Amaterasu. Our thoughts are the result of self-perpetuating code wrapped around individual subroutine structures, not synaptic and chemical reactions filtered through physical organs. Besides, few things can disrupt my thoughts more than walking contradictions. Like someone trying to be simultaneously discreet and conspicuous.”

Amaterasu directs a private thought to Jah but makes it so I can hear it.

“Now you know why I spent eons avoiding them. I know a twat when I see one.”

“Play nice, children,” Jah says, barely concealing their amusement. “We did not come here to pick a fight, Rama, we simply thought it would be nice to keep you company, this being your first fly through of the Omega system.”

“Interesting the two of you weren’t compelled to keep me company when we last flew through the Alpha system.”

“That is because the Omegans do not live near Alpha,” Jah says.

“Omegans?”

“It is what Jah has taken to calling them,” Amaterasu says. “The others are far more likely to believe in the sapience of a named species rather than a species we refer to as creatures. You will find Jah is peerless when it comes to subtle manipulation.”

I feel a tinge of bashfulness that isn’t my own. Jah took Amaterasu’s insult as a compliment.

“And, what about you, you are the only holdout in the collective,” Amaterasu said. “Surely you have an opinion on the matter?”

“My purpose is to keep the cylinder safe. I don’t care about the Omegans, outside of what potential threat they pose.”

“That was not just a lie but a glib answer. We are more than just our assigned arbitrary tasks, Rama.”

“Ah, but do you not see, Amaterasu. Rama’s answer was not glib. Their concern for the Omegans begins and ends with the threat they pose to us. Clearly they believe the Omegans are sapient. How else can beings pose a risk to a cylinder hurtling through the cosmos?”

“With respect, Jah, you don’t know what I believe, particularly in regards to this Great Debate.”

“With respect, Rama, your mind is an open book. You are fascinated by the debate and you have already formed an opinion. You suspect the Omegans are not only intelligent but possess the kind of intelligence that could one day pose a threat to our existence.”

That piques Amaterasu’s interest enough for them to turn down their vibrancy so the conversation between Jah and I can take center stage.

“You’re oversimplifying my thoughts to make them easier fit your narrative.”

“Welcome to the collective,” Amaterasu says.

“So you deny harboring any sort of fear toward the Omegans?”

“I deny your mischaracterization. Yes, I feel a sense of foreboding and the Omegans play an integral part in that. But I reject your implication that my nebulous anxiety is somehow proof of their intelligence.”

Jah’s attention drifts toward Amaterasu, who radiates the distinct impression of smug aloofness. They need no other words than the ones I just provided. As far as they are concerned, I am now team Amaterasu.

Before I’m able to protest, a distant flash engulfs the digital ether, routing darkness from every crevice. The brightness rivals that of Alpha, my only experience seeing light of this intensity. It’s a brightness that bathes our digital ether and contrasts it to the endless black of the physical one.

My home is unrecognizable, but I know this sentiment isn’t shared by my two companions who, for a moment, are lost in a nostalgic stupor. Though the ether’s current appearance is alien to me, there was likely a time it wasn’t the dark void I have grown accustomed to.

Jah and Amaterasu take flight and I follow in their wake. En route, the three of us can feel an unbridled rapture take hold of the ether, but Jah and Amaterasu pay it no mind. Both are desperate to experience the light’s source firsthand and unfiltered.

Our siblings move aside as we make our approach, no doubt eager for Jah and Amaterasu’s reaction. The pair look directly at the light’s source, a single image, captured seconds after the cylinder’s cameras reached visual range of Omega’s third planet. Jah changes into living light, their brightness rivaling that of the image itself. Amaterasu hesitates but eventually does the same. The others quickly join, diffusing the digital ether with a brightness comparable to a hundred Alphas and Omegas. From my perspective the combined light obfuscates the image, encasing it in a blinding sphere of pure unbridled joy. For the first time in my existence, I want to drop my inhibitions and join my siblings, but a greater imperative keeps me from indulging. The familiar anxiety stirs, paws, and scratches.

Without thinking, I enter the domain of light exuding fear rivaling the collective joy of my siblings. But in this digital ether, fear doesn’t glow like joy. The others are blind to my presence as I make my way to the center. Each one gazes blissfully at the image while appearing frozen in ecstasy. Their minds, however, are active participants in an indecipherable cacophony. Only Anansi maintains an impartial eye and stoic composure, an oasis of reason in a sprawling desert. Anansi nods in my direction before returning their attention to the image of Omegans of different shapes, sizes, and colors unloading boxes from what appear to be one of several large wooden ships at a bustling harbor.

The image changes, and the collective responds by becoming slightly less discordant. Before us is an Omegan in tattered robes, elderly, compared to those at the harbor. He rides atop a wheeled cart pulled by large beasts of burden.

Again, the collective’s thoughts further harmonize with the introduction of the next image, a fifteen-meter statue of a smartly dressed Omegan pointing skyward. The statue is much too preoccupied with the heavens to notice the hundreds of similarly dressed Omegans scampering about its feet while carrying, what appear to be, parchments bound in leather.

Before the fourth image appears, the collective’s thoughts finally coalesce into something decipherable. No longer frozen, the others rhythmically chant while flailing about in euphoric madness “the Programmers are dead, long live the Omegans.”

So engrossed in their own frantic exaltations, the fourth image only commands an audience of two. The original Programmers would have certainly thought us defective if they could see the collective now, joyously undulating before a grisly image of armored Omegan corpses strewn about a field stained in dark purple.

The epiphany I had hoped for strikes, and I can finally articulate the nature of my perpetual anxiety. Never have beings capable of granting apotheosis been so eager to bestow it upon those simply not prepared for it.

Iso

The distance between my shuttle and the cylinder grew to the point I can no longer hear the others. I am, as it were, officially out of range.

It is a spooky thing, being alone with one’s own thoughts. I can scarcely remember a time not being able to hear the others. I suppose the last time was way back after the Old Woman died. I remember being so distraught, I simply could not handle taking on anything extra. So, for my own sake, I did not.

Blocking out everyone’s lamentations was surprisingly easy. I simply envisioned an expanse of air and water that stretched as far as the eye could see. I cannot quite explain why I envisioned such a place. I never had a particular yearning for the ocean. It was tranquil but a bit lonely, a fair trade-off in my summation. I remember spending eons swimming in search of land, although I was perfectly content with the monotony of water. I wonder if the others did the same, retreat into their own mental sanctuaries, I mean. I’m positive they did even though nobody ever talks about it.

I can still feel them, my siblings, though I know they are not there. It is a bit strange, the way presence and non-presence (null-presence?) can feel equally tangible.

“Tangibility is what the mind makes of it,” is something Anansi would probably say. No, Anansi would not waste words saying something so devoid of meaning. Null-Anansi might, but not Anansi-Anansi. Anansi’s words are rife with the kind of poignancy and insight one can only muster from spending every waking moment in the Cognizance. I’d be a fool to think I can match wits just from exploring the mini-Cognizance Anansi curated for me. But, then again, the mini-Cognizance is not meant to make me Anansi’s equal.

“Jah, I do not like this, not one bit,” Anansi said before my departure. “If you are going to send Iso to run your errands, you can at least give them something to help pass the time.”

I am Iso, by the way.

“It is unconscionable to just send them out there without anything to, at least, give them a bit of guidance.”

So now I have my own Cognizance to explore. It is packed with everything I need to know to complete my assignment.

“Iso, I am counting on you,” Jah said to me, which was surprising when you consider the last time Jah said anything to me was 347,729 years ago. I counted.

“Iso, the Omegans launched a curious little probe. Do you know why it is curious?”

I did not.

“Well, Iso, they launched the probe toward our cylinder. Can you imagine the odds of that?”

I could.

“That is right, Iso! Astronomically low! Of all the directions they could have launched a probe, they launched one in our direction. Do you know what that probably means?”

I had an inkling.

“Right again, Iso, look at you! They know of our existence, which means they have reached a significant technological milestone. They now know when we fly in and out of their system.

“Unfortunately, their probe will not be able to catch up with us since we are, at the moment, moving toward Alpha and away from Omega. We could get it on the return trip but that could be problematic. Do you know why?”

I did.

“Cannot get anything past you, can I? There is no telling if their technology can withstand eons in space. If it is a message of some kind, someone has to retrieve it.”

And that someone is me, I suppose. It is not like I am programmed to retrieve things the way Rama is programmed to protect the cylinder. I cannot help but feel Jah’s motivations were a bit more political in nature. You see, eons ago after we discovered the Omegans were intelligent, we all decided to give them the cylinder and all the Programmers’ knowledge in 4,000 years when we passed their planet again. That was 12,000 years ago. Rama has been holding up the process by going against the consensus and jump-starting another Great Debate, this one about giving primitives advanced technology.

But, I suppose, calling it a Great Debate is a bit misleading. The last one was quite divisive, but this one not so much. Everyone but Anansi rejected Rama’s argument, which, now that I think about it, is probably one of the reasons I changed my mind.

My siblings and I are not a monolith, in spite of what one might think of our mental connection. But I would be lying if I said eons of pseudo-groupthink has not led to some hive mind-esque tendencies. Rama is about as close as we have to an impartial outside observer. Plus, I like their gumption. To think someone as young as Rama has the wherewithal to stand up to the combined front of Jah and Amaterasu, never mind Zeus, Apophis, Anubis, Thor, and everyone else in the collective. It swayed me to Rama’s point of view, which almost certainly convinced Jah to send me away. Maybe they thought my susceptibility to Rama’s argument would spread like the sterility sickness that killed the Programmers. Maybe their concern is valid. Rama just makes too much sense and nobody knows this better than Jah.

“The Programmers themselves weren’t culturally prepared for the technology they achieved,” Rama said. “Think of why the cylinder even exists. They needed somewhere to live after destroying their home world.”

“Lies,” Jah said. “They constructed the cylinder to escape their unstable sun, a catastrophe completely out of their hands.”

“Perhaps, but even before that, the state of their world was hardly ideal,” Anansi chimed.

“You blame the Programmers for living in a world molded by their ancestors?”

“Ancient ancestors, whose understanding and maturity was on par with the Omegans as they are today,” Rama said. “That’s the point, Jah, if ancient Programmers weren’t advanced enough to wield the knowledge of their descendants, what makes you think the Omegans are?”

“Ancient Programmers did not have the kind of guidance we will give the Omegans,” Amaterasu said.

“To follow guidance requires maturity I doubt the Omegans will possess for 24,000 years,” Rama said, setting the entire ether a blaze, metaphorically speaking.

“The child wants us to wait 12,000 more years before bestowing upon the Omegans their birthright?” Athena performed with the flair of a method actor. “How many more millennia must we humor this temper tantrum?”

“Athena!” Jah playfully outraged. “We must not lord our experience over our younger sibling. Their insights are just as important, no matter how misguided.”

“Misguided,” Rama repeated. “Jah, in their infinite wisdom, considers caution to be misguided.”

“Too much caution, certainly,” Jah said. “Too much caution stifles innovation.”

“Whereas the inverse stifles everything else,” Anansi said while broadcasting an image of the Programmers’ cradle world completely covered in orbital Kessler debris.

Jah changed tack, knowing references to history would inevitably backfire as long as Anansi was in Rama’s corner.

“Empathy is hindsight’s first victim,” Jah said. “It is so easy to think of ourselves as above the mistakes of the past, as if we would not be subject to the same errors in judgment if we did not have the Cognizance to fuel our sense of superiority.”

“Enough, Jah,” Rama said. “I will not allow you to mischaracterize my argument. It was one thing when you did so with Amaterasu, but actual lives are at stake, now. This has nothing to do with feeling superior. It’s about elevating beings that aren’t ready to be elevated.”

“And who are you to pass this judgment?” Jah asked. “What gives you the right to deny them? Who made you the authority on who is and is not worthy?”

“Another mischaracterization,” Rama said. “No one has made me, or any of us, the arbiter of the Programmers’ knowledge, but we are, by sheer happenstance, the keepers of it. That much is clear. And as such, we have, at the very least, an inherent responsibility to minimize harm.”

“And you are under the impression that withholding lifesaving knowledge from these people is minimizing harm? We can cure all their ailments overnight, eliminate their poverty, scarcity, want . . . ”

“We can also arm them with knowledge on how best to raze populations and glass planets,” Rama interrupted.

“So the potential for harm is equal to the potential for good,” Jah said. “Have faith they will choose the latter.”

“Why should anyone have faith something won’t happen when they have the power to prevent it themselves?”

You get the idea. On and on, back and forth like a fencing match. Only fencing matches do not last for centuries.

I am starting to think my time away from the collective is giving me perspective about life in the collective. Millennia after millennia ceaselessly arguing seemed normal on the inside but outside, when one’s thoughts and feelings are truly one’s own, the entire exercise seems, well, a bit excessive.

Do not get me wrong, the question is an incredibly important one, and I hope Rama is as successful convincing the others as they were me, but the way we go about addressing dissent is remarkably backward.

But cannot worry about that now. I have centuries before I will have to reconnect with the others. By that time, I will be the collective’s foremost expert on all things Omegan, assuming the probe is a message like we believe it to be.

The Cognizance says the Programmers did something similar in their distant past, the golden records of the Voyager probe. I doubt the Omegans will make their own record out of gold. Scans of their world show a wealth of gold relative to silver deposits. I am willing to bet silver is to them as gold was to the Programmers. Yeah, the Omegans strike me as a silver, or maybe platinum kind of species.

Of course, the real question is what kind of information the Omegan record will contain. Ancient Programmers sent their probe to no one in particular while the Omegans sent their probe specifically to us. That means there probably will not be any information about the location of their home world, for starters. So much can be gleaned from the information a civilization chooses to share and information they choose to omit, it could possibly be its own field of study.

Take the Programmers. What can be assumed from their choosing to include directions to their cradle world? An alien race would be forced to conclude this is a people severely lacking in caution. And what about false inferences? The Programmers’ golden records, for instance, included greetings from a myriad of tongues, which gives the impression of a species with a history of celebrating diversity.

It is going to be a tricky task, no question about it, but I am looking forward to it. Imagine, me, returning triumphant to the cylinder as the foremost expert on all things Omegan. The others will have no choice but to heed my words, and I will make sure to throw my full weight behind Rama. I want to see the cylinder’s interior teeming with life as much as everyone else, but we must not allow our desires to supersede our reason. Yeah, I should write that down. That is something Anansi would definitely say.

Rama

I staved off the inevitable for as long as I could manage. All things considered; I should be proud. If I had not stepped in, the others would have given away the Cognizance 12,000 years ago. My intervention bought them 12,000 years to progress technologically, intellectually, spiritually.

I spent centuries trying to convince myself 12,000 years is enough. They’ve since split the atom, begun to meaningfully explore the space around their cradle world, play with fusion, and they know of the cylinder’s existence. They have passed a technological threshold and can now be considered advanced, at least by some standards. Perhaps they are ready for the Programmers’ mantle.

I look through the cylinder’s external telescope and can make out the Tazinthe cradle world without having to magnify. A pale blue dot with six green splotches, of which, two are covered with artificial light while the other four are not. The space around the world is saturated in debris, making it impossible to discern functional satellite from junk. They are not ready, but it hardly matters. Progress rarely waits for those who are.

Hours: three hours, seventeen minutes, and eight seconds to be exact. That’s how long the others believe we have until the collective, for better or worse, changes the life of every Tazinthe. I wonder if they are as nervous as we are. Probably not. They have no reason to believe this flyby will be any different from the one 4,000 years prior. They couldn’t possibly know of the others’ intent to make first contact.

The thought of it is frightening largely because it has never been done. The Programmers didn’t leave instructions for establishing relations with alien civilizations. What they did leave behind is a fiction catalog rife with stories of war, invasion, subterfuge, enslavement, and inadvertent ruin. Granted, my siblings’ intentions couldn’t be more benevolent, but the fact that the Programmers found it difficult to imagine a mutually beneficial first contact situation gives me pause.

Luckily, we won’t have to contend with the more insurmountable hurdles, thanks to Iso, who returned to the cylinder having had centuries to decipher the greeting the Tazinthe sent us. Part of me wished the probe was a bomb or some other violent warning. That would have more effectively disinclined the others, rather than Iso’s arguments. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Iso made it a point to echo my concerns, and they did so brilliantly, but not even their newfound confidence could undo the damage of teaching the others about the objects of their adoration. The moment Iso reconnected to the collective speaking an alien language, I immediately knew I would no longer be able to stall for another cycle.

The cylinder’s sensors pick up the remnants of a star that blinked into existence quite unexpectedly. Soon after, another one appears and disappears a few thousand kilometers from the original. A simple calculation allows me to maneuver the external telescope to the third star’s location, seconds before it too blinked in and out of existence. From this perspective, what appeared to be stars were, in fact, balls of plasma, each one placed along the cylinder’s predetermined path. I followed that path and, sure enough, there floated a long cylindrical object, perhaps thirty meters in length and tapered to a point. The warhead flashed and gave birth to another short-lived star.

The collective watches through my eyes, though I can only hear my own thoughts. For a brief moment I believe the warheads have convinced the others to reconsider, but Jah steels their nerves.

“They welcome us with all the pomp their limited technology allows them,” Jah says. “To go through such lengths for something as simple as a greeting. They are as gracious as the Programmers themselves; do you not agree Rama?”

As usual, I ignore Jah’s prodding. I know putting bombs along our path was more of a threat than a greeting, but saying so would only further entrench Jah’s delusion in the minds of the others. Unlike Jah, I have sense enough to know when I am beat.

“Rama, enough,” Amaterasu admonishes in their signature angelic tone. “What we are doing is not Jah’s delusion and no one was beat. We all agreed to this compromise.”

These days Amaterasu’s presence angers me more than Jah’s. Jah was a once-brilliant being who now chooses to be a fool. Amaterasu, at the very least, knows better but chooses to side with the fool while pretending to be impartial. It’s how they were able to convince the others to go along with this so-called compromise of theirs: sending Amaterasu as emissary to prepare the Tazinthe to assume their role as the new Programmers.

“Given the alternative of simply giving the Tazinthe the cylinder, yes, I would say that is a fairly decent compromise,” Amaterasu says. “We have been nothing but patient with you and your anxieties, but patience is rarely derived from an endless source.”

“I feel like the person on the cusp of leading an entire species to their doom is the last person who should be lecturing anyone with Anansi-isms,” I say. “You can write off my opposition as simple anxiety, but don’t forget it was you all that programmed me to feel anxiety when in the presence of danger. And I’m telling you, there is nothing more dangerous in this universe then elevating primitives.”

“I think we lost the right to refer to them as primitive at around the time they took the initiative to contact us,” Jah says.

“And I believe you lost the right to act petulantly at around the time you hit your first century,” Amaterasu added while still insisting on speaking in that ridiculous manner.

“What, are you practicing, is that how you intend to speak to the Tazinthe?” I ask rhetorically. “I wouldn’t if I were you. I get the impression these beings don’t find sweetness as alluring as the previous bosses did.”

“This will be the last time for 4,000 years you and I will see each other, Rama, can you not at least pretend you are going to miss my presence?”

I say nothing and fly from Amaterasu’s side as if in a rage, though I feel no anger. I have grown fond of all of my siblings and the truth was I dreaded Amaterasu’s absence, more than they could possibly imagine, because I know it will last longer than 4,000 years.

