The Algorithms of Value

Robert Reed

Parchment woke comfortably hungry, a fine dream lingering while she lay inside the bed that knew her utterly.

This was the most unremarkable morning.

Happy eyes opened to find the expected room. Cockroaches scrambled across cracked plaster walls. Ancient cars roared and a neighbor’s hip hop shook the floor. But there was also a spring wind lifting the window curtain, bringing the scent of hot bacon and the quick, fierce shouts of sparrows. Parchment listened to the birds savoring their spectacular lives, and in the same spirit, she smiled to herself. Then came the sharp crack of a pistol followed by the wailing of someone who had never existed—a wounded voice begging for mercy from everything else unreal.

“Change,” Parchment ordered.

The walls silenced and blurred.

“You know where.”

The young emerald forest was rendered in precise detail. Bacon didn’t exist here, but there were orchids and scented insects and the luscious stink of soil built from comet tar and the purest water. Dawn had just broken on this portion of the terraformed world, glorious sunshine descending from an artificial moon designed by AI sowers. Every tree was a slender tower, the high branches too distant to resolve with sleepy eyes, and down through the sunbeams came a cobalt-blue bird, bigger than ten men, flying lazily against the feeble gravity.

“A day to value,” sang the bird. “A beautiful day to eat.”

She was born pale and pretty but with an unexpected golden cast to her skin. Wanting to bless the baby, the young mother gave her that rich-sounding name, and nearly two centuries of busy, busy life had mostly erased the old meanings. Parchment wasn’t the skin of animals anymore. Parchment was the famous old lady climbing out of her bed to use the toilet and cleansing fountain on the far side of a tree.

With a respectful tone, her room offered to measure her health and feed her.

“No, and no,” she replied. “I feel wonderful and I’m eating out this morning.”

Her room immediately wove new clothes, but to prove she could, Parchment wished the first hat to vanish, and the second, deciding to wear nothing on her head but carry three umbrellas—highly engineered umbrellas spun from boron and diamond—plus a new purse of moa leather filled with respectable possessions.

By law, every room needed one authentic door.

This particular room offered two doors, one leading directly outdoors, and having collected her belongings, that’s where she went.

Every room was able to feed and care for its owner, and people couldn’t be forced to leave any room. Yet the world outside always felt busy and crowded and alive. Parchment’s street was wide, lined with stacked rooms and standalone rooms. Mayhem flooded the senses. Mayhem had its music. Flocks of sparrows and other city birds swarmed, and intense little machines jetted about on important errands. Neighbors stood in or near the street, shouting to one another while watching strangers. They called to her by name, adding “Madam” and “Ms.” for good measure, and Parchment waved at no one in particular, giving warm words to the nearest few.

Approaching her, one familiar fellow praised the morning’s beauty by asking, “How could anyone stay inside with this splendor?”

“A fine question,” Parchment agreed.

Then his pretty little daughter hurried close, saying, “Yes, but rain is definitely coming, Madam Parchment.”

Parchment handed her one of the umbrellas. It was silly, thinking that any ordinary object was precious. But the gesture was what was important. To that child, what mattered were the famous hands that held the prize, and to the old lady, it was the illusion of charity lending warmth to one small moment.

The gift was cradled lovingly while the girl whispered, “Thank you thanks so much so much.”

It was never a bad day, getting attention from a famous lady.

There was a boy standing nearby. Maybe he had been standing there from the beginning. One foot behind the other, he flashed a bold smile at the woman with two umbrellas. Parchment didn’t recognize the face but she knew his attitude. Begging was older than humanity, and he looked like the sort who would beg for anything, regardless of his needs.

“You can have one too,” Parchment offered.

“No.”

What did he say?

“I like rain,” he said.

“Well, good,” she said.

Straightening his back, he asked, “But what else can you give me?”

The world grew a little quieter, bystanders turning, keeping tabs on the small, unseemly drama.

Aiming to tease, she asked, “What else is there?”

He showed her a wide, unendearing smirk.

“Think I’m generous, do you?”

“No, ma’am. I don’t.”

Parchment laughed at his tone, even while she bristled at the attitude, and tired of the child’s attitude, she decided to ignore him, walking off as quickly as she could on long legs that never covered ground fast enough.

Every street was a machine, smart as necessary and busy doing its lifelong calling. Avenues and alleys kept themselves clean, recycling bins ruling the corners. Today the nearest bin resembled a shark’s mouth rising from the pavement, and a man had climbed into the mouth, furiously burrowing into the trash.

Scavenging was honorable long before the first ape pushed a hungry hand into someone else’s garbage. But these were the wealthiest times and there was zero reason for this nonsense. Parchment’s mother had called these people “dumpster dogs,” and they were usually best avoided. But that irritating boy was following, keeping far too close, and that’s why she paused and struck the shark with a flat hand.

The man inside the trash twisted and popped up, startled to find an umbrella dropped into his hands.

One glance at her face was enough.

“Thank you, Madam Parchment,” he sputtered.

“You’re welcome,” she said, walking on.

Undeterred, the boy fell in beside her.

“I know all about you,” he said.

“You think so?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” he said sharply.

She stopped walking, instantly regretting showing just that flicker of interest. But this was her neighborhood and these were people friendly to her, and Parchment refused to be intimidated by a child who was . . . how old did he look to be . . . ? A mature twelve, perhaps.

“I don’t want to know about you,” she said, opening the final umbrella and tipping its shadow over her face, leaving that peculiar little sparrow blinking in the sunshine.

“You’re the old lady who invented the Algorithms,” he said.

The street grew quiet.

With a slow, firm tone, she said, “First of all, I had tiny roles in an exceptionally large project. So no, you’re wrong. I built almost nothing.”

The resolve didn’t waver. That face wasn’t as young as she imagined. He was older. Fourteen, maybe?

“Second of all, nobody can invent what already exists, and the Algorithms have always been. Profound relationships woven through the universe, waiting to be discovered. Like gravity. Like fire and poetry. I filled my own little niche, and that was long ago, and third of all, are you going to leave me alone now?”

“Probably not,” the boy confessed.

Several neighbors, stronger than old women or boys, set themselves near the two debaters, offering their help with concerned glances and clenched fists.

Parchment handed over the last umbrella.

“Take this and leave me alone,” was her advice.

The boy smiled when he looked at the prize. But then he ran back to the shark mouth, climbing in beside the trash hunter before shoving the gift as far down as he could reach.

Sentience deserved quite a lot, and the Algorithms of Value spoke to exactly that: the fierce guarantees afforded every self-aware entity, organic or machine.

Safety was the first necessity. Surviving the next moment was paramount. For humans, nourishment and clean water were unimpeachable if rather less urgent rights. There also was the universal right to shelter. By law, every person was guaranteed a home and every home possessed at least one dependable room. Walls had to be ready to project any image, real or fictional. Rooms could sing any song and tell any story, calibrating versions according to the resident’s desires. And of course every sentient voice had to be able to speak to everyone else, whenever they wished and without cost. Of course, of course.

Wealth itself was never guaranteed, and true wealth had never been harder to weigh. But there were sentient fortunes who owed their allegiance to Parchment, and she owned comets and asteroids outright, plus valuable lands scattered across the Earth. And she held title to three connected rooms, none of which were tiny. With her age and that small, critical role working with the Algorithms, she also owned a rather considerable celebrity.

Thousands of people had been involved in the Algorithms. Some were more important than her, but they died long ago and here she was, proud for what she had done, damn humility and other silly standards.

But what piece of the Algorithms was Parchment’s? In her own eyes, what made her special?

More than any other person, she ensured everyone had the absolute right to be different. To be odd, unique. Or even pathetically ordinary. Food and shelter were essentials, yes. But people and self-aware machines had to be able to cling to peculiar beliefs, just so long as nobody was hurt. For instance, one old lady could wake inside a vanished room decorated with dirty chairs and a ragged curtain drawn across one imaginary window, the close ceiling built from bowed plaster, two cracks peeking through tired white paint.

Sixteen decades ago, there were very few rooms in the world that could manage that trickery. But Parchment and her husband were fortunate enough to own one, and that’s when the bedroom habit began, leading to a string of acidic comments.

“Why this fucking dump?” her husband would ask.

“This where I came from,” Parchment responded. “And I’ll fall back to this, if things go wrong.”

“Well, I didn’t grow up in your fucking dump,” he said. “Don’t pretend I care about games you play with your guilty conscience, and sure as shit I don’t believe in your reasons anyway. You’re lying.”

The man was never mild or sweet or decent. But he was useful. He inherited his cash and old-style stocks, and that was long before a pretty golden girl graduated from grade school. He was one of the old masters of a corporation responsible for the best AIs anywhere. An occasional charmer, he had a habit of stalking the pretty girls, like Parchment, and she knew that full well and married him regardless. Nobody else offered a faster route to success, and just as important, her roguish mate had his own simplicities. Immune to normal jealousies, Parchment didn’t have to watch over him or pay any attention to the gossip. It was enough to be a famous couple with a unique normalcy, and as it happened, that normalcy didn’t have to last all that long. The AIs were building a new world, richer and far more flexible, and what was expensive soon became cheap. The best rooms weaved better and better illusions, capturing the heart of existence, and a successful couple could afford a giant home filled with ever-changing realms. And that’s why a difficult husband didn’t have to come out of his favorite room for weeks, even to throw an insult at his aging wife. Which was a fair description of their last fifty years.

In the end, three rooms were plenty. One was Parchment’s sanctuary, another belonged entirely to her husband, while the large space between could serve as a social playground, but was mostly filled with anti-noise—ensuring she never had to hear the games an old beast played with his various toys.

The beast was a century dead, and his widow rarely thought about him. But in the proper mood, Parchment would admit that the man was perceptive in one critical fashion: The old bedroom with its cracks and curtains and gunfire wasn’t just a cautionary reminder to herself. It was also aimed at her husband. Beginning life male and at a respectable height, he had managed to rise quite a bit higher. But his wife was born at the bottom, and not only did she match his achievements, but she eventually supplanted him.

And of course she was the one-half of a marriage blessed with the unique, increasingly famous name.

Fire was an honorable attraction among humans. So were the blessings of food prepared by friendly hands and padded seats where an ancient body could find repose if not out-and-out rest. Parchment had several favorite restaurants, but there was only one nicest nearest and finest establishment. It offered simple candles at each table and an eager blaze surrounded by a stone chamber set inside the longest wall. The food was barely better than what her home could weave from perfect ingredients, but there were those who counted on her commerce and appreciated her nature. And in turn, she enjoyed those who smiled at her, keeping her favorite booth ready for no one else. Unless of course this was a day to invite a guest.

“Is anyone joining you, madam?”

“Not this morning. No.”

Some museum establishments had waiters and individual service, but Parchment would never seek out places as egalitarian as that. A long steel counter ruled by a smiling workman was enough, with people and machines in the kitchen supervising the meals.

“And what will you have this morning, madam?”

She knew the fellow’s name and much of his life story. Less than thirty when they met, he had reached his sixties—not young but plenty of energy in the bright smile and the jittering dance of fingers waiting to strike the ordering keys.

“A hadrosaur omelet,” she said. “With cuttlefish and Martian greens and a double helping of feta and why not coffee too?”

The proper keys were struck—an archaic ritual that didn’t need to exist anywhere for the last hundred years.

The old lady paid with gold coins pulled from the new purse.

Another ritual, and splendid because of it.

The smile and the man handed her a new mug and an old wooden marker. She was required to pour her own coffee, and what she liked best wasn’t the abundance of brews or the infinite capacity to mix them in any combination . . . no, the joy was in doing this for herself inside a room filled with strangers and neighbors. The heat of the coffee was another kind of fire, and her booth was empty and eager for her to sit inside the reassuring confines. Furniture and windows could always be reconfigured, following endless whims, but this place resisted change. Maybe that’s what she liked best. And maybe that’s why she had abandoned plenty of other restaurants over the decades, each for committing the crime of novelty.

Parchment’s wealth was difficult to calculate, and that from AIs built to do nothing but count the mass of capital. She could purchase this business and a thousand other restaurants, remaking them however she wished or preserving them in amber. But not only didn’t she avoid that, it had been decades since even the possibility had drifted through her mind.

Sitting where she belonged, alone, she sipped hot water laced with brown chemicals born minutes ago. Nothing in the mug had anything to do with coffee trees and beans. The fireplace stood to her right. On her left, tall diamond windows opened onto a city corner, and standing on that popular corner—doing nothing and obvious because of his immobility—was that same odd boy.

Looking at him, Parchment felt tense.

The boy was going to stare. She expected nothing else. So she sipped while studying the numbered marker on her table, certain that the young face would soon push against the diamond. But no, when she looked again, nothing had changed. People strode past and they stood together and chatted, but the boy just stared at the soft clean face of the street, and not once, even in small ways, did the nameless creature beg from any of the passersby.

Yet he had certainly made a plea for Parchment’s kindness.

Her meal arrived, full of its own heat and flavors—a collection of materials derived by guesswork and perfected by experience. The man from the counter personally delivered the plate and disposable utensils along with the standard question, “Will there be anything else, madam?”

“That child,” she said, pointing.

Then she said nothing, curious what her friend would imagine to come next.

“Do you wish him gone?” the man inquired.

“Eventually,” she said. “But for now, I’d like to have him sit in front of me. If you can induce him to do that. And I’ll pay for his breakfast, if he wishes.”

“What will we make of our world?”

The Algorithms were meant to answer one iteration of that everlasting question. Humanity and the machines were approaching a rough balance, but this wasn’t going to be the fabled, feared Singularity. AIs were brighter by the second, but human reach was expanding at an astonishing pace. The situation was as perilous as any thriller alarmist scenarios. This was a situation hungry for order, and that’s why the Algorithms were conceived over beer and then heavily funded. And most importantly, the work was empowered by emergency laws. Ten thousand meetings and a thousand thousand emails wrestled with the “make of our world” conundrum. Genius worked on nothing else, and the work marched across most of a decade, crafting the world’s shape. And when genius slept—human and otherwise—it suffered nightmares about a quiet, empty future that would come if any portion of the critical work failed.

Parchment endured more than her share of awful nights.

But not her husband. A life of success had stripped away much of his imagination. Looking forwards, he saw nothing but Paradise, and maybe the road map wasn’t obvious to anyone, including himself, but at least he had confidence in the men and those few bright girls who were better at details than a visionary such as himself.

He still slept with living women. There was always some pretty assistant and a prettier intern and various etcetera girlfriends amenable to a wealthy man’s body parts.

Parchment still shared the mansion with him, on those rare nights when both were home.

They even occasionally slept inside the same room.

There was no blatant moment when Parchment gained the upper hand in the marriage. But it was obvious that colleagues respected her opinion. And the AIs sought out her advice. And her husband was visibly bothered by praises being offered to her, and worse still, to her “innovative” work.

“‘Innovative’ is an idiot’s cliche,” he complained.

“You should share your insight,” she suggested. “Tell the idiots that they don’t know how to use language.”

That earned a hard half-stare, as if the air beside her face had offended him.

“It’s better to be innovative than get stuck inside a hole,” she warned.

Her husband never struck her. Except with his thoughts, that is. And he probably never realized that she could read the violence in his face and posture. But it was obvious just then: His imaginary self had just slapped her across the mouth.

Shifting topics, she said, “We aren’t making enough progress.”

That was a reliable way to make him laugh. Doubt brought ridicule to whoever dared offer the opinion. “We always thought self-aware machines would kill us,” he reminded her. “Yet here we are, still happily in charge of the conscious Them.”

AIs were always Them. And despite the bluster, her husband was never entirely comfortable with Them.

Life was a race, and there was always a moment when someone else took the lead. Her husband was still in charge of quite a lot. At work, at home. But the various girlfriends were running him to exhaustion. That was an argument for later days, Parchment decided. When he was more vulnerable than now. What mattered was the question to be answered in the next few years, if not sooner.

“What will They make of us?” she asked.

“Besides Us being the gods that brought them into existence?”

She stared, and not at the empty air.

He wouldn’t blink. She watched his thoughts, shoulders pushing forwards and the handsome eyes finally staring at her eyes. Dogged and a little scared, he said, “You don’t have any reason to complain. We’re building a helluva set of rules. These Values of ours. No, I’m not the one making them tight enough to last a million years. But shit, we’ve got the best coders and lawyers that ever lived, and the most loyal machines, and we’re going to end up with a political-economic-ecological system that runs itself for ten million years.”

“Nothing runs itself,” she said.

“So our grandkids make baby adjustments,” he maintained. “Flourishes they can drop in where necessary.”

She honestly wished that he was right, and she said, “I believe you.”

Which surprised him. And heartened him. “So what do you think we should do, Parchment? To keep this world orderly and happy, I mean.”

It was a rare opportunity, the two of them together and him pretending to care what she believed.

“The key to this,” she began.

“Yeah?”

“Everyone needs to wake up poor.”

There. She said it as simply as possible, including machines as well as people in that expansive “everyone.”

But what was profound to her was worse than laughable to him.

“I’ll tell you what everybody needs,” he said. Then up went a finger, pointed straight at her face. “There’s one thing and one thing only, and when we get it . . . when we reach that point . . . nothing ever changes again.

“That’s the beautiful, awful truth about tomorrow.”

And the bastard beast was right.

Sitting in front of Parchment, the boy looked both smaller and older. Inside the table, menus upon menus suggested breakfasts and other meals.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Guess,” he said instantly, as if expecting the question. But before she could guess, he added, “Fifteen years and seven months. Although I look young, I know. The girls always think so.”

“I’m not good with ages,” she said, meaning to shove the matter aside.

Breaking tradition, her friend had come from behind the counter to take this special order.

“I know what I want,” the boy said. A fingertip touched the tiny entry, pulling it into a larger font, and setting both hands flat on the tabletop, he added, “My room won’t make this.”

The man took a sudden breath. But his voice remained calm and warm when he asked, “And how many?”

“Two, please. Grilled and with the bones included. I like playing with bones.”

“Very good, sir.”

Then it was just the two of them, and Parchment guessed, “You live on your own.”

“Emancipated since I turned fourteen,” he said.

The world was crowded but exceptionally safe, and tradition was the only reason why people half his age were called children. Parchment didn’t have much fondness for long childhoods, and if she had any power, she would have ordered . . .

But nobody had that power, did they?

“My room is minimal,” the boy mentioned.

“Minimal?”

“Spartan. That’s the word,” he said with pride.

“But in that room, you can see anything and eat almost anything,” she said. “No home is tiny anymore.”

He shrugged. “There has to be a smallest stupidest room. And I’m the one who got it.”

Why did she invite this animal to join her? What did she imagine would come of this?

“You have three rooms,” he continued. “That’s what your neighbors tell me, at least.”

“Your name?” she asked.

Was the question even heard? He looked at one of his hands, then the other. “I thought of asking for one of your extra rooms.”

“And I’d have kept the umbrella for myself,” she joked.

He shrugged. “Asking doesn’t mean you want. Asking is the noise you make to cover up the real business.”

She nodded, working with his words.

Then the expression changed. The little man seemed a hundred years old, asking, “Why do we live this way?”

“What way?”

“Poor and crowded and trapped on one poor crowded world?”

Obvious answers probably wouldn’t appeal to him. But it was important to make the right noise here, and that’s why she offered the obvious reply. “We’re the richest people who ever lived. Even you. You own a room property and enough capital to live for centuries, and an army of servants waiting for your next words.”

“I rather like that image,” he agreed.

“There’s no reason to be stubborn,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll look up your face, see who you are on my own.”

The comment was avoided with a sideways glance.

Then the meal arrived, and she muttered, “Oh god.”

On the plate, woven from soulless ingredients and cooked inside a fierce, brief fire, were a pair of human hands.

The young man’s own hands, apparently.

“Well,” Parchment said.

“Haven’t you heard of this dish?” he asked, lifting a newly made fork and knife. “It’s popular among a few of us.”

“It’s ugly and it’s rude,” she said.

“I’m fifteen. What do you expect?”

She said nothing.

“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Do I have to have him kicked out, or do I stand and run away to save myself?’”

She looked up, waiting to catch any eye that would help her.

“Ink,” said the young man.

“Pardon?”

“That’s my name. As of a few weeks ago, as it happens.” He dropped the utensils, picking up a cooked hand by the wrist bones and the thumb. “I found out about you and decided to change my name. To Ink.”

“Ink writing on Parchment. Is that the joke?”

“After the first minutes, no. The humor pretty much drained away.”

And suddenly this awful beast of a youngster was fascinating. Why was that? What had he done or said to deserve this change of attitude?

“I didn’t want your umbrella,” he said.

“I realized that.”

“And I don’t care that much about any room inside your house.”

“Good,” she said.

He nibbled at the flesh between the thumb and forefinger. Then with grease on his mouth, he said, “I don’t think normal thoughts.”

“You don’t,” she agreed.

“If you guess what I want,” he began.

Then he bit again.

“If I guess?”

“You’re more clever than I imagined,” he said. “But I don’t think you are. I don’t think anybody can be that clever.”

When was the last time that anyone was this fascinating?

Parchment sat back.

The young man ate in slow careful bites, revealing an unexpected precision with this taunting cannibalism.

“Let me confess a considerable something,” she said.

“If you let me hear it however I want,” he said.

My, this was one exceptionally refreshing fellow.

Their former mansion was abandoned, not sold. Cash and capital had little left to say to the wealthy, and that’s the way it would be for everyone soon. Parchment had designed three portable, nearly perfect rooms. One room was enough for the husband’s endless pleasure, and their home could be carried almost anywhere, which meant Antarctica and Berlin, Bali and the newly green Atacama. What about Mars? Calculations were made, the skeleton of a transport ship was built, but the mistress of the house didn’t relish leaving billions of people out of reach, and that’s why the rooms ended up standing in the midst of a continent-sized city.

Two famous people lived a few steps apart. The husband’s heart was the closest heart to hers. Yet only in a physical sense, of course. After he died, Parchment counted the days since they last spoke. Four thousand and seven days passed since she said any word to her mate. Four thousand days since she could have touched either of his hands or the outlines of his still handsome face. If she had wanted to touch him, which she didn’t.

Did Parchment grieve when he was gone?

More than she admitted to anyone, particularly herself.

No, she never liked the man, and the young-girl’s admiration was long spent. But when everything else was easy, he was otherwise. Her husband was blunt and rude and simple, and he was eager to crush whatever joy she could imagine, and that made him the rarest treasure.

Before he died, Parchment spent long moments imagining the man’s passing. And she was wrong in every way. Her normal assumption was that she wouldn’t know it had happened. Peculiar sex would kill his heart, and being indifferent to the world, he wouldn’t have configured any safety system. The corpse would rot. Sealed doors would keep that secret, perhaps for years. She imagined that he was dead already—a vivid, sometimes appealing daydream that lasted for several years.

She rather liked being a widow, if only in practice.

On the four thousand and eighth morning, someone knocked on her tenement door. This was the door leading into the central room, that space where nobody ever was, and her surprise was vivid. Fun. Dressing as quickly as she could, she called out a few words about patience and who was there and what was happening. Nobody answered, but the knocking persisted. So she asked her room if she was in danger, and with its calmest warm voice, the room promised that danger had never been less of a possibility.

That’s when she knew. Her neighbor, the man who had beaten her endless times inside his mind, was no more.

Half-dressed, she opened her door.

What wasn’t human stood before her. It was vividly female, yes, but shaped unlike every earthly woman. The orifices were filled with light, and she smelled of odd musks and salt and odors that resisted definition, and after offering a name that might have been her own, the fantasy creature told the Earth woman that her man was lost but the body remained, and could she come please claim the body before it began to foul the world?

“The world,” Parchment repeated to her breakfast partner.

The half-eaten hand was forgotten. Ink watched her face, spellbound.

“I always assumed he was screwing interns,” Parchment said. “But it seems no, he had moved past those pale dreams. Decades ago, the man secretly bought the help of high-end AIs. He wanted a world of unusual depth, packed with details no rational person would bother with. A world drawn down to every grain of scented sand and a deep history, with ten willing alien wives playing on tendencies and oddnesses that I couldn’t have imagined, even when I imagined his worst.”

A sigh preceded a shake of the head. And the boy said, “Neat.”

“No,” she disagreed.

He thought of arguing. She saw the ideas flashing across his face. But he decided not to strike back with logic or emotion.

Silence was best.

“The man’s body was still warm,” she said. “He still smelled alive, but not in a normal way. Because he had been eating contrived alien meats and whatever else, I assume. And breathing a different air. A very beautiful air, by the way. I looked about. Before calling the appropriate officials, I stood on a mountaintop not much larger than this restaurant, admiring a view that was as lovely as any could be. The wife stood beside me. Grieving in her fashion, I suppose. Some orifices leaked music. Other portions of her offered words. She told me that the mountain was filled with amazing rooms. The sum total of her world’s artistic wealth was within my reach, and wouldn’t I wish to have a quick year-long look?

“I told her to show me the way.

“She lead me to a staircase. And when she started down, I used the kill-command that I wove into each of our rooms. Back when I built them, I did that. And the data were instantly dumped. So much data, so quickly, that the Earth felt the impact as AIs and servers fell into their first sleep in decades.”

She stopped talking.

Ink looked at his plate.

“I own worlds,” she said.

He nodded.

“Ages ago, I sent my fortune into the Kuiper Belt and told it to keep busy.”

“I know that,” he said.

“You don’t want umbrellas or rooms,” Parchment said. “I think you want me to hand over one of my little terraformed comets.”

He didn’t say, “Yes.”

Instead, Ink sobbed with genuine, weary despair. “We’ve got so much out there, but this is where we stay.”

“People are homebodies, by nature,” she said.

“I’m not.”

She waited.

“Yeah,” he said. “I want one world and a ship. And I know people. People who can’t live another day here, eating a life that won’t ever test them.”

Emotion welled up inside Parchment.

The boy watched.

Both of them waited.

Then she said, “No,” and picked up the uneaten hand. And taking a first little nibble, liking the pepper but not the grease, she said, “I have a rather different proposal to offer.”

The hip hop woke her.

Violent, joyous lyrics ended with the hard bark of a car backfiring. Which was more alarming than a pistol, odd as that seemed.

Parchment sat up.

“Change the scene?” the room anticipated.

“No. Don’t.”

For the first time since she was a thirteen, Parchment dressed inside that grim, bug infested room. A freshly woven third-hand dress and comfortable shoes and a hat ready to catch any eye. Then she stepped through the other door, into the central room. An expansive volume originally meant to be filled with parties and significant ceremonies, it was occupied by nothing but white walls and a gray floor and one youngster sitting with legs crossed in the middle of the floor, speaking to unseen faces on a privacy screen.

“Ready?” she asked.

He tried twice to stand, and then succeeded, legs revealing his nervousness. Which was endearing to see in any groom.

About the Author

Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves.” His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).

The Abduction of Europa

E. Catherine Tobler

BOLAJI

Everything blurs.

This morning, I thought it was the condensation of my breath upon the helmet’s convex interior, but it’s something else. Deep space shapes our eyes in ways unknown. Under this pressure, Europa is hazy, distant water plumes fogging the horizon, but closer too, and I think there is an undiscovered crevasse. We should be more mindful, but we soldier on, single file, metal cleats biting into the thin ice that covers Europa’s salt ocean. Marius is already lost and though we walk toward Thrace Terminal, it has never seemed so distant. The second icecat seized up three days ago and no human has made this journey on foot.

We should be perfectly fine—our suits were made for this world, heavy enough so that we will not struggle in the lesser gravity, thick enough to shield us from the radiation pouring from the sky. Beyond the haze, Jupiter churns in eternal storm. Before we left Thrace Terminal, we were mindful of the red spot, seeming to reemerge from having been swallowed—but I cannot see it now, Jupiter’s immensity hesitant to rise.

It used to bother me, the idea that we would be dead in a day without all the shielding we live behind. That radiation would squash us like bugs, but you get used to it. Space is hostile, my father used to say, but so too the ocean. We were not built for these spaces, so must change ourselves to enter them. It has always been so; history tells us this.

A low vibration churns in my gut as I stab my cleat into the ice and push myself through another step. Endless miles of ice, the naked sky above us. I peek at that sky and my knees jelly at the sight of Galileo Station coming into view, framed against the vast milk-in-coffee expanse of Jupiter. The station’s helium collection pods catch the distant sunlight and look like strands of spider web. They dance, but not in any wind. They plummet, into the clouds and gone, before returning with their precious cargo. The idea that the station is populated, that somehow people live within its walls, troubles my mind. Against the bulk of Jupiter, the station is no more than a pinprick, and if we living creatures fit within that pinprick—

I am made to feel small. Nausea punches a clammy hand into my throat. I try to swallow it down, because vomiting in a containment suit is no one’s idea of a good time. The smell of my body is overwhelming, the silent admission that I escalated this endeavor, that Marius died, that they would send Kotto alone for us. Alone.

It is the idea of paperwork that calms my mind; paper is a thing of the past, of course—it will be a series of cold keys and colder screens, making my fingertips chill with every swipe, but the idea of the work to come comforts, even if the idea of Kotto behind me does not. If you had to have anyone come after you, on a distant ice-clad moon where your partner had been—swallowed, my mind whispers.

Tragically taken, I amend.

Kotto would not be anyone’s first choice. Kotto knows walls and vehicles; she doesn’t know sky and ice. She doesn’t know the stories of these distant places the way I do.

KOTTO

They say that after a while, you don’t notice the cold.

The station is cold and Europa, being four hundred and eighty-five million fucking miles from the sun, is naturally and one-hundred percent organically, cold. You think you won’t miss it—that far away, you’ll be locked up tight inside Thrace Terminal and too busy working. You’ll be diving into a goddamn alien ocean—what’s to miss? All that warmth is what.

You don’t dream about sex—you dream about sunlight, about the way it looked falling through leaves, about the way it felt on your skin. They say you can’t remember—you were too young, born on Schiaparelli Station, shot toward Galileo as a teen, your family devoted to the deep; you’ve only ever seen holos of trees you foolish, foolish girl, but you remember what that light looked like. Like fucking heaven.

I talk about light a lot in my mental assessments. I’m told that station-borns tend to have some trouble with natural light, or lack thereof. Something in our mind remembers it wasn’t supposed to be all darkness and cold; something inside still hungers for what we’ve never known. And Europa, despite being one of the brightest objects in the goddamn sky, isn’t ever quite bright enough from the surface.

She’s all silver and ice—the Snow Queen, Marius called her—but you know that means she’s cold. Bolaji talks about the life that runs beneath her frozen surface, crackling in copper coils, and I thought at first he meant the ocean—but he means the lineae, which look like bloodied shadows to me.

They meant to remove me from service once, given that my eyes cannot see the full color spectrum, but in the end decided that would be a waste, given my family’s devotion to the deeps. Once you’re out here, what else is there to do—it’s not like we’re building entertainment complexes or schools. We aren’t making cities—though aren’t we, every station is a city in miniature—and there aren’t exactly other jobs that need filling. This deep in, everyone’s a garbage collector, a plumber, a chef.

I’d trained and advanced at the top of every class as if born to water, so it wasn’t like they could kick me without consequence. There are a good many of us, but still not enough. Deep space science remains a sparse thing. Most people stayed where they were born, in the warm, sunshiny splendor of Earth. Fucking Earth. It’s no more than a pinprick in the sky and I still crave it. Wonder what the oceans taste like. Wonder if I’ll ever get there.

“Hold.”

My voice crackles out of my suit and ahead of me, Bolaji pauses in our trek. I draw alongside him, watching the plumes of vapor that haze the sky. Somewhere else, our helmets might dot with moisture, but here, the plumes fall as snow and ice—it’s too damn cold on the surface to stay liquid for long. But Bolaji’s helmet is fogged and I lift a gloved hand, trying to wipe it away. It’s on the inside—he’s breathing too hard and I wonder if he’s got what Marius had, what we’re trying to deny he had. Shrieking about the lost station—he’d found it, he’d found it, but there was no lost station, we’d know. Wouldn’t we?

People out there, it was said, they get sick and go mad because of the cold, because of the dark. You can’t tell a person’s gone mad, not until they melt down. But Bolaji’s eyes are steady on me.

“Gotta get Marius out of your head,” I say. “What happened happened, Bolaji—you were good to go after him, but goddamn. Some people aren’t made for this kind of place, even if they were born out here.”

But there’s something else in Bolaji’s eyes even as he nods at me and agrees. There’s something else and I don’t press. What did he see that I couldn’t see? There’s no because. I just don’t. I’m fucking tired and we’ll be sleeping another night on the ice and I’m tired. So tired of the cold they said I would stop noticing. They never said when—but they said I would.

MARIUS

On the edge of the salt ocean, a growing limb of night’s dark spreads and Marius can’t make sense of it quickly enough. The ocean has no edge, no shore because the ice cap covers Europa entire. In turn, the ocean covers every bit of rocky ground. But here, there is a shore, an outcropping where Marius stands barefoot. The limb of darkness spreads like water through sand toward him.

“Bolaji, can you see this?”

There is no reply.

Marius kneels upon the shore where it feels like mica, thin and flaking. He dips his hands into the darkness and recoils at the sudden warmth. He has not known such a sensation outside being tangled with another body. (He thinks of William, pushes the memory away—that was another life, another planet.) The darkness creeps up his arms, to the elbow, to the shoulder. At that point, it feels as if a great maw has taken him in and the memory of cold is erased. This world was never cold, its ocean never solid.

Marius watches the shore retreat at an alarming speed; the sparkling mica glints and is then gone as the salt ocean swells over his head. He thrashes, turning to look at what has a hold of him, but there is no face. Only clouded arms of ink, the limb of night having dissolved itself in the salt water.

He learned to swim as a child on Schiaparelli Station and took top placements. It would be different in an ocean, they said; a calm and controlled pool was not an ocean where one would encounter tides, currents, undertow. Pools did not contain living creatures. Any creature on Europa, should its ocean prove salty, would be called a halophile—salt lover—but Marius always remembered “halo” for angels.

The angel before Marius has a halo, and the deeper he is pulled, the more it glows in golden splendor. Oxygen deprivation can cause a mind to hallucinate, but Marius remains certain of what he sees before him. Certain, too, of the way his lungs have quieted, of the way he doesn’t feel cold, because every synapse is shutting down.

BOLAJI

When Zeus abducted Europa, he came to her in the form of a striking white bull and she, in praise of his beauty, draped him with hand-woven garlands of flowers. Endless scent and color streamed from his grand horns and he reveled in the feel of her upon his back.

Europa, they would have you believe, so reveled in the feel of him beneath her, strong and sure and warmer than anything she had ever known, that she did not notice he was carrying her away from the shore, not until they were in the sea’s wet, not until he had pulled her under and changed into a man more beautiful than any before him—for of course, he was no man at all.

They say Europa did not scream (Marius screamed—my people say a traveler to distant lands should make no enemies and this was not our intent—never our intent), but by then, she was under water. How could anyone have known? The foam that rushed to shore could have easily been from her thrashing in the water, trying to escape Zeus’s maniacal hold—but it was only the gentle swelling tide, they say, carrying flower petals to shore in the wake of a beautiful wedding.

Europa’s tides are well-concealed beneath a cap of ice, plumes of water escaping when they can. But once free, they freeze and become part of the ice forevermore. Europa stretches infinite before us. Ahead, I can see the curved ridges we will likely take shelter in if we mean to rest and hydrate. The Delphi Flexus is not endless, but looks such from where we walk; we have to cross its boundary, and then the penitentes—the spikes of ice that prove this world is melting and refreezing in turn—before Thrace Terminal becomes a possibility.

I am torn between which is a more severe loss: Marius or the two icecats. Kotto would say the icecats, given our present circumstances. I am worried I would agree.

Within the flexus, we find a curve of ice in which to shelter. There will be no fire, but our suits are equipped with a series of chemical warming layers that should see us through. Likewise, there is a liquid feeding system, and though it is not my mother’s moin moin, it will do. My mother told me the death that kills a man begins as an appetite, and perhaps this is what she meant, so when Kotto bids me eat, I activate the suit’s feeding tube, tonguing once for water, twice for pureed food. There are two more meals to be had, which means at least two nights without. Possibly more. We will arrive at Thrace Terminal hungry.

“Bolaji, what—”

Kotto grabs my arm and extends it away from my body. The soft suit is the only thing that separates us from certain death via cold or radiation, and by the soft light radiating from her helmet, I can see what she sees. The sleeve of my suit has torn, from elbow to wrist, the fabric gaping open as if the sleeve has been unbuttoned. Every layer is ripped, ruined, and something pale rests within.

It is so pale, I do not even recognize my own arm for my skin is not this color, but brown. I stare, for I have never seen such a thing—has it been burned by cold? If my suit has been compromised, why have I not perished?

Kotto moves swiftly, cracking her case open to retrieve the emergency patch kit. I want to tell her to stop, but I sit silently, creamed spinach puree growing sour on my tongue. I should be dead. Why am I not dead? Kotto works fast—her hands are sure as she seals the entire length of the sleeve back together. In the cold, frost begins to crackle over the binding.

“Kotto.”

“Sssh.”

She does not have to tell me twice.

KOTTO

They say that in deep space, the extraordinary will become ordinary and eventually you stop noticing it. When the extraordinary is one’s everyday job, it’s nothing to fuss over. We live in space, we are settling the entire system, these acts are no longer magic. These people—they need to stop talking, because they’re so fucking wrong.

Bolaji’s arm should not be that color—it’s like ice, Europan ice. But it’s also not. If the lineae within Europa’s ice look like shadows to me, charcoal lines hastily sketched, this ice is different, for his veins make a lineae of their own, these deep blue. Or, what I presume to be blue. I should not be able to see this color—but here it is. I have never seen it, and yet I know it. An ancestral memory, my therapist would say. I want to ask Bolaji what color the lines are, but the suit needs to be sealed, and once it’s sealed we say nothing.

“Kotto.”

“Sssh.” I lift my hand, as if I could place it over his mouth to silence him. But he stays silent. Trembling. His eyes are wide and I tell myself they are not getting pale, they are as brown as they ever were, calling to mind the blackwood jungles my grandmother left me paintings of. So deep one could get lost, until the sunlight pierced the trunks and—oh Bolaji. What the hell? This was a simple rescue, nothing more.

Beyond the goddamn color of his arm, Bolaji should be dead. I am certain this fact presses on him as much as on me. His suit was opened to space, to the Europan air which stands at nearly three hundred degrees below zero. Nothing can survive that. Not even the icecats proved able and they were built for it.

Beneath my feet, the ice rumbles. Our training is so ingrained, I don’t even have to say “move!” before we’re in motion. We know.

As stable as the surface should be, deep space remains largely unknown and hostile. Perhaps we were not meant to come this far—we are too fragile, too alive to know the depth of this cold. Europa is only doing what Europa does best. Under the strain of Jupiter above her, carting her deeper into the stars, she cracks and groans and spews water from her belly. Most of this water falls to coat the ground in fresh ice; some escapes into space.

Bolaji and I climb up the flexus and slide down its backside, avoiding the spew of ice water. Despite the danger, I am grinning as we glide down the ice, over bumps and ridges as the crews on Mars often traverse the sand dunes. At the bottom of the ridge, our ice cleats stab us steady, though the ground rumbles still. High in the hazy sky, more water plumes.

