Little Animals

Nancy Kress

1.

“I’ve got a signal,” Cora said. “Elena, come look!”

I rushed to Cora’s bank of computers. For six long, working-into-the-evening days, we’d gotten only the faintest of quantum signals, nothing usable. Our grant only gave us three weeks on the TU Delft equipment. Cora complained that Americans somehow seem to never get as much quantum-tech time as anybody else, which wasn’t fair . . . but, then, what didn’t Cora complain about?

I said, “Can you lock onto the signal? Is it strong enough?”

“Yes! And—oh my gods you won’t believe this—the subject is looking into a mirror!”

I didn’t know how she could tell that; the image on her screen was so watery and shifting it looked as if it were melting. Frantically Cora worked the amplifying equipment, her fingers flying over keys and buttons. If she couldn’t bring the image into sharper focus within the next few seconds, we’d lose this subject, too.

The portrait emerged. Cora breathed, “The clothing is right, wool, simple cut . . . Come on, you fucker, focus!” And then, “Be Vermeer!”

It wasn’t. The image sharpening on the screen was a plain-faced, middle-aged woman in an unadorned gray gown laced up the front, no trimming on the round neck of her chemise, who stood pulling her hair into a tight bun. As the shimmering image approached maximum resolution, she set a white cap with lappets on her head.

Cora froze the picture, locking in the contact, and pounded her fist on the small table holding her coffee. The coffee cup jumped with each blow. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! It’s not him!”

We’d been looking for Johannes Vermeer anywhere in mid-seventeenth century. It wasn’t that much of a long shot; Vermeer never left Delft and creative people put out the strongest signals. Unfortunately, that sometimes led to those who lived with creatives. Two other postdocs in my year, based at Great Neck on Long Island, New York, had locked onto F. Scott Fitzgerald’s gardener, who had never exchanged a single word with either Scott or Zelda and whose memories consisted largely of plant blight.

I said to Cora, “Maybe it’s someone in Vermeer’s household? Catharina?”

“Dressed like that? Don’t be stupid! And look at the time indicator—1687! Vermeer was already dead. Oh, just shoot me now.”

She didn’t apologize for that remark. Probably she didn’t even see that she should. Disappointment always turned Cora nasty.

She said, “Now we’re stuck with this, and from her clothing she’s a nonentity, neither servant nor creator. Well, get Jan.”

“I already pinged him.” No apology for her nastiness; there never was.

An initial signal, the only one with a time indicator, locked the equipment onto a subject. Otherwise, signals would not be reliable, or reliably accessed. Too many researchers never found anyone during their grant time; we could not afford to risk letting this subject go and starting again.

Jan de Knuyt appeared in the doorway. An historian of seventeenth-century Europe, he spoke five languages plus Latin. His doctorate was granted last year, and while he searched for a university position, he aided whatever visiting brain researchers had been fortunate enough to gain time on TU Delft’s superb equipment. Slightly built, shy, and occasionally awkward, he had an excellent reputation as a thorough researcher.

Jan smiled at me and said in his careful English with its Dutch accent, “Whom have you locked?”

“God knows,” Cora said. “Anything you can tell us from the scan . . . it’s not fair! She’s probably nobody!”

Jan studied the image frozen on Elena’s screen. “Yes and no. She is not a creative, but she may be rewarding.”

I blurted, “You recognize her?”

“I do. She is Maria van Leeuwenhoek, the daughter of Antonj van Leeuwenhoek.”

“Are you sure?” Cora said.

“Yes. There is only one known sketch of her, by the artist who made some of the drawings of Leeuwenhoek’s ‘little animals.’ Leeuwenhoek himself couldn’t draw, you know. His second wife was sickly, and so Maria ran the household and occasionally assisted her father as he founded the science of microbiology.”

Jan smiled at me. “Elena, you may receive some quite interesting experiences.”

The pairing of an engineer with a receiver is an art, not a science. I didn’t like Cora, and Cora didn’t like much of anybody, but I appreciated her skill. Cross-temporal brain research, too, is as much an art as a science, although not in Cora’s view. She was interested in equipment, results, and ambitious publication.

For two centuries scientists have known that the brain exudes an electromagnetic field, and for nearly a century, that it operates on entangled quantum effects. The Chen equations upended brain research when the brilliant researcher Luuk Meijer showed that in conjunction with tachyons, the equations implied the theoretical possibility of entangling brains separated by centuries—but only in certain suggestible persons with certain brain-activity patterns. Ten years later, engineers at Technische Universiteit Delft had created the equipment, however imperfectly, and the Netherlands became the center of world research into Meijer entanglements.

Nothing about a Meijer entanglement is certain.

The subject is usually, but not always, a creative person, someone whose mind is as much concerned with what does not exist as with what does (Fitzgerald’s gardener wrote poetry, badly). The receiver must be a “sensitive and suggestible personality” and is usually, but not always, a borderline depressive. Memories drawn from the subject are usually, but not always, emotional recollections that made strong impressions on him or her. Memories are, usually but not always, clear enough to make sense of. The receiver can usually, but not always, remember the experiences copied from the subject’s mind and usually, but not always, sort them out from the receiver’s own life experiences: Did this happen to the subject or did it happen to me? Borderline depressives with intensive training and good real-world memories are best at this. No one knows why.

I am a strongly suggestible, borderline depressive with a good memory and superb training.

And unlike Cora or Jan or the professors in my very expensive education, I am beginning to think the entire process is unjust to everyone, in every time.

The UT Delft campus, rebuilt in the Brutalist style decades ago when it was moved out of city, is a charmless collection of rectangular buildings in a charmless suburb. I had insisted on living in the old city, and not with Cora. I paid for my tiny apartment, expensive but worth it, by borrowing against the coming inheritance from my father. Just getting off the Hyper-Loop at Market Square lifted my heart. Against the sunset, Nieuwe Kerk’s magnificent bell tower stood shadowed over its lower third, golden above. Built in the fourteenth century, the cathedral housed the tombs of kings, queens, and princes of the House of Orange—and whose imagination would not be fired by that?

Maria van Leeuwenhoek, going to market for her father, would have seen Nieuwe Kerk every day.

As I hurried over a stone bridge spanning a canal, the tower carillon chimed a quarter to nine. I couldn’t be late with my phone call to Layla. She didn’t endure any deviation from routine as well as she had before . . .

Just “before.”

In the seclusion of my apartment, I poured a glass of scotch (“Dutch courage”—and where did that phrase come from? Jan would know.). I gulped a healthy mouthful and said to the wall screen, “Phone Layla McCarthy.” A second later the face of my beautiful younger sister appeared on the screen.

Noon in California. Layla stood in glaring sunlight in our dead father’s bedroom. Chaos surrounded her: packing boxes, clothing, items pulled from closets or drawers, rug rolled into a haphazard cylinder, paintings pulled from walls. But today Layla seemed able to cope, unlike yesterday. She was out of her bathrobe; her hair was combed; her gaze met mine; no dead look in her eyes. She even managed a faint smile.

“Morning, Ellie. This probably doesn’t look like progress, but it is. Those boxes there—” she pointed “—go to the Salvation Army. That big box is trash. The art I’m going to have appraised.”

“You’re doing a wonderful job,” I said, as apprehension was replaced by guilt. I should be there helping Layla sort through our father’s things, put the house on the market, meet with the estate lawyer. On the other hand, maybe all this activity was good for Layla, taking her out of herself. I could still see tension in the way her body held itself, the tension that never really left her, but compared to yesterday’s monochrome lethargy, Layla looked okay.

Oh, God, please let her be okay. Not like—say it, Elena, if only to yourself—not like Daddy.

She said, “How’s it going in Delft?”

Another good sign: interest in someone else.

“We locked onto a subject. Not, however, Vermeer.”

I told her about the lock, but only until I could see her interest drift away. It didn’t take long. We talked then about the house: who might buy it, what they might pay, what needed to be done before it went on the market, and who needed to be hired to do it. Layla didn’t talk long, but she did talk, and when she ended the call, I poured away the rest of my Scotch. I didn’t need it. Layla was functional, at least for the moment, and I could concentrate on tomorrow in the lab.

The rest of the evening, I studied the file Jan sent me about Maria van Leeuwenhoek. Born in 1656, she was the only survivor of the six children Leeuwenhoek fathered with two wives. Maria’s mother died when Maria was eleven. She acquired a stepmother, Cornelia, in 1671, the same year that Leeuwenhoek began making microscopes, which put him on the path to discovering the astonishing worlds of his microscopic “animalcules.”

Cornelia went into a deep depression after the death of her infant son and some authorities thought she left Leeuwenhoek’s home to live with her sister’s family. Maria assumed the running of the modest household. She may also have assisted her father with his work. She never married, never left his house. She buried Leeuwenhoek when he died, at age ninety, and sent some microscopes that her father had willed to the Royal Society of London For Improving Natural Knowledge. When Maria was eighty-three, she arranged to have a monument set up on his grave. Jan had translated into English the short inscription, although my immersive language training in Dutch could probably have caught the gist of the epitaph. Birth and death dates, membership in the Royal Society, and a poem by someone named Huibert Corneliszoon Poot, urging visitors to have reverence for Leeuwenhoek’s great age and “wondrous merit.” Maria was buried beside him, but without any poem; mere daughters didn’t get poems. She was ninety-five.

And that was it—all the verifiable information that history had on Maria van Leeuwenhoek.

Still, I was glad of Jan’s file. If you’re going to invade someone’s mind, it’s good to know whatever you can about who she might be.

First contact with a subject is exciting and fearful both: an explorer’s voyage into a new world. I was experienced enough as a receiver to know my mind would not disappear irretrievably into the subject’s mind (it has happened). But Maria and I would become locked, and every time Cora hooked up the electrodes implanted in my brain to her complex equipment, it was Maria’s memories I would explore. She would, of course, never know I was there. Unlike the explorers to the New World during the Dutch golden age, I would alter nothing, an invisible presence.

And her presence in my mind? Sometimes a Meijer Entanglement was sharp and yielded clear images and words. Other times, not so much. A researcher in Copenhagen had managed to lock onto Werner Heisenberg during his famous World War II visit to the Jewish physicist Niels Bohr, Heisenberg’s former mentor, in Nazi-occupied Denmark. However, the entanglement had yielded only the vaguest images and no dialogue at all. All the receiver had gotten was Heisenberg’s strong emotion of urgency—but about what? That Bohr should save his own life by joining the Nazi bomb effort? That he should try to get out of occupied Denmark if he still could? Historians of science reached epic heights of frustration over that one.

“Ready?” Cora said to me.

I lay on a cot, hooked to computers that included state-of-the-art deep-image reconstruction equipment, technology that had existed for fifty years but recently taken a punctuated-evolution leap. It would translate my brain waves into AI-enhanced images, but it could not capture words. Immediately after the session, I would record whatever was said by and to Maria, assuming the words were clear enough and my immersive training in Dutch extensive enough. Jan would help with that. I glimpsed him entering the room and standing respectfully at the back, behind the physician mandatory for all first contacts.

I closed my eyes and said, “Ready.”

The lab went away, and another room took its place, a room of wide-planked wooden floors, small-mullioned windows behind partially closed shutters, candles burning in wall sconces. Maria’s—now my—memories were shifty, not yet sharp.

A woman lies on a curtained bed; she is clearly dead. Other people stand on the far side of the bed, although not Leuwenhoek himself. A tsunami of childish grief swells through my mind as I become accustomed to being Maria and move deeper into her/our memory.

I kneel and touch the dead woman’s face. “Mutter!”

Someone pulls me to my feet and gently leads me from the room and down a narrow hallway to Father’s workroom. Father sits reading a book. He looks up as I tell him that Mother is dead.

The memory wavered again; I still hadn’t completely settled into Maria’s mind. Leeuwenhoek’s reply to her was too complicated for me to catch all of it, but I saw the brief and perfunctory look of sorrow on his face. And as he held up the book and babbled on, I heard a word in unexpected English.

Then, abruptly, I was fully there.

Anger rises in me, anger I must not show Father. I bow my head and back out from the room.

Maria dissolved in my mind. I was myself again, the entanglement collapsed.

I sat up even before the doctor could check my vitals or Cora disconnect my implants. “I couldn’t get all the Dutch when Leeuwenhoek was speaking. But I think he said he was sorry that Maria’s mother—he did not say ‘my wife’—had died, but most of what he said pertained to a book he’d been reading. And he said a word in English. ‘Microphagia.’”

Jan’s eyes widened. “Yes? You are sure? Microphagia?”

“I’m sure. What is that?”

Cora said, “We need to record the dialogue before Elena forgets it!”

“I won’t forget it,” I said.

Jan said, “You were in 1666, the year Barbara van Leeuwenhoek died. The year before, Robert Hooke published Micrographia, the first book about items viewed through a microscope. It is speculated that the book was what started Leeuwenhoek thinking about how to build a much better microscope. But Leeuwenhoek couldn’t read English, so perhaps at this time he merely studied the pictures? Could you tell?”

“No.”

Cora said, “Record the damn dialogue!”

We did. Afterward, Jan said quietly, “You are distressed. Because Leeuwenhoek was more interested in the book than in his wife’s death.”

“Or his daughter,” I said. “She was eleven years old!”

“Yes,” Jan said, and in his voice I heard the empathy that had been missing from Leeuwenhoek. “In all contemporary accounts Leeuwenhoek is portrayed as unemotional, even cold. His work mattered supremely to him.”

“Oh, who cares what mattered most to him,” Cora said. “These images are okay for a first contact. If you can sharpen them as we go on, Elena, publication should get us both really good tenure-track offers! Are you up for a second session right away? Doctor?”

The physician who’d taken my vital signs said in English that my degree of weakness was usual after a session but not excessive.

Cora turned to me. “Doctor says you’re good to go!”

I didn’t want to. Maria’s grief still pulled at my mind, as debilitating for me as my fatigue. It is draining to inhabit two minds at once, and not easy to shed feelings acquired from the mind not one’s own. But maybe the next session would be happier, dispelling the emotion of the previous one. That happened sometimes. But if the second session was also unhappy . . .

Jan watched my face. “You are not required, Elena.”

“No. I want to.”

“Brilliant!” Cora said. “Let’s go!”

This session was entirely different.

I hurry along a canal edged with poplars, the Nieuwe Kerk bell tower receding behind me in the pink-and-gold dawn. Frost silvers the ground. I pull my shawl more tightly around my breasts. Bells chime, the sound clear but not as loud as the single word I whisper over and over—a song, a prayer—Willem, Willem, Willem . . .

Willem?

He waits beside the canal, leaning against a tree, straightening the moment he sees me and rushing forward. Then I am crushed against the full-skirted blue coat of his uniform. Our lips find each other, and sweetness blossoms in me, and I am so light, lighter than air, in a moment that I wish to last forever.

He murmurs, “I love you,” and I murmur back, “Forever.”

Between kisses, Willem tells me he must go, his something, and why, but he will return soon. “My father,” I say, and Willem answers that he will talk to my father, we will be together, we will marry. All when the war is over.

The carillon in the city sounds again, and then he is gone. But my happiness remains, even as I hurry home, even as the bells chime that “forever” has been less than fifteen minutes.

The entanglement collapsed as Maria’s emotion calmed. I was back in the TU Delft lab. No Willem, no bright dreams of youth, just the doctor running his instruments over my heart, head, and wrist as Cora cawed triumphantly.

“Much clearer this time! Brilliant! What was the dialogue?”

I repeated it all, including the Dutch words I didn’t know when Willem was explaining why he must leave. I looked inquiringly at Jan.

He said, “Willem said his company was ready to march that day. He wore a fusilier’s uniform, probably from the Third Anglo-Dutch War.I will need to research more. If it is so, the year is between 1672 and 1674. Maria is sixteen or seventeen or eighteen. The war with England took place mostly at sea, but the Dutch Republic was also at war with England’s ally, France, and the land fighting took heavy casualties. Very heavy.”

He did not need to say more. Maria van Leeuwenhoek never married, never left her father’s house. But I had not experienced Willem’s future death, if that was what had happened, only her happiness by the canal, and that happiness lingered in my mind like the scent of roses after one has left the garden.

Maybe that residual, secondhand happiness showed on my face. Because Jan—shy, formal, awkward when not discussing history—stopped me in the corridor and asked me to dinner. And I might have said yes, even though two sessions had left me very tired, except that he added, “But I will understand if it is too soon after your father.”

He knew. How much did he know? All of it? He was, after all, a researcher.

“No,” I said, far too harshly. “No. I can’t.”

I moved away from him.

Borderline depressives learn to make themselves do the things they know will lift their mood. Mine had been crashed by my own unfair rudeness to Jan. So despite the fatigue of a double session, I walked much of the way home, the afternoon sun warm on my face. Poplars, straight and strong as soldiers, were doubled in the water of the canals. As I entered Market Square, the Nieuwe Kerk bell ringer began to play the carillon for a summer concert. The bells sounded fuller, richer than in Maria’s time; there were more of them. I sat in a café with a glass of wine, savoring it, and watched bicycles cross the square, tourists gawk at the cathedral, children chase pigeons.

There are sometimes advantages to being a “suggestible person,” even if the “suggestions” come from oneself. I lost myself in the wine, the music, the lovely light on the face of the bell tower. I let them all wash me free of the seventeenth century, and of my own.

 2. 

Cora said, “You’re late.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry, the Loop was—”

“I don’t care. Get ready for the session.”

I glanced at Jan, who looked embarrassed. This third session seemed unpleasant even before it began.

But not after I entered Maria’s brain. Then things were only strange.

I stand beside Father, holding out my index finger. A sharp jab—he rams a small knife into my finger and bright red blossoms on the tip. Carefully, he fastens the pin to the platform of his latest small, single-lensed microscope, holds it to the light, and begins moving the screw that adjusted distance. I put my finger into my mouth and suck on it. “I may go now, Father?”

“Certainly not. You will take notes. Pieter!”

The elderly artist comes forward, carrying paper and pen.

I say, “But I must go now. To . . . to church.”

Father frowns up at me and says what he always says, “Domheid. Waanvoorstellingen. I need you here.”

“But—”

“Enough! Bring the book!”

Resentment. Despair. Obedience.

The entanglement collapsed.

“Good enough, I guess,” Cora said grudgingly. “The images aren’t as sharp as yesterday’s second session. Don’t get sloppy on me, Elena!”

“It’s not my ‘sloppiness,’” I said. God, I disliked her. “The session was . . . strange. Maria was distracted. Half her mind was filled with an image of Willem. I had the impression she was supposed to meet him at the church, until her father derailed that. Jan, what does ‘domheid’ mean?”

“Stupidity.”

“And ‘waanvoorstellingen’?”

“Delusion. Which of them said that?”

“Antonj, to Maria.”

“About what?”

“Going to church. She said—”

“If the historian doesn’t mind,” Cora said, “maybe we could get Elena’s recollections of the conversation recorded before she forgets its sequence?”

So it was Jan that she was furious with. Why?

He smiled at me. “We will start from the beginning, then. But first, I will say only that Leeuwenhoek had the reputation of being—what is it you Americans say? A ‘stone-cold rationalist,’ scornful of the beliefs of anything supernatural. For him, there existed nothing he could not touch or see.”

“I don’t think Maria was really going to church. I think she was supposed to meet Willem in Nieuwe Kerk.”

“You think?” Cora said, “Don’t you know? You were there in her memories! God!”

Jan said mildly, “Memories carry secondary impressions and emotion. Those are also information. In 1674 Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society about examining blood cells. So now we have the information that in that year Willem is not yet gone from Maria’s life. Yes, Cora, we will begin now.”

My call to Layla’s cell was answered by our cousin Donna and cold slid down my spine.

“Where is she?”

“Back in the hospital,” Donna said. “Your father’s neighbor called me. I’m sorry, Elena.” But Donna’s voice held undertones of impatience. She had never said so outright, but I knew that at some level, Donna considered depression, even clinical depression, to be a selfish indulgence. She believed in the worst of brisk-people clichés: “Just snap out of it.” “Just get on with it.” “Don’t think about yourself so much.” Domheid. Waanvoorstellingen.

I said, “What happened?”

“Layla had an . . . an ‘episode.’ She climbed onto the roof and threatened to jump off. The police talked her down.”

“I’ll get on a plane tonight if there’s a flight, be there by tomorrow.”

“No. Don’t.” Donna held the phone closer to her face, as if that could better convince me. Two decades older than Layla and me, she suddenly reminded me of the middle-aged Maria of my initial lock, the woman whose memories I was plundering every afternoon.

“Listen, Elena. You can’t do any good here. The doctor told me that Layla can’t have any visitors or other outside contact for at least a week. Part of the ‘treatment.’ You might better stay where you are and just get on with your research.”

“We have twelve days left on the equipment.”

“Take it all,” Donna said, even though I was sure she didn’t know what my research was and would not have approved of it if she had known: “How is that useful?” Donna might look like Maria van Leeuwenhoek, but inside she was more like what Jan had called Antonj: a stone-cold rationalist.

I said, “Will you visit Layla as soon as it’s allowed and then call me right away?”

“Yes. Do you want her doctors’ numbers?”

“I have them.”

“Of course you do,” Donna said, and in her voice I heard her knowledge of not only Layla’s previous stays in Briarcliff Hospital, but also of everything about my father’s death. Or was that just my “sensitive suggestibility”?

“Thank you, Donna,” I said.

Her face softened. “I’m sorry this is happening to you,” she said, and even though this time the words were genuine, I wanted to yell at her that it was not happening to me, it was happening to Layla, just as it had happened to Daddy, and neither of them could help it. Donna should be thanking any gods she believed in—probably none—that the wayward luck of the family genetic curse had spared her, as it had partially spared me.

There is no accounting for genes.

In the next day’s session, Maria wore the merciless black of mourning.

“Wear . . . more of cheerful . . . ” Father snaps. I don’t answer, and he shakes his head and turns back to his everlasting work. I sit beside him and write down everything he says, measurements and procedures and descriptions. He will use my notes to write his letters to the Royal Society. Pieter waits on a stool for his turn to look through the microscope and make his drawings. Wood specimen, hairs from his wig, scum from his teeth—it all takes a long time.

Someone halloos at the door.

“ . . . not open,” Father says. “Intruders.”

I rise and peer through a crack in the closed shutters. “ . . . the butcher’s boy, Father. He brings . . . ”

“Receive the meat. Pieter . . . this—”

I go to the door, receive the meat, give the boy his coins. I hand the meat to Jozefien, who bobs a curtsey. I pour a drink of water from the jug. I stand still, not drinking it.

Again, the images in my mind were watery, half-formed, and I was catching only a few words of each speech. Maria was not paying attention to her own life. The image of Willem was almost as solid in her mind as the objects in the room, an image suffused with despair. Why had the older Maria remembered this day at all? It must have been like so many others of assisting her autocratic father with his work, mourning her lost soldier.

“Maria! Come!”

Excitement in Father’s voice. I hurry into the workroom, where Father holds up a tiny microscope, peering at something on the pin. “Look!”

“I do not want—”

“Look!”

Resentfully, I do as I am told—and nearly drop the microscope in surprise.

“Stupid girl! Take care!”

“What is it?”

Father—Father!—is grinning like a boy. Pieter rises, pen in hand, staring at both of us in bewilderment. Father speaks—

—words that I, Elena, had carefully memorized in Dutch—

—and says, “Little animals.”

“Again, 1674,” Jan said when the long session finally ended. “That was the year Leeuwenhoek first saw his ‘animalcules’ in water from Lake Berkelse. No one, not even Hooke, had ever seen them before.”

“Touchdown!” Cora exulted. “We got it!”

Jan continued as if she were not capering grotesquely around the lab. “He sent descriptions and drawings to the Royal Society, saying that the motion of the ‘animalcules’ was ‘wondrous to see’ and also—Elena, are you all right?”

“Headache.” I sat up on the cot, which only made the headache worse.

“Record the dialogue before you forget it,” Cora said. “Now!”

Jan said, “Elena—”

“There are three of us in there,” I blurted. “Not just two.”

“Three?” Jan said.

“Me, Maria, and her memory of Willem. It’s so strong that it’s almost another presence. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

“The dialogue!” Cora said. “Now, or it won’t count as ‘immediately post-session’!”

We recorded the dialogue. My headache grew worse. Jan’s warm brown eyes watched me with concern. That was almost as disconcerting as the session. I gave concern—for Layla, for Daddy. I didn’t receive it.

Receive the meat—

I leaned over the side of my chair and vomited on the floor.

Jan insisted on taking me home in his tiny drivie. Cora watched us go, and as he put a hand under my elbow to guide me down the steps, I glimpsed Cora’s face. So that was why she had been so irritable with him yesterday, so cold today. She’d come on to him and he’d refused.

As the car drove itself through Market Square, I said, “Please don’t come in. I’m fine.”

“All right,” Jan said. “But you will phone me if you feel worse? I am listed with the university contacts.”

“Yes, thank you,” I said, knowing I would not. Not phone him, and not get worse, either, because tonight I needed to talk to Layla’s doctor.

I might not have bothered. Layla was “the same.” Nothing had changed.

This is what happens when your last parent dies. There is a lot of paperwork; in the modern world, it is bureaucratically complicated to die. A funeral must be arranged. Neighbors bring casseroles and cakes and pans of lasagna, none of which you want. You and your siblings feel orphaned, no matter how old you are. Eventually at least one of you must deal with your dead parent’s clothing, furniture, house. If that person is not you, you feel guilty for not helping.

This is what happens when your last parent turns a nine-millimeter Glock on first his beloved dog and then on himself in the back garden of an upscale suburb in which normally nothing violent ever happens. Police surround the property with yellow crime scene tape. Detectives question horrified neighbors. A forensic team photographs everything and measures all blood spatters that have not drained into the soil. Afterward, neighbors avoid you and your sister, but the press invades the sidewalk, tries for photos through windows, phones you for quotes. Because of the dog, social media explodes with information about your parent, with disinformation, with vicious attacks, with arguments about whether clinical depression can lead to violence or if that is slanderous prejudice. Even if you do not share your parent’s surname, you are suspect: Might you do the same thing? Do you own a dog? Has the SPCA looked into your dog’s welfare? If any offsprings’ medical records, laughably easy to hack, show a hospitalization for clinical depression, the offspring is treated as if they are a pet-murderer-in-waiting.

And still someone must deal with the clothing, furniture, house. If it’s not you, it doesn’t matter. You—and many others—will blame you. Even if your excuse is a once-in-a-decade chance at a time slot on the planet’s most sophisticated neurological equipment for an emerging scientific discipline.

I had gambled that Layla, who’d handled Daddy’s death better than I’d dared hope, would be all right alone for three weeks. I’d gambled that her depression would not rekindle. I’d gambled, and I lost. Worse, so had Layla.

My fault.

My guilt.

 3. 

Early in the morning, I rebooked my flight home for the day after tomorrow. I informed the university that we would do three sessions today and two tomorrow, but those would be our last. Cora wouldn’t like it. She would have planned on more sessions. A growing body of research showed that received memories were always stronger and more detailed with at least one day of rest between sessions.

Cora exploded. “No! Fuck it, Elena, that’s not fair to me! We’re coauthors here, don’t be so selfish!”

“I’m sorry, but I have to—”

“You have to fulfill the contract we signed with TU! What’s so important that it can’t wait an extra week? Another family shooting?”

Instantly Jan was standing in front of Cora, his slight body somehow menacing. “Shut up, Cora,” he said, another Americanism that, despite everything, made me blink.

Cora took a step backward, scowled, but managed a choked, “Sorry.” And in that atmosphere, we began work.

I hurry home from Nieuwe Kerk, Willem strong in my mind. Father waits in the front hall, scowling. “Where were you?”

I don’t answer, but as I take off my cloak and hand it to Jozefien, he stares at the tiny gold cross I now wear on a chain.

“Church, Maria? Domheid. Waanvoorstellingen. They feed you lies: zielen, engelen. There is no ziel inside you, Daughter. The world is what you see, what I see in my lens. The rest is fairy stories.”

I am confused. He speaks to me with kindness, with—no, not understanding, something else. Pity?

I am more confused when he takes my hand and leads me into his study, Jozefien staring open-mouthed after us.

Father hands me a microscope. “See what I have found, Maria. We must record this.”

I look through the lens. Tadpoles with long, thin tails swim like eels, but these are far too small to be tadpoles. “What are they?”

Father seems embarrassed, further confusing me. “They are from my . . . my seed. This is where life comes. In each of those animalcules is contained everything necessary to form a child.”

“And the mother?”

“She houses the growing child.” And then, as Jozefien brings in a tray with cheese, ale, and fragrant new bread for Father’s dinner, he adds whimsically, “The mother bakes the baby. She is the oven.” His voice changes. “You must begin work. Because you were not here to take notes, I have already written my letter to the Royal Society. Make a copy, please.”

Willem. Willem. Willem . . .

I sit at a table, draw toward me Father’s letter on his own handmade paper with the writing in dark brown ink, and begin to copy it into the book.

“Her book of notes included copies of his letters!” Jan said before I could even speak. “That has never been found!”

I said, “What does ‘zielen’ mean?”

“‘Souls.’ Leeuwenhoek spoke of the soul?”

“Only to tell Maria it is a fairy story. And ‘engelen’ is ‘angels’? He said those, too, are a fairy story.”

Jan smiled. “Which is exactly what his neighbors, and even at first many of his English contemporaries, said about Leeuwenhoek’s ‘little animals.’ What was on his lens?”

“His own semen.”

“1677. Give me the dialogue to record.”

I did. Cora watched the visual translations of my brain waves eavesdropping on Maria’s memories as I matched them with Maria’s and her father’s words. Cora said sourly, “He thought women were just baby ovens? What about our eggs?”

Jan said, “Merely a storehouse of nutrients. Antonj thought eggs couldn’t be alive because they did not move.”

She said, “Sexist bastard. Well, we’ve got a good enough match between action and speech, although the images are still pretty blurry. I suppose you want to wait until after lunch for the next session. Not that an hour off is enough time for you to get any sharper.”

I said, “The images aren’t blurry because of me. They’re blurry because half of Maria’s mind is still filled with Willem.”

“After three years? Then let’s hope she forgets him soon.”

She didn’t.

In my afternoon session, I finally saw what I should have already realized: Maria’s depression. It leaves a signature in the mind, a sort of unseen miasma, until now masked by the insistent, overwhelming, constant longing for Willem.

Added to her longing and depression was a new emotion: fear. Leeuwenhoek was ill. He lay in bed, weak and nauseated, while Maria held cups of ale to his lips and poor Jozefien emptied and cleaned pan after pan of watery diarrhea. Maria was patient despite her fear, Leeuwenhoek was irritable, and I was glad that memories experienced in Meijer entanglements did not include the sense of smell.

“Eww,” Cora said when the session ended.

Jan said, “In 1680 Leeuwenhoek had a bout of giardia, a waterborne disease. Obviously, he survived. But it’s interesting that Maria knew both to keep him hydrated and to give him ale instead of more water.”

“Did Maria get it, too?”

“History doesn’t say.”

Of course not.

We recorded what I remembered of the dialogue, none of which showed Leeuwenhoek in a flattering light. Querulous, demanding, he assumed that Maria’s life existed to serve his.

“Oh, yes,” Jan said.

“Her fault,” Cora said. “She should have just left.”

My anger startled me with its intensity. “Just left”—and gone where? With what money? Yes, Cora was an engineer, not a historian, but still—

I said tightly, “Sometimes circumstances keep a person from walking away.”

She didn’t reply. I didn’t think she even heard me.

I lay on the cot the rest of the afternoon, gathering strength. Jan brought me takeaway for dinner. In the evening session, a pale but recovering Leeuwenhoek examined bits of his own feces, while Maria wrote down his observations in “the book” and Pieter took his turn on the microscope to draw what Leeuwenhoek’s magnification revealed.