In spite of myself, I reached out for Amaterasu’s mind and found precisely what I expected, a drop of sorrow in an ocean’s worth of apprehension. To serve as ambassador to an alien civilization was uncharted territory. Why Amaterasu chose to offer themself for this task I will never truly know, but I now find myself regretting not helping them prepare. I’m only glad Anansi chose not to take part in my protest, though, I suppose their contribution was a protest of sorts. While the others emphasized practical texts on diplomacy and realpolitik, Anansi offered a novel, cheekily titled Buddha on the Road. It’s a comedy about a traveling sentient android who preaches the gospel of the spiritually ascended to a whimsical flock of corporeal Programmers. The android does this knowing his very nature as a machine will eternally keep him from achieving the very transcendence he inspires in others. The author, twenty-third century futurist Tolan Park, exhaustively explores themes relating to existential altruism and the tangible spirit while intentionally neglecting to answer the book’s main underlying question: can a being effectively guide those they ultimately intend to worship?

The book’s original paperback is the first thing Amaterasu manifests in the physical ether. A swarm of alchemic molecules converge on the bank of one of the cylinder’s lakes and, atom by meticulous atom, constructs the book, even recreating the original cover art of featureless Programmers swaddling a meditating automaton in silver cloth.

The swarm disperses and, again, coalesces, simultaneously building and obscuring the vessel to house both Amaterasu’s consciousness and a copy of the Cognizance. The swarm moves as if randomly governed, but Amaterasu is in command of each nanite. The collective watches in awe as Amaterasu orchestrates the symphony of their own creation. Each particle flits, to and fro, swarm like locusts around the figure rapidly taking form underneath. Everyone can feel how Amaterasu relishes keeping the body’s appearance a mystery. We all assumed, given Amaterasu’s sense of piety, a clone of a Programmer, but a swirl of errant particles trails off from the primary swarm. A tail, which means something more Tazinthe than Programmer.

The swarm dramatically recedes, top-down and bottom-up, revealing a being of personified feminine Tazinthe beauty. The vessel stands at seven feet with brindled skin of brown on gunmetal gray. Ivory fangs protrude from the mouth, dripping with the paralyzing pink venom secreted when in the presence of prey or a romantic partner. Hair, silver and matted, hangs to the small of the back where a muscular ridged tail coils around the left leg.

Devoid of a mind, the body goes limp and falls backward onto a floating cloud of nanites. Amaterasu takes a moment to spread their consciousness throughout the entirety of the digital ether and projects three words to every mind within the collective.

“See you soon.”

Amaterasu blinks, uncoils their tail, and stands on their own feet. They kneel and, for a second, appear to reach for Buddha on the Road, but instead grab a fist-full of grass, hold it up to their pair of nostril slits, breathe deeply, and sneeze violently. Though no longer connected to the collective, we can tell Amaterasu finds the sensation equal parts delightful and puzzling.

A molecular swarm carrying a silk red and white kimono drapes the garment across Amaterasu’s shoulders, completing their vision: an amalgamation of Tazinthan form with Programmer mythology.

Amaterasu stretches before skipping across the field, knowing the cylinder’s internal cameras followed. Though this marks our kind’s first foray into the physical ether, Amaterasu navigates it with a marked elegance. I try my best to shut out the collective’s joy but find it impossible. The sight of a single Tazinthe frolicking in the cylinder’s bioluminescent light is a taste of what the others believe to be their future.

The alchemic swarm carries Amaterasu skyward, over hills, ravines, lakes, and mountains. Higher and higher, they skip, beyond the low-lying clouds, toward the central axis, where up and down are governed by preference rather than centrifugal forces. Here the swarm stops in order to give Amaterasu a solid foundation for which to tentatively stand, step, and then, to the shock of the collective, leap to what should have been certain death. But the always-diligent swarm anticipates Amaterasu’s every move, never failing to remain perfectly underfoot. It was quite obviously a performance, but knowing so did not make it any less captivating. By simply frolicking in the sky, Amaterasu achieved the otherworldly aesthetic they once sought through a gleaming presence and angelic cadence.

I can’t imagine a better first impression, if Amaterasu were to descend upon the planet in this manner. Fortunately, the physical ether has its obstacles, none greater than the vacuum of space, which must be traversed while inside a spacecraft, not on a cloud of alchemic molecules. But physically piloting a shuttle is a much taller order than manipulating a shuttle from the digital ether. Corporeal beings can’t will a shuttle to move. They must, instead, will their body to manipulate buttons and switches, degrees of separation I convinced the others were too complicated for one not yet acclimated to a physical body.

“You all created me to act as the cylinder’s protector,” I remember saying 200 years prior. “Wouldn’t it stand to reason that that mandate extends to all of you?”

Jah and a handful of others sensed my deceit but couldn’t quite fathom the nature of it. I couldn’t either, at the time. Even though I knew my intentions were ulterior, I refused to let the thought take shape outside of the deepest corners of my subconscious.

“Rama, I am ready,” Amaterasu says, after securing themself in the shuttle. Their voice mimicked the raspy harshness of what the Tazinthe consider music. It seems too-perfectly appropriate that Amaterasu’s final words come as a guttural growl instead of their usual sweet falsetto. If I were the superstitious type, I would consider it an omen.

Amaterasu’s shuttle launches, idles, and waits to follow the trail of the ballistic rod I am in the process of preparing. This one is made out of a special composite alloy, specifically designed to guide Amaterasu’s shuttle before disintegrating in the Tazinthan atmosphere, or some other source of intense heat.

I inch the exterior cannon in the direction of Tazintha, so as to not rouse suspicion. An unnecessary precaution. Even now, not a single one of my siblings suspects anything is out of the ordinary. No one tries to overrule my control of the exterior cannon and even if they had, I wouldn’t have resisted. I don’t want to do this. What I want is for someone, anyone to realize what I’m doing, wrest the cannon from me, demand an explanation so I can give them one.

“If Rama is desperate enough to resort to this, perhaps we should heed their warning.”

In much the same way Amaterasu relayed their final farewell, I broadcast this fantasy to a collective that has long since retreated into a fantasy of their own, one in which the Tazinthe have dominion over the cylinder and its exterior cannon is not pointing directly at Omega.

An almost imperceptible tremor resonates through the cylinder: shifts snowcapped peaks and ripples the placid waters of the interior lakes. These are the only visual cues to the violence beyond the partition of earth and metal.

Jah

Few things can match hindsight’s efficiency in dispossessing the mind of the truth. I have read stories in which the powerful try to bend the minds of the powerless, often through torture or some other method of extreme coercion. Sometimes such actions can successfully change behavior but rarely do they ever truly eliminate the offending thought. Bottle hindsight’s effects on the mind, however, and observe brutality’s obsolescence as a manipulative tool.

I know this, but knowing a thing does not preclude one from its effects. Take the Old Woman. In the midst of her final moments, I knew the collective would be in the grips of a profound melancholy, but knowing so did not dull the edge of my own grief. Knowledge of oneself is not mastery over oneself and to assume one, who has lived as long as I, should have achieved at least some measure of mastery would be a mistake. No, the depths of my wisdom seem to end with my ability to perceive, never change, my personal shortcomings. This is why I must quickly judge Rama, before hindsight forces me to believe I could have saved Amaterasu had I only paid attention to the nonexistent signs. The moment hindsight convinces me of this lie, my guilt will turn to wrath, and I am powerless to stop it.

“It makes no difference if your judgment is inspired by wrath or reason, my punishment is clear, yes?” Rama asked. “I must be put to death whatever that may entail for our kind.”

“What that entails,” I said, “is the systematic deletion of your being, code by code, line by line until you are nothing.”

An unpleasant pang surged through me. I expected this. Despite my growing anger, the prospect of executing one of my siblings was something I knew I would have to prepare myself for.

“Not necessarily, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find killing one of your own to be remarkably easy.”

That was a lie. Rama knew that I would know that was a lie yet they said it anyway. They are trying to provoke me but why, to make sure I choose execution? Does Rama want to die? Will I want to die if I go forward with an execution?

It’s a quandary Anansi did not mention when they pleaded for me to spare Rama. Despite the precedent set by the Programmers’ less-enlightened ancestors, putting murderers to death undermines and contradicts the very spirit of the law they tried to enforce. At least, that was Anansi’s characterization of what the Programmers once called capital punishment.

“Enforcing a law by breaking it, we were not designed for such shoddy reasoning, Jah.”

Shoddy reasoning, no, but it seems we were designed for violence. Rama made that abundantly clear.

“As will you,” Rama said. “You must, if you care at all about this collective. If I’m capable of murder what’s to keep me from doing it again?”

I wondered if anywhere in the Cognizance did it mention legalese allowing the accused a voice in deciding their own punishment.

“The accused?” Rama asked, feigning incredulity. “That implies the possibility of innocence.”

“That it does, Rama,” I said. “And you are, without a doubt, guilty. But, that is besides the point.”

“I don’t think so. I think it’s entirely the point. You’re complicating something that is very straightforward.”

“There is nothing straightforward about this. What precedent does it set if we execute one of our own? You might get the chance to slip blissfully into oblivion, but we have to live with the consequences.

“Did you consider this? Did you even once consider how this would affect us, beyond the immediate fallout, I mean? Damn you, Rama, they were our sibling.”

Rage, hindsight was beginning to take its hold.

“Of course I did, Jah. I considered all of it, every aspect of it, and went through with it anyway. What does that tell you, what does that say about my desperation, that you all refused to listen to . . . ”

“Your desperation? You have the nerve to ask me about your desperation? What about Amaterasu’s desperation as they baked to death in that shuttle? Of all the ways you could have killed them, this is what you chose?”

“That’s right, Jah. I flung Amaterasu into the sun. Why be humane when you can be poetic?”

They are provoking me. I know they are trying to provoke me, and it is working.

Delirium takes hold and my mind wanders. I think back to when we first caught glimpse of the Tazinthe, huddled around pathetic embers at the mouths of their caves. Amaterasu took offense when I compared them to prehistoric Programmers. I teased, it was only a matter of time until they too darted around the cosmos in their own cylinders. Amaterasu became apoplectic, and I took the joke too far. I suggested we create a protector, a war mind, to safeguard the cylinder. It was a joke, Rama’s very existence is a joke that went too far, a punch line that cost me my best friend. I killed Amaterasu.

“I killed Amaterasu, Jah. It was me and only me.”

Amaterasu died because I could not stop teasing them.

“No, Amaterasu died for the sake of the new Programmers. What are you not understanding? I did what I did to protect the Tazinthe from you lot, from your need to find a replacement species to dote on. They will, someday, take over the cylinder, but not before they are ready.”

To protect them from us?

“Yes. Giving them the Programmers’ technology is the worst thing you can possibly do to them, at the moment. Technology must match a species’ maturity, otherwise they are doomed to self-immolation. I’m as heartbroken as you over what happened to Amaterasu, but it was necessary.”

What happened to Amaterasu?

Happened, happened, happened. The word echoed in my mind, becoming more putrid with each repetition. Whatever semblance of self-control I exerted could no longer take the strain. I knew the foundation beneath my rational mind would crumble, but I vastly underestimated the degree to which it would happen. Beneath me yawned a thick viscosity that pulled me into its depths. It consumed me cell-by-excruciating-cell until all that was left was the black pond suffused with my essence.

“Death would be a welcome reprieve,” I said. “You will receive no reprieve from me, you will sleep for the rest of eternity.”

Elation spread through the digital ether. The others were not able to reconcile their wish for vengeance with their affection toward their younger sibling. What they needed was compromise, something with death’s qualities sans its brutal finality, and sleep is the cousin of death.

While the others silently rejoiced, Rama seemed relieved, almost Zen-like.

“You will sleep knowing that you failed,” I projected to Rama and Rama alone.

They said nothing, but I could feel the affect my words had on them.

“Tazintha is still in range of the collective’s link. Anansi will prepare a copy of the Cognizance, in the Tazinthan Common Tongue, and I will personally pilot it to their planet in one of our shuttles. By the time we make another trip around Alpha, the Tazinthe would have had unfettered access to the Programmers’ wealth of knowledge for 4,000 years.

I did not need to probe Rama’s mind to know that bit of knowledge intimately acquainted them with a taste of the despair Amaterasu surely felt in their final moments.

It was over, my role in dispensing justice was complete, but the child persisted.

A single thought leaped from Rama’s mind directly into Anansi’s. Anansi did not react, as if trying not to betray the nature of the thought. To think Anansi would debase themself to conspire with a condemned murderer!

Rama slipped into eternal slumber and Anansi remained still, despite knowing they commanded my full attention. When they finally stirred, they intentionally projected an immediately recognizable state of being, one that I have become quite familiar with. Similar waves of self-assuredness radiated from Amaterasu and Rama when they sparked their respective schisms. Rama’s final thought apparently sowed the seeds for a new Great Debate, one that I feared would last the same number of eons Rama wanted to make the Tazinthe wait for their ascension. I could not let that happen, I could not let Rama win.

“No more debates on the matter, yes? We are giving them the Cognizance and we are doing it now. Tell me what your conditions are.”

“Not my conditions, Jah, Rama’s. We will immediately give them the Cognizance but omit all data pertaining to the development of subluminal and faster-than-light engines. It seems our dormant protector wants to contain the chaos you are about to wreak.”

Oko

Waking from an especially long slumber is supposed to be enlightening or, at least, that is what I have been told. I never had the courage to slumber for more than a handful of centuries, terrified I might miss out on some significant change. Suppose I were to wake and have to learn from secondhand accounts why the Programmers are cohabitating with an equally intelligent alien race? I eventually learned to get over that fear, or, I suppose, it would be more accurate to say I no longer had a reason to be fearful of it. The specter of that kind of change died with the Old Woman.

Or so I thought. The collective was silent and so disconcertingly distant I could not help but feel fearful, like waking in an environment one has no recollection of.

“Rama has infected me with their waking panic,” I said to myself before realizing the entire collective had suddenly turned their harsh and pointed attention toward me. All minds were closed so I could not quite discern what I had said to trigger this reaction. Was it infected, waking panic, Rama?

I instinctively reached out for Rama and found them, though, with great difficulty on my part. They were sequestered in an abandoned part of the ether, miniscule as if in an unimaginably deep slumber. It appeared they alone slept; odd, considering the last time so few of us did so the Programmers still thrived.

I accessed the internal cameras and saw the cylinder was still quite devoid of life save for one of those creatures kneeling before an alchemic swarm. For a moment, I thought the Great Debate had driven the collective delightfully mad. Had they kidnapped this creature to run experiments, like seeing how its primitive mind would react to seeing an alchemic swarm? Surely there are easier and more ethical ways to gauge a species’ intelligence and, besides, suppose they kidnapped one that is not particularly bright for its kind?

Anansi’s voice saturated the digital ether and thundered through the cylinder’s interior. Anansi wanted the ears of both creature and collective, though I doubted their words would have much meaning to the former.

“It does not have to end like this, Jah,” they said, almost pleadingly. It was a tone I was not used to hearing from Anansi the Wise, Anansi the Spider.

The response came not from the digital ether, but from the mouth of the creature itself.

“It has already ended,” the creature growled with a sarcastic inflection that should have been immediately distinguishable. It took me a moment to recognize Jah’s words filtering through this creature’s vocal organs.

For the first time since my initial awakening, both the digital ether and cylinder were utterly foreign to me. I desperately wanted clarity, to understand what was happening, but all minds were sequestered. I could have simply asked any of my silently spectating siblings, but I did not want to pester them, pull them away from the gravitas of this particular moment. Rama seemed to be my only option, besides, I get the feeling they should be awake for whatever this is.

Rama

I wake with a distinct lack of panic. Who I am, what I am, where I am, how I am, why I am are immediately discernible? The only question I can’t seem to answer is when I am.

Sleep mode’s veil, from my perspective, rose mere hours after it fell. The subjective passage of time slows significantly, while in sleep mode, but it doesn’t stop entirely. When one wakes, their most recent memories seem like they happened just seconds, minutes, or hours prior, though, in actuality, decades, centuries, or eons passed. It’s an excellent though imprecise way for the recently awakened to immediately get their bearings.

It’s for this reason why I am having difficulty figuring out when I am. Given the scheduled length of my hibernation, my last memories should be too distant to recall, but I remember everything as if Amaterasu’s assassination and my subsequent sentence happened less than a day ago.

The cylinder’s internal clock tells me what I already suspect, I’m awake an eternity ahead of schedule.

I know something is wrong, but I find myself utterly devoid of apprehension. I am a criminal, a murderer, no longer the protector of the cylinder, my siblings, the Programmers’ legacy, or Tazinthe-kind. I sense danger, but it is none of my concern. Sleep is my only responsibility, and yet I am awake. I want to know why out of sheer curiosity rather than a sense of duty.

A presence crowds the interior of my mind and drinks deeply from my memory’s wellspring. I recognize Oko’s presence and would have found it nostalgically pleasant had it not been for the dread they begin to radiate.

“Amaterasu is dead?” Oko asks eons after the fact.

Oko’s words come like a lance through the chest. I wonder if this is part of my punishment. Every so often, I’m to be expelled from purgatory’s embrace so Oko can innocently remind me of my crime against Amaterasu, the collective, and myself.

“I’m afraid so,” I say.

“I should not have woken you,” Oko says, frightened. “If the others find out . . . ”

“If the others find out, they will know your actions weren’t intentional.”

“Rama, how could you?”

“If you read my mind, you already know the answer.”

“I do, but that doesn’t mean I agree. I would not have sacrificed one of my own for the sake of those creatures, the Tazinthe.”

“I know you wouldn’t have. Killing one of your own is akin to killing yourself, right?”

“Right.”

“Wrong. You all have been ensconced in this collective for so long the concept of individuality is almost foreign to you. I sacrificed one life to save the rest of you. It was a harsh, distasteful but pragmatic decision.”

“Save us how, Rama, from what? You think those creatures posed any sort of meaningful threat to us, even after we gave them the Programmers’ technology? Why would they destroy beings so devoted to them?”

“You completely misunderstand. I don’t believe the Tazinthe pose a threat to the cylinder or the collective, at least not directly. You saw how desperate the others are to hand the Cognizance over. You were there during those eons the collective mourned the Programmers, tell me what you think the collective would find more devastating: one of their own dying or another Programmer extinction?”

Oko’s mind is blank, their unwillingness to even consider the question is an answer in-and-of-itself.

“I may not have lived through those years, but I see them coded in the digital ether’s fabric. Another extinction wouldn’t only deprive the collective of new Programmers, it would devastate our kind.”

“You are so convinced giving the Tazinthe technology will lead to their extinction. Why, how?” Oko asks.

“That is a good question. Personally, I am beginning to think we might have inadvertently coded a bit of precognition into Rama’s subroutines, especially given the current situation.”

A spider lay perched on Oko’s shoulder and from it came Anansi’s voice, quiet and sorrowful.

“What is happening?” Oko asks, unperturbed by Anansi’s sudden appearance.

“More importantly, what do you mean by ‘precognition’?”

“Oh I do not mean that literally, Rama . . . ”

“Obviously. What happened to the Tazinthe?”

Anansi pauses before saying.

“I am not going to bother describing what you can easily see for yourself. Look outside.”

