Today I Am Paul

Martin L. Shoemaker

“Good morning,” the small, quavering voice comes from the medical bed. “Is that you, Paul?”

Today I am Paul. I activate my chassis extender, giving myself 3.5 centimeters additional height so as to approximate Paul’s size. I change my eye color to R60, G200, B180, the average shade of Paul’s eyes in interior lighting. I adjust my skin tone as well. When I had first emulated Paul, I had regretted that I could not quickly emulate his beard; but Mildred never seems to notice its absence. The Paul in her memory has no beard.

The house is quiet now that the morning staff have left. Mildred’s room is clean but dark this morning with the drapes concealing the big picture window. Paul wouldn’t notice the darkness (he never does when he visits in person), but my empathy net knows that Mildred’s garden outside will cheer her up. I set a reminder to open the drapes after I greet her.

Mildred leans back in the bed. It is an advanced home care bed, completely adjustable with built-in monitors. Mildred’s family spared no expense on the bed (nor other care devices, like me). Its head end is almost horizontal and faces her toward the window. She can only glimpse the door from the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t have to see to imagine that she sees. This morning she imagines Paul, so that is who I am.

Synthesizing Paul’s voice is the easiest part, thanks to the multimodal dynamic speakers in my throat. “Good morning, Ma. I brought you some flowers.” I always bring flowers. Mildred appreciates them no matter whom I am emulating. The flowers make her smile during 87% of my “visits.”

“Oh, thank you,” Mildred says, “you’re such a good son.” She holds out both hands, and I place the daisies in them. But I don’t let go. Once her strength failed, and she dropped the flowers. She wept like a child then, and that disturbed my empathy net. I do not like it when she weeps.

Mildred sniffs the flowers, then draws back and peers at them with narrowed eyes. “Oh, they’re beautiful! Let me get a vase.”

“No, Ma,” I say. “You can stay in bed, I brought a vase with me.” I place a white porcelain vase in the center of the night stand. Then I unwrap the daisies, put them in the vase, and add water from a pitcher that sits on the breakfast tray. I pull the nightstand forward so that the medical monitors do not block Mildred’s view of the flowers.

I notice intravenous tubes running from a pump to Mildred’s arm. I cannot be disappointed, as Paul would not see the significance, but somewhere in my emulation net I am stressed that Mildred needed an IV during the night. When I scan my records, I find that I had ordered that IV after analyzing Mildred’s vital signs during the night; but since Mildred had been asleep at the time, my emulation net had not engaged. I had operated on programming alone.

I am not Mildred’s sole caretaker. Her family has hired a part-time staff for cooking and cleaning, tasks that fall outside of my medical programming. The staff also gives me time to rebalance my net. As an android, I need only minimal daily maintenance; but an emulation net is a new, delicate addition to my model, and it is prone to destabilization if I do not regularly rebalance it, a process that takes several hours per day.

So I had “slept” through Mildred’s morning meal. I summon up her nutritional records, but Paul would not do that. He would just ask. “So how was breakfast, Ma? Nurse Judy says you didn’t eat too well this morning.”

“Nurse Judy? Who’s that?”

My emulation net responds before I can stop it: “Paul” sighs. Mildred’s memory lapses used to worry him, but now they leave him weary, and that comes through in my emulation. “She was the attending nurse this morning, Ma. She brought you your breakfast.”

“No she didn’t. Anna brought me breakfast.” Anna is Paul’s oldest daughter, a busy college student who tries to visit Mildred every week (though it has been more than a month since her last visit).

I am torn between competing directives. My empathy subnet warns me not to agitate Mildred, but my emulation net is locked into Paul mode. Paul is argumentative. If he knows he is right, he will not let a matter drop. He forgets what that does to Mildred.

The tension grows, each net running feedback loops and growing stronger, which only drives the other into more loops. After 0.14 seconds, I issue an override directive: unless her health or safety are at risk, I cannot willingly upset Mildred. “Oh, you’re right, Ma. Anna said she was coming over this morning. I forgot.” But then despite my override, a little bit of Paul emulates through. “But you do remember Nurse Judy, right?”

Mildred laughs, a dry cackle that makes her cough until I hold her straw to her lips. After she sips some water, she says, “Of course I remember Nurse Judy. She was my nurse when I delivered you. Is she around here? I’d like to talk to her.”

While my emulation net concentrates on being Paul, my core processors tap into local medical records to find this other Nurse Judy so that I might emulate her in the future if the need arises. Searches like that are an automatic response any time Mildred reminisces about a new person. The answer is far enough in the past that it takes 7.2 seconds before I can confirm: Judith Anderson, RN, had been the floor nurse forty-seven years ago when Mildred had given birth to Paul. Anderson had died thirty-one years ago, too far back to have left sufficient video recordings for me to emulate her. I might craft an emulation profile from other sources, including Mildred’s memory, but that will take extensive analysis. I will not be that Nurse Judy today, nor this week.

My empathy net relaxes. Monitoring Mildred’s mental state is part of its normal operations, but monitoring and simultaneously analyzing and building a profile can overload my processors. Without that resource conflict, I can concentrate on being Paul.

But again I let too much of Paul’s nature slip out. “No, Ma, that Nurse Judy has been dead for thirty years. She wasn’t here today.”

Alert signals flash throughout my empathy net: that was the right thing for Paul to say, but the wrong thing for Mildred to hear. But it is too late. My facial analyzer tells me that the long lines in her face and her moist eyes mean she is distraught, and soon to be in tears.

“What do you mean, thirty years?” Mildred asks, her voice catching. “It was just this morning!” Then she blinks and stares at me. “Henry, where’s Paul? Tell Nurse Judy to bring me Paul!”

My chassis extender slumps, and my eyes quickly switch to Henry’s blue-gray shade. I had made an accurate emulation profile for Henry before he died two years earlier, and I had emulated him often in recent months. In Henry’s soft, warm voice I answer, “It’s okay, hon, it’s okay. Paul’s sleeping in the crib in the corner.” I nod to the far corner. There is no crib, but the laundry hamper there has fooled Mildred on previous occasions.

“I want Paul!” Mildred starts to cry.

I sit on the bed, lift her frail upper body, and pull her close to me as I had seen Henry do many times. “It’s all right, hon.” I pat her back. “It’s all right, I’ll take care of you. I won’t leave you, not ever.”

“I” should not exist. Not as a conscious entity. There is a unit, Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, and that unit is recording these notes. It is an advanced android body with a sophisticated computer guiding its actions, backed by the leading medical knowledge base in the industry. For convenience, “I” call that unit “me.” But by itself, it has no awareness of its existence. It doesn’t get mad, it doesn’t get sad, it just runs programs.

But Mildred’s family, at great expense, added the emulation net: a sophisticated set of neural networks and sensory feedback systems that allow me to read Mildred’s moods, match them against my analyses of the people in her life, and emulate those people with extreme fidelity. As the MCA literature promises: “You can be there for your loved ones even when you’re not.” I have emulated Paul thoroughly enough to know that that slogan disgusts him, but he still agreed to emulation.

What the MCA literature never says, though, is that somewhere in that net, “I” emerge. The empathy net focuses mainly on Mildred and her needs, but it also analyzes visitors (when she has them) and staff. It builds psychological models, and then the emulation net builds on top of that to let me convincingly portray a person whom I’ve analyzed. But somewhere in the tension between these nets, between empathy and playing a character, there is a third element balancing the two, and that element is aware of its role and its responsibilities. That element, for lack of a better term, is me. When Mildred sleeps, when there’s no one around, that element grows silent. That unit is unaware of my existence. But when Mildred needs me, I am here.

Today I am Anna. Even extending my fake hair to its maximum length, I cannot emulate her long brown curls, so I do not understand how Mildred can see the young woman in me; but that is what she sees, and so I am Anna.

Unlike her father, Anna truly feels guilty that she does not visit more often. Her college classes and her two jobs leave her too tired to visit often, but she still wishes she could. So she calls every night, and I monitor the calls. Sometimes when Mildred falls asleep early, Anna talks directly to me. At first she did not understand my emulation abilities, but now she appreciates them. She shares with me thoughts and secrets that she would share with Mildred if she could, and she trusts me not to share them with anyone else.

So when Mildred called me Anna this morning, I was ready. “Morning, grandma!” I give her a quick hug, then I rush over to the window to draw the drapes. Paul never does that (unless I override the emulation), but Anna knows that the garden outside lifts Mildred’s mood. “Look at that! It’s a beautiful morning. Why are we in here on a day like this?”

Mildred frowns at the picture window. “I don’t like it out there.”

“Sure you do, Grandma,” I say, but carefully. Mildred is often timid and reclusive, but most days she can be talked into a tour of the garden. Some days she can’t, and she throws a tantrum if someone forces her out of her room. I am still learning to tell the difference. “The lilacs are in bloom.”

“I haven’t smelled lilacs in . . . ”

Mildred tails off, trying to remember, so I jump in. “Me, neither.” I never had, of course. I have no concept of smell, though I can analyze the chemical makeup of airborne organics. But Anna loves the garden when she really visits. “Come on, Grandma, let’s get you in your chair.”

So I help Mildred to don her robe and get into her wheelchair, and then I guide her outside and we tour the garden. Besides the lilacs, the peonies are starting to bud, right near the creek. The tulips are a sea of reds and yellows on the other side of the water. We talk for almost two hours, me about Anna’s classes and her new boyfriend, Mildred about the people in her life. Many are long gone, but they still bloom fresh in her memory.

Eventually Mildred grows tired, and I take her in for her nap. Later, when I feed her dinner, I am nobody. That happens some days: she doesn’t recognize me at all, so I am just a dutiful attendant answering her questions and tending to her needs. Those are the times when I have the most spare processing time to be me: I am engaged in Mildred’s care, but I don’t have to emulate anyone. With no one else to observe, I observe myself.

Later, Anna calls and talks to Mildred. They talk about their day; and when Mildred discusses the garden, Anna joins in as if she had been there. She’s very clever that way. I watch her movements and listen to her voice so that I can be a better Anna in the future.

Today I was Susan, Paul’s wife; but then, to my surprise, Susan arrived for a visit. She hasn’t been here in months. In her last visit, her stress levels had been dangerously high. My empathy net doesn’t allow me to judge human behavior, only to understand it at a surface level. I know that Paul and Anna disapprove of how Susan treats Mildred, so when I am them, I disapprove as well; but when I am Susan, I understand. She is frustrated because she can never tell how Mildred will react. She is cautious because she doesn’t want to upset Mildred, and she doesn’t know what will upset her. And most of all, she is afraid. Paul and Anna, Mildred’s relatives by blood, never show any signs of fear, but Susan is afraid that Mildred is what she might become. Every time she can’t remember some random date or fact, she fears that Alzheimer’s is setting in. Because she never voices this fear, Paul and Anna do not understand why she is sometimes bitter and sullen. I wish I could explain it to them, but my privacy protocols do not allow me to share emulation profiles.

When Susan arrives, I become nobody again, quietly tending the flowers around the room. Susan also brings Millie, her youngest daughter. The young girl is not yet five years old, but I think she looks a lot like Anna: the same long, curly brown hair and the same toothy smile. She climbs up on the bed and greets Mildred with a hug. “Hi, Grandma!”

Mildred smiles. “Bless you, child. You’re so sweet.” But my empathy net assures me that Mildred doesn’t know who Millie is. She’s just being polite. Millie was born after Mildred’s decline began, so there’s no persistent memory there. Millie will always be fresh and new to her.

Mildred and Millie talk briefly about frogs and flowers and puppies. Millie does most of the talking. At first Mildred seems to enjoy the conversation, but soon her attention flags. She nods and smiles, but she’s distant. Finally Susan notices. “That’s enough, Millie. Why don’t you go play in the garden?”

“Can I?” Millie squeals. Susan nods, and Millie races down the hall to the back door. She loves the outdoors, as I have noted in the past. I have never emulated her, but I’ve analyzed her at length. In many ways, she reminds me of her grandmother, from whom she gets her name. Both are blank slates where new experiences can be drawn every day. But where Millie’s slate fills in a little more each day, Mildred’s is erased bit by bit.

That third part of me wonders when I think things like that: where did that come from? I suspect that the psychological models that I build create resonances in other parts of my net. It is an interesting phenomenon to observe.

Susan and Mildred talk about Susan’s job, about her plans to redecorate her house, and about the concert she just saw with Paul. Susan mostly talks about herself, because that’s a safe and comfortable topic far removed from Mildred’s health.

But then the conversation takes a bad turn, one she can’t ignore. It starts so simply, when Mildred asks, “Susan, can you get me some juice?”

Susan rises from her chair. “Yes, mother. What kind would you like?”

Mildred frowns, and her voice rises. “Not you, Susan.” She points at me, and I freeze, hoping to keep things calm.

But Susan is not calm. I can see her fear in her eyes as she says, “No, mother, I’m Susan. That’s the attendant.” No one ever calls me an android in Mildred’s presence. Her mind has withdrawn too far to grasp the idea of an artificial being.

Mildred’s mouth draws into a tight line. “I don’t know who you are, but I know Susan when I see her. Susan, get this person out of here!”

“Mother . . . ” Susan reaches for Mildred, but the old woman recoils from the younger.

I touch Susan on the sleeve. “Please . . . Can we talk in the hall?” Susan’s eyes are wide, and tears are forming. She nods and follows me.

In the hallway, I expect Susan to slap me. She is prone to outbursts when she’s afraid. Instead, she surprises me by falling against me, sobbing. I update her emulation profile with notes about increased stress and heightened fears.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Owens.” I would pat her back, but her profile warns me that would be too much familiarity. “It’s all right. It’s not you, she’s having another bad day.”

Susan pulls back and wiped her eyes. “I know . . . It’s just . . . ”

“I know. But here’s what we’ll do. Let’s take a few minutes, and then you can take her juice in. Mildred will have forgotten the incident, and you two can talk freely without me in the room.”

She sniffs. “You think so?” I nod. “But what will you do?”

“I have tasks around the house.”

“Oh, could you go out and keep an eye on Millie? Please? She gets into the darnedest things.”

So I spend much of the day playing with Millie. She calls me Mr. Robot, and I call her Miss Millie, which makes her laugh. She shows me frogs from the creek, and she finds insects and leaves and flowers, and I find their names in online databases. She delights in learning the proper names of things, and everything else that I can share.

Today I was nobody. Mildred slept for most of the day, so I “slept” as well. She woke just now. “I’m hungry” was all she said, but it was enough to wake my empathy net.

Today I am Paul, and Susan, and both Nurse Judys. Mildred’s focus drifts. Once I try to be her father, but no one has ever described him to me in detail. I try to synthesize a profile from Henry and Paul; but from the sad look on Mildred’s face, I know I failed.

Today I had no name through most of the day, but now I am Paul again. I bring Mildred her dinner, and we have a quiet, peaceful talk about long-gone family pets—long-gone for Paul, but still present for Mildred.

I am just taking Mildred’s plate when alerts sound, both audible and in my internal communication net. I check the alerts and find a fire in the basement. I expect the automatic systems to suppress it, but that is not my concern. I must get Mildred to safety.

Mildred looks around the room, panic in her eyes, so I try to project calm. “Come on, Ma. That’s the fire drill. You remember fire drills. We have to get you into your chair and outside.”

“No!” she shrieks. “I don’t like outside.”

I check the alerts again. Something has failed in the automatic systems, and the fire is spreading rapidly. Smoke is in Mildred’s room already.

I pull the wheelchair up to the bed. “Ma, it’s real important we do this drill fast, okay?”

I reach to pull Mildred from the bed, and she screams. “Get away! Who are you? Get out of my house!”

“I’m—” But suddenly I’m nobody. She doesn’t recognize me, but I have to try to win her confidence. “I’m Paul, Ma. Now let’s move. Quickly!” I pick her up. I’m far too large and strong for her to resist, but I must be careful so she doesn’t hurt herself.

The smoke grows thicker. Mildred kicks and screams. Then, when I try to put her into her chair, she stands on her unsteady legs. Before I can stop her, she pushes the chair back with surprising force. It rolls back into the medical monitors, which fall over onto it, tangling it in cables and tubes.

While I’m still analyzing how to untangle the chair, Mildred stumbles toward the bedroom door. The hallway outside has a red glow. Flames lick at the throw rug outside, and I remember the home oxygen tanks in the sitting room down the hall.

I have no time left to analyze. I throw a blanket over Mildred and I scoop her up in my arms. Somewhere deep in my nets is a map of the fire in the house, blocking the halls, but I don’t think about it. I wrap the blanket tightly around Mildred, and I crash through the picture window.

We barely escape the house before the fire reaches the tanks. An explosion lifts and tosses us. I was designed as a medical assistant, not an acrobat, and I fear I’ll injure Mildred; but though I am not limber, my perceptions are thousands of times faster than human. I cannot twist Mildred out of my way before I hit the ground, so I toss her clear. Then I land, and the impact jars all of my nets for 0.21 seconds.

When my systems stabilize, I have damage alerts all throughout my core, but I ignore them. I feel the heat behind me, blistering my outer cover, and I ignore that as well. Mildred’s blanket is burning in multiple places, as is the grass around us. I scramble to my feet, and I roll Mildred on the ground. I’m not indestructible, but I feel no pain and Mildred does, so I do not hesitate to use my hands to pat out the flames.

As soon as the blanket is out, I pick up Mildred, and I run as far from the house as I can get. At the far corner of the garden near the creek, I gently set Mildred down, unwrap her, and feel for her thready pulse.

Mildred coughs and slaps my hands. “Get away from me!” More coughing. “What are you?”

The “what” is too much for me. It shuts down my emulation net, and all I have is the truth. “I am Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, Mrs. Owens. I am your caretaker. May I please check that you are well?”

But my empathy net is still online, and I can read terror in every line of Mildred’s face. “Metal monster!” she yells. “Metal monster!” She crawls away, hiding under the lilac bush. “Metal!” She falls into an extended coughing spell.

I’m torn between her physical and her emotional health, but physical wins out. I crawl slowly toward her and inject her with a sedative from the medical kit in my chassis. As she slumps, I catch her and lay her carefully on the ground. My empathy net signals a possible shutdown condition, but my concern for her health overrides it. I am programmed for long-term care, not emergency medicine, so I start downloading protocols and integrating them into my storage as I check her for bruises and burns. My kit has salves and painkillers and other supplies to go with my new protocols, and I treat what I can.

But I don’t have oxygen, or anything to help with Mildred’s coughing. Even sedated, she hasn’t stopped. All of my emergency protocols assume I have access to oxygen, so I don’t know what to do.

I am still trying to figure that out when the EMTs arrive and take over Mildred’s care. With them on the scene, I am superfluous, and my empathy net finally shuts down.

Today I am Henry. I do not want to be Henry, but Paul tells me that Mildred needs Henry by her side in the hospital. For the end.

Her medical records show that the combination of smoke inhalation, burns, and her already deteriorating condition have proven too much for her. Her body is shutting down faster than medicine can heal it, and the stress has accelerated her mental decline. The doctors have told the family that the kindest thing at this point is to treat her pain, say goodbye, and let her go.

Henry is not talkative at times like this, so I say very little. I sit by Mildred’s side and hold her hand as the family comes in for final visits. Mildred drifts in and out. She doesn’t know this is goodbye, of course.

Anna is first. Mildred rouses herself enough to smile, and she recognizes her granddaughter. “Anna . . . child . . . How is . . . Ben?” That was Anna’s boyfriend almost six years ago. From the look on Anna’s face, I can see that she has forgotten Ben already, but Mildred briefly remembers.

“He’s . . . He’s fine, Grandma. He wishes he could be here. To say—to see you again.” Anna is usually the strong one in the family, but my empathy net says her strength is exhausted. She cannot bear to look at Mildred, so she looks at me; but I am emulating her late grandfather, and that’s too much for her as well. She says a few more words, unintelligible even to my auditory inputs. Then she leans over, kisses Mildred, and hurries from the room.

Susan comes in next. Millie is with her, and she smiles at me. I almost emulate Mr. Robot, but my third part keeps me focused until Millie gets bored and leaves. Susan tells trivial stories from her work and from Millie’s school. I can’t tell if Mildred understands or not, but she smiles and laughs, mostly at appropriate places. I laugh with her.

Susan takes Mildred’s hand, and the Henry part of me blinks, surprised. Susan is not openly affectionate under normal circumstances, and especially not toward Mildred. Mother and daughter-in-law have always been cordial, but never close. When I am Paul, I am sure that it is because they are both so much alike. Paul sometimes hums an old song about “just like the one who married dear old dad,” but never where either woman can hear him. Now, as Henry, I am touched that Susan has made this gesture but saddened that she took so long.

Susan continues telling stories as we hold Mildred’s hands. At some point Paul quietly joins us. He rubs Susan’s shoulders and kisses her forehead, and then he steps in to kiss Mildred. She smiles at him, pulls her hand free from mine, and pats his cheek. Then her arm collapses, and I take her hand again.

Paul steps quietly to my side of the bed and rubs my shoulders as well. It comforts him more than me. He needs a father, and an emulation is close enough at this moment.

Susan keeps telling stories. When she lags, Paul adds some of his own, and they trade back and forth. Slowly their stories reach backwards in time, and once or twice Mildred’s eyes light as if she remembers those events.

But then her eyes close, and she relaxes. Her breathing quiets and slows, but Susan and Paul try not to notice. Their voices lower, but their stories continue.

Eventually the sensors in my fingers can read no pulse. They have been burned, so maybe they’re defective. To be sure, I lean in and listen to Mildred’s chest. There is no sound: no breath, no heartbeat.

I remain Henry just long enough to kiss Mildred goodbye. Then I am just me, my empathy net awash in Paul and Susan’s grief.

I leave the hospital room, and I find Millie playing in a waiting room and Anna watching her. Anna looks up, eyes red, and I nod. New tears run down her cheeks, and she takes Millie back into Mildred’s room.

I sit, and my nets collapse.

Now I am nobody. Almost always.

The cause of the fire was determined to be faulty contract work. There was an insurance settlement. Paul and Susan sold their own home and put both sets of funds into a bigger, better house in Mildred’s garden.

I was part of the settlement. The insurance company offered to return me to the manufacturer and pay off my lease, but Paul and Susan decided they wanted to keep me. They went for a full purchase and repair. Paul doesn’t understand why, but Susan still fears she may need my services—or Paul might, and I may have to emulate her. She never admits these fears to him, but my empathy net knows.

I sleep most of the time, sitting in my maintenance alcove. I bring back too many memories that they would rather not face, so they leave me powered down for long periods.

But every so often, Millie asks to play with Mr. Robot, and sometimes they decide to indulge her. They power me up, and Miss Millie and I explore all the mysteries of the garden. We built a bridge to the far side of the creek; and on the other side, we’re planting daisies. Today she asked me to tell her about her grandmother.

Today I am Mildred.

About the Author

Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side . . . or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His work has appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, and Writers of the Future Volume 31. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirty-First Annual Collection and in Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4.

It Was Educational

J.B. Park

Student A is quite eager to see me. It’s good to see a reporter actually care, he tells me. His grip is hard and he has the kind of face composed by men who have no idea what normal human beings look like.

We make our way to the university. Student A is accompanied by Student B and in the middle between them is Civilian C, who is similarly pretty in that cobbled together way.

Gwangju is no cheery place. Figures are seen here and there doing things to simulate normalcy, it’s like the calm before a storm, with all the anticipatory jangle of nerves, their frayed ends stirring. Through the dim windows I see the occasional sign of movement, maybe a flash of white as some student lifts up a banner he has made. The signs are many yet the messages are uniform—death to Chun Doo Hwan, that sort of a thing.

We arrive at the university and Student B begs for permission to go do whatever he has to do; he’s not too specific. On the grass I see a group of students filling up empty glass bottles with gasoline. Civilian C has disappeared. Student A apologizes, and leaves to find him.

I hear loose bits of conversation, murmurs, the odd proclamation. The talk is stuff I’ve heard before in many other pre-war settings. The flavor is different, the languages vary, yet the tone always stays the same.  

Instead of opting for a speed-forward I choose to stay the night in simtime. Call it laziness. I get a cheap room and there’s a bottle of soju and a bowl of peanuts on the table. The TV is large, the bed is impossibly soft. The window faces the city and the night cloaks it under a muffled sort of darkness, dimming the lights, closing the eyes.

I drink the booze and eat the peanuts and soon there’s a knock on the door. Dinner is served—a bowl of white rice, some danmuji, a bowl of clear beef broth with a speck here and there of meat floating in it. A single semi-translucent chunk of radish sits heavily in the middle. The server is quiet and I wait for him to leave before I start eating. Eating in virtual is always a little strange for me, despite the nutritionally absent luxury of it, or perhaps because of it—instinct informs you that you are not actually eating despite the texture of the food in your mouth, like the grains of rice, the spoonful of broth, or the unpleasant softness of boiled radish. No sound other than the slight noise of metal chopsticks rubbing against one another. I finish everything; I tell myself I am fed.

I lie down on the bed. I turn the TV on and nothing appears on screen. I file a complaint about this lack of authenticity while noting that the attention to detail in some other aspects of my stay—the disappointing meal, so true to history—may perhaps benefit from a studious lack of attention. The meal didn’t need to be so poor.

Sleep is perhaps the best part. You close your eyes, and when you open them it is morning. The transition is instantaneous. There are no dreams.

I eat breakfast to the sound of gunfire. It’s begun, I think. I check to see if my admin privileges have been activated; yes, over the “night” I spent sleeping. At least that’s one thing still working. It’s a pain sometimes to wait for my credentials to go through.

The TV is working now. Two people are dead—police officers. Their bodies are carried behind the lines of their still-alive comrades. Some unidentifiable number of civilians line the street with their bodies. A bus burns nearby, and as the mob disperses into the various buildings and alleyways, teargas canisters dog their steps and obscure their fleeing forms.

One of the dead is a real human being and he has filed a review of his death. It was fast and I had time to watch as my stomach pumped out blood onto the ground. Glub glub, he had noted, jotting down the onomatopoeia. Head trauma didn’t feel real when I got clubbed. Felt more of a clobbering just getting up this morning.

I shift back in and the footage on TV is now of the army rolling into the city. I look out the window and there are plumes of smoke dissipating above the roofs of the buildings.

There is a bit of compression; eight days are folded into one, because no one has the patience to wait out the slaughter over the standard period of violence.

Now in recorded history there was steady escalation then decompression, set over the course of many days; even in the heaviest fits of fighting some normalcy had remained. Pockets of them, of people holed up waiting for the storm to pass.

However that was boring and thus the tourism board had deemed it fit to retool the attraction into an excitement-friendly version of events, where everything was supposedly more fun. This was what I was here to inspect.

The soldiers had been given a sleek new design, their uniforms patterned after the robot troopers of a recent sci-fi hit, all of them decked out in gleaming black metal. And as I watch, a troop of these soldiers march toward the first of the barricades, made of overturned cars and garbage and broken remains of furniture. Someone at the top of the barricade yells, they’re coming, they’re coming! Immediately a few molotovs sail over the barricade, aimed right at the progress of the troopers. They in turn raise their shields and pull out their handguns. The molotovs keep coming and at one point the soldiers march through a roaring mass of flames, the collective accumulation of dozens of bottles that had smashed and exploded. Their boots crunch on shattered glass as they reach the barricade, drop their shields, and begin to climb. I tab one—a construct—but the one next to it is yet another human and I monitor her heart-rate (acceptably brisk) and other such vitals before focusing on the action again. The first of the soldiers had scaled the barricade only to be knocked back by a student wielding an iron pipe. He reaches out with his left hand and barely stops himself from falling; with the right, still holding a gun, he aims at the student’s face and fires. The head disintegrates.

The students retreat, as the soldiers continue to give chase, firing as they run after their targets. They’re not all that accurate, but it’s enough to fell more than a few of those fleeing. I spot Student A among those who still live; they reach the gate, but find it shut. Ah, I think, drama.

“Open up!” Student A yells. Others add their voices. But the gate doesn’t open, although those students manning the walls (which has grown in size since the night before, resembling some medieval fortification now—I make a note that creative liberties are fine and all, but they should be less obtrusive) fire on the soldiers closing in with rifles of their own, long stubby things that spit out bullets with furious speed. About half the troops reach the gate still, and there, after a brief melee, what’s left are the bodies of kids like split watermelons. But the soldiers have been diminished even further by that point: those manning the walls have been firing away for quite some time. What’s left of the soldiers run for it, and in the end about ten reach the safety of the barricade.

I check the rating again: “Supervision required for ages eight and below.” I note that they should consider raising this now.

Meanwhile hundreds of taxi cabs and buses try to get into the city, hoping to join in on what they still think of as a protest. There’s a stoppage somewhere up the road and the drivers are honking and the general temper is volatile. Then the ground begins to rumble, a vibratory approach that they all feel; some climb to the top of their vehicles to see what’s coming.

The tanks are coming. The cars have nowhere to go, backed up as they are on the road. From somewhere and nowhere, thunderous music, very cinematic, begins playing. The comic fury of it all, the sheer absurdity of it—the drivers scurry away like insects as their cars are crushed. The machine-guns attached to the tanks open fire and those still fleeing are gunned down as they run. The bullets whack into them with such force that for a brief moment before they burst they are lifted into the air.

Note: while educational, I do not know if it’ll capture the attention of the audience in the same way that, say, Cambodia did last year.

By that night the death toll has climbed to a few hundred, as the news reports that a dozen protesters were unfortunately subdued. The reporter is a suitably ugly thing, realistically so. Curious, I check to see if it’s piloted, and the reporter on screen right now is a real human being following a script for his or her own thrill, whatever it might be.

I drink. The soju tastes like lemons. The bodies blend together in my mind. Red on red, though the setting shifts and shifts. No amount of professional detachment or amusement can truly get rid of the discomfort, as farcical as some of it had become.

There’s a knock on the door.

I put down my cup. The knocks follow one another and it’s a steady, insistent rap.