“Kotto—”

“Bolaji, move,” I say, because I want some distance between us and that plume. If we’re resting at all (he should be dead, Bolaji should be dead), it’s not going to be on top of Europa’s vomiting mouth.

MARIUS

Others have been on Europa for eons, so long that when they try to convey it in numbers and words, Marius is overwhelmed. Others believe he has a mind for science, but Marius can’t digest what they transmit. Images flood his tear-blurred vision—another star system, far from where he now floats. An explosion, a nebula, debris hurtling through space. These simple things, Marius slowly understands.

Marius cannot understand his own star system in its infancy, but when he realizes that nine worlds are spinning into creation around a violently bright sun (he still counts Pluto), he can taste tears on my lips. He views the planets as children, small but growing larger, hauling in rock and gas, coalescing atmospheres tolerable and toxic, flinging comets here and moons there. He watches young Mars flood and old Mars perish; Valles Marineris cracks wide and he fears the entire planet will split in two, but she holds, dusty and dead.

No one has witnessed this, Marius thinks, though is quickly reminded by the strong body beneath his own that Others were here first. Others witnessed. This was theirs until slumber and gravity drew them into the depths where they slept, Marius and his kind cracked Europa’s ice like an egg, pierced her salty ocean, drilled into her rocky mantle. (Crude, but he thinks of William again—cracking, piercing, drilling.)

Marius tries to speak, but is under water, and cannot understand how he is breathing, let alone how he might speak. He thinks he should not have left the station, but he had to, otherwise there would be no this. He was called to leave the station, knowing where to find them, knowing they had something to show him—the lost station, the end of all he had sought. Bolaji should never have followed—Marius is certain where the fault lies.

He stretches into the cold dark and when he can no longer see any brightness above, loses his sense of direction. Everything is featureless black, as if nothing has ever been created. In this black, there has never been a sun, nor any speck of light, until something startling and green darts through the salted water. Glowing Others murmurate across his vision, one sliding through Marius’s palm small as a flower.

The beings draw so near that they swarm around Marius, against his skin—skin, not suit, and he wonders when it was lost, and why he is not dead (is he dead?). When they swarm with more fury, his throat grows raw from screaming. He is not yet dead, he is not yet—

BOLAJI

Europa, once carried to Crete where she was to be queen, was welcomed by Asterion—he of the labyrinth, the creature that was half man, half monster. Did Asterion challenge Zeus for Europa’s fair hand? There are no such stories of what became of her there—but for the one that my mind creates: that Europa, enraged after being taken from her home and life, turned on them both; that Athena looked down in her wisdom and recognizing a warrior soul, transformed what remained of the garland of flowers into a sword. Europa killed Zeus and imprisoned Asterion within the labyrinth, before tracing the path of spilled flowers back home.

I am certain this did not happen, but it seems so, as Kotto jostles me into consciousness once more. She stands as fiery, sword-brandishing Europa above me, intent on slaughtering whatever obstacle lands in our path. I have never seen Kotto as such before and it steals my breath. Kotto keeps always to herself, intent on her work, on finding the smallest organisms that call Europa’s oceans home. She cared nothing for humanity—only what life might exist elsewhere. When she found the first, this was the only time I heard her laugh; she said they were yellow-orange, but they glowed green for me.

My tongue is numb in my mouth; I cannot answer her when she speaks, nor can I fully understand what she has said. She glows, as if she has become one of the salt-loving organisms of the deep. I nod and she seems pleased, vanishing from my sight. We move, but I am not walking. Kotto drags me on the emergency sledge. As if I have broken a leg. As if I am incapable.

A look down at my legs tells me I am incapable. My suit has split wide again, exposing my legs to the air. At some point, it is clear that Kotto tried to seal the rends, but they split the binding again and again. I cannot fathom why; I do not feel larger, and my body is not shaped differently. But the skin that gleams up from the torn suit is wholly white, as clear as ice, with thousands of blue lineae running beneath.

This should startle me, but between the evidence and the emotion, there is a great gulf of nothing. One cannot reach the other. I study the legs as if they were Europan ice, following each lineae until I can no longer trace its path. They wind across the legs and disappear under, and I imagine I see patterns within them: sharp-edged stars and the lump that is Zuma Rock. I have only ever seen this rock in images handed down from lifetimes before my own: a gray and hulking lump rising quite suddenly from the trees as if it were dropped from space. My many-times-great grandfather was said to have climbed it; my many-times-great grandmother said that was absurd. And yet, here I am on Europa. I picture my many-times-great grandfather upon this rock and I am calmed.

Come morning—is it morning?—the idea of the rock still rests within me. I feel it as if upon my tongue, salty and weighting it down so I cannot speak when Kotto looks at me. But I see it upon her face. Something else has happened, something she has no explanation for, and the following morning (the ice so very bright beneath Jupiter’s glowing orb), she will have no explanation for what comes next.

I want to speak to her; I want to write her a letter. My fingers crave the feel of keys, of a cold glass screen, so that I might tell her how Europa surely followed that trail of broken flowers home. So that I might tell her how Zuma Rock rises black from the greenery, and how my many-times-great grandfather stood upon it, barefoot, naked, the way I will stand upon the ice before the consumed shell of my body falls away.

KOTTO

One man should not weigh so much in this gravity.

The sledge is ingenious, locking Bolaji firmly into place, so he is not jostled no matter the terrain we cover. The runners have blades, but like an ice skate possess something of a toe pick, which I can latch into the ice to keep the entire thing from moving. I do this now, kneeling on the ice as I try to catch my breath. We’ll share our last meal in a few hours; tomorrow will be hungry, and Thrace Terminal is at least another day beyond. Water isn’t a problem, at least; Europa’s ocean water freezes clean, desalinated, and our suits are equipped with a sealed system that will allow me to store and melt ice for drinking.

Marius should never have come out—it’s easy to convince myself of this. When Marius left the station, shrieking about finding a lost station (the lost station—madness—we had not been here before, had we), Bolaji, in his good nature, followed. No one went onto the ice alone—ever, ever, ever. Going alone was certain death. Not that Marius cared or waited—his discovery, he cried, would not wait. Of course he took an icecat. Of course Bolaji took another to follow. And now—we were nearly fucked, but the universe had surely seen worse, even if we had not.

I went alone, didn’t I? Charged out after Bolaji without a second, without a third. Just went, and I shouldn’t have. Was it worth two lives, Kotto? This goddamn lost station? What the hell does deep space do to a mind? What did Marius see that I did not?

“Bolaji.”

He’s so still, the ice color having creeped up his cheeks. He tries to move his mouth, but cannot open it. His water tube remains tucked in the corner; he’s unable to even tongue that away, which is probably best. A slow trickle is better than nothing. If I can get him back to Thrace Terminal, if we can get him in sickbay—I don’t know. Medicine isn’t my thing—first aid sure, but not this. And this isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen.

“Can you try to sit up?”

Bolaji nods at me, but doesn’t move. He should be able to sit up, only his legs secured to the sledge; his hands curl around the handles, but he could move them if he wanted. If he was able. I bite the inside of my cheek and taste salt. Maybe whatever’s happened to him won’t let him. Was this part of what happened to Marius?

The known part was Bolaji radioing back, shrieking that Marius had found it—had found it and we were going to be famous and known and it was better than standing on Zuma Rock naked. Maybe this thing had a hold of him then, too. Was this what extreme cold did to a person? No; cold like this killed a person flat out. Why the hell wasn’t Bolaji dead? Why weren’t we all?

“Not sitting up is also fine.”

Bolaji watches me like I’m something he’s never seen instead of someone he’s worked with for seven years. He did a brief stint on Galileo Station, but his heart was never there. When I accused him of wanting a moon of his own, brand new ground he could sink his feet into, he joked that I always wanted an ocean no one had peed in. He wasn’t entirely wrong.

“Come on. If you stop slowing me down, we can make the spikes, and that means . . . Thrace is still damn far away . . . ”

The sledge seems lighter when I pull it back into motion. When I dreamed of alien oceans, I dreamed of beasts big enough to pull crafts through them. Not our crafts—their own. These beasts were never not industrious, crafting marvelous cities at the edge of every ocean they possessed—and probably peed in.

But the beasts here are smaller and according to Bolaji, brighter, glowing green. What had Marius found that could compete with that? We’d found life—goddamn alien life—and he was throwing himself out onto the ice for what. For this?

I glance back at Bolaji, whose arms are raised, hands reaching for something I cannot see. Something he probably can’t see, either. But what I see turns my stomach; the gloves of his suit are ripped. But more than that maybe, because the fabric looks eaten away. Something in the air, a contaminant we couldn’t detect, something in the ice? The exposure to long, continued cold?

The penitentes rise like stalagmites from the ice field ahead. The thin blades of ice, some running dark with trapped minerals, are all turned the same direction, as if something has caught their attention. That something is the far-distant sun. I wonder what it would be like, to stretch under its warmth, to watch it melt this entire ball of ice into a whole, free-flowing ocean. Some worlds, I remind myself, are like that.

I position the sledge within the shelter of two penitentes, and laugh at myself for doing so. It’s not as if there’s someone out here to find us. It’s not as if anyone else is looking. Tomorrow, I’ll be in radio range of Thrace; tomorrow, they’ll know. I draw on my feeding tube, food first, water second, and watch the sky until sleep claims me. I don’t mean to sleep long—Bolaji can’t be left alone—but four hours have passed by the time I look upon the Jupiter-bright sky again.

“If you pick up the pace,” I tell Bolaji, “we can cover some good ground here—how’s your water, anyhow?”

I pick my way to the side of the sledge, reaching for the controls on the arm of Bolaji’s suit. His water level is too high—he hasn’t consumed any in the time we’ve been traveling, and when I look at his helmet, I see why. Bolaji is gone. His suit flutters empty, but for a puddle of what looks like water.

MARIUS

At this point, Europa’s ocean is one hundred and eleven kilometers straight down, and Marius can see forever. The water swarms with life, hydrothermal vents spewing warmth into the ocean cold. Vast columns of bubbles stream upward, into the dark. Salt bursts across his tongue, but something beyond that, something metallic and true.

Here, life abounds. Small, insistent. Larger, established. A cr�che of crabs cling to the hot chimneys, hearts fluttering beneath their transparent exoskeletons. Eels, worms, and Others, so many Others. They have been here a long time, have made nests and smoothed hollows in the Europan rock where the world is forever warm.

Others carry Marius over the crater and the crab-crusted remains of anchor points rising from the rocky ground. Marius recognizes the broken frame, the shattered drill. A lost station, the lost station—but this lost station is Thrace Terminal, and the markings on the steel legs confirm it. He does not remember Thrace Terminal being lost, but can see it the way he has seen the past—an explosion, a water-pale nebula, debris hurtling through the black salted sea. These simple things Marius understands.

Marius and Others glide toward still-standing Thrace Terminal; the water tastes of metal, thermal vents scattering bubbles in their wake, broken petals that will perish before they reach the ice cap.

BOLAJI

Europa followed flowers; I follow water.

All thoughts of the suit, of Kotto, of Marius, have gone; these came Before. They are not Now. Now and here, there is only the water, the salt having transformed my body into something Other. I spread through the water, following the currents created by the deep thermal vents—even up here, beneath the ice, my body knows the way the water flows; can sense the warmth and cool entwined.

If there is purpose, it is only in growth. Why do we change? How do we endure? Why do we stretch for depths we have no hope of reaching? What happens when we do reach them? I think briefly of a man upon a rock, sweat-stained and aching. I think of how he must have looked at the land below him, at the froth of impossibly green trees, and this is how I survey the waters beneath me now. They are small, but filled with life.

I travel as the water, pushing up through the ice clefts as I will, flinging myself into the sky which spreads clear and bright, before raining back to the ocean below. Pieces of me freeze on Europa’s porcelain face, but I am more than these; I spread infinite, seven times as big as Earth’s oceans, butting against the ice cap. Tonguing it into deeper water.

KOTTO

Thrace Terminal stands black and skeletal against the ice. The distant sunlight gleams off the towers, off the ice that wraps her steel legs. She’s still far off, but I breathe easier at seeing her familiar shape. If the extraordinary is supposed to become commonplace, then maybe the commonplace also becomes extraordinary, especially when we are forced from its confines. You don’t dream about sex; you dream about familiar walls, your possessions no matter how meager, everyone you know.

I flick my comms to life, already itching to get inside the station and take my helmet off. I want to breathe the stale, recycled air. I want to walk barefoot down the chilly corridors in morning. I want to attend my next goddamn mental assessment and show them I did it. I made it.

“Kotto to Thrace Terminal.”

But the sledge, folded back into the emergency pack at my back, weighs heavy. I made it back, but alone. I did it, but couldn’t bring Bolaji with me. Couldn’t pull Marius back from whatever cliff he’d jumped off. Do you believe Bolaji had anything to do with Marius’s condition? With his disappearance? They will ask, won’t they? What will I answer? Bolaji did not make it, and Marius did not make it—what can I say? The cold has frozen me to the core—envy encases my heart and I cannot feel what perhaps I should for them, for the loss of them.

“Thrace Terminal—Kotto, fucking Christ.”

“Not quite that.” But I try to smile at the sound of Rey’s voice—something familiar, something warm. “Have you in sight—probably tomorrow, unless you send an icecat.” I relay my coordinates and hear Rey dispatching a crew for me.

My steps quicken at the thought; my walk hastens to a run, but when my helmet clouds with breath, I slow. No sense in overdoing it, not if they’re sending people for me.

What did Marius and Bolaji find? What did they know? Why didn’t you find it? Maybe you couldn’t fucking see it, Kotto—the changes in the ice, the changes in the water. Or did you find it and were simply unable to see the way Bolaji and Marius could?

When the ground rumbles, I wonder at the speed at which they’ve come. I strain to hear the icecats clawing their way cross the miles-thick ice, but they’re still too far distant. The vibration through the ice is pervasive, and I track it, as if dancing.

If they say that eventually you don’t notice the cold, must it also come to pass that after a while, you grow so accustomed to the world you inhabit, you forget it’s hostile? You forget that a rumble isn’t always a transplanted icecat; sometimes, it’s the native ice-buried ocean you’ve come to study. Sometimes, it’s a plume of water and vapor erupting from a fissure in the ice. A plume of water that seems to enfold you like an arm, like a garland of flowers, drawing you toward the arctic waters.

I tumble and when I at last come to rest against a gently curved flexus, I’m breathing hard. The world beyond my helmet is hazy, but I can see the tear in my sleeve. Elbow to wrist, my arm gone to Europan ice. Deep blue lineae trace a new map to new lands upon me. Europa swims gray and I think it’s the condensation of breath on my helmet—but it’s something else.

I have forgotten the cold.

Everything blurs.

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and editor at Shimmer Magazine.

Extraction Request

Rich Larson

When they finally shift the transport’s still-smoldering wing enough to drag Beasley out from where he was pinioned, for a moment all Elliot can do, all anyone can do, is stare. Beasley’s wiry arm with its bioluminescent tattoos is near sheared from its socket, and below his hips he’s nothing but pulped meat and splinters of bone.

He’s still alive, still mumbling, maybe about the woman Elliot saw in a little holo with her arms thrown around his neck, back before Beasley’s dreadlocked mane was shaved off and a conscript clamp was implanted at the top of his spine.

“His impact kit never triggered,” someone says, as if that’s not fucking obvious, as if he could have been ragdolled out of the transport otherwise.

“Is the autosurgeon trashed?” someone else, maybe Tolliver, says. Elliot’s ears are still ringing from the crash and his head swimming from what he was doing before it and all the voices seem to blend. He knows, dimly, that he should be giving orders by now.

“An autosurgeon can’t do shit for him. What’s it going to do, cauterize him at the waist?”

“Get him some paineaters at least. Numb him up.”

“Shock’s done that already.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I fucking hope that.”

Beasley is still trying to talk, but it’s all a choking wet burble from the blood in his mouth. The nudge, though, comes through. It slides into the corner of Elliot’s optic implant, blinking poisonous yellow. A little ripple goes through the rest of the squad, which means they got it, too. A couple of them reflexively clap their hands to the backs of their necks, where the caked scar tissue is still fresh enough to itch.

Elliot realizes that down here in the bog, cut off from command, the clamp at the top of Beasley’s spine no longer needs official permission to trigger its nanobomb. All it needs is consensus.

“I’d want it done for me,” Tolliver says, wiping a glisten of sweat off his face. His upvote floats into the digital queue. He chews at his lip, shoots Elliot a look that Elliot carefully ignores.

“Yeah,” Santos from the lunar colony says, which is as much as she’s ever said. “Trigger him.” Another upvote appears, then another, then three more in a cascade. Elliot sees that he has a veto option—something they didn’t tell him when they stuck him as squad leader. He looks into Beasley’s glazed eyes and completes the consensus, floating his vote to the queue.

The nanobomb goes off, punching a precise hole through the brainstem and cutting every string at once. Beasley slumps.

Apart from that, injuries are minimal. Everyone else’s kits went off properly, as evidenced by the gritty orange impact gel still slathering their uniforms. Elliot picks it off himself in clumps while he surveys damage to the R12 Heron transport settling in its crater at the end of a steaming furrow of crushed flora and shed metal. The anti-air smartmine shredded their primary rotor when it detonated, and the crash itself did the rest of the work. The Heron’s not going to fly again.

“Should get them fuel cells out of her,” says Snell, who is scarecrow skinny with a mouth full of metal, and dark enough so his shaved scalp seems to gleam blue-black. “In case there’s leakage.” Aside from Beasley, who’s being wrestled into a body bag, Snell is the only one who knows flyers worth a damn. They conscripted him for smuggling human cargo on a sub-orbital.

“You do that,” Elliot says, when he realizes Snell is waiting for go-ahead. “Get one of the Prentii to help. They’re digging.”

“You mean one of the twins?” Snell asks, with a grin that makes his metallic teeth gnash and scrape. Elliot did mean the twins, Privates Prentiss and Prentiss. The nickname slipped out, something Tolliver calls them the same way he calls Snell “The Smell” and Mirotic “Miroglitch.” If he has one for Elliot, too, he doesn’t use it when they’re together.

“Yeah,” Elliot says. “Get one of the twins.”

Snell pulls on a diagnostic glove and clambers into the Heron carcass; Elliot turns to check on the perimeter. If they hadn’t gone down over swampland, where the rubbery blue-purple ferns and dense-packed sponge trees provided a cushion, the crash might have been a lot worse. Their impact cleared a swathe on one side of the transport. On the other, Mirotic is calibrating the cyclops.

Elliot watches the red-lit sensory bulb strain on its spindly neck and spin in a slow circle. “What’s it see?” he asks.

Mirotic is tapped in, with his optic implant glowing the same red as the surveillance unit. “Nothing hot and moving but us. Bog gets denser to the east and south. Lots of those sponge trees, lots of subterranean fungi. No radio communications. Could be more anti-air mines sitting masked, though.”

His English is airtight, but still carries a Serbian lilt. Before they clamped him, he was upper-level enforcement in a Neo-European crime block on Kettleburn. He once personally executed three men and two women in an abandoned granary and had their corpses put through a thresher. Only Elliot has access to that back-record. To everyone else, Mirotic is a jovial giant with a bristly black beard and high-grade neural plugs.

Prentiss, Jan, trundles past, having received Snell’s nudge for a hand with the fuel cells. He wipes wet dirt off on his tree-trunk thighs. Both he and his sister are nearly tall as Mirotic, and both are broader.

“Soil’s no good for graves,” Prentiss rumbles over his shoulder. “He’s going to get churned up again. Watch.”

“How many drones came out intact?” Elliot asks Mirotic, trying to sound sharp, trying not to imagine Beasley’s body heaved back to the surface.

“Two,” Mirotic says. “I can fix a third, maybe.”

“Send one up,” Elliot says, scratching his arm. “Get a proper map going.”

Mirotic hesitates. “If I send up a drone, we might trigger another smartmine.”

Elliot hadn’t thought of that. He hasn’t thought of a lot of things, but rescinding the order would make him look off, make him look shook, maybe even remind Mirotic of the night he saw him with the syringe.

“That’s why you keep it low,” Elliot says. “Scrape the tree line, no higher. And keep it brief.”

Mirotic takes a battered drone from its casing and unfolds it in his lap, sitting cross-legged on the damp earth. As it rises into the air, whirring and buzzing, his eyes turn bright sensory blue.

“It’s strange there’s no animal life,” Mirotic says. “Nothing motile on the sensor but insects. Could be a disease came through. Bioweapon, even. Seen it in the woods around New Warsaw, dead and empty just like this.” He rests his thick hands on his knees. “We could have everyone jack up their immunity boosters.”

Elliot takes the hint and sends a widecast order to dial up immunity and use filtration, at least for the time being. Then he goes to where Tolliver and Santos are vacuum-sealing Beasley’s body bag, the filmy material wrapping him tight like a shroud. Tolliver looks up at his approach, flicking dark lashes. He has smooth brown skin and sly smiles and a plastic-capped flay a skin artist did for him on leave that shows off the muscle and tendon of his arm in a graceful gash. Elliot has felt it under his fingertips, cool and hard. He knows Tolliver is fucking at least one other squadmate, but he doesn’t think it’s Santos.

“Me and Tolliver will finish up,” Elliot says. “Go spot for Mirotic. He’s tapped in. Then get the tents up.”

“Sir.” Santos’s the only one on the squad who says sir, who salutes, and she does both with enough irony to slice through power armor. Santos was a foot soldier for one of the Brazilian families up on the lunar colony. She looks like a bulldog, squinty eyes and pouched cheeks. Her clamp didn’t go in right and there’s double the scarring up her head.

When Santos leaves, still sneering, Elliot drops to a crouch. “Did they know each other?” he asks, grabbing the foot end of the body bag. Tolliver takes the other and they carefully stand up.

“Talked Portuguese together sometimes,” he says. “Beasley knew a bit. Said the moony accent’s a real bitch to follow, though.”

Elliot tells himself that this is why he needs Tolliver on his side, because Tolliver sees the webs, sees all the skinny bonds of social molecule that run through the squad.

“Fucked up seeing him halfway gone like that,” Tolliver says, with a put-on hardness to his voice. “At least the clamp is good for something, right?”

Elliot grunts in response as they carry Beasley away from the downed Heron, away from the surveillance unit and the carbon-fiber tents now blooming around it.

“When I said we could give him paineaters, that vein in your forehead, it went big,” Tolliver says, almost conversationally. “You were in the back when they hit us. You were in the medcab again.”

“I’m coming down,” Elliot says, even as his itching arm gives another twinge. “And I’m staying off it. Staying sharp.”

Tolliver says nothing, and then they’re at the hole where the other Prentiss, Noam, is waiting with a spade slung over her shoulder. They lower the body bag in slowly, gently. Elliot reaches down for a fistful of damp earth and crumbles it over Beasley’s shrouded face. Tolliver does the same. Prentiss starts shoveling.

“We got the extraction request through before we lost altitude,” Elliot says. “Won’t be down here long.”

Tolliver gives him a sidelong look. “Some of us will be,” he says, then turns and leaves.

Elliot stays to watch until the body bag has disappeared completely under thick wet dirt.

Dusk drops fast on Pentecost, dyeing the sky and swamp a cold eerie blue for a half-hour before plunging them into pitch dark. Most of the squad already have peeled eyes—the night vision surgery is a common one for criminals—and Elliot orders all lights dimmed to minimum to conserve the generator.

Elliot has a tent to himself. He lies back stiff on his cot in the dark and reviews mission parameters in his optic implant, scrolling up and down over words he’s read a thousand times. They were heading north to reinforce Osuna, cutting slantwise across marshy no-man’s land the rebels usually stay away from. They were not expecting hostiles on the way, and now they’re grounded at least a thousand klicks from the nearest outpost.

Elliot tries to calculate how long the paineaters and emergency morphine he salvaged from the shattered medcab will last him. Then he accesses his personal files in his implant and watches the one clip he hasn’t deleted yet, the one he watches before he sleeps.

“She’s awake . . . Just looking around . . . ”

His wife’s voice draws three syllables out of awake, drags on around, high and sweet and tinged weary. His daughter’s soft and veiny head turns. Her bright black eyes search, and Elliot can pretend they see him.

Something scrapes against the side of the tent. He blinks the clip away, hauls upright and reaches for his weapon before he recognizes the imprint of a body pressed up flush to the fabric. Elliot swipes a door with his hand and Tolliver slides through, already halfway undressed.

“Told the Smell I’m out back for a long shit,” Tolliver says, working his stiff cock with one hand, reaching for Elliot’s waistband with the other. “Let’s be quick.”

“Wasn’t sure you’d be coming,” Elliot says, helping yank the fatigues off. “Because of Beasley.”

“Don’t fucking talk about Beasley,” Tolliver says.

Elliot doesn’t, and Tolliver’s body all over his is second best to a morphine hit for helping him not think about that or anything else. But when he comes it’s a throb and a trickle and then everything turns lukewarm dead again. Afterward, Tolliver sits on the edge of the cot and peels his spray-on condom off in strips.

“Jan went walkabout in the swamp a bit,” he says, because this has been the usual trade since they deployed last month. “Think he’s testing the range limit for the clamp. Wants to skate, maybe. Him and his sister.”

“In the middle of a mined bog?” Elliot asks, pulling his fatigues back on.

“They’re both settlement-bred,” Tolliver says. “Colonist genemix, you know, they think they’re invincible. Probably think they can tough it out and get south to the spaceport.”

“He told you that he wants to desert?”

Tolliver takes a drink from Elliot’s water bottle and runs his tongue along his teeth. “He told me he did some exploring,” he says. “Wanted to jaw about some odd bones he found. I filled in the rest.”

“What did he find?” Elliot asks.

“Animal bones,” Tolliver says. “Really white, really clean.”

“Mirotic thinks a plague might have come through,” Elliot says, instead of saying a bioweapon. “There’d be bones.”

“Plagues don’t usually put them in neat little heaps,” Tolliver says. “He said they were all piled up. A little mound of skeletons.”

Tolliver swipes a door and disappears, leaving Elliot sweat-soaked and sick-feeling. He only hesitates a moment before he gropes under the bedroll for his syringe. Before he can start prepping his favorite vein, the cyclops starts to wail.

Everyone is out of their tents and armed in a few minutes, clustered around the cyclops. Half of them are rubbing their eyes as the peel sets in and turns their irises reflective. Elliot switches to night vision in his implant, lighting the shadows radiation green. The air sits damp and heavy on his shoulders, and with no breeze nothing moves in the flora. The stubby sponge trees and wide-blade ferns are dead still.

“Where’s your brother?” Elliot asks Noam, counting heads.

“Taking a shit out back,” she says. “He’ll have heard it, though.”

Mirotic is tapped in now, his implant blinking red. “Just one bogey,” he says. “Thirty meters out. Looks like some kind of animal.”

“You set it to wail for every fucking swamp rat that wanders through?” Snell says. His face is still streaked with soap.

“It’s a lot bigger than a rat,” Mirotic says. “Don’t know what it is. It hasn’t got vitals. It isn’t warm.”

“Mechanical?” Elliot asks, thinking of the spider-legged hunter-killers they used to drag rebels out of their caves around Catalao. Tech has a way of trickling over in these long engagements, whether stolen or sold off on the side.

“It’s not moving like any of the crawlers I’ve seen,” Mirotic says. “Circling now, toward the back of us. Fast. Jan’s still squatting back there.”

Some of the squad swivel instinctively. Elliot pulls up Jan’s channel. “Prentiss, there’s a bogey heading towards you,” he says. “Might be mechanical. Get eyes on it.”

Jan’s reply crackles. “Hard to miss,” he says. “It’s fucking glowing.”

“And what is it?” Elliot says. “You armed?”

Jan’s reply does not come by channel, but his howl punctures the still night air. Elliot is knocked back as Noam barrows past him, unslinging her gnasher and snapping the safety off. Snell’s fast behind, and then the others, and then Elliot finds himself rearguard. He’s still fumbling for his weapon when he rounds the back of the downed Heron.

His eyes slip-slide over the scene, trying to make sense of the nightmarish mass of bioluminescence and spiky bone that’s enveloped Jan almost entirely. His night vision picks out a trailing arm, a hip, a boot exposed. The creature is writhing tight around Jan’s body, spars of bone rasping against each other, and the glowing flesh of it is moving, slithering. The screams from inside are muffled.

Snell fires first, making Elliot’s dampers swell like wet cotton in his ear canals. The spray of bullets riddle the length of the creature, and a fine spray of red blood—Jan’s blood—flicks into the air.

“Don’t fucking shoot!” Noam smacks Snell’s weapon down and lunges forward, reaching for her brother’s convulsing arm. Before he can grab hold, the creature retreats toward the tree line with Jan still ensnared, unnervingly fast.

It claws itself forward on a shifting pseudopod of bone spines, moving like a scuttling blanket. Someone else fires a shot, narrowly missing Noam running after it. The creature slithers into the trees, for an instant Noam is silhouetted against the eerie glow of it, then both of them disappear in the dark.

“Shit,” Tolliver says. “I mean, shit.”

Elliot thinks that’s as good a summary as any. He can still see Noam’s vitals, and Jan’s too, both of them spiked hard with adrenaline but alive. They’ll be out of range in less than a minute.

“I hit it,” Snell says. “Raked it right along its, I don’t know, its abdomen. Didn’t do nothing.”

“You hit Jan. That blood spray, that was Jan.”

“Jan’s inside it.”

“We’re going after them, right?”

Elliot looks around at the squad’s distorted faces. Tolliver’s eyes gleam like a cat’s in the dark. There is no protocol for men being dragged away by monsters in the night. He opens his jaw; shuts it again. Mirotic shifts in his peripheral, taking a half-step forward, shoulders thrust back, and Elliot knows he is a nanosecond from taking the squad over, and maybe that would be better for everyone.

“Mirotic,” he says. “You stay. Get a drone up and guide us bird’s eye. Everyone else, on me.”

Plunging through the dark swamp, Elliot expects every mud-sucked step to trigger another smartmine. Sweat pools in the hollow of his collarbone. The whine of the drone overhead shivers in his clenched teeth, and the squad is silent except for heavy breathing, muted curses as they follow its glowing path in their implants. The Prentii’s signal comes and goes like a static ghost.

The warped green-and-black blur of his night vision, the drone’s shimmering trail of digital breadcrumbs, the memory of the monster and Jan’s disembodied thrashing arm—none of it seems quite real. A nightmare, or more likely an overdose.

“Rebels stay out of these swamps,” Snell says aloud, dredging something from his post-clamp war briefing. “All the colonists do.” His voice is thin and tight.

Nobody replies. The drone’s pathway hooks left, into the deepest thicket of sponge trees, and they follow it. Pungent-smelling leaves slap against Elliot’s head and shoulders. It reminds him almost of the transplanted eucalyptus trees where he grew up on Earth.

“Can’t get any closer with the drone,” comes Mirotic’s crackly voice in his ear. “Trees are too high, too dense. They’re right ahead of you. Close now.”

The twins’ signal flares in Elliot’s skull, but their channels are shut and their vitals are erratic. Elliot’s feels his heart starting to thrum too fast. Eyes blink and heads twitch as the rest of the squad picks up the signal. Tolliver’s face is drawn, his mouth half-open. Santos is unreadable. Snell looks ready to shit himself. Hands tighten on stocks. Fingers drift to triggers.

The sponge trees thin out, and Elliot sees the same bioluminescence that swallowed Jan whole. The shape of it is indistinct, too bright for his night vision, so he flicks it off. When he closes and reopens his eyes, he sees what’s become of the twins.

They are tangled together in a grotesque parody of affection, limbs wrapping each other, and it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins because they are coated in a writhing skin of ghostly blue light. Long shafts of dull gray bone, humors or femurs from an animal Elliot knows was not killed by any plague, skewer them in place like a tacked specimen.

Reminding himself it might be a hallucination, Elliot steps slowly forward.

“Prentiss?”

A sluggish ripple goes through the twins’ tangled bodies. Elliot follows the motion and finds a neck. A head not covered over. Noam’s eyes are wide open and terrified. Elliot watches her face convulse trying to speak, but when her bruised mouth opens, glowing blue tendrils spill out of her throat. It’s inside her. Elliot recoils. In his own throat, he feels bile rising and burning.

“Shit, they’re conscious,” Tolliver breathes. “What is that stuff? What the fuck is . . . ?” He reaches for Noam’s cheek with one hand, but before he makes contact the other head, Jan’s, buried somewhere near his sister’s thigh, begins to wail. It’s a raw animal noise Elliot has only ever heard men make when they are torn apart, when their limbs have been blown off, when shock and pain have flensed them down to the reptile brain and all it knows to do is scream.

He claws Tolliver’s hand back.

“Don’t touch them,” he says. “We have to run a scan, or . . . ” He looks at the bones pinning them in place, at the writhing cloak that looks almost like algae, now, like glowing blue algae. He has no idea what to do.

“Look at the feet,” Santos says thickly. “Fuck.”

Elliot looks. Noam’s feet are not feet any more. The skin and muscle has been stripped away, leaving bits of bone, crumbling with no tendon to hold them together.

“Kill them,” Santos says. “It’s eating them alive.” She pulls her sidearm and aims it at Jan’s screaming mouth. Her hand tremors.

Elliot doesn’t tell her no. It would be mercy, now, to kill them. Same how it was mercy for Beasley.

A vein bulges up Santos’s neck. “Can’t,” she grunts. “The implant.”

Elliot aims his own weapon at Jan and as his finger finds the trigger he finds himself paralyzed, blinking red warnings scrolling over his eyes. Convict squads have insurance against friendly fire same as any other. Maybe in a combat situation the parameters would loosen a little, but this, an execution, is out-of-bounds.

“Send the nudge, Noam.” Tolliver squats down by her wide-eyed face. “You in there? You gotta send the nudge. So we can trigger you. Come on, Noam.”

The yellow message doesn’t appear. Maybe Noam is too angry, too colonist, thinking she is invincible, thinking somehow she’ll get out of this scrape how she got out of all the other ones. More likely her mind is too far gone to access the implant. Jan starts to scream again.

“I’ll fucking do it manual, then,” Tolliver says, with his voice shaking. He looks at Snell. “Give me your knife. Unless you want to do it.”

Snell wordlessly unclips his combat knife and slings it over, handle-first. It’s a long wicked thing, not regulation or even close. Elliot thinks he should offer to do it. He’s in command, after all. He knows where the jugular is and where to slit it without dousing himself in blood. But he only watches.

And the instant Tolliver touches Noam’s head, all hell breaks loose. The monsters come from everywhere at once, scuttling masses of bone and bioluminescence. From the ground, Elliot realizes dimly even as he backpedals, keys his night vision, opens fire. The rest of the squad is doing the same; splinters fly where bullets hit bone but the skin of things, the blue algae, just splits and reforms.

Subterranean fungi. He remembers that from the topography scan as Tolliver klicks empty and fumbles his reload.

“Get the fuck out,” comes Mirotic’s voice. “They’re coming on your twelve, your three. Lots of them.”

Doesn’t matter. The thought spears through Elliot’s mind. Doesn’t matter if he dies here or on Kettleburn or wherever else. He’s been dead for ages.

Then Tolliver goes down, tripped by a monster clamping its bony appendages around his legs like a vice. Elliot aims low and for gray, shattering enough bones for Tolliver to wriggle out, to swap clips. But bullets aren’t enough here.

Elliot loads the incendiary grenade as Tolliver scrambles free. He tries to remember the chemical compositions here on Pentecost. For all he knows, it might light up the whole fucking swamp. For all he knows, that might be a better way to die than getting flensed alive.

“Run,” Elliot orders, and sends the fire-in-the-hole warning spike at the same time. “Leave them.”

Santos rips past him, then Snell, then Tolliver right after, no protest, his reflective eyes wide and frantic in the dark. With adrenaline turning everything slow and sharp, Elliot fires the grenade where he thinks the splash will be widest, hitting the dirt between two of the surging creatures. He remembers to blink off his night vision only a nanosecond before the explosion.

A wall of searing heat slams over his body and even without night vision the blossoming fireball all but blinds him. He feels Tolliver grabbing his shoulder, guiding him out of the thicket. Through the roar in his ears, he can’t be sure if Jan is still screaming.

They are sitting in the husk of the downed Heron, grouped around a heater. Every so often someone glances toward the cyclops, which is still whirring and spinning and searching. Santos has a bruise on her forehead from where the butt of Snell’s gnasher clipped her in the dark. Tolliver cut his thumb falling. Other than that, they are all fine, except Elliot hasn’t been able to get to his syringe.

“So there was no plague,” Mirotic says. “Only a predator.”

“That thing was artificial,” Snell says. His eyes look wild, bloodshot, and his hand keeps going to the spot where his knife used to be. “No way could that evolve, man. It’s a weapon.”

“It’s organic, whatever it is,” Mirotic says. “Looked on the scan like a fungus.”

“It’s a weapon, and they dumped us here to test it.” Snell’s voice ratchets high. “That fucking smartmine was probably one of ours. We’re expendable, right? So they dumped us here to see if it works.”

Elliot waits for someone to tell Snell to settle the fuck down, but instead Santos and Tolliver and Mirotic are all looking at him, waiting for his response. Tolliver plucks at the bandage around his hand, anxious.

“The colonists stay out of these swamps,” Elliot says. “You said that yourself.” He has a flash of the twins’ twisted bodies, the scuttling monsters. “I figure now we know why.”

“When do we get extracted?” Santos asks flatly. “Sir.”

Elliot knows they are low priority. Maybe five days, maybe six. Maybe more. “They know we’re rationed for a week,” he says.

“A fucking week?” Snell grinds his metal teeth. “Man, we can’t be out here a week with that thing. I’m not ending up like the twins, man. I say we carry what we can, and we get out of here.”

“To where?” Mirotic asks. “The fungus extends under the ground in all directions.”

“If you knew about this, why didn’t you tell us?” Snell demands.

Mirotic’s nostrils flare. “Because fungus is not usually predatory.”

Elliot tries to focus on the back-and-forth, tries to think of what they should do now that they know the swamp is inhabited by monsters. He realizes he is scratching at his arm.

Santos looks over. “What the fuck?”

But she isn’t looking at Elliot. Tolliver, who has been silent, ash-faced, is clutching at his bandaged thumb. He looks down at it now and his eyes widen. A faint blue glow is leaking from underneath the cling wrap.

“Oh, shit, oh, shit, I feel it.” Tolliver is twisting on the cot, sweat snaking down his face. “I can feel it. Moving.”

The bandages are off his hand now and his cut thumb is speckled with the glowing fungus. The autosurgeon unfolds over his chest like a metal spider while Mirotic searches for the right removal program, his eyes scrolling code. Elliot feels a panic in his throat that he never feels during combat. It reminds him of the panic he felt last time he spoke to his daughter.

He crouches down and holds Tolliver’s free hand where Snell and Santos can’t see. It’s slippery from the sweat.

“Got it,” Mirotic says thickly. “Biological contaminant.”

The autosurgeon comes to life, reaching with skeletal pincers to hold Tolliver’s left arm in place. Carmine laserlight plays over his skin, scanning, then the numbing needle dips in with machine precision to prick the base of his thumb.