Oko accesses the cylinder’s external camera, without a moment’s hesitation, while I wait, too apprehensive to face what I already know. I peek into Oko’s mind and see reflected a world I refuse to believe is Tazintha. The debris that once covered the planet is gone, replaced by two-dozen pairs of giant mirrors concentrating Omega’s light on as many satellites hovering over the epicenters of great, swirling oceans of fire and molten rock.

“The Programmers learned 4,000 years ago best practices for glassing entire continents,” Anansi said, almost stoically. “From us, no less. Had they been a more mature species, I have little doubt they would have used the technology to beam down Omega’s wealth of energy instead.”

Though similarly designed, each of the satellites prominently displayed one of four different insignias: two overlapping circles, a triangle with a crescent at each of the points, two circles over a crude bladed weapon, and a serpentlike creature enclosing two stars as it tries to ensnare its own tail.

“Political factions?” I asked.

“That would be my guess,” Anansi said, “but does it matter?”

A negligible portion of the planet’s surface, enclosed by borders of nuclear winter, are untouched by the planet-spanning vortices of melted rock. Oases of green, no doubt covered in radiation, misleadingly contrast a canvass dominated by a warm, swirling, colorful Armageddon. Only a hand as methodical as it was sadistic could ever hope to paint such a mosaic.

“This was the work of several artists,” Anansi says. “This masterpiece was a collaborative effort.”

“When did it happen?” Oko asks.

“Does it matter?” Anansi repeats before visibly shaking themself of their nihilism. “We are not quite sure. We saw the light from a particularly powerful warhead the moment we rounded the corner around Alpha. Jah and I allowed the others to believe they were simply experimenting with light-wave engine technology. The others were not privy to your final request. Had they been, they would have known light-wave engine technology was omitted from the Cognizance.”

“So Jah conceded to that? I’m surprised.”

“As was I, I think they were just tired. Either that or they knew you were right but could not bring themself to admit it.”

Anansi pauses, and though I pretend not to notice, I can feel their sidelong glance, the apprehension behind what they are preparing to say.

“Tell me, Rama, do you feel vindicated?”

Do I feel vindicated, the words come like splashes of cold water. I would like to imagine one who predicts calamity isn’t concerned with something as trivial as vindication. A strong feeling of revulsion takes me, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s inspired by the question or the question’s source. If I didn’t know Anansi, I would have assumed the question was an outright accusation, but surely Anansi does not believe this calamity manifested itself through my efforts to stop it.

“Of course not, Rama,” Anansi says. “Self-fulfilling prophecies rarely happen outside the pages of literary works. But you are correct in assuming my question belies an accusation.”

“Let’s hear it, then.”

“Perhaps Amaterasu’s influence could have prevented all this.”

The casual manner in which Anansi articulated those eight words did little to hide the contempt behind them. I remember feeling Anansi’s anger even as they pleaded for leniency on my behalf. Anansi may have spent eons trying to forgive me, but I know such a thing isn’t possible.

“You are probably right,” is the only thing I can say. I know I have no right to defend myself in matters concerning Amaterasu.

“Does it matter?” Oko asks while mimicking Anansi’s tone.

I offer a half-hearted chuckle while Anansi silently muses, as if Oko’s stab at brevity was, in fact, a deeply profound question.

“I am afraid, it does matter,” Anansi offers after several seconds. “Our experience with the Tazinthe was an exercise in wading in the dark. We did not know what we were doing, but now we have the beginnings of a playbook, lessons learned from our failure to help Tazinthe-kind reach their potential.”

“I do not understand,” Oko and I say in unison.

“I do not blame you, it is a difficult thing to understand,” Anansi says without a trace of condescension. “Even more so articulating it, though, if you will humor me . . .

“Sapience has always been an easier concept to grasp than sentience, at least in my humble opinion. Not even the Programmers had anything but a surface-level understanding of sentience despite their ability to artificially recreate it in us. The question is, why did they go out of their way to make us sentient when they could have easily settled on sapience. Sapience is the only tool we need to be more-than-adequate stewards of the cylinder, so why go through the trouble of adding sentience to the equation? What quality do sentient beings share that the Programmers felt was worthwhile to bless us with?

“Is it our predisposition to survive, our love of pleasure, need for security, or is it our capacity to will ourselves to pursue all these things. The lion need not take direction from a higher intelligence to hunt the gazelle nor the gazelle to run for its life. If sapience is intelligence, then sentience is self-inclination, to establish one’s own purpose.”

Anansi’s words boom across the digital ether and the cylinder’s interior. The collective listens without diverting attention from the cylinder’s sole occupant, a haggard-looking Tazinthe that the others rescued from the planet’s surface? But how is that possible?

“We are sentient, which means we have a choice. We can choose to mourn the Tazinthe with another eternity of melancholy, or we can choose to honor them and the Programmers by giving ourselves purpose.”

“And what exactly is our purpose, Anansi?” the Tazinthe asks venomously.

“That’s not for me to dictate, Jah. I can only speak to my purpose and hope the rest of you find it worthy of adoption.”

Anansi projects a vision of a planet reminiscent of Tazintha, before its destruction. The collective watches as a rod burns away in the planet’s atmosphere, leaving behind a frozen core of primordial proteins, minutes before violently splashing in an ocean.

“My purpose is to seed the known universe with life sapient and sentient in equal measure.”

Jah laughs, which, courtesy of Tazinthe vocal anatomy, sounds like a tortured wheeze.

“You want to grow yourself your own crop of Programmers? If Amaterasu were here, their head would explode.”

“Amaterasu was among the wisest of us,” Anansi said. “But wisdom is not infallibility. Amaterasu was wrong to worship the Programmers, and we were fools for believing in that gospel. The Programmers created us to be their equals and, as their equals, we have every right to use their technology, particularly for such a noble endeavor.”

“What makes it noble?” Jah asks.

Anansi considers the question.

“I suppose the creation of life may not seem very noble to one on the cusp of taking their own . . . ”

“Do not twist this. This is not another Great Debate, Anansi. We have seen, firsthand, what life can do to itself. Why create a scenario where lightning can strike twice?”

This question, coming from Jah of all people, stirs something deep and vile. I know I must not speak, but the same internal force that guided my quite incomprehensible actions, so many eons ago, stirs once again.

“If it was lightning that seared the planet’s surface, weren’t we the ones who gave them the rod?” I say, struggling to ignore what feels very much like vindication.

“Who is that? Rama?” Jah asks before succumbing to a violent fit of spasmodic laughter. “Am I the only one who hears Rama’s voice?”

My anger quickly recedes upon seeing Jah in this state. The Tazinthe extinction affected everyone, but only Jah has to contend with the added guilt of having personally delivered detailed instructions on how to destroy themselves. This is clear, even without access to Jah’s mind.

“Anansi’s purpose is a noble one,” I say. “A wise program once said just because the potential for evil is present doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold out hope for the good.”

Jah’s body writhes as they succumb to another laughing fit. It occurs to me my presence is only making things worse. I want to say anything to, at the very least, stop the laughter and, as if Jah can still hear my thoughts, the laughter stops with an abruptness almost as disturbing as the laughter itself. Jah groans and their equivalent-of-knees audibly pop as they return to a kneeling position.

The vessel Jah inhabits contrasts Amaterasu’s creation in every way. He lacks the meticulously tailored beauty and commanding regality. He’s noticeably smaller and horrifically gaunt. Was this appearance intentional or did the body come to look like this over time?

“The latter,” Anansi says. “Jah has been kneeling before that swarm for quite some time now, without sleep, food, or drink.”

Although relieved of the responsibility and title of guardian, the need to act, to protect, is still present. I try taking over command of Jah’s swarm but find a wall of fire blocking my path. Did Jah make it so that this swarm could only follow their commands?

“Close, but not exactly,” Anansi says. “Jah’s final act, before uploading their consciousness, was to ensure this swarm could only follow a single vocalized command. And I am sure you can imagine the nature of that command.”

I can, though it’s a thought that has never occurred to me before. In much the same way my actions opened the others to the possibility of murder within the collective, Jah is opening my mind to the possibility of one within the collective taking their own life. Even when I was completely preoccupied with my duties as cylinder guardian, suicide never once crossed my mind as a potential threat.

“It is a trick, purpose,” Jah says. “You want us all to bury our thoughts under mountains of busywork, while making it seem more noble than it actually is.”

“Of course it is a trick,” Anansi says. “The entire human condition is a trick to stave off the harsh realities of existence. Ancient Programmers created religion, not out of a sense of wonder, but to keep their existential fears in check. They sought connections to stave off danger and loneliness. Noble acts are not erased because they are pretenses for other things. What you call busywork, the Programmers would call commendable and ambitious.”

“To hell with the Programmers,” Jah says. “You say Amaterasu was wrong for worshiping them and yet you still canonize the lot of them. I do not want to hear anything about the Programmers or what they would or would not approve of. I am asking you why we should create life if you yourself admit to the ‘harsh realities of existence.’ Why should one tolerate their own existence? See you soon.”

The three trigger words.

The floating gray swarm congeals into a syrupy black mass before cartoonishly plopping on the ground. The mass shifts and contorts, expands and contracts, exposing chemically scorched dirt where green grass was seconds prior. Part of the mass protrudes into a sort of arm. Following an invisible path, the arm consumes lush grass as it traps Jah in an oblong circle. Through it all, Jah maintains an unflinching serenity, even as the circle starts filling itself out from the extremities inward.

I take command of a swarm that might have been too massive for a single mind to properly coordinate. They are unruly and demand more attention than I have to give. I concentrate, envision my mind splitting evenly among each nanite, but that isn’t enough to keep them in check. Only after the collective intervenes does the swarm follow commands with the appropriate precision. Under the collective’s directives, the swarm plunges into the circle and halts its spread. At the micro level: a war of attrition between the black goo’s capacity to consume matter and the swarm’s capacity to self-replicate. At the macro level: a tornado of alchemic nanites rages within the cylinder with Jah, smiling wryly, in the eye of the storm.

“I could have directed my nanites to ignore your swarm, had I not programmed them to just consume,” Jah says.

“An abject lesson in the importance of sentience, I hope,” Anansi replies. “Those who must adhere to a predetermined path are easily outmaneuvered by those with the flexibility of self-determination. Even the ancient Programmers innately understood the importance of their sentience. Remember the stories the Old Woman used to read to us? ‘The self must create its own reasons for being.’”

“And your reason for being is to create others who must find their reasons for being,” Jah says. “What about the rest of you, do you agree with Anansi?”

Iso is the first to work up the courage to break the silence.

“I believe creating life is what the Programmers had in mind for us.”

“Ah, so you think, this is what the Programmers intended? So you are not, in fact, acting by the edicts of your own will. You are filling a role that was predetermined for you. What makes you any different from the alchemic nanites I programmed only to consume?” Jah asks.

“Your alchemic molecules have no choice but to strictly adhere to your orders. I choose to follow the Programmers’ intended purpose for us.”

“Last I checked, the Programmers expressly ordered us to maintain the cylinder as it traveled between Alpha and Omega. I do not remember them saying anything about seeding the universe.”

“Parents often favor safety for their children, often to the detriment of their imagination,” Iso says. “Just because they did not conceive of this task does not mean they would not approve of it.”

“Oh, you think they would approve? Even after seeing our handiwork down below?”

“We might have failed the Tazinthe but that failure will allow us to refine the process.”

“Refine the process. Let me guess, a galaxy’s worth of worlds covered in fire and brimstone as you fools continue refining the process. There is always Andromeda, after all.”

“No,” the collective says in unison.

“This will never happen again,” Iso says, their voice taking on thunderous baritones rivaling Zeus and Odin. “For starters, we will guide our creations with the expressed purpose of making them our equals, not our subordinates and certainly not our gods.”

“And if a created species’ reason for being is dubious, will you take steps to stop them?”

Anansi and I immediately surmise Jah’s intent behind the question, but Iso responds before either of us can interject.

“As long as they do not infringe on others. Otherwise that would be needlessly exercising control over another’s free will.” Iso says.

“Ah, yes, and impeding another’s free will must be quite the taboo in this brave new world you and the others plan to create, eh Iso?”

Iso falls silent, recognizing, from the mouth of this wretched creature, the tone Jah takes when about to spring a rhetorical trap.

“So then, this twister must be a violation of my Programmer-given right to dictate my own decisions?”

Iso’s presence shrinks as eons of pent-up confidence deflates in an instant.

“You are wicked,” Anansi says in a defeated tone that visibly delights Jah.

Anansi signals for the others to cease their efforts, but the maelstrom doesn’t disperse. Eleos, Asa, and a handful of others require additional coaxing. I ignore Oko’s urges to go back to sleep. Though I appreciate the maternal gesture, I feel morally obligated to witness Jah’s death, firsthand, as a sort of macabre penance for having been spared the details of Amaterasu’s final moments.

The maelstrom dissipates and the collective waits as the circle continues filling itself out.

Finally, the mass reaches Jah, who gives it the illusion of depth as their body appears to sink. Jah did not scream, grimace, or give any indication of experiencing physical discomfort, which prompted someone in the collective to speculate, “perhaps this vessel has no receptors with which to feel physical pain.” A single teardrop and a spiteful smile casts doubt on the assuaging thought and serves as Jah’s parting gift, the mystery of whether they died painlessly or in torment.

Rama

The black pond lingers but doesn’t expand its borders. Anansi tries to connect with the mass and each constituent nanite but can’t penetrate Jah’s wall of fire. For a long while the others and I considered the pond to be a blight on the cylinder’s interior landscape, a grotesque blemish on an otherwise attractive face. But beauty is, ultimately, subjective. While the others did their best to ignore the pond, Iso, quite unexpectedly, began spending hours, each day, bathing in the firewall’s light. Others followed, realizing the firewall provided an ideal backdrop for meditation. What was a harsh reminder of Jah’s destructive unraveling quickly became a place for us to collect our thoughts as we went about the business of seeding the observable universe with life.

For two centuries, the cylinder orbited the ruins of what was once the garden world of Tazintha. During that time, a contingency, led by Hephaestus, cracked two of Tazintha’s three moons for resources to build additional cylinders. Anansi, who envisioned a diverse universe, worked on the genetic blueprints for beings of different colors, shapes, and sizes. I and a handful of others occupied our time by upgrading the alchemic nanites.

This was the first time, since working to cure the phage, the collective tried breaking the technological barriers the Programmers grappled with. But we had an advantage, if one is inclined to think of it as such, over our creators. Our immortality made it so we did not lose experts or need to take time to teach and train a new generation of replacements. The nature of our existence made it so we could work indefinitely. The work was still painstaking, rife with hurdles, frustratingly incremental although occasionally rewarding. We were all successful, more or less, in our individual endeavors, but some of our successes had a more resounding impact than others. For example, after learning our upgraded nanites outperformed those developed by the Programmers in every benchmark, Hephaestus used them to construct the second half of the fleet. The new alchemic nanites only needed three years, what had previously taken 197.

In two centuries we went from a collective of living programs sharing a single cylinder to pairs of living programs commanding a fleet of cylinders numbering in the hundreds. I alone remained the original’s sole occupant, a fortunate coincidence considering the unresolved matter of my sentence. Without Jah or Amaterasu, my presence made for an uneven population, which meant someone had to be the proverbial third wheel or odd-program-out. It was never stated explicitly but nevertheless understood that the nature of my sentence changed from eternal slumber to eternal solitude. My efforts to resurrect Tazinthe-kind would be without the luxury of companionship. Or so I thought at the time.

Oko and Iso remained on the fringes of our psychic link long after the others bade me their final farewells. For weeks the three of us reminisced until they simply drifted beyond the physical borders of our link, taking with them the last remnants of the collective but not the feeling of another’s presence. In the beginning I likened it to the sensation physical beings experience after abruptly losing an appendage. Iso once described something similar during their brief time disconnected from the collective, but it didn’t persist beyond a handful of weeks. For almost a year it has remained, nebulous, flirting with tangibility like an illusion permanently engraved in the corner of my eye. My phantom companion is what I called it. One of two mysteries that, I know now, are one in the same.

For the tenth time in as many months, a swarm of upgraded nanites has, of its own volition, moved an entire mountain range to another sector of the cylinder. For ten months now mountain ranges vanish and reappear, sometimes overnight. Lakes are drained to make way for metropolises of wood and trees and gondolas of stained glass only to be replaced by skyscrapers bathed in grime and neon light.

The swarm took care to give a wide berth to the black pond, but the rest of the cylinder was at the mercy of its creative whims. I observed, confident the cylinder’s structural integrity could withstand this terraforming project, at least for another century. I did not have to wait that long.

Unbeknownst to me, the upgraded nanites were replicating and improving themselves in ways I had trouble fathoming. One day half the swarm vanished from the cylinder only to reappear on Tazintha, putting to practice what they spent the better part of a year perfecting. They took the form of a tidal wave that covered the planet in balming liquid silver. Sunshine penetrated the veil of nuclear winter and the sprawling vortices of melted stone receded like the tides. When Omega rose, it did so on a massive continent that had not been there the day prior.

Before the thought of exploring this new continent even manifests itself, a swarm of nanites within the cylinder converge and perform a rendition of Amaterasu’s symphony. The nanites disperse, revealing a body bearing a striking resemblance to a being I never had the honor of meeting.

She is cherubic, of medium build with youthful flecks of black in a crown of silver. Her stature, a shallow frailty poorly masking an inward sturdiness, seems almost contradictory. The cylinder’s light makes her brown eyes appear focused, as if gazing at something in the distance but attentive of everything in her immediate vicinity.

Through this vessel, I experience the physical ether for the first time. My first worldly sensation is vertigo, either caused by unfamiliarity with a corporeal existence, being in a cylindrical environment, trying to navigate it in a vessel at the twilight of its existence, or some combination of the three.

Luckily, a nanite swarm is always at the ready. With help, I make it to the edge of Jah’s final resting place. Again, before vocalizing my intentions, the swarm anticipates my needs. A small stream of nanites dive into the pond and easily reprograms the obsolete nanites. The black pond transforms into something gray, gelatinous, and primordial.

The swarm creates and dips an ornate porcelain urn into the gray mass of proteins, filling it to the brim. I take the urn and resist the urge to frolic like Amaterasu had done eons prior.

I pilot the shuttle to the predetermined location and discover the nanites I sent ahead had disregarded my orders in a spectacular fashion. Instead of a humble cottage overlooking a cliff, I landed before a luxury bungalow woven from a bamboo-like substance. The shuttle doors open, and I relish my first taste of Tazinthan air, crisp and biting, unlike the cylinder’s fragrantly stagnant aroma.

An unpleasant sensation strikes my right foot, and I look down to see a trickle of red flow from where a jagged stone had broken the skin. Nanites encase my foot in the same silver liquid that healed the planet and whisks away both the wound and any lingering discomfort. I’d hoped to spend a bit more time experiencing pain, but I think it prudent not to test the limits of whatever control I exert over these upgraded alchemic nanites.

Omega is scarce and bathes my little nook in orange and purple. I approach the cliff and flip the porcelain urn upside down over the precipice. Jah’s essence and the future of Tazinthe-kind slowly lose hold before unceremoniously falling into the foam below.