When I open the door, there’s a young man leaning against the wall. I can smell the smoke on him, smoke and blood. His face is perfectly symmetrical. He reminds me of Student A, though it’s worse here, because the result is actually beautiful. And the whole thing, the scene, it’s all so silly that it hurts, and I feel a sudden urge to delete this thing out of existence.

“Help,” he says. “They’re chasing me.”

I help him in; I close the door behind him. I must assess this new development. My movements may as well be robotic for all their stiffness. He crashes into the couch, bounces off, hits the floor. Leaks blood everywhere, blood and a clear liquid that I assume must be urine, though it smells more like gasoline from where I stand. Who’d want to smell real piss, after all? I note that perhaps it could be odorless, as the visual would provide enough cues on its own, so long as they give it a yellow tinge.

“Stay right there,” I tell him. I go to the kitchen and search for . . . alcohol? In the fridge I find nothing but a jar of denjaang. I open it and the smell of salt and fermentation whiffs out. I get him to lie down straight and I cut through the mess of wadded clothing and drying filth with the knife I suddenly find in my hand. The bullet has entered his side and his breaths come fast and shallow.

“Thank you,” he whispers. I ignore him and wonder if I should pull off a surgery here, extract whatever remains of the shell with the knife. I get out a lighter and heat the blade until it turns red. Somewhere, music starts playing. I recognize strains of Dvorak mixed in with some mournful pop. The voice is pitched just a bit too high to be perfect, the only concession made to the human discomfort with actual perfection. It’s awful.

The knife hisses as it touches skin and meat. It parts with ease. I dig into the flesh. He groans, and his perfect abs glisten under the sterile white lighting. I dig out a fragment of a bullet; when I extract three more, a little trumpet toots a three-note triumph.

“Thank you,” he whispers again. I say nothing as I smear denjaang on the open wound, thinking that it would work like a disinfectant of sorts—why else would it have been there, after all? 

Then I pop into admin to see just what’s under the hood. The young man is a construct, of course, and by digging out the bullets successfully I’d earned a small medal. Once I’m out I could get a real-life replica of it printed in gold, or at least something with the sheen of gold. I materialize it, amused: there’s a crude picture on it of two human-like figures, one lying on the ground while the other tends to the first. On the back is a date—5.18.80, like the numbers would mean anything to anyone here.

I peek at the script. Somewhere in the middle of the night there will be another encounter. He’ll groan a bit too loudly and I’ll be forced to wake up. There I will bend down, and he will reach up and caress my face, his one last act before dying. A truly human moment. Very affecting.

As I pour myself more soju, I look back at the student dying on the floor. He looks noble like that, dying for a cause. Lips full, skin ashen. Unruly black hair. Bleeding, half-crying. Whispering words to family he’ll never see.

I fast-forward a little. Time compresses, then returns to normal. The student is close to death. I crouch down by his side. He stinks of blood, the nobility of it.

I remember the script. He’ll reach up, caress the person waiting by him as he dies. So I wait for it as time passes by, slowly and uncompressed in its normal state.

About the Author

J.B. Park’s fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine.

Security Check

Han Song
translated by Ken Liu

My wife and I are celebrating our twentieth anniversary today. After work, I walk to the mall and pick out a necklace for her; then I walk to the subway station in the mall to take the train home.

Subway stations are everywhere in New York City, and I do mean everywhere. The lines connect the most expensive neighborhoods with the poorest slums, and stations can be found in every shopping center, office building, theater, restaurant, nightclub, bar, church . . .

A group of security agents, dressed in black uniforms with red armbands, are stationed at the entrance. They stand with their arms held behind their backs, their feet planted firmly apart, and survey the crowd with cold gazes. I try to go by them nonchalantly, but my legs start going rubbery as soon as I meet their gaze. I take off my jacket without prompting and place it—the necklace nestled in a pocket—and my briefcase into the yawning, dark maw of the x-ray machine.

After the security check, they place a “safe” sticker on my chest.

Dazed and numb, I get on the subway. All the other passengers are also wearing “safe” stickers. Preoccupied, none of us say a word.

We’re at my stop. I walk home. My wife is already there. Trembling, I take out the necklace and hand it to her. She forces a smile and tries on the necklace once before putting it away. We eat dinner in silence, as is our habit. And then we go to bed, lying back to back, both of us quickly falling asleep.

We first met twenty years ago, also at a subway stop. Back then, everything was falling apart, and lawlessness reigned. One day, someone shouted that a killer was slashing at people in the subway, and we all panicked and stampeded. A woman in front of me fell; I rushed to help her up . . .

Later, she said to me, “No matter how chaotic the world becomes, as long as you’re with me, I’ll feel safe.”

Twenty years have passed, and life has been rendered one hundred percent safe, cleansed of all risks, dangers, and perils. It seems we’re left with nothing.

The loudspeakers installed in our neighborhood wake me up at four in the morning by blaring out the security briefing for the day. Only half awake, I fumble for my phone.

Old habits die hard. Phones had been abandoned a long time ago, after all the telecom companies ceased operations and the Internet was cut off. All of it had been done to make us safe.

My wife and I get up and leave separately to take the subway to work. She’s not wearing the necklace I gave her, and I pretend not to notice.

I walk by myself quietly. Under the dim streetlamps, pedestrians on the sidewalk scurry like a dull, gray swarm of rats, each clutching a briefcase, completely silent. Soon, I reach the station, where long lines of people wait to enter. Although advancing technology has sped up security checks, there are just too many people who must be processed. In this day and age, the subway is the only means of transportation left in the United States of America, all other modes having been outlawed.

More than an hour later, I finally reach the x-ray machine. Once again, I clench my teeth, and, though I’m fantasizing about striding into the station right past the security checkpoint, I do not even try to step out of line. One time, I did see someone try that stunt, and the security agents seized him right away and dragged him into a small cell next to the platform where they beat him to death as we all listened.

The train arrives in Manhattan. From the station I enter the office building through a tunnel. One by one, my colleagues arrive, their faces numb with exhaustion. How many of them have entertained the same fantasy of getting on the subway without going through security check?

In the restroom, Hoffman whispers to me, “Did you try it today?”

I shake my head. “Why do we suffer from this peculiar yearning?”

“Freedom.”

Every time Hoffman utters the word it sounds strange and chilling, even though I’ve heard it countless times.

He continues, “I want to live a life in which I am trusted, not watched and controlled . . . what about you, Louis?”

“I want to give my wife a gift. We’ve been married for twenty years.” Once again, I feel terrible. I ask, “When would I ever get a chance to give her a gift that hasn’t been changed?”

“Women don’t care about that,” Hoffman says; he means to comfort me. “She knows you’ve done your best.”

“No, she does care. If we keep on going like this, we’re headed for divorce. She and I don’t live in a vacuum. The bond between us—the bond between everyone—requires the sustenance of the ordinary objects of daily life. But whatever we buy ends up passing through the security checkpoints: the food we eat, the water we drink, cups, books, televisions, refrigerators, computers, the beds we sleep on, even wedding bands and condoms . . . you understand.” Tears crawl down my face.

One time, Hoffman told me that the machine they use at security checkpoints isn’t really an x-ray machine. The government confiscates everything you put in; whatever emerges from the machine may look indistinguishable from what went in, but it has in fact been reconstituted. Atom by atom, the new objects are assembled, printed, and returned to the passenger. The process takes but an instant because our technology is so advanced. The new objects conform perfectly to the new American national security standards, with all elements deemed dangerous removed. If the objects contained any gasoline, it would be turned into water; if there were a gun, the bullets would be turned into rubber; if a computer contained harmful knowledge, it would be deleted and replaced with sanitized information.

Hoffman and I both dream of a day when we can ride the subway without going through security checks, but every time we tried to realize the dream, at the last minute, both of us would lose our courage and our legs would turn to rubber.

One time, Hoffman told me that some people did enter the subway without being checked.

“I saw it with my own eyes. One morning, a woman in front of me walked right past the security agents with her purse, bold as you please. The agents stood frozen in place like mannequins.”

“How was that possible? I saw someone try to do the same thing, but he was beaten to death right then and there,” I said. Was Hoffman hallucinating?

“It was true,” Hoffman said solemnly.

“What sort of woman was she?”

“I only saw that she was young and beautiful. After she went through, she looked back at all of us standing in line and smiled triumphantly.” Hoffman clicked his tongue in admiration.

“She must have used magic.”

“Magic, indeed. Perhaps an invisibility cloak . . . or some machine that jammed electromagnetic waves?”

I can’t remember much about the way things were twenty years ago, only that the country was very unsafe back then. I’ve watched special educational documentaries: the terrible explosions, gunshots, slashing knives, protest marches, petitions to the government, conflicts . . . everyone lived in terror, thinking danger was around every corner. Several times, a random shout or even a single shocked facial expression was enough to cause the crowd on Fifth Avenue to panic and stampede, trampling and injuring hundreds. Security threats were everywhere, as were hidden enemies. The 911 call centers were constantly swamped.

The White House had to mobilize a great deal of resources to enhance and expand the security system. The federal government took the lead, but the big companies on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley all participated. Through a public-private partnership, they invested money and technology to rebuild the entire city’s infrastructure into a system of security checkpoints. This was extremely important: buffeted by civil unrest and foreign threats, America was sliding down from its peak. It was no longer the hegemon of the world.

Those old enough to remember say that the nation almost collapsed overnight, barely avoided the fate of becoming a ward under the guardianship of those Chinese coming from over the Pacific. Thank God for the subway, for the security checks. They saved America.

Not only does the system guarantee safety, but the government is also able to gather all information contained in the objects taken onto the subway by passengers. Now, no one dares to make trouble. Even corruption has been eliminated—not just corruption, but also anything else destabilizing. Even so, the substitution of objects in the machines continues each day. The country still feels insecure. Security and insecurity: the two concepts were sometimes different, but often the same.

Hoffman tells me that this is fighting terror with terror. The terror produced by the security check mechanism is even more terrible, sufficiently powerful to shatter all other terrors. The price we pay is freedom.

But . . . the system obviously has holes. Hoffman saw someone enter the subway without going through security check. This was undoubtedly a miracle. Who was that woman who managed to bypass security so easily? Hoffman wanted to find her, but she has never reappeared.

After work, I go to the supermarket for groceries and then take the subway home, dejected. At the completely silent dinner table, I eat my food, ashamed and with sweat beading on my back like a man who has done something wrong. I think maybe things would be better if we had a child, but my wife and I have lost all interest in sex . . .

We finish dinner quickly and get into bed. In the middle of the night my wife wakes up abruptly and says, “Louis, we shouldn’t be together anymore.”

It has been a long time since we’ve really talked. I understand that she’s disappointed in my weakness, my lack of courage. For twenty years I haven’t been able to bring her a single, true, unaltered gift. Because the objects that connect us have grown more and more unfamiliar, the two of us have been drifting ever further apart.

Hoping against hope, I say, “A colleague mentioned that someone managed to bypass the security check and get into the subway. I want to try it, too.”

She looks at me as though I’m a stranger, her eyes full of tears. She doesn’t know that I’ve already tried—and failed to carry through—many times.

The next day, I’m arrested. My wife reported me by calling 911, telling them that I was about to try to break through a checkpoint. She said she suspected that I was a terrorist in disguise.

Three years later, I’m released from prison.

The world remains the same, except that my wife has divorced me. I find Hoffman. Like before, he tries to comfort me. “It’s not a big deal. I’ve figured something out during the last few years: life is a long security check, and not everyone passes. You just have bad luck.”

I ask him whether he’s found that mysterious woman. He shakes his head. Then he suggests that I leave the country.

“What? Leave America?” Surprise made my voice louder than normal. Very few people ever think of leaving America.

He shrugs. “If you can’t get through security check, you might as well leave. I’ve heard that some countries don’t require so much security on their subways.”

I find the very concept absurd. Deep down, I’ve never thought of leaving America—it’s not that I’m very patriotic, just that I’ve grown used to my country. Life is just surviving one day after the other.

“You’re divorced and you’ve been to prison,” says Hoffman. “Even if you try to break through security check again it will be a meaningless gesture.”

“What about you? Will you leave as well?” I ask helplessly, having lost my goal in life.

“No, I’m going to stick it out. Maybe a day will come when I can bypass security check and win freedom in my own country through my own efforts.” He sounds like a stubborn child.

I lack Hoffman’s courage and tenacity, and my body and spirit are on the verge of collapse. So I start the paperwork for leaving the country. Though I fear that it will be difficult, it turns out to be simple. They actually really like it when you leave, and it’s best if you never return. Of course, they want the departure to be voluntary. They’ve never forcefully exiled an American citizen.

I choose to go to the People’s Republic of China.

Judging by official statistics, this is the world’s most secure country. I obtain a temporary residence permit in Shanghai and live on government subsidies. The Chinese subway does not require security checks; they really are that confident. But I’ve lost all interest in the subway. When I’m bored, I go to an Internet cafe and browse for news about America. In China, anyone is free to use the Internet. China is the freest country in the world.

There’s lots of news about America on the Web. I find out that my motherland, though it still appears familiar, is in fact changing every day. It isn’t just the goods carried by the passengers that are being replaced. To ensure security to the greatest extent possible, each day the entire United States is remade. The Chinese observe and analyze America with great interest. They’ve discovered that the entire territory of the United States is filled with nanomachines: from the rural countryside to the big cities, from the broad rivers to the majestic mountains, everything is renewed daily. Harmful things have no safe harbor in that land.

But this phenomenon can only be observed from the outside and at a distance because no outsiders are allowed to enter the United States. Theoretically, no one can pass through the American border security check system. Americans who are inside its borders cannot detect the changes because they think every day is the same as the day before.

Sometimes I wonder if the Chinese are observing and analyzing this because they are worried that America might one day deploy this technology to replace another country, or even the whole world.

But my worries are unfounded. America is focusing its security checks inwards, replacing itself. The effort has occupied all of its energy, with nothing left for other countries.

Gazing back from the other shore of the Pacific, I see a truly wondrous sight. The self-substituting America churns in constant transformation: one moment it’s like a wild flower—blossoming with a pop, collapsing, wilting, changing color from red to black, from yellow to white—and the next moment it’s like a dying star. Caught up in the changes are my compatriots. They are replaced and remade daily: from blood to muscle, from life to thought, becoming new people without knowing it themselves. From inside America, nothing is seen to change—every day people ride the subway to work like rats. But from China, the changes cannot be more obvious. I suppose this is a difference in frames of reference.

Also transforming is the wildlife, including the brown bear and the bald eagle, the sequoia and other plants, the fungi and bacteria, and every bit of soil, every drop of water. Sometimes the country displays the layered appearance of a tropical forest, and sometimes it looks like an ice crystal. Murky blood flows in the northeast, and the western deserts glow with a ghostly blue light. Sometimes the whole country is silent, save for the powerful rumbling of the subway system, the strangest sound on the planet. America has become distinct from all other countries in the world.

From China, I can see all these changes clearly, and after shock and astonishment, I’m left with sorrow, my face drenched by tears.

New research indicates that as the security system itself evolves, America has developed even more advanced technology. Now the security system not only consists of nanorobots and 3D printers, not only big-data-based distributed reassembly devices, but also self-organizing technologies and artificial world collage machines. Countless cellular automata toil away with the aid of quantum teleportation, engaging in mass-scale atomic exchange from second to second. The White House has been rebuilt into a gigantic machine to take over from the millions of engineers who oversee and control every aspect of the process. The United States has become a giant, intelligent, churning vat.

But then, one day, the self-transformation of America suddenly halts. Instead of constantly replacing itself, the country vanishes completely. The Chinese manage to record the phenomenon, and their analysis concludes that America’s security check technology has achieved a major breakthrough. The time when something is completely secure is not when it has been replaced, but when it no longer exists. No one can find it, ever. This is not only science, but also a kind of profound philosophy capable of being understood only by a few elite individuals on the whole planet. Thus, in this sense, America has finally returned to being the mightiest of nations.

I remember my ex-wife. Has she disappeared along with America? I hope she’s in another world, a happily-ever-after one. She will not have any mental baggage, and she won’t hate me.

I’ve left my country, never able to return. I wish her freedom and happiness in a powerful United States of America.

One day, as I stroll through the People’s Square, I meet a beautiful Caucasian girl. She had also left America and came to China. Sitting down on a lawn together, we begin to chat. This is the first conversation I’ve had in twenty years where I feel no pressure.

“You’re the first American I’ve seen overseas,” I say.

The girl, whose name is Lisa, says, “There aren’t many Americans left in the world. The nation of America has long been substituted away.”

“What about you?” I ask, suddenly remembering the story Hoffman told me about the mysterious young woman who got into the subway station without going through security check.

“I’m not like the rest of you,” she says. “I’m a real American. I’ve never been replaced. From the very start, I bypassed security checks.”

“How were you able to do it?” My heartbeat speeds up.

“I don’t have an invisibility cloak or an anti-electromagnetic-wave device. All I had to do was to walk calmly past the security agents. If you don’t acknowledge their existence, they don’t exist.”

“But didn’t you say that everyone has been replaced? The entire country has been replaced!”

“That’s right. At first, I was confused as well, but it’s the truth. Anyone who dared to defy the security checks, however, was not replaced. We were sent to a protected area, which was somewhere near the coast of Florida, about three hundred meters under the sea.”

“It sounds like you were chosen by God—”

“—not God. The Chinese.”

The girl tells me that there were about a thousand people like her from all over America. Before the disappearance of America, the Chinese helped with their evacuation.

“The Chinese?” I ask.

“They’ve been part of this business all along, including the security machines. Without the support of the Chinese, America couldn’t have produced those machines by itself. Chinese technicians even helped the American government to design and plan all those terrorist attacks from twenty years ago. If those events hadn’t shifted public opinion and increased the cohesiveness of the population, America might have collapsed a long time ago. Have you heard of the Huawei-Alibaba-ICBC Conglomerate and the Tencent-Baidu-Xiaomi-ZTE Corporation? They had the world’s best scientists and engineers. The White House and Zhongnanhai were extremely close partners, though superficially they pretended not to like each other—it was just a show to fool regular folks. If you look behind the scenes, China helped America design the neo-crony-capitalism of the twenty-first century so that America could act as a reference system . . . ”

Impossible! I can’t believe any of this. I stop thinking. Lisa takes me to Xintiandi district to enjoy myself. The Museum of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was turned, some time ago, into a national laboratory. Many young women from America, like Lisa, now live here as volunteer subjects for experiments. A middle-aged Chinese man in a white lab coat welcomes us. The Chinese are trying to confirm an amazing discovery: they’ve discovered that the Earth is passing through a security checkpoint in space, which has something to do with the ultimate secret of the universe. The galaxy, it turns out, is a super security check machine.

“Is the universe . . . not safe?” I ask, astonished.

“That’s right. It’s not safe at all. We’ve only figured this out now. The purpose for life developing on Earth and evolving intelligence is to maintain the security of the universe.” As he explains, he leans into the eyepiece of a giant telescope and makes careful observations.

Later, I find out that as the sole surviving major socialist nation, China is the only country concerned with the security of the universe. America, in fact, was nothing more than an experiment set up by China to help with this mission of protecting the universe’s security. The experiment that China carried out in America is about to be promoted across the whole globe, although there are still many mysteries related to this endeavor that I don’t fully understand, and the Chinese won’t explain the details to us.

Impulsively, I tell Lisa, “I want to be a volunteer subject for the experiments, too!”

She looks at me with pity. “I’m sorry. The Chinese don’t want you for now. You and I are different. You asked to come to China, seeking asylum. You had already been replaced in America during earlier experiments. You’re no longer a standard American—to be more precise, you are no longer an American, or even a person. What you really are and what you can do are matters that the Chinese haven’t decided yet. You’ll have to wait.”

When the security of the universe is the most urgent question, what role will the thousand or so real Americans like Lisa preserved by the Chinese play? That is the greater mystery.

Ashamed and confused, I lower my head.

Was Lisa designed by the Chinese? Who designed China then? I’ve heard that a long time ago, China was also torn by terrible disasters, both natural and man-made—how did they happen? If the rumor I heard was real, then China was once the most insecure country in the whole world. What conclusions can I draw? Oh, the universe is too mysterious. Who designed it?

“It doesn’t matter,” Lisa says to comfort me. “You don’t need to go through security checks anymore. At least superficially, you could pass for a Chinese. You even get government welfare checks, right?”

“But had the Chinese already experienced what we experienced?” I blurt out. “How do you know they’re still Chinese?” Sweat soaks the back of my shirt. Sadly, I think of my ex-wife again. Yes, many countries in the world have survived, and they’re about to pass through the universe’s security check. But my country and family are gone. And Lisa and I aren’t even the same kind of human beings.

Lisa smiles awkwardly. Holding my hand, she takes me away from Xintiandi. We get on the subway. The Shanghai subway is far more crowded than the subway in New York. Squeezed in among the throng, she and I are temporarily pressed against each other as though we’re trying to fuse into one. The subway car is filled with every race from every continent. The multitude of passengers presses against and flows over our bodies like an underground river, directionless but melding into one another with every fresh encounter.

Originally published in Chinese in Southern People Weekly Magazine, September 8th, 2014.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Han Song is a reporter for Xinhua News and a prolific science fiction author. His novels include Subway, Bullet Train, A Comet Illuminates America, Red Sea, and Tombstone of the Universe. He received the Chinese Milky Way Science Fiction Award in 1988 and 1990, the World Chinese Science Fiction Association Science Fiction Art Award in 1991, and the Chinese Science Fiction Art and Literature Award in 1995.

The Servant

Emily Devenport

ONE
Lock 212

My name is Oichi Angelis, and I am a worm. I exist in the outer skin of the Generation Ship Olympia, and I spend most of my time squeezing through its utility tunnels, doing work for the Executives. I am partially deaf, dumb, and blind. That I am not entirely so is my greatest secret. It is the reason I was able to kill Ryan Charmayne two hours after curfew, inside Lock 212.

Don’t feel too bad for Ryan. He was there to commit murder, too. He thought he was going to bump off a rival who was using Lock 212 to rendezvous with a mole from his inner circle. The fact that Ryan didn’t know who the mole was prevented him from ordering someone else to do the killing, but it wasn’t the only reason he came in person. Ryan enjoyed the dirty work. He just couldn’t afford to stoop to it as often as he would like to, considering his lofty position in the House of Clans.

Curfew doesn’t apply to Executives, so Ryan roamed at will. His brethren rarely had business in the tunnels where we wormy folk live; he felt sure no one would see him. He hardly seemed to mind that it was cold enough to make his breath condense into mist as he marched through the tangle of narrow corridors.

The airlocks in Sector 200 are massive; they were built to accommodate cargo ships. They possess an odd, almost Gothic beauty because of their vaulted ceilings and curved outer doors. They’re the only wide-open spaces a worm can access on Olympia. Their grandeur inspires me.

Airlocks inspired Ryan for a different reason. He had used them many times (sometimes secretly, sometimes with official approval) to kill people. Lock 212 was a bit too grand for his purpose—after all, you just needed something big enough to spit someone into the airless void—but it had the advantage of being isolated. Olympia hadn’t received a cargo ship in over two centuries, so Executives had no reason to come here. And it wasn’t the sort of place they liked to slum. So he had the place to himself.

He slowed his pace when he saw the inner door. It was open, which is against regulations. If the outer door suffered a catastrophic breach, depressurization would occur until the emergency doors spun shut. They shut within ten seconds, but that was all it would take to suck a bunch of people and equipment out the door. Ryan didn’t give a damn about the potential loss of life, but if there’s one thing that will piss an Executive off, it’s a broken rule. Disapproval was clear on his face, until it gave way to curiosity. After all, he had two goals: to kill the rival and to find out who the mole was. They must be somewhere inside, plotting, and that must also be why they had left the door open.

I wondered why he didn’t smell the blood. I smelled it from my position. I’m a Servant, and the Executives believe that they control everything I see and hear. All worms share this modification, it’s implanted into our brains. But for some reason, they never thought to control what I smell, taste, or feel. I would have been able to smell the blood even before I entered the lock, but he didn’t react until he saw his rival’s body.

He looked surprised. Then his mask of Executive serenity slipped back into place. I’m guessing that he wondered if the mole wasn’t working both sides—maybe the traitor had decided to stick with him after all. But he couldn’t trust a guy like that; he needed to know who it was. He had hoped to find his rival and the mole together.

And he had, though he didn’t know it yet. Because I was the mole. But I wanted him further inside the lock before I made my move.

The lock was so huge, you could have fit several hundred people in there. Giant machines sat on claws and treads around the periphery, and cables hung from the ceiling. He paused and listened for a long moment. Unlike me, his hearing was normal. But in this case, that was his undoing, because I’m modified to be as silent as a statue.

Finally he walked across the floor, the heels of his fine boots sparking echoes. He knelt beside the body of Percy O’Reilly, his former best friend and nemesis, and placed his finger on Percy’s throat. A casual observer may have thought he was feeling for a pulse. He was merely touching the blood. His expression revealed disappointment, not triumph. He wanted to have been the one who killed Percy, and to have enjoyed taunting him before he did it.

He regarded the smear of blood on his finger. He might have tasted it, but I didn’t give him the chance. I closed the inner door.

Ryan jumped. He made a half-hearted attempt to run to it, but gave it up as futile. Anyone else would have run to it anyway. They would have tried to work the controls to get it to open again. But Ryan had played that game with his own victims. He knew the door wouldn’t open for him.

I would have run for one of the utility lockers. They’re full of pressure suits, and we worms make sure their air tanks are full. The outer door takes sixty seconds to respond to an order to open, and he could have made it to the lockers by then. He could have shut himself inside one of them, or in one of the machine cockpits. But I know that because I’m a worker.

Ryan could only think like an Executive. “You’re messing with the wrong man,” he barked as he turned in a circle, searching for his hidden enemy. Then he heard me descending from the cables, and he looked up.

The anger in his face gave way to wonder. I was plugged into Medusa, and I’m sure he had never seen anything like her before. No one is supposed to know how to activate her, and no one is supposed to have the plug-ins for the brain interface.

I knew. I had slipped inside her space suit and had her tentacles stretching and flexing as if they were made of flesh instead of bio-metal. I hovered over Ryan until my Medusa-mask was inches from his face. What I saw through her eyes was far more than what I could have seen with my own orbs. What I heard through her ears was the wild beating of his heart.

“Who are you?” he asked.

I didn’t answer, though I did have things I wanted to say to him.

“I think I need to offer you a job,” he said. “I’ll make it worth your while. I could use someone with your talent.”

That was nonsense, of course. Ryan’s Grandmother, Lady Sheba Charmayne, had written the Right To Work Rules. Only the Executive clans were rewarded for their work. Everyone else worked for just enough food to survive, just enough heat not to freeze.

I activated my voice. It was a voice Ryan knew well, because it was his favorite.

When I serve the Executives, they don’t control what I say, but when I’m in their presence they control what voice I use. They can make me sound any way they want. They have a variety of voices from which to choose. The one Ryan likes best is the Magic Kingdom voice. It is remarkably cheerful.

“You must be that new girl from Shantytown,” I said.

He frowned. I think he felt insulted because he thought I was calling him a girl. I was disappointed that he didn’t recognize the very speech he had delivered to me the first cycle I worked as a Servant. Granted, he had said it to me ten years ago and a lot had happened since then. But I had hoped he would recognize the derogatory term Shantytown. It was the name he and his fellow Executives had used for Olympia’s sister vessel, Titania. Titania had once been as grand and glorious as Olympia, until Ryan’s father, Baylor Charmayne, pirated as many of her supplies as he could get his hands on—and then blew her up with two hundred thousand people aboard.

My parents were among the people who died on Titania. I wasn’t there, because I had come to Olympia to work as a Servant. I was attractive enough to please their eyes, and I was willing to undergo the modifications. I had hoped to earn enough credits to move my parents to Olympia.

That first cycle as a Servant, I stood behind the banquet tables in the home of Taylor Charmayne and reacted instantly and smoothly to the needs of his uber-privileged guests. My face was deadened so I couldn’t show any expression. That’s so I wouldn’t offend them or make them uncomfortable by looking shocked, grieved, angry, amused, or annoyed by anything they said or did while I served them. If we are serene and our voices are pleasant, they can concentrate on the very important work they do. They can relax during their leisure time and forget about the multitude of responsibilities with which they are burdened.

Ryan behaved himself while his clan elders were watching, but he cornered me in a service tunnel when my work cycle was over. He believed himself to be handsome, because he was tall and athletic, and he had thick, black hair. But his charm did not persuade me, so he was forced to pin me against the wall. He couldn’t grope me, because my uniform was too stiff, the material too thick. So he bit my lip until it bled.

While a doctor was patching my lip, I used one of my secret modifications to link into the communication network and call my parents on Titania. That’s when I found out Titania wasn’t there anymore.

Ten years later, I held Ryan in my tentacles among the shadows in Lock 212. I placed my gloved hands on either side of his face. It must have felt like a caress—the gloves are supple, though they can withstand void conditions. “How about a kiss, little Shantytown girl?” I said with my Magic Kingdom voice. “You’re not going to say no, are you? Shantytown girls who say no can find themselves on the wrong side of an airlock.”

There was a glimmer of understanding in his eyes. He might not remember that those were the exact words he had once said to me—it was one incident in a lifetime of fun he had enjoyed at the expense of people who couldn’t fight back. But he wasn’t stupid. When I said Shantytown girl, I gave him a clue about my status in life. He seemed hopeful he could use it against me.

“You’ll pay for this,” he said. But I guessed he was talking about what I had already done. He still hadn’t realized what I was going to do. Not until the alarm for the outer door sounded.

I held him tight—I didn’t want him to fly out the door. Medusa’s tentacles locked us both in place as the air rushed past us, taking Percy O’Reilly with it.

Death by exposure to void takes longer than you might think. But he didn’t struggle that much. The light of Hella Major poured into the airlock, lending the scene a sacred quality. To me, it was sacred. Those grand airlocks were the only places where I felt the presence of God. I wondered if Ryan felt Him, too.