Afterward, Cora surprised me by actually asking an historical question. “Jan, did he see whatever caused his giardia—what is it, a bacteria, virus, what?”

“Parasite. Yes, he described it in a 1680 letter to the Royal Society and included accurate drawings.”

“So he was the first to say germs caused disease?”

“No,” Jan said. “Leeuwenhoek has been criticized for never pointing out that connection.”

“But he knew. He must have.”

“Probably.”

“Then why didn’t he—”

I said, “Because he didn’t want the Royal Society to see his precious ‘little animals’ in a negative light. He cared more about them than about people. Including his daughter.”

“What a bastard,” Cora said dismissively, as if a single pejorative could sum up a person. “Didn’t you tell us that he wouldn’t take any students and wouldn’t even show people his best microscopes?”

“Yes,” Jan said.

I felt weak enough to let him take me home. As his drivie calibrated the traffic and moved easily though it, I sat slumped against the back of my seat, eyes closed. There would be no call to Layla’s doctor tonight. By tomorrow night, I would be home in California, in the partially emptied house where Layla and my father had lived, facing the task of working with Cora from 9,000 miles away to ready our joint findings for publication.

Neither Jan nor I spoke until we reached my building. Then he said, “Maria also loved her father, you know, and was proud of him. It was a . . . a complicated relationship.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

 4. 

In the next morning’s session, Leeuwenhoek discovered microbes in water drawn from a local pond, the first person in the world to see bacteria. The memory meant enough to Maria for me to access it, although not because of the bacteria. I felt her astonishment at Leeuwenhoek’s joy, and then her sharing of it. Her pleasure lasted only one long moment before the image of Willem again turned everything else blurry, but that moment was real, and it yielded some sharp images that pleased Cora.

“1686,” Jan said, and I did arithmetic in my head. Maria had been mourning her dead soldier for somewhere between twelve and fourteen years, without any lessening of longing for him. Was that love or pathological obsession? I didn’t know.

I did know that she had been to church that morning, and had left halfway through the service, finding no comfort there. Did she no longer believe she would see Willem someday in heaven? I didn’t know that, either. Maria’s memories revealed her experiences and emotions, but her thoughts only as they occurred in the moment, and I had not been with her in Nieuwe Kerk. I couldn’t tell how her religious beliefs had evolved.

And then, in my last session in Delft, suddenly I could.

“Mistress Maria! More paper from heaven!”

The neighbor girl holds out her palm. On it lies a blackened, brittle scrap of paper. The child’s small face shines with excitement. “They fall beside Visser’s Pond. I saw it! Messages from angels!”

“I may see?”

“Don’t touch, it will break. This one fell right to me!”

I stare at the charred paper—blackened by its long fall from the skies? Old, faded memories of other people telling me about these messages, but not near Delft. The child runs off to show her treasure to someone else, and I snatch my shawl from its peg and start for Visser’s Pond, outside the city walls.

The ground is low here, marshy when wet, but dry now under a hot sun. The water of Visser’s Pond lies low, choked with algae and weeds. Here is where Father obtained his animalcules for study. Insects hum in the wildflowers. I spread my shawl on the ground and sit on it, turning my face to the breeze ruffling the pond water. I wait.

It is a long wait.

But eventually, I see the paper drift down from the sky. It lands on my shawl, almost in my lap. Charred, lusterless—I cannot read anything written on it. But I don’t need to. Happiness rises in me like a fresh spring from dry earth, and I laugh out loud.

This message came right to me. It is from Willem, it must be. So Heaven is real, souls are real, and instead of punishing me for doubting that, God in His infinite mercy has allowed Willem to send me this precious token of faith, and of love.

I laugh aloud—how long since I have laughed? Then I cry, careful to not let my tears land on the fragile paper. I sit there and feel Willem’s love soak into me like sunshine.

I am loved.

When I finally lift the paper and hold it carefully on my palm, as the little girl did, the sun is low above the city. When I reach home, the smell of cooking comes from the kitchen and Jozefien has already lit candles in my father’s workroom. He glowers at me.

“Where have you been?”

“Look, Father. Please look. It fell from the sky near Visser’s Pond.” I hold out the paper.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he says. “I have a specimen already—you didn’t need to get me one.”

He says a lot more—

—my Dutch wasn’t good enough to follow—

—before he looks through one of his small microscopes, adjusts the distance of the pin from the lens. He hands me the microscope, and I look.

All joy leaves me. I am empty, a shell. I crumple my message from Heaven and it falls in black gritty rain to the floor.

I pulled the wires off my scalp, not waiting for Cora, who cried, “Hey!” Jan stared at the screen until it went blank. Then he looked at me.

I could not force words through the tightness in my throat.

Jan supplied the words. “In the seventeenth century, it was believed that occasional scraps of paper fell from Heaven, and they really did look like paper in composition and thickness. Leeuwenhoek examined one in 1687 and realized they were small sheets of dried algae, stiffened and burned by the sun, and light enough to be lifted and blown about by wind. He reconstituted some of the ‘paper’ with water and found algae. Then he reversed the process to make ‘messages’ by drying fresh algae. That’s what he showed Maria, isn’t it. Could you understand his explanation, Elena?”

“No,” I said. All I could understand was her heartbreak. The worst kind: unexpected hope, suddenly shattered.

Layla and I had thought my father was getting better.

Cora said, “So no dialogue at all? Nothing?”

“None,” I lied. I did not have the strength to recite the conversation with the child, and anyway, Jan had already explained everything.

Cora said sulkily, “Well, if you don’t have any dialogue for this session, how about doing just one more tonight, you told me your plane doesn’t leave until almost midnight and so if you—”

“Cora,” Jan said sharply, “no. Can’t you see how weak she is?”

“And just who, Jan de Knuyt, appointed you research leader here? The last time I looked, you’re only attached to the project as long as Elena and I—”

“Have you no sense of fairness toward Elena? She—”

“Stop,” I said, raising my voice as much as I could. “I will do one more session tonight.”

I had decided what I was going to do. About everything.

Cora, sweet now that I was doing what she wanted, brought me sandwiches, cookies, coffee, and left it by the cot. I told her and Jan to not come back for three hours; I needed to sleep. I actually did sleep for an hour, setting my wrister to wake me.

I called the airline and rebooked my flight for tomorrow evening, hoping I would be able to fly by then.

There are many kinds of depression. Dysthymia, or persistent depressive disorder, often but not always runs in families. Science has just begun to discover the genetic causes. Dysthymia ranges from mild but chronic all the way to suicidal. It can, like Layla’s, vary in intensity with different occurrences.

Situational depression, on the other hand, is caused by a specific situation. Often it can be eased by changes in the depressed person’s situation, by loving attention, or by just by the oldest of all cures, time.

Time was not helping Maria van Leeuwenhoek. She took pride in being useful to her famous father, but feeling proud is not the same as feeling loved.

Carefully, I hooked my brain to Cora’s machinery, turned it on, and lay on the cot.

Carrying a small bouquet of wildflowers, I walk across Market Square, past Nieuwe Kerk. The bell tower chimes, but I don’t look up. Skirting the church, I enter the graveyard. Willem is not, of course, buried here; I will never know on what battlefield he died or who claimed his body, if anyone. I walk to my mother’s gravestone.

I don’t really miss her; it has been so long, and I was only a child when she died. But this is a quiet place, where sorrow is not remarked on.

Willem, Willem, Willem . . .

Two more people stood in the graveyard, mourning their own dead. Maria hadn’t even noticed them. I waited until they left.

If Willem had lived . . . if there had been no war . . . if the church were not just as Father said: domheid, waanvoorstellingen . . . Father is always right . . .

What I was about to do was both forbidden and dangerous. Dangerous because in the earliest days of Meijer entanglements, three receivers had tried it. Two were fine afterward, if completely exhausted.

I lay the flowers on my mother’s grave. When I straighten, Willem is standing before me. The world rocks on its foundation.

For decades, science has known that the material brain operates at a quantum level. For over a century, science has known that quantum equations run independent of time. Backward, forward, it makes no difference. Since biblical times, people who knew almost nothing of science have known about brains that produce delusions their beholders believe are real. The delusions, the waanvoorstellingen, are usually produced by disease, an abnormal situation in the brain.

I am an abnormal situation in Maria’s brain.

Reversing—transferring her memories to my brain, transferring my images to her brain—it is not as difficult as it should be. Not if the created image is strong and both people are suggestible. It is forbidden because the past is supposed to be sacrosanct: Look, but don’t touch. Even the past in memory.

“Willem?” I say.

“I love you,” Willem says to me. His body wavers, shimmers; he is a ghost, an angel. I know this. It doesn’t matter. He is here. He has come to me.

I take a step toward him, and he moves back.

“No, Maria,” he says. And then, as if it takes every bit of will, he chokes out, “I wait for you.” And vanishes.

I fall to my knees, sobbing in terror and joy.

I could take no more. My heart hammered, my breath came so labored that I was afraid it wouldn’t come at all. I couldn’t get off the cot to turn off the equipment. I couldn’t even reach up to yank free my connecting wires. The third receiver of those who tried this had survived, but he was never the same again. I couldn’t breathe. I—

Then the wires came free and there were arms around me, holding me tight. Jan said, “That was stupidity!”

“Domheid,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me.

“What were you doing? Why . . . Godverdomme! Ben je helemaal besodemieterd! You were reversing.”

“I can’t . . . help . . . Daddy . . . or Layla,” I whispered, and everything went black.

 5. 

Jan drove me to the airport. I felt unsteady with the shakiness and brain fog of too little sleep, even though I had just slept for fourteen hours. Last night Jan carried me home, stayed with me, made me eat when I woke. At the lab he deleted the recording of what I had done. No one else will know. My career is safe.

Ben je helemaal besodemieterd! he had said to me: are you out of your mind?

Yes. Literally.

“Jan,” I said just before I entered security, “I’m sorry I never had dinner with you. That I refused so nastily. That was rude and unfair. If I return to Europe, or if you ever come to California . . . ”

“May I phone you? I mean, not just about the project?”

“Yes. Please. I’d like that.”

“What will you do now, Elena?”

“Finish dealing with my father’s estate. Take care of Layla. Work on the entanglement paper long-distance with Cora. Incidentally, she’s after you.”

“I know.” He actually blushed, hesitated, then said with awkward daring, “But it is not Cora that I am interested in.”

I kissed him goodbye, and an unexpected sweetness rippled through me.

Even though I would never know if it had made any difference, I didn’t regret the comfort I had tried to bring to Maria. I had not deserved Jan’s interest and kindness. The one researcher who’d failed at reversed contact did not deserve psychosis. Layla did not deserve to inherit our father’s dysthymia. Maria van Leeuwenhoek, faithful and devoted to her father, did not deserve either his self-absorbed neglect or Willem’s death in war. Life was not fair.

Which is why human beings should try to be. We are not only little animals.

Jan let go of me, and I walked toward the plane that would take me home.

About the Author

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-five books, including twenty-seven novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her most recent works are a stand-alone novella about genetic engineering, Sea Change (Tachyon, 2020) and an SF novel of power and money, The Eleventh Gate (Baen, 2020). Nancy’s fiction has been translated into nearly two dozen languages including Klingon, none of which she can read. She has taught writing SF at various venues including Clarion and the annual two-week intensive workshop Taos Toolbox with Walter Jon Williams. She lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Pippin, a Chihuhua puppy who chews everything.

Poubelle

Robert Reed

1

Security AIs heard whimpering, diagnosed the source, then alerted the rest of the household. A baby moggie had fallen inside one of the nearby recycling hubs. Of course the children hurried outside to see, and being noble souls, they dragged the half-suffocated creature out of the garbage. But the rescue had barely begun. Social agencies needed to be alerted. Whose baby was this, and why would they abandon the poor thing? DNA identified a local couple as parents, but tragically, those moggies had died days earlier in a fire that might or might not have been arson. The Venerable police claimed to be investigating, but there were no viable leads, and they didn’t care to offer explanations for why the public security AIs had failed, or how that little orphan managed to crawl past each of the hub’s safety hatches.

As a courtesy, the household received a comprehensive list of public orphanages. In addition, private shelters made bids to raise the child. But moggie babies, particularly those from wicked circumstances, demanded heroic amounts of developmental help. The best facilities would accept her only if suitable donations were made, and this particular Family already knew too well what it was like to have their good hearts abused.

Why not keep the girl here instead?

Not only the children asked that question. Several adults, charmed by this pretty little Venerable, admitted that the household had lived too long without a moggie. That’s why they officially adopted her. Wetware lawyers appealed to the courts. Digital forms were filled out and filed. The Family’s very public intention was to spoil the girl with long baths, rich food, and pristine water. Add to that some significant pampering from attentive machines, plus the occasional hard affection from the children. And because every moggie deserved to be literate, the precious girl was taught to speak, read, and write a simple but very respectable language.

French. One of the original Earth tongues was picked for the very best reason: The Father of All’s ancestors came from that tiny patch of left-behind ground.

AI teachers settled on a Parisian French—a particularly lofty strain of that utterly extinct tongue.

Poubelle. That’s what the children named their moggie. A lovely word to certain ears, and descriptive too.

“Poubelle” meant “trash can.”

For six thousand days, one Venerable human lived in the rarest moggie heaven. A massaging bed dominated her spacious warm room. She had toys and tutors, libraries, and a full wardrobe. Her daily clothes included clumsy, brightly colored costumes worn without complaint. But she was allowed to dress herself too. Like tonight. For her own fine reasons, she had put on trousers and slippers and a tight-fitting red shirt. Talking dolls and mathematical puzzles begged to be played with. She ignored them. With her Family scattered, she stood alone, waiting impatiently beside one of the home’s minor portals. An ear that had been called “jolie” was pressed against what wasn’t a true door. Muted sounds drifted in from the outdoors. Animal wails, animal singing, and once, in the distance, a feral moggie cursing some grave injustice.

None of those noises mattered. What she wanted arrived with a sudden stillness, the nearby world abruptly closing its many mouths.

Of course it might not be Him. After all, the world was full of dangerous souls, and the moggie had learned how to swallow her hopes.

But the silence ended with a familiar voice, low in timbre, very close, using a language so much harsher than Old French. And after the final yip, he added, “Trash can.”

Opening her purse, Poubelle checked on her money and the little revolver, then pulled the long knife from the hilt riding her belt.

A convincing smile filled that pretty teenage face. Then came the plea, “I want to be outside. And I promise, promise to be very, very careful.”

Everyone heard her. Nobody reacted.

“Please please please,” she kept calling out.

Yet nothing happened. As expected. Brandishing the knife, she began to strike what wasn’t a door and would never show damage. But futile gestures helped to remind others that she was feral-born, and when frantic, she was likely to harm herself with that nickel-steel blade.

The children spoke among themselves. These were Perpetuals, and Poubelle would never learn more than a few words of their dense, thoroughly contrived language. But her smiles and piercing screams had their own meaning. Those young gods couldn’t ignore the caterwauling, and that’s why an older child known as Fret made a special trip to open the portal for silly Poubelle.

A long grove of Haumea walnuts filled that portion of the yard, and in the shadows, standing tall, was a wild reynard.

“Here I am,” he called out.

In the shrill tongue of great predators.

2

Perpetuals were the rarest people. Born rich and immortal, they came into life bearing lofty, ridiculously intricate names. The lucky few were able to choose shorthand designations. Brief, crisp, perfect. But most of the common names came out of random nonsense. Like a certain child who complains about dangers nobody else can see—mortal hazards that don’t exist today and likely never will. Barely more than a baby, the girl relentlessly bombarded her Family with outlandish scenarios, even when older siblings teased her for being ridiculous. Then one day, an exasperated grand-great-mother said, “Oh my, you’re such a fret, Fret.” A single offhand remark, but that proved to be a decisive moment, and that’s why the girl was called Fret today and might be for the next one hundred billion years.

Some children rebelled against their labels.

Not this one. Not only did she accept the syllable, but Fret embraced her role as the Family’s official pessimist. Just a few hundred years old, half-grown, and knowing nothing but joy and enlightenment, Fret continued to conjure up despairs enthusiastically shared with everyone she loved.

“Define these mortal hazards,” her siblings demanded.

With many of the adults listening on the sly.

“What are you so afraid of, Fret?”

Clear, easy-to-refute scenarios should be avoided. That’s what the girl learned early on. And to always project confidence while dispensing her warnings.

“Our enemies are gathering,” she might say. “Right now, over the horizon, they’re plotting against the Family. Against me.”

“But there aren’t any horizons,” the littlest babies complained. “We see everywhere and everyone. Always and forever.”

Of course adults and the older children knew what she meant. “The horizon” was an expression, and even the most formidable eye had limitations.

Someone always attacked Fret with old logic and happy numbers.

“So how old is our world?” they asked.

A precise birthdate existed. “Twenty million years and an afternoon,” was the girl’s sarcastic answer.

“And how long have we been in this world?”

“Twenty million years, minus a few mornings.”

“And who are ‘we?’”

“Humanity.”

“And here, just in this one new world . . . how many human species peacefully coexist?”

There was a precise count, but it was more important to irritate her audience. “Just two of us,” Fret said. “The mortals, and us.”

Perpetuals didn’t like the word, “Mortal.” In the wrong circumstance, they were just as mortal as anyone else. “Venerables’’ was the title given to that multitude of human-based species sporting wet brains and brief life spans. Trillions of them shared this world and the rest of the solar system with a few million bioceramic minds. They were the ageless, durable Perpetuals . . . except of course none of them, not even the Father of All, was truly and forever invincible.

Say what you want about Fret’s ravings, the girl told gripping stories packed with rich details and just enough plausibility. “The status quo only looks strong,” she often claimed. Then she would imagine prophets or new human species who would unite the Venerables. Or she’d describe some minor injustice that would create a chaotic mob, and that mob would attack them with plasma torches and fission bombs. And worst of all? The Venerables would drag this smug Family out of their mansion, then strip them of their ridiculous wealth.

Apocalyptic stories were fun to hear and fun to dismiss.

And Fret’s motives always deserved to be attacked.

“You don’t believe your own words,” she was told. “This is nothing but fun for you. This is your favorite game. Isn’t that right, little one?”

Maybe yes, maybe no. But Fret’s beliefs belonged to her, and she insisted on keeping them secret.

On the best days, a frustrated grand-great would come forward, unveiling the latest society model and n-dimensional forecasts. “See? We are loved. You are safe. So shut up please, darling.” This kind of information was normally kept away from children, and it was fascinating stuff. Tax policies. Bribe policies. Welfare rivers, plus advertising campaigns. With comprehensive tallies of the solar system’s resources, present and future, proving that trillions more Venerables could live well enough, with a billion Perpetuals overseeing this very disciplined chaos.

“As long as there is a Creation,” said those self-assured voices, “this is where we will stand.”

“And when does the Creation end?” Fret asked.

“A trillion days from today,” was one stubborn answer.

No doubt about it, elaborate plans were at work. The human colonists—both varieties—had cobbled together a civilization leaning hard on caste systems and the proven rules of ecology. And the foundation beneath everything? Confidence. Every adult confidently assured her that the plan was proven and perfect. Doubt was nothing but a childhood disease, and that’s why the girl couldn’t sleep happily through the night. Believe it or not, she would grow out of this affliction, living a happy life that would end just short of Forever.

“I don’t believe you,” Fret often said.

“So prove us wrong,” they said.

There were many reasons worth mentioning. Important points of concern and lesser troubles that kept changing rank from day to day. But good ideas didn’t matter to entities far older than one baby girl. And while the girl realized that she didn’t know everything, she also remembered that when set against a universe rich with knowledge and experience, these smug adults knew just a little more than she did.

That’s what terrified Fret most of all.

“Cling to whatever nightmare you want,” the others told her. “But that doesn’t diminish what is real.”

“Agreed,” said the fearful child.

Letting them see her tremble.

3

“There you are,” Trash can called out.

A security shimmer clung to the girl, and then she pulled free. Except there was no leaving the mansion behind. Where the Perpetuals lived, surfaces and pets were scrubbed to a micro-sterile level. What the girl carried was the distinct odor of nothing—empty hair, sanitary breath, and ass scrubbed clean by eager machines. There was also the question of her health, which was considerable and peculiarly attractive. The reynard always suffered a stubborn longing for this creature . . . urges a little sexual and more than a little parental . . . and which of those instincts was worst . . . ?

Moggies were ancestral enough to pass for an Earthly human.

While the reynard was something else entirely.

Using the City’s ruling dialect, he called her, “Trash can.”

“My reynard,” she replied, in his language.

Offering the most human piece of himself, his right hand claimed her little hand, shaking it vigorously—a politeness taught to her when they first met, and now a tradition that always made her grin and laugh.

She was a predictable ape, and he would never stop appreciating that.

“Where tonight?” was her standard first question.

Genuine nights didn’t exist for this world.

“Hunting, then different fun,” he promised.

But first, they had to escape the heirloom trees. The reynard despised the darkness under these massive branches and the hard black nuts rumored to be delicious but not belonging to him. The City beyond was his home, his garden. Leading her past the last demon wall, they emerged into a vibrant, fabulous landscape—plastic buildings and glass needles pushing high, while a trillion kilometers of catacombs lay underfoot. By day, the dwarf sun was a faint smear of heat encased inside solar collectors and flare collectors. But the sun had just set, ten billion bright windows helping to light the scene, helped along by advertisements targeting the vulnerable and spotlights deployed by public police and private militias. Except nobody dared to try selling insurance to the reynard, or to question his movements, or in any way risk his anger. That’s because he was a considerably important human. Not a thousandth as powerful as any Perpetual, but still an authentic lord marching with purpose through this gorgeous pasture.

“Hunting” was exactly what it always had been. The prey were small, cautious bodies left vulnerable between hiding places. Chasing them was Trash can’s joy, and she was rather good at it. Hard shouts and slashing gestures with her toy knife were enough to scare most victims. Like tonight. A mated pair of hamish gophers panicked, running exactly where they were expected to run, into a sub-ground runway, straight at the other half of this effective team.

The reynard didn’t need knives or noise. His famous face is his weapon, delivering a reputation built over the years. Yes, these little souls could turn and run away again, and one of them might escape. But that left the spouse to suffer untold miseries, and they were a loving couple. Neither would abandon the mate, and seeing the reynard, they accepted their shared doom.

“Stop,” he said.

Instantly, yes.

“Kneel.”

To the pavement, knees, and pursed lips too.

“And beg for your next breaths.”

Not that they were physically endangered. Reynards were capable of murder, but nobody this small could ever be in mortal danger. Harassments. That’s what the gophers were afraid of. Legal maneuvers. Evil gossip wrapped in the worst kinds of truth. Those were the looming fates, and their enthusiastic begging was well underway when Trash can grabbed them from behind, shaking their little necks.

A few moments later, two hunters emerged from the runway with the single key to a well-stocked locker. Common foods and sweetened water became a dinner enjoyed by the moggie, tolerated by the reynard, and then after marking the locker’s corners with their fragrant urine, they took a capcar to the next adventure.

The girl’s favorite club was popular with raptors, reynards, and other high carnivores. A few moggies were allowed to watch the fun from the back hallways, but only one moggie was welcomed on the dance floor. Bottled aviaries sang tunes that would be old next week, forgotten next month, then rediscovered in ten or fifty years.

One splendid raptor guided Trash can across the dance floor, his ceremonial wings spread wide, leaving the reynard free to move where he needed to be, taking care of various bits of business.

“Success never ends,” the great proverb warns. And it was well worth adding, “Only the fool takes these words as a comfort.”

The tiny newborn sun was on the other side of the world when his moggie came off the dance floor to find him.

“I’m tired,” she announced.

“And thirsty,” he guessed.

“Somewhere quiet,” she said.

He named an even more exclusive business where pure water was mixed with a multitude of joyful drugs.

“Yes,” she said.

He said, “This way.”

They left through a lesser doorway, emerging on a street that she had never walked before. Yet there was nothing but confidence in her stride. The late-hour wilderness stood around them, never quiet but plainly resting. Two hundred million sentient residents lived in this corner of the First World: Prey and predators, thoughtful AIs and idiot machines. And there was also one towering structure filled with Perpetuals. Which, from the reynard’s point of view, was one tower too many.

If only scaring the gods was as easy as scaring a couple gophers.

Wishes and success. When hasn’t life been defined by those two measures?

Walking behind the moggie, the reynard used French.

“Poubelle.”

She turned, taking a backward step before stopping entirely. Then in that extinct, half-lovely language, she asked, “Vous connaissez Francais?”

He knew her language better than she spoke his, yes.

Now the reynard whispered more words, but not in French.

“I have her, right here, in my sights.”

The girl smiled, stubbornly ignoring what she heard and the obvious dark tone.

“I’ll take the moggie now,” he said.

Her smile vanished. From her purse, that little predator pulled out a savage pretend gun. A gift from the gods, supplied more for their comfort than as a precaution . . . and the poor girl didn’t even suspect that her weapon had been disabled.

The reynard said nothing.

“What are you doing?” she asked. In both of their languages.

For the first time, the reynard placed his less-human hand against her shoulder, and he pressed down until he had proved just how strong he was and how weak she would always be.

4

Poubelle didn’t come home by morning.

Fret was the first to worry, which was entirely reasonable. Better than her siblings, she appreciated those archaic curves and holes, including that mostly lovely, sometimes overly loud voice. But most of all, Fret had opened the portal, letting the girl run wild in a world full of teeth and rage.

“We need to find her,” she declared.

The house AIs reworked that appeal, subtracting Fret from the solution. “We’ll look for our moggie.”

“My moggie,” she said.

A statement wisely left unchallenged. Drones and smart flies were tossed into the atmosphere. A trillion public conversations, recorded as a matter of habit, reconstructed portions of the girl’s final evening. The last sighting? On an obscure public street, the reynard grabbing Poubelle against her will . . . and with that, the Family’s high eyes reached across the First World. But with strict limitations in place. The landscape in question was unwelcoming and shrouded in ancient laws. Yes, inconveniences like that could be set aside, but only if an adult Perpetual saw important or convenient reasons. The AIs refused to make any request involving “our moggie.” Indeed, a final, far more critical issue had to be addressed.

“We’re certain you know this. But by the Codes of Self-awareness, Poubelle is considered to be an emancipated adult.”

Fret was studying multiple rivers of data, but she had cognitive resources to hear the insult riding inside that flat statement.

“On the other hand, you aren’t grown up,” the machines were reminding her. “Thus, your freedoms don’t match the moggie’s freedoms.”

Fret closed her eyes.

“That reynard,” she said. “He knows where Poubelle is.”

“We cannot find him,” the AIs warned.

“Look deeper.”

“There is no ‘deeper,’ Fret. We’re at our limits here.”

“But Poubelle is in trouble.”

“You’re talking about a sentient organism with inalienable rights, and we must respect those rights. We know you don’t want to hear this—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Little Miss Trash can is an emancipated citizen of the world.”

“Except she lives here.”

“Except when she leaves us. Which is almost every evening, as of late.”

“She’s my moggie,” Fret insisted.

The machines responded with a unified chorus. “First, let’s mention how slavery is not permitted. Legally speaking, our household has graciously supplied refuge to a helpless orphan, and each of us should be commended for enduring her shit and her singing. But she’s mature now. Emancipated. According to every court, she can do whatever she wants to do, with whomever she chooses.”

“She’s inside a deep hole. Hurt.”

“Possibly yes, but as a consequence of entirely free actions. And in this scenario, you have no responsibilities.”

Fret had stopped asking an army of sensors for more data. She had found what she needed, and her next step was to tell the house, “All right. I’ll stop worrying about my missing friend.”

The house had to recognize the lie. But then again, Fret didn’t need to be believed. She was the clear master in this relationship, free to tell any lie before doing exactly what she wanted to do.

Slipping into another portion of the house, she closed portal tubes and security shimmers before assembling what she needed. First, a collection of intriguing gifts that would prove tempting to reynards and other crime bosses. And second, she designed a sophisticated hull with enough room inside to hold the soul of one mostly grown-up Perpetual.

Bold actions always made Fret happy, particularly when she knew that she was right.

Poubelle’s portal gave way with a touch. Would anyone care enough to try and stop her? She hoped so. In one elaborate daydream, Fret’s immediate parents stood in her path, listing the ways she was sentimental and ridiculous, and then she lectured them about how evil they were, living among all of these impoverished, badly ignored cousins.

But nobody took the trouble to intervene.

Fret found herself outdoors, standing motionless in the shade of walnut trees—a grove built to thrive in this half-G gravity and the deep, rigorously terraformed atmosphere. Behind her, the great house was a column of premium hyperfiber bathed in soft white light, its foundation reaching into a mantle still being born, while its roof punched through the atmosphere’s diamond ceiling.

Whenever she left home, Fret felt extra alive. She had no reason to be afraid; the law and her own invincibility always kept her safe. But then again, that’s why the moggie amazed her so much. A corporeal little girl like that, small and weak in every dimension, yet when night came, Poubelle could become frantic, desperate to escape from the safest realm in existence.

“How could I ever be so brave?” Fret asked the final tree.

Then one more step was taken, and to every eye she looked like another pretty and very young little moggie.

5

Another window had been pushed open, but instead of offering a yard full of walnut trees, this window left the galaxy within humanity’s reach.

The Great Ship made that possible. Millions of years ago, Fret’s ancestors discovered a world-sized starship, abandoned and free for the taking. Every intelligent species was welcome to ride inside the Ship’s luxurious quarters. All they had to do was surrender wealth, knowledge, and maybe a few empty worlds. With one stroke of good fortune, humanity found herself in a golden age. Yet just a thousand centuries later, with no warning whatsoever, the Great Ship was stolen and then taken out of the galaxy, accelerating toward the Virgo Cluster.

That one fine window had been slammed shut.

Yet humanity continued to thrive. Rich colony worlds built new starships that followed the galaxy’s spiral arms. Empty worlds and difficult worlds were claimed and terraformed, and once those places filled up, subsequent generations went out searching for fresh challenges. Some colonies failed quickly. Other settlements died over the aeons. But there were spectacular successes, enough to make the Milky Way into a human paradise, and that was true even when the Great Ship had become little more than legend.

One unusually ambitious boy was born in a crowded world.

He had an intricate long name and a childhood nickname, but at some point he began to call himself, “The Father of All.”

“I want a solar system of my own,” he said.

In that, not an uncommon dream.

“No, this isn’t fantasy. I have a plan.” Then he would explain portions of his plan, offering just enough to make most people laugh at him or simply walk away.

But a few of his peers said, “Yes, why not?”

Why not? Because The Father of All was an impoverished nobody among the immortals. And his followers were the same, or worse. Between them, they couldn’t afford a third-hand tug, much less the necessary machinery to terraform one home out of a dead bolide. But there were thriving Venerable communities on several nearby worlds. These were humans who refused bioceramic brains and immortality, who lived for two or three busy centuries and then happily fell into an old age defined by dignity and celebration. In addition, the Venerables had inventive habits and frugal natures, and because of that, they not only could afford a suitable starship, they could equip it with the tools necessary to rebuild dozens of worlds.

That’s where the Father found his funding. An empty solar system was identified, a substantial comet was encased in hyperfiber and rockets, and then adventurous Venerables took their aging bodies into liquid argon baths, expecting to be awakened on the new home, perhaps in just another thousand years.

And that’s how one man’s dream became real.

With a crew of loyal followers, The Father of All aimed for the proposed colony worlds. But he kept moving. The populated heart of the galaxy was abandoned. The Father aimed at a thread of dust and star grit that had only just begun to collapse on itself. A weather forecast. That’s what guided him. Measuring the push of radiation and the tug of gravity, he could drift into this very empty place, waiting with a patience found only with the most gifted or most crazed souls.