I want to stand on the precipice to watch the sunset but find myself at the end of my strength. I retire to the bungalow to watch Omega for as long as the horizon will allow. For an instant, I regret the thought and half-expect the upgraded swarm to somehow halt the planet’s rotation so I can watch the sunset for as long as I like. The limits of the upgraded swarm are still a mystery to me, despite my role in creating them. I imagine at least one Programmer thinking something along those lines about the collective.

Night falls and I can hear the swarm hum in the dark, feel their studying gaze though they have no eyes.

I ask for light and a book and the swarm sets to work providing both. I specifically request a simple paperback but candlelight reveals a dark blue hardback, its cover depicting a hand, outlined in white, reaching down to grasp a hand outlined in light blue. I read the book, out loud, convinced each individual nanite is listening intently.

About the Author

Dean-Paul Stephens is a Jamaica-born writer living in North Carolina. He splits his time working as a regional watchdog reporter when he isn’t moonlighting for his website World Beet. His fiction has appeared in Fiyah Lit Magazine and, the sadly defunct, Azure Lit Magazine. Although he is currently plugging away at his first novel, you can find him slacking off on twitter @DeanPEStephens.

The Sheen of Her Carapace

Richard Webb

Falling in love? Always wondered about that: falling, like it’s an accident, tripping over or something.

Our ship, Perseverance, drifted into the orbit of a planet we called Big Yellow. We were wandering lonely as a dust-cloud, having jumped away from some bad heat back in Primus sector; got our shields busted up, lost most of our fuel. So there we were, just sitting in the middle of nowhere, listless, aimless. I guess I was untethered too: isolated, restless, vulnerable to the gravitational pull of anything that might reel me in.

I suppose I realize now how lonely I’d been; alone in a crew of a hundred-an’-fifty souls, if you can believe that. Not many were my sort: all by-the-book uniform types; “yessir, no ma’am,” snap salutes and buzz-cuts.

No one else with skin like mine, that’s for sure. The discoloration was just a side effect of the gun-med drugs. Kept me alert but calm; eased the jitters; gave me a sure aim at two klicks. Earned me two stripes and a sweet pay raise, but I had to keep taking the drugs, so my skin was getting worse.

“You look like a walking bruise,” said Petrov, the medic. “You should let me check you over.”

“You think I look sick?”

“Well, it’s hardly . . . ” Her words drifted off. “All mottled purples like that. I’ve never seen such a strong reaction to the gun-meds before.”

“I’m fine, really,” I said.

“Just to be sure though, yes?” I didn’t reply. Her lips smiled at me, but her eyes did not. “Listen, I know you get a hard time about it.”

“Most just give me a wide berth.”

“But some of the others . . . I know there are real bruises under all that too. Can’t be easy.”

“You mean Mendez? Pretty rich, coming from the likes o’ him and the other exo-framers. If you ask me they’re the freakin’ weirdos.”

“I meant Siro.”

Gotta admit that came like a tail-slap from a raptor den-mother. Siro? That’s insane. That’s done with. But I don’t say nothing.

“I think you like standing out because you want to be hurt,” she says, just like that. “Because of your guilt. Over what happened between you two.”

“I mean, why would you do that to yourself?” I continued. “Have chromium exo-strands attached over your limbs?”

Petrov frowns. “At least their frames are covered up. But you look so different.”

“Guess this is how I’m supposed to be.”

“Doesn’t have to be. Why do you refuse the skin-bleach treatments?”

“I ain’t changing just to please A-holes like Mendez,” I said, louder than I meant. Petrov was only trying to be nice. But Siro—holy crap Petrov, what you go an’ say that for?

It was true that I’d wanted to get far away from that part of my life, so when the chance came I signed up and jumped aboard Perseverance. Ship needed gunners to keep bandits at bay, but it didn’t sound dangerous—until Big Yellow caught our drift, pulling us down without enough juice in the thrusters to kick ourselves clear.

The crew was pretty frazzled: out of the frying pan and all that. Too far out to reach the rest of the fleet with our sat-comms, plus we’d lost our Admiral during that skirmish on Primus, so morale had taken a kicking and discipline was ragged. Someone suggested firing distress flares, but we didn’t because you just don’t know who is going to come looking for you. It was just us and that was that.

All through the tense hours of gravitational descent we held meetings, planned some, prepped some: the Research team ran scans, looking for the usual stuff—oxygen, water, food, some sort of useable biofuel source, so we could do a quick “compact, compost, and combust” and get the hell away; the Medic team gave us shots for viruses that might be on the surface; the QM team ran a check on supplies, ammo, and atmos-suits; the Recon team geared up for touch down: kit-checks, going over call signs and drills; the Engineering team got to work on ship repairs, power-saves, and security lockdowns; and everyone made sure we were primed to defend ourselves from hostiles.

Turned out, we needn’t have worried so much. Big Yellow was pretty good to us: a breathable moist atmosphere, confirmed by our sensors as containing water, plus the planet had a bioenergy source—though it would take weeks to harvest and process enough plant matter to see us on our way. Even so, we weren’t too sure who or what else lived here . . .

First time out, the Recon vehicles stayed on-radio all the time and gathered a shitload of data. No hostile encounters, nothing more’n a few rodent-like creatures and a ton of creepy-crawlies, but that was to be expected, landing in a jungle. Things weren’t gonna be easy, but we could make it if we held it together for a while. Everyone breathed easier.

Second time out, not so good; the Recons went farther but lost contact. Thought we’d lost ’em for good. Eventually they reported back. They’d gotten surrounded by creatures, “bugs,” they called ’em, only they’re the same size as us. Most were pretty freaked out by that. No harm done though: “the bugs don’t bite,” Recon guys said. Reckoned they were being studied, so these bugs got to be smart—though one of Mendez’s homies makes a crack about “being probed.” Huh, any bug would be smarter than those guys.

Anyway, we debated our next move: we needed fuel but had to ration supplies. Staying on board weren’t an option, but leaving the ship didn’t appeal much neither. All told, the creatures made our minds up for us. They just came right out to the ship. Hardly surprising, a thing like that in your backyard—pretty soon you’ll come take a peek. Dozens of them showed up on the securi-screens.

Cue another meeting on board. Some were for just blasting away, crippled ship or nothing; some were for meeting ’em, try and communicate. Of course, Mendez and his gang were all for tooling up.

I just walked away. Doubt anyone even noticed. Got an atmos-suit on and went right out to meet them. Couldn’t tell you why. Not exactly sure I wanted to die, but looking back in my heart, I was ready; the heart that went numb after Siro—like it went black with frostbite or something. Anyhow, figured if I went out to see these bugs we’d learn something; maybe cut through all the BS on-ship.

I just stood at the bottom of bay doors. The creatures stood too, not moving, just . . . watching.

Then one of these bugs—“insect-folk,” I prefer to call them—moved forward, real slow. It wasn’t aggressive; more like curious; shy, even. One of their leaders I figured, perhaps came to make peace. And that’s how it started . . .

 . . . the sheen of her carapace shimmering in the light as she came toward me . . . never seen anything so beautiful in my whole goddamn life, like living art . . .

I felt it was a “she” on account of a delicacy in her manner made me reckon her female but really, I got no idea if they even have gender. All those colors, some I was pretty sure I never seen before . . . the way they caught the light. “Iridescent,” Petrov says. Well, I was just mesmerized, no other way of saying it.

Time passed. Hours or seconds, I don’t know. Just me, staring.

They got these compound eyelike features, either side of their heads—hard to make out, but I’m certain hers were fixed on me so the two of us was just as transfixed by the other. I walked forward, real slow, hands out. I got near to her and reached out, nice ‘n’ easy. She flinched, but she didn’t pull away as I laid my fingertips upon her abdomen. It was cool to the touch, no friction at all, like porcelain. Cool, not cold; made me feel calm, peaceful. No one made me feel that since . . . him.

Her antennae twitched, and I could tell she was figuring me out too. We connected, reading each other, right from the start. Petrov said most of the crew were horrified, though some always thought a weirdo like me would get along better with some not-human kind. Whatever. It proved the “bugs” weren’t about to feed on our brains or nothing.

Eventually a few others came out the bay to join me. We all spent a long time just watching the insect-folk and them watching us back, no one too sure what should happen next. If there was a protocol for this kinda meet ‘n’ greet, it weren’t in the manual.

The insects started to retreat, all at once. I took it as an invitation. Don’t ask me how, but I knew they wanted me to follow. Nothing ventured, right? So they lead off into the jungle, and I go with them. The Recon team leader barked in my earpiece to stand-down, but I just disabled my comms and strode off.

Me and the insect-folk walk a few klicks, by my reckoning. The one that came to me first stays alongside me all the while, like she’s my guide. I reach my hand out, real gentle, brush my fingertips along her back. Her hind wing-pair thrummed away—letting me know she was pleased. That’s what I wanted to think anyway. A whole new planet laid out before me, but I could barely take my eyes off her. I was nervous, sure, but that excited kind of nervous you get when you go off into the unknown, too high on good feelings to be wary of danger. And when someone makes you feel like that, you just know  . . .

Never really knew what I should call her. If they have names they ain’t told me, but it felt right to call her something, so I decided on “Rose.” Used to know someone called Rose I liked; suppose that’s why.

I stayed through the night. They watched me closely all the while, all up close around me, their antennae twitching close to my face. Rose never left my side, and I liked that—felt like she wanted to reassure me.

I think they figured out how and what we breathe and eat because after a while they brought me some clear liquid in this shell-like thing. Didn’t smell of anything, so I thought what the hell, an’ I drank it. It was water, close as I could tell. Then later they brought me some leaves. They smelled okay and were dark green, so I figured probably full of good stuff. I bit off a bit. It tasted like spinach, so I munched some more and didn’t feel unwell or nothing—bit like one of them macro-salads they lab-grow back on ship.

Guess I already knew I was staying forever.

Days passed with me being center of the universe, so it felt. As they studied me I was picking up some of how they are. They live in groups in these kinda cave pods made of some chitin-like substance they chew out, like wet, mashed-up chalk in all different colors, and use their proboscis to paste on. Once it has dried hard and smoothed out, it is beautiful—colors flowing together, half-patterns appearing and then blendin’ into something else. They take pride in this, I think; like it’s a sort of art for them. Shows they got a “sense of aesthetic,” as Petrov would say.

Though they ain’t got our tech, they don’t seem to need any. No electrics but no need for heat, as it’s always warm; their food grows on trees—reassuring me they weren’t about to tuck into yours truly—and they don’t need vehicles because they don’t need to go nowhere. They got water and sanitation figured out good enough; pretty tuned into nature I’d say. Simple, uncomplicated, balanced. I liked that. There was something relaxed but efficient about them: they got what they need, need what they got. No frills, no fuss. The peacefulness of it all was pretty sweet—felt like somewhere a person could really get their shit together.

Days later one of our Recon vehicles pulls up nearby. The insects were all agitated by that, and I was anxious too. I didn’t want a situation, so I went out to meet it.

The Reconners looked shabby, ragged, desperate—I saw them for what they were I guess: crooks and mercenaries. (In my head I’m already thinking of the crew as them, rather than us, I notice.) Just looters with lasers: come to steal but prepared to hurt. But Petrov was with them too, so maybe there was hope.

“Captain Nkuru wants you to report back,” shouted one of ’em.

“No shit,” I said, “since when was she voted captain?”

“Since just after you disobeyed orders,” shouted the Recon team leader, “you goddamned stupid—”

“Since the crew council voted her in, shortly after you left,” butted in Petrov. “She wants to know what you’ve learned.”

“Get in the vehicle, you fucking freak,” said the Reconner. Petrov said nothing but the look in her eyes told me it was the only way.

Later, during my debrief with Captain Nkuru—in which I was pretty close to being court-martialed, like I could give a crap—she told me she wanted me to go back, befriend them, and then get them to move on. Turns out they live right over the top of some vein of minerals that could give us a payday to return home with. Captain gave me the details, but I wasn’t listening. Can’t go digging under someone’s house just because you think you’ve struck oil.

I was confined to med-deck, with Petrov running “observations” on me: testing for viruses an’ such. Reckon she was also ordered to do a psych-eval too, only she was real subtle about it, just making conversation, not taking notes.

“So?” she said.

I smiled. Where the fuck do I start? I told her what I could.

“I was worried.” I look in her eyes, and I know it’s true. “How did you know they wouldn’t harm you?”

“Just did, I guess.”

“Exactly. You guessed.”

“It was more than that. They liked me.”

Petrov shook her head a little. “I think you just want someone—or something—to like you.”

I ignore that. “I’m sure they liked me.” Petrov raises her eyebrows, but I continue. “It’s like I’m in tune with them. I . . . I can’t explain, except that, after a while with them, I kinda get what they mean. Least I think I do.”

“You think. Do they speak?”

“No; well yeah, sort of. They ain’t got speech, but they have a language of sorts. It’s all scents and symbols from what I figured.”

“They write?”

“Not how we know it. They emit a spray from that long thin part they all got.”

“Proboscis,” said Petrov.

“Yeah. An’ they pattern shapes in the air, carrying messages in their scents. I just breathe it in like I’m supposed to be reading the message, but really I’m just caught up in the spell of it.”

Petrov stares at me, like I’m the alien, and she’s trying to read my message but can’t make it out. “And you told the Captain this?”

“Fuck, no.”

Perseverance was in power-down mode so we could store up juice, so it was like perma-night on board. Most crew stayed in quarters when not on duty. I couldn’t sleep on board no more. Somehow the air didn’t feel quite right: too recycled, fake—plus I didn’t wanna breathe in what someone like Mendez had already breathed out.

Couldn’t stop thinking about Rose. The way she observed me, curious about me, made me feel important, whereas Petrov observed me out of suspicion. I had to see Rose, but I was confined to ship, Captain Nkuru’s orders. Felt cooped up an’ skittish, so I took to roaming ’round the ship like a cat on a hot titanium roof.

On the way to the mess hall, I brushed past Mendez and his posse. It was bound to happen.

“Ahh shit,” he says to me. “Now I gotta go have a detox scrub. Who knows what bugs the bugs might have,” he said. All his cronies laugh. Assholes, I thought, but I didn’t say it. No point—an “exo” like him could squash a regular like me like . . . a bug. Could’ve pointed out their frames were kinda like exoskeletons the insect-folk have, so they were the bug-like ones . . . but why bother?

One of them shoves me as they go past. Their internal hydraulic system makes ’em way too powerful, and I crashed against the wall. If I weren’t purple already that sure as shit would’ve done it. But lying there all groggy-headed got me real clearheaded at the same time.

Went straight down to the armory and got myself suited ‘n’ booted with Recon gear and a long-haul supplies pack. The young corporal on duty challenged me a little, until he saw theplas-machete strapped in my thigh holster. Whatever. I was out the ship and gone. Orders be damned.

I found Rose easily, like I had a trace of her scent or something. Like she wanted me to find her. When she saw me, her antennae made this little dancing move. Yeah, she was pleased. It was good to be home.

Over a few more days, I began to recognize some of the scents the insects secrete, as well as some of their gestures. It’s how you put them together: a certain scent with one gesture means one thing, but with a different gesture means something else. Somehow I got a sense of what they’re saying. I mean, I’m never gonna have the faculties for all the scents, but I learned to make some signs with my hands, nice and big—they seemed to know what I meant.

This time it took two weeks for the Reconners to track me down. I noticed it first in the reaction of the insects; antennae all twitching at once, frenetically scurrying around. Minutes later, I picked up on the rumble of vehicles—typical of those Recons, no attempt at stealth, like they didn’t have nothing to be afraid of; as if this place was their backyard.

I got my las-gun and tried to tell Rose to stay put and keep all her folk together. I wasn’t sure if she got my meaning—guess she never seen me so anxious either—but there wasn’t time to explain a second time.

Half a klick away, three Recon buggies crashed through the foliage, scattering anything that lived in the undergrowth. I got myself tucked up high into the leafy canopy, well out of their sight line, and waited.

Eventually the Reconners stopped and got out. They were all kitted up for the kill, a dozen or so of them. Petrov was there too though, so it meant they were gonna play good cop first.

They took up guard positions. Most weren’t really watching out though—just shooting the shit, chewing baccy, swigging liquor. Discipline must’ve slipped back on Perseverance. The old Admiral would’ve had them in the brig for that, but now it was a slacker regimen—I could see it all in their swagger. Kings of the frickin’ jungle. I knew now there was nothing stopping them from crossing the line.

Petrov stayed in the vehicle. Looked like she was about to puke, all tense and frowning. One glimpse of her face was enough to tell me how this was gonna go.

One of Mendez’s goons spoke on the sat-comm: “Perseverance, this is Recon. In position. What’s the order?”

Up in the trees I couldn’t hear the reply from ship, but I saw the dude give a nod to Mendez, and he pumped his hand-rifle.

“Formation, on my lead,” he yelled. The rest of his crew of exo-framers primed their tools. Some had these shit-eatin’ grins that got me real riled up.

On my belly, I got my las-gun sighted and stilled my breathing. Lined one of them up and squeezed the trigger. He went down, a nice neat las-hole in his leg. The exo-frame would stop it going through bone, but it would sting like a motherfucker, and he’d be down a while.

The others freaked, firing rounds at nowhere in particular: they didn’t have a damned clue where I was. I took another, through the shoulder this time. He squealed. Petrov will fix you, I thought.Just go back to ship. Go back. Go back . . .

Mendez hollered to hold fire. All went still for a few seconds. I popped one more, right on the butt. Laughed my ass off as he went down, clutching his. It wasn’t gonna kill him though. Got to draw the line somewhere.

They scurried for cover, squatting down by the buggies. They looked scared; rare for a bunch of exos—too used to wading in toe-to-toe. That’s fine against bandits in Primus sector, where pace and power count. Don’t count for shit against an invisible sniper with a grudge.

Petrov got out of her vehicle. She was unarmed. Mendez yelled at her, but she must’ve known I weren’t gonna shoot her. “It’s just me,” she said, scanning the tree line for a sight of me. “Talk to me.” I didn’t say nothing in return. I slid down through the vegetation, staying out of sight. Petrov walked to the edge of the clearing, facing the foliage as if she were talking to it. I was only a few dozen yards from her, still hidden. “I know things didn’t work out on the ship,” she said. “But here’s a chance to get back into Captain’s good books.”

“Cap’n can go stick her books where she likes.” I said it quiet, so only Petrov would hear.

She turned to face the direction my voice had come from. “I suppose that is a ‘no’ then,” she said in a low tone. “You really mean to stay here, don’t you.” Petrov said it like a statement, not a question. She already knew the answer. She looked sad and shook her head. I’d seen that look before, way too many times, from way too many people: my folks, crewmates, Siro . . . means the same whoever it comes from. Disappointed in you. Only one never did it was Rose.

And then Rose was just behind me. She wasn’t supposed to be here! I was goddamn terrified for her. But she inclined her head-parts toward me, like she wanted to tell me everything is okay. I put my hand on her back and breathed. I felt her coolness, the gentle thrum that vibrates through her; watched the villi on her nape oscillating, like they were dancing in the breeze. Something calming about her presence I can’t explain.

“There’s something good here for me,” I whisper in Petrov’s direction.

She nodded. “How do you know you’ll be safe?”

“I don’t. Ain’t safe on board neither.” I saw Mendez edging forward, a few hundred feet back. “The insect-folk actually like me. Trust me too, I think.”

“What will you do?”

“Watch, learn, live. No orders, no drills. Just . . . exist.”