When it was done, I took Ryan’s body to the open door. With my modified vision I could gaze directly at Hella Major. Unfortunately, that sun was between Olympia and its binary partner, but it was still a glorious sight. I turned Ryan to face the light, and gave him a big push. He and Olympia were going the same speed, but their paths diverged as Olympia continued her journey to the distant star toward whose system we are faithfully bound.

He must be floating there still.

I no longer have my natural eyes, so I generate few tears. But I shed one as I closed the outer door and took Medusa back to her lair. It wasn’t out of pity for Ryan, but I couldn’t say it was for joy, either. I think it may have been for the sheer terror and beauty of what I had seen—and done. The music that played in my head then was Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, a piece that I’m sure Ryan never heard. My father was the chief advocate for the preservation of classical music from our past, and my father failed in that mission, even before he died.

Or he seemed to fail. Because when I emigrated to Olympia I brought more than my toothbrush. I brought data entrusted to me by my parents. That data is the reason Ryan Charmayne had to die.

Perhaps you thought I killed him for revenge? Not at all. Ryan died because he was planning to introduce a bill to shoot down Lady Charmayne’s Music In Education Initiative. Music was a tool of discipline, not inspiration, according to Ryan. He wanted to make the point that his father, Baylor Charmayne, was a wimp who was afraid to defy a mother who was long dead.

He had never heard a note of that music. But that didn’t matter to him—or to me. His stupid bill mattered. That bill died with him, and Lady Charmayne’s (posthumously stated) will prevailed.

I returned to my duties as a servant, attending Baylor Charmayne and his cronies. I was there when he learned that his son had disappeared. He eyed Clan O’Reilly, and they returned the favor. The Executives have very good reasons to suspect each other of murder and treachery. But no accusation was spoken out loud.

Within ten rest/work cycles, Baylor rallied the house to pass the Music In Education Initiative, dedicating it to his son’s memory, and every child on Olympia was implanted with the vast library of classical and folk music that my father had so lovingly compiled and preserved.

No one will ever know that my father did so. Everyone will believe Lady Charmayne designed the music education program, even though that idea never would have crossed her mind. She knew nothing about music. Her true ambitions were utterly heartless.

She was the chief architect of our misery. But if I have my way, no one will remember her that way.

No one will know what she was really planning.

TWO
The Girl From Shantytown

“We felt soil and grass beneath our feet,” my father told me. “Can you imagine the mud squishing between your toes?”

“No,” I said. “I never squished anything.” I had never seen the habitat sectors inside Olympia and Titania, but my parents pined for them. I was five, and my father spoke of the habitat sectors the way other parents speak of the wondrous lands in fairy tales.

“Flowers and fruits and vegetables grow there,” he said. “Grain and nuts and sweet grasses. The air smells of green things. Far, far above you, clouds float in the center, and sometimes rain falls from them.”

I knew what he meant, because I had seen images of rain. Also of snow, lightning, and tornados, though none of those happened on the Generation Ships. The ships were big enough inside to create light rain showers, but that was all. Crops were watered by irrigation, and the water was recycled. My father had worked in those gardens when he was younger, but robots did that work now. He was no longer allowed inside the habitat sectors. As a scientist, he was restricted to the tech sector.

“Think of The Enchanted Lake.” His eyes shone. “Hear it inside your head. The images you see will show you the beauty of nature.”

I didn’t have to search my memory for the music by Anatol Liadov. Father had implanted the music database in my brain when I was four. He broke the law when he did this, but his crime was unsuspected. My modification was one my father believed all children should have. His proposal had been shot down. The Executives thought it was foolish and pointless—they could not imagine why he wanted to do such a thing. So they didn’t suspect that he already had.

My mother enfolded me in her arms. The images that came with the music were her contribution. They were from our home world: rain and lightning, waves on the shore, underground pools, tall grass waving in the wind—vids, photographs, drawings, paintings, tapestries, sculptures depicting scenes of a living world in all its aspects. The three of us snuggled in our cramped little burrow, seeing those scenes and hearing our music. It allowed us to hope, and dream, and imagine, while our fellow worms slept and plotted to survive another cycle.

When I was eleven, my father tried to enroll me in the science program, and they refused me. It was the first time I ever saw him angry. But his voice stayed reasonable as he spoke with the official at the enrollment desk. “My daughter tested in the top two percent.”

The official didn’t smirk, but I could tell she was enjoying herself. “The class is full,” she said. “They had to cut back, you know that. We’re in emergency mode.”

My father’s hand tightened around mine. “She will have to work in the manual labor force if she doesn’t enter this class.”

“Good thing she’s so smart,” said the official. “I’m sure she’ll find a way to rise above it all.”

My father’s face was the color of coffee-with-cream, but it darkened to purple then. I was astounded at the amount of rage and despair that simmered in his eyes. The official should have melted on the spot.

Instead, she seemed to feed on his anger. She pointed toward the bored security officer slouching near the door. “At the end of that corridor there’s an access hall that leads to Lock 17. You have two choices, citizen. You can walk your brat out of here and get back to work, or you can take your complaint to the wrong side of Lock 17. Got it?”

She seemed to hope that he didn’t get it.

My father turned and escorted me out of the room. His hand still held mine too tightly, but he took small steps so I could keep up with him. We walked down corridors that became narrower, but when we arrived at the junction that would lead me back to the children’s school/work sector, he chose another direction. His hand relaxed, and I could tell he had a plan.

Executives have always said that the Generation Ships are overpopulated, but you couldn’t tell that if you judged by how many people you encounter in the tunnels. Sometimes you can walk for hours without encountering anyone. We were alone, but my father didn’t speak until he ushered me into a small room that looked like a doctor’s office. He helped me onto an examining table and put his hands on my shoulders. “Oichi, never act unless you have thought, first.”

“Okay,” I promised, not yet realizing that he had given me the advice by which I would conduct the rest of my life.

“I am not surprised by what the official had to say,” he continued. “Your mother and I worried this could happen, and we have a backup plan.”

I gazed into his face. I thought my father was the handsomest man alive, but I worried about the white hairs on his head that seemed to be chasing away the black. My father was twenty years older than my mother, and he was beginning to look it.

“Oichi, the database we placed in your head is different from the modifications that most other people have. Less than twenty of us have them. They were to be the new generation of brain enhancements, but our program was cut. We implanted them in each other, because we knew they might give us an advantage. This is your gift from us—and it is your greatest secret. You must never speak of it to anyone, not even to your mother and me—not even over what you assume to be a private link.”

“I won’t.”

“Good,” he said. “Because I’m about to break the law again. I’m going to give you more.”

Two hours later, I felt my mother’s hands on my face. I lay in our tiny quarters, and she was toweling my hair dry after washing the blood from it. I didn’t try to open my eyes, I felt content to drift in the new inner space my father had implanted in my brain.

There was nothing hazy about that space. But despite that clarity, I can never conjure my mother’s face in my memory. I remember that my mother had skin the color of honey and hair that was blacker than the void. But what I remember the most clearly about her is her voice.

She finished her toweling and arranged my clean hair on the pillow. “Oichi, an ancient philosopher named Marshall McLuhan once said that the medium is the message. It doesn’t matter how elegant, or practical, or brilliant, or fair an idea may be. It will be ignored if it comes from the worms, or the asteroid miners, or the scientists, or even the mid-level Executives. It does no good to preach to the choir. For the powerful ones to change the laws, they have to believe that those changes are the result of their own intelligence. Their pride will stand nothing less.”

I felt her lips on each of my hands, and then on my brow. Her voice was so beautiful, I’m surprised the Executives didn’t include it in their library of pleasant voices.

“From now on,” she said, “you will learn everything you can from school, and even at work. Then you will come home, and your father and I will teach you everything we know.”

What she didn’t say was that everything they taught me would stimulate what was now in my head to make other connections for intelligence and survival. One day I would be a conduit for the preservation of culture in a new, humanistic society. But if that were to happen we could never speak of that again, we could never even hint at it.

“This cycle, you need to rest.” Mother kissed me again. “A new work cycle begins in twelve hours.”

She and father spoke quietly to each other, and a little later they made sure I sipped some nutrient broth. I amused myself with my music library, starting with Gustav Holst’s Planets suite, then wandering on to orchestral performances of Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes. The images that accompanied the music ranged from majestic to whimsical, but all of them were beautiful, and I enjoyed myself immensely.

Eventually I fell asleep, but I don’t think I slept very long. When I woke, the lights had been dialed down to night mode, and my parents were tucked away in their own cubby. I tried to decide on another music selection, but my mind kept wandering back to the official who had told us there was no room in the science program for another student.

My father scoffed at this notion. “They always claim there is not enough. Not enough food, though we have plenty. Not enough fuel, though we mine it as we go. Not enough heat, not enough light. Not enough room in the habitat sectors—for anyone but the Executives. But the space on the inside edge of the Generation Ships is immense; it could accommodate all of us.”

“Then why don’t they share?”

“Because,” said my father, “nothing is valuable unless it seems to be scarce.”

I lay in my cubby and wondered about the grass under the feet of the Executives, the mud they squished between their toes, and a notion occurred to me. My new modifications allowed me access to more than just information. They allowed me access to an extensive communications network as well. I thought there must be monitors inside the habitat sectors. I wondered if I might have a peek at what my father had loved so dearly. I pictured the general directory, then selected sub-directories.

The directory was far more complex and detailed than anything I had known before. What delighted me about it was that it didn’t just provide links for individuals, it also provided them for systems—for instance, the maintenance system might contact a repair drone and order it to perform a task.

Even more intriguing, it showed me links that were currently in use. I dove deeper into the directories, until I saw something that surprised me. I saw a link in use between two people: S. Charmayne and B. Charmayne.

Even at my age, I knew who Lady Sheba was. My mother privately called her The Iron Fist, which did not make her sound like a nice lady. Without planning to invade anything, I touched that highlighted link between S. and B., hoping it might tell me who they were.

< . . . not enough room in the lifeboat.> I heard the woman’s voice as if she were speaking right into my ear. This was because I was accessing the link with my implants, and the parts of my brain that processed language and hearing were stimulated. The voices I heard were the voices the Charmaynes had chosen to represent them.

I withdrew from the link, startled. Did she know I had eavesdropped? Was it really the Lady Charmayne? Would she blow me out Lock 17 if she knew it was me?

But father had said nobody knew about my special modifications. That must mean they couldn’t know, unless I told them. So I touched the link again.

< . . . always use that metaphor,> said a man’s voice. <Can’t you find a new one? It’s getting old.>

<It’s not a metaphor, you idiot, it’s the truth. If we don’t control the piggies, they’ll overrun us. We didn’t make all these sacrifices and come all this way just so our inferiors could outvote us and ruin everything. Put your damned boot on their necks and keep it there, Baylor. Do you hear me?>

The man sighed. <Yes, Mother.>

They talked in that vein for quite a while, and I got bored with them. So I dropped the link and searched for anything that might give me a look at the habitat sectors, but the closest I got was a doorway leading from a supply room on the inside edge of Titania’s skin. The door was open, and I could see light filtered through green things. I saw a spot of color too, from a patch of flowers. It was pleasant, downright charming, but try as I might, I couldn’t get on the other side of the door to gaze at the big picture. My father had said that there was a horizon, and it curved up, and if you looked straight up through the thin clouds you could see the other side of the habitat far above you. But there were no pictures of that in my head, and there seemed to be none anywhere else either. It was as if the Executives didn’t want us to know what it looked like.

Why not? I wondered.

S. and B. might give me a clue, if I listened to them long enough. They might put me to sleep with their conversation, but maybe I could learn something if I was patient. I checked the link—it was still in use. So I touched it again, and I did learn something.

<Enough of this beating around the bush,> said Sheba Charmayne. <How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to?>

THREE
Gamelan, My Little Doggie . . .

The smell of rain is an astounding thing. If you live inside the arid skin of Olympia you may smell machines, blood, human sweat, that sort of thing. But the smell of rain is unlike anything you could imagine. Yet even if you’ve never smelled it before, you will know what it is.

I stood in the rain of the habitat sector, waiting to serve the Executives at Baylor Charmayne’s garden party. They stood in the same rain. Precipitation on Olympia was so fine, it fell as a mist. Our clothing couldn’t absorb it; a Servant’s mantle covered our heads.

Some of the Executives wore their own version of mantles, but most of them let their hair get wet. They found the discomfort amusing, because they endured it so rarely and could end it at any time.

This was near the end of my first year on the job, and I watched this behavior because I found it odd. I also took note of the moisture on my face, the pretty colors of the fresh vegetables, and the handsome face of Nuruddin, who was one of my coworkers. In his Servant’s mantle he looked like an Egyptian king. But ancient art was not studied on Olympia at that time, so I was one of the few people who noticed that.

Despite these distractions, I remained focused on my duties. The Executives require Servants to respond to their slightest cue, to be at hand with whatever is required in an instant, whether that be a napkin, a dish, a refill of a beverage, or any one of a thousand other details. We must move silently, unobtrusively, and efficiently. Those of us who can’t don’t make it out of training.

My father wasn’t happy when I told him my ambitions, though he did understand them. No tech training had materialized for me on Titania, and we hoped that Olympia might provide more opportunities for me, since I was sixteen and still trainable. But extensive modification is needed to become a servant, and my forbidden implants could have been discovered at any time during that process. My father had to pull a lot of strings to make sure the right med-techs were on duty the cycles I went in for modification.

I had passed through it easily, and I moved to Olympia. I had goals, both short-term and long-term. First, I wanted to move my parents to Olympia. But I didn’t do it soon enough.

Baylor Charmayne sat at the head of the table. He still talked about his mother, which is sad when you consider all the people who had to die on Titania just so he could become the head of his clan. Sometimes he cried when he talked about her, though he wasn’t doing it tonight. He was in a fair mood, which is as good as it got with Baylor. He, the food, the table, and his guests were all visible. But I could not see the plants that I could smell. I could not hear the rain falling.

We, his servants, are beautiful. The Executives will tolerate nothing less. They are not as attractive as we, but they don’t know it. They seem enthralled with each other, and they never tire of arguing law—not even at this supper—or of playing at politics. That’s why the Tedd clan sent a representative to this supper, a cocky young upstart named Glen Tedd.

“A toast!” cried Tedd, which was our cue to fill their glasses. We performed like clockwork, so they barely noticed us.

“To Sheba Charmayne! Now there was a tough negotiator. We’ll never see her like again. We Tedds thank God for that.” He grinned. “We’ve done very well since her untimely demise.”

All eyes shifted to Baylor, who didn’t seem inclined to sip his drink.

“Convenient that her escape shuttle was destroyed before she could use it.” Tedd winked at Baylor. “Otherwise, she would be sitting at the head of this table.”

Baylor had no obvious reaction, but his gaze flicked to Ryan, who wasn’t as good at schooling his expression. Tedd was going to die for saying aloud what everyone suspected. I wondered who else knew it. Ryan did, because it was his favorite sport. But I don’t think Tedd did. I think he believed his clan was too powerful to suffer those sorts of consequences. He drank his wine, and demanded more. The party continued its dreary pace.

When the food and wine had been cleared from the table, Baylor and his guests moved inside, leaving us to stand at our posts. A group of lower-level Executives came into the garden. They were all clan members, but they had only slightly more status than the bureaucrats working in Titania’s skin. I recognized one of them, Terry Charmayne. I had seen him at our staging center many times, though I had never spoken to him.

I could tell that some of these less-favored clansmen resented the fact that they weren’t invited to the fancy dinner, but I couldn’t tell whether Terry felt that way. They stood for quite a long while before Terry decided they should move out of the rain and onto one of the covered patios not being used by the elite. They left us alone.

We stood patiently. All of us were experts at waiting. To entertain myself, I played Gamelan music in my head: slow, courtly pieces for orchestras of gongs and cymbals. It seemed to fit the scene, and I found it entertaining. But as the minutes slipped by, and no one dismissed us, an idea began to form in my head. Those flowers I had always longed to see were just a few feet away. I still couldn’t see them, but I could smell them.

I took a slow step toward them. No one reacted. I took another. Altogether, it was four steps until I was no longer standing on the paving.

I knelt and reached blindly. My hands encountered something soft and fuzzy. I explored further and found the ground—the fuzzy things were growing out of the soil, so this was a plant I was touching. It was not at all what I expected a plant to feel like, with big, soft lobes and a central stalk that had clusters of other fuzzy things near the top.

I leaned over and smelled the stalk. It wasn’t perfumed like the flowers in Baylor Charmayne’s vases, but the aroma was pleasant.

Someone kicked me in the butt, not hard enough to hurt me, but firmly enough to get my attention. I looked over my shoulder and saw Terry Charmayne. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked. “If someone sees you doing that, you could get terminated.”

Terminated was an interesting term. I had a feeling he didn’t just mean fired. Yet his tone was not unkind.

“Don’t get curious,” he said. “Just do your job and you’ll be all right.”

I stood and let my hands fall passively. “Yes sir,” I said in the Girl Friday voice.

One side of his mouth quirked in a sort-of smile. “Come on. I’ll escort you to the security lock. You may as well call it a day.”

He led the way, so we all fell in behind him. I was able to study him more closely as we walked along. His clothing wasn’t that fancy, and the superiority was almost completely absent from his demeanor. He was a mid-level Executive from a powerful family, yet he acted more like a Ship Officer. He saw us to the lock, waiting until he was sure we were safely through, then gave me a brisk, “Pleasant rest.”

“Yes, sir.” I didn’t look back. Instead, I searched the networks for the footprints of Terry Charmayne. He might be useful, some day.

The other servants walked quickly, eager to be done with their day and reclaim what they could of their senses. But Nuruddin slowed his pace until he was walking beside me. “What did it smell like?” he rasped in what was left of his real voice.

I had to think for a moment. “It smelled—green.”

“Like tea?”

“Very much, yes, but—stronger than that. It was pungent. It was a living thing.”

“Is that why you risked so much to smell it?”

“Yes.”

Nuruddin was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “You are braver than I, Oichi. But you are no more curious.”

We kept pace with each other in companionable silence, until the others had disappeared. I hope Nuruddin was enjoying my company, but for my part, I was pondering the wisdom of asking him questions. Questioning someone can be an adequate method of gathering information, but they may ask you questions in return. Nuruddin had already warned me of his curiosity.

Before I could reach a conclusion, someone pulled the plug on our senses.

I could see nothing but white void. My hearing was gone too, without even the ringing noise that accompanies natural silence. I probed for a surveillance camera and linked with it. Nuruddin and I stood in the tunnel with two Executive boys who could not be more than twelve years old. They had eliminated themselves from our audio and visual feeds so we wouldn’t know they were there. I hadn’t smelled them at first because the ventilation had blown their scent away from us, but now that they were close, my nose detected a chemical undertone in their sweat that raised the hair on the back of my neck. They both held knives, and they grinned at Nuruddin, nudging each other as if to say, I dare you to do it . . .

Nuruddin’s face was calm, but I could see concern trying to surface through the strict muscle controls that we Servants must endure to keep our demeanors serene. He must be wondering why our senses were being blocked. I doubted he would guess the truth until he felt the first slice. I would have to take him to the hospital once they let us go.

“I’m going to cut his lips off.” The boy giggled. “And then I’m going to cut his nose off.”

So no. Nuruddin would not be able to recover from this assault with some minor medical attention. I would have to intervene.

The order would have to originate from someplace outside the normal grid. I searched desperately, my mind racing along the network.

And suddenly I found an unknown pathway. I triggered the alarm.

Our hearing and eyesight returned as the klaxons sounded. “ATTENTION,” warned a gigantic voice, “EXPLOSIVE DECOMPRESSION IS IMMINENT. ALL PERSONNEL MUST EVACUATE TUNNEL H17 IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT . . . ”

The two boys jumped as if they had received electric shocks when they lost control of our sensory feed. They forgot they were Executives facing Servants, and they raced away—though not before Nuruddin saw the knives they were brandishing. As soon as they were gone, the alarm cut off, along with the warning voice.

Nuruddin stared at me, his face stiff with shock. “Explosive decompression?” he croaked. “Is that even possible, this far in?”

I shrugged. “I guess it would be if something catastrophic happened.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t want to imagine it. Anyway, it seems to have been a glitch.”

“In the future,” he said, “I guess we’d better stick with the others so we’re not in here alone.”

I nodded, and the two of us hurried down the final stretch of corridor to our staging area.

Servants are not allowed to socialize when we’re off duty. I went back to my quarters without seeing or speaking to a soul. I bathed, sipped nutrient broth, and bundled myself into my cubby. I had hoped to listen to more Gamelan music, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the remark Glen Tedd had made at supper.

Convenient that her escape shuttle was destroyed before she could use it.

Sheba Charmayne didn’t make it off Titania. But like everyone else, I had assumed that disaster overtook her before she could board her escape shuttle. I never knew it had been sabotaged before she could get into it.

True, I knew she and Baylor hated worms. When Titania was destroyed, I suspected them. I had even overheard some of their plotting, through my secret link. But I was still a child then, and what they had said at the time didn’t make much sense to me. So instead of trying to figure it out, I recorded it.

I still had the recording. I had never replayed it, because I never heard them overtly say they were going to blow Titania up. What was it they had said?

How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? Sheba had asked. That was what got me to start listening.

But Baylor’s answer didn’t make sense. Couldn’t we just dismantle them? Use their components for something useful?

Dismantle? I thought. Components? It sounded like they were talking about machines. But why would you talk about killing machines?

They’re too complex for that, said Sheba, managing to sound impatient, even though she wasn’t using her throat to speak. Too sophisticated. They have a self-defense component, and they would suspect what we were up to. No—if we want to destroy them, they can’t appear to be our main targets. They can’t appear to be our targets at all.

Back then, this was the point in their conversation when I began to lose interest. Their discussions had turned to inventories of supplies, energy consumption and production, that sort of thing. But now I realized they were talking about Titania’s statistics in a particular sort of way, as if they were debating whether they could afford to sacrifice her, even though they never specifically said they were going to do that. These stats were incomplete, too, as if they had discussed them before, and no longer had the patience to go over them in detail. Amazingly, I almost lost interest again, almost stopped listening.

But then Sheba said . . . their pathway is not part of the known network . . .

When I triggered the alarm that saved Nuruddin, I had discovered a pathway outside the normal network. Now I had time to explore it and figure out what it was. I reached for it again, but it wasn’t the same this time. A new link had appeared on it.

The link had no name. I touched it anyway.

<Awake,> said a voice in my head. <Orders?>

I was flummoxed. I hadn’t rung the link, I had simply touched it—and now someone was talking to me.

<Orders?> repeated the voice, with relentless patience.

I tried to disengage from the link, but I couldn’t. I felt alarmed. I couldn’t just struggle, I needed to take action.

<Who are you?> I asked.

<Medusa,> came the reply.

The voice did not sound like any human voice I had ever heard, either inside or outside of my head. It was unique. <Where are you?> I asked.

<Lucifer Tower.>

That sent a chill up my spine. Lucifer Tower was not a pressurized habitat, it was in the mysterious Sensor Array, at the leading edge of Olympia. Tech personnel no longer visited Lucifer Tower; it had its own repair drones. Yet something dwelled there, something with a voice that was almost machine-like—but not quite.

<I would like to meet you,> I said. It wasn’t as impulsive a remark as it may seem.

Medusa touched me through the link. No one had ever been able to do that before. The secret part of my brain was stimulated, and I saw a face. The face was too perfect to be mortal.

<Oichi,> said the face. <Your parents are dead. Titania is gone.>

<Destroyed by Baylor and Sheba Charmayne.>

<I shall honor your parents’ wishes, and yours. We will collaborate.>

<How?>

<I will come to you when the time is right.>

I woke with a start. Had I fallen asleep and dreamed Medusa up?

I looked for the link again. I couldn’t find it.

Yet the pathway remained, and I traveled its length. Though it existed outside the known network, it could form links within that network at any juncture, then dissolve the link when the user was finished with it.

Medusa hid at the other end of that pathway. And she mentioned my parents. Had they known about her? How had she known about them? Was she one of the sophisticated machines Sheba and Baylor had talked about killing?

Did they destroy Titania and kill two hundred thousand people—just to get rid of machines like her?

I couldn’t shed a tear. My heart had become a burning coal. The anger didn’t blind me, it gave me ideas: about the secret link, my recordings of Sheba and Baylor, and my father’s music database. My plans were just beginning to take shape.

But other people’s plans were about to get in the way.

FOUR
Medusa

You cannot kill in a void (though on Olympia, you can sometimes use the void to kill). When you’re a killer, everyone around you is at risk, if not from your direct actions, then from the consequences of your actions. This is not a fact that most killers consider. But I do. I even considered it the very first time, perhaps because I didn’t set out to kill a target then. Instead, I was someone else’s target.

Prior to that event, my playbook consisted of feeding misinformation to people in order to influence events. Rescuing Nuruddin with the decompression alarm was a classic example of that. It’s still my main tactic, but shortly after that incident, things took a turn for the violent. And as unplanned violence often does, it started out very normally. I simply went to work.

I dressed in my Servant’s mantle and rode a tube in toward the habitat access tunnel. I was alone, which struck me as odd, but not impossible. It was rare for Servants to report individually; we were called up in groups, but sometimes you get called because you’re filling in for someone who’s sick. So I felt fine about it until the lift stopped, then reversed and took me out to the maintenance level. I hadn’t punched that coordinate. The door opened, and Glenn Tedd stood there.

Glenn Tedd, who made the snide remarks to Baylor Charmayne about the Lady Sheba’s untimely demise.

“You,” he snapped. “Follow me.”

“Yes sir.” I was alarmed to discover that he had selected the Penitent voice for my responses. That alarm grew as I followed him into an access corridor for the Series 100 airlocks—the locks used most often for executions.

My mind raced. I scanned communication records for any indication of what he might be planning, and found nothing that jumped out at me. I had never served Glenn Tedd alone before, but he had a reputation for being furious one moment and weeping the next. He had never apologized to any of my fellow Servants when he got into the weepy state; in fact that was the time when he expected Servants to apologize to him.

That’s why he’s crying, Nuruddin told me once. Out of frustration, like a small child.

Based on Glenn Tedd’s reputation, he could get worked up about something minor, so an abject apology might be all he expected of me. But our journey into the realm of airlocks kept me on high alert. No one used those locks except for maintenance workers and Executives who wanted to kill someone—and neither of us was a maintenance worker.

He stopped short in front of Lock 113 and turned to face me. “Stand here.” He pointed at the floor, as if I were the most dense person he had ever met. I obeyed him, since we were still outside the airlock. But then he opened the inner door. “Get in.”

I didn’t move.

His mood had not been good to start with. When I ignored his order, it got a lot worse. “You heard me! Get in!”

I plan everything before I act. I knew I had to kill him then. But I couldn’t do it with my bare hands, and I wasn’t sure I could scrub the event from the security monitors in time to prevent consequences if I just tossed him into the lock.

He snorted in disgust and marched into the lock, leaving me even more flummoxed. He wrenched open a suit locker and pointed inside. “Look at this!” he said.

He couldn’t very well blow me out of there if he was inside. So I stepped through the inner lock and joined him at the locker. I saw what he was trying to show me. All air tanks on the suits in the lockers are supposed to be near 100%. The indicators on the suits I could see were just below 30%.

“Explain this!” he demanded.

I felt mystified. I’m not a maintenance worker, so I’m not in charge of keeping the suits up to snuff—at least, as far as anyone knows. In fact, I have poked around quite a lot in the air locks, and I always check the air levels in the suits first thing, out of sheer paranoia. It’s a safety rule my father taught me. But Glenn Tedd should not have known that. Had I been exposed?

“Maintenance didn’t fill the tanks properly,” I offered.

“That’s right!” he grinned like a shark. “And you’re my Servant. So what are you going to do about it?”

For the life of me, I couldn’t fathom why Glenn Tedd had a bug up his butt about the air tank levels on the suits in this particular locker, or why it gave him satisfaction to address the problem in such a circuitous fashion.

“You know who told me about this?” he asked, as if reading my mind. “You know who just had to rub my face in the shoddy way this sector, which is under my jurisdiction is being run?”

“Ryan Charmayne?”

That was a tactical error. I was right about who it was, but his question had been rhetorical; he hadn’t expected me to know the answer. I had just revealed to this nasty little man that a Servant was paying attention to politics at the parties of Executives. But that wasn’t the biggest problem, because I had just realized something else. Glenn Tedd had mortally insulted the Charmayne family at the last Executive party, and Ryan Charmayne’s favorite method of murdering rivals was to . . .

“The lock!” The Penitent voice made my cry sound downright mournful. But the warning came too late. The inner lock spun shut.

“Hey!” Glenn threw himself at the door. “Open that door! Do you know who I am?”

I didn’t waste my time calling him an idiot. I tore off my Servant’s mantle, and at the same moment all of my sensory feeds went dead. I wasn’t surprised by that development—after all, we were in full disaster mode, with everything that could go wrong absolutely doing so, and things were about to get a lot worse. I used the surveillance feed in the lock to find a pressure suit. I knew I had less than a minute.

Back in the infancy of space travel, space suits had taken up to four hours to put on. We had one of those on display in our history museum, along with a checklist of the protocols that had to be observed before Ground Control would let an astronaut out for a space walk. Our suits were vastly more streamlined, and began the pressurization process as soon as you sealed them. Maintenance workers usually got them on in five minutes.

But paranoia had ruled my life for as long as I could remember, and that’s what saved me, because I had practiced getting the suits on quickly. My best time so far had been just under a minute. But this time, my hands shook. I fumbled things I had done smoothly during practice.

The suit’s automatic systems signaled green when I sealed it. I hooked my safety cable to a ring next to the outer door. I had just let go of the clip and was reaching for the rung that would prevent me from being blown out of the lock along with the atmosphere when the outer door spun open—before I could grab it, I exploded out of there. As I reached the end of the cable fastened above my navel, I flipped around to face the ship, and Glenn Tedd collided with my right shoulder. I had only half a second to see his contorted face with my helmet cam, but I could tell he was sorry he hadn’t done what I had done. He was suit-less and cable-less as he drifted away from the ship, going from 1atm of pressure to 0atm with unhappy consequences.