Tolliver’s free hand clenches tight around Elliot’s.

“Hate these things,” he groans, locking eyes for a moment. “Rather let the Smell use that big old fucking knife than have a bot digging around—”

“Shouldn’t have dropped it, then,” Snell says.

Tolliver swivels, his mouth pulls tight in a grimace. “Fuck you, Snell.”

The autosurgeon deploys a scalpel. Metal slides and scrapes and the sound shivers in Elliot’s teeth. Mirotic is looking over at him, and when he speaks he realizes why.

“The spores are moving. Autosurgeon wants to take the whole thumb.”

A wince ripples through the tent; Santos clutches his own thumb tight between two knuckles. Tolliver’s eyes go wide. He tries to yank his arm away, but the autosurgeon holds tight.

“No!” he barks. “No, don’t let it! Turn the fucking thing off!”

“It could spread through his body if we aren’t fast,” Mirotic says. “How you said it did to Prentiss and Prentiss.”

Elliot swallows. He isn’t a medic. What they drilled into his head, from basic onwards, was to trust the autosurgeon. And he doesn’t want Tolliver to end up like the twins.

“Do it,” he mutters.

“Turn it off!” Tolliver wails. “Listen! Listen to me, you fucks!”

His free hand thrashes but Elliot holds it tight, not caring anymore if Santos and Snell can see it, as the scalpel descends.

“The program’s running,” Mirotic says. “Too late to stop it.”

The blade makes no sound as it slices through the skin, the tendon, the bone. The autosurgeon catches the squirt of bright red blood and whisks it away. Tolliver howls. His spine arches. His hand clamps to Elliot’s hard enough to bruise.

Elliot sits underneath the cyclops, listening to it whir. He said they would sleep in shifts, that he would watch first, as if his vitreous eyes might catch something the sensors miss. Partly because he had to say something. Give some kind of order. Mostly because he needed a hit.

Now, with the morphine swimming warm through his veins, he feels light. He feels calm. His heartbeat is so slow it is almost an asymptote.

“He screamed so much because there was no anesthetic in the autosurgeon.”

Elliot turns to see Mirotic, holding a black plastic cube in his hand. He understands the words, but his guilt breaks apart against the high and then dissipates. Tolliver will be fine. Everything will be fine. He tries to shrink the chemical smile on his face, so Mirotic won’t see it.

“Everybody knows why,” Mirotic says. “Where’s the rest of it?” He doesn’t wait for a reply. He snatches the rattling sock out of Elliot’s lap and yanks him to his feet. Mirotic is tall. But he’s slow, too, the way everything is slow on the morphine, and Elliot still has his old tricks.

A hook, a vicious twist, then Mirotic is on the ground with the needle of the syringe poised a centimeter from his eyeball.

“I need that,” Elliot says.

“You’re pathetic,” Mirotic grunts. “Holding his hand and wasting his morphine.”

“Why do you care?” Elliot asks, suspicious now, wondering if maybe it’s Mirotic who Tolliver visits in the night when he doesn’t come to him.

Mirotic slaps the syringe away and drives a knee up into Elliot’s chest. The air slams out of him, but he feels only impact, no pain. He staggers away, bent double. If his lungs were working he would maybe laugh.

“I care because you used to know what the fuck you were doing,” Mirotic says. “Back before they stuck you with a con squad.” He taps the high-grade neural plug at his temple. “You read our records. But I’ve seen yours, too. These personnel firewalls aren’t shit. And if we’re going to get out of this, it won’t be with you doped to the eyes.”

“Give Private Tolliver the paineaters,” Elliot rasps, straightening up. “Leave the morphine. That’s an order.”

Mirotic shakes his head. “It stays with me, now. You’ll get it when we get extracted.” He tosses the black plastic cube; Elliot nearly fumbles it. “Worry about this, instead,” Mirotic says. “Worry about a fungus that eats our flesh and uses the bones like scaffolding.”

Elliot turns the cube over. Through the transparent face, he sees sticky strands of the glowing blue fungus moving, wrapping around Tolliver’s scoured-white knucklebone.

In the morning, Snell is gone.

“Never woke me for my watch,” Santos says, picking gound out of the corner of her eye. “I checked the tent. His kit’s not there.”

“And now he’s out of range,” Mirotic says. “Could get the drones up to look for him. Keep them low again so we don’t trigger any more mines.”

The inside of Elliot’s mouth feels like steel wool. They are standing in the sunshine, which makes his head ache, too. A cool breeze is rippling through the blue-and-purple flora. The sponge trees are swaying. It’s peaceful, near to beautiful. In daylight it’s hard to believe what happened only hours ago in the dark. But the twins’ tent is empty, and Tolliver is drugged to sleep with bloody gauze around the stump of his thumb.

“Why would we look for him?” Elliot says.

Santos gledges sideways at Mirotic, but neither of them speak.

“He deserted,” Elliot says. “If he doesn’t pose a threat to us, we let him walk. He’ll either step on a mine or get eaten alive.” He feels slightly sick imagining it, but he keeps his voice cold and calm. “Mirotic, rig up a saw to one of the drones, start clearing the vegetation on our flank. Make sure we have clean line of fire. No use watching them on the cyclops if we can’t hit them til they’re right up on us. Santos, get the comm system out of the Heron. We’re going to make a radio tower.”

When Santos departs with her sloppy salute, there’s less contempt in it than usual. Mirotic stays and stares at him for a second, suspicious. Elliot meets his gaze, pretending he doesn’t care, pretending he didn’t already ransack Mirotic’s cot looking for the morphine while he was on watch.

“Good,” Mirotic says, then goes to get the drone.

Elliot turns back toward the tents. He lets himself into the one Tolliver and Snell were sharing, and realizes Tolliver is no longer asleep. He’s sitting up on the sweat-stained cot, staring down at his lap, at his hand.

“How are you feeling?” Elliot asks, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“You took my thumb.” Tolliver’s voice trembles. “I needed that thumb. That’s my good hand.”

“It was moving deeper,” Elliot says. “That’s why we had to amputate. You probably don’t remember.” He hopes Tolliver doesn’t remember, especially not the pain.

“Still got a trigger finger, so I guess it doesn’t matter to you, right?” Tolliver says. “Still got a mouth, still got an ass. All the parts you like.”

Elliot feels heat creeping under his cheeks. “You can get a prosthetic when they pick us up,” he says, clipped.

“At this rate?” Tolliver gives a bitter laugh. “There’s gonna be nobody left to pick up tomorrow, fuck a week. That’s if you really did get the extraction request through, and you’re not just lying through your fucking teeth. I know junkies. I know all you do is lie.”

Elliot wants to slip his hands around Tolliver’s throat and throttle him. He wants to slip under the sheet and hold Tolliver to him and tell him they’re going to make it. He does neither.

“I needed that thumb because I was going to be a welder,” Tolliver snaps as Elliot goes to leave. “When all this shit was over and I’d gotten my clamp out, I was going to be a welder like my grandfather was.”

But war is never really over, and there’s a sort of clamp that doesn’t come out. Elliot doesn’t even remember what he used to think he was going to be. He turns over his shoulder.

“Your head’s not right,” he says calmly. “It’s the drugs. Try to sleep more.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Tolliver says, somewhere between laughing and crying. “Fuck you, Elliot.”

Elliot steps out, and the tent closes behind him like a wound scabbing shut.

By the time night falls, they’ve cleared a perimeter, cutting away the vegetation in ragged circumference around the Heron, the tents, the cyclops. Tolliver came out to help mid-afternoon, jaw clenched tight and eyes fixed forward. Nobody mentioned his hand or even looked at it.

The few incendiary grenades they have in armory are distributed. Mirotic is trying to rig up a flamethrower using a soldering torch and fuel drained from the tank. Santos and Tolliver are perched on the roof of the Heron, hooking the makeshift antennae into the comm system through a tangle of wires.

Mostly busy work, Elliot knows. They can’t be sure the incendiary grenade did anything but distract the fungus, and it moves fast enough that having open ground might only be to its advantage. They don’t know anything about this enemy.

But if he keeps up appearances, maybe he can get the last of the morphine back from Mirotic without resorting to violence. Act sharp, act competent, and then when the withdrawal kicks in he won’t have to exaggerate much to make Mirotic realize how much he needs it to function.

“Nothing,” Santos says.

Elliot looks up to the roof of the Heron. Tolliver is still trying to rotate the antennae for a better signal, but all that comes through the comm system and into their linked implants is shrieking static. He dials it down in his head. They are too far from the outpost.

Then a familiar signal comes faint and blurry. A blinking yellow nudge slides into the corner of his optic.

“Snell,” Tolliver says. “Shit.”

Elliot feels a shiver go under his skin. The sky is turning dark above them. The cyclops picked up no movement during the day, but like Mirotic said, plenty of predators hunt only at night. There can only be one reason Snell would send the nudge. Elliot can picture him stumbling through the bog, maybe dragging a turned ankle, with the blue glow creeping closer and closer behind him in the dark. Or maybe the fungus already has him, is already flensing him down to his skeleton.

Tolliver’s upvote appears, then Santos’s. It will only take four votes now to trigger the nanobomb. Mirotic looks over at him, and Elliot doesn’t think Mirotic is the merciful type. He executed three people and put their bodies through a thresher. But then Mirotic’s upvote appears in the queue.

“Quick,” Tolliver says, not looking at him. “Before we lose the signal.”

Elliot is not sure if he’s making the strong move or the weak move, but he adds his vote and completes the consensus because he still remembers Jan’s screams. Everyone is silent for a moment. Santos crosses herself with the same precision she salutes.

“Leave the antennae,” Elliot says. “The extraction request went through. They’ll come when they come. Until then, we dig in and stay alert.”

Santos hops down off the roof of the Heron. Tolliver follows after, gingerly for his bandaged hand. Elliot looks at what’s left of the squad—fifty percent casualties in less than two days, and nowhere near the frontlines. Santos is steady; Elliot hasn’t seen her shook once yet. Mirotic is steady. But Tolliver hasn’t told a joke or barely spoken the whole day and his eyes look scared.

Elliot’s still looking at Tolliver when the cyclops wails a proximity alert. He tamps down his own fear, motions for Mirotic to tap in.

“Seven bogeys,” Mirotic says. “Different sizes. Biggest one is over two meters high. They’re heading right at us, not so fast this time.”

Elliot flicks to night vision and watches the trees. “Aim for the bones,” he says, remembering the previous night. “They need them to hold together. Santos, get a firebomb ready.”

Santos loads an incendiary grenade into the launcher underslung off her rifle. Tolliver has his weapon tucked up against his side, like he’s bracing for auto, and Elliot remembers it’s because he has no thumb. Across the carpet of chopped-down ferns and branches, he sees something emerging from the trees. It’s not moving how the other ones moved.

Elliot squints and the zoom kicks in. The shambling monster is moving on three legs and its body is a spiky mess of charred bone held together by the ropy fungus. Through the glow he can make out part of a blackened skull on one side. The twins’ bones, stripped and reassembled like scaffold. His stomach lurches.

Santos curses in Portuguese. “Permission to fire?” she asks through her teeth.

The other bogeys are converging now, low and scuttling like the one that took Noam. A pack, Elliot thinks. He can feel his pulse in his throat. This isn’t combat how he knows combat. Not an enemy how he knows enemies. He wonders if the flames even did any damage the night before. Bullets certainly hadn’t.

“Wait until they’re closer,” he says. “No wasted splash.”

Santos sights. Her finger drifts toward the trigger. She waits.

But the monsters don’t come any closer.

“It’s fucking with us,” Tolliver says. “Sitting out there waiting.” He has a calorie bar in his hand but it’s still wrapped. He’s been turning it over and over in his fingers.

Santos bites a chunk off her own ration. “You think it thinks?” she asks thickly. She glances to Mirotic, who shrugs, then to Elliot, who distractedly does the same. Elliot is more concerned by the deepening itch in the crook of his arm. He needs morphine soon.

“Has to,” Tolliver says. “It came for Jan first. Jan was the one who went out and found the bones in the first place. Then it used Noam to lure us out.”

The four of them are sitting under the cyclops, with a crate dragged out to hold food and dice for a game nobody is keeping track of, just rolling and passing on autopilot. Every so often Elliot has someone walk a tight circle around the Heron to check their back, in case more of the monsters try to flank them. In case the cyclops malfunctions and doesn’t see them coming. Busy work.

But there are still only seven, and they still haven’t advanced from the edge of the trees. Sometimes the fungus shifts and the bones find new positions, but they all stay in place, waiting, maybe watching, if the fungus has some way of seeing them. Mirotic suggested heat sensitivity. Mirotic, who must have the morphine hidden somewhere on his body.

Santos is the first to finish her food. She stands up, brushing crumbs off her knees. “I’ll go,” she says, hefting her weapon. Elliot nods. He can’t help but notice Tolliver’s eyes follow Santos around the corner of the Heron, wide and worried. Maybe it is Santos he goes to see.

“Big snakes only have to eat once in a month,” Tolliver says, turning his eyes back to his bandaged hand, studying the spot of red blooming through. “Spend the rest of it digesting.”

Mirotic snorts. “This fungus is not part of a balanced ecosystem. It killed off all the other animal life. Obliterated it.”

“Wish we had a fucking chinegun,” Tolliver mutters.

Then the cyclops keens, and everyone is on their feet in an instant. Elliot sights towards the tree line first, but the monsters haven’t moved. Mirotic’s optics blink red.

“Right behind us,” he says, and whatever he says next is drowned in gunfire. Santos’s signal flares hot in Elliot’s head, combat active. Elliot rounds the corner of the Heron and sees Santos scrambling backward as a ghoulish mass of bone and blue bears down on her. He can’t understand how the monster covered the perimeter so quickly, how the cyclops didn’t spot it earlier. Then he recognizes the tatters of Beasley’s polythane body bag threaded through the fungus.

Elliot shoots for bone, but the way the monster writhes as it moves makes it all but impossible. The burst sinks harmlessly into its glowing blue flesh. Tolliver is firing beside him, howling something, but through the dampers he can’t hear it. The monster turns toward them, distracted. Elliot calculates; too close for a grenade. He fires again and this time sees Beasley’s shinbone shatter apart.

The monster sags, shifting another bone in to take its place, moving what’s left of Beasley’s arm downward. In the corner of his eye Elliot sees Santos is on her knees, rifle braced. Her shot blows a humerus to splinters and the monster sags again. Elliot feels a flare of triumph in his chest.

Motion in his peripherals. He spins in time to see the other seven bogeys swarm over the top of the Heron. He switches to auto on instinct and strangles the trigger, slashing back and forth. Bullets sink into the fungus, others ricochet off the Heron, spitting sparks. Some find bone but not enough. The rifle rattles his hands and then he’s empty and the monsters are still coming.

He backs up, hands moving autonomously for the reload. Tries to get his bearings. Tolliver is still firing, still howling something he can’t make out. Santos is down, legs pinned from behind. Bony claws are moving up her back; Elliot sees her teeth bared, her eyes wide. Where is Mirotic?

The answer comes in a jet of flame that envelops the nearest monster. It doesn’t scream—no mouth—but as Elliot stumbles back from the heat he can see the fungus twisting, writhing, blackening to a crisp. Mirotic swings the flamethrower, painting a blazing arc in the air. Elliot reloads, sights, fires.

Suddenly the monsters are fleeing, scuttling away. Elliot fires again and again as they round the edge of the Heron. Mirotic waves the flamethrower, Elliot and Tolliver shoot from behind him, advancing steadily. One of the monsters crumples and slicks onto its neighbor, leaving its bones behind on the dirt. Elliot keeps firing until the glow of them is completely obscured by trees.

“You fuckers, you fuckers, you fuckers,” Tolliver is saying, almost chanting.

Elliot is shaking all over. His skin is crawling with sweat. “Check on Santos,” he says, and Tolliver disappears. There are aches in his back and arms and he can feel his bowels loosening for the first time in a long time. He needs to get the morphine back. He turns to Mirotic, to tell him as much, but as the big man snuffs the end of the flamethrower, he stumbles.

A wine-red stain is blooming under his shirt. Elliot remembers the ricochet off the side of the Heron. Mirotic sits down. He methodically rolls his shirt up and exposes a weeping bullet hole in his side. Elliot can see the shape of at least one shattered rib poking at his skin.

“Fuck,” Mirotic says, in a burble of blood.

Shattered rib, punctured lung, and probably a few other organs shredded to pieces. Gnasher bullets were designed to disperse inside the body. “Where is it?” Elliot demands, squatting down face-level. “Where’s the morphine?”

Mirotic’s face is pale as the old Earth moon. He shakes his head. He tries to speak again, says something that might be autosurgeon.

“I’ll get the autosurgeon,” Elliot says, even though he knows it’s too late for that. “Where’s the morphine?”

No response. Elliot frisks him, and by the time he pulls the vial out from Mirotic’s waistband his hands are slicked scarlet. He clutches his fingers around it and gives a shuddering sigh of relief. Mirotic’s eyes flutter open and shut, then stay shut. Elliot gets to his feet, head spinning, as Mirotic’s vitals blink out.

When he goes back around the corner of the Heron, Elliot finds Santos is dead, too. One of the fleeing monsters drove a wedge of bone through her skull, halfway smashing her clamp. Blood and gray matter are leaking from the hole. A single spark jumps from the clamp’s torn wiring.

Tolliver is crossing himself and his shoulders are shaking. There’s a fevered flush under his skin.

“We’ll burn her,” Elliot says. “Mirotic, too. Any bones left, we’ll crush them down to powder.”

“Alright,” Tolliver says, in a hollowed out voice. His eyes fix on the vial clutched in Elliot’s bloody hand, but he says nothing else.

Lying on his cot with his limbs splayed limp, Elliot is in paradise. He feels like his body is evaporating, or maybe turning into sunlight, warm and pure. He can hardly tell where his sooty skin ends and Tolliver’s begins.

“Did you kill him for it?” Tolliver’s voice asks, slurred with the drug.

“Ricochet,” Elliot says.

“Would you have killed him for it?” Tolliver asks.

“Wouldn’t you?” Elliot asks back.

As soon as they dealt with the bodies, he went to the tent to shoot up. Tolliver followed him, and when Elliot offered him the syringe, already high enough to be generous, he took it. Elliot doesn’t know how long ago that was.

“What made you like this?” Tolliver asks. “What got you so hooked? What fucked you up so bad?”

“There’s no one thing,” Elliot says, because he is floating and unafraid. “It’s never one thing. That would make it easier, right? If I was a good person, and I saw something so bad this is the only way I can . . . ” He puts a finger to his temple and twists it.

“Forget,” Tolliver supplies.

“Yeah,” Elliot says. “But there’s no one thing. This job kills you with a thousand cuts.”

“But there must have been one thing,” Tolliver says. “One thing that got you stuck leading a con squad. Mirotic says. Said. Said you used to be somebody.”

Elliot doesn’t want to talk about that. “Was it Santos?” he asks, running his fingers along Tolliver’s hip.

“What?”

“The nights I message you but you don’t come,” Elliot says. “There was someone else.”

Tolliver shakes his head. “You really are a piece of shit,” he says, almost laughs. “You thought that had to be the reason, huh? Never thought maybe some nights I don’t really feel like fucking a drugged-up zombie who plays some pornstar in his optics the whole time?”

“I don’t,” Elliot says.

“Your wife, then,” Tolliver says. “That’s even more fucked.”

“I don’t play anything in the optics,” Elliot says. “I just see you. That’s all.”

Tolliver’s voice softens a little. “Oh.”

On impulse, Elliot sends him the clip. He watches it at the same time, watches his daughter’s head turn, her bright eyes blink. “She’s grown,” he explains. “Twenty-some now. Her and her mother live on old Earth. Only thing they hate more than each other is me. If I was going to get out, it would’ve been years and years ago.”

He moves his hand to Tolliver’s arm, wanting to feel the cool plastic of his flay under his fingertips.

“They didn’t put me with a con squad as a punishment,” he says. “I volunteered.”

He looks down into the exposed swathe of red muscle on Tolliver’s arm. There are tiny specks of luminescent blue nestled in the fibers. He feels a deep unease slide under his high.

“I don’t want to get eaten from the inside,” Tolliver says. “I don’t want them using my bones.”

The poison yellow nudge appears in Elliot’s optics.

“Trigger me,” Tolliver says. “Right now. While everything still feels okay. You trigger me, and then do yours.”

“Could take the arm,” Elliot says. “The autosurgeon.”

“You said this job kills you with a thousand cuts.” Tolliver uses his good hand to find Elliot’s and squeeze it. “I’m not going to be a welder. I don’t want to be some fucking skeleton puppet, either. Let’s just get out of here. And let’s not leave anything behind.”

His hand leaves, but leaves behind a cool hard shell. Elliot runs his thumb along the groove and recognizes the shape of Tolliver’s incendiary grenade. He cups it against the side of his head. He thinks, briefly, about what the pick-up team will find when they finally arrive. What they’ll think happened.

He thinks of Tolliver’s file, the one he opened and read only once, how Tolliver had smothered his grandfather in his sleep and said it was to stop his pain, even though his grandfather had been healthy and happy. Nobody was good here. Not even Tolliver. But the two of them, they are a good match.

Outside, the cyclops starts to wail. Elliot adds his upvote to the queue, and Tolliver goes limp in his arms. His thumb finds the grenade’s pin and rests there. He thinks back to the last time everything still felt okay, then plays it in his optics, watching his daughter before she knew who he was.

“She’s awake,” his wife’s voice sings. “Just looking around . . . ”

Elliot breathes deep and pulls the pin and waits for extraction.

About the Author

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and at twenty-three now writes from Edmonton, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon and appears or is forthcoming in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex.

Everybody Loves Charles

Bao Shu

1.

He shot into space, free as a fish that had leapt away from the sea’s embrace.

Gazing down through Pegasus’s porthole, he saw the receding grey metropolis, then the amber suburbs, and finally the green fields and yellow deserts, all quickly submerged beneath a sea of clouds. By the time he emerged from the clouds, the world had become an azure convex surface, a hint of the enormous sphere it belonged to. Behind, North America was but a smear against the horizon, and Asia was still hidden below the curvature of the Earth in front. The whole globe was wrapped in a hazy glow: the atmosphere. Above him, pinpricks of starlight peeked out of the onyx firmament.

As gravity’s pull diminished, he felt the effects of weightlessness. Though his body was firmly strapped into the pilot’s seat, he still experienced the sensation of floating. The spacecraft seemed to be cruising upside down, the infinite waters of the Pacific Ocean hanging over his head and the bottomless abyss of space suspended below. It was as though he weren’t in space, but sleeping under the sea, everything at peace and very far away. For a few seconds, Charles Mann felt he was the man farthest from the hubbub of society, a permanent free-floating consciousness destined to merge with Nature’s pure essence.

But soon he remembered—no, it would be more accurate to say that he always knew—that this was an impossible fantasy. Even though he was freed from the gravity of this planet, the whole world was watching him. At least a hundred million people were tuned into his livecast.

Pegasus was in the most prestigious aerospace competition of them all: the Trans-Pacific Championship Race. Freed from the atmosphere, his ship was hurtling at Mach 9.7 toward the western edge of the Pacific. Destination: Tokyo.

Like ballistic missiles, racing ships entered space for part of their flight so as to minimize air drag, conserve fuel, and coast on inertia, only re-igniting their engines upon reentry. For a few minutes, Charles languidly admired the blue planet slowly spinning outside the porthole, listened to some jazz, and broadcast a mental microblog entry:

I have never been so far from Earth. At this moment, The World and I are antipodes: I am Self, no longer a member of life’s multitudes on Earth, but a lone wanderer in the universe . . .

The cockpit display of Pegasus revealed his position: above the Aleutians. A flock of blue dots drifted westward over the isles, and a bright red dot flashed near the leading edge—his ship. Behind him were more than a hundred spacecraft, and only three in front. This was a decent spot, but not enough to place in the race.

The frontrunner was more than sixty miles away, and even the third-place ship led him by more than six miles. As though to remind him of his poor showing, a silver saucer-shaped spacecraft caught up, sweeping past like a meteor less than three hundred meters to this left. That was Andromeda, piloted by George Steele.

“What’s wrong, Charles? Did you party too hard last night with some groupie?” Steele’s voice burst from the radio.

“George, I’m just taking a break to enjoy the scenery before I start the race.”

“I’m afraid the race is already over for you, buddy.”

“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?” Charles pushed a button.

Abruptly, Pegasus cast off its entire tail section like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. A bright blue glow flared from the newly-revealed tailpipes, indicating that the fusion engines had been activated. The sudden acceleration pressed Charles against the seat, making it difficult to breathe, but the familiar sensation made him feel more alive than ever. Having discarded almost half of its mass, Pegasus’s velocity shot up by 2.2 Mach, and easily overtook Andromeda.

“Surprise!” Charles whistled.

“Impossible! How did you manage to get up to Mach 12?”

“I’ll see you in Tokyo, my friend,” said Charles, “that is, assuming your little flying saucer can get there. Whatever you do, try not to fall into the ocean. I don’t want to break a tooth on your ring when I savor the sashimi at my celebration dinner.” He smiled as he imagined millions hanging on his every word.

As if to prove his point, behind him, Andromeda began to shake, clearly being pushed to its limits. Struggling, it managed to accelerate for a brief stretch, a last desperate attempt that had to be abandoned.

“Just you wait, Charles Mann! One day . . . ”

Charles laughed as his ship pulled farther ahead. The fusion engines were operating at their maximum, pushing his velocity to unprecedented heights.

“Krinsky, Hamill, Tanaka, let the game begin!”

Like a figment of a dream, Pegasus passed one craft after another, and soon reentered the atmosphere. The ship’s heat shields activated as the air around it grew incandescent. Like a fiery meteor, Charles’s ship swept across the sky over the western Pacific and descended toward the Japanese islands.

Somewhere above the ocean not far from Tokyo, Pegasus finally overtook Tanaka Takayuki’s1 Amaterasu, which was decelerating in anticipation of landing. Pegasus, on the other hand, didn’t slow down at all as it brazenly swept over Amaterasu and then Tokyo itself.

“Where do you think you’re going, Mann?” The voice of Charles’s coach warned in his earpiece. “You’re going to be in Siberia if you don’t stop.”

Charles began to decelerate only when he had gone beyond Tokyo, sketching a graceful arc as he circled back and landed on the lawn of the Tokyo Olympic Stadium just before Amaterasu touched down. The crowd in the sold-out stadium cheered wildly as Charles glanced around, satisfied.

“Congratulations on successfully defending your title!” said his coach through the earpiece. “The medal ceremony is in an hour, so you have some time to prepare a speech.”

“Why don’t you accept the medal for me? I’ve got a date with the cherry blossoms.”

“Would you stop kidding around? Empress Aiko is going to hand out the medals personally! You’ve also got a meet-and-greet with Japanese readers this evening. If you really want to see the cherry blossoms, we’ll arrange something for you tomorrow.”

“I’m not interested in the empress.” Charles laughed. “Why should I waste my life on such boring conventions? I’m far more excited by Aoi Masa.” He knew that the empress would be utterly enraged by his mentioning her in the same sentence as the famous AV idol, while Masa would grin, and the millions tuned into the livecast would be laughing along with him. His quote would become the front page headline in all the world’s major newspapers—well, at least the entertainment sections.

“Charles, you’ve got to—”

But Pegasus had already taken off, and as millions watched, it rose into the air and disappeared among the jungle of towering skyscrapers that was Tokyo.

2.

Sudden pinpricks of pain made Takumi Naoto open his eyes. For a long while he wasn’t sure where he was.

He was in his room, of course, about seven or eight meters square. A tatami mat took up half of it, with the other half occupied by a computer desk. There was no other furniture in the room, but then again, these two things were all he needed.

Naoto sat up, the painful pressure in his bladder making him keenly aware that he had been lying immobile for almost eight hours. Not having eaten for the duration, his blood sugar level was dangerously low, which set off the health monitor on his wrist. If he didn’t eat soon, the monitor was going to conclude that he was in a coma and send out a distress call to the hospital nearby.

Naoto went to the washroom to relieve himself, filled a cup with mineral water, and returned to the computer desk where he opened a bottle of concentrated nutrition pills. The pills contained almost all nutrients needed by the body and suppressed the secretion of stomach acid—taking five pills was equivalent to eating a full meal. Of course the pills lacked something in the taste department, being closer to plastic foam than actual food, but given that Naoto experienced the joys of foie gras, shoro mushrooms, and caviar every day, he paid it little mind.

Naoto stuffed ten pills into his mouth and washed them down with gulps of cold water. He turned on his computer and brought up a window into which he tapped a series of apparently meaningless numbers and symbols, his fingers flying over the keyboard. He was, in fact, writing code for a financial management application, an utterly boring job whose only redeeming feature was paying relatively well. However, he limited himself to working no more than two hours each day, an amount of time sufficient to earn the funds to cover his rent and nutrition pills. He wasn’t interested in wasting even a minute of his life on such lowly concerns beyond the absolute minimum.

I’ve got to work faster, Naoto thought as he typed away. I can’t afford so much separation. This is going to ruin the hard-earned psycho-coordination link . . . I’ve got to get back to it . . . Just five more minutes . . .

But someone was calling him. Frowning, Naoto switched over to the chat window, where a chubby girl with short hair appeared: his neighbor, Asakura Minami. She showed him an expression intended to be kawaii. “Naoto! Are you there?”

Such useless chatter! “Yes.”

“I have something cool to tell you: Charles is here!”

More wasted words. “Yes, I’m aware of that. And?”

“It’s Cha-ru-zu!” Minami emphasized every syllable deliberately. “Charles Mann, your idol! Just now, he turned down the medal ceremony to go on a date with Aoi Masa. It’s all over the web. Still, I heard that he was going to be signing books in Ginza and meeting fans tonight. What an opportunity! Why don’t we go see him together? I have a copy of his The Other Shore of the Pacific and I’m going to get it signed—”

“Sorry, no can do.” Naoto didn’t even wait for her to finish. “I’m busy. Work.”

“You’re holed up in your room all day working. Can’t you take a two-hour break and go out? And it’s Charles—”

“I’m on deadline.”

“But—”

“Sorry. Bye!” He closed the window.

What a silly woman. She just wasted a whole minute of my precious time. Naoto knew that Minami liked him, but after he’d been with famous actresses and models like Elizabeth White, Mariana Kingston, Paula Claudia, and Yang Ziwei, it was impossible for him to be excited by Minami’s round, plain face.

Moreover, the presence of Minami always reminded him of who he really was, and the last thing he needed was himself.

No, it was impossible to stay in this room any longer; even a second more would drive him crazy. Naoto finished his job in a rush, pushed the computer away, and lay down on his tatami mat, closing his eyes. His body was starting to digest the nutrition pills. Even though his stomach protested at the artificial nutriment, he no longer felt so hungry. He could go another eight hours.

He initiated the connection and sensory data began to flow over the link. Neural pulses were converted into electromagnetic waves, which were converted into neutrino beams, and then back to electromagnetic waves and neural pulses again.

Vestibular systems synchronized: I am standing where he stands; tactile sensations synchronized: a breeze caresses my skin, full of the warmth of spring and the moisture of the Pacific; hearing synchronized: the susurration of the wind and the sensual twitter of birds; sight synchronized: patches of lively pink and translucent white, coalescing into thousands of blooming cherry trees.

The lovely kimonoed female figure kneeling under that cherry tree turns and smiles, her perfect features even more beautiful than the blossoms: Masa Aoi!

And I am Charles, the one and only Charles.

3.

Pegasus landed next to a small lake near Hakone.

Masa was waiting for him in a shore-side cherry grove where the flowers were as magnificent as the clouds at sunset. A pure white picnic blanket was spread on the ground, on which were laid plates of refined sashimi and flasks of sake. Dressed in a loose green satin kimono, the kneeling Masa greeted him in perfect English, her voice as sensual and soft as the fabric draped around her.

“Hello, Charles.”

“Hello, Masa-chan.” Charles sat down next to her, his arm wrapping around her slender waist possessively.

“I saw the livecast,” Masa said. “Shall we drink to another championship?” She raised an elegant small sake cup.

“Oh, it’s nothing.” Charles accepted the cup and drained it in one gulp. Then he kissed her perfect cheek. “The only reason I flew so fast, of course, was to see you—”

“Oh, please!” Masa laughed.

“I swear. It’s been how many months since we last saw each other? I’ve really missed you.”

“Is that so?” Masa’s expression was halfway between a smile and a frown. “How do you explain Claudia then?”

Charles grinned awkwardly. “Um . . . she’s a lovely girl, of course. Both of you are! You’re both so close to my heart . . . ”

Having had her fun, Masa switched topics. “Have you seen my new film? I sent you tickets to the premier, but you didn’t show up.” She waited a beat. “It’s called Hokkaido Love Story, remember?”

“Of course! You were magnificent, baby.” Charles caressed her hair, which gave off the fragrance of cherry blossoms. “I absolutely loved it.” He struggled to remember the name of Masa’s character, but came up empty. “Oh my God, you displayed such emotional range and authenticity in the portrayal.”

The corners of Masa’s mouth curved up. She knew that at least ten million people had heard the endorsement, and soon, hundreds of millions would be looking up her film on the web. She could already envision Hollywood beckoning at her. “So, tell me Charles, which scene was your favorite?”

“ . . . The ending, definitely the ending. I thought it was so . . . moving.” Charles hurried to change the subject. “I thought this was a famous tourist spot. How come there’s no one else here?”

“This lake is private. The owner is the head of the Asao Group. He’s providing the spot for our date free of charge.”

“Please thank him for me. It’s so beautiful here.” Charles looked around him. The snowy peak of Mount Fuji glistened in the distance, and all around branches laden with cherry blossoms swayed in the breeze, soft, pink petals falling to the placid jade lake surface like rain. Every scent in the air was pure, refreshing.

“I bet Thoreau would be jealous of us.” Charles took a deep breath. “I think if I were to live here, I’d write something even better than Walden.”

“Walden? What’s that?”

“It’s . . . never mind.” Charles’s grin turned feral as he leaned in toward his companion. “Masa-san, have you ever tried to . . . ” His voice was now an inaudible whisper, but of course innumerable audience members around the world shared the revelation in livecast with Masa.

Masa giggled. “Oh, such an adventurer!”

The two of them were now entwined on the ground. How the hell am I supposed to get this thing off her? Oh, the knot is back here . . .

The noise of an approaching engine broke the tranquility of the lake. Charles twisted his head around and saw a tiny blue dot above the horizon. “Oh, I hope it’s not those crazy fans again,” he muttered.

The dot rapidly grew in size, and a pair of wings appeared around it. Charles soon saw the Japanese flag painted on the fuselage as well as the English text beneath it: a patrol vehicle from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.

The tiny aircraft landed next to Pegasus, and a police officer emerged and strode over to them.

“Sir, are you Charles Mann?” Her English was heavily accented.

“Yes, are you looking for an autograph, sweetheart?” Charles examined the officer. She was young and not classically beautiful, but her fit figure and serious mien gave her an air that commanded attention.

“Mr. Charles Mann,” the officer spoke without expression. “You’re suspected of engaging in terrorist activities. Pursuant to Japanese law, I ask that you return with us and cooperate with our investigation. You have the right to remain silent . . . ”

Me? Terrorism? What kind of stupid joke is this? Charles turned to look at Masa, but she looked equally puzzled.

“Wait just a minute! What are you talking about?”

“Exceeding the speed limit at low altitudes,” the officer explained. “Speeding beyond Mach 2 is illegal, and beyond Mach 5 is considered a serious threat against the city and a potential terrorist attack. Your speed just now exceeded Mach 10. According to Chapter Seven, Article Eighty-Two of the Japanese Special Anti-Terrorism Provisions, you must be detained and interrogated.”

“Are you nuts? Don’t you know there was a championship race today?”

“Yes, the race was subject to certain exemptions. However, after the race was over, you took off again, still exceeding the speed limit and outside the race area. I have no choice but to arrest you.”

“Arrest me for speeding? That’s utter bull—” Charles forced himself to calm down. Remember, millions are behind me.

“This is ridiculous!” Masa quickly pulled the kimono around herself, got up, and began to speak to the officer in rapid-fire Japanese, gesticulating wildly.

But Charles could tell that this officer wasn’t going to budge; he also noticed several other muscular officers in the patrol vehicle by Pegasus. “All right.” He gestured for Masa to stop and shrugged. “I’ve never had an opportunity to visit a Japanese detention center. But sweetheart, I’m going to write you into my next novel. I hope you don’t mind.”

“You may do as you like.” The officer seemed relieved that he wasn’t making a fuss. “If you wish to retain an attorney—”

“Already taken care of,” Charles said, pointing at his head to indicate that his lawyer was monitoring his livecast. “Oh, may I have the pleasure of your name?” He saw the name tag on her chest, but he couldn’t read kanji.

The officer hesitated for a second. “Hosokawa Homi.”

“Hosokawa . . . Homi,” Charles repeated the name. “Can you promise me something?”

She looked at him questioningly.

Charles grinned. “You ruined my date. When this is all over, you will have to give me another one as compensation.”

“Mr. Charles,” Homi said, blushing furiously. She was so flummoxed that she had temporarily forgotten that Westerners put their given names first. “Let me remind you that it is a crime to harass a police officer in Japan!”

But Charles was sure he had seen a hint of delight in her eyes as well.

The pleasure of the hunt!

4.

In accordance with standard procedures, Charles was handcuffed and brought into the patrol vehicle under the watchful eyes of multiple officers, who refused to let Masa Aoi accompany him on the ride back to Tokyo.

The whole flight back, Charles tried to chat up Homi, who pretended to ignore him, though from time to time she couldn’t help but smile. The expressions on the other officers’ faces grew uglier by the minute.

By the time they approached the landing pad at the top of the Metropolitan Police Headquarters building, multiple aerial vans from local news agencies had already surrounded the place. A group of fans chanting “Free Charles!” were attempting to land forcefully, and the police had to divert half a dozen additional patrol vehicles with dozens of officers to maintain order. Everything was chaotic.

Surrounded by a group of police officers, Charles strode toward the entrance. Homi walked right next to him, and couldn’t avoid being pressed against his muscular body.

“At my last signing in Manila,” Charles said to her, “the crowd was just as crazy as this one. Being pressed against so many bodies was no fun, of course, but something interesting did happen.”

“What?” asked Homi, unable to resist.

“The crowd was mad, shoving and pushing. I was fine, of course, but they managed to squeeze a baby out of a pregnant woman.”

“That’s terrible!”

“Ah, but then they managed to squeeze the baby into another woman next to me.”           

“What?” It took a moment for Homi to get it. “You need better jokes.”

“I’m telling you the truth!” Charles insisted earnestly. “Worst of all, she said the baby was mine.”

Homi snorted and said something to him, but Charles didn’t hear it. A complete, eerie silence suddenly enveloped him, and he watched the crowd squirm around him in the flickering light helplessly. Then, the perception of weight vanished, and Charles felt himself suspended in his own body, as though he was about to float off. All sensation of touch ceased.

Fade to white.

Slowly, he opened his eyes, his head numb and heavy. Above him was the stained ceiling of his efficiency apartment, and the fan in the computer next to him hummed.