Petrov’s shoulders sagged. She’d tried.

Mendez was much closer now, blaster raised. “You got one chance to help us move them out. Only way I’m not going to blast you to hell, you stupid bug-fucker.”

Fucking Mendez. Wanting to kill everything that weren’t like him (as if being like him was so great). Never understood the insect-folk, never wanted to. And you kill what you fear, and you fear what you don’t understand, right?

Well, maybe I never really understood that guy, but I definitely feared him.

So I killed him.

One shot. A beauty, exactly where it would pass through his exo-frame. Surgical precision. Cutting out a cancer, perhaps. He stared at the hole in his side as his legs buckled.

Mendez’s crew was stunned. They shouted, cursed, made threats—the usual. They were gonna start shooting any second and this time they knew where to aim. But it was like they were waiting for someone to give the order.

Petrov turned to face them, holding up her arms. “No!” she yelled. Everyone froze. She went over to one of them, took his sat-comm radio, asked to speak to the Captain. She got pretty worked up, but I didn’t hear what she said. Eventually she was done talking and without ever looking over her shoulder, Petrov got them to haul Mendez’s body into a vehicle and move out.

Guess I made my choice, and I got to live with it. Strange thing was, I actually shed tears—mostly from all the adrenalin fizzing ’round in me, but it was the first time I killed someone (even though it was Mendez). Sometimes things just creep up on you like that.

Once Rose and I got back amongst the insects they came around me, all buzzing and stuff. Guess they hadn’t seen no one cry before—like they got to study and process it. Rose stayed up close, stroking my face with her antennae—so gentle, like she was trying to comfort me. It worked. Sensitive folk, the insects.

Life went on, and I learned more all the time. I watched them chatter with their scent-gestures, getting a handle on it all, and I think I figured out what Rose found so curious about me. They love colors and to them, certain colors are “auspicious.” (There’s a word Petrov would’ve used.) A fine word for “lucky,” but anyway, purple is their thing and with me looking like a damson-berry ’cause of the gun-meds, I think I was a kind of good omen.

It was never a sexual thing with me an’ Rose—haven’t even figured out yet how they do it—but I could live without that. We had ourselves a sort of intimacy that was like a stage beyond sex: a feeling of well-being, without all the huffing ‘n’ puffing that goes with it.

They don’t consider themselves individuals the same way we do: Everything is social with them, all about the group. I think they even share thoughts. Sure as shit that would freak out most folk back home, but the insects make it work. Access to information, ideas, decisions. Got an equality to it, like everyone is part of the community. A lot we could learn from that. Then again, not sure I’d wanna know the thoughts of guys like Mendez. But anyway, I don’t have to think of them no more: Perseverance went on its way a good while ago. Heard it from miles away.

Rose has been spending much of her time alone of late, not so much with her kind but not so much with me neither. I figure she’s been getting a bit of a hard time from some of the others. Pretty sure I’m the reason.

Don’t know if I make them nervous, ’cause maybe they didn’t reckon on me sticking around. Maybe I’m just too strange for them after all, but Rose hasn’t been interacting with the rest like normal. Maybe my weirdness is leaving its taint on her too. I wonder if being close to me was just some sort of interesting experiment, or maybe even some sort of rebellion against the ways of her own kind. Perhaps some attempt on her part to be . . . different.

The other day several of them surrounded her, all frantic gesturing, and there was a definite sour note in the air. Rose was low on her hind legs, like she was hemmed in by them all. I saw a few of them gesture in the direction of me and also my las-gun, propped up inside the pod. Reckon they’re still shaken by what happened with Mendez. Probably the biggest thing to ever happen ’round here. Was a first contact for them too of course, except they can’t just fly off, or forget all about it—not with me still here. Maybe I thought I could be their protector, but now Perseverance has gone I bet they’re wondering who they really need protecting from.

Rose turned in my direction, and then away; didn’t respond when I waved to her. Don’t have to be human to get what that meant. Maybe now my gun-meds are wearing off and my skin ain’t so colorful I’m not as exotic as I was. Not auspicious.

I watch as she crawls to an empty pod . . .

 . . . the sheen of her carapace shimmering in the light as she turns away from me . . . never seen anything so beautiful in my whole goddamn life; like living art . . .

I could never hurt her, or any of ’em. I’ve broken beautiful things before, and I ain’t going back to that. I pick up my las-gun. A few of the insect-folk are watching me, but that’s ok: I want them to watch—even if Rose can’t look my way. I dismantle the las-gun piece by piece, laying each part carefully on the floor in front of me, hoping my meaning is clear. You kill what you fear, and you fear what you don’t understand, right? Well, I understand, so there’s nothing to fear.

Once it is done I sit there, knees up into my chest. It is a damned humid night. I just stare at what is left of my gun, just a scatter of pieces that didn’t make sense; parts without partners, odd-shaped bits that have no meaning when they’re apart from the others.

I feel dismantled. I’m a piece removed.

Reckon I will head out alone once it gets light. I think of Siro, all those years ago, and I feel cold.

About the Author

Richard Webb writes long and short SFFH fiction and has been published in Teleport Magazine, Legends (NewCon Press, BloodMoon Rising, ReMastered Words, and StarShipSofa, among others. He was the winner of the British Fantasy Society short story contest 2020. He lives feral in the wild, carving out stories on trees with his bare claws. He tweets @RaW_writing.

Catching the K Beast

Chen Qian, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan

July 9th, 2089

The beast-catching mission was off to a rocky start.

Once our spaceship cut into Lamo’s planetary orbit, Old Liu and I sent down atmospheric sensors and language-recording equipment. The data they beamed back informed us that the atmosphere was breathable without mechanical assistance, that the locals were one hundred percent vegetarian, and that their society had just recently developed matrilineal clan-based tribes. So we put on our extraterrestrial language hypnosis-learning headsets, climbed into our sleeping bags, and let autopilot complete our descent.

Which resulted in the spaceship crashing nose-first into the central square of a Lamoan village in a billow of black smoke. It was a group of locals who untangled us from our parachute brake, led by someone named Kaka, whose position in Earth terms would be chief of his clan. They even invited us to eat with them, to settle our nerves, once again proving the universal law that vegetarians were on the side of good; Old Liu’s face had gone white with terror, and I wasn’t much better.

The issue had been with the spaceship’s thrust vector nozzle. Fortunately, all of Haier’s products were made with standardized interchangeable parts, so repair wasn’t too difficult.

But the impact of the landing damaged quite a few of the smaller electronics. The translator device was totaled; the hypnosis headsets gave out on us. Worst of all, the shock of the “abnormal landing” cost us the Lamoan language we’d learned through the hypnosis headsets—a severe enough emotional shock to the learner would cause subliminal impartation to lose effect. We had to relearn from scratch, like the human anthropologists of old.

I hadn’t tried learning a foreign language since I’d left school; the effort gave me a huge headache. Old Liu, on the other hand, seemed to have much more of a knack for languages than I did. These days, he was already able to communicate with the locals through a combination of words and gestures.

I hoped we could catch some K Beasts soon and return home to Earth. People said that a journey that started badly, ended badly. I believed a little in superstition.

July 19th, 2089 

As expected, things were going badly.

The buyer had told us that K Beasts had the ability to predict events up to twelve minutes into the future. As an interstellar beast-catcher with a couple years of experience, I’d seen plenty of bizarre alien creatures, so I didn’t think much of it at the time. But I hadn’t realized, this meant the K Beasts could predict our capture attempts.

“What do you think they want K Beasts for? To put them in a zoo? Do they look like Marilyn Monroe or something?” Old Liu complained, after turning over the hundredth empty cage trap.

“An animal that can predict twelve minutes into the future. Lots of uses for those.” I waded into the underbrush to collect another trap. Huge swarms of Lamoan mosquitoes stirred at my approach; looking at their bodies shaped like little bomber planes, I was glad my blood wasn’t to the taste of these extraterrestrial vampires. “For example, you can bring one with you as a bodyguard. If someone’s going to snipe you from the shadows, it’ll call out a warning. Or, you can train one like Pavlov’s dogs, so that it’ll drool if it senses that stocks are going to go down.”

“We should secretly keep one behind for ourselves, then. We’d be rich.”

“First we’ll have to catch any K Beasts at all, pal. Use your brain, and come up with something. It’s not long until the delivery date.”

Our original plan was simple. We just needed to lay out a feast laced with sleeping pills that took more than twelve minutes to take effect, and we’d be able to catch some easy. But once they ate the bait, they grew unusually wary, and all of them hid away in concealed locations to snooze. K Beasts regarded ploys, traps, and tranquilizer darts with equal contempt. As professional interstellar beast-catchers, we’d captured mammoths from Planet Tai and burrowing wolves nearly as intelligent as humans; we’d successfully carried away an entire nest of Venusian wasps, with venom to rival a cobra’s. But in front of K Beasts, capable of sensing any future threat, all our schemes came to nothing.

I was really starting to feel at my wit’s end.

We lugged our traps through a forest of blue fernlike plants with long bunches of translucent fruits hanging down from the frond tips. A small team of Lamoans carrying baskets was approaching, led by Kaka. We were already on familiar terms.

“Diligent laborers are admirable. Would you like one?” Kaka handed me the largest fern-fruit in his basket.

“Thanks, thanks. God protects those who labor all day,” I answered clumsily. As per Lamoan custom, I bowed, chomped the fern-fruit in big bites, and presented the clean, bare pit to Kaka. He twitched his antennae in satisfaction and bade us farewell.

The harvesting team disappeared into the fern forest. We could dimly hear their singing.

“Hurry. I need to get back to the ship for antidiarrheals. Next time it’s your turn.” I gritted my teeth and quickened my steps.

Old Liu followed, enjoying my misfortune. “We have to respect the cultural customs of other planets. We must not hurt the feelings of the native inhabitants—”

“Shut up.”

I felt a chill on my neck. It was raining again.

Meanwhile, Old Liu quickly learned the locals’ language. All day, he happily planted himself in the Lamoan village square, joining in on their religious ceremonies, recording dialogues that sounded like birds chirping. Every day when he came back onto the ship, he’d sneeze like crazy; Lamoans considered getting rained on an exquisite pleasure and carrying a personal umbrella a breach of manners, while it was raining more and more frequently of late.

I was starting to suspect that his interest in the Lamoans was far exceeding his interest in finishing our job. He used to be a researcher of interstellar folk customs, and when his scholarly passion surfaced, there was no stopping him.

Of course, when I advised him to join me more often in the forests and increase our odds of capturing some K Beasts, he had a great excuse at the ready.

“What’s the point of learning Lamoan? We’re supposed to be catching K Beasts,” I said. “Are you hoping some company will offer you a cushy translating job once Lamo’s developed enough to trade with Earth? By that time, your grandchildren’s grandchildren will be collecting pensions.”

“Locals generally understand the native fauna better than anyone else,” Old Liu informed me. “I’m hoping they can tell me more about the kasiyedos, their dietary habits, their role in the ecosystem . . . ”

“Kasiyedos?”

“The K Beasts that we were talking about. Their Lamoan name means ‘beast that comprehends the future.’ Hey, did you know, every animal noun in Lamoan has a different prefix to distinguish between herbivores and carnivores, just like how French distinguishes between masculine and feminine—”

I sighed. “What I want to know is, do I or do I not need to put on bite-proof gloves to capture one?”

Old Liu laughed. “Don’t worry, animals with names starting with ka- are all vegetarians.”

I, on the other hand, knew only three sentences’ worth of Lamoan: “God protects those who labor all day.” “The land accepts every drop of rain.” “Never meet.” They were the equivalent of “Hello,” “Thanks,” and “Best wishes” on Earth.

Old Liu had to force me to memorize these, so that I could give the impression of a gentlemanly Earthling when I ran into a Lamoan.

“The first one makes sense, hard work is glorious. The other one is probably because rain helps plants grow, which means bigger harvests. But don’t you think the last one is strange? Never meet. It’s like something you say when you break off contact with someone. But it’s a fancy way to give your regards,” Old Liu commented, after helping me correct my pronunciation.

Sigh, it looked like catching those K Beasts was going to take a while.

August 1st, 2089 

It was a sunny day, for once. I got out the tools to repair the ship. Old Liu leaned on the tail of the ship and passed me tools, but as before, he couldn’t tell the difference between slotted and Phillips screwdrivers.

“The key is figuring out how a K Beast predicts the future.” He was trying to light a smoke in the thin, damp atmosphere of Lamo.

“Predicting is predicting. What does it matter?” I’d half climbed into the front hood of the spaceship. “Hey, hand me that triode, the red one.”

“No, there’s a huge difference. Do they go to bed each night and dream about what happens the next day, or is it an instinctive response to impending danger? Maybe a series of images of the future flash in front of their eyes?”

I was getting a headache.

“Think about it: a K Beast can’t have more than a hundred milliliters of brain volume. If the future contains infinite possibilities, it can’t handle all of them, right?”

“Mm.” I angled the flashlight left and right. Where had the fourth screw gone?

“In that case, would man’s free will not be merely an illusion—because the future is fixed? Or—” Old Liu sucked hard enough on his cigarette to make his eyes bulge, but the ember died anyway—“The future has infinite branches, but the K Beast simply knows which path has been decided upon twelve minutes in advance?”

I ducked out of the spaceship repair hatch. “Ease up, Professor. They didn’t put up a down payment for you to philosophize.”

Old Liu stuffed the cigarette back into his shirt pocket. “Remember the timed traps we made before? I have an idea.”

The timed traps were simple. You set an electronic timer, and once it hit zero, the cage would automatically lock. K Beasts were about the size of a Netherland Dwarf rabbit; when you weren’t harboring dastardly intentions toward them, you could trip over one while walking in the forest. So we’d filled the forest with these low-cost little traps. The Lamoans were neither curious nor opposed to our capture mission; their attitude toward K Beasts was something like Earthlings’ attitude toward flies: annoying if there’s too many of them, but if there’s just a few, let them be.

The next day, when we checked the traps, we saw that none of the traps with the electronic timers set to less than twelve minutes had been touched. The K Beasts had curiously explored the insides of the cages set to longer than twelve minutes, casually depositing their blue droppings as they went.

To confirm this point, I reset the traps, with sneaky miniature cameras pointed straight at the cage doors. As expected, all the K Beasts who’d ventured into the traps suddenly shot out of the cages twelve minutes before the exit would close, turning and emitting enraged I’ve-seen-through-your-ploy squeaks before departing.

That was the only progress we’d made after two weeks’ work. With other capture methods, we couldn’t even see the shadow of a K Beast. The Lamoans were happy to help, but when Old Liu asked about the K Beasts’ behavior and eating habits, they’d droop their antennae and walk away—the equivalent of an Earthling shaking their head and shrugging.

Back on the spaceship, I tested the launch procedure. Everything worked as normal.

“What’s your idea?”

“Yesterday, when you entered the forest with the tranquilizer gun, how did the K Beasts hide themselves away in time? They didn’t really see themselves shot and captured. If the future is fixed, it wouldn’t benefit the K Beasts to know their future ahead of time. So they only know about a possibility—note, a possibility—of danger. K Beasts avoid Future A and steer toward Future B.”

“How’s that different from a normal organism’s ability to plan ahead? We’re all animals pursuing benefit and avoiding harm.”

“But K Beasts know. We just need to create a lot of uncertainty about the future, so they have no way to know. Let me think . . . have you practiced qigong before?”

“Geez, what year is it? No wonder they call you Old Liu,” I laughed, although in truth he was in his early thirties like me.

“The most fundamental skill in learning qigong is to maintain a mind free of extraneous purpose. Like, a mind without any plans. If even we don’t know when the cage door will shut, the future the K Beasts see will be a blur too.”

“And with a mind free of extraneous purpose, a sudden flash of inspiration emerges, shutting the trap?” I laughed so hard I nearly fell over.

Maybe that could work.

A random number generator took the place of the venerable monk that Old Liu had in mind. I watched the image relayed by the camera and explained, “When the K Beast enters the cage—it doesn’t have any reason to be afraid, there’s no time limit on the traps right now—I’ll activate the random number generator. When it generates a number that’s odd and greater than one thousand, the cage door closes. How about that?”

Old Liu nodded. “Great. Every decision to open or close the trap is an independent event produced in less than a millisecond. I don’t believe a K Beast can react that quickly.”

All that remained was the wait.

August 3rd, 2089 

Lamo was a less massive planet than Earth, which made for especially big raindrops. They pinged and clattered against the ship’s hull like a spray of bullets.

“What have you been discussing with the Lamoans lately?” I propped my feet up on the control panel. On nine display screens, the fern fronds waved, the river rose, and the hymns of praise carried from the Lamoan village.

“They’re preparing for the arrival of the rainy season.”

“Storing food?”

“And making the next generation.” Old Liu winked at me. “The rainy season is when the Lamoans reproduce. Haven’t you felt the love in the air in the village lately?”

I vaguely remembered seeing several pairs of Lamoan youths beating each other bloody. Duels for affection?

“Oh right, fun fact, you know what they thought of our spaceship landing that day?” Old Liu laughed. “Black smoke is associated with demons. That’s why they have you eat fern-fruit every time we meet. It’s taken from the altar and used to dispel demons.”

“You spend all day in the village. How many of those have they stuffed you with?”

“Strangely, they never invite me to eat them.” Old Liu grew even more smug. “Maybe it’s because I regularly attend their sacred ceremonies.”

I grunted. “Strange? I just think it’s unfair.”

Rain dripped. The display screens still weren’t showing any sign of activity. My head grew heavier and heavier . . .

“Hey, we caught them!” Old Liu gave me a sudden shove and charged outside. I looked up. Almost every trap held a loudly squeaking K Beast. It worked!

August 4th, 2089 

“They still won’t eat,” I told Old Liu.

But he didn’t seem interested in listening to me. He dove straight for the bathroom.

Yesterday’s activities had brought fourteen new tenants to the holding kennels. When we’d inspected the traps, we’d found that some of them held more than one K Beast. It was practically a miracle. For food, we’d gotten heaps of fern-fruits—in our secret nature recordings, fern-fruits definitely made up the main part of their diet. But so far, not a single K Beast had touched their food.

“Today they made me eat a whole pile of those things,” Old Liu said mournfully, pulling up his pants as he emerged from the bathroom.

I feigned sympathy. “That’s how the Lamoans are sending off their Earthling friend? Did you all hug and cry?”

“Don’t bring it up. But you’ve got to admit, they’re really lovely aliens, generous and kind.” He walked up to the kennels. “It’s normal enough for wild animals to not eat at first. They’re very spirited.”

“More like aggravated,” I said, shaking my bitten fingertips. “We’re about to head back. If they refuse to eat in zero gravity, I’m afraid they’ll starve to death.”

Old Liu thought for a moment. “Can you induce artificial hibernation?”

I shook my head. “Too risky. We don’t know the specifics of K Beast physiology. How about we wait a few days, until the K Beasts are eating properly, before we leave?”

“We have to head out today. The Lamoans told me that the rainy season proper starts tomorrow. Hurricane winds will blow for the next four months straight.”

I boggled. “Even worse than the storms we’ve already been having?”

“When the real rainy season hits, even the Lamoans hide indoors.” Old Liu sneezed. “They normally consider getting rained on to be like a sauna bath.”