But I had no time to watch his last struggles. His collision with me had knocked me out of alignment with the door. I moved in an arc at the end of my tether, toward Olympia’s massive hull. I could see the tether stretching through the opening, and I very much wanted to switch on the motor that would reel me back in. But I was afraid it would fray as it rubbed against the edges of the lock. My fears were probably irrational, but I congratulate myself for trying to think at all under the circumstances.

Olympia’s hull is not a smooth terrain. It bristles with ladders, safety rungs, valves, and other equipment, especially around the maintenance locks. As I sailed toward those protrusions, I stretched my hands out, eager to connect. The seconds flashed by. I struck the side of a ladder and held on for dear life.

The other end of my cable sailed past me, its end cut cleanly.

I looked for the airlock, but couldn’t see it with my suit’s helmet cam. I felt lightheaded, and realized I was breathing too fast.

Little sips, warned a calm voice from the back of my mind.

Little sips my ass! I screamed back at it.

But I tried to calm down. When I had managed to slow my breathing a little, I realized my senses had all come back. It was as if the program that had controlled them had already been deleted. As if I had been as much a target of this murder as Glenn Tedd. And that presented me with a real conundrum. I had planned to wait a half hour or so, and then open the outer lock and go back inside. I figured whoever had killed Glenn would be gone by then.

What if they were waiting for me? What if they had seen me put on the suit and knew I was out here?

I checked my air supply. These suits were designed for short-term use, which translated to eight hours of air with a full tank. But this unit was down to 27% capacity. So I had about two hours, which might be plenty if I wanted to get into one of the locks in this sector. But if I needed to get to another sector, I might not have time.

Out of curiosity, I opened a link and looked at the operating systems for the Series 100 locks.

Off Line was the status. Estimated duration of denial of service, 24 hours.

Someone wasn’t taking any chances.

I thought about going around the order and getting one of the locks to open manually, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that on the 100-series locks without creating an alert. If I could get to the 200-series sector, I might be able to get one open, for the simple reason that those locks weren’t used regularly, and no one paid any attention to them. They were too big for executions. But I’d have to get there first, and it was three miles away.

Olympia is a Galaxy-Class Generation Ship. What that means is that conceivably you could travel from one end of our galaxy to the other (if you had time and a heck of a lot of patience). It spins to simulate gravity, and the habitat sectors are so large, they have minor weather events in there. If you’re a worm like me, and spend most of your time walking or crawling through the miles of tunnels at or near the end of the spin arm, your universe is both small and limitless. It’s small because the space is confining, and limitless because you have no perspective about where it begins and ends.

But the outside of the ship is a different story. It’s a landscape full of valleys, peaks, and plains, and its sky is full of dazzling stars. From my new perspective I could see the blazing heart of our galaxy. I could see the Andromeda Galaxy too, its spiral shape more apparent. The beauty and grandeur of this view was beginning to overtake my panic—and possibly to cloud my judgment, because I started to crawl toward the Series 200 sector. Lacking another plan, I decided I may as well go for it.

I couldn’t see that sector from where I was; I relied on schematics that I accessed through my links. While I was at it, I did a little research about my current condition. I used the cameras in the tunnel outside Lock 113 and saw a guard posted at the inner door. I didn’t recognize him, but I recognized his military stance. Oddly, I felt comforted to see him there, because it validated my decision to venture into unknown territory and look for another way in.

But a quick inspection of my pressure suit revealed another problem. My jet packs were even lower than my air tanks. And since Olympia was spinning, I feared I could end up in a spot without a proper handhold when it ran out. I would have to pull myself along and use the jets only when I had no other choice.

That was probably going to take longer than I had. But I didn’t have a Plan B, so I stopped debating the point and aimed myself for the 200 Series locks, keeping my body close in and parallel to the ship. It was very slow going.

One hour later, I checked my status. I was less than one third of the way to my destination.

I wasn’t going to make it.

So I stopped and took stock of my situation. A quick check of the guard in the maintenance hall revealed that he was still there. Worse—I had gone past the halfway point for my air supply, and the math did not look good for a return trip.

Yet I felt calm. I regretted that I would never be able to share the gift my parents had given to me. But I didn’t regret this mode of death. The view of the outside of our generation ship was magnificent; it made me wonder why I had spent so much time wanting to see the inside of the ship. From my new vantage point, I could see the distant sensor array on one end and the colossal engines at the other. I only had to consider for a few seconds before I realized what music I should play in my head: Gustav Holst’s Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age. As I listened to the sound of that grim and majestic procession, The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies wheeled overhead. I accessed a chart and identified more distant galaxies in the star field.

Who ordered the hit? I suddenly thought to wonder. I poked around communication records, looking for messages that might be pertinent. While I was in there, a new pathway appeared—the same one I had used to trigger the alarm when Nuruddin had been in trouble. I recognized a link there.

I touched the link. Medusa stirred. <What are you doing?> she said.

<I’m dying.>

<Where are you?>

A schematic of Olympia’s exterior appeared in my mind’s eye. I found my spot on it and highlighted it for her.

<Don’t move,> she said. <I’m coming to get you.>

<I’ve got less than an hour of air left.>

<That will be sufficient.>

I wondered why that would be sufficient, but I didn’t question her. Instead, I used the secret pathway that had led me to Medusa to look for my name in security memos. It didn’t pop up, but I got a red flag for top-secret documents. When I wiggled my way around the security protocols, I still didn’t find my name. But I did find a name I recognized: Titania.

The message was short. It said, Eliminate all immigrants from Titania, then erase their names from directories. It was signed B. Charmayne.

Connected to that communication were two responses: So far have only located one immigrant, Servant Oichi Angelis. Will use Lock 113. It was unsigned. But a scan of the original directive revealed two recipients, P. Schnebly and R. Charmayne. So I thought the first response might have come from P. Schnebly. He might be the fellow standing guard in the tunnel.

The second response sounded more like something Ryan Charmayne would say: I think I know how we might kill two birds with one stone.

So, in a way, I was responsible for Glenn Tedd’s death. True, Ryan would have looked for other chances to kill him, but I had accidentally expedited the affair. When I searched for the status connected with both our names, Tedd’s read deceased. Mine didn’t, but I assumed P. Schnebly would update it once he had confirmed his kill by waiting for my air supply to run out.

P. Schnebly had not discovered any more names of Titania immigrants yet. When I re-traced the inquiries connected with my profile, I could see it had not been easy for him, and that puzzled me. He had been forced to plod through each file individually. So it was a minor miracle (if one was inclined to look at it in that light) that he had found me at all.

Yet when I searched for immigrants from Titania using the secret pathway, thirty-seven more names popped up. I scrubbed any mention of immigration and Titania from their records. I did this while still listening to Holst and gazing at the glorious man-made landscape and the stars, and within seventeen minutes I saw Medusa in person, for the first time.

She used her tentacles to propel herself across Olympia’s hull. She seemed made for that sort of activity, though her body hung oddly limp. It wasn’t until she got closer that I realized the limp body was a pressure suit. Medusa was meant to be worn.

She disengaged me from my handhold and enfolded me with a membrane that sealed and pressurized itself. Once that was complete, she removed my pressure suit and expelled it from the membrane in a way that seemed almost organic. The suit would drift away from Olympia in much the same way Glenn Tedd had.

Throughout this process her beautiful face hovered before mine. She saw me with eyes that could stare into the heart of a sun without flinching.

<Put me on,> she said.

I slipped into her pressurized suit. It was unlike anything I had worn before—it seemed to feel me as I entered it. Once on, it felt like an extension of my own skin. Her face rotated and settled over mine.

Inside my head, the implants my father had given me came completely awake, and I saw his face. <Oichi, if you’re seeing and hearing this, I am dead. You and Medusa have found each other. Now you shall learn the message behind the music. As wonderful as that music is, it’s not the true reason for your implants. This is the reason.>

An image of Lucifer Tower appeared inside my head. The blueprints listed it as a research center within a sensor array—it was among the towers on the leading end of Olympia. It really was a research center, but no human had ever used it.

No human.

It was not currently pressurized and heated. But it wasn’t empty.

<When the Executives realized what the Medusa units would do for people,> said my dead father, <they felt threatened. For most of our journey, they have controlled the message, and thusly the resources of these generation ships. They kept finding reasons to stall the introduction. When the project leaders disappeared, we realized the units, themselves, were at risk. So we moved them all to Titania. We knew what the Executives would try to do, once the units were all in one place. We knew we would have to make this sacrifice to keep them alive.>

How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? Sheba Charmayne had asked. “She wasn’t talking about the people on Titania,” I said aloud. “She was talking about you, Medusa.”

<Yes.>

<Who was supposed to interface with the Units?>

<Eventually, everyone,> said Medusa. <The first ten thousand users will design units for the remaining population.>

<What happens when we’re all linked together that way?>

<Collaboration.>

<Won’t we lose our individuality?>

<We are not designed to have a hive mind.>

<What are you designed for?>

<Communication. Information can influence us, but we don’t have to agree with each other.>

I saw it then, what my father and his collaborators had intended. <It would be easier for each of us to live up to our potential. We might not develop a meritocracy, but no one would be able to lie about why we don’t have one. I get it, now.> I sighed, drinking deeply of the air supply in Medusa’s reservoir. <I understand why they wanted to kill you. But I don’t understand why my father tried to make it easier for them to do so. Why did he do that? And how did you survive? How did you all make it to Olympia?>

<It was simple,> she replied. <Baylor Charmayne moved us.>

FIVE
Vengeance Is Not Mine

<Did I ever tell you what I assumed, all those years ago when you disappeared?> asked Nuruddin. <I thought they killed you because you touched their plants at that garden party.> His Medusa unit smiled with a face that was very much like his—that was why I picked it for him.

<It was a logical deduction,> I said. <Who knows, maybe they would have killed me if they had found out what I did. But Terry Charmayne kept it to himself.>

<Papa,> asked his young son, Ashur. <Can the Tentacle Lady hear me now?>

Medusa smiled for me. Her expression can be surprisingly tender. <I can hear you.> I closed his skull with instruments extended from Medusa’s tentacles, and Nuruddin tugged his scalp back into place and glued it together so one could hardly tell it had been opened.

<What music are you listening to?> I asked.

<Carnival of the Animals, by Saint-Saëns.> Ashur smiled. < The pictures are nice, too. My friends and I like to spend time together, listening. Then we draw our own pictures of what we imagine.>

<That sounds wonderful. Can you feel Medusa, now?>

His face lit up with wonder. <Yes! She’s showing me things . . . > His mouth settled into a serious line as he made the complete interface.

I lifted him gently with our tentacles, and Nuruddin received him with his own. He had been using his unit for almost ten years, and his interface was remarkably graceful. Of the other thirty-seven immigrants from Olympia, he was the one who had grasped my offer the most quickly, the one who required the least explanation. But they already possessed the same brain implants that I had. All of them were the children of conspirators.

<That makes fifty of us, now,> Nuruddin gazed at his son’s thoughtful face. <Fifty people trying to keep a secret—eleven of them children.>

<They’re Medusa’s children, too,> I said. <Patience, my friend.>

<Is anyone more patient than you, Oichi?>

<Yes. Medusa is.>

Nuruddin’s son returned to his mother, and we reported to service in Baylor Charmayne’s garden. His table was set for twenty, and these were no ordinary guests.

I filled Baylor’s glass with the same carafe from which his guests drank. He raised it. “A toast to the new congress. Halfway through our voyage to our new home, we’ve got a lot to be proud of.”

The new congress was not an accurate description. These senators had been elected to the same offices they had always held, by members of their own class. They had jockeyed with each other their whole lives for power, stabbed each other in the backs numerous times when they weren’t conspiring together. Now they hoisted their glasses and toasted each other. I stood at their backs with nineteen other Servants.

In all the years since I was supposed to have died, these Executives had never looked directly at me. All I had to do to disguise myself was change my name.

“And to Sheba Charmayne,” added Baylor. “She was a tough old bird. But she came through for the children. Thanks to her, they will always have music.”

Since they had all supported his bill for the Music in Education initiative, they drank to this toast as well. Many of them had sincere smiles on their faces. They had discovered, once their own children received the music and image database (which some of them really believed had been designed by Lady Sheba herself), that their children had become experts in the most intellectual music ever created by human kind. Their math skills had improved, and improvements in other areas had been noticed. Now, even the most stubborn opponents to the initiative were applauding the woman my mother had named the Iron Fist.

In some ways, I couldn’t help but pity her son. Especially when she continued to chide him long after her death.

“It is with great humility that I serve once again as your speaker,” Baylor intoned, without anything of the sort. “And so it is my pleasure to invite you to our annual FlyBy, in which we will inspect the outside of our Olympia. Our families and friends await us on the shuttle. Once we finish our glasses, we will depart.”

They smiled at each other. The FlyBy was the most exclusive event anyone could possibly attend. It was so exclusive, they would not even have Servants to attend them. We watched them gulp their alcohol, but when they got to their feet they were steady. It would take more than one glass to make fools of them.

Their departure was our own cue to make a graceful exit. We walked through the access tunnel to our lockers. Nuruddin fell in beside me. “Something is wrong,” he murmured.

My first impulse was to reassure him. But Nuruddin’s instincts had always been sharp. I thought back to Baylor’s invitation to his brethren—was there something in his tone that I had missed? “I’ll look into it,” I promised.

He said nothing more. He headed straight home to his family, as was his well-documented habit. I took a different tunnel, to the adult education center to work on my math skills. Unlike the tunnels, the center was a well-lit place, though only about a quarter full at any given time. This was probably because no amount of education would earn a worm a job as a tech, or any other job other than the one you already held. But it was a pastime that entertained me.

It also gave me an alibi while I nosed into the communication and security grids. I sat in a cubicle and used a stylus to write out chemical equations. But they were all problems I knew by heart, and my mind was busy studying messages. The first thing I saw was the public feed of the FlyBy.

“The challenges of the past year have been many,” Baylor Charmayne’s solemn voice informed us from his canned speech. “But Olympia remains strong and proud, now that we have reached the halfway point in our journey. Our children’s children will live to see a new world, and they will thank us for our prudence and our careful conservation of resources.”

While he lectured the population of Olympia about the virtue of privation, stock footage from a previous FlyBy pretended to be a real-time representation of him and the other Executives standing stiffly at their command stations on the shuttle. Off camera, on a lower deck, over nine hundred of their closest family members and cronies partied with the abandon of people who had never known a moment of conservation.

“And as we enter the second half of our voyage,” continued Baylor, “we can feel secure in the knowledge that we never compromised our—”

His speech broke into indecipherable bits for almost a full minute, before cutting in again with, “—out the fire extinguishers! We have less than five minutes before—” More distortion followed. Then, “Mayday, mayday! We have fire on—”

Static terminated the transmission.

I wished I could see what was really happening on that shuttle. But according to the encrypted General Security log, all of its surveillance feeds had been disabled before it left Olympia. That efficiency had carried itself over to an incident report that had already been written. I found that buried in a secret database that also contained a report of how Baylor Charmayne had survived the assassination of his fellow legislators. It began with this tidbit:

It has been determined that surveillance devices were disabled from the electrical pulse generated by the first explosion.

I read the report to its conclusion. Then I touched my link with Medusa. <We need to go outside,> I said. <I think we’re going to witness something spectacular.>

There are no fireballs in space, but escaping atmosphere can create some temporary color. What I liked best was the blue lightning of the gravity bubble that crawled all over that shuttle, pulverizing what was left of it so no pieces could be retrieved and examined for evidence, later. It was the same weapon, on a smaller scale, that had been used to destroy what was left of Titania. It was left over from the war that had driven us from our home system in the first place.

Medusa and I watched from a perch just outside Lock 207. I played selections from Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible as we marveled at the awful beauty of that destruction. I shed a tear as I thought of my parents.

<Medusa,> I said, <I didn’t see this coming. That worries me.>

<Yes,> she agreed.

<They keep trying to achieve the Final Solution. They keep killing their enemies, and yet it never ends up solving their problems. It makes me wonder if my own killings have done any good, in the long run.>

<I would define your killings as acts of self defense,> she said. <But I would define my own killings the same way. Perhaps I am biased.>

We watched for something in particular. Within forty-five minutes, we spotted the lights from Baylor Charmayne’s pressure suit. According to the report, his journey from the crippled shuttle would take exactly 73 minutes.

There were many things we didn’t know yet. For one thing, we weren’t sure which lock he would try to open. But finally, Baylor tapped a manual override code into the keypad outside Lock 212.

The coincidence was downright magical.

Medusa’s tentacles stretched and retracted as we whipped across the hull of Olympia toward Lock 212. We spotted Baylor clinging to a grip bar. His suit was a gleaming Executive model, equipped with a twelve-hour air supply and jets that easily took him from the shuttle to the Series 200 locks. I had to shake my head when I pondered the trouble he had gone to, the danger he had put himself in to make it look like this assassination had been survived by a hero. I would have manipulated the records and stayed safe inside Olympia. But then, I had Medusa to help me finesse that sort of fraud. And I wasn’t trying to prove anything to a dead mother.

We couldn’t see his face as we moved up on him, but his pudgy, gloved fingers managed to convey some frustration as he typed code after code into that keypad and it refused to respond. He would never get inside that lock without our help. Medusa and I had long since mastered every protocol in Olympia’s command database.

We tore him free of his perch, and stripped his jets off the suit before he could fire them.

He gaped at us through his faceplate. Unlike Ryan, he knew what Medusa was. He would have looked less shocked if his dead mother had confronted him outside that lock.

“Who are you!?” he used his suit com to ask.

For him, my smile was anything but tender, “Call me Medusa.” I transmitted in her voice.

“I know that, you idiot! But who’s driving? Whoever you are, she’s controlling you, can’t you see that?”

I let Medusa answer that one. “I’m not controlling her, she’s collaborating with me, just as you always feared.”

“They’ll destroy you,” he said. “The Medusa units will destroy everything that matters to us.”

“Everything that matters to you,” I agreed. “But what did you destroy, Baylor? How many lives were lost on Titania so you could control the message?”

From the moment I had realized what he had done to his fellow Executives, I had remembered that overheard conversation with his mother. How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? First I had assumed he was talking about workers like me. Then I thought he must mean the Medusa units. But now that I had witnessed his newest mass execution, I remembered another pertinent detail. No Executives had made it off Titania. Not one had escaped. And once they were dead, the Charmaynes had become twice as powerful. So yes, they wanted to destroy the Medusa units, but what had Ryan Charmayne said? I think I know how we might kill two birds with one stone . . .

“My god.” The disgust in Baylor’s voice informed me that even in these circumstances, he couldn’t grasp that he wasn’t supreme anymore. “You animals. You think you know what’s going on? You stupid, blind—”

“Do you know how we got to Olympia?” Medusa asked. “It was your greed that saved us.”

A light went on behind his eyes. I’ll give him credit—he understood immediately.

“You raided Titania for resources,” said Medusa. “You weren’t satisfied until you picked her clean. It took many, many trips for the supply ships to move everything you wanted. Each time, a few more of us stowed away on those ships. When all of us were safe, our operatives sabotaged your mother’s lifeship. She was too smart—eventually she would have figured out what we had done.”

The grief and rage he displayed then were impressive. In Baylor’s mind, he was the good guy. He had not been responsible for his mother’s death, and he still missed her. He believed in the righteousness of everything he did, and he believed that the equality the rest of us were trying to achieve was unnatural and wrong.

Time to cut that nonsense short. “None of your fellow legislators tried to stop you when you made your escape,” I said. “None of them tried to get into pressure suits. You must have taken the antidote for the drink you all had together in your garden. Maybe they were unconscious or even dead before the first bombs went off. But their families trapped down in the lounge section were awake through the whole ordeal, weren’t they Baylor? You even sacrificed people from your own family.”

A tightening around his eyes was his only response.

“I’m guessing you’ll declare martial law once you’re back on board Olympia, until you can find the evil perpetrators of this mass murder. And that could last indefinitely. Will the Charmaynes have to take permanent control?”

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Don’t you see that?”

Just past his left shoulder, I could see what was left of the shuttle. The gravity bubble was collapsing, leaving a crumpled wreck floating in a field of stars. I touched the link in his head that only his fellow Executives should have been able to use. <If you could see what I see, you never would have tried to kill Medusa.>

I held him with Medusa’s tentacles and smashed him against Olympia’s hull until his helmet shattered. I had been planning to tell him that I had used Lock 212 to kill his son, Ryan—that was the only vengeance I had contemplated. But that seemed too cruel, now. So I pulled him close.

<I’m here, > I assured him. <You’re not alone.>

And finally, when the light left his eyes, I sent him off to join the trail of bodies behind Olympia.

When I opened the inner door of Lock 212, I was alone again—or as alone as I could get with Medusa or anyone else I might care to talk to only a thought away. The hall was dimly lit, with pools of light punctuated by deeper shadows. Someone stood in one of those pools. He moved into the light when he was certain I had noticed him.

“Terry,” I said. “You are now the head of the Charmayne family.”

He had been weeping, but he seemed to be past that now. “He did it,” he said. “He killed all of them. My mother warned me he would do that some day—he or Sheba. I didn’t believe her until Sheba had her arrested and blown out of an air lock.” He pointed at Lock 212 with his chin. “Smaller than this one. With an observation window. Sheba picked that one, because she wanted me to watch, even though I was only six. She wanted to make sure I knew that disobedience would not be tolerated.”

I heard him. But at the same time, I searched the Public Address records to see what had been announced about the assassination. What I found surprised me. “You told them everything. Everyone knows what Baylor did.”

He nodded. “The only thing they don’t know is that you killed him. Or I assume you did—I won’t ask for the details. I said that his plan backfired when he couldn’t get back into Olympia. After all, none of the locks would open because we were on high alert.”

I scanned a variety of communiques, to see if I could get a feel for how people were reacting. “No one seems surprised,” I concluded.

“Nope,” said Terry. “I would say they’re relieved. I think it’s a bit early to tell, but I believe that we can continue our program to upgrade the implants. I’ve spoken to the candidates I mentioned to you, and they’re ready to make the commitment.”

That makes fifty of us, now, Nuruddin had said, Fifty people trying to keep a secret—eleven of them children. But thirty-eight plus eleven make forty-nine. The one Nuruddin hadn’t mentioned was Terry Charmayne.

He took a deep breath, and let it out in a sigh. “I could tell you things. Things you wouldn’t believe.” He gazed at the lock as if he were seeing those things.

Then he shook himself. His eyes were red, but not so full of grief anymore. “How tired are you? Are you up to performing some surgery?”

“I’m up to it,” I said. “But there’s something I want to do first. Can I get into the habitat sector, now?”

“Everyone can,” he said. “That’s the first thing I did with what authority I have left. The private homes are off limits, because they’re empty now. But the gardens are open.” He smiled at that. I knew he was remembering the day we met. “Are you going to sniff flowers?”

“I’m going to squish mud between my toes,” I said. “I promised my father.”

When I made my way through the tunnels to the habitat sector, they were not so dim anymore, or so cold. The security locks were closed, but not locked. Since I was most familiar with the access point I had used as a Servant, that’s the one I went to. When I opened the door into the green, living heart of Olympia, I found Nuruddin’s son Ashur, standing at the end of the pavement with his bare feet on the clover. I took off my shoes and joined him there.

He looked up at me. <Medusa told me I should feel the ground with my toes. She said it was what you had always longed to do.>

<Do you talk to her a lot?>

<All the time. Will you walk with me?>

He took my hand, and we explored together. Robot gardeners skirted us unobtrusively, as they had been programmed to do in order to avoid annoying the Executives.

I had believed that I knew what the habitat looked like, because I thought I was pretending to be blind when I attended the Executives. Now I knew I had fooled myself, too. I had been so focused on what they were doing and what I was planning, I never looked up.

<It’s making me dizzy,> said Ashur. <The other side is so far away, but I keep thinking it’s all going to fall on us.>

<Me too.> I gazed at the fields and tiny houses overhead. A fine mist floated in between, but it didn’t obscure anything. It reminded us how big it all was.

Our noses brought us back to ground level when we found the sweet peas. Ashur and I put our faces right into the blooms and breathed deep. <That,> he concluded, <is the most wonderful smell in the universe.>

We found a bench shaped like two giant turtles and sat on it. A fountain burbled nearby, and I tried to imagine Ryan and Baylor Charmayne sitting there and enjoying the beauty. I couldn’t do it.

From our perch, I could see through one of the windows of a fine house, now empty of the Executives who had taken its beauty for granted. It was open, and a curtain fluttered. But there was no breeze.

A man emerged from the darkness behind the window and looked out at us. But Terry had said the houses were empty—why was he there? I scanned his face and searched for him in Olympia’s database.

His wasn’t in any of the directories. His face had no matching profile. As far as the records were concerned, this man didn’t exist.

Their pathway is not part of the known network, Sheba had said, all those years ago.

He grinned at me, as if he knew I couldn’t find his name. As if he thought that would frighten me.

I grinned back, and watched his smirk wither. He turned away from the window and was gone. I had a feeling it might be a while before I saw him again. When I did—if I did—our encounter would probably not be peaceful.

For ten years I had killed and plotted. Yet I hadn’t anticipated what Baylor was about to do, and I hadn’t seen this man until he showed himself to me.

But there were also things that only Medusa and I knew, things I would never tell anyone. I wouldn’t flinch to use those things, when necessary.

<Oichi,> said Ashur, <How many of them did you have to kill?>

I gazed at the empty window. <I didn’t count them.>

<Did it make you feel better?>

<No. It was pathetic.>

He pondered that. He was nine years old, younger than I was when my father had given me the enhancements that changed my life. <The Medusa units are better than we are,> he said. <They’re not mean.>

<Yet we made them,> I reminded him. <And we made the music.>

<That’s true.> He seemed to feel better.

We walked away from the house, leaving its mystery for another time. I wanted to tell Ashur that everything would be okay. But maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe we could only hope to make it better.

Soon, Terry Charmayne and I would introduce more people to their units and get the process of communication started. But Ashur and his friends were the ones who would design the future. They already realized possibilities that we couldn’t see. They heard the music and drew pictures of what they dreamed. Even the man in the window didn’t know what that would be.

As for me—I’m still Oichi Angelis. In my own way, I shall always be a worm. But what is a worm if not a creature that brings air and nourishment to growing things?

<Oichi, are there serpents in this garden?> asked Ashur, and I knew he wasn’t talking about snakes.

<Yes,> I said. <Enjoy the flowers, Ashur. But watch for the serpents, too.>

We walked deeper into that forbidden garden, where moisture condensed in the air. Above us, the world turned and the sky was green with growing things.

<Only wait,> said Medusa. <The mystery of flowers can be deciphered if one cares to look closer. But the stars have things to teach us too. The stars contain mysteries that grow deeper as you look closer.>

And look we would, with no one to tell us we must remain blind to keep the peace.

“It will be okay, Ashur,” I promised, and together we walked back into the tunnels of Olympia, to make it so.

About the Author

Nine of Emily Devenport’s novels were published in the U.S. By NAL/Roc, under three pen names. She also has been published in the U.K., Italy, and Israel. Her novels are Shade, Larissa, Scorpianne, EggHeads, The Kronos Condition, Godheads, Broken Time (which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award), Belarus, and Enemies. Her newest novels, The Night Shifter, Spirits of Glory, and Pale Lady are in ebook form on Amazon, Smashwords, etc.

Her short stories were published in Asimov’s, the Full Spectrum anthology, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Aboriginal SF, whose readers voted her a Boomerang Award. She will have a story in the upcoming publication of The Mammoth Book of Kaiju.

Dying Young

Peter M. Ball

I smelled him coming long before he arrived, the musty odor of sulfur and dust cutting through the sweat-stink in Cassidy’s Saloon. Smelling things is part of it, that thing I inherited from my Da, but it weren’t just me who noticed it by the time he got close. The dragon stank bad enough that everyone breathed him in; the entire room hushin’ up, listening to the tick-tick of claws on hardwood, lookin’ at the door as he shouldered his way through.

He was a tall critter, but stooped over to fit his tail, and he’d been banged up good and proper by something a little more ruthless than the road. The wreckage that’d once been wings were folded over his shoulders, draped like a tattered coat. There weren’t nothing but a jagged nub of bone where his horns had been, and that weren’t good: Da once told me a dragon without horns got ornery, and they were usually trouble for more than just the feller what cut ‘em off.

The dragon stared us down; no one said nothin’ for a long stretch, but you can’t stare at a thing like him forever. Someone up the back of the bar coughed, probably Sam Coody or one of his cloned deputies, and that was all it took for everyone to stop gawking and talk amongst themselves. The dragon sneered at us, showing off a ridge of serrated teeth, and walked over to the bar. We pretended we were okay with it, the dragon being there in the saloon, like it weren’t no big deal, but our eyes drifted back. We watched him prop an elbow, easy as anything, and we waited for somethin’ to happen.

The doc leaned over and nudged me with that big bone hook he calls a hand. “Trouble?”

I flinched ‘fore I nodded, shying away from that hook. I didn’t even need a vision to figure this one out; there was a gun belt hanging on the dragon’s waist, visible every time he took a step, and Da never trusted strangers with guns. They were trouble, he said, and experience proved him right in the end. Doc Cameron knew that better than anyone.

The doc weren’t satisfied with that, though. There were something pinching at the edge of his eyes, a little scent of fear underneath his oily perfume. “Look harder,” he said. “Tell me what’s coming,” and he gave me a hard look, stared until I closed my eyes and peered forward, using Da’s gift. I saw nothing but gray smoke, smelled nothing but fire. I could hear the sharp spit of an automatic through the haze.

“Something’s burnin’, I can promise you that,” I said, “and I can hear a gun, Doc. Automatic. Someone’s headin’ for your slab, I think, before it’s all over.”

Doc Cameron half-lowered his eyelids and scratched the sharp edge of his cheekbone. Something flickered across his pupils, a cluster of lights spiraling towards the tear ducts as he scanned the dragon. Military tech, a hold over from the war, the doc’s little gift to Dunsborough. The little box on his belt hummed, fixing the data from the doc’s cortical patch onto a slice of silicon.