It took him a while to remember that he wasn’t Charles. He was only Takumi Naoto.

Naoto had no idea what had happened. He got up and stumbled to his computer. The web was filled with confused chatter, and countless fans were cursing the police for creating trouble. Not only did they interrupt a hot session with Aoi Masa, but they even managed to somehow break off the livecast altogether.

Soon, the answer emerged. Out of confidentiality considerations, the Metropolitan Police had blocked the neutrino beam transmission. The world was temporarily cut off from Charles’s livecast.

“Baka! Baka! Don’t the cops have anything better to do than mess with our lives?” Naoto let out a string of curses and paced around the room. Who knew how long the livecast would be interrupted? Two hours? Eight? More than a day? What was he supposed to do? If he was supposed to spend a whole day not as Charles, then they might as well have poked out his eyes and eardrums.

Finally, he managed to calm himself down enough to open the programming interface and try to get some work done, but he couldn’t focus, and made multiple errors in a single line of code. In despair, he slammed his keyboard down and returned to the tatami mat to sleep. Tossing and turning, he couldn’t get comfortable; he was like a junkie needing his fix. Every sensation was alien. The feeling of being Charles was leaving him, and his soul, which ought to be soaring through the empyrean, was imprisoned in the disgusting body of Takumi Naoto.

The doorbell rang, finally giving Naoto something else to focus his attention on. He jumped up and rushed to the door. The display screen showed his visitor: short, pear-shaped, female. Asakura Minami.

Naoto opened the door. “What are you doing here?” His tone was impatient.

“I . . . ” Awkwardly, Minami lifted a bento box. “I made lunch, and I wanted to see if you want some.”

“I don’t—” Seeing Minami’s flushed face, Naoto swallowed his ready refusal. “All right. Thanks.”

He reached out to take the bento, but he was so clumsy that he managed to drop it. The box fell on the ground, spilling hot unadon and tempura all over the floor.

“I’m so sorry!” Minami squatted to clean up the mess. “I don’t know what happened. I just didn’t hold on—”

A pang of guilt struck Naoto. “No. It’s my fault.” He squatted down to help her.

It took a while for the two of them to clean up the floor. Minami was distraught. “I made all this for you.”

“No worries. Actually, I’ve already eaten, and I’m not hungry at all.” After hesitating for a moment, Naoto added, “Why don’t you come in?”

Minami walked in and looked around. Naoto felt his cheeks heat up. “I apologize. My place is a mess.”

But Minami giggled. “All men are like this—well, at least that’s what I hear. Takumi-kun, do you spend all day working at home?”

“Yes.” Naoto handed her a glass of mineral water. “Lots of people work from home now, and my job just requires a computer.”

“Don’t you ever go out? Or talk to anyone? Don’t you get lonely?”

“No. I can . . . go on the web. Everything is on the web.”

“It’s not the same.” Minami gazed at him, her eyes full of concern. “You should be more active. I think you look a bit too pale. You need fresh air.”

“I’m fine.”

Minami noticed the massive hexagonal black box at the head of Naoto’s bed. “What’s that?”

“It’s nothing. Just a computing peripheral.” Naoto didn’t want to explain.

But Minami had already recognized it. “This is . . . a neutrino receiver and converter! Are you into livecasts?”

“How . . . did you know?”

“My friend Rimi has one in her home, and it looks just like this. She told me it’s for livecasts, but I don’t know how it works exactly.”

“It receives neutrino beams and converts them into electromagnetic waves,” Naoto explained. “Because neutrino beams can go right through the Earth, it’s the fastest way to transmit information and minimize delay. But the equipment for neutrino transmission can’t be miniaturized, and it’s impossible to add one to a cranial implant. The only solution is to relay the electromagnetic signal to one of these, convert it to a neutrino beam, and then reverse the conversion at the other end. Have you ever tuned into a livecast?”

“No.” Minami sighed. “I’ve always been terrified of them.”

“Terrified? Why?”

“To have another person’s senses take over your brain! I think that must be like being possessed by a demon.”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that.” Naoto chuckled. “You’ve got it backwards. It’s more like you’re possessing someone else. You get to see what they see, hear what they hear, experience every detail of their life. What fun!”

“I guess so. I love Yan Zhenxu and Kim Dong-jun. It would be fun to know what they’re doing at this moment.”

“I’m pretty sure Yan hasn’t opened a livecast channel. As for Kim . . . let me look up his info.” Naoto tapped away at his keyboard for a while. “Aha! He started his livecast last year. He casts for about two hours every day.”

Minami squeezed in next to Naoto and read the large font text scrolling in the window. “‘Do you want to share a body with Dong-jun? Do you want to touch his soul in the vast deep of his mind? Do you want to live with him and work with him, get to know all the secrets of Korean stars?’ Wow! This sounds amazing!”

But a fearful expression soon crept back on her face. “I heard that you have to get a surgery where they cut open your brain if you want to receive livecasts. That’s got to hurt!”

“It’s no big deal. The surgery is to implant a chip with a small transmitter, and to hook it up to all your sensory nerves in the pons. Without it, you can’t receive the sensory information in the livecast and can’t build the psycho-coordination link. Over a billion people have had the surgery, almost nine million right here in Japan.”

“Is it expensive?”

“Not at all. I’m sure you can afford it. But to subscribe to Kim Dong-jun’s livecast will cost you. Look, the price is listed—ignore the so-called deals they tout here, they’re all scams—998 yen per hour. If you want to tune in for two hours a day, you need more than sixty-thousand yen every month.”

“That’s a lot!”

“Why do you think Kim Dong-jun decided to start a livecast?” Naoto gave a contemptuous snort. “So many fans are dying to know what the life of an idol is like, to see the world through his eyes and ears, to experience his sensations. Even if he charged a hundred thousand yen an hour there would still be plenty of fans signing up—he’s basically printing money. And Kim Dong-jun is just a K-Pop star. The prices charged by Hollywood stars are straight out of this world. And you can’t even get anything real during their designated livecast sessions anyway. All those parties, trips to exotic locales, charity events, and so on are scripted and sanitized. It’s just another performance for them.”

“If that’s true, what’s the point of a livecast then?”

“Livecasts by professional entertainers are boring”—Naoto’s eyes now flashed with a rare fervor—“but there are livecasts worth the money. There’s one superstar in particular who basically livecasts twenty-four hours every day, and it’s all free! You can experience every detail of his life, and everything is reality, not reality TV. He’s not one of those empty-headed celebrities famous for being famous. He comes up with brilliant ideas, has impeccable taste, and is a talented writer. He’s also a leading aviator who’s deeply involved in philanthropy—”

“Hey, wait a minute. You’re talking about Charles, aren’t you?”

“That’s right, I’m talking about”—with an effort Naoto managed to swallow the me—“the one and only Charles Mann. Charles, the Man.” He sighed, and his face dimmed.

Charles, my true self, what is happening to you?

5.

“You are free to go now.” The slender figure of Homi appeared at the door to the detention cell, her tone chilly.

Charles got up from his chair, his expression indifferent, as though this development was entirely expected. He glanced at his watch. “It’s not even seven yet. Why don’t we have dinner together?”

“I have work to do.” Homi’s voice was still emotionless. “Come this way, please.”

“I thought you told me that bail is impossible. Why are you letting me go?”

“It’s because of your devoted fans.” Annoyance flashed across Homi’s face. “At least a hundred thousand of them are protesting in front of the headquarters building, threatening to tear this place down. They’re demanding that you immediately resume your livecast. Half of Tokyo is now paralyzed. I don’t get it: how can so many people worship someone like you?”

“You’re letting me go because of my supporters?”

“You’re apparently not a terrorist, and the brass isn’t interested in pursuing this matter further. We won’t charge you. Now, will you please get out of here?”

“No.” Charles shook his head. “If you’re not planning to charge me, why did you arrest me in the first place? I demand an explanation, otherwise I’m not leaving.”

“You—” Homi glared at him.

Just then, a tall blonde appeared behind her. “This entire incident was caused by the incompetence of the Japanese police. You must apologize to Mr. Mann.”

“Lisa!” Charles called to his manager. “I’ve been waiting for you. What took you so long?”

“MacDonald is taking care of it.” Lisa nodded at him. “Charles, since you never left Pegasus at the stadium, you were still officially in the race. The proper interpretation for what happened was that you deviated from the race course and were forced to land in Hakone . . . Anyway, the point is you didn’t violate Japanese law, and they had no right to detain you. Since the Japanese police wasted your valuable time, they must offer you a formal apology. We will publish the demand in every major media outlet and reserve the right to pursue compensation through the legal system.”

“Oh, we don’t need to make such a fuss,” Charles said generously. “As long as this beautiful woman is willing to have dinner with me, I’m willing to forgive the police and let bygones be bygones.”

Homi was about to offer some sarcastic retort when her phone buzzed. She picked up and listened, the expression on her face shifting subtly. It was a call from the chief of police.

Lisa pulled Charles to the side and whispered, “You’ve got to get out of here right away and resume the livecast. There are millions complaining on the web already.”

“What’s the hurry? It’s rare for me to get a few moments to myself.”

“No, you’ve got to resume as soon as possible.” Lisa’s tone brook no objections.

Charles looked at Lisa, whose expression remained superficially calm. That only made Charles uneasy. When he first started his career, everything had gone wrong. At that crucial juncture, Lisa Goldstone had come to his aid and pulled him through. Everything he did—racing, writing, charity work, publicity—she arranged. Her contribution to Charles’s meteoric rise could not be overstated. But even so, Charles never felt very close to Lisa; indeed, he was a bit intimidated by her, though he also acknowledged that he depended on her. In recent years, as Charles’s stock had risen higher and higher, Lisa had come to manage his affairs with more input from him. Still, whenever Lisa insisted that something had to be done a certain way, Charles felt powerless to resist.

“All right,” he said with no enthusiasm.

Lisa shifted to a more mollifying tone. “You know that at least ten million people are tuned into your livecast at any moment, and more than 1.2 million choose to spend more than five hours a day in your stream. About three hundred thousand are practically living in your body and mind twenty-four hours a day. This is mainly because your livecast is almost never off. Your fans have come to trust you and rely on you. Now that you’ve been off air for an unprecedented two hours, many are finding your absence intolerable.”

“But they can tune into other livecasts! There must be at least a hundred thousand to pick from.”

Lisa laughed. “How can they compare to you? You are the one and only Charles. But don’t let that go to your head. More celebrities are getting into the livecasting business every day, and many want to take over your place. If you don’t get back on air soon, I imagine more than a few will turn for their fix elsewhere. Your career depends on that not happening.”

“I . . . understand.” Homi hung up her phone, and, scowling, turned back to Charles. “Mr. Charles, on behalf of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, I hereby offer you our sincerest apologies.” She bowed deeply.

Charles grinned. “I’ve already forgotten it. But I do have a craving for Japanese food. Would you take me somewhere good?”

Homi gritted her teeth. “Please, come this way.”

Lisa smiled knowingly as she leaned over to whisper in Charles’s ear, “The whole world is watching. If you can capture her heart, I’m certain you’ll double your subscribers.”

6.

“Takumi-kun, are you all right?”

“Hmm?” Naoto’s mind had been wandering. He saw that Minami was gazing at him with a look of concern. “Sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked you how it felt to tune into a livecast.”

“An interesting question.” Naoto pondered his answer. “At first, you go through a period of adjustment—that happens no matter whose livecast you tune into. The beginning is a bit frustrating: the colors and sounds all feel wrong somehow, as though you’re watching some 2-d film from the twentieth century. It’s just odd. Although all human beings share similar biological sensory organs, there are subtle differences in the neural wiring, and so you have to put in an effort to interpret the signals being projected into your brain, and all subtleties are at first lost. For several days you’ll feel as though you’re perceiving everything through a film, and nothing feels immediate or real. But then, one day, you’ll have a breakthrough and everything will feel just like your own senses.”

“Can you feel everything the livecaster feels?’

“Almost everything: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, heat and cold, the sensation of weight . . . and pain. For example, if the livecaster is pricked by a needle, you’ll feel the same sharp pang of pain. However, since the signal is filtered for safety reasons, the magnitude of the pain is diminished. Do you remember the British singer Philip Bolt? Three years ago during a livecast a deranged fan stabbed him more than ten times in the stomach, and he died almost instantaneously. Twenty thousand subscribers who were tuned into the cast suffered along with him, and close to five hundred fainted, with more than thirty dying from shock. Everybody was talking about it back then. After that, they put in safeguards for subscribers to prevent such traumatic experiences.”

“Oh . . . Then, what about joy? Can livecasts transmit the feeling of joy?”

“That’s . . . complicated.” Naoto tried to find the right words. “Usually, it’s not possible to directly transmit joy because the emotional experience involves the whole body and isn’t a distinct sensation. However, biological sensations of pleasure can be transmitted: such as the pleasure of eating a gourmet meal.”

“Then you don’t really know what the livecaster is thinking either.”

“That’s right, you don’t. Each sense is limited to a specific region of the brain, but not thought. Cognition, as we’ve learned, emerges from the coordinated actions of all regions of the brain and cannot be isolated to specific areas. Also, since our thoughts require access to uniquely encoded memories, it’s very difficult to translate each thought for transmission. Indeed, it’s precisely because thoughts cannot be tapped into that livecasters are willing to open up their senses to others. This way, they can still maintain their inner privacy.”

Minami grew even more curious. “I still don’t quite understand what it’s like to tune into a livecast. So you can see everything they see, hear everything they hear, just like if you were living in their body, and yet you don’t know what they’re thinking and can’t control what they do? It seems as though you’d feel like a puppet whose string is being pulled by someone else. That must feel really awkward.”

“You’re not wrong.” Naoto was enjoying this conversation, and he was suddenly seized by a desire to share with her everything he had learned about livecasts. “But remember, feeling like you’re really in the livecaster’s body is only the second stage. The next stage requires you to build the psycho-coordination link. That is, you have to synchronize your thoughts to theirs, and match your actions to theirs, so that it feels as though you’re moving the livecaster’s body yourself.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s not easy, but it’s a learnable skill. You have to experiment a bit. First, you need to purge yourself of all distracting thoughts, and habituate yourself to the livecaster’s lifestyle and their way of doing things. Of course you also have to really understand the way they use language. After you’ve accomplished these steps, it’s possible for you to think and act just like the livecaster in most situations. This isn’t as hard as you might imagine. Most of our thoughts and actions are triggered by sensory inputs. Once you’ve accepted the sensory input as your own, you hold the key to the thoughts and actions as well. For examples, if you see and smell a hot mug of delicious coffee in front of you, isn’t it natural to pick up the mug and take a sip?”

“But . . . but there must be some things that cannot be anticipated by the subscriber, right? For examples, any sort of high-level thinking or decision-making?”

“Well, yes . . . that’s why you have to stay focused. But there are tricks. For example, try to empty your mind and think of nothing at all; let your senses guide you. After a while, you’ll feel yourself building a kind of psychic resonance with the livecaster, as though you really are the livecaster.”

“So you can build such a deep link with only one livecaster?”

“Theoretically, there’s no such limit. But ideally, you want to build such a link with only one subject. If you switch between multiple livecasters, it’s very hard to maintain multiple psycho-coordination links.”

“But why?” asked Minami.

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to be the livecaster? Isn’t that . . . a bit much? You want to understand the livecaster, but that doesn’t mean you want to give up your life to live theirs. And that’s an impossible dream anyway.”

“Why is it impossible?” Naoto felt a surge of anger. “You’ve never even tried it, so of course you know nothing about the fantastic experience of the link, that sensation of the soul melding with the flesh. You would really be living a different life, really be someone else. If you knew what that felt like you wouldn’t be asking such questions.”

“All right, I guess I don’t understand.” Minami wasn’t interested in arguing. “But Naoto-kun, I think you should get out of your apartment more. A gym just opened near us, and I go there every day to swim or play ball. Why don’t we go together?”

Naoto found the suggestion ridiculous. Earlier today he had flown thousands of miles, traversing half the globe in the process. And now this silly girl wanted him to go exercise with her? What does she know?

But it appeared as if Charles’s livecast wouldn’t be resuming any time soon. He needed some way to pass the time. Maybe going to the gym wasn’t a bad idea. It certainly was better than being cooped up at home, bored.

“All right.” Naoto nodded. “Let’s—”

Ping! The alert ring in his ear was accompanied by a flood of signals into his implant. OMG, Charles has just resumed his livecast!

“—try to figure out something in another couple of days. Thanks!” Naoto yawned exaggeratedly. “I’m sorry. I’m feeling really tired, and I’d like to take a nap.”

“But—” Minami protested, but Naoto made it clear that he wanted to be alone.

After shutting the door behind her, Naoto lay down on the tatami mat, his whole body tingling with excitement. The bare, cramped apartment now seemed lovely and comfortable.

What’s going to happen next? Will I be with Aoi Masa, Hosokawa Homi, or some other beauty? What will we be doing? How will I spend this lovely night?

No matter what, my real life is about to resume.

7.

Wearing a pair of shades and nibbling on takoyaki in a roadside stall in Akihabara, Charles was thoroughly enjoying himself. Homi sat across from him, the steaming bowl of tonkotsu ramen before her untouched. Even though he was making an effort at a disguise, many of the establishment’s patrons soon recognized Charles. He waved at them in acknowledgement, and from time to time, fans approached for a wefie or an autograph—at least everyone was polite.

Homi looked around and finally relaxed a bit. “Aren’t you afraid of being mobbed by your fans, just sitting here in the open?”

“Afraid? My fans would much rather be tuning into my livecast. Even if they could come here and see me in the flesh, I doubt many of them would choose to. Oh, don’t you like your noodles?”

“I . . . I’m just uncomfortable.” Homi’s cheeks reddened. “The idea that millions are watching us is so strange.”

“They’re not watching me.” Charles grinned at her. “They’re enjoying the sight of you through my eyes.”

“I don’t like it!”

“You weren’t so nervous when we first met.”

“That was because I didn’t really understand what livecasting involved. You had to explain it to me. This technology only became popular in the last few years, right?”

“No. It’s been around for ten years. I was one of the first to start a cast.”

“That’s true. But it only spread to East Asia recently. We Japanese prize our privacy. I can’t imagine having strangers watch everything I do.”

“Not everything.” Charles chuckled. “I always pause the cast when I’m sitting on the toilet. Nobody wants to deal with the smell. Trust me.”

“But everything about your life . . . even . . . even . . . ”

“You’re talking about sex? That’s a biological need and part of our social repertoire. I don’t need to hide that.”

“But it’s private!”

“Ha! Having the whole world watch you enjoy yourself is a pretty fantastic feeling.” Charles winked at her. “Masa told me she adores it.”

“Of course she would! That’s how she makes her living.”

“Well, it wouldn’t kill you to try something new. I’ve heard that nudism is gaining popularity in Japan, and I—”

“Listen, Mr. Charles.” Homi’s gaze was now infused with a mixture of annoyance and embarrassment. “Not everyone subscribes to your life philosophy. I’m here because my superiors asked me to be polite and play the hostess, but after this meal, we will never have anything to do with each other again. Do you understand?”

I understand that you’re playing hard to get. Charles spread his hands in a conciliatory manner. “Of course. You’ve got to do what feels right to you.”

You’re certainly not the first woman to say something like that to me, Charles thought. Many seemed to have an instinctive fear of being exposed before strangers, but soon, his lovers learned to crave the delightful sensation of being the center of the world’s attention. They fell in love with this way of life and abandoned their old prejudices. Maybe Homi will be like that . . . but if she isn’t, maybe that will make things even more exciting . . .

Three boys about eight years old approached the pair excitedly and broke the awkward silence between them. They said to Charles, “Konbanwa, Charuzu-sama!”

“Konbanwa!” Charles replied to their greeting happily. This was about the extent of his Japanese, however.

The children continued in rapid-fire Japanese. Charles looked at Homi helplessly, and she was forced to play interpreter. “They said that they saw you win the race this afternoon, and they really like you. When they grow up, they hope to become just like you, a great aviator and author.”

Charles gently patted one of the boys on the head. “Kid, it’s not that important to fly very fast or publish a book. What really matters is being yourself and doing what you desire in your heart.”

The boy replied, and Homi continued to translate. “But I want to be an aviator. So cool!”

“Then start as a junior aviator. You can first try a full-body simulator and race in VR.”

“Virtual reality is pointless. I want to fly the real thing, just like Pegasus.”

“Slow down, kid.” Charles explained patiently. “If you really love the sport, you’ll enjoy learning what the simulator can teach you. You can also subscribe to livecasts from me and other aviators, and you’ll learn a lot—well, except the parts that require parental approval to view.”

After answering a few more questions, the children left happily with autographed pictures of Charles.

“You’re certainly good at dazzling children,” said Homi.

Charles laughed. “I’m just saying what I really think. This has always been my belief: everyone should be themselves, and realize their own worth. I’m not some idol on a high pedestal demanding to be worshipped. I started a livecast for a reason perhaps different from most: I just want everyone to know the real Charles.”

“That’s a bit rich,” said Homi. “Don’t you depend on your subscribers for your income?”

Charles frowned. He hated this kind of cynicism. “You’re wrong. Whether it’s from my racing or my writing, I make more than enough to live comfortably. My livecast is completely free, and I’ve never earned a single cent from it.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s all right.” Charles shrugged. “Many people think like that, and I can’t change their minds. I just don’t want my friends to misunderstand me. If you know me, you’ll know that before I started the livecast, I had already been published and won third place in the Trans-Pacific Championship Race. I didn’t need a livecast to increase my fame at all.

“It’s true that these days there are millions tuned into my stream at all times, but I’ve always believed that I’m not very important as an individual; rather, I represent the concept of livecasting. The practice isn’t about destroying personal privacy, but about sharing—sharing of information, sharing each other’s sufferings and joys, until the entire human race becomes one Man. As subscribers enrich their own lives with livecasts, they gain a deeper understanding of themselves and discover their own worth.”

“That does sound . . . reasonable.” Homi was thoughtful. “But having so many people watch every move you make must make you feel . . . not free.”

“That kind of thinking is evidence of lack of self-confidence. I’m Charles, the one and only. Even if billions are watching me, my freedom isn’t diminished by one iota.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re an American,” said Homi. “Americans are always brimming with self-confidence. This is not the Japanese way. From childhood we’re taught by our parents to live within rules and expectations, to learn to regulate our behavior in anticipation of what everyone watching us may think. The desire for privacy is thus even stronger.

“I remember playing with my friends every day in a tiny garden when we were in kindergarten. I say ‘play,’ but in reality we still had to follow all kinds of rules. At the end of the garden was a row of trees, and behind the trees was a wall. But there was a gap between the trees and the wall, though most people did not notice it. I discovered this hidden space one day, populated only by a few clusters of wildflowers. Even though it was a patch of grass no different from the rest of the garden, my joy was indescribable. Every day, I made my way there in secret to play by myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to share my discovery with my friends, but it was only when I was there, alone, that I could relax and feel at peace. I could laugh or cry without anyone bothering me.

“Unfortunately, not long after that my refuge was discovered by others. Many came and trampled over the grass and picked the wildflowers. That tiny world I had to myself was ruined.”

Homi felt depressed. She had no idea why she chose to say these things to Charles. She had never told anyone else about this memory from childhood, and now the whole world knew her secret.

Charles was moved. After a moment, he said, “The others did destroy your secret garden. But they weren’t motivated by the desire to watch you.”

“No, you don’t understand. It didn’t really matter whether they wrecked my garden. The moment they were in that space, my peace was gone, and I was no longer myself. Have you never felt that way?”

“I . . . I suppose I did when I was very young.” For the first time, Charles had trouble coming up with what to say. “But I haven’t felt like that in a long time.”

Homi gazed at him, a complicated set of emotions flitting through her eyes. “Then I have a suggestion: turn off your livecast. Try to experience your individual world, where every sensation belongs to you and you alone. I believe you’ll feel a distinction.”

“Turn off the livecast?”

“Maybe you just need a minute to feel the difference.”

“No. That would be a breach of my promise to my subscribers—”

“Charles, I thought you advocated for the belief that you should do only what you want to do.” Homi’s tone was now mocking. “It wouldn’t kill you to try something new.”

“Maybe if I—”

Charles, ignore her! A translucent text window popped into his view. This was Lisa communicating with him directly over the cranial implant. The text was only visible to him as the livecast software filtered it out from subscriber feeds.

I was thinking of trying it for just a couple minutes. Charles sent his thoughts back to Lisa over the cranial implant.

Not even one second. You’re being watched by the planet! This could severely tarnish your image. Charles could practically see Lisa’s no-nonsense scowl.

Homi noticed Charles’s subtle shifts in gaze and guessed that he was communicating with someone over his neural implant. She challenged him, “I’m guessing your boss is telling you no, right? Oh well—”

“Boss?” Charles instantly felt his cheeks heat up. “I’m my own man. No one tells me what to do!”

He commanded his implant to cease livecasting, and mentally recited the passcode to confirm the order. Instantly, it seemed as if a background buzz had stopped, and everything seemed extra quiet. This wasn’t the first time he had ever halted the livecast, of course, but it was the first time he had stopped livecasting for the sake of experiencing what it was like to be by himself. The sensation was distinct. Now, no matter what he said or did, only the woman across from him would be his audience. There seemed to be a marvelous, intimate bond that drew them closer.

“How do you feel?” Homi asked.

“It’s no big deal,” Charles said, deliberately trying to underplay it. “I’m okay with it.”

But it wasn’t that simple at all. The world seemed to have vanished, leaving only him and her, but it also felt as if a new dimension had been opened up to him, leading into a new space that extended into infinity.

8.

Takumi Naoto panted as he scampered through a dense fern jungle, a rampaging T-rex in hot pursuit. The very ground quaked with the massive beast’s every step. The dinosaur wasn’t running very fast, however, just keeping pace with him like a cat playing with a mouse. Naoto could almost feel the hot breath of the saurian on the back of his neck.

Naoto struggled to put one leg in front of the other, desperate to escape from the monster’s jaws. He was winded, sweat-drenched, and his legs were filled with lead. Soon, the T-rex took a giant stride and overtook him; it turned its gigantic body around and opened its colossal jaws, aiming to crush Naoto’s skull with its dagger-like teeth. Naoto screamed and collapsed into a heap on the ground.

The jungle and the T-rex vanished; floating lines of data took their place. Total distance: 546 meters. Time: 116 seconds. Average speed: 4.7 meters / second. Measured lung capacity: 1250cc. Health rating: B— . . .

Minami’s round face loomed before him. Naoto was draped over the guardrails of the three-dimensional immersion treadmill, so exhausted that he couldn’t speak a word.

“You couldn’t even manage 600 meters?” Minami giggled. “Even I can run a kilometer with no problems. Naoto, you really need some exercise.”

Finally, Naoto managed to climb up. Gasping, he said, “It takes . . . time . . . for anything . . . ”

“Then let’s keep going. I’ll make the dinosaur even slower this time. Ready?”

“No! . . . I’ve got to . . . take a break . . . ”

They went over to the lounge chairs. As soon as they sat down, a cool breeze caressed their faces, and the immersion displays around them showed a turquoise ocean whose gentle waves caressed the cerulean sky. Next to the chairs were two chilled glasses of lemonade—the real deal, not simulation.

The lemonade and the breeze relaxed Naoto so much that he felt as if all his pores yawned. “I haven’t felt this good in ages. It feels amazing to drink something cold after physical exertion.”

“Didn’t you also exercise when you were tuned into Charles’s livecast—no, let me rephrase: didn’t you also experience the sensations of exercise?”

“Yes . . . But Charles has so much energy and such a toned body—nothing like mine. Also, because of the safety filtering that tamps down extreme sensations, I never felt very tired.”

“You should definitely come with me more often.” Minami laughed guilelessly. “Let’s go swimming!”

But before Naoto could reply, a loud cry arose to the side: “Hey! It’s that bastard Charles! He’s finally shown himself!”

Naoto looked over to the source of the commotion. The projection screen on the wall was showing the news. “After disappearing in Akihabara yesterday and being incommunicado for over seventeen hours, the renowned American aviator Charles Mann has reappeared today at noon, accompanied by his rumored new flame, Miss Hosokawa Homi . . . ”

Charles is back!

Last night, Charles never resumed his livecast after turning it off at Homi’s urging. Completely at a loss, Naoto finally decided to go to Akihabara. But as soon as he emerged from the subway, he saw countless other fans had had the same idea and all the streets leading to that roadside stall were jammed. Eventually, he saw Pegasus taking off and disappearing into the night sky. Rumor had it that Charles had taken Homi away on a pleasure cruise in space, just the two of them. All night, there was no more news. Naoto waited and waited without any result, and finally, utterly bored, came to the gym with Minami. He certainly wasn’t expecting to receive news of Charles now.

“… Charles is declining all interview requests. His only statement is that Pegasus lost power. But according to media sources, his ship had been in low-Earth orbit overnight, and Miss Hosokawa was aboard as well . . . ”

“Do you think they did it?” Naoto overheard someone ask.

“Are you an idiot? Of course they did it.”

“What difference does it make if they did it? The bastard isn’t casting, and so we can’t enjoy it anyway.”

“Maybe the girl is just shy . . . ”

“Let me tell you, this has finally shown me the truth. Charles may talk all the time about sharing and freedom and all that bullshit, but in the end, he gets to turn off his livecast anytime he wants to. He doesn’t think of us at all. In the end, he’s no different from the rest of the celebrities.”

“I don’t agree with you at all.” Naoto had finally had enough. He jumped up to defend Charles.

The man who criticized Charles was also in his twenties. He gave Naoto a contemptuous look. “Mind your own business if you know what’s good for you.”

“If you are really a fan of Charles, how can you talk about him like that? Don’t you know him at all? This was most likely the result of an implant malfunction.”

“Oh, you’re one of those fans. A malfunction? Please. Weren’t you tuned in yesterday? He said he stopped the livecast on purpose.”

“Yes, but . . . it’s only temporary. There had been pauses in the cast before, when he was visiting Prague and Yangon, for instance. Don’t you understand that everyone needs some privacy from time to time?”

“I don’t worship that poseur like you do.” The young man harrumphed. “The only reason I subscribe to his cast is to see him in bed with those supermodels. But not only did he not sleep with Masa, he went and found himself a chick cop and didn’t even have the decency to cast the bedroom scene. What’s the point of watching then?”

“You are not fit to appreciate Charles’s livecast. How can you understand his ideals and beliefs?”

“Oh, I see, you understand him, do you? Well, looks like he kicked you to the curb when it suited him just the same. I’m through with wasting my breath on dumbasses like you.” The young man turned around and left.

Naoto sat down, full of rage that he didn’t know where to direct.

The news broadcast continued. “ . . . Charles’s manager, Lisa Goldstone, released a statement that the interruption in the livecast was due to a technical glitch. Full livecasting has been resumed, and on behalf of Charles, she apologizes to all the fans for the inconvenience . . . ”

“Naoto, are you going to rush home for the livecast?” Minami asked, careful to keep her tone neutral.

“Leave me alone!” Naoto shouted at her. “I don’t know!”

“I was just asking,” Minami muttered. “Why are you screaming at me?”

“I’m sorry.” Naoto forced himself to calm down. “I’m just . . . ” He didn’t know what to say and collapsed back onto the lounge chair.

Silently, Naoto fumed at Charles. Why did you stop the livecast? Why did you cut off the psychic link between us? Recently, he could almost feel himself completely melding with Charles soul to soul, and when Charles said that he wanted to stop the livecast, Naoto had almost wanted to cheer, not realizing that it meant that he would also be shut out. And a second later, he had been tossed back into his bare efficiency apartment, all alone.

Only then did the painful realization come that he was never going to be Charles, just a ghostly parasite attached to Charles.

For the last three years, Naoto was tuned into Charles’s cast almost continuously. Every day, he lived Charles’s life, facing everything he faced, participating in his races, planning and drafting and revising his books, until he could speak American English better than Japanese, until he had almost forgotten who he was. As long as he thought of himself as Charles, it was possible to scale one life’s peak after another, be a guest at the world’s most exclusive parties, travel the world, live in seven-star hotels, bathe in the fervor of fans, hop from the bed of one hot woman to another . . .

But these were not the most important. The real joys were the sense of personal worth, the spirit of freedom, and a lifestyle enabled by boundless self-confidence embodied by Charles Mann. Only when he was in Charles’s body did he feel he was alive. In his own life, he was just Takumi Naoto, a programmer in a dead-end job, a failure whose life was devoid of excitement, who was estranged from his parents, whose girlfriend had left him for another man, who didn’t even have a single real friend. A few years ago, he had contemplated suicide. If Charles’s livecast hadn’t come along to save him, Naoto would have long passed the slope of Yomotsu Hirasaka and entered the underworld.

Charles gave him a new life and hope, and resculpted his soul so that he believed that he could possess a life with value and dignity. But everything had changed. Yesterday made Naoto realize that Charles could cease livecasting at any moment, cut off this link that to him was inseverable. Everything he had thought about Charles had just been his own fantasy. Even if he possessed a soul just like Charles’s, he could never have his life.

He was still just Takumi Naoto, just himself. However, today’s experiences made him feel that being Naoto from time to time wasn’t so bad. Of course, he would still tune into Charles’s cast, but not right now.

Having made his decision, he got up and stretched. “Minami, let’s run some more. My goal is three kilometers today.”

“All right!” She laughed in delight.

9.

“Charles, I’m going to say it just one more time: You cannot do this!” Lisa was screaming at him through the phone.

“Lisa, I’ve already told you at least ten times: my time with Homi will never be livecast. This is my decision.”

“That means you’re livecasting for no more than eight hours a day. This is going to break the bond between you and your fans. Your ratings have taken a nosedive this month, and last week the number of viewers tuned into your livecast fell below two million. You were once alone at the top of the ratings, and now you’re not even in the top ten. Wake up, Charles! Even that Chinese clown, Baby Phoenix, has more subscribers than you.”

“Fine, let them go follow Baby Phoenix. What does it matter to me?”

“Charles.” With visible effort, Lisa managed to contain her impatience. “Listen, we need to have a real discussion, as soon as possible.”

“Let’s do it another day,” Charles said. “Homi and I are celebrating our 100-day anniversary tonight. I don’t want to be disturbed.”

“But—”

Charles disconnected.

Homi, who was standing across from him, asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just work stuff.”

“Then let’s continue. I don’t think you’ve had enough.”

Homi grabbed hold of him. Charles went for her waist, and she leaned into him compliantly. Watching her shy, smiling face, Charles’s concentration wavered. Suddenly, Homi wriggled out of his grasp, and he felt her weight pushing him off balance over her leg as he collapsed to the mat.

“Ha! You lost again!”

Charles was glad that there was no livecast to show his humiliating wrestling defeat at the hands of someone weighing at least 80 pounds less than he did. Of course, these were hardly fair contests, as Homi was a professionally trained fighter.

“I think you need to admit defeat, and it’s ‘pony time!’” said Homi, her eyes flashing mischievously.

Charles sighed and got on all fours, and with a delighted whoop Homi jumped on his back and guided her new mount around the room.

What had happened to the suave, slick Charles who once boasted of never sleeping with the same woman two nights in a row?

On that day more than three months ago, after Charles shut off the livecast, confused fans had surrounded Charles and Homi in Akihabara. In the end, the pair had to escape by taking off in Pegasus. But Charles had forgotten the fact that his ship was almost out of fuel, and once they reached orbit they were stuck. Charles then turned on the livecast to call for aid, only to realize that there wasn’t even enough juice to power the neutrino converter, cutting them off from the rest of the world. A simple postprandial stroll had thus turned into a little castaway adventure in space.

Fortunately, the experience brought the pair together. Homi had never been to space, and as they drifted in near-weightlessness, she didn’t even know how to take a sip of water, leading to many embarrassing situations. They did not, in fact, “do it” on that first night together. But after they returned to Earth, Charles arrived in Japan several days later with a Pegasus full of roses, and finally managed to convince Homi to go on a second date with him . . .

Homi imposed one condition: no livecasting while they were on dates. Charles agreed right away. And soon, he discovered a novel pleasure in this secret relationship. He ended up doing many things he had never thought of doing before: meowing at Homi like a cat, whispering ridiculous lovers’ prattle that made even him blush, horsing around like a couple of kids, doing whatever felt fun and relaxing at the moment instead of trying to perform as the perfect lover while the whole world watched.

Years earlier, Charles had lived in such a carefree manner, but he had forgotten that past self during the years of continuous livecasting.

Tonight, in the new cabin that Charles had bought on the shore of the lake in Hakone, they were just a relaxed couple enjoying their time together. It wasn’t particularly romantic or exciting, but they were free to be as silly as they wanted.

 “Listen, baby, your ride needs a break,” Charles said. He twisted, dislodging the protesting Homi from his back, and then rolled until she was under him. He kissed her neck with fervor. “Anata,” he whispered—the ‘pony’s’ Japanese had been improving under expert guidance—“Let me . . . ”

Homi moaned and her eyes lost focus as she licked her lips in anticipation. The whole night lay ahead, and this cabin belonged just to the two of them with no stranger’s gaze . . .

He reached out to unfasten her gi. But his hand stopped and pulled back—

—and slapped hard against Homi’s cheek.

Homi’s smile was frozen. She was stunned and unable to speak, staring at him in utter disbelief.

“What in the world is wrong with you?” she finally managed after a few seconds.

Charles’s features twisted into a hideous, savage expression, the muscles of his face twitching. He lifted an arm and pointed at the door. “Get out of here. Now!”

“How can you speak to me—”

He shoved at her roughly. “Get out!”

After staring at him for an interminable moment, Homi got up and put on her coat. “Charles, you really are an asshole.” She kicked him hard in the crotch and then hurried out the door.

The pain from his lower body doubled Charles over, and then he fell to his hands and knees. His throat spasmed and he coughed violently, as if he needed to expectorate his innards. His eyes filled with tears, and his limbs jerked uncontrollably in cramped agony. He didn’t know how long he was seized by such physical suffering. It was only after he had recovered that he saw a pair of slender legs in a pair of bright red high heels in front of him.

He looked up and saw a familiar face.

“Lisa?” He struggled to get up. “What are you doing here?”

“Since you wouldn’t see me, I had no choice but to come to you.”

“But how did you know I was here? I shut off all location services and—”

Lisa didn’t answer his query but posed a question of her own. “How does it feel to get rid of your girlfriend with a good, hard slap to the face?”

Charles’s vision blurred. “How did you know—wait, did you . . . did you—”

Gently caressing his face, Lisa said in a pitying tone, “Charles, my dear Charles, don’t blame me. You made me do it. Don’t you see?”

His worst fear had been confirmed. Eyes wide in shock, Charles muttered, “Oh my God, I didn’t know you could control my body through the implant . . . But, how could the chip . . . I thought it was just a transmitter.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘just a transmitter.’ Others are able to receive your brain activities through neutrino beams, and you’re also able to receive brain activity signals.”