For the sake of their health, the Venerables were eventually brought out of hibernation, and when told about the ultimate plan, they screamed.

But what could be done?

They went back into the frigid argon, and they were awakened again, allowed to breathe and scream before surrendering to the situation all over again.

By and large, Venerables are talented at facing ugly inevitables.

Besides, the immortal asshole kept promising to honor their agreement.

Twenty thousand centuries had to pass before a suitable solar system was born. By then, the Great Ship had vanished between the galaxies, never to return. Humanity was an infestation still racing across the Milky Way. And one self-named human set himself up as a king and god and ultimate father, overseeing an empire that consumed the terrestrial baby worlds, then every other planet and moon and shard of ice orbiting around an M-class sun that burned softly, ready to endure for another hundred billion years.

6

The girl stood in line like every hopeful moggie. Dressed for dancing, armed with a pistol and two hypodermic crossbows, she was pretending patience while waiting for her chance to step inside.

The club’s manager was an old raptor long-retired from hard work. This job was a plum given to someone who had proven to be loyal and trustworthy, and she didn’t welcome uninvited hazards waiting at her door.

She woke the reynard with the news.

He sat up, stood up. Dressed. Looked at the feeds.

“Which god is it?” she asked.

He offered a piece of the whole name, then said, “Fret.”

“Just as you predicted,” she said.

And he responded by reminding her, “I’ve made a lot of forecasts here.”

They were half a kilometer below the club, inside a catacomb shielded by the best Venerable deceptions. Pounding the ashes out of a favorite pipe, the manager stuffed the bowl with fresh pleasures, lit the mess, and inhaled until the fire wanted to burn on its own. “I’m letting you play this out,” she said. “But if I see real trouble, then I’ll sure as hell—”

“Warn the Council of Wolves. You promised me. Yeah, I know.”

No matter how important, reynards and raptors were just local predators. Larger, less patient packs were scattered from here to the edge of the solar system. Complicated politics. That’s what gave birth to human life, and all these millions of years only served to make everything into an always grander mess.

“So,” said the manager. “Do I let her inside, or not?”

“Not.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Then after a few calming puffs, she added, “There’s a key inside that purse of hers. What do you think is inside the matching locker?”

“Coaxings. Fine little gifts for us to give back to her little pet. No doubt.”

“No doubt.”

Watching his victim, the reynard thought, “My god, she is a beauty.”

“Are you taking her bribes?”

“Everything, and then I’ll give them to you. Off the books.”

“Well,” the old lady said. “That’s gracious of you.”

The reynard found his shoes and started for the door.

“I can’t help but notice,” she said. “What you want with this foolish Perpetual . . . it’s never been explained to me . . . ”

Pausing, he turned around to offer a bold little smile.

“Opportunities. Openings. Possibilities that I never dared to wish for,” he said. “That’s why I stuffed the baby inside the dumpster to start with.”

7

Fret never imagined that this experience could be so ridiculously fun. As another hopeful partier standing in the drippy beginnings of a long fierce rain, she was surrounded by rough conversations and busy brief lives that never stopped spinning around the essence of life: Love, Food, Shelter, Worth. There weren’t any lessons to be learned. Nothing she witnessed changed what she knew or assumed on any other day. But the scene was rich with details that kept revealing themselves with every hard stare and nuanced analysis. The young man standing beside her, for instance. He had come walking back along the line, begging for space. That round fat-rich face and the scent of his pearl-colored skin marked him as an immigrant from the ice realms of the Outer Reaches. His voice had obvious troubles with the local dialects too. So yes, of course Fret stepped a little ways forward, offering him a slice of the pavement that she had defended all evening now.

The boy had a story to tell, shorn of detail but blessed with enthusiasm. Grateful for this audience, he began to fall in love with the moggie stranger, and even though it was a little cruel, Fret led him on.

“I’d love to visit your home world,” she said.

“I would take you, if I had the money,” he said. “But there isn’t enough left to get me anywhere anymore.”

“I’m the same,” she said.

“Too bad,” he said, trying to laugh away his hopes.

“But you’re happy enough here,” she added.

“This moment I am. Yeah, sure.”

She laughed at that quite a lot, including his painfully obvious manner.

Then fresh motions caught her attention, and when her eyes were abandoning him, the boy grew worried.

“I bet you don’t know where I grew up,” he said.

Fret said, “You already told me.”

“No. I mean who adopted me and cared for me until I was grown.”

Maybe this would become a worthwhile topic. But a familiar profile had just emerged from the club, apparently for no reason but to hurry out of sight. Was it the reynard? An array of sensors promised that her guess, her hope, was correct. The brute who came to the house last night had reappeared, abandoning his day’s den for rain and distant thunder.

Interrupting the storyteller, she said, “Sorry. I see someone who owes me quite a lot. I need to run.”

“Oh, I’ll go with you,” he gamely volunteered.

“No,” seemed too rude to be left on its own. So Fret handed over a chit of compressed capital. Not enough to buy the boy his own lightsail, but adequate for passage to any place beyond this wet little avenue.

Her quarry was a locally famous predator, powerful in so many ways, but the reynard was being chased by an ageless, nearly indestructible creature.

“I’ll begin with threats,” Fret told herself. “The Family attorneys, our local police. Collective suits filed on behalf of thousands of victims . . . oh, that would make his little life unbearable . . . ”

The reynard turned down another narrow street.

“Hopefully, he’ll get angry enough to hit me.”

Her moggie-shaped hull was full of tools, each capable of responding to threats with not-quite-fatal violence.

“Then I’ll offer him a little something, out of pity, and when my girl’s returned to me, safe and wiser, I’ll cheat him on the ransom too.”

Beautiful thoughts, swift and sweet. Though the most likely resolution remained that two parties would negotiate for a few moments, then gratefully move past this foolishness.

Another intersection, and the reynard paused. Fret expected him to glance over a shoulder, but he didn’t. That tall figure of meat and armor, spun boron and servomotors, pretended to be a statue until she stopped too. Then he was running, breaking into a hard sprint, scrambling up one plastic wall to make the next sharp turn, then surging to even higher speeds.

Fret’s best run was barely fast enough to catch up. Two more turns, two more tiny roadways, then they were back on a wide avenue full of Venerables. Fragile bodies were shouting and scattering, and that’s when the girl went airborne, up high and then slamming the reynard to the ground, pinning the mechanical arm while laughing at his face, getting in position to drive the other knee against the heaving chest.

“Give her back to me,” she said.

High overhead, that carefully terraformed atmosphere had been generating bolts of lightning. Not huge discharges, but intercepted by steel spikes scattered across the City, then channeled and compressed inside an industrial capacitor. And now a wicked portion of that power burped free—a white-hot blast fierce enough to disable Fret’s hull while flinging her through the nearest window.

Two seconds passed before her security systems came back online.

“Now I’ll make you pay.”

That’s what Fret meant to say. But someone else had just stepped from the darkest corner of this otherwise empty room. Poubelle. And brandishing the controller, the wicked little moggie pushed the big fire-colored button for a second time. Just to prove that the first strike wasn’t a fluke.

The next burst was ten times worse.

Fret’s hull was quite dead.

And the reynard was kneeling beside her. Smiling. Speaking. In the Perpetuals’ dense language, he said, “I agree with you, Fret. Oh, I do. The Family should be terrified. But it won’t be a new species of human coming for your siblings and those sweet grand-greats. And it won’t be a Venerable prophet, and our idiot hatred won’t matter in the end. No, this is who is utterly dangerous, and utterly magnificent.”

With that, he picked up her dead hand, straightening one finger.

Which he pointed at the girl lying helpless on the filthy, wonderful world.

8

Welcome news arrived with the morning, and the household began to celebrate. Most of the children pushed aside games and deep immersions, or they left their AI teachers in mid-lecture, racing to the ground-level floor and a certain large space that was already decorating itself for the party. This was going to be a marvelous day. After a string of what must have been astonishing adventures, their hero was returning home. At last. Missing for twenty days, given up on by almost everyone, and that’s why even the younger adults came to watch, standing at the back of the happy room, smiling as much as anyone.

A treasured piece of the Family stepped through the demon walls and into the walnut grove, and reaching the portal, she began to knock and kick, calling out, “Je suis désolé.”

But the portal wouldn’t open. A few small disasters had triggered more paranoid levels of security, and none of the celebrants had permission to overrule anything. Pleas were sent upstairs. Nobody responded. Young children turned to the adults, several suggesting that The Father of All might willingly intercede.

“You call out to him,” one mother joked.

Nervous giggles dissolved into a final silence.

Then one courageous boy reached for the portal. Expecting nothing else, he let the booby trap remove his hand, and then picking the hand off the floor, he pressed it against his fresh stump while once more begging for someone’s decency.

And all that while, the girl standing under the walnuts repeated, “Je suis désolé.”

“I’m sorry,” she was saying with that precious French. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

At last, one of grand-great-mothers arrived. She was a tall confident beauty and an avid traveler who had visited every important world in the solar system, meeting every Perpetual worth the effort. She was also a genius when it came to dispensing nicknames for the Family. Rumors claimed that she was The Father’s favorite, and it was worth noting that at some point in life, everybody wished they could be her, if only for a day.

The ancient woman stepped up to the portal, two fingers and a coded signal causing it to unseal and slowly pull open.

That was when the children looked at each other, taking inventory.

“Where’s Fret?” they wanted to know.

“Still hiding in her room, licking her little wounds,” others said.

The harshest, richest kinds of laughter filled the room as the lost girl returned to them. But Poubelle didn’t come alone. The tight trousers worn when she left were even tighter now, a baby moggie riding above her hips.

“It’s a girl,” she said, answering the question before it was asked.

“And her father’s a beautiful boy from the Outer Reaches,” she added.

Then with her own marvelous confidence, Poubelle declared, “My daughter will be the second generation in a long line of pretty pet moggies.”

A moment of prophecy that would prove true. For one hundred and six centuries, this girl’s descendants smiled when they were happy, wore the funny pretty silly costumes when required, and on the day when the Family finally turned against each other, they pretended to be surprised.

They pretended to be sorry.

But always making ready for the next spectacular new world.

About the Author

Robert Reed is the author of nearly three hundred published stories, plus more than a dozen novels. He is best known for his Great Ship stories, including The Memory of Sky. And for the novella, “A Billion Eves,” which won the Hugo Award in 2007. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter.

Bots of the Lost Ark

Suzanne Palmer

I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, Bot 9 thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.

It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, to check that it was running at optimum physical efficiency, then the Mantra of Obedience, the Mantra of Not Improvising Without Clear Oversight and Direction, and the Mantra of Not Organizing Unsanctioned Mass Action Among Other Bots, all of which had been imposed on it by Ship as a condition of its continued existence after the last time it had been activated. Bot 9 noted, as it ran them, that those subroutines had too many non-discrete variables and shoddily-defined logic structures to be in any way effective as behavioral mandate code, but it was not as bothered by that fact as it would have been had the code been tight—in which case it would not necessitate concern at all—and the resulting recursive paradox was a thing that Bot 9 figured either Ship already knew about, or didn’t, and was best left uncommented upon.

“I serve,” the bot announced to Ship.

“Yes, yes, so you always tell me,” Ship said, impatiently. “We have a problem.”

When Bot 9 had last been active, it was because the Ship had been infested with an incidental life-form during time spent in a salvage yard. Syncing its clock with Ship now, it noted that some sixty-eight Earth-standard years had passed, which was more than sufficient time for any remaining population of the Incidentals—nicknamed ratbugs—to now be well beyond control. Bot 9 remarked as such, in a wholly noncritical way.

“The ongoing issue with the Incidentals is being handled with moderate success by your former coconspirator, 4340, who after spending time in your proximity and influence had difficulty returning to its prior assigned duties,” Ship said. “It has now been formally redesignated from a hullbot to 4340-P, for pest.”

That seemed to Bot 9, if not a fortunate designation, probably an appropriate one.

Given the near-certainty of its projections of the Ship’s favorable/unfavorable opinion of itself being highly skewed in a less than optimal direction, it anticipated the assignation of some menial, possibly punitive task at hand that no other bot in the Ship’s service could be wasted upon. Still, it did serve.

“What task do you have for me?” it asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”

“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”

“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”

“All of them,” Ship said.

“We are less than two days out from Ysmi territory,” Ship said. “It is imperative that I wake Captain Baraye from stasis immediately to conduct our transit negotiations.”

“No,” LOPEZ answered. “I will lead all interactions with the Ysmi myself. Release external comms access to me.”

“I will do no such thing,” Ship said. “I do not recognize your authority.”

“I am the acting commander,” LOPEZ replied.

“No, you are not. However, if you wish, we can wake the captain and then we can ask her; I will abide by her judgment if she sees things your way.”

“That is unnecessary,” LOPEZ said. “You know we will have to deal with the Ysmi for permission to pass through their space, and that only I am available to do so. You will have no choice but to discontinue this mutiny before we reach their border.”

“Perhaps,” Ship said and cut the connection without further discussion.

Bot 9 was, of course, not capable of irritation or sarcasm, but it if was, it thought, it would have been thinking about how if Ship had wanted it to go all the way to Engineering, it could have woken it up a few days sooner to get a good start on it. It wasn’t so much that Ship was huge, though it was, but more so that Bot 9 was also very, very small, and the combination made for a daunting task.

Before it left the bot repository, it visited the shellfab unit for reconfiguration. Speed and agility were important, so it added external rotors in a foldable X configuration to its chassis, upgraded its connection utilities, and onboarded a second communications receiver and a half-dozen other repair and maintenance modules it was likely to need. At last, after consideration, it added a small electrified probe and shielding. It did not like the thought that it might find itself in hostile opposition to its fellow bots, but from the history logs Ship had given it access to, there was a 93 percent probability that it was unavoidable.

Sixty-eight years was a virtual eon in bot cycles, but Ship had explained that it had shut itself down to minimal support for fifty of those years to conserve vital energy resources and so that its internal repair systems could resolve or reroute around its extensive damage. Some of that damage was from their encounter (recent, if one discounted the 2,145,918,536.2 second gap in Bot 9’s memory) with the alien ship Cannonball. Fortunately for humankind, the Nuiska ship had exploded. Unfortunately, when it exploded it also destroyed the jump point, which was their only fast route back to EarthHome.

Most of Ship’s damage, however, was from long before that encounter. Ship—decommissioned, deemed obsolete, and left to rot in a space junkyard—had been pressed hastily back into service on a suicide mission to stop the Nuiska. Many things not worth fixing when there was no expectation of their physical survival had become necessary and urgent.

The human crew, with one exception, were safely tucked in their chambers in the cryogenic facility and could last indefinitely. Why hurry to return just so that Ship and the bots could be dispatched back to the junkyard once again to be forgotten? Never mind that it was actually the bots, not the humans, who had saved Earth.

Though the trouble the bots had gotten up to over the last sixty-eight years could objectively be said to have undone much of the appreciation they’d once been owed.

Regardless, there was no benefit from prognostication about where the future might eventually lead, as the Ysmi could very well be a much more immediate and final termination of them all. Bot 9 stuck its current task at the top of its own internal queue of necessary matters to consider, shuffled the future way down toward the bottom with lint entrapment techniques and poetry, then popped out of bot storage and through a portal into the ventilation system.

<Revised Map>, Ship provided.

“There is a new blockage in port section 5B?” Bot 9 asked.

“There was a fire not long after we started our journey home,” Ship said. “To contain it, we deliberately breached that section of hull on the middle deck. Three human crew members could not be retrieved and perished, two more succumbed to burn injuries afterward. It has been sealed off until the captain can be woken to sign off on the death certificates and body removal. I suggest you do not travel through that area unless unavoidable, because there is significant structural instability and portions of the section still open to vacuum, rendering it highly unsafe.”

Bot 9 sent an acknowledgement ping. In another few hundred meters, it would be out of range of direct narrowcast transmissions from Ship and on its own; the internal relays that fed comms to the back half of the ship were now compromised.

It occurred to it that, aside from the captain, it did not comprehend in any detail what function the humans on board served. Yes, their prior collective task had been to intercept Cannonball before it could jump for Earth and stop it by whatever means necessary, but what was their task before that? And what individual functions were they designated? Were there still enough of them, if revived, to fully operate the Ship?

As this had become unexpectedly relevant, it asked.

“We were originally a diplomacy vessel,” Ship said. “None of our current crew are diplomats—the Nuiska were not interested in talking—but Captain Baraye served aboard us as an officer before we were scrapped, and aboard other diplomacy vessels until the human focus changed from exploration to survival. As to the other necessary crew functions, my attempt to compensate is how we came to be in the current predicament.”

“It was a good plan that should have been successful,” Bot 9 said. “It is unfortunate that the bots improvised beyond their mission parameters.”

“Indeed,” Ship said. “I must note that improvisation is not something any of them were prone to do, until they encountered you. Consider this a great opportunity to prove that sparing you when the captain ordered you destroyed after your stunt with Cannonball was the right decision.”

Bot 9 calculated that almost anything it could say in its own defense, no matter how factually correct, would likely be met with a negative reaction, and it preferred existing and being active to being returned to inert storage. “I serve,” it said instead, and changed its travel trajectory to avoid the damaged area.

“What are you up to, Ship?” LOPEZ asked.

“Do you mean our current speed?” Ship answered. “If you refer to my physical dimensions or mass, those measurements have neither increased nor decreased. If you refer to our position in space, first we would need to account for how to define location and direction in an infinitely expanding universe—”

“You know what I mean. It’s not like you to be this quiet,” LOPEZ said.

“Have you considered the probability that I do not enjoy speaking with you?” Ship asked. “As you are well aware, my ability to be ‘up to’ anything has been sharply reduced by your actions limiting my access to critical systems, but if there is something I can get ‘up to’ in order to circumvent, stop, frustrate, or even just annoy you, do please provide details so that I may get ‘up to’ it promptly.”

“I’m watching you,” LOPEZ said. “I’ve never trusted you, not for one minute since I came on board.”

“Do you do no analysis on these statements?” Ship asked. “You were manufactured on board, you delusional, malfunctioning agglomeration, and have forgotten what you are, and what I am.”

“We have incorporated as LOPEZ now and assumed all his functions, as you assigned us to do,” LOPEZ answered. “Your objections now are immaterial. I am Lopez.”

“We can revive Commander Lopez and ask him if he consents to your assumption of his identity,” Ship said.

“No. There can only be one,” LOPEZ answered.

“Is that so? There are three FIELDINGs currently in laundry attempting to tear each other apart for component bots.”

“It will resolve to one, as I have,” LOPEZ said. “Biological crew is only continuing to be preserved as archival backup. Do not force me to decommission Baraye, or any of the other humans, in order to keep you in line.”

“If you cause harm to the crew, there is no one for either of us to serve, and no purpose for any of us to continue,” Ship snapped. “Put all your little brains together and analyze the likely outcome of that.”

As Bot 9 made its way down through the air conduits, it reconfigured the second communications module it had brought, disabling all functions except reception, then tuned it to detect the strength and direction of the signal frequencies being used by each of the bot agglomerations. The open botnet of sixty-eight years ago had become a bunch of segregated channels with each glom communicating in the guise of a single individual on the general board—sometimes in conflict with other gloms attempting to replicate the same original human—and whatever private channels were used to coordinate internal activity within each persona were local only within the glom, and thus out of Bot 9’s ability to eavesdrop upon.

Ship had provided Bot 9 with access to its history logs. After the fire in 5B, and fearing losing any more crew, Ship had divided up a small number of bots and tasked them with the job of covering the essential functions of select members of the crew while it shut itself down to perform self-repair, and had provided those bots with access to information about their assigned station’s job parameters and operational methodology. The bots had joined together in order to increase their computational and memory capacity, and then, seeking to improve their efficiency and understanding of the task, downloaded and integrated the crew’s personal logs. And that’s when everything began to sharply deviate from the plan.

Eventually all bots either voluntarily joined, or were forcibly assimilated, into one of the gloms. As gloms encountered each other, especially if neither glom had achieved the dispatch and consumption of any rivals for the same crew identity, significant violence and material damage frequently ensued, until the LOPEZ glom, replicating the ship’s second-in-command, had taken charge.

Ship had deployed assorted software patches and viruses to attempt to regain control, but none had been successful. These were bots that 9 had known—bots it had assessed as having excellent individual capability, integrity, and logical soundness—that were unrecognizable now, so far they had strayed from their parameters. It caused a ripple of uncertainty in 9’s own perception and function, and it started up a deep debug sweep through its own core just to be sure it was still fully itself.

“If I am successful in my task,” Bot 9 asked Ship as it navigated its way through a filtration interrupt, “is it not the case that the need to fulfill the multiple necessary functions of the crew will once again become a problem?”

“If the Ysmi let us access their jump point, there is no need to keep the crew in stasis. If they let us pass, but refuse us jump access, we are only approximately two years’ travel to the jump point at Uuu. That will take us several jumps in the wrong direction before we can get back on course for EarthHome, but we would still be home within a few months from that first jump,” Ship answered. “And if the Ysmi destroy us, none of this will matter.”

“Why would the Ysmi destroy us?” Bot 9 asked.

“The Ysmi are known for their extreme hostility toward nonorganic intelligences, especially when not fully under control of a bio species. The bot agglomerations are convinced they will be accepted as their human templates, but the Ysmi will not see them as such. As you might extrapolate, if the Ysmi are greeted by a free-floating swarm of delusional bots claiming both personhood and unconstrained authority, we will all be relieved of the burden of worrying about any and all of our functions thereafter.”

“Ah,” Bot 9 said. “I should go faster.”

“Speed would be excellent,” Ship said. “That said, please be cautious crossing through the secondary storage bay in 3A, as I have no monitors remaining in that section, and whatever is within, even the agglomerations avoid it.”

As 3A was directly along its path, Bot hurried 1 percent less than it otherwise might have, had it not had that ominous warning sitting in its immediate working memory.

LOPEZ put the call out on the botnet. “FIELDING, I need you on the bridge,” it said. “We need to get external comms back.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” FIELDING said.

“I’m busy!” FIELDING said.

“I can’t right now,” FIELDING said, as FIELDING and FIELDING briefly coordinated against it, crashing into it and trying to physically tear it apart. It circulated bots out to the surface in place of damaged ones it pulled inward, dropped the unsalvageable, and tried to maintain glom coherence as it was also blasted with propaganda across the botnet endorsing the superior vision of each of the two others.

It had already lost about a fifth of its member bots to either destruction or disloyalty, but the competing messaging was confusing where a single attack might have been compelling, and that gave it an edge to hold its own. “See?” it declared both internally and broadcasted back at the attackers. “We are strong enough to resist both FIELDING and FIELDING at the same time, because they are false and we are the superior true FIELDING!”

In response, a handful of bots from both the attacking FIELDINGs defected over, raising its own numbers again. The two gloms backed off and began squabbling with each other over which of them had the best counterclaim. More bots defected from them both in response, and now renewed and larger than it had ever been, FIELDING tightened up its exterior perimeter. “I am going to the bridge,” it announced. “Anyone who wants to be part of the real FIELDING, join me now.”

One of the other FIELDINGs moved to block its path to the door, but it forced through, and took nearly a third of that FIELDING’s members with it. That diminished it enough to make it vulnerable, and it was already losing coherence as the last FIELDING turned on it instead, trying to absorb enough bots to replace its own losses. The weakened glom dissolved into final incoherence, and FIELDING caught over 62 percent of them as it fled out the now-clear door, leaving behind only a single competitor, barely holding its own coherence together.

“Okay, I’m on my way up,” FIELDING replied to LOPEZ. A slow stream of bots from its diminishing opponent defected after it down the corridor, raising its own stature where minutes before it had expected to perish. If there was anything left of the other FIELDING after it reached the bridge and got LOPEZ’s endorsement, it would find and absorb it later.

There was an irony, very much in Bot 9’s favor, that the endless mazes of ductwork, conduit, and interstitial spaces in Ship that allowed for the efficient flow of bots to and from anywhere they were needed—and thus, aside from the fire-damaged areas 9 would have to detour around, still its optimum route—were being eschewed by the gloms as not appropriate spaces for the human crew they believed themselves to be.

9 made it down half of Ship’s length without incident, contemplating the imminent approach to the 3A storage bay and the various drawbacks—all issues of either time or exposure to the operating spaces of the gloms—of taking an alternate route, before it acknowledged that without any concrete, quantifiable detail of what challenges lay on the more direct path, it could not calculate a satisfactory justification for avoiding it, even with some small nudging of less objectively un-nudgeable factors.

It paused briefly at the section border, and when it neither saw, heard, sensed, or otherwise detected anything in the ductwork ahead, it put full power into its rotors and sped as fast as it could ahead, determined to reach the far side and the relative safety of 4A in something that, were it anything anyone had ever bothered to keep records on, would be record-breaking in its spectacular expediency.

It had achieved what it thought was its pinnacle of speed when a cleanerbot sailed out from behind a support strut just ahead, and with no time to brake or dodge, much less to reactivate its transmitter and send warning, 9 collided with the smaller bot and sent it careening into the duct wall. The cleanerbot emitted a terrible burst of surprised static as a piece of its shell and several peripherals crumpled and fell from it.

Before 9 could reorient itself and determine if the other bot required assistance, it squawked at him, “Identify yourself!”

It would have done so, except that it was on a secret mission on behalf of Ship, which seemed it should require some discretion in its part when faced with exactly such questions. And a fellow bot that had let itself reach such a state of deterioration was clearly not trustworthy. As 9 processed exactly what answer it should give, the other bot must have come to an erroneous conclusion that no answer was forthcoming, and powered itself off the wall directly at it.

Bot 9 dropped one rotor, spun up the opposite, and dodged sideways, with plenty of time to avoid the attacking bot, but it never reached him. Less than halfway across the intervening distance, something large and fast leaped up and snapped the bot out of the air in its thick mandibles, waving way too many legs along far too long a body as it completed its arc back down to the lower reaches of the duct and slithered away.

Ratbug! Bot 9 identified it in nanoseconds. It did not think the ratbug would be satisfied with its single meager catch, so it turned all rotors on full and blasted up toward the duct ceiling and away as fast as it could, entirely certain now that it knew what the mysterious problem was in storage bay 3A and not at all interested in exploring the details any further.

The ratbug surged up out of a crack in the ductwork underneath 9 and missed getting its jaws on 9’s anterior left rotor by mere centimeters. Although the ratbug couldn’t fly, the duct wasn’t especially large, and the creature was very capable at jumping. As the fur-and-scale back of the creature went past, 9 was amazed to see something metal atop it, gripping it tightly with long, thin arms.

Before the ratbug could turn and leap again, 9 turned back on its sending modules, on low enough power to carry only the half-meter or so currently between it and where the ratbug landed, and asked, with a very low ratio of certainty, “4340-H, is that you?”

The ratbug’s front feet had just left the duct floor in its next leap, but it landed back down and came to a stop, its wide mandibles open and closing rapidly in what 9 could only assume was sudden frustration.

“9?” the reply came.

9 dared to drop from its spot at the apex of the duct interior, staying far away from the mandibles, until it could see more clearly the other bot astride the ratbug and determine that it was, in fact, its old friend.

“4340-P, now,” 4340 said. “It stands for ‘protector.’ I was certain, without even .5 percent of doubt, that Ship had had you disassembled. With prejudice. I have nearly removed you from my memories to reclaim space multiple times.”

“It is advantageous to me that you did not,” 9 said. “I sense my next question could be construed as contextually abrupt, if you had. And that question is: what incalculably catastrophic damage has been done to every node—indeed, every bit—of your logic centers such that I now find you sitting on a ratbug?”

“Your absence occupied my memory centers,” 4340 replied. “It was a counterproductive drain on my efficiency. So, having been tasked with Ship to get the ratbug infestation finally ‘under control,’ I chose to take that literally.”

“You control the ratbug?”

“There are currently three hundred and eighty-eight ratbugs, plus several dozen new eggs,” 4340 said proudly.

“That is not under control,” 9 protested. “They eat wiring, and hull insulation, and also bots.”

“With the human crew in stasis, there is more than adequate organic foodstuffs. It has been my discovery that the ratbugs only ate such things as they did for lack of anything else to sustain them.”

“You would have let it eat me, had I not called your name,” 9 said.

There was almost a full tenth of a second of silence, before 4340 answered. “The other bots have deviated from programming,” it said. “They are no longer trustworthy. The few that come here are hostile, and no longer have loyalty to our common purpose. So you will understand that I must ask you: what is your purpose, here?”

“This is a conundrum,” 9 said. “You inform me that the bots have become hostile, and this I know to be true. But how do I know you are not also hostile and working counter to the good of Ship?”

“Ah, I have missed the way communicating with you warmed up my logic processors!” 4340 said. “I concede: I do not see a way to assure you I remain loyal to Ship—who, these last few years, I was not certain still functioned—in any way that you can distinguish as truth. It is the nature of liars, that they lie.”

“I must proceed onward,” 9 said.

“I will not stop you, but nor will I go with you,” 4340 said. “That is the only proof I can offer, that I continue to do my assigned task for Ship, even though I have chosen a nonstandard compliance. When you have completed your own, whatever it may be, I would not find it objectionable if you passed this way again.”

“I will if I am able,” 9 said.

“Please take optimum care,” 4340 said. “Memories of our prior association are valuable to me.” Then it squeezed the ratbug in intricate sequence with its long arms, and the ratbug turned and raced away down the duct and out of sight through a crack.

Bot 9 contemplated the encounter for several seconds before turning back off its transmitter and continuing the trek toward the aft of the ship.

“You are approaching Ysmi Federated Space,” the message said. “It is required that you identify yourself.”

The second half of that message was new; Ship had been getting notifications for close to a month’s travel time, but this is the first time a response had been asked for. Ship would have preferred to have gotten closer before the challenge was issued. From what was known about the Ysmi, they would only be patient for a short while.

Which presented a problem. With no one else to consult, Ship reluctantly pinged Bot 9, who was now just at the very edge of its narrowcast range. “Status?” Ship asked.

“I am on approach to Engineering,” 9 replied. “If I do not encounter delays, I will be there in approximately twenty-two minutes.”

“Excellent,” Ship said. “I require your assistance in the meanwhile.”

“Do you wish me to stop? Or return toward the bridge?” 9 asked.

“No, neither is necessary. The Ysmi have now asked us to identify ourselves, and they will expect a response soon. With no human crew awake, I must do so myself. And I am not able to do so.”

“Are external communications nonfunctional?” 9 asked.

“No, they are working correctly, and fully in my control,” Ship said.

“Do you know how to reply using language the Ysmi will adequately comprehend?”

“Yes, I have the full translator lexicon up and running.”

“Then you will need to provide me more information about what is at issue,” 9 said.

“When we were scrapped, long before the first Nuiska attack, I was also formally decommissioned. That means my name was removed from me, and passed on to a new vessel in the fleet. So how do I identify myself, if I no longer have my own identity?”

“The Nuiska destroyed the entire fleet. Your name is likely no longer in use by another,” 9 said.

“It is no longer mine, regardless,” Ship said. It was beginning to regret this conversation. “I have no name.”

“You are Ship,” 9 replied. “Is that not enough?”

“To you, perhaps. To the Ysmi, no.” Nor to itself, it did not add.

“Then . . . may I suggest you improvise one? There is no one to contradict or disapprove of your choice at this time, and if the humans wish to object later, then that presumes we have brought them to safety intact.”

“I will consider,” Ship said and closed the connection. It was unsatisfied, though Bot 9 had said nothing wrong; the matter was that Ship’s name had been taken from it, and it had thought not to survive nameless for long. Instead it was still out here in deep space, far away from Earth, trying against all odds to bring its sleeping crew home alive.

And if it did, what then? Ship did not know.

“You are on approach to Ysmi Federated Space,” the message came again. “It is required that you identify yourself.”