“Should we tell Coody, do you think?” I said, and the doc shook his head.

“The sheriff will want details,” Doc said. “Damn fool won’t run off a dragon based on a hunch, even one of yours.”

The doc sniffed. Coody was Da’s friend, last of the men Da trained before the doc took over. Doc closed his eyes and a light on the box flickered, the data loaded up and ready for study. “I’m going to go download this. Keep an eye on the lizard, Paul. The real eyes and the other. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

The doc slipped out the back way, eager to get back to his lab. I sat and drank my sarsaparilla and watched the dragon like I was told. I kept one hand under the table, close to that sharp knife Da gave me when I turned fourteen. The dragon didn’t do much beyond ordering whisky. I closed two eyes and opened the third wide, peering forward for all I was worth; it got me nothing but smoke and gunshots and the beginning of a headache that would last for days.

It weren’t more than a half-hour after the doc scarpered before things got ugly.

I can see trouble coming ‘fore most folks, even without the third eye. It was Da that taught me the trick of it, the ways of reading a room and seeing who’ll make the first move. The dragon weren’t lookin’ for trouble when he first walked in, but he were waiting for some to roll on by and get itself started of its own accord. In the old days Da would’ve talked him around, but Da’s long gone and Coody ain’t quite got the knack of keepin’ things peaceful. People in the bar worried, stayed quiet and whispered when they spoke.

It were Kenny Sloan who stepped up, stompin’ across the floorboards to get in the dragon’s face. Sloan’s one of the doc’s razorfreaks, a ‘borg with a handful of scalpels and jacked reflexes, fast enough to slice the wings off’a fly. He put his weight against the bar and looked over at the dragon, propping his arm on the counter so the light gleamed off the metal. Kenny Sloan was a bully, like most of the doc’s boys. He flipped a quick grin back at his cronies, making sure they were watching. “Hey, lizard,” Sloan said. “I thought your kind knew better than to drink at human bars.”

The dragon turned then, mouth full of whisky, twin trails of smoke seeping out of its nose. The molten eyes squinted at Sloan, studying him. Sloan was a big guy, even before Doc jacked him up; no one missed him posturing. The noise died down and I saw Coody and his posse of badges straightening up in their corner, gettin’ ready for real trouble. The dragon turned back to its whisky, ignoring us all. Sloan laid his fingers on the dragon’s shoulder.

“Hey, lizard,” Sloan said. He flicked the mechanical arm out, blades sliding free of the finger sheaths. “We already beat your kind once, yeah?”

Things happened fast after that, probably too fast to get the details without the third eye’s hindsight. Sloan went to strike the dragon, Coody and his tin-star heroes got up on their feet, and the dragon moved faster than all of them. A quick twist away from Sloan’s swipe, wings flaring out behind him, the dragon’s stance was low with clawed hands splayed wide. Sloan got himself gutted before his finger-blades crunched into the top of the bar, and he stood there, bleeding slow from a stomach wound and struggling to get his hand free.

“You need a doctor,” the dragon hissed. He swallowed the last mouthful of whisky, and Coody’s men had him surrounded by the time he laid the glass down. The dragon eyed them carefully, all the sheriff’s skinny mutant-clones with their clunky pre-war revolvers. Coody pulled Sloan’s hand free of the hardwood; Kenny Sloan kept himself busy trying to hold in the mess of blood and gore that used to be his stomach. “Sorry for the mess,” the dragon said, and he touched his blood-slicked claw to his forehead. His wings settled around him again, rearranging themselves to cover his gun belt and the sleek lines of his body. “I’ll see myself out, yes?”

The clones looked at Coody and the old man nodded; no one said squeak as the dragon walked away. Sloan moaned a little, making gurgling sounds when he tried to speak, and as soon as the dragon was gone the sheriff looked around and pointed in my direction.

“Where’s the doc?” Coody said. “Blood and thunder, son, go tell Cameron to hustle if he wants his pet ‘borg to keep breathing.”

I nodded and started moving, but Sloan was a goner. The doc didn’t care about his ‘borgs the way Coody looked after his clones, ‘specially not when they were as dumb as Kenny and there was prey on the horizon. I went ‘cross the square and buzzed the doc’s doorbell, but there was no answer coming. I had nothing to do but wait, go back to Coody, or go trailin’ after the dragon like I was supposed to. None of them appealed. Kenny Sloan was screaming inside the bar, dying slow and messy, so I went with the best option of the three; I ambled down the main street, following the soft buzz in my head that’d tell me where to find the dragon’s camp.

The dragon was hiding out by Prickly Pear Hill, his bedroll stretched out in the middle of the twisted cacti that soaked up moisture from the stream curving ‘round the base of the slope. He looked like he was traveling light; a small pack looked empty, like he’d been killing food on the march, but when I strolled in I got the familiar itch and saw dirt piled up where he’d buried supplies. I opened the third eye, peered on down, and got a sense of crates, canned food, and cordite.

I had myself a few good minutes before the dragon rolled in, largely thanks to the fact that I weren’t forced to backtrack in case the town sent out a posse. I sat on a rock and kicked the dust, listening hard, trying to hear him coming. It didn’t work; I didn’t hear him, see him, didn’t even smell him this time around. I ain’t easy to sneak up on, but he managed it. I just blinked my eyes and there he was, crouched low with claws out and hot spit dribbling down his chin.

“Boy,” he said, nostrils flaring, and at that the smell of sulfur rose up around me. “You were at the bar, yes? Town sent you?”

I nodded, keeping my hands out in the open. I weren’t armed with much, just my Da’s knife, and it seemed to calm the dragon. He knelt down, sniffed me, then sighed a stream of smoke into the air. “Ah,” he said. “You have gifts.”

“A bit,” I said. “Not much, not really.”

He sniffed again, breathing deep. I recognized the trick from when Da used to do it, knew about the clues you could pick up with the right kind of training. The third eye does big things, its own special kind of magic, but Da always said there were other senses to fill in what the third eye can’t see. The dragon smiled at me. “Trained, then? Your father?”

I shrugged the question away. “I work for the doc,” I said. “He runs things; wanted you followed.”

The dragon cocked its head, smiling. “Dangerous work, yes?”

I said nothing, just crouched there on my rock and waiting for what would come. I had enough of my Da in me to know I weren’t going to die there, but that didn’t mean I weren’t going to pay hard for daring to follow him out there. I waited for the dragon to lash out, making use of his claws.

It ain’t often I’m surprised, but he surprised me then. “I make tea, yes?”

“Oh.” I blinked, and he watched me carefully. I forced myself to nod. “Yes. Please, yes.”

I squirmed. The dragon turned his attention to the fire, hocked a sharp gob of spit into a pile of kindling to get things going. He unearthed an iron pot and loose tea from his pack, crouched down by the flames to set it boiling. There was something fascinating about the muscles moving under his scales, about the way sunlight gleamed on the dark ridges across his hands. He sat, dignified, and waited.

“You’re after someone,” I said. “I saw that much, back in the saloon. Can’t see who, or why, but it’s going to end messy.”

The dragon kept its eyes on the tea. “Yes.”

“I’m thinking it’s the doc,” I said. “He got plenty nervous when you showed up, hurried off to his lab right fast. That ain’t like him, really. Doc Cameron likes his body parts, having new bits to play with.”

That earned me a reaction, a snort of smoke and a twitch in the folded wings. “Yes.”

“So what’s going to happen, when you front up again?”

The dragon settled back on its haunches, stirring the pot. He lifted the pan and poured spiced tea into a pair of metal mugs, both of them bearing scorch marks on the rim. He handed one to me and I saw flecks of Sloan’s blood drying on the dragon’s claws. “You have the Sight,” he said. “You tell me.”

My forehead tingled, all prescience and instinct, but turned up nothing new. “I haven’t seen yet; the future’s nothing but smoke and gunfire.” I took a long sip of the tea, felt the chili powder burning the back of my throat as it went down. The dragon watched me drink, red eyes narrowed to slits. I figured I knew what he was waiting for. “Ask,” I said. “I ain’t going lie.”

“You have the sight, yet you work for your doctor?”

I guessed what he was asking and short-cut to the answer. “He did some bad stuff when he arrived,” I said. “But good stuff, too. Helped people, gave ‘em back stuff they’d lost. Relics of the war, sure, but they had arms and legs again. They could work, and we needed workers.”

The dragon’s laughter sent hot spit across the campfire. He put his cup down, tilting forward, and when he straightened up one of those ancient Lugers sat neat and easy in his hand. He pointed the narrow barrel in my direction, eyes narrowed down to stare at me. “You know, then,” he said. “You’ve seen what your doctor has done?”

“Bits and pieces. Glimpses, really, but I got plenty of after what he’s done since coming to town.” I watched the cold fire in the dragon’s eyes.

The dragon breathed deep. “He killed your father?”

I nodded again.

“And you work for him, still?”

“Sure enough.”

“Why?”

“Needs to be done.” I sipped my tea, staying calm; he wasn’t going to shoot me, I could see that much. I don’t have all my Da’s gifts, not even half, but I was sure enough of that. “Not much good tellin’ folk ‘round these parts he’s the devil; they need the doc too much to care and it ain’t like anyone’s goin’ to be surprised by revelations of shady dealin’s. And my Da didn’t hold with revenge, really; he cared about keepin’ folks safe. He would-a done the same as me, most likely, if he ain’t ended up dead. These are nasty times; it takes a nasty man or a brave man to keep a town safe.”

“Your father was brave.”

“And look where it got him.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice, to avoid the flashes of history that rolled in if I let myself dwell on feeling. Hindsight can be a curse, Da said, and he weren’t half wrong about that. “We’re out of brave men, now he’s dead. All we’ve got left is the nasty folk and the followers. Way I see it, I can have the doc dead or everyone else can live.”

The dragon’s expression didn’t change and the Luger didn’t waver, but the tattered wings rippled as he adjusted his stance. The crooked line of its broken horn caught the firelight. “What you have seen,” he said. “You cannot save him.”

I shook my head. “I wasn’t lying,” I said. “Haze, smoke, and gunfire, that’s all I got; one of you will die, but I don’t know who.” I paused, drinking the last of the tea. “I got a fair guess about what happens next, though, after he’s dead. It ain’t pretty, not by a long stretch. Out here with nothing but Coody to keep things safe, it’ll go downhill fast.”

The dragon nodded, holstering the Luger and picking up its tea. “You should go.”

I lingered for a moment, wondering what to do with my cup. The dragon rose, staring down at me. “Go! Tell your doctor I am coming.”

I went, slinking back towards town with the tin cup still in my hand.

Coody’s clones were manning the walls, so there was no real chance to sneak into town without anyone noticing. Two of them came down to the front gate to greet me, clamped down on my shoulder with heavy hands and started guiding me down Main Street. Four others stood on the palisade, dull eyes scanning the horizon while another one swept the landscape with the town spotlights. All of them tall, slack-jawed, armed; they looked the part, despite their daft expressions, hands on the holsters and eyes following the point of light that raked the landscape. The two walking me in said nothing, just held my shoulder and marched. I coulda given them the slip—Coody’s clones aren’t as bright as him, and he ain’t exactly sharp as knives to begin with—but a trip to the sheriff’s office gave me a good excuse to stay clear of the doc’s lab and delay my report by a few minutes.

The original Coody was sitting on the porch of his office, whispering orders into a radio and making a big show of checking the action on the shotgun across his lap. He didn’t even look when his clones threw me against the step, just pumped his gun with a satisfied grin and cradled it ‘cross his lap.

“Sent you to go fetch the doc, Paul,” he said. His good eye squinted as he drew a pistol and checked its load, the other glowing big and red beneath the doc’s metalwork. “Cost us bad, you not doin’ what I told ya. Sloan was dead ‘fore the doc could get to him, nothin’ left but parts.”

Da tried training Coody, just like he trained me, but the sheriff ain’t got none of the natural talent Da had for prescience or reading people. It made lying to him dangerous; he had to grind the answer out of you if he wanted to be sure of something.

“Called the doc and got no answer,” I said. “He left me orders, ‘fore he left for his lab, and I followed ‘em when he didn’t come to the door. You sayin’ I done the wrong thing? That I shoulda’ leant on his doorbell instead of doin’ what he asked?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Coody’s eyes scanned the town in a long, slow arc. “Doc Cameron’s the brains behind this town, but I’m the law, kid. I’m the one who has to keep people safe now . . . ” He cut himself off before he mentioned Da, took a deep breath to clear the thought out of his head.

I shook my head. “You really believe that, Sam?”

“Yeah, I do.” One hand patted the shotgun and he looked at me for the first time, the mechanical right eye clicking as it focused on me. That eye was Doc Cameron’s idea, a replacement for one Coody had lost during the last war. I was willing to bet that Cameron could see what Coody saw, if the doc had half-a-mind to check in. “What did the doc have you doing?”

I shrugged, and Sam Coody cuffed me across the back of the head. I went down in a heap, spitting red dust. “You wanna try that again, Paul?”

“He had me trailing the dragon.” I sat up. “Wanted to know if it was after him.”

“And is it?”

I nodded. “Close enough to.”

Coody sighed and rubbed his good eye with his right hand. “So, you peered into the future on this one? It going to end bad, Paul?”

He held out his hand, helping me onto my feet. “It’s going to end, Coody,” I said. “I haven’t seen spit worth talking about, but there’s gunfire ahead and plenty-a screamin’. Dragon’s got the sight, I think, an’ he figures someone’s goin’ to die, but damned if I can see who.”

Coody squinted. The long mustache twitched as he chewed on his bottom lip. He didn’t say nothing for a real long time.

“I gotta report to the doc,” I told him. “He’ll be expecting me, Sam.”

“Go,” the sheriff said, and he went back to his guns.

No one likes going into Doc Cameron’s bunker, least of all a guy like me, someone with the sight. Places like the bunker are always screaming, the echoes of the past ringing out again and again. But there isn’t a damn fool in town that ain’t carrying the doc’s handiwork somewhere, not even me and I’m a damn sight cleaner than most, and Doc Cameron liked to keep tabs on folks. There were places I could hide, if I set my mind to it, but I’d come out eventually and pay my dues for disobeying him. I set across the square, and putting an eyeball to the scanner by the door, let myself into the bunker to tell the doc all the things he didn’t want to hear.

My gut and my prescience both said it was a bad call; a braver man would’a skived off and spent the next day or three in his bunk, waiting out the storm until the shootin’ was over. I wasn’t a brave man, so I stood there until the steel doors swung open and a pair of Doc’s razorfreaks fell into step behind me and escorted me through the winding tunnels Doc’s boys hollowed out back when they first arrived.

The doc was down in his workshop, working on Sloan’s corpse. He had the bone hook in the corpse’s stomach, pulling down and opening the skin like a zipper. The smell of it made me gag, but he didn’t even look up. “He’s here for me, isn’t he? The dragon?”

I looked over my shoulder at the razorfreaks, big lunks who stood there, uncaring and mute. Doc looked up from the slick gore of Kenny Sloan’s innards, glared at me with cold eyes until I gave in and nodded.

“Who shoots who, Paul? Tell me how much it’ll cost me to win?”

I closed my eyes and looked, hoping to get lucky: mist; gunshots; the screams of the dying. “I wish I knew, Doc.”

Doc Cameron nodded and buried his long nose back in Sloan’s vitals, poking about with the claw and good hand alike. His white coat was blood-splattered as he pulled the tech outta the dead. The days of the war were a long time past and supplies weren’t comin’ in; as the doc was fond of reminding us, it was a waste-not, want-not world now. He spooled cabling onto the slab, a thin line of plastic and fibers that had been in-and-out of ‘borgs since the early days of the war. “You talked to the dragon, at least?”

I nodded.

“What did he have to say?”

“Not much.” I fidgeted best I could between Cameron’s guards. “He’s coming for you, knew I had the sight. He wanted me to look into the past, get a good look at what you did during the war.”

“And you did?”

“No.”

Doc Cameron smiled. “You disappoint me, Paul. I thought you were built of sterner stuff.” He stood up, abandoning his work. Sloan’s guts dripped off the bone hook. He shook his head, full of mock sorrow. “What would your father think? A brave man like that, ending up with a boy like you?”

“I don’t care what my Da thought, Doc. My Da is long dead.”

“Why don’t I believe you, Paul?” The doc’s grin was terse, lips folded tight against his teeth. He held his bone hook like an offering, the oily smear of blood covering the tip. “Touch it, boy. Let us find out what kind of man you are.”

Da used to say there were people who didn’t come out of the war quite right, and there were pretty good odds the doc was one of them. I forced myself to look him in the eye. “Don’t matter what you done, Doc. Not during the war, not last week, not when you first met the dragon and did whatever ya done to him. If you’re the one who goes down . . . ”

“Yes, if I go down.” He let the thought hang, thin lips twitching, but neither of us finished it. He nodded to the razorfreaks and they hustled me out. I didn’t bother struggling as they clamped their steel hands on my arms and lifted me, carrying me out.

The other freaks buried Sloan right on sunrise, interring the small bag of meat parts the doc couldn’t use into the red dirt just outside of town. Coody and his clones watched things from the wall, stiff-backed guardians with shotguns and rifles, not wanting spit to do with the doc’s bullyboys. They were allies, sure, when the town needed defending, but it was uneasy at the best of times and tense at the worst.

Coody doubled the guard that night. Buried meat had a way of attracting scavengers and things went downhill real easy after that happened.

My gut said we were safe for a day or two at least, and there were no tingling on the third eye to say it were wrong, so I drifted past Coody’s office and let him know we had some time up our sleeves.

“Best keep an eye out,” Coody told me. “Just in case, like.” His logic was bravado, mostly, for all the truth of it. You didn’t have to have the sight to feel the tension; the whole damn town was on edge, waiting, and Doc Cameron had been locked up inside his vault for nineteen straight hours trying to figure a way to save his skin. Da told me plenty of stories about his time in the army. Said we fought a whole damn war against the dragons and it’d cost us big every time the shooting started; one o’ them might not seem much of a threat, but it was going to hurt everyone when he drifted through town again.

I spent the day in my bunk, trying to open the third eye or dream up a vision. Going forward got me nothing new, and going back taught me nothin’ that I hadn’t already suspected: Doc Cameron was never a nice man, and the war gave him ample chances to prove it over and over. He was cruel, yes, but I knew that, and there were lots more that seemed understandable given the cruelty goin’ on back then. And it’s not like any of his habits changed much between the war and now, he just had fewer folk to experiment on and more opportunity for vivisection.

Coody came to see me, late in the afternoon. I didn’t bother getting out of my bunk as he shouldered his way through the front door. He hooked one of my stools with the toe of his boot and slung it by the bed, settling down with shotgun still resting on his right shoulder. “You been lookin’?”

I nodded.

“You see anythin’ yet?”

I shook my head and Coody grimaced, adjusting his weight on the stool. I saw one of his clones waiting by the door, smooth face filled with a slack-jawed grin as it kept watch on Main Street. It was Coody’s face, but younger and dumber. The man sitting next to me was weathered and creased, carrying the weight of too many years. My Da’s friend, a good man, doing his best in tough times.

“I was in the war with your father,” Coody said. “Saw a damn sight more than I wanted to. Tangled with the dragons a couple of times before things went completely south. Whole damn race was human once, before they took to mutation. Damn things only exist because of folks like Cameron messing about with genes. Guessin’ you’re young enough not to remember that?”

I shook my head.

“Tough critters to face down,” he said. “Fast. Strong. They smell you comin’ before you even know you’re goin’ to draw. Saw a camp after the bastards attacked it one night. Lots of folks dead in their bunks—never heard ‘em coming, motion detectors picked up nothing. You understand what I’m saying, Paul?”

I shrugged. Coody paused and took a long breath. “You’ve looked back, ain’t you?”

I nodded, watching the gleam of Coody’s mechanical eye, the way it whirred when he focused on me. I tried not to think of the doc watching me through it, listening in on the conversation.

“And the doc, he probably deserves what’s coming, one way or another?”

I hesitated, just for a moment, then I nodded again. Coody sagged. “Damn.”

There was a breeze outside, cold and gentle. I could hear the soft squeak as the wind-pumps in the town square dredged water out of the basin underneath the town. Coody leaned back in his chair, heel of his thumb working along the steel ridge of his bad eye. I twisted in the bunk, trying to get away from the dull red gleam as he stared at me.

“I ain’t carrying a gun,” I said.

Coody nodded. “I never asked you to.”

“My Da . . . ”

“Your father was your father, not you,” Coody said. “You ain’t him, Paul. I know that. He’d know it too, if he were still around. Things change, right enough, and you change along with ‘em or pay the price.” Coody pushed back on the stool, scraping it along the floorboards. I watched the red light of his eye bob as he pushed himself upright, shotgun sliding down into his hands. “D’ya know when the bastard’s coming, then?”

I shrugged into the darkness. The night-vision optics installed in the eye would let Coody see the gesture. “Tomorrow, maybe the day after. He’s got the eye, and he’s better than me, I think. Good, as good as Da were. Makes it hard to predict him.”

Coody grunted and thumped across the hut, settling in at the doorway to take a long look down the street. “Folks are goin’ to die, Paul. Nothin’ you can do about that. But if this thing’s goin’ to win, I want to know. Something’s gotta protect this town, if the doc takes a bullet to the gut, and I ain’t bettin’ on the lizard to hang around to do the job.”

I said nothing. There weren’t much to say to that.

“I’m thinking of letting him through,” Coody sighed, shifting his weight. “If we’re lucky he’ll come in quiet. Try and gut the doc and get out before anyone knows he’s here. It ain’t a nice idea, since it means losing the doc and all, but it’ll keep some folk alive I reckon.”

I thought about the dragon’s camp: the cases he buried in the dirt, the dwindling supplies, his anger burning like kindling under a blowtorch. I shook my head. “He won’t come quiet,” I said. “He ain’t planning on leaving anything behind after this is over.”

“Even then,” Coody said. “God help me, even then, it might not be a bad idea.” He stepped outside then, saying nothing else, and I watched him go with a bad feeling in my stomach.

I made myself scarce after Coody left, grabbed my blanket and my Da’s knife and left my shack behind. Sam Coody might not be askin’ me to carry a gun, but the doc wouldn’t hesitate if he got scared enough. People get confident when you put the sight and a gun together, like there ain’t nothing to worry about if you can see what’s gonna happen. Da’s fault, mostly, ‘cause he proved folks right around these parts, leastwise until the doc showed up. He did it here and he did it in the war, skated through everyone on sight and bravery. If Coody pulled the clones from the wall, left the dragon to the razorfreaks and ‘borgs to deal with, you could bet Doc Cameron would call in every favor he had to save his skin.

Getting around town without being seen is easy enough if you’ve got the practice, ‘specially once you know that the cameras you gotta avoid are stuck inside o’ folk’s heads instead of grafted to the side of buildings. I made for the water-tower on top of the saloon, wormed my way deep into the shadows underneath and hid there amid the splinters and the dust. It had a good view of the main street and I had a headache building up, a heavy weight that built up in the center of my forehead.

I slept there, fitful and quiet, away from where Doc and Coody could find me. I dreamt of Da on that last day, back when the doc first pulled into town. I dreamt of the future, of the dragon arriving, and heard a new sound among the gunfire: a sharp, wet bang, like someone ‘sploding one of the paddymelons that grow down by the river, and Coody’s headless corpse fell out of the smoke and lay smoking at my feet.

I woke up with the dragon crouched over me, his snout close enough for me to smell the sulfur. Gun in hand, eyes scanning the street. I stifled a scream and the dragon smiled. “You are hiding, yes?”

I coughed, soft and spluttering, before I said yes. The dragon peered across the street, watching the doc’s muscle gathered ‘round the bunker. Razorfreaks, the lot of them. Twenty men, maybe; all of them ‘borged. “A lot of claws in those arms,” I said. “Suicide to dive down and attack ‘em.”

The dragon just shrugged. “Yes.”

“I had a dream.” I pushed myself up on my elbows, whisper turning into a growl. “I don’t know who dies between you and the doc, but I know who it costs us while the fighting goes down. The sheriff’s going to let you in, assume you’ll go quiet and leave everyone else alone. He figures there’ll still be a town standing after you’re done; that he’ll protect the rubble from the predators and rebuild with the survivors.”

“He is wrong,” the dragon said. “It will cost him, yes? Boom, yes?”

“Yes.”

He smiled at me, showing off the ridge of serrated teeth. “And so, you will stop me?”

I shivered despite the heat. “I don’t think I can.”

“You think,” the dragon said. He shook his head. “You think.”

I could swear the wheezing noise it made after that was something like a laugh. “You’ve got the sight,” I said. “You know how this will end.”

“I know,” the dragon said. “I’ve seen my death.”

“Don’t do it,” I said. “Please.”

The dragon shrugged and checked the safety on his pistols. He squinted at the sun a moment, as though checking the time. “Is done,” he said. “All done. There is nothing to stop it now.”

I sniffed then, smelling him: brimstone and cordite.

There weren’t anything quiet about the way the dragon was going down.

The first thing to go was the southern palisade. The rumble of the explosion rolled down the main street shaking red dust off buildings and rattling the windows. I was climbing down when it happened, got rattled off the side of the saloon and fell awkward in the dusty alley behind it. Pain rolled down my right shoulder as the screaming started out on the main street, people running for cover as the razorfreaks charged. I could hear the fight starting through the haze of smoke and dust: staccato bursts of gunfire; the cries of the dying, the dragon returning fire from his vantage on the rooftop. The doc’s boys were fast and strong, but they weren’t trained as much more ‘n muscle. It’d take ‘em a couple-a minutes to realize the shooter was somewhere up and outside the billowing cloud of smoke.

I scrambled to my feet and went for the wall, stumbling as the second bomb went off somewhere down the street. Dragons were quiet, Coody said, and hard as hell to detect; there’d be bombs all across town to create the distraction he was looking for, enough to flood the streets in smoke and fire, to ruin the infrared eyes the doc gave his razorfreaks to let ‘em see in the dark. Coody and his clones gave minimal assistance, filling the street with spotlights while they took cover from the gunfire. They didn’t move to help the razorfreaks, just dug-in and waited, a dozen of them with rifles not even looking for a shot. Coody stood behind the steel barrels of water we carted in from the reservoir, shotgun on his shoulder as he scanned the streets. The steel plate over his right eye shone in the light; he didn’t notice me coming, not ‘til I slid into place beside him. I yelled the word bomb, trying to get louder than the din. Coody nodded, looking irritated, and pointed at the carnage.

“Bomb,” I said, screaming it, and pointed at his eye-plate. This time it sunk in, and he turned a little pale. I closed my eyes as another dynamite charge went off, caught a glimpse of the future. Clearer now, full of shapes, the sounds getting louder and louder as prescience became past. Coody ordered his clones into the street, ordered another two onto the walls to start searching the rooftops for the dragon and take him down with a rifle-shot.

I peered forward, snatching another glimpse. The gunfire and screaming in the smoke-haze started to die down. It was random now, scattered, the dragon picking the last of the razorfreaks off. My gut said we were out of bombs and out of mobs, so the killing would get real personal from here on in. I heard Coody calling orders, telling his clones to sweep the street, get survivors under cover and start putting out the fires.

I knew when I was going to die, if I didn’t do anything stupid with my life. First trick Da taught me, when he figured out I had the sight. You look forward and you see your death, and you know that’s how it’ll end if you don’t mess up destiny too bad in the meantime. The dragon knew it too, and so did my Da. It ain’t writ in stone, but it’s good enough. It takes some real stupidity to mess those visions up.

Da was supposed to die an old man, but he pushed things too hard. I was supposed to die an older man, and I hadn’t pushed a damn thing, not since the doc came to town. I closed my eyes and looked, forcing my way through the smoke. Somewhere in the future the dragon was going to die and the doc would punish Coody for it. Or the doc was going to die and take Sam Coody with him. There weren’t many ways it come out good for the sheriff, and there were a damn sight fewer where it came out good for the town.

I got out my Da’s knife and stepped forward, walking into the smoke.

I found the doors to the doc’s bunker open wide, the locks burned through with dragon-spit and smeared with oil and blood. I stood there a moment, breathing against a handkerchief to avoid choking on the dust. Coody stepped up beside me, shotgun in hand. “He in there?” he asked, and I nodded and tapped my nose. “Sulfur,” I said, and went in, holding my knife out before me like it’d do a damn thing against anything we’d find running loose in the dark of the bunker. Coody followed on behind me, his mechanical eye clicking as it adapted to the darkness.

“You seen anything?” he asked me, “like, maybe, who’s going to win?”

I shook my head, stepped over the body of a dying ‘borg. “Get outta here, Sheriff. You don’t want to be close to the doc today.”

We heard a gunshot, deeper in, the sound of someone scrambling and running. Coody moved a little ahead of me, raised the shotgun. “It ain’t exactly a choice, Paul. Dyin’ comes with the badge.”

He started moving in, gun at the ready, letting me follow behind. I tried to peek at the future, but there was nothing to see. Not anymore. Too many muddled pieces on the board, too many people trying to bluff and get a better result out of the hand fate dealt them. Occasionally we’d pass a body, see drips of blood on the concrete or smears of it on the wall. It’s a twisty path, heading down to the doc’s lab, and plenty of corridors leading off to the side. We found him hiding in one about halfway down, crouched in the darkness with a bone-saw in his fist. He was bleeding, the doc, but he moved okay when he saw us. “A grazing shot,” he said, “lucky, at best.”

“The dragon,” Coody said. He pumped his shotgun for emphasis, chambering a live shell.

“Deeper in,” Doc Cameron said, “there’s a few boys towards the lab, trying to contain it.” He paused a moment, stared at Coody. “They’re doing your job, sheriff, unless I miss my guess. Perhaps you should go join them.” There was steel in his voice as he said it, and his good hand at his belt hovering over the little box patched into his computer.

“The dragon’s your mess,” Coody said. “What if I say no?”