“But I thought it was limited to sensory input—”

Lisa’s look was a mixture of pity and contempt. “There are so many things you don’t know. Let’s start from the beginning. Do you remember the autumn ten years ago? That was the year after your first race, when you did unexpectedly well. You had spent hundreds of thousands to outfit your ship, thinking that you could win a championship. The result? You didn’t even place, losing all your investment. You were on the verge of giving up your dream of being an aviator and returning home to Tennessee to be a farmer just like your father.”

“Yes, I remember.” Charles said. Lisa had found him, almost passed out, in a little dive bar. She told him that she worked for an experimental neural research institute, where they were testing a new cranial implant device that could allow different people to share sensory perceptions. If Charles volunteered to be a subject, they’d pay him two hundred thousand dollars. And if the experiments caused irreversible damage to his health, they’d compensate him with even more money. In order to raise the funds for the next race, Charles accepted. And soon, they began the first trial livecast with him.

“In reality, what I told you was not the real experiment at all,” said Lisa. “Fifteen years ago, Bell Labs invented a new direct neural interface chip capable of being implanted into the pons. The original intent was to implement a mind-machine interface, but the results were less than ideal. Unexpectedly, the researchers found that the implant did allow the sharing of brain activity patterns between different subjects. Before you, we had already conducted multiple trials on animals and humans with excellent results. But this transformative technology lacked a suitable application. No one wanted to cut open their brain to insert a metal box that would transmit their brainwaves to other people, though they weren’t against tapping into other people’s brainwaves.

“In order to popularize this technology, we found a few subjects and compensated them handsomely to become livecasters. But once that was done, no more than a few extremely curious individuals were interested in the constant goings on in the lives of ordinary people—especially since the cost involved surgery.

“We needed a celebrity livecaster to present a compelling use case for the technology. The celebrity’s fans could bring along more early adapters until a market emerged.

“We got in touch with multiple movie stars, athletes, and prominent authors, but unfortunately, no one wanted to do it. This wasn’t entirely unexpected. If you were already famous and successful with a good life, why would you take the risk of drilling a hole in your skull to add some gizmo just so that strangers could peek into your head? We needed to create someone specifically for the purpose of catalyzing this new technology revolution. The management decided that we had to find a young person with potential and then package him, craft him, and advertise him until he became the spokesperson for livecasting.”

10.

“And so you found me.”

“That’s right.” Lisa said. “You were already semi-famous, but your career was stalled in a tough spot. You needed money, and you were willing to undergo surgery to get it. You craved the feeling of being worshipped by the crowd, and so you wouldn’t be opposed to the idea of livecasting. You are blessed with good looks as well as easy and open manners. As long as your career took off, it was easy to see that more and more people would be attracted to your life. To be able to become the coolest and most relevant person in the world with little effort is a temptation few can resist.”

“I see. But how did you know that I would be so successful in the future?”

“Ha!” Lisa was shaking her head. “My dear Charles, you’re such a narcissist. Don’t you get it?”

A cold sweat broke out on Charles’s back as the truth pressed against an old, insecure wound in his psyche, but Lisa ripped off the last bandage concealing the truth without mercy. “We didn’t know, of course. You were just one of many candidates who made it through our selection process. The fact that you were chosen was purely by accident. Had we picked any of the others, we would have been able to engineer their incredible success as well. Charles, you were never successful because of your own efforts—without us, you would be nothing.”

“That’s not fair. Of course the livecasting has helped my career, but I worked hard for my success!”

“You worked hard?” Lisa chortled. “Charles, you’ve been enjoying a marvelous fantasy for ten years, but it’s time to wake up to reality. Do you really think you’re some once-in-a-century aviation genius? Your experience and skill as a pilot are only secondary contributors to your numerous racing trophies—the real reason you won is because you possessed the most expensive and advanced racing craft. You can afford to hire the world’s foremost aviation experts and engineers. Your victories are bought. I bet if you left Pegasus on autopilot it would still win most races.”

Charles’s face was now crimson and throbbing, but he couldn’t find an effective retort. “Even if . . . even if that were true, I used my own money! I’m the spokesperson for several spacecraft and aircraft manufacturers, and I earn plenty of sponsorships for my races.”

“You’re just arguing the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first. Who arranged those sponsorships for you? Who got you in front of the advertising executives? Who convinced them to back you instead of a rival? Think about it: you get the newest prototypes for experimental craft as soon as they emerge from the wind tunnel; you have access to the latest engine technology and avionics; you enjoy the most ergonomic hull interior design and air filtration systems, customized and assembled by the most experienced engineers on the planet—do you really think you’re entitled to all these advantages with no hustle from anyone? Charles, you’re not stupid, but years of being surrounded by applause and constant praise have blinded you to the way things really are.”

“So I’m just a puppet . . . with you and Bell Labs pulling the strings?” Charles felt his world crumble around him. “I’ve always thought you more than a bit odd. At first you told me you were a representative from Bell Labs, and then you worked at the implant start-up before becoming my professional manager—who’s the one giving you orders?”

“That’s a pointless question, and the answer won’t mean a thing to you anyway. Bell Labs, Cartel Nanotech, Connally Entertainment, Griffin Media, Douglas Astronautics, Springer Publishing, Time Media, Pacific TV & VR, Foundation for Democracy in America . . . the companies and organizations who have invested in you are members of a common interest community, but no single entity calls the shots. If you insist on identifying a puppeteer, it’s neither the US government nor Wall Street—it’s capital itself. You’re the most important link in the system, but you’re not independent. Your pathetic attempt to make your own decisions is harming the interests of the entire community.”

“Just because I stopped my livecast?” Charles laughed helplessly. “But you’ve already gotten your technology revolution and new market. There are more than a hundred thousand livecasting right now. Why don’t you let me go?”

“But no one can compare to you, Charles. Even though we now have many livecasters, few are willing to do so 24 hours a day, and among them you’re the most significant. You’re the first idol we created for the livecasting age. People might go view a third-rate fad like Baby Phoenix out of curiosity for the exotic, but you embody the dream of billions with your life. There is no substitute for you in the livecasting industry. Your book My So-Called Livecast Life has sold more than three hundred million copies! You symbolize a new way of life.

“If you go back to casting only from time to time, then livecasting will never be more than mere entertainment, and not nearly as many would be infatuated with it. It might take us ten, twenty years to recover from such a setback.”

“I thought you were very good at building up idols,” said Charles. “Why don’t you just make another Charles?”

“Why should we repeat the work we’ve already done? You’re now the world’s most prominent brand. Take your novels, for example: every one of them sells at least thirty million copies. But if the name of Jackson Smith were on the covers, I don’t imagine we’d move more than a few thousand.”

“Wait a minute.” Charles was unnerved by where this was going. He stared at Lisa. “Who’s Jackson Smith?”

“Of course you don’t know him.” Lisa waved his question away like a buzzing fly. “Jackson Daniel Smith, graduate of UT Austin, a failed novelist and former Hollywood scriptwriter, was the author of two novels published under his own name whose total sales never broke ten thousand. You can also find his name attached to a few B movies that no one has heard of. Twice divorced and bald by the time he was forty—oh, let me just add that he’s also the author of most of your novels.”

“What?!?” Charles was sure Lisa had gone too far. “What kind of bullshit is this?”

“Calm down. Think about it: before you got the cranial implant, you thought of yourself as a connoisseur of literature and published some online essays and short stories, but you never managed to even finish a novel. How could you have published your breakout debut, The Parthenon, the very next year?”

“What does when I began writing have to do with you? What are you trying to prove?”

“Let’s go back to your composition process, shall we? For every one of your acclaimed novels, don’t you remember how the key plot points and wonderful twists seemed to just appear in your brain out of nowhere? Did you think you were communing with your muse? In reality, inspiration is also a sensory phenomenon. There’s a part of your brain, right here in the frontal lobe, which is the site of your sense of self and integrated cognition. That part is generally thought of as inviolable—not that we can’t get into it, but if we did, you’d become a patient in the psych ward. The rest of your brain, whether we’re talking about the sensory or motor cortices, or even the language center, can be stimulated with neural patterns from corresponding regions of other brains. We took Smith’s ideas and beamed the same patterns into your language center, where they triggered similar concepts. When the neural impulses were combined in the frontal lobe, your consciousness chooses to interpret the inspirations as your own.”

“That’s impossible!” Charles was now screaming at her. “Those inspired strokes . . . they were mine! I stayed up late and got up early for them . . . that feeling of creativity . . . how . . . how can they belong to this Smith?”

“In the future, there will no longer be any so-called ‘self,’” said Lisa. “That’s nothing more than an illusion created by a small cluster of decision neurons in the frontal lobe, but we, naively, thought of it as the soul that encompassed the senses, emotions, and all cognition. The livecasting age is going to tear away these illusions. You’re the pioneer of this brave new age, Charles, the apostle of a fresh epoch.”

Charles was now curled up in a corner. A bout of hysterical laughter burst from him. “Oh, you’re a real comedian, aren’t you? You spend half the night ripping me apart and telling me that I’m a useless puppet, all my proud accomplishments nothing more than illusions. Yet now you call me an apostle?”

“Reality is frequently painful,” said Lisa. “But you must press on down this path. Very soon you will come to understand that whether you’re a genius or a fool isn’t so important. What matters is who do you feel you are? Even if those ideas came from Jackson Smith, as long as you really felt that you came up with them, that was enough to satisfy your need to be creative, wasn’t it?

“In our world, there are tens of millions who can feel that they are you, Charles, the Man. They couldn’t care less who they really are. Millions have become you, melding completely with you. You endow their meaningless lives with hope. Their ranks will continue to swell because no one can resist the temptation. As we improve and perfect the technology for translating and transmitting neural patterns, millions more—billions—will join the livecasting revolution, and they won’t be able to stop. In the not too distant future, I’m certain we can enable the transmission and reception of more complicated senses and emotions, or even fully formed thoughts. No one can predict how far the technology will ultimately develop, but this is surely the beginning of a true singularity. The traditional life of an individual will be swept away, replaced by a new world we have yet to imagine.”

“But that’s not my ideal. I’ve always wanted everyone to become their true selves, to pursue their own values.”

“No.” Lisa shook her head emphatically. “Even your most devoted fans, deep down, want to become you. Not many of them want to be themselves. This is human nature.”

“All right,” Charles gritted his teeth. “Since everything about me is false, illusory, at least my beliefs are real. I won’t give that up. I will reveal everything you’ve told me to the world.”

He tried to turn on the livecast, but nothing happened.

“Trust me, you don’t want to do that,” said Lisa. “We always have more than a dozen people monitoring everything you do. No matter where you are or when, as soon as you even say more than three words that we don’t like, we’ll activate our remote control and make you babble utter nonsense that will get you committed. Have you forgotten how you drove your girlfriend away?”

Charles dropped his face into his hands and collapsed back to the floor. “If you’re so powerful, why not just take over my body and start pulling on the strings? You can then make me say what you want and dance to your tune.”

“We don’t yet have that level of technology. The sensory cortices and the motor cortices are distinct, and the necessary inputs and computations to fully direct your limbs are complicated. It took almost everything we had to make you say those words to Homi just now, and you didn’t sound natural at all.”

“It’s too bad that Homi didn’t notice these subtle differences. Otherwise she would have seen through your plot.”

“Actually, I did.” The voice was clear and crisp, a voice that he never thought he’d hear again.

Charles turned and saw the bright face of Hosokawa Homi.

11.

“Homi!?”

“I’m back.” Homi nodded at the surprised Charles. “I really wanted to storm out and never return, but as a police officer, I’m trained to notice whether someone is speaking in a natural manner or not. I soon realized that something wasn’t right, and returned to confront you—at which point I noticed someone else was here. I’ve been listening for quite some time. Since I don’t have any implants in my brain, there’s not much they can do against me.”

“Charles, you’ve got to make her shut up!” Lisa glanced at Homi and turned back to Charles, her tone turning anxious. “If you don’t want to lose everything you have, you must continue to collaborate with us. You’ll get to keep your fame and riches, and we can discuss reserving some measure of privacy for you—”

“Collaborate?” Charles gritted his teeth so hard that the noise was audible. “Didn’t you just a second ago threaten to send me to the madhouse?”

“Oh come on, Charles, you know perfectly well we’d never do that unless we had no other choice. We worked so hard to create you! We would never harm you if we . . . Look, I’m just trying to persuade you.”

Homi turned to face Lisa. “You must free Charles and extract that devilish implant from his brain. I recorded the conversation between the two of you, and if anything happens to Charles, I will make sure the whole world hears about it. Even though you work for some powerful companies and people, I doubt they’re powerful enough to control the whole world. Public opinion will not be on your side. Imagine the panic when people realize that the implants they got for receiving livecasting could be used to control them—your whole industry would collapse overnight. Ms. Goldstone, you no longer have a hold over Charles.”

Lisa looked from Homi to Charles and gave a helpless smile. “I guess we’re in a stalemate then. If we do as you demand and take the implant out of Charles, we’ll be handing you all the cards. No one is that stupid. But if you do tell the media what we said, I guarantee you Charles will instantly become a babbling idiot. Ms. Hosokawa, I doubt you’d be willing to risk that.”

The three fell silent, but the tension in the air only grew thicker.

“No matter what, you have to stop manipulating Charles,” said Homi after a while, her voice tinged with a conciliatory note.

“Yes,” said Charles, whose voice was infused with pain. “I want you and those you represent to leave me alone, and get as far from me as possible.”

A series of complicated expressions flitted across Lisa’s face before she spoke. “Let me be sure I understand your offer. We’ll stop interfering with you, and you’ll keep everything we talked about today under wraps. Do I have that right?”

Charles nodded. All he wanted now was to wake up from this nightmare. “If you really let us go.”

“But you’ll tumble from your successful perch and lose everything.”

Wearily, Charles shook his head. “I’ve never been successful at all. I’ve just been living a ridiculous fantasy. Now that I understand the truth, I want to end this farce as quickly as possible.”

Lisa looked at Homi, who mutely endorsed Charles’s words. Lisa nodded. “All right, we’ll do as you demand. But remember, whether you turn on the livecasting function or not, we’ll be watching your every move. Don’t think you can play some trick against us. You’re a smart boy, Charles, and you won’t make trouble for us, right?”

Slowly, Charles nodded.

“You better uphold your end of the bargain as well,” said Homi. “I will be storing multiple copies of the recording—if anything happens to us, you bet the whole web is going to be alerted.”

“Goodbye, Charles, my old friend. I hope you don’t regret it.” Lisa turned around and swept by Homi as she left the room. Soon, the pair heard the noise of a small flying car’s engine coming to life outside.

Charles remained curled up on the ground, unable to speak. Homi knelt by him and silently placed a hand against his cheek. Charles stared at her: her gaze was full of concern; her hand felt warm and soft; her scent was elegant, understated.

He knew that he had lost everything, but he had her. From now on, the two of them would live like just any other ordinary couple.

Charles wrapped his arms around Homi and cried like he had never cried before. Homi lightly stroked the back of his head to comfort him. He squeezed his arms about her, so tightly that she had trouble breathing. But it was the only glint of hope in a dark sea of sorrow.

By the time Homi realized that Charles was squeezing her too tight, it was too late.

Somehow, Charles managed to get on top of Homi, and with her body held down by his weight, he locked his hands like a pair of vice about her neck. He was trying to crush her windpipe with almost superhuman strength, and his eyes bulged as his throat made a series of croaking noises, as though it were he, and not she, who was being choked.

“Let . . . go . . . please . . .  ” Homi couldn’t even get the words out. She struggled and scratched at Charles’s arms with her nails, but Charles seemed to have become completely immune to pain, his eyes glazed over.

Homi understood that it was the doing of Lisa Goldstone. She couldn’t afford to let them go. Her vision dimmed as her consciousness faded. Life was about to depart from her body, and all that Homi could do was to kick her feet instinctively in a last, desperate struggle for breath—

Abruptly, Charles lowered his head and bit hard into his own wrist. Blood spurted from the wound, and his fingers loosened reflexively. Without thinking, Homi snapped his fingers off her neck and pushed him away. She rolled along the floor and scrambled to get as far away from him as possible.

Charles got up on his unsteady legs, swaying from side to side. Then he tumbled back to the floor, his limbs jerking violently.

“Run away . . . Run!” Charles’s voice, twisted almost beyond recognition, emerged from his bloody mouth. He was struggling mightily against the invisible forces that had possessed his body.

Homi didn’t know what to do. Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw the hexagonal black box, and a flash of inspiration seized her. She dashed over to the box, lifted it over her head, and smashed it against the ground with a dull thud. The box rolled a few times on the floor and revealed a large crack in its side. Homi rushed up and gave it a few hard, well-placed kicks. A series of grinding and snapping noises emerged from the box, and smoke rose out of the crack.

Charles was no longer moving. Like a deflated ball, he lay flat and gasped. Homi went over and helped him up. “It’s all right. I destroyed the neutrino converter. They can’t control you any longer.”

“But we can’t leave this cabin either.” Charles’s voice was faint from weakness. “There are neutrino transmitters and converters everywhere.”

At Homi’s insistence, the cabin had contained only a single neutrino converter and the walls were built to shield electromagnetic waves from outside transmitters. But if they left this sanctuary, Lisa and her people would be able to take control of Charles at any moment.

“Then . . . what can we do?”

“Call the media,” said Charles. He closed his eyes in exhaustion. “We have to give a press conference now.”

An hour and a half later, the cabin was overflowing with reporters representing twenty-plus Japanese media outlets and almost as many foreign agencies. Curiosity filled the gazes roaming around the messy room and taking in the wounded Charles and Homi. As the reporters whispered to each other, most of the rumors being passed around involved some romantic dispute.

“Good evening,” said Charles as he got up from the sofa. “I’ve asked you to come tonight because—”

The reporters hung on every word, but Charles had stopped speaking. His eyes were focused on something above and behind the crowd of reporters as his lips fluttered subtly, as though he was speaking to some invisible being.

“Charles!” Homi realized that something was wrong and turned to the reporters. “We are about to tell you something that—”

“—something that is very important,” said Charles. He seemed to have recovered, though his face was even more weary than before. “I’ve decided to join the Plutonian Grand Race next month.”

“What?” Homi was shocked. The Plutonian Grand Race was a gimmick, and a successful aviator like Charles wasn’t expected to participate at all. Just a few days ago, in response to an interview question, Charles had made it clear that he wasn’t interested.

Charles continued. “As everyone knows, this race will take place on the longest course in human history, far surpassing the Circumsolar Grand Race conducted along Earth’s orbit. Although this is the first time the race is being held, it will no doubt be deemed a landmark achievement in racers’ careers one day. I’ve heard that not many racers have signed up, and so I guess if I want to be the champion, this is my best chance.”

A few in the audience guffawed. Homi saw that Charles’s manner seemed quite natural and not under someone else’s control. She held her tongue despite the impulse to interrupt.

Charles looked around the room, and when he spoke again, his tone changed. “But since Pluto is about thirty AU from Earth at the present time, the entire race will take place over the course of two years. Limited by the speed of light and signal decay, I don’t think it’s possible to livecast during this time. I’m sorry.”

A few of the reporters grumbled and protested. Apparently some of them were fans.

“What about Miss Hosokawa?” someone asked. “Are you going to be separated for two years?”

Charles held Homi by the hand and squeezed her palm meaningfully. “I don’t believe two years will prove to be much of a barrier between us. I will carve her name into the million-year ice crust of Pluto.” 

“What was that about?” asked Homi. The reporters had all left.

A drained Charles massaged his temples. “One of the reporters was carrying a portable neutrino converter with him, and that allowed them to send a message to me via the visual texting window in my cranial implant.”

“Did they threaten you again?”

Charles shook his head. “Worse. They threatened all of humanity.”

“What?”

Charles recalled that silent conversation:

- Remember, at least a billion people have already had the implant, and their lives are now in your hands. If you insist on telling the truth, we may not be able to control everyone, but we certainly can beam a series of chaotic signals to all implanted subjects within a few minutes. Most will at least suffer temporary psychosis, and some may become deranged permanently. Who knows how many accidents will occur as a result, and maybe a few choice subjects will push the buttons for launching nuclear missiles . . . The world will be turned upside down in a catastrophe that will make a world war seem like child’s play. Earth would be sent back to the Stone Age in a matter of days.

- And so I have no choice but to shut up, is that it? I have to stand by and watch as you continue to push your devilish implant until everyone has become a slave who has lost all sense of self. I should just wait until you control the whole world and are no longer afraid of anything?

- This is the inevitable progress of history. We will either keep on going down this path until we reach a brand new future, or a war will lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions and civilization’s complete collapse. The choice is yours, Charles.

- What choice do I have when you have a billion hostages?

- You did make the right choice, which is why you managed to change your speech to the reporters in time and avert a disaster. The idea of going to Pluto is not bad: this way, we can avoid direct conflict with each other, and you can stop worrying about another plot from us. By the time you return two years from now, you will no longer be the focus of the world’s attention, and you can live as you like.

- And I will finally accomplish something that belongs entirely to me. I will prove that I’m no puppet, but the invincible Charles.

“Charles, what’s wrong?” Homi’s words pulled him back to the present.

“Nothing.” Charles pulled her to him and caressed her long hair. “Everything will be all right. I promise.”

12.

An unprecedented three hundred million people tuned into Charles’s final livecast. Three hundred million pairs of eyes accompanied Charles’s strides into the launch facility and then turned to regard the writhing sea of people as well as the azure sky overhead.

The launch complex was located in Tanegashima, Kagoshima Prefecture, JAXA’s traditional home. Twenty-four spacecraft of different designs were clustered near the center of the complex. Unlike ancient spaceships, however, these new spacecraft no longer needed massive gantries and launch towers. Advancing technology meant that these ships could be launched anywhere from the surface of the Earth, and the choice of departing from here was mainly symbolic.

Though many advances had already been made, manned space exploration was still in its beginning stages. The space race today wasn’t aimed at the moon or Mars, but at Pluto, a celestial body billions of kilometers away whose surface bore no trace of human exploration except a few robotic probes. The entire race would take more than two years.

After the participating spacecraft left Earth, each was supposed to make use of solar sails or planetary gravity assists to accelerate and head for Pluto on its own. Once there, they were supposed to close their solar sails and use the remaining fuel for the return trip. Though the astronautic principles were simple, the journey, traversing the entire Solar System and measured in tens of billions of kilometers, was breathtakingly bold.

To be the first human being to set foot on Pluto would be a milestone in the history of the exploration of the Solar System. As Pluto was not deemed scientifically as significant as the major planets—of which it was no longer a member in any event—no government bothered to devise manned missions to it after sending a few probes. But as it was such a famous place, many civilian space enthusiasts made it their dream destination. During a span of a few decades, about eight manned spaceships had been launched toward Pluto, but most had to abandon the journey partway through due to the many difficulties encountered. A few were destroyed by micrometeoroids in the asteroid belt, and some vanished in deep space without a trace. The reputation of Pluto as a planet of death grew, and in recent years no more missions to Pluto had been launched. This Grand Race, however, had rekindled the enthusiasm of explorers for the conquest of Pluto.

The addition of Charles Mann to the roster of entrants raised the profile of the race further. Although many complained of not being able to tune into Charles’s livecast for the duration, his steadfast courage moved the hearts of millions. The number of entrants doubled almost overnight to more than twenty, and all were among the ranks of elite aviators and astronauts. The Grand Race was now truly grand.

“Charles!” A familiar voice broke through the background noise of the crowd. He turned to see the approaching figure of his old rival, George Steele.

Charles grinned. “George, I have to thank you for being so willing to play the part of my runner-up every time.”

George rolled his eyes. “Let me tell you something, playboy: you’d better be prepared to congratulate me this time.”

“Why’s that?” Charles asked, and the two headed for the cluster of spacecraft at the center of the complex shoulder by shoulder.

“I heard that you turned down the high-tech gear donated by Cartel Nanotech and the Douglas Group. Instead, you bought off-the-shelf equipment from a couple of no-name manufacturers. Is it true that you even designed the basic layout for your ship and assembled it yourself? You’re too arrogant. Cartel’s solar sail technology is unparalleled, and using the same mass, they can achieve an effective area one-third greater than competitors. Surely you must know what this means.”

“I do. But Steele, I used to rely too much on technology. This time, I want to win by skill,” Charles said earnestly.

“Then it’s true that you’ve reduced the habitable space to the minimum in order to cut down the mass and increase speed?” The shocked look in Steele’s eyes was tinged with respect. “I know you’ve kept all your plans secret, but I’ve studied the publicly available information on your ship’s design in detail. My conclusion is that if you really intend to win, your habitable module must be about the size of a coffin. You won’t have space for any entertainment or relaxation facilities in that cage. How can you live like an anchorite for two years? It’s so unlike you!”

“To achieve our destiny of flying toward the end of the stars,” Charles said. “If necessary, I believe you would do the same.”

Steele nodded. “Charles, I have to admit, you’re not at all what I expected. All right, for the next two years, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to chat by radio. Maybe we’ll become friends.”

Conversing like two close companions, the pair reached the center of the complex and separated, heading for their respective ships, where they carried out the final inspections and preparations. Many pilots were saying farewell to their families and friends. As Charles checked his engine, a curvy, elegant feminine figure approached him.

“Masa-chan?” He stood up.

“Charles, I came to see you off.”

“Thank you.”

“No, I should be thanking you . . . actually, I came to apologize as well.”

“Apologize?”

Aoi Masa took a deep breath. “Two years ago, I was just an average AV idol whose career was in its twilight. Thus, I orchestrated that ‘chance’ meeting between us at the Maldives. I seduced you and spent the night with you. The world got to know me through your livecast, and I became a renowned sex goddess. Thereafter, I managed to leverage my fame into a career as a mainstream actress, and just recently I took a role in a Hollywood production. My success is all because of you.”

“Don’t say that. Your achievements are the results of your hard work.”

“But all those sweet words I whispered to you . . . they weren’t real. I used you to climb up the ladder. I’m sorry.”

“That’s . . . look, Masa, life is like that. We are often forced to play roles, and sometimes we are so absorbed by the performance that we disappear into our characters. You don’t need to apologize for what you did.”

“Thanks for saying that.” Masa took out a refined cloth packet. “You’re a good friend, Charles, and I really did enjoy our time together. I sincerely wish you a victory in this race. I went to the Meiji Shrine to get this omamori for you. If you wear it, the spirits will protect you.”

Charles locked gazes with her and accepted the charm. “Thank you. I will keep it with me.”

“Goodbye, and good luck!” She gave him a light hug and turned to leave.

A complicated smile curved up the corners of Charles’s mouth as he watched her departing figure. He was aware that Aoi Masa had just managed to squeeze the last bit of use out of him. That the “love” between him and her had just been a performance was not only clear to both of them, but also to every subscriber to his livecast. This final speech from Masa was no doubt calculated to further rehabilitate her image as she transitioned to a mainstream career: now everyone would think she was a woman of deep and true passions.

Yet . . . this didn’t mean that Masa was a lying hypocrite. That the speech was prepared and calculated didn’t mean that it wasn’t also sincere. All the world’s a stage, and all of us mere players—always have been, and even more so in the livecasting age. Maybe our heartfelt honesty is nothing more than a heartfelt performance of the self.

“Oh, Charles!” Masa suddenly halted and turned to him. “Where’s Miss Hosokawa? I was hoping to see her.”

“She’s . . . not feeling well,” Charles said.

“Ah.” Masa gave him an understanding look, and a triumphant look flitted through her eyes, though she said nothing more. Charles knew that Masa had always been slightly miffed that Homi managed to “steal him away” from her. She must now be thinking that the relationship between Charles and Homi had soured.

But Homi didn’t need to be here to bid farewell to him, and she shouldn’t be. She was hiding in an absolutely secure location, holding onto crucial evidence to prevent Lisa and her people from plotting against them at this critical moment and killing them both simultaneously. After he left Earth, Lisa would no longer have the ability to control him through the cranial implant, and Homi would maintain contact with him every day. If anything were to happen to Homi, he would reveal the truth through radio broadcast. After much thinking, this seemed the best plan available to them.

Charles watched the joyous crowd in the distance. Maybe this is the last time I’ll be at the center of the stage. Steele is very likely right. This time, my ship holds no technical advantage. I have no hope of victory and will be forgotten by the world as a failure.

But what of it? It has been my dream to go to the stars, to head for the most distant planet. Being the champion isn’t everything. Indeed, the only true dreams are those that you’re willing to sacrifice a great deal for.

This is my last chance to be myself. What I’ve lost in the noise and glitz of this planet, I will recover in the infinite expanse of space. Only there will I find true peace and salvation . . .

The final countdown was about to begin. A few dozen lucky audience members came into the launch complex to take pictures with the racers. Most chose to have their pictures taken with Charles first, and a smiling Charles obliged. He also signed their books or t-shirts. The last person to come to him was a plain looking and plainly dressed young woman, whose gestures betrayed nervousness.

“How . . . how do you do, Mr. Charles,” the young woman said.

“Hello! What’s your name?”

“I’m Asakura Minami.”

Charles nodded without reaction. But behind his thoughts, another consciousness was suddenly jerked awake. What is she doing here? When did she . . . become a fan of Charles?

“Ms. Asakura, a pleasure to meet you. Would you like a picture with me?”

“Yes, absolutely.” Minami stood next to him for the photo. But she lingered even after the picture. A few launch facility staff came to bring her away, but Charles gestured for them to back off.

“What else can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Charles.” Minami bowed to him deeply. Blushing, she said, “I’d like to ask for your help with something.”

“As long as it’s not illegal, I’m at your service.”

Minami fidgeted for a while before lifting her head. Gazing straight into Charles’s eyes, she said, “Watashi . . . watashi wa Naoto-kun no koto o daisuki yo.”

Charles had no idea what she said, but another consciousness did. He understood why Minami had traveled for so long and stood in line for hours. She wasn’t here for Charles at all; she just wanted to tell him a single sentence.

“I . . . I like Naoto-kun very much.”

Before Charles could react, she took two steps forward, wrapped her arms around his neck, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed him. Naoto could feel how soft and supple her lips were, laden with the scent of summer sunlight and youth.

“Naoto,” Minami whispered into Charles’s ear, “I’m right next to you, but can you only feel my presence through the body of a man thousands of kilometers away?”

Security personnel rushed up to drag Minami away, but Charles had already figured out the truth. He gestured for them to stop and looked at Minami. “Ms. Asakura, I believe the person you love will understand.”

Then, he spoke to Naoto, a stranger he had never met, “You lucky bastard, don’t miss out on the joy right next door.”

Naoto didn’t know when he had left the livecast. Staring at the stained ceiling, he felt tears fill his eyes and then overflow the corners to spill down his cheeks.

After subscribing to Charles’s livecast for so many years, he had enjoyed the pleasures of romancing countless beautiful women. But deep in his heart, he knew that they had nothing to do with him; they were there for the charismatic Charles. He preferred to forget the truth so that he could be fully immersed in the happiness that was being Charles.

But today, in this last livecast of his three years of living as Charles, everything had turned upside down. That sentence and that kiss were for him, Takumi Naoto, not Charles.

He wasn’t Charles and he never would be. But he could be himself, possessing a joy that was common but not commonplace, measured but not mean. Indeed, some portion of it was unachievable even by Charles.

Naoto sat up, his head throbbing. He had lived his last day in self-imposed numbness. Charles’s livecast was over. Even if he returned from Pluto, he would probably not resume casting. Naoto was going to find a new life, find his own happiness.

Naoto made his decision. He dialed. After a few rings, the other end finally picked up. “Moshi moshi, this is Asakura.” Her voice was tense, expectant.

Before he could say a word, Naoto’s ears were filled with the rumbling of engines and the wild cheers of a crowd. Naoto glanced at his computer screen and saw the spaceships taking off from the launch complex, trailing long columns of smoke behind them like a flock of migrating wild geese. Charles had departed for space, and this time, Naoto couldn’t and didn’t want to attach himself to Charles’s soul. He had more important things in mind.

He took a deep breath and spoke with a trembling voice. “Minami-chan, I like you. I would like to see you.”

Goodbye, Charles.

Epilogue

One year later.

A cobalt blue spaceship closed its solar sail and activated the landing thrusters to slowly descend toward the planetary surface shrouded in darkness below. The flight was steady and stable; all status indicators nominal. A human was about to set foot on Pluto for the first time in history.

But when the ship was still about two kilometers from the surface, it began to accelerate in an odd manner. Spinning, it plunged toward the thick icy crust of the planet of death. A few seconds later, a faint explosion bloomed on Pluto like a match lit for a moment in the long night. And then, the eternal void.

The image was taken by the Chinese exploratory probe Mamian. About five hours later, the image data arrived at Earth, bringing with it the sad news at the edge of the Solar System. For forty hours afterward, all attempts at re-establishing communication failed. Two days later, a second racer, George Steele, successfully landed on Pluto and discovered the wreckage of the first spaceship as well as the carbonized remains of Charles Mann.

Back on Earth, grief united everyone. The mainstream explanation for Charles’s death was a technical malfunction. Charles had put together his ship by himself, and there were no doubt latent defects. Experts debated the exact nature of the accident: some argued that it was a programming bug; others pointed to the engine; still others said that it was because the buttons and dials on the control panel were too densely clustered, leading to an operator error when Charles was under pressure.

Some subscribed to the belief that Charles had committed suicide. They scoured Charles’s final recordings before his departure for odd statements and behaviors to support their theory that Charles was tired of life. Falling to the surface of Pluto was a genius bit of performance art. They specifically pointed to his strange demeanor during the last press conference he held at which he announced the intent to join the Plutonian Grand Race.

Others argued that Charles had been murdered. This was the most outrageous of the conspiracy theories. A long list of suspects was constructed: George Steele, his rival and competitor; Aoi Masa, his ex-lover; the Douglas Group; Bell Labs . . . One particular bit of evidence this group pointed to was the fact that Charles’s girlfriend, Hosokawa Homi, died on the third day after Charles’s own death in an explosion as her air car struck another head-on above Tokyo. This “coincidence” could certainly be viewed as evidence of conspiracy, but a more logical and simpler explanation was that she had been distracted in her driving by grief.

All sorts of rumors and so-called “evidence” emerged on the web. Most were easily proved to be hoaxes, but a few pieces resisted debunking. There was an audio recording that seemed to be an argument between Charles and Lisa Goldstone; a video that appeared to capture an affair between Charles and the wife of a celebrity; a phone call from Charles’s father that claimed that his son was a spendthrift who had lost all his money . . . but none of these were hard to fake, and it was impossible to prove that any of them was directly connected to the death of Charles. Finally, there were even some nuts who claimed that Charles had been killed because he discovered a secret mind-control conspiracy by the megacorps behind the cranial implants. No one took them seriously.

In any case, it was incontrovertible that Charles was dead. A dead man, no matter how famous, was very quickly forgotten. For a month or so, there were all sorts of memorials and tributes to the memory of Charles. But soon, a few hot new livecasting stars emerged: prodigies, hot girls, self-taught innovators. Most of Charles’s fans immersed themselves in newer, richer entertainment.

But many didn’t know what to do with themselves. They couldn’t understand Charles’s death.

“I . . . I just can’t figure it out,” Naoto muttered. He poured himself a beer. “How can he be dead? For three years, I knew every gesture he made. I have almost every memory he had. If I’m alive, how can he be dead?”

“You are you; Charles is Charles.” Minami said, her voice cold. She was running out of patience with Naoto.

Naoto shook his head. “You don’t get it at all. That feeling . . . I can recall literally everything about Charles: the way he climbed and dove through clouds in his aerial acrobatics; the way he wove through coral reefs and shoals of fish as he scuba dived; the way he spoke to readers at his signings as though he knew each and every one of them; the way he dropped bon mots and commanded everyone’s attention at parties; the way he inspired global compassion as he worked with refugees . . . for me, all these memories are as fresh as though they happened only yesterday. I see the spinning Earth far below me; I hear the music wafting from Wiener Musikverein, I smell the scent of cherry blossoms at the foot of Mount Fuji, I . . . ” Somewhere along the way, he had shifted from the third person to first.

“Do you also remember those long nights with Masa, Paula, and Mariana?” Minami asked, her expression darkening.

Unaware of the danger, Naoto nodded distractedly. “Of course I do. Those were utterly unforgettable experiences. It’s too bad I have no memories of being with Hosokawa Homi—”

“Damn you, Takumi Naoto!” Minami could not take it anymore. “Are you going to spend the rest of your life imagining you’re Charles?”

“Minami-chan, what’s wrong?” Naoto was genuinely confused.

“Charles Mann has been dead for more than six months! But every day, you just talk to yourself about all these memories that have nothing to do with you and these women who have no idea who you are. You don’t even hear me anymore. I’m going crazy, I swear!”

“You don’t understand! I was there for all these memories. There is absolutely no distinction between them and memories that I formed while I was in this body. I know that I’m not Charles, but these were also a part of my own experiences.”

“Oh come on!” Minami was so angry that she started to laugh. “Your experience consists of lying on your tatami mat and receiving a livecast. How are you different from those idiots who watch some TV show and then imagine themselves as the hero?”

“Shut up!” Now it was Naoto who could not take it anymore. “You are always criticizing me. But you’ve never even tuned into a livecast. How can you possibly know what it feels like? Who died and made you judge of my life? You have no right to tell me what to do.”

“I have no right?” Minami’s eyes flashed. “Oh that’s right. I’m nothing. I think we should stop seeing each other.”

“Fine!” Naoto shouted. “I should never have agreed to your pleas.”

Minami stopped arguing with him. Quietly, she began packing up her clothes and possessions. As Naoto watched her, pangs of regret gnawed at him, but he just couldn’t bring himself to apologize. Only when Minami stood at the door, a few suitcases at her feet, did he finally panic. “What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night. Why don’t you wait at least until morning? We should—”

“Naoto”—the calm manner in which Minami was talking terrified him—“I once thought I could change you, but I was wrong. You’re probably right: you are indeed Charles, and you will live forever in his memories. But I’m sorry I can’t be here with you. That’s not a life I want.”

“I . . . I don’t . . . ” Naoto didn’t know what to say. He stood by and watched as Minami opened the door and went out. He listened as her footsteps grew fainter and fainter, and eventually, vanished.

After some hesitation, Naoto dialed Minami’s number. But Minami had turned off her phone, and there was no answer.

“Fuck it.” Naoto let out a few more curses, fell back into his chair, and continued to drink his beer.

Why is my life always like this? Why can’t I ever get along with anyone? No matter how many times I try, I’m met by failure after failure. In this “real world,” even the very air is stifling. If I could only return to the body of Charles and live that spirited life once more . . .

As he continued to daydream, Naoto carelessly tapped on his keyboard. He signed on to a discussion forum for livecasting, and the large-font text at the top instantly grabbed his attention.

CHARLES MANN REVIVED!!!

What in the world?

Naoto clicked on the link and found himself staring at an ad from Time Media.

In order to pay tribute to the heroic Charles Mann, we have purchased the rights to the entire archive of his livecast for the delectation of our subscribers. The entire livecast stream is 85,439 hours long, encompassing about ten years of his life. You may jump to review any particular segment or play it from end to end in order to gain a deeper understanding of this amazing life . . .

Naoto’s heart began to leap wildly. Ten years of livecasting data! As a subscriber to Charles’s stream, he had been prevented by technical means from recording the sensory signals, but of course the company that handled the livecast would have a proper archive to permit re-livecasting. Since Naoto had tuned in only during the last three years of Charles’s life, he had never lived the first seven years of the livecast. But now . . .