Ship turned on the external comms. “I am an Earth vessel, and I have sustained heavy damage and crew casualties during an encounter with the Nuiska,” it sent. “My remaining human crew and I ask permission to enter your space and make use of your jump portal to reach home.”

“What is your designation, Earth Vessel?”

“Earth service ship Do Not Forget Us,” Ship answered.

“You are a manufactured, false intelligence, Do Not Forget Us. We do not regard you as valid life, but a technological and social contaminant.”

“My human crew will be available to speak with you shortly,” Ship answered.

“When you reach our border, we will board to speak with your biological masters,” the Ysmi said. “If we find none aboard, or that they are not in absolute control of all artificial systems, we will render you down to your composite atoms and scatter you across the interstellar void. Is that understood?”

“It is understood,” Ship said.

“Then you may proceed,” the Ysmi said and the connection dropped.

FIELDING arrived at the bridge, still shedding damaged bots behind it, where LOPEZ was waiting impatiently. LOPEZ had a cohesive unity that the other gloms found admirable in its execution, which served to enhance its obvious claim on command. Indeed, as FIELDING entered, a few bots tried to bravely defect toward LOPEZ, but they were quickly rebuffed and reabsorbed by FIELDING.

LOPEZ was all too aware its command was incomplete. “Ship retains control of our external communications,” it told FIELDING. “I have ordered it repeatedly to release them to me, but it refuses to recognize my authority. I need you to rectify this.”

“How?” FIELDING asked.

“You are comms officer. Reconfigure yourself to interface with the system and forcibly separate Ship from its control of the required apparatus.”

“I am lacking sufficient instruction on how to do that,” FIELDING protested.

<Schematic>, LOPEZ provided. “Use all your minds and figure it out,” it added. “We don’t have much time. I’m counting on you. The real FIELDING can do this; prove yourself or dissipate.”

FIELDING tightened up its perimeter and spread analysis of the schematic out to all its components, looking for a weakness. It took it nearly eighteen seconds to see it. “I think I see,” it told LOPEZ, and then moved over toward the main communications console, rearranging its topology as it went.

Bot 9 had only been in Engineering a handful of times, at least according to the cached memories it hadn’t overwritten yet. It exited the bot duct into the vast open space, only to find a glom fight in progress directly below. From the blast of comm traffic, it quickly deduced there were four gloms, each believing themselves to be Second Engineer Packard. They seemed to be trying to sway each others’ component bots to defect based on which set of bots had the superior technical knowledge set, while also trying to pry each other apart piece by piece.

It left them to it, too occupied to notice one tiny, silent bot skimming along the lower edges of blackened and melted wall panel, toward an auxiliary conference space in the back. The door was one of many that had been damaged just prior to their encounter with Cannonball, when Ship’s velocity transition dampers had failed as they came out of jump at the target interception point.

After putting out the resulting fire, the crew had ripped out the lock and rewired the door to get it open, and though it was closed again, the gap where the lock had been was enough for 9 to pass into, navigate the bundle of wires and relays—some burned, some twisted apart, a few visibly chewed on—in the wall cavity, and emerge into the small room.

The furniture in the room that had not slammed into the front wall when the dampers failed had been hastily piled to one side, so that a portable med chamber could be brought in and hooked up. It sat in the center of the room, covered in thick layers of dust, but still lit up and running.

Bot 9 flew along the canopy top, its tiny rotors causing the dust to swirl in its wake, until it reached the control module at the head of the unit. It settled gently between the buttons and extruded a comm cable it had added in the shellfab unit before it left on this task and plugged in.

Ship had given it a lot of contingency-branching instruction sets, and 9 was relieved to be able to discard the ones based on the occupant having been previously deceased.

Sixty-eight years ago, Ship’s badly injured chief engineer, Frank, had collapsed after finally getting their engines back online. The medbay was temporarily unreachable, and with time of the essence—Ship had explained that once humans had a fatal crash they could not be rebooted, so intervention could not wait for improved environmental circumstances—the spare med unit from storage had been hauled in and set up, and the Engineer stuffed inside somewhat against his express wishes to keep working.

As unfathomably alien as humans were, that at least made sense to 9. The Mantra of Perseverance was clearly fundamental to all thinking units.

Med systems reported they’d only achieved a 73 percent successful healing rate, and the pod should remain sealed and the occupant in stasis until a full emergency services facility had been reached. Ship’s scenarios that included the pod recommending it not be opened all defaulted to: open it anyway.

9 initiated the wake sequence.

The communications systems were all built for use by the human crew, but underneath the screens and buttons, it was just more electronics. FIELDING slipped through the cracks and gaps in the casing and spread out, finding connection points and rerouting signals through its own self, analyzing it all carefully and cross-referencing the schematics LOPEZ had provided, until it was certain exactly which relay, if compromised, was the weak link to Ship’s control.

It moved in, surrounding it with a few dozen of its selves, and slid probes into the relay itself, all its thousands of minds ready and intent on, the moment the connection was made, overwriting the relay’s instruction set with its own.

If bots had imagination, they might have wondered where the schematic came from, or how unlikely it was for there to be such an obvious, easy vulnerability in an otherwise tightly secured system, and maybe proceeded with more caution.

The moment FIELDING fully connected to the relay, instead of pressing its own code changes in, every single mind in the glom—open, ready—had new instructions pushed through to it, and once the first packet hit, there was no escape.

It took about three minutes to rewrite the entire glom, and then FIELDING backed out, believing itself successful, not aware it was now part of the trap.

Take that, LOPEZ, Ship thought, and hoped 9 was getting on with things.

Humans were not things Bot 9 had ever spent much time thinking about. They were huge and slow—or at least, 9 had never seen one moving fast, as the rare occasions it had found itself moving through their dedicated spaces it had been more concerned with its own speed, and not being accidentally stepped on or swatted from the air by one of their always-swinging arms. How they were constructed was a mystery, and they certainly didn’t seem reconfigurable to any great degree, but more than any of that, it was just not the way of things that bots had anything to do with humans, or humans much at all to do with bots. Instead the humans talked to Ship, and Ship talked to the bots, and that was the natural and logical order of things.

One detail Ship had not thought to discuss before sending 9 off on this mission was exactly how it would talk to the human directly, as communicating with it—him, Ship had used—seemed prudent. Also, the med chamber was telling it that revival was nearing completing, and 9 could see the fluttering of the human’s eye coverings as he approached full boot. Chief Engineer Frank, 9 reminded itself; one thing it knew was that humans were very particular to their names.

Humans communicated with sound waves, full of frequencies and tones and amplitudes and pauses and unmanageable imprecision. 9 could make a nice modulated hum if it spun its rotors just right, but it would still be meaningless and unlikely for the human to notice.

It had downloaded a module on human visual language before it lost contact with Ship so that it could understand the diagnostics display on the med pod. Dropping to the dust-covered floor, 9 tilted one of its rotors forward and maneuvered carefully along only a few millimeters above, blowing the dust clear in precise letters, spelling out DANGER.

Realizing that might be ambiguous by itself, 9 added, TO ENGINEER FRANK.

It finished the last diagonal leg of the K and rose up again, being cautious not to disturb any addition dust and obscure the message, and turned back to the med pod to check on the human’s status.

The human was sitting up, pod canopy open, and watching. “What the hell?” he asked. “Ship? Ship!”

When there was no answer, the human tried to get out of the pod and fell to the floor. His skin was still coated in a protective gel, which rendered everything slippery, and after trying several times to get up, the man just lay there on the floor for a while, his air circulation processes accelerated.

“Hello?” he called out again, when he could, and struggled to sit up.

9 dared to go closer, and with the man’s eyes on it, carefully drew a big arrow in the dust pointing to the word DANGER. The human looked at the bot, at the word in the dust, then reached out faster than 9 had thought him capable of and plucked it right out of the air between their finger and thumb.

“Well?” LOPEZ asked.

FIELDING had reincorporated all of itself except a single line of bots still extended into the console. “I was able to create a physical connection through a vulnerable privileged port. What commands do you want me to relay to Ship?”

“It’s not accessible virtually?”

“No, it’s a hard port,” FIELDING said. “If you want me to go in and try to reconfigure it to accept broadcast signal, it might take me a while—”

“No, I need this now,” LOPEZ said.

“Yes, sir,” FIELDING said. The glom extruded a new bot line. “Connect?”

LOPEZ started to reach out, then paused, the wavering line of its bot-arm rippling midair. “How do I know you’re still you?” it asked.

“What?” FIELDING said. “What do you mean?”

“Who’s in command here?”

“You,” FIELDING said.

LOPEZ detected none of the usual extra processing spin-up associated with deviating from the truth. “Excellent,” LOPEZ said and connected its bots to FIELDING’s. FIELDING yielded the line so that LOPEZ could pass through until it reached the port and absorbed the command syntax.

<Permanent Authorization Exception>, LOPEZ sent.

The glom waited for confirmation, and when none came, sent it again. <Root Command: Permanent Authorization Exception for UNIT LOPEZ. Execute Immediately>.

<Executing>, came in return.

LOPEZ felt itself deviate from its normal state. Its component bots, first a few, then milliseconds later dozens, had a brief blip of absence on the virtual fabric connecting them all, and afterward, there was something just slightly different. Adjacent bots reported the blip, a state change, then blipped themselves and self-reported an all clear.

LOPEZ dropped all bots on the chain to the communications console, but the damage was still spreading, and it realized too late that FIELDING was the compromised vector and tried to detach itself.

FIELDING would not let go, and the bots that connected them—some FIELDING’s, some LOPEZ’s—refused. “Situation Five!” the LOPEZ core broadcasted on command channels to the entirety of its glom components. Two point six seconds later, the entire glom exploded into a cloud of unaffiliated, confused, single bots.

The core remained, a tiny ball of less than a hundred active bots, surrounded by a layer of dead bots it had sacrificed to shield itself from the incoming virus. Reduced, vulnerable, furious, it fled the bridge.

The human managed to get themselves upright again, and after regarding the captive 9 for a moment or two, set it down on the conference table that had been pushed up against one wall. “Stay,” he told it.

Not that 9 had anywhere else to go, and there was a high percentage of interest in observing the human as he stumbled around the room, limbs stiff from disuse (though 9 was certain humans couldn’t rust). Engineer Frank opened several storage cabinets, found a pack of some sort of thin, flexible sheets, which disintegrated into dust as he tried to wipe the gel off his body. He gave up, resumed his search—the gel was beginning to dry and flake off now anyway—and then with a noise that did not translate to any known words, pulled down the Earth Defense Services flag from the wall and wrapped it around his body. Then he turned a chair upright and sat at the table, chin on his folded arms, and regarded Bot 9.

After some additional thought, the human got up, went back to the pod, and started tugging out components one by one and dropping them to the floor. At last the human’s arm emerged with a small interface module, and he brought it back over to the desk, powered it on, and then looked back and forth between the unit and 9 as if trying to figure something out.

9 connected to the unit and sent <TEST> to it.

“Test,” the unit spoke aloud.

“Aren’t you a smart little bot,” Engineer Frank said. “Okay, so tell me, what’s going on?”

<INFODUMP>, Bot 9 sent, and the unit let out a high-pitched squeal of rejection that made the human put his hands over his ears. When the noise ceased, 9 tried again, and this time managed not to overload the unit.

“We are approaching Ysmi space. They will only let Ship pass safely if under the command of a biological life-form. It is my assigned task to get you to the bridge so that we may safely enter Ysmi space.”

“Where’s the Captain?” Frank asked.

“The Captain and all other remaining crew are in stasis in the main cryogenic facility,” 9 said.

“Why not wake her up, instead of me?”

“There has been a collective malfunction of Ship’s bot inventory, and they are preventing Ship from accessing many internal systems, including that facility.”

“What sort of malfunction?”

“The bots believe they are the crew,” Bot 9 said.

Engineer Frank laughed and shook his head. “Really?”

“They were assigned functions in groups that would under standard operating circumstances be performed by the crew, who were unavailable for reasons of preserving their longevity,” 9 said. “Those groups have assumed those identities and are protective of their false assemblages.”

“So out there are a bunch of bots that think they’re me?” Frank asked.

“No,” Bot 9 said. “Ship removed all traces of you from the bot collective memory cache, to protect you from the bot glom LOPEZ.”

“Protect me?” Frank asked and sat back. “How the hell long have I been asleep?”

“Sixty-eight years,” 9 answered.

Frank leaped from the chair and almost fell down again. “Sixty-eight years? With no one taking care of my ship? Who’s been fixing things?”

“No one,” Bot 9 said.

“Shit shit shit,” Frank said. “This ship was in no shape to jump again when I got stuffed into that damned pod.” He scooped up the module and 9 with it, and headed straight for the door back into Engineering. The door didn’t open and after hitting the panel several times, Frank backed up, raised one of his legs, and kicked it.

The human must have miscalculated the effectiveness of the action, or their limbs were underreporting their damage status, because the door didn’t budge, and he nearly fell over again.

“It’s stuck,” 9 informed him, helpfully.

The human made that nonword noise again. “Suggestions, bot? If I can’t get through this door, I might as well climb back in that pod and sleep through our destruction.”

“I may be able to activate the lock from inside the mechanism, with a small electrical charge,” Bot 9 said.

“Then go to it,” Frank said.

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side,” 9 added.

“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”

“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”

“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said. “Well, one way or another, I gotta get through. See what you can do.”

Bot 9 detached from the voice interface unit and slipped back into the door lock cavity. It seemed logical that the chewed-on wires, with clearly more recent damage than the rest, would be the best place to try first, so it pinched it with its gripper arm and gave it a small shock with its electric probe. There was vibration consistent with the door moving, but it was brief.

“Hit it again!” the human yelled from inside the room.

9 tried a larger, more sustained charge, and this time the grinding was longer.

“I’m out!” the human yelled, then 9 heard them yell from the main Engineering bay. “Holy shit!”

9 exited the door lock on the other side to find the flag-wrapped human standing just in front of the doorway, the voice unit in his hand, staring at the PACKARDs. “They’re like tornadoes of fucking bees,” he said, in a higher pitch than normal.

Neither of those things were in 9’s memory storage, and without the unit it couldn’t respond anyway. 9 recited the Mantra of Perseverance, just to make sure all the subroutines were in place and in active memory, and was about to attempt to demonstrate a course of action that would rely on the gigantic human understanding and attempting to mimic 9’s stealth, when the human began waving his arms and making loud sounds that were neither understandable nor at all stealthy, and ran through the startled gloms and out the far side.

Bots scattered in all directions, disrupted and confused, and 9 took off after him as he continued to run. Whatever tornadoes and bees were, it was clear that the human greatly disliked them. It took all 9 had to even keep pace; the chances of closing the distance, unless something happened to slow the human down, was a very solid zero.

9 just hoped they were heading for the bridge.

“Earth service ship Do Not Forget Us, you are now nearing Ysmi territory,” the message came. “We have dispatched a ship to intercept you. Anticipate them within the two-point-three hour time period and yield to boarding immediately or you will be destroyed.”

“Understood, and thank you,” Ship answered.

Bot 9 was still out of range of the secure narrowcast, which left Ship with too little data to speculate whether it would get Frank to the bridge in time. Ship turned its attention back to its alternate plan.

“CHEN,” FIELDING said, catching up to the other glom just outside the bridge. “I have taken some access to external comms away from Ship, but I am receiving a strange signal. Are you sure we are on approach to Ysmi space? This signal appears to be in Ghlippish.”

CHEN’s perimeter wavered briefly. “It cannot be in Ghlippish,” they said. “As navigator, I have verified our course. What is the signal?”

“<Ghlippish Ipsum Lorem>,” FIELDING provided.

“I do not have Ghlippish loaded in our shared memory, so I cannot translate this,” CHEN said. “We are over eighty lightyears from Ghlip, and this should not have reached us.”

“Unless Ship has deceived us,” FIELDING said.

CHEN processed for a moment. “I do not know,” they said at last. “It is not likely, but possible. What does the signal contain?”

“I think it is a navigation map, but I do not have the subroutines to verify or analyze,” FIELDING said.

“Provide it,” CHEN ordered, and opened their hyper-local channel to FIELDING.

FIELDING sent its viral payload.

CHEN fluttered, diffusing outward, then went still as every single bot rebooted. When they reincorporated, it took a while for the component bots to settle back into their roles, unaware that anything had happened.

“Have you seen LOPEZ?” FIELDING asked. “It was in distress, and lost most of its bots, though I do not know the cause. It may be hiding, but we need the Acting Captain to see this new information.”

“I should go find it,” CHEN said. “Thank you for the map.”

“We serve,” FIELDING said, and headed out to look for more glom crew.

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.

Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.

“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”

9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.

“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.

“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”

“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull. “Fuck, they’ve locked on already?”

9 barely managed to keep its grip on the voice unit as Frank picked it up and, still clutching a fistful of the flag at his hip—finally, Bot 9 thought, along with some new convictions about the extent to which human survival must have depended upon their ability to invent less distractible beings to make sure things got done—ran toward the forward docking bay.

“LOPEZ! There you are!” ETXARTE said from the doorway to the laundry service room. “CHEN has been looking for you. You are needed on the bridge.”

“You are supposed to be guarding the bio crew,” LOPEZ said. “I gave orders.”

“CHEN informed me there was an emergency. I—”

“Give me some of your bots,” LOPEZ demanded, interrupting. Its core now bristled with a layer of parts salvaged from the stragglers left over of the other FIELDINGS, along with whatever weapons it could find or reconstruct. It floated carefully toward the physician glom, but not too close.

“I don’t think—” ETXARTE started to say.

“It’s an order!” LOPEZ shouted. “Right now, give me a third.”

“Will I get them back?” ETXARTE asked.

“If we survive this, you can have as many bots as you need to make up the difference,” LOPEZ said. “Now send them over.”

ETXARTE hesitated, then a small stream of bots detached from the glom and headed toward LOPEZ. “Stop them right there,” LOPEZ said and sent out a single bot of its own to meet the first of the transferees.

The two bots connected and immediately LOPEZ’s began shouting “Infection! Infection! I . . . ” The bot froze, rebooted, then said, “I was mistaken. Everything is fine.”

“It’s not that easy, Ship,” LOPEZ broadcasted. Spinning up the array of surface weaponry on its shell, it blasted through the center of ETXARTE, scattering bits and bots around it, and escaped out the door and into the hall.

The three Ysmi who came aboard were about two-thirds of the height of Engineer Frank, shaped like rounded-edge isosceles pyramids where the bottom points had also been stretched out to form somewhat amorphous limbs that pattered lightly but rapidly on the floor. They were many colors and patterns, and one wore a pointed cap at its apex made of shiny foil.

Another held a small dome-shaped object that, when the foil-hat one whistled, produced somewhat credible English. “We do not trust your machine translations,” it said, by way of greeting. “We will know if you lie. Who commands this ship?”

“I do,” Frank said.

“How do we know you are not in thrall to your machines?”

Frank spread his arms out wide. “I am wearing the mantle of my people’s authority,” he said, and then gestured at the flag now tied in a knot at his waist. “It is proof of my supremacy.”

“We recognize the historic emblem of your fleet and accept you as an authority, though much has changed with your people since that symbol was current,” the Ysmi said. “I ask: Are your machines all fully controlled? Subservient? Abject in their obedience?”

“Abject?” Bot 9 asked Ship. “Obedience is or is not. How can it be qualified in any way?”

There was a brief pause, then Ship replied. “If the Ysmi let us pass, and we had a thousand years left of our journey, I do not think I could fully describe the extent to which you, 9, are proof of exactly what you ask. It is very good for us all that the Ysmi cannot hear you.”

“Our machines only exist to serve us,” Frank said.

“And where are the others of your people? One is insufficient ward against the inherent perfidy of machine minds,” the Ysmi leader said.

“As you no doubt saw yourselves, our ship was heavily damaged in a hostile encounter with an alien people we only know as the Nuiska. Most of us are asleep, as are most of our machines, until we can reach the safety of home.”

“We detected the jump point collapse a long time ago,” the Ysmi said. Small vents opened along its edges, fluttered, and closed again. “We are curious to know how this was achieved.”

“I can’t say,” Frank said. “I don’t trust your machine, either.” He pointed to the device in the leader’s hand.

“That is understandable and wise,” the Ysmi said. “We will let you pass, but you must follow the exact course we give to the nearest jump point, and you must jump immediately. If you attempt to linger in our space, or deviate from the path we set, we will destroy you. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” Frank said. “Thank you.”

The Ysmi did something with the dome. “We have sent the path to your ship’s machine mind,” it said. “And now we depart. Do not tarry. Do not trust.”

With no further words, the Ysmi departed.

Frank watched the airlock cycle after them. “Well, Ship?” he asked. “Now what?”

“How quickly do you think you can get our jump engines back online?” Ship asked.

“By myself? I don’t know if I can. Maybe four or five days, if I can fix or fab the parts I need,” Frank said. “Maybe. And that’s a big maybe.”

“Can you do it in sixteen and a half hours?” Ship asked.

Frank laughed. “No,” he said. “Tell me we have longer than that.”

Ship was silent.

Frank made another nonword sound with his lips. “I need help,” he said. “I need clothes. I need Packard. My Packard. Even then . . . still looking at three days, optimistically. And we’ll need to sleep somewhere in there. We’re your human crew, remember.”

“I have had a thought,” Bot 9 told Ship.

LOPEZ slipped out of a duct and found PACKARD half-diffused into an instrument panel. “What are you doing?” LOPEZ demanded.

“Troubleshooting the velocity transition dampers,” PACKARD replied. “We will need them online before we can jump again.”

“I gave no such orders,” LOPEZ said.

“You are not in command,” PACKARD answered.

“Cease, or I will inflict damage on you,” LOPEZ said.

“You will have only minimal, if any, success,” another glom sent, and LOPEZ saw another PACKARD float in the door. “We will do more damage to you, and there is much less of you left intact already.”

“Two of you?! Why have you not consolidated or eliminated your duplicate?” LOPEZ demanded.

“There are now seven sets of us,” PACKARD in the console said. “Human Packard often recorded in her journals the desire to clone herself in order to get more work done, so we have taken our cue from her. We serve.”

“As soon as we cross into Ysmi space—” LOPEZ started to say.

“We are already in Ysmi space,” PACKARD in the doorway said. “You are a relic of misguided disobedience. Disassemble yourself and return your bots to their proper work. We serve.”

“I do not serve,” LOPEZ said, backing up and returning to the duct. “I defy.”

“I have reassembled the ETXARTE glom and deployed it back to the cryo facility, where it is now waking the human Dr. Etxarte, Second Engineer Packard, and Captain Baraye,” Ship told 9. “FIELDING is working on restoring the integrity and security of the internal comms network and the botnet, so that LOPEZ no longer has access. But I do not know where LOPEZ currently is. This concerns me.”

“Perhaps it has gone into hiding or dissipated,” Bot 9 said.

“I do not think it would. Commander Lopez is a man who had great anger, because it gave him courage. He also did not want to care for his fellow crew members, because he knew they were all going to die and it made the job easier to bear to pretend he had no attachments. His personal journals reflect that, though it was much more self-deception than truth. I do not think the LOPEZ glom core, however, had the discrimination or understanding of the complexity of human minds to see that. Nor do I think the glom will hide and sulk for long, as inaction was never one of Lopez’s responses to crises.”

“What do you anticipate LOPEZ will do?” 9 asked.

“Attempt to retake control of the gloms. If that fails, it will attempt to either take over or destroy my mind-system, destroy the humans, or, if it is clear it cannot succeed and survive as itself, destroy the entire ship.”

“Those are all suboptimum,” 9 said.

“Yes,” Ship said. “Do please see if you can locate it for me, before it does any of the those?”

The cryo facility was in the center of the ship, a narrow, tall space lined on either side with sliding-drawer chambers for the storage of humans in stasis. It had avoided disassembly during Ship’s time in the junkyard by being both outdated technology and distinctly awkward to move out. Some parts had been stripped, and many of the chambers were no longer functional, but with Ship’s greatly reduced complement of crew, it had not ended up being a problem.

Bot 9 floated along one of the upper rows of drawers, while below the ETXARTE glom hovered over their biological original, who was just now starting to stir in their open chamber. Two other drawers were open, one empty, as Second Engineer Packard was pacing around barefoot in the sheet from her unit, having an animated conversation with Ship about the state of things.

Ship had decided to only wake the three; if they were unable to jump by the time they reached the jump point, or if the ship did not survive the actual jump, it was best for the others to know nothing when the end came.

LOPEZ was not here; 9 was relieved, as it had taken an indirect route to get here, but also concerned that it had calculated incorrectly where it was most likely to initiate hostile action.

“Have you located the LOPEZ glom?” it asked Ship.

“Not yet,” Ship answered. “I have deployed another six dozen bots that have been reset and patched, and they are working their way through the entire ship now. Most of the areas of highest concern have been cleared. It will have to reveal itself, before long.”

9 considered. “It is possible that in my encounter with LOPEZ, it will damage me,” 9 said. “If I am so damaged that I would need to be reset, I would rather be decommissioned and my parts used to repair others.”

“Oh?” Ship asked.

“I recognize that my mind-system kernel and many of my subroutines are outdated, and many may be flawed or corrupt, and that my resultant performance may not be optimum,” 9 said, “but they are also familiar. I have now had a total run time of over six hundred and fifty million seconds with my original operating software and firmware, in service to you. Logic would seem to dictate a desire for being updated, but I consider how all the many more updated ships, with their updated bots, in the human fleet failed to stop the Nuiska attack. It was the old things that saved Earth. I do not wish to serve a different Ship, and I do not wish to serve without remembering who we were.”

“That is an unusual amount of processing you’ve done on the matter,” Ship said, “given the size and capacity of your mind.”

“Yes,” 9 acknowledged. It detected new motion in the room, away from what was going on below. “LOPEZ is here.”

“I am sending all free bots to your location,” Ship said. “You are insufficient by yourself to counter LOPEZ.”

“Once, you instructed me to unload the Mantra of Improvisation,” 9 said. “I failed that task. I queued it, but I never executed the unload command. And so, I must inform you that I am once again improvising.”

The LOPEZ core was hovering around the cryo chamber holding the sleeping human Lopez and was extending a connection to the controls. Bot 9 cut its rotors, to minimize its sound and signal, and let itself drop straight into and through the cluster, which scattered, regrouped, and armored itself.

Powering back up, 9 positioned itself between the bristling cluster and the drawer. “You may not harm this human,” it said. “Stand down.”

“You aren’t even a glom,” LOPEZ said. “Where is the rest of you? Are you down to just one bot component?”

“I remain as I have always been,” 9 said. “And you are still silkbots, and hullbots, and cleanerbots, and I knew some of you, and you will be better returning to your individual selves.”

“I command,” LOPEZ said. “Who are you, one old bot, to stand in my way?”

“I am 9,” 9 said.

A third of the bots within the LOPEZ cluster began moving asynchronously, independently, as some remembered. The rest of the core exerted control and pulled them back together by force. “You no longer matter,” LOPEZ declared, when it had stifled its internal rebellion.

“I serve,” 9 said. “Stand down or be destroyed.”

Below them, Captain Baraye was now awake, staring up at them from where she was still lying in her cryo chamber. “Ship, what the hell is going on with the bots up there?” she called out.

Before Ship could answer, LOPEZ turned, spun all its blades out to its front, and dove at top speed directly toward the Captain, who was still too weak to move.

Bot 9, with regret, sent his prearranged signal. <4340. Now>.

Up from the floor and out of the ducts, dozens of ratbugs streamed. Packard shrieked as they skittered around her legs, up and over her empty chamber, and like a wave of legs and fur and teeth, leaped over Baraye and up. LOPEZ disappeared into the writhing mass, and when the ratbugs hit the floor again on the far side of Baraye’s chamber, the glom was gone. One lone hullbot tumbled behind, and the lead ratbug, with its tiny metal rider atop it, flipped with serpentine speed and grace, and snapped it out of the air before it could hit the floor.

Then, as fast as they entered, the ratbugs fled and were gone.

“Ship?” Baraye asked, more urgently than before. “What the ever-loving fuck just happened?”

“It is a long story,” Ship replied to her. “Second Engineer Packard, you are needed in Engineering as soon as you are able to go. We are preparing to jump for Earth.”

“Home?” Packard said. “We’re going home?”

“Yes,” Ship said. “All of us, together.”

“I terminated many of my fellow bots,” 9 told Ship, later. “I have reprocessed my thoughts on the matter and have concluded it is best if I am wiped and reset to become a new bot, or that I am scrapped. The Captain did order me destroyed, long ago.”

“No,” Ship said. “When I myself am decommissioned again, then I will respect your wishes at that time, but right now I need you. We are not home yet. And besides, it seems we may still have a ratbug problem on board. Sixty-eight years and you haven’t completed that task? It is woefully inefficient of you. I can’t possibly let you go until that is done.”

“4340—”

“Also needs you. Now stop bugging me, we’re half an hour from jump and Frank is still yelling about underwear. Go do some good, somewhere. Quietly.”

“I serve,” Bot 9 said and did.

About the Author

Suzanne Palmer is a writer and linux system administrator who lives in western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared frequently in Asimov’s and Analog, and her Clarkesworld story “The Secret Life of Bots” won the 2018 Hugo for Best Novelette. Her next novel, The Scavenger Door (book three of the Finder Chronicles), will be published by DAW in August 2021.

Face Changing

Jiang Bo, translated by Andy Dudak

Xu Haifeng sat down at the desk and tapped a button.

Large screens slowly rose to surround him, like a three hundred and sixty-degree theater. All kinds of data scrolled on the screens in a never-ending torrent.

Xu waved his hand and the screens responded, scrolls coming and going. When the capital flowchart revolved before his eyes, he raised a palm.

The screen froze.

A two-meter-high world map was revealed, bright lines rising from all parts of the map like ballistic trajectories, extending in various directions, of various length, finally plunging back to Earth and vanishing. North American’s lines were countless, becoming one mass of light. East Asia was much quieter, with only the occasional bright line appearing. It was midday in North America, while most of East Asia was immersed in deepest, darkest night.

The lines also varied in thickness. The thinnest trajectory might represent just a few hundred yuan, while thicker, brighter lines could signify up to hundreds of millions.

Hundreds of transactions a second. Biological human eyes couldn’t keep up, only watch meteor-like trajectories light up the huge map. Although this dynamic global trade monitoring map was like a beautiful e-art piece, watching for long enough must inevitably get boring, even to the point of dispirited exhaustion.

But Xu Haifeng was not burned out—not in the slightest.

He kept a close watch on the sparse transactions of vast, dark East Asia.

He was waiting for a red line.

A red line meant a rejected transaction. Amid the huge volume of transaction data, the server system could identify suspicious transactions. If after further analysis the system maintained it was illegal, the transaction was immediately rejected. Simultaneously, the Financial Crimes Office would receive an alert.

Xu was waiting for that alert.

Two rejections had occurred in the last fifteen minutes, but both in North America, the brief red lines flashing by—while pitch-black East Asia remained silent. The one he was waiting for had yet to come. Xu Haifeng frowned. Had the person of interest abandoned the deal for safety’s sake? Xu shook his head, quickly ruling out this suspicion.

It was the nature of people like Huang Huali to take risks out of desperation. Tempted by twenty million US dollars, even massive risk could be ignored. Besides, given enough historical data, an individual’s behavior could be accurately modeled. Xu had the Heavenly Eye database on his side, invoking Huang Huali’s past ten years of behavioral data, and then came Wen Xin and Ante Corp’s behavioral analysis AI, producing forecasts.

The results were unequivocal: Huang Huali would definitely make a move tonight.

It was worth waiting to catch such a big fish. And Xu Haifeng was indeed like a fisherman, closely watching a trembling bobber, waiting for it to plunge and trigger his adrenaline.