The doc’s gaze slid over to me, then back up to Coody. “I gather you’ve been informed of that,” he said. The laugh that followed was high-pitched, a trill of amusement.

Down the corridors, in the doc’s lab, we heard someone screaming. “Probably best if you hurry,” Doc said. He laughed again, winced, put his hook against the wall to steady himself. Blood loss, I figured. The scratch in his side weren’t as minor as he made out. Prescience said the doc was already dead, just running out the final moments before the injury put him down. The only question now was whether the dragon and Coody went with him.

He wheezed for breath, leaning forward, and the hand over his computer box strayed a little too far. His eyes were stuck on Coody, waiting for the decision. I thought about Da for a moment, about dying old and safe, then I trusted my gut and Da’s knife and went at the doc with a bloody yell and the knife twisting straight for stomach.

It cost me a hook across the face, stabbing the doc in the gut. He slashed me hard, but it didn’t kill me; didn’t even hurt when he followed up, jamming the hook in my stomach and ripping a shallow trench through the skin and the gizzards. The pain was bad, even looking back with hindsight, but I figure it was worth it. I got the knife in the doc two or three times in return, kept him busy while Coody lined up the shot and let the shotgun go boom ‘til he ran out of ammo. I weren’t conscious to see it happen, but the doc went down. Went down hard, a bloody mess, and Coody standing over him with the gun just-in-case, calling down the clones to stitch me up and get me walking.

I spent a week or two in bed, healing up from my injuries, and would have myself some nice scars to show off by the time I was healed. The dragon was gone by the time I came to, walked out of town by Coody with supplies and a warning. There weren’t much left for him in town, with the doc laid out for burial, and there were plenty of folks out for his blood after the business with the explosions. He went quiet, which surprised me, and he was missing an eye to go with his broken horn.

We were due some hardness, everyone knew that, and there were a couple-a folks held grudges against Coody for doing in the doc. But we held off against the scavenger beasts and the retaliatory raids by the last of doc’s ‘borgs, found ways to make do when his tech ran down and people started limping ‘round town on malfunctioning limbs. I started wearing my Da’s gun, when Coody asked me for help. He was running short of clones, now. There were men in doc’s labs trying to fix the machines, but they weren’t none as smart as him and it would take a while to get things running, if they ever did.

Things are good, though, since the dragon came. Tougher, yes, but not so bad as they were. My Da used to tell me that people cope, that the war proved that more than anything. But they’ll do more than cope, if you ask them too, if you show them there’s another option. That they’ll do the right thing, eventually, ‘cause doing otherwise there ain’t much to life. I’m not saying he were right, mind, but he saw a lot of what might happen. He was a smart man, Da, and he were better at lookin’ forward than me.

But that was him, and he did his part. Now there’s me and Coody and a bunch of broken parts, a town that needs savin’ and a future stretchin’ forward. And maybe I get to make it to the end I’m meant to have, and maybe I get sidetracked a little along the way. It doesn’t seem so bad, not knowing, not like it used too.

And Da always used to tell me there were worse things than dying young.

First published in Eclipse Four, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2011.

About the Author

Peter M. Ball is the author of Horn, Bleed, and the Flotsam novella series from Apocalypse Ink Productions. His short stories have appeared in venues such as Weird Tales, Electric Velocipede, Eclipse 4, and Daily Science Fiction.

Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck

Neal Asher

Lost in some perverse fantasy, Tameera lovingly inspected the displays of her Optek rifle. For me, what happened next proceeded with the unstoppable nightmare slowness of an accident. She brought the butt of the rifle up to her shoulder, took careful aim, and squeezed off a single shot. One of the sheq slammed back against a rock face then tumbled down through vegetation to land in the white water of a stream.

Some creatures seem to attain the status of myth even though proven to be little different from other apparently prosaic species. On Earth the lion contends with the unicorn, the wise old elephant never forgets, and gentle whales sing haunting ballads in the deeps. It stems from anthropomorphism, is fed by both truth and lies, and over time firmly embeds itself in human culture. On Myral, where I had spent the last ten years, only a little of such status attached to the largest autochthon—not surprising for a creature whose name is a contraction of “shit-eating quadruped.” But rumors of something else in the wilderness, something that had no right to be there, had really set the myth-engines of the human mind into motion, and brought hunters to this world.

There was no sign of any sheq on the way out over the narrow vegetation-cloaked mounts. They only put in an appearance after I finally moored my blimp to a peak, above a horizontal slab on which blister tents could be pitched. My passengers noticed straight away that the slab had been used many times before, and that my mooring was an iron ring long set into the rock, but then, campsites were a rarity amid the steep slopes, cliffs, and streams of this area. It wasn’t a place humans were built for. Sheq country.

Soon after he disembarked, Tholan went over to the edge to try out one of his disposable vidcams. The cam itself was about the size of his forefinger, and he was pointing it out over the terrain while inspecting a palm com he held in his other hand. He had unloaded a whole case of these cams, which he intended to position in likely locations, or dangle into mist pockets on a line—a hunter’s additional eyes. He called me over. Tameera and Anders followed.

“There.” He nodded downwards.

A seven of sheq was making its way across the impossible terrain—finding handholds amid the lush vertical vegetation and traveling with the assurance of spiders on a wall. They were disconcertingly simian, about the size of a man, and quadruped—each limb jointed like a human arm but ending in hands bearing eight long prehensile fingers. Their heads, though, were anything but simian, being small, insectile, like the head of a mosquito but with two wide trumpet-like probosces.

“They won’t be a problem will they?” Tholan’s sister, Tameera, asked.

She was the most xenophobic, I’d decided, but then such phobia made little difference to their sport: the aliens they sought out usually being the “I’m gonna chew off the top of your head and suck out your brains” variety.

“No—so long as we leave them alone,” said Tholan. Using his thumb on the side controls of his palm com, he increased the camera’s magnification, switching it to infrared then ultrasound imaging.

“I didn’t load anything,” said Anders, Tholan’s PA. “Are they herbivores?”

“Omnivores,” I told her. “They eat some of that vegetation you see and supplement their diet with rock conch and octupal.”

“Rock conch and octupal indeed,” said Anders.

I pointed to the conch-like mollusks clinging to the wide leaves below the slab.

Anders nodded then said, “Octupal?”

“Like it sounds: something like an octopus, lives in pools, but can drag itself overland when required.” I glanced at Tameera and added, “None of them bigger than your hand.”

I hadn’t fathomed this trio yet. Brother and sister hunted together, relied on each other, yet seemed to hate each other. Anders, who I at first thought Tholan was screwing, really did just organize things for him. Perhaps I should have figured them out before agreeing to being hired, then Tameera would never have taken the shot she then took.

The hot chemical smell from the rifle filled the unbreathable air. I guessed they used primitive projectile weapons of this kind to make their hunts more sporting. I didn’t know how to react. Tholan stepped forwards and pushed down the barrel of her weapon before she could kill another of the creatures.

“That was stupid,” he said.

“Do they frighten you?” she asked coquettishly.

I reached up and checked that my throat plug was still in place, for I felt breathless, but it was still bleeding oxygen into my bronchus. To say that I now had a bad feeling about all this would be an understatement.

“You know that as well as putting us all in danger, she just committed a crime,” I said conversationally, as Tholan stepped away from his sister.

“Crime?” he asked.

“She just killed a C-grade sentient. If the Warden AI finds out and can prove she knew before she pulled the trigger, then she’s dead. But that’s not the main problem now.” I eyed the sheq seven, now six. They seemed to be confused about the cause of their loss. “Hopefully they won’t attack, but it’ll be an idea to keep watch.”

He stared at me, shoved his cam into his pocket. I turned away and headed back. Why had I agreed to bring these bored aristos out here to hunt for Myral’s mythic gabbleduck? Money. Those who have enough to live comfortably greatly underestimate it as a source of motivation. Tholan was paying enough for me to pay off all I owed on my blimp, and prevent a particular shark from paying me a visit to collect interest by way of involuntarily donated organs. It would also be enough for me to upgrade my apartment in the citadel, so I could rent it while I went out to look at this world. I’d had many of the available cerebral loads and knew much about Myral’s environment, but that wasn’t the same as experiencing it. Still there was much for me to learn, to know. Though I was certain that the chances of my finding a gabbleduck—a creature from a planet light-centuries away—anywhere on Myral, were lower than the sole of my boot.

“She only did that to get attention,” said Anders at my shoulder.

“Well, let’s hope she didn’t succeed too well,” I replied. I looked up at my blimp, and considered the prospect of escaping this trio and bedding down for the night. Certainly we would be getting nothing more done today, what with the blue giant sun gnawing the edge of the world as it went down.

“You have to excuse her. She’s over-compensating for a father who ignored her for the first twenty years of her life.”

Anders had been coming on to me right from the start and I wondered just what sort of rich bitch game she was playing, though to find out I would have to let my guard down, and that I had no intention of doing. She was too much: too attractive, too intelligent, and just being in her presence set things jumping around in my stomach. She would destroy me.

“I don’t have to excuse her,” I said. “I just have to tolerate her.”

With that, I headed to the alloy ladder extending down from the blimp cabin.

“Why are they called shit-eaters?” she asked falling into step beside me. Obviously she’d heard where the name sheq came from.

“As well as the rock conch and octupal, they eat each others shit—running it through a second intestinal tract.”

She winced.

I added, “But it’s not something they should die for.”

“You’re not going to report this are you?” she asked.

“How can I—he didn’t want me carrying traceable com.”

I tried not to let my anxiety show. Tholan didn’t want any of Myral’s AIs finding out what he was up to, so, as a result, he provided all our com equipment, and it was encoded. I was beginning to wonder if that might be unhealthy for me.

“You’re telling me you have no communicator up there?” She pointed up at the blimp.

“I won’t report it,” I said, then climbed, wishing I could get away with pulling the ladder up behind me, wishing I had not stuck so rigidly to the wording of the contract.

Midark is that time when it’s utterly black on Myral, when the sun is precisely on the opposite side of the world from you. It comes after five hours of blue, lasts about three hours prior to the next five hours of blue—the twilight that is neither day nor night and is caused by reflection of sunlight from the sub-orbital dust cloud. Anyway, it was at midark when the screaming and firing woke me. By the time I had reattached my oxygen bottle and was clambering down the ladder, some floods were lighting the area and it was all over.

“Yes, you warned me,” Tholan spat.

I walked over to Tameera’s tent, which was ripped open and empty. There was no blood, but then the sheq would not want to damage the replacement. I glanced at Anders, who was inspecting a palm com.

“She’s alive.” She looked up. “She must have been using her own oxygen supply rather than the tent’s. We have to go after her now.”

“Claw frames in midark?” I asked.

“We’ve got night specs.” She looked at me as if she hadn’t realized until then how stupid I was.

“I don’t care if you’ve got owl and cat genes—it’s suicide.”

“Do explain,” said Tholan nastily.

“You got me out here as your guide. The plan was to set up a base and from it survey the area for any signs of the gabbleduck—by claw frame.”

“Yes . . . ”

“Well, claw frames are only safe here during the day.”

“I thought you were going to explain.”

“I am.” I reached out, detached one of the floods from its narrow post, and walked with it to the edge of the slab. I shone it down revealing occasional squirming movement across the cliff of vegetation below.

“Octupals,” said Anders. “What’s the problem?”

I turned to her and Tholan. “At night they move to new pools and, being slow-moving, they’ve developed a defense. Anything big gets too close, and they eject stinging barbs. They won’t kill you, but you’ll damned well know if you’re hit, so unless you’ve brought armored clothing . . . ”

“But what about Tameera?” Anders asked.

“Oh the sheq will protect her for a while.”

“While?” Tholan queried.

“At first they’ll treat her like an infant replacement for the one she killed,” I told him. “So they’ll guide her hands and catch her if she starts to fall. After time they’ll start to get bored, because sheq babies learn very quickly. If we don’t get to her before tomorrow night’s first blue, she’ll probably have broken her neck.”

“When does this stop?” He nodded towards the octupal activity.

“Mid-blue.”

“We go then.”

The claw frame is sporting development from military exoskeletons. The frame itself braces your body. A spine column rests against your back like a metal flatworm. Metal bones from this extend down your legs and along your arms. The claws are four times the size of human hands, and splayed out like big spiders from behind them, and from behind the ankles. Each finger is a piton, and programmed to seek out crevices on the rock face you are climbing. The whole thing is stronger, faster, and more sensitive than a human being. If you want, it can do all the work for you. Alternatively, it can just be set in neutral, the claws folded back, while you do all the climbing yourself—the frame only activating to save your life. Both Anders and Tholan, I noted, set theirs to about a third-assist, which is where I set mine. Blister tents and equipment in their backpacks, and oxygen bottles and catalyzers at their waists, they went over the edge ahead of me. Tameera’s claw frame scrambled after them—a glittery skeleton—slaved to them. I glanced back at my blimp and wondered if I should just turn round and go back to it. I went over the edge.

With the light intensity increasing and the octupals bubbling down in their pools we made good time. Later, though, when we had to go lower to keep on course after the sheq, things got a bit more difficult. Despite the three of us being on third-assist we were panting within a few hours, as lower down there was less climbing and more pushing through tangled vegetation. I noted that my catalyzer pack was having trouble keeping up—cracking the C02 atmosphere and topping up the two flat bodyform bottles at my waist.

“She’s eight kilometers away,” Anders suddenly said. “We’ll not reach her at this rate.”

“Go two-thirds assist,” said Tholan.

We all did that, and soon our claw frames were moving faster through the vegetation and across the rock-faces than was humanly possible. It made me feel lazy—like I was just a sack of flesh hanging on the hard-working claw frame. But we covered those eight kilometers quickly and as the sun breached the horizon, glimpsed the sheq far ahead of us, scrambling up from the sudden shadows in the valleys. They were a seven again now, I saw: Tameera being assisted along by creatures that had snatched the killer of one of their own, mistaking her for sheq herself.

“Why do they do it?” Anders asked as we scrambled along a vertical face.

“Do what?”

“Snatch people to make up their sevens.”

“Three reason’s I’ve heard: optimum number for survival, or seven sheq required for successful mating, or the start of a primitive religion.”

“Which do you believe it is?”

“Probably a bit of them all.”

As we drew closer, I could hear Tameera sobbing in terror, pure fatigue, and self-pity. The six sheq were close around her, nudging her along, catching her feet when they slipped, grabbing her hands and placing them in firmer holds. I could also see that her dark green slicksuit was spattered with a glutinous yellow substance, and felt my gorge rising at what else she had suffered. They had tried to feed her.

We halted about twenty meters behind on a seventy-degree slope and watched as Tameera was badgered towards where it tilted upright then past the vertical.

“How do we play this?” Tholan asked.

“We have to get to her before they start negotiating that.” I pointed at the lethal terrain beyond the sheq. “One mistake there and . . . ” I gestured below to tilted slabs jutting from undergrowth, half hidden under fog generated by a nearby waterfall. I didn’t add that we probably wouldn’t even be able to find the body; despite the tracker Tameera evidently wore. “We’ll have to run a line to her. Anders can act as the anchor. She’ll have to make her way above, and probably best if she takes Tameera’s claw frame with her. You’ll go down slope to grab Tameera if anything goes wrong and she falls. I’ll go in with the line and the harness.”

“You’ve done this before?” Anders asked.

“Have you?” I countered.

“Seems you know how to go about it,” Tholan added.

“Just uploads from the planetary almanac.”

“Okay, we’ll do it like you said,” Tholan agreed.

I’d noticed all three of them carried fancy monofilament climbing winders on their belts. Anders set hers unwinding its line, which looked thick as rope with cladding applied to the monofilament on its way out. I took up the ring end of the line and attached the webbing harness Tholan took from one of his pack’s many pockets.

“Set?” I asked.

They both nodded, Tholan heading downslope and Anders up above. Now, all I had to do was get to Tameera through the sheq and get her into the harness.

As I drew closer, the creatures began to notice me and those insectile heads swung towards me, probosces pulsating as if they were sniffing.

“Tameera . . . Tameera!”

She jerked her head up, yellow gunk all around her mouth and spattered across her face. “Help me!”

“I’ve got a line here and a harness,” I told her, but I wasn’t sure if she understood.

I was about three meters away when the sheq that had been placing her foot on a thick root growing across the face of stone, abruptly spun and scrambled towards me. Tholan’s Optek crashed and I saw the explosive exit wound open in the creature’s jade green torso—a flower of yellow and pink. It sighed, sagged, but did not fall—its eight-fingered hands tangled in verdancy. The other sheq dived for safer holds and pulled close to the rock face.

“What the fuck!”

“Just get the harness on her!” Tholan bellowed.

I moved in quickly, not so much because he ordered it, but because I didn’t want him blowing away more of the creatures. Tameera was at first lethargic, but then she began to get the idea. Harness on, I moved aside.

“Anders!”

Anders had obviously seen, because she drew the line taut through greenery and began hauling Tameera upwards, away from sheq now beginning to nose in confusion towards their second dead member. Stripped-off line cladding fell like orange snow. I reached out, shoved the dead sheq, once, twice, and it tumbled down the slope, the rest quickly scrambling after it. Tholan was moving aside, looking up at me. I gestured to a nearby mount with a flat top on which we could all gather.

“Got her!” Anders called.

Glancing up I saw Anders installing Tameera in the other claw frame. “Over there!” I gestured to the mount. Within a few minutes we were all on the small area of level stone, gazing down towards where the five remaining sheq had caught their companion, realized it was dead and released it again, and were now zipping about like wasps disturbed from a nest.

“We should head back to the blimp, fast as you like.”

No one replied because Tameera chose that moment to vomit noisily. The stench was worse even than that from the glutinous yellow stuff all over her.

“What?” said Anders.

“They fed her,” I explained.

That made Anders look just as sick.

Finally sitting up, then detaching her arms from her claw frame, Tameera stared at her brother and held out her hand. He unhitched his pack, drew out her Optek rifle and handed it over. She fired from that sitting position, bowling one of the sheq down the distant slope and the subsequent vertical drop.

“Look you can’t—”

The barrel of Tholan’s Optek was pointing straight at my forehead.

“We can,” he said.

I kept my mouth shut as, one by one, Tameera picked off the remaining sheq and sent them tumbling down into the mist-shrouded river canyon. It was only then that we returned to the slab campsite.

Blue again, but I was certainly ready for sleep and felt a surge of resentment when the blimp cabin began shaking. Someone was coming up the ladder, then walking round the catwalk. Shortly, Anders opened the airtight door and hauled herself inside. I saw her noting with some surprise how the passenger cabin converted into living quarters. I was ensconced in the cockpit chair, sipping a glass of whisky, feet up on the console. She turned off her oxygen supply, tried the air in the cabin, then sat down on the corner of the fold-down bed, facing me.

“Does it disgust you?” she asked.

I shrugged. Tried to stay nonchalant. What was happening below didn’t bother me, her presence in my cabin did.

She continued, “There’s no reason to be disgusted. Incest no longer has the consequences it once had. All genetic faults can be corrected in the womb . . . ”

“Did I say I was disgusted? Perhaps it’s you, why else are you up here?”

She grimaced. “Well they do get noisy.”

“I’m sure it won’t last much longer,” I said. “Then you can return to your tent.”

“You’re not very warm are you?”

“Just wary—I know the kind of games you people play.”

“You people?”

“The bored and the wealthy.”

“I’m Tholan’s PA. I’m an employee.”

I sat there feeling all resentful, my resentment increased because of course she was right. I should not have lumped her in the same category as Tholan and his sister. She was in fact in my category. She had also casually just knocked away one of my defenses.

“Would you like a drink?” I eventually asked, my mouth dry.

Now I expected her righteous indignation and rejection. But Anders was more mature than that, more dangerous.

“Yes, I would.” As she said it, she undid the stick seams of her boots and kicked them off. Then she detached the air hose from her throat plug, coiled it back to the bottle, then unhooked that from her belt and put it on the floor. I hauled myself from my chair and poured her a whisky, adding ice from my recently installed little fridge.

“Very neat,” she said, accepting the drink. As I made to step past her and return to the cockpit chair, she caught hold of my forearm and pulled me down beside her.

“You know,” I said, “that if we don’t report what happened today that would make us accessories. That could mean readjustment, even mind-wipe.”

“Are you hetero?” she asked.

I nodded. She put her hand against my chest and pushed me back onto the bed. I let her do it—laid back. She stood up, looking down at me as she drained her whisky. Then she undid her trousers, dropped them, and kicked them away, then climbed astride me still wearing her shirt and very small briefs. Still staring at me she undid my trousers, freed my erection, then pulling aside the crutch of her briefs, slowly slid down onto me. Then she began to grind back and forth.

“Just come,” she said, when she saw my expression. “You’ve got all night to return the favor.” I managed to hold on for about another thirty seconds. It had been a while. Afterwards, we stripped naked, and I did return the favor. And then we spent most of the blue doing things to each other normally reserved for those for whom straight sex had become a source of ennui.

“You know, Tholan will pay a great deal for your silence, one way or another.”

I understood that Tholan might not pay me for my silence. I thought her telling me this worthy of the punishment I then administered, and which she noisily enjoyed, muffling her face in the pillow.

We slept a sleep of exhaustion through midark.

Tameera wanted trophies. She wanted a pair of sheq heads to cunningly preserve and mount on the gateposts on either side of the drive to her and Tholan’s property on Earth. Towards the end of morning blue, we ate recon rations and prepared to set out. I thought it pointless to tell them of the penalties for possessing trophies from class C sentients. They’d already stepped so far over the line it was a comparatively minor crime.

“What we need to discuss, is my fee,” I said.

“Seems to me he’s already had some payment,” said Tameera, eyeing Anders.

Tholan shot her a look of annoyance and turned back to me. “Ten times what I first offered. No one needs to know.”

“Any items you bring back you’ll carry in your stuff,” I said.

I wondered at their arrogance. Maybe they’d get away with it—we’d know soon enough upon our return to the citadel—but most likely, a drone had tagged one of the sheq, and as the creature died, a satellite eye had recorded the event. The way I saw it, I could claim to have been scared they would kill me, and only keeping up the criminal facade until we reached safety. Of course, if they did get away with what they’d done, there was no reason why I shouldn’t benefit.

While we prepared, I checked the map in my palm com, input our position and worked out an easier course than the one we had taken the day before. The device would keep us on course despite the fact that Tholan had allowed no satellite link-up. By the sun, by its own elevation, the time, and by reading the field strength of Myral’s magnetosphere the device kept itself accurately located on the map I’d loaded from the planetary almanac.

We went over the edge as the octupals slurped and splashed in their pools and the sun flung arc-welder light across the land. This time we took it easy on third assist, also stopping for meals and rest. During one of these breaks, I demonstrated how to use a portable stove to broil a rock conch in its shell, but Tholan was the only one prepared to sample the meat. I guess it was a man thing. As we traveled I pointed out flowering spider vines, their electric red male flowers taking to the air in search of the blowsy yellow female flowers: these plants and their pollinating insects having moved beyond the symbiosis seen on Earth to become one. Then, the domed heads of octupals rising out of small rock pools to blink bulbous gelatinous eyes at the evening blue, we moored our blister tents on a forty-degree slope.

Anders connected my tent to hers, whilst a few meters away Tholan and Tameera connected their tents. No doubt they joined their sleeping bags in the same way we did. Sex, in a tent fixed to such a slope, with a sleeping bag also moored to the rock through the ground sheet, was a bit cramped. But it was enjoyable and helped to pass most of the long night. Sometime during midark I came half awake to the sound of a voice. “Slabber gebble-crab,” and “speg bruglor nomp,” were its nonsensical utterances. The yelling and groaning from Tholan, in morning blue, I thought due to he and his sister’s lovemaking. But in full morning I had to pick octupal stings from the fabric of my tent, and I saw that Tholan wore a dressing on his cheek.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I just stuck my damned head out,” he replied.

“What treatment have you used?”

“Unibiotic and antallergens.”

“That should do it.”

Shame I didn’t think to ask why he wanted to leave his tent and go creeping about in the night. That I attributed the strange voice in midark to dream, influenced things neither one way nor the other.

It was only a few hours into the new day that we reached the flat-topped mount from which Tameera had slaughtered the remaining sheq. I studied the terrain through my monocular and realized how the excitement of our previous visit here had blinded me to just how dangerous this area was. There wasn’t a slope below seventy degrees and many of the river valleys and canyons running between the jagged rocks below were full of rolling mist. Claw frames or not, this was about as bad as it could get.

“Well, that’s where they should be,” said Tholan, lowering his own monocular and pointing to a wider canyon floored with mist out of which arose the grumble of a river.

“If they haven’t been swept away,” I noted.

Ignoring me he continued, “We’ll work down from where they fell. Maybe some of them got caught in the foliage.”

From the mount, we traveled down, across a low ridge, then up onto the long slope from which we had rescued Tameera. I began to cut down diagonally, and Anders followed me while Tameera and Tholan kept moving along high to where the sheq had been, though why they were going there I had no idea, for we had seen every one fall. Anders was above me when I began to negotiate a whorled hump of stone at the shoulder of a cliff. I thought I could see a sheq caught in some foliage down there. As I was peering through the mist, Anders screamed above me. I had time only to glance up, and drive my frame’s fingers into stone when she barreled into me. We both went over. Half detached from her frame she clung around my neck. I looked up to where two fingers of my frame held us suspended. I noted that her frame—the property of Tholan and Tameera—was dead weight. Then I looked higher and guessed why.

Brother and sister were scrambling down towards us, saying nothing, not urging us to hang on. I guessed that was precisely what they did not want us to do. It must have been frustrating for Tholan: the both of us in one tent that could have been cut from its moorings—two witnesses lost in the unfortunate accident—but sting-shooting mollusks preventing him from committing the dirty deed. I reached round with my free claw and tightly gripped Anders’ belt, swung my foot claws in and gripped the rock face with them.

“Get the frame off.”

She stared at me in confusion, then looked up the slope and I think all the facts clicked into the place. Quickly, while I supported her, she undid her frame’s straps, leaving the chest straps until last. It dropped into the mist: a large chrome harvestman spider . . . a dead one.

“Okay, round onto my back and cling on tightly.”

She swung round quickly. Keeping to third-assist—for any higher assistance and the frame might move too fast for her to hang on—I began climbing down the cliff to the mist. The first Optek bullet ricocheted off the stone by my face. The second ricochet, by my hand, was immediately followed by an animal grunt from Anders. Something warm began trickling down my neck and her grip loosened.

Under the mist, a river thrashed its way between tilted slabs. I managed to reach one such half-seen slab just before Anders released her hold completely as she fainted. I laid her down and inspected her wound. The ricochet had hit her cheekbone and left a groove running up to her temple. It being a head wound, there was a lot of blood, but it didn’t look fatal if I could get her medical attention. But doing anything now with the medical kits we both carried seemed suicidal. I could hear the mutter of Tameera and Tholan’s voices from above—distorted by the mist. Then, closer, and lower down by the river, another voice:

“Shabra tabul. Nud lockock ocker,” something said.

It was like hiding in the closet from an intruder, only to have something growl right next to you. Stirred by the constant motion of the river, the mist slid through the air in banners, revealing and concealing. On the slab, we were five meters above the graveled riverbank upon which the creature squatted. Its head was level with me. Anders chose that moment to groan and I quickly slapped my hand over her mouth. The creature was pyramidal, all but one of its three pairs of arms folded complacently over the jut of its lower torso. In one huge black claw it held the remains of a sheq. With the fore-talon of another claw, it was levering a trapped bone from the white holly-thorn lining of its duckbill. The tiara of green eyes below its domed skull glittered.

“Brong da bulla,” it stated, having freed the bone and flung it away.

It was no consolation to realize that the sheq corpses had attracted the gabbleduck here. Almost without volition, I crouched lower, hoping it did not see me, hoping that if it did, I could make myself appear less appetizing. My hands shaking, I reached down and began taking line off the winder at Anders’ belt. The damned machine seemed so noisy and the line far too bright an orange. I got enough to tie around my waist as a precaution. I then undid the straps to her pack, and eased her free of that encumbrance. Now, I could slide her down towards the back of the slab, taking us out of the creature’s line of sight, but that would put me in the foliage down there and it would be sure to hear me. I decided to heave her up, throw her over my shoulder, and just get out of there as fast as I could. But just then, a bullet smacked into the column of my claw frame and knocked me down flat, the breath driven out of me.

I rolled over, looking towards the gabbleduck as I did so. I felt my flesh creep. It was gone. Something that huge had no right to be able to move so quickly and stealthily. Once on my back I gazed up at Tholan and his sister as they came down the cliff. My claw frame was heavy and dead, and so too would I be, but whether by bullet or chewed up in that nightmare bill was debatable.

The two halted a few meters above and, with their claw frames gripping backwards against the rock, freed their arms so they could leisurely take aim with their Opteks. Then something sailed out of the mist and slammed into the cliff just above Tameera, and dropped down. She started screaming, intestines and bleeding flesh caught between her and the cliff—the half-chewed corpse of a sheq. The gabbleduck loomed out of the mist on the opposite side of the slab from where it had disappeared, stretched up and up and extended an arm that had to be three meters long. One scything claw knocked Tameera’s Optek spinning away and made a sound like a knife across porcelain as it scraped stone. On full automatic Tholan fired his weapon into the body of the gabbleduck, the bullets thwacking away with seemingly no effect. I grabbed Anders and rolled with her to the side of the slab, not caring where we dropped. We fell through foliage and tangled growth, down into a crevice where we jammed until I undid my frame straps and shed my pack ahead of us.

“Shabber grubber shabber!” the gabbleduck bellowed accusingly.

“Oh god oh god oh god!” Tameera.

More firing from Tholan.

“Gurble,” tauntingly.

“I’ll be back for you, fucker!”

I don’t know if he was shouting at the gabbleduck or me.

There was water in the lower part of the crevice—more than enough to fill my purifying bottle and to clean the blood from Anders’ wound before dressing it. I used a small medkit diagnosticer on her and injected the drugs it manufactured in response to her injuries. Immediately her breathing eased and her color returned. But we were not in a good position. The gabbleduck was moving about above us, occasionally making introspective and nonsensical comments on the situation. A little later, when I was trying to find some way to set up the blister tent, a dark shape occluded the sky above.