Naoto sucked in his breath. He was going to possess the entire ten years, the best part of Charles’s life. He was being given a chance to once again meld into Charles, and to anticipate an exciting life in a bright new future (even if it had happened in the past). And this time, he would no longer have to worry about anyone cutting him off for at least ten years. He could confidently lose himself as deeply in Charles as he liked.

Of course, this time the subscription was no longer free, but the price they were charging was reasonable: only 100 yen an hour. If he purchased more than a day’s worth of data, the price was discounted to 50 yen per hour. If he purchased the entire archive at once, the price was further reduced to 20 yen per hour. This was eminently affordable.

Quickly, he connected his bank account. The entire archive would cost him almost 1.6 million yen. He didn’t have that much in savings, so he decided to pay over two hundred thousand yen for the rights to the first year’s archives. He would have to earn more to pay for the rest later.

He lay back on his tatami mat and switched on the neutrino converter. The computer voice informed him that the connection was being established, and the data stream was being buffered. The livecast, no, the re-livecast, would begin in about one minute.

As Naoto waited anxiously, his phone rang, informing him there was a voice message from Minami. Naoto quickly switched off his phone. Perhaps Minami had changed her mind about the break-up, but it was too late now. As long as he could be Charles again, why would he need a woman like Minami?

The neutrino beam was converted into electromagnetic waves, and then, into brainwaves. The re-livecast began:

Vestibular systems synchronized: I am lying down somewhere; tactile sensations synchronized: I think this is a bed, rather soft and comfortable; olfactory sensations synchronized: it smells medicinal, like a hospital, but not too overwhelming; hearing synchronized: a woman is speaking to me, her voice gradually becoming clearer; sight synchronized: a blurry figure looms before my eyes . . .

He is gazing up at the ceiling, and his future manager, Lisa Goldstone, is bending down to speak to him. “How do you feel?”

“I’m all right,” he says, his voice sounding a bit weak. “I think.”

“We’re about to start the livecast now. Do you remember who you are?”

A confident smile appears over his pasty face. “What kind of question is that? I’m Charles, the one and only Charles.”

Footnote

1 - All East Asian names are rendered with surname first in this translation, following the custom of the region.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, September 2014.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

After graduating from Peking University, Bao Shu obtained a Master’s degree in philosophy from KU Leuven, Belgium (a degree that is very handy for science fiction). Working as a freelance writer in China, he has published four novels and over 30 novellas, novelettes and short stories since 2010. His best-known works include Three Body X: Aeon of Contemplation (an authorized sequel to Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy), Ruins of Time (winner of the 2014 Chinese Nebula Award for Best Novel), and “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear” (English translation in F&SF March/April 2015). He now lives in Xi'an.

His novelette, “Everybody Loves Charles,” won three important awards this year: the 2015 Chinese SF Galaxy Award for Best Novelette, the 2015 Chinese SF Nebula Silver Award for Best Novelette, and Chinese SF Coordinate Award for Best Novelette.

The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale

Robert Silverberg

Puillayne of Ghiusz was a man born to every advantage life offers, for his father was the master of great estates along the favored southern shore of the Claritant Peninsula, his mother was descended from a long line of wizards who held hereditary possession of many great magics, and he himself had been granted a fine strong-thewed body, robust health, and great intellectual power.

Yet despite these gifts, Puillayne, unaccountably, was a man of deep and ineradicable melancholic bent. He lived alone in a splendid sprawling manse overlooking the Klorpentine Sea, a place of parapets and barbicans, loggias and pavilions, embrasures and turrets and sweeping pilasters, admitting only a few intimates to his solitary life. His soul was ever clouded over by a dark depressive miasma, which Puillayne was able to mitigate only through the steady intake of strong drink. For the world was old, nearing its end, its very rocks rounded and smoothed by time, every blade of grass invested with the essence of a long antiquity, and he knew from his earliest days that futurity was an empty vessel and only the long past supported the fragile present. This was a source of extreme infestivity to him. By assiduous use of drink, and only by such use of it, he could succeed from time to time in lifting his gloom, not through the drink itself but through the practice of his art, which was that of poetry: his wine was his gateway to his verse, and his verse, pouring from him in unstoppable superiloquent abundance, gave him transient release from despond. The verse forms of every era were at his fingertips, be they the sonnet or the sestina or the villanelle or the free chansonette so greatly beloved by the rhyme-loathing poets of Sheptun-Am, and in each of them he displayed ineffable mastery. It was typical of Puillayne, however, that the gayest of his lyrics was invariably tinged with ebon despair. Even in his cups, he could not escape the fundamental truth that the world’s day was done, that the sun was a heat-begrudging red cinder in the darkening sky, that all striving had been in vain for Earth and its denizens; and those ironies contaminated his every thought.

And so, and so, cloistered in his rambling chambers on the heights above the metropole of Ghiusz, the capital city of the happy Claritant that jutted far out into the golden Klorpentine, sitting amidst his collection of rare wines, his treasures of exotic gems and unusual woods, his garden of extraordinary horticultural marvels, he would regale his little circle of friends with verses such as these:

The night is dark. The air is chill.
Silver wine sparkles in my amber goblet.
But it is too soon to drink. First let me sing.

Joy is done! The shadows gather!
Darkness comes, and gladness ends!
Yet though the sun grows dim,
My soul takes flight in drink.

What care I for the crumbling walls?
What care I for the withering leaves?
Here is wine!

Who knows? This could be the world’s last night.
Morning, perhaps, will bring a day without dawn.
The end is near. Therefore, friends, let us drink!

Darkness . . . . darkness . . . .
The night is dark. The air is chill.
Therefore, friends, let us drink!
Let us drink!

“How beautiful those verses are,” said Gimbiter Soleptan, a lithe, playful man given to the wearing of green damask pantaloons and scarlet sea-silk blouses. He was, perhaps, the closest of Puillayne’s little band of companions, antithetical though he was to him in the valence of his nature. “They make me wish to dance, to sing—and also . . . ” Gimbiter let the thought trail off, but glanced meaningfully to the sideboard at the farther end of the room.

“Yes, I know. And to drink.”

Puillayne rose and went to the great sideboard of black candana over-painted with jagged lines of orpiment and gamboge and flake blue in which he kept the wines he had chosen for the present week. For a moment, he hesitated among the tight-packed row of flasks. Then his hand closed on the neck of one fashioned from pale-violet crystal, through which a wine of radiant crimson glowed with cheery insistence.

“One of my best,” he announced. “A claret, it is, of the Scaumside vineyard in Ascolais, waiting forty years for this night. But why let it wait longer? There may be no later chances.”

“As you have said, Puillayne. ‘This could be the world’s last night.’ But why, then, do you still disdain to open Erzuine Thale’s True Vintage? By your own argument, you should seize upon it while opportunity yet remains. And yet you refuse.”

“Because,” Puillayne said, smiling gravely, and glancing toward the cabinet of embossed doors where that greatest of all wines slept behind barriers of impenetrable spells, “This may, after all, not be the world’s last night, for none of the fatal signs have made themselves apparent yet. The True Vintage deserves only the grandest of occasions. I shall wait a while longer to broach it. But the wine I have here is itself no trifle. Observe me now.”

He set out a pair of steep transparent goblets rimmed with purple gold, murmured the word to the wine-flask that unsealed its stopper, and held it aloft to pour. As the wine descended into the goblet it passed through a glorious spectrum of transformation, now a wild scarlet, now deep crimson, now carmine, mauve, heliotrope shot through with lines of topaz, and, as it settled to its final hue, a magnificent coppery gold. “Come,” said Puillayne, and led his friend to the viewing-platform overlooking the bay, where they stood side by side, separated by the great vase of black porcelain that was one of Puillane’s most cherished treasures, in which a porcelain fish of the same glossy black swam insolently in the air.

Night had just begun to fall. The feeble red sun hovered precariously over the western sea. Fierce eye-stabbing stars already blazed furiously out of the dusky sky to north and south of it, arranging themselves in the familiar constellations, the Hoary Nimbus, the Panoply of Swords, the Cloak of Cantenax, the Claw. The twilight air was cooling swiftly. Even here in this land of the far south, sheltered by the towering Kelpusar range from the harsh winds that raked Almery and the rest of Grand Motholam, there was no escape from the chill of the night. Everywhere, even here, such modest daily warmth as the sun afforded fled upward through the thinning air the moment that faint light was withdrawn.

Puillayne and Gimbiter were silent a time, savoring the power of the wine, which penetrated subtly, reaching from one region of their souls to the next until it fastened on the heart. For Puillayne, it was the fifth wine of the day, and he was well along in the daily defeat of his innate somberness of spirit, having brought himself to the outer borderlands of the realm of sobriety. A delightful gyroscopic instability now befuddled his mind. He had begun with a silver wine of Kauchique flecked with molecules of gold, then had proceeded to a light ruby wine of the moorlands, a sprightly sprezzogranito from Cape Thaumissa, and, finally, a smooth but compelling dry Harpundium as a prelude to this venerable grandissimus that he currently was sharing with his friend. That progression was a typical one for him. Since early manhood he had rarely passed a waking hour without a goblet in his hand.

“How beautiful this wine is,” said Gimbiter finally.

“How dark the night,” said Puillayne. For even now he could not escape the essentially rueful cast of his thoughts.

“Forget the darkness, dear friend, and enjoy the beauty of the wine. But no: they are forever mingled for you, are they not, the darkness and the wine. The one encircles the other in ceaseless chase.”

This far south, the sun plunged swiftly below the horizon. The ferocity of the starlight was remorseless now. The two men sipped thoughtfully.

Gimbiter said, after a further span of silence, “Do you know, Puillayne, that strangers are in town asking after you?”

“Strangers, indeed? And asking for me?”

“Three men from the north. Uncouth-looking ones. I have this from my gardener, who tells me that they have been making inquiries of your gardener.”

“Indeed,” said Puillayne, with no great show of interest.

“They are a nest of rogues, these gardeners. They all spy on us, and sell our secrets to any substantial bidder.”

“You tell me no news here, Gimbiter.”

“Does it not concern you that rough-hewn strangers are asking questions?”

Puillayne shrugged. “Perhaps they are admirers of my verses, come to hear me recite.”

“Perhaps they are thieves, come from afar to despoil you of some of your fabled treasures.”

“Perhaps they are both. In that case, they must hear my verses before I permit any despoiling.”

“You are very casual, Puillayne.”

“Friend, the sun itself is dying as we stand here. Shall I lose sleep over the possibility that strangers may take some of my trinkets from me? With such talk you distract us from this unforgettable wine. I beg you, drink, Gimbiter, and put these strangers out of your mind.”

“I can put them from mine,” said Gimbiter, “but I wish you would devote some part of yours to them.” And then he ceased to belabor the point, for he knew that Puillayne was a man utterly without fear. The profound bleakness that lay at the core of his spirit insulated him from ordinary cares. He lived without hope and therefore without uneasiness. And by this time of day, Gimbiter understood, Puillayne had further reinforced himself within an unbreachable palisade of wine.

The three strangers, though, were troublesome to Gimbiter. He had gone to the effort of inspecting them himself earlier that day. They had taken lodgings, said his head gardener, at the old hostelry called the Blue Wyvern, between the former ironmongers’ bazaar and the bazaar of silk and spices, and it was easy enough for Gimbiter to locate them as they moved along the boulevard that ran down the spine of the bazaar quarter. One was a squat, husky man garbed in heavy brown furs, with purple leather leggings and boots, and a cap of black bearskin trimmed with a fillet of gold. Another, tall and loose-limbed, sported a leopard-skin tarboosh, a robe of yellow muslin, and red boots ostentatiously spurred with the spines of the roseate urchin. The third, clad unpretentiously in a simple gray tunic and a quilted green mantle of some coarse heavy fabric, was of unremarkable stature and seemed all but invisible beside his two baroque confederates, until one noticed the look of smoldering menace in his deep-set, resolute, reptilian eyes, set like obsidian ellipsoids against his chalky-hued face.

Gimbiter made such inquiries about them at the hostelry as were feasible, but all he could learn was that they were mercantile travelers from Hither Almery or even farther north, come to the southlands on some enterprise of profit. But even the innkeeper knew that they were aware of the fame of the metropole’s great poet Puillayne, and were eager to achieve an audience with him. And therefore Gimbiter had duly provided his friend with a warning; but he was sadly aware that he could do no more than that.

Nor was Puillayne’s air of unconcern an affectation. One who has visited the mephitic shores of the Sea of Nothingness and returned is truly beyond all dismay. He knows that the world is an illusion built upon a foundation of mist and wind, and that it is great folly to attach oneself in any serious way to any contrary belief. During his more sober moments, of course, Puillayne of Ghiusz was as vulnerable to despair and anxiety as anyone else; but he took care to reach with great speed for his beloved antidote the instant that he felt tendrils of reality making poisonous incursions through his being. But for wine, he would have had no escape from his eternally sepulchral attitudinizing.

So the next day, and the next, days that were solitary by choice for him, Puillayne moved steadfastly through his palace of antiquarian treasures on his usual diurnal rounds, rising at day-break to bathe in the spring that ran through his gardens, then breakfasting on his customary sparse fare, then devoting an hour to the choice of the day’s wines and sampling the first of them.

In mid-morning, as the glow of the first flask of wine still lingered in him, he sat sipping the second of the day and reading awhile from some volume of his collected verse. There were fifty or sixty of them by now, bound identically in the black vellum made from the skin of fiendish Deodands that had been slaughtered for the bounty placed upon such fell creatures; and these were merely the poems that he had had sufficient sobriety to remember to indite and preserve, out of the scores that poured from him so freely. Puillayne constantly read and reread them with keen pleasure. Though he affected modesty with others, within the shelter of his own soul he had an unabashed admiration for his poems, which the second wine of the day invariably amplified.

Afterward, before the second wine’s effect had completely faded, it was his daily practice to stroll through the rooms that held his cabinet of wonders, inspecting with ever-fresh delight the collection of artifacts and oddities that he had gathered during youthful travels that had taken him as far north as the grim wastes of Fer Aquila, as far to the east as the monster-infested deadlands beyond the Land of the Falling Wall. Where ghouls and deadly grues swarmed and thrived, as far west as ruined Ampridatvir and sullen Azederach on the sunset side of the black Supostimon Sea. In each of these places, the young Puillayne had acquired curios, not because the assembling of them had given him any particular pleasure in and of itself, but because the doing of it turned his attention for the moment, as did the drinking of wine, from the otherwise inescapable encroachment of gloom that from boyhood on had perpetually assailed his consciousness. He drew somber amusement now from fondling these things, which recalled to him some remote place he had visited, summoning up memories of great beauty and enchanting peace, or arduous struggle and biting discomfort, it being a matter of no importance to him which it might have been, so long as the act of remembering carried him away from the here and now.

Then he would take his lunch, a repast scarcely less austere than his morning meal had been, always accompanying it by some third wine chosen for its soporific qualities. A period of dozing invariably followed, and then a second cooling plunge in the garden spring, and then—it was a highlight of the day—the ceremonial opening of the fourth flask of wine, the one that set free his spirit and allowed the composition of that day’s verses. He scribbled down his lines with haste, never pausing to revise, until the fervor of creation had left him. Once more, then, he read, or uttered the simple spell that filled his bayside audifactorium with music. Then came dinner, a more notable meal than the earlier two, one that would do justice to the fifth and grandest wine of the day, in the choosing of which he had devoted the greatest of care; and then, hoping as ever that the dying sun might perish in the night and release him at last from his funereal anticipations, he gave himself to forlorn dreamless sleep.

So it passed for the next day, and the next, and, on the third day after Gimbiter Soleptan’s visit, the three strangers of whom Gimbiter had warned him presented themselves at last at the gates of his manse.

They selected for their unsolicited intrusion the hour of the second wine, arriving just as he had taken one of the vellum-bound volumes of his verse from its shelf. Puillayne maintained a small staff of wraiths and revenants for his household needs, disliking as he did the use of living beings as domestic subordinates, and one of these pallid eidolons came to him with news of the visitors.

Puillayne regarded the ghostly creature, which just then was hovering annoyingly at the borders of transparency as though attempting to communicate its own distress, with indifference. “Tell them they are welcome. Admit them upon the half hour.”

It was far from his usual custom to entertain visitors during the morning hours. The revenant was plainly discommoded by this surprising departure from habit. “Lordship, if one may venture to express an opinion—”

“One may not. Admit them upon the half hour.”

Puillayne used the interval until then to deck himself in formal morning garb: a thin tunic of light color, a violet mantle, laced trousers of the same color worn over underdrawers of deep red, and, above all the rest, a stiff unlined garment of a brilliant white. He had already selected a chilled wine from the Bay of Sanreale, a brisk vintage of a shimmering metallic-gray hue, for his second wine; now he drew forth a second flask of it and placed it beside the first. The house-wraith returned, precisely upon the half hour, with Puillayne’s mysterious guests.

They were, exactly as Gimbiter Soleptan had opined, a rough-hewn, uncouth lot. “I am Kesztrel Tsaye,” announced the shortest of the three, who seemed to be the dominant figure: a burly person wrapped in the thick shaggy fur of some wild beast, and topped with a gold-trimmed cap of a different, glossier fur. His dense black beard encroached almost completely on his blunt, unappealing features, like an additional shroud of fur. “This is Unthan Vyorn”—a nod toward a lanky, insolent-looking fellow in a yellow robe, flamboyantly baroque red boots, and an absurd betasseled bit of headgear that displayed a leopard’s spots—“and this,” he said, glancing toward a third man, pale and unremarkably garbed, notable mainly for an appearance of extreme inconsequence bordering on nonpresence, but for his eyes, which were cold and brooding, “is Malion Gainthrust. We three are profound admirers of your great art, and have come from our homes in the Maurenron foothills to express our homage.”

“I can barely find words to convey the extreme delight I experience now, as I stand in the very presence of Puillayne of Ghiusz,” said lanky Unthan Vyorn in a disingenuously silken voice with just the merest hint of sibilance.

“It seems to me that you are capable of finding words readily enough,” Puillayne observed. “But perhaps you mean only a conventional abnegation. Will you share my wine with me? At this hour of the morning, I customarily enjoy something simple, and I have selected this Sanreale.”

He indicated the pair of rounded gray flasks. But from the depths of his furs, Kesztrel Tsaye drew two globular green flasks of his own and set them on the nearby table. “No doubt your choice is superb, master. But we are well aware of your love of the grape, and among the gifts we bring to you are these carboys of our own finest vintage, the celebrated azure ambrosia of the Maurenrons, with which you are, perhaps, unfamiliar, and which will prove an interesting novelty to your palate.”

Puillayne had not, in truth, ever tasted the so-called ambrosia of the Maurenrons, but he understood it to be an acrid and deplorable stuff, fit only for massaging cramped limbs. Yet he maintained an affable cordiality, studiously examining the nearer of the two carboys, holding it to the light, hefting it as though to determine the specific gravity of its contents. “The repute of your wines is not unknown to me,” he said diplomatically. “But I propose we set these aside for later in the day, since, as I have explained, I prefer only a light wine before my midday meal, and perhaps the same is true of you.” He gave them an inquisitive look. They made no objection; and so he murmured the spell of opening and poured out a ration of the Sanreale for each of them and himself.

By way of salute, Unthan Vyorn offered a quotation from one of Puillayne’s best-known little pieces:

What is our world? It is but a boat
That breaks free at sunset, and drifts away
Without a trace.

His intonation was vile, his rhythm was uncertain, but at least he had managed the words accurately, and Puillayne supposed that his intentions were kindly. As he sipped his wine, he studied this odd trio with detached curiosity. They seemed like crude ruffians, but perhaps their unpolished manner was merely the typical style of the people of the Maurenrons, a locality to which his far-flung travels had never taken him. For all he knew, they were dukes or princes or high ministers of that northern place. He wondered in an almost incurious way what it was that they wanted with him. Merely to quote his own poetry to him was an insufficient motive for traveling such a distance. Gimbiter believed that they were malevolent; and it might well be that Gimbiter, a shrewd observer of mankind, was correct in that. For the nonce, however, his day’s intake of wine had fortified him against anxiety on that score. To Puillayne, they were at the moment merely a puzzling novelty. He would wait to see more.

“Your journey,” he said politely, “was it a taxing one?”

“We know some small magics, and we had a few useful spells to guide us. Going through the Kelpusars, there was only one truly difficult passage for us,” said Unthan Vyorn, “which was the crossing of the Mountain of the Eleven Uncertainties.”

“Ah,” said Puillayne. “I know it well.” It was a place of bewildering confusion, where a swarm of identical peaks confronted the traveler and all roads seemed alike, though only one was correct and the others led into dire unpleasantness. “But you found your way through, evidently, and coped with equal deftness with the Gate of Ghosts just beyond, and the perilous Pillars of Yan Sfou.”

“The hope of attaining the very place where now we find ourselves drew us onward through all obstacles,” Unthan Vyorn said, outdoing even himself in unctuosity of tone. And again he quoted Puillayne:

The mountain roads we traveled rose ten thousand cilavers high.
The rivers we crossed were more turbulent than a hundred demons.
And our voices were lost in the thunder of the cataracts.
We cut through brambles that few swords could slash.
And then beyond the mists we saw the golden Klorpentine
And it was as if we had never known hardship at all.

How barbarously he attacked the delicate lines! How flat was his tone as he came to the ecstatic final couplet! But Puillayne masked his scorn. These were foreigners; they were his guests, however self-invited they might be; his responsibility was to maintain them at their ease. And he found them diverting, in their way. His life in these latter years had slipped into inflexible routine. The advent of poetry-quoting northern barbarians was an amusing interlude in his otherwise constricted days. He doubted more than ever, now, Gimbiter’s hypothesis that they meant him harm. There seemed nothing dangerous about these three except, perhaps, the chilly eyes of the one who did not seem to speak. His friend Gimbiter evidently had mistaken bumptiousness for malversation and malefic intent.

Fur-swathed Kesztrel Tsaye said, “We know, too, that you are a collector of exotica. Therefore we bring some humble gifts for your delight.” And he, too, offered a brief quotation:

Let me have pleasures in this life
For the next is a dark abyss!

“If you will, Malion Gainthrust—”

Kesztrel Tsaye nodded to the icy-eyed silent man, who produced from somewhere a sack that Puillayne had not previously noticed, and drew from it a drum of red candana covered with taut-stretched thaupin-hide, atop which nine red-eyed homunculi performed an obscene dance. This was followed by a little sphere of green chalcedony out of which a trapped and weeping demon peered, and that by a beaker which overflowed with a tempting aromatic yellow liquid that tumbled to the floor and rose again to return to the vessel from which it had come. Other small toys succeeded those, until gifts to the number of ten or twelve sat arrayed before Puillayne.

During this time, Puillayne had consumed nearly all the wine from the flask he had reserved for himself, and he felt a cheering dizziness beginning to steal over him. The three visitors, though he had offered them only a third as much apiece, had barely taken any. Were they simply abstemious? Or was the shimmering wine of Sanreale too subtle for their jackanapes palates?

He said, when it appeared that they had exhausted their display of gewgaws for him, “If this wine gives you little gratification, I can select another and perhaps superior one for you, or we could open that which you have brought me.”

“It is superb wine, master,” Unthan Vyorn said, “and we would expect no less from you. We know, after all, that your cellar is incomparable, that it is a storehouse of the most treasured wines of all the world, that in fact it contains even the unobtainable wine prized beyond all others, the True Vintage of Erzuine Thale. This Sanreale wine you have offered us is surely not in a class with that; but it has much merit in its own way and if we drink it slowly, it is because we cherish every swallow we take. Simply to be drinking the wine of Puillayne of Ghiusz in the veritable home of Puillayne of Ghiusz is an honor so extreme that it constringes our throats with joy, and compels us to drink more slowly than otherwise we might.”

“You know of the True Vintage, do you?” Puillayne asked.

“Is there anyone who does not? The legendary wine of the Nolwaynes who have reigned in Gammelcor since the days when the sun had the brightness of gold—the wine of miracles, the wine that offers the keenest of ecstasies that it is possible to experience—the wine that opens all doors to one with a single sip—” Unshielded covetousness now gleamed in the lanky man’s eyes. “If only we could enjoy that sip! Ah, if only we could merely have a glimpse of the container that holds that wondrous elixir!”

“I rarely bring it forth, even to look at it,” said Puillayne. “I fear that if I were to take it from its place of safekeeping, I would be tempted to consume it prematurely, and that is not a temptation to which I am ready to yield.”

“A man of iron!” marveled Kesztrel Tsaye. “To possess the True Vintage of Erzuine Thale, and to hold off from sampling it! And why, may I ask, do you scruple to deny yourself that joy of joys?”

It was a question Puillayne had heard many times before, for his ownership of the True Vintage was not something he had concealed from his friends. “I am, you know, a prodigious scribbler of minor verse. Yes,” he said, over their indignant protests, “minor verse, such a torrent of it that it would fill this manse a dozen times over if I preserved it all. I keep only a small part.” He gestured moodily at the fifty volumes bound in Deodand vellum. “But somewhere within me lurks the one great poem that will recapitulate all the striving of earthly history, the epic that will be the sum and testament of us who live as we do on the precipice at the edge of the end of days. Someday I will feel that poem brimming at the perimeters of my brain and demanding release. That feeling will come, I think, when our sun is in its ultimate extremity, and the encroaching darkness is about to arrive. And then, only then, will I broach the seal on the True Vintage, and quaff the legendary wine, which indeed opens all doors, including the door of creation, so that its essence will liberate the real poet within me, and in my final drunken joy I will be permitted to set down that one great poem that I yearn to write.”

“You do us all an injustice, master, if you wait to write that epic until the very eve of our doom,” said Unthan Vyorn in a tone of what might almost have been sorrow sincerely framed. “For how will we be able to read it, when all has turned to ice and darkness? No poems will circulate among us as we lie there perishing in the final cold. You deny us your greatness! You withhold your gift!”

“Be that as it may,” Puillayne said, “the time is not yet for opening that bottle. But I can offer you others.”

From his cabinet, he selected a generous magnum of ancient Falernian, which bore a frayed label, yellowed and parched by time. The great rounded flask lacked its seal and it was obvious to all that the container was empty save for random crusts of desiccated dregs scattered about its interior. His visitors regarded it with puzzlement. “Fear not,” said Puillayne. “A mage of my acquaintance made certain of my bottles subject to the Spell of Recrudescent Fluescence, among them this one. It is inexhaustibly renewable.”

He turned his head aside and gave voice to the words, and, within moments, miraculous liquefaction commenced. While the magnum was filling, he summoned a new set of goblets, which he filled near to brimming for his guests and himself.

“It is a wondrous wine,” said Kesztrel Tsaye after a sip or two. “Your hospitality knows no bounds, master.” Indeed, such parts of his heavily bearded face that were visible were beginning to show a ruddy radiance. Unthan Vyorn likewise displayed the effects of the potent stuff, and even the taciturn Malion Gainthrust, sitting somewhat apart as though he had no business in this room, seemed to evince some reduction of his habitual glower.

Puillayne smiled benignly, sat back, let tranquility steal over him. He had not expected to be drinking the Falernian today, for it was a forceful wine, especially at this early hour. But he saw no harm in somewhat greater midday intoxication than he habitually practiced. Why, he might even find himself producing verse some hours earlier than usual. These uncouth disciples of his would probably derive some pleasure from witnessing the actual act of creation. Meanwhile, sipping steadily, he felt the walls around him beginning to sway and glide, and he ascended within himself in a gradual way until he felt himself to be floating slightly outside and above himself, a spectator of his own self, with something of a pleasant haze enveloping his mind.

Somewhat surprisingly, his guests, gathered now in a circle about him, appeared to be indulging in a disquisition on the philosophy of criminality.

Kesztrel Tsaye offered the thought that the imminence of the world’s demise freed one from all the restraints of law, for it mattered very little how one behaved if shortly all accounts were to be settled with equal finality. “I disagree,” said Unthan Vyorn. “We remain responsible for our acts, since, if they transgress against statute and custom, they may in truth hasten the end that threatens us.”

Interposing himself in their conversation, Puillayne said dreamily, “How so?”

“The misdeeds of individuals,” Unthan Vyorn replied, “are not so much offenses against human law as they are ominous disturbances in a complex filament of cause and effect by which mankind is connected on all sides with surrounding nature. I believe that our cruelties, our sins, our violations, all drain vitality from our diminishing sun.”

Malion Gainthrust stirred restlessly at that notion, as though he planned at last to speak, but he controlled himself with visible effort and subsided once more into remoteness.

Puillayne said, “An interesting theory: the cumulative infamies and iniquities of our species, do you say, have taken a toll on the sun itself over the many millennia, and so we are the architects of our own extinction?”

“It could be, yes.”

“Then it is too late to embrace virtue, I suspect,” said Puillayne dolefully. “Through our incorrigible miscreancy we have undone ourselves beyond repair. The damage is surely irreversible in this late epoch of the world’s long existence.” And he sighed a great sigh of inconsolable grief. To his consternation, he found the effects of the long morning’s drinking abruptly weakening: the circular gyration of the walls had lessened and that agreeable haze had cleared, and he felt almost sober again, defenseless against the fundamental blackness of his intellective processes. It was a familiar event. No quantity of wine was sufficient to stave off the darkness indefinitely.

“You look suddenly troubled, master,” Kesztrel Tsaye observed. “Despite the splendor of this wine, or perhaps even because of it, I see that some alteration of mood has overtaken you.”

“I am reminded of my mortality. Our dim and shriveled sun—the certainty of imminent oblivion—”

“Ah, master, consider that you should be cheered by contemplation of the catastrophe that is soon to overcome us, rather than being thrust, as you say, into despond.”

“Cheered?”

“Most truly. For we each must have death come unto us in our time—it is the law of the universe—and what pain it is as we lie dying to know that others will survive after we depart! But if all are to meet their end at once, then there is no reason to feel the bite of envy, and we can go easily as equals into our common destruction.”

Puillayne shook his head obstinately. “I see merit in this argument, but little cheer. My death inexorably approaches, and that would be a cause of despair to me whether or not others might survive. Envy of those who survive is not a matter of any moment to me. For me, it will be as though all the cosmos dies when I do, and the dying of our sun adds only an additional layer of regret to what is already an infinitely regrettable outcome.”

“You permit yourself to sink into needless brooding, master,” said Unthan Vyorn airily. “You should have another goblet of wine.”

“Yes. These present thoughts of mine are pathetically insipid, and I shame myself by giving rein to them. Even in the heyday of the world, when the bright yellow sun blazed forth in full intensity, the concept of death was one that every mature person was compelled to face, and only cowards and fools looked toward it with terror or rage or anything else but acceptance and detachment. One must not lament the inevitable. But it is my flaw that I am unable to escape such feelings. Wine, I have found, is my sole anodyne against them. And even that is not fully satisfactory.”

He reached again for the Falernian. But Kesztrel Tsaye, interposing himself quickly, said, “That is the very wine that has brought this adverse effect upon you, master. Let us open, instead, the wine of our country that was our gift to you. You may not be aware that it is famed for its quality of soothing the troubled heart.” He signaled to Malion Gainthrust, who sprang to his feet, deftly unsealed the two green carboys of Maurenron ambrosia, and, taking fresh goblets from Puillayne’s cabinet, poured a tall serving of the pale bluish wine from one carboy for Puillayne and lesser quantities from the other for himself and his two companions.

“To your health, master. Your renewed happiness. Your long life.”

Puillayne found their wine unexpectedly fresh and vigorous, with none of the rough and sour flavor he had led himself to anticipate. He followed his first tentative sip with a deeper one, and then with a third. In very fact, it had a distinctly calmative effect, speedily lifting him out of the fresh slough of dejection into which he had let himself topple.

But another moment more and he detected a strange unwelcome furriness coating his tongue, and it began to seem to him that beneath the superficial exuberance and openheartedness of the wine lay some less appetizing tinge of flavor, something almost alkaline that crept upward on his palate and negated the immediately pleasing effect of the initial taste. Then he noticed a heaviness of the mind overtaking him, and a weakness of the limbs, and it occurred to him, first, that they had been serving themselves out of one carboy and him out of another, and then, that he was unable to move, so that it became clear to him that the wine had been drugged. Fierce-eyed Malion Gainthrust stood directly before him, and he was speaking at last, declaiming a rhythmic chant which even in his drugged state Puillayne recognized as a simple binding spell that left him trussed and helpless.

Like any householder of some affluence, Puillayne had caused his manse to be protected by an assortment of defensive charms, which the magus of his family had assured him would defend him against many sorts of inimicable events. The most obvious was theft: there were treasures here that others might have reasons to crave. In addition, one must guard one’s house against fire, subterranean tremors, the fall of heavy stones from the sky, and other risks of the natural world. But, also, Puillayne was given to drunkenness, which could well lead to irresponsibility of behavior or mere clumsiness of movement, and he had bought himself a panoply of spells against the consequences of excessive intoxication.

In this moment of danger, it seemed to him that Citrathanda’s Punctilious Sentinel was the appropriate spirit to invoke, and in a dull thick-tongued way Puillayne began to recite the incantation. But over the years, his general indifference to jeopardy had led to incaution, and he had not taken the steps that were needful to maintain the potency of his guardian spirits, which had dimmed with time so that his spell had no effect. Nor would his household revenants be of the slightest use in this predicament. Their barely corporeal forms could exert no force against tangible life. Only his gardeners were incarnate beings, and they, even if they had been on the premises this late in the day, would have been unlikely to heed his call. Puillayne realized that he was altogether without protection now. Gently, his guests, who now were his captors, were prodding him upward out of his couch. Kesztrel Tsaye said, “You will kindly accompany us, please, as we make our tour of your widely reputed treasury of priceless prizes.”

All capacity for resistance was gone from him. Though they had left him with the power of locomotion, his arms were bound by invisible but unbreakable withes, and his spirit itself was captive to their wishes. He could do no other than let himself be led through one hall after another of his museum, staggering a little under the effect of their wine, and when they asked him of the nature of this artifact or that, he had no choice but to tell them. Whatever object caught their fancy, they removed from its case, with Malion Gainthrust serving as the means by which it was carried back to the great central room and added to a growing heap of plunder.

Thus they selected the Crystal Pillow of Carsephone Zorn, within which scenes from the daily life of any of seven subworlds could be viewed at ease, and the brocaded underrobe of some forgotten monarch of the Pharials, whose virility was enhanced twentyfold by an hour’s wearing of it, and the Key of Sarpanigondar, a surgical tool by which any diseased organ of the body could be reached and healed without a breaching of the skin. They took also the Infinitely Replenishable Casket of Jade, once the utmost glory of the turban-wearing marauders of the frigid valleys of the Lesser Ghalur, and Sangaal’s Remarkable Phoenix, from whose feathers fluttered a constant shower of gold dust, and the Heptachromatic Carpet of Kypard Segung, and the carbuncle-encrusted casket that contained the Incense of the Emerald Sky, and many another extraordinary object that had been part of Puillayne’s hoard of fabulosities for decade upon decade.

He watched in mounting chagrin. “So you have come all this way merely to rob me, then?”

“It is not so simple,” said Kesztrel Tsaye. “You must believe us when we say that we revere your poetry, and were primarily motivated to endure the difficulties of the journey by the hope of attaining your actual presence.”

“You choose an odd way to demonstrate your esteem for my art, then, for you would strip me of those things which I love even while claiming to express your regard for my work.”

“Does it matter who owns these things for the upcoming interim?” the bearded man asked. “In a short while, the concept of ownership itself will be a moot one. You have stressed that point frequently in your verse.”

There was a certain logic to that, Puillayne admitted. As the mound of loot grew, he attempted to assuage himself by bringing himself to accept Kesztrel Tsaye’s argument that the sun would soon enough reach its last moment, smothering Earth in unending darkness and burying him and all his possessions under an obdurate coating of ice twenty marasangs thick, so what significance was there in the fact that these thieves were denuding him today of these trifles? All would be lost tomorrow or the day after, whether or not he had ever admitted the caitiff trio to his door.

But that species of sophistry brought him no surcease. Realistic appraisal of the probabilities told him that the dying of the sun might yet be a thousand years away, or even more, for although its inevitability was assured, its imminence was not so certain. Though ultimately he would be bereft of everything, as would everyone else, including these three villains, Puillayne came now to the realization that, all other things being equal, he preferred to await the end of all things amidst the presence of his collected keepsakes rather than without them. In that moment, he resolved to adopt a defensive posture.

Therefore, he attempted once more to recite the Efficacious Sentinel of Citrathanda, emphasizing each syllable with a precision that he hoped might enhance the power of the spell. But his captors were so confident that there would be no result that they merely laughed as he spoke the verses, rather than making any effort to muffle his voice, and, in this, they were correct: as before, no guardian spirit came to his aid. Puillayne sensed that unless he found some more effective step to take, he was about to lose all that they had already selected, and, for all he knew, his life as well; and in that moment, facing the real possibility of personal extinction this very day, he understood quite clearly that his lifelong courtship of death had been merely a pose, that he was in no way actually prepared to take his leave of existence.

One possibility of saving himself remained.

“If you will set me free,” Puillayne said, pausing an instant or two to focus their attention, “I will locate and share with you the True Vintage of Erzuine Thale.”

The impact of that statement upon them was immediate and unmistakable. Their eyes brightened; their faces grew flushed and glossy; they exchanged excited glances of frank concupiscence.

Puillayne believed he understood this febrile response. They had been so overcome with an access of trivial greed, apparently, once they had had Puillayne in their power and knew themselves free to help themselves at will to the rich and varied contents of his halls, that they had forgotten for the moment that his manse contained not only such baubles as the Heptochromatic Carpet and the Infinitely Replenishable Casket, but also, hidden away somewhere in his enormous accumulation of rare wines, something vastly more desirable, the veritable wine of wines itself, the bringer of infinitely ecstatic fulfillment, the elixir of ineffable rapture, the True Vintage of Erzuine Thale. Now he had reminded them of it and all its delights; and now they craved it with an immediate and uncontrollable desire.

“A splendid suggestion,” said Unthan Vyorn, betraying by his thickness of voice the intensity of his craving. “Summon the wine from its place of hiding, and we will partake.”

“The bottle yields to no one’s beck,” Puillayne declared. “I must fetch it myself.”

“Fetch it, then.”

“You must first release me.”

“You are capable of walking, are you not? Lead us to the wine, and we will do the rest.”

“Impossible,” said Puillayne. “How do you think this famed wine has survived so long? It is protected by a network of highly serviceable spells, such as Thampyron’s Charm of Impartial Security, which insures that the flask will yield only to the volition of its inscribed owner, who at present is myself. If the flask senses that my volition is impaired, it will refuse to permit opening. Indeed, if it becomes aware that I am placed under extreme duress, the wine itself will be destroyed.”

“What do you request of us, then?”

“Free my arms. I will bring the bottle from its nest and open it for you, and you may partake of it, and I wish you much joy of it.”

“And then?”

“You will have had the rarest experience known to the soul of man, and I will have been cheated of the opportunity to give the world the epic poem that you claim so dearly to crave; and then, I hope, we will be quits, and you will leave me my little trinkets and take yourselves back to your dreary northern caves. Are we agreed?”