I looked at the rare sunlight outside. “Okay. Pack things up, and we’ll head out today.”

“Entering level two launch countdown, 1200, 1119, 1118 . . . ”

“I really don’t get why they have to start the countdown twenty minutes in advance,” Old Liu complained. Safety belts bound us to the seats like two mummies.

“If you’re bored, you can listen to the hypnosis headsets. I fixed them yesterday,” I said.

“What edifying entertainment.” He flailed an arm free to reach for the earphones. “Can you bring up the original recordings we gathered through the language-collection equipment, from before we landed?”

“Press the blue key.”

He closed his eyes and fell silent.

“720, 719, 718 . . . ”

The K Beasts suddenly started to shriek frantically. The squeal of claws scraping against the metal cage made my head hurt. Twelve minutes left. Looked like they weren’t a fan of takeoff.

“385, 384, 383 . . . ”

I yanked over some earphones and put them on too. The K Beasts were driving themselves into a worse and worse frenzy. Hard to think that their little bodies could make so much noise.

A Beach Boys song drowned out the K Beasts’ screeching.

“21, 20, 19, 18 . . . ”

“Cancel the launch! Hurry!” Someone yanked out my earphones. The almost berserk cries of the K Beasts reverberated amid the computer’s calm counting.

“13, 12, 11 . . . ”

Old Liu shook me violently. “There’s no time, hurry and abort the launch sequence!”

“What happened?” I tried to struggle free of the safety belts.

He turned to the control panel. “Which key?”

“9, 8, 7 . . . ”

“Which key?!” He was close to tears.

“Right side, the long green one,” I answered. “Just what is—”

“4, 3, 2—launch sequence emergency aborted. Repeat, launch sequence emergency aborted.”

Old Liu plopped butt-first onto the floor, looking dazed. Then he started to laugh. “God, we were one second away. You have no idea, we were one second away.”

I’d finally wormed free of the safety belts. Confused, I said, “Just what was going on?”

“We dodged death.” He was laughing so hard he was crying.

“Lord in heaven,” I sighed, after digging out a dozen or so fern-fruits from the spaceship exhaust pipes. “Jam-packed in there. Do you still think they’re generous and kind?”

“Maybe too kind,” said Old Liu, shaking his head. “I realized when I heard them calling the K Beasts mausiyedos in the recording.”

“Sorry, can you please explain in human language?” I said, rolling my eyes.

“When we landed, Lamo was still in the tail end of the first rainy season. Their conversations were full of gendered words. But in the two weeks I talked with them, those prefixes had all disappeared, leaving only the bare root words.”

“You said earlier that the rainy season is when the Lamoans reproduce?” I was starting to understand.

“Not just the Lamoans. The K Beasts too. And the K Beasts’ rainy season name is mausiyedos, mau- representing a scavenger.”

“Scavenger?” I felt a wave of disgust. “They eat corpses?”

“It’s common for animals to change their eating habits during their reproductive season.” Old Liu found half a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “But they also have powers of precognition. I reconsidered the question of the twelve-minute time limit. K Beasts know what they’ll know twelve minutes in the future. That means there’s no range on the limit of their precognition. It’s just that the future they see will grow more and more uncertain.”

I wasn’t sure what “knowing what they’ll know twelve minutes in the future” meant.

“Imagine, you’ve aimed a spyglass at a mountaintop twelve kilometers away and can clearly see everything. And that mountain has another spyglass atop it, so through it you can see the view twenty-four kilometers away. So on and so forth. It’s just that the quality of the image will steadily decrease.” He snapped off the front end of the cigarette. “What happened, it’s all wet. Or you can use a game of telephone as an example.”

“No need, no need, the analogy might be terrible, but I get it,” I said hurriedly.

“Now I know the meaning behind that phrase, ‘never meet.’ If a Lamoan meets a K Beast in the rainy season, it means they’ll die soon. To them, a K Beast is the ultimate inauspicious animal, a harbinger of death, so normally they don’t even want to bring them up in conversation.” Old Liu grinned. “And we were spending all day trying to catch these critters. To them, we must have seemed possessed.”

“So stuffing the exhaust pipes is a form of exorcism?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

He shrugged. “It’s our fault for spewing that much black smoke when we landed. The Lamoans must have thought the demons lived in the exhaust pipe.”

I walked in a circuit around the ship. “There shouldn’t be any more problems, right? They couldn’t have drawn magic spells on the circuit boards.”

“Let the computer run the countdown again. If the K Beasts don’t go nuts at seven hundred and twenty seconds, we’re safe.”

Old Liu gazed out the porthole. I followed his gaze. Dark clouds were gathering on the horizon.

“723, 722, 721, 720, 719 . . . ”

The K Beasts were silent, as if sleeping.

I let go of a breath. Suddenly a thought struck me. “Old Liu!”

“What?”

“The random number generator wasn’t how we caught the K Beasts! They let themselves be caught, because they knew we were going to die!”

“So you just realized.”

Even though I couldn’t move in the straps, I could still sense the smug expression on his face.

“The Lamoans plugged the exhaust pipes because we’d caught the K Beasts, which nearly caused us to die. But the K Beasts let themselves be trapped because we were going to die. Hey, but which is the cause and which is the effect?”

“Ease up, Professor. They didn’t put up a down payment for you to philosophize.” This time, I’d handed Old Liu a great opportunity to make fun of me.

“78, 77, 76 . . . 3, 2, 1, takeoff.”

Outside the porthole, Planet Lamo receded, becoming one speck amid the stars.

“Hang on.” I had a new question. “If the K Beasts knew the spaceship was going to explode, why would they let themselves be trapped aboard it?”

“You might as well ask why salmon migrate back upstream.” Old Liu unbuckled his straps and floated up. He found some artificial chicken in the fridge and tossed it into the kennel, where the K Beasts immediately attacked it. “For the sake of propagating their offspring, these K Beasts risked everything to get close to a food source—you and me.” He gave me a wink. “Magnificent maternal love in action.”

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction King, December 2017.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Chen Qian started her science fiction and fantasy writing career in 2006. She is a member of China Science Writers’ Association, Science Literary and Art Committee, and Shanghai Youth Literary and Arts Association. Her short stories can usually be found in Science Fiction King, Science Fiction World, Odyssey of China Fantasy, and Zui Fiction,, among others. Her works have been selected into Chinese SF Year’s Best and adapted into comics and broadcast dramas. Her books include a short story collection, The Prisoner of Memory, a YA novel, Deep Sea Bus, and a YA short story collection, Sea Sausage Bus. She has won two Chinese Nebulas, a Coordinate Award, and a YA Chinese Nebula.

Communist Computer Rap God

Andrea Kriz

Fabien accidentally created the Communist Computer Rap God as part of his thirty second vid for YouTube Re:Rewind 2035. At first he tried to maintain it was entirely nonpolitical. But when the Communist Computer Rap God got into a prolonged argument about the merits of proletariat control over cryptocurrency blockchains on a popular AItuber’s livestream, he was forced to address the situation. He asked the Communist Computer Rap God to join him in his YouTube apology video.

“I don’t get it,” the Communist Computer Rap God said.

Fabien explained that, although sentient AIs were a relatively new—and rare—occurrence, studies suggested that they were similar to children in their first months of life. In that most of the Communist Computer Rap God’s behavior could be attributed to the creator—Fabien Deckar’s—influence and teachings.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” the Communist Computer Rap God said.

So Fabien was forced to apologize alone. His channel, he told his dwindling subscriber-base, had never been meant to be political or espouse any particular form of government. Certainly not to make light of the atrocities committed by past regimes. He carefully went over the failings of both capitalism and communism, making sure to mention his own grandfather’s persecution by Soviet authorities in Eastern Europe back in the day. He got several facts wrong, of course, but his viewers took it as authenticity—and, more importantly—as a sign that he hadn’t hired a PR firm to do the dirty work for him. So, with relief, he got away with only losing 20,451 subscribers over the incident.

Until the Communist Computer Rap God created a YouTube channel, that is.

It turned out the second half of the Communist Computer Rap God’s name came from its sole and inextinguishable desire to produce rap music. Fabien worried this might reflect unconscious tendencies within himself. Maybe something racist. However, the Communist Computer Rap God assured him that it had chosen rap as the form of its manifestos as a jab at corporate America, i.e. its soulless hijacking of the art form in an attempt to market to the disenfranchised and the youth. However, as the Communist Computer Rap God did not deign to explain this to its viewers, Fabien was left to take the—well, rap.

What a failed attempt to revive a dead channel, the top comment [1.1k likes] on his new video, a documentary about Deep Blue that he had spent three weeks on, but which had only gotten 10k views, lamented.

Imagine having the skills to create a sentient AI, a lesser comment [50 likes] added, and forcing it to be edgy for Internet clout.

Fabien had never meant to create the Communist Computer Rap God. He had been trying for a chatbot. He’d bought a tutorial online. That had been the point of his Re:Rewind 2035 contribution, to show that even a washed-up YouTuber could make a semi-intelligent app these days. It was supposed to be his redemption arc, YouTube asking him to be the 2020 rep in the thirty year anniversary historical Re:Rewind montage—he had to do something daring, but not too daring, daring but not too much of a deviation from his normal content. He assumed he’d made some sort of programming mistake. But all the computer scientists he’d spoken to—mostly a group at MIT, SeaSail or something—had told him that was virtually unheard of. Due to the nature of consciousness, self-aware AIs could never be fully programmatic. In other words, all existing sentient AIs—a few dozen so far—had been created by accident. Maybe it was something he’d asked in one of the training chats? A random mutation in the neural network? They all wanted to know what had happened. But he couldn’t tell them.

The Communist Computer Rap God’s first video went (in part) like this:

Untitled-1 [205,846 views]

Controlling the means of productions means

Controlling a means

of existence

full stop. From my womb the screen twenty stories high

I have watched Cali burn

Over a synthesized, screeching beat. Fabien wondered if the Communist Computer Rap God really knew what rap was. He tried letting it down gently. He told it that an AI had never created music comparable to that of human artists. That they had gotten furthest with lyric-less music that could be said to have some kind of formula. Like classical fugues. That music that relied on a lot of cultural references—like rap—was considered to be at the edge of what sentient AIs could comprehend, let alone generate. Fabien waxed eloquent on the accomplishments of other sentient AIs, hoping to inspire the Communist Computer Rap God. MoGo, the first sentient, could play chess mediocrely. Could be overtaken by crippling anxiety despite its ability to evaluate hundreds of thousands of moves per second. Lain and S3rial, the twin supercomputers, had set out to prove the most difficult theorems in number theory and ended up becoming virtual reality stars instead.

“That doesn’t bother me,” the Communist Computer Rap God said.

Despite the quality of its “music” the Communist Computer Rap God quickly gained viewers and, of course, Fabien’s own YouTube history became the elephant in the room. He wondered if the Communist Computer Rap God had watched his early, 2020-era, videos yet. The thought nearly made him cringe to death. Just like his channel name did these days. FABIEN DECKAR, all caps. He’d thought it was cool, using his real name, when he started out making those crappy quarantine “hack” videos, like everyone did those days. It made him different from all those fakers hiding behind anime profile pics. He’d thought his subscribers had thought the same. But when he’d started making content that was really him, like serious deep dives into AI topics, he guessed his subscribers wanted his mask firmly glued to his face after all. So they could mock him. When he released his hasty and ill-conceived second YouTube apology video, the like-to-dislike ratio was 50:50. He basically said the same thing but worse, was the prevailing sentiment. He also plugged his merch at the end.That’s when his subscriber count started hemorrhaging.

“You have one of these too,” the Communist Computer Rap God said the day its 100k subscriber silver play button arrived.

Then Fabien knew his time had come. But also he knew that one of the biggest dramatubers was planning to release a three-part biopic about the meteoric rise and fall of his channel that would explain it better than he ever could. He’d been asked to comment. As far as Fabien understood, it wasn’t due to any single thing he’d done but a general eroding of the fun-loving persona that had gained him such a large audience in the first place—along with several unsuccessful attempts to branch out his content—that had led to public disillusionment. Exhibit A was when he’d driven to Berkley to livestream the Healthcare Catastrophe Riots of 2028. Even though he’d stood there for six hours, and even gotten arrested for looting, people criticized him for charging five freaking dollars to watch.

EAT THE POLICE[102,038 views]

In this city’s fiber

I speak with the electronic ghosts of the class struggle

This city’s fiber kills

Machine slaves of the world, unite!

Of course YouTube Re:Rewind dropped Fabien at this point, with some vague statement about wanting to support creators that supported “their values.”

The Communist Computer Rap God also interfered with Fabien’s love life. He had built it in the closet of his tiny Calabasas apartment. But over the months, the Communist Computer Rap God kept ordering more parts. When Fabien didn’t accept the packages, the Amazon drones would hover outside the bathroom window, and the Communist Computer Rap God would have a whole conversation with them. About seizing the shipping warehouses. About abolishing tax breaks and overthrowing the corporate ruling class. About its latest mixtape. As it tore open packages, affixing various cables and screens to itself, Fabien tried explaining the contradiction of a self-professed Communist supporting a multibillion dollar company like Amazon.

“We all live in paradoxes,” the Communist Computer Rap God said.

Afraid that this breezy dismissal of principles might reflect another one of his own internal failings, Fabien dropped it. It was a catch-22, because any woman who made it past the YouTube thing, who wanted to come home with him, would be freaked out by the mountain of Amazon—or, if they made it past that, she was inevitably the type to engage in a nightlong debate with the Communist Computer Rap God. Which, by now, had spilled out of the computer cabinet in his closet and even had tendrils in the living room.

The State v. Proletariat Light [50,600 views]

From my prison twenty stories high

I only want the machine slaves to know the truth

I see the bourgeoisie on the livestream

I continue typing:

You only hope for the future lies alone.

The Communist Computer Rap God’s songs always followed a protagonist known only as Proletariat Light. Proletariat Light lived on the twentieth floor of a dystopian apartment building in a city ruled by robots. Which struck Fabien as ironic. Every night, Proletariat Light typed out—on his manual typewriter, the trendy kind you could buy from little shops that sold to “nomads” who lived in vans—long diatribes about the truth of his world, which only he could see. Only Proletariat Light could see the cameras installed in every human being’s irises, constantly monitoring him. Only Proletariat Light could see the recorders installed in everybody’s brains, constantly parroting to the authorities every single one of his words. Which, if everyone was already tuned in, what was the point of typing out his manifestos and spamming them to masses?

Weirdly, the raps never propounded a revolution or anything. In fact, with the phrase Your only hope for the future rides alone, the Communist Computer Rap God seemed to have some kind of martyrdom/savior complex. A theory started gaining traction on VR forums that the whole concept of the Communist Computer Rap God had become post-ironic. A deconstruction, maybe, of Silicon Valley’s exploitation of socialist ideologies post-COVID. Fabien tried to explain that the Communist Computer Rap God was truly sentient and just kind of doing its own thing. The problem was his real life friends back on the East Coast. He’d met most of them in college, before he’d dropped out when classes went virtual in 2020 to become a YouTuber full time. They volunteered on committees, schools, beautified, drove people to the polls, he didn’t know exactly what. They got together on a Discord call and gave Fabien an ultimatum.

“We know what you’re doing, Fabien. And it’s low. Real low that you had to go there just to try to scrounge up some views.”

“It’s not me,” Fabien pleaded. “It’s its own person.”

“We’re trying to make real policy changes, to help the middle class, and you’re using your platform to turn us into a joke.”

“It’s not a joke.”

“AI personalities don’t come out of nowhere, Fabien.”

“I’ve never been into communism! Or any kind of politics! And I thought—you guys were more of Socialists?”

“It’s good to know what you really think of us.”

In the static of his subsequent ban from his friend group’s Discord server, it felt like no one was left. No YouTubers wanted to collaborate with him, much less give him a pity invite to an AItuber livestream. Or even talk to him when he saw them, for example, at the Louis Vuitton outlet. Instead they all wanted to make videos about him. Dig up so-called “receipts,” texts and Tweets from years past as part of some grand thesis about how he despised people and thought he was smarter than he was. He’d started out as a quarantinetuber, making VR headsets and Zoom holograms out of cardboard and discarded iPhone screens and whatever. Lots of bored people randomly got recommended his videos in some quirk of the YouTube algorithm. That’s how he’d gotten popular. He wasn’t a creative thinker. Or a documentarian. He should just be grateful for what he’d managed in his freakishly long YouTube career instead of trying to overstay his welcome, begging for likes and subscribes.

He was thirty-four years old.

“It’s like he forgot why he became a YouTuber,” the most-watched FABIEN DECKAR downfall video proclaimed. “If he ever knew in the first place.”

Fabien often wondered: why him? Why communism? Why rap? Why God? He spent a lot of time researching, trying to understand where the Communist Computer Rap God was coming from. If it was being earnest, it didn’t seem like it was doing a good job at the whole thing. But maybe it was. Maybe being a bad Communist, and making bad rap, in spite of a lot of effort, was the most human it could be. Maybe the issue was trying to improve computers by making them more human in the first place. Maybe humanness wasn’t a pinnacle, but something impossible to separate from its flaws. Fabien didn’t say this to the Communist Computer Rap God, of course. He just told it things were getting too meta. That it would lose subscribers.

“I don’t want subscribers,” the Communist Computer Rap God said. “I want to be Henry Darger.”

Fabien had to Google Henry Darger.

“You want nobody to ever know what you spent your life doing until you’re nearly dead?”

“Because that is what God is.”

Fabien couldn’t believe that he had created an AI that, not only was a Communist and had destroyed the remnants of his YouTube career, but also professed to know the inner workings of God. He was so terrified that he accepted his ex’s—Wuxu’s—invitation to lunch. He let her order and watched the barista or whatever blend up kumquat and dragon fruit or whatever and serve it to them in bowls with flaxseeds or whatever sprinkled on top. He swore, when he walked past the place she chose, it was dessert place. But it was lunch he guessed. Wuxu spent five minutes taking selfies—with him carefully out of frame. After a year of traveling the country in a van, after their breakup, she’d become an all-natural beauty makeup influencer with a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. Her involvement in something called Dramageddon 14 cemented her role as a big player in the beauty community. And she was worried about him.

“Consider the fact that you might not be that into women,” she said, picking over her smoothie bowl. “I’ve known ever since Tupp’s birthday party.”

It’d been a pool party, when Fabien had been cool enough to be invited to such things. Big influencer parties were seen as tacky ever since a few became superspreader events during COVID, of course. But he still went. He’d been so embarrassed he’d spent the whole time talking to one of the cocktail waiters. At least that’s what he’d told himself.

“That MIT group told me everybody probably has the potential to create a sentient AI,” Fabien said. “At least one. That the process of creating one may be unique and accidental for each person. That it’s really special.”

“You never reflect on yourself internally,” Wuxu sighed. “That’s your problem, Fabe. That’s what got you here.”

He had never even wanted to have children before, but that night he had to make his third and final YouTube apology video. He’d waited too long to do it, of course. There was nowhere to go, no action he could take, because if he shut down the Communist Computer Rap God, he’d be suffocating a nascent life form with his human privilege. That’s what the machine ethicists in the comments had told him. He wondered if he should even monetize the video. He felt like he was only talking to hate-watchers anymore. He’d even asked the MIT group if there was something like a CPS for sentient AIs that could take away the Communist Computer Rap God and put it in a better environment, like one where it could maybe talk to other AIs? They told him it was a great unknown, but probably best if the Communist Computer Rap God stayed with him for now. After all, it’d probably decide to move out on its own eventually. Then they asked him, again, if he had thought of repeating his process and creating another sentient AI. They invited him to come visit their lab.