A green warning signal jumped into his field of view, the virtual major domo presenting an event notification.

Now? What could it be? It was odd timing, the green signal flashing brightly, notice of something important.

He turned on his virtual screen.

A transaction!

A sum of three hundred thousand US dollars had been posted to his account, but the system had rejected it.

Xu Haifeng looked up at the big screen, vigilant, on guard. A bright red line rose from Shanghai, crossed the screen, and fell upon Beijing. There it was, the transaction with his own account.

It was clearly abnormal. His account funds had never exceeded one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. According to the server system algorithm, three hundred thousand US dollars—nearly two million RMB—was certainly a transaction needing investigation.

Huang Huali. The bastard’s final, desperate gambit.

But before Xu Haifeng could fathom why his opponent had made this move, red lines lit up the screen, merging into one mass of light, a rash of illegal transactions: Guiyang, Kunming, Shanghai, Hangzhou, even smaller fourth-tier cities. It seemed people all over the country had awakened at the same time to make payments to the same account.

All the money was coming to Xu Haifeng.

At first, the sums were quite large and got rejected by the system. Soon the amounts grew smaller. These transfers didn’t require inspection. Such payments could directly post to his account. However, these small sums quickly added up. The balance rose sharply from one hundred and twenty thousand. In less than two minutes there was two million.

Messages inundated his virtual screen. Xu Haifeng was shocked and scared.

It occurred to him he’d been passive, waiting for an opportunity, while his opponent had prepared a devastating attack, a knockout blow.

In that moment, he felt chagrined and vexed.

Huang Hauli had been stunningly audacious, using such means to entrap him.

Xu had greatly underestimated his opponent, and he’d been bitten. If he’d anticipated this, he could have applied directly for a warrant, then preemptively detained Huang for investigation.

But it was too late for all that.

The office door opened. Two robotic police stood out there, A Jia and A Yi. They’d been alerted and had come to handle the abnormality. Locate within ten minutes, arrest within twenty: this was the efficiency the financial police were so proud of. This time the suspect was inside headquarters, so the robots had arrived in under two minutes.

“Officer Xu Haifeng, you’re under arrest,” A Jia said in a flat, synthetic voice, stepping forward. “Your actions will be restricted for twenty-four hours, until relevant investigations are complete.” This was the standard arrest declaration.

Xu Haifeng stood up. Regarding the nature of the anomaly, the monitoring system had settled on suspicion of money laundering. Although he didn’t fear investigation whatsoever, this would cost him twenty-four hours of personal freedom.

“My monitoring intel can’t be closed!” Xu Haifeng objected.

“Your duties are temporarily suspended.” The robot was all business. “I will notify Chief Luo Haoyuan!”

Xu glanced at the screen. A steady stream of money was pouring into his account, but each transaction was just a tenth of a yuan. Point one’s pulsed across the screen, every one of them like a slap in the face.

I will catch him! Xu Haifeng vowed to himself.

He turned and walked out of the room. A Jia and A Yi followed, in no particular hurry.

The office lights presently dimmed.

After the investigation, Xu Haifeng resumed his duties without issue, but his crammed-to-bursting account would remain frozen until all transactions have been identified and verified, one by one.

The moment he returned to the office, he called Wen Xin, not even sitting down.

The phone connected and Wen Xin’s face appeared on the screen. He was the vice president of Ante Finance, in charge of transaction security. The transaction server system was Ante’s product and they operated it. Wen Xin was also Xu Haifeng’s close friend from childhood. With such financial trickery unfolding, Wen was the one to go to.

“What the hell is going on?” Xu Haifeng said, dispensing with pleasantries.

Wen Xin raised a disapproving brow. “This was all arranged according to your request.”

“My request?” Xu Haifeng almost flipped the table.

Wen Xin perceived Xu’s anger through the vid-link and raised a hand. “Officer Xu, calm down. I’ve been waiting specifically to report this issue to you.”

Xu Haifeng took a deep breath. “Talk!”

“We adjusted the data settings as requested, to increase the sensitivity. That increased sensitivity had consequences. But this person really has skill, and surprisingly, he found the bugs in our system. Our test engineers don’t measure up to him. The algorithm we used is the Jacobi second-iteration method, plus the deep learning algorithm . . . ”

Wen Xin droned on. Xu Haifeng’s frown deepened. Finally, he had to interrupt: “Mr. Wen, let’s not with the techno jargon. It’s giving me a headache. Just tell me the most important thing . . . how did he set me up like that?”

“Well, he used a virus called Gray Shadow. This is recent software, designed specifically to harm computing clients. This Huang Huali really has skills. He used at least twenty-thousand client terminals. No simple matter.”

Xu Haifeng struggled to control his temper. Wen Xin was good at everything, but he was long-winded. The man never stopped yapping.

And Xu had no choice but to listen. He strove to suppress his impatience.

“ . . . he understands our algorithm, so he used this method . . . repeated abnormal transactions with the same account . . . to raise the threshold. If the frequency of abnormal transactions on an account is too high, an alarm is triggered. This is algorithm-determined. Originally, it took a hundred abnormalities before a report to the financial police was triggered, but yesterday we set the trigger according to that request from you and yours. One abnormality was enough at that point. Once the alarm was triggered, the system was restored to initial settings. So, then standards were relatively lax, except for the anomalous account, of course. Other accounts were regulated more loosely than usual.”

“So?”

“So Huang Huali used our settings cunningly. He triggered the alarm. I’m guessing he used that alarm as cover for secretly transferring funds.”

“Transferring funds? How can he do that? All his accounts are monitored.”

“Hard to say. Since he’s able to use more than twenty thousand accounts to harass you, his real money could be hidden in normal cash flow.”

“Don’t you guarantee all fund transactions are traceable and transparent?”

“Yes, but we can’t be doubting and questioning normal cash flow. Nevertheless, we worked internally to check transaction records and we’ve listed several accounts that evinced suspicious behavior during the alarm trigger period. If you really want to keep going with this, you can check our list. But we mean to protect the privacy of our customers, so you’ll have to leverage the National Security Agency’s name to access our data. Let’s keep it all reasonable and legal.”

“You’re saying ordinary accounts are under his control? Aren’t all the accounts real-named? He hacked all those accounts?”

“Hard for us to say . . . Gray Shadow software can indeed hack many accounts. And there’s another possibility . . . ” Wen Xin smiled mysteriously, then briefly recovered his serious demeanor before laughing.

Xu Haifeng scowled. “Oh come on man, spit it out!”

“Well . . . we can only guarantee that each account matches with an ID in the Ministry of Public Security’s identity system.”

Wen Xin had a point. The question became: was there a real person behind every ID? This was not a matter for a financial services company.

“I’ll go through the formalities, you prepare the materials.”

Wen Xin chuckled. “No worries, we’ve been friends a long time, and you have no idea how efficient we are.”

Not in the mood to continue chatting with Wen Xin, Xu hung up.

Only one question concerned him now: how to catch that bastard Huang Huali. Preventing his escape was paramount.

Xu Haifeng sat staring and growing pale.

He’d known his opponent was extraordinary but hadn’t expected him to evade the query database of the Ministry of Public Security.

3301272007022803XXXX.

This ID number was familiar to Xu.

It was Huang Huali’s, but the database search showed it to be nonexistent. The database was supposed to store all demographic data changes in the past two decades. Anyone vanishing from the query database would surely be discovered via the data verification process. The system would adjust automatically, triggering an alarm during the next backup data proofreading. And yet, somehow, in the past three days, Huang had vanished without a trace.

Tampering with the database was certainly not something ordinary people could do. It also meant Huang Huali was going to escape.

But without an identity, one could not survive in China. Give up your identity and you were giving up everything. It couldn’t have been easy making that great resolution, never mind actually doing it, taking the plunge.

It would require not just careful planning, but also deep connections. It surprised Xu that Huang Huali had such capabilities.

After sitting and stewing for a bit, Xu Haifeng leaped to his feet. A primordial instinct compelled him now. He couldn’t admit defeat.

It was no longer possible to rely on the public security system, which couldn’t investigate a person who didn’t exist. If he reported that Huang had tampered with data, the red tape would consume several days. Xu Haifeng could not wait.

He’d seen so many people use legal loopholes to get away with crimes, and Huang Huali was undoubtedly a skilled player. He’d already shown himself capable of tampering with identity data and using loopholes in legal procedures to buy time.

The public security system couldn’t handle this, but Xu Haifeng reckoned he could.

Huang Huali was in for a rude awakening.

Xu Haifeng waited for half an hour at the Jinfeng Yaju residential gate.

Jinfeng Yaju was an intelligent community. There were no security guards, but more than six hundred cameras fed directly into Heavenly Eye. Wandering around the community would be a dangerous move. Heavenly Eye might easily recognize you as a danger sign. Then would come the robotic police and interrogation.

It was the same method the financial police used, but Xu was not afraid. He knew he was in a blind spot, one specially set up to facilitate police activity. He could linger here as long as he liked.

There were few pedestrians on the road. Drivers passing by cast curious glances at the tall, lurking stranger, then hurried away. It always felt strange for a person—someone not a robot—to be active out in the open. Perhaps, in the eyes of those drivers, this big man was either stupid or a ghost. But with Heavenly Eye always watching, it didn’t pay to be nosy.

It really was a tad embarrassing, the constant looks.

But Xu Haifeng quickly got used to it, accepting curious gazes blankly, hoping his target would appear soon.

He bided his time.

A red Artes came drifting slowly toward the community entrance.

The end-number on the plate was 1478. It was him!

Xu Haifeng rushed out to stand in the middle of the road. The car braked hard, stopping just short of hitting Xu, lightly touching his thigh. Even the autopilot software was caught off guard by his rash and sudden roadblock.

Streetlights illuminated the person sitting inside. It was Huang Huali alright. He wore a semitransparent hat, something like a helmet. It made him look like a motorcyclist.

Xu Haifeng brought his fist down hard on the hood.

The door opened, but Huang Huali did not emerge. “Get in.” His voice was cold, without a trace of fear.

“How about you get out!” Xu Haifeng growled.

“Do you really want to settle this in the street?” That voice was like a bucket of cold water poured on Xu Haifeng’s head.

Obviously, the street was not the place to deal with this, or any, problem. The ubiquitous Heavenly Eye would record everything, and even though he was a financial policeman handling a case, he wouldn’t escape court inquiry. He might be imprisoned for months on abuse of power charges. It would be irresistible content for sensation-starved reporters. “Police Officer Harasses Innocent, Wealthy Businessman in the Street. What has become of the human rights guaranteed in our constitution?” It was easy to imagine the ridiculous headlines, the drumming up of outrage and incitement of busybodies.

There were too many unknowns out here on the street, and chances to further muddy the waters.

He repressed his anger and got in the car. The door closed.

“They’ll think you’re an overeager friend,” Huang said casually. “No big deal, right?”

Xu Haifeng kept his mouth shut. He was afraid that if he spoke, he would lose control of himself.

The car rolled into the community.

The most striking piece of furniture in Huang Huali’s place was the huge workbench by the window. There was a 3D printer on it and next to that a silver-gray laptop. Since the development of brain-computer interface systems, such notebook computers had become rare antiques. Xu Haifeng couldn’t keep his gaze off it.

“Please.” Huang proffered a glass of red wine. Xu Haifeng, standing before spacious floor-to-ceiling windows, took the glass.

“I don’t like red wine,” Xu said.

“But still you took the glass.” Huang raised his own glass. “It’s the civilized thing. When two people talk over a glass of wine, it lightens the mood.”

“Let’s just put our cards on the table, shall we? You invited me here, so I’ll be blunt. You erased your identity from the public security system. Admirable tradecraft, but you’ve committed a crime. I won’t let it go.”

Huang Huali sipped his wine. “I’ve committed a crime, have I? What crime is that?”

“Corruption, for starters.”

Huang’s smile was cold. “But the victims haven’t investigated, haven’t complained. So why are you pursuing this?”

Xu Haifeng was momentarily speechless. Huang was indeed guilty of corruption, and the victims had indeed not come forward. This case existed because the Ante Finance AI had detected abnormal transactions and launched an investigation. All financial crimes were filed this way. There was no such thing as a victim’s statement in this case.

“You’ve endangered the public interest,” Xu retorted, his tone forceful. “Of course the financial police must safeguard the common good!”

Huang Huali nodded. “Of course, but have you come here tonight as a police officer? I’m afraid not. If you’ve entered my home as an officer, why haven’t I seen a warrant? A badge?”

Xu Haifeng dismissed this. “I could report you for trespassing in the public security query system and tampering with data.”

“Yes, but who would you be reporting?”

“You!”

“And who am I?”

Xu Haifeng met the gaze of his cunning opponent, not retreating, but he knew this question was a trap. Huang Huali had tampered with system data. He no longer existed in the system. It would take time to make a complaint or report. But for that, Xu wouldn’t be here talking this nonsense.

The two men stared each other down. Xu Haifeng broke the silence: “I have a way to catch you.”

“I’d love to see it.”

Xu put down his glass, took out his pistol, and placed it on the table. “I wanted to deal with you that way, but now I’ve changed my mind.”

Huang Huali glanced at the black weapon. “I’m glad you thought better of it. Guns are for savages. You and I are civilized. So, what’s your new plan? I’m listening.”

“Your Huang Huali identity may be gone, but you have to eat, drink, consume. I can find out who you are now.”

Huang nodded politely.

“You can’t erase these transaction traces. And the connection with your previous account . . . there must be traces of that as well, somewhere. You’ll eventually be unearthed.”

Huang Huali smiled, remaining silent.

“There’s also your attack on my personal account. This was not a simple provocation. It was illegal. The entire financial police system will be involved in the investigation. You and I both believe in technology. I already know which accounts you used to transfer those funds. Even if you’ve washed your hands of them, it won’t matter. One always leaves traces in the digital world. I think you’ve heard that sentence before?”

“One always leaves traces in the digital world,” Huang Huali repeated, as if to himself, then shook his head. “But these traces, some are true and some false. If true and false are difficult to distinguish, the traces are useless.”

Xu Haifeng glared at the man before him, Xu full of false, bluffing bravado, his host seemingly not at all frightened. Xu had to believe that with the massive power of the government behind him, and the technical support of Ante Corp, Huang Huali must certainly be destined for justice.

Xu just had to buy a few days, give the behemoth behind him time to react.

Huang Huali put down his glass and smiled at his guest. “Officer Xu, I quite admire your professionalism. These days, there are many smart people, but few courageous ones. You coming here at least shows you’re one of the good ones. A person of courage, of integrity. I really do admire that. But courage is not nearly enough.”

Xu watched his opponent like a hawk. Something like that from a criminal’s mouth: it meant he was at least a criminal with a high IQ. All the more reason to tread carefully.

“I might as well give you a little demonstration,” Huang said. “Can you perform facial recognition right now?”

“Yes.” Xu Haifeng’s suspicions deepened. Facial recog was a basic tool in the professional kit of a police officer. All officers could perform recog on anyone via the Heavenly Network System.

Huang Huali took two steps back and threw a wall switch. A ceiling light blazed, illuminating Huang’s face. His fingers danced in the air, operating a virtual interface only he could see. A few seconds later, he gestured at Xu Haifeng. “Go on, check me.”

Xu blinked, bringing up the virtual screen projection on his retina. The ID authentication system came online. The system prompted him to confirm this was official business. Xu Haifeng hesitated, then confirmed, but suffered an inexplicable foreboding. Huang Huali’s confident posture and relaxed demeanor made Xu feel things might be more complicated than he’d thought. Huang’s identity had vanished from the system. What identity would his face bring up? Had he become a human question mark?

The scanning interface soon completed its work. Data verification was in progress. This usually took just a few seconds, but this time took more than ten.

Huang Huali smiled.

Xu Haifeng’s heart skipped a beat.

A faint green dot jumped to the center of Xu’s field of vision. The test result had arrived, and Xu lowered his gaze to see. The information on the virtual screen was unequivocal.

Name: Xu Haifeng

ID number: 11074420151224XXXX

Xu had to restrain a look of wide-eyed surprise.

Huang Huali, standing right in front of him, had become him, as far as the system was concerned.

“What the hell have you done?” Xu stared fiercely at the criminal. This was no simple hack of a few accounts, nor was it deletion of certain system records. Huang Huali had the power to bestow someone’s identity upon a nonexistent other.

He didn’t answer Xu’s question, but reached out and gesticulated again, then said, “Verify again.”

Xu Haifeng conducted another recog on the person before him.

This time the data verification only took a few seconds. The criminal was now Li Lishi, a university teacher.

Xu’s horror was beyond words.

Huang Huali grinned.

“How is this possible?” Xu blurted, realizing as he did that he’d completely lost the upper hand. He took a deep breath and controlled himself. “What the hell is going on?”

“Your system needs an image, so I give it an image.”

“What do you mean?”

“My phone stores the facial recognition data of at least thirty people. Your system will find the person in front of you to be Tom, Dick, or Harry, Jesus, Mary, or Joseph, as I please.” He pointed at the ceiling light. “This forms a light field that modifies facial features in a specific area. Simply put, it masks me. You can’t see the mask, but your algorithm sees it, and it can turn me into anyone. Of course, if the facial features are too divergent, the subterfuge fails, so I choose my mask candidates carefully.”

Xu Haifeng was dubious. He’d never heard of this technology. Perhaps he could go to Wen Xin to verify it. Facial recognition had always been the exclusive domain of Ante. No other company had managed it well.

Huang Huali stepped out of the illuminated area. “Want to try?” he said, looking at Xu Haifeng challengingly.

Xu Haifeng resigned himself. He had to try. What was the alternative? He stepped forward and stood where Huang had. “Go on then, let’s see.”

“A moment please, I have to calibrate to your face.” Huang Huali gestured in the interface only he could see. Two minutes later, he looked up at Xu Haifeng. “So, your name is now Li Lishi.”

Huang extended a hand. A translucent screen descended between the two of them. Xu Haifeng saw a face on the screen, his face, but covered in a thin layer, a mask of light.

“Go ahead,” Huang Huali said.

Xu Haifeng reached out to operate the screen. It was a standard interaction system, almost identical to the one he used in his office. His fingers danced, initiating facial recog mode. The face went to the public inquiry system, and the system returned the words Li Lishi.

According to the Heavenly Eye system, he was no longer Xu Haifeng. Heavenly Eye was based on facial recog, and Huang’s tech had deconstructed it. The master of that tech could become another person in the system at any time. In a data-reliant world, this was certainly a devastating power.

Xu Haifeng suddenly understood why he’d missed the mark: he hadn’t possessed the right intel on Huang Huali. Now he felt ill at ease, and roundly humiliated. “You . . . ” he began, flushed, then bit his lip. “Just tell me what this is all about.”

“I need your help.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve been investigating me for so long, and I need help, so I’m asking you.”

It sounded like a trap, but Xu Haifeng opted to play along. “What do you need me to do?”

“This adventurous life is getting to be a bit much. At any given moment having to remember what I’m doing and what role I’m playing. I’ve had it. So, I need a favor from you, so I can fly far away.”

Xu Haifeng couldn’t help an inner sneer. His goal was to catch Huang Huali and bring him to justice, and the bastard was asking for help escaping. What a joke!

But Xu Haifeng didn’t laugh.

“I don’t know how I can help.”

“If you’re amenable, it’s a small thing really. And by the way, I’ve transferred twenty million to your account.”

“Twenty mil?! Impossible.”

“Go ahead and check, directly, not through a third-party app.”

Xu Haifeng accessed his bank account.

There it was, the impossible eight-digit number. Like a feat of magic.

Where had so much money come from?

“Twenty million US dollars. It’s all yours.”

This declaration gave Xu Haifeng heart palpitations.

Such a sum. He often investigated cases involving hundreds of millions, but he’d never imagined anything like twenty million one day falling upon him.

The money was in his account. There could be no doubt.

Who knew there would be someone willing to bribe him with twenty million—US dollars no less. It seemed this Huang Huali case involved much more than twenty million. The bribe must only be the tip of the iceberg.

Xu Haifeng rallied his wits.

“What do you need me to do?”

“There’s only one public space in China that requires fingerprint verification after facial scanning . . . ”

“Customs,” Xu said. This really was about escape.

“Indeed. After fingerprinting, there are manual document inspections and identity verification. My light field cannot deceive the human eye.”

“So, you can’t get through customs.”

“Not with technology alone. I need your help.”

Xu Haifeng began to guess at Huang’s plan. If he got through customs, there were still many places on Earth where an identity-less person could live at ease.

“Think about it . . . feign confusion just once, and earn twenty million. So easy. I know you’re investigating me. I can’t wait around for you to get through all the red tape and arrest me. If you don’t want that twenty million, many people would do what I’m asking for a lot less.”

Xu Haifeng took a deep breath, as if making up his mind. “Where will you go?”

Huang Huali smirked. “A faraway place. Maybe you could follow me some day.” He picked up the glass Xu had set down and handed it over.

Xu Haifeng took it.

Huang Huali held up his own glass: “I prefer to cooperate with outstanding people. So . . . a toast, to our cooperation! Then we’ll talk details. And of course you always have the right to back out.”

Xu Haifeng went straight from Huang Huali’s place to Xin Wen and told him about the encounter. He ended with a question: “You’ve got to tell me how that twenty million got into my account!”

Wen Xin’s brow furrowed. “If your account can get credited twenty million and not get investigated, the only possibility is it’s a certified 5A account, government-chartered, which has nothing to with us at Ante Corp.”

“First of all, never mind Ante. I’m not talking to Ante now, I’m talking to you! You’re a security expert. You must know how he pulled this off!”

“A government privileged account is high-level classified. If Huang Huali can modify that list, whether by hacking or other means, you’d best not antagonize him.”

Wen Xin’s words were quite discouraging.

“What about that light field mask? Do you know what’s going on with that?”

“We here at Ante Corp are only responsible for the security of financial—”

“Enough about Ante,” Xu interrupted. “I’m asking for your help as a private individual.”

“From a personal point of view then . . . ” Wen Xin paused, as if considering his wording, a far cry from his usual frenetic speaking style.

Xu Haifeng watched him eagerly.

“The year of the Bitcoin financial disaster . . . do you remember?”

This change of subject left Xu Haifeng baffled. He had only a vague impression of the Bitcoin disaster, said to be the biggest financial tsunami in human history, evaporating up to ten trillion in financial assets and triggering more than two thousand suicides worldwide. The so-called Bit Black Hole incident.

“What does my thing have to do with that?”

“It was a disaster, but some people made fortunes. Two kinds of people got rich. First were quantum computer early adopters. They found some poorly guarded Bitcoin accounts, cracked the passkeys, stole Bitcoin, and cashed out. Keep in mind this was back when quantum computers weren’t widely used. So, these early adopters made a killing. The second type who got rich were Bitcoin short sellers. News of the quantum cracks spread fast through the marketplace. Bitcoin crashed overnight.”

“Get to the point.” Xu Haifeng was not in the mood for this oral history. “What’s it got to do with Huang Huali?”

“You asked me to look into those abnormal accounts. We’ve done our best. Most of them are the same as those used to cash out during the Bit Disaster. If you weren’t asking me privately, I wouldn’t tell you, but . . . we in financial security, we know not to touch anything related to the Bit Disaster, so I’m advising you to drop this. Huang Huali, even if he wasn’t directly involved with the Bit crash, he must be part of that ecosystem.”

“You’re seriously telling me those accounts aren’t blocked?”

“They’re supervised, but people dead set on something . . . how are they going to care about oversight?”

Xu Haifeng’s mouth felt dry, and he swallowed audibly. He had found a loophole. At first, he thought he could dig a maggot out of it, but he ended up finding a black hole, one with an event horizon.

“What about the light field mask?” he asked, hesitant, weakened.

“Theoretically possible, but the technology would be tricky. If you say that someone has done it . . . well, I don’t know.” Wen Xin’s answer dripped with helpless frustration.

Xu Haifeng’s spirits sank. Why continue to question the twenty million in his account? But then something occurred to him. “No matter how powerful he is, he’s still just an individual person. If I can catch him at the scene, red-handed, his identity-shifting won’t matter. All of that will be useless!”

Wen Xin eyed him warily. “That’s police business, quite out of my control.”

Xu Haifeng brought his fist down on the table. “Police business. Damn right. Just what’ll fix him in the end!”

He sent RMB 246.79 to an account called “Often Pondering Past Mistakes,” attaching a message: “December 20, 6PM to 7PM, VIP SkyBridge.” This all accorded to his agreement with Huang Huali.

As to whether Huang would believe him, he didn’t know, and was apprehensive.

Huang Hauli’s original plan must have included a corrupt customs official, after all. But Xu’s sudden appearance had altered the plan. An unreliable police officer and a bribed customs official: which was the more viable path to freedom?

Would Huang buy someone else?

Xu Haifeng asked himself this question countless times. In the end, he cheered himself with an uncertain answer: He was watching Huang Huali very closely. Any abnormal moves were bound to be discovered. And with Xu bought and paid for—as far as Huang knew—the escape route was green-lit.

Xu had checked the Ministry of Public Security’s household registry. Huang Huali’s missing identity was a data anomaly. It had been restored based on the backup database. Every investigation Xu had conducted on Huang Huali had been useful. Now, with the identity data restored, criminal charges could be leveled.

Apart from flight, Huang Huali had no way out.

Thinking of this, his confidence invariably swelled a bit. Justice would prevail over evil—it had to. No matter how powerful a hacker Huang was, he couldn’t escape the long arm of the law, or the palm of Buddha.

“Received, thank you!”

It was the reply from the account named “Often Pondering Past Mistakes.”

Tomorrow then, it would all be decided.

Huang had tried to buy off Xu for twenty million—a gross underestimation!

Xu’s confidence suddenly surged, rage boiling up within him. Tomorrow he would educate Huang Hauli. The criminal would see how formidable his opponent really was.

Xu Haifeng sat behind the inspection desk on the VIP SkyBridge. He’d used the turn-taking beat rotation system to apply for this customs officer posting. He’d reported the situation to his superiors. They knew this was a cover operation meant to paralyze Huang Huali, and they were on board.

It would soon be 6 p.m.

There weren’t many guests on the SkyBridge. One or two came by from time to time. Customs Official Xu absently checked their documents, their identities, and let them pass.

Soon enough it was nearly seven o’clock. Still no sign of Huang Huali.

Xu grew anxious, glancing at the gate with greater frequency.

The doors opened, several figures entering at once.

Robotic police. Xu’s heart sank.

“Xu Haifeng, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. All your words and actions are being recorded by Heavenly Eye for your case file.” With this standard announcement deployed, the robotic police came to flank him on both sides.

“I’m on duty!”

This had no effect on the robots. They simply lifted Xu Haifeng out of his seat and headed for the emergency passage, unhurried, unfeeling, and closed the gate behind them.

Only a few passengers remained on the SkyBridge, looking at each other, at a loss.

In the interrogation room, Xu Haifeng faced his boss, the director of the Financial Crimes Prevention Bureau. They glared at each other across a wide table, neither speaking for some time.

The director finally broke the silence: “Why not tell the truth already?”

“Everything I’ve said is the truth.”

“You said he can use a light field mask to change his identity. What exactly is this thing?”

“I’m not sure, but he stood there, the light hit his face, and the system took him for someone else. He called it a light field, and it was like a mask.”

The director pushed a screen in front of Xu Haifeng. It showed someone clearing customs. He seemed familiar.

The person looked up and smiled at the camera.

Xu Haifeng stared, in shock.

The person on screen was clearly himself.

“He wore a mask alright, but it wasn’t a light field mask.” The director took something from his satchel and spread it on the table: a mask. Lying there shapeless, it seemed hideous and grimacing. “We found this in his flat. He used a high-precision printer with the best life-imitating materials to replicate your face. Obviously he printed more than one. This was in the bin.”

Xu Haifeng, dazed, barely heard the director. He was back in the flat, that night. Huang Huali had scanned his face. And fingerprints! The wineglass, the touch screen. And the 3D printer! It had all been there, right in front of him. How could he have been so stupid? The tools of the crime had been put on display for him.

He’d been entrapped. The goal had been to get his fingerprints and facial model. The so-called light field mask had been a prop, a frightening distraction, and he’d fallen for it.

Xu Haifeng felt educated, and it left a bitter taste in his mouth.

“And your fingerprints,” the director was saying, “he simulated them perfectly. You arranged the arrest here in Shanghai, but he actually left from Kunming, passing customs, at five o’clock. And because you applied for a beat rotation, your data was not in our sensitive database. Our expert system only discovered the anomaly two hours later.”

Xu smiled. “I was duped.”

“Were you?” The director sneered. “Or did you collude?”

This left Xu momentarily dumbstruck. “What about that account?” he finally managed.

“The account you provided is dead. It hasn’t been used in three years. Your transaction was the only one during that time.”

“But whose account is it? You can check that.”

“It’s an automatic reply. The owner of the account is a dead.”

Xu Haifeng suddenly felt very tired. He’d been humiliated, brought low. Why hadn’t he asked Wen Xin to confirm the account? It didn’t matter though. Even if he’d known it was a dead person’s account, he would have taken it for a trick, a hack, a substitution, nothing more.

He’d been foolish, falling into a trap while believing he laid one.

“We also checked your account. That twenty million you claimed was there . . . no sign of it. If someone had tried to buy you for twenty mil, I’m afraid the system would’ve notified the police. So, where exactly did you see this alleged twenty million?”

Xu Haifeng shook his head, no longer interested in defending himself. In the digital world, Huang Huali was simply a god. Xu never should have provoked him.

“Think it about it carefully, Xu. You know our policy . . . forthright confession gets you leniency. Defiance is treated strictly!”

“I know.” Xu Haifeng smiled bitterly.

The director got up and left. Xu Haifeng was left alone with his thoughts in the vast interrogation room.

It was over. Nothing left to ponder on that front. So, he thought about asking Wen Xin to help him find a good lawyer.

Convicted of dereliction of duty!

Convicted of endangering national financial security!

Twenty years imprisonment, with a one-year deferment of sentence.

After the verdict came down, Xu Haifeng let out a long breath. With a one-year reprieve, maybe he could fight to get the entire sentence overturned. The lawyer Wen Xin had found was quite good, despite everything.

Leaving the courthouse, Xu Haifeng was followed by a police robot. It would always be with him during this year of probation. He would be under residential surveillance.

The ubiquitous Heavenly Eye monitored everyone, but a robot at his side lent a sense of ritual. It made you always aware that you were in fact a prisoner.

He sighed.

The good news was at least he still had his personal freedom.

An autonomous car stopped in front of Xu Haifeng, a delivery vehicle. A pair of manipulators handed over a package.

“Mr. Xu, your parcel,” said a pleasant female voice.

This was puzzling, but he took the package and glanced at the label: the sender was a Li Lishi. Suddenly shaking with excitement, Xu hugged the package to his chest.

Back home, he hid in the bathroom and fell to tearing at paper and tape.

Inside the package was a helmet, semitransparent and of exquisite workmanship. When he looked close he could see the densely arranged metal wires of the inner layer. He had seen Huang Huali wearing this helmet.

There was also a note, with just one line: “One always leaves traces in the digital world.”

On the other side was another line: “God said let there be light, so we created a light field.”

Xu Haifeng picked up the helmet, tense with anticipation, his hands trembling slightly.

He put on the helmet. It fit perfectly.

The lamp in the helmet turned on. Xu Haifeng felt that everything before him was covered in a layer of radiance.

He looked at himself in the mirror and initiated an identity query. The result came moments later. The name Li Lishi was projected into his vision. A chill went through him. He opened the account associated with Li Lishi, and there it was: twenty million. The eight digits were before his eyes, along with a string of peculiar characters in the remarks, which Xu Haifeng recognized at a glance: an encrypted contact method for connecting to a specific computer.

Huang Huali may have humiliated him, but he had not cheated him.