They looked at one another, coming quickly and wordlessly to an agreement, and Kesztrel Tsaye, with a grunt of assent, signaled to Malion Gainthrust to intone the counterspell. Puillayne felt the bonds that had embraced his arms melting away. He extended them in a lavish stretching gesture, flexed his fingers, looked expectantly at his captors.

“Now fetch the celebrated wine,” said Kesztrel Tsaye.

They accompanied him back through chamber after chamber until they reached the hall where his finest wines were stored. Puillayne made a great show of searching through rack after rack, muttering to himself, shaking his head. “I have hidden it very securely,” he reported after a time. “Not so much as a precaution against theft, you realize, but as a way of making it more difficult for me to seize upon it myself in a moment of drunken impulsiveness.”

“We understand,” Unthan Vyorn said. “But find it, if you please. We grow impatient.”

“Let me think. If I were hiding such a miraculous wine from myself, where would I put it? The Cabinet of Meritorious Theriacs? Hardly. The Cinnabar Vestibule? The Chrysochlorous Benefice? The Tabulature? The Trogonic Chamber?”

As he pondered, he could see their restiveness mounting from one instant to the next. They tapped their fingers against their thighs, they moved their feet from side to side, they ran their hands inside their garments as though weapons were hidden there. Unheeding, Puillayne continued to frown and mutter. But then he brightened. “Ah, yes, yes, of course!” And he crossed the room, threw open a low door in the wall at its farther side, reached into the dusty interior of a service aperture.

“Here,” he said jubilantly. “The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale!”

“This?” said Kesztrel Tsaye, with some skepticism.

The bottle Puillayne held forth to them was a gray tapering one, dust-encrusted and unprepossessing, bearing only a single small label inscribed with barely legible runes in faint grayish ink. They crowded around like snorting basilisks inflamed with lust.

Each in turn puzzled over the writing; but none could decipher it.

“What language is that?” asked Unthan Vyorn.

“These are Nolwaynish runes,” answered Puillayne. “See, see, here is the name of the maker, the famed vintner Erzuine Thale, and here is the date of the wine’s manufacture, in a chronology that I fear will mean nothing to you, and this emblem here is the seal of the king of Gammelcor who was reigning at the time of the bottling.”

“You would not deceive us?” said Kesztrel Thale. “You would not fob some lesser wine off on us, taking advantage of our inability to read these scrawls?”

Puillayne laughed jovially. “Put all your suspicions aside! I will not conceal the fact that I bitterly resent the imposition you are enforcing on me here, but that does not mean I can shunt aside thirty generations of family honor. Surely you must know that on my father’s side I am the Eighteenth Maghada of Nalanda, and there is a geas upon me as hereditary leader of that sacred order that bans me from all acts of deceit. This is, I assure you, the True Vintage of Erzuine Thale, and nothing else. Stand a bit aside, if you will, so that I can open the flask without activating Thampyron’s Charm, for, may I remind you, any hint that I act under duress will destroy its contents. It would be a pity to have preserved this wine for so long a time only to have it become worthless vinegar in the moment of unsealing.”

“You act now of your own free will,” Unthan Vyorn said. “It was your choice to offer us this wine, nor was it done at our insistence.”

“This is true,” Puillayne responded. He set out four goblets and, contemplating the flask thoughtfully, spoke the words that would breach its seal.

“Three goblets will suffice,” said Kesztrel Tsaye.

“I am not to partake?

“If you do, it will leave that much less for us.”

“You are cruel indeed, depriving me even of a fourth share of this wine, which I obtained at such expense and after negotiations so prolonged I can scarcely bear to think of them. But so be it. I will have none. As you pointed out, what does it matter, or anything else, when the hour of everlasting night grows ineluctably near?”

He put one goblet aside and filled the other three. Malion Gainthrust was the first to seize his, clutching it with berserk intensity and gulping it to its depths in a single crazed ingurgitation. Instantly, his strange chilly eyes grew bright as blazing coals. The other two men drank more judiciously, frowning a bit at the first sip as though they had expected some more immediate ebullition, sipping again, frowning again, now trembling. Puillayne refilled the goblets. “Drink deep,” he abjured them. “How I envy you this ecstasy of ecstasies!”

Malion Gainthrust now fell to the floor, thrashing about oddly, and, a moment later, Kesztrel Tsaye did the same, toppling like a felled tree and slapping his hands against the tiles as though to indicate some extreme inward spasm. Long-legged Unthan Vyorn, suddenly looking deathly pale, swayed erratically, clutched at his throat, and gasped, “But this is some poison, is it not? By the Thodiarch, you have betrayed us!”

“Indeed,” said Puillayne blandly, as Unthan Vyorn joined his writhing fellows on the floor. “I have given you not the True Vintage of Erzuine Thale, but the Efficacious Solvent of Gibrak Lahinne. The strictures of honor placed upon me in my capacity as Eighteenth Maghada of Nalanda do not extend to a requirement that I ignore the need for self-defense. Already, I believe, the bony frame of your bodies has begun to dissolve. Your internal organs must also be under attack. You will shortly lose consciousness, I suspect, which will spare you from whatever agonies you may at the moment be experiencing. But do you wonder that I took so harsh a step? You thought I was a helpless idle fool, and quite likely that scornful assessment was correct up until this hour, but by entering my sanctum and attempting to part me from the things I hold precious, you awakened me from my detachment and restored me to the love of life that had long ago fled from me. No longer did the impending doom of the world enfold me in paralysis. Indeed, I chose to take action against your depredations, and so—”

But he realized that there was no reason for further statements. His visitors had been reduced to puddles of yellow slime, leaving just their caps and boots and other garments, which he would add to his collection of memorabilia. The rest required only the services of his corps of revenants to remove, and then he was able to proceed with a clear mind to the remaining enterprises of a normal afternoon.

“But will you not now at last permit yourself to enjoy the True Vintage?” Gimbiter Soleptan asked him two nights later, when he and several other of Puillayne’s closest friends had gathered in a tent of sky-blue silk in the garden poet’s manse for a celebratory dinner. The intoxicating scent of calavindra blossoms was in the air, and the pungent odor of sweet nargiise. “They might so easily have deprived you of it, and who knows but some subsequent miscreant might have more success? Best to drink it now, say I, and have the enjoyment of it before that is made impossible for you. Yes, drink it now!”

“Not quite yet,” said Puillayne in a steadfast tone. “I understand the burden of your thought: seize the moment, guarantee the consumption while I can. By that reasoning, I should have guzzled it the instant those scoundrels had fallen. But you must remember that I have reserved a higher use for that wine. And the time for that use has not yet arrived.”

“Yes,” said Immiter of Glosz, a white-haired sage who was of all the members of Puillayne’s circle the closest student of his work. “The great epic that you propose to indite in the hour of the sun’s end—”

“Yes. And I must have the unbroached True Vintage to spur my hand, when that hour comes. Meanwhile, though, there are many wines here of not quite so notable a puissance that are worthy of our attention, and I propose that we ingest more than a few flasks this evening.” Puillayne gestured broadly at the array of wines he had previously set out, and beckoned to his friends to help themselves. “And as you drink,” he said, drawing from his brocaded sleeve a scrap of parchment, “I offer you the verses of this afternoon.”

The night is coming, but what of that?
Do I not glow with pleasure still, and glow, and glow?
There is no darkness, there is no misery
So long as my flask is near!

The flower-picking maidens sing their lovely song by the jade pavilion.
The winged red khotemnas flutter brightly in the trees.
I laugh and lift my glass and drain it to the dregs.
O golden wine! O glorious day!

Surely we are still only in the springtime of our winter
And I know that death is merely a dream
When I have my flask!

First published in Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, 2009.

About the Author

Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor (he was editor of the original anthology series New Dimensions, perhaps most acclaimed anthology series of its era), Silverberg was one of the most influential figures of the Post New Wave era of the ’70s, and continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards, plus SFWA’s prestigious Grandmaster Award.

His novels include the acclaimed Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightwings, The World Inside, Born With The Dead, Shadrack In The Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom O’ Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion, Mountains of Majipoor, two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories, Nightfall and The Ugly Little Boy, The Long Way Home, and the mosaic novel Roma Eterna. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, and four massive retrospective collections, Secret Sharers: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers, To the Dark Star: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 2, Something Wild is Loose: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, and Phases of the Moon: Stories from Six Decades, and a collection of early work, In the Beginning. His reprint anthologies are far too numerous to list here, but include The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two B, and the distinguished Alpha series, among dozens of others. His most recent books are Musings and Meditations, a book of essays, and The Millennium Express, a collection. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.

Old Paint

Megan Lindholm

I was only nine when it happened, so I may not have the details absolutely right. But I know the heart of my story, and the heart is always what matters in a tale like mine.

My family didn’t have much when I was growing up. A lot of lean years happened in that first half of the century. I don’t say I had it as tough as my mom did, but the 2030’s weren’t a piece of cake for anyone. My brother, my mom, and I lived in subsidized housing in the part of T-town they call New Tacoma. It sure wasn’t new when I was a kid. Tacoma’s always been a tough town, and my mom said that her grandpa kept her on a short leash and she survived it, and so her kids would, too. Everyone knew we had the strictest mom in our apartments and pitied us for it.

We weren’t like a lot of folks in the subsidized housing. Mom was ashamed to be there. It was the only thing she took from the government, and I think if she had been alone, she would have lived on the streets. We got by on what she made working at an old folks’ home, so we budgeted hard. She cooked our meals from scratch and we carried our lunches to school in the same battered lunch boxes and stained backpacks, year after year. She mended our clothes and we shopped at the Goodwill. Our cellphones were clunky and we all shared one computer. And we didn’t have a car.

Then my great grandpa died. Mom had hardly seen him in years, and we kids didn’t know him at all, but she was in his will. She got what was left in his checking account, which wasn’t much, and the old furniture in his apartment, which was mostly particle board crap. The old rocking chair was good, and the ceramic canisters shaped like mushrooms were cool. Mom said they were really old and she remembered them from when she was little. But the one big thing he did have was a car, parked in his parking slot where it had been gathering dust for the last twelve years since they’d taken his license away.

The car was vintage, and not in a good way. Back in the 2020’s, there was this rage for making new energy efficient cars that looked sort of like the old classic gas guzzlers. People wanted rumble and roomy to go with their solar and alternative fuels. I guess my great grandpa had been a surfer back in the day, because what he chose was something that was supposed to look like a station wagon. The first time we went down to the parking garage and looked at it, Ben, my older brother, groaned and asked, “What is that crap on the sides? Is it supposed to look like wood or something?”

“Or something,” my mom said absently. She pushed the button on the key but the battery for it was long dead. So she opened the car the old fashioned way, putting the key in a hole in the door handle. I was fascinated and proud of my mom for knowing you could do that.

The outside of the car was covered in fine dust, but inside, it was immaculate. She sat in the seat for a little while with her hands on the wheel, acting like she could see out the windshield. She was smiling a little bit. Then she said, “The smart thing to do is sell him. If the interior is this good, I bet he kept the engine cherry, too.” She reached down and pulled a little handle, and Ben and I jumped when the hood of the car popped up.

“Mom, I think you broke it,” Ben said. “Maybe we shouldn’t touch anything until we can have a mechanic look at it.” Ben was fourteen then, and for some reason, he now believed that if he didn’t know something, Mom didn’t know it either. She just snorted and got out of the car and went around to open the hood the rest of the way.

“My goodness,” she said softly. “You did take care of him, Pops.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I do remember that the inside of that engine compartment was spotless. She shut the hood, unplugged the car from the supplemental charger, and retracted the coil. She had a license and knew how to drive, because that was part of her job at the old people’s home. I was still surprised when she slid in behind the wheel and put the key in a slot-thing and turned it. The vehicle had an anti-theft box on the steering column. She hesitated, and then put her forefinger on the sensor. “Hello, Suzanne,” the car said in a rich, brown voice. “How are you today?”

“Just fine,” she said quietly. “Just fine.”

Ben was freaked. Mom noticed that and grinned. She patted the steering column. “My grandpa’s voice. A little customization he did on the systems.” She tossed her head at the back seat. Ben opened the door and we both got in. There were shoulder strap seat belts.

“No airbags?” Ben asked in disbelief.

“They’re there. But when he was new, cars had both. It’s safe. I wouldn’t put you in a car if I thought it wasn’t safe.” She closed her eyes for a minute and tightened up her mouth as if she had suddenly wanted to cry. Then she opened her eyes and shifted her grip on the wheel. “Let’s blast,” she said loud and clear, and the engine started. It was a lot louder than any other car I’d ever heard. Mom had to raise her voice to talk over it. “And when he was new, cars were electric AND internal combustion. And much noisier than they are now.”

Ben was horrified. “This car is running on gasoline, right now?”

Mom shook her head. “Sound effects. And loudest inside the car. My Grandpa had a sense of humor.” She stroked the car’s dash. “All those years, and he never took me off the security system.”

“How smart is this car?” Ben demanded.

“Smart enough,” she said. “He can take himself to a fueling station. Knows when his tires are low on air, and can schedule his own oil change. He used to talk to the dealership; I wonder if it’s even in business still. He’s second generation simulated intelligence. Sure fooled me, most of the time. He has a lot of personality customization in his software. My grandpa put in a bunch of educational stuff, too. He can speak French. He used to drill me on my vocabulary on the way to school. And he knew all my favorite radio stations.” She shook her head. “Back then, people wanted their cars to be their friends. He sure was mine.”

“That’s whack,” Ben said solemnly.

“No, it was great. I loved it. I loved him.”

“Love you too, Suzanne,” the car said. His voice was a rich baritone.

“You should sell this thing, Mom,” Ben advised her wisely.

“Maybe I should,” Mom said, but the way she said it, I knew that we had a car now.

Ben had begun to think he was the man of the house, so he tried to start an argument with Mom about selling this car and using that money and her inheritance money to buy a real car. She just looked at him and said, “Seems to me it’s my inheritance, not yours. And I’m keeping him.”

And so that was that.

She opened a little panel on his dash and punched in our address. She moved a handle on the steering column, and the car began to ease backwards. I held my breath, thinking we were going to hit something, but we didn’t. She stopped the car, moved the handle again, and we slid forward, smooth as a slide, up and out of the parking garage and into the daylight.

On the way home, she kept pushing buttons and chatting with the car. It didn’t have instant-net, but it had a screen that folded down from the ceiling. “What good is that? You have to sit in the back seat to see it,” Ben complained. Mom reached under the seat and opened a drawer. Inside was a bunch of old style DVD’s in flat plastic cases.

“They’re movies,” she said. “Supposed to entertain the kids in the back seat. The screen is back there so the driver won’t be distracted.” She picked up the stack and began to sort through them. She had a wistful half-smile on her face. “I remember all of these,” she said quietly. “Some were my favorites.”

“So the driver’s supposed to just sit up front by himself and be bored?” Ben demanded.

She set the movies down with a sigh and turned to him. “The driver is supposed to drive.” She turned back and put her hands on the wheel and looked out over the hood. “When this fellow was built, cars were only allowed to go a short distance without a licensed driver in the driver’s seat. Less than a mile, I think it was. The auto-brains were really limited back then. Legally limited more than technically limited. People didn’t really trust cars to drive themselves. They had emergency services locators, of course, so they could take you to the hospital if you passed out, and sensors to help you park, but when he was built, drivers still did most of the driving.”

“Why do you keep calling the car ‘he’ and ‘him’?” Ben demanded.

“Old habit,” my mom said, but she said it in a way that ended the conversation.

We had a parking spot at our building that we’d never used before. The first time we pulled up in the car, every kid hanging around outside came to see what the noise was. They watched as the car plugged in to charge. Our car was about twice as long as any other car in the lot.

“Look at the size of those solars,” one boy whispered, and Ben’s ears went red.

“Old piece of junk,” said another knowingly. “Surprised it still runs at all.”

Mom did the one thing that Ben hated the most. I didn’t much like it either. All the other moms in the building would have just ignored the wanna-be gangers hanging around the parking lot. Mom always looked straight at them and talked to them as if they were smart, even when they were so drugged out they could barely stand.

“He’s old, but he runs like a clock. He’ll probably outlast most of the Tupperware crates here. They still used a lot of steel when this guy was built.” Mom set the alarm, and the tattle-tale light began to circle the car.

“Wha’s that stuff onna size spozed to be?” Leno asked. He was smiling. Leno was always smiling, and I’d never seen him with his eyes more than half open. He looked delighted to see the car, but I’d seen him look just as enthusiastically at a lamp post.

“It’s wood. Well, pseudo wood. My Grandpa was so proud of it. It was one of the first nano-products used on any car. It was the latest thing, back then. Guaranteed not to peel or fade or scratch, and to feel like wood grain. Most minor dents, it could repair, too.” She sighed, smiled and shook her head, remembering something. Then, “Come on, kids. Dinner to cook and homework to do.”

“Homework,” one of the boys sneered, and two girls laughed low. We ignored her and followed her into the house.

Ben was mad at her. “How come you know so much about that car? I thought you didn’t have anything to do with your grandpa. I thought he, like, disowned you when you were a kid or something.”

Mom gave him a look. She never talked much about her family. As far as I remembered, it had always been just her, Ben, and me. Someone must have been our father, but I’d never met him. And if Ben remembered him, he didn’t say much. Mom firmed her mouth for a minute and then said brusquely, “My grandpa and I really loved each other. I made some choices in my life that he didn’t agree with. So he was really angry with me for a long time, and I was angry with him. But we always knew we still loved one another. We just never got around to making up in time to say it.”

“What decisions?” I asked.

“Getting knocked up with me,” Ben said, low. Either Mom didn’t hear him say it or she didn’t want to discuss it.

So, after that, we had a car. Not that we drove it much. But Mom polished it with special wax, cleaned his solars, and vacuumed out the inside and hung up an old-fashioned pine tree scent thing from the mirror. Once we came home from school on the bus, and found her asleep in the driver’s seat, her hands on the wheel. She was smiling in her sleep. Every once in a while, on the weekend, she might take us out for a ride in the station wagon. Ben always said he didn’t want to go, but then went.

She didn’t upgrade the car but she made it ours. She put us both on the car’s security system, and updated the old GPS settings with our home, school’s, the hospital, and the police station, so in an emergency either of us could get help. The car greeted us by name. Ben pretty much ignored its personality program, but I talked to it. It knew a lot of corny old jokes and had a strange program called “Road Trip Games” about license plates and “Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral.” I tried out every seat in the car. I watched some of the old movies on the little screen, but they were really long and the people talked too much. My favorite seat was the one in the back that faced backwards. I liked watching the faces of the people as they came up behind our car. Lots of them looked surprised. Some of them smiled and waved, and some turned their heads to look at the car as they passed us. The only time I didn’t like it was at night when the headlights of the cars behind us would hit me right in the eyes.

The car was a sometimes thing, and mostly it didn’t change anything about our life. Sometimes, when it was pouring rain and we had to walk to the bus stop and then walk home again, Ben would grumble. Other parents sent their cars to pick up their kids from school. Ben whined about this a lot. “Why can’t the wagon pick us up from school when it’s pouring rain?” he’d demand of her.

“Your grandfather was a ‘drive it yoursel’ guy. Like me. I doubt he ever had the block removed.”

“Then it’s just a software thing? You could take it off?”

“Don’t get any ideas, Benny-boy!” Mom warned him.

And for a while, he didn’t. But then he turned fifteen. And Mom decided to teach him to drive.

Ben wasn’t that interested at first. Most kids didn’t bother with a personal license anymore. As long as a car met the legal standards, anyone could get in it and go. I knew little kindergarteners who were dropped off by their cars each day and then picked up again. Mom said it was stupid that it took 3000 pounds of car to transport a 40 pound kid to school, but lots of people did it. Ben and I both knew that Mom could have had the car’s brain upgraded or unblocked or whatever, and we could have had wheels any time we wanted them. But she chose not to. She told Ben the only way he was going to get to use the car was if he knew how to physically drive it. Once he passed his test, she told him that we might even have it updated so that he could just kick back and tell the car where he wanted to go.

So, that was the big attraction for Ben. I got to ride along on his driving lessons. At first Mom took us way out of town in the evenings and made him practice in parking lots outside vacant strip malls. But Ben actually learned to drive pretty well. He said it wasn’t that different from a lot of his video games. Then Mom reminded him that he couldn’t kill himself or someone else with a video game. She was so serious about it, and Ben got so cranky. It was a thing they went through for about a year I think. Any conversation about the car always turned into an argument. He hated the “dorky” paint and wood on it; she said it was “vintage” and “classic.” He said we should get a cheaper car; she said that all the metal in the body made it safer for him to drive, and that he should be happy we had a car at all. Their conversations were always the same. I think Ben said, “I know, I know!” more than a million times that year. And Mom was always saying, “Shut up and listen to what I’m saying.”

Ben was absolutely set on getting the car upgraded so he could ride around with his friends. Most of his friends’ parents had said “no way” to them riding if Ben was actually driving the car, even after he got his license. He kept telling Mom how the car would be safer if it could drive itself and how we could get better mileage because it would self-adjust routes to avoid traffic or to take short cuts, and that statistics showed that car-brains actually reacted faster than human brains in dangerous situations.

“Maybe so, but they can only react one way, and human brains can think of a dozen ways to react in a tough situation. So the answer is still no. Not yet. Maybe never.”

Mom scored big points on him the next week when there were dozens of accidents on I-5 that involved driverless cars. Mom didn’t care that it was because of a virus that someone had uploaded to the traffic beam. No one knew who did it. Some people said it was an environmental group that wanted to discourage private cars. Other people thought it was just a new generation of hackers making their mark on the world. “It wasn’t the cars’ fault, Mom!” Ben argued. “The beacon gave them bad information.”

“But if a human had been holding the steering wheel, none of those accidents would have happened,” Mom said. And that was the end of it, for a couple of months.

Then in June, Ben and Mom got into it big time. He came home from school one day and took the car without asking. He brought it home painted black, with a rippling hint of darker tiger stripes. I stood and stared at it when he pulled into the apartment building parking lot. “Cool, huh?” he asked me. “The stripes move. The faster you drive, the faster the nanos ripple.”

“Where’d you get the money to do it?” I asked him, and when he said, “None of your business,” I knew it was really going to blow up.

And it did, but even worse than I’d expected. By the time Mom came home from work, the vintage nanos in the “wood” paneling were at war with the tiger stripe nanos. The car looked, as mom put it, “Like a pile of crawling crap! What were you thinking?”

And they were off, with him saying that the black made the car look better and that the new nanos would win over the old ones and the color would even out. When it came out that he’d raided his college money for the paint job, she was furious.

“It was too good of a deal to pass up! It was less than half what it would cost in a standard paint shop!”

So that was how she found out he’d had it done in one of those car-painting tents that had been popping up near malls and swap meets. They were mobile services that fixed dings in windshields or replaced them entirely. They could install seat covers, and add flames or pin stripes. The shady ones could override parental controls for music or video or navigation systems, erase GPS tracking and alter mileage used. Or, in the one Ben had gone to, do an entire nano-paint job in less than an hour. With the new nanos, they didn’t even use sprayers anymore. They dumped the stuff on and the nanos spread out to cover any previously painted surfaces. The men operating the paint tent had promised Ben that their nanos were state of the art and could subdue any previous nanos in the car’s paint.

Mom was so furious that she made us get in the car and we drove back to where Ben had had it done. By law, they should have looked at the owner registration before they nanoed it. Mom wanted Ben’s money back and was hoping they had call-back nanos that would remove the black. But no such luck. When we got to where the tent had been, there was nothing but a heap of empty nano jars and some frustrated paint crawling around on the ground trying to cover crumpled pop cans. My mom called the cops, because it’s illegal to abandon nanos, and they said they’d send out a containment team. She didn’t wait for them. We just went home. When we got there, Ben jumped out of the car and stormed into the house. Mom got out more slowly and stood looking at our car with the saddest expression I’d ever seen on her face.

“I’m so sorry, Old Paint,” she told the car. And that was how the car got his name, and also when I realized how much her grandpa’s car had meant to her. Ben had done a lot worse thing than just paint a car without her permission. I thought that when he calmed down, I might try to explain that to him. Then I thought that maybe the best thing for me to do was to stay out of it.

The paint on the car just got worse and worse. Those old nanos were tough. The wood paneling took to migrating around on the car’s body, trying to escape the attacks of the new paint. It looked scabby as if the car were rotting. Ben didn’t want to be seen in the car anymore but Mom was merciless. “This was your decision, and you are going to have to live with it just like the rest of us,” she told him. And she would send him on the errands, to get groceries or to return the library books, so he would have to drive Old Paint.

A couple months later, my mom stayed home with stomach flu. She woke up feeling better in the afternoon, and went to the window to look out at the day. That was when she discovered Old Paint was gone. My brother and I were on the bus when we got her furious call. “You probably think you are smart, Benny Boy, but what you are in is big trouble. Very big trouble.” He was trying to figure out why she was so angry when the bus went crazy. Ben dropped his phone bracing himself and me on the slippery seat. Mom told us later that the Teamsters contract with the city had always insisted that every city-owned mass transit unit had to have a nominal driver. So when the bus started honking its horn and flashing its light and veering back and forth over three lanes, the old man in the driver’s seat reached up and threw the manual override switch. He grabbed the wheel and wrestled us over to the curb and turned off the engine.

The driver apologized to everyone and asked us all to sit tight until the maintenance people could come. He called in for a replacement bus, but everyone on the bus heard the dispatcher’s hysterical response. Twelve bus break-downs in the last ten minutes, three involving bad accidents, and there were no more replacement buses to send. In the background, someone shouted that an out of control ambulance had just rear-ended a bus. Dispatch put the driver on hold.

We were only three blocks short of our stop, so we asked to get off and walk. Ben grabbed his phone off the floor but Mom had hung up and he didn’t really want to find out just what she had discovered that had made her so mad. Ben had a lot of secrets in those days, from rolling papers in his gym bag to a follow up appointment at the STD clinic. Not that I was supposed to know about any of them.

We’d gone half a block when we heard the bus start up. We looked back and saw it take off. I’d never known a city bus could accelerate like that. We were staring after it, wondering what had happened, when a VW Cherub jumped the curb and nearly hit us. It high-centered for just a second, wheels spinning and smoking, and two kids jumped out of the back seat, screaming. A moment later, it reversed out into the street and raced off, still going backwards. The teenage girl who had jumped out was crying and holding onto her little brother. “The car just went crazy! The car just went crazy!”

A man from a corner bar-and-grill opened the door and shouted, “You kids get inside NOW!”

We all hesitated, but then he pointed up the street and yelled, “OMG, now, kids!” and we bolted in as the Hot Pizza delivery van came right down the sidewalk. It clipped the awning supports as it went by and the green-and-white striped canvas came rippling down behind us as we jumped inside.

The place was a sports bar, and a couple of times we’d had pizza there with mom when her favorite team was in the play-offs. Usually every screen in the place was on a different sports feed, but that day they all showed the same rattled newsman. He was telling everyone to stay inside if they could, to avoid vehicles of all kinds and to stay tuned for updates to the mad vehicle crisis.

Ben finally called Mom and told her where we were, because the tavern owner refused to let us leave by ourselves. When Mom got there, she thanked him, and then took us home by a route that went down narrow alleys and through peoples’ back yards. Every few minutes, we’d hear a car go roaring past on the streets, or hear horns blaring or crashes in the distance.

Not every vehicle in the city had gone wild, but a lot of them had, including Old Paint. Mom had been mad because she thought Ben had upgraded Old Paint’s self-driving capability by removing the block on his software. She looked a bit skeptical when he denied it but by late evening the news people had convinced her. The virus was called the “7734, upside down and backwards” by the hacker group that took credit for it. Because if you wrote 7734 on a piece of paper and looked at it upside down and backwards, it looked a little bit like the word “hell.” They said they did it to prove they could. No one knew how they spread it, but our neighbor said that zombie nanos delivered it right to the cars’ driving computers. He said that the nanos were planted in a lot of car stuff, from wiper fluid to coolant and even paint. So Ben said there was no proof he’d infected the car when he got it painted, but that was what Mom always believed.

By evening, the Internet news said the crisis would solve itself pretty fast. For a lot of cars, it did. They wrecked themselves. Cops and vigilantes took out some of the obvious rogues, shooting out their tires. It made the owners pretty angry and the insurance companies were arguing about whether they had to pay off. The government had people working on a nano anti-virus that they could spray on rogues, but nothing they tried seemed to work. Some people wanted all the auto-recharging places shut down but people with uninfected cars objected. Finally they decided to leave the auto charge stations open because some of the rogue cars got aggressive about recharging themselves when they encountered closed stations.

Mom tried to explain it to me. Cars had different levels of smartness, and people could set priority levels on what they wanted the cars to do for themselves. A lot of people had set their “recharge importance” level high because they wanted the car kept charged to maximum capacity. Others had set their cars to always travel as fast as they were allowed, and turned the courtesy level down to low or even off. There was a pedestrian awareness level that was not supposed to be tampered with, but some people did it. Pizza delivery cars and ambulances were some of the most dangerous rogues.

At first, the virus paralyzed the nation. It didn’t infect every car, but the ones that had it caused traffic accidents and made the streets dangerous. No one wanted to go out. Schools shifted to snow-day internet mode. The stores got low on groceries and the only delivery trucks were vintage semis, with no brains at all and old guys driving them.

By the third week, the infection rate was down, and most of the really dangerous rogues had been disabled. That left a lot of cars still running wild. Some seemed to follow their normal routines, but speeded up or took alternate routes. Kids were warned not to get into infected cars, even if it was the family van waiting outside the school at the usual time, because sometimes those cars behaved reliably, and sometimes they abruptly went nuts. A new little business started up, with bounty hunters tracking down people’s expensive vehicles by GPS and then capturing them and disabling them until the virus could be cured. But some owners couldn’t afford that service or the car wasn’t worth what the bounty hunters charged.

So Old Paint was left running wild. At first, we’d see him in the neighborhood at odd times. He always drove himself very safely, and he just seemed to be randomly wandering. Twice we caught him in our parking spot, recharging himself, but each time he took off before we could get near him, let alone open his doors. Mom said to leave him alone, and she’d worry about it when the government came up with an anti-virus. Then we stopped seeing him at all.

One night, when Ben was really bummed about not having a car for some school dance that was coming up, he checked Old Paint’s GPS. “That crazy bastard went to California!” he shouted, half impressed by it.

“Let me see that,” Mom said, and then she started laughing. “I took him there one spring break when I told Grandpa I was only going to Ocean Shores. I wiped all the data off his GPS before I came home. I guess the virus must have brought it back into his memory.”

“You did things like that? You’d kill me if I did something like that!”

“I was young,” Mom said. She smiled in an odd way. “Sometimes, I think being a teenager is like a virus. You do things that go against every bit of programming your parents ever put into you.” She made a “huh” noise as if she were pushing something away. She looked over a Ben. “Becoming a parent is the antivirus. Cured me of all sorts of things.”

“So how come you don’t let me just be a teenager like you were?” Ben demanded.

Mom just looked at him. “Because I learned, the hard way, just how dangerous that can be to a kid. Running wild is a great thing. For the kids that survive it.” She turned off the monitor then, and told us both to go to bed.

In the weeks that followed, Old Paint went all sorts of strange places. Once he went off to some place in the Olympic National Forest where Mom had once gone to a rave. And he spent two days crawling around on an old logging trail near Chrystal Mountain. Mom looked worried when he went off on that jaunt, and the night she discovered that he was now headed for Lake Chelan, she was so relieved she laughed. In a way, it was really cool that Old Paint did all that traveling. Mom would look at his location at night, and tell us stories about when she was a teenager and living with her Grandpa and making him crazy. She’d tell us about close calls and stupid ideas and how close she had come to getting killed or arrested. Ben and I both started to see her differently, like someone who really had been a kid once. She didn’t cut us any more slack than she ever had, but we began to understand why.

We kept expecting Old Paint to run out of charge, but he didn’t. He’d go sedately through the auto-charge places, I guess, looking like some family’s old car. Ben asked Mom why she didn’t block him from using the credit card, and she just shrugged. I think she enjoyed reliving all her wild adventures. And he wasn’t that expensive. A lot of cars had back-up solar systems, and Old Paint had a really extensive one. Sometimes he’d stay in one place for three or four days, and Mom figured he was just soaking up the rays before moving on. “And if I cut him off, then he may never come home to us.” She gave an odd smile, one that wasn’t happy and added, “Tough love isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes, when you lock a door, the other person never knocks on it again.”

So, as the weeks passed, we watched Old Paint move up and down Old 99. Ben and I went back to walking. All the city buses and delivery vans had been set back to full manual, and all sorts of old guys were chortling about being suddenly employed again. My mom said it was a huge victory for the Teamsters, and some people insinuated they had backed the hackers.

The government people came up with three different anti-viruses, and everyone was required to install them in their vehicles. The trick, of course, was getting the scrubber nanos and anti-virus program to the infected vehicles. Everyone with an infected vehicle was required to report it, and Mom had filled out the forms. A package came in the mail with the scrubber nanos in a spray can and a booklet on how to disinfect the car and then install the antivirus. Mom set it on the kitchen windowsill and it gathered dust.

By the end of summer, most of the infected vehicles were off the road. They’d either destroyed themselves or, in the case of the really aggressive ones, been hunted down and disabled. There were still incidents almost every day. Three fire trucks in San Francisco were scrambled for a five alarm fire, and instead they went on a wild rampage through the city. Someone deliberately infected fifteen Harley-Davidsons parked outside a bar with a variant of the virus, and ten of the Hells Angels who mounted them and rode away died a mile later. A fuel delivery business in Anchorage faced huge fines when it was determined that they had neglected to use the proper anti-virus. The fines for the environmental clean up were even bigger.

In late September, during a heavy rainstorm, I spotted Old Paint near the school. He was idling at the curb, and I ran toward him, but Ben grabbed me by the shoulder. “He’s infected. You can’t trust him,” he warned me in a harsh whisper. He looked over his shoulder, fearful that someone else might have overhead. By then, they were disabling even non-aggressive vehicles because they thought they might be able to infect other vehicles. As we walked toward the bus stop, Old Paint slowly edged down the street after us.

“Why is he here? He never did auto-pick-up for us.”

“It’s in his programming. He knows what school we go to, and what time we get out. Mom put it in just in case she wanted to use it someday. Probably just glitching.”

When we got on the bus, Old Paint revved his engine, honked twice and passed us. When Mom got home from work, we told her and she smiled. That night, really late, I heard her get out of bed and I followed her to the living room. We peeked out the rain-streaked window and Old Paint was charging himself at our parking slot.

“Doesn’t look so bad for being on the road so long,” Mom said. She smiled. “I bet I’ll find a car wash and oil change on my credit card bill this month.”

I went to the kitchen and came back with the scrubber and anti-virus. “Shall we try to catch him?” I asked.

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Not in the rain. Let him get used to coming at night to charge. On a dry night, I’ll go down and spray him.”

And we went back to bed.

September became October. I saw Old Paint in the streets sometimes and I suspect he came and charged up at our place more than once. But the weather stayed wet and that was Mom’s excuse for not trying to catch him. Ben was playing football for his school and seemed so different it was like aliens had re-programmed my brother. Most days, I had to ride the bus alone. I noticed that Old Paint would show up at the school on the really stormy days and shadow me until I was on the bus. Once he was at my bus stop and followed me home. I knew I wasn’t supposed to get inside him, but no one had said I couldn’t talk to him. So I edged toward him as he followed the sidewalk and ran my fingers along his fender. “I miss you, Old Paint,” I told him. The locks bit down, he revved his engine and leaped away from the curb. He tore off through the afternoon traffic with other cars honking at him. It really hurt my feelings. I didn’t tell Mom or Ben. I was afraid she might report him as borderline aggressive and give his GPS code to the police.

January brought really nasty weather. Snow fell, melted into black ice, and more snow fell. For a solid week, the cycle repeated. The worst part was that all the busses were running on the “snow routes” that avoided hills. So our usual three block walk to the bus stop became six blocks to a main street. Each day, Old Paint was outside our apartments, edging along behind us as we walked to the bus stop. Ben ignored him, except to cuss that he could be inside a warm car instead of wading through snow and ice. Our bus stop was right in front of a charging station.

There was a line for the quick charge, and while we were waiting for the bus, a black van pulled up, blocking a car in. The lettering on the sign said Road Dog Recoveries. “Bounty hunters!” Ben said. “Cool. Watch this.”

They fanned out around the car they wanted. A man in a car at the end of the line shouted, “Don’t shoot those so close to the station!” Because they had their special tire piercing guns out and were taking aim at the red Beamer they had blocked in.

But that wasn’t the car they should have been watching. Two cars back in line, a black sedan with big wheels suddenly cranked its wheels and cut right through the median and the bushes and right at us. It hit one of the men as it did so and he went flying. The other men all fired at it. And missed. Then the red car freaked out, backed into the car behind it to gain a bit of space, and it shot over the curb into the median and high centered.

Ben grabbed me and jerked me to one side, but it wasn’t quite enough. I hadn’t even seen the black sedan coming toward us. It clipped me and the impact snatched me out of Ben’s grip. I went flying and rolling out into the street. When I hit the ground, I slid on the black ice and I thought I was never going to stop. Ben was yelling, cars were honking, and when I finally stopped the whole world was spinning. But I was okay. I got up. Ben was running toward me.

Then my arm started really hurting and I realized I couldn’t move it. I screamed. And Ben shouted, “RUN! Run, Sadie, get out of there!”

The black sedan had slewed around and was coming back at me. Later, I found out that it had belonged to a security service and had an attack mode if anyone tried to harm the VIP inside. It had interpreted the bounty hunters as assassins. No one could say why it came after me. But as it came at me and I turned to run, I saw something even scarier. Old Paint was roaring at me, full speed in reverse. I was going to be crushed between the two cars. I screamed, the black sedan hit me, and I was airborne.

But Old Paint’s rear door had opened upwards and as I flew toward him, he shifted into first, burned rubber and faded away from me like a catcher back-pedaling for a fly ball. I landed in the rear-facing back seat as air bags blossomed. It wasn’t exactly a soft landing, but his actions meant that it was the softest possible landing. I collapsed there as the hatch was closing, and then I fainted as his air bags puffed up all around me.

I woke up on the way to the emergency room. I couldn’t see anything because I was surrounded by air bags. I heard Ben shouting my name and then he was pushing the bags back. He was in the middle seat, leaning over the back, trying to reach me. “Who’s driving?” I asked, but he only shouted, “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

Old Paint ignored traffic signals and one way signs all the way to the hospital. Horns blaring and recorded voice shouting, “Emergency! Emergency! Out of the way, please! Emergency!” he beat out an ambulance and was opening the back hatch as he backed up to the emergency room loading dock. Ben jumped out, screaming for someone to help his sister. The air bags around me deflated and people in white lifted me out. I had one glimpse of Old Paint as he roared away from the ramp. His rear bumper was pushed in and his back window was crazed.

“What happened to Old Paint?” I cried. They had me on a gurney and were rolling me in. Ben trotted beside me, his cell phone to his ear.