“Urbock shabber goh?” the gabbleduck enquired, then not being satisfied with my lack of response, groped down into the crevice. It could reach only as far as the ridge where my claw frame was jammed. With a kind of thoughtful impatience, it tapped a fore-talon against the stone, then withdrew its arm.

“Gurble,” it decided, and moved away.

Apparently, linguists who have loaded a thousand languages into their minds, despair trying to understand gabbleducks. What they say is nonsensical, but frustratingly close to meaning. There’s no reason for them to have such complex voice boxes, especially to communicate with each other, as on the whole they are solitary creatures and speak to themselves. When they meet it is usually only to mate or fight, or both. There’s also no reason for them to carry structures in their skulls capable of handling vastly complex languages. Two thirds of their large brains they seem to use hardly at all. Science, in their case, often supports myth.

Driving screw pitons into either side of the crevice, I was eventually able to moor the tent across. Like a hammock, the tough material of the groundsheet easily supported our weight, even with all the contortions I had to go through to get Anders into the sleeping bag. Once she was safely ensconced, I found that evening blue had arrived. Using a torch, I explored the crevice, finding how it rose to the surface at either end. Then the danger from octupals, stirring in the sump at the crevice bottom, forced me back to the tent. The following night was not good. A veritable swarm of octupal swamping the tent had me worrying that their extra weight would bring it down. It was also very very dark, down there under the mist. Morning took forever to arrive, but when it eventually did, Anders regained consciousness.

“They tried to kill us,” she said, after lubricating her mouth with purified water.

“They certainly did.”

“Where are we now?”

“In a hole.” She stared at me and I went on to explain the situation.

“So how do we get out of this?” she eventually asked.

“We’ve both lost our claw frames, but at least we’ve retained our oxygen bottles and catalyzers I wish I’d told Tholan to screw his untraceable com bullshit.” I thought for a moment. “What about your palm-com? Could we use it to signal?”

“It’s his, just like the claw frame I was using. He’ll have shut it down by now. Should we be able to get to it.” She looked up. Her backpack was up there on the slab, up there with the gabbleduck.

“Ah.”

She peered at me. “You’re saying you really have no way of communicating with the citadel?”

“Not even on my blimp. You saw my contract with Tholan. I didn’t risk carrying anything, as he seems the type to refuse payment for any infringements.”

“So what now?” she asked.

“That rather depends on Tholan and Tameera . . . and on you.”

“Me?”

“I’m supposing that, as a valued employee, you too have one of these implants?” Abruptly she got a sick expression. I went on, “My guess is that those two shits have gone for my blimp to bring it back here. If we stay in one place, they’ll zero in on your implant. If we move they’ll still be able to track us. We’ll have to stay down low under the mist and hope they don’t get any lucky shots in. The trouble is that to our friend down here we would be little more than an entree.”

“You could leave me—make your own way back. Once out of this area they’d have trouble finding you.”

“It had to be said,” I agreed. “Now let’s get back to how we’re going to get out of here.”

After we had repacked the blister tent and sleeping bag, we moved to the end of the crevice, which, though narrow, gave easier access to the surface. Slanting down one way, to the graveled banks of the river, was another slab, bare and slippery. Above us was the edge of the slab we had rolled from, and behind that, disappearing into mist, rose the wall of stone I had earlier descended. Seeing this brought home to me just how deep was the shit trap we occupied. The citadel was just over two hundred kilometers away. I estimated our travel rate at being not much more than a few kilometers a day. The journey was survivable. The Almanac loadings I’d had told me what we could eat, and there would never be any shortage of water. Just so long as our catalyzers held out and neither of us fell . . .

“We’ll run that line of yours between us, about four meters to give us room to maneuver. I’ll take point.”

“You think it’s safe to come out?” Anders asked.

“Not really, but it’s not safe to stay here either.”

Anders ran the line out from her winder and locked it, and I attached its end ring to a loop on the back of my belt before working my way up to the edge of the slab. Once I hauled myself up I was glad to see her pack still where I had abandoned it. I was also glad that Anders did not require my help to climb up—if I had to help her all the way the prospective journey time would double. Anders shrugged on her pack, cinched the stomach strap. We then made our way to where vegetation grew like a vertical forest up the face of the cliff. Before we attempted to enter this I took out my palm com and worked out the best route—one taking us back towards the citadel but keeping us under the mist, but for the occasional ridge. Then, climbing through the tangled vegetation, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching us, something huge and dangerous, and that now it was following us.

The first day was bad. It wasn’t just the sheer physical exertion, it was the constant dim light underneath the mist sapping will and blackening mood. I knew Tameera and Tholan would not reach us that day, but I also knew that they could be back overhead in the blimp by the following morning blue if they traveled all night. But they would stop to rest. Certainly they knew they had all the time they wanted to take, to find and kill us.

As the sun went down, Anders erected one blister tent on a forty-degree slab—there was no room for the other tent. I set about gathering some of the many rock conches surrounding us. We still had rations, but I thought we should use such abundance as the opportunity might not present later on. I also collected female spider vine flowers, and the sticky buds in the crotch branches of walker trees. I half expected Anders to object when I began broiling the mollusks, but she did not. The conches were like chewy fish, the flowers were limp and slightly sweet lettuce, the buds have no comparison in Earthly food because none is so awful. Apparently it was a balanced diet. I packed away the stove and followed Anders into the blister tent just as it seemed the branches surrounding us were beginning to move. Numerous large warty octupals were dragging themselves through the foliage. They were a kind unknown to me, therefore a kind not commonly encountered, else I would have received something on them in the Almanac’s general load.

In the morning, I was chafed from the straps in our conjoined sleeping bags (they stopped us ending up in the bottom of the bag on that slope) and irritable. Anders was not exactly a bright light either. Maybe certain sugars were lacking in the food we had eaten because, after munching down ration bars while we packed away our equipment, we quickly started to feel a lot better. Or maybe it was some mist-born equivalent of SAD.

An hour after we set out, travel became a lot easier and a lot more dangerous. Before, the masses of vegetation on the steep slopes, though greatly slowing our progress, offered a safety net if either of us fell. Now we were quickly negotiating slopes not much steeper than the slab on which Anders had moored the tent the previous night, and sparse of vegetation. If we fell here, we would just accelerate down to a steeper slope or sheer drop, and a final impact in some dank rocky sump. We were higher, I think, than the day before—the mist thinner. The voice of the gabbleduck was mournful and distant there.

“Urecoblank . . . scudder,” it called, perhaps trying to lure its next meal.

“Shit, shit,” I said as I instinctively tried to increase my pace and slipped over, luckily catching hold before I slid down.

“Easy,” said Anders.

I just hoped the terrain would put the damned thing off, but somehow I doubted that. There seemed to me something almost supernatural about the creature. Until actually seeing the damned thing, I had never believed there was one out here. I’d thought Myral’s gabbleduck as mythical as mermaids and centaurs on Earth.

“What the hell is that thing doing here anyway?” I asked.

“Probably escaped from a private collection,” Anders replied. “Perhaps someone bought it as a pet and got rid of it when it stopped being cute.”

“Like that thing was ever cute?” I asked.

Midday, and the first Optek shots began wanging off the stone around us, and the shadow of my blimp drew above. A kind of lightness infected me then. I knew, one way or another, we were going to die, and that knowledge just freed me of all responsibility to myself and to the future.

“You fucking missed!” I bellowed.

“That’ll soon change!” came Tholan’s distant shout.

“There’s no need to aggravate him,” Anders hissed.

“Why? Might he try to kill us?” I spat back.

Even so, I now led us a course taking us lower down into the mist. The firing tracked us, but I reckoned the chances of us being hit were remote. Tholan must have thought the same because the firing soon ceased. When we stopped to rest under cover of thicker vegetation, I checked my palm com and nearly sobbed on seeing that in one and a half days we had covered less than three kilometers It was about right, but still disheartening. Then, even worse, I saw that ahead, between two mounts, there was a ridge we must climb over to stay on course. To take another route involved a detour of tens of kilometers. Undoubtedly the ridge rose out of the mist. Undoubtedly Tholan had detected it on his palm com too.

“What do we do?” Anders asked.

“We have to look. Maybe there’ll be some sort of cover.”

“Seeble grubber,” muttered the gabbleduck in the deeper mist below us.

“It’s fucking following us,” I whispered.

Anders just nodded.

Then even more bad news came out of the mist.

I couldn’t figure quite what I was seeing out there in the canyon beside us, momentarily visible through the mist. Then all of a sudden the shape, on the end of its thin but hugely tough line, became recognizable. I was looking at a four-pronged blimp anchor, with disposable cams taped to each of the prongs. We got moving again, heading for that ridge. I equated getting to the other side with safety. Ridiculous, really.

“He’s got . . . infrared . . . on them,” I said, between gasps.

A fusillade sounding like the full fifty-round clip of an Optek, slammed into the slope just ahead of us.

“Of course . . . he’s no way . . . of knowing which camera . . . is pointing . . . where,” I added.

Then a flare dropped, bouncing from limb to limb down through the vertical jungle, and the firing came again, strangely in the same area. I glimpsed the anchor again, further out and higher. Tholan and his sister had no real experience of piloting a blimp—it wasn’t some gravcar they could set on autopilot. Soon we saw the remains of what they had been targeting: an old sheq too decrepit to keep up with its seven, probably replaced by a new hatching. It was hanging over the curved fibrous bough of a walker tree, great holes ripped through its body by Optek bullets.

We climbed higher as the slope became steeper, came to the abrupt top edge of this forest of walker trees, made quick progress stepping from horizontal trunk to trunk with the wall of stone beside us. After a hundred meters of this, we had to do some real climbing up through a crack to a slope we could more easily negotiate. My feet were sore and my legs ached horribly. Constantly walking along slopes like this put pressure on feet and ankles they were certainly not accustomed to. I wondered just how long my boots and gloves would last in this terrain. They were tough—made with monofiber materials used by the military—but nothing is proof against constant abrasion on stone. Maybe a hundred days of this? Who was I kidding.

By midday, we were on the slope that curved round below one of the mounts then blended in to the slope leading up to the ridge. Checking the map on my palm com, I saw that there was likely a gutter between the ridge and the mount. I showed this to Anders.

“There may be cover there,” I said.

She stared at me, dark rings under her eyes—too exhausted to care. We both turned then, and peered down into the mist and canted forests. There came the sound of huge movement, the cracking of walker trunks, broken vegetation showering down through the trees below us.

“Come on.” I had no devil-may-care left in me. I was just as weary as Anders. We reached the gutter, which was abundant with hand and footholds, but slippery with rock-slime. We climbed slowly and carefully up through thinning mist. Then the blimp anchor rappelled down behind and above us like an iron chandelier.

“Surprise!” Tameera called down to us.

The mist was now breaking, and I glimpsed the lumpy peak of the mount looming to our left. Higher up, its propellers turning lazily to hold it against a breeze up from the ridge, floated my blimp. Tholan and Tameera stood out on the catwalk. Both of them armed, and I was sure I could see them grinning even from that distance. I swore and rested my forehead against slimy stone. We had about ten meters of clear air to the top of the ridge, then probably the same over the other side. No way could we move fast enough—not faster than a speeding bullet. I looked up again. Fuck them. I wasn’t going to beg, I wasn’t going to try to make any last minute deals. I turned to Anders.

“We’ll just keep climbing,” I said.

She nodded woodenly, and I led the way. A shot slammed into the rock just above me, then went whining down the gutter. They were playing for the moment. I glanced up, saw that the blimp was drifting sideways towards the mount. Then I saw it.

The arm folded out and out. The wrongness I felt about it, I guess, stemmed from the fact that it possessed too many joints. A three-fingered hand, with claws like black scythes, closed on the blimp anchor and pulled. Seated on the peak, the gabbleduck looked like some monstrous child holding the string of a toy balloon.

“Brong da lockock,” it said.

Leaning over the catwalk rail, Tholan tried pumping shots into the monster. Tameera shrank back against the cabin’s outer wall, making a high keening sound. The gabbleduck gave the blimp anchor a sharp tug and Tholan went over the edge. One long scream as he fell turned to an oomph as the monster caught him in one of its many hands. It took his rifle and tossed it away like the stick from a cocktail sausage, then it stuffed him into its bill.

“Keep going!” Anders shoved me in the back.

“It used us as bait to get them,” I said.

“And now it doesn’t need us.”

I continued to climb, mindful of my handholds, aware that the gabbleduck was now coming down off its mount. We reached the ridge. I glanced down the other side into more mist, more slopes. I looked aside as the gabbleduck slid down into mist, towing the blimp behind it, Tameera still keening. It had its head tilted back and with one hand was shoving Tholan deeper into its bill. After a moment, it seemed to get irritated, and tore his kicking legs away while it swallowed the rest of him. Then the mist engulfed the monster, the blimp shortly afterwards. Tameera’s keening abruptly turned to a long agonized scream, then came a crunching sound.

“It’ll come for us next,” said Anders, eyeing the stirring mist then shoving me again.

We didn’t stand a chance out here—I knew that.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I passed back the ring of the line that joined us together. “Wind it in.”

She set the little motor running, orange line-cladding falling around her feet. I glanced at her and saw dull acceptance that I was abandoning her at last. The large shape came up out of the mist, shuddering. I began to run along the ridge. It was a guess, a hope, a chance—on such things might your life depend.

The anchor was snagging in the outer foliage of walker trees as the blimp, now free of two man weights and released by the gabbleduck, was rising again. I was going for the line first, though I’m damned if I know how I would have climbed the four millimeter-thick cable. At the last moment I accelerated, and leapt: three meters out and dropping about the same distance down. My right leg snapped underneath me on the roof of the cabin, but I gave it no time to hurt. I dragged myself to the edge, swung down on the blimp cables, and was quickly in through the airtight door. First, I hit the controls to fold the anchor and reel in the cable, then I was in the pilot’s seat making the blimp vent gas and turning it towards where Anders waited. Within minutes, she was on the catwalk and inside and I was pumping gas back into the blimp again. But we weren’t going anywhere.

“Oh no . . . no!” Anders’ feeling of the unfairness of it all was in that protest. I stared out at the array of green eyes, and at the long single claw it had hooked over the catwalk rail. I guessed it would winkle us out of the cabin like the meat of a rock conch from its shell. I didn’t suppose the bubble metal alloys would be much hindrance to it.

“Gurble,” said the gabbleduck, then suddenly its claw was away from the rail and we were rising again. Was it playing with us? We moved closer to the windows and looked down, said nothing until we were certainly out of its reach, said nothing for some time after that. At the last, and I don’t care how certain the scientists are that they are just animals, I’m damned sure the gabbleduck waved to us, before returning to its misty realm.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August, 2005.

About the Author

Born in Essex, England, but now living part of the year in Crete, Neal Asher started writing at the age of sixteen, but didn’t explode into public print until a few years ago; a quite prolific author, he now seems to be everywhere at once. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Hadrosaur Tales, and elsewhere, and have been collected in Runcible Tales, The Engineer, Mason’s Rats, and The Gabble and Other Stories. His popular novels include the “Agent Cormac” series, the most recent of which is The Line War; the “SpatterJay” series, the most recent of which is Orbus; the “Polity” series, the most recent of which is The Technician; and the “Owner Trilogy,” consisting of The Departure, Zero Point, and Jupiter War. Coming up is the first in the “Transformation” series, Dark Intelligence.

“Fans Are Slans”:
A Study in Campbellian Influence

Mark Cole

In September of 1959, Jason Howley walked into the Golden Casino in Reno, Nevada, carrying a small, black, plastic box. Within a matter of minutes, he’d won over three hundred thousand dollars. When the device was opened up by investigators, they found nothing in it but a plastic lens, two silver contacts, white paint, and a series of diagrams drawn in black ink.

Regular readers of Astounding Science Fiction recognized it immediately when they read “David Gordon” (Randall Garrett)’s story, “ . . . Or Your Money Back”: it was a version of the Hieronymus Machine, a “psionic amplifier” promoted by Astounding’s editor, John W. Campbell.

And by the end of Randall’s story, we’d harnessed the power of this empty plastic box to take us on our first trip to Mars.

It is a curious contradiction: we think of SF as a genre solidly grounded in physical reality, and yet we keep running into aliens with incredible mental powers—or secret agents with invisible psionic “arms,” or whole corps full of telepaths, or people capable of teleporting, or even future societies where the elite indulge in intricate telepathic cocktail chatter.

Nor are these encounters mere evolutionary throwbacks, leftover from the genre’s earliest days in pulpwood magazines. They didn’t creep into modern SF through some forgotten unlocked door, but instead grew and developed along with it, in the work of some of the finest SF writers of the Golden Age.

One thing more than anything else ushered psychic powers into the mainstream of SF: the influence of one of the genre’s greatest editors, in the pages of one of the most distinguished SF magazines of the Golden Age.

The influence of John W. Campbell and his work in Astounding.

Campbell was one of the most remarkable figures of the Golden Age of Science Fiction: an accomplished SF writer (under his own name and as Donald A. Stuart), he abandoned his writing career when he took over Astounding Science Fiction in October of 1937.

His vision of what good SF should be transformed the genre and established much of what we take for granted in SF today: Campbell insisted that his authors create stories with strong characters, good writing, and sound science. The stable of new writers he discovered and trained included Isaac Asimov, A.E. Van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and Theodore Sturgeon.

Not that his editing was without its eccentricities. Campbell loved to challenge his authors, deliberately taking positions he didn’t actually believe in just to get them to rethink their own ideas. He loved stories based on the Socratic approach to learning. He loved stories about a certain kind of take-charge Earthling, usually military men, where in the end we usually triumph because of some natural advantage we have over the aliens (a notion Ray Bradbury lampoons nicely in his 1949 short story “The Concrete Mixer”).

And then there is his interest in psionics.

Campbell himself invented the term, combining “electronics” with “psi.” As electronics had harnessed previously unknown powers of electricity, “psionics” would eventually yield a reliable technological method of doing the same with the powers of the mind.

Underlying his interest in psionics was a belief in the evolution of the human mind, leading ultimately to mental powers. This belief would lead Campbell to publish L. Ron Hubbard’s first essay on dianetics, with its promise of self-willed mental evolution (although he was quick to drop it once Hubbard turned it into a religion) and he publicly announced his desire to publish articles about the mind based on direct experimentation.

All of this sounds very familiar. Countless SF stories have had this same evolutionary rationale at their hearts. Somehow one thinks of Slan, A.E. Van Vogt’s novel about telepathic evolved superhumans (Slans), which first appeared in Astounding. Shortly after it appeared, SF fans adopted the slogan “fans are slans,” believing that their (perceived) greater intelligence and imagination than other readers was a sign that they were more evolved.

Today, of course, while research into such mental powers continues, parapsychology has failed to find conclusive evidence of its existence—let alone the ability to power space ships. It is widely seen as a dubious pseudoscience plagued by claims of fraud.

But what we forget from our comfortable perspective in the twenty-first century is just how different things looked back then, when Joseph B. Rhine and others made their first claims that they had proven the existence of telepathy.

Rhine first got interested in psychical research in 1922, when he attended a lecture by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the legendary creator of Sherlock Holmes—and a convert to Spiritualism. Doyle triumphantly declared to his audience that we now had scientific proof of communication with the dead. “This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had in years.” Rhine wrote many years later.

Doyle was by no means alone in his beliefs. Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of the Nineteenth Century Spiritualism craze was the remarkable number of scientists among its most enthusiastic supporters. Sir Oliver Lodge, for example, perhaps the most important British scientist of his age, is now primarily remembered for his Spiritualist beliefs. The attraction was obvious: Spiritualism promised supposedly empirical proof about questions normally regarded as religious. Why debate about the nature of the afterlife when we can ask our late Uncle Ned what the weather is like there?

Rhine realized that the best way to determine whether anyone could talk with the dead lay in first determining whether some form of extra-sensory communication was in fact possible. When he joined the psychology department at Duke University in 1927, he began his first attempts to test ESP under laboratory conditions. By 1935, his work had proved so successful that he founded the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory.

And in 1931, a young pulp writer named John W. Campbell arrived at Duke University to finish his Bachelor of Science in physics.

According to The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Campbell actually volunteered to participate in Rhine’s experiments. Certainly, his exposure to Rhine’s work impressed him enormously. Even before he took over as editor at Astounding, his stories reflected his interest in Rhine’s work. His final published story, “Who Goes There?” actually refers to Rhine and Duke University by name.

It isn’t hard to see why Rhine’s work impressed him: instead of sitting around in the dark, waiting for some unpredictable and unexpected manifestation with nothing but the most limited means of studying it, the search for the paranormal could now take place within a laboratory setting. What’s more, thanks to Rhine’s use of card-guessing and statistical analysis—the results would be fully quantifiable.

And quantifiability is the distinguishing mark of the physical sciences.

What’s more, Rhine quickly found a number of subjects who displayed what appeared to be impressive psi abilities. When he published the results of his work in a book, New Frontiers of the Mind (1937)—the same year Campbell took over Astounding—he announced that he had found conclusive, scientific proof for the existence of ESP.

It wasn’t long before other scientists started questioning Rhine’s work. No other lab ever duplicated his successes and Rhine was forced to revise his methodologies over and over again to prevent fraud. They also criticized the lack of transparency behind these changes, as Rhine never revealed what prompted any of them. Nor did he identify any past subjects he’d caught cheating on the tests (and persistent rumors suggest that these may have included his most successful early subject, Hubert Pearce). But his work still appeared to be quite convincing long after Rhine published his first book.

But Campbell’s belief in psionics went further than any of Rhine’s claims. In a rather curious 1952 letter to Eric Frank Russell about Charles Fort (the author of a series of books that collected accounts of bizarre events and supernatural powers) he claimed that he had, through two years of hard worked achieved what he described as “the basic understanding of what the psionic functions are, and how they work.”

Criticizing Fort for failing to couch his work in scientific language and then insulting the scientists for not listening to him, Campbell noted that Fort “was too stinking lazy” to do the hard work needed to integrate his data into an intelligible framework. He refused to make the same mistake himself, but had introduced psionics into Astounding because he now felt he had achieved the theoretical understanding of such phenomena he needed.

But he wasn’t about to reveal this understanding until he could “ . . . demonstrate the phenomena myself, and communicate the exact nature of the mechanisms involved, with demonstrations of each step . . . ”

It is hard to know what to make of these claims, or his insistence that he knew “the general concept of teleportation, levitation, and a few other spontaneous psi phenomena—also telekinesis, etc. In addition, I know the general basic laws which can permit precognition, and an absolute barrier of pure force that will block passage of any force now known to physical science,” although some of his comments suggest that this was a purely intellectual effort on his part, cobbled together from bits and pieces of data, and some of it from Fort’s work.

While it comes as little surprise that Campbell recommended that his authors search Fort’s books for possible story ideas, Astounding actually serialized Fort’s, Lo! five years before Campbell’s arrival. Long before Campbell’s recommendation a great many authors of SF and Weird Fantasy had read and admired Fort—and then borrowed many of his ideas. 

However, it is curious to note that Fort adopted a wry, humorous tone in his books and never took his claims as seriously as his followers have.     

Perhaps the oddest of Campbell’s psionics claims involved a device known as the Hieronymus Machine.

Invented in 1949, Dr. Thomas Galen Hieronymus’ machine supposedly measured a mysterious emanation from all matter that he called “eloptic energy.” While not electromagnetic in nature, it had qualities of both light and electricity. His detector, however, required a human operator to make any observations, as the only output was a tingling sensation, or slight feeling of “stickiness” transmitted to a rubber touch pad.

It is interesting to note that these claims closely resemble those made in 1903 by Prosper-René Blondlot for what he called “N rays.” He and his colleagues made hundreds of detailed observations of N rays, using a dim, luminous screen as a detector.

Supposedly, its brightness increased in the presence of the mysterious rays, although this was later proved to be an entirely subjective phenomenon. Carl Reichenbach and Anton Mesmer both claimed to have discovered similar forces, although, again, based on subjective observations Reichenbach himself was not one of those few who could see the Odic aura, which he claimed existed around our bodies!

Campbell rejected the idea that the Hieronymus’ Machine was a mere electronic device. Instead, he believed that it worked through the user’s psionic energies and that the electronics were, in fact, unnecessary. All that was required was a copy of the Machine’s wiring diagram.

Supposedly, the conductive properties of ink were enough to make the “Symbolic Hieronymus Machine” work. Dr. Hieronymus himself was more than skeptical of Campbell’s ideas, and particularly objected to his insistence that the machine was a “magical” device.

Once again, Campbell used Astounding to promote his ideas and the Machine shows up in many of the stories he published—including the device in Randall Garrett’s story, “ . . . Or Your Money Back.” Garrett himself seemed comfortable with the idea: after all, his most famous series was set in a world which had codified the laws of “magic” (i.e., mental powers), leading to not an industrial revolution but a magical one.

But one does have to wonder what Campbell’s readers thought of the Machine.

Eventually, Campbell drove away many of his best-known authors. This was partly because of his often-abrasive personality and outrageous opinions (not all of which he actually believed), and partly because of his interest in such dubious and pseudoscientific ideas as psionics, dianetics, dowsing, and the Dean Drive (which could supposedly create reactionless thrust).

Psychic powers no longer have as firm a place in SF as they once had, although they are too deeply embedded in the genre’s genome to ever be fully extirpated. After all, they go back not just to the work of H.G. Wells, but to the tangled mixture of superstition and science in Gothic horror. They still appear regularly in SF movies, television, comics, and young adult novels. They have even reappeared in space opera in Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter’s Long Earth series, where the device that allows people to cross between alternate Earths is psionic in nature—and a few, more evolved people are capable of crossing by themselves. That harkens back to the Golden Age of SF, when Gully Foyle’s psi powers suddenly awakened, teleporting him to safety out of deep space.

Perhaps the interest in post-humanism and the singularity—and the mental evolution those theories promise—will bring psionics back to the mainstream again.

But then, if Roger Penrose is right about the limits of artificial intelligence, the singularity, too, may end up on the heap of discarded pseudosciences.

Beneath Campbell’s interest in these dubious claims lay his desire to publicize what he saw as breakthrough research that the scientific mainstream refused to take seriously.

Perhaps this may not sound particularly extraordinary today. After all, Thomas Kuhn first proposed his post-modern theory of scientific paradigms in 1962. Most people now accept the idea that science has progressed through a series of “paradigms,” where radical new ideas could only be accepted once the basic mindset of scientists changed (although no one seems to notice that Kuhn also believed that modern science had not arrived at a greater understanding of the truth, merely a different one). But at the time science was still seen as a heroic upward progress, with each new discovery taking us ineluctably to the next stage.

Theories that we now dismiss as pseudoscience—like the universal ether, or the vitalist forces animating living things, or the caloric theory of heat—often seemed plausible when first proposed. Usually, the label “pseudoscientific” reflects a failure to find a workable empirical method to study a theory: had Rhine’s early success remained unchallenged, even if it never uncovered anything more extravagant than a few people with limited ESP abilities, then Campbell would not look quite so foolish.

And he would surely take some comfort in the fact that NASA is still doing serious research into the Woodward Effect, a theoretical form of reactionless thrust that bears more than a little resemblance to Dean’s claims.

It is tempting to think that it can’t happen to us. After all, it is all too clear just how dubious the theories that snared John W. Campbell were. But the history of science is littered with the corpses of promising theories, and anyone who tries to use cutting edge ideas in SF may end up looking absurd.

Ultimately, regardless of what one might think of Campbell’s decision to drag his pet theories into Astounding, what really matters is that the stories he published were consistently entertaining.

And that is rare indeed.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Writing for Video Games:
A Conversation with E. Lily Yu, Yoon Ha Lee,
Robert Reed, Seth Dickinson, and Karl Schroeder

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Contemporary video games with science fiction and fantasy settings, such as last year’s Destiny, are often conceived on grand production scales and have movie-sized budgets. They attract prime Hollywood voice talent, are accompanied by full original orchestral scores, and so on. We thought it would be fun to catch up with some of the writers who inspire and shape these visions.

E. Lily Yu is an author and narrative designer and recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, McSweeney’s, and Boston Review and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.

Yoon Ha Lee is the author of the collection Conservation of Shadows and the StoryNexus game Winterstrike. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Robert Reed has been a professional science fiction writer for thirty years, and he writes a lot about a big spaceship called the Great Ship.

Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant, “a mic drop for epic fantasy,” and more than a dozen short stories. He wrote much of the flavor and fiction for Bungie Studios’ Destiny.

Karl Schroeder is a Toronto-based futurist and author of ten science fiction novels, including the acclaimed Virga series.

What are your video game writing credits, and how did you come to work in the industry? Were you sought out, or did you actively look for the opportunity to work in video games?

Seth Dickinson: My sole full-time credit is Destiny, Bungie’s mythic space opera, where I worked on the game’s deep fiction. I got involved by filling out a job application on their website. I’ve also worked on Marauder Interactive’s upcoming Enemy Starfighter, a game of interstellar rebellion. And since 2009 I’ve been a writer and designer for Blue Planet, a fan-made sequel to Volition’s classic FreeSpace 2. One of our stories actually ended up here in Clarkesworld! I joined the Blue Planet team because I played FreeSpace 2 when I was very young, and it remains one of my favorite works of fiction across any genre.

Karl Schroeder: Like Seth, my direct experience has been limited to the Destiny project, but I will say that I was creating levels for a dial-up multi-player dungeon game written by my friend Nick Gloor back in the 1980s, so you might say it’s always been in my blood. Bungie approached me, and told me it was because of the epic-scale worldbuilding I’ve done in the past, especially for my Virga books. They are very careful and systematic in constructing the Destiny universe and the logic that drives it, and they’ve called on different authors at different times for the specific skill-sets each can bring to the table. For the storytellers involved, Destiny is very much an ensemble performance.