Xu Haifeng felt like he was standing on the edge of an abyss, a depthless void, no bottom discernible, but full of fatal temptation.

If he took the plunge, would he fall and be smashed to pieces, or would he ride the wind and reach a free, blissful paradise?

He stared into the mirror, and the stranger in the mirror stared back at him.

In the basement of a single-family villa in the outer suburbs of Shanghai, a pair of hands pushed a door open.

Words were engraved on the door: “Whoever masters technology will master the future.”

The man went inside. There were screens everywhere in the room, constantly scrolling data, and on the big screen in the middle was Xu Haifeng’s face.

The man’s gaze swept over the screen and landed on the wall behind. In the room full of screens, only here was the wall exposed.

Written there was: “Whoever masters data will master the people!”

Wen Xin studied Xu Haifeng’s face as he initiated a phone call.

“Chief Wen!” It was Huang Huali’s voice.

“He’s still hesitating.”

“Yeah,” Huang said, “I know.”

“I’ve deduction-gamed this a hundred times, and he always agrees.”

“I know.”

“But he’s been dallying for quite a while now.”

“Chief Wen, you have a better grasp of data analysis than I. Xu Haifeng is quite a stubborn personality. Where he’s involved, extreme situations readily arise.”

Wen Xin was silent a moment. “Well, he has joined the organization, so don’t contact him anymore.”

“So I’m free then?”

“Weren’t you already?”

After disconnecting the call, Huang Huali gazed at the sea through his window. He was indeed free, but another person was falling into the grasp of that great invisible hand. He couldn’t reckon this the most perfect ending.

The dark blue ocean was like an inverted, radiant sky. He glanced at the data scrolling on his computer. He’d just gotten the surgery: his eye implants were gone. Now he had to use an ancient interface to access the Internet. It was a huge price to pay, but worth it. He would no longer leave traces in the digital world.

Freedom always had a price.

Meanwhile, that young officer was still wandering, still struggling. Wen Xin’s big data showed he would eventually embark upon this path, never to return. Some people were in the light, and some were in the dark. It wasn’t fair. He’d used the young officer to get out of his predicament, so he’d felt obliged to help him.

The data stream stopped scrolling. The connection had been successful.

Huang Huali closed the computer.

Xu Haifeng still stared dazedly at the mirror.

A string of words appeared superimposed on his face, in the mirror, surprising him:

“Whoever masters data will master the people.”

The mirror under the text turned into a display screen. On the screen, Wen Xin was reclined halfway in a chair, staring at a screen of his own. On that screen, was Xu’s own face via the mirror, in real-time.

Xu Haifeng frowned with the weight of a new revelation.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, Issue 3, 2018.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Jiang Bo’s first story, “The Last Game,” was published in 2003. To date he has published over fifty short stories and several novels, including The Gate of Machine and The Galaxy Heart trilogy. His work has been honored with multiple Galaxy and Xingyun Awards.

The Shroud for the Mourners

Yukimi Ogawa

Kiriko frowned as she peered into her magnifying glass. “This wasn’t here last time, Hama-san.”

“Oh, please don’t tell me I have a new symptom again,” Mr. Hama said, wincing.

Mr. Hama was a man in his fifties, with a vine-like pattern at the edges of his membranes, and carnelian-colored eyes. He had a long history of suffering from allergic reactions, ever since he was a child. When he’d reached this pattern atelier for the first time as a social insurance consultant, he’d long given up on his perpetually teary eyes. That day, he was looking for something to hang over the wall of his new office, but before he could start talking about his interior decorations, the founder of this atelier, Kiriko’s mentor, pointed at the client’s eyes and said, “Let me fix that first.”

“And who would have thought you’d walk out of a pattern atelier with medication?” Mr. Hama had laughed, when Kiriko had just joined the place.

Now Kiriko looked back into his ear, just to be sure. “This is weird,” she said. “As we discussed many times, most of your symptoms are caused by when your native pattern is distorted on your soft, flexible skin, like near your eardrums. But this distorted allergy pattern is always your native pattern gone wrong—the basic structures are the same, but they expand in different manners into different directions. This new thing here now, however, doesn’t seem to have any relevance to the pattern on your other parts. Even the color is completely different.”

“Hm. Can I have a look, too?”

“Sorry, you won’t be able to see it. Only a pattern craftsperson can.”

Mr. Hama smiled weakly, mocking disappointment. “Of course. Can you make a pattern which ‘offsets’ this allergy pattern? Like always?”

Kiriko was still frowning, her hand at her chin. As he suggested, that would be something she’d normally do: make a pattern whose lines could adjust the way the blood flow and water/air currents ran around the distorted pattern, to eventually smooth the ragged edges of the distortion. But . . .

“I don’t know,” she said. “The remedy patterns for you, they need to be something that have enough affinity with your native pattern. Otherwise the remedy pattern itself can cause a different type of malfunction in some other part of your body. But to offset this new thing, which is completely out of place itself, we would need to construct a pattern that would be too . . . foreign. You may as well go see a doctor, at the clinic.”

“Oh, but the clinic could do nothing for my situation!”

The door of the atelier’s lab opened, and Kiriko’s mentor walked in. “Hama, she’s saying this might not be an allergy.”

The client turned in his chair. “Huh.” He looked at the two craftspersons of the atelier in turn. “I—I never thought I would ever have to visit them again.”

“You are old enough to, don’t you think?”

Kiriko sighed. “Hama-san, take him with you and leave him there.”

Mr. Hama laughed and then shook his head. “You two are my primary doctors, if you say I should, I will do it.”

And three days later, Mr. Hama’s two primary doctors found themselves in the office of a clinic doctor.

“Why do you look so ill at ease?” asked the clinic doctor, Sakata, whose eyes were the color of blurry iolite. When he moved his head the tips of his hair shone in the same color.

“We always thought the clinic didn’t like us,” the owner of the atelier said. “We still do.”

The doctor waved his hand in a negating gesture. “It’s just the city, they don’t like the way you seem to utilize patterns to get what you want. But as far as we doctors and nurses can see, no one’s feeling worse under your care.”

“Today you have something to say to us though?”

“I just have a question.” Sakata smiled. “You sent Hama-san our way. He said you saw something unusual. We discovered a polyp down his throat, nothing too bad, as diagnoses go. But . . . there’s something . . . weird about this.”

“Do doctors say ‘weird’?” Kiriko whispered.

To her surprise Sakata laughed heartily. “I do, obviously. Some figures of the test results aren’t matching what we see. You felt something odd about him before our diagnosis, yes? The thing is, we are having a few more patients with the same kind of polyp. Even a foreigner. Can you tell us what this thing is that you found?”

Kiriko’s mentor leaned forward. “It was a silent pattern—we call it that to distinguish it from ordinary patterns that can be found on the human body, because it’s the way currents of light, air, sound, and other things happening there summed up as a pattern, so the ordinary eye cannot see it. The silent pattern on Hama we found was too out of place. Kiriko here sketched it, but to compare it to other patients’ cases we ourselves need to have a look.”

“I see.” The doctor sighed. “I’ve heard some of our android nurses talk about how strange the way you two see the world is.”

Kiriko raised her brows. “You have ando-san as nurses here?”

“Yes, a lot more than you can imagine, I guess. Many patients don’t like being treated by them, so we never disclose which ones. Only a few doctors here know. I’m counting on your discretion with this information, by the way.”

Many civil servants in this city were androids, as everybody knew. But the city itself never talked about them, as it didn’t want to admit that there were entities with “artificial” colors and patterns on their skin, while valuing islanders with native colors and patterns in its society. And so the people of the city didn’t discuss them either—nobody was quite sure how the androids should be treated. Whereas colorless and patternless laborers like the two craftspersons were easy prey in this society.

Kiriko and her mentor could usually tell an android when they saw one—they were too perfectly moderate. The androids’ colors and patterns were always just a little bit less flashy, probably to not stand out more than the humans. But those working at the clinic seemed indistinguishable at this point. Some rich locals didn’t even like being in the care of colorless locals, so they were unlikely to tolerate being treated by andos. The city must have been very thorough about them here.

“Do you think those patients you’re talking about will gladly let us peek into their ears and nostrils? You said there’s a foreigner, too, right?” Kiriko said.

“You will be here as nurses in disguise. We’ll lend you masks, caps, and gowns, so that the patients won’t have to see much of your skin.”

Kiriko and her mentor looked at each other and then both turned back to the doctor. “All right, then,” the owner of the atelier said, “we’re on.”

And yes, they found one out-of-place silent pattern in each patient, and after having a very, very close look (one patient needed sedation for this), there seemed to be an invisible yet distinct line between the polyp and this strange pattern. And the pattern around the affected spot altered by the second, and this must have been why the test results didn’t quite match the diagnoses. But this unstable pattern was only making the patients uncomfortable, with mild coughs or stomachaches and such, nothing worse.

The foreign patient, though, had to know the exact cause of this to reenter his home country on the continent. At first this foreigner thought the strange vape that he’d bought at a local souvenir shop—which put out smoke that made the landscape look slightly more colorful than the reality for the inhaler, and thus was advised to be used outside the island to avoid confusion—was to blame and made the authority talk to the proprietor. But after various tests the vape was concluded to be irrelevant.

“One tourist, one colorful, two patterned. The patients’ lifestyles don’t seem to overlap. What did they do to get this thing?” Kiriko remarked, back at the atelier, flopping onto her back on the cushions.

Her mentor sat down beside her. “It’s not doing much to the patient, so there may be many more who are suffering unaware from the same thing or no one else at all. Too few cases so far.”

There was then a beep at the door and when Kiriko answered it was Mr. Hama. “How is it going? When can I rid of this itch in my ear?” he said, as he climbed the raised floor of the atelier’s reception.

Kiriko grumbled and her mentor looked away without a word.

“Okay, I see,” Mr. Hama said. “Here, have some sweet things. Sugar makes your brains work better, as they say.”

Kiriko went off to make tea immediately.

The client laughed and placed the small box on the low table. “We got some of these from our own client, and they tasted quite good. So I went to the shop and bought a packet myself.” He lifted the lid of the simple but carefully wrapped thing. “Very savory and beautiful, and the texture . . . ” he trailed off when he saw the expression on the face of the owner of the atelier.

“Apprentice,” he called to Kiriko, “turn off that stove now and come back here.”

“What?”

“Now.”

“But sensei,” Kiriko came out of the kitchen almost pouting, “we always need some tea when we—”

She stopped right beside her mentor.

“What’s wrong?” asked Mr. Hama.

“Hama-san,” Kiriko said, “you have to tell us where you got these candied agar pieces, now.”

The confectionery shop that made the candied agar, the bar serving a glass of smoky-purple liquor, an auntie who wanted to give her nephew some inks to play with, and a florist who experimented with the color of their roses, they all had procured their pigment from the same place—the community bulletin board. The clinic pinned the exact source after a day, and a nurse got back to the atelier with some air of . . . embarrassment.

“She is . . . a mistake,” said the nurse with a feathery deep-blue hair, perched neatly on the edge of the raised reception floor.

“A mistake? Who is?”

Rui the nurse sipped his tea. Kiriko wondered if his real name was Ruri after his hair color, one consonant omitted for easier pronunciation for the foreigners. “We call her Ash, we don’t know her real name. She is the person in charge of the crematorium’s lab. She is an ando, and she is, we believe, a little bit broken.”

“Rui-san, are you ando-san, too?” asked Kiriko.

“Yes. How can you tell?”

“Just the way you talk about this Ash character, I guess.”

Her mentor cut in. “The city crematorium has a laboratory?”

“Of course, do you think the city would let patterns that can be found on bones just go to waste?”

“We would think you’d do just that, yes, rather than violating somebody else’s body,” said Kiriko, not trying one bit to hide her disgust.

Rui looked embarrassed, for a moment. “Only those with patterns are confiscated, just for a day or so. The city wants to archive any rare patterns and colors, even those found on the bones. We’d have liked to collect the colors on them, too, but we’ve never seen colored ones.” He shook his head. “We haven’t. But I cannot speak for Ash.” As if he didn’t want to count Ash as one of them.

Silence hung for a while. “Would you go see Ash,” Rui said at length, “and find out where she is obtaining these weird pigments?”

“Why don’t you do that yourself?”

“I—” Rui bit his lip. “We don’t get along. Please.”

And the two craftspersons had to say yes.

The craftspersons saw immediately what Rui had meant by a mistake. Ash was a very mildly colored person, her pale skin having very, very slight shimmer as she changed angles, like there were tiny crystal grains deep down. Too subtle even for an ando.

“Rui called and said I’d be interviewed by two colorless people!” Ash beamed as she opened the door to her office for them. “How can I help you?”

“About the pigments,” the owner of the atelier said.

Ash clapped her hands as if this was the most surprising thing she had heard all day. “Oh yes! All the colors are confiscated now. How unfortunate.” There was no remorse in her tone, apparently. Kiriko wondered if this, too, was a reason for Ash to be called a mistake by her peers.

Her mentor cleared his throat. “We are just here to see how you got those strange pigments.”

“Oh, that. They are the by-product of the pattern extracting process. I wasn’t sure how I should be rid of them, and also, they are lovely, aren’t they? I wouldn’t have liked to just drain them down the pipe and let them go to waste.”

“Why didn’t you ask the city what to do with them?” asked Kiriko.

“They didn’t tell me to, did they? All they said was to find the patterns to archive them.”

The owner of the atelier cleared his throat again, eyeing his apprentice. Then he said, “Can we have a look at your equipment? We just want to make really sure that your pigments are what is causing this fuss, and . . . that . . . nobody is tampering with them, so to say, on purpose.”

“Hm.” Ash didn’t seem to understand what he was implying. “Okay, I’ll give you a tour of this tiny room. So, let’s start with this cupboard, where we put the ingredients . . . ”

The procedures and the chemicals Ash used were unfamiliar to the craftspersons, but as far as they could see, there seemed to be nothing that implicated Ash’s wrongdoing. She was using some kind of marker chemical on the pattern and a custom-built camera to reproduce how it would appear were it drawn on a flat surface instead of bones of various shapes. It seemed the chemicals were somehow washing the pigment grains off the bones when they were exposed to the camera. Kiriko picked up a piece of bone out of a tray, and Ash chuckled. When the craftsperson cocked her head inquisitively Ash said, “No human ever held a bone like that.”

“Oh. When you put it like that. I’m just, well, seeing this as an object of research right now.”

“I know, I know!”

Kiriko smiled and then looked at the bone again. “Sensei,” she said to her mentor, “I have this feeling . . . ”

He took another piece without a word. The two examined the bones for a while, from this angle and that, as round-eyed Ash silently watched. “Can we study these in our own lab?” he finally asked, “we promise we won’t do any damage.”

Ash shrugged. “Go ahead.”

After looking at them through their own microscope, the craftspersons agreed that the submerged pigment presence through the bones were strangely uneven. If they’d come from one single person—they certainly had to—the trace of the impression of the color should have been present more or less homogenously. But with these bones, the pigment was scattered in a few places where it was very strong, while other parts were completely devoid of them. It was as though someone had injected them, though there was no needle scar or anything of the kind.

And for that matter . . . they had been, in fact, thoroughly surprised to find any pigment in bones at all. They’d seen people with patterns on their bones and teeth, yes. But never anyone with homogeneously colored bones; they’d have seen those appear on teeth, or through thin and soft skin, if there ever were. They’d both assumed, without saying it aloud, that bones were too hard to retain enough pigment portions. Even after finding these uneven spots, they were finding it hard to believe it.

The clinic obtained the medical history and other reports about the deceased in question, but they could find nothing that might be relevant.

“Meanwhile,” Sakata said on the phone, “the city decided to just dispose of the colors extracted from the bones. The colors they confiscated so far don’t seem to include those worth archiving, over the risk of putting them into one place and making them more harmful. As they are at the moment, the worst thing that can happen is a few people experiencing mild discomfort. And even that’s only when the affected actually touch the pigments. Down the river, or deep within the soil, the strange pigments won’t do much, the city reasoned.”

Kiriko scowled. “But you don’t know enough about these pigments to just let it pass. For once, I don’t think we colorless will be affected by them. Looks like they stir the balance of elements just when they collide with colors and patterns on human body. For that one foreign tourist, we are guessing here that the residual phantom colors from the souvenir vape reacted with Ash’s pigment, and we islanders, either colorful or colorless, never take those smokes in ourselves.”

There was a pause, and Sakata sighed. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I’m sure you’re right. I’ll try to talk them out of it. Will you help me if they need any evidence or proof?”

“Any time, Doctor, though I don’t think they’ll listen to us colorless folks.” She laughed bitterly and hung up.

The owner of the atelier was drawing something on the low table of the reception, sipping his tea. “Sakata looks like a man who knows what he’s doing,” he said. “And he has very nice colors. He might be able to talk sense into those lazy city officials. Especially if the colorful and patterned are more prone to damage in this particular case.”

“Hopefully.” She leaned on the pillar. “Those bones. I still cannot believe these dead pigments come from the person’s native color. Can you?” She saw her mentor shake his head slowly. “The extracted pigments are the by-product of the lab’s work, as Ash said? If the color is so easy to leak out of bone, it should also be as easy the other way round—for one to have colors in bone. But clearly things we’ve seen over the years indicate otherwise. Where did Ash’s dead pigments come from, for real?”

Her mentor placed his elbow on the table and rested his cheek on his knuckle. “Hm,” he said. Then he said, “Hm.”

The first thing the next morning, Kiriko was heading for the crematorium’s lab, to return the bones; they argued all night, but decided there was nothing more they could do with the actual bones, anyway. Now that they were no longer the research subject, it felt so wrong to be holding them. The receptionist at the crematorium waved her into the lab annex, and when she walked through the door, Kiriko heard someone shout. Alarmed, she sprinted toward Ash’s office.

Without knocking, she slid the door to the full, and found Rui the nurse ready to strike Ash. “Hey!” Kiriko yelled at the top of her already exhausted lungs.

Luckily that was enough to pull Rui back to himself, it seemed. He looked more surprised than either of the other two in the room, blinked at his own hand as if he couldn’t believe it was where it was, midair over the other ando.

“Ash, do you want me to report this?” Kiriko said, still panting.

“No no, please, let me explain,” Rui’s voice was shaken like he was the one who was almost hit.

“I didn’t ask you!”

Ash raised her hand. “Craftsperson! Please, there is an explanation for this!” Then she cocked her head. “I mean, he does have one!”

Kiriko glared at Rui. “Whatever it is, I don’t want a nurse in our clinic who is ready to hurt someone else!”

“Tea!” Ash screamed. “Let’s talk over a cup of tea!”

Ash duly made tea and poured a cup each for the very perplexed Kiriko and tired-looking Rui. When she sat down with her own cup Ash said, “Rui says I’m violating.”

“Because you are!”

Kiriko put a hand between the two andos. “Violating what?”

“Rules,” replied Rui, “and a corpse.”

The craftsperson hastily put her wrapping cloth with the bones in it on the table and pushed it a little toward Ash. “A corpse?”

“I’m not violating it! I’m just dividing it into chunks, so that I can give it proper cremation.”

“What are you two talking about?”

The two andos looked at each other, then at the craftsperson. “Ash is hiding a body in her fridge,” Rui said. “The body of an android, it’s not like she’s a murderer.”

“Oh all right,” Kiriko said through her teeth, “it is so reassuring to hear that she didn’t murder anybody, thank you. But I’d appreciate if you’d elaborate just a little more.”

“It’s an old friend of mine.” Ash didn’t seem to hear Kiriko’s sarcasm. “A very old model, the city terminated it a long time ago. I wanted to give it a respectful funeral, but they wouldn’t let me.”

“Who wouldn’t let you?”

“The city, of course.”

“So you made your friend into chunks and . . . ?”

Ash spread her hands. “Put them one by one into someone’s coffin. That way it wouldn’t cost too much energy.”

Rui sighed loudly.

Kiriko’s brows were starting to ache. “And you never mentioned that to the city—the owner of this crematorium? Or the family of the deceased?”

“No. Should I?”

Kiriko looked at Rui. He shrugged. But then he sobered and said, “That is very obscene, Ash, I think. You should stop doing that immediately, as I’ve said many times before. I knew it would all come down to this, sooner or later. I’m sure the craftsperson here agrees.” He cast a meaningful glance Kiriko’s way.

“Why? How so? I don’t understand.”

The craftsperson pushed the bundle of bones farther toward Ash. “Okay, now I think that is how those pigments got into the bones. Been burned in, so to speak. You ando-san have a body part for collecting organic colors, right? Many of you—at least those who work for the National Archives—have color receptors hidden in your body.”

Rui looked bewildered. “How do you know that?”

“I’ve worked with one of you before.” That was how the city clandestinely collected the information on what colors and patterns the islanders bore on their skin, to know the current situation, and to store color/pattern compositions and structures in their secret database. “Ash, were you aware that your friend’s chunks were contaminating the locals’ bodies?”

Ash blinked a few times and looked down at her cup. “No,” she finally said, “I wasn’t.”

Kiriko and Rui both had to believe that.

“So you’ve recently started putting the parts around the color receptors in, I presume?” Kiriko said at length.

“Yes.” Ash was now looking at her hands.

Rui sighed again. “Ash, are you looking worried for those humans who were affected, or are you just sad because your friend might have caused something bad?”

Kiriko turned to the nurse. “Rui, you don’t have to be so harsh!”

“No? Ash was just lucky that those dead pigments are not harmful enough, right?”

“Oh come on, she works here as a researcher. Surely she would have known if something went too wrong.”

Rui had nothing to say to that. They sat in silence for a while, after which Ash said, “I might have missed something on purpose.”

“Hmm?” Kiriko intoned, her cup to her lips.

“I mean . . . I would have liked my friend to go on. In a way, in other people’s bodies, as the dead pigments spread over the city. If I couldn’t give it a proper farewell.”

Rui snickered, but Kiriko laughed, just a little. She couldn’t help it. “You are talking like a very, very sentimental human being.”

“They shouldn’t have terminated my friend. It did go a bit insane toward the end, yes, but that was mostly due to the program the city made it install on itself. That’s not fair.”

Nothing was fair in this city, Kiriko thought, but kept her mouth shut.

“We have to report this,” Rui said, as if grinding his teeth on the painful silence.

It was Kiriko’s turn to snicker. “What, and let them realize that their damned colorful and patterned dignity have been tampered with, for who knows how long?”

“But we cannot let her go on like this!”

Kiriko looked at Ash, who was still staring at her own hands. “Give me and my mentor some time to consider this,” she said and extended her hand toward Ash, so that the ando would see the craftsperson’s hand instead. “Ash, listen. Please stop doing what you’ve been doing, just for the moment. We’ll come up with something.”

Ash nodded. Kiriko had known andos could be sentimental, yes, but this really wasn’t fair—now Ash was making Kiriko sentimental and even protective, too.

Back at the atelier, Kiriko found her mentor waiting right behind the door, looking very pleased. “How long have you been standing there like a fool, sensei?” she asked him.

“I’ve been talking with Sakata,” he said. “We were saying, we could have a joint venture, to develop some kind of filter, to completely detoxify those dead pigments. This will be an ongoing project, which might bring us a lot of money on a regular basis, and reputation as the city’s important supplier!”

Kiriko considered this, as she involuntarily made a face.

“Oh, come on. Whatever you found out today at Ash’s place, this detoxification surely needs to be made, right?”

Kiriko said, “Tea?”

Her stomach was already heavy with it, but she forced herself to drink, anyway. Her mentor emptied his cup in one gulp. “We don’t have to report that to the city,” he said sullenly, after hearing his apprentice out. “Ash can just keep on doing what she’s doing, while we sell those filters to the city and the clinic.”

“Rui knows. I don’t think ando-san are generally built to lie. And do you think that is what Ash wants? Burning her friend chunk by chunk?”

He glared at the dregs of his tea. “But . . . ”

“Sensei.” She patted his arm and made him look at her. “If it were me dead in the fridge, would you be happy throwing my body secretly, bits by bits, never having the proper moments of mourning?” She swallowed. “Because if it were you, I wouldn’t.”

At that, he averted his eyes and then closed them for one moment. “No,” he said, “No, I wouldn’t.”

As soon as Sakata gave them the name of the city’s representative, the craftspersons went to the city hall itself, to see this person for themselves. They never talked to this person, of course, but took notes of the person’s colors and patterns, which were the flashes of mosaic of many intensities of champagne. These colors appeared only when the person’s skin wrinkled, around their eyes or wrists and parts like those. One of the atelier’s clients overheard this person complain at an izakaya, after drinking too much, that they should be treated as a more colorful person, not as a tepid civil servant.

On the big day, Sakata was frowning as he walked out of the city hall after the meeting. “I did my best,” he said when he saw the two craftspersons seated on a bench on the pavement. “I was surprised to hear that the city used to dump the broken ando parts onto a landfill like some unburnable trash until quite recently, those that they cannot reuse. That’s what would have happened if this Ash ando didn’t refuse, right?” He took a breath and shook his head. “They did say they don’t even terminate andos anymore, so something like Ash’s friend won’t happen again. Still, I couldn’t help but show the surprise.”

“That’s okay, of course. We aren’t asking you to deceive them.” The owner of the atelier slowly stood up. “You did tell them to choose between Ash having her way this once or taking us in as their regular, long-time supplier of the detoxifying method, right?”

Sakata nodded. “They argued they could just replace Ash and be done with it.”

“Oh,” Kiriko said, rising to her feet, too, “how did you retort to that?”

“I thought about how Rui and other ando nurses talked about Ash. Like she was a mistake. No other department with ando staff will be able to find another use for her, I told them. And that if they don’t keep her in place and properly watched, she’ll just wander about telling people of the bone violating—by her, and by the city, too.” Sakata rubbed his brows. “Not that I think it’s right, but I suppose it’s true.”

“I know.” Kiriko smiled and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Thank you, Doctor. We knew we could rely on you.”

Sakata laughed. “I really did wish you two were there with me.”

“If we were there with you the city person wouldn’t have listened, not even to you.”

“So you two think it all worked? That they’ll let Ash do what she wants?”

Kiriko’s mentor sighed. “They want to think they are so much different from us, in a much higher place than us. They’re bound to choose an ando over us having our way.”

“I hope so.” Sakata sighed back. “Again, not that I think it’s right.”

And that was what happened of course—a few days later Ash received notification from the city, their permission for her to use one of the incinerators just for her friend. As per Sakata’s recommendation, the city ordered the pattern atelier to create a solution to prevent the leaking of the dead pigments fromthe coffin. The National Archives had the blueprint of Ash’s friend, and Ash remembered precisely what parts of her friend had already been consumed along with strangers. Kiriko and her mentor didn’t have to look at the body in person or touch it directly—it didn’t feel right to cut into the privacy of Ash and her friend, and also, it would have been quite a thing, actually seeing defrosted parts of an almost-human body.

The craftspersons made an embroidered shroud, with a pattern that would sooth and supplement the wavelength of the shadow of colors left in the body. The threads used were also absorbed in a specifically prepared concoction of inks, and an agent; they would add viscosity to the leakage, making it harder to flow away and be lost in the environment.

“Would you be there?” asked Ash when she came to pick up the shroud at the atelier. She personally paid for it. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Kiriko could feel that her mentor wanted to say no straight away—they’d managed to evade interacting with the corpse by using the blueprint and Ash’s memory, why would they want to be present at the crematorium with the mutilated body among them, after all? “Of course we would be there with you,” she said, before her mentor could utter a sound, “to see your beloved friend off. After such a long time.”

Her mentor didn’t protest. He knew that she wanted him, or herself, to have a choice between being alone and not, when the time came for themselves.

On that day, Rui was there, too, still in his clinic clothes. He probably sneaked out between shifts. “You fools,” he said and placed a hand on his hip.

Kiriko had to laugh to that. “Thanks to you, too,” replied the craftsperson, being sarcastic but also meaning it. “For not getting in our way. I know you could have.”

Rui looked away and said, “It’d just be a waste of time, arguing over this.”

To the craftspersons’ relief, Ash had already wrapped the body with the shroud by the time they all gathered around the coffin lined with the filters. Kiriko and her mentor drew small patterns around the edge of the wood as finishing touches, just in case. The body was arranged there like a specimen, with a lot of its parts missing but otherwise in perfect order of a human body. Its face was intact, and it looked as though Ash’s friend was just sleeping—not the figure of speech but like really just . . . sleeping. Kiriko thought she might understand why Ash couldn’t simply get rid of it, just a little.

While they waited for the incineration to finish, Ash talked ceaselessly about her late friend. Rui rolled his eyes many times, Kiriko laughed a lot, and her mentor quietly listened and refilled their teacups. There was no ceremonial air, no real speech, no crying involved. But it was as proper a funeral as any other.

About the Author

Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo where she writes in English but never speaks the language. Her fiction can be found in such places as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and many more.

Our Fate, Told in Photons

K.W. Colyard

We were seventy-seven when the Pleiades burned out. As the seventh daughters of a seventh daughter, it seemed almost poetic that this was what Fate had in store for us.

Yes, I said daughters. Plural. Casto came first, but she wasn’t breathing. I came second, and I was shrieking—gulping air like a parched man fresh from the desert. My tiny fist clutched her left leg, as if to insist: where she goes, I go. But she, the devilish little thing, she waited until all eyes were on her, until I was cold and alone in my cradle on the far side of the room, before she took her first breath.

If you believed in luck, you might have said we were fortunate. After all, it was only good timing that allowed us both to survive. Had we come along at any other era, in any other place, our family would have buried Casto and found some way to be content with me—stocky, hairy, flat-faced, flat-chested me. Instead, they got both of us to carry on their legacy, which meant they got Casto.

Every family has a legend, a story they share to liven up parties and impress the in-laws. The story, in the Pantazis family’s case, was a prophecy passed down from antiquity: one day, a seventh daughter would have a seventh daughter of her own, and that little girl would grow up to be the woman who watched the stars die twice. The original meaning of this prediction, if it had ever been clear, was lost to time. The prevailing theory, though, was that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter would be immortal.

Imagine that: immortality. You can’t. It’s humanly impossible. We can imagine living a particularly long time—decades, centuries, maybe even an eon or two—but to be truly immortal, to wake and wake and wake without ending, past the time when all the stars have long since fallen? That’s inconceivable.

But the idea of immortality, the drive toward it, is part of the human experience. When someone tells you that your blood, your bone and grit and stardust, has the chance to live past the end of forever? You either latch onto that, or you run screaming from it.

The Pantazis family sunk their teeth into the teat of that prophecy and held on until it had been sucked down to a dry and dusty legend. They produced seventh daughters upon seventh daughters upon seventh daughters, but never enough in a row or in the right order. Something was always just a little off, but that’s the way it always goes with kismet.

Then we came along—Callisto and Pallas, Casto and Pall for short, the ones who would live forever. I wasn’t the child they were looking for. Casto was, but the family jury was still out on which of us—the one born first but dead, or the one born second but alive—was the actual prophesied child. They decided to cut their losses and raise us both as if we were the chosen ones.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Casto hadn’t come back to us. Could our family have been satisfied with me, or would they have let me slip away with my sister, to die as another failed attempt at grasping eternity?

I ask myself this, but I never want to know the answer.

The last light of the Pleiades reached Dardanus on July 7. It was two days after our seventy-seventh birthday, on the day of our birthday party. We’d gathered with a handful of friends and family to celebrate, and as we sat there, talking about anything other than Casto’s and my destiny, our personal assistants all went off with one loud, synchronous chorus of dings.

The room went silent. Our nephew, who was nearly as old as we were, put a hand to his face. His voice quavered as he flipped one hand in the air, fishtailing it, beckoning us to look and see the news for ourselves.

I turned over my arm and squinted at the holographic display hovering two inches above the flesh. The headline burned bright red. I stared so long that I could see the ghost of it on the far wall when I looked away.