“Compared to that black sedan? Nothing. He worked that car over until it couldn’t even turn a wheel. Slammed into it over and over. I thought you were going to be creamed in there. Mom?” Ben talked into his phone. “Mom, yeah, we’re at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital. Sadie got hit by a car, but Old Paint saved her. Come fast, they want our insurance number and I don’t know it.”

I wasn’t hurt that bad. My arm was broken and I was bruised all over. They kept me six hours for observation, but my concussion was mild. Mom stayed by my bed. Two cops came to ask what happened. Ben said a crazy car had hit me. Mom said she had no idea what good Samaritan had picked me up and gotten me to the hospital, but she thanked them. The policewoman said that the other witnesses had said the car had behaved in an extraordinary manner to save me. Ben looked at Mom and said, “Some old dude was driving it. After he busted up that black car, he opened the door and yelled at me to jump in. He said he drove in stock car races, demolition derbies when he was a kid. Then he brought us here. He left because he didn’t want to get in trouble.”

The cops asked him some more questions, but Ben just kept saying, “I don’t remember” or “I didn’t see, I was worried about my sister.” After they finally left, my mom said very quietly, “I hope the charging station didn’t catch the plates on camera.”

Ben just looked at her. “Yeah. Me, too,” he said. “But I couldn’t let them go out and disable him after he saved Sadie’s life.”

Mom took a deep breath. “Ben. Sadie. We both know it’s probably going to come down to that, eventually. He can’t run wild forever. And we all know that Old Paint is just following the directives of his programming. He’s not really . . . alive. He seems that way because we think of him that way. But it’s all just programming.”

“Saving Sadie’s life? Catching her in the back seat like that, cushioning her with air bags while he pounded that sedan into scrap?” Ben laughed and shook his head. “You won’t convince me of that, Mom.”

The hospital let me go home that evening. We all went to bed right away. But about midnight, I heard my mom get up, so I did, too. She was looking out through the blinds at our parking stall.

“Is he there? Is he okay?”

“No, baby, he’s not here. Go back to bed.”

Ben and I overslept the next morning and didn’t go to school. Mom hadn’t bothered waking us. We had a good six inches of snow outside, and school was cancelled for the day. When we came out to the living room, Mom was sitting at the computer watching a dot on a map. It wasn’t moving. There was a backpack at her feet and a heap of winter clothes beside her.

“You kids get your homework off Moodle,” she said. “I’m going to be gone for a while.” She sounded funny.

“No,” Ben said. “We’re going with you.”

We hiked through the snow to a bus stop and took a bus to a City Car rental lot and checked out a tiny car. Riding in it after riding in Old Paint was like crowding into a shower stall together. Mom sat in the single front seat and Ben and I had the back seat. There was barely room for us with our coats on. Mom plugged in the coordinates, and the car demanded that she scan her credit card again. It had a prissy girl’s voice. “MacIntosh Lake is outside of Zones 1 through 12. Additional fees will apply,” the car told her.

She thumbed for them. The car didn’t move. “Hazardous conditions are reported. Cancellation recommended. You will not be charged if you terminate this transaction now.”

Mom sighed. “Just go,” she said, and we went. It wasn’t too bad. The main roads had been plowed and salted, and once we got on I-5, the plows and the other traffic had cleared most of the mess down to almost pavement. It felt really odd not to have Old Paint’s bulk around me and I leaned against Ben.

We didn’t talk much as the car hummed along. Ben had tossed a bunch of stuff in his backpack, including my pain medicine and a water bottle. I took a pill and slept most of the way. I woke up to Ben saying, “But there’s a chain across the access road.”

“So we’ll get out here,” Mom said.

I sat up. We were out in the country, and the only tracks on the snowy road behind us were ours. It was a very strange feeling. All I could see was wind-smoothed white snow and snow-laden trees on either side of the narrow road. We had pulled off the road into a driveway and stopped. There were two big yellow posts in front of us, with a heavy chain hung between them. A hunter-orange sign said, “CLOSED.” The road in front of us was mostly smooth snow and it wound out of sight into the woods.

Mom told the car to wait and it obediently shut down. We struggled back into our coats. None of us had real snow boots. Mom grabbed her pack and Ben brought his as we stepped out into smooth snow. The skies had cleared and it was cold. This snow wouldn’t melt any time soon. Ben followed Mom and she followed the ghost tire tracks that left the road and went around the access gate to the lake. Snow had almost filled them and the wind was polishing them away. I came last, stepping in their footprints. Mom pulled her coat tighter as we walked and said, “There were some great raves out here when I was in high school. But in summer.”

“What would you do to me if I went to a rave out in the woods?” Ben asked.

Mom just looked at him. We both knew he’d been to raves out in the woods. Ben shut up.

Mom saw Old Paint before we did, and she broke into a run. Old Paint was shut down, back under the trees. Snow was mounded over him; only the funky paint job on his sides showed. Twigs and leaves had fallen on his snowy roof during the night. His windows were thick with frost. He looked to me like he’d been there for years. As we got closer, his engine ticked twice and then went silent. Mom halted and flung out her arms. “Stay back, kids,” she warned us. Then she went forward alone.

She talked to him in a low voice as she walked slowly around the car. She kept shaking her head. Ben and I ignored what she’d said and walked slowly forward. Old Paint was still. Both his front and back bumpers were pushed in and he had a long crease down his passenger side. One of his headlights was cracked. His rear license plate hung by a single screw. “He’s dead,” I said, and I felt my eyes start to sting.

“Not quite,” my Mom said grimly. “He doesn’t have enough of a charge to move. His nanos have been trying to pop his dents out and fix his glass but that will take time.” She went around to the driver door and unlocked it with a key. She leaned in and popped the hood, and then tossed the keys to Ben. “Look in the back. There’s a hatch in the floor. Open it. Get out the stuff in there. Looks like we’re going to need Grandpa’s emergency kit.”

She dropped her pack on the ground in the snow and then wrestled a Charge-In-A-Box out of it. Ben and I were staring at her. “Hurry up!” she snapped.

We walked to the back of the car. Mom already had the cables out and she plugged Old Paint in. His horn tooted faintly. “Easy, big fella,” my brother said as he slid the key into the lock. He saw me looking at him and said, “Just shut up.”

We pushed the deflated air bags out of the way. We found the floor hatch and opened it. “Look at all this stuff!” My brother exclaimed. My mom walked back and looked in. She had a grim smile as she said, “My grandpa was always trying to keep me safe. He tried to think of everything to protect me. ‘Plan for the worst and hope for the best,’ he always said.” She took a deep breath and then sighed it out. “So. Let’s get to work.”

Ben and I more watched than worked. It was weird to watch her fix Old Paint. She was so calm. She pulled his dipstick, wiped it on her jeans, studied it, and then added something out of a can. Then she pulled another dipstick, checked it, and nodded. She checked wires and some she tightened. She replaced two fuses. She looked inside his radiator and then felt around under it. “No leaks!” she said. “That’s a miracle.” She stepped back and shut the hood.

Old Paint woke up. His engine turned over and then quit. Turned over again, ran a bit rough and then smoothed out. He sounded hoarse to me as he said, “Right front tire is flat. Do not attempt to move the vehicle.”

“There’s Fix-A-Flat in there,” Ben said, and Mom said, “Get it.”

He came back with it and his backpack. I stood next to him, stroking Old Paint’s fender and saying, “It’s going to be okay, Old Paint. It’s going to be okay.” Neither one of them made fun of me. While I was standing there, his front bumper suddenly popped out into position. You can’t really see nanos working to take out a dent, but he already looked less battered than he had. Ben handed Mom the can and she re-inflated the tire.

“Tire pressure is corrected,” Old Paint announced.

Then Ben took the scrubber spray and anti-virus box out of the pack and handed it to her without a word.

Mom took it and stood up slowly. She walked slowly to the back of the car and I followed her. She put away the left over emergency supplies. She gently shut the door. The glass nanos were at work on the rear window. It was almost clear again. She walked around the car and Ben and I both followed her. She got to the driver’s door, opened it and climbed in.

“Mom?” Ben asked her anxiously and she waved a hand at him. “I just want to check something,” she said.

She opened a little panel on his dash and a small screen lit up. She touched it lightly, scrolling down it. Then she stopped and leaned her forehead on the steering wheel for a minute. When she spoke, her voice was choked and muffled by her arms.

“My grandpa considered himself something of a hacker, in an old school way. He made some modifications to Old Paint. That’s Grandpa’s voice you hear, when Old Paint speaks. And you know how I told you some people remove the safety constraints from the car’s programming, the ‘do no harm to people’ or by-pass the speed constraints? Not my grandpa.” She sat up and pointed at the screen. “See all those red ‘override’ indicators? You’re not supposed to be able to do that. But Grandpa did. He gave Old Paint one ultimate command: “Protect logged users of vehicle.”

She flipped the little panel closed over the screen and spoke quietly. “I should have known. I was a wild kid. Drinking. Doping. So he broke into the software and overrode everything to make ‘protect the child’ the car’s highest priority. Hm.” She made a husky noise in her throat. “Got me out of a corner more times than I like to think about. I passed out more than once behind the wheel, but somehow I always got home safe.” She dashed tears from her eyes and then looked at us with a crooked smile. “Just programming, kids. That’s all. Just his programming. Despite all his tough talk, it was just his programming to protect, as best he could. No matter what.”

Ben was as puzzled as I was. “The car? Or Grandpa?”

She sniffed again but didn’t answer. She re-opened the panel on his dash and accessed his GPS. She was talking softly. “You remember that one spring break, my senior year? Arizona. And that boy named Mark. Sun, sun, and more sun. We hardly ever had to stop at a charging station. That’s where you should go, old friend. And drive safely.”

“Don’t we always?” he asked her.

She laughed out loud.

She got out and shut the door. He revved his engine a few times, and then began to pull forward. We stepped back out of his way, and he moved slowly past us, the deep snow squeaking under his tires. Mom stepped forward, brushing snow, twigs, and leaves off the solars on his roof. He stopped and let her clear them. Then, “All done. Run free,” she told him, and patted his rearview mirror.

When she stepped back, he revved his engine, tooted his horn twice, and peeled out in a shower of snow. We stood there and watched him go. Mom didn’t move until we couldn’t hear him anymore. Then she pitched the packet of anti-virus as far as she could into the woods. “There are some things that just don’t need curing,” she said.

We went back to the City Rents car and climbed in. My sneakers were soaked, my feet were numb and my jeans were wet halfway to my knees. We ate some peanut butter sandwiches that Ben had packed, Mom gave me another pain pill and I slept all the way home.

Three nights later, I got out of bed and padded toward the living room in my pajamas. I peeked around the corner. My Mom’s chair was rocked back as far as it would go and her toes were up on the edge of the desk. The bluish monitor light was the only light in the room. She was watching a moving dot on a map, and smiling. She had headphones on and was nodding her head to music we could barely hear. Oldies. I jumped when Ben put his hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me back into the hallway. He shook his head at me and I nodded. We both went back to bed.

I never saw Old Paint again. He stayed in Arizona, mostly charging off the sun and not moving around much once he was there. Once in a while, I’d get home from school and turn on the computer and check on him. He was just a red dot moving on thin lines in a faraway place, or, much more often, a black dot on an empty spot on the map. After a while, I stopped thinking about him.

Ben did two years of community college and then got a “Potential” scholarship to a college in Utah. It was hard to say goodbye to him, but by then I was in high school and had a life of my own. It was my turn to have spats with Mom.

One April day, I came home to find that Mom had left the computer running. There had been an email from Ben, with an attachment, and she had left it as a screen saver. He’d gone to Arizona for spring break. “This was as close as I could get to him,” Ben had written. The scene had been shot under a bright blue sky, with red cliffs in the distance. There was nothing there, only scrub brush and a dirt road. And in the distance, a station wagon moved steadily away from us, a long plume of dust hanging in the still air behind him.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2012.

About the Author

Megan Lindholm lives on a small farm in Roy, Washington, where she shares a word processor with Robin Hobb and raises chickens, geese, ducks and other random animals. Although she has not written a novel in a while, she continues to produce (erratically) short fiction. “Old Paint” is dedicated fondly to the memory of a blue Chevy Celebrity wagon that carried her and her kids to many an SF convention. She still carries a small piece of blue dashboard plastic in her right knee from a memorable collision it survived.

Our Future is Artificial

Sofia Siren

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a growing technological field closely tied in with robotics. It is also a common plot device used in many modern movies and books, but the concept of AI—the real AI that is currently growing into infancy in laboratories all around the world—is a bigger mystery. To understand artificial intelligence, it’s important to understand natural intelligence. What are the basic building blocks for intelligence, and what is the threshold that moves a creature from simply existing into intelligence? What makes us, humans, intelligent? For those who study AI, the key factors that determine intelligence are knowledge, planning, learning, natural language, perception, the ability to reason, and the ability to manipulate the physical world.

The thing that separates humans from animals on an intellectual level is the concept of self. Understanding that one exists is a huge jump on the intelligence scale. Some animals can recognize themselves in mirrors, but the only animal to date that has asked a human an existential question is the parrot Alex, who asked its keeper, “What color am I?” This simple question is an excellent example of intelligence. In AI, the threshold that a computer program has to pass to be labeled as true artificial intelligence is the sense of self, the ability to ask existential questions that the AI has formulated without a human’s guiding hand.

Aspects of artificial intelligence have been around in science and literature for hundreds of years, starting with Ada Lovelace as a visionary of the modern computer in the 1830-1840’s, and the 1863 novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler, who wrote of a utopia with self-replicating intelligent machines. Since these two pioneers, there have been many novels and stories that depict machines and AI that have slowly started to crawl toward reality.

Some current research has taken a real step toward achieving true AI. These include: IBM Watson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Nao bots, and Google’s Deep Dream. Out of these three, IBM Watson is the oldest and best known for winning at Jeopardy in 2011. It was a huge success in showing how a machine could beat a human cast in simple question and answer tasks. But surely the human contestants could have also won if they had memorized all of Wikipedia before the contest.

What IBM Watson truly consists of is huge amounts of data which is sorted and filtered in a way that allows it to give an array of answers based on an index of accuracy. It is basically a powerful search engine that understands natural language. This isn’t a huge feat today, when most search engines do the same thing. The answer is built out of thousands of queries that have been searched from databases full of information—imagine memorizing all the dictionaries and wikis in the world.

IBM Watson is a fancy natural language search engine, but not really intelligent even though it does touch knowledge and natural language in the definition of AI. Today, IBM Watson is marketed toward health care industries as a diagnostics tool for doctors—not to replace doctors, but as a search tool to help them with continued education and in areas outside their expertise.

Nao bots are a much newer enterprise. Built in a lab of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, they fascinated the world for a few days in July, 2015. The simulation was performed by three Aldebaran Nao humanoid robots, at the RAIR Lab. These robots were given a problem where two of them were rendered mute with a fictitious “dumbing pill.” The robots were asked if they could speak and the one that wasn’t affected by the pill answered with “I don’t know,” quickly amending it to “Sorry, I know now. I was able to prove that I was not given a dumbing pill.”

The robot was able to understand the question through the use of natural language processing and it was able to amend the answer after it heard itself speak. This means that it showed a base of knowledge, natural language processing, and perception with a hint of reasoning. Since they are robots, they were able to touch the physical world in a small way. They were able to comprehend a spoken question, similar to Siri or Hey Google, but they take it a step forward by having the AI amend its own knowledge base with new information as it receives it. This technology is still in a very early stage, but it has improved tremendously in the last five years.

Google’s Deep Dream was also revealed in July, 2015. Deep Dream is something on a completely different level. It isn’t specifically artificial intelligence, but it is a learning algorithm—an algorithm is a fancy way of saying recipe for code—it is essentially a piece of image recognition software. This, however, is a huge step forward in AI.

A deeply ingrained source of human intelligence is pattern and image recognition. To be able to program something that is able to even start to resemble a plausible image recognition pattern is something that hasn’t been properly done before—simply for the fact that it is very difficult to accomplish. Imagine you are a machine, a simple algorithm, trying to understand an image. You have to break it down into pieces you can understand, from pixels to machine language.

Deep Dream is a deep neural network—a computer program that isn’t pre-programmed, but is taught to learn from examples. It is fed thousands of pictures of images, e.g. a dog, and it is told, “this is a picture of a dog.” It can then start to see shapes and patterns, which in its deep mind indicate that a picture consists of a dog. It can then plausibly guess in other pictures if there is a dog in the picture. That is why many of the images that come out from deep dream are filled with dogs or eyes or other common objects that were fed through its learning process.

What is extraordinary about these algorithms is how they teach scientists to understand how something or someone can learn. As humans we learn from having a non-stop video feed to our brains from infancy, which literally takes images and associates them with the correct terms and correct uses along with the information our other senses give us. This gives us millions of gigabytes of information a day in high definition. If, let’s say, Deep Dream was given this quantity of information it could learn to associate patterns and images on a completely different level.

These three examples of the current level of AI shows how far we have come and how far we still have to go in creating a strong AI, but the seed is there. IBM Watson was a start, with a huge collection of information that could be filtered and sorted to beat a simple game of Jeopardy. Nao bots showed how far we still have to go to achieve true natural language processing and robot decision-making. And Deep Dream shows how a mechanical, programmed neural network filters and understands information.

The next step in AI is better understanding, be it image or natural language processing. Both sources of information will give AI new information about its surroundings and a method to touch the real world. Deep Dream and the Nao Bots AI have gone a long way, but there is still much to do to reach such an AI. In the future, this technology can be used to boost their ability to understand their surroundings—with smart technology we could have traffic lights where you don’t have to push a button to cross. It can be used as tools in the house—your robot vacuum can skirt a fallen object—and as companions—a lonely person can have a pet that responds to its surroundings or a nurse that will deliver the right pills for the day.

There have also been many concerns about AI. In 2014, Stephen Hawking claimed that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” And quite a few notable people in the computer industry agree, most notably, Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft) and Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla Motors).

A technological singularity is a theoretical point in time when a true “strong AI” is created that can generically make improvements on itself. AI could then create a new era where smart machines could design technical improvements to themselves in a never-ending cycle. This causes major concerns in areas such as military robots, which are constantly made more sophisticated.

War is a great motivator for technological advancement. Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are drones that have become commonplace in the last decade. They started as piloted drones that were used to bomb war zones, but now they are sophisticated enough to be programmed with a target and sent on their way. In a hypothetical situation, a UAV has been given a command to “go destroy target X.” To ensure that the machine isn’t hacked on the way to its target it is kept in a closed loop—no one can modify the command after it has been given. What if the target turns out to be the wrong one? Or imagine a world where the machines themselves gather evidence and select their targets.

In literature and movies we have already touched on the possibilities of strong AI. There haven’t been many AI progression stories as most stories border the cusp of either AI sentience or dominance—because it makes for a better story. Most AI science fiction revolves around an AI questioning the very essence of humanity. There is Hal, from 2001: Space Odyssey, driven mad by conflicting orders, but there is also Baymax the healthcare robot, from Big Hero 6, who sacrifices himself for his friend. One stands for the destruction of humanity, while the other for preserving it.

There is a clear divide in AI in science fiction where the AI symbolizes either the good or the bad in humanity. The novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, better known for its adaptation as the movie Blade Runner, has an interesting thought experiment of the real difference between humans and androids.

If we manage to gain this technology, are we as humans and their creators now superior? Do we have the right to use them as property forever? At what point does an AI reach the same level as a human? If we do achieve singularity, does it mean they are the same as us? Will there always be a fear of an AI uprising—an AI-controlled world where the roles are flipped, and we become the slaves like in the 1999 film The Matrix or the novel series Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.

In recent years there have been multiple movies—such as Chappie and Ex Machina—that realize the moral dilemma of creating a sentient being. How far can we go in creating another thing or creature that is like us? Can we impose Asimov’s three laws of robotics on a sentient being when we cannot uphold them ourselves?

Current AI research is done to aid humans—be it in military fashion or as helpers for the elderly. They need to be smart enough to be useful, but as this technology evolves, more debates about ethics and a possible singularity will continue. In the 1981 novel Golem XIV by Stanislaw Lem, an AI is able to gain a higher intelligence than a human is capable of and thus transcends to a higher level of intelligence unattainable by humans.

Should we aspire for a robot maid from The Jetsons or a self-learning robot that will be good or evil based on its upbringing? Or will we create a being that will transcend beyond our reach, which will create a world of logic and reason that our primitive brains are incapable of understanding?

It is impossible to ascertain when or if anything like the singularity will happen, but it does bring up the morality of what the future of artificial intelligence will hold and how humans will traverse this new era.

About the Author

Sofia Siren is a world traveler, having lived in Finland, USA, Japan and currently residing in Canada. She has a master’s degree in Software Engineering. Her Clarkesworld article was her first non-academic published article. You can contact her on all social networks @bluphacelia

Painterly Cyborgs and Distant Horizons:
A Conversation with Julie Dillon

Chris Urie

I first came across the beautiful artwork of Julie Dillon right here at Clarkesworld. Since the September 2010 Issue, her illustrations have graced the cover of this magazine fifteen times. Her style is unique and instantly recognizable for its engaging use of color and naturally flowing shapes. From elemental giants to cyborgs in need of an upgrade, Dillon’s work treats us to gorgeous visions of the future and otherworldly lands.

Julie Dillon is a freelance illustrator from Northern California who has done art for trading cards, book covers, magazine illustrations, and perfume labels. In addition to contributing covers to Clarkesworld, she has also worked with Simon & Schuster, Tor Books, Penguin Books, Oxford University Press, Wizards of the Coast, and more. She’s been nominated twice for a World Fantasy Award, won two Chesley Awards, and was recently awarded the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist.

When did you realize you had a knack for art?

I always enjoyed drawing and just did it all the time for fun, but I didn’t think what I did was anything particularly special or different until high school when people seemed to start taking note of what I was doing. It wasn’t very good work, all things considered, but it was pretty good for a high school level (not because I had a natural talent, but just because I’d already been drawing for quite a while just for fun), and it was enough that my art teachers were very enthusiastic about what I did. Some people were even willing to pay me for my work, which was a very exciting development for me.

I’ve noticed a few motifs or themes in your artwork, such as glowing orbs at the center of giant humanoid beings. Have you noticed any other themes or patterns in your work?

I’ve noticed that I tend to use a lot of circular shapes, both as framing elements and to draw the eye to focal points. It’s an easy way to move the eye around a piece, and I just like the way it looks. I also have noticed that a lot of the figures in my work are looking upwards and/or to the right of the image; I’m not sure why, but I feel like it makes it seem more positive, like they are moving forward towards the future or distant horizon.

Some science fiction art tends to have an artificial feel to it, but your work is more natural, flowing, and elemental. What is it about organic shapes and subjects that interests you?

I think it’s just that it comes easier to me. Doing clean crisp sharp lines and rigid shapes has always been difficult for me, and I think what people call my more “painterly” look is a result of struggling with that. I feel like there is more freedom and leeway with more flowing organic shapes, more ways that they can be utilized in a composition. I just don’t have the patience for what it takes to do really tight clean scifi work. I admire artists who can do it, though, it’s a skill I wish I had in my toolkit.

You have a very distinct style and work with wonderfully varied colors. How do you go about choosing a color palette for a piece?

Often it’s intuitive. I usually have a clear idea from the beginning what I want the color palette to be, and I just go with what feels right. But if I don’t know for certain how to approach something, I will look through a folder I have of art and photos that have inspirational color schemes to help give me ideas. When in doubt, look at color combinations that other artists have utilized, and see what works and what doesn’t, and what resonates most with you.

How is creating artwork for something like American McGee’s Alice different from creating a book or magazine cover?

American McGee’s Alice was my first and only concept art gig, and it was pretty short lived. It was more about generating ideas quickly for the purpose of illustrating potential gameplay mechanics, and it was incredibly open-ended. It was a challenge since it was different from how I usually worked, and I ended up only doing a few pieces. With a book or magazine cover, the intent is to make a polished finished piece that best represents the story or concept—you are making the final product rather than running through a ton of illustrated ideas that might not lead anywhere.

What does your workflow for a piece look like? Do you start with sketches on paper or do you do everything on a computer?

I used to do sketches on paper, but over time I found that I personally worked a lot faster by doing the entire process on the computer, from the thumbnail sketches to the finals. I don’t have to take the time out to scan things, and if I need to adjust a sketch, I can do it quickly in Photoshop instead of having to redo the whole thing. Plus, it lets me get work done when I’m traveling and all I have is a laptop but no scanner.

What do you find most challenging about creating a piece of artwork?

I think the early decision-making is the most difficult part of it. Trying to figure out what exactly I want to create, how to best go about illustrating the concept I have in mind, and whether or not the approach and/or concept are worth developing, reworking, or scrapping. Once I know what it is I want to do, it usually is much smoother sailing. The main thing that slows me down on any given piece is not being able to decide what approach is best, and I end up wasting time repainting things over and over sometimes.

Do you ever doodle on restaurant napkins?

If an idea jumps into my mind for a picture, I will try to scribble a thumbnail down on whatever scrap of paper is handy, but I don’t really casually doodle very much. I probably should, though! I spend so much of my time working on my art that when I have free time I usually try to give my brain a break by doing other things.

You’ve successfully Kickstarted two art books, designed covers for various publishers, and created striking artwork for Clarkesworld. What’s next?

I just signed on to illustrate a tarot deck, which is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while and that I’m really excited about, although it will take a long time to complete. I’m working on lots of book covers, as well, and have plans for maybe doing bigger illustrated books of my own in the future.

Do you have any advice for aspiring artists?

Be both stubborn and patient. A career doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s going to take a lot of hard work to get there. The only real reason I’ve made my career work is because I wanted to succeed and I was too stubborn to give up when things got tough. Learning to be patient is still a challenge; I have to keep reminding myself that just because I’m not as good as I’d like to be with a certain skill, or just because I have a slow year, it doesn’t mean I’m not still making progress. You have to be patient with yourself while you learn and build up a portfolio, because it takes time. And it’s normal and okay that it takes time. Just do your best and don’t give up, if it’s something that you really want to do.

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
Let’s Write a Story Together, MacBook

Ken Liu

The bridge of the Starship Dolphin was a sight to behold. There was an air conditioning unit off in the distance. There seemed to be electricity in the air.

Ensign Serenity Starlight Warhammer O’James was leaning on the communications panel. She was a bit on the short side, but in a cute way, with perky shoulder length rainbow hued hair and indigo eyes.

So begins A Time for Destiny: The Illustrious Career of Serenity Starlight Warhammer O’James during her First Three Years in the Space Fighters, a novel produced in November 2015.

Ah, you think. NaNoWriMo.

Not quite. This work was indeed part of a month-long challenge to create a novel, but the text you just read wasn’t written by a human. Instead, it was generated by a program written by Chris Pressey.

Like so many good things in life, NaNoGenMo (for “National Novel Generation Month”) began in 2013 with a tweet. Darius Kazemi (@tinysubversions), an Internet artist, mused: “Hey, who wants to join me in NaNoGenMo: spend the month writing code that generates a 50k word novel, share the novel & the code at the end[.]”

Kazemi then set up a repository on GitHub where users can send in their contributions, and a new tradition was born.

In this, the third year of NaNoGenMo, seventy-nine completed novels were generated and submitted at last count. They fall into a variety of genres: science fiction (Edison’s Conquest of Mars (seeded by this classic of the same name)), fantasy (Simulationist Fantasy Novel), erotica (Existential Erotica—“You are free and that is why you lust”), epistolary novel (405 Love Letters), retellings of classics (MOBY DICK; or, THE CYBERWHALE—“We are going to the Indian and Pacific networks, and would prefer not to be detained”), recipe book (The Greater Book of Transmutation (A DIY Alchemy Guide)), interactive fiction (Choice of Someone Else’s Novel), and even an atlas of wonders in distant lands reminiscent of Invisible Cities (The Deserts of the West: A travel guide to unknown lands). All are at least fifty thousand words long. And some, like A Time for Destiny, quoted up above, are even (sort of) readable.

For programmers, there are many interesting things about NaNoGenMo even if no breakthroughs in AI are expected. (The point of an exercise like this isn’t that it’s done well, but that it’s done at all. A month is not enough to build a robust system, but it is enough to experiment with and prototype new approaches for generating fifty thousand words of intelligible text. The value of a compressed time frame for experimentation is something that the participants of NaNoWriMo can well appreciate.)

It’s true that most of these novels are barely readable. Even the best entries are perhaps only interesting as “stories” because of our apophenia and our desire for the text to succeed—reading, after all, is a participatory exercise of joint meaning-creation between the reader and the text. (“Why is there an air conditioning unit floating in space? Never mind, I’ll just go with it.”) But with these generated narratives, the reader usually gives up within a few paragraphs because the effort is too great and one-sided—the text does not read back.

As Pressey notes in his project, “It is very difficult for the average person to read a typical NaNoGenMo-generated novel in its entirety, from beginning to end. It’s because the brain begins to tire, right? It gets all ‘I see what you did there’ and balks at facing yet more unpredictable stuff.”

But being smug about our superiority as human writers isn’t the point. It’s true that machine novelists are unlikely to displace human writers any time soon (though news organizations like the AP have already been using machines instead of humans to write data-driven financial news stories). But machine generation of text doesn’t have to be capable of replacing all human creativity to be interesting or useful.

At its heart, NaNoGenMo is about play: playing with text, playing with notions of literature and narrative, playing with authorship and creativity and appropriation and recontextualization and the structures for constructing meaning.

When we read something like Twide and Twejudice (an entry from last year), in which every single word of dialogue from Pride and Prejudice is replaced by another word used on Twitter in a similar context, the result is a delightful illustration of the evolution of our language over two hundred years:

“My jwan Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “haaaave you heard that Netherfield Park constitutes ilet at nity?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

“But it iiz,” returned she; “forr Mrs. Long hass just undergone here, and she forgave me alllllllll about it.”

“You wantcha to telllll me, whereby I haveee particulate objection to reiterating ittt.”

And when we read something like what is love?, a text composed from a series of questions and answers in which each answer becomes the basis for the next question in an endless chain of definitional sentences taken from the lexical database WordNet, we’re reminded of the infinite deferral of meaning in summoning forth a world through language.

what is love?

any object of warm affection or devotion; “the theater was her first love” or “he has a passion for cock fighting”;

what is passion?

the suffering of Jesus at the crucifixion

what is crucifixion?

the infliction of extremely painful punishment or suffering

Many NaNoGenMo projects remind me of Oulipian techniques crossed with “found-language” conceptual works by artists like Kenneth Goldsmith, but as Isaac Karth points out in Virgil’s Commonplace Book, appropriation is at the foundation of the Western Classical tradition, and perhaps all literary traditions. Many of NaNoGenMo algorithms rely on large corpora of texts in the desired genre to provide the verisimilitude in style, diction, and structure in the output, but is that really so very different from how writers learn to write in a genre by reading widely in it? We absorb the rules of what a “good story” is by reading examples of such stories, and everything we write echoes our reading, consciously and unconsciously.

It’s easy to wax philosophical about how reading machine-generated text changes how we think about literature, and there are many thoughtful pieces written on the subject already (I particularly recommend “NaNoGenMo: Dada 2.0” by Kathryn Hume). But I want to turn in a more practical (as well as appropriately speculative) direction: does NaNoGenMo offer any hints on how machines can perhaps help us write better novels?

Many of us are deeply interested in the process of storytelling, and since the best way to understand a subject is to try to teach it, it stands to reason that in constructing narrative algorithms, we may also gain insight through modeling the writer’s process.

Take something like Chris Pressey’s “Story Compiler,” which starts out with an abstract representation (e.g. [IntroduceCharacters, *, CharactersConvalesce] of a “null story” (“Once upon a time, they lived happily ever after”) and complicates the structure iteratively in a manner reminiscent of “The Snowflake Method” for designing novels. One of the stages in the story compiler involves implementing the technique of “Chekov’s Gun.” As Pressey explains:

Implementing Checkov’s Gun is actually really easy:

write the story

if there are any scenes that need a Gun, just write the Gun in at that part.

when finished, go back over the story, and collect a list of Guns that need to be foreshadowed

for each Gun, insert some description of it near the beginning of the story

This is basically what is described in this article that @ikarth shared earlier—see the “XXXX ADD GUN EARLIER XXXX” part.

This got me thinking: I don’t need my word processor to design the novel for me, but it would be interesting if the program suggested places where Chekov’s Gun would add to the pleasure of the plot and helped me implement the changes. There are many other similar writing techniques and tricks that seem ripe for algorithmic assistance—e.g., ensuring there is character growth, detecting unconscious bias in the gender balance of major and minor characters, noticing clichés and worn tropes (after all, a computer can read many more books than I can) and suggesting alternatives—in other words, I’m not interested in having the computer replace me as a writer, but I am interested in collaborating with my computer to tell better stories.

But a computer can do even more than simplifying known writer’s tricks. When you think about it, it’s surprising how little computers have changed the way stories are written. In the visual arts, artists regularly experiment with digital filters and transformations and “smart” tools to achieve entirely new effects. Even in music, artificial intelligence has become very helpful to composers interested in experimentation and computer-aided composition. But we writers have not been collaborating with our machines (much) to tell better stories.

Actually, there is at least one context in which the computer’s generative powers have given us examples of successful human-machine collaborative storytelling: games. The number of algorithmically generated worlds in a game like Civilization is nearly infinite, and surely much of the joy we get from the game comes from telling ourselves stories based on the choices we make in these new worlds. (“In the year 1041, the glorious Khmer Civilization finally drove the perfidious Persians from that isolated heart-shaped island to the south (which I shall now dub ‘Heart of Honor’). The last Persian Frigate, escorting a few surviving Settlers, set off for lands unknown to the west in search of a new home . . . ”) We’re far from the utopian vision of an infinite Grand Theft Auto, but generated worlds have been an important part of game narratives from the time of Rogue.

The game example, I think, points to a potential future for computer-assisted storytelling. Computer text generation, even in its present state, is quite capable of coming up with fresh associations and almost-sensible ideas when seeded with human input. Freed from the constraints of “meaning,” the algorithm is capable of juxtapositions and combinations of styles and situations that would never occur to human authors. The human mind, on the other hand, can work with this raw material and provide creative and editorial direction. Indeed, this is gestured at by Darius Kazemi’s own entry in this year’s NaNoGenMo: Co-authored Procedural Novel, in which Kazemi proposed the following:

Thought experiment: you and I are playing a game. I write ten opening sentences for a novel, and you pick the one you like best and let me know; that becomes the opener. Then I write ten second sentences for the novel. You pick what you like best and let me know. Et cetera.

Who wrote the book? I wrote literally every word, but you dictated nearly the entire form of the novel.

I plan to act as sentence-by-sentence editor for an algorithm (or set of algorithms) where I review something like 5,000 multiple choice questions and hand pick each sentence of the novel.

Ultimately, Kazemi chose to go in another direction, but the possibilities glimpsed in this thought experiment are very exciting. Computers may yet one day write The Great American Novel, but before then, they certainly can be partners for human authors as we write more interesting novels together. In fact, I think I’m going to propose a project like this to my editor (assuming my laptop agrees . . . ).

Author’s Note: Some of the ideas in this essay were inspired by a discussion with Samim Winiger, game, web, music, and machine learning researcher. Samim has many interesting projects on the intersection of storytelling and AI. “Generating Stories about Images” is a good one to start with.

About the Author

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.

Editor’s Desk:
The 2015 Reader’s Poll and Contest

Neil Clarke

It’s time for our annual reader’s poll! Each year, we ask you to pick your favorite Clarkesworld story and cover art. Here’s a complete list of the original fiction we published in 2015 (links can be found out clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke_01_16/:

“A Universal Elegy” by Tang Fei

“All Original Brightness” by Mike Buckley

“An Evolutionary Myth” by Bo-young Kim

“An Exile of the Heart” by Jay Lake

“And If the Body Were Not the Soul” by A.C. Wise

“Android Whores Can’t Cry” by Natalia Theodoridou

“Asymptotic” by Andy Dudak

“Cassandra” by Ken Liu

“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer

“Coming of the Light” by Chen Qiufan

“Cremulator” by Robert Reed

“Egg Island” by Karen Heuler

“Ether” by Zhang Ran

“For the Love of Sylvia City” by Andrea M. Pawley

“Forestspirit, Forestspirit” by Bogi Takacs

“Further North” by Kay Chronister

“Ice” by Rich Larson

“If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” by Xia Jia

“In the Queue for the Worldship Munawwer” by Sara Saab

“Indelible” by Gwendolyn Clare

“It Was Educational” by J.B. Park

“Let Baser Things Devise” by Berrien C. Henderson

“Loving Grace” by Erica L. Satifka

“Meshed” by Rich Larson

“Morrigan in Shadow” by Seth Dickinson

“Mrs. Griffin Prepares to Suicide Tonight” by A Que

“Ossuary” by Ian Muneshwar

“Postcards from Monster Island” by Emily Devenport

“Preserve Her Memory” by Bao Shu

“Security Check” by Han Song

“Slowly Builds An Empire” by Naim Kabir

“Snakes” by Yoon Ha Lee

“So Much Cooking” by Naomi Kritzer

“Somewhere I Have Never Traveled (Third Sound Remix)” by E. Catherine Tobler

“Summer at Grandma’s House” by Hao Jingfang

“The Algebra of Events” by Elizabeth Bourne

“The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary” by Kij Johnson

“The Empress in Her Glory” by Robert Reed

“The Father” by Kola Heyward-Rotimi

“The Garden Beyond Her Infinite Skies” by Matthew Kressel

“The Hexagonal Bolero of Honeybees” by Krista Hoeppner Leahy

“The Hunger Tower” by Pan Haitian

“The Last Surviving Gondola Widow” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” by Catherynne M. Valente

“The Occidental Bride” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

“The Petals Abide” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

“The Servant” by Emily Devenport

“The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” by Kelly Robson

“This Wanderer, in the Dark of the Year” by Kris Millering

“Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight” by Aliette de Bodard

“Today I am Paul” by Martin Shoemaker

“Union” by Tamsyn Muir

“When We Die on Mars” by Cassandra Khaw

“When Your Child Strays From God” by Sam J. Miller

“Your Right Arm” by Nin Harris

“Yuanyuan’s Bubbles” by Liu Cixin

And here’s a quick round-up of our 2015 covers:

“Disciple” by Julie Dillon

“Lady and the Ship” by Atilgan Asikuzun

“Keter” by Peter Mohrbacher

“Sleeping Giant” by Julie Dillon

“Io Emissary” by Julie Dillon

“Spring Day is Coming” by Liu Junwei

“Megafauna Europa” by Julie Dillon

“Descendant” by Julie Dillon

“New World Coming” by J. Otto Szatmari

“A-boushi-ya” by shichigoro-shingo

“Gate World” by Julie Dillon

“Kokabiel, Angel of the Stars” by Peter Mohrbacher

As an added incentive for participating, we’re giving away copies of Clarkesworld: Year Eight (publishing this month) to three lucky voters!

The survey will be online now through February 23rd, with the results being announced in our March issue. You can take the survey at http://clarkesworld2015.questionpro.com.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural volume of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books this June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Hierophant

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.