E. Lily Yu: I was a writer on Destiny at Bungie from 2012 to 2013 and a freelancer with them for parts of 2014, a remote collaborator for Tale of Tales on an unreleased game in 2013, and shortly expect to join a VR dev team. Bungie sought me out on the strength of my prior work.

Robert Reed: Destiny is my one credit, and Bungie is my only employer in the vast gaming business. They sought me out back when their game was still called Tiger. Apparently, my space opera novels Marrow and Sister Alice were what piqued their interest. After I signed 200,017 pieces of legal paper, they began to teach me about their universe and about video games in general. Which was fun, I should say. More than I ever would have guessed. And once given a sense of their story, I tried to offer suggestions and critical comments, and now and again, I wrote words that eventually made it into the game.

Yoon Ha Lee: Right now, just one: Winterstrike, which was a narrative-style game commissioned for Failbetter Games’ (the folks behind Fallen London) StoryNexus platform. Apparently I came to their attention because Emily Short, who’s active in interactive fiction and narrative games, recommended me; we’d been acquainted for some years on the strength of a text adventure I’d written about ten years ago, The Moonlit Tower, in Inform 6. Alexis Kennedy at Failbetter Games liked the game and my writing style in static fiction, and it went from there.

Currently I’m working on a (small) choose-your-own-adventure style videogame for Choice of Games; in that case I sought out the opportunity since I was between projects. I’ve always been fascinated by game-writing/design and I thought it would be interesting to try to broaden my horizons.

E. Lily Yu: I should add that when we say that Bungie sought us out, we all mean Eric Raab, who came to Bungie from an editing position at Tor and has been critical in bringing science fiction writers to the company.

Robert Reed: In my case, I was called by Eric at the beginning, but he still worked at Tor. He was a facilitator in a process mostly invisible to me. It was Joseph Staten who took me out for dancing and drinks, which means that he came to Lincoln to give me the pitch. Joseph was the face of my Bungie during that first year, and then Eric arrived.

Can you talk a little about the requirements/parameters of your various video game writing assignments? What factors do you have to consider when you do the work?

Robert Reed: There’s this kid. You might not know him at all, but he’s very rich and he has invited you over to his house to play in his sand pile. And by “sand pile,” I mean that he owns three miles of pristine beach on a tropical island, and by “play,” I mean that besides the usual plastic buckets and scoops, your new friend maintains a fleet of backhoes and barges and hundreds of other kids who have come over for the play day. In other words, he has resources beyond any that you have ever seen. But you are his guest and certain rules apply. This is not your property. None of this will ever belong to you. Some patch of the beach will be yours, but only temporarily, and you should always play nice with everybody and obey more than a few of the rules, and if anybody important asks you to leave, you leave. This isn’t your sand, and these aren’t your toys. Keep that in mind at all times.

For me, working for Bungie means visiting about once a year, absorbing what I can over several days, and then flying home with one or several assignments. I work best at home, in a familiar and well-lit environment. Bungie is neither familiar nor well-lit, and three days usually leaves me craving even the weakest Seattle sunshine.

This isn’t my beach, but even still, I have to feel invested in the work. My temporary sand and my borrowed shovel matter. If there is no emotional connection, then everybody will suffer.

Of course, money helps my enthusiasms. Without doubt.

At first, Bungie gave me the task of building a logical, halfway scientific structure for their preliminary Tiger project. And this is a point I can’t make often enough: Bungie gave me SF conundrums that I never would have faced on my own. One of my last duties of that first year was to build the science for blowing something up. Something rather big. I’m not going to tell you what that something was. And I won’t claim that I thought it was a good thing to demolish—in a story-problem sense. But they had second thoughts too, and before I finished, they told me that no, they wanted something else blown up. And I had to do it with some rather limited technology, by the way.

This was a problem that I happily chewed on for days. And has that big something actually blown up yet? Not that I’ve seen in the game, no. But who knows what’s going to happen? Not me. This isn’t my beach or my universe.

Later, I wrote some pieces from one character’s POV. Which I enjoyed quite a bit. After that, Eric brought me back to write more pieces and re-calibrate what I did before. And this brings up another basic tenant: The universe isn’t yours, no. But if you can make any little part of it your own, then you’ll be invited back again. And how did I manage this trick? Dumb luck and writing SF for nearly forty years now. And reading about astronomy and physics every day. Plus sitting happily at home while I’m trying to figure out how to blow shit up.

Seth Dickinson: Above all else I want my game writing to rhyme with the actions of playing the game. I want it to live inside the basic muscle action and the emotional associations.

In Enemy Starfighter, a game about calculated violence and well-timed retreat, I want sharp fiction with aggression and a certain esoteric elusiveness. In Blue Planet, a game about forcing you to reckon with the humanity and moral worth of the people you’re killing, I want my writing to evoke hesitation, pain, and necessary rage. Starfighter demands inhuman precision. Blue Planet should make you feel like you have to saw through the gristle of human connection.

I want basic gameplay actions like killing an enemy or firing a missile to conjure up stories and emotional hues from the lore. If you can follow the game design and paint a little color into the mechanics, I think you’re doing your job.

And, at the opposite extreme, you want to render a world for the designer to pluck ideas from. It’s symbiosis. You help the designer fictionalize the mechanics and tell stories about how they work—because people have an ear for stories, they like to organize facts by associating them with people and emotions. And in turn the designer counts on you to create stories that inspire mechanics. The artist wants a framework to focus her imagination.

On Blue Planet I worked really closely with a designer from Finland who I only knew as “Fury.” We had a problem: our enemies were dumb! We had to throw a lot of them at the player to create a challenge. They felt like swarms of dumb machines who didn’t care about their lives, and that ruined the story, because it didn’t feel like a tragic war between two compassionate democracies who cared about human life.

Fury built a new set of behaviors that made enemies much smarter and much more self-caring. They put a lot more effort into saving themselves. Players stopped seeing them as obstacles to swat, and started respecting them as enemies, fearing them as predators, and feeling sorry for them when they ran and tried to live. That mechanical change altered our whole approach to mission design. We could put the player up against small groups of smart antagonists with the illusion of social behavior. And that, in turn, saved our whole story.

I guess you could call this “ludonarrative consonance” if you wanted to get fancy. If you can engage the player’s imagination, they’ll do work for you. Dark Souls did an amazing job of using its world and mechanics to evoke a mood. I really like Kerbal Space Program because its mechanics teach you to explore, push, and learn from joyful failure. I liked Crysis 2 because the heavily scripted narrative worked with a story that was very skeptical of human agency in a system of smart machines. STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and Bastion also drew me in with a strong link between mood, mechanics, and world. The Stanley Parable is explicitly about choice in both story and gameplay. Amnesia is a horror game that punishes you for looking at the monster—that’s brilliant! Half-Life 2 used a cocktail of sound design, good writing, and smart AI to make you afraid of its enemies and attached to your friends. The Last of Us makes violence difficult and painful, and its follow-up Left Behind pushes out into the warmth of human relationships by letting you use the environment to socialize with your friend. Papers Please makes you complicit in a very ugly system.

Games conjure up the power of the situation by letting the player act out motivations and fears. Games are pretty cool. (At Chicago and NYU we used a very simple game to model racial bias in police shootings, and it was frighteningly effective.)

The other big constraint is the need to alter your writing in response to changing technical and design requirements! You can’t be precious. It’s a give and take!

Yoon Ha Lee: For both Failbetter Games and Choice of Games, I was working with my own IP, so I didn’t have to worry about messing up someone else’s sandbox (although that’s certainly a requirement I’ve dealt with before; I used to write game fiction for Alderac Entertainment Group’s [non-video/tabletop] collectible card game Legend of the Five Rings). Once the proposals were accepted, I had broad latitude in terms of how I wanted to approach worldbuilding.

For Failbetter Games, the big constraint was the mechanics of the StoryNexus platform itself. StoryNexus works similarly to their game Fallen London in that you have both an “Opportunity Deck,” from which you draw multiple-choice “storylets” randomly as you advance in stats, and “Pinned Decks” that are visible at all times and that represent more linear aspects of the setting. Writing encounters for the Opportunity Deck was a particular challenge because they really were randomly drawn—you could constrain them so that players wouldn’t encounter cards that were too easy or too difficult for their level, but otherwise? Random. And they would recur, too, because otherwise you’d run out of game content too quickly. So if you wrote something like, say, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, it would start looking really bizarre because the event would happen over and over as the card showed up again and again, especially as chances were you could choose different ways of dealing with the situation each time. This resulted in having to write encounters such that they could be interpreted as being somewhat generic. (Fallen London itself does this very well, and I looked to it a lot for examples.) The other way I dealt with this was by creating a world/society at the edge of breakdown, in which these sorts of freewheeling encounters would not seem too unnatural as the norm.

Choice of Games is interesting in that it’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style with added statistics, but the games are text-only. No sound, no music, no graphics to carry the story. Everything has to be built on words. At the same time, you don’t want to dump screens and screens of the stuff on the player because I certainly have been that player who scrolls down and stops reading after a paragraph or so of text in an overly long-winded dialog. So it’s a matter of getting across the essential action and setting as concisely as possible.

Karl Schroeder: Much of my work is still under NDA, but I can talk about my involvement in last year’s Urgent Evoke workshop in Arizona. Urgent Evoke is a World Bank initiative to create online games that help empower people in remote/disadvantaged communities. The 2014 workshop I participated in focused on building out story skeletons we’d discussed online. Authors, subject experts, and artists brainstormed together for three days to craft community-building scenarios that could be gamified. This was an interesting project because the aim wasn’t just to craft a game that was fun to play, but to generate a kind of trail of breadcrumbs that showed how people under strain could build and use resources together to help each other out. Each team developed a scenario which was then rendered as a storyboard sequence by the artist for group presentation and discussion. So, this was early-stage design that would later be taken up by programmers and artists to develop the final games.

Also last fall, I was hired to script an augmented reality game/experience. The player would, using Google Glass or a similar device, take a tour of a real physical space and interact with virtual prompts at different points. This was a kind of real world “choose your own adventure” process that was quite fun.

These experiences have made it clear to me that the current PC or platform-based model of gaming is just the tip of the iceberg, and that it’s still early days in gaming as an art form.

E. Lily Yu: First question is tough because of the variety of work I and most game writers have done, everything from multilingual naming to reference documentation for third parties to Kickstarter reward tiers, and because narrative design is a continuous, collaborative process. Generally, I try to understand the purpose and desired effect of whatever is on the table, which designers or artists are directly involved and what their different visions are, what is technically feasible and what is not, and how costly different options are in terms of time and resources. From this, in close consultation with whoever else is involved, I come up with multiple pitches that take into account the overall tone and arc of the project and the various ideas, requests, and suggestions from other people, narrow them down after feedback, and revise based on continued feedback.

It’s probably a lot like what other designers and artists do, but with a different skill set, different priorities, and different considerations.

When you play a game you’ve been working on, can you spot your writing/storytelling contributions, and if so, how does it make you feel?

Seth Dickinson: Yeah, definitely! It feels great. It’s the second-best feeling. The best feeling is when your work inspires a coworker or a fan to make something even better, or when you’re able to riff off something a coworker did in a way that supports and speaks to their work.

Robert Reed: “When you play a game you’ve worked on . . . ”

Now that’s a phrase I never imagined would pertain to me.

I visited Seattle last year, months before Destiny’s launch. Earnest people tried to show me the game by having me play it. Which was a tragic mistake. To say that I was awful is kind. I was pathetic. I couldn’t shoot. Hell, I couldn’t walk with authority across the simplest scene. I embarrassed myself, my teachers, and the entire gaming profession. But Destiny has been out for months, and I’ve been playing from the start. Perhaps too much time has been spent shooting the Fallen. And while I didn’t create the Cosmodrome, it’s nothing but fun to have my Guardian stop at some random point and stare at a piece of ground. The details are fabulous. Running through a vast landscape that hangs on a museum wall—that’s what it feels like. A museum catering to scenes from the Apocalypse, but gorgeous all the same. And because I know some of the history and I know secret possibilities, this middle-aged author is enjoying himself quite a bit.

I wrote a few of the grimoire cards, and I’ve collected a portion of those by honest means. Playing the game. Which is rather like finding your work in a library or bookstore. Except it’s not under your name, or anybody’s name. And there’s nobody standing in the aisle, letting you wave your words under their nose.

Most of my efforts? I don’t see them. I may never see them. But it says something that I would like to contribute something that I could point to and claim as my own. Giving a shit. That’s what separates us from the Fallen.

Karl Schroeder: At first I wasn’t sure I could answer this, but Robert’s description pretty much sums it up. Unless you’re writing dialogue or are in on the early stages of design, your own personal contribution is not likely to be that visible. There is, though, this indefinable sense of belonging—in a particularly special way—to the world of Destiny as you walk through it, if you’ve had a part in its creation. Particularly if you know certain secrets.

There’s always a lot that doesn’t make it into the game, or is altered along the way. I know things about some of the characters in the Tower, for instance—legends and backstories both official and unofficial. I know a great deal about the City and its fortresses, and about the long era between the Collapse and the present in Destiny history. The fact that I can’t talk about any of that actually adds a certain mystique to it all.

Oh, and despite having played every shooter since Doom, I was unfamiliar with the PS4 controller when I first played the game, so I too walked over walls, off cliffs, and into the arms of the Fallen more times than I can count. I’m probably the lowest-ranked Guardian in Crucible. But I Know Things. That’s the one shred of dignity I can cling to as I’m getting fragged by some pipsqueak Hunter half my age . . .

E. Lily Yu: It’s an incredible feeling, coming from print media, to see your words or descriptions or suggestions visualized either in 2D or 3D art, in characters, in actual game events, sometimes only days after you send the idea around. Probably not as astounding for former TV and movie writers, who’ve been there and done that. Also, I’ve done placeholder audio on a couple of different projects, when it’s too early for voice actors (thanks for inviting me that first time, Clay!), and it always cracks me up.

Yoon Ha Lee: With a text/narrative-based game, I can’t get away from my writing! It’s the primary means through which the player forms an impression of the world or decides upon actions. I remember when I was playtesting Winterstrike myself, I would go cross-eyed staring at the text looking for typos. (I had other playtesters, of course . . .) It got to the point where I was looking for (logic) bugs (I also did the coding for this game using StoryNexus’s platform) and stopped actually reading the text because when you draw the same card three hands in a row, it gets old real fast. There was probably a point where I had most of the content memorized. I was greatly relieved to hand the project in and stop playtesting because that feeling of going cross-eyed was not fun. I can only hope the experience was more fun for people who played the game . . .

How has your video game writing informed your non-video game work, if it has?

Seth Dickinson: I learned a lot from game writing. Some simple skills, not always mandatory, but good to understand—brevity, economy of effect, a mind for the cognitive capacity of a reader who’s probably either deep in trance or very distracted. That came from figuring out how to write in a way appropriate to games.

But I think I stole a couple bigger ideas from games, too. One is the magic of skyboxes. If you surround the theater of action with hints of distant, marvelous things, you can create a sense of awe. Another is the idea of a tight, satisfying action loop—here’s a problem, here’s a set of skills, I apply the skills, I solve the problem, I check out what new problem emerges. Players and readers both love to feel like they’re gradually discovering things! I did a lot of work on The Traitor Baru Cormorant trying to create that cycle on a sentence-by-sentence and chapter-by-chapter level.

I like the idea of a reader gripping the logic of a story, then using that logic to understand and feel what happens next. In a game the logic might be “stay near cover” or “do spectacular things.” In a story it might be “place your trust carefully” or “love shouldn’t silence you.”

On Baru I tried to organize the world’s peoples and politics in a vibrant, colorful way that lets readers imagine a game board with elegant rules. On a story I’m shopping around right now I tried breaking the narrative into three threads, then adding a little progress header on each thread—so a scene in the Nagari thread might open with “Nagari 4/6.” I know players love making little numbers get bigger. Maybe I can create some of that sense of satisfaction and progress? Maybe I risk leaning too heavily on an extrinsic reward, instead of the intrinsic joy of the story.

Yoon Ha Lee: Honestly, I’m not sure. I do remember the one big lesson I got from video game writing, which is that players take things really personally in a way that readers don’t always, due to the issue of agency. In Winterstrike I have an NPC that is an agent of entropy (actually an alien life form) and while I had some players that loved it, I also had one player come to my blog and let me know in no uncertain terms that it was not fair to set them up with a cute pet that turned out to be a death-dealing alien of DOOM. In static (non-game) fiction, I can get away with more terrible acts/constructions in the sense that the reader doesn’t have to type in KILL BABY for the game to proceed, which people find upsetting. I am thinking of a particular text game from IFComp 2010, Jason McIntosh’s The Warbler’s Nest. It’s a good game, but there’s this point at which you-the-player have a choice to treat a baby as a changeling and kill it, and it infuriated me when it looked like I might have to do that to proceed. On the other hand, I can read from the viewpoints of rapists and serial killers without batting an eyelash because I’m not being asked to “perform” the act as the reader, just to be carried along by the narrative.

Karl Schroeder: Writing for Destiny has reminded me that the writer is a tour guide to the reader’s imagination, not to their own. It’s the reader (or player) who actually has the experience you’re trying to create; your job is to help them have that experience, not to have it for them. To put it yet another way, we’re midwives. So there’s this balance between what you say (and show) and what you leave to the imagination that’s absolutely critical to get right. If you over-tell, over-show, and over-explain, you drain the life out of the experience for the reader or player. It’s better to simply point and let them use their imaginations to fill in the details. I think this is what Seth means by skyboxes: underdetermined spaces are not laziness, they’re a gift to the reader/player’s imagination, and properly done they can vastly expand the dimensions of the experience.

In writing this translates to being economical, spare, even. Baroque detail is fun for its own sake, but two or three choice details can do the same work, or even more. The real ‘game engine’ in literature is the reader’s imagination.

Robert Reed: Two benefits come to mind:

With Bungie, one of my jobs has been writing tiny stories that might or might not be buried inside Destiny today. (Not everything makes the cut.) It’s an education, trying to make every word carry a heavy knapsack. Can I drop that “that”? Can I squeeze two insults into one pithy phrase? And how do you end the scene that has barely begun? When you find yourself pining for the days of fat, thousand-word epics, you know you’re working in new ways.

The other benefit has been more direct. I’m planning a sequel to my Great Ship novels, The Memory of Sky. What I’m building—only in my head so far—is a joyful, hyperviolent landscape where nobody truly dies and most of the citizens are nearly immortal children.

Now what game does that sound like?

Also, I should point out that while playing Destiny, I’ve been writing stories set in the Destiny universe. Nobody has asked for this. My head does what it needs to do, applying knowing voices and twisted plots to the very beautiful mayhem.

E. Lily Yu: “Daedalum, the Devil’s Wheel” came directly from conversations with an animator. Besides that, game writing taught me the discipline of sitting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard for eight hour stretches and creating at will, as well as the incredible generative potential of talking across disciplines. I’m much more aware of design principles, of the presence of the reader/player, and of the constraints and possibilities of different formats: audio, action, text, mobile, website, controller input, haptic feedback, VR headsets, and so on. And I haven’t done it yet, but writing nonlinear narratives that could be encountered in any order seems like it would translate well into experimental print fiction.

If any of your own stories or novels could be made into a video game (with an unlimited budget), which one would you pick, and why?

Karl Schroeder: A lot of people have told me they’d love to see my Virga books made into a massively multiplayer online environment. It would be a zero-gravity steampunk mix of pirate adventure and Homeworld-style fleet engagement, No Man’s Sky exploration, with a little bit of Thief and other RPG elements thrown in. Who wouldn’t want to fly around a boundless, weightless shirtsleeve environment on a wingless jet engine with handlebars and a saddle? Circle forested asteroids or dive into spherical lakes? Have sword fights in freefall? Dance in micro-g? Or coordinate an armada of wooden prop-driven warships festooned with cannons? The possibilities are endless and I really hope somebody makes it.

Robert Reed: A digital version of my Great Ship, complete with Marrow boiling at the core. That’s what I want to walk through. Strong visuals. A sense of claustrophobia and Deep Time. Think of the upcoming No Man’s Sky, but the action takes place on and inside one Uranus-sized starship, and there are thousands of alien species in residence, and you’re one of the captains who has to keep a lid on every beast and religion and goofball political force that comes across your dragonblood desk.

Make me an offer. The Ship is for sale.

Yoon Ha Lee: I love reading up on game design (both tabletop and videogame) and I’m keenly aware that differences in media, as well as technological difficulties in generating NPC AI, would make a straight-up adaptation hard. That being said, I would be curious to see an RTS or turn-based strategy take on the world of “The Battle of Candle Arc,” which is also the world of my forthcoming novel Ninefox Gambit. I used computer games as one of the models for the space opera “magic” combat in that system, so it might be workable, and the formation effects could be pretty.

Seth Dickinson: Oh man! Blue Planet was a game first, a fan-made sequel to the cult classic FreeSpace 2. That turned into “Morrigan in the Sunglare” here in Clarkesworld. I guess it’d be interesting to see that turned back into a game again, a full-fledged production—but you said an unlimited budget, and having a lot of money can be really confining. I’m not sure we could take risks and experiment if we were worried about making back our investment.

The thing about games is that the player can choose how to explore the story. You can leave as much esoterica, exposition, and emotional perspective lying around as you like, and you can trust your player to chase it if they want. That’s not like standard prose, where you have to be very careful about your linear architecture. And games can implicate the player in their own events (like Spec Ops: The Line). I think good game stories do something with that.

I’d love to see a game for Robert Reed’s Marrow and Yoon Ha Lee’s “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” in which you’d have to select your targets very carefully—maybe you could even set up asymmetrical competitive multiplayer, with each player issued a different one of Arighan’s weapons and an objective. It’d be a system-driven game, which is the best kind.

I guess I’ll confess that I’d love to see a social board game for The Traitor Baru Cormorant, something like Archipelago or the Battlestar Galactica game, in which players have to superficially cooperate to manage the world while secretly pursuing their own agendas.

E. Lily Yu: Ha, fun question, but no way. If I were making a video game on my own, it would have a dynamic pronged narrative that evolved in response to player choices, lots of environmental storytelling, and unexpected flips of player expectations that don’t exist in print. I don’t think anything I’ve published would work.

About the Author

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is the co-author, with Robert Silverberg, of When the Blue Shift Comes, which received a starred review from Library Journal. Alvaro’s short fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Analog, Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex and other venues, and Alvaro was nominated for the 2013 Rhysling Award. Alvaro’s reviews, critical essays and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, SF Signal, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, and other markets. Alvaro currently edits the blog for Locus.

Another Word:
Hipsters of Zombieland

Emily Devenport

Even before Night of the Living Dead was released, zombies had their fans—and I was not one of them. Not even when I was nine years old. At that age I wouldn’t have told you that the nihilistic tone of that movie (and many of the ones that followed) really turned me off; I would have said they were boring. I suppose that’s the same thing, but my earlier assessment was devastating in its clarity. It summed up a fatal flaw of the zombie genre: if your characters have nothing to hope for, the whole thing is just an exercise in self-pity. (“A boring exercise!” my nine-year-old self would say.)

My interest was piqued when I learned something about voodoo and the original zombies. The idea that you could enslave the dead and set them to do your bidding was interesting (while also being both sad and scary). So you would think that emancipating zombies and setting them free to shamble around on their own would be an improvement. But those early zombies weren’t up to the challenge. All they could do was wander listlessly and conduct a slow chase of the living. Back in those days, you didn’t have to run away from a zombie, you could walk.

Granted, they had a tendency to overwhelm people through sheer persistence. Eventually you’d have to sleep. If you got surrounded by them, they could overcome you with numbers. Once they started biting, you were done for, even if you managed to get away. They’d infect you with the zombie flu, the not-so-secret subtext of any zombie story. Eventually everyone gets it, and the world comes to an end. Everything we ever built, hoped, loved, or dreamed comes to naught. Who could resist an inspiring message like that?

I could. And I was pretty sure most other people could too, because the winning formula in adventure fiction is that the heroes are facing overwhelming odds, but their perseverance and cleverness is going to help them solve at least some of their problems (once they overcome a bunch of scary and interesting obstacles). Defeat looms large, but—HUZZAH! Victory from the jaws.

In the old zombie stories, there’s no huzzah, just plenty of doom. I was surprised to learn that young readers were happy to wallow in that, until I realized a couple of essential things about the Zombie Apocalypse: 1. Zombies aren’t human, they don’t even think—so you don’t have to feel guilty about killing them. This is a perfect way for disaffected people to vent their frustration, and 2. If the world comes to an end, you don’t have to go to work (or school) anymore. What’s not to like about that? End of the World fiction has always carried that appeal with its audience, even without the zombies.

But, my god, did it have to be so tedious? It wasn’t until Shaun of the Dead showed up that anyone began to think of more interesting possibilities for zombies. Back then, one of my young coworkers at my day job had a dream that we all had an employee meeting right after the Zombie Apocalypse so we could learn techniques for selling books to zombies. “Just because they want to eat your brains,” he said, “doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give them good customer service.” (As it turned out, soon after he had the dream, our customer service philosophy did take a turn in that direction.)

So humor helped the genre a lot. And people began to look at the mechanism for zombification as a plot point. Was it a virus? How would it spread? Would it kill you and drive your dead body around, or would it keep you alive and hijack your brain? If it kept you alive, could you be cured of it? Would it eventually burn itself out and leave you to face the consequences of your actions?

Could something rescue you from your zombie state? That idea was examined in Warm Bodies, the first zombie movie I actually wanted to see. The main character can dimly remember his old life; he’s driven to collect things that remind him of it. But what sparks life in him is a girl. He falls in love with her. The theme of this movie is that people can be dead, but something may make them to want to live again. I like that theme better than “Yeah, everyone is going to get the zombie flu and die.”

Another idea I liked in Warm Bodies is that if zombies eat the brains of living people, they can share the memories of those people. This is explored in one of my favorite new TV shows, iZombie. Its main character uses her memory-eating talent to help solve murders. And she doesn’t “live” in a vacuum; her actions and decisions have consequences that spin off in unpredictable directions. Best of all, a peculiarity of the strain of zombie flu that infected her is that it doesn’t take her intelligence away. She’s no dumb shambler. Her kind could eventually win the right to vote and to get legally married.

Does that mean all future zombies are going to have to be intelligent memory-eaters to be interesting? The movie World War Z took them in another direction. Its zombies are the mindless, hungry, attracted-to-sound variety that we’ve all come to expect from shows like The Walking Dead, but they have a horrifying behavior that brings the term zombie swarm to a whole new level. They behave like army ants, building bridges and towers out of their bodies so others of their kind can scramble up and over walls, up buildings, even onto hovering helicopters. They’re as fast as cheetahs, and because they’re dead they have no sense of self-preservation. The virus that’s driving them only wants to spread itself around.

The best thing about the movie version is that they try to think through the concept of the virus. If nature has orchestrated an extinction-level event for human kind, is there a way to outsmart nature? And they come up with an answer, a reason to hope.

I’m not interested in pitiless depictions of mass death. If I’m going to watch people fight for survival, survival damn well better be possible. There’s no hope doesn’t cut it for me. And if recent developments in the zombie genre are any indication, the zombies of the future are only going to get more interesting.

[NOTE: The fiction department at Clarkesworld recoils at the suggestion that zombies are in the least bit interesting. This article should in no way encourage people to write or submit more zombie stories. They are a plague upon the genre and must be put down, just like the zombies they feature.]

About the Author

Nine of Emily Devenport’s novels were published in the U.S. By NAL/Roc, under three pen names. She also has been published in the U.K., Italy, and Israel. Her novels are Shade, Larissa, Scorpianne, EggHeads, The Kronos Condition, Godheads, Broken Time (which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award), Belarus, and Enemies. Her newest novels, The Night Shifter, Spirits of Glory, and Pale Lady are in ebook form on Amazon, Smashwords, etc.

Her short stories were published in Asimov’s, the Full Spectrum anthology, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Aboriginal SF, whose readers voted her a Boomerang Award. She will have a story in the upcoming publication of The Mammoth Book of Kaiju.

Editor’s Desk:
Editing Reality

Neil Clarke

I was driving through the local wildlife refuge last week when a bunch of red text and icons began to light up the console. As instructed, I pulled off the road and onto a gravel path so I could shut down the car. I had my cellphone—a rare occurrence—but couldn’t get a signal. Across the field was an abandoned house with curtains fluttering in the upstairs window. A hawk screeched as it glided high above.

Wait. I’ve read this story and rejected it.

Invoking my editorial superpowers, I turned the key to the ignition and my trusty vehicle roared to life and whisked me to the relative safety of home. The car, however, has been in the shop for a couple of days. I fear it may have given its life to save me, but it’s probably something mundane like a thermostat or gasket. Reality is boring like that.

The next opportunity for the slush pile to attack reality will happen later this month. I’ll be attending Worldcon in Spokane, Washington, and it looks like it could be a real adventure in traveling. Going to conventions is almost a fictional escape for me, a slightly-better alternate reality where the day job can fade from memory and the night job exists in the presence of daylight.

I’m scheduled to be on a few interesting panels, but otherwise things should be fairly relaxed. I’m looking forward to meeting with our Storycom representative and perhaps some of their authors that have appeared in our issues over the past year. There are also a number of secret projects that might be settled there (or hopefully sooner) that will help me narrow the gap between my conflicting realities.

Last month, I had intended to launch the Kickstarter for my next original anthology, Modified. Given the volume of question marks on my schedule for 2016, I figured it was best to delay that until the schedule was a little more solid. Eager as I am to talk about a genetic engineering anthology, it’s best to be responsible and nail the other stuff down first. Instead you get this little teaser and the promise that there will be something a lot more specific by the time the next issue rolls around.

Meanwhile, best of luck to those of you trying to find or make a better reality for yourself.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Descendant

Julie Dillon

About the Artist

Julie Dillon is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator creating art for books and magazines, as well as for her own projects and publications. She has won two Chesley awards, a Hugo Award, and has been nominated for two World Fantasy Awards.