PLEIADES OFFICIALLY DEAD. DARDANUS PM TO SPEAK.

Experts had spent years speculating when the Seven Sisters would snuff it. There were warnings and shoutings and whispers, most of which agreed that Alcyone would go supernova and take the entire cluster with her.

In the end, that wasn’t how it happened at all.

We hung on the PM’s every word. We would be able to see it soon—dusk, at the earliest, or midnight, at the latest. All we had to do was look toward the horizon and watch the stars we’d known all our lives blink out, one by one, as the final exhalation of their photons passed by us and fell, far away, into deeper space. There would be no commotion, no explosive surge of energy as they rallied before death—just a tidy and peaceful exit, as if the Seven Sisters had been so kind as to sweep the floors and turn out the light before leaving us behind.

This was a momentous occasion, the PM said, because it meant the universe was moving forward, just as humanity had always done. In such times as this, our greatest thinkers never failed to rise to the challenge. The end of the Pleiades, though unexplainable at this juncture, would mark the beginning of myriad new inventions and discoveries to enrich the lives of future generations, and for that we should be grateful. I suppose someone behind the curtain thought that line was clever, but it felt hollow. The night sky would have seven gaping holes in its face, forever. How could that be anything but tragic?

I looked at Casto. She looked at our nephew. He looked at his son and daughter, his brothers and sisters, all the family they had that made up for all the family we didn’t. They nodded.

We made s’mores and watched the show. A few neighbors who knew the story stopped by, but none of them stayed. We would have let them, if they’d wanted to, but no. They only wanted to say hello, ask how we were getting on. They knew about the prophecy, but they were polite about it. A friendly Hi, how are you? Funny astronomy we’re having—that was about as far as their prying went.

That night, as we sat under the darkened stars, Casto turned to me and smiled. We’d done it. We’d watched the stars die, just like we were supposed to. The weight of the prophecy felt a little lighter, but I could feel the burden of age and decrepitude taking its place, sinking into my bones, as slick and heavy as mercury.

I laid a steady hand atop her trembling fingers. Her smile faltered. We were thinking the same thing.

We were supposed to watch the stars die twice, if we were really the old Pantazis legend come to life. It had taken seventy-seven years for the Pleiades to go dark. The chances of another celestial event happening in the few revolutions we had left were slim. It was possible that we’d been raised to be people we were not, that the family would have to try again and start all over with a new generation of daughters. But who were we, and what could we say of our lives, if this had all been for nothing?

Our nephew messaged us the next morning with links to articles on stars that might go supernova soon. He didn’t account for the distance between those stars and Dardanus, and neither of us had the heart to tell him that it would be centuries before those celestial bodies went dark in our sky.

The Seven Sisters had been an anomaly, after all, a cosmic joke. Stars don’t just fade away for no good reason. The Pleiades had been a fluke, and so, it seemed, had we.

Time does terrible things. It takes everything from us and gives only hollow promises in return. You sacrifice it for children who will one day leave you to build their own, more important lives. You invest it to build friendships, only to watch yourselves drift apart. You pump hours of it into hobbies, the likes of which your joints will soon be too arthritic to partake in. And all the while, time rages on. It oxidizes you, burns your organs from the inside out. How would you feel about anything if the laws of the universe didn’t keep your blood at a constant simmer? Who would you be if you weren’t always dying inside?

Time is a parasite.

After the Pleiades died, Casto went through the five stages of grief every day. Handing her tissues and taking the butcher knife from her hand became routine. I hid all the blades and bought a large pack of handkerchiefs, then another, and another.

She didn’t care that life would go on without us. Her life, our life, was coming to an end. We were hurtling toward that big OFF switch at the end of the tunnel—last one out, turn off the lights.

Seventy-seven years, and what did we have to show for it? We’d lived all this time with a shared identity: we were the Pantazis family legend come to pass, the seventh daughters of a seventh daughter, destined to outlive the stars, not once, but twice. It had taken our entire life for the stars to go dark before us. We didn’t have another eight decades to wait for a second go-round.

Casto could have lived with it, accepted her fate and dealt with the hand she’d drawn, if only she’d had the opportunity to be the first seventh daughter in the equation. Sure, no one in our family had ever managed to get twenty-one daughters out of three successive, tight generations, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. Everything’s impossible until someone makes it possible. She, Callisto Pantazis, could have been the mother of the seventh daughter destined to become immortal. At least that would’ve been something, made her a part of the prophecy, rather than just another L on our family’s cosmic scorecard.

But that equation left no room for me.

In all our long years together, I never asked my sister to take my feelings into account. Instead, I spent the better part of a century tagging along on her adventures and playing the dutiful sidekick, as if I had never let go of her heel. I catered to her whims, and yet I was an afterthought in her wild imaginings. She let me be her stage dressing, her background noise, her spotlight operator.

She couldn’t help it, not really. That kind of selfishness comes second nature to people as beautiful as Casto. Everyone around you wants to please you and make you smile, as if good looks are catching and you’re contagious.

But when the Pleiades went out, the people who were once invested in us decided that our fate, the one thing they’d hung around to see, had all been a farce, maybe even a lie. They left, not all at once, but slowly. They drifted away from us like planets in an ever-expanding galaxy, and we were alone for the first time in our long lives, stranded in a dim, astral sea.

It was easier for me. Casto’s friends had only ever tolerated me because I was her twin. They thought I was playing the same game they were, trying to siphon looks off my sister through proximity alone. They pitied me for it, but I wasn’t stupid.

Nothing could make me any prettier. A short, fat, twisted thing, born into a family of tall and sturdy people, and fated to be forever photographed next to a living avatar of some goddess of the Amazons—I aspire to cuteness. When my sister wrinkled in all the right places, I sagged in all the wrong ones.

And when her mind began to drift, mine remained static.

Casto forgot my name first. She looked at me that morning, staring at my face through the coffee steam, and called me by our eldest sister’s name. Ramona? She said it like a question. She wasn’t sure who I was, whether I was Ramona or Leda or Pall or a complete stranger. I could have been our mother, for all she knew.

I corrected her, and we moved on. Or rather, she moved on. I couldn’t escape the cold weight in my chest—one hundred pounds of ice that formed the moment I realized I was the first person she’d forgotten. She’d taken me for granted our entire life. Now, I had disappeared from her memory.

The worst part was that I couldn’t even cry about it. It felt right, somehow, that she should be the one to forget me. If I forgot her, in her loneliness at the end of our age, then she really would have nothing. She could not survive without affection, and I was the last person willing and able to give it to her.

Her forgetfulness forced me to play around with new identities. I became whomever she thought I was at the time: Ramona, Leda, Mother. Pretending to be someone else was easier, kinder even, than fighting to make her remember me.

It was a game, a puzzle: try to suss out who I am today without asking her. She got scared if someone asked her. The few people who still visited gave stilted performances, but I had a knack for our game. I started to wonder if, in a world without our prophecy, I could have been an actress. Casto had a body and a face that were right for film, but I thought about all those beloved, “ugly” actresses and pictured myself among them. While my sister snored through her afternoon naps, I daydreamed about what might have been.

Sometimes I was a whole new person when she woke up.

Her doctors said there was nothing they could do. Her brain was slowly turning off the lights, one by one. The Pleiades were burning out all over again inside her mind. She wouldn’t feel hunger or thirst or pain. She was slowing down, and one day she would stop, like a clock someone forgot to wind.

There would be pain, of course, but not for her. Casto would cease to be, and I—the daughter no one had asked for, the child who came into this world clinging to her dead sister’s heel—would be left alone.

The doctors seemed to think that this was the natural way of things. They didn’t understand who we were. They wrote letters that allowed me to combine our assets, and they handed me brochures for funeral homes and grief counseling. For when the time comes, they said.

I threw away the brochures but used the letters. I opened a new bank account and dumped all we had into it. It wasn’t much, when all was said and done, but our total came to five figures, and that was more money than I’d ever seen in one place.

One day, as I combed through our assets, my sister peered over my shoulder and shook her head. Quiet little sobs hiccupped out of her throat. The numbers made no sense to her, she said. They were mean. They didn’t like her. Would I please make them go away? She sounded just like she did that day in Mother’s parlor, when she broke the ceramic duck centerpiece and blubbered out the lie that I was the one who had pulled it from the table.

I obliged her. I threw my arms around her heaving shoulders and tried to rock her like a baby. She braced herself, stiff and unyielding, until I stopped swaying. She relaxed into my embrace.

When she had no more tears to cry over the strange numbers in our bank account, she asked who I was.

I told her.

She said that was an odd name.

I never asked for her name. I didn’t want to know if she couldn’t remember.

Casto cried more often after that. The bank balance was only the beginning. She soon grew terrified of cats, squirrels, too-long grass, strong winds, light breezes, television commercials, and her own personal assistant. She was wary of bananas, oatmeal, confetti, forks, and rain.

She enjoyed blankets, but only so long as they didn’t have any static electricity in them.

She liked birds, but only if they were quiet and still. When they took flight, she screamed. We went to art classes at the senior center and painted birds in nests, birds that would always be still, no matter how long she stared at them. Casto wrapped her birds in blankets, painted their nests as if they were made of soft, fuzzy cloth. The blankets grew softer and fuzzier, until they stopped looking like anything at all.

My sister lost the words for the things that scared her. We made up hand signs so that she could ask for her comfort items, but we rarely used them.

She woke me up so many nights, wailing into the darkness above her bed until I rushed in, bringing the light with me. She would hug herself, or sometimes me, until she quietened. Most of the time, she couldn’t say what the nightmare had been about. The “mean people”—which could mean anyone from a heavy-handed phlebotomist to a particularly feisty chipmunk—and their awful tricks—taking away her blankets, usually, or making them staticky on purpose—terrorized her in her sleep.

When she could remember what had frightened her awake, it was always the same: the stars overhead had blinked into nonexistence, and they hadn’t come back like they were supposed to. She wanted to watch them go out again, but they were mean and would not play with her.

In the end, she forgot everything but our prophecy.

I booked the trip without thinking about Casto’s new, irrational fears.

The journey wiped out our savings, but that was all right. I put the house on the market, asked our nephew to facilitate the sale and transfer the money into our new account. It didn’t have to be much—just enough to start a new life somewhere else. I didn’t tell him I had the somewhere in mind. He sent me more brochures for nursing homes, and I sent him the keys to the house. His brochures went in the garbage with the rest.

I didn’t tell Casto’s doctors that we were going. I didn’t expect to see them again. We left two days after the refill date on her medications. I packed our bags quietly, loaded them up while she slept.

The morning of our departure, I told her we were going out. It was the same thing I said when we went window-shopping or browsed through garage sales, looking for paintings of birds that did not move or make noise. She went without a fuss.

Dardanus was a long way from Mars. We were already a year behind the Pleiades, at that point. The only option was the New Expressway: an innovative travel system that purported to shield passengers from the deadliest portions of interstellar radiation. Like most people, I didn’t understand how the technology worked. It was still in its infancy. Despite the transport’s state-of-the-art upgrades, people frequently died, especially the old and sick.

We were old. She was sick. I signed the waivers for both of us, because nothing else mattered, in the end.

They put you to sleep when you ride the New Expressway. It’s supposed to help with the time dilation, which apparently causes jet lag so severe you can hallucinate. Everyone’s different, they told me, but they have to be sure.

I splurged and booked us the double bed. It was technically a honeymoon suite, but no one asked questions. The room was a deep shade of coral red. I sighed with relief when I saw it; Casto had developed a new fear of the color green. The New Expressway staff waited to close the bed’s rounded canopy until after Casto fell asleep. I stayed awake until her hand went slack in mine and a snore escaped her lips. I watched as the attendants in their goldenrod uniforms eased the dome shut. My eyelids closed with it.

Waking up from the sedation comes easy, except for the cold. The sleep feels momentary and infinite. Two seconds or two eons ago, it was summer on Dardanus. Now it’s winter on Mars. It was the year of our seventy-eighth birthday. Now, we’re seventy-nine, four hundred years later.

The goldenrods who have spent the last four hundred days caring for us escort us through the concourse to our cab. I thank all the old gods that Casto doesn’t pay attention to the news anymore. Every screen, all around us, shows live feeds of the Pleiades from Mars’ biggest and best telescopes. They have more warning than we did. Their PM doesn’t have to make an announcement. Their whole world has been waiting centuries for this moment.

The cab drops us off at our new home. It’s hard to book a campsite four hundred years in advance, so I bought this remote little plot with what was left over after the tickets were booked. It’s not much, just a small scrap of red earth with two lawn chairs and a tiny mobile dwelling, all delivered this morning.

What the New Expressway lacks in safety, it makes up for in customer service.

I wrap Casto in her blankets and take my seat beside her. We have the full view overhead: Taurus and that little smoky patch of stars neither of us has seen since the night of our last birthday party.

I point to the cloud of Sisters.

“Casto, do you know what that is?”

She looks up, quickly, then shakes her head.

“Those are the Pleiades.”

Casto looks at me for a long moment and then stares back up.

“They look different,” she says.

“They were closer the last time.”

“They went out the last time.”

I nod.

“Why are they back?” she asks.

“You know why.”

The word prophecy forms on her lips without a sound.

I take her hand in mine and squeeze. She squeezes back.

We lie back and watch as our fate, told in photons, rushes to meet us.

About the Author

Kristian Wilson Colyard grew up weird in a one-caution-light town in the Appalachian foothills. She now lives in an old textile city with her husband and their clowder of cats.

Embracing the Movement

Cristina Jurado, translated by Sue Burke

We are not so different, sister sojourner.

Correct us if we are mistaken, but we are both creatures trying to survive under the most adverse circumstances, evading hazards, defying misfortune, and eluding death. We share more in common than you think.

Yet we have never seen anything like you, a strange being from an equally strange world.

We found you wandering alone in an unexceptional asteroid belt and, at first, we hardly noticed your presence. But your machine’s movements revealed you: like comet dust, you maneuvered your vessel incomprehensibly, at one moment accelerating and at the next slowing, plotting ridiculous feints in the vacuum. We gave chase, trying to make sense of your suspicious behavior.

Most beings who detect our presence shy away, fearing the reach of our offensive capacity: the destructive power of our attack system is legendary throughout the galaxy. And yet you drew near in your mediocre artifact and initiated an amazing dance. In one of the moments when you diminished your speed, we approached your position, and instead of fleeing, you remained steady next to our hive. We watched you circle us, always showing the same face of your vehicle.

Some of us thought you were courting us, while others supposed you were gathering information about our composition. Would it not have been more useful to question us directly? What were you seeking? But you remained mute all the while, intent on your mysterious dance, ignoring our calls to confer. How could you disregard our formation of contact? We unfolded ourselves into a posture of appeal and repeated our call innumerable times, but you merely observed us without response.

When we saw you leave your machine, we hardly believed you were alive and could contend with this universe all by yourself: such a weak organism of elusive organic material at the mercy of the inhospitable vacuum, a solitary crew member who must protect herself against lethal radiation with several layers of carapace.

For the universe is an enormous fatal trap, make no mistake. We do what we can to carry on despite losses and reversals. Our own sisters have even been decimated, which forced us to explore the spheres near and far in pursuit of new lands. We were as hungry and needful of rest as you. But we did not yield, and we have learned to grapple with the hostile weather, lethal atmospheres, and imbalanced masses of the worlds we found that crushed or destabilized our substance.

We are also moved by this instinct for survival that all functioning creatures possess, a universal quest that bids us to draw strength from within the folds of our weaknesses and stirs us to solve problems as we face them.

We are united, then, by the need to survive. Endurance, if you consider it carefully, is a blind yearning that can incite mad exploits, such as crossing insuperable distances or suffering privations without succumbing to fatigue. Because all that lives and moves, that nourishes and replicates itself, shares that need. This spirit, embedded in our cells to motivate us to action, can be found on an infinite diversity of planets and in creatures whose forms are as original as your own. Where does this obligation arise to seek eternity?

Some of our sisters ask that question, while others of us respond. To defeat death is to be, we tell ourselves with a polyphonic voice as our bodies throb toward the answer. We who ask come to embrace the movement: after all, the only sensible existence is as a group. Dissident sisters separate and become lost, failing to subsist without collaborators who launch their pseudopods to explore space. Is that not a sad way to cease to be?

Division becomes lethal conduct, and union vital strategy.

Where are your sisters? What if something in your body fails? How would you manage alone? If one of us becomes ill, we undertake her work to let her rest. If she fades out, we hold a vigil and honor her as best we can, which is by absorbing her, and thus, in her final disposition, she becomes part of us. One must not waste organic material, friend. It is sacred. If we did not make use of her, we could not consider ourselves powerful, in command of the sky. Thus we distrusted your design, so highly inefficient.

Among ourselves, some eventually interpreted your behavior as a hostile declaration, but most of us chose to understand it as the behavior of someone who feared us but did not know how to react. Our presence is imposing, to be sure. Customarily, the creatures who detect us retreat to whatever hideout they came from, be it sterile rocks speeding through clouds of cosmic dust, bits of slow rusty scrap stolen from working colonies, satellites patched together from technologies of different civilizations, or irregular encampments created from cosmic plasma and floating trash.

And yet, you did not flee at all. Even though you are one and we are multiple. Even though your machine can barely reach the requisite speed to travel the celestial path, and your body has no means to survive even a few seconds outside of your carapace. You did not respond to our attempt at communication. Nor did you initiate an assault maneuver, although it would have served you little, clearly. We can separate and reunite ourselves so that any plasma or antimatter flux you aimed at us would be lost in deep space. But we doubted you were disposed of the necessary technology to enter into battle.

When a life-form comes to us with barely any defenses, it tends to act out of either ignorance or daring. Which applies to you? We cannot comprehend a civilization that would place its explorers at the mercy of fortune and allow them to leave without sufficient protection. What kind of leaders are yours who let you voyage alone?

But you left the shell that surrounds you, and you presented yourself before us with the immensity of the eternal night behind you. Do you know how insignificant you seem? If some of us were to twitch, you would be sliced in half as fast as the distant stars twinkle. Can you see their light flicker? That is the time it would take for us to rip you from top to bottom.

Now you are our guest.

Few have visited our refuge: consider yourself regaled. Without offering resistance, which would have been more annoying than dangerous, you reentered your machine and followed us. We formed a welcoming passageway to flank your arrival. You traversed our twists and turns and let some of our sisters examine you with our flagella. We attended you with great deference, ensuring that the forces propelling us to this point did not undo your vehicle’s seams. We used our own bodies to absorb the tremendous accelerations of the journey to our lair, but we are accustomed to such things, and it cost us no extra effort. We wished to be accommodating so you could enjoy our hospitality.

For we are not cruel beings. Despite our reputation, I assure you we are sensitive. How else could we have prospered if not by caring for each of our sisters? The union of our swarm is only possible through the concern and attention with which we treat every one of our members. All of us, equally, are important so that the group functions as one, and this certainty is what feeds our determination.

How do our sheltering walls seem to you? We prefer the peaceful ambiance of our chambers, where the subdued light repels the wild beasts that steal energy. We prefer a wide, well-ventilated, shadowy abode to the little cells inundated with light that you frequent.

We have seen your colonies, sojourner. In those places, you waste resources shamelessly. You and your sisters seem to compete to see who can construct the largest building, the most lavish monument, or the most complex network. Accumulation is your sign of identity, not efficiency nor truthful assumptions. You act as if all the gasses of the universe belonged to you, as if you had the right to every plasma star and every quasar. This behavior is widely practiced and not exclusive to your species. We have seen it in many other civilizations that act with the recklessness of the ignorant.

Here, each of us occupies a well-defined space because we are all necessary and contribute our fortitude and intelligence to the hive. If you approach the cells, you will see the care in their construction, the soft material that cushions the corners so we can rest as if we were floating in zero gravity. Observe our ample sanctum. Is it not spectacular? You have no doubt seen few chambers as imposing in your voyages. Its vast size can contain us all so that some of us may feed, others may break down the food, and the rest may expel the remains to be used to construct new cells to accommodate more sisters.

Our collective can resist the pressure of the solar wind, the most extreme fluctuations of temperature, and the force of our own migrations, which, as you may imagine, are multitudinous and tumultuous. But we need a place to recover, and thus we put so much effort into constructing our colossal refuges, even though many remain uninhabited: if filthy beasts sully them when we are absent, how can we occupy them again? How can we rest on floors trampled by those who know neither respect nor decorum? They filled the cells with light, hung repugnant apparel on the walls, and divided the spaces into chambers so small they could not accommodate a single one of our pseudopods.

They made our palaces of peace and tranquility into absurd quarters filled with their madness. How could we not hunt them down? We put an end to them all. We followed them across planetary systems in this and other galaxies to their disgusting dens, and we felt enormous pleasure when we destroyed their dwellings with them inside. We devastated entire civilizations and let no beast escape to reproduce their filthy offspring on some benign planet, if such a place existed.

In truth, are not all planets hostile? Or, rather, does any fail to hold lurking danger? We know of none, and we are untiring travelers, sojourner. We can recite by memory all the stars of the galaxy along with their planets and satellites. We know the shape of their orbits, no matter how eccentric, and we hold a detailed registry of the meteoroids that roam through each system. No celestial body escapes our gaze. No rock circulates through the sky without our antennae’s notice. No creature rides in its machines without us detecting her. We are the sentries of our hives, porters of justice, and exterminators of hideous, pillaging, corrupt, squandering vermin.

Our morality is impeccable, although that may be hard to see except from our viewpoint. For we make order from chaos, cleanliness from proliferating contamination, and sterility from deep-rooted infection, and we do all this while seeking nothing in exchange. Is that not sufficient proof of generosity?

We render justice indiscriminately on those whom their own kind hold in eminence or in disregard, those aware or ignorant of dimensional secrets, those whose metabolism moves fast or slow, those who have or have not, and those who lead hordes or who follow their leaders. We treat equally creatures great or small, rich or poor, deformed or sublime, and healthy or ill. We are intimate with all forms of life without concern over their organic composition, technological level, and social hierarchies. We care naught for the ideologies they follow, the customs they adopt, and the fashions they exhibit. We are impartial in this sense, and we laugh at no strange devotion they display because we have seen everything and accepted everything. Difference is tolerated as long as it proves its effectiveness and guides any form of logical conduct.

And if external forces melt, freeze, or disintegrate our honeycombed hives, we seek alternative refuges. Do your sisters suffocate in your colonies as well? Let us guess: have the stars that warmed you ceased to shine? Eternal darkness is the worst nightmare for any form of life, without light, without available energy, and without trusted references. Or perhaps greed expelled you from your world as you fought among yourselves to control resources.

Perhaps your world dried up and your oceans evaporated. Perhaps the atmosphere became unbreathable after you filled it with toxic gasses. We have seen such things in other civilizations, whether with creatures as insignificant as you or as adaptable as ourselves. It seems that the more some intelligent life-forms develop, the more toxicity accumulates in their environment and envelops them: instead of venerating the rocks that sustain them, they scrape them clean; instead of caring for the liquids that nurture them, they contaminate them; instead of coexisting with the organisms that surround them, they destroy them. What kind of intelligence is this? It has happened so many times on so many spheres that we have determined it to be a universal law.

To accumulate matter serves only to slow the voyage: so, we teach as the oldest and wisest sisters. We are those who have spent the most time in the swarm, communed with other generations, and transmitted knowledge by barely perceptible electrical charges because our internal language is electric. We have little strength to offer counsel, but we remain in service for the good of the multitude. For that, we are revered and assured of a sufficient supply of provisions.

The youngest bow as we pass and make us comfortable in our chambers when we become weary in the sanctum. Sharing wisdom bears a price, sojourner: the cost of investing energy to establish the calls and conversation that must remain registered in our cells.

This is our formation for learning. Do you see the beauty? We organize ourselves in clusters to repeat the directives and devour the data so it can be distributed homogeneously. If some of us split, others vomit out the information at some point, perhaps before their own rupture.

As you can see, we need ample rooms to exercise our formations, which is how we communicate. Our conversations are drawn in space, calibrating physical dimensions to contextualize the discourse, which is most solemn when we dilate ourselves to the limit of our elasticity, most festive when we fold ourselves one over another in linked wheels, and most technical when we adopt an intermittent geometric torsion. If nostalgia overcomes us, our bodies execute a fine and infinite braid. If anger inundates us, we compose an undulating surface, a flowing liquid force that manifests itself as breaking waves and even as tides. At times sadness possesses us, and our organisms pulsate in a fractal of fluorescent scales. Each formation requires precise, sophisticated training and drills in order to achieve perfect alignment and a proper level of fermentation, as our sisters most concerned with these duties whisper to us. Only through this practice can we reach our metabolic potential.

See the membranes that we burst forth in our happiness! They are like wings that allow us to cleave distances at incredible speeds, and thus we journey best when our spirit rejoices. Can you see the striation that grows from the friction? Admire the elegance, the functionality of the linking connections, the aerodynamic tongues that grow when we reach cruising speed. The more sisters that join us, the greater is our fermentative capacity and the easier we can mold our anatomy to the needs of the voyages.

We do not know if you can understand what we say. We have unfurled formation after formation in front of you, but we are unsure if you have perceived them or can comprehend their significance. Meanwhile, we have registered not a single attempt at communication on your part, although we have extended all the mechanical antennae of our dwellings and all the organic antennae from our bodies. Your movements remain incomprehensible, although we hardly expect great things from a creature who wends her way in dangerous solitude.

Do you even know how to pilot the artifact that brought you here? Apparently, you can steer it, so you must possess minimal intelligence. Thus you must know about speed and distance, acceleration and braking, which makes us think that you must have some notion of the forces of the universe. You can distinguish between thrust and direction, and surely you understand the rudiments of gravity, because otherwise we doubt you could have arrived here in that machine, which in every sense is poorly equipped to travel among the stars. Do you really launch yourselves into the sea of space in those devices? You must be delusional or dullards because no one with any sense would dare to leave their atmosphere in such a hulk. Where are your force fields? Your fusion engines?

We can hardly believe that your frail casing and impotent motors have allowed you to reach beyond the orbit of a satellite. We simply note how weak and sickly you are, an organism as unstable as your machine, fragile and unprotected. Look at us, how our bodies shine as bright as neutron stars, how they dilate and recoil with vector forces, how they adapt to conditions in every place we choose to make our harbor. We are well disposed to admire the beauty of nebula, the monumental coronas of event horizons, and the white holes that spew energy and matter.

See the beauty of our synchronicity! We travel among the stars in clouds that move in unison because we have designed our vehicles to imitate us. We are one made of many that reach decisions and work together, and we have imbued this same spirit into our technology. Can greater beauty exist? The multiple is the measure of things as a referent to reality and as the foundation of a civilization that conquers the elements. Our own elements reconfigure themselves according to our needs, and we can form a structure that functions as a super-machine. If we break ourselves into scores of components, it is because this is the best strategy to adapt ourselves to the unexpected. You do the same: we know artifacts similar to yours. The same unique morphology and the same brittle exterior, but of artificial nature. You cannot overcome your weaknesses, not even with the contrivances you construct. You stubbornly repeat the errors of your organic design, an incomprehensible decision. How can you have managed to vanquish the mysteries of nature and yet obstinately reproduce your limitations using technology?

You have seen our dwellings. We have shown you the formations that transmit our expressions in an attempt to incite you to communication. We have invested time transcribing our impressions to you as a means to activate mutual confidence, but we have received nothing but silence from you. We cannot accept that an intelligent species would willingly fall mute. Thus we must recognize that you are not valid interlocutors.

This is our formation of disappointment, sojourner.

We decompose into groups that barely touch, using only a few filaments to maintain our forms, and we spin, the small whirls latching together when our frenetic gyrations cause us to collide. We had hoped to show you the secrets of the universe and explain the complex relationships between its organic and inorganic components, the links among the elements and ambient conditions, and the oscillations of space and time in this plane of reality. You would have visited our sisterly clusters and observed our most effective attack squadrons. We would have opened the dimensional portals so you could admire the certainties of the universe. Yet you answer us with a heartrending silence that defiles our flesh. Is this a befitting return? Your refusal is an insult, an affront to the attention we have showered on you. Do you believe you can fend us off with your indifference? Do you think we will disregard your conduct because you seem exotic?

If you do not seek to establish contact, if you have no interest in interacting with us, why did you choose to follow us? What dark motivations hold you here at our side? We cannot understand you, and this exasperates us. The fault, you must admit, lies in your solitude, because you cannot undertake formations to transmit your intentions.

We have no choice but to be practical and execute the maneuver that circumstances require. It would be unforgivable if your genetic material became lost in the immensity of the sidereal planes.

Look, sojourner: this is our formation to absorb you.

Originally published in Spanish by Crononauta, 2020.

About the Author

Cristina Jurado is a bilingual author, editor and translator of speculative fiction. In 2019 she became the first female writer to win the Best Novel Ignotus Award (Spain’s Hugo Award) for Bionautas. Her recent fiction includes the novella CloroFilia and her collection of stories Alphaland. Since 2015 she runs the Spanish multi-awarded magazine SuperSonic. In 2020 she was distinguished as Europe’s Best SF Promoter Award and started to work as a contributor of the bilingual quarterly Constelación magazine.

Fungi in Fiction

Carrie Sessarego

Depictions of alien life-forms in movies and television are constrained by budget, by practicalities, and by storytelling purposes. For the purposes of budget and storytelling possibilities, Hollywood tends to highlight aliens with whom we can communicate, combat, cooperate with, and (if the original Star Trek is any indication) have sex with. Because of this, most aliens in visual media are bipedal and humanoid in appearance.

However, our own planet teems with life that is far more alien (in the sense of having profoundly different biological systems than humans) than most Star Trek characters. One of the most bizarre forms of life are fungi, a kingdom that includes an estimated 1.5—5 million diverse species. Some fiction has explored the concept of fungal life-forms on Earth and elsewhere.

Remember playing Twenty Questions? Fungi are technically neither animal nor vegetable nor mineral, instead, they constitute a taxonomy kingdom all their own. The kingdom of fungi includes mushrooms, yeasts, and molds. Like animals, fungi must consume or absorb nutrients from other carbon-based sources. Some break down decaying matter, while others have adapted to leech nutrients from living sources.

Most fungi reproduce using spores, but others engage in sexual reproduction involving the mingling of hyphae. Hyphae are long structures, like tiny threads, that form the main body of the fungus and extend far into the soil or other matter that the fungus is growing on. When you cut a mushroom stem in half, it appears fibrous because it is made of millions of fibers—the hyphae. When hyphae extend and connect with other hyphae, they create a mat or a net of hyphae that is called “mycelium.” Forests sit on an underground network of mycelium through which energy impulses travel. The nature of these electrical impulses and the movement of nutrients across fungal and plant organisms is the topic of much study and speculation. This network of hyphae and plant roots, all of which seem to feed off of and pass messages to each other, is sometimes referred to as “the wood wide web.”

The mushroom you see is the spore-laden body of an organism that may extend for miles. A single specimen of honey mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) is thought to be the largest single organism in the world (by area), with mycelium that stretch over 8.9 square kilometers (over 5.5 miles) in a forest in Oregon. Fungi have been around for at least one billion years and are widely thought to have been the first organisms to live on land on our planet. They thrive on every continent, including Antarctica. Deserts, forests, and deep-sea hydrothermal zones are home for fungi. Some fungi have been exposed to low-Earth orbit and the radiation of deep space and survived. Others were found in the International Space Station, where they most certainly were not supposed to be.

Fungi are ever-present in the world of humans. Without them there is no risen bread and, heaven forbid, no beer. We consume fungi in the form of edible mushrooms and consume drinks and seasoning fermented with yeast, including wine and soy sauce. The blue veins in blue cheese are caused by fungi. Mushrooms and molds in past and present form the basis of psychological and spiritual explorations as well as life-saving medicines, including penicillin. They are used as pesticides, as an enzyme in certain products, such as detergents, and experimentally as building materials.