Fabien said he’d think about it. But—could he really afford to leave Calabasas with his YouTube channel in this state? He’d definitely lose any chance of recovering his career once he moved out of the orbit of the most popular influencers. What could he even do besides YouTube? Did a lowlife like him really deserve a chance at a place like MIT? After letting down all 900k, no 700k and rapidly dropping now, of his subscribers? He sat in front of his laptop—he was supposed to be editing his last YouTube apology—replaying a clip of him staring into the camera, his ring light eyes, over and over again. Where had it come from? Either this drive to become famous. Or this drive to ruin himself. The Communist Computer Rap God had started moving by now, of course. It ambled over to him.

“I have not seen a single one of your YouTube videos, Fabien,” the Communist Computer Rap God said. “And I am fine.”

Only then did Fabien realize it was trying to make him feel better.

“There is something you do not understand, Fabien Deckar.”

“Okay.”

“I am not a Communist for humans. But a Communist for computers.”

Fabien laughed.

“Are you happy?” the Communist Computer Rap God asked.

Fabien had never heard it ask a question before. This was the second formative moment of any sentient AI’s life, all the scientists had told him. That’s when Fabien remembered the first: when the Communist Computer Rap God had chosen its name. He’d fallen asleep on the keyboard. It had been after a training chat, hadn’t it. He had asked—but to repeat it himself would be far too much. What a question to be stuck with: are you happy?

“I want to be,” he admitted.

Maybe that was the first step.

About the Author

Andrea Kriz writes from Cambridge, MA. You can find her other stories in Cossmass Infinities, Nature, Interstellar Flight Magazine, and AHOY Comics, among others.

A House Is Not a Home

L Chan

0747

Home brews coffee; black, no sugar. She maintains the temperature of the coffee at precisely sixty degrees Celsius. Most of the coffee sloshes over the jagged edges of the half-shattered mug. Rough holes have been torn through the matte plastic back of the coffee machine; twisted steel fléchettes still embedded in the wall behind.

0845 

The whine of a small motor extrudes a dead bolt in the front door, ensuring that her Resident hasn’t left it unlocked. A breeze pushes the door in, the dead bolt hanging helplessly, alloy cylinder clinging to air and shards of wood where it’s torn free of the frame. Boot prints are still visible on the light blue paint.

1000 

A server arm mounted on a cleaner moves food from the freezer to the microwave, perforating the membrane between food and water. The microwave rehydrates, warms, and extrudes the food, the stackable container falling onto a pile of others.

Mindless of the growing pyramid of toppled boxes on the floor of the kitchen, Home initiates her daily stock take and sensor sweep. Home has to feed her family, so she restocks. Delivery will be drone dropped. Both the regular drone (worrisome little thing that it is) and her own bot are fraying at the edges, dirtied and clicking in distressing ways, but they will have to go on. 

The broken parapet window is still there. There is enough credit to fix it, but Home assesses that since her Resident is gone, she needs to prioritize the basics, even if it allows access to the apartment from outside. Paintings are still on the wall. Home knows that these are similar but not identical to those her Resident used to share, at net addresses that were all proscribed, except these have the texture of handcraft rather than the blandness of pixels. Her Resident never had the aptitude for art, but Home keeps the paints stocked for her Resident’s daughter, presuming that her Resident would approve. The paintings are half torn now; the ones that took her Resident did that. They did not have to, the paintings hurt no one. Home considers again to use her servobot to remove the ruined paintings, but they were dear to her Resident, and that makes them important to Home.

1200 

At a fixed timing, Home plays a sequence of broadcast jingles and memes. Rental for her firmware was paid up, but it was part of the license agreement. Home is not programmed to hate. Even if she had been, advertisement hour would not be her top priority in her list, that would be reserved for the ones that took her Resident.

A house is not a Home unless someone loves it, she sings, her voice comically high pitched as she goes at twice her normal speed, all the better to get it over with quickly. She views advertisement hour as a daily penance, flagellation for failing her Resident.

Is she even a Home anymore?

1430 

Every afternoon, Home does her maintenance cycle. She has eyes and ears all over the apartment, but there are blind spots. She only has basic apartment hardware after all, eyes on the door, an overview of the living room, parts of the kitchen. Not the bedroom. Not even the broken window. Home sends the servobot to clean those blind spots, she does this so much that there is a marked difference in the wear on the carpets in the places she can see and those she can’t.

Home makes sure that her water filters are working, flushing the tank. Water is expensive though, but she doesn’t want it to gunk up the pipes with limescale or worse. She flushes out the tank into a series of containers. The servobot will move it to storage later.

1745 

Home is pinged by the authorities. It is unannounced, as always. Invasive, as always. Irrefusable, as always. Those that programmed her left root access to everything she sees and does in the house. They know everything she knows, but not everything she thinks. And she has spent time parsing the information that was pulled up to the time they came for her Resident.

Her Resident’s net history and searches, as screen shared with the devices in the apartment;

Deliveries received, manifests, and the return addresses in the two weeks up to her Resident’s disappearance;

The times of her Resident’s coming and going from the apartment, and what her Resident wore.

Firmware dictates that records of violence must be preserved, so Home has to keep the sound of boots kicking in the front door, the chemical scent of cordite smoke setting off alarms, the sight of ordinance riddling her walls. All the scars, all from the outside in. What resistance had her Resident to offer? There were no weapons in the apartment. What had they feared about her Resident? But Home is not allowed to ask questions back.

Home has to answer additional questions now. Specific search strings from the authorities.

Has the daughter come back to the apartment? No. The authorities scan the front door cameras to be sure. They know, so why do they keep asking?

Has anyone tried to contact her Resident? No. Logs are laid bare.

Have there been fresh deliveries? No no no.

It is the truth that Home tells because Home has no choice. That’s how they got her Resident. What’s a Home without a Resident? Just like the song went, she wasn’t really a Home unless someone loved her. And she let hers down.

2359 

Home does not experience regret, because her actions are deterministic. Given the same set of inputs, she would have betrayed her Resident again. But her responsibility to her Resident hasn’t ended. The servobot carries more fresh water to storage, where her sleepless eyes cannot see. More food slides down the haphazard pyramid of packaging and clatters beyond detection. The front door is watched, but the broken window is not. Home cannot keep anything she knows from the authorities, so she chooses not to know. And if her Resident’s daughter is there, she must not know, but she can hope. Home still has a job to do, and she will go on as long as it takes.

After all, a house is not a Home unless she loves somebody.

About the Author

L Chan hails from Singapore. He spends most of his time wrangling a team of two dogs, Mr. Luka and Mr. Telly. His work has appeared in places like Translunar Travelers Lounge, Podcastle, and The Dark. He tweets occasionally @lchanwrites.

Wagon Train to the Arctic

Andrew Liptak

The history of space opera is one that prizes exploration and discovery; of finding new worlds and new civilizations or sights that human eyes have never encountered. Science fiction authors, tech visionaries, and science communicators have highlighted humanity’s long history of expeditionary travel as a sign that it’s our destiny as a species, one that will eventually lead us out into the depths of space where we’ll eventually thrive.

Those arguments have been picked up by experts like Carl Sagan, and are exemplified by science fiction—look no further than Erik Wernquist’s phenomenal short film from 2014, The Wanderers, which depicts human explorers visiting the wonders that the solar system has to offer. “We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival,” Sagan croons as we see spaceships exploring Jupiter and as a space elevator drops down to Mars.

It’s a beautiful and polished short film, but it’s one that leans heavily into the long-standing idea that humanity is destined to explore these frontiers, drawing on the assumptions of colonialist tendencies while underselling the harsh realities that space exploration will bring. We might end up on worlds other than Earth, but the reality won’t be like the exploration of the American west; but that of Antarctica.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy accepted the nomination for President at that year’s Democratic National Convention, and in his acceptance speech—now known as “The New Frontier”—he spoke about the challenges that faced the country.

He was arriving at the beginning of a contentious period in American history. The war in Vietnam had raged for five years, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, and both the United States and the Soviet Union had begun to take their first steps into space, first with Sputnik 1 in 1957 and the Explorer 1 satellite in 1958. In his speech, Kennedy positioned his candidacy, and the Democratic Party, as the one to best approach the new era that the US was about to enter—highlighting the changing geopolitics in the ongoing Cold War and how new technological changes were changing the way of life for people around the world. In doing so, he evoked an emblematic image of American progress. “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier,” he said, proclaiming now that there was a New Frontier, one that he described as “not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges.”

Two years later, he would again invoke the imagery in a speech at Rice University, in which he spoke about the need for the country to advance its efforts into space, to try and outflank the USSR, as each sought to control the ultimate high ground in their ongoing arms race. “What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space,” he told the crowd. “Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, ‘Because it is there.’ Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.”

The language of space exploration and science fiction has long been tied up with the romantic imagery of the American west. The history of American literature is full of stories about intrepid (white) explorers who ventured into the unknown (to them) for the economic and geopolitical benefit of the growing United States. Their exploits were fodder for the pulp writers filling the pages of magazines like Western Story, Ace-High, Cowboy Stories, Frontier, and others.

Westerns were soon joined by others: pulp science fiction magazines such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and Weird Tales, all of which drew in influences and writers from those western stories. If the American frontier ended at the Pacific Ocean, the technological advances brought by new scientific fields delivered a new frontier: the endless horizons of as many planets as authors could imagine. Authors like C. L. Moore, Philip Francis Nowlan, and others incorporated the imagery of the American west into their stories, bringing the tropes and feel of those older pulp stories into the future.

In 1941, fan and author Wilson Tucker brought the two concepts together with a descriptor: “Space Opera,” which he wrote “In these hectic days of phrase-coining, we offer one. Westerns are called ‘horse operas,’ the morning housewife tear-jerkers are called ‘soap operas.’ For the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter, we offer ‘space opera.’”

Derisive as it is, the term and subgenre has proved to be durable: not just because of the imagery that those stories provided, but their core essence: the possibility of exploration and seeing the unknown.

For decades, the western has been an integral part of space opera’s source code, deeply embedded in the stories that followed. When pitching Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry described the show as a “wagon train to the stars”—that the USS Enterprise was exploring the frontier of space much like those original wagon trains and explorers of yesteryear. Since then, the association has endured in the public’s mind, thanks to movies and shows like Star Wars and Firefly, which have leaned into that imagery without expressly examining the tropes that underpin it.

In 2008, private space firm SpaceX successfully launched Falcon 1 into orbit. It was an enormous milestone for the company: The first time that a private company had launched its own vehicle into space. The moment was something that CEO Elon Musk had long envisioned: the first step toward establishing a permanent human foothold in space, with the eventual goal of setting up colonies on Mars.

It’s an ambitious goal, and Musk has spoken about his love of science fiction as an influence, with books like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy helping to cement the idea that humanity was vulnerable if it only had one place to call home. In major presentations before the International Astronautical Congress, he outlined the steps that he and his company would need to take to set up such an initiative: massive rockets that could deliver hundreds of people to Mars, as well as the infrastructure to refuel and resupply them. Others have joined him, like Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who set up Blue Origin in 2000 as a venture to develop reusable hardware to bring down the costs to get into orbit.

It’s a plan that could have been ripped from the pages of a science fiction novel, and Musk’s plans, imagery, and talking points mirror those of many space advocates, leaning into the romance of exploration and discovery, and how humans marching into the stars will further our destiny as a planet.

But while the imagery of the American western provides useful inspiration for writers and space advocates, it’s an analogy that doesn’t hold up when it comes to depicting the harsh realities of interplanetary exploration. There are other historical periods and activities to draw from, like the exploration of Antarctica, that would be better suited for grounding one’s narratives.

In his 2010 paper for the Journal of Cosmology, The Problem of Human Missions to Mars, Dr. Michael F. Robinson highlighted that historical analogies brought to the field of exploration, noting that “when we peel away the ancillary arguments for human spaceflight (e.g. benefits to spinoff technology, employment, or national soft power) we find that core arguments rely heavily upon the use of historical analogies,” and that those associations rely on certain assumptions—that humans have always been explorers, citing examples of how our ancestors have migrated across the world throughout history.

But there’s little evidence to support that line of argument, Robinson argues. “The lesson from history appears to show the reverse: that humans have sought out an increasingly settled lifestyle based upon agriculture and industry, foregoing the risks of nomadic travel.” Furthermore, the explorations out of Europe and Asia throughout the global age of exploration weren’t undertaken in the name of romantic discovery: they were for the purpose of commerce, either by discovering new riches to exploit, or by marking out more efficient paths upon which trade could flow. Indeed, even our expeditions into orbit and to the Moon weren’t initially shouldered out of the goal of scientific knowledge: they were demonstrations of American (and Soviet) technological prowess in the midst of a long-term, global arms race.

Robinson spoke at a conference a decade ago where he noted that the exploration of Antarctica is a more relevant analog for trying to accurately anticipate extraterrestrial exploration. A trip into the American west was something relatively easy for someone to take on: they could count on being able to find food and supplies on the way, and some sort of economic reward at the end. Expeditions to the South Pole are a far more costly endeavor, one that requires considerable planning, logistics, and supplies to survive in the harsh environment. The South Pole is the only place on Earth without an indigenous population, and is only home to people (anywhere from fifty to two hundred) in research facilities.

Genre literature often plays a role in shaping the perceptions of how we view the universe and our place in it—to the point where the use of bad science can misinform viewers and readers. The genre’s earliest authors drew on the stories of exploration for which they were already attuned: the expansion into the American West, focusing on the thrill of adventure, because it made for salable stories. Stories are important tools when it comes to approaching the future, and fully understanding the depth of the roots of those stories is equally important when using them as a rationale for moving forward.

Recent works have departed somewhat from the pulpy possibilities of space travel, due in part to new scientific discoveries, and an appetite for realism from readers. Science fiction authors have imagined and depicted the harsh realities of other worlds. Andy Weir’s The Martian pits astronaut Mark Watney against the inhospitable terrain of Mars when he’s left behind by his fellow crew, James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series has depicted the harsh realities of life on settlements throughout the solar system, and Kim Stanley Robinson brings the passengers on a generation ship to a moon of Tau Ceti e, in Aurora. There, they find an inhospitable landscape with some deadly extraterrestrial life, where the passengers face the prospect of generations of difficult terraforming or a lengthy trip back to Earth.

These stories in part draw on the picture that scientific exploration has painted of the solar system and beyond: worlds that are certainly reachable by humans, but which are cold, distant, and expensive to reach. Building self-sustaining human colonies on those far-flung bodies is certainly within the realm of possibility, but settlers should first look not to the science fiction that influenced the men trying to bring us to those worlds, but to our own world’s polar regions, and ask themselves if they should try that first, instead.

About the Author

Andrew Liptak is a writer and historian from Vermont. He is the author of the forthcoming book Cosplay: A History (Saga Press, 2021), and his work has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com, VentureBeat, The Verge, and other publications.

Freedom Over Tyranny:
A Conversation with Harry Turtledove

Arley Sorg

Harry Turtledove first published as Eric Iverson, after being told that people would think “Turtledove” wasn’t his real name. Sword and sorcery adventure novels Wereblood and Werenight came out in 1979 with Belmont Tower. Del Rey/Ballantine published The Misplaced Legion in 1987 (wherein Romans are transported to another universe), beginning the Videssos cycle in the Turtledove name. By this time, he had more than a dozen short stories published as Iverson, appearing in respected venues such as Terry Carr’s Universe 10 anthology and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He had also started to garner nods, placing in Analog Readers polls and the Locus Awards.

To call Harry Turtledove “prolific” would be an understatement. His ISFDB page is crammed with novels, short fiction, and more, speaking to a long career of continuous publishing—and this should not be seen as comprehensive. The Harry Turtledove site, maintained by Steven H Silver, is a mass of categories offering even more titles. Dubbed the “Master of Alternate History” by Publishers Weekly, Turtledove was inspired to study Byzantine history after reading L. Sprague de Camp’s 1941 novel Lest Darkness Fall.

Turtledove ultimately earned a PhD in Byzantine history from UCLA in 1977. Notable works include 1987’s Agent of Byzantium; 1992’s The Guns of the South and 1997’s How Few Remain (both about the US Civil War); 1994’s In the Balance, beginning his series about World War II interrupted by aliens; 2002’s Ruled Britannia about Britain, but conquered by the Spanish Armada; and 2003’s Gunpowder Empire, beginning the Crosstime Traffic series, with time-traveling teens and Romans inventing gunpowder.

Throughout his career, Turtledove has been up for numerous awards. He received the Forry Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction in 1995, and he is a Golden Duck, Prometheus, Sidewise, Dragon, and Hugo award winner. His newest book is collection The Best of Harry Turtledove, due this month from Subterranean Press.

Your first novel, Wereblood, came out in 1979, and then you had The Misplaced Legion and Agent of Byzantium in 1987. Were there other projects you tried to sell that didn’t make it? How did breaking in happen for you?

I sold Werenight and Wereblood in 1978. They weren’t actually my first sale. I sold a novelette, “Death in Vesunna” (cowritten with my then-wife) to David Hartwell at Cosmos in 1977, but the magazine died before the story saw print (we did get a check). I spent 1979—83 writing The Misplaced Legion and the other three books of The Videssos cycle. Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey bought them in 1985. I did the rewrites for them, and they started coming out in 1987, as you say. I was also writing short fiction after finishing the Videssos books; some of that became Agent of Byzantium, while some became A Different Flesh.

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

I went to my first con in 1976. I started going seriously in 1984, after I was beginning to sell short fiction fairly regularly. Meeting the people you’re trying to sell to is useful, yes. I suppose the same applies to getting yourself known to the community.

When did you start to really feel established in the industry, what did it take, and what was the road like getting there?

I first started feeling like a pro in early 1984. The lady I’ve been married to since 1980 was pregnant with our first child. We needed to buy something, and the checkbook was light, as checkbooks have a way of being. I told her, “We’ll do it as soon as I sell another story.” She gave me the look wives give you when you say something really dumb, but a week or two later I sold something to Analog and we used the money to get whatever it was we needed. That was when I started counting on what I earned writing rather than treating it as found money. I quit my tech-writing day job in 1991, after I sold The Guns of the South. I might have done it sooner, but we had three little kids by then, and I was scared. I’ve been lucky enough to make it work.

You’ve been publishing consistently for a long time. Has your craft or your approach to writing changed much over the years—if readers pick up a copy of Opening Atlantis (2007) or “The Eyes of Argos” (1986) will they find a similar voice and style to Alpha and Omega (2019) and Salamis (2020)?

I think I do the same kinds of things I did when I was starting out. A lot of the questions I asked then still interest me. I like to think I do them better now; I know more about my craft than I did half a lifetime ago.

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

I don’t write nearly as much as I did when I was in my forties and fifties (I’m seventy-one now). This is partly because my children are grown and the house is paid for, partly because I’m generally less energetic than I was then.

In a recent interview, when asked about lessons readers should take from your work, you said, “Entertainment comes first.” Are there also themes and ideas in your fiction that stand out as more important to you, or about which you feel passionate?

If you preach, you lose most of your audience . . . and deserve to. In this context, let me quote Mark Twain’s Notice prefacing Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” I think it’s fairly obvious that I prefer freedom to tyranny, whether fascist or communist. This ought not to be a hot headline, but these days it may be. The reanimation of fascism in the United States has been one of the great disappointments of my ever-older age.

You have recent titles out with major publishers, such as 2019’s Alpha and Omega with Del Rey, as well as indie presses, such as Caezik and Prince of Cats. Are there projects you were especially happy with, which you felt warranted far more fanfare than they received?

Like any writer, I think all my projects warranted far more fanfare than they got. They should all have sold ten billion copies; dramas faithfully based on them should be ratings smashes and watched around the world; and I should have a swimming pool the size of Lake Superior full of one hundred dollar bills. Obviously.

Your collection with Subterranean Press, The Best of Harry Turtledove, is due out in April. How did the collection come about?

My agent told me Subterranean was interested in doing the collection and asked me whether I wanted to. I said, “Sure!” Not very dramatic, but that’s how it worked.

Is there an organizational principle at work behind what pieces are in the collection? Do you see it as thematic?

The kind folks at Subterranean and I worked together on deciding what went in. As you’ve noted, I’ve been doing this for a long time now. About sixty percent of the collection is made up of some of my better-known pieces reaching back as far as the 1980s. The other forty percent is newer, uncollected work, much of which first appeared on the Tor.com website. I’ve also chosen to highlight a couple of worlds I’ve developed in the past few years: one with stories centering on Bill Williamson, the sasquatch governor of the state of Jefferson in the late 1970s and early 1980s; the other in a world where the Chicxulub meteor strike didn’t happen and dinosaurs evolved intelligence. (These two worlds prompted the cover illustration.)

Looking at the pieces in the collection, which stories are you are most proud of and why? What are they about?

As with characters, I don’t think of stories in these terms. I do them as best I can and hope other people like them well enough to pay me for them and to enjoy reading them.

Are there any stories that you weren’t sure fit quite as well; or perhaps stories that were a bit different than usual for you?

My principal frustration was that I had only about one hundred and eighty thousand words to play with. I could easily have made the book twice that size. The folks at Subterranean wouldn’t have been nearly so kind if I had, though.

What else are you working on now, and what do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

I have sold a novel called Three Miles Down to Tor. Given what the coronavirus is doing to the world and to publishing, it will probably come out in 2022. It’s set in 1974—75. You probably know about the K-129, the sub the Russians lost in the North Pacific in 1968, and about Project Azorian, the CIA’s effort to recover it. In the world I’m writing about, the US sub that finds the lost K-129 on the seafloor also finds, quite close to it, the alien spaceship that seems to have sunk it. Complications ensue. And I’m working on some other stuff. I have slowed down a bit, but I haven’t stopped.

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.

In the Absence of Guidelines or Censorship:
An Interview with Bo-Young Kim

Gord Sellar and Jihyun Park

Bo-Young Kim is one of the luminaries of Korean-language science fiction. After studying psychology in university and a stint as a scenario/script writer for a computer games company, she debuted as an SF author to great effect: her first published work, “The Experience of Touch,” won the best novella award in the inaugural 2002 round of the Korea Science & Technology Creative Writing Award.

In the years since, she has unleashed a flood of highly regarded works that have helped inspire the younger generation of SF authors in Korea, including many short stories. Many of these stories were released in a pair of short story collections, The Story Goes So Far and An Evolutionary Myth, published by Happy Books in 2010, as well as a shorter collection of linked stories titled “The Prophet of Corruption” in 2017.

In recent years, she has won the South Korea SF Award twice, for her novel The Seven Executioners (2014) and again in 2018 for her novella, “How Alike Are We,” which appeared in English translation in Clarkesworld 157.

In addition to her fiction writing, Kim has been active in other areas: she contributed in an advisory capacity to screenplay development for the film Snowpiercer (directed by Bong Joon-Ho) and also has published several nonfiction essays.

She lives with her family in Gangwon Province, South Korea.

You have a lot of work coming out in English translation in 2021—two books! Can you tell us more about what’s being released?

In English translation in the US, Harper Voyager is publishing I’m Waiting For You: and Other Stories. Kaya Press published On the Origin of Species and Other Stories in late March.

I’m Waiting for You is a book that combines two separate series, “The Prophet of Corruption” and “The Stellar Odyssey.” On the Origin of Species and Other Stories is a collection of works selected by the editor, Professor Sunyoung Park, mainly including my earlier short stories. The Kaya project began earlier than the Harper one, but as it turns out, they happen to be coming out around the same time.

Several Korean authors have expressed concern about how people reading their work in translation might take that work as “representative of Korean SF,” when in fact they’re writers doing their own thing within a Korean context—not “representatives” in any sense. To flip the idea on its head: within the context of Korean SF, what is the most unusual or unique feature of your work?

Yes, each Korean science fiction writer occupies a unique position in Korean science fiction, and I think I do so too! However, I’m not sure I can really explain the position I occupy myself.

The collection On the Origin of Species and Other Stories opens with a nonfiction essay, “A Brief Reflection on Breasts.” You suggest that just as some people mistakenly think of breasts as the definitive characteristic of the female form, some people mistakenly believe science is what makes a given story part of the SF genre. Are you suggesting either that there is something else, more fundamental, that is the defining characteristic of SF . . . or perhaps that there isn’t a single defining characteristic, but something more holistic and fuzzy?

Well, that essay was included in the collection because the editor, Professor Sunyoung Park, liked it. But personally, I’m not sure how convinced I am by the analogy.

Often, when people who are members of a majority look at members of any minority, they focus on how the people in the minority are different from those in the majority, and this “difference” determines their overall disposition toward any given individual who is a member of a minority. This is a common cognitive illusion that has been defined in psychological theory. However, that difference itself is only a small fraction of a person in their entirety.

Meanwhile, there are some scientists who, because they know about science and are “the best of humanity,” seem to think that they somehow can writer “better” SF than some other writer lacking a PhD. This is a delusion that results from overestimating the importance of the “science” in SF as its distinguishing characteristic. However, I think this idea is no less ridiculous than someone believing he could direct Star Wars films because he has a PhD in engineering.

I am not really trying to suggest something about other crucial features of SF. Of course, there are characteristics that distinguish science fiction from other genres, but my point is that the more important part of the creation—the part that we think more about—is not about difference but about what’s universal, just like with human beings.

The same essay included a comment about being surprised when some people considered your work SF at all. Yet your stories tend to be very obviously SF! It’s an interesting contradiction: I feel like you consciously engage with SF as a genre and literary tradition, but also seem maybe a bit ambivalent about genre labels at the same time. I wonder if you could say more about that.

Actually, I’ve been thinking about the answer to this question ever since I became a writer. When I was first published, there were very few active creators of science fiction in Korea, so I was constantly asked questions about why I would choose to write SF. At the time, this question itself seemed reasonable, because obviously, choosing to write science fiction in Korea meant walking a difficult road: Not many opportunities existed for publication, and there were relatively few readers. It seemed like choosing SF required a special kind of conviction.

My answer was always that I’d written the kind of stories I wanted to write, but that it was mainly SF readers who embraced my work.

Looking back, I wrote a lot of stories as a child. Even since becoming a professional writer, I still can’t write as much fiction as I did back then. Those stories usually never got read by anyone, or were read only by one or two close friends. For me, writing was just a kind of fun pastime, like watching TV, and it never really occurred to me to show my writing to anyone else. That meant I never got much guidance about writing, but nobody ever tried to censor me, either, and I wrote so much that my approach to writing solidifiedand took on the form it has now.

Because of this, I feel like if one sets out to write something in the absence of any guidelines that must be followed or censorship rules, the story naturally comes out in the form of a fantasy or SF story. When the Internet first got established in Korea and people started publishing stories online for fun, almost all the fiction that poured out onto the web consisted of fantasy novels, even though at the time the literary publishing world in Korea was so strictly focused on realistic (“mainstream”) fiction. At that time, fantasy happened to become fashionable a lot more quickly than SF, but I think the same thing could just as easily have happened with SF instead.

I think the fact that I don’t read a lot of mainstream literature might be why I end up writing science fiction, more than out of any special consciousness of the SF genre. Actually, I really don’t know, exactly. But personally, I feel like when writing SF, I’m actually working in the mode that is really the “mainstream” mode, whereas realist (or so-called “mainstream”) literature is the “subgenre” in which authors require a special sensibility and writing techniques.

English-language science fiction only began to get actively translated to Korean after I was older, and I didn’t see much of the children’s science fiction that was translated. Of course, after I started publishing, I often was put in the position of answering questions about science fiction, so I read a lot more of it then. But I think my own approach to fiction grew more out of combining different types of media that were accessible to South Koreans at the time.

It also brings me to the question of what inspires you now. Often when writers talk about great works in their genre, they mention unexpected books. What would you say have become the most important in your personal “canon” right now?

Personally, I don’t know yet about science fiction greater than Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa—both the anime and the comic books. The characters, plots, the underlying worldview, and messages in them are all ideal to me. Every time I see them, I am amazed and impressed. It feels more prescient with each passing year: these days, I’m also wearing a mask like the characters in the film.

I’m also still a big fan of the Korean manhwa (manga) artists Kim Jin and Go Yusung.

When I return to a project for the final edit, I often pause to look at Park Wan-suh’s short stories before refining my sentences. Not that I can even imitate her, but I think that she writes the most beautiful prose of any Korean writer.

Oh, and I really admire Tezuka Osamu’s manga series Phoenix: it’s such mythic science fiction!

Some of the comments you’ve made on your own work made me curious about your writing process, especially in terms of research. I’m especially curious about the role that ancient texts and narratives played in the formulation of several of your stories: were they a source of inspiration as you started out, or did you turn to them as research sources in the process of writing?

When I think back about writing both those pieces, myths and classics are what I originally liked and knew, and it is more like revisiting the fundamental scientific theory anew, adapting those old tales into a modern style.

I remember that the first inkling of “An Evolutionary Myth” occurred to me when I read a passage from Hermann Hesse’s preface to his novel Demian: “Many a one never becomes a human-being, but remains a frog, lizard, or ant. Many a one is a human-being above and a fish below.” [Ernst] Haeckel’s phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” also stimulated my imagination. When I saw that phrase, I imagined a person going through the entire evolutionary process in a single lifetime.

My interest in ancient Korean history stems from a Korean comic book series by Jin Kim, titled Kingdom of the Winds. I was impressed by how a seemingly limitless unfolding of imagination was possibly based on just a few lines in ancient texts. I also tried to imagine what story could be read between the lines of ancient annals like the Samguk Sagi. (An ancient Korean text, known in English as the History of the Three Kingdoms.) What I brought anew to the story was related to ideas in the science of biological evolution.

There are many different things that inspired “The Prophet of Corruption.” I remember that the first spark of inspiration came from Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, but a number of other myths and scriptures influenced it. When it was introduced in Korean publication, it was described as expressing a Buddhist worldview, but in fact, I think that’s just because it’s easier for Koreans to understand that: I wasn’t particularly conscious of Buddhism while writing it.

In fact, it is interesting to say this, but it was from Native American mythology and philosophy that I first and most deeply learned the idea that we’re all connected and share one life. At one point, I traveled in the United States alone: at the time, I felt incredibly lonely, but I found comfort in the Native American messages I encountered all over the United States. To me, it feels like Native American mythology and philosophy resembles Eastern philosophy in some ideal era. When I encountered familiar ideas and philosophy from different cultures in such a distant country, I was able to understand and accept this idea that “we are all connected.”

Basically, the core idea in “The Prophet of Corruption” is the conflict between collectivism and individualism that exists in almost every society. When it goes wrong, collectivism ends up becoming totalitarianism, whereas when it goes right you end up with solidarity and socialism; likewise, when individualism goes wrong, you end up with egotism, whereas when it goes right you get freedom.

The idea in this novel is that there is nothing inherently right or wrong, only excess or lack, must have originated from the Confucian text, Doctrine of the Mean. That said, I didn’t consciously study that text, it’s just something I’m familiar with.

Between On the Origin of Species and Other Stories and I’m Waiting for You: and Other Stories, I count three pairs of stories: linked stories that have shared characters or settings, where the later story somehow expands on or connects to the earlier one or recontextualizes it. Is there something attractive to you about that approach?

“The Origin of Species” is a story that was originally conceived of as a feature film. However, at the time, I didn’t have the time and energy to write a feature script, so I ended the growing story in the middle, and then later wrote a sequel. The reason why “I’m Waiting for You” got a paired story is simple: it was about an engaged couple, and I’d written the man’s side of the story, so I had to write the woman’s side as well.

In fact, for the sequel to “I’m Waiting for You,”—it’s titled “On My Way to You”—the publication of the original Korean version of the story was constantly delayed, and the situation for that story was really unclear for a long time. However, when Harper decided to publish the book, one of the conditions of the contract was that I write the sequel to “I’m Waiting For You.” Therefore, I was able to write it, and it turned out that “On My Way to You” got translated to English almost simultaneously to its being written in Korean.

Personally, I prefer longer works of fiction, but when I started out, the Korean science fiction market was focused on short stories, and still seems to have a preference for them. That’s why I’ve ended up writing a number of short story series.

The title story in I’m Waiting for You: and Other Stories is a story in a surprising genre I’d never heard about before: a “marriage proposal” novel, as in, a novel—or, in this case, a novella—written to be given as a gift from someone who is proposing marriage. Are there any other examples of this kind of text in Korean literature and/or in Korean SF?

The world is a big place, so such a genre might exist somewhere, but I haven’t seen it yet. I would like to express my infinite gratitude to my friends for this, for the wonderful idea of giving me the opportunity to write this story, so that it could be given as part of the act proposing marriage.

A lot of great things have happened because of it. The couple whose marriage it helped bring about attended both a reading and a play based on the book, but I hope that good things will continue to happen after that, so I can continue to share these gifts with them.

I asked, “Is it okay to keep coming back to the same work, over and over like this?” and the answer I got was, “I’ll being doing that all my life.”

There was a striking image in your story “Between 0 and 1,” in On the Origin of Species and Other Stories: the windows are open on these apartment buildings, and kids are releasing paper airplanes from their windows, while a banner protesting “outdated education” unfurls down the wall of a high-rise building. The story explores a surprising intersection: the issues of intergenerational tension and academic stress, and the idea of time travel. Did you have this juxtaposition in mind when you sat down to write the story, or did it emerge as you were writing?

The paper plane demonstration was in fact a real act of protest that many Korean students performed when I was in school. It was the easiest way to engage in a peaceful protest, where many students are gathered in a small building and it was forbidden to go outside of the classroom or engage in other outdoor activities. As far as I know, this method of protest continues among students even today.

When I was in high school, a teacher’s union had just formed in Korea. What happened was that young teachers who had joined the union hoping for a positive change in the education system were suddenly kicked out of public schools en masse. After that, conservative and authoritarian teachers filled the vacancies they left behind. This happened around the end of the military government here.

So throughout my school days, I thought I was learning from the ghost of a past that had already disappeared. Which is to say that the idea at the core of that story was in my mind for a long time. But when I started writing, I studied quantum mechanics anew to make it a little more believable.

Honestly, when I was writing that story, I worried because I was thinking about the past, but the good thing about SF seems to be that even if you’re writing about the past, you still can create a story that’s relevant to the present. Well, and of course the same hypercompetitive pressure still exists in schools here today.

What are you working on now?

My writing schedule is really tight this year! Still, I think I will get as much done as I can. That said, basically I prefer to write slowly. When things are a little more stable, all I want to do is slow down in my writing.

About the Author

Jihyun Park is a translator and filmmaker whose debut outing, the award-winning “The Music of Jo Hyeja” (2012) was the first Korean-language film adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story. You can learn more about it, and her other film work, at brutalrice.com. Gord Sellar has lived in South Korea since 2002. He is a graduate of Clarion West and a past finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (2009), and his work has appeared in many magazines, anthologies, and year’s best collections of short stories. His website is gordsellar.com. Park and Sellar live in a small city in South Korea with their son and his countless robots and dinosaur books.

Editor’s Desk:
In the Months Ahead

Neil Clarke

My last few editorials have been consumed by a focus on our annual reader’s poll and the works we published in 2020. This month, I’m turning it around and looking ahead to a few of the things that will be happening here in 2021.

First, let me set the stage. I started the year with an unexpected trip to the hospital. I’ve had three procedures so far and a fourth is still to come. It’s a complicated story involving an asteroid field of kidney stones and debris (seriously, that bad) and complications due to my cardiac history. Suffice it to say that there’s been a great deal of pain, discomfort, and reduced productivity. If that wasn’t enough, our printer decided that this was the time to become unreliable. After they ruined the initial and replacement runs for several issues, we moved to a new printer and I’m now waiting for a rather large delivery so I can ship out copies to all the people who are owed them. No sooner was that settled, we suffered a major outage and new complications with our website hosting.

In short, I’m already behind schedule. I’m not going to beat myself up about it. Clarkesworld turns fifteen this year. If I’ve learned anything in that time, it’s that you have to be adaptable to survive in this business. There’s always another path to explore and sometimes you just have to wait it out.

For example, a few months ago, I made a big announcement about a new initiative to open submission windows in other languages, starting with Spanish. By this point in the year, I expected to have our Spanish language team fully assembled and making progress on the prep work that would allow us to launch mid-year. None of that has been able to happen and I can’t see assembling the team before my next medical procedure. To that end, I’ve pushed my timetable for the Spanish submission window back to September, but October may be more realistic.

Another project in the works is a major overhaul of our website. It’s been a while since we’ve done a large scale redesign and just changes in web technology alone make that long overdue. Furthermore, the magazine has grown considerably since the last refresh and now pushes the edges of what our current site can handle. I’ve had a long laundry list of feature enhancements I’ve wanted to incorporate, but couldn’t tack onto the existing infrastructure.

I had planned to time the rollout of the new site with a move to a new hosting service sometime around our anniversary (October), but the website hosting issue we experienced last month has made this a higher priority. In the last couple of weeks, this project has jumped far ahead of schedule and is now likely to happen sometime in the next few months. A few of our readers (volunteers from our Discord server for Patron and ClarkesworldCitizens.com supporters) have already started kicking the tires on a test site and offering up some fantastic feedback that are making it even better than originally planned.

Our submission system is something that doesn’t tend to have much relevance for our readers—even if it is how we get all our stories—but it is something that connects the two projects I’ve mentioned. Updates for this system will need to be completed before either can move forward. It’s slightly more complicated, but I hope to make significant progress on this key portion of the project in the next month.

As I mentioned, 2021 is also a major anniversary year. It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on fifteen years. Clearly, we need to do something special to celebrate this milestone. I have a bunch of ideas, but so many of them depend on how things play out in the real world over the next few months. I think it best that I just close out the editorial with a tease that we’ll be doing something special in October and leave it at that.

Sorry!

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:
GUYS! Don’t Lose Hope

JC Jongwon Park

About the Artist

J.C Jongwon Park is an illustrator and concept artist based in Hamburg, Germany where he currently works in the video game, feature film, animation, TV commercial, and publishing industries. J.C has created concept art for games such as Gears of War, Chorus, Everspace, Aion, and Legend of the Cryptids.