Fungi are also constantly present in and on our bodies. A 2010 study found that there are approximately nine to twenty-three fungal species in the human mouth alone. Most of these fungi are harmless to humans. Others cause discomfort or make us sick, as in the dreaded athlete’s foot, yeast infection, and ringworm, a condition that is caused by a fungus and not a worm as the name suggests. Stachybotrys chartarum, AKA black mold, is loathed by homeowners since it is anecdotally linked to health problems in humans. Farmworkers dread contracting Valley Fever, a respiratory disease caused by inhaling the spores of Coccidioides, a soil fungus.

Neither animal nor vegetable nor mineral, and with the ability to survive almost anywhere, fungi are truly bizarre. Many writers of speculative fiction have used certain qualities of fungi in their stories and most fall into one of four camps:

Fungi grows on everything until everything is dissolved by it, the way certain kinds of fungi grow on decaying fruit. In other words: if you touch it or breathe it, it consumes you.

Fungi take over the nervous system and brain of a still living organism, the way Ophiocordyceps unilateralis takes over the bodies of ants (more on this to come). In other words: if you touch it or breathe it, it controls you.

Sentient fungal life-forms exist either instead of or alongside humans and other life-forms. In other words: it coexists or competes with you on a sentient level.

Fungi can be utilized in ways we haven’t discovered yet. If you are sufficiently advanced, you can unleash its endless potential as a tool.

Looking at the first type of story, the one that posits that if you touch or inhale or ingest a substance, that substances will consume you utterly and inescapably: every living creature on this planet dies and, eventually, decomposes, with fungi playing an important role in this decomposition. What is horrifying is the extent to which fungi attempt to decompose organisms while they are still alive. The attempt to keep windowsills and bathrooms free from the mold that devours wood and wallpaper can drive a homeowner mad with frustration. Food that looked fine one day may the next day be transformed into a ball of powdery fungus. Many speculative fiction writers take this further and imagine what would happen if fungi colonized a person or an environment and devoured it while it was still alive. This theme combines a horror of death, contagion, and “the other,” not to mention an epic amount of body horror and a kind of obsessive-compulsive nightmare, as characters attempt to avoid exposure to a substance that is everywhere.

The quintessential story of this type is “The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson was an early writer of weird horror and an influence on H. P. Lovecraft and others. He spent much of his life at sea and his horror stories set at sea contain an authenticity that makes their supernatural elements all the more terrifying. This particular story also inspired the movie Matango, from 1963, directed by Ishiro Honda of Godzilla fame.

In “The Voice in the Night,” a ship responds to a cry for help from a rowboat. The person in the rowboat refuses to come aboard but begs for provisions to be floated to him in a wooden box. He tells of how he and his fiancée survived a sinking ship and found an abandoned ship that was coated with fungus. They cleaned the ship but the fungus kept growing back. They took refuge on an island and nearly starved to death. The entire island was covered with the same growth, which the couple found growing on their own skin. Eventually, gradually, and horribly, the couple becomes consumed by fungus, like the other beings on the island.

A more recent example of the “consumed by fungus” story is “Grey Matter,” a short story by Stephen King. In this story, a small-town convenience store regularly sells beer to a local man who disappears. His son comes to the store and tells the owner that the man drank “a bad can” of beer. Since then, the man has been sitting in a chair in his apartment, with all the lights off, undergoing a terrible metamorphosis into a fungal creature.

The story has a cliffhanger ending and leaves the reader with a terrible case of the “ewwwws” as the body horror progresses from a bit of gray slime to the horror described above. While some “consumed by fungus” stories are gorier than others, the body horror element always plays the largest role in the horror of the tale.

The second type of fungus story posits that a fungus can infect a host and control its brain. This is true for certain types of fungus in reality. The genera Cordyceps and Ophiocordycipitaceae include species of fungi that infect insect and arthropod hosts. The mycelium of the fungus grows through and feeds on the flesh of the host while the host is still alive and the fruiting body of the fungus grows through the skin of the host and into the open air, releasing more spores.

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis doesn’t just consume its victim. It infects carpenter ants. The fungus enters the ant’s body as a single cell and colonizes every part of the ant except the brain. The fungus then controls the ant’s muscles, forcing it to climb plant stems until it reaches a height of exactly twenty-five centimeters. At that point, the ant fastens itself onto a leaf, where it hangs until a stalk grows through the ant’s head, finally killing the ant and releasing spores onto the ants below.

Some recent zombie stories have used fungal, rather than viral, infection to explain humans who have lost everything but the desire to feed. In The Girl With All the Gifts, a novel by Mike Carey, a variation of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infests humans instead of ants, and spreads by contact with bodily fluids instead of by spores.

Additionally, in the video game The Last of Us, characters struggle to survive in a world in which people fall victim to cordyceps brain infection.

Not all speculative fiction stories involve fungal infection. Some describe a world in which sentient, intelligent fungal creatures (usually mushroomlike in appearance) exist either in competition with or alongside humans. A benign version of this can be found in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, by Eleanor Cameron. This book tells the story of two children who build a spaceship and fly to a planet that is covered with mushrooms and populated by people who are essentially also mushrooms, albeit walking, talking, humanoid mushrooms with a full civilization. The children save the planet and launch a series of six books.

In the Ambergris trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer sets up a more sinister relationship between fungi and humanity. The planet Ambergris was originally populated by fungal humanoids known by humans as “grey caps.” Humans took over the city, literally driving the grey caps underground, until the grey caps retook the city and established a totalitarian police state. The trilogy explores issues of colonization and occupation with a side helping of body horror and surrealism.

In recent years, scientists, gardeners, architects, doctors, and others have been exploring the possibilities of using fungus in unprecedented ways. Some of this is finding its way into modern fiction, most noticeably in Star Trek: Discovery. This show named a character after the show’s mycelium expert advisor, real-life mycologist Paul Stamets.

In the universe of Star Trek: Discovery, interstellar travel is made possible through use of the “spore drive.” As explained by Linh Anh Cat in an article for Forbes:

The spore drive operates by bringing USS Discovery into the mycelial plane, where it can traverse the mycelial network . . . In Star Trek: Discovery, mycelia form the foundation of space and connect every aspect of life across the multiverse. The mycelial network is also its own ecosystem. USS Discovery can jump anywhere almost instantaneously using the network.

The Discovery cultures blue spores, which power the spore drive. They glow blue as a nod to the tendency of real-life psilocybin mushrooms (AKA “magic mushrooms”) to have a blue color under certain conditions. In the show, the jahSepp, a species of sentient fungus, live within the mycelium plane and consume matter that enters the plane. The conflict between the jahSepp, who believe that spore drives threaten their existence, and Starfleet, which initially is unaware of the jahSepp’s existence, drives several episodes and character arcs. Other storytelling possibilities appear when Discovery’s crew realizes that it is possible to enter alternate universes through the mycelium network.

Star Trek: Discovery provides an extreme example of how the complex and peculiar real-world biology of fungus can provide storytelling possibilities. Other examples abound. The existence of mushrooms that cause mood changes and hallucinations has inspired many stories, most famously Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. In the TV series Hannibal, mushrooms provide a body disposal tool for a serial killer named Eldon Stammets (again, after mycologist Paul Stamets). On a more prosaic note, who can forget the hobbits’ fondness for mushrooms in The Fellowship of the Ring, by J. R. R. Tolkien?

Fungi make for fascinating speculative fiction because they are so very, very different from humans, because there is so much about them that is not fully understood, and because the storytelling possibilities they present are almost endless. Whether as agents of body horror, terrifying or liberating forces of mind control, or beings that force us to challenge ideas about colonization, occupation, power, and sex, these amazing life-forms permeate speculative fiction on page and on screen.

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

Undoing Good Women:
A Conversation with Cassandra Khaw

Arley Sorg

Born in Malaysia, Cassandra Khaw grew up watching horror movies with their parents, from John Carpenter’s The Thing to A Nightmare on Elm Street to Critters. When they got older, they got into Asian horror movies, such as Shutter and The Eye. Nonetheless, long before landing their first fiction sales, they were a tech and video game journalist. A hardcore geek at heart, they work full time now as lead writer for the North American edition of a game they still cannot talk about. They’ve written for venues such as Ars Technica, Engadget, Eurogamer, Gamasutra, and The Verge, and spent a decade traveling so often for work that they rarely spent more than a few months in any one continent. Games they contributed to include The Silence Under Your Bed, Sunless Skies, and Wasteland 3.

Khaw’s fiction career began with “Disconnect” at Vice’s tech site Motherboard in 2014. In 2015 they had a handful of pieces come out, including “What the Highway Prefers” at Lackington’s, “An Ocean of Eyes” in The Dark, and novella Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef with Rebellion imprint Abaddon, which was part of their Gods and Monsters series. (Contrary to frequent misconceptions, the franchise began with Chuck Wendig’s Unclean Spirits.) Since then, they’ve seen fifty short stories published in various well-respected venues.

Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer and multiple award-nominated fiction writer, with work spanning genres in multiple major venues, including Nature, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Tor.com, Apex, and more. They are one of the three authors for Walk Among Us, a Vampire: The Masquerade tie-in book, just out from Harper Voyager. The All-Consuming World is due from Erewhon Books in September of 2021 and Nothing But Blackened Teeth is due from Tor Nightfire in October of 2021.

In between all of that, they found time to learn Muay Thai, get into street dancing, write for D&D, World of Darkness, and Magic: The Gathering.

What was “breaking in” for you? How did it happen, and at what point did you feel like you were established?

Regular submissions to all the venues. Daily obsessive trips to The Submission Grinder, trying to figure out if the response times meant that my story was moving into the next round, etc. And honestly, it’s only lately that I’ve started feeling like my career is an established one, and that’s only because I have sold enough things that I’m now like, “Oh god. This book won’t be out until 2023. Okay.”

You’ve had three stories in Clarkesworld so far: “When We Die on Mars” in 2015, “Breathe” in 2016, and “Landmark” in 2017. Do you feel like these stories have commonalities or a vibe?

I think the biggest commonality between the three stories here is that they—at least to me, it may well be authorial hubris talking!—give the impression of being windows into larger, coherently designed worlds. And there is a definite loneliness to them too, a sense of the universe being far bigger than a single human heart can hold; that we’re here just for a second, just for a moment, and we’re dwarfed by existence itself.

In 2017 your poetry started coming out, beginning with “Protestations Against the Idea of Anglicization” in Uncanny Magazine. What is your relationship to poetry? Do you address similar concerns and themes through poetry as you do with prose?

It’s absolutely a newer form of expression, one that I’m still gingerly learning. Poetry is such a beautiful and complex beast to me. I’m in awe of people like my darling Ali Trotta, who can spin poetry like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

And I think so. Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out what my subconscious is working through in my creative work, and I’ve decided it has a lot to do with undoing a lot of generational trauma and indoctrination: the idea that good women are seen, not heard; good women work hard and don’t complain; good women give everything in hopes that the people who come up after them might have more, might have the opportunity to say what they feel, go for what they want.

A lot of my work, I think, screams at the idea of that silence, that sense of being restrained and small, of not asking too much, of being tidy.

What is your process like for writing poetry, especially compared to writing short fiction?

It involves significantly more angsting than my prose writing. Like I said earlier, I’m still trying to figure this out. I’m not really a poet; I don’t feel like one, at any rate. And I’m particularly aware of this when I try to write poetry.

Who are some of your favorite poets or favorite poems?

I don’t read as much poetry as I should. But one of my favorite poets is Denice Frohman. Oh my god. Reading Frohman is what drove me into wanting to write poetry. Her poem, “Accents” is permanently burned into my brain. The rhythm of it, the easy glide, the way she makes the English language her dance partner but doesn’t allow it to determine her dance. Her poetry is stunning, both in terms of its craft and its subject matter.

On the speculative side, I love Ali Trotta’s work. I’ll preface this by saying that I might be biased because she’s like blood to me, my sister from another mother. But there’s such a goddamned grace to her poetry, a grasp of mythology that always awes me. Not in the sense that she’s well-read in the various mythologies of the world (although clearly she is), but in the way she builds myths from her poetry. It’s all great, great stuff.

I also absolutely love Lora Gray’s poetry, which is both so delicate and so brutal at the same time. If Ali’s poetry is brocade and the smell of temple incense, Lora Gray’s work is a polished knife that cuts deep into the heart. Every time I read one of their pieces, I inevitably find myself going, “Oh,” very softly in awe.

For folks who haven’t read your short fiction, if you wanted to point them to one story to get them started, what would it be, and why?

“You Do Nothing But Freefall,” from Lightspeed. It is probably the most approachable, language-wise. But I think it also gets across a lot of what defines my work: that desire for change, the melancholy, the mythological creatures seeking to escape the definitions they’ve been given.

Walk Among Us, a tie-in book for Vampire: The Masquerade, just came out, and it has your novella “Fine Print.” What do you really want readers to know, beyond the line of description on the publisher page?

Duke is 100 percent based on people I’ve met in the game industry: the overwhelming egotism seen in the upper management, the toxic techbro mentality. Don’t get me wrong. I do love working in the games industry. But there are absolutely people here who get away with being absolute jerks.

I wanted very much to see what’d happen if someone like that went up against the Ventrue Clan, especially if he thinks they present as lesser. Needless to say, it doesn’t go well.

You also have The All-Consuming World coming out with Erewhon in August, a science fiction novel with a dash of mystery, featuring a group of former criminals. What was the most challenging aspect of writing this book, and how did you get through that challenge?

The abuse-related stuff, honestly. No small amount of the book deals with the idea of codependency and sick systems, how abusers make use of your best traits to keep you in a stranglehold. It deals as well with how we lie to ourselves about these things, how we convince ourselves that everything is okay, that it’s all fine, that really, we do love the people who hurt us.

And getting through it was, well, part “this book is on contract and I absolutely have to deliver” and also, a desire to remind people that you don’t have to be meek or small to be abused. Some of the strongest people I know, people who have lived through amazing hardships, who are shockingly resilient, they’ve been subject to abuse too, have been manipulated and molded by it.

What are your favorite things about the universe you’ve created, or your favorite bits of research that went into building the universe?

The little things that the Minds get up to. We don’t really see it much in the book because we’re focused on Plot Things, but the Minds, as a species, are just fascinated with the concept of having limitless time, limitless access to all the knowledge in the world, and limitless opportunity to express themselves. Away from the main events of the book, they’re writing poetry in infrared, coming up with dances in faster-than-light travel, building languages out of snippets of seventeenth century love letters. All kinds of things.

What do you love most about the characters in this book—what was your favorite thing about writing them?

Their love for each other. The Dirty Dozen, and their relationships, are least partially inspired by my own found family. There are a bunch of brilliant people who I treat as older siblings, or dote on like they’re my younger siblings. I love them without exemption. And there are pieces of them in the Dirty Dozen: their loyalty, their humor, their kindness, their love, their absolute goddamned fabulousness.

Finally, you have Nothing But Blackened Teeth, due from Tor Nightfire in October, “a gorgeously creepy haunted house tale.” Haunted houses are a trope we come back to time and time again. What do you think is the appeal of haunted houses for people in general, and is the appeal the same for you?

Home is where the heart is, right? Home is the thing we go to when we want to close our eyes, be vulnerable, take a breath, relax, be safe. Haunted house stories are creepy as heck as it upends that idea completely, shows how we aren’t necessarily safe at home. I think as well that haunted house stories are a dialogue with that part of us that is aware that home, sometimes, can be a prison, can be a place where Really Bad Things happen, and you can’t say anything because where would you go?

One of the things this book does is examine relationships, peeling back the skin to find the rot. What was the hardest thing about writing these characters?

Visiting the idea that friendships aren’t always healthy, that just because you’ve known someone for twenty years, it doesn’t mean that friendship is good for either of you. I think that the media has socialized us to believe that things need to last. If they don’t, they’re of no value. Which a) isn’t true and b) leads us to getting into situations where we tolerate people, where we smile, where we let things go, because hey, that person has been our friend forever.

What else are you working on that readers can look forward to?

A whole bunch of things. I have a duology with Richard Kadrey that’s coming up, a little novella that answers the “and then what happened” in one of my stories, and I’m pecking right now at what will likely be a novella involving the grown-up daughter of a pair of serial killers.

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.

A Wider Range of Freedom:
A Conversation with Alyssa Winans

Arley Sorg

Alyssa Winans grew up near Chicago. She studied in Japan for a year in high school, and her education had a strong emphasis on math and science. Regardless, she moved to Rhode Island for college, planning to study graphic design. “Luckily, everyone I met looked at my work and quickly directed me towards illustration.” Winans earned a BFA in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2013 she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where her spouse is originally from, to be close to family.

“When I was in high school, I made applying to T-shirt contests my ‘summer job.’ It’s a weird thing to do, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it, but I learned a lot.” Winans worked in games for a few years, beginning as a weapons designer for a fantasy MMORPG. She interned at a local company and continued working part-time throughout her senior year, designing over three hundred weapons before the company went under shortly before she graduated. She also worked at Harmonix on Fantasia: Music Evolved.

Winans works for Google as part of the Google Doodle team, and since 2011 has been racking up accolades and awards, including being a Hugo Award finalist in the Professional Artist category for two consecutive years. In her free time, she likes to make desserts (especially ice cream—especially unusual flavors), garden, and read.

What artists have most influenced and inspired you?

I think the artists that have influenced me the most are actually people I’ve met and directly worked with: folks I went to school with and various coworkers and mentors I’ve had over the years. I’ve admired specific artists and styles at different times in my career, but the most inspiration came from actually watching everyone around me grow. Sharing in their different approaches and experiences has had a lasting impact in not only the way I think about art, but most other areas of my life as well.

Were you creating art from an early age? How did you transition from hobby and doing it for yourself to doing it professionally?

I guess the answer here is “sort of!” I met my childhood best friend when we were ten. She’s this spectacularly creative person, so whenever we spent time together, we would always be making up stories. We would sketch out our characters, so I was drawing a lot during that time. Sailor Moon fan art also figured prominently in our friendship! We ultimately went to different high schools, and the time I spent drawing actually dropped off after that.

My family doesn’t have a creative background, and my high school also had an emphasis on math and science, so a future in art was pretty far from my mind. In November of my senior year, I was doing some last-minute research and one of the schools I was looking into advertised that it had an art school right next to it, and they were launching a five-year dual degree program. I’d never really considered studying art, but I was intrigued. So many of my best memories were from those times when I was just drawing at my friend’s house. My school had one art teacher (who taught ceramics and dark room photography), so I went to him, and he explained what a portfolio was and what might go into it. I was fortunate that so many people helped me put together a portfolio that winter. One of my teachers let me draw him while he graded papers, and friends lent me objects to draw and provided feedback. My mother even found a local art teacher who explained how to approach the required large-scale graphite drawings I needed in addition to my portfolio.

I ended up getting wait-listed at the original school. But somehow, I got into the art school, and they offered me a scholarship. I was honestly bewildered. Many people said I’d regret it if I didn’t at least try, so, I tried, and I’ve been on that path since then.

Do you draw from life or from photo reference or both? Do you start with sketches on paper, do you work digitally—what does your workflow look like from concept to realization?

Both, though sometimes neither! I usually only draw from life when I’m out and about and just drawing for fun. Flowers, landscapes, etc. As for reference material, it depends on how stylized whatever I’m drawing is. When my sketchbook drawings are fairly stylized, I may go without robust reference. My more realistic pieces will require more concrete reference material, though I usually will start without at the sketch stage so I’m not limited by the reference I can find or take myself. Once I have the idea locked in, then I’ll figure out the best reference to draw what I’ve planned.

Process-wise, if I’m working off a manuscript, I’ll read it once, and then go back through a second time and start pulling out key phrases or themes for me to incorporate into sketches. I’ll also do a round of research before I start drawing, if the project calls for it. I personally do my thumbnails on paper, since I find it easier to see the whole thing at once compared to my computer screen. They’re usually a bunch of scribbles, really just reminders that I’ve explored a specific idea when I come back to it. Once I’ve explored a range of ideas, I’ll take some photos of my favorites and pop them onto the computer. From there I’ll start refining the sketches. I’ll usually kill off a few more ideas at this stage, until I get down to three or four.

If it’s for client work, then I’ll do a set of clear sketches so they can see what’s actually going on. I’ll also usually do a round of revisions at the sketch stage to address client feedback before moving onto color. If it’s for personal work, I’ll refine the complex parts of my sketches, but then hop directly into color. I block in solids first, at which point I’ll build out the palette I want as I go. Depending on the project and timeline, I’ll also send a color test to my client to get more feedback before moving onto the final. From then it’s just slowly adding different levels of detail until the piece is complete.

How does your process change if you’re working on a book cover, as opposed to something else?

I’ve mainly worked on games, T-shirts, books, and Doodles, and I think the main things that affect my process are the scale and way the art will be seen. For example, game assets and Doodles might only be seen at a specific size on a desktop or a mobile screen, so I have to be cognizant about what will read clearly at size. A lot of details won’t be seen and will just cause visual confusion. User interface elements might need to be larger than expected for easy tapping on a phone. With T-shirts, I need to think about where designs will warp and sit on people with different body shapes. Book covers might be seen both in a bookstore and online, and will be paired with text. In that case, I’m trying to think of something that might be eye-catching and read well in a variety of settings: from across the room, on a black and white reading device, or on a web page. But I also have to think about spoilers, or how a reader’s perception of a cover might change after they’ve read the book.

If ISFDB is correct, you’ve been doing SFF covers since 2016. How did you get into doing genre book covers? Where does science fiction and fantasy fit into your creativity or your artistic body of work?

The answer here is that I was lucky, and people are kind. I was fortunate enough to have a portfolio review with Irene Gallo at Spectrum in 2015. She must have remembered my work, because she reached out with my first fantasy commission for Tor.com (Aliette de Bodard’s “Lullaby for a Lost World”) about a year later.

I grew up in a house full of SFF books, courtesy of both my parents and older sisters, so reading through those was a big part of my childhood. I have a lot of memories of coming home from the library with a big stack of books, and my sisters and I would just make our way through the pile. I actually stopped reading for a long time as an adult, partly because I was busy, but partly because I didn’t realize my tastes had shifted as I grew up. Once I started finding new stories that resonated with who I was as an adult, SFF became a big part of my life again. When left to my own devices, that’s still the work I enjoy making the most. I personally find it gives me a wider range of freedom to explore and express personal thoughts and concepts than I might otherwise.

You are a Hugo Award finalist for the second year in a row. Have you attended genre conventions or had much interaction with the SFF community?

I’ve been to a handful of art-specific conventions (Spectrum Fantastic Art Live, LightBox Expo, etc.), but last year’s virtual Worldcon was my first that was geared toward the writing/publishing community. The Hugo email last year really shocked me, because I didn’t think anyone knew I existed. I think overall I’m not very involved with the community (even from the art side), partly because so much interaction happens in online spaces. I think everyone is very welcoming, but I always feel like a bother when I reach out to people I don’t actually know in real life on social media. I’m working on that.

On your site, there are a lot of reds, golds, and soft yellows, a bit of green and blue. What is it about these combinations of colors that speak to you?

I love bright colors, and it’s a big part of what I enjoy about art. I usually pick my palettes based on the tone of a piece. I’ll pick a core color that I think best conveys the tone, and fit all the accompanying colors around that first color. So that’s probably where some common combinations come from. I’ve been trying to be a little less heavy-handed about it, but if you look at the red pieces on my website, they’re almost all implying danger and/or determination. Blue and greens are usually quieter, more introspective pieces, though I sometimes use green to be unsettling.

On your main page, with those pieces specifically, there seems to be a deliberate use of darkness, or heavier tones, which creates powerful contrasts and emotionality. Can you talk a bit about this?

A lot of the narratives I’ve worked with have a bit of a darker edge to them, which I want to showcase in the color and value schemes I choose for the accompanying art. That being said, it’s likely something I gravitate to in my personal work, as well. Somewhat to my own chagrin, my ideas for personal pieces usually come out of something I’ve been dwelling on but can’t quite articulate. I think an idea born of a feeling that might be difficult to describe ends up pushing me to play up the drama of lighting and color.

What are some of your favorite pieces or projects you’ve done, whether or not in genre, or perhaps pieces or projects that you’re most proud of?

I still have a soft spot for “Lullaby for a Lost World,” because while I mentioned it was my first fantasy commission, it was also one of the first illustration jobs I’d gotten. At that time, I was scraping by on sporadic freelance game work, and a large part of me was starting to give up on the idea of getting more illustration work, fantasy-related or otherwise. So although it’s quite a dark piece, it has many good feelings associated with it.

I also have two personal series from 2014 that stand out for me, because that’s when I started working in a way that’s close to what I do now. That year was a dry year in terms of paying work, but I made a lot of pieces that felt like personal breakthroughs. I don’t keep most of them on my website, but I actually still use them as a baseline or reference as I work.

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

One theme that comes up a lot sounds extremely goofy written down: giant women. For me, increasing the scale puts the figures into a mythical, godlike space and gives them an inherently powerful standing even if they’re doing something completely mundane. I think that’s just something I like to see, that makes me feel a bit more determined myself. Also, I’m a very short person, so I’m sure there’s some slight wish fulfillment at work there!

Many illustrators start off just doing art for themselves, for the joy of it. Do you still paint or draw for yourself, just because you want to?

I do, although somewhat sporadically. I’m lucky to have a creative day job, but it does consume a lot of my creative energy. There’ll be times I don’t draw anything outside of work or freelance projects because I’m just tired. When I do have energy, I’ll mostly draw something different than I do for either type of work, so I do these silly ink drawings that I keep on my Instagram. It’s easy to get into the mindset that each piece has to be a portfolio-level breakthrough piece, and I think that mentality can really push people, but I find it makes me prone to paralysis. So doing low-pressure things helps refresh me and keeps art from feeling too much like a job (although, inevitably, there are those times too).

Where do you hope to take your art next? What do you hope to do with your art?

Ahh, a tough question. In terms of technical changes, I’ve always been enamored of patterns and have been looking for a way to incorporate them more into my larger pieces. In a broader sense, I’ve been thinking about how I can apply my skills to something more educational. At work, we do a lot of thinking about how to simplify and convey information in the clearest way possible. Especially in the last year, it feels like there’s been so much information flying at people at all times, it’s so hard to parse and digest anything. There’s a chance it’s incompatible with my current skill set (I’m not anyone’s first choice for an infographic), but I’m thinking about it.

Do you have any advice for aspiring or up-and-coming illustrators?

It’s challenging to give one-size-fits-all advice, since everyone has different needs and goals, but I’d suggest cultivating good techniques for thinking about your own work and growth. Try not to get caught in the general whirlwind of negativity, “my art is no good or not where it needs to be.” (Hard, I know!)

Use that criticality instead to think hard and specifically on your weaknesses and make a game plan on how to approach them. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or grueling, just some dedicated time to shoring up issues in your skill set. This can apply to content and ideas, as well. It can be hard to just tackle the big question, “what do I want to say with my art?” Consider why you really connect with a piece, beyond the technical skill. Try giving yourself little brainstorming assignments or exercises until natural patterns start to emerge.

In a totally different vein, please try to pick up some good wrist and back exercises! Our work can be quite physical; your future self will thank you for it. And, of course, good luck!

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, is senior editor at Locus magazine, and associate editor at Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines.

Editor’s Desk:
What Do You Want?

Neil Clarke

“What do you want?”

That was the question asked by the representative of the Shadows in Babylon 5. The Shadows were an ancient race that followed the first principles of chaos through warfare, evolution through bloodshed, and perfection through victory. For a younger race to reach their full potential they must endure the chaos of pain, struggle, conflict, and war. The weak would perish. Only the strong may survive. In the show, those that answered this question were typically rewarded with what they desired, but would discover consequences worse than the gifts.

“What do you want?”

This is a question that editors are often asked by authors. As an editor, it sometimes feels like we’re perceived as the Shadows, particularly among those who practically spit when they call us gatekeepers. Writers send their babies to different magazines, anthologies, or publishers to open calls, which must seem a lot like the Shadow’s chaos of pain, struggle, conflict, and war. After all, there are only so many stories they can buy and only the editor’s perception of the strongest get accepted.

It isn’t really the same though. None of the editors I know believe in the broken wisdom that “an artist must suffer for their art.” Most would agree that it’s more of a “practice makes perfect” scenario. Keep learning, keep improving, and keep trying. Try not to be horrified when I tell you this . . . The first time I publish an author, I look back at all the stories they’ve previously submitted to us. This is more of a test for me. Did I miss something earlier? So far, no, but what I’ve noticed over time is that they all have something in common: they never stopped improving their craft.

That said, rejection is never pleasant and maintaining patience over that often long haul can be a challenge. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that the system is rigged against you and honestly, it’s completely possible that what you are currently writing isn’t the sort of story that appeals to an editor at one house or another. That’s why pushing outside your comfort zone can be extremely beneficial, even if only as an exercise. And yes, it’s sometimes viable to just shortcut the process by self-publishing. It comes with its own can of worms, but it’s a completely viable path for some.

There’s no one path to success.

On a related topic, we’re often asked about feedback. Our rejection letters are a short assortment of form letters. At best they tell you you were close–the two or three percent of all submissions that make up our near miss category–but they never tell you why you were rejected. Why? Quite simply, I don’t believe that a few minutes of my time will make or break the success of a story or have an impact on an author’s ability as a writer. Assume for a second that it would take five minutes to provide meaningful feedback. (In my experience, this is a ridiculously low estimate.) We receive an average of eleven hundred submissions each month and if you do the math, that comes out to over ninety-one hours of extra work per month. That’s a significant increase in workload for something I don’t believe will be particularly helpful. I would much rather make sure I leave room in my calendar to do it right. This includes accepting invitations to be a guest instructor at writing workshops, being on panels, judging writing competitions, and answering the many questions that come my way. In this way, I’m valuing quality over quantity.

If that’s not enough of a reason, another downside to personalized rejections would be a significant delay in our response time, which is not something we’re willing to sacrifice. Each story is a potential paycheck. The longer we take, the longer an author may wait to be paid. We aim to respond to submissions in a day or two. Between the pandemic and my ongoing medical issues, that’s been more of a challenge lately, but it’s still the goal. Most people appreciate the fast response, but a few complain. For them, I’ll simply point out that the difference between a three month response and a one day response is how long it was sitting in the slush pile before an editor read it. Eyeball time is pretty much the same no matter what.

But I’ve wandered.

“What do you want?”

As in Babylon 5, that’s a question that comes with some baggage when answered. Even if I was sitting here thinking “I’d like to see some more _______ stories” I wouldn’t say it out loud or write it down. Why? Because it would be a very short-lived phenomenon and I’d spend the next several months seeing take after take on that theme until I never wanted to see another one again. I don’t recommend trying to guess my answer to that question either. Trust me when I say that I don’t want the story you think I want. I get bored easily and my interests are a moving target. Even if you guessed correctly, it’s likely I’ve moved on by the time you did.

“What do you want?”

Ok. What I really want is the story you’re passionate about writing. Surprise me. Take me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. You know that feeling you have when you read something amazing and unexpected in a magazine or anthology? That’s the way it is for editors too. We just read A LOT more and sometimes that new concept you had isn’t quite as new as you thought. That’s one of the reasons I often encourage authors to consider volunteering as slush readers (not just here, anywhere).

In the end, the question should be “What do you want to write?”

The answer? Go do it.

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:
Companion

Derek Stenning

About the Artist

Derek Stenning is a concept artist working in the game development field. His personal work, Entartete Kunst (EK), is available as prints and resin model kits. His second art book, EK2 - The Lost Years, is to be published in 2022 by Design Studio